1. I'm enjoying having hours and hours indoors to read. Because I'm reading Bleak House electronically, I have no idea what page I'd be on if I were reading a hard copy version. Kindle tells me I'm about 20-25% finished, making me think that I'll be spending many more days with Esther, Lady Dedlock, John Jarndyce, Lawrence Boythorn, the Jellybys, Mr. Krook, the Neckett children, Miss Flite and the ever growing cast of characters populating this book. I swear, I'm experiencing reading Bleak House almost like reading a newspaper, returning to this novel every morning and reading continuing stories about people always in the news and reading other stories about previously unknown persons who pop up and have their own newsworthy stories get underway and then bearing witness to having the intrepid reporter, Charles Dickens, dig up ways that these characters' stories overlap and connect with each other.
As a bonus, the three books examining the Nixon presidency that I ordered last week at Better World Books arrived today. I took a break for a while from Dickens and peeked at passages from these arrivals. They are famous books, one by Dan Rather and the other two are Woodward and Bernstein's books on the subject. I have never read any of them.
2. Over the last, oh, forty years I've had stretches in my life when I didn't eat meat at all, others when I didn't eat meat at home, but gladly ate it at restaurants or in other people's homes, and other times when I was a complete omnivore. I enjoy vegetarian cooking and eating and right now Debbie and I are enjoying eating mostly vegetarian meals, but we aren't being strict.
It's fun. I especially enjoy referring back to cookbooks I used a lot during my graduate school days and on into my second, largely vegetarian, marriage -- books like, among many others, Laurel's Kitchen, The Moosewood Cookbook, and one that Christy gave me about thirty-five years ago, American Wholefoods Cuisine. I pulled out American Wholefoods Cuisine this afternoon, eager to remind myself what Nikki and David Goldbeck's book had in the world of tofu recipes.
I found one that fit in perfectly with a pattern of cooking and eating Debbie and I have been enjoying over the last couple of months. Normally, Portuguese Stew is a fish stew (and I was tempted to make it today using shrimp we have on hand), but the Goldbecks' recipe substitutes tofu for the fish. I'll admit, it's not a great substitute in terms of flavor, but, for me, and my care of my kidneys, a great protein substitute. It was simple to make -- all I had to do was cook some chunks of potatoes in boiling water until they were tender, cook chopped onion, garlic, and sweet pepper (I added a bit of chopped cabbage) until tender, pour cans of diced tomatoes over this, season this mixture, let it simmer for a while, and then fold in the potatoes and the block of tofu I'd cubed and simmer it some more.
I seasoned this stew with Cajun seasoning instead of paprika and I enjoyed the way the Cajun spices and the sweet diced tomatoes worked together. I enjoy the texture of tofu and the way it absorbs flavors. It had been quite a while since we'd eaten tofu and it made me very happy.
This meal was a throwback to the kind of cooking I did a lot of when I lived alone in a tiny basement apartment at 361W. Broadway in Eugene from 1984-87. As I enjoyed tonight's stew, the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms played in my head, a frequent accompaniment to my dinners back in those years.
3. I hadn't watched A Touch of Frost for a while and tonight we viewed an unsettling episode from Season 11 featuring two stories, one involving the murder of a drunken, wife-beating man and the other the murder of a college-aged woman who worked for an escort service and, with forged passports, helped women from Poland sneak into England. She also became intimately involved with a good friend's father. Jack Frost's decision to join a gym provided some comic relief from the two creepy crime story lines. I purged the creepiness of this episode from my mind by going to bed and working another acrostic puzzle from my new book of ones based on American history and culture.
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