Every Day Matters

Cheese Drops

I baked two batches of my friend Leslie's Cheese Drops on my snow day. They are sooooo good.

                            Cheese Drops

2 sticks of butter, softened
1/2 lb grated sharp cheddar (freshly grated is best), softened

1/2  tsp. Cayenne pepper ***
1 tsp. salt (I used less)
2 cups flour
1 cup chopped pecans (I chopped them fairly fine)
1 tsp. caraway seeds

Cream softened butter well, until it is light in color. Add cheese and cream with butter to mix well. Sift (but I don't)  pepper, flour, and salt together and then beat into the butter and cheese. Fold in pecans and seeds.

Drop onto ungreased cookie sheets by 1/2 tsps. Bake at 350 degrees for 15-18 minutes. Cool and store in airtight container. These do not spread very much at all.

A real hit!

*** since all cayenne pepper is not "created" equal, I use very little of it                        ===========================================

When I made the second batch, I rolled the dough into balls and liked the way they looked better than the dropped ones.

Snow Day

 
We had 17 inches of snow on Saturday. Above is the view from our front porch and below is the path Bob shoveled on the deck so he could get to the bird feeder...those birds were very hungry!

 

Laura and Ken had even more snow than we did and Charlie and Charmer sure enjoyed it. They told Charmer to sit and she plopped herself down in the snow. Watch  her frolicking here (click on the word "here")

Sunday Salon: The Little Prince

 
No, I am not talking about my little prince, Charlie, but about the wonderful book (published in 1943) by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, the legendary French aviator who disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean in July 1944. He was flying with the Free French Forces on what turned out to be his final assignment: collecting intelligence data  on German troop movements in and around the Rhone Valley before the Allied invasion of southern France.In 1998, a fisherman named found a silver identity bracelet bearing the names of Saint Exupéry and his wife Consuelo and his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock, hooked to a piece of fabric, presumably from his flight suit.

From Wikipedia: "In 2000, a diver named Luc Vanrell found a P-38 Lightning crashed in the seabed off the coast of Marseille. The remains of the aircraft were recovered in October 2003. Investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the plane was, indeed, Saint Exupéry's F-5B reconnaissance variant. In June 2004, the fragments were given to the Museum of Air and Space in Le Bourget."

The Little Prince was partly inspired by St. Exupéry's crash, with his navigator, in the Sahara in 1935. It is "a poetic self-illustrated tale in which a pilot stranded in the desert meets a young prince from a tiny asteroid; a philosophical story, including societal criticism and remarking on the strangeness of the adult world.

I discovered this book sometime in the 60s and it has remained one of my favorite books of all time. No matter how many times I read it, I am entranced. Imagine my delight when I saw that a pop-up version had been published. I promptly bought it and I love it. The book is gorgeous. The popups are magical and throughout the book there are also small popups concealed behind panels that can be opened.

The Amazon page has a short video presentation where you can take a tour through the book The Little Prince PopUp

This was the perfect Christmas gift from me to me!

Go NAVY, beat Army

Today was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, and for the eighth year in a row, NAVY won. As a USNA grad who then spent 7 years in the Navy, Ken is always psyched for this game, and this year he decided to get Charlie involved.

 

I think that watching the game made him drool........

Computer and Charlie

My beloved MAC G-4 died last week. Deader than dead. So dead that I had to resort to my external hard drive's backup (good thing I do that every ten days!). And thank goodness I have Ken, my own personal IT genius. Within hours of getting a new computer (MacBook), Ken was remotely accessing my computer (from 80 miles away) and getting everything set up and recovered. [I had aborted copying my external hard drive when it "told" me that it needed to copy 412 GB of information!!! What the heck?] Well, Ken knew what to do and had me all set up in just one hour. What a guy and believe me, I know how lucky I am!

Bob took the dead computer down to Baltimore on Sunday so Ken could destroy the hard drive. Once he got it out, he was letting Charlie bang on the keys and Charlie threw up into the keyboard. If it had not been dead before, it would have been killed by that.

Ken has an old, small computer on which he downloaded an application that responds to Charlie touching the keys. Here are some pictures of that. Doesn't Charlie look soooo serious? And then when things do not go as planned, he decides to eat the computer! Haven't we all wanted to do that sometime?

     

Charlie's First "Temper Tantrum"

While eating dessert on Thanksgiving, Ken let Charlie try his pumpkin pie and he LOVED it!

When Ken stopped feeding it to him, Charlie let his displeasure be known, as you can see below:

Family Heirloom

Many Devine babies, including mine, have rocked in this little chair. My grandfather, a wonderful carpenter, made it for my father. Charlie has what we call "temporary custody".

 

Cowboy Charlie

Is this the cutest cowboy you ever saw? Bob, who took these great photos, calls him "buckaroo".

Charlie and his Casey Cousins

Charlie likes pretty girls, like his cousin Devin

and we told his cousin Ryan that Charlie is a chick magnet

Salon Sunday: Bookish Things about Me

                                   

                                Twenty Bookish Things About Me

1. I read fast, but not as fast as I used to, and like books that immerse me immediately and carry me along.

2.  Although I’ve always loved to read and write and think about stories, I majored in Elementary Education in college.

3.  I have met Anne Lamott, Elizabeth Berg, John Gilstrap, and Esmeralda Santiago.

4. I love libraries.

5. A few years ago, I began “allowing” myself to abandon books that did not grab me in the first 50 pages. This has been very liberating.

6. I like audiobooks and never listen to anything else in the car. 

7. I rarely re-read books. Some books that I have re-read are really old favorites like Desiree by AnneMarie Selinko and Valley of Decision by Marcia Davenport

8. Frances Parkinson Keyes is just about my favorite author of all time. I discovered her in my early teens.

9. When I am in a new place, I love to find independent bookstores.

10. Reading a good book is the best thing I can think of doing.

11. When my children were young, I read a lot of mysteries and now I rarely ever read them.

12. I dislike and distrust most memoirs.

13. I like “foodie” fiction and essays. My favorite writers in the food essay genre are Laurie Colwin and Nigella Lawson.

14. If I do not see books in a person’s home, I wonder about that person.

15. I do not read books about the Nazi/Holocaust experience, nor do I read science fiction, fantasy, time travel, memoirs, mysteries (although I do read some thrillers).

16. Even though I just said I do not read fantasy, I have been a fan of Nick Bantock’s for 20 years and own almost everything he has written, even his children’s pop-up books. And I like the type of magical realism in Alice Hoffman’s earlier novels.

17. I rarely read BFB (big fat books) because I find that most of them are overwritten and the authors could have used an editor who was not afraid to say this.

18. I love to talk about books and authors, and have a fascination with the publishing business

19. Although I do not think I have ever read a book that did not teach me something, my main purpose for reading (novels) is entertainment. Thus, I have little patience with those novelists whose writings are convoluted and esoteric. I like forthright and linear writing/stories.

20. Epistolary novels are my favorites.