the SIMMER blog

wordless wednesday xlix

 
 

what winter means

I love summer, I do, when the farmer's market is bursting with 18 kinds of greens, and all those lovely tomatoes and green beans and fruits that need nothing more than a light rinse under the tap to be enjoyed.

But I also love winter. When you can shove a joint of meat into the oven around noon and it fills the house for hours with a gorgeous, tantalizing, ever-evolving smell, and emerges tender as velvet to be served to a crowd -- right away, or later, or whenever you get around to it.

 
I recently made a leg-of-lamb from the Ad Hoc cookbook, but it was not this one. This one was the seven-hour leg-of-lamb from All About Braising, and it was better than the Ad Hoc version, which is the first time I've ever said that about anything from the Ad Hoc cookbook. I worship the Ad Hoc cookbook. But there's just something about braising the lamb until it falls apart that I like much much better than the kind that takes a shorter turn in the oven.

 
 The seven-hour lamb, as you can see here, is just onions + tomatoes + carrots + time.

 
And time.

(And apparently some fennel I didn't capture in the first shot.)

 
And time.

(Doesn't it look like a Dutch still life or something?)

 
Until the vegetables are soft and the lamb is barely holding itself together and the house smells so good you can barely stand it. Tzatziki, bread, dessert, done.

Winter. It's what's for dinner.

covering the cover flat

So like I said on Tuesday, I don't have the actual ARCs of The Kitchen Daughter, but I did get the ARC cover flat, and what a lovely little piece of art it is:

 
The colors are livelier in person, but the flash was giving me trouble. This one comes a little closer to capturing them:

 

It's so gorgeous, the shaded golden background and the red of the peppers, with the spine and back bringing in another color, a beautiful burgundy. I just keep staring at it.

This was also a wonderful surprise:

in defense of bookstores on intrepid media

It's not like me to rant, but I got upset when reading a Stephen King interview (which is also not like me, I have nothing against the guy in general) and it led me to get all het up to the tune of a few hundred words, which became my Intrepid Media column for the month:

bookstores are aliiiiiive.

wordless wednesday xlviii

 
 

the advance advance

It's almost time for the advance review copies (ARCs) of The Kitchen Daughter to arrive! And I don't have them in hand yet, but I do have this, which I'll talk more about on Friday:

 

nanowrimo advice on writer unboxed

It's the first day of November! You know what that means!

(No, not All Saints' Day, although technically, yes, it IS All Saints Day, and what a lovely day it is, but no, that's not what I mean.)

It's the first day of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.

I'm not participating this year -- I'm working on publicity plans for The Kitchen Daughter and cranking away on edits for book #2 -- but I've written up some of my lessons learned from NaNos past in today's post on Writer Unboxed:

putting the NANO in NaNoWriMo.