Book Review: Prodigal Summer

I picked up Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver at a thrift store. I read The Poisonwood Bible several years ago and remember liking it. I thought I'd give this a try. It was a great read. The book follows three sets of characters, alternating chapters between the stories. There's a woman living alone in the mountains, maintaining forest service trails and tracking wildlife. Then there are a pair of elderly feuding neighbors and a young widow living on her husband's family's land. Throughout the book, in each story, Kingsolver weaves this amazing knowledge of the interdependence of species: predators and prey, birds, plants, trees, insects. This was a work of fiction, and yet I feel that I learned.

As the stories progress, they touch briefly on each other. In the end, I feel it was a story about a place more than about characters. This book was unlike anything I've read before, and I loved it. Good job, thrift store.

Book Review: The Whole-Brain Child

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson was fantastic. I've been meaning to read it for a while now and am so glad I did. Siegel and Bryson present neuroscience research and apply it to parenting kids. It sounds like it might be dry and technical but is quite readable and accessible.

The suggestions are easy to implement and quite down-to-earth. I really appreciated how realistic the authors were about the challenges of parenting and how it's okay to not to it "right" all the time. I highly recommend this book. I've been implementing some of the strategies myself and will recommend it to clients. 5 stars!

Bread 3: Whole wheat honey oatmeal

I love this bread! It was the first bread we made in our new loaf pan. Bons helped me pick it out at Williams Sonoma. This bread was tasty, fluffy, and easily the best sandwich loaf I've ever made. I haven't had great success with yeasty-sandwich loaves in the past; they're often denser than I like. This one is perfect.

The loaf was super easy to make, using ingredients I always have on hand. The recipe is for a KitchenAid mixer, which made mixing it up easy peasy. Seriously, throw the ingredients in the mixer, stand there and watch it flop around the bowl, then wait for it to rise. Why don't I do this more?

One of the best things about this little project is how much Bons is getting into it. She loves measuring the ingredients and checking the rise and punching it down. She requests different kinds of bread and wants to eat the yummy bread all the time.

Bread 2: No Knead

My goal is to do one new bread per month. With the summer heat here, I figured it'd be safe to double-up during these cooler months. I will likely not be real excited about turning on the oven in August and September.

I've made no-knead bread before, but this was a new recipe with new techniques. It was completely delicious. The rise time was shorter, the crumb less spongey. It baked on a pizza stone instead of in our clay pot. It used a steam bath. I ended up getting rust spots on my cheap old bread pans.

This recipe made two loaves. It was so good we ate the first one before I could even take a picture of it. This recipe is repeatable, for sure. I think next time I'd like to try a blend of this recipe with our old no-knead recipe. The mix of one with the baking technique of the other until we find our perfect loaf.

Bread 1: Marble loaf

I was looking through cookbooks and blogs for new bread recipes to try and this one caught The Bons' eye. It's part white and part rye. Honestly, the bread was just okay. But, having this be the first bread we've made in months it tasted delicious to us. We gobbled it up fast.