Donni Webber, creator and owner of fairygardens.com and author of Magical Miniature Gardens & Homes: Create Tiny Worlds of Fairy Magic & Delight with Natural, Handmade Décor(Page Street Publishing 2016; $9.99 Amazon price) offers ideas and instructions for creating a variety of gardens and accessories. Chapters titled The Fairy Sunny House: An Exploration in Fairy Interior Design, A Gourdy Gnome Home: A Gnome in a Gourd, Hobbiton: A Terrarium Garden That Hobbits Will Love and Enchantment in a Gift: Giving the Gift of Magical Fairy Garden Kits feature a myriad of both easy and more complex craft projects. The following are from her book.
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Tin Town
Materials: collection of 5 empty vintage cans with lids
removed, drill (or you can use a sharp nail in hammer), pebbles, assorted miniature
plants, garden gloves, garden trowel, potting soil, sand.
Method:
1. Using the drill or sharp nail, puncture holes in the
bottom of the tins so that water can drain. Place pebbles in the bottom of the
tins to help with drainage. Choose miniature plants including several
succulents in a color scheme you like.
2. Add top soil to the tin. For the succulents add ½-inch
small pebbles or sand. Add plants. Then add miniature garden items including
the wine cork planter (directions provided below). Create a door and window
(directions below).
Miniature Tin Town Door and Windows
Materials: sharp scissors, paper painting tape, wax paper,
dark brown acrylic paint, paintbrush, wood skewer, red acrylic paint
Method:
1. You scissors to cut rectangular door in a square window
from the painting tape. Still the shapes on to the wax paper.
2. Use dark Brown acrylic paint to paint the door and window
Brown with a paintbrush.
3. To make the door handle, dip the end of the wood skewer
into the red acrylic paint and I did come to the door.
4. When the paint is dry, peel the door and window from the
wax paper and stick
1. Use a pen knife to carefully whittle a whole about 1 inch
deep into the center of the cork. Be slow and deliberate with your whittling,
making sure that the blade does not slip and make a hole in the outside of the
cork or cut your hand.
2. Hello Hall in the court with moist soil. Make sure your
succulent cutting has a long stem for planting. Prepare the cutting by using
the nails of your thumb and forefinger to snip off the stem at the end so the
cut is fresh.
3. Use the wooden skewer to make a hole in the soil in the
core planter of the bright depth for the stem of your cycle succulent cutting.
Plant the succulent in the soil and place the planter in your garden.
Everything is Just Fine, a social satire about families on a Beverly Hills soccer team for 10-year-old boys told partially in e-mails, explores the secrets and failings of the parents as they connect with each other throughout the season’s wins and losses.
Written by Brett Paesel, who also authored the bestselling Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom, the book could have been full of stock characters. We have the divorcee who drinks too much and spends way too much time flirting with other women’s husbands, the vaguely zoned-out housewife who keeps telling herself she is really, really grateful for what she has until she lands in bed with the sexy Latin soccer star who is helping coach the team and Coach Randy, who after losing his job, hides out at the library so his wife doesn’t know he’s unemployed.
But Paesel goes beyond the stereotypes and we come to know and care about these people as we follow what they’re dealing with in their lives.
“Because of an over-parenting snafu–I wanted to get my son on his
friend’s team–I ended up in the Beverly Hills soccer league,” says Paesel
about what inspired her to write her book. “My neighborhood league would have
been much more modest. Suddenly, I was in a world that was rarified. The fields
are lovely and have shade, parents lived in McMansions and some of them even
owned restaurants. My son’s team played Beckham’s kid’s team. Paparazzi
regularly staked out the games. Will Farrell was a coach at one point. My son
wasn’t a gifted player and he landed on a team that really didn’t have a
super-strong athlete, but the coach was hugely enthusiastic, and they became
the little team that could. The coach sent long e-mails giving shout-outs to
each player. I remember he called my son a Lion which he wasn’t – he was
deathly afraid of the ball. I started out wondering what was going on with the
coach because he was so zealous and seemed to have lots of time to craft these
e-mails.”
At first Paesel thought she was writing a short story parody of the email
chain she was reading but soon started feeling compassion for her characters.
“I wanted to know them better,” says Paesel who is also an actress and
producer. “They are all very flawed people, but I was moved by their intense
desire to connect – even when they fell disastrously short.”
Though she initially based most of her characters on people she knew,
Paesel says they quickly became their own people and so now, when she sees them
in her mind, she no longer sees the real people they were based on.
Does she worry that someone will know themselves when reading her book?
“People never recognize themselves in my writing for some reason,” says
Paesel. “I found this to be true in my memoir writing as well.”
Besides a good read and a lot of
laughs, Paesel hopes that people put her book down feeling a sense of belonging
to this great human drama we get to live through.
“The characters in my book get too caught up in things that are simply
unimportant and won’t get them the happiness that they are desperately seeking,”
she says. “At the heart of my book is an exhortation to keep paying attention
to what’s really important. Which is always – very simply – love.”
Ifyougo:
What: Brett Paesel has several book
events in Chicago.
Abby Wambach, the two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA World Cup champion and international soccer’s all-time leading scorer, is taking on a new game, that of empowering women—asking them not only to be thankful for what they have but also to demand what they deserve. And that’s the premise of her new book, Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game (Celadon 2019; $15.82 Amazon price).
To create a winning championship team, Wambach, who was co-captain,
helped forage the 2015 Women’s World Cup Champion Team into a wolfpack of
winners. Now she’d like women to ignore the old rules that help keep them down
and instead change the game.
Believing that there has never been a more important moment for women,
she talks about the “Power of the Wolf” and the “Strength of the Pack,” and her
book is rousing call to women outside of the sports world but employing the
techniques she used to create a championship team.
“We are the wolf,” she said in her keynote address to the Class of 2018
at Barnard’s 126th Commencement on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at Radio City Music
Hall and her book reflects that stirring speech. Her concepts of “Power of
their Wolf” and the “Strength of their Pack” is her way to be a catalyst for
overcoming the obstacles that women face. As an example, she talks about the
pay gap where women in the U.S. still earn only 80 cents on the dollar compared
to men and black women make only 63 cents, while Latinas make 54 cents.
“What we need to talk about more is the aggregate and compounding effects
of the pay gap on women’s lives,” she says.
“Over time, the pay gap means women are able to invest less and save
less so they have to work longer. When we talk about what the pay gap costs us,
let’s be clear. It costs us our very lives. That’s why if we keep playing by
the old rules, we will never change game.”
Wambach offers some rules to overcome being Little Red Riding Hood and
instead become “the wolf.”
· Make failure your fuel: Transform failure to wisdom and
power.
· Lead from the bench: Lead from wherever you are.
· Champion each other: Claim each woman’s victory as your
own.
· Demand the effing ball: Don’t ask permission: take what
you’ve earned.
Ifyougo:
What: Celebrate the release of Abby Wambach’s book Wolfpack
When:
Thursday, April 11 at 7 pm
Where:
Community Christian Church, 1635 Emerson Lane, Naperville
Cost: Tickets cost $29.97 (with service fee) and include a pre-signed copy of the new book and admission for one person. You will receive your book when you arrive at the event. wolfpackandersons.brownpapertickets.com
FYI: For
more information, call Anderson’s Bookshops, 630-355-2665
Totally unexpectedly, Lori Gottlieb’s long term boyfriend, the man she
thought she’d marry, made a succinct and ultimately devastating statement,
saying he didn’t “want to live with a kid in the house for the next ten years” and
then he was gone.
Lori Gottlieb
Suddenly, Gottlieb, a psychotherapist who writes the weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column for The Atlantic, had to deal with her own issues as well as those of her clients, a process she chronicles in her very engagingMaybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019; $28).
The clients include John, a married man with two children and a very
successful career as a television producer who pays Gottlieb in cash because he
doesn’t want his wife to know he’s in therapy.
“You’ll be like my mistress,” he tells her at the end of their first
therapy session. “Or, actually, more like my hooker. No offense, but you’re not
the kind of woman I’d choose as a mistress . . . if you know what I mean.”
Another patient, newly married, had achieved tenure at her university and
after years of hard work, was eager to become a parent.
“She was accomplished, generous, and adored by colleagues, friends, and
family. She was the kind of person who enjoyed running marathons and climbing
mountains and baking silly cakes for her nephew,” writes Gottlieb.
The client, Julie, overcomes cancer once and then six years later receives
the news it has reoccurred, and she has a year or so to live.
“One of the themes of the book is that our stories form the core of our
lives and give them deeper meaning,” says Gottlieb, whose book was recently optioned
for television by Eva Longoria for 20th TV. “Sharing these stories is
essentially about one person saying to another: This is who I am? Can you
understand me?”
But even for therapists, it’s scary to reveal ourselves to others and
that’s what Gottlieb, who speaks about relationships, parenting, and hot-button
mental health topics on such shows as The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS
This Morning, Dr. Phil, CNN, and NPR, discovered when she found a professional
to talk to about her fractured relationship. Despite her understanding that’s
it’s important to be truthful, she, like all of us, edit the truth.
“Clients make a choice about what to leave in, what to leave out as well
as how to frame the situation in the way they want me to hear it,” says
Gottlieb who found herself doing just the same. “One of the things with my therapist
that I did that my clients do to me, is I wanted him to like me, I want him to
like me better than others in the waiting room. That’s why we don’t always tell
our therapists our secrets. We don’t realize the ways we get in out way in the
therapy room is the way we get in the way in our own lives.”
Gottlieb describes people as emotionally hiding out.
“People carry out their pain, they think they can compartmentalize,” she
says. “I see so much loneliness in the people who come to see me, people are
really stressed out.”
Texting and social media sometimes stop us from being together and
communicating. That’s why therapy can help people change largely because as
they grow in connection with others in a way often lost in our fast-paced,
technology-driven culture.
But change is scary, both for Gottlieb in her personal therapy sessions that
she chronicles and for her clients who we follow as they come to grips with
their issues in her office.
“I thought it was important to put myself out there with this book,” says
Gottlieb, noting that the book was very difficult to write. “Therapists are
real people and we have our own struggles. We’re all members of the human race.”
Ifyougo:
What: Author
Lori Gottlieb and Amy Dickinson, who writes the syndicated advice column, Ask
Amy, discuss Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
When: Monday,
April 8 from 6-7:15pm
Where: Harold
Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St., Chicago IL
Gottlieb will also be interviewed by Dr. Alexandra Solomon of Northwestern University and author of Loving Bravely on Tuesday, April 9 at 7pm at New Trier High School, Cornog, 7 Happ Road, Winnetka, IL. Cost: Free. Sponsored by The Book Stall. 847-446-8880; thebookstall.com
Jacqueline Winspear, author of The American Agent, the 15th book in her Maisie Dobbs’ series, transports us to early September 1940, as Adolf Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg or lighting attack on London and other United Kingdom cities, an intensive attack already used successfully in Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium and France to enable an invasion to take place. Day after day, night after night for months on end, hundreds of German bombers would fly across the Channel to wreak havoc. Maisie and her friend, Priscilla are volunteer ambulance drivers, and on one run they are accompanied by an American war correspondent, Catherine Saxon.
Following her late-night broadcast to the US, where she describes
her experience of seeing the death and destruction that the bombings have
wrought on the city, Saxon is found dead in her rooms. Maisie Dobbs is brought
in to conduct an undercover investigation – her presence requested by a man
from the US Department of Justice, Mark Scott, who had previously saved her life
in Munich, in 1938. The story is
peppered with excerpts from real broadcasts and reporting at the time.
On a multi-city tour, Winspear will be in Chicago for a book signing on April 4. Speaking to Jane Ammeson, she talks about An American Agent and how her own past was an impetus for her series.
For
readers who have never met Maisie, can you give us a brief summary?
Readers first met Maisie Dobbs in the first
novel in the series – entitled Maisie
Dobbs. From a working class
background, Maisie is a young woman of intellect and a keen intuitive ability,
which is recognized by a friend of her employer. Dr. Maurice Blanche – a
psychologist and Doctor of Forensic Medicine who consults with the police –oversees
her education and entry to university, which is sponsored by her employer – but
WW1 intervenes, and Maisie volunteers for nursing service, and is later wounded
at a Casualty Clearing Station in France – an experience that defines her. Later, having recovered, she becomes Blanche’s
assistant, and in the first novel in the series we see her striking out on her
own upon his retirement – she is a “psychologist and investigator.” Maisie is
very much a woman of her day – so many young women had to be incredibly
self-sufficient as the men they might have married had been lost to war. I have
written extensively on this subject as it’s always interested me.
I am
impressed by your vast knowledge and ability to bring us into this time period.
I know your grandfather was severely injured in the Battle of the Somme and
your family talked about the war. How did those experiences translate into you
writing books and immersing yourself in this time period?
Family stories always have an immediacy that
reading books and immersing oneself in research sometimes lacks. My grandfather
was very much of his generation of men who saw the most terrible death in the
trenches of WW1 France and Belgium – he never talked about it, with the
exception of a couple of stories shared with my father. But I could see the
wounds – his poor shrapnel-filled legs (he was still removing shrapnel
splinters when he died at age77), and I could hear the wheezing of his
gas-damaged lungs. And I knew he had suffered shell-shock. Added to this were my mother’s stories of the
Second World War – her experiences of being evacuated, of having to return to
London, then of being bombed out time and again. And yes, of seeing death on
the streets following a bombing. The
experience of listening to family stories – even from a very young age –
inspired my curiosity, which later became an adult inquiry, so you could say
I’ve been researching my subject since childhood.
This
is your 15th book in the series. How do you go about developing your stories?
Are they mapped out or do you take an incident and place Maisie in there and
let it all happen?
I think creating a story is like lighting fire.
First of all, you lay down the paper and kindling, then you need a match for
the flame, and you follow that with your fuel.
Often the kindling for a story is laid down years before I begin to
write – because I have been waiting for the spark to light the fire and then
the fuel to build the flame. For
example, I had known the true story that inspired “Elegy for Eddie” since I was
a teen – of a young girl not 16 years old, a cleaner in the local brewery
stables who had given birth to a baby boy while at work, and while stopping him
from crying had starved his brain of oxygen. That young boy – thereafter
considered “slow” – was born and grew up around horses and had a gift. As he grew up, he could settle the most
uppity horse, simply by laying a hand upon the animal – that’s how he earned a
living at a time when horses were vital for commerce and transportation. As a boy, my father knew this young man, and
he told me of his later “suspicious” demise.
After I began writing the series, I knew “Eddie” would form the basis of
a story – the kindling, if you will. Then
I learned more about the pre-war machinations of various powerful men close to
Churchill, and the secrecy surrounding their work, whether it was in creating
soft propaganda or developing fighter aircraft.
That’s when I asked the question – what if an innocent, a young man of
limited intellectual ability but deep empathy stumbled across crucial
classified information? Then what might happen? The flame caught and I had a
fire. But when I begin writing any
story, I only know the main landing points along the way, I do not know all the
details – they come as the story is written. I like to have the basic map, but
I also like to “dance with the moment” and be able to respond to new ideas or
information as they emerge.
Are
there times you’re back in the England between the wars versus 2019?
To some extent I have to be in the years I’m writing about – I cannot be distracted by today while I’m writing. When I’m at work, I am completely with my characters – I walk their streets, I can see what they are wearing, what they buy, what they eat, and I can hear their use of language, which is different from today.
In January 2011, Newsweek magazine
published an article titled “America’s Dying Cities” focusing on 10 cities with
the steepest drop in overall population as well as the largest decline in the
number of residents under the age of 18. Among those listed such as Detroit and
Flint, was South Bend, Indiana which over the years had lost or seen diminished
several large manufacturing companies including Studebaker and an exodus of
young talent.
“What is particularly troubling
for this small city is that the number of young people declined by 2.5% during
the previous decade,” the article posited, “casting further doubt on whether
this city will ever be able to recover.”
Around that same time, Pete
Buttigieg, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, studied politics,
philosophy and economics at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and had worked for the management
strategy consulting firm McKinsey and Company—the type of resume that screams
New York, Los Angeles or London, but certainly not his native South Bend—moved
back to the city where he grew up and threw his hat into the ring as a
Democratic mayoral candidate. He was 29 years old.
Buttigieg won his election. During his first term, as an officer in U.S. Navy Reserve from 2009-2017, he took a leave of absence to serve for a seven-month deployment in Afghanistan in 2014, receiving the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his counter terrorism work. Back home, he won re-election with 80% of the vote despite having come out as gay just four months earlier. Let me repeat that—a gay man was re-elected in Indiana with 80% of the vote.
“I’ve found people are really
accepting,” Buttigieg tells me when we finally connect on the phone—since we
set up a time to talk it’s been changed numerous times because he’s been very
busy since announcing he was going to run for president. He’s appeared on “The
View,” “CBS This Morning,” and “CNN” and has been interviewed by Rolling Stone,
the New Yorker and the New York Times to name just a few. Plus, his father, a
Notre Dame professor, had passed away.
The citizens of South Bend also
like results and this city, which Newsweek had doubted could come back just
eight years ago, is doing just that.
I live near South Bend, my brother
taught at Notre Dame University for 30 years, my son went to Holy Cross College
and I’m a big football fan so I’m there a lot. Over the years I’ve watched the
city’s downtown empty out, morphing into a place of empty storefronts as retail
and restaurants left either for good or for the area around University Mall, a
large sprawling indoor shopping center surrounded by smaller strip malls, car
dealerships and both chain and independent restaurants.
Then came such Buttigieg initiatives
as “1000 Homes in 1000 Days initiative,” which demolished or rehabilitated abandoned
homes in the city. His “Smart Streets” redefined the downtown, making it both
safer and more appealing. Two years ago, the city made the largest investment
ever—over $50 million– in its parks and trails, creating the green spaces so
valued by urban dwellers.
“There’s been an evolution in
economic redevelopment,” Buttigieg tells me. “It’s not about smoke-stack
chasing anymore. The coin of the realm is the work force—the people. A city is
made of people and it needs to be fun and a place you want to live. We didn’t
have those expectations before.”
Buttigieg talks of “urban
patriots,” a term he uses to describe groups of people who savor the challenge
of turning a rust belt city around and making it a “cool” city.
“It’s a type of militancy in how
people are approaching it which is quite different than when people were
leaving cities,” he says. “I grew up believing success had to do with leaving
home, but once I got out, I missed that sense of place and I realized I could
be part of my city’s economic re-development. So, I moved home. At a moment
when we’re being told that the Rust Belt is full of resentment, I think South
Bend is a reply, we’ve found a way of coming together, getting funding to make
our city better. There’s a sense of optimism. I think people are beginning to
look at politics and politicians and asking do they make life better or not and
what do they bring to the table to help everyone.”
Here’s what South Bend is like now. You can go white water rafting through the center of town. Vibrant neighborhoods consisting of coffee shops, eclectic boutiques, trendy restaurants and outdoor gathering places thrive in the downtown. Last fall, Garth Brooks performed outdoors in Notre Dame’s football stadium (its $400 million expansion which added several thousand premium seats as well as new academic buildings was completed just two years ago) in front of a sold-out crowd of 84,000 on a very cold and rainy October night. SF Motors started manufacturing at the old Hummer plant, producing electric cars. Walking trails, including one along the St. Joseph River, abound. Eddy Street Commons located across from the Notre Dame campus continues to expand, a destination of bars, shops and eateries as well as condos and apartment buildings. Old neighborhoods with homes that once had sagging porches and peeling paint, are now pristinely restored.
“We’re calling out to another
generation,” says Buttigieg. “There’s an energy here, people are proud of their
city and are working together to make it even better.”
Indeed. The other day, I was flipping through a magazine article about the best places in Indiana and paused at a magnificent photo of a downtown scene lit with colored lights reflecting on the sparkling waters of a river. Where is this? I wondered. Looking down, I saw the answer: South Bend.
“I’ve long and often said that the ‘Mexican Drug Problem’ is really the American drug problem,” says Don Winslow who recently completed The Border, the third book in his Cartel Trilogy.
While Winslow is writing fiction, his
New York Times bestselling books are all too real.
“We’re the consumers and the ones
funding the cartels and fueling this violence because of our demand for drugs,”
says Winslow. “And then we have the nerve to point to Mexico and talk about
Mexico corruption. What about our corruption? If there’s anyone who should be building a
wall, it’s Mexico to protect themselves from our demand.”
Winslow’s fast action paced books, written
in a style he describes as “close third person,” are good reads on several
levels, including the enjoyment of a well-researched thriller about Drug
Enforcement Agency undercover operative Art Keller and his long struggle in a
harrowing world amidst Mexican cartel power struggles, traffickers, drug mules,
teenage hitmen, families seeking asylum to escape the drug wars, narcos, cops and
political corruption on both sides of the border as well as attorneys and
journalists.
The other level is the indictment of what
he views as a failed policy by the U.S. to stem the tide of drugs.
“We’ve had a War on Drugs for almost 50 years and last year more people
died of drug overdoses than ever before,” says Winslow. “We’ve already had this
lab experiment and it was called Prohibition. As long as you have people
wanting drugs, you’ll have people selling drugs. The way to end the violence
and crime that goes along with drug use is to legalize drugs and treat them as
the social health problem they are.”
Whether you agree with Winslow, whose books have been acquired by FX
Networks for television, his writing is compelling as he takes us into a world
he has inhabited since his first book, The
Power of the Dog, was published. He intended to end the series with The Cartel, his second book about Keller,
which he sold to Fox for a seven-figure amount.
“I swore that was my last book—I was done,” he says. “But the difficulty
was that the story wasn’t. The violence in Mexico is increasing, the heroin
epidemic in the U.S. is killing more people and the immigration issue—there was
more to discuss. Like in my first two books, I had more to say through the
medium of crime fiction.”
Winslow says the escalating violence in Mexico is amazing. In 1998, the
big news was the murder of 19 people in a Mexican village that was drug
related.
“By the time I was working on The
Cartel, that kind of incident wouldn’t even be in the papers, it’s such a
low body count,” says Winslow, noting that the difficulties in writing his
earlier books was finding people involved in the drug trade who were willing to
talk. “By the time I got done writing The
Cartel, people who had been hiding their crimes were celebrating them.”
But Winslow says he’s seeing a definite groundswell of change.
“Cities are doing some really interesting and forward thinking about it,”
he says. “We have a 2.2 million prison population behind bars and 20% of that
is drugs; we have 181,000 in Federal prison and around 90,000 of those are drug
related. We are the market for drugs. We’re 5% of the world’s population and we
use 80% of the opioids. We need to be doing something different.”
Though he says he’s done with the Cartel Trilogy, Winslow acknowledges it
was weird when he sent off his final manuscript.
“That was 20 years of my life, a total of one-third of my life,” he says.
Jim Laughren wants to keep it real when talking about wine. No pretentions, no superciliousness.
It’s about what you like, not what the big time wine critics say you should like says Laughren, author of 50 Ways to Love Wine More: Adventures in Wine Appreciation! (Crosstown Publishing 2018; $26.95), an NYC Big Book Award winner and finalist in the American Book Fest Best Book Awards.
“I wrote the book with the intention of starting a conversation about wine,” says Laughren, a Certified Wine Educator and former president of a wine import and distribution company. ““I wanted my book to be for people who really like wine but are put off by wine snobs. All of my writing and teaching is about letting people know that what other people think doesn’t matter, that there are no secrets to wine though many wine critics would have you believe otherwise and that only they hold the secrets. Historically, there’s never been a wine or gate keeper.”
Indeed, says Laughren, wine was, for centuries both seasonal and also for everyone.
“In Rome, they even gave their slaves wine though it was the dregs, of course,” he says. “Wine’s greatest gift is to give pleasure and we’re all entitled to that.”
Determining your own palate means trusting your own preferences. And though wine can be complex, it becomes easier to appreciate when a person understands how memory and emotion are inextricably tied to taste and are determining factors in all of our personal wine journeys.
“At the top of the nasal passage is the olfactory epithelium that connects directly to the area of the brain where memories are stored,” explains Laughren. “You know how some wines have tastes of tobacco. If as a child you had a kindly grandfather who smoked a pipe, contrasted with a child whose parents chain smokers and a house that reeked of cigarettes, those memories would impact how the two would feel about the taste or aromas of tobacco in wine.”
Laughren, founder of WineHead Consulting, encourages people to explore new wines while still enjoying your favorites.
“There are 10,000
different grape varietals,” he says. “Look at Italy, there are probably 800
varieties in that country alone.”
Like most of us, Laughren
drank some funky wines in college.
“Most wines made in the
1970s were very sweet,” he says. “Group think changes. Now those in the know
pooh-pooh sweet table wines as the drinks of the unwashed masses. But if that’s
what you like, don’t spend too much time thinking about it, just enjoy them. Instead
think about exposing yourself to other wines and widening your experience.”
Ifyougo:
What: Reading, signing, and wine
tasting with renowned wine expert Jim Laughren who be discussing his new book, 50 Ways to Love Wine More.
Where: The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N
Lincoln Ave., Chicago, IL
It’s personal for Katie Parla, award winning cookbook author, travel guide and food blogger who now has turned her passion for all things Italian to the off-the-beaten paths of Southern Italy, with its small villages, endless coastline, vast pastures and rolling hills. “Three of my grandmother’s four grandparents are from Spinoso, deep in a remote center of Basilicata,” says Parla, the author of the just releasedFood of the Italian South: Recipes for Classic, Disappearing Lost Dishes (Clarkson Potter 2019; $30).
Katie Parla in Southern Italy. Photo credit Ed Anderson.
Parla is a journalist but she’s also a culinary sleuth, eager to learn all about foodways as well as to chronicle and save dishes that are quickly disappearing from modern Italian tables. She’s lived in Rome since graduating with a degree from Yale in art history and her first cookbook was the IACP award winning Tasting Rome. She’s also so immersed herself in Italian cuisine that after moving to Rome, she earned a master’s degree in Italian Gastronomic Culture from the Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, a sommelier certificate from the Federazione Italiana Sommelier Albergatori Ristoratori, and an archeological speleology certification from the city of Rome.
Matera. Photo credit Ed Anderson.
In tiny Spinoso, Parla and her mother checked into one of the few available rooms for rent and went to office of vital statistics to find out more about family history. “We made the mistake of getting there before lunch,” she says. “You could tell they really want to go home and eat. They told us there were only four or five last names in the village and since ours wasn’t one of them, then we couldn’t be there.”
Caiazzo. Photo credit Ed Anderson.
But Parla found that sharing wine with the officers soon produced friendlier results (“wine and food always does that in Italy,” she says) and after leafing through dusty, oversized ledgers written in fading, neat cursive they were able to locate the tiny house where her grandfather had lived as well as other extensive family history. “Thank goodness for Napoleon, who was really into record keeping, no matter his other faults” says Parla.
Katie Parla. Photo credit Ed Anderson.
Many of her ancestors were sheepherders, tending sheep, staying with a flock for a week in exchange for a loaf of bread. This poverty was one reason so many Southern Italians left for America. But it also is the basis for their pasta and bread heavy cuisine says Parla. To capture the flavors of this pastoral area, Parla visited restaurants and kitchens, asking questions and writing down recipes which had evolved over the centuries from oral traditions. Describing Rome, Venice and Florence as “insanely packed,” Parla believes that those looking for a less traveled road will love Southern Italy, an ultra-authentic region to the extent that in Cilento, for example, there are more cars than people on the road.
Spezzatino all Uva . Photo credit Ed Anderson.
“There’s all this amazing food,” she says. “But also, there’s all this unspoiled beauty such as the interior of Basilicata. And the emptiness, because so many people are gone, creates this sense of haunted mystery. It’s so special, I want people to understand the food and to visit if they can.” For more information, visit katieparla.com
’U Pan’ Cuott’ Baked Bread and Provolone Casserole
Serves 4 to 6
1 pound day-old durum wheat bread (I like Matera-style; see page 198), torn into bite-size pieces
3 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
7 ounces provolone cheese, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 teaspoon peperoni cruschi powder or sweet paprika
2 garlic cloves, smashed
1 teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon peperoncino or red pepper flakes
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt
Overview:
In Bernalda, a town in Basilicata best known as the ancestral village of Francis Ford Coppola, there are many ancient bread traditions. The town isn’t far from the durum wheat fields of the Murgia plateau and the famous bread towns Matera and Altamura. One of the town’s classic dishes is ’u pan’ cuott’ (Bernaldese dialect for pane cotto, “cooked bread”). Families would bake stale slices of Bernalda’s enormous 3-kilogram loaves with whatever food scraps they could find, resulting in a savory, delicious bread casserole bound by gooey bits of melted provolone. Use the crustiest durum bread you can find or bake.
Method:
Preheat the oven to 475°F with a rack in the center position.
Place the bread in a colander, rinse with warm water, and set aside to soften. The bread should be moistened but not sopping wet.
In a large bowl, combine the tomatoes, provolone, peperoni cruschi, garlic, oregano, peperoncino, and ¼ cup of the olive oil. Season with salt.
When the bread crusts have softened, squeeze out any excess liquid and add the bread to the bowl with the tomato mixture. Stir to combine.
Grease a baking dish with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil, pour in the tomato mixture, and drizzle the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil on top. Bake until the top is heavily browned, and the provolone has melted, about 20 minutes. Serve warm.
Spezzatino all’Uva
Pork Cooked with Grapes
Serves 6 to 8
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 pounds boneless pork shoulder, salted and cut into 2-inch cubes
1 garlic clove, smashed
1 cup dry red wine (I like Aglianico del Vulture)
2 bay leaves
4 cups pork stock or water
1 bunch of red grapes (I like Tintilia grapes), halved and seeded
Overview:
The foothills east of the Apennines in Molise grow Tintilia, an indigenous red grape known for its low yield and pleasant notes of red fruit and spices. Each year, the majority of the harvested grapes are pressed to make wine, with the remainder reserved for jams and even savory dishes like this pork and grape stew, which is only made at harvest time. The slight sweetness of the grapes mingles beautifully with the savory pork and herbaceous notes of the bay leaves. Salt the pork 24 hours in advance.
Method:
Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When the oil begins to shimmer, add the pork, working in batches as needed, and cook, turning, until it is browned on all sides, 7 to 8 minutes. Remove the pork and set aside on a plate.
Reduce the heat to low. Add the garlic and cook until just golden, about 5 minutes. Add the wine, increase the heat to medium, and scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. When the alcohol aroma dissipates and the liquid has nearly evaporated, about 2 minutes, add the bay leaves.
Return the pork to the pan. Add enough stock so the meat is mostly submerged and season with salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 1½ hours more, until the pork is fork-tender. Add the grapes at the 1 ¼ hour mark and continue cooking until they are tender. If the sauce becomes too dry, add a bit more stock (you may not need all the stock). Serve immediately.
Ifyougo:
What: Katie Parla has three events in Chicago
When & Where: March 19 from 6:30 to 9pm. Katie will be celebrating the release of her cookbook with her friends at Monteverde, 1020 West Madison Street, Chicago, IL. The cost of the dinner is $150 including food, wine pairings, tax, gratuity and copy of the book. (312) 888-3041.
When & Where: March 20 from 6 to 9pm. Katie will be hosting an aperitivo and signing at Lost Lake’s Stranger in Paradise, 3154 W Diversey Ave., Chicago, IL. No booking necessary, just come on down. Books will be sold on site by Book Cellar. (773) 293-6048.
Menu of five cocktails from the book, $12.
Three small plates (two pastas from Pastificio di Martino and olive oil poached tuna, endive and olives) from Chef Fred Noinaj, $12-15.
When & Where: March 21 from 6 to 7:30pm. Katie will host an aperitivo and sign books, which will be available for purchase at Bonci Wicker Park, 1566 N Damen Ave., Chicago, IL. (872) 829-3144.
In Andrea Bartz’s mystery novel, The Lost Night, Lindsay Bach believes
she remembers the night her once-best friend Edie committed suicide. It’s
seared into her brain. Or so she thinks. Over dinner, a long ago friend who has
just moved back to New York suggests that she wasn’t with the group like she believes.
Could that be true? Getting a friend to hack into her old email account, Bach backtracks
a decade ago to when she and her group of friends were post graduates starting
jobs, consuming too much alcohol, partying too hard and falling in love—often.
(Photo by Kate Lord)
With each new revelation about
that time and her part in the days leading up to Edie’s death, Bach has to
employ the skills she uses to fact check magazine articles for her job to do
the same in her life. The questions are many, but the most important ones are
did the captivating and beautiful Edie really commit suicide or was she
murdered? And did Bach have something to do with her death that she can no
longer remember.
Bartz, who earned her master’s
degree at Northwestern University and the author of Stuff Hipsters Hate, her blog turned book, says she wanted to write
a book like those she likes to read—tomes by female mystery writers like Tana
French, Gillian Flynn and Jessica Knoll. For inspiration, she turned to a time
in her life—New York City in 2009. Like her favorite writers, the novel struck
a note and even before the book was published at the end of February, it had
already been optioned by Cartel Entertainment as a limited series with actress Mila
Kunis’ Orchard Farm set to produce.
“It was a crazy time and we were
partying while the world was burning,” she says of her time as a 23-year-old. “I thought of this time and how bizarre it
all was and then interlaid it with a mysterious death. It opens up a certain
subculture that I hope is interesting to readers, it certainly was
introspective for me.”
The novel, atmospheric, intense
and intriguing, reflects an interest in psychology and memory that has always
interested Bartz—and Bach, the character Bartz describes as being most like
her. In an early chapter, Bartz tells a lover how drunk blackouts mean that the
incidents that occurred never were recorded in our memories. They don’t exist
and yet they happened.
“We’ve all had those incidents
where someone will describe an event and say you were there and you don’t
remember it,” says Bartz, noting there’s something both creepy and disorienting
about how there’s no hard and fast truth just different memories
So, it is
with Bach, who is shaken out of her of complacent lifestyle by having to
grapple with the truth—as elusive as it is.
Ifyougo:
What: Author Andrea Bartz will be answering questions about her new
novel The Lost Night, and magician
Jeanette Andrews will be wowing the audience with a short performance.
When: Wednesday, March 13 at 7-9 pm
Where: The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, IL
Shelf Life 