Weekly Round Up: Fiddle-dee-dee

 

A weekly-ish round up: eats, workouts, watches, and so many reads.

I have so much to tell you, where do I even begin?  Oh I know.  The elusive Wordle in one finally happened.

Eats

The two best things that I've made recently are:

Take In Beef and Broccoli from the So Easy, So Good cookbook.  This is a "prep now, cook later" meal, which means that you mix up the stir fry sauce and beef in a ziplock bag, freeze it, and then thaw the day that you want to eat it.  One personal shortcoming that I have with beef stir fries is that I can never slice the beef thin enough, so I gave myself an assist by getting shaved beef from Trader Joe's.  It was a game changer.  I need to take a closer look at the meat section at my local grocery stores to see if they have something like this, because if so we're going to be having beef stir fries more often.  Anyways, this can be summed up by the title of the cookbook - it was so easy, and it was so good.  I did not start thawing early enough, so it was still pretty frozen when it went into the pan, and it still cooked up into something lovely.

Vegan Greek Pasta Salad from The Cheap Lazy Vegan.  The thing that intrigued me about this was the vegan feta, which is just tofu marinated in a bunch of stuff.  I was curious to see if it would be All That, or if it would just taste like Tofu With Stuff.

Verdict: tofu feta is All That!  If you're at all into tofu you need to drop everything and make it.  The pasta salad was good too.

My only gripe is not with this recipe specifically but with all pasta salad recipes in general.  When I want pasta salad I want it for 1-2 meals.  The standard pasta salad recipe makes Pasta Salad for Days.  I only made half of the recipe which was supposed to be two servings, but after I had this for lunch twice I still had a mountain of pasta salad left over.  Lesson learned, the next time I will make one forth of the recipe.

Workouts

Not much to say.  I'm still hiking, in between storms and heat waves.  I have two more hikes left in the hiking challenge to finish by the end of June.

Watching

In the world of Hot Couples TV, Hubs and I hit the couch and watched Pee-wee As Himself.  The big takeaways are: (1) the Pee-wee character was a joy, (2) bad things happen when you're a celebrity on the DL, and (3) you should drop everything and watch this.

Books I've Read Recently That Are Not Gone With the Wind

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton is a book that I really, really liked.  It's about a cookbook author who has broken up with her long time boyfriend and hit it big with her latest cookbook, on cooking for one in a small space.  She meets the perfect guy, but soon finds that the aftermath of a "perfect" relationship is bringing all of the other things about her life that aren't so great to the surface.  (Psst...if you've read this...I was delighted by how the neighbor story line was resolved...I did not see it coming.  Chef's kiss!)

The latest Hot It Book of the Sarah's Bookshelves podcast is The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff.  You might think your family is complicated, but then you meet the Brights, who come into their relationship with baggage.  One has a secret kid, and the other has an alcohol problem.  I liked the book well enough while I was reading it, but when I finished my rating became "I need to think more about this one" except that it's been a few weeks I still haven't gotten around to thinking about it.  

A Real Housewives Memoir!  I'm not a Real Housewives person, but when SHU dropped that she was interviewing a RH for the Best of Both Worlds podcast, I was intrigued.  Tiffany Moon grew up in a house where nothing less than an A+ was tolerated, graduated from high school/college/med school at an alarmingly early age, pursued a high pressure medical career, had a family, and eventually realized that it was all a bit much.  So she simply did life on her terms: cut back her hours, picked up a season of RH as one does, and had fun on social media.  As if that wasn't enough, she mentioned on the podcast that she has a new puppy, and I was expecting it to be a cute fluffy dog.  Nope, it's a Belgian Malinois.  If you're not familiar, this is a breed that I only know about because my very lean German Shepherd Mutt bears a passing resemblance.  It's basically a German Shepherd on steroids, so a dog that I very much admire but would not be able to handle.  But I won't lie, it makes me proud when I'm out with Doggo and someone says "wait, is that a Belgian Malinois?"  Anyway, where was I...Tiffany's book is Joy Prescriptions: How I Learned to Stop Chasing Perfectionism and Embrace Connection.  I adored every word of this book and I can't wait to see what she does next.

I read another memoir for one of my IRL bookclubs, which is not about a RH.  It's fair to say that A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout is a tough read, and not something that I would have picked up on my own.  She is a freelance journalist, and in 2008 she made what was supposed to be a quick trip to Somalia with another journalist.  They were kidnapped for 460 days.  The first 100 days went relatively well, and the final 360 days did not.  TBH I was on the fence about reading this book, but as soon as I read the first page I was hooked.  What got me was her passion.  She started out in life as someone with no goals who was working as a waitress and leveled that up to a love of travel, which she then leveled up to a journalism career, and after her ordeal, to humanitarianism.  

After all of that, it was time for a palate cleanser.  I picked up the next book in the Alphabet Murders, M is for Malice.

Gone With the Wind Recap

I've read some really great books in the past month, but they all pale in comparison to Gone With the Wind.  TL;DR there are no other books.

I've read GWTW before and seen the movie.  As best I remember, I read it in high school and again sometime as an adult.  For whatever reason, I have GWTW amnesia.  I remember the story well enough...Scarlett wants Ashley, Ashley doesn't want Scarlett, Rhett does, and she says fiddle-dee-dee a lot.  What I forget is the impact.  There is a lot more to this book than 1,000 pages.

Earlier this year Engie read it and wrote a series of posts on it (here is part 1).  Her raves brought back distant memories, and I knew that it was time for a reread.  Jenny and I talked about it when we met in February, and at the end of May she reached out and asked if I wanted to do an offline bookclub.  We discussed how fast we were going to read it.  My first thought was 250 pages a week, and Jenny suggested 500 pages a week...I mean that's basically my normal reading volume so why not?  

As soon as I read the first chapter I was All In.  GWTW is not a good book, it's a great book.  I am not Margaret Mitchell, so I don't have to words to say why, other than IYKYK.  Both Jenny and I became obsessed, and the pages started flying.  10 days later we finished.

I think the general objection to GWTW is that it glorifies slavery, to which I say bull.  It is a fond remembrance of the Old South, and the story of how that world came undone.  It's a fair enough point that the former slaves stay with the O'Haras, but the book is pretty clear that they didn't have a lot of options.

Once I had the refresher on the book my next move was...

The most recent time that I saw the movie was back when I was knee deep in watching AFI Top 100 movies.  In this post before the rewatch, I said it was "overhyped and overblown".  A few months later I watched it, and my breakdown was: first 15 minutes really push the This is a Big Epic and "pay no mind to all of the British actors with southern accents", the next 2 hours and 45 minutes are genius, and the last hour is a snooze.

Stuff to say about movie vs book:

• The movie is largely faithful to the book with a few edits.  Scarlett has fewer children, and a few characters are left out.  For example, in the book Scarlett hires Will to manage Tara, and his two pivotal moments are telling her that the Yankees have raised the taxes and when Ashley comes back, he reminds Scarlett to hold back and let Melanie have the first shot since "he's her husband, ain't he?".  In the movie Pork gets the 411 on the tax situation, and Mammy reminds Scarlett who Ashley is married to.
• The book uses the word damn twice (that I caught anyway), but the movie only gets to give one damn.  Movie Scarlett's oath of choice is "great balls of fire" instead of Book Scarlett's "God's nightgown".
• The movie neuters Scarlett's business acumen a bit.  In the book she has a gift for business and pursues an empire to make sure that she will never be hungry again.  In the movie it seems like she's more interested in the business because it's an excuse to keep Ashley around.
• The n word flies free in the book, but is never used in the movie.
• I don't feel that the movie glorifies slavery any more than the book does, but the movie has a cringy "tell me it's the 1930s without telling me it's the 1930s" moment that is pretty typical for how black characters were portrayed in films of this time.  Uncle Peter has a scene where he has to kill "the last chicken in Atlanta" for dinner, but it's raining and apparently he's never been in rain before and he just can't figure out how to handle an umbrella and an axe at the same time.  This is simply not the character in the book.
• Woof, the last hour of the movie drags and then does an abrupt speedup.  Two characters die toward the end, and in the book there is space between Death 1 and Death 2.  In the movie the bodies fly one after the other.  The book does not drag at the end.  Sure there's a moment when everyone is rich and boring, but stuff happens and the reader stays engaged.
• Overall the movie has a fresh and timeless feel, except for the occasional passages where it forgets that it's a talkie and decides to break out ponderous and verbose title cards.  Margaret Mitchell did not write like this.

After reading 1,000 pages and watching a four hour long movie, I still wanted another drink from the GWTW well before moving on.  I found it in this hour long documentary about Margaret Mitchell on Youtube (video here).  If you have any interest at all in this topic, it's worth a watch.

• She was complicated.  When she was in college she refused to attend a class with a black student, and later in life she funded a number of black scholarships for medical school.
• Her first marriage was Not Good.  You will die when you find out what her first husband's name was.
• Remember the fun fact that Elisabeth's dad always reads the last chapter of a book first?  Well, he is in good company because Margaret wrote the last chapter of GWTW first, and then worked backward to the first.  One thing that I noticed about the early chapters is that they have a nice relaxed feel, and now that I think about it, there is tension in the final chapters, which makes sense...she was just getting started in the final chapters, but was fully up to speed when she wrote the first chapters.

Whew that was a lot!  What else is going on?

Doggo wants you to know that shark week came early this year, but she is on top of the situation.

Peace Out!  Who's read GWTW?  Thoughts?