Spaghetti sauce and The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

Last month I read The Kitchen Counter Cooking School which was an eye-opening read for me.  I learned that you don't have to have mixes to make basic dinner foods.  You can use whole, fresh foods instead of packages to make almost anything.  I don't use tons of packaged foods, but I do use some.  I'm going to use fewer in the future.

Tonight I made spaghetti sauce sort-of from scratch.  I used canned tomatoes, but I did can them myself. 

1/2 lb hamburger cooked with
1/2 diced onion (the book tells how to do that easily and neatly)
1 minced garlic clove
Add:
1 quart diced tomatoes
1 pint tomato puree
salt
pepper
Italian seasoning, all to taste

That "to taste" is kind of new to me.  You're supposed to actually get a spoon and taste the food and see if you like it.  If not, change it.  Sounds basic, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

Good spaghetti dinner tonight!

How did I let this get away from me?

Haha, this month it's *my* book we're reading for the book club.  We all suggested a book almost a year ago and mine was the very last in the lineup.

I took the picture from amazon.com so you can't really look inside.  I don't think so anyway. :-)

But!  The book club meeting was moved up a week and on Monday I remembered with a start that I had less than two days to get my book read!  So now I'm off to finish the remaining 2/3 of the book because I absolutely won't have time to finish it tomorrow.  Adios for now!

Newbery Award-winning books!

For a few months now I've been thinking about my assorted Newbery books, wanting to gather them from various shelves in couple of bookcases, match them up with the years of their awards, write that year on the spine, and line them up in order.

Today was the day!

I stood in front of the girls' bookshelves and pulled all the books I thought might be Newbery winners, then stacked them up in my office.  Next I went to the ALA website for a list of all the Newbery and Newbery Honor winners from 1922-present and started matching them up.

A surprise was one of my favorite authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder, had no fewer than FIVE Newbery Honors from 1938 to 1944.  I hesitated, trying to decide if I should keep my Little House books together in a set or break them up and put them in the Newbery set, and decided on the former.

 

Here is my new Newbery shelf with about fifty books on it.  There are several other books floating around the house that will join the set in the next few days.  I'm pretty pleased with it.

 

 

March Book Club

My niece Carolyn suggested this month's book club read and it's a lively one!  I was interested from the first page and it only got more exciting in the next few.  That's just the way I like to start a book.  A few of the book club selections in the past year have been difficult or impossible for me to get into (ahem, Kelly M, I think they were both your picks), so I appreciated being able to jump right into this one.  And to redeem Kelly M, I will say she is the one who had this one on her shelf and lent it to me before the library could come up with it.

I hadn't ever heard of Clive Cussler, but since this is the 12th book with this hero, I'd say Cussler's been busy and successful over the years.  Have you read anything by him?