On food and books (what else?)

[selenay]

Martin Sheen was on Desert Island Discs a couple of weeks ago. I finally got around to listening to it (don't normally listen to DID, but was told this one was great) and I have to say, he's a fascinating guy with some great music choices. If you can find it (because it's probably not on iPlayer anymore), I'd highly recommend it.

Oh, Radio 4, how awesome are you?


Someone on one of the Ravelry groups I'm on posted a link to this recipe: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2008/06/crash-hot-potatoes/

I may need to try it out at the weekend. I'm not normally a massive potato fan, but these sound om nom and could be excellent with some slow cooker ribs and green beans. Not that I'm already trying to plan next week's menu choices or anything...

I love food. And cooking. And baking. As much as I love eating out (and I really do!), I also love eating my own cooking because I get to try new things and flavour them just how I like them. This is particularly important when it comes to baking, where store-bought things are frequently far too sweet for my palette and I'd much rather eat my own baking. A lot of what I make tends to be have richer flavours without being teeth-achingly sweet, which is my preference. This week I have a nommy batch of fairy cakes as my evening baked treat. I'm thinking that next week will be little butter tarts, for which I have acquired my mother's recipe. We've tried commercial butter tarts. Ugh. How do people eat things that sweet? For Easter weekend, I may bake a cheese cake.

It's possible that I'm turning into a food snob :-) Yesterday I baked some chicken wings, which were very nom, and at the same time grilled a chicken breast. The chicken breast has been chopped up and turned into a pesto-ey chicken salad thing for use in this week's wraps. It's an experiment that may fail (edited to add: not a fail!), but at least I tried. The rest of this week's menu is all "things wot I cooked and froze". So I'm kind of living off freezer food, but not really because it's all home-made. Is it silly that I'm already excited about Thursday's shepherd's pie?

Despite all the joys of baking and cooking, right at this moment I would give just about anything for a burger. Seriously. Major burger cravings. Not a home-cooked one - the evil kind from some horrible fast food place that you know is going to slowly kill you. Preferably with fake cheese and bacon. Or the smoky Jack burger from Jack Astor's *drools* Maybe I could treat myself on Friday?


I learned this week that as much as I love a good mystery, if I'm not in the mood for one then I should probably save it for when I am in the mood. I've been on a fantasy/sci-fi kick for the last couple of months, reading some absolutely terrific stuff, and then I picked up an Inspector Lynley book and it didn't really do anything for me. I could tell that it would normally have had me glued if I'd been on a mystery kick, but it wasn't what I wanted so it didn't hold me and actually took several days to read. That's most unusual. Those kinds of books are usually done and dusted in a couple of days.

So I'm back with the sci-fi, reading Declare by Tim Powers. I'm only a few pages in, but already hooked. Yay! And when I finish my Edward III biography, I am totally picking up Archer's Goon as my dead tree book. A few pages of it got browsed last night and it was tough to put it down :-)

At the end of March, I did a bit of counting up and summarising of statistics for my LibraryThing 75 books thread. Doing an end of quarter summary seemed like a good idea until I looked at the figures. It did rather point out the discrepancy between the quantity of books that I bought and the quantity that I read. It also brought forward that I've not done a good job of tackling my back-log. Really, getting Mount TBR shorter is supposed to be this year's goal. Instead it's grown. Ack!

One day, I will understand why I'm the type of person who Must Own ALL The Books and why there are people out there who don't feel that need. Seriously, how do people not buy books?

For anyone who is interested, these were my top reads from Q1 of 2011:

Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey
Soulless - Gail Carriger
Doomsday Book - Connie Willis
To Say Nothing Of The Dog - Connie Willis
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson

And as of last night, I'm at 26 books for the year so I'm well on track to more than hit 75 books. As 75% of those have so far been awesome with only one total clunker, it's looking like this year will be a terrific book year. I say that every year, though...

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

Switching to Kindle has done amazing things for me in terms of keeping Mount TBR from growing, since now I really can hold off on buying a book until I'm actually about to start reading it, instead of needing to grab it when I'm in the store and see it on the shelf and then leaving it sitting around for years waiting to be read. (The downside being that Mount TBR isn't shrinking, either, since it's now so much more convenient to read books off my Blackberry's Kindle app that it's been months since I bothered with a dead tree edition of anything. I should make a point of at least reading the borrowed books so I can give them back, but I got bogged down on the last couple of them I tried.)

[selenay]

I am finding that my Kindle purchases largely stay just ahead of my reading. I get a bit twitchy if I have less than one unread book on the Kindle (you never know when you might spend 20 hours in an ER with only your Kindle...), but there's none of the "must grab it now in case I never see it again" thing going on. And I try to only be two or three books ahead of myself, which is about all I can plan for anyway.

But I still seem to have an inability to not buy dead tree books. I'm reading them and I always have a Kindle book and a dead tree on the go, but I buy faster than I read. Mount TBR never seems to shrink.

[fyrdrakken]

See, I've built up a backlog, between going nuts on Amazon in the free classics section (books I used to read and loved, or books I hadn't yet gotten around to reading, or anything interesting-looking that I figured might as well download and check out) and using the free Calibre program to convert fic (especially nice long fics) into e-books and loading them into either my Kindle app or my MobiPocket app. So there's lots and lots to read on my Blackberry that didn't cost me a thing, and since the Blackberry lives in my pocket that means I'm walking around with a library ready to access at any time I find myself idle.

The downsides involve A) having a very small screen requiring continual holding frequent page-turns (so that I start getting tingly wrists or numb thumbs if I spend too long reading on the mobile without making a special point of switching hands periodically), B) running low on space on the Blackberry's media card (to say nothing of having so many files loaded into my reader programs that they take too long to load and eat lots of memory), C) having to clear read e-books off the Blackberry to save space (though they're archived on my netbook and my backup drive) and not being able to conveniently redownload them to my mobile without a USB connection to the netbook if they're not either Amazon-purchased e-books or available on Archiveofourown.org. Which is why in a few paychecks I expect to finally shell out for a physical Kindle, so I can keep more things archived on the device itself and so I can get a self-standing case and prop it up on a table and be able to knit while I'm reading more often.

ETA: Forgot to mention, the other reason I'm so liking the idea of switching my library to Kindle, is the whole storage issue, where my books are living in bug-infested collapsing cardboard boxes in the garage, and sometimes people who aren't me stack other junk atop them or move them around, and it's just a horrible experience digging through them to find the books I want to reread, which isn't always successful. I've got a sub-wishlist on Amazon just marking the books I'm prepared to rebuy as e-books the next time I want to read them. I'm figuring that rebuying at the rereading pace is going to help with budgeting the expenditures, not least because if I never get the urge to read it again there's no real point in buying it again.

[selenay]

The physical Kindle is absolutely worth the money :-) I love mine and I sense that you'll love it as well.

One of the things that I love about AO3 is that they made .mobi a download option so I can now grab some fics, email them to my Kindle and read them on a nice, comfortable screen wherever I go.

I'm very grateful that I've got the space for my books in the house (need more shelves, though) but I've noticed that there are titles that I want to duplicate on the Kindle for the convenience. And titles that I want to buy in dead tree format for the posterity. It's great that Amazon keeps my purchases stored so that I can easily re-download if I lose or upgrade my Kindle, but I still don't quite trust that I won't lose access to electronic files. So things that I've loved beyond reason (Connie Willis is a good example) are likely to get re-bought anyway.

I'm a terrible hoarder.

[fyrdrakken]

AO3 fic is great for accessing and downloading directly from my Blackberry, too -- just visit the site on my mobile browser and download the MOBI to the right folder. (My private Bookmarks on my AO3 account are basically stories waiting for me to get around to downloading to the BB.)

And between the storage issue, the bugs attacking my books, the way I've literally read the covers off of certain favorites (such as The Hobbit and Watership Down, two more it occurs to me to add to my list of future Kindle rebuys) and the time years ago we had a plumbing issue that soaked under walls and through carpets and ruined the books I had stored in cardboard boxes in my closet, I kind of lost the habit of thinking of dead tree editions as being all that safe and secure for long-term. I have my Kindle purchases (or the free "purchases" for $0 made through Amazon's system) all downloaded to my netbook, and those files are kept backed up to external hard drive as well. I'm not entirely trusting in Amazon to keep my virtual library stored for me. But hard drives are so much tidier and more portable than all that paper, and so easy to duplicate as well!

[trouble]

Daughter of Time - I can't remember, is that about Empress Matilda?

[selenay]

Richard III and the Princes in the Tower :-)

I knew a lot of the research from my own reading on the subject, but I loved the way she constructed the book around it and made it Richard III come alive even though he was never actually "there" in the book.

[trouble]

Oh, right! I've heard good things about it.

[wadjet-theperv.livejournal.com]

om nom on the potatoes. Totally going to try those out. The cooking sounds fab. Unfortunately I can't eat much since the gastric bypass and I have to be very careful about what I eat too. I'm always looking for things I can eat that won't make me nauseous. Haven't found much so far, but I keep trying!

The kids aren't too adventurous, youngest especially, but she's only 12 so there's still time. Riv is allergic to pulses, but likes all other veg, most herbs and a bit of a kick to her food, and we all like garlic.

Cooking and baking are very therapeutic, I find. I really love doing it, even if I don't always eat much or any of what I've cooked :o)

I do miss reading though. Can't seem to find anything to really capture my imagination these days. It's so full of RL crap. I'm definitely going to find a biography of Edward III though. I do quite enjoy biographies.

All the best for a great book year!

[selenay]

I can't sympathise with the being careful on what you eat. I took myself out for lasagne today (instead of the burger) and found myself getting very stressed about how much I should eat and whether it would be a really stupid thing to do. At home I can cook just what I think that I'll manage and not worry too much about it.

It was good to do it and find the I'm sitting here not feeling nauseous and ill. The test will be tomorrow, that's usually when the "oh, that was stupid" nausea sets in. Hopefully I'll get back to being adventurous in my eating out (without the stressed, nightmares and panic attacks that I gave myself over it this time) as I get more confident that I'm not hurting myself with it.

Cooking and baking are very therapeutic :-) Today I'm making a batch of butter tarts and there will be far more than I can get through, so I'm taking the excess to share at work.

Hope you find a good Edward III biography. The ones that I'm reading right now is good (by Ian Mortimer) but the writer has a few unusual ideas that I'm not sure I agree with, so I want to find one by someone else to get a more rounded feel for Edward III.

[lysimache.livejournal.com]

I just read all of Josephine Tey's books in the past few months (except Brat Farrar, which I need a copy of still), and they were AWESOMESAUCE. *nods firmly*

[selenay]

I definitely need to find the rest of her books :-)

[sisacoue.livejournal.com]

found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later