Chocolate Eclairs and Mad Hungry

All the ingredients laid out.  This recipe was perfect because it used
14 eggs!  Our hens have gone into laying overdrive.

Today I have a cookbook recommendation and some food pictures for you.

Just a bit of the mess that ensued.

Our church was having a bake sale.  I volunteered to make chocolate eclairs and, boy, were they tedious to make...I mean, good.  First, you make a cream puff dough, made of melted butter, water, flour, and salt.  Then you squeeze the dough through a pastry bag and end up covering every surface and large sections of your hair in dough.  Then you pause, disgusted, and start just spooning the dough onto the cookie sheets.  After the puffs are baked, they are sliced and left to cool while you go make a custard that for some aggravating reason gets filled with little cooked egg lumps.  After straining the custard, you cool it for an hour, while you pull out your double boiler and cook a chocolate ganache.  After the chocolate ganache comes within seconds of burning and sticking because you are too busy reading a hilarious autobiography, you take that off and let it cool.  Now it's time to fill those eclairs.  First you fill one half heaping full with that lovely custard that turned out gorgeously, then put the top cap on and drizzle chocolate ganache over all.

The gorgeous eclairs...all 22 of them.

After I took a bite of that perfectly airy, elegant eclair, it was all worth it and I found myself forgetting all the work and the fact that every single dish in the kitchen was dirty as I smiled and licked my fingers.

Yes, the subtitle is Feeding Men and Boys.
I have no idea why.  However, the recipes are for anybody.

These delicious eclairs came from the fabulous book Mad Hungry.  It's written by Lucinda Scala Quinn and it's a book on cooking hearty family food instead of eating out, but really anybody.  Her recipes are well-written, look delicious, and taste delicious (at least the ones I've had).  The photographs are pretty and aid in making me even hungrier for the delicious recipes.  If you're a voracious cookbook reader, you most definitely need to buy this book.  If you're not, then please just go to the library and check the book out.  You might surprise yourself and end up purchasing a copy...

Yum.

And every. single. chocolate. eclair. sold.  I'm actually a little sad about that.  I was hoping for a little treat this afternoon...

Lambs!

The lambies have started to arrive!  And, boy, are we excited!  I think that it's probably my favorite sign of spring.  The reason I'm bringing this exciting announcement into the blogging world, is because of the lambs' names.

You see, every year, we have a theme for all of the names (makes figuring out who's in what generation easier).  Last year, it was Greek gods and goddesses, this year it is...
authors!

So far, we have triplets named J.R.R.Tolkien (author of The Hobbit, etc.), William Shakespeare, and Jane Austen.  Except that they are so sweet and small at this age that we're calling them Tolkie (we hope Tolkien wouldn't be offended), Willie, and Jane.  Little does their proud mama know what famous people they have been named for!

Here are pictures from the day we let them out of the horse stall they were born in into the big world.

Sorry, this is the only picture I have of all three of them.

Meet Shakespeare...

Tolkien...he's the runt of the litter.  The little guy is so small and he
also has a problem with spacing out and then, whoops! Where
did Mama go?

And here is Jane.  I think she might be my favorite

A Happy Thought

Amen to that!  I'll be back with a book review tomorrow.

Reading Cookbooks

It's odd, I know.  But it's a whole other kind of reading.  Not the kind of reading with a beginning, middle, and end, with a plot and an overall message, but I still love it.

The 1964 edition.  This book is almost too tome-ish
to read for fun.  But, seriously, it has pretty much any recipe
that you can think of.

It's the kind of reading you do when you're feeling tired or in need of some inspiration.  Reading cookbooks is perfect for those days when you're all out of books, or don't feel up to sitting down and giving your full attention to a story.

A very amusing read.

I particularly like vintage cookbooks.  They all seem to tell a story about what people were doing in a certain era.  It's fascinating how much you can learn about people through their food.  I wonder what people will say in 50 years when they look at cookbooks from our era.

Cookbooks are fun to read on several levels.  First, they can be read in light of a history book, if you're reading a vintage cookbook.  Seriously?  Tuna jelled in a mold with lime jello and cabbage?!  (I am not making that up.)  They can also be read as a sort of current events book, if you're reading a modern cookbook.  For instance, think about reading a paleo cookbook or a celebrity cookbook.  Then of course, there's the inspiration that comes from reading cookbooks.  I love going through the vintage cake sections and reading about new kinds of cooking.

Just a little contrast between the above vintage
cookbooks and a modern cookbook.
The recipes in this cookbook are delicious, by the way.

And finally, I love the thought of people from all different time periods writing cookbooks so that the concept of how we eat food could be changed just a little for the better.

A picture of cookbook from which my pretzel recipe came.

Bookmarks

I made these bookmarks several months ago, inspired by this post.  I absolutely love fun little sewing projects like this that take just a few minutes out of my time and leave me with something so pretty and functional.

I made about 12, but ended up giving most away as birthday/Christmas/hostess gifts, so I only have two left for myself.  I'm thinking that perhaps I need to make some more…

All you have to do is cut a piece of elastic slightly smaller around than an average book size.  Sew each edge to a piece of felt, then sew whatever decorations (buttons, ribbon, fabric, etc.) onto the top of the felt body.

The two modeled here look pretty similar, but you could do any sort of pattern.  This is a fun way to use up little scraps and get some functional bookmarks that aren't just pieces of ripped paper.

Books About Reading

Just in case you are hankering for some reading about reading, I've compiled a list of books that I have really enjoyed.  Included are more pictures of farm animals.

Kitties in a patch of sunlight.

                           

Books I Have Read

Woe Is I by Patricia T. O'Conner- Okay, this is more a book about writing, but I howled, I tell you, howled, all the way through this book.  If you need a little brush up on grammar, or just are in need of some laughter and entertainment, I highly recommend this book.

Book Lust by Nancy Pearl-  A great book full of book lists.  I like to use this when I'm in a "I can't find anything to read mood.  It's arranged by category: sci fi, fantasy, etc.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss- Yet another grammar book; this one is hilarious, too.

How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren- This book is all about the art of reading, from speed reading to inspectional reading.  It's definitely a tome, but a well written tome and I enjoyed it.

The Novel 100 by Daniel S. Burt- An in-depth review of the greatest 100 novels.

Honey for a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt and Barbara Hampton- There is definitely a Christian undertone, but the books recommended are not really Christian.  I love the book recommendations.  Each chapter is a category like Adventure and Suspense or Mystery.

So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson-I loved this book.  I checked it out of the library and devoured it.  It is much more autobiographical than any of the books listed above.

A guinea hen

                                                             

On My To-Read List

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster-  Whew!  Yes, that really is the title.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by Maureen Corrigan

Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan Hill

Anguished English: An Anthology of Assaults Upon Our Language by Richard Lederer and Bill Thompson- Apparently, this is another extremely funny grammar book.

Barn kitty

On Reading

So why do I read?  It's not like every single book that I pick up interests or moves me.  I've even read some pretty awful fiction.  So what keeps me reading?

There are several reasons.

1. I love hearing other people's stories, both in real life and in books.  Even the minutia interests me.  The little tidbits about people that I pick up along the way are part of what makes reading worth it.

Pictures in this post are of some of our farm animals.

                                 

2.  I almost always learn something new when I read a book, whether it's a new name, something about another country, or how to cook a dish that is new to me.

                                       

3.  Reading helps me become a better writer.  There's all kinds of data on this, none of which I can cite at the moment.  I do know, however, that the more books I read, the more I can feel my writing "voice" develop.  With every new book I read, it gets a little easier to write.

                               

4.  I read out of habit.  I have been reading and being read to since I was a little girl, so it just feels natural whenever I have a free moment to pick up a book and start reading.  

                                    

A Handy Website and a Pretty Pillow

I have discovered a magnificent website!  I found it via Pinterest and I have been steadily using it every time I go to the library.  There are several like it, but my favorite is called What Should I Read Next?  All you have to do is type in a book that you loved and it generates lots of titles that are similar.

So check this website out next time you're trying to decide what to read!

In other news, I just finished a beautiful pillow.  It's made from some old fabric from a box of vintage scraps and the front is a piece that I picked up at a sale.  The front was a little too boring and 80s for me, so I just added the pretty patchwork and the buttons to brighten it up.  I have discovered how much I enjoy piecing little scrappy stuff.

I think it looks lovely in the chair at my sunny desk.