This has been a super busy week for me and also for my friends. I had hoped to get a post up, but there’s just too much going on.
School image created by Kjpargeter – Freepik.com
Book Club Dinner
Tonight (meaning Tuesday night), I hosted my book club, and that involves making dinner for the group. We take turns hosting and that includes making the entire meal: appetizers, main course and dessert as well as providing the all important wine 😉 I haven’t had to host since last May, so I can’t really complain about it.
The appetizers were easy: cheeses and crackers, smoked salmon spread and crackers, and spanakopita that I bought at Trader Joe’s and just had to heat.
I was in the mood for Moroccan style chicken, so I decided to try a new recipe. I don’t think that’s the greatest idea to make a new recipe, but that’s what I did. I chose a recipe from the New York Times that had gotten good reviews. The original recipe called for skin on and bone in chicken thighs, but I know the women in my group prefer boneless, skinless chicken so that’s what I bought. The recipe called for Meyer lemons which are less acidic and assertive than regular lemons and olives with the pits in because they are more flavorful than pitted olives. The recipe wasn’t difficult, but because I was using boneless, skinless chicken I had to modify the recipe a bit, and I wasn’t sure how long to braise it. While the women were having appetizers and chatting, I worked on the chicken. The recipe called for a cup of liquid: I used 1/4 cup of Vermouth because that was all I had and 3/4 cup of chicken broth. After the chicken had been in the oven for at least an hour, I removed the chicken, olives and lemon wedges and put them in a serving dish. I poured the liquid (that seemed to be way more than a cup because of all the lemon juice) into a pot and tried to reduce it on top of the stove. After 10 minutes of so, it still wasn’t reduced enough and it was getting late. So I added corn starch that I had dissolved in cold water. It thickened the sauce to the consistency I was looking for.
For the sides, I made Israeli couscous salad and roasted asparagus. For dessert, I made panna cotta with rosewater with a raspberry coulis (heat frozen raspberries with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and a little water and then strain it in a sieve). I think the meal came out mostly quite well, though I wasn’t in love with the recipe that I used for the chicken. I wish I had a few photos especially of the colorful couscous and the lovely panna cotta. Oh well.
Book Club Book
BTW, the book we read last month was The Radium Girls by Kate Moore, a non-fiction book about the young women of the 1920s-30s who worked in watch/clock factories hand painting the watch face numbers with radium to make the numbers glow in the dark. The teens and young women who did the painting dipped their brushes in radium, put them in their mouthes to get the bristles to come to a point and then painted. There was so much radium in the studio that they got it on their clothes, their hair and their skin – they actually glowed in the dark. They ingested so much radium that many of them became very sick from radium poisoning, developing sarcomas, losing teeth and bones. Many died. The book focused on their brave fight to get the companies they worked for to admit that radium was dangerous, to institute worker protections, and to help pay their extensive medical bills. The story was harrowing, but so important to our history and to our safety at work today. I didn’t love the writing style, but learning about these heroines of the past was certainly worth it.
Tomorrow, I have to get up early and drive a friend who had foot surgery recently and can’t drive or walk too much to an appointment a couple of towns away at 9am. So I am headed to bed!
Fashion Flash
Here’s a link to this week’s edition of Fashion Flash, hosted by the glamorous fashion-blogger, Janise of Mama In Heels. As always, there’s a great variety of beauty, health and wellness, exercise, travel, fashion, and lifestyle posts. Click here to check them out!
I hope to be back tomorrow! Hope your week is going well xoxo
Thank you, Allison, and thank you readers, for foregoing a more in-depth beauty post today! (I’m the friend with the out-of-commission foot, and the book club dinner was excellent, by the way!)
You are an early bird this morning, Kim! See you shortly 🌞
We did the audio book of that one a couple months back at work. Every day it was like “OMG HOW CAN THINGS POSSIBLY GET ANY WORSE FOR THESE POOR WOMEN?!?!” And yet every day, with each chapter, the downward spiral continued. Jawbones falling out left and right, most people treating them like they were crazy… Harrowing is the right word to describe it, yes. I already knew the basics of the story, but just hearing the depth of the corruption, coverup, and plain refusal to see truth was…shattering.
When I first started reading Radium Girls, I honestly didn’t know if I could continue because it was so depressing. But I’m glad I continued because the heroism of the women profiled in the book was beyond belief. The corporate corruption was horrendous, and though eventually, the women’s perseverance led to workplace safety regulations as well as to some relatively meager compensation for them. But it’s also horrifying to see that kind of corruption, coverup and lack of concern for anything but profitability going on today. Sad 🙁