Too Short or Too Long?

 

Things Like These by Claire Keegan.
Reminds me a lot of James Joyce (not just because it’s Irish).
Very good book, but too short. Shortlisted, too.

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves. Lots of good characters!
Good book but too long, gets kind of lost in the misdirections.

The Shortest Way to Hades  by Sarah Caudwell.
Unfortunately a very discursive and frustrating book to read. 
It would be a good plot — almost a locked room situation —
except for excessive detail about legal matters and TOO LONG!

Kitchens, March 2025

New in My Kitchen in March

New spoon rest or teabag holder that Evelyn made me.

What’s new on the refrigerator this month? Just one new and timely magnet.
For a thought-provoking essay on Orwell see: “We are all living in George Orwell’s World Now”
in the New York Times Magazine.

Things We Ate in March

Vietnamese shrimp and snap peas. Recipes from Andrea Nguyen.

Favorite dish: au gratin potato casserole prepared in my French baking dish that I’ve had for many years.

Roast lamb, roast potatoes, broccoli, and a glass of red wine.

An omelet and a pita bread.

In our kitchen one morning. Toast, jam, butter, orange juice, coffee. Other mornings, other selections.

Alice at our favorite bakery, Tous Les Jours — lunch. Yes, we three ate all these pastries!

A visual recipe from the website Recipe Tin Eats. It was very good!

A great meal from Carol’s kitchen.

Recently opened in Ann Arbor: one of a small chain of Vietnamese/French coffee shops. 

Beyond my own Kitchen: US Food Aid Disrupted

Destructive actions by our government have been constantly increasing. 

“Last week, the USDA cut an initiative called the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which helped schools receive fresh ingredients from small farms.” (source)

Food-insecurity is a major concern that has been addressed by some very effective programs during the past five years, but those programs are being abruptly discontinued. Farmers have suddenly been abandoned by government programs that purchased their goods on behalf of food banks. Agencies like Feeding America are struggling to cope with these losses. 

“USDA had previously allocated $500 million in deliveries to food banks for fiscal year 2025 through The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Now, the food bank leaders say many of those orders have been canceled.” (source)

Food banks throughout the country, which have struggled to help those in need as their numbers increased, are now profoundly challenged as many millions of dollars in food aid has been cut off: 

“USDA’s cancellation of the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance programs has garnered headlines, but they are just two of more than a dozen programs supporting small farms and regional food infrastructure that have been impacted. (source)

Source: “Feds cancel #4.3M worth of poultry, cheese, eggs to Michigan Food Banks” (March 29, 2025)

Here in Ann Arbor, throughout our state of Michigan, and in most other states, needy families that relied on USDA food supplies for nutritional help are facing a grim future. 

“Nearly $5 million worth of food for Michigan food banks has been cut by the Trump Administration, according to the CEO of one of Battle Creek's food banks. Although that number accounts for about 4% of food distributed to Michiganders across eight counties, South Michigan Food Bank CEO Peter Vogel is hopeful the cuts won't cause southwest Michiganders to go hungry. Canceled meals, including products such as chicken, eggs, pork, turkey and cheese, were expected to be delivered this spring and summer.” (source)

Farmers, already jeopardized by international trade cancellations in the tariff wars, are additionally faced with these newly cancelled orders. (The impact on farmers of new tariffs scheduled to begin this week is a major issue, separate from the various program cancellations.)

“Funding pauses at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are affecting sustainable agricultural programs in Michigan. The program Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funds 41 projects, including 28 in Michigan. Grants support programs that increase economic opportunities for farmers who use sustainable practices. The disbursement of those funds has been stopped, according to two of those projects in Michigan.” (source)

Thinking of my own kitchen, where I am so extremely fortunate, makes me also think of the less fortunate people in my community, my state, and my country — one of the tragedies that is unfolding in the tsunami of federal injustice.

Blog post and original photos © 2025 mae sander.

Other photos as credited.

Shared with In My Kitchen at Sherry’s blog.

“The Egg and I” and Other Reading

 Rural Living in the mid-20th Century

The agony of raising chickens.

What’s an aigon-eye? As a small child I remember my mother and her sisters talking about an aigon-eye that was in a movie — another mysterious thing that I had never seen. Eventually, I learned the name of the book and later movie The Egg and I, by Betty MacDonald (1907–1958). According to the preface in the above edition, the 1945 publication — unexpectedly — was wildly popular. When I saw it on the shelf of recommended reads at the library, I decided to that I would finally read it after all these years.

On the whole, it’s not a terrible book, but it’s very dated, especially the author’s appalling racist views of the Native Americans who lived around her in the Pacific Northwest where she and her husband had a farm. I have no idea if this was the first humorous family memoir about the difficulties of being a farm wife or about some other family challenges. I know that other similar memoirs were popular at around that time; for example, Cheaper by the Dozen, published shortly afterwards, and I Remember Mama, a play and movie in the late 1940s. It’s still a popular genre, for example Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water. You can probably think of many more, both humorous and serious.

Betty MacDonald’s narrative offers lots of supercilious discussions about uncouth but generous and well-meaning neighbors, lots of self-congratulatory descriptions of extremely hard work raising farm animals including despised chickens, and lots and lots of purportedly good-natured complaining. All this passes for humor. I guess I’ll skip the movie.

The Author’s Other Books

Here’s the biggest surprise: Betty MacDonald was also the author of a series of wonderful books that I remember fondly from my childhood. Our teachers read them to us and we eventually read them to ourselves. I never connected, until this week, that this author also wrote Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and the sequel Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic. (Now I see that the cover of the first edition of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle actually did mention The Egg and I, but it never made an impression on me then.) Life can be very strange, can’t it. 

In case you haven’t read the books, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle taught kids to behave themselves by hilariously unorthodox rewards or punishments. One that sticks in my memory was the time she caused seeds to sprout in the very dirty ears of a girl who never washed (but learned her lesson). I was amused, but also annoyed at the preachiness that teachers expressed when reading to us, but I recall that on the whole, everyone loved these books. I’ll keep my happy memories by not rereading the books.

Backyard Birds in the Twenty-First Century

Amy Tan, a great author, has documented how she became a birder.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a very pleasant read.

Her sketches and notes delighted me.

Her description reminded me of several places where we have fed hummingbirds by hand.
(From our December, 2024, trip to Trinidad and Tobago).

I was surprised that she wrote about never seeing a hummingbird nest. I especially thought about this very daring bird that lived on electricity in Costa Rica. (Date: January 1, 2024).
As I read, being reminded of birds and birding from my experience contributed to my enjoyment of Tan’s book.

Amy Tan constantly tries to please her avian customers with delicious treats!

I love owls, as does Amy Tan, and I admired her beautiful sketches of them.

Of course Amy Tan’s descriptions made me think of owls I have seen.
(Owl in Costa Rica, December 2023)

Reviews © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters and Deb’s Readerbuzz.

Where are you now that we need you?

 

Good Books

 

I enjoyed reading the novel Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. It was a top bestseller in 2018 when it was published. Along with several other books, it’s been on my list for a long time. I thought that the author, Gail Honeyman, did a good job of building a character who had been very damaged as a child by neglect and uncaring authorities who were responsible for her welfare. The first-person narrative works very effectively at portraying a person who doesn’t have a good grip on what really happened, but who learns to be more and more honest in attempting to attain insights — one might almost say enlightenment — about her experiences. 

The word FINE is used throughout the book as a kind of touchstone about Eleanor’s experiences. She always says she is fine. A search discloses use of the word over 80 times in the text. At the end, she points out that saying she is fine was always the only way she was allowed to describe her condition. And thus she was never allowed to develop any insight into what was being done to her or how she authentically felt. My summary sounds trite, but her way of using the word “fine” is much more nuanced.

Near the end of the book, she finally grasps the significance of her childhood and also her adult isolation:

“I woke again. I had not closed the curtains and light was coming in, moonlight. The word connotes romance. I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person's hand holding mine. There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness. People sometimes say they might die of boredom, that they're dying for a cup of tea, but for me, dying of loneliness is not hyperbole. When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact—I truly feel that I might tumble to the ground and pass away if someone doesn't hold me, touch me. I don't mean a lover — his recent madness aside, I had long since given up on any notion that another person might love me that way — but simply as a human being. The scalp massage at the hair-dressers, the flu jab I had last winter— the only time I experience touch is from people whom I am paying, and they are almost always wearing disposable gloves at the time. I'm merely stating the facts.

“People don't like these facts, but I can't help that. If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.” (p. 393)

I also loved the book Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, which was also a bestseller. after its publication in 2022. The center of this book is an octopus named Marcellus, who lives in a display tank in an aquarium. Marcellus narrates some of the chapters of the book, and he has an incredible grasp of what he has seen, with uncanny insights into the people who maintain and visit the aquarium. However, the author doesn’t overdo the insightful narrative of this remarkable invertebrate creature — most of the book is narrated from a conventional omniscient point of view.

Here are a few of the words of wisdom from Marcellus:

“IF THERE IS ONE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION HUMANS never exhaust, it is the status of their outdoor environment. And for as much as they discuss it, their incredulity is ... well, incredible. That preposterous phrase: Can you believe this weather we're having?

“How many times have I heard it? One thousand, nine hundred and ten, to be exact. One and a half times a day, on average. Tell me again about the intelligence of humans. They cannot even manage to comprehend predictable meteorological events.

“Imagine if I were to stride over to my neighbors, the sea jellies, and, while shaking my mantle with disbelief, make a comment such as: Can you believe these bubbles these tanks are putting out today?

Preposterous.

“(Of course, this would also be preposterous because the jellies would not answer. They cannot communicate on that level. And they cannot be taught. Believe me, I have tried.)”  (p. 149)

More of the wisdom of Marcellus:

“I have observed humans at every life stage, and they are, at all times, undeniably human. Even though the human baby is helpless and must be carried by its parent, no one could mistake it for anything else. Humans grow from small to large and then sometimes recede again as they approach the end of their life span, but they always have four limbs, twenty digits, two eyes on the front of their heads.

“Their dependence upon their parents is unusually prolonged. Certainly it makes sense that the smallest children require assistance with the most basic of tasks: eating, drinking, urinating, defecating. Their short stature and clumsy limbs make these activities difficult. But as they gain physical independence, oddly, their struggle continues. They summon mother or father at the slightest need: an untied shoelace, a sealed juice box, a minor conflict with another child.

Young humans would fail abysmally in the sea.“ (p. 117)

I enjoyed Remarkably Bright Creatures, both for the wonderful creation of Marcellus, the sentient octopus, and for the human story that’s partly observed by Marcellus.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was in the middle of reading Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke, and I have finished reading it. The suspense and the tightly-wound plot all are sustained until the end. This author is really adept at creating complicated characters!

Here’s an example that shows the author’s portrayal of a character — and also shows the way Locke uses food scenes:

“By the time he pulled into the parking lot at Geneva's, the sun was setting. Randie left the truck first, lifting the bottle of bourbon from the backseat and walking it into the cafe.

“She chased it with sips of ice-cold Dr Pepper, kept a sweating bottle of it at her side as they waited for their food. Thin slices of pork, ringed in fat crisped in its own grease in the pan, dirty rice, and grilled onions, with pickled cabbage and sliced tomatoes on the side.

“The first two drinks went down on an empty stomach, and Randie grew strangely quiet, her fingertips grazing the tabletop in time to the slide guitar coming from the jukebox.” (p. 339)

Unfortunately, drinking and overeating don’t agree with Randie! Sometimes there’s an overdose of realism in this book. 

Reviews © 2025 mae sander

Shopping Center Murals, Novi, Michigan

Novi, Michigan, is around  35 miles from our house in Ann Arbor. Recently, we made a shopping trip to a mall there to buy some wood and tools for a project Len is about to do. While waiting for him, I was surprised to find murals illustrating the businesses in the mall — I took a few photos.

A mural at Rockler Woodworking and Hardware, the store where Len was shopping.

An illustration of one of the main types of merchandise at the chain store Men’s Warehouse.

More at Men’s Warehouse.

A mural in a corridor between various parts of the mall.

A pretty ordinary mall.

In case you are wondering, Novi, Michigan, is said to get its name because it was stop number six — that is No. VI — on an old stagecoach road. Several other explanations also exist for this unusual name. 

Photos © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Sami’s murals.

Is Spring Coming Yet?

 

At Bao Space downtown, we had a pleasant lunch. I tried their hot & sour soup.
It was tempting because the weather is cold again. But we hope the cold won’t last.

Alice is visiting us. She ordered a rice bowl.

Signs of Spring

Despite our day of icy rain, plants are starting to re-emerge in our garden

Sandhill cranes stay in Hudson Mills Metropark all year, but they seem to have brighter head plumage now.

Addendum: Friday afternoon birds at Kent Lake:
 A Red-Winged Blackbird, a Sandhill Crane, and three wild turkeys.

A new grey recliner is now on our front porch, along with the wooden table Len made recently.
We’ve even had a few afternoons warm enough to sit outside

Reading

I finished reading The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1947-2024)

The New York Trilogy is very meta — which means that as a reader, you are always conscious that this is a work of modernistic fiction. You have to accept that the author and reader are conspiring about characters, who are being created in a very artificial way. The story is not told the way that traditional authors related to their characters and their readers. 

In other words: these three very loosely related stories make the characters seem aware that they are characters in a story, that they have an author, and that you have agreed to see them as characters. It’s very mannered. At times the characters are relatable, but at times the whole thing just seems annoying.

Auster’s work has been around for decades, and I have meant to read his works — maybe I should have read them long ago. All the pretense might have been interesting back in the 1980s, but now I feel as if the whole thing is a bit exaggerated and passé.

I am reading Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke. It was very hard to get into the book, and I read the first 100 pages twice — but now I’m finding it very good reading. It’s about a Black Texas Ranger and how he solves some mysterious murders in a small town. (I don’t know the solution yet. Will keep reading.)

Quotes about a Sad Week in America

Food Safety? What Food Safety?

From “Food Safety Jeopardized by Onslaught of Funding and Staff Cuts” by Christina Jewett:

“In the last few years, foodborne pathogens have had devastating consequences that alarmed the public. Bacteria in infant formula sickened babies. Deli meat ridden with listeria killed 10 people and led to 60 hospitalizations in 19 states. Lead-laden applesauce pouches poisoned young children.

“In each outbreak, state and federal officials connected the dots from each sick person to a tainted product and ensured the recalled food was pulled off the shelves.

“Some of those employees and their specific roles in ending outbreaks are now threatened by Trump administration measures to increase government efficiency, which come on top of cuts already being made by the Food and Drug Administration’s chronically underfunded food division.” (New York Times, March 19)

Attack on the American Mind

From Robert Reich:

“Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind — on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an attack on the capacity of Americans for self-government.

“It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who believe democracy is inefficient, and want to replace it with an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.

“Be warned.” (source: Reich’s Substack)

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz and with Eileen’s Critters.

A Cute but Unnecessary Book

 

Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake: A Compendium of Classic Authors’ Favourite Recipes.
Arbitrarily photographed with some eggs in my kitchen that were going into an omelet that was probably better than anything in the book.

Collections of recipes by famous people appeal to many readers. Many such collections have been published, sometimes by asking the famous people to contribute recipes, and sometimes by finding their recipes already published somewhere else — maybe in a journal or in letters, maybe in a novel. Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake is such a collection with recipes already published in similar anthologies. When I heard about it, I ordered it because it sounded really good and I thought that in some way, it would be original. It isn’t. I am somewhat disappointed.

The sources of the recipes in this new book are mainly recipes from earlier collections — sometimes it seems to be kind of a cannibalized work. Here are the covers of some of the sources cited in the afterward to the work:

Where to find writers’ favorite recipes? Look in earlier collections of writers’ recipes.
Most of the books depicted above are now out of print and costly. I found the images by searching the web. I own only one of these books (though I also own some similar collections).

Big Question: do these sound like good recipes? Would you want to use them to make dinner or a special treat for guests? Well, not really. After all, most of the authors whose work is included were not at all cooks. Some of them even say they weren’t very good in the kitchen, though some of the recipes are quite plausible, if ordinary. For example, Allen Ginsberg’s Cold Summer Beet Borscht is almost exactly like the borscht my mother made. Christopher Isherwood’s “Brownies Wendy” are simply the most standard classic brownies (the ones my seventh-grade cooking class was assigned to make). Tennessee Williams’s Grits are pretty undistinguished from the usual southern favorite. Barbara Pym’s Marmalade is ordinary as well. Not much to see here —  though at least these are interesting authors, so maybe it’s nice to know what they might have cooked.

A few recipes are distinguished by their unappealing nature: these are recipes that I would never try and in fact they are by authors that I would probably never read:

• Noel Streatfield’s Filets de Boeuf aux Bananas contains beef, bananas, horseradish, parsley… no thanks. Also, I had never heard of Noel Streatfield (1895-1986), author of children’s books, but now I have. 
• Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Devils on Horseback are made from bacon wrapped around prunes that are stuffed with olives stuffed with pimentos. I guess these were popular back in the day — this author was born in 1923. I have a feeling that her books are also forgotten, along with her style of cooking.
• Spike Milligan’s Spaghetti Dolce is spaghetti with cream, sugar, and brandy. Another unappealing recipe by another forgotten writer.

Fun fact: Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake has no listed author: it was put together by the staff of the publisher, Faber. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be a rather cynical hack job. While some of the authors may be interesting, many are deservedly obscure, and they have no actual connection to one another, aside from the fact that at some point they published recipes. I think the book’s reason for existing is just to make a bit more money off the same old material, and, like the title itself, is meant to attract attention in a shallow kind of way. If you already have any collections of recipes by writers and artists, you probably don’t need this one.

Better Celebrity Cookbooks

 I have quite a few celebrity recipe collections on my shelves. I also have several recipe books by famous authors, where they shared their recipes along with maybe a few anecdotes about dinner parties or meals shared with other famous people. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook by Gertrude Stein’s companion, written after Stein’s death, is probably the most famous (and to me wonderful) of such celebrity cookbook. 

Memorably, Peter Sellers’  1968 film “I love you Alice B. Toklas” made reference to the Hash Brownies recipe included in this book. The film is surely forgotten by now, but this cookbook was consequently even more famous at that time.

Plots & Pans: Recipes and Antidotes from The Mystery Writers of America promises “Hundreds of Delicious Recipes from the Most Imaginative Writers in America — Spiced with their Wit, Leavened with their Malice, and Served with their Own Distinctive Style.” Published in 1989, this book is still in print and available. The illustrations are amusing.

I have around a dozen other recipe books featuring work by various authors. Some were compiled later, and the recipes are reconstructed from brief mentions in an author’s works; for example: a Jane Austen cookbook or an Agatha Christie cookbook, by authors who didn’t participate in making the book. I also have several by authors who were interested in food as well as detective fiction or other fiction. 

Bottom line: you can do better than the recently published book!