What are the benefits of tamales? I'm glad you asked. We can vary the heat by preparing different sauces using different peppers: this year we have have a mild green sauce of ancho and anaheim, a hot green of jalapeno and serrano, and a red hot red consisting of dried arbol peppers (the ones with this sauce will be for me, because no one else will eat them--a good way to ensure getting all I want). And tamales are the perfect fast food, because they freeze beautifully. You simply pull one or two out of the freezer, pop them in the microwave, and there you have a delicious dinner! The fillings will be pork, and veggie (zuccini and yellow squash, garlic, onion, cheese), and a green or black olive in the middle of each. It took a several tries to find a store with corn husks (this isn't the southwest, after all). Today was given over to sauce preparation, and tomorrow will be construction day (big assembly line deal).
And what has our reading turned to lately? John is embarking upon Finnegans Wake, and God knows where that will take him...Joyce is C-R-A-Z-Y. Anyway, on page 40 we find a somewhat less obtuse sentence than usual--although it does runs on for two and a half pages!, so here is a brief portion of that sentence:
...O'Mara, an exprivate secretary of no fixed abode (locally known as Midlew Lisa), who had passed several nights, funnish enough, in a doorway under the blankets of homelessness on the bunk of iceland...Meanwhile, I have finished reading Jane Eyre, for the second time in 37 years. What did I find on page 2? Jane is escaping from her loneliness by immersing herself in a book, Bewick's History of British Birds. Through this book she explores "the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland..." Jane recognizes in these cold, lonely, far off places her own desolation.
And now we turn to Chris, who left her appointment book in our cousin Lynn's car, and when she called Lynn to find out where she needed to be on Monday, Lynn turned to the correct date and said, "Iceland." Chris was mystified, until she got her book back and found an illegible "Ireland", which was a reminder about the person she was meeting who had just returned from there. So, here's to Chris, and a picture of her that nicely conveys her eccentric nature.
Chris and Lynn
1 comment:
I just started reading “August Folly” (1937) by Angela Thirkell and what do I read on p.20?:
“I’ll wait for cheese,” said Mr. Tebben. “The Vikings had more sense, so had the Icelanders. The very idea of an open-air theatre was abhorrent to them, if indeed they ever thought of it. Their national literature, stories of gods and heroes, was familiar to them, and they would have laughed, yes, laughed at the idea of dramatising what was already in the highest degree dramatic. We find no traces of open-air theatres in Norway or Iceland. Practical people, they realised than an open-air parliament, for so, very roughly, one may describe the Thing, or All-Thing, was enough strain on anyone without resorting to open-air entertainments. If they wanted to be entertained they sat at home, by a fire, and had their skald to recite to them.”
“More like the wireless,” said Mrs. Tebben, sympathetically.
Iceland IS everywhere!
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