the Owl's new roost

Hello World. Welcome to the virtual residence of an out-of-body me.


And something from my commonplace book:

You ask why can't Clarissa hold her tongue.
Because she fears her fingers will be stung.
from Gerard Manley Hopkins' Seven epigrams


Ball and Cross Books is relinquishing its downtown space and thus is having a sale this weekend---Buy 1 Get 1 FREE! I bought a little biscotti cookbook, a nice hardback of Quentin Bell's biography of his sister-in-law, Virginia Woolf, and a cool book of orgami.
But the best so far is the Tassajara Bread Book by Ed Brown. Tassajara used to be a resort near our favorite part of the USA--that would be Monterey California--and Brown was working as a cook when the place got bought up and turned into a Buddhist monastery. The cookbook is printed in 1970 and it shows--lots of honey and whole wheat flour and raw bits. I looked the book up on Amazon and it has lots of good reviews, and testimonials that this book got the reviewer baking bread for the first time. Most of the cookbooks I've used have been very precise, but this one is filled with recipes like the big bang. It's great fun.

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