Matilda, Roald Dahl

I remember years ago reading James and the Giant Peach and loving it. And I've also got good memories of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Of course, that's kid lit and I'm wayyyyyy past that, right?

Well, thanks to the Waterstone's promotion of "books that will change your life" I had an excuse to go back to childhood and read a Roald Dahl book that I'd missed when younger.

Matilda was fun and amusing and a quick read (and a nice change from the depressing and slow book that preceded it).

Worth all the teasing I got from E and A while reading it too...

Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry

I picked this up last summer at an independent bookstore in San Francisco under the heading of "books you should have read". At times it felt more like a 'should' read than something I really enjoyed, but in the end I was glad I'd read it and stuck it out.

The up-close view of alcoholism and crazy relationships was sad and yet touching too.

La Consultation

I bought the DVD of La Consultation because I thought it might show the reality of a physician's life, and therefore be pretty interesting for my team at work (who seem to not understand the reality of nuts and bolts patient contact).

I finally had some time to watch it, and it was pretty much what I was hoping for, although maybe a skew towards younger patients than would be ideal for my work.

As a movie it was pretty slow, even for a documentary (although I found the bonus short Desirs d'amour, better in that regard). My guess is if you don't have a strong interest in health care this film would be hard to sit through...

A Death in the Family - James Agee

I really liked this sad but thought-provoking Pulitzer prize winner by James Agee. I must have bought it from a "prize winners list" one day, I actually selected it from my bookshelf because it was the first on the shelf.

The perspective of several characters and just a small dose of magical realism make the story very personal and although the topic is very sad, you feel like you're witnessing regular people in regular lives, just dealing with a tough moment.

The book held my attention well on busy trains and waiting rooms, and yet was easy to pick up and put down again.

Plein Soleil

I'm really loving not just not having a TV (such a good decision!) but also not watching a TV series in a long time. We watch about 1 episode of Law and Order or Poirot every 2 weeks nowdays, most evenings it's reading before bed, or sometimes as movie. We need to get better at watching half movies (and finishing the second half the next night) since we tend to push into our sleep to finish the film... Last night was that situation again.

We watched Plein Soleil, a 1960 film w a very young Alain Delon. It was good - not great, but good. The movie had a pace and tone that was clearly 1960, which was fun to watch. Delon was very cute and a good actor to boot.

Fiber banana cranberry muffins

Last week at the market the guy at the fruit & veggie stand gave me some bananas. They were closing for the summer and he gave me some extra freebies (he does this from time to time). I rarely buy bananas - they're not one of my favorites and E doesn't buy them regularly either. When I have them they go into smoothies or more often we watch them start to go bad and then E will make bananas foster (loaded with butter and sugar - yikes!).

The fate of the current batch of bananas was looking to be similar - for one week untouched by all of us, now starting to get soft (which the French like, buy I don't). One made it into a smoothie this morning (along with all the leftover fruit from this week, before I stocked up again at the market). But what to do with the others?

My mom used to make banana bread from time to time, so I set about trying to find a healthy recipe that E will like (I've never been a huge banana bread person myself. I finally found this recipe that upped the fiber and there we had it. I subbed dried cranberries for raisins as E prefers them. I think I forgot to put in the oil but I'm not 100% sure on that - I was doing several things at once but I'm pretty sure I made them fat free, not even subbing in applesauce. Totally inadvertent on my part, but the result is dense little muffins. They're not too sweet but they might be too far into health food for E to like them...

Spring Rolls

For lunch today I made a variation on these Spring Rolls. I added beef and didn't use rice noodles, added cut up green beans and had 3 kinds of fresh herbs (parsley, coriander - I think we say cilantro in the US, and mint). I also added some of my fresh basil-orange salsa to the rolls. They were really tasty and easy (once all the chopping was done).

I plan to take rice paper with me on vacation, because this is sure to be a favorite this summer with leftover meat from the bbq...

Gloria - John Cassavetes

Last night we watched Gloria by John Cassavetes. E said it was a good thriller, but that's not how I'd categorize it - certainly not a thriller, and I didn't find it particularly good.

I was pretty put off by the adult sentences coming out of the 8 year old's mouth - maybe it's because I live with an 8 year old, but kids simply don't talk and think that way, and that got in the way of the film for me. I also found it pretty slow at parts.

Gena Rowlands was good in the movie, and there were several cinematography moments that were interesting too.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

This sucked.

I mean really sucked.

E and I went to see a late showing in English thinking we'd regret not having seen it in the theatre, since we both like the original series (well, I didn't really like the 3rd one, found it too hokey with Sean Connery, buy still...).

We were wrong. Not only was the movie bad. Bad story, bad ideas - alien/other dimension beings - mercy!, with very little good action or suspense, some pretty lame actors (the son), etc. But the worst for me is adding this to the "Indiana Jones" franchise makes the whole series less valued in my opinion. Knowing Indy ends up here just makes you wish he'd not made it out of some of his tight calls in earlier films.

We made a promise to each other never to buy the DVD no matter how much A might want it some day...

Mache salad with grapefruit and tarragon

I've always been a just-throw-it-together salad girl. I never understood the idea of salad recipes. I mean, it's salad, what's so hard? My mom made mixed salads like that all my life, on a base of lettuce cutting up whatever veggies were in the fridge, I never knew other kinds of salad really. My stepmom makes 2 really good salads, one a parmesean-pinenut-romaine salad, the other Asian with mandarin orange slices and almonds. But even with those salads, nothing ever clicked for me.

Until this one. This salad was borne of a few extra minutes on the web, throwing ingredients into the search engine and seeing what came up. E had bought 2 containers of mache (lamb's lettuce) at the market and one was still untouched, so I was looking for a recipe interesting enough to get him to eat a salad (not an easy task). And I found this.

This salad was AWESOME. I made it without the chicken because we didn't have any - so it was vegetarian and light and really good. The grapefruit gave enough to be interesting, and even though my avocados turned out to be pretty yucky the dressing and other elements made you forget the bland and hard avocados. The dressing was the key, I actually had the tarragon mustard they called for and I suspect that helped, along with my favorite hand mixer which was able to make a nice emulsified mix.

E paid a very high complement - not only by eating all of his, but by telling me it was "tres fin" which is one of the highest cooking complements available.

A hit, that will make another appearance - maybe with chicken next time. Yum.