Wine-Marinated Grapes

Menu planning is difficult. Every weekend, I look through my cookbooks and notebooks to decide what I'm going to make for the week ahead. But even with the hundreds of recipes available, sometimes I want to change things up a bit.

I follow about a hundred food blogs so you can imagine how inundated I am with recipes every day. When I see a particular recipe I love, I email myself a link to that blog post. Then I tag it with "Recipes" in my Gmail. So anytime I feel dissatisfied with all the books and all the ripped-out magazine pages (I know, poor me, right?), I turn to my email. Which is how I discovered this gem: Wine-Marinated Grapes, which I virtually dog-eared from the blog Thursday Night Smackdown. I dog-eared it in 2008.

I was looking for inspiration this past Saturday. Adam was out of town, visiting his own Soul Twin (husband to my own Soul Twin), and Bug was wiped out from a 3-day camping trip. Which is code for she-was-going-to-sleep-a-lot-and-watch-lots-of-TV. So what to do with all that free time? Make drunk grapes!

Michelle at Thursday Night Smackdown got the recipe from Bon Appetit...and aptly, brilliantly named the post "The Snozzberries Taste Like Snozzberries". Come on, children's literature folks, you know where that line is from. God, the parallels of food and kids' lit never cease to amaze me.

ANYWAY, the recipe is ridonkulously easy. Click the Bon Appetit link above - you'll see. And here's where I might scare away potential dinner guests (and maybe even the ones in current rotation): the recipe requires a bottle of dry white wine and I used a bottle of white Zin that a guest had brought over for dinner. White. Zin. I am not drinking that. Ever. And this is the moment where everyone who ever comes over to my house for dinner (and reads this blog) panics. So, for that, I am sorry.

One thing that Michelle mentions is that you can strain the marinating liquid and save it for wine spritzers. I was skeptical. I mean, wine spritzers? With white Zin? A little froofy, right? Oh, no. This was soooo good:

The wine, the grape juice, and the lemon zest are rather sublime. Add a splash of seltzer and a couple of lime slices and you have the perfect summer apertif. Really wonderful.

This is a ridiculously long blog post about drunk grapes but I can't resist. What a fun way to spend my Saturday afternoon while Bug was watching Wizards of Waverly Place.

Eat, drink, and snozz some berries.

"Too-short girl in the high-stacks world of librarianship" *

As I mentioned, I'm a little behind in the blogosphere (it's the fabbity-fab life, remember?)...

...so imagine my delight when I saw three new posts from Tiny Little Librarian in my Bloglines! I love her stuff. Keep blogging!


If you haven't checked her out and you work in a library, what the heck are you waiting for?! Go. Now.

* My post title is TLL's tagline on her blog.

A bouillabaisse of children's literature stuff, if you will

I sure do seem to be posting a lot lately, don’t I? There are a couple reasons for this:

1. I had an end-of-the-year project at work that completely prohibited me from blogging during my lunch break. And I was too burned out to do it when I got home. So November and December were pretty shot.

2. Adam has been working late the past few nights so, rather than drinking a glass of chard with him (or a pint of beer, for him), I have been glued in front of the computer. This is the last night he has to work late – you’ll probably see a bit of a drop-off after today.

3. I’m feeling drained after ALA, and I don’t feel like working. Boo.

But I just discovered Bloglines and I am the happiest camper right now. All the time I’ve freed up! I can spend it…you know…blogging more!

Sarah Miller reviewed Ever by Gail Carson Levine – argh! I’m completely pining for that book! Sure, I could probably get a hold of my contact at Harper, but I don’t like to play that card too often. Anyone else have a galley out there and want to do a switch? I have Meg Cabot’s new one, Airhead, or the new Mysterious Benedict Society. Anyone? Anyone?

Thanks (again!) to my daily Shelf Awareness email, I’ve found a new blog! And thanks to Bloglines, I’m not sweatin’ it. It’s Collecting Children’s Books, and I’m completely fascinated. In particular, he has a discussion going about the merits of opening up the Newbery discussions. Apparently, for about 4 years in the 1970’s, the Newbery committee came up with “nominees” – Peter has proof of this – and this allowed everyone to read those books and discuss, discuss, discuss before the actual winner and honor books were announced. I think there is definitely something to this: I like the idea of increasing sales and circulation for a wider circle of books; additionally, this process would allow libraries and booksellers to actually have decent stock of the winners when they’re announced! Can you imagine! The meaningfulness of Mock discussions would increase. Everyone – teachers, librarians, booksellers, children, teens, adults – would feel part of the process and feel invested in the outcome, rather than this hush-hush weird sequestering thing that happens now. If the “youth media awards” are truly the “Academy Awards of the children’s literature world”, it sure would be fun if we tried a system revolving around nominees. Maybe I could even do a spread and take bets? Perhaps?

Ultimately, I’m the rare librarian who actually likes and encourages change. Why shouldn’t we try a different approach and see what happens? If it doesn’t work out, how about we go back to the sequestering?