Lazy W Marie

Happy First Anniversary, Book Club!!!

January 19, 2012

In January of 2011, almost exactly a year ago as I write this, my friend Tina and I decided to start a book club. We each invited one woman to join us, making a group of four. I invited my cousin Emily, and Tina invited her coworker Desiree. It was awesome. Our initial goals were threefold: to get thinky more often, to expose ourselves to a greater variety of literature, and YES to socialize. Because we’re girls. We really had no idea how things would go. I mean, January is famous for quickly abandoned though brilliant ideas, right?

BOY HOWDY that is not how things went down

for our little Oklahoma Book Club.

Since last January, our group of four has grown to twenty-two. 22. TWENTY-TWO. Veinte y dos. That is a 450% growth rate, you guys. And we didn’t advertise or anything; it’s all been just by word of mouth. In fact, in late October we made the rather uncomfortable decision to close enrollment due to a potentially unmanageable crowd. Seating and feeding people is one thing; but more importantly, in gigantic crowds we lose the intimacy needed for really satisfying book discussions.

In our first year we devoured eight novels as a group and have shared many hours of great conversation with each other, exploring and debating the content of these selections. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve made each other blush. We’ve challenged our belief systems. Thanks to a Los Angeles book industry hook up we have with one of our members (her name rhymes with Frulia) , we even conducted a telephone interview with Aimee Bender, the author of one of our books! DO YOU KNOW COOL THAT IS?? So cool it’s almost awkward.

As suggested by our club name, Dinner Club With a Reading Problem, we also eat. We eat really well. It goes without saying that every one of our gatherings has been a passionately convivial affair, sometimes themed to the book and other times a wild pot luck free-for-all. Even the self-proclaimed kitchen-challenged among us have participated happily, and we’ve traded fun recipes along the way. Again, because we’re girls.

Reading has never been so much fun. We always set attainable deadlines depending on the time of year and most members’ life groove at the time, so that no one seees book club as a burden or work. We keep in touch with each other throughout the reading weeks. And we have grown to know each other in deeper ways than you normally do in a casual acquaintance. Hearing a woman’s thoughts on a hefty read can reveal incredible things about her life and heart.

So anyway… If you do not yet have a book club, I double dog dare you to start one. It will not cost you much time or money, and what it DOES cost you will return to you tenfold in a rich life experience.

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Curious about who we are or what we’ve read?

Here are some vital stats:

The average age of our 22 members is 35.78 years. (Our most junior member turned 21 the same day as our most recent dinner, and our most seasoned lady is 55, though you would never guess it to look at her.)

Among the group we have 13 children and 4 grandchildren, ranging from infant to college aged.

Roughly one third of our members is married, one of them being half of a Derby Union. More on that another time.

Professions: By coincidence, a different one third of our members is in number-crunching professions. Accountants, analysts, IT whizzes, auditors, etc. Also in the group is a paralegal, a credit union manager, a college student/part time employee/ Mom of two teens, a literary publicist, a hair design student, a computer nerd, a social worker supervisor, a receptionist, a project manager for a major investment house, an oil & gas accounting/ payroll manager, a verification associate, and a dorky farmish blogger. We are a motley crew, and I love it.

These are the books we’ve read as a group so far, though we always find time to discuss our additional private reads along the way:

The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Hunger Games by Susanne Collins
Catching Fire by Susanne Collins
Mockingjay by Susanne Collins
The Shack by William P. Young
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson

By the way, you can find my reviews for most of these books somewhere on this blog.

How Do We Choose Our Books? In the beginning we planned to take turns like nice, polite little ladies. I mean, there were four of us. It was easy. Then throughout the year, as membership grew, we started kind of stabbing in the dark, just sort of brainstorming over plates of food and deciding wildly what to read next.
It was working out alright, but last week we decided to take a slightly more orderly approach in 2012 and draw names two months out, that person being the one to choose our next title. We meet every six weeks, more or less, and we recently started meeting at different places! All of our 2011 events were here at the farm, which I loved dearly, but I also love going to other people’s homes, and fortunately our group is overflowing with willing hostesses.

How Big of a Deal is This, Really? Well, it’s a really big deal. It just is, you guys. One member (her name rhymes with Flacie) expressed that of all the activities in her busy life, if she ever felt pressed to sacrifice something, the last thing she would sacrifice would be Book Club. That speaks VOLUMES. ha-ha-ha-ha…
Another member (her name is definitely not Margaret) has been making six hour drives from Austin, Texas to join the fun. Still another member (her name rhymes with Blephanie) reluctantly picked up the ~~burden~~ joy of reading by joining the group for a book she had started three years prior but never finished. And guess what? She not only stuck with us; she hosted the next party!
Personally, I am amazed to discover so much depth and stimulation at such an easy price. The events plan themselves, really, because we are all so eager to see each other and spill our guts about the books. We definitely have found some kind of magic here, and I can see it lasting many years.

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So Happy First Anniversary, Ladies!! You have each found a very special place in my heart because of this uncommon adventure. I have thoroughly enjoy getting to know everybody and stretching my reading muscles beyond what I would read on my own. Please stick around… 2012 is going to be incredible!

Much Love,
xoxoxo
Marie

Self Sufficient (Small Stone January 18th)

January 18, 2012

This morning was cold. Beautiful, yes, but definitely colder than the deliciously warm days we’ve enjoyed all month. The pond wore a thin skin of ice even where the sun could reach. The grass was crunchy with frost. And all the animals were heaving out plumes of steamy breath as they patrolled the farm. One of my jobs this morning was to make sure everyone could find fresh water to drink throughout the day.

I did that and some other things and was quietly distributing piles of hay for the four-leggeds and tearing off bits of stale bread for the birds when I heard it. A loud, crushing sound and then a splash behind me. Chunk-hi had hammered his great, square chin and then his massive horns against the ice in his trough, releasing the loose water beneath it.

“Oh I’m sorry, little buddy, I totally forgot about your trough!”

“That’s okay, Mom. I got this.” His long beard was dripping with water, his horns shiny and steaming. Long black eyelashes blinking calmly at me.

He can’t really talk, you guys. He’s a buffalo. But we understand each other just fine.

Raised Beds From Reclaimed Wood

January 17, 2012

A blogging friend and I are thinking alike quite a bit these days. Heather posted this weekend about making the most of your kitchen’s leftover contents and coming up with fun, new recipes following a decadent, costly, and probably calorie-heavy holiday season. First of all, her recipe for yogurt banana bread looks as delicious as it seems to be healthy!

Secondly, I like her approach. So much. She suggests that we make the most of what we have. Take honest inventory of your resources and make the most of that stuff, right now.

“Do what you can,

with what you have,

where you are.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

These words convey to me such a sense of calm and resourcefulness, such encouraging satisfaction! Do they to you too? In a culture where consumption is key and having is often more important than doing, it’s easy to get caught up in the various races we all know about. Today, let me echo Heather’s mantra and offer you some additional encouragement to make the most of what you have.

But not in the kitchen, in the garden. My favorite room in the house.

Handsome and I spent a good part of the long weekend building garden structures. We built three raised vegetable beds and one fantastic arbor over the center aisle, all from reclaimed materials! I’m not even kidding. Seriously, with the exception of going to Home Depot (where spending temptation knows no bounds) to buy one replacement blade for his reciprocating saw and a box of long screws, we made zero purchases for these major farm improvements.

This kind of thing gives me happy chills, you guys. We used old stockade fencing peeled from the rubble of the kids’ playhouse “fort” in the back field. It had been thrashed by the violent May 10 tornado almost two years ago, but I have not had the heart to let go of any of it. This doesn’t count as letting go; this is re-purposing and keeping near all over again.

We used limbs and trunks from already-fallen trees in the nearby Pine forest. We even plucked rusty nails out of old planks of porch wood and used those again, both the planks and the rusty nails. After an hour or two of collecting raw materials for free, I stood back and was fairly stunned by how much we had at our disposal.

The sight was definitely motivating! We built and built and schemed and sort of measured and worked together like a well oiled machine, not stopping for lunch until the whole thing was done.

What’s fun about accomplishments like this, beyond the monetary savings, even beyond the intrinsic pleasure of having been resourceful citizens of the planet (she says as she snaps her suspenders), is that our new projects have been braided together with happy old memories.

For the next several years, hopefully, I will be gardening within these lovingly constructed boxes. These boxes built from rough, painted wood that instantly brings to mind the sound of my children laughing and the smell of sunshine in their hair.

I will be coaxing flowering vines up heavily barked tree trunks that remind me of the first walks my husband and I took together on this property, four and a half short but historic years ago.

My adorable, deeply loved nephew and my two precious, beautiful daughters.

This was taken in the spring of 2008, almost four years ago.

I see the mud on their clothes and those easy smiles

and remember how much fun we all had, how much love flowed freely.

I hope they remember too.

Okay, off we all go to the next great thing in life. Have a wonderful rest of the day or night, friends! Take a good look around and challenge yourself to make something new and beautiful out of what you already have, right now. Because you are blessed!

And please say a prayer for my girls and their cousin.

xoxoxo

Sopapilla Bread

January 17, 2012

I ran across a yummy looking bread recipe on Pinterest* that really must be shared. This past weekend our fabulous little book club was feasting on Mexican delicacies while discussing Before I Go to Sleep (which is reviewed here, if you are interested).

I toted this along as a dessert thinking everyone craves a sugary speck of bread after a spicy Tex Mex meal but maybe not something fried. It was well received, and I’ll be making it again. The next time, though, I think we’ll serve it drizzled with honey. That’s how we eat sopapillas in Oklahoma. Do you do that where you live?

I did not invent this, of course, but I do feel like I can simplify the approach a tiny bit just by saying this: The ingredients and process for this are pretty much the same as any standard cinnamon roll recipe, right up to the point that you would roll the dough and slice it into little pinwheels. This means that you could probably take your own favorite cinnamon roll recipe and just treat the dough differently to come up with a slightly different presentation. No biggie.

I am happy to report, however, that this particular filling is much more buttery and waaaay more sugary than I have found others to be. Yum. I mean, it’s so sugary that it crunches between your teeth in a delicate, state-fair-food kind of way. And it is so buttery that it stays moist. Not at all dry, even naked of icing. To illustrate this point, the test batch I made on Friday afternoon was under a cake dome all weekend and when I nibbled some on Monday it tasted perfectly moist and yummy.

Care for the recipe?

For the Dough:

2 3/4 cups + 2 Tablespoons flour

1/4 cup sugar

2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast (one packet)

1/2 tsp. salt

4 Tablespoons butter

1/3 cup whole milk (I only had skim milk so used heavy cream, no problemo)

1/4 cup water

2 eggs (room temp & beaten)

1 tsp. vanilla

For the Filling:

1 cup sugar

2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

4 Tablespoons butter, browned

To Make the Dough:

1. In a saucepan, melt the butter in with the milk or cream. Remove from heat, add water & vanilla, & allow to cool to about 125 degrees.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together 2 cups of flour with the sugar, yeast, & salt.

3. Pour the warm milk mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well. (I used a wooden spoon, not an electric mixer, and it worked great.) Now add the beaten eggs to the batter as well as 3/4 cup of flour. At this point I mashed it all up with my bare hands rather than stir. It worked well to incorporate the new flour. The batter will be sticky.

4. Place the ball of dough in a greased bowl and let it rise (covered) in a warm spot until it doubles in volume. This takes less than an hour.

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5. Knead in 2 more Tablespoons of flour, making the previously sticky dough nice and springy, replace the cover, and let the dough rise once more while you mix up the filling.

6. The filling is simple. Just stir together the spices & sugar in one bowl. And the same saucepan as earlier heat the butter past the point of melted, gently until it turns a nice clear, brown color. Now remove butter from heat and hang on a little longer.

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7. Roll the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Spread browned butter all over it, right up to every edge, then sprinkle on the sugary mixture. (Personal note: While making the test batch I panicked a little. It seemed like an excessive amount of butter and sugar, compared to recipes I’ve tried in the past, but this turned out to be what made this recipe so wonderful. Personal opinion.)

7. This is where the cinnamon roll/sopapilla bread road divides. Rather than roll your dough into a cylinder then slice that into little pinwheels, you use a pizza cutter to slice the flat sheet of dough into long strips. Then you stack those strips into a long, skinny dough skyscraper. Then you cut that long skinny dough skyscraper into stacked squares.

8. File your stacked squares on edge into a regular bread pan and let it rise one last time, just for a few more minutes.

9. I forgot to mention preheating your oven. Mine heats up with ridiculous speed, so I can do it right at this point. 350 degrees is good. Now bake the dough. Bake it till your house smells amazing. This takes about half an hour, then I suggest letting the bread rest for a while in the oven, but with the oven turned off and the door open.

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Now for a little housekeeping. As mentioned earlier* I found this recipe on Pinterest, where I was happily led to a blog called I Heart Food and So Can You. The author there did a great job illustrating every step, and her blog is lovely, so go check it out. She also credits two other previous blog posts for this recipe, Mandy’s Recipe Box and, ultimately, Joy the Baker. Credit where credit is due, I groove it. Whoever first dreamed up this particular incarnation of cinnamon-butter-drenched yeasty love, I don’t know. But it was B & K whose blog photos lured me in through Pinterest, so there we have it.

There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Mexican Food,

and Credit Your Sources.

xoxoxo

Another One Bites the Dust (Small Stone January 15th)

January 15, 2012

We are speeding along the two lane paved road which is flanked by dry grassy fields and quiet groves of bare deciduous trees. Blurring anonymously through a brown and gray still life. The cold wind hisses in through the barely open sunroof and a Queen classic pounds out of the speakers. Gasoline fumes faintly poison our fresh air but it’s intoxicating. I lay my left hand on his right thigh and wait while we accelerate uphill, the force of the car’s acceleration pressing me steadily backward into the curvy seat. Through his pants, I can trace one finger along the unseen hem of his boxers. Once we reach about 4800 RPMs, his leg flexes for the trade of gas for clutch and rapidly back again, and we’re off as if before we’d been sitting still..

My spine melts into the seat and watch him command the vehicle. I am such a goner.

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