Summer BBQ Recipes

1. Kathy's chicken marinade


Spring Chicken Recipe:
*2 lemons
*1 green onion (thinly sliced)
*1tbsp lemon pepper seasoning
*1 tsp sugar
*1/2 tsp salt (I left it out)
*4 chicken breasts

Finely grate peel from lemons into a large bowl. (I forgot to do that this time. But it's good) Squeeze lemons (about 1/2 c of juice). Stir in onion, lemon pepper, sugar, and salt. Add chicken, turn to coat. Let stand at room temp for 20 minutes. turning often. Cover and refrigerate for no more than an hour (marinade is very acidic).

Oil grill, heat to med. bbq covered 4-6 minutes per side. (Discard marinade) Continue cooking until springy when pressed (I check to see if pink inside as well)
Enjoy!

2. Carla's cake

 Here's my revised version of Nigella Lawson's Flourless Orange Chocolate Cake.  The only difference between my recipe and hers is she boils then cools the orange prior to pulping it.  I find that's an unnecessary extra step and have never made it that way but always as below.  I think you can click on a link somewhere below  to see her original recipe.  You can figure out the the recipe measurement conversions at http://www.onlineconversion.com/weight_volume_cooking.htm  though I have a scale and bake by weight...as an impatient and not very accurate baker I seem to get better results that way.  Enjoy!

Flourless Chocolate Orange Cake
1 whole medium orange, cut in quarters
1/4 cup orange juice
6 eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
200 g ground almonds (I place whole unpeeled almonds in the food process and blend until fine before starting the recipe)
250 g caster sugar
50 g cocoa
orange peel, for decoration
Directions:

1
Put the whole orange and juice in a food process and blend until smooth

Preheat the oven to 350.  Grease a 9" springform tin.

Add the eggs, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, almonds, sugar and cocoa to the orange in the food processor. Run the motor until you have a cohesive cake mixture, but slightly knobbly with the flecks of puréed orange.

Pour and scrape into the cake tin and bake for an hour, by which time a cake tester should come out pretty well clean. Check after 45 minutes because you may have to cover with foil to prevent the cake burning before it is cooked through, or indeed it may need a little less than an hour; it all depends on your oven.

Leave the cake to get cool in the tin, on a cooling rack. When the cake is cold you can take it out of the tin. Decorate with strips of orange peel or coarsely grated zest if you so wish, but it is darkly beautiful in its plain, unadorned state.

Read more: http://www.food.com/recipe/nigella-lawson-flourless-chocolate-orange-cake-303266?oc=linkback">http://www.food.com/recipe/nigella-lawson-flourless-chocolate-orange-cake-303266?oc=linkback

3. Joyce's Salad

A)  Make a large tossed salad with a variety of different lettuces (make sure to include some nice crisp pieces of romaine), spinach etc. Add vegetables of your choice -- cucumber, bell peppers, green onion, whatever you like.

Top salad with:

1 large handful cilantro, chopped fine
.5 cup crushed tortilla chips
1 chopped avocado

B)  honey-lime vinaigrette:

Mix together (I find my food processor works great for this):

2 Tbsp honey
1 Tbsp cider vinegar (white wine vinegar would be fine too)
the juice of 1.5 limes
1 clove of crushed garlic (optional)
1 tsp Dijon mustard
.5 tsp cumin
.5 tsp salt
.5 tsp pepper

With food processor running, drizzle in .5 cup sunflower oil (or whatever oil you prefer). Taste and adjust as required. Pour over salad and toss. Enjoy!

Summer 2013 Reading Recommendations

Here are several posts with suggestions of books you might enjoy if you don't know what to read this summer.

The Horned Man, James Lasdun

Kiss of the Fur Queen, Tomson Highway

The Devil You Know, Jenn Farrell

The Witch of Exmoor, Margaret Drabble

The Shooting Party, Isabel Colegate (the ultimate inspiration for Downton Abbey)

Remarkable Creatures, Tracy Chevalier

Summer 2013 Reading Recommendations: Prize Winners & Nominees

I liked all of these a lot:

Mosquito, Roma Tearne (Kiriyama Prize nominee, among others)

Mrs Palrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor (Booker nominee)

Lullabies for Little Criminals, Heather O'Neill (Canada Reads winner)

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King (Canada Reads nominee)

Fabrizio's Return, Mark Frutkin (Trillium Award winner)

The Hours, Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer Prize winner)

The Sense of an Ending, Julain Barnes (Booker winner)

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (Booker winner)

February, Lisa Moore (Canada Reads winner, Booker nominee)

Eating Dirt, Charlotte Gill (winner of a whole slew of prizes)

The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald (Booker nominee)

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje (Giller prize winner, Kiriyama prize winner, Governor Generals award)

 

Summer 2013 Reading Recommendations: Fun Books

Don't know what to read this summer? Maybe you'll like:

Empire Falls, Richard Russo (won the Pulitzer prize)

Border Songs, Jim Lynch

The Librarian, Larry Beinhart

Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel

The Book of Lies, Mary Horlock

Look at Me, Jennifer Egan

Summer 2013 Reading Recommendations: Classics

Don't know what to read this summer? Try one of these:

Classics ~ 19th and early 20th century
You know the Brontes and Austen. Here are some others:

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West

Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh

Anna Karenina, Tolstoy

Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Discussion Questions


1. Do you sympathise with Bernadette? What are the causes of her neurotic behaviour?

2. How successful is the author in combining humour and despair? Would you describe it as a comic novel?

3. Elgie accuses Bernadette of being selfish and self-pitying. Is he right?

4. Is Elgie justified in trying to have Bernadette committed to a mental institution? Does his decision ultimately have positive consequences?

5. How much is the book Bernadette’s story, and how much is it her daughter Bee’s?

6. Is Bernadette a good mother?

7. What do you think of neighbour Audrey Griffin’s attitude towards Bernadette? Could you imagine having either of them as a neighbour?

8. Why does Audrey eventually help Bernadette? Are there any similarities between the two?

9. What picture does the novel paint of Microsoft and Seattle? Does it ring true?

10. What does the future hold for everyone involved?

 

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Author's view

I’m going to discuss what no self-respecting writer wants to be caught discussing, and that’s the theme of my novel. 
When I sat down to write Where’d You Go, Bernadette, my main concern was that it be hugely entertaining for the reader. My motto was, ‘If I have fun writing it, they’ll have fun reading it.’ I wanted the characters to be relatable but a little wild, the story to be grounded but veering off in surprising directions, the tone to be sharp but sweet. The whole endeavour was so brain-bruising, fiendishly complicated and time-gobbling that the last thing I thought about was what I wanted to say.
But a wonderful and mysterious thing happened when I read through the first draft Where’d You Go, Bernadette after having put it aside for a few weeks. My fresh eyes noticed key words and phrases that kept popping up. It dawned on me that over and over, I had framed my characters’ relationships with each other not in terms of love, but in terms of how well they knew each other.
For instance, Elgie contacts a psychiatrist (and unwittingly ignites a catastrophic chain of events) when he realizes he no longer ‘knows’ his wife, Bernadette. Their daughter Bee, outraged when a classmate’s mother assumes she has chosen to go away to boarding school to escape Bernadette, screams, ‘You don’t know me!’ Bee’s ultimate insult to Elgie is an accusation of ‘not knowing anything about’ her relationship with Bernadette. Soo-Lin forlornly concludes that a man isn’t romantically interested in her when she realises he never asks her any questions about herself. In one of my favourite lines in the book—one that I reluctantly cut after two editors, an agent, and a friend flagged it as unspeakably mean—Audrey informs Bernadette that several generations of her family lived in the same neighbourhood, and Bernadette dryly responds, ‘You seem to be mistaking me for someone who wants to get to know you.’ 
There are a dozen other instances. All were there in the first draft, and I can’t say I was conscious of any of them. But when I read the manuscript over, the conclusion was inescapable: I was trying to articulate something that deep down I obviously felt very strongly about, that to know someone is to love them.
And then, a memory:
When my daughter was days old, I confessed to my sister, a mother of three, that I felt like I didn’t love her. ‘That’s because you don’t know her yet,’ my sister said. But how do you get to know a squirming, peeping bundle that opens her eyes only to greedily, painfully nurse and then conk out for eight hours? My best guess was to lay my daughter down, lie beside her, and watch. By getting to know her in this way, I grew to love her.
I didn’t remember this either until I read through the first draft of Where’d You Go, Bernadette. But somehow, the idea that love comes from knowledge—and estrangement from a lack of knowledge—ended up all over my pages.
Indeed, the opening lines of Where’d You Go, Bernadette announce that what follows is the dossier Bee has compiled in an attempt to learn everything she can about her mother. So the form of the novel, the object the reader is holding in his hands, is an expression of this definition of love. 
I can’t imagine readers of Where’d You Go, Bernadette would pick up on any of this. Nor would I want them to!  But if anybody’s curious how the novel’s themes came about, it was by complete surprise, when I was having too much fun to notice.


Source: http://www.youreadinggroup.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/customPage.do?CMSFragment=PrizeWinnersSlot9.jsp&title=Book%20Of%20The%20Month