Turkey Chili Mac

I kept seeing commercials for this dish and it sounded tasty so I put it on my list to try at some point. Then, two Sundays ago, the recipe was also in the newspaper so I gave in and made it sooner than planned. I am always wary of anything with chili in its title because 1) that usually involved beans in some fashion and I find beans gross and 2) it usually is also spicy and I don't really do much spice. I don't find pleasure in burning my taste buds out for some reason, call me crazy. However, I am glad I tried this dish.

In many ways, it is a lot like my Grammy's goulash - just ground turkey instead of beef and a kick of chili powder rather than oregano. The recipe makes just as much - in fact, I didn't make this at the best time. I was leaving for a trip to the Mouse three days after making this which meant I had to eat it for lunch and dinner for three days to make sure none went to waste. I sadly did not have room in the freezer at the time to put some in tupperware to freeze. It could be a very plain dish but I cooked some green peppers and onions up and put them in there and that added to the heartiness of the dish. I also, full disclosure did not put the full amount of chili powder, but the amount I put in was just right for me. I recommend this for a cold, damp, grey day when you just want to curl up with tea and a book.

You could also top this with sour cream - yum!

Turkey Chili Mac

Ingredients:
1 lb. ground turkey
1 jar Ragu Old World Style Pasta Sauce
1 Tbsp. chili powder
8 oz. macaroni, cooked and drained
1 green pepper, chopped (optional)
1 medium onion, chopped (optional)
2 Tbsp. olive oil

Directions:

1) Heat 1 Tbsp. olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-heat heat and cook ground turkey, stirring occasionally until done.
2) At the same time, heat 1 Tbsp. olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium heat and cook the green peppers and onions together until softened.
3) Once turkey and vegetables are done, stir into a single pot with pasta sauce and chili powder. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low and simmer covered 10 minutes. Prepare macaroni at this time.
4) Stir in drained macaroni and heat through.
5) Serve topped with shredded cheddar cheese and sour cream.

Come Thou, Tortoise

Canada is cool...in more ways than one. I grew up about 2 hours south of the Great White North and dreamed about moving there more than once. It was the home of most of my family's summer getaways. In the fall, we went south to Disney; in the summer, we want north to Canada. Toronto, being the closest city to home, was usually where we headed. When I was younger, the Toronto theaters were home to Phantom of the Opera and Beauty and the Beast. It holds the Hockey Hall of Fame, the CN Tower and a fantastic zoo. Niagara Falls is also helpfully along the way so we'd often stop to take in the falls as we headed towards the city (always from the Canadian side; the American side is just sad). There, just behind the ledge overlooking the falls was a store full of Anne of Green Gables merchandise I know Mom bought more than one Christmas gift for me there. Because of my Dad being who he is though, we did head further north once or twice. Montreal is home of the fabled Montreal Canadiens which meant we needed to be in town to take in a game, first at the original Forum and then later at the Molson Centre (I think this may be the Bell Centre now...I know it's changed names since last I was there). We were snowed in once at Montreal; a risk of traveling in February. I found the city enchanting; it has a miniature Notre Dame and the BioDome which is as cool as it sounds. I was studying French by then and trying it out for the first time among native speakers was an adventure. I was also lucky enough to have a friend with a boat so one summer in high school we made our way up the Rideau Canal to Ottawa. I visited the National Library of Canada long before I set foot in the Library of Congress and saw the changing of the guards on the lawn of Canada's Parliament before I saw Buckingham Palace's decidedly less impressive version. So, in summary, I have wanted to be adopted by Canada for a long time.

Canada also, as if they needed something to make them cooler, has a national reading program called Canada Reads. In which, a group of books is selected as contenders for that year's Read. Canadian scholars and celebrities are then selected to defend one of the books in a series of public debates in which a single book is selected as that year's winner. I repeat, Canadians are the coolest people ever. A close friend of mine from graduate school clued me into this awesomeness and while I don't follow it religiously, it has added a few books to me to-read list over the last couple of years. Jessica Grant's Come, Thou Tortoise is one of those books.

From Goodreads

Audrey Flowers is either easily confused or just likes to be willfully oblivious to most of what is going on around her. As the book opens, she is in Portland with her inherited tortoise from the previous tenant of the apartment. However, a phone call sends Audrey back to Newfoundland to deal with a sudden loss and all the confusion that comes with it. Told in alternating voices of Audrey and her pet tortoise Winnifred, Come, Thou Tortoise is one of the more unique reads I have come across because let's face it, how many books include the point of view of a tortoise? So, I did enjoy this book.

Any book which ponders toonies, loonies and Timbits must be enjoyed in my book. However, it was a slightly frustrating read. Audrey is a complicated character, a woman that you never quite figure out. She isn't the best narrator for one thing; is she confused, is there some sort of mental disorder here or has she willfully blocked out reality so well that she really does not see what is right in front of her? As the reader, you have to pay close attention to the few facts you get because that is the only way to try to read between the lines of Audrey's convoluted world view. I much preferred Winnifred's chapters. She is a tortoise who knows what is up. She spends a majority of the book with Chuck and Linda, the people Audrey has taking care of Winnie while she is in Canada. Chuck is a thwarted Shakespearean (aka an out of work actor) who uses Winnie as a bookmark and keeps telling her how inviting the Willamette River looks from the window.

I also enjoyed Jessica Grant's play with language. It's not something that works outside of books (Jasper Fforde does this a lot in his work) but I always enjoy when I come across it as it shows the medium of the book doing something no movie or TV show can do. However, Audrey takes the language into her speech and in that case, it does get old. When she's first told that her father is in a coma from an accident, she keeps calling it a comma. This is carried throughout the book, she is even corrected by several characters but she keeps saying comma. It is a coping mechanism of Audrey's and something she does elsewhere as other events take place and while cool on the page, it was one of the more trying features of Audrey's overall character after awhile.

Come, Thou Tortoise is a quirky read but fun and it has the major bonus of lots of Canada love. Downside? I'd really love some Timbits now and the closest Tim Horton's is back home...

Influential Books

Not sure how I started thinking about this but I suspect it came from reading Lies My Teachers Told Me. It looks at textbooks used in high school history classes and all the ways they are inadequate to the task of teaching students history in the correct way. It made me reflect on my high school experience (and perhaps the fact this year is my 10 year reunion has me thinking about it too) and that moved me more towards the books I read in English class (overall, I don't remember my history texts being the end all be all of my history classes). However, I soon realized limiting myself to books I read in class would leave out perhaps some of the most important. Books I stumbled into on library shelves, books given to me by relatives and friends and books that I, truth, can't remember how I found them anymore. All I know is these books have permanent spots on my bookshelf where real estate is at a premium and I revisit them often. They have influenced me in some fashion - be it they introduced me to a genre of books that greatly influence me or the book itself I met at just the right point in my life. So, here in no particular order:

Anthem, Ayn Rand

Of all my classes over the years, 9th grade English stands on its own. It was a unique group of people with a teacher who pushed us further than anyone had up to that point. He expected more from us and while we moaned and groaned over it, I remember "By The Waters of Babylon" being particularly painful, we enjoyed it. It's a class we still reference to this day and was the place I was first introduces to Anthem. This was, upon reflection, both a good and bad thing. Good because Anthem was pretty defining at the time. Think about, a bunch of freshman reading a book that is about creating individual identity, forging one's way outside of the safety of one's family and community, discovering how you are going to define yourself? It was also good because it introduced me to the dystopian genre, a genre I went on to devore over the following summer. This was before Hunger Games, Matched, Divergent. I had only the classics of the genre: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World. It's a genre I still love today and kind of love that it's mainstream now. Bad? Well, Ayn Rand comes with her own set of problems. Anthem is a novella and about as likable as Rand gets. It's because of Anthem I worked to read Atlas Shrugged so hard. I succeeded but I definitely did not like Rand as much when I was finished. What had been such a celebration of individuality and exploration in Anthem just became the story of selfish, insufferable, unlikable people in Atlas Shrugged. But, I still take a summer afternoon and read Anthem, if only to remember my 15 year old self.

Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery

I sadly have no idea how I found Anne. Was it a gift? Did I buy it myself? Did I, horrors!, watch the movie and Road to Avonlea long before I read the first book? Anything is possible. I just remember begging my mother to drive me out to Waldenbooks in 6th grade because I HAD TO HAVE THE NEXT BOOK. I even recall buying the last three books at the same time as I just knew I was going to read them in record time. What would my life had been like if no precocious redhead hadn't assured me there were no mistakes in tomorrow yet? Anne was the first fictional best friend I wanted, Gilbert definitely my first fictional boyfriend and Marilla the best aunt a girl could ask for. I wanted to live in these books so bad it wasn't even funny. And hey, they were educational as well. Thank you Walter for where you fought in WWI as I distinctly remember it helping me on a test in school. Anne also introduced me to more of L.M. Montgomery's books and short stories which I still pull out for comfort reads whenever I have the chance.

The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

My aunt gave me this book in 4th grade. I have no idea why to be honest. Maybe she'd liked it as a kid and wanted to share it with me, her bookworm niece? For whatever reason, I am forever grateful. I didn't get this book at first. WWII was just a vague concept in my head, the Holocaust a word that I knew was bad but didn't really get why. Anne explained that to me. She also though was infallibly honest. I think we heroize her a bit too much. She was a teenager; she fought with her mother and her sister, she had a crush on the only boy she could, she was a brat at times, a saint at others. Her flaws were amplified by the situation she found herself in, as were her great moments. I appreciated her more when I was older and I marvel now. This girl, in hiding for persecution based only on her beliefs, wrote that, in spite of everything, she still believed that people were good at heart. One of my favorite moments of my semester abroad was visiting the Secret Annex and paying my respects to the dreamer who hid there. It brought into my world something I had only imagined in a book.

Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

I came very late to Austen. Shocking I know and one of my best friend was the one who properly introduced me to her finally in high school. Once I'd had my first introductions, there was no going back. Austen's brand of romance, humor and tone hits such a perfect cord with me, I read a lot of literature simply because it is marketed as "Austenesque." I even read all the continuations, moderizations; I watch all the movies, no matter that I've seen five other versions. Hell, I own three versions of Pride & Prejudice on DVD. Well this isn't my favorite of Austen's work (Persuasion holds that honor), it was the first I read and therefore the one I owe for making me a Janeite.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire

I think I found this wandering the aisles of Borders. I had read Wicked and enjoyed it though it was a dense read and Confessions sounded as if it were along the same lines. Not so. Confessions was a much more approachable book, a book with a much clearer plot and the lines of the story, while still grey, a bit easier to follow. It was not the first time I had read a revisionist novel (clearly since I had read Wicked), but it was the first time I grasped how cool the concept could be. Iris was my kind of girl; a brilliant, plain Jane, someone who is just trying to do the right thing and who, in a moment of weakness, thinks about doing the selfish thing. Many years later, Confessions would inspire my senior thesis ensuring that fairy tale retellings will always fascinate me and also remind me that nothing is as black and white as we would like.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I think perhaps I saved the best for last. The Little Prince is a book you have to grow into. I had a copy on my shelves from an early age though I've no idea where it came from. I had read it, enjoyed it and then forgotten about it. Then it was handed to me in 11th grade French class and suddenly it was a book of wisdom, of life lessons, a book I could always turn to for comfort, for hope, for a touch of whimsy when I needed it. It teaches you that there is always more than one way to look at something, that you must always tend your baobabs, and that sometimes, those things staring you in the face are the very things you were looking for in the first place. It is a story of trying to find one's way home and the things you discover along the way. While high school French class touched me in many ways, The Little Prince is the gift I treasure most and I'll pull out my copies (one in English and in black and white, one in French with the color illustrations) and remind myself of its lessons whenever I have a bad day.

Walking and Reading

(Disclaimer: I don't actually walk and read. I did try to perfect that back after I saw Beauty and the Beast and wanted nothing more to be Belle. Unfortunately, I lack the talent to walk any length of time reading and not hitting something or injuring myself. I reluctantly concluded I would never be as cool as Belle...)

I am feeling much more like my old self these days. I still have some tweaks of pain when I move in certain ways but overall, I am 100% better! Hopefully, this health scare will keep me on the right path from now on! While I am not quite feeling up to the zumba class a friend found for me, I am hoping to attend that soon! In the meantime, I continue my tour of Tallahassee's parks with Tom Brown Park.

Lake Leon at Tom Brown Park

Tom Brown seems to be, if not the largest, one of the biggest parks in the city. It holds the annual 4th of July celebration for Tallahassee along with being host to ball fields, Mountain bike trails, a dog park and a 1.5 mile paved trail, Goose Pond Trail. I met up with a friend one night after work last week and wandered from Lake Leon onto the Goose Pond Trail. Since we lost the light quickly, we didn't make it very far but we also stopped to enjoy watching the dogs at the dog park for a bit so I think we lost a bit of time there. But I liked what I saw of the park. I didn't see much of the extensive ball fields the park has since the walking trail where we started isn't close to them but the park was a busy place on a late Wednesday afternoon which is always a good sign. It was much busier than the park I've visited before but Tom Brown, as I said, it one of the largest parks in Tallahassee as well as more centrally located, right off Capital Circle. It also happens to be much closer to where I live so I hope to visit and walk regularly once we get over the spot of bad weather we're having (it's warm out but rainy and stormy for the next few days).

I also enjoyed having someone to walk with. I love my alone time, and I usually need more of that that the time I need to spend around people, but it's also fun to just walk with a friend and talk about random things, about work and family and home. It's also fun to take some time after work to unwind and complain a little if you need to. Normally, I don't have that decompression time to talk something out if I need to and I appreciated having it along with walking and feeling better. 

Next, I want to feel up to a high power zumba class but I think I'm still a week or two from that. I watched one of the Step Up movies over the weekend which meant I was dancing like an idiot around my apartment and yeah...not yet ready for zumba! So, I'll keep walking. I also should work on getting over my fear of the treadmill so even when it's gross out, I can get some walking in as pacing in my apartment just doesn't do much. That said, I don't think it's the treadmill I'm afraid of so much as the odd people I run into at the small gym at my complex. Always nice people, just odd. I almost miss a large gym just for the anonymity they offer. I might need to think about investing in a gym again at some point but for now, baby steps! 

In other news, I need to get back into my reading groove. When I feel crappy, I mostly want to lay on the couch like a slug and watch TV. But, since I'm feeling better, I'm getting back into reading.  I got a bit dragged down too by The Cookbook Collector. I really wanted to like this more than I did but in the end, I was sort of ambivalent to it. It made interesting use of the dot com bubble followed by the bust and 9/11 but I just never much cared for the characters. Confession (AND SPOILER ALERT): I thought good riddance when she killed two characters on one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers. How awful is that?! For one thing, you can see it coming so the shock value isn't really there and two, one of the characters was awful, just completely unlikable and the other character I had nothing invested in. She could have never mentioned him again after she spent a chapter or two on him and I wouldn't have ever wondered where he went. Luckily, I followed it up with a fun historical romance of a girl who runs away to join a ballet company in Brazil in 1912 and then Libba Bray's Beauty Queens which is about a plane crash which lands the contestants of a teen beauty pangent stranded on a not so deserted island. I would tell you more but it's a book you must read to believe and I highly recommend it with a caveat - you need to be someone who likes snarky comments with a Mel Brooks sense of humor (and as someone with family members who do not get that humor, I always like to warn people where it appears).

I just finished Carlos Ruiz Zafon's love letter to books, The Shadow of the Wind. Seriously, I'd like to crawl into the library described in the first chapter and never come back out. After I finish one last library book, I need to start on the stack of books I've accumulated since Christmas as gifts and from book store sales. First up on the stack? A new Flavia de Luce novel (well, new to me, I'm a bit behind on the series). A little Flavia is always a good thing!

Walking a Park

Path at A.J. Henry Park, Tallahassee

My surgery went well; my recovery was a bit unexpected. Everyone made it sound a lot easier than it turned out to be for me. I handle pain well, thank goodness, but I was not up and about easily only a few days following my surgery. Tomorrow is 10 days after my surgery and today is really the first day I've felt mostly normal since they took my gallbladder out. I guess everyone is different but this one threw me for a loop a lot more than I was expecting. Slowly but surely, I am getting my feet back under me. One thing I've been trying to do is to keep moving. It does help me feel a little less like I am an invalid and also I feel a bit like I am walking off the pain. However, doing laps in my apartment gets old fast so I figure it's time to start exploring the parks of Tallahassee.

I love walking; I always have. My favorite cities are completely walkable from one end of them to the other. I love not needing to drive or catch a bus or subway. I love taking in a walk whether it's for pleasure or to get me from point A to Point B. I loathe running or really most other forms of exercise if I'm being honest but I adore walking. Sadly, Tallahassee isn't exactly a walking city. I wouldn't walk down my road if you paid me. It's a charming road but has no sidewalk or shoulder to speak of. So, if I want to walk, I have to find a place to do so.

Tallahassee also has, thankfully, a plethora of parks to choose from. Being unimaginative yesterday, I just picked the park at the top of the list on the website. A.J. Henry Park is in the northeastern part of the city and, like anything else, took me about 20 minutes to find amongst the really nice houses I drove through. It is a fairly small park on the shores of a tiny lake. There is a short boardwalk along the lake's edge, picnic areas which were host to two different birthday parties the day I visited, and then miles of trails through the woods. I wandered the woods for an hour, finding my way to a small ravine with a stream running through it. There were stairs down to the stream which I appreciated it as taking the steep looking trail wasn't really something I felt up to just yet. It was a beautiful day for a walk in the woods and while I ran into a few other couples walking, I seemed to have the forest mostly to myself which is really the best way to enjoy a walk.

My only complaint was the trails were not marked very well. I found posts with maps that had either been destroyed or weather had rendered mostly illegible. There were color coded arrows which would have been helpful if I'd known what trail I'd been on to begin with. I suppose I could have pulled out my phone and gotten the map from the parks' website but it didn't fit my mood so I just wandered. I think I mostly stuck to the green trail but really, I have no idea. A bit more guidance would have been appreciated but I didn't get lost so I suppose that would be considered a successful walk in the woods.

I hope to explore more of Tallahassee's parks in the coming weeks as I try to keep active more. Sadly, most of this week will see me walking on the treadmill though as I'm returning to work. Tomorrow will most likely be a very long day but I'm looking forward to getting back onto my usual schedule and feeling like things are getting back to normal.

What a Week

There are times when you just have to laugh. Like at 11:30 last Tuesday night when I was woken by the sound of loud running water. Much too loud to just be the shower running in the apartment upstairs so I got up, opened my bathroom door, and discovered my bathroom had a new waterfall feature. Of course, it was flowing from the vent in the ceiling and right onto the floor so not really one I wanted. Over the next couple of hours, after the fire department had come and gone and the water stopped running down the side of the building from the apartment above mine, I headed to a hotel for the night. The next day, I moved to a new apartment on the other side of my complex and had to face going back into my old apartment to move things as well. An apartment that had, by that time, ceiling paint hanging down everywhere, carpets that were ripped up to allow giant fans to be placed underneath and massive dehumidifiers sat running in the corner. It took the next three days to finish moving all the belongings the complex didn't for me. I'm still working on getting my address switched everywhere. You forget how many places have your address until you have to change it everywhere - I keep remembering more places to contact. Hopefully, I don't miss any.

On top of that, I am having surgery on Friday. I am both nervous and excited. Excited because I am ready for my body to stop hating me, ready to go back to normal though, truth? This health episode, as fun as it has been, has properly scared me. I'm 28 next month - should I be having gallbladder attacks already? Should I be taking heartburn medicine like it's candy and worry about everything I eat making me feel like I'm having a heart attack? Clearly I need to change some things after this surgery to get rid of my wonky gallbladder because this scared me and I shouldn't be this worried yet. My eating habits have been better but I need to add exercise back into my schedule. The last year or so it's gotten put aside, first because TMJ made my head feel like it was exploding and I got that under control then I moved across the country and then my body decided it would rather not let me eat much more than bread and applesauce. I need to work on this.

Nervous? Well, surgery is scary. I haven't had one since I was 9 or 10. After several operations to have tubes put in my ears, my last one not only put tubes in my ears but also took out my tonsils and adenoids. Fun fact, as a kid, I couldn't breath through my nose correctly. Once they took my adenoids out though, that quirk was taken care of. I suppose you could also count getting my wisdom teeth removed in 10th grade though you even walk after that surgery to the recovery room. I don't remember walking but they tell me I did. The wisdom teeth had to come out because I'd had braces for years, teeth removed, my top jaw widened to accommodate all my teeth. Wisdom teeth would have screwed up all the money my mother poured into fixing my smile.

Reading back through here, I sound like a walking health disaster and I guess on some levels I always have been so I'm hoping to start working on that if only because it's just getting annoying now. So, wish me luck this week and hopefully things will get back to a better normal soon.

A Family I Wish Would Adopt Me

From Goodreads

A very long time ago now, one of my best friends gave me a book that introduced me to one of my all time favorite fictional families. Crocodile on the Sandbank was the first adventure of Miss Amelia Peabody, a wealthy spinster who dreamed of seeing Egypt her whole life. Amelia is smart, stubborn, brave and has that fabulous British common sense that never ceases to amuse. Over the years, when I needed comfort reading, Amelia was one of the books I reached for. Because of that, I only just read the twelfth book this week. By the time Amelia reaches her twelfth adventure, she’s gained a husband, her own children, foster children and lots of good friends and enemies that seem to always pop up at the worse times. Seriously, I want that family to adopt me already. Amelia and her family never cease to make me laugh, make me anxious and make me want to reach in and shake them. I actually had to walk away for two days from the eleventh book because one of the characters infuriated me so much that I stormed about my apartment yelling at her. Yes, I am well aware she is fictional but if the book is that good, characters become your friends and so, as when any friend does something asinine, I wanted to help her out by telling her to snap out of it.

Another reason the Amelia Peabody mysteries rule is because of their setting. Egypt of the late 19th century/early 20th century was fascinating. They were still finding new tombs and temples. Egyptology was still being defined and Amelia and her family are the preeminent archeological experts of the day so they are involved with all the major finds of the time. I feel like I learn a lot about Egyptology into the bargain of fantastic characters and great mysteries.  My friend who introduced me to the series said recently, after visiting an Egypt museum exhibit, she hadn’t realized how much she had learned until she was talking about the exhibit.  It reminded me of touring the Egyptian wing at the British Museum back in 2005 and having the same realization as I explained to my mother why I recognized the names of the mummies. A book that teaches you as you solve a fun mystery and root for the characters? I need more of these in my life. I sort of live in dread of the day I catch up with Elizabeth Peters and where she is in the series because it will be a sad day when I need a comfort read and there isn’t a new Peabody mystery waiting for me on the shelves at the library. I think that is why I am not running through the series like I usually do but I recommend you rushing out and trying out the series if you haven’t yet. Amelia Peabody is the best thing that will ever happen to you.