My First 5K!

The exciting news of the weekend is that I ran my first 5K yesterday. I've been thinking about doing one for awhile, but 5Ks have come and gone this fall without me running any of them. I think I was more determined about this one, partly because of being so irritated about having Lyme disease. So, I guess I ran this in the spirit of, "Take that, you blasted Lyme bacteria." Or something like that.

Basically, what I learned is that if you can run 3.1 miles outside on your own, there's no reason you can't run 3.1 miles among hundreds of other people doing the same thing. What I liked about this race is that it was huge (more than 4000 people, with 2500 or so walking and 1500 or so running) and not particularly intimidating. Yes, there were elite runners up in front who got to leave right when the gun went off (not actually a real gun, more of a "ready, set, go") rather than nearly 5 minutes later, but there were also old people and young people and babies tucked into strollers and people who looked rather stout to be runners and people in costumes--a polar bear and a penguin, as per the logo above, a tortoise who ran at the very, very end and a whole host of marshmallows, as befitting a run at which hot chocolate was served at the finish line.

I'd been a bit nervous ahead of time, given that I've been on Doxycycline for more than 2 weeks, and I'd been feeling a bit queasy in the few days before the race. There was also the fact that I never exercise in the morning, if I can possibly help it, and I don't particularly like the cold. (It was 30 degrees at the 10 a.m. race time.) I left my stuff at Alex's house and walked over, to avoid any parking insanity, and he'd insisted that I wear an extra fleece and my hat, but when I got there, there didn't seem to be anyplace to leave them. Thankfully, the nice folks at the Chameleons hair salon--all of whom were running or walking themselves--let me leave them there.

The only thing that surprised me was that there weren't more people I knew there. I ran into my friend Michael at the end and saw my friend Susan, who was volunteering, but that was about it. The one mean thing I thought about the course was that the only real hills were just after the 2 mile mark when the course cut across the Smith campus. I'd seen Susan before the race, and I saw her right before the second Smith hill, and though she was wearing hiking shoes, a down jacket and long underwear, she ran up the hill with me, which I thought was very nice of her.

I still don't know my exact time, since I left at least 4 minutes after the official start, but it was somewhere around 35-36 minutes, so just under 12 minute miles. No one, including me, would say that was at all fast, but for a person who didn't run for 20 years, I thought it was just fine. The even better number is that the run raised more than $90,000 for Safe Passage, which is a local domestic violence organization. (Update: The final results are in. My time was 35:13, 11:21 a mile. I'm pleased that it was closer to 11 minutes than 12 a mile, and I was right that I left a full 5 minutes after the gun.)

And afterward, after I'd collected my mug and chatted with Michael and drunk my hot chocolate (slightly burned, alas) and fetched my jacket and hat from Chameleons, I wandered back to Alex's via the new winter farmer's market (where I got some spinach) and Cornucopia (where I got some Sidehill Farm yogurt) and the Pleasant Street Video store, where I got some movies. I ran into Andy and showed off my race number (3239). And after tea with Alex and a few more errands, I came home and got to feel virtuous for the rest of the day, which is the advantage, I learned, to morning exercise, especially at 106% of your maximum heart rate. (Well, so said my trusty heart rate monitor which, I have to assume, was mistaken.)

And one more time, I have to give a shout out to Couch to 5K (which I first wrote about earlier this year here) because without being talked through an easy, systematic way to start running, I'm not sure I would have done it. And now here I am, one very slow 5K down, thinking about when I might run another.

Hooray, Hooray for Betsy Ray

There are times when only comfort reading will do, and comfort reading of the most extensive sort--a much loved childhood series. One such time was this summer when I was sick, and I re-read the first four Betsy-Tacy books, ostensibly to see how they would work for my nieces, now both reading up a storm. (Just fine--not that there was any question of that.)

Another such time was this past week, when I learned that not only do I have Lyme disease but that I tested positive several months ago, and the doctor's office accidentally misplaced the test results. Not only that, but my best case scenario for treatment is a month of oral antibiotics (thereby wiping out all the good stomach bacteria I've been building up for years, which I'm convinced has kept me relatively healthy when I'm in India). (The other treatment scenario involves IV antibiotics for several weeks, but I'm devoutly hoping it won't come to that.) (By the way, I feel fine.)

So, comfort reading, if only to avoid thinking about all the things I'd like to do to the doctor's office, not to mention the stupid deer tick that bit me god knows when and didn't have the courtesy to make me get a rash, so I would know what had happened.

I first read the ten Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace when I was a child and then again as a teenager. I read them during stressful times in grad school, and I read them in my thirties, at least the last six, the books that take Betsy Ray and her best friend Tacy Kelly through high school and then abroad and into adulthood and marriage. I've always known that mine was not a solitary obsession, but it turns out to be more widespread than I'd imagined. The new reissue of the last six books from Harper Perennial Modern Classics, in three volumes, has garnered mentions in both New York Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. It also spurred the first ever Maud Hart Lovelace Reading Challenge, not to mention the Betsy-Tacy Book Blog Tour.

The Betsy books are fictionalized versions of their author's life--Maud Hart Lovelace grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, at the turn of the century in a warm, loving family, wanting to be a writer. Lovelace told stories of her childhood to her only daughter, Merian Kirchner, and the Betsy-Tacy series was born. The first four books, which take Betsy and Tacy, and their friend Tib, from the ages of five through twelve, are delightful. Tacy is shy, Tib is tiny and Betsy makes up stories and hatches adventures for them all.

The last six books are different. Not that they're not equally delightful, but they're no longer children's books. Each high school book takes Betsy and her crowd through a year of high school. Betsy and the Great World skips ahead several years to 22-year-old Betsy on her own in Europe in the months before the outbreak of World War I. And Betsy's Wedding brings her home and sees her married to her sometime high school sweetheart and writing rival, Joe Willard. (I only just now learned that the Betsy-Joe high school relationship is entirely fictional, as Maud Hart Lovelace didn't meet her husband, journalist Delos Lovelace, until she was in her twenties.)

What keeps these books relevant and engaging is Betsy herself. She is incredibly alive in these pages--charming and flawed and constantly aiming to improve herself, or, at some points, change herself entirely. (She never succeeds.) What is lovely about Betsy is that she screws up, over and over again. She gets overly involved with her friends, she blows off her school work, she makes plans and doesn't keep them. She wants to be a writer but doesn't always make it her priority. She is, in short, entirely believable as a teenager and as a young woman.

It's probably been ten years since I last read the series, and it's interesting to me what details remained with me. For some reason, I remembered Betsy's sister Julia getting blackballed by her sorority but not Betsy and her friends forming their own sorority, Okto Delta, with less than wonderful results. In Betsy and the Great World, I remembered her visit to Oberammergau, where the Passion Play is performed every ten years, but I had no recollection of her near love affair with a young Italian man in Venice. What struck me on this re-read of Betsy and the Great World is how perfectly Lovelace portrays how it is to be on your own in another country for the first time. Betsy may have traveled with infinitely more luggage than I did, but some of the things Betsy thinks in her first few days in Munich are exactly the things that I thought during my early days in Delhi twenty years ago. When Betsy finally makes a friend, and everything changes, I knew exactly how she felt. It also amused me to see that I absolutely identified with Betsy's yearning to take a bath. In her case, the obstacle was the location of the bathroom with the tub (in the section of her hotel where army officers were quartered), whereas I was struggling with the paucity of bathtubs in India in general. But while my friend Becca and I were so desperate for a bath that we were on the brink of asking a woman we'd just met if we could use the bathtub in her hotel room (we lost our nerve, alas), Betsy persists, gets her bath and charms the officers all at the same time. Go Betsy!

What's odd is that I don't actually own any of the Betsy books. I always read library copies as a child, and when I got older and thought about buying them, I discovered that the older editions are rare and expensive, and most of the reprints are not very well done. (Really, there were some terrible choices for cover illustrations along the way. Several times I thought, "But Betsy and Tacy didn't look like that!") That may change, though. I'm delighted that there are handsome new editions out, with the original illustrations and new introductions and material about Maud Hart Lovelace and her life. It's heartening to know that Betsy and her family and friends will continue to charm and entertain readers today, a century after Maud Hart Lovelace graduated from high school in Mankato and moved first to Minneapolis and then out into the great world. And maybe if the books are on my shelf, I won't wait ten years to re-read them. I won't need the excuse of illness or anything else to curl up with Betsy, Tacy and Tib, with Carney and Cab and Winona, with handsome Joe Willard and Julia Ray's endless stream of beaus, and watch Betsy roll the Magic Waver curlers in her hair before bed and settle down at her Uncle Keith's trunk to write the stories that she hopes will some day make her famous.

Corduroy Mansions, Part II

Somehow, I managed to miss this entirely, but the ever prolific Alexander McCall Smith is writing a sequel to his delightful Corduroy Mansions, first published online in daily installments in the British newspaper The Telegraph last year. (I'm wondering if I should add more frequent perusal of British newspapers to the too many things I already read online.) This one is called The Dog Who Came in from the Cold, which must mean that Freddie de la Hay, the temporarily vegetarian Pimlico terrier that William the wine merchant adopts, is back.

I wrote about the first volume of Corduroy Mansions here, last November. Alexander McCall Smith is so astonishingly productive--he seems to write a new volume for all three of his other series every year--I'm not sure why I didn't assume he'd write a sequel to this as well, especially because the ending of the first book wasn't really an ending. (AMS likes ending with a party and a toast--he's done this with several of the volumes in the 44 Scotland Street series as well--and it's true that the party and the toast help distract you from the fact that there's no real resolution to anything.)

As with the first volume, there are multiple ways to access the new book. You can read it on the Telegraph site linked above. You can sign up to have each daily installment sent directly to your email address (though I'm assuming you'd have to read the already-published installments on the site). My preference, obvious given my love of audio books, is to download the podcast of the novel, narrated by the excellent Andrew Sachs.

If you missed the first volume and aren't yet sure you want to commit, Alexander McCall Smith has kindly provided a brief summary, to let you know what you're in for. His books are light but smart and always entertaining, and this one is no different.

Meanwhile, if you'll excuse me, I have 46 chapters to download . . .

Meatless Mondays: Tried and True Spinach Soup

I haven't done a Meatless Monday post in a long time, but since soup season is here (even though the past few days could have passed for spring, were it not for the heaps of fallen leaves on my lawn), it seemed like the time to write about this soup.

When I realized, recently, that my ancient copy of The Moosewood Cookbook had broken into 2 pieces, I was not at all surprised to learn that the page on which the binding broke is the page for Cream of Spinach Soup. I don't cook too many things from Moosewood anymore (with a few significant exceptions, of course), but this soup is one of the absolute keepers.

What's funny about the soup is that I make no other soup this way. In fact, I've never seen a recipe for another soup that follows this same method. I think that's interesting, especially given that there's basically a formula you can use that is adaptable to many kinds of soup. (That would be the saute onions, carrots and celery in a bit of oil, add the other vegetables and/or beans and herbs, add the liquid, bring to a boil, let simmer, etc. formula.) This soup is not like that. Mollie Katzen tells you to put a potato, an onion, a carrot and a clove of garlic in a pot and cover with water, then cook til the vegetables are soft and then puree it all, thus creating a stock that is not stock. I am sure that I could fiddle with this recipe and find a more sophisticated way of getting to this same place, but I have no interest in doing that because this way works just fine. (In the revised edition, she's more specific with amounts, but I still see no need to change the original. This is one soup, though, that definitely benefits from having an immersion blender, as you have to puree both the vegetables and the spinach, and it's much easier not to have to deal with a traditional blender.)

The other thing interesting about this recipe is the amount of butter. In the original Moosewood, published during a time that vegetarian food had to be made palatable by the addition of massive amounts of butter and cheese, the recipe calls for a roux that includes 1/3 cup of butter. There is no reason to have 1/3 cup of butter in this soup, and from the beginning, I cut it down to 1 or 2 tablespoons. Still, when a new addition of Moosewood came out, I was surprised to learn that the butter had gone from 1/3 of a cup to optional. This seemed excessive, and I ignored the new instructions just as I had ignored the old, although, admittedly, the optional amount of butter in the revised recipe is approximately what I use anyway. The 1-2 tablespoons of butter gives it some depth but doesn't make it heavy. I also always use 1% milk because that's what I mostly have in the house, and it comes out just fine. (I do find that the roux thickens more quickly if the milk is already hot, so I usually heat it up in the microwave before adding it to the roux.)

The recipe is also flexible enough to adapt to any kind of spinach you might have. I've made it with frozen spinach and with fresh spinach in a bag from the grocery store. I will admit, however, that the best versions of this soup have been made with (usually organic, though not always) spinach bought from the farmers market and cooked shortly thereafter.

Even though I occasionally flirt with other spinach soups (like the lovely spinach and green garlic soup from Orangette), I always come back to this one. It's not just that I've been making it for as long as I've been cooking and can remember all of the kitchens in which I've made it. It's that I haven't found one to top it. Sometimes it's just good in an ordinary way, but when I can make it in the fall, when all of the vegetables are newly out of the ground and when the chill in the air is there to remind us of what's ahead, it can be sublime. And there's no way that something this shade of green isn't good for you. But that it's good for you is secondary. I make this soup over and over because it's a lovely thing to eat, no matter the time of year.

Cream of Spinach Soup

Adapted from The Moosewood Cookbook

1 carrot
1 onion
1 clove garlic
1 potato
Cover w/ water. Steam until tender. Puree in its own water. (I usually don't peel the potato, especially if it's organic, but you can if you want.)

Steam 1lb. spinach in 1 cup water till wilted. Puree.

Make roux by whisking 1-2 tablespoons flour into 1-2 tablespoons melted butter. Whisk in 2 cups (warm) milk and cook over very low heat, stirring, until thickened.

Add the spinach to the roux, along with
1/2 tsp. salt ( or more)
pepper
1/2 tsp. basil
pinch nutmeg
pinch thyme
(any fresh herb like parsley or marjoram)

Add carrot/potato onion mixture to spinach. Adjust seasoning and, if too thick, add milk.
Heat (very low flame) and stir till smooth, creamy, green, fragrant. (The soup is all of these things, but I do usually find it needs more salt. At this point at the end, I like to use Maldon salt or other sea salt. I also sometimes grate in a bit of Parmesan cheese.)

Serves 4. Time: An easy 40 minutes.

Another reason to love Mollie Katzen

I don't eat this sandwich as often as I should. I forget about it for months at a time. But usually sometime during the height of apple season, I remember. And I make the sandwich. And I am glad.

It doesn't even have its own page in Moosewood--it's one in a list of sandwich possibilities. I tried it the first time more years ago than I can remember and wondered how such a simple combination could taste so good. I eat toasted cheddar all the time, practically every day, but somehow the addition of apples and walnuts elevates it to something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

It's not complicated. You need good sandwich bread, a bit of butter, a few walnuts, an apple, some sharp cheddar. You put the lightest trace of butter on the bread, cover with thin slices of apple, sprinkle with walnuts, top with cheese. Bake in the toaster oven or under a broiler in the oven. The bread ends up lightly toasted, the apples soft, the nuts crunchy, the cheese melted and bubbly. The tang of the apple cuts the richness of the cheese and nuts. If you arrange it carefully enough at the beginning, in each bite you get a bit of everything. It is especially good washed down with a cup of fresh apple cider (especially the cider from Outlook Farms, which is unpasteurized and utterly delicious).


And at the end, when all that's left is crumbs, you will look longingly at your plate and promise yourself that you will not wait til next year's apple season to make it again. The only saving grace of forgetting about such as simple and delicious treat is that when you remember and make it and eat it, it is like you are discovering it anew.

An Audio Book for a Very, Very, Very Long Car Ride

Earlier this week, I finished listening to the only audio book I'd listened to since August. It's not that I hadn't been listening to audio books much in that time. It was that this one was very, very, very, very long. 26 discs long, to be precise, and 32 hours of reading.

The book was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, originally published in 2004. I bought it soon after it came out, but it had been sitting on my shelf, unread, for almost 5 years. Then, this summer, I took it out. I had a bout of flu in July, right after my summer break started (what timing), and during the first week, when I wasn't good for much of anything, I re-read the whole Harry Potter series, needing something both familiar and engaging. (It totally holds up when read as one very long story. I would read it that way again, assuming another block of time that hopefully doesn't involve the flu--it certainly helped with the not remembering many of the pertinent details that happened while waiting two years for the next book.)

But when I was done with Harry, I still was in the mood for something long and engaging and having to do with magic, and there was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on my shelf. I took it out and read a chapter, then had an AHA moment when I realized it would probably be a good book to listen to as an audio book. This was confirmed when I went to the library and happened to run into Darnell, husband of my friend Leanna. He saw the audiobook in my hands and asked if I were going to listen to it. I said I was. I asked if he knew about it. He said he'd listened to it. I asked if he liked it. He paused for a moment, and then said, slowly, "I loved it." He went on to say that just seeing it in my hands made him want to listen to it again. This impressed me, especially given the sheer length of it. When I saw Leanna a few weeks later, it turns out that soon thereafter, Darnell had foisted the book upon her over a long weekend, and she had read it as well. (We both appreciated the coincidence, since we could then talk about it with the details still fresh. Although because Leanna had read it over one long weekend, and I was listening over the course of several months, it meant that she had finished while I had just come to the part, about halfway through, when Jonathan Strange had dabbled in black magic while in Portugal serving as Lord Wellington's personal magician.)

Jonathan Strange is, as I suspected, a very good book to listen to, and Simon Prebble is an excellent narrator. Listening to it is something of a commitment. It is, as I may have mentioned, long. It meanders. And for the first several hundred pages, it's kind of hard to see where it's going, given the slow pace, the digressions, the footnotes. Yes, there are footnotes. I've read several reviews saying that this book wouldn't work on tape for first time readers because of the footnotes, but I disagree. They seem a bit of a distraction, at first, but as the story progresses, they make more and more sense and are often both interesting and entertaining in their own right. (I did consult the paper copy of my book several times to double check and re-read things, but I was tempted to read ahead, and I wanted to let Simon Prebble finish reading, so I had to restrain myself.)

But what is the book about, you might ask. It's a historical novel and a magical novel, or at least a novel with magic in it, and a novel about friendship and rivalry. It's also a very well written novel. It's set in the first part of the 19th century, during the Napoleonic wars (the same time period of my beloved Patrick O'Brian novels). Magic, which had once flourished in England, is no longer practiced but only discussed (at length) by "theoretical magicians." And then the first practical magician in memory appears, fussy and selfish Gilbert Norrell who can enchant the statues in York Cathedral so that they can talk and conjure up ships made of rain to form a blockade against the French. Then, a quarter of the way into book, appears Jonathan Strange, young, brash and bold, who has no intention of becoming a magician until a tramp sleeping under a hedge tells him it is his destiny. Strange becomes Norrell's pupil and friend and eventually his rival and enemy. There are other main characters--noble Stephen Black, butler to politician Sir Walter Pole, a "nameless slave" and, eventually, a king; Norrell's mysterious and compelling servant Childermass; and especially the Faerie king, known only as "The Man With the Thistledown Hair," summoned by Norrell to assist in raising Sir Walter's fiancee from the dead, whose role becomes more evident--and frightening--as the book progresses. There is also one character whose presence hovers throughout the book, but whom we only catch a glimpse of towards the very end--John Uskglass, the Raven King, whose magic ruled England for centuries, the man whom Norrell fears and Strange admires to the point of obsession.

This is not a book with many women characters, unfortunately. There is Lady Pole, the first victim of the Man With the Thistledown Hair, whom we only see glimpses of in her natural and unenchanted state, and Arabella Strange, Jonathan's wife, who is at risk of becoming another. I wish there were more. And it's interesting to me that neither Strange or Norrell is particularly sympathetic. As a result, this isn't an emotionally demanding book, although the last two hundred pages are gripping, the plot racing ahead and much more being at stake.

It's not a perfect book, though few are. It could be shorter and tighter, without losing anything; it could perhaps not meander quite as much. But it is a testament to Susanna Clarke and Simon Prebble that I listened to it patiently and with great enjoyment, through car trips to New Hampshire and Cape Cod and Boston, to and from work, in my kitchen while chopping onions, at the gym while doing leg presses, day after day, week after week, I listened. And when it was over, I was a little bit sad, and I wondered, as others of Susanna Clarke's fans have been wondering for the past 5 years, when she's going to write a sequel.

Obits

I miss my friend Doris Abramson, of Common Reader fame, more often than you'd think, given that I usually didn't see her more than a few times a year. But I miss her most when I read an obituary I think she'd enjoy. This also happens more often than you'd think. Last week, it was this Independent obit of Molly Malone Cook, long time partner of the poet Mary Oliver. We went to hear Mary Oliver read at Smith last week, a reading packed with more than 2000 people in the biggest auditorium on campus, usually only packed for Ani DeFranco and the like. (Alex has a nice blog post about it up at his White Mountain blog.) Mary Oliver spoke of Molly and read a few excerpts from the book of Molly's photographs and Mary's prose, called Our World, that came out a few years ago. I was curious later, so I googled and found the obit. (Admittedly, it's possible that Doris saw this obit since it came out in 2005. I hope so.)

Today, there were two in the New York Times. I liked the one about the romance editor (who died at 56), but I especially liked Mimi Weddell, 94, "Actress and Hat Devotee." I think Doris would have liked it too, and I am sad all over again that she is not there to enjoy it along with me.