Have you read Unbroken- A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand ? If not, I encourage you to do so.  It’s not only the perfect Memorial Day read, but a testament to the American spirit.

The story is based on the life of Louis Zamperini.  The novel starts at the beginning.  Our hero is a thieving fireball of dysfunction running through the streets of Los Angeles, California.   We get to see him mature, take up running, turn into a true athlete, and then make his way to the 1936 Olympic games.

But then, World War II broke out sending us deeper in Zampori’s story.  I don’t want to be a spoiler, but be warned while reading this book you’ll think to yourself, this is bad.  Oh, this is bad.  And when you think it can’t get any worse, it does.  Yet, Louie’s spirit pushes the book forward in a way that inspires me to do better, to complain less, to forgive.

While this book has been criticized for not digging deeper into the psyche of the kind of trauma that Louie endured, I think it is true to his generation.  I don’t know about you, but the people I know who lived through the Depression and The Great War are very matter of fact about things that happened to them.  Was it a coping skill? Of course it was, but it is who they are.

Laura Hillenbrand has created a biography that should sit on all of our shelves.  It’s very presence will remind us of how fortunate we are and to look at the positives in our every daily lives.  It’s quite simply, the perfect Memorial Day read.

I ruined dinner the other night.  Just killed it.  I made an enchilada sauce so spicy that I couldn’t serve it to the kids.  They couldn’t, in fact, even smell it.  I think they ended up eating rolled turkey and a whole bunch of other stuff I pulled from the bottom of the fridge.  Truly, not my best showing.

I let the abandoned sauce hang for a day before deciding to fry it out in my new “Ruined  Dinner Quesadilla.”  It was delicious.

Recipe:

Brown a pound of organic ground beef.  Add chopped green pepper, onion, garlic, and a good dose of cumin, cayenne, salt, pepper, and chili pepper, and some paprika (I think this came to about two tablespoons of spice).   Add a can of tomatoes and a cup of water.  Cook down for an hour or two. Shove it into the fridge for a full day to mellow.

(You see the thing is I didn’t really follow a recipe. Hence, the extra heat on the first night.  I’d go with it though, you never know what will happen!)

Stuff all of the goodness a tortilla with a load of Cabot cheddar cheese and fry it up.  Add sour cream, cilantro, and hot salsa.

I wonder what I’ll ruin next!

(Through the iPhone lens)

Yes, it’s time for another Cow Shit Corner Award.  Today, my honoree, you have found yourself in fine company of  Direct Air (The airline who traps you in Florida), the guy with chew on the way to Mexico (Who I thought I’d need to resuscitate due to cardiac arrest), and the swimsuit manufacturing industry (Don’t get me started!).  First, let me say you are simply an Honorable Mention.  I know it’s difficult, but you should honored to simply be acknowledged.

Let me set the scene:

First book club since October.  We gathered at a local eating establishment so happy to be out and together and be talking about books!  We got some drinks.  We ordered some dinner.  We got ready to talk about the book. Little did we know that you’d arrive with your instruments and your ego.

The incident:

To the band. We loved your music and kind of saw it as a nice background for our book discussion.  It’s true that we did get a bit rowdy when I told the group how the guy at the book store kept having little old ladies coming in and asking for “Filthy Shades of Grey.”  That’s funny! How could we help but laugh? We didn’t that know that you were sensitive.

Coming over and chewing us out for laughing was, you know, kind of rude.  I mean, we weren’t laughing at you.   We still eating so we couldn’t leave and it was book club in a restaurant (not a bar!).  So yeah, what were we to do?

Then when you plunked down the funky  ”pass the hat” expecting us to give you money. Kinda awkward,  because at that point, you’d already yelled at us.  Confession,  I totally had some cash in my pockets, but you killed the mood.

So for that, I’m giving you the Cow Shit Corner Award (Honorable Mention #1), you are nowhere near the caliber of the other winners, but by dampening the mood of a bunch of mommas on the town, you are certainly a winner.

I lost my words last week.  There was just nothing there.  I’m not kidding.  I couldn’t think about one thing to write about.  I’m trying not to clutter the world with my nothings, but usually my nothings are really about a little something.  This got me thinking about inspirations.

What inspires you? What pushes you forward in whatever you do? I mean people do amazing things every day.  They create random art or solutions or inventions.  People write books that get dog-eared as they move from person to person or movies that promote change through new understanding.

Today, I was inspired by my breakfast.  The almond joy cake was a simple chocolate cake with coconut pudding.  I said, coconut pudding! How can that not inspire? I washed it down with a double espresso and spent the day revising an old manuscript from my archives.

I encourage you to indulge in a sweet concoction and spend a day with an old idea.  Maybe you’ll find the old idea is a good one.  I’m pleasantly surprised.

Why didn’t I think of this?

Oh, the world of a writer.  You must first come up with an idea, then you write the idea, then you decide that the idea bites (because it mostly likely does at this stage).  So you destroy it. You rewrite it.  This is still the stage where somebody says, “You know, I’m not sure you should use the word shiver so much.”

Sigh…

Conundrum:  When you spend all day obsessing about words you can get stuck and not move story.  If you just write story you probably have done poorly on word choice.

That is why writing is such a long process.  You’ve got to put on your Stetson, fedora, bowler, headgear, and then you need to stick that chepeau for good measure.  After all of that you might have something that’s just okay, or quite possibly something that is astonishing in its wonder.

After you’ve done all this.  You chop it again.  Then you morn the chasm of that wonderfully crafted section where the words were polished and distinct.  THAT’S THE TRICK! Does this beautifully crafted piece of writing with perfect syntax, imagery, and prose really do anything for the story? No.  This is equivalent to a house builder lobbing off the addition because it really does’t fit the house, even though he’d spent hours hanging intricate moldings and not leaving an errant speck of paint behind.

Once you’ve done all of this you probably will get rejected.  Which makes you jab and gouge it again until it’s something that you don’t even recognize.  You say to yourself,  ”Well, this chick is one sick puppy!”  Then you realize the sick puppy is you.

A writer is learning how to say  nothing, more cleverly each day.

~William Allingham

I like purple, I mean who doesn’t like purple? But, the challenge was to create something that people could have for dinner.  At first I was thinking meat so raw that its was purple, but that might make people sick.  My next obvious choice was the simple red cabbage, which isn’t red but purple.  I yanked out my Cuisenart and processed four pounds of cabbage and organic carrots.  Then I placed it in a cabbage leaf bowl and made my topping: a spicy peanut sauce, cilantro, peanuts, and those crunchy Asian thingies (Totally blanking on the name).  My thing was that each person would create their own salad in their own little cabbage boat.

I’m not sure that picture does it justice.

We started with drinks!

This is a sparkling wine just before the homemade blueberry reduction was poured in.

Wow!  We also had some really interesting purple rum concoctions that was poured with the aroma of purple flowers floating through the air.  Oh, did I mention that we listened to Purple Rain.  We did!

But, it’s the table that I really loved.

Lilacs next to purple cheese!  Purple potato salad, purple dip made out of beets, and more purple.  Naturally I had a favorite dish.  Yes, it was the same Iron Chef that blew me away last year.  Lauren you are a food genius. I ‘d like to live just for a moment in your foodie brain.  Get this…

Homemade purple fish sticks in a purple horseradish sauce.  I’m not kidding.  It was amazing.  I think that I might have been so busy eating them that I forgot to get a picture of these beauties.  But, I sort of know what she did.   She went to the best fish place in town, Brown’s Trading Co, and got cod so fresh it was practically moving.  She cut it into chunks, seasoned it, and then dredged it in purple chips.  She then panned fried them to perfect crispy goodness and let us dip in the horseradish yum that she somehow seemed to make by combining a bunch of other sauces.  Damn. I just brought cabbage.

So ladies, great food and drink.  I loved it.

I don’t write much about teaching on this little blog, maybe because I usually write about nothing, and teaching is so substantial.  Real people are involved.   On top of that many of my students at SMCC are adults who work full time, and have families, and who’ve often already logged in multiple degrees before coming back to school.  As a teacher it can be a lot of pressure (Especially when the above picture is the view from outside my classroom).

Yet my teaching philosophy remains the same no matter what I teach.  It’s simple:  force engagement, make it light, and delve into the subjects from different angles.  This works if you are trying to teach fifth graders the principles of sound (You should see fifth graders create their own experiments using a bunch of stuff from my kitchen cabinet) or teaching Internet Ethics.  I’m not kidding.  When you create this atmosphere of trust and acceptance you can have the most amazing projects happen right before your eyes.

This open-ended teaching works like this.  Create a bunch of learning indicators and then let the students, and this is very important, do whatever they want.  Yes, I let students muck around in their own imaginations and simply see what happens.

The day of presentations I always feel like Willie Wonka when he says, “I wonder what’ll happen next…”

Though, I shouldn’t wonder.  Magic always seems to happen.  Students blow me away by the sheer wonder of their imagination.   I spent this week listening to projects about Cannibal kitties, a veteran’s revolt against improper WW II advertising, and unicorn sperm… (You get the picture).  But in the very same project with the same expectations, I listened to students present about true change in their lives.  One project was so moving it gave me a lump and my throat and pushed me to an understanding about a topic I’ve never truly achieved before.  Let me repeat that, we went from unicorn sperm to true personal growth.

This semester is done.  My hat goes off to all of my little geniuses.  It’s been a true pleasure and I look forward to hearing great things about all of you.  I am once again humbled by your greatness.

Have an amazing summer!

All of you foodies may have been wondering why I haven’t been writing about food for a while.  That’s an easy question to answer, I simply haven’t been eating.  No, I take that back.  I’m occasionally eating the following: ice cream, bagels, oatmeal, and toast.  I realize that it’s incredibly sad and that I’ve been failing the food pyramid.  It’s just that after been green (check out post here), it’s taking me a while to bounce back.

So it might not be a surprise that when I finally started cooking that I opted for a giant bowl of comfort food.  It was delicious.

Recipe:

Take all the veggies that look good from the fridge.  I used fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, and spinach.   Cut loosely and sauté in a pan with fresh garlic, olive oil, and maybe some butter.  Add loads of salt and pepper.  Cook down.

For fun, I added a nice dash of white wine and some Greek olives and chunks of feta cheese.  Taste for seasoning.   Spoon veggie mixture over pasta and apply fresh basil.  This is the secret! Do not even bother making this dish if you don’t have fresh basil. For good measure I added some parsley.  It needs to brightness.

Sprinkle of top with fresh parmesan and enjoy.

Now that you’ve read my lame little food blog you must check out a woman that really knows what she’s doing in the food department. Once my stomach gets better I just may start at the beginning of her blog and try to cook each and every dish…

The Back Road Journal

Check it out!