On the Table and Elsewhere

 

Reading slowly — I find this book hard to get into.

For My Mona Lisa Collection

What We Have Been Eating

Chips and dips!

Andrea Nguyen’s recipes are always delicious!

Leftover shrimp.

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Food and Other Stuff

 

Len is doing great cooking again.

This Week’s Mona Lisa

Did you say art? You must mean Mona Lisa.

Recent Reading

I lost interest in the middle of this thriller.

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The thirteen stories in this collection vary quite a lot, and several of them differ from the novels of Louise Erdrich that I have read. I enjoyed them all. I’ll pick one example, the story titled “Borsalino,” in reference to a particular type of hat that the narrator wears.

The hat: “a soft brown Borsalino, with a wide grosgrain ribbon band
and a generous brim.” It has a very special hat band made of snakeskin.

This story takes place in Venice during two trips that the narrator takes, quite a few years apart. On the first trip when she’s a student, the narrator is befriended by a local man named Enzo, who offers to be a guide…

“So I took the thief’s tour. In through cracks in walls, squeezing around or climbing through damaged gates, we wandered through ornate gardens and empty apartments. Enzo seemed to know everyone who was keeping the city going, from the bakers to the garbage collectors. He knew his way into shuttered shops, the secret areas of churches, cloisters, ancient palazzi. Servants let us sleep on couches hidden from sunlight, under sheets, or wander in the bishop’s residence. We ate bread and cheese in tiny private gardens, sipped from a bottle liberated from a merchant’s fabled wine cellar. Over the days we went to the islands. In Murano, he blew glass with the glass-blowers. In San Lazzaro degli Armeni, he greeted a monk who let us into the library. Enzo spoke, in a language I had never heard before, to a mummy, tranquil and stern, a neighbor of the monk. We went to Isola San Michele, the island of the dead, and wandered into the oldest part of the cemetery, filled with blackened angels and tilted vaults.” (p.99)

It’s clear that Enzo is very special and has a strange place in the world of the cemetery — especially in “ a cozy mausoleum” where he shows her an old mattress in a crypt. And seems to sleep there. “My hat rattled, as if the snakeskin in the hatband had come alive and moved.”

On the second trip, things are a little different. The author has her husband and children with her, and they start the day normally…

‘I went back to Venice another time. It was about sixteen years later, over a decade into my first marriage. We went with two of our children, both girls, seven and eight years old. I had them keep a travel diary for their younger sister, still at home, just a toddler. In the hotel where we stayed, near the Accademia Bridge, a lavish breakfast was served. The girls listed everything on one page, drew it on another. They were enthralled by the tall glasses of blood orange juice. They drew the arrays of folded meats and pallid cheeses, the puffy pastries, pots of jam, giving each a letter grade.” (p. 101)

But then things turn dark. Enzo, she learns, is not human. He’s a spirit that has lived in Venice for centuries. Further, the hat, which she’s brought with her on this trip too, turns out to be a kind of a magic hat, especially its snakeskin hat band. 

All the stories have something special in them.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

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Weekend Images

Partly-Read Book

I wasn’t finding very many new ideas here, so I skipped several chapters
I expected more from Mark Bittman..

Silly Newspaper Items

I guess if I got drunk I would forget it was still winter. 

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Wait… What?

Baking Hamentaschen

Ingredients for the dough, which has to be made, chilled, rolled, cut out, and filled.

We cooked some traditional prune filling, and also used jam.

A Purim Play: children watch through the window. A plate of hamentaschen is on the table. 

 Photos © 2026 mae sander

February Wrap-Up: Not Much New

Hello Mona Lisa in Paris and in my kitchen

I’ll start my February wrap-up with this Mona Lisa from Evelyn’s trip to Paris.
You probably know that I collect Mona Lisa objects.

Obviously all that’s really on my mind this morning, February 28, is the outbreak of a hot war in the Middle East. A horror show once again, probably instigated to boost the ego and deflect attention from the crimes of a monster. Now to continue with the post I had already prepared.

Mona Lisa and Other Magnets: Past and Present

Mona Lisa to my refrigerator, pretty much the same as January.
This month just hasn’t been very acquisitive, as you’ll see throughout this post.

Magnets in Janyary, 2024 — mainly from Costa Rica.

Magnets in October, 2021

Shared with murals at ColorfulWorld.

February Kitchen

Soup, stew, burgers, lamb chops.

Fruit, pancakes, and Len’s bread.

Note the valentine platter!

I guess I’ve had this white octagonal bowl a long time.
And eating the same thing over again. But we like it!
As I say, a month without much that’s new.

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Dinner from Carol’s Kitchen

African chicken stew with rice and several garnishes; salad; and fruit tarte for dessert.

Not My Kitchen: Lunch at Zingerman’s Deli

A Mural at Zingerman’s

Not My Kitchen: Food at the Olympics

From a random Instagram search

During February we watched a lot of the Milan Winter Olympic Games.

Polar bears in the news: another thought for the month though not in the kitchen

The New York Times recently reported that in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean the polar bears are doing well. The rapid warming of this area, which portends disaster for the planet is at least temporarily making polar bears’ lives much better, as it allows their prey to flourish in winter.

In Svalbard in 2015, we saw this polar bear from the deck of the National Geographic Explorer.

The bear was eating a gull that it had captured. Polar bears eat any prey they can catch.

Kitchen Trouble

Trouble? Our dishwasher is misbehaving, but we are trying to discipline it.

Sherry’s In My Kitchen blog event offers a chance to share your kitchen and see what other people have in their kitchens at the end of each month (or the beginning of the next month). Most of the participants share new kitchen gear, new food choices, and new recipes. This month, I didn’t get any new stuff, but I’ve done my best to share what’s going on in my life. I’m also sharing this with Deb’s Sunday Salon.

Blog post and photos © 2026 mae sander

Overwhelmed by the Renaissance

A not-quite reading success…

“Every day of our lives we’re targeted by at least one lie about history.” (p. 25)

“The plague is as important as the Mona Lisa to our effort to understand this Renaissance, both terrible and great.” (p. 193)

“When you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women.” (p. 234)

“If you know only one thing about Savonarola it’s the Bonfire of the Vanities, the Renaissance’s darkest hour (nope), a mass book burning (nope) and art burning (nope), invented by Savonarola (nope) to exert the stifling force of Church and Faith against the broadening of art, science, and thought that he hated (still nope).” (p. 291)

“ I’ve looked through one of Galileo’s telescopes, it’s in Florence, and realizing it’s less powerful than the plastic Hamburglar binoculars I once got in a McDonald’s Happy Meal filled me with new awe that a cunning mind armed with the right questions can get a long, long way with simple tools.” (p. 570)

My Reading

I only managed to sort-of-carefully read the first 500 pages of Ada Palmer’s tome Inventing the Renaissance. I scanned the rest. It’s much much too long, and it has a number of flaws, the main one being that it is precious in the sense of being affected and self-congratulatory. Worse yet, it’s constantly offering rather ordinary and boring  bits of the author’s autobiography — mainly about her experience as a graduate student and her students’ reactions to the subject matter.

Inventing the Renaissance manages to cover several hundred years of humanist thought, to define many concepts, and to provide sketches of the accomplishments of dozens of thinkers of the age and many patrons of these thinkers. I’m a fan of Leonardo da Vinci, Isabella d’Este, Michelangelo, Lucrezia Borgia, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli, several members of the Medici family, Benvenuto Cellini (“the Florentine goldsmith-sculptor-assassin-jailbreaker-necromancer”), and so on. It’s interesting to read a not-so-critical view of Savonarola. But eventually the level of detail seems brutal, especially when one’s boredom is amplified by details of the author’s academic career.

Of course the book provides a huge dose of historic narrative, character studies of many Renaissance figures, summaries of philosophical narratives, introductions to the major thinkers and interests of the age (both famous ones and obscure ones), a bit about the politics of art works like Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, and much more. At the end, there’s even a brief history of printing — which in my opinion deserves more prominence: the author characterizes the introduction of printed books as “an information revolution: not new technology (we’re on the Gutenberg-type press until the nineteenth century) but a distribution network revolution.” (p. 587) I felt that her view was weak.

Unless you are a glutton for an extreme level of detail about obscure points, and unless you are a fan of the author’s fascination with her own life and academic achievements, I strongly doubt that you would enjoy reading this book. And although I have in the past immersed myself in some of the biographies of the same individuals featured here, I found it horrendously dense and challenging to follow, which is not a compliment. I say: leave the reading of this academic stuff to the professionals!

Thinking of Famous Art in the Renaissance

I enjoyed the art history, such as discussion of Michelangelo’s slaves.

Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel. One of the most amazing mural paintings in history:
the book has interesting historical info about this art work and its creator.
Shared with Deb’s Sunday salon at Readerbuzz.

Leonardo’s portrait of Cecelia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan was painted when Leonardo was “sent there by Lorenzo de Medici as something between an ambassador and a gift for his Sforza allies.” (p. 326) The ermine is shared with Eileen’s Critters!

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Photos of art works from Wikipedia