Wine: Picket Fence
April 27, 2010 | Iowa,Wine
I am by no means a wine connoisseur, but I like to drink it, and I really like to try local wines. I was surprised to learn how many wineries there are in Iowa. We even have one just down the road from us. What’s better than trying the local flavor of your new home?
This isn’t a review. I’ll leave that to the experts. No, this is more of an American Bandstand Rate-a-Record opinion, “It’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it. I give it a 98, Dick.” Only, you know. With wine. And without Dick.
I recently tried Picket Fence, a semi-sweet white wine by Park Farm Winery in Bankston, Iowa. It was recommended to me by Eric in the liquor department at Hy-Vee in Mason City. It was $9.99. (He was spot on with all his recommendations.)
On the bottle: “A crisp, clean, semi-sweet white wine. Our Picket Fence pairs wonderfully with fish, seafood, chicken and pork dishes; especially when cooked with butter or cream sauces. Not too dry, yet not too sweet, this wine is on the fence!”
I really liked it. I like white wines, especially German rieslings, but some of the Iowa whites I’ve tasted are way too sweet with a “homemade” taste to them. Picket Fence, though, was just the right balance for me. I drank it with a ham dish with a cream sauce — a recipe I got from @collisionbend (Thanks, Will!) — and it was tasty.
Posted by Becky @
6:00 am |
Books: How Reading Changed My Life
April 26, 2010 | Books
I just finished reading How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen. It’s only 84 pages, but every word on every page spoke to me. Have you ever read her? If you haven’t, you should. She writes like a reader. A very well-read reader. I only disagree with her on Anna Karenina, which made her list of books she would save from a fire.
I thought about taking one of her lists and setting a goal to read everything on it. Each list has 10 books, and I’ve read a few on each list, so I’d have a head start. But I’m more tempted to make my own Anna Quindlen list, picking from each of her lists.
Here goes.
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace
- Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
- The BFG by Roald Dahl
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- The Group by Mary McCarthy
- Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
A reader’s dozen.
What should I read first?
Posted by Becky @
6:00 am |
Books: Honey for a Child’s Heart
April 24, 2010 | Books
I just finished reading Honey for a Child’s Heart: The Imaginative Use of Books in Family Life by Gladys Hunt. I read it because Ilina at Dirt & Noise wrote about it.
It’s a tad heavy-handed with the whole “separating the wheat from the chaff” ideas regarding books (and, in my mind, people), but I should have expected that, I suppose, from a Christian writer published by Zondervan, a Christian publisher.
But I like her lists for reminders and ideas. And, ironically, her definition of home is one of the least judgmental things I’ve heard in the last couple of years, and it’s a subject I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, “What is home? My favorite definition is ‘a safe place,’ a place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure relationships and affirmation. It’s a place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurturing. The people in it do not need to be perfect; instead, they need to be honest, loving, supportive, recognizing a common humanity that makes all of us vulnerable.”
I’d have to say amen to that.
Posted by Becky @
6:00 am |
Ode to spring
Daffodils are up. Snow fences are down.
Freedom. Lighter backpacks mean bigger items for show & tell.
Oh, spring. Ooh, you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re really impressed down here, I can tell you. You’re just so super.
I love that you’re here, but I hate that it took so long. I could do without the bipolar extremes, but that won’t happen in Iowa, will it? No. No, it won’t.
Posted by Becky @
6:00 am |
Books: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
April 19, 2010 | Books
Quick. Anna Karenina and Barbara Kingsolver. What do they have in common?
Well, for one, they’re both pretty. Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle pleases the senses. The colors are pretty, as are the red-and-white vegetables in a cupped hand on the cover. I thought they were radishes. Shows what I know. They’re Christmas lima beans. I run my fingers over the cover. The letters are indented, and the cover feels like fabric. Nice.
Anna Karenina is a pretty little book. (Yes, it’s a library copy. No, I didn’t steal it. I bought it at a library sale.) It’s barely bigger than a postcard when it’s open. The pages are thin, almost translucent. I love the way it feels in my hands. There’s a nice weight to it. I mean, look at it. Don’t you just want to gobble it up? I did.
Except it was SO painful to read. But I was determined to finish that darn book, even though I hated it. (I have since learned that life is too short to read a book you don’t enjoy.) Yes, I know. It’s been called the “greatest novel ever written.” Doesn’t mean I liked it.
That’s the difference. I loved Kingsolver’s book. Loved, loved, loved. What these books also had in common was they both took me forever to read. The first one because I couldn’t stand it. The second one because I loved it so much I didn’t want it to end.
I did finally finish reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, though. Kingsolver wrote it with her daughter Camille Kingsolver and her husband, Steven L. Hopp. Daughter Lily didn’t write for the book, but she was often the star of its pages. The book chronicles the year they spent eating locally produced food as well as growing their own. I read the book after Ilina at Dirt & Noise recommended it. She wrote her own post about how Animal, Vegetable, Miracle changed her life.
I’m not sure why I hadn’t read Kingsolver before. Plenty of people told me I should. I’m glad I finally did. I took her with me to the Y, and she had me laughing out loud on the treadmill. I’m sure the folks without ear buds thought, “Um, hello? If you can read AND laugh? You’re not working hard enough.” I took her to the doctor’s office, and she had me laughing out loud there, startling others from their celebrity-mag browsing.
She reminded me, in part, of my father, who grew up on a farm and, as far as I can remember, planted a garden wherever he lived. All the houses we lived in were rentals, and some came with the job. The tiniest back yard we ever had was in Omaha. He turned the whole thing into a garden. The biggest garden I remember seemed a mile long, but I have no idea how big it actually was. It had just about everything in it.
That was the time, in the mid-1970s that we lived on a farm for a couple of years. We went without a book deal (darnit) and without a family pact to change our lives. We simply went back to the place my father grew up. Looking back, it seems like a very hippie-dippy thing to do, but my parents were as far removed from hippies as one could get. Well, there was Kumbaya thing. Some people joke about “holding hands and singing Kumbaya.” I was actually there when they did. And there was the baking of homemade granola at my aunt’s house. In Boulder. So, who knows. Maybe “hippie” is a relative term.
In any case, we didn’t just dip our toes into the farm experience, we did cannonballs in the deep end of the pool. If my parents had any formal ideas about “sustainable living” or anything like that, I wasn’t aware of them.
We raised chickens for eggs and meat. Gathering and selling eggs was my project. I learned my way around a henhouse from my grandmother, who at that time lived in town after farming for decades. We raised ducks and geese. I remember “harvesting” chickens, something not terribly new to me, since I watched my grandmother butcher chickens before. (Did we harvest the ducks and geese too? I can’t remember now.) There were rabbits, a lamb and even a pony.
I’ve actually thought about having chickens again for fresh eggs. I’m surrounded by farmland here in Iowa, and surely it’s not all corporate farmland. I’ve found several resources for farmer’s markets and locally grown produce. There’s even a group in Eastern Iowa that exists because of Kingsolver’s book and what they learned from it. The group is Corridor Locavore, whose goal is a comprehensive directory of locally grown food and goods.
Just when I thought I couldn’t like Kingsolver any more, she made it clear she loves Italy almost as much as I do. She’s Italian by marriage and visited Italy after planning for 10 years. I’m Italian by way of my heart. There’s not a drop of Italian blood coursing through my veins, but I fell in love with Italy when we were there 10 years ago. (I hope to get back one day — maybe to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary? That gives me about three years to plan!) The sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the people. Oh, what a delicious country! The people we met were kind, generous, loud, funny, beautiful and hospitable. Hospitality in Italy always involves food. Amazing food. No matter how simple or elaborate.
We were “welcomed” to Italy with an unannounced train stop, dozens of police with guns drawn, checking everyone’s passport. We were told they were looking for a fugitive, and, no, this wasn’t standard procedure for welcoming guests to the country. It was thrilling. You know … in a death-defying rollercoaster kind of way.
But our real welcome involved food. We shared a compartment on the train with a young couple. They had packed a large lunch, and they insisted on sharing with us. How could we say no? We couldn’t.
Everything we ate and drank in Italy was so much more than satisfying. Everything else was a feast for the senses.
The young women who zipped through Florence on mopeds, which you would think would be quite a dirty business, but, no. They would stop and step away without a hair out of place, perfectly ironed, manicured and looking as if they belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine. Stunning. And the men. There were groups of them posing together in their clean white shirts, crisp pants and shiny shoes. Gorgeous. There were others dressed as gladiators in Rome, speaking dozens of languages to passers-by (sometimes to one person relunctant to speak, in an effort to determine which language she spoke) — hugging, kissing and cajoling them into signing on for a guided tour.
Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don’t tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It’s fairly sexy. Of course I don’t know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don’t burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, p. 247)
The Italians we met were never ones to give up on us. We stopped at a small shop in Pisa. It offered pizza by the slice, which was freshly made and under glass. Their version of fast food, I suppose? I was tired and ready to give up with my questions in not-even-close Italian. The woman behind the counter sensed my frustration. She came around front, took me by the arm, speaking the whole time, pointing, gesturing, smiling. She didn’t want to let me go without eating some of her wonderful pizza. And it was wonderful. So was she.
As is Barbara Kingsolver. Hands to my heart, she’s better than a cup of perfect cappuccino — when it’s offered, don’t ever pass it up and then savor every last sip. (And, no. She didn’t make me cry about turkeys, not one little bit. OK. Maybe just a little bit, dangit. But all the laughs made up for that.)
Posted by Becky @
6:00 am |
