Recap

Books added to my TBR list:

• The Duet by Robert Elmer (reviewed by Barbara H.)
  A not-so-retired Dutch Reformed farmer develops an attraction for his granddaughter’s new piano teacher: a widowed college professor. The two are worlds apart practically and theologically–so the inevitable sparks fly. Sounds like fun–and since I’m always up for a good theological argument, I have high hopes for that part of their relationship. We’ll see :-)

Videos Watched:

• Room 8 (linked to from 22 Words)
  
  The film-makers wer given a nondescript dialogue and a challenge: imagine a film. This winning entry is amazing.

Videos Watched:

• Your Life in Jelly Beans (linked to from all over)
  
  A very interesting visual of how we spend the days of our lives.

Recipes Tried:

• Herbed Ricotta Gnocchi with Quick Tomato Sauce (from Serious Eats)
  A delicious meatless meal that, according to my husband, is “surprisingly filling; one bowl was almost too much.” I’m thrilled to have found a meatless meal with such staying power–and that’s as delicious as this is. I’ll be making it again–maybe trying out some different herbs and sauces with the basic gnocchi recipe.

• Cherry Tomato and Green Bean Salad with Herbed Breadcrumbs (from Serious Eats)
  I thought this was pretty good, Daniel thought the green beans were undercooked. Then again, I really like green beans, and, having grown up snitching raw beans while stemming, I enjoy them raw. I may try it one more time, cooking the beans a bit more just to see if it improves Daniel’s opinion of them.

Nutrition News:

• The More you Sleep the Less you Eat (HT: LifeHacker)
  In a controlled study at University of Pennsylvania’s sleep lab, scientists discovered that individuals who were in bed only 4 hours a night eat an average of 30% more calories per day compared to individuals who were in bed 10 hours a night. Low-sleep individuals ate an average of 550 calories during the hours between 10 pm and 4 am, when the control group was sleeping. This is an interesting study, but I’m wishing they had used a 7 or 8 hour

Projects Done:

• US Map Jigsaw Puzzle (from Mr. Printables)
  
  The little Miss just celebrated her second birthday–and came down to Lincoln for the weekend following the fourth. I went up to Lincoln for the weekend following the fourth, so I whipped up a gift for her. I have a B&W laser printer, so I printed the states and colored them with permanent markers before pasting them to sturdy cardboard and cutting out the pieces. Then, because I don’t like to do anything by halves, I created a tray for the pieces and mod-podged the whole thing to make it more durable. The Little Miss seemed to like it.

Books added to my TBR list:

• The Beast In The Garden: The True Story Of A Predator’s Deadly Return To Suburban America. by David Baron (reviewed by Instapundit)
  The story of cougars. No, not older women chasing younger men–Mountain lions. Once hunted almost to extinction, they are now making their way back into our towns–with potentially dangerous implications. According to Reynolds (the Instapundit), this is “nonfiction, but it reads like a thriller novel.”

Stuff I’ve Read:

• 4 Subtle Changes in the English Language from Mental_Floss
  1. From infinitive to participle
  2. From present to progressive
  3. From ought to have to
  4. Increase in the “got” passive

  Not all of these changes are bad–but a few make me wonder. Why do we use the passive voice more often now? Does this indicate a lack of self-efficacy? Do *I* use the passive voice more frequently? Perhaps it’s time for another thought experiment.

Videos Watched:

• A History of the Bathing Suit: Who says it has to be itsy-bitsy? (linked to by Challies)
  
• It’s NOT about the nail
  Happy Food folk showed us this. Hilarious.
  

Stuff I’ve Read:

• Suggestions for Thankfulness from Mark Altrogge (quoted by Vitamin Z)
  1. Thank God for all he did to redeem you.
  2. Thank God for your spouse and children if you have them.
  3. Thank God for spiritual blessings.
  4. Thank God for his word and hundreds of promises.
  5. Thank God for your church.
  6. Thank God for material blessings.
  7. Thank God for how he treats you.
  8. Thank God for as many mercies as you can discern in every affliction
  9. Thank God for future blessings

Nutrition News:

• Nature rebukes Harvard epidemiologist for shooting off at the mouth (HT: Instapundit)
  According to the chair of Harvard’s Nutrition and Epidemiology chairman Walter Willett, one particular scientific study that disagrees with current nutrition dogma is “rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.”

  The study in question was a meta-analysis indicating that overweight (but not obese) people live longer than those in the “normal weight” category. From Willett’s criticism, one might think that this work was published by self-submittal on a non-peer-reviewed web-only journal, right? Think again. How about the prestigious, 130-year-old peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association? You got it.

  Apparently “the church” isn’t the only institution interested in squashing science that contradicts its beliefs.

Books added to my TBR list:

• Equal of the Sun by Anita Amirrezvani (reviewed by Elizabeth of 5M4B)
  What looks like a fascinated fictionalized glimpse into the court intrigues of a sixteenth-century shah–through the eyes of the eunuch of a powerful (and power-hungry) princess. This sounds like a whole lot of fun.
• Glimpses of Grace by Gloria Furman (reviewed by Lisa of Lisa Writes)
  Actually, I didn’t just add this to my TBR list–I rushed to Amazon.com and bought myself a copy. When it arrived the next day, I skipped washing dishes over lunch to read the first chapter. I need this look at the gospel in the midst of ordinary homemaking.
• Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (reviewed by Jen E at Momma Blogs A Lot)
  An epistolary novel about a woman who runs away after her daughter wins a family vacation to Antarctica and a school fundraiser goes wrong. Jen E says:

  “I found myself relating to Bernadette a lot, which was a little bit scary for awhile there, but it also kept me rooting for her and her family. This is a great look at mental illnesses both perceived, ignored and real – and a story that shows the complexities of families, marriage, neighborhoods & the world.”

Recipes Tried:

• Sweet Potato and Spinach Curry (from Serious Eats)
  The dish itself is vegetarian, but I added some beef and served it with quinoa. It combines two of the most spectacular “super-foods” and turns them from sides into a fantastic meal. This recipe produced a delicious sweet and spicy curry that I’ll definitely be trying again (although I’ll probably try either decreasing the cinnamon a smidge or increasing the other ingredients just a bit–it seemed just a little sweet to Daniel and I.)

Stuff I’ve Read:

• If Dependence is the Objective, Weakness is an Advantage (Vitamin Z, quoting JD Greear)
  This is great–and great comfort for me as I endure a season of great emotional weakness:

  “God loves to use the weak because he loves to show off His power. That’s why he so often works by revealing our weakness, not showcasing our strength. He does not want to put our talents on display, because although that might impress people, it will not help them. So he chooses the weak to shame the strong, the simple to confound the wise, and sometimes he humbles the strong—so that our boast would not be in our strength, but in Christ as our righteousness, strength, provider, and security.

  The greater your weakness, the greater the chance for God to display His power.”

• Challies asks if he’ll still delight in God’s sovereignty if…
  In a nice complement to Greear’s post above, Challies asks himself a series of questions regarding the strength of his belief in and delight in God’s sovereignty–when the story isn’t about someone else, but about himself.

  “Jonah, will you love my sovereignty even when you don’t see it as good? Or will you trust my sovereignty only when it gives you what you would have chosen anyway?

  Will you still rejoice in my sovereignty if I decree that you will be like her, if I call you to be the next Joni Eareckson Tada? Or are you quite certain that you can best glorify me by serving with an unbroken body?

  Will my sovereignty still be good if your neck is bent to the sword?

  Will you still declare your joy in my sovereignty if I sovereignly decree something that painful, something that shameful, for you or for someone you love?”

  A stunning and thought-provoking post.

Help Wanted:

• Grace is trying to find Benjamin Godard’s La Lanterne Magique III
  Do any of you happen to know where she can find a copy?

Stuff I’ve Read:

• The Most Important Type of Church (linked to by Lisa Notes)
  My husband and I have been asking ourselves what the most important aspect of the church is. What is the primary function or functions of the church? While mulling over these questions, I ran across this blog post. The author concludes:

  “The Bible doesn’t call us the Body of the Holy Spirit or the Body of the Word. We are called the Body of Christ and if we know that the the Bible is God’s very words and the Holy Spirit is the indwelling of Christ in us, well then it seems that Jesus should and must come first.

  A church relying mostly on the Bible or mostly the Spirit, or teaching only tenants of Christ, but not living them out, is broken, lop-sided, and lacking.

  The more I have begun to grasp the necessity to cling to the Person of Jesus and seek Him and His headship over everything else, the more I have felt a part of the church…the more I have felt whole as a member within His body.

  The church where Christ is head is best. Everything else is just secondary.”

  Of course, how that practically plays out within a church body is somewhat difficult to quantify.

• The Indulgence Box
  Tim Challies writes about the difference between the view of justification typified by the indulgence box and the view of justification Martin Luther was developing from his reading of Scripture:

  “Indulgences came to typify the widening gulf between the church’s teaching on justification and Luther’s new and growing understanding.

  Its significance is found far more in what it represents than it what it actually is. The pennies that slid through the slot and into the coffer represented a gospel of salvation by works, a gospel foreign to the Bible, a false gospel. Luther had recovered the great doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone, and there would be no place for indulgences and no place for meritorious good works.”

  The entire article is worth reading.

Books added to my TBR list:

• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (reviewed by Susan at Girls in White Dresses)
  I’m pretty sure I had this one on my list already, but Susan’s review convinced me to bump it up to the top again. Her conclusions?

  “So many threads to this story — twins who are separated, a gothic mansion, a fire, tragic accidents, plots twists (most of which I didn’t see coming; I love that in a story!), and more.

  Read this if you like a well-written, good story. Thirteenth Tale delivers!”

Stuff I’ve Read:

• Blogging Rules that Aren’t Really Rules
  Lisa writes about the “good old days” of blogging, when we blogged what we felt like blogging when we felt like blogging it rather than turning blogging into a business with rules and guilt over not following the rules. I could certainly identify with a lot of her thoughts.

  “Perhaps three or four of the ten of you who read this blog with any degree of regularity will understand when I say I miss the good ol’ days of blogging, you know, back when we traded awards and buttons and memes and participated in weekly carnivals. Maybe my inner cynic is showing but blogging seemed funner then, easier somehow. There were no rules or best practices to follow and certainly no blog experts or or consultants or books or conferences or lists of ranks (yes, there really are all of those things in abundance).

  We all just blogged our blogs apart from any blogger guilt.”

Podcasts Listened to:

• Prophets of Doom (from Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History”)
  We listened to this 4 hours long podcast on the way up and back to Kansas City for Daniel’s nieces’ birthday party–and I listened to the rest over my lunch hour over the next couple of days. Carlin tells the fascinating story of a polygamist Anabaptist cult that took over the city of Munster, Germany in the 1500s. It’s probably not a story of interest to everyone, but those who are interested in the history of cults, in medieval warfare, or in torture might find this story interesting. Dan Carlin is, as always, a thoroughly unobjective reporter (that is, he makes no pretense that he likes to interpret history as well as report on it)–which is fine by me so long as one is honest about it.

Stuff I’ve Read:

• Menter farmstead a historical site
  I have a Google Alert feed set up to notify me whenever a new webpage containing the word “Menter” is catalogued by Google. Recently, I discovered that the Menter farmstead, where my grandpa grew up, is now a registered historical place. Who’da known?

• What is the Gospel?
  

  “Just like the word love, we use the word gospel at times freely and careless, rarely asking and answering the question, ‘what is the gospel?’

  …

  It was on that day that I started a journey to absorb everything I could on the subject of the gospel. I approached the question, ‘what is the gospel?’ with fresh eyes and an open heart. I wanted to be awakened again to the radical scandalous grace of God and refreshed by his ferocious love. All of this happened and more.”

  This article reminds me of a friend of mine who teaches at a Catholic high school. Beth once gave her students an assignment based on something she’d heard at a morning mass. “What is the gospel?” she asked. She kept asking that question regularly throughout the semester and included it as extra credit on her final exam. Turns out, despite the priest exulting that the advantage of going to a Catholic school was “we get to talk about the gospel daily”, not a single student could describe what the gospel was. This, of course, gave my friend opportunity to share with her students what the gospel really is.

Books added to my TBR list:

• And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (reviewed by Jennifer at 5M4B)
  I think I have all three of Hosseini’s books on TBR list now–and I have yet to read any. Shame, shame. Someday…

• The Fate of Mercy Alban by Wendy Webb (reviewed by Nancy at 5M4B)
  I always think I’m not a mystery/suspense-type person, but then I read one of these reviews. This story is told partly in the present, partly as a fictionalized manuscript of past events. The format intrigues me–although the “creep you out” aspect may be a bit much for me. We’ll see.

Recipes Tried:

• Springtime Frittata (from Family Table as published on Serious Eats)
  
  This was a very nice Frittata–and it does seem super versatile. Of course, I changed some things. I kept the potato peel on the potato, used Spinach instead of Swiss Chard, skipped the parsley, and used freeze dried chives instead of fresh. I also used 10 whole eggs instead of nine whole eggs plus three yolks and decreased the salt to just the first teaspoon. Despite the decrease in salt, I still thought the finished result was a bit too salty. Maybe the Gruyere adds enough salt that we shouldn’t add any more? My husband thought the whole thing could use some more cheese (but I happen to know that cheese is really his first love, so I tend to pooh-pooh his “more cheese please” requests–you can judge for yourself.)

• Homemade Barbecue Sauce (from Ree Drummond via Food Network)
  We replaced the Chipotle peppers with 1 tsp of Ground Chipotle Pepper and added about a half can of tomato paste. I thought it was pretty good, but it wasn’t Daniel’s favorite. We’re still searching for a good recipe that he really loves.

• Asparagus and Tomatoes (from Miracle Skinny Drops)
  
  I didn’t check this website out thoroughly–so don’t take my using their recipe as a recommendation for the site or the product–but this asparagus dish is easy and yummy as promised. I used olive oil instead of coconut or MCT and diced a whole tomato instead of using grape tomatoes. Still, it was pretty decent.

• Enchilada Casserole
  When I got to making the enchiladas I’d been planning, I realized that while both the hamburger and the enchilada sauce were thawed, I’d forgotten one important ingredient: tortillas. But we had a game night to get to so I couldn’t take the extra time to go shopping. Instead, I made a casserole. I mixed my hamburger/onion/green pepper/black olive mix with some homemade yogurt cheese (from a batch of yogurt that went a bit sour). I spread that on the bottom of a 9×13, spread my enchilada sauce on top, and covered it all with cheese. Then I whipped up some cornmeal biscuits, added a little extra liquid so they’d be droppable, and dropped the biscuits on top. I baked the whole mix at 375 until the biscuits were done (about 20 minutes) and…wouldn’t you know? We ended up liking it.

Projects Done:

• Sock Monkey (from Craft Passion)
  
  We made a pink and gray Sock Monkey for Daniel’s niece’s first birthday. The cutting out was a cinch, the stuffing rather not. Our final product ended up a bit weird, but okay enough that I’d try again. H seemed to enjoy chewing on it (of course.)

• Tanagram Type Puzzle (from There is Beauty all Around)
  
  Daniel and I made this game as a gift for his niece’s fourth birthday. I cut and sewed, Daniel turned and designed–and within a week, we had 42 game pieces and about a dozen sample designs in a glossy booklet for our niece to try. I hope she enjoys it–Daniel and I sure enjoyed playing with it before we gave it to her :-)
  

Nutrition and Health News:

• Sucking on your baby’s pacifier might help him be healthy
  

  “Infants whose parents sucked on their pacifiers to clean them developed fewer allergies than children whose parents typically rinsed or boiled them.”

  This study adds to the growing evidence for the so-called “hygiene hypothesis”, the idea that protecting our kids from exposure to “germs” is actually counterproductive–leading to weaker immune systems and/or autoimmune diseases. Read more in the New York Times’ article.

Books added to my TBR list:

• Hug a Bull and I Love Ewe by Aaron Zenz (reviewed by Carrie at Reading to Know)
  These children’s picture books that teach the names of male and female animals sound wonderful. Since my new library owns copies, I’ll definitely be looking them up!

• The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith (reviewed by Seth at Collateral Bloggage)
  I’ve seen quite a few food fads go by in my relatively few years–but the most recent fads, whether “whole foods” or “paleo” are by far the most unique. Unlike the fads of the past, which were based on complicated (and often flawed) scientific/nutritional arguments, this latest fad is almost entirely fought using evolutionary and environmental arguments. This book, which appears to argue for a similar approach to food (and against vegetarianism), sounds like it could be an interesting read.

Recipes Tried:

• Cheeseburger Crescent Casserole (from Pillsbury)
  Daniel bought some crescent roll dough I don’t know how long ago–and it’s been sitting in the kitchen ever since. Maybe two months? I don’t particularly like the stuff, so I hadn’t used it. But finally, I decided that it must be used, so I searched for recipes. This is a really simple recipe that I adjusted rather significantly. I added onions and green peppers and red peppers and jalepenos and mustard; and used minced dill pickles instead of dill pickle relish and swiss cheese instead of American. But it wasn’t half bad, tasted like a cheeseburger. If you happen to accidentally have crescent roll dough on hand, this is a good way to get rid of it (how’s that for a glowing review?)

• Chicken Enchilada Pizza (from How Sweet Eats)
  This was a.maz.ing. No other way to put it. I enjoyed it fresh from the oven. I enjoyed it microwaved for lunch the next day. I enjoyed microwaved three days later. It was wonderful. I used 2 cups of white flour and one cup of whole wheat in the crust, used my mom’s homemade enchilada sauce for the meat, and skipped the avocado (mine went bad in the produce basket before I made this recipe, boo!) I also cut up whole tomatoes and shredded my own romaine lettuce to cut down on cost–I think this might also have been why even the lettuce wasn’t too gross on reheating. I can’t vouch for using a regular pan, but this cooked up great on my pizza stone.



• Creamsicle French Toast
  Daniel and I decided to make French Toast this morning, since Daniel’s project is done (at last) and we had some bread in the freezer from last week’s Caprese Grilled Cheese. Daniel was looking at various recipes and found one that involved orange liqueur–which got me to think about oranges. I figured that I had orange juice concentrate in the freezer, and we had cream cheese in the fridge…why not mix the two together and use that as a filling for our French toast? Our bread was sliced thinly enough that we made them more like a sandwich, but they turned out pretty decent, if I do say so myself. Not like every-weekend-wonderful, but certainly a nice experiment.

Apps/Plugins/Technological Gizmos Used:

• TWICCA for Android (linked to by LifeHacker)
  Apparently TweetDeck is going the way of GoogleReader–which means I needed a new Twitter Client for my phone. LifeHacker was so kind as to suggest Twicca. I’m liking it so far, although I wish it had the capability of running my Twitter feed and my Facebook feed side by side like TweetDeck did. Oh well, nothing has everything. Download Twicca here.

Videos that Made Me Laugh:

HT: 22 Words

This was a light week as blog reading and recipe-trying goes…

Books added to my TBR list:

• Blood Work by Anthony J. Carter (reviewed by Tim Challies)
  All about how the blood of Christ accomplishes our salvation. An excerpt from the book:

  “His precious blood signified His precious life and His precious death. Consequently, the redeemed do not receive a blood transfusion from God. We receive a life transfusion–His death for our death, His life for our life. It is all according to His precious blood, which satisfies God’s righteous requirements for life and justice.”

  I feel like this is the sort of book that would not only increase my knowledge, but increase my worship of the One who bled for me.

Recipes Tried:

• Caprese Grilled Cheese (from Serious Eats)
  Wow! This was incredibly yummy. I DID think grilling both sides of the bread was overkill-but overall? Amazing.