Tag: The library

Former Etsy Narrative for my Archives

[Here in my etsy shop, I share with you reclaimed paperbacks, many of them favorite books I’ve read myself, including pulp fiction, pop lit, bestsellers, and classics I haven’t.]

I have always loved books. It was my excuse to get a degree in English and the humanities (the one major that fed my reading addiction). Besides going to the library every Saturday with my sisters and dad as a child, I ended up working in libraries for years starting in high school and through college. Before he took off for Vietnam, after he’d moved us North in case he didn’t come back, my dad took us to the local library to meet the children’s librarian, Mrs. Nickerson. He did come back and we continued our weekly library jaunts to libraries wherever we were living at the time from Steubenville, Ohio, to Oceanside, California, back to Cape Cod and more. When I had my own children, the library was an outing at least once a week, usually more. We’d spend hours there in the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont. Libraries always felt like home to me. Even on vacations, we always went to the local library.
A library job is what brought me from Vermont back to the Cape, and while the job didn’t work out (people change) and I miss Vermont terribly, my love of books remains constant and saves me from total despair at times.

[While some of these books are well worn, they are not in tatters and still highly readable. Some are even written in so you can share another reader’s journey as you take your own. With a book, you can escape to all over the world. You can inhabit the life of someone else when you need to escape from your own. You’re never alone with a book. And along with a book, goes a good cup of tea. I am a tea connoisseur as well as a bibliophile and will include in each package some hand-stuffed and tied bags of some of my favorite teas. Enjoy!]

Sweet Potato Spoon Bread

If Alice validated my love of simple, Heidi encouraged me to experiment. To be adventurous with ingredients I have or don’t have. To seek a foundation for the ingredients I have on hand and adapt a recipe to them. And I’ve been successful! When I was much younger (although it doesn’t seem as much!), I used to think exotic spices, herbs and other ingredients created a great dish. I could not have been more wrong.
I have since learned that good old salt and pepper can be the best seasoning, maybe butter, garlic and olive oil, too.
Heidi does create recipes with ingredients that I would not necessarily consider combining though and her Sweet Potato Spoon Bread recipe is one of them. But, like I said, she taught me to take more risks in the kitchen. After all, if I’m going to live on the edge, the kitchen’s a fairly safe place to do it. So, I gave the spoon bread a try. And it was delish! So good that I have since repeated it and also discovered another blogger’s recipe that is a sweet potato soup with goat cheese biscuits. In the interest of simple and ease though, I use Heidi’s from her cookbook Super Natural Cooking, leaving out the shallots. So it’s basically just the mashed sweet potatoes with some whole wheat pastry flour and eggs stirred in, layered in a casserole with dollops of creamy goat cheese and baked. Even Marty likes it! Super Natural Cooking was the first cookbook I’d bought new in decades. I highly recommend it with the caveat that one way I’ve figured out I must buy a certain book is when I’ve checked it out from the library several times, keeping it on my shelf longer than the library’s probably had it on theirs!