1. I was in charge of making a salad for tonight's family dinner. I had decided a few days ago that I wanted to make a leafless salad. Originally, I was going to make a barley and white rice salad, but I made a mistake in the kitchen and to rectify it, I made a white rice and couscous salad instead. (The mistake: I took out a bag of what I thought was barley, but it was Israeli couscous. I followed the direction for making barley and a gummy, over cooked glob resulted, so I tossed it and turned to the other golden couscous I had on hand.)
I already had white rice made from my dinner Tuesday evening. Once I had the couscous prepared, I just had to decide what to chop up and put in the bowl to build a salad. I decided on the following: radishes, green onion, cucumber, red pepper, pan roasted almonds, pan-fried corn kernels, and a chopped Cosmic Crisp apple. I juiced a lemon and combined it with olive oil and black pepper for a dressing.
I tasted this salad and concluded it lacked something, but that if Christy and Carol had some fresh herbs available and let me have some, it would enliven this salad, significantly improve it.
So, as we gathered at Carol and Paul's for dinner and Molly's birthday celebration, Christy brought me fresh basil, chives, and oregano. Carol had thyme and parsley and some chocolate mint. I spruced up the salad with their herbal gifts and, PRESTO!, these herbs improved the taste and texture and scent of the salad and my Kitchen Sink Couscous and White Rice Salad turned out to be pretty good.
2. We enjoyed a royal feast in celebration of Molly's birthday. Paul mixed Sunrise Bellinis for a birthday cocktail (they looked great, but I stuck with water). Carol fixed a pickled food and nut appetizer plate. For dinner, Carol seasoned and Paul grilled salmon which we enjoyed with the kitchen sink salad, grilled vegetables from Carol and Paul's garden, and air-fried polenta. Carol put out a huckleberry sauce she made that could go on the polenta and/or on the salmon.
Christy was in charge of dessert and she baked a splendid Peach Cobbler Dump Cake served with Peaches and Cream ice cream.
We talked about a lot of things tonight: water witching, the Walker family tree, flowers and plants found in Shakespeare's plays and poems, the current situation at Nocturn, and more.
3. When I wasn't throwing everything but the kitchen sink into a salad bowl or eating a birthday feast today, I was under the spell of Jess Walter's detective novel, Over Tumbled Graves.
This book is set in Spokane in the mid to late 1990s, much of it on that stretch of East Sprague known for dive bars, adult bookstores, Chinese restaurants, grimy convenience stores, drug dealing, and prostitution.
Jesse Walter mailed off his completed manuscript of this book to his editor two weeks before the arrest of Spokane serial killer Robert L. Yates. It's uncanny, then, that Walter's novel about a serial killer targeting prostitutes in Spokane is eerily similar, but not identical, to what the public learned about Yates after his arrest.
Walter's central character in this book is Detective Caroline Marby, the lone woman on the Spokane Police Department's Special Investigations Unit. Over Tumbled Graves is the first of two Caroline Marby books Walter wrote (the second: Land of the Blind). I don't know if any others are in his future plans.
I can hardly put this book down. Walter draws complex and compelling characters efficiently. Caroline Marby is especially fascinating. His love for physical places, whether he's writing about the power of the Spokane River running through Riverfront Park or the seedy sketchiness of East Sprague or the drunken mayhem on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, energizes this novel. No single place, whether it's Pleasant Valley, Sacred Heart Hospital, places to eat and drink in Spokane, dive bars on East Sprague, or other neighborhoods in Spokane is generic.
To top it all off, Walter is a terrific storyteller. This book is plotted imaginatively, suspensefully, and intelligently. It's divided into five parts, each part's title is the same as each of the five parts of T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. The book's title comes from two lines in The Waste Land: "In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing/Over the tumbled graves."
Somehow, these lines from The Waste Land make me think of the last lines of Pink Floyd's song, "Time".
And, lastly, I'm not sure at all what the parallels are between the book Over Tumbled Graves and The Waste Land. I'm going to reread The Waste Land and think about it more.
Just for the record, here are the titles of the five parts of Eliot's poem and, in turn, of Jesse Walter's novel:
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