Sorry about that last post. It wasn’t really for general consumption (I mean, it’s good for general consumption, I just wasn’t trying to share) I just needed to make sure I wrote it down somewhere before one of the other recipes in my head pushed it out. I meant to publish privately but didn’t think that it was a big enough deal to tear it down after it published. It is very good, as I’m sure Ember would attest, and I’m considering trying to make it into a frozen meal, with cooked chicken and the sauce in ice cube trays for quick cooking. Melody was talking about some of her attempts at frozen meals, and I was intrigued.
I’ve been busy. Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed was a good long read, lasted me a whole week, what with the 700 pages and all. And I did read all of it, which is more than I can say for the skimmed portions of Everything Under The Sky, more on that later. Lamb did a fine job of creating characters strong enough to pull off the complex and somewhat busy and distracting backstories he had in store for them. The most powerful part of this book was the first half, where Caelum Quirk deals with his guilt, both over his aunt’s death in Connecticut and his wife’s traumatic experience in Littleton Colorado while he was away dealing with it. Maureen, a school nurse, hid in a cupboard in the school library while Kle.bold and Har.ris accomplished their killing rampage’s last moments. Lamb’s use of true material, real names and stories really strikes a chord with anyone who has struggled with the face of evil. However, once Maureen and Caelum move away to the family farm in Connecticut to try to overcome her PTSD, the story becomes overly complex and less believable. Maureen becomes a drug addict, kills a boy while driving high, and ends up in the jail that Caelum’s relatives founded. There is much soul searching, intense self-pity, and some marital infidelity, which I’m sure you know I find to be truly a plot deal breaker. The story turns out to be so much more about Caelum’s identity crisis than about evil, as was (rather laughably) attested by a review that called him an American Dostoyevsky. All in all, I found it very well written but I was conflicted about whether I truly enjoyed it. I might read one of his others, though, so this was not a total bust.
I also read, as I mentioned above, Everything Under the Sky, a long awaited novel from the Spanish Matilde Asensi. I really enjoyed her first book to be translated into English, The Last Cato. The Last Cato was a better written Dan Brown-like thriller, without the gross historical inaccuracies and better Greek translations, following Dante’s work rather than a hacked up version of Scripture. My sister didn’t like it, but I enjoyed it as a light read that was interesting and well put together. Everything Under the Sky, however, was a disappointment. Elvira comes to Shanghai dragging her recently orphaned niece, in order to put her dead husband’s affairs in order. Having been married over twenty years but living on different continents, Elvira is not particularly cut up about her husband’s death, instead is mostly peeved that she gets swept into a complex pursuit of an elusive emporer’s tomb. I was so disappointed in this book. I didn’t connect to Elvira at all, and her neice Fernanda didn’t have enough personality to really believe, and the Chinese people ran in and out of the story so fast I could barely catch them. Serious sad face here. Elvira is described in the cover blurb as being “prim and straightlaced” but I found her to be more whiny and self-absorbed than anything else, fiercely (and anachronistically) fighting for respect as a woman in a country with so many greater problems. I did finish it, but it was more of a skim at the end. Maybe Buffy will like it more.
In other news, my sister Mel and my mom and I canned 100 pounds of tomatoes on Saturday. We came out with 28 quarts of tomatoes, and four different kinds of hot sauce. We made Roasted Tomato Bhut Jolokia hot sauce, Roasted Tomato Red Caribbean hot sauce, Jalapeno Hot Sauce, Mixed Pepper Hot Sauce, Pizza Sauce, Tomato Juice, and V8 (6 in our case) juice. I used the jalapeno hot sauce last night for a taco pizza and it was delicious. We are already plotting about applesauce later this year. It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.
And now, instead of another seven hundred and eighty-eight words:

Best Pizza Sauce ever...