at last (picture etta james)

warm weather is here to stay. i can feel it in my bones. flowers from the yard...ahh the delights of spring.

Banned Books

I love lists and I love books - what could be better than a list of books? Nothing! I really can't believe that banned books are still an issue. I have already read a good number of books on this list, but not enough. So now, just like my AFI movies, I am going to begin working on this list of banned books from the American Library Association. So far I have read 29 of the 100. I'm really looking forward to expanding my bookshelves with what I'm sure will be some new favorites.

Read: 29

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

6. Ulysses by James Joyce

7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

9. 1984 by George Orwell

10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

17. Animal Farm by George Orwell

18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

27. Native Son by Richard Wright

28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

37. The World According to Garp by John Irving

38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally

42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence

49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

51. My Antonia by Willa Cather

52. Howards End by E. M. Forster

53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

56. Jazz by Toni Morrison

57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron

58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

68. Light in August by William Faulkner

69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence

76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

82. White Noise by Don DeLillo

83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

87. The Bostonians by Henry James

88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling

96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike

98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster

99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

A New Cookbook

I was delighted to receive this cookbook from my husband for Christmas. I have really felt the urge for about a year now, to become a better cook. I've been a vegetarian for twelve years and Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is a really amazing guide. I have ben a fan of Deborah Madison for many years. I have eaten at her restaurant, Greens, in San Francisco twice in the early 2000s. This past summer, while attending the Seed Savers Exchange Annual Convention in Iowa with my farmer husband, I very nearly had the pleasure of having drinks with Deborah Madison. I was so disappointed, we missed her by mere minutes. Luckily, we have next year - hopefully by then I will be able to tell her of some of my grand adventures with her recipes!

One of my resolutions for the new year is to cook an average of one recipe a week from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. For me, this is a very lofty goal, and I am not doing well so far, but there is still plenty of time.

a new year

i am going to be more consistent with blogging this year. i swear.

Cooking Class - Lessons 1 and 2

Recently, I have had the desire to become a better cook. I have always loved to bake, but cooking has really been a completely other realm. Luckily, my husband, Nate is an excellent cook - he went to CCA in San Francisco and has since transitioned to a farmer; he always is thinking about food in one way or the other. So we have decided that Nate is going to teach me lessons, which I am very excited about. I figured out that each lesson, especially in the beginning should be learning a practical part followed be a dish using those techniques.


Our first lesson on Saturday went very well. The technique was different knife skills, which I found very daunting. Nate taught me julienne and baton cuts and how to properly cut an onion. I just could not keep my knife parallel on the onion! The dish we made was pasta with homemade sauce using tomatoes, onions and garlic that he had grown, which was really neat.



Our second lesson, which took place on Sunday was all about one of our favorite dishes to eat: Beet, Kale and Goat Cheese Pizza. This is a glorious concoction that Nate brought together last year, and I figured it was about time for me to learn how to make it. I adore beets, which were easy to cut, and I enjoyed cooking the greens, watching them transform was interesting. My only regret - not making two pizzas!