November 2021 Newsletter

Life in Mexico

We’re back in Manzanillo after a summer sojourn in San Miguel de Allende, and we’re looking forward to seeing all our friends at the Mujere’s luncheon, being held on Wednesday November 3 at the delightful Oasis Restaurant!

In addition to the delicious meal and guest speaker, we’ve got a few treats of our own!

Laurie Austin Brown will be selling her brand-new line of coconut bowls – excellent for soups, stews and other delights (see the red curry shrimp recipe below).

I will also be doing the first paperback signing for The Hotel Seamstress!

You can also order the Kindle version here!

A story of love, and war,

And how one person can change the course of history.

Recipe; Red Curry Seafood

Oral traditions date the first servings of this delightful meal to the legendary kings of Siam in the Iron Age. But the basic recipe has remained the same down through the ages; spicy, fresh and delicious on rice!

Ingredients

1 lb of shrimp, peeled and deveined. 

1 lb of white fish, cut into cubes

10 mushrooms.

½ cup of snow peas

1 can of coconut milk

1 tsp of red curry paste

1 tsp of sugar

¼ cup of fish sauce

1 lime peel, grated.

8 leaves of basil.

Cooked Jasmine rice

Heat the coconut milk and add red curry paste, sugar, fish sauce and grated lime in a covered pan.  Throw in the chopped fish, snow peas and mushrooms.  Cook on medium (covered) until fish is white. 

Add basil and serve in rice.

Enjoy!

Book Review; The Lincoln Highway

By Amor Towles

The premise is simple; a group of young people set off on a post-WWII journey across the country in search of their future.

The celebrated author of A Gentleman in Moscow, however, gives depth and profundity to the book by creating a pantheon of unique characters. The main protagonist is a young Nebraskan farmer by the name of Emmet who has just been released from juvenile detention for manslaughter. His traveling companion is his eight-year old brother Billy, recently orphaned by the death of their father. Joining then are two juvenile home escapees, Duchess, the son of a former vaudeville star, and Woolly, the scion of an Eastern Seaboard magnate.

Emmet and Billy’s quest to go to California in search of their mother is quickly derailed when Duchess steals their car and heads to New York to help claim Woolly’s inheritance. They meet all sorts of eccentric characters along the way, each one piling one complication after the other on their ultimate mission.

The story begins slowly; it took several starts before I warmed to the characters, but I’m glad I persevered, as the book is a delight.

And importance of The Lincoln Highway to the story? Here’s the author’s own words.

“When I conceived of the story, I had no idea that it existed. I stumbled across it as I was mapping out the route that the characters were going to take out of Nebraska. Once I learned the history of the highway—and that it extended from Times Square to San Francisco—I couldn’t believe my luck. Almost immediately, the Lincoln Highway reinforced or reshaped a number of the book’s themes and events.”

I highly recommend The Lincoln Highway!

TV Series Review; Seinfeld

Streaming on Netflix

Boy, this one takes me back. When Seinfeld first aired in 1989, they still had TVs with tinfoil wrapped around the rabbit ears and phone message machines with tape cassettes.

But the premise of the series – a show about nothing – holds up today as well as when it first aired. Some TV series date poorly, but the casual insanity of each Seinfeld episode (a bet on who can hold off masturbating the longest, for instance), simply defies pigeon-holing.

I had also forgotten that the original seasons featured Jerry Seinfeld doing his stand-up. It’s a joy to watch him take the most mundane topics and turn them upside down. (“I’m watching TV and they’re showing me commercials about how to get out blood stains – if you’ve got a T-shirt with blood stains on it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem.”)

Each one of the principle actors – Michael Richards as Kramer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine, Jason Alexander as George  – have long gone on to other endeavours, but it’s a delight to see them all so young and full of vitality.

And the series? Once it hit syndication, the real money started flowing in, to the tune of an estimated $4 billion; it’s been reported that Netflix paid well over $500 million to stream all 180 episodes. Seinfeld is, by far, the most successful TV comedy ever.