Good morning! I hope that you had a great week. I was sort of dragging this week after the long weekend. But I have bounced back and am ready for some time at the beach today. I have a huge stack of books and magazines in my beach bag and I am looking forward to a little sun and some sand between my toes.
Interesting Food
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Doesn’t this Grilled Peach and Prosciutto Pizza from What’s Gabby Cooking look like the perfect treat for the weekend?
Chili Cheese Dog Sliders from Climbing Greer Mountain would be great for a weekend BBQ or picnic.
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I made these Jerk Chicken Salad Bowls from Recipe Runner and they were delicious!
If you want to use some of the bounty from your garden these Carrot Cake Pancakes from Taste of the South would be delicious.
These are the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies EVER. If you like chocolate chip cookies that are crunch on the outside, soft on the inside and filled with chocolate than I think you will love these cookies.
Lavender Sugar Cube Scrub is a great DIY project for you to make with your lavender harvest this summer.
Interesting Articles
Getting Psychologically Beach Body Ready
This Letter From a Man to His Late Wife is Beautiful and Heartbreaking.
The Underrated Pleasures of Eating Dinner Early
8 Female Executives on the Habits That They Gave Up
Interesting Books
I have these books on my bedside table and in my beach bag to read this week.
Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets
Jessica Fox was living in Hollywood, an ambitious 26-year-old film-maker with a high-stress job at NASA. Working late one night, craving another life, she was seized by a moment of inspiration and tapped “second hand bookshop Scotland” into Google. She clicked the first link she saw.
A month later, she arrived 2,000 miles across the Atlantic in Wigtown, on the west coast of Scotland, and knocked on the door of the bookshop she would be living in for the next month . . .
The rollercoaster journey that ensued—taking in Scottish Hanukkah, yoga on Galloway’s west coast, and a waxing that she will never forget—would both break and mend her heart. It would also teach her that sometimes we must have the courage to travel the path less taken. Only then can we truly become the writers of our own stories.
An old friend calls Catherine Lockhart and Liam Taggart to his famous Italian restaurant to enlist their help. His aunt is being evicted from her home in the Tuscan hills by a powerful corporation claiming they own the deeds, even though she can produce her own set of deeds to her land. Catherine and Liam’s only clue is a bound handwritten manuscript, entirely in German, and hidden in its pages is a story long-forgotten…
Ada Baumgarten was born in Berlin in 1918, at the end of the war. The daughter of an accomplished first-chair violinist in the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic, and herself a violin prodigy, Ada’s life was full of the rich culture of Berlin’s interwar society. She formed a deep attachment to her childhood friend Kurt, but they were torn apart by the growing unrest as her Jewish family came under suspicion. As the tides of history turned, it was her extraordinary talent that would carry her through an unraveling society turned to war, and make her a target even as it saved her, allowing her to move to Bologna—though Italy was not the haven her family had hoped, and further heartache awaited.
What became of Ada? How is she connected to the conflicting land deeds of a small Italian villa? As they dig through the layers of lies, corruption, and human evil, Catherine and Liam uncover an unfinished story of heart, redemption, and hope—the ending of which is yet to be written.
More like a poetic biographical essay on a fictional person than a novel, The Cook is a coming-of-age journey centered on Mauro, a young self-taught cook. The story is told by an unnamed female narrator, Mauro’s friend and disciple who we also suspect might be in love with him. Set not only in Paris but in Berlin, Thailand, Burma, and other far-flung places over the course of fifteen years, the book is hyperrealistic—to the point of feeling, at times, like a documentary. It transcends this simplistic form, however, through the lyricism and intensely vivid evocative nature of Maylis de Kerangal’s prose, which conjures moods, sensations, and flavors, as well as the exhausting rigor and sometimes violent abuses of kitchen work.
In The Cook, we follow Mauro as he finds his path in life: baking cakes as a child; cooking for his friends as a teenager; a series of studies, jobs, and travels; a failed love affair; a successful business; a virtual nervous breakdown; and—at the end—a rediscovery of his hunger for cooking, his appetite for life.
“I’ve planted my feet on Fijian earth and I intend to stay here until the last sunset. Why don’t you join me? Leave behind everything that didn’t work out!”
When Sina, Maya, Ingrid, and Lisbeth each receive a letter in the mail posing the same question, the answer is obvious. Their old high school friend Kat—Kat the adventurer, Kat who spread her wings and took off as soon as they graduated—has extended the invitation of a lifetime: Come live with me on my cocoa farm in Fiji. Come spend the days eating chocolate and gabbing like teenagers once again, free from men, worries, and cold. Come grow old in paradise, together, as sisters. Who could say no?
Now in their sixties, the friends have all but resigned themselves to the cards they’ve been dealt. There’s Sina, a single mom with financial woes; gentle Maya who feels the world slipping away from her; Ingrid, the perennial loner; Lisbeth, a woman with a seemingly picture-perfect life; and then Kat, who is recently widowed. As they adjust to their new lives together, the friends are watched over by Ateca, Kat’s longtime housekeeper, who oftentimes knows the women better than they know themselves and recognizes them for what they are: like “a necklace made of shells: from the same beach but all of them different.” Surrounded by an azure-blue ocean, cocoa trees, and a local culture that is fascinatingly, joyfully alien, the friends find a new purpose in starting a business making chocolate: bittersweet, succulent pieces of happiness.
A story of love, hope, and chocolate, PIECES OF HAPPINESS will reaffirm your faith in friendship, second chances, and the importance of indulging one’s sweet tooth.
Retired architect Otto Laird is living a peaceful, if slightly bemused, existence in Switzerland with his second wife, Anika. Once renowned for his radical designs, Otto now spends his days communing with nature and writing eccentric letters to old friends (which he doesn’t mail). But Otto’s comfortable life is rudely interrupted when he learns that his most significant and revolutionary building, Marlowe House, a 1960s tower block estate in South London is set to be demolished.
Otto is outraged. Determined to do everything in his power to save the building, he reluctantly agrees to take part in a television documentary, which will mean returning to London for the first time in twenty-five years to live for a week in Marlowe House. Once Otto becomes reacquainted with the city he called home for most of his life, his memories begin to come alive. And as he mines his past and considers life moving forward — for himself and his building — Otto embarks on a remarkable journey that will change everything he ever thought he knew.
Interesting Finds
Great maxi-dress.
Don’t forget a straw hat to protect you from the sun!
Cute whimsical earrings.
Versatile slide sandals from Target!
That’s it for this week, I hope that you found something interesting to read or make and I hope that you will share your finds with us. I enjoy reading your suggestions and have made many of your recipes, listened to the podcasts and read the books, unless you have suggested anything true crime, I do not like to listen to or read scary stuff, sorry.
Have a wonderful and safe weekend.
NOTE: This post contains affiliate links.
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Friday Favorites
Silent Sunday
I like loose dresses, although I never wear them anymore. Took them all to Goodwill. Thought at least someone would then be wearing them. It just amazes me the creativity of food bloggers. I didn't get a speck of it in my DNA.
Brenda
And now I'm hungry.
Ordering a few books now!