I don't know how to pronounce it

but I have a new love:

Stracciatella ice.

It's mostly ice cream, yet somehow similar to gelato, filled with soft little bits of chocolate and if you put chocolate sprinkles on top, well, you can hear accordians playing and envision the picturesque canals of Venice. It's heavenly.

I really cannot buy it again. I have singlehandedly eaten the entire carton.

Book #5: "Red Horizons" by Ion Mihai Pacepa

This book is an inside view of the extreme corruption in Nicolae Ceausescu's megalomaniac communist dictatorship. It's a must read for anyone traveling to my little corner of the world. For everyone else, it's probably too depressing.

What was more upsetting to me than the obscene wealth and ostentation enjoyed by Nicolae Ceausescu was his utter disregard for the welfare of the Romanian people. He could have cared less whether they all lived or died, so obsessed was he with clumsily attempting to influence foreign affairs, much in the same way that an unpopular schoolboy mucks about on the playground.

I'm ready to move on to something more cheerful.

Lost

It seems that a part of my brain, namely a large portion of my memory, has been diverted to more urgent tasks involving the care and feeding of Miss Bee.

I used be responsible.

It started when I left my digital camera on a plane. Thanksgiving, 2007. David, Bee, and I were flying back from Texas. On the camera were photographs of my daughter taking her first steps. She has taken many steps since, but the loss of those precious photographs still stings.

I have lost all kinds of other things:

When moving from temporary housing to our permanent apartment, we lost all of Bee's short sleeve shirts, but only for a few months. A new tenant found them in a drawer at the end of September and a fat lot of good they did Bee then.

I lost the stone from my engagement ring; it fell out of the setting. Somewhere in this dusty city a tiny, imperfect garnet, signifying all the hopes of my future, is resting.

At Disney World, I left my sunglasses in a restaurant at Epcot center. Disney's Lost and Found thought that they found them, but they mailed me a pair belonging to someone else.

I left my camera charger in the outlet in a hotel. You would not believe how expensive that little piece of plastic to replace.

I forgot Bee's sweater on board a cruise ship.

My favorite pair of yoga pants are lost in my house. I have no idea how this is possible but I know I didn't lose them while out jogging.

Then, last week, I lost my identity card. Oh! the bureaucracy involved get that replaced. I shudder at the thought. --It was found! There are some small miracles. 01-14-09 --

In her poem, "One Art" Elizabeth Bishop writes the "art of losing isn't hard to master." I have never felt the meaning of her words so keenly. Losing is one art I need to unlearn this year.

Book #4: "So Many Enemies, So Little Time," by Elinor Burkett

The subtitle of this book, "An American Woman in all the Wrong Places" is really what caught my eye.

This book is essentially a travelogue about Kyrgyzstan, with gleeful forays into Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The author seems to enjoy sneaking into countries that are notoriously anti-American in order to see for herself just how friendly or unfriendly they really are.

Burkett discovers that most people want the US to help, but not interfere, and usually have some very strange misconceptions about what America has done or plans to do in the future.

Other than that, the book was just okay. I read a lot of travel books and I have been spoiled by authors like Billy Bryson and Rigel Crockett. Haven't heard of the latter? I enjoyed his book, "Fair Wind and Plenty of It" so much that I rationed chapters.

In the meantime, for additional literary inspiration you might check out A Postcard From. . . . The author is also planning to read 50 books in 2009 and, as an added bonus, writes about her adventures in glorious Western Europe.

Portrait of the artist as a young toddler

The only thing she likes more than drawing with chalk is washing the chalkboard afterward.

Books #2 and #3:

"Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day," by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois

"The Great Scandinavian Baking Book," by Beatrice Ojakangas

Cookbooks count.  I read them from cover to cover.  

I cannot post much of a review for either of them at the moment--my head is still swimming with the sheer number of combinations of yeast, flour, water, and salt. . . but both look like they're going to be a welcome (and utilized) addition to my ever growing library of cookbooks.

I'm excited about "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" as another New Year's resolution of mine is to bake homemade bread, but have been struggling with finding time during the week. Generally, it takes about 15 minutes to whip up the dough, the two hours for it to rise, then about an hour for the dough to proof, and then an hour to bake.  That would mean pulling loaves out of the oven around 11 pm.

With the Hertzberg method, you use an extra large batch of refrigerated dough that has already completed its initial rise. He claims that the loaves have to proof for about 40 minutes and then bake for a mere half hour.  I am going to try it this weekend.

As for "The Great Scandinavian Baking Book,"  I have about 15 recipes that I want to try, but the first one will be Aebleskiver filled doughnuts.  I finally broke down and ordered the special pan needed to make them.  

Next book: a travelogue, as I continue to leap from genre to genre.

Wonderland

It's snowing in the city.  Everything is soft and white.  Even the traffic seems muted.  

Tonight, I came home to Bee telling me excitedly how she went to the park and made snowballs--and threw them at her babysitter.  All in good fun, I hope.  

After dinner, I baked oatmeal cranberry bars because a warm oven is the perfect foil to winter weather.  

It's a shame my office doesn't give snow days.