Chocolate and Chocolat

Being completely out of touch, I just recently - finally - saw the wonderful movie "Chocolat", and fell in love with "Vianne Rocher", the main character that Juliette Binoche plays.

The following week we took KosherCop to the library to try to get more "Magic Treehouse" books. There were none, but in the place where they should have been was flyer listing all the books that Treehouse fans might also enjoy so we discovered some new wonderful books.

The way these excursions generally work is that one parent stays with KosherCop while the other gets to look for their own books. Then, when that parent finally decides to come back, the other can use the last five minutes to look for a book before a) the library closes or b) KosherCop realizes he is hungry starving and we have to go. This time I let KosherCook look for some books first and was left with five minutes to do my usual commando-style raid on the new fiction section.

My typical M.O. is to scoop up 4 or 5 books that seem mildly interesting and hope that one of them is worth reading. But this time I only needed 1 minute.

The first book I saw was the sequel to "Chocolat", "The Girl with No Shadow" by Joanne Harris. I didn't need 4 more "just in case" books - I was fully committed to reading this one book and couldn't wait to get home to read it.

The only problem was that once I started reading it, I began to notice small inconsistencies between references to things that had happened in the book "Chocolat" and the movie. I don't typically like to see the movie version of a book I've really enjoyed, and I certainly don't like to go back and read a book after I've seen the movie - I find myself imagining all the characters as the actors who played them and that gets really annoying.

But this time I was torn. I was immediately drawn into the story but part of me wanted to stop reading and go back and read "Chocolat" first, before continuing with the sequel. Of course I couldn't stop reading "The Girl With No Shadow" because it was far too good to put down and I couldn't get back to the library quick enough to get the first book.

In the end it didn't matter. Joanne Harris gives enough back story that I felt confident that the plot of the movie was similar enough to the book that I didn't feel left out reading this one first.

And since I am very sad that I've finished it, I can read "Chocolat" just so I can spend some more time with the characters.

One thing I did find odd was that "The Girl With No Shadow" was originally published in the UK with a much better title - "The Lollipop Shoes". It had a better cover too as far as I can tell. I'm curious why the publishers (or author, I suppose) felt Americans would be less likely to buy a book called "The Lollipop Shoes".

I feel a little jealous of everyone who got to read it under the original title. But, it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the book - I still loved it.

And I have been craving (and eating) chocolate like there's no tomorrow. I especially want to try chocolate with chili pepper in it, now. I actually found some, but it wasn't hekshered. Darn!

Adventures and Mysteries

Every day I find myself looking at KosherCop and wondering where my scrunchy-faced little baby went. But as much as it scares me to see him growing up so fast, my brother was right. Kids just get more and more fun as they get older.

Our new fun is reading mystery/adventure stories. We had gotten him the first story in the Magic Tree House series for his birthday and it seemed to really capture his imagination. So when his aunt sent him a gift card to a bookstore, we went back for more.

This series is great - a brother and sister find a magic tree house that allows them to travel through time. There is mystery, adventure, clues, danger, and plenty of jumping off points for imaginative play. KosherCop's new favorite game is to round up his friends after services to "spy and look for clues".

What's nice is each story is self-contained, but is part of a larger mystery that (at least for the first 4 or 5) builds over several books. KosherCop just gobbles them up and then talks and wonders about the clues. It's really exciting to see this new phase.

The other series I tried to get him interested in was the Boxcar Children. He was enjoying the first one pretty well while we were reading it, but after putting it down he has been too excited about the Magic Tree House books to pick it up again. I guess even though the kids in the story live in a train car, the fact that it's not moving loses something for him. It's very much the kind of story I would have liked as a kid, though - heck, I like it now! Four kids live rent-free and they decorate their home with stuff they find in a junkyard?

Why it's a vintage girl's dream come true!

Fall CSA Program

It's very exciting! We've decided that the response to our synagogue's CSA has been so positive, that we are going to offer a Fall Program.

Since there is another more established CSA in our area that uses the same farmer, we can look at what they received last year for any given week to get an idea of what will be in our box.

I was really surprised by the vegetables that arrived from late September to late November, when the fall season will run.

I always assumed it was all squash and root vegetables, but behold the mouth-watering assortment of produce we have to look forward to:

• cabbage
• winter squash
• lima beans
• white sweet potatoes
• sweet peppers, green and red
• broccoli
• apples, low/no spray
• kale
• eggplant
• carrots
• parsnips
• white turnips
• yellow turnips (rutabaga)
• celery root (celeriac)
• radishes
• leaf lettuce
• lettuce greens
• Chinese cabbage
• Swiss chard
• beets
• collards
• head lettuce
• pumpkin
• red bell peppers, sweet
• leeks
• mixed greens
• herbs
• hot peppers in a bag
• tomatoes
• Asian pears (No Spray)

If I had stopped to think about it this makes sense - what with fall being all about the harvest. I mean we only have a Jewish holiday (Sukkot) and an American holiday (Thanksgiving) centered around this harvest during this time period.

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life about how she and her family eat only what they can grow themselves or can find locally for one year. One of the things she talks a lot about is how unbelievably clueless most of us are about when the actual growing season is for most fruit and vegetables. Thanks to decades of being able to purchase anything from anywhere at any time of the year, we are all as spoiled as the vegetables left on a Sunday night at the local supermarket.

The way she presents the progression of the growing season makes a lot of sense. She asks us to imagine all the vegetables and fruits we eat as part of the same plant:

"To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root."

- from an excerpt of her book in Orion Magazine

Using this imagery (which you can see an illustration of at animalvegetablemiracle.com), it makes perfect sense that asparagus (shoots) are one of the earliest vegetables to arrive in early spring, then green leafy vegetables, then later the fruits with lots of seeds like eggplant and peppers, and then the gourds.

I feel kinda dumb (for not thinking of it before), yet enlightened.

You Had Me At "Cake"

I have a crush on my local library.

If it was a man I'd be finding excuses to visit him every day to borrow stuff (oh wait - I'm already doing that) and mistaking his generous inclination to share for flirtation.

Come to think of it that's pretty much how I got my husband. Out with a bunch friends and KosherCook after a Jewish singles event, I mentioned that I hadn't seen a movie in over 2 years. Shocked and horrified he asked me out to the movies. He was offering popcorn and pity - I, of course, assumed he liked me. It didn't take him long, though, to figure out we were meant for each other. Of course, it helped move things along that I kept showing up to borrow his stuff.

Seriously though, the library is like a little slice of heaven, especially in the 90 degree heat of summer. I've taken to trolling bookstores with a little notebook, taking down names and ISBN numbers and then requesting the books at the library. I typically have 15 or so books out at one time, with about 6 different due dates. If it wasn't for the email reminders the library sends, my addiction would be completely unmanageable.

The book I just finished was worth reading just to see the title every time I picked it up - I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley. I can completely relate to the shards of hope she clings to in the face of mounting disappointment. Unlike the promised but undelivered pastry of the title, Sloane Crosley serves up a witty collection of tales in which she is relegated to underdog in her own life story. I could barely contain myself while reading "Christmas in July," an essay about her tenuous Jewish identity being eroded away by an accidental stint at bible camp. I insisted on rereading it out loud to KosherCook after finishing it the first time.

I was already hooked on her writing, when she reeled me in with a single phrase - a phrase curiously similar to the one I uttered 8 years ago which also sealed the deal for my husband. If you ask him why he married me he'll tell you it was Kashrut and Britcoms that piqued his interest. But when I saw our car abandoned in a sea of parking spaces and said, "The Cheese Stands Alone," he knew I was the woman for him.

Similarly, Sloane Crosley became the newest of my favorite writers when she said it with soy. "The soy cheese stands alone."