Books and Food; What Else Do You Need?

Ta-da! Internet! In our home! Isn't technology amazing? To celebrate, I've spent far too long on the Internet already today. Although, to be fair, I thought I had completely recovered from birth, and so went to a church production of "From Cumorah's Hill" last Saturday, and it turns out I hadn't fully recovered, and all the activity was too much for me. So now I've been trying to take it really easy and comfortable-like, which mainly means sitting around the house reading, and trying to convince Lydia to not mess the house up, since I don't want to make Avram clean it up. So it's actually been a very nice change to have the Internet on where I can reach it from my comfy Living Room chair.

I've started Little Women, which is a lot preachier than I remember it being the last time I read it. Regardless, it's fun to read because of all the nice memories I have of it, like the first time I read the book, and I was in third grade at Bennion Elementary, where I did full time ELP (extended learning program - a gifted school thingy), and I rode the city buses to and from school (by myself, I might add, and I was only nine. Not only did my Mom not think this was weird, no one else seemed to, either. My, how times have changed). I remember once on the bus, when I was reading Little Women for the first time ever, I reached the part where Beth dies, and I sat bawling my eyes out, while simultaneously trying to hide it because I was embarrassed to be crying in public. Good times.

The edition I'm reading right now is a British one, and is annotated for a British audience, which I love, because then you get things like: "Beth clapped her hands, regardless of the hot biscuit* she held," and then in the back of the book, "American biscuits resemble English scones and are usually eaten hot, with butter."

The book also defines buckwheat pancakes and other such food 'oddities.' It's fun to be more in the know than the average assumed reader.

Speaking of food and reading, whenever I read a book with strong food passages/mentions/culture associated with it, I pick up a hankering for that very food. Like when I read Lord of the Rings, I'm always eating chunks of meat, with buttered bread and sliced cheese and apples, because for some reason in my mind this adds up to traveling food. Or of course, there are the Little House books, which always send me into a cooking tizzy; I even have the Little House cookbook, although my personal copy is completely hashed, without any cover at all, and half of the index fallen off, from all the use I've given it.

Reading To Kill a Mockingbird (as a note to Camilla; I don't know how I managed to miss being assigned this book in all my years of schooling either. It chalked on point up to Avram; we're always being variously surprised by the other's comparative ignorance of some piece of knowledge or literature. If it's something he hasn't read, than I usually make some comment about homeschooling missing things, and if it's something that I haven't Avram will be surprised at how public schooling could miss it.) made my latent (very, very latent) Southern tendencies come out, and that night for dinner I made Southern fried chicken (except for in the oven, so it wasn't completely artery clogging, while still tasting very good because I still used real butter) and cornbread. I would have had butter beans too, because they always seem to be going on about them in Southern books, but I don't actually know what they are. Avram thinks they are probably lima beans, and a quick check on the Internet seems to support that theory. As I heartily dislike lima beans, maybe it was a good thing I didn't have access to them, because then I may have made them in a fit of Southerness, but that doesn't mean anyone in our house, myself included, would have eaten them.

What I need to do is find a book that makes me think of fresh vegetables and fruit, and not of chocolate or anything with sugar in it, and read that book. Any suggestions?