December 14, 2011
7:00 p.m.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Figs with Prosciutto and Maytag Blue
We have an old fig tree in our back yard and this is one of my favorite ways to prepare them.
- With a paring knife, slice an "X" at the bottom of each fig.
- Insert a dollop of soft cheese into the "X". Suggested cheeses: goat cheese, blue cheese (especially "Maytag Blue"), burrata, brie
- Wrap a slice of Prosciutto di Parma around each fig.
- Place under broiler until the edges of the prosciutto are crispy, around 5 minutes.
- Serve warm as an appetizer.
- Lick your fingers.
December Book Options
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| Amazon.com |
The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better, using the simplest of methods: the checklist. In riveting stories, he reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds. And the insights are making a difference. Already, a simple surgical checklist from the World Health Organization designed by following the ideas described here has been adopted in more than twenty countries as a standard for care.
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| Amazon.com |
From Wikipedia:
Fair Stood the Wind for France is a novel written by English author H. E. Bates, it was first published in 1944 and was his first financial success. The title comes from the first line of Agincourt, a poem byMichael Drayton (1563–1631).[1]
Plot introduction
The story concerns John Franklin, the pilot of a Wellington Bomber who badly injures his arm when he brings his plane down in Occupied France at the height of the Second world War. He and his crew make their way to an isolated farmhouse and are taken in by the family of a French farmer. Plans are made to smuggle the them back to Britain via Vichy controlled Marseilles but Franklin's conditions worsens and he remains at the farm during the hot summer weeks that follow and falls in love with the farmer's daughter Françoise. Eventually they make the hazardous journey together by rowing boat and bicycle...
[edit]Adaptations
It was adapted into a 4-part television mini-series in 1980 for the BBC starring David Beames as Franklin and Cécile Paoli as Françoise.[2] This production is available on DVD, distributed by Acorn Media UK. In November 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two part dramatisation by Maddy Fredericks in the Classic Serial strand.[3]
[edit]Memorable quotes
'Sometimes the Alps lying below in the moonlight had the appearance of crisp folds of crumpled cloth'. (First Penguin edition, page 5)
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| amazon.com |
It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.
As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.
Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.
Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
