Category: just plain fun

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Fresh for 2024!

AuntGem1 Comment

Changes coming …

Everyone, welcome to the new year! Can you believe it? 2024 - where are the flying cars and jetpacks?

I’ve decided to make a few changes to this website. As many of you know, each year I either continue the diet I’m on or start a new one. This year, I’m going to be keeping a record of my journey – but on my new Substack newsletter – Lighthearted by Jennifer.

Why a Substack? That will give me the opportunity to tailor the content for a special group of readers. In my newsletter, I’m going to share my thoughts on my weight loss (35+ pounds so far) what’s working and what isn’t. And I’ll pen a few posts on how I’m keeping my sense of humor through it all.

Lighthearted by Jennifer is where I’ll write about Keto, cooking, nutrition, and exercise. Here at Notes from Aunt Gem I’ll post my book reviews and miscellaneous essays. Who knows – maybe this year I’ll make the garden bloom!

I’ll post once a week on my health journey at my new spot. For the select few – those who elect to become paid subscribers – I’ll send at least one more post per week, and that one will have:

  • My actual measurements
  • My actual weight – the good, the bad, the ugly!
  • More info on what I’m finding that works

Come join the Lighthearted crew and lose weight with us!

Let’s read and eat this holiday!
Beauty · Books · Cooking · holiday · hostess with the mostess · just plain fun · Something wonderful · Thanksgiving

Let’s read and eat this holiday!

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This year’s Thanksgiving, I’m keeping it minimal. No two main dishes of both Turkey and Ham, no 12 side dishes, no pie and cakes (plural) for dessert.

It’s a bare-bones Thanksgiving dinner: ham, one side dish of green bean casserole, and one recipe inspired by something I read: Bourbon-Berries. The recipe I got years ago from Gabriel Mallor’s recipe exchange on the Ace of Spades website. Sorry, no picture of that – but it looks delicious! I’ve already made it in advance of the holiday and it is chilling in the fridge.

I smile and shake my head thinking about the Thanksgiving extravaganzas I’ve put together in the past. Last year I brined the turkey for the first time ever, taking the recipe from the Pioneer Woman’s wonderful book: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays.

That lovely book, a gift from my sister-in-law (who knows me well) helped me create my aforementioned Thanksgiving extravaganza. There were so many dishes on the table that as we were finishing, I exclaimed: “I forgot the carrots!” Or some such extraneous side – I can’t remember now. Everyone looked around and laughed. And Dad, ever the wit, said, “Well, Thanksgiving is ruined!”

Cookbooks – books that please twice

Anyone who knows me knows I love to read and I love to eat. It’s just too bad for my waistline I also love combining the two. Reading cookbooks is one of my favorite pastimes too – if you truly want to learn the history of American food, how it developed from the colonial days, suffered through the “better living through chemistry” boxes and cans of the middle 20th century and has enjoyed the renaissance since the early 70s of Alice Waters and other chefs, NEEDS to read’s James Beard’s classic: American Cookery.

I bought this book from a kiosk in the old Dutch Square Mall in spring 1985 – the year James Beard died. In a fit of religious zeal I had just decided to do a Lenten fast from Diet Coke and sweets – I was so ambitious those days! Therefore, I was hungry. So naturally I had to buy a cookbook. But this cookbook – it was an inspired choice. If I had to save one cookbook from my house in a fire, it would be this one. All the beautiful illustrated cookbooks by Susan Branch, the Moosewood Cookbook, the Pioneer Woman, *even* The Joy of Cooking – I’d leave all those to burn up if it meant I could save this book.

Beauty in the word and image

I adore the writers of cookbooks who not only write delicious recipes, but also illustrate them with beautiful artwork they’ve created. I love both cooking from and just admiring the ones I own by Susan Branch, an artist/writer/cook who lives on Martha’s Vineyard. I started with her first book, Heart of the Home: Notes from a Vineyard Kitchen, and now with the change of the seasons, I’m cooking from her aptly named Autumn. Just look at these beautiful covers and pages – all hand-drawn:

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and may you cook something special this year!

For the literary tippler
Books · just plain fun

For the literary tippler

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“An English major walks into a bar….”

Today’s book isn’t the usual work of fiction I love. Instead, I got a present for my birthday which I love just as much: Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist. This collection of recipes carries the theme of “cocktail book for the literary obsessed” from the dedication: “For Brenda … – worth her weight in Cuervo Gold” to the Acknowledgements (“Loud, slurring thanks to my first readers and drinkers.”)

This book is for anyone who actually read all the way through the classics we were assigned in ninth grade (except for Moby Dick, who could get through that) or the introverts whose idea of a good time is a good book, and something to munch on. It’s for all the book nerds. Make that the mixologist nerds too.

Every cocktail recipe celebrates a book. Choose your favorite poison; Author Tim Federle, a former Broadway actor, found a literary allusion for it. Is it five o’clock somewhere? Have an Are You There God? It’s Me, Margarita. Love the juniper in gin? Enjoy a Gin Ayre. For something sweet, try Love in the Time of Kahlua.

Perfect for Christmas!

Ever since I started stocking a bar cart during Covid-times (no bread-baking for me, no sir) I’ve had lovely bottles of spirits sitting around on display. Now I can invite the Book Club over and make “The Pitcher of Dorian Grey Goose” and facilitate the most convivial book discussion ever!

Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist

Books · Hobbies · Introspection · just plain fun · me

The Joy of Book Club

AuntGem2 Comments

Yes, you read that right. Book Club! (Or as I misspelled it in a DM to a friend, “boom club.” That did make it sound more enticing!) I joined my current group about a year or so before the Big Disruption – COVID-19. That shot our monthly meetings all to heck and gone – we didn’t meet again for over 18 months, I think. Days, weeks, months, all flow together in my brain.

A focused group

I love that that the group I joined goes in depth on the works of a select few writers: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams – all the writers that met together as “The Inklings.” The Columbia book club is named “The Inklings” in homage to them. This winter we started reading The Magician’s Nephew, from the Chronicles of Narnia series. I loved reading these books, and can’t wait to see how we’ll draw on the themes that this book begins to illuminate even in the first two chapters: a person’s character, honor, our responsibility to others, and more. Plus, the color illustrations by Pauline Baynes in the 2001 edition are beautiful.

The color plates inside are delightful.

Junk reading: the cotton candy of the brain

Of course I don’t read only literary fiction. I’m not finishing up some of the weighty tomes that I listed in a previous post last summer. In fact, I’m buying trashy non-fiction and fiction books and gobbling them up like popcorn and Milk Duds at the cineplex.

And I’m not fooling anyone by hiding them on my Kindle. In fact, that’s one of the two reasons I bought a Kindle. I first decided to buy one after I started running out of bookshelves, counter space, end table space, and floor space to stack books. Once I had it, I realized I could hide those unauthorized celebrity biographies, wacky sci-fi, dystopian end-of-the-world fantasies, polemical screeds, and the Twilight series on the Kindle. Oh, how I wish I was kidding about that last one. Several hours of my life that I’ll never get back.

Frog Legs are Keto-friendly: who knew?
just plain fun · Keto · me

Frog Legs are Keto-friendly: who knew?

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This morning I watched an old clip of the Craig Ferguson show with guest Ricky Gervais. There was a short bit that threw me back in time, to when I was an even-more gullible child.

We used to take big family vacations when I was a kid – once every summer, we’d head to the beach with the aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents to spend a week in a huge house. Every year we’d go eat real Calabash-style seafood. One year at the fancy Calabash restaurant, my grandpa asked me if I wanted to order frogs legs with him. I scrunched up my face and shook my head furiously – no, I most DEFINITELY did not want frog legs! Yuck. Ugh. Gross! Who would eat frog legs? I made my displeasure at the very idea known. He just chuckled and said OK. And we all ordered, with me getting whatever kids’ special they had.

A half-hour later we were all chowing down on our lovely, overpriced seafood (Dad always complained about the prices, and how the servers rushed you.) At 9 I had the attention span of a gnat. I had completely forgotten about the conversation. I was happily cleaning up my plate as you did, looking for seconds, when Grandpa asked me, “Would you like some fried chicken?” “I would! Thank you!” Grandpa passed me a meaty leg and I munched enthusiastically. Everyone asked me how I was enjoying the chicken. “This is wonderful, very good,” I replied blithely as I proceeded to polish the bones.

I was so focused on the yummy bones I didn’t notice the adults at the table sharing grins and suppressing laughs.

Later that night, after we paid the check, and while we were walking through the parking lot, Uncle Wayne said to the group at large “Do you think we ought to tell Jenny what she had to eat tonight?” Everyone burst out laughing as I said “What? What? What are you talking about?” Uncle Wayne happily chortled “those were frog legs.” I can’t even imagine the look on my face. I’m sure I spluttered, “Well, they tasted just like chicken!” which everyone says. I can verify, yes, that’s true.

I’ve never eaten frog legs since. And I may never eat them again as long as I do keto – because while the frog legs themselves are zero-carb, that delicious fried breading sure isn’t. HOWEVER: a couple minutes searching the Internet shows some cooks have creatively tackled that challenge:

Stirring up a taste of Christmas…
Accentuate the Positive! · Cooking · Family · Gratitude · Hobbies · holiday · just plain fun

Stirring up a taste of Christmas…

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Yes, even before Thanksgiving! Today in the Anglican church calendar it’s the last Sunday before Advent, also known as Christ the King Sunday. This Sunday’s collect, from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer in the Anglican church started with the words “Stir up…”:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Book of Common Prayer, 1549

I’m starting the process of making a fruitcake, which does have to age a full month. For the past few years I’ve been making extra-special fruitcakes – not the bricks of old, but something that people may actually like once they take a bite out of politeness. I love seeing the reaction of people who hate fruitcake. No, you don’t. You hate Claxton fruitcakes. So do I!

This year I’m making a recipe which calls for 6 full cups of candied citrus peel. The sweet teenager at the Publix didn’t have a clue what I was asking about, and we both started consulting Google Images. He finally led me to the fruitcake ingredient aisle (they move it EVERY YEAR.) The only thing there were those icky-sweet pieces of “fruit” that were in neon colors. Time to make my own. I searched for a recipe and found an easy one on AllRecipes.com.

Life Lesson: Easy is not the same thing as Fast. Or Cheap.

– Aunt Gem

First, my actual cake recipe called for six full cups of candied peel. I shrugged and bought up two bags of Cuties (easy to peel!) and a bag of lemons. I’m $10 in and I haven’t even started on the almonds. Then I started peeling.

Only halfway to 2 cups of peel

Finally, I hit two cups after I emptied an entire bag of clementines. I have a lot of fruit to eat in the next few days. Fortunately, I’m making ambrosia for Thanksgiving.

This is what two cups of peel looks like at the start of the process.

First, you bring to a full boil. Then, you let it simmer for 10 minutes.

Then you drain everything – and repeat the whole process two more times. Finally, you wind up with this:

The two cups I started with shrunk.

And now, over an hour later, I still have four more cups to make. This fruitcake better be worth it, Martha!

Loving my podcasts
Accentuate the Positive! · educational · Hobbies · just plain fun

Loving my podcasts

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Lately, all my spare time is devoted to listening to podcasts. The fiction ones are my favorite, but I love certain current events commentators and there’s a couple of funny podcasts which lighten my mood every time. See my list below – you may find a new favorite. And let me know of any good ones you have!

Comedy

Wrong and Wronger

If you choose just one podcast to add to your collection, make it “Wrong and Wronger.”

This one stars Steve Olivas, a psychologist turned humorist turned author for rock stars, and James Breakwell, the Twitter-famous “funny dad” who writes hilarious stories about his family of four girls and the adventures they share. Steve and James started podcasting together after an inteview when the two realized their sarcastic jabs at each other “clicked.” Originally, the show was about the two of them taking opposing sides (by coin toss) on the weighty issues of the day: dogs vs cats, mustard vs ketchup on hot dogs, bubble wrap vs peanuts. Then they’d invite their audience to vote for the winner. About 160 episodes in, they decided to branch out and now just natter on about whatever’s on their mind. You should start at episode 206, when they started discussing the saga of Steve’s new rural property in Tennessee, now known as Rattlesnake Ranch.

I discovered this podcast during August 2021, when the news was full of the disastrous way we left Afghanistan, and the ensuing tragedies. I had to stop listening to the news for a while – and I chose this podcast as a way to find some sunshine in those horrible days. Steve and James’ crazy stories and hiliarious debates made me forget all the ugliness each time I listened. If you choose just one podcast to add to your collection – make it this one!

The Jennifer Fulwiler Show

I love this lady. She is about 10 years younger than I am and has six kids under the age of 18. She’s Catholic and a standup comedian. In other words, she’s as different from me as anyone could be. She spent most of her young married life at home with the kids, while writing funny books and starting a blog about her conversion, then started a radio show, then followed her dream of being a stand-up comedian! The description on Apple: “This podcast is like if someone gave a TED Talk after three mimosas.” You will love her!

History and Commentary

The MartyrMade Podcast

Darryl Cooper covers history, religion, philosophy, ritual – all seeking to bring meaning out of chaos. I first discovered him through where else, Twitter. His latest podcast is an in-depth look at the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars, and the injustices done to coal miners as they sought to better their lives. Other favorite episodes include the series he did on Epstein and his audio versions of his Substack posts.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Speaking of Substack writers, I’ve been following Bari Weiss’s work at her Common Sense Substack since she left the New York Times. As an extension of that, she’s started her podcast Honestly. She’ll interview a guest on one of the issues of the day – and that guest can be anyone, liberal, conservative, whomever. It’s thoughtful, thought-provoking, and dare I say, shows surprising balance in such a polarized time.

Fiction

The Leviathan Chronicles

Instead of drifting off to sleep to a TV screen, I drift off to sleep listening to a podcast story. The trouble with the Leviathan Chronicles is that these science-fiction episodes are so well-written, well-acted and voiced (with over 60 actors) that I have to stay awake to listen to just one more episode. The initial three seasons focus on the story of a hidden city – known as Leviathan – hidden deep in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific. Just start listening to it – you’ll be so involved in the characters and the relationships the author builds that when the story becomes fantastical – you’ll be swept along.

And now for my favorite…

Wooden Overcoats

I’ve loved this funny, witty, oh-so-beautifully written and acted British podcast for the last few years. It’s only 4 seasons long – and I’ve yet to finish the last two episodes because I can’t bear to have it end. Here’s the perfect description, from the podcast website:

RUDYARD FUNN RUNS A FUNERAL HOME ON THE ISLAND OF PIFFLING.
It used to be the only one. It isn’t anymore.

Rudyard Funn and his equally miserable sister Antigone run their family’s failing funeral parlour, where they get the body in the coffin in the ground on time. But one day they find everyone enjoying themselves at the funerals of a new competitor – the impossibly perfect Eric Chapman! With their dogsbody Georgie, and a mouse called Madeleine, the Funns are taking drastic steps to stay in business…

-Wooden Overcoats
Time flies when you’re lost in a good book
Accentuate the Positive! · Books · educational · just plain fun

Time flies when you’re lost in a good book

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Humidity and heat = AC and books!

I chose to take June off from blogging. Then the heat and humidity of a South Carolina summer sapped me of the strength to do anything more in my garden than just water the plants and let them be. Doing so left me nothing to blog about from my garden – how many posts can I write on wilting vines?

Summers in SC are perfect for staying indoors, reading, sipping sweet iced tea, and enjoying Mr. Willis Carrier’s wonderful invention of commercial air conditioning. To keep this short, I’m just posting a list of some of the books I read since June, with maybe one or two lines of description. Tell me what a person reads and I’ll tell you about that person….

June

Kindle

Out of the Silent Planet
by C. S. Lewis

The beginning of Lewis’ lesser-known trilogy for adults. Fanciful yet deep. It rewards constant re-reading.

Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
Bill O’Reilly, Martin Dugard

I’ve read so many books about the Kennedys – this was one of them. I can’t remember much about it.

January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right
Julie Kelly

Julie Kelly has been the voice of those who have no voice in this matter. Read it and be infuriated.

OUTCRY: Why does Pope Barnabas release Catholic clergy from their vows of celibacy?
Ned Cosby

A piece of fiction which imagines a future pope determined to rid the church of sexual abuse.

Paperback and hardcover

Uncharted (1) (Arcane America)
Sarah A. Hoyt and Kevin J. Anderson

I love Sarah’s blog and love to read her books.

July

Kindle

The Devil’s Hand: A Thriller (Terminal List Book 4) AND

In the Blood: A Thriller (Terminal List Book 5)
Jack Carr

I had to read both of these to finish the series before I watched an episode of Amazon Prime’s Terminal List series. My conclusion: I’m happier with the books.

Blessed With All This Life (The Wilder Bunch Book 7)
Max Cossack

The last of the Wilder Bunch series, and yes, of course I have them all. I was turned on to the famous novelist Max Cossack by his lovely wife who writes the Ammo Grrrll columns at Powerline blog.

Paperback and hardcover

The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human
Naomi Wolf

Still finishing this one up – it makes my blood boil!!

August (so far)

Kindle

The Iron Web
Larken Rose

A chilling look at a possible dystopian future, where men have forgotten how to be free.

The Puppet Masters
Robert A. Heinlein

My introduction to a master – thank you, Sarah Hoyt!

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert A. Heinlein

I’m 75% of the way through this and it makes me cheer. The transportees settled forcibly on Luna (our moon) have risen up and declared their independence. I’d heard of this one before I read it – it is a masterpiece.

Waiting in the wings

The Little World of Don Camillo (Don Camillo Series Book 1)
Giovanni Guareschi

Another delightful recommendation from Sarah. Can’t wait.

Paperback and hardcover

One Row at a Time
Rochester A. Baker, Sr.

Rochester is in my Toastmasters club, Two Notch Toastmasters. He has written a lovely book which is both a memoir of lessons learned in his long life, “one row at a time,” and a tribute to his late wife Sheilda. She came with him to Toastmasters meetings years ago, before she passed. A wonderful elegy.

Gotta get back to my latest …

As you can see, I’m still finishing a couple or three. I’ll usually have four or five on the go at all times. Oh, yes, I read two Jack Reacher paperbacks as well this summer, but they’re in the car, destined for the Little Free Library on the corner and I can’t be bothered to dig them up.

A good book, a glass of sweet tea, and a little something to munch on – it don’t get better than this!

– Aunt Gem’s dad
Adventuring with The Hobbit
Books · Gratitude · Hobbies · just plain fun

Adventuring with The Hobbit

AuntGem1 Comment

Dear readers: as you know, my site now focuses on four things: gardening, baking, cooking, and books. Today it’s time to focus on my love of reading.

So many books have famous first lines. There’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Herman Melville started Moby Dick with “Call me Ishmael.” And “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.” My favorite is from the book I just finished with my book club: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Of course, that’s from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

As much as I love the first line, the first paragraph of this adventure is what truly draws me in:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

Tolkien’s verse

We gathered Tuesday night for the final session on The Hobbit, and we all were sad to leave it. Everyone was quoting favorite lines from the book to each other, just to hear Tolkien’s lyrical prose. One of my favorite parts of the book, aside from the sheer adventure of it all – the dramatic journey of our little hero, the modest hobbit, fighting with evil spiders and a DRAGON – was some of the poetry Tolkien crafted as the songs sung by the dwarves and the elves. The songs reflected the characters’ nature: light, cheerful verse for the elves, cruel consonant-heavy lines for the goblins. And of course, our hero Bilbo Baggins, invented silly verses on the fly when he distracted the spiders away from his friends.

Old fat spider sitting in a tree!

Old fat spider can’t see me!

Attercop! Attercop!

Won’t you stop

Stop your spinning and look for me!

-The Hobbit, chapter 8

A complete world

Beside the poetry, everyone who has read Tolkien knows about the care he takes with what the sci-fi community calls world building. I’ve always thought of it as scene setting. The maps on the inside covers of the book were created by the author. But you can get it all from the descriptions Tolkien gives of the Shire, of Bilbo’s very nice hobbit hole, of the paths the adventurers take through the deep forest of Mirkwood, the wastes near the Lonely Mountain and finally in the dragon’s cave. Everything is described so beautifully that I can picture every scene of the book. But of the first Hobbit movie – I remember nothing except the first dinner scene. That’s the magic of books – you, as reader, collaborate with the author in creating the story in your mind.

Finding the Lonely Mountain

A brief, final battle

I’m thankful that Tolkien resorted to the “Deus ex Machina” technique of the using the Eagles to shorten the final battle – because it nicely shortened a brutal war scene. I thought that at least 30 minutes of graphic fighting could have been cut from “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy movies – which I DO remember – without sacrificing the story. And it was somehow so hobbit-like for Bilbo to be conked on the head with a rock, causing him to go unconscious and miss the last part of the battle.

A humble hero

Bilbo Baggins is described as a hobbit who “looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father” and indeed he lived a decorous life until he was 50 years old. But then, with the visit of Gandalf the wizard, the part of him from his mother’s people, the adventurous and less respectable Tooks, came out. The two halves of his personality warred within him starting with the unexpected tea party he hosted for the 14 dwarves. In shock the dwarves were expecting table service (and knew his larders better than he did) he muttered “Confusticate and bebother these dwarves!” Then after being thought a grocer instead of fierce, he marched forth to join the fray. On the journey Bilbo went back and forth from bemoaning the lack of a pocket handkerchief to devising ingenious plans to save his friends from danger. That was Bilbo’s charm: he was a hero who didn’t think highly of himself, who forgave those who did him wrong (witness his weeping over Thorin) and who was pleased to be “quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

Notes

I’m sure I don’t have to tell this erudite audience from whence the lines in the first paragraph came, but in case you don’t know:
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

The cover of the copy I have – the 75th Anniversary edition.