This week my book club met and last week my dinner club met.
This month my book club read A Person of Interest by Susan Choi - I have to admit that without a book club with very high social norms of "you will read the book" - I probably wouldn't have finished this one. It was really well written and is a fictionalized version of a combination uni-bomber + Wen Ho Lee case. Unfortunately, the book 
also combined my two least favorite features in a book or movie - absolutely no sympathetic characters and a case where someone is wrongfully suspected of a crime and suffers for it (the best/worst example of this genre is Brokedown Palace - for me an almost unwatchable movie.) You would think these two qualities would cancel each other out - if the book's main character (Professor Lee) is unsympathetic - who cares if he has his life destroyed because he is a terrorist suspect - and yet I still do care. Next month's book (which I actually read about a year ago) is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan which while a good story has really disturbing passages about the process of foot binding.
also combined my two least favorite features in a book or movie - absolutely no sympathetic characters and a case where someone is wrongfully suspected of a crime and suffers for it (the best/worst example of this genre is Brokedown Palace - for me an almost unwatchable movie.) You would think these two qualities would cancel each other out - if the book's main character (Professor Lee) is unsympathetic - who cares if he has his life destroyed because he is a terrorist suspect - and yet I still do care. Next month's book (which I actually read about a year ago) is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan which while a good story has really disturbing passages about the process of foot binding.The theme of this month's dinner club was "Food without Silverware." Our host for the event Ben is the lone bachelor in the group and complained that dinner club is really designed for people who have gotten married because they own dishes and silverware for 10-12 people - voila we had a meal that did not require silverware and hardly required dishes. I think silverware must make food healthier because this was probably our least nutricious dinner club - with vats of guacamole and seven-layer dip counting as a side dish. Dan and I made miniature bisteeya - a moroccan dish of chicken, nuts and cinnamon in phyllo dough. The dish contains pine nuts - girl friends and I have talked about the fact that we have a hard time eating/cooking with pine nuts because our mutual friend Megan is allergic to them - somehow we have subconciously absorbed this fear of pine nuts and everytime they are in a dish I notice it - in a way I would not notice "this dish has peanuts in it."
4 comments:
that is really funny. Its not like I miss pine nuts - I don't even know what they taste like, as my tongue is even allergic, so I jsut start itching if I get one. I have heard they are good. You should eat at will! I would love to try your Moroccan dish (with walnuts or other substitute!)
indeed - I think the recipe actually called for almonds but I didn't have any and substituted the pine nuts which were hogging up the freezer
I sometimes feel bad just having the pine nuts in the fridge! What if they touch something??
And my friends all think I'm crazy when I warn them two and three times that a dish has pine nuts it it.
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