Christmas Books

The Sisters "Humphrey" exchanged early Christmas presents this Thanksgiving since we'll all be apart on the 24th this year. There being four of us our tradition is to draw names and only give and receive one gift. It makes it much easier on us now and made it much easier on our parents in the past who then funded our gift-giving. It's a fun tradition: the lottery. It's exciting.

This year I gave to Brooke and got from Sue. Among other things (as Suzanne is a notorious spoiler and is always putting our gifts to shame) I got the four books above.

I'm so excited. I asked specifically for Mark Bittman's Kitchen Express and can't wait to start working on the super-simple recipes - 404 of them!

I'm terrible at following instructions and this book has but a few lines per recipe - three recipes can fit on one page. Plus he breaks the recipes up into seasons which is terrific. If you've never watched his show on nytimes.com you've got to now. He's so charming in and completely un-charming way.

I read Organize Your Life which I mentioned in my last blog and I've also given Make It Yourself the twice- or thrice-over. I probably won't do any big projects too soon. It might take me a while to get to The Cat Who Talked Turkey. Though I am looking forward to it I've got, literally, a stack of Paddington Bear chapter books ahead of it in line for super-light reading.

But I'll let you know as I try out recipes.