Mushroom Barley Soup

It's almost the season that shall not be named...but for now, we get to enjoy the best parts of fall: cool nights and mornings, excuses to wear sweaters and cute boots, eat warm or warming things, and drink wine.  This recipe allows all three of the last three things to happen simultaneously, weather and attire is up to you though!

Also - you can probably make this vegetarian, but may need to do some body building in the soup to replace it...maybe a Tbsp tomato paste or miso? Maybe both?

Mushroom Barley Soup

Mushroom Barley Soup

Adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook and The New Best Recipe

Serves 4-6

Mushroom Barley Soup

All that glitters is gold...or cholera: Walk on Earth a Stranger, by Rae Carson

Walk on Earth a Stranger

Rae Carson

Harper Collins, 2015

ISBN: 978-0062242914

Lee Westfall is relatively content in her life in a Georgia homestead with her mother and ailing father, though she does wish they could use the windfall from her secret ability to sense gold to improve things without major ramifications.  Major ramifications take that choice away from her when she returns home from school one day to find her parents murdered and their hidden gold findings missing.  With nothing to hold her back, her best friend Jefferson, a half Cherokee boy urges her to run away west with him in pursuit of the gold that is there for the taking in California.  Lee is reluctant, and Jeff sets off with the promise that he’ll wait as long as he can in Independence, MO for her if she decides to join. When her uncle turns up at the funeral covered in gold dust that only Lee can sense and tells her he has plans for her it is abundantly clear to Lee that he is behind her parents deaths.  Lee realizes her best option is to follow Jeff west, disguises herself as a boy, and begins the formidable, perilous and adventure filled journey west - to Jeff, gold, and away from her uncle and past.  Along the way she, along with the millions who also made the historic journey, will encounter no less than bandits, buffalo, brutality, racial tensions, starvation, exposure, medical emergencies, all while trying to stay alive and hide her identity and talent.  This is a nonstop historical fiction with a touch of whimsy and a promise of future romance, and it is wholly engrossingly fabulous!  With realistic characters in realistic yet hard to fathom from a contemporary standpoint, it is a strong recommendation for all libraries serving teen patrons or with adults who love YA.  Basically, unless you have no money, buy this book.     

Perhaps the most articulate way to say this is that some books can be hugely absorbing, and I found that to be the case with this one.  But a better way to say it is this: a book has not hit my squee button like this in quite some time - like May, when I read the Royal We (or actually probably also Uprooted).  

Case of the Terribles: Fall Flavors

I'd like to invite all y'all to join my rally cry against the orange tinged dark arts I've been spotting in grocery stores, food aisles, running supplements, and most offensively and horrifyingly, my parents refrigerator.  Hear my rally cry against the indencency of pumpkin spicing, maple baconing, or caramel appleing everything! Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a strategically placed piece of pumpkin bread or maple syrup pour (right in my mouth hole area), but things have been getting out of hand, food producers of North America.  When the irreproachable and humble workhouses that are English muffins take on a pumpkin spice hue, I have to wonder: can no food product go unsullied?!

Hear my rally cry against the indecency of pumpkin spice everything: nooooo mooooooooooooooore!  (And especially no more pumpkin beer in July. JUST NO.)

 Please note the relative health of all these things is overwhelmingly, impressively, and staggeringly healthy.  

Here be the grossest things I've found in the wild this fall season:

Maple. Bacon. Energy. Gel.

 Because energy gel wasn't gross enough, we flavored it like sweet meat.  

I'm no wizard, but I predict this will go over real well at mile 15.