Read recently

• Driving Over Lemons (Chris Steward), a memoir of an English guy and his wife moving from England to a farm in rural Andalucia
  
• Murder on the Rocks, Berried to the Hilt, Dead and Berried (Karen MacInerney), all mind candy, murder mysteries set on an island in Maine, the kind with recipes at the back (not very special recipes, either). Plus how many times can the protagonist get hit over the head before there's serious brain injury? (average: more than once per book)
  
• How to be a Woman (Caitlin Moran), a fabulous memoir with musings on feminism. I laughed out loud more than once, and it was also great to see some opinions I agree with in print, far more coherently than I could put them.
  
• Paris in Love (Eloisa James), snippets from the year she and her husband spent on sabbatical in Paris (with their kids), engaging anecdotes, not all of them about food :-) (In fact, the bit I keep coming back to is about how French women dress well: they figure out what looks good on their body type, ignoring whatever fashion says is "in" if it doesn't work for them, and take new clothes to the tailor to have it fit them.)
  
• Broken Harbor (Tana French), a psychological whodunit set near Dublin, weaving together parallel strands between the case and the detective's family history; it felt much more substantive than the average murder mystery.
  
• The Birthday of the World (Ursula K. LeGuin), a book of short and not-so-short science fiction stories, many of them looking at the effects of or societal structures that would lead to different kinds of families. I enjoy this kind of sociological what-ifs, possibly more because so much speculative fiction seems to be focused on space-age technology without necessarily changing the people at all.
  
• Diplomatic Corpse (Phoebe Atwood Taylor), an Asey Mayo mystery from the early 1950s. I'd heard of the detective before, thanks to Murder Ink, a kind of compendium of mysteries from some decades back, but hadn't read any before. It was an odd experience: this was supposed to be the "Codfish Sherlock" (on Cape Cod, don't'cha know), but the drawl he speaks in feels more backwoods to me. Plus there's a lot that's dated (no man could have a beard without being "a subversive"; casual borrowing of cars; people's experience during "the war"; etc.). I found it disconcerting when the first part of the book is told from one character's point of view, then mid-chapter, suddenly switches to someone else for the rest of the book. The pacing felt odd. And then there's the names! Who would really choose "Asey Mayo" for their detective? And one of the other main characters is Buff Orpington! (It's a kind of chicken.) And to go along with the avian theme, there's a Bird, a Babcock, and a Henning. Though I'd've been fine with them were it not for the Chicken Man.

B Shabbat food

Happy Shvat! And welcome to the arctic. Tonight's dinner brought to you by the letter B and a desire for starches, with
bread (white and rye flours, a rather wet dough leading to very freeform rolls)
butter (peanut or the dairy kind)
bean-vegetable soup (black beans, pinto beans, and lima beans with garlic, carrots, a half-pint of tomatoes, barley, potato, and cabbage, plus cumin and the end of a bottle of Portuguese red wine)
beet pickles