What I Did on My Summer Vacation
Baked, read, walked about, and did my happy dance
Saturday News Digest, V1/E23
Table of Contents
From the Bakery Dept.
A Master Artist at the Fruit Stand
Best Book I Ever Read
Out and About in the Neighborhood
Three Cheers for a Milestone!
From the Bakery Dept. Pound cake miracle
Just as I was packing our stay-at-home vacation bags, Anne Byrn, in her terrific newsletter, Between the Layers, revealed her trials and tribulations with a peach pound cake. Her baking skills and benevolent “you can do this, too!” manner are unmatched, but it took her 37 years to get it right. If she’s having this much trouble with a recipe, incompetent people should steer far, far away. Of course, that didn’t stop me, and I immediately assembled the cake’s ingredients under the wobbly security that I used to be fairly successful with a very nice lemon pound cake.
“I can do this!” I exclaimed to no one and proceeded to make the kind of mess that surrounded the lemon pound cake (see picture above). But you know what? Anne’s generous virtuosity resulted in even me producing a damn good peach pound cake!
You are much more skilled at baking than I’ll ever be, so go have fun whipping up Anne’s absolutely divine cake! And, if you want to, I wouldn’t mind at all if you invite me over for a slice and a friendly chat.
A Master Artist at the Produce Stand The colorful joy of Ruby C. Williams
Thirty years ago, if you were driving out of Tampa, Florida, on Route 60, you might have slammed your brakes and skidded into the dusty parking lot of a produce stand on the side of the road. Even if you really didn’t need any of the fine greens and fruits on display, you would be drawn out of your car by all the strange beauty tacked up and around the slightly askew wooden shed. Such was the magical power of Ruby C. Williams’ art. There were strawberries and a blueberry pie, strange animals, sassy women and tart sayings. God’s words, too, wise words you sought to memorize while marveling at the joyous beauty of Ms. Williams’ artistry.
When she died on August 8 at the age of 94, she left us jewels to forever behold.
Best Book I Ever Read Winner of the "I wish I was such a genius writer" award!
What Allie Brosh’s Solutions and Other Problems (Gallery Books, 2020) is not: a graphic memoir, bunch of comic strips, sane.
What Solution and Other Problems is: a collection of hysterically funny heartbreaking stories. In no particular order, they explore weird toddlers, dogs, daydreams, mental blips, and cancer scares. Her sister’s suicide and her parents’ subsequent divorce are mourned. She grapples with universal questions: Is life fair? Does it matter? Why is it so hard to be kind to yourself? She puts it all up for grab.
How can you tell a book is the best you’ve ever read? It helps you think deeply about life in a way you didn’t before you began to read it. It pulls you into seeing and feeling differently about who you are and want to be. I can’t say you’ll feel the same about Solutions and Other Problems, but that’s okay. I can see how that might be possible. Allie does, too.
Out and About In the Neighborhood A communal brick oven
One vacation chore was to search for someone to fix my 1932 technologically state-of-the-art Corona portable typewriter. There aren’t too many people out there who consider this a profitable profession, so it was a miracle when Yelp referred me to Ridgeway Typewriter, and it was only five blocks from my house! There I found Nicoli, sitting in an open garage jammed with what looked like every make and model of typewriter starting from the 1910s to probably the last IBM Selectric in the city. In other words, a typewriter freak’s paradise.
The encounter got even better when I spied a brick oven to the side of the garage with a bread slot on top and a wide grill below. It turned out the builder was the owner of Super Roofer, the father of a friend of my youngest son and his employer for about two months during one of my son’s teenage rough patches. The owner launched into explaining how he became fixated with constructing a brick oven in the alleyway behind his house. He started collecting bricks from jobs and then he and a friend figured out the precise particulars of brick oven design. Once completed, he, his friend, the block’s residents, and anyone else he told about it (like the whole neighborhood) fired it up and brought over pizza and bread dough, hunks of meat, and the occasional whole lamb and pig. Then they’d sit around long into the night, drinking beer, eating and swapping what my son later described as very, very tall tales (apparently, my son was a frequent participant). Mr. Super Roofer lamented that the oven hadn’t been used at all this summer because of the heat.
Nicoli restored my little typewriter to its former glory, and the next week I brought over my husband’s college Olivetti. That was when Mr. Super Roofer invited me to come around some weekend in the fall when the oven will surely be up and running again.
How lucky am I?!
Three Cheers for a Milestone!
Last Tuesday, the marvelous ag….@gmail.com signed up to receive America Eats!, thus becoming its 300th subscriber. That marks a 361 percent increase to our little band of readers in just 18 months!
Scoff, if you must, all you with thousands of readers and Substack people who won’t include me in their special food section until I have a hell of a lot more, but consider this: As a cranky semi-recluse, my original mailing list was 83 addresses, and many of those were doctors, ex-friends and colleagues, and home repair contractors. They pretty much cut and ran after the first month, for a long time reducing the number to about 67 souls. So the fact that I now have 300 astonishingly wonderful people reading me is unbelievably gratifying and stupendous. I’ve come to think of America Eats! as a weekly book reading where 300 people show up interested enough to hear what rattles around in my head. Any publisher/author would be floored by such attention. This is why I have been doing my frantic happy dance!
Thank you, thank you, thank you all for sticking with me! And a big old hug to ag….@gmail.com.
And while you’re at, let’s talk! What did you do on your vacation? Have your own happy dance you’d like to show us?
Congrats on the milestone! :) And what a wonderful neighborhood find!!
Nothing more gratifying than people who want to participate in what you do! Congrats!