Monday Night Dinner

Last week Reading Rainbow broadcast its last show and ended an era.  Long before I knew who Lieutenant Geordi was, or realized that his nifty visor was really just a spray-painted banana clip, I knew who Levar Burton was because he read to me on a regular basis.  Reading Rainbow was not actually one of my favorite PBS shows – I liked 1-2-3 Contact or Mr. Rogers better – but like every other adult of my generation I can sing the opening lyrics of Reading Rainbow and I was horrified when I saw the news.

Books and food were and are the mainstays of my life, and to a lesser extent food in books.  The very first recipe I can remember making was maple snow from the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook, closely followed by apple turnovers from the same book.  And when I say making, I mean my mother made it while I looked on because I in about first grade at the time.  A couple of moves later, I convinced my mother that we needed to make gingerbread men for Christmas because that’s what Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy did.  The recipe I still use for homemade lemonade comes from the Anne of Green Gables cookbook – although the recipe they give for raspberry cordial is probably not what got Anne and Diana tipsy, my mother’s somewhat more lethal recipe involving raspberries marinated in vodka and sugar is probably closer to what they drank.  I can remember my mother pulling out the Winnie-the-Pooh cookbook for soothing honey drinks when I was sick.  And I’m still disappointed that all the food they talk about in Jane Austen novels is significantly less appealing than she makes it sound.

My mother is a librarian and there was no way that I was going to escape my childhood without a thorough indoctrination into the world of books.  She read to me every night until I was in high school, and even then I kind of missed it.  The first thing we did whenever we moved anywhere new was to find the local library.  I didn’t really need Reading Rainbow to convince me to read – usually I had to be convinced to do anything else – but it was always tangible evidence that other people found reading as magical as I did.  After 26 years it seems hard to imagine PBS without Levar Burton telling children . . . .

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high
Take a look, it’s in a book – Reading Rainbow.

I can go anywhere!
Friends to know and ways to grow – Reading Rainbow.

I can be anything!
Take a look, it’s in a book – Reading Rainbow.

Reading Rainbow, Reading Rainbow, Reading Rainbow, Reading Rainbow!

Pulled Chicken
Tomatoes
Lightly Pickled Cucumbers
Cole Slaw
Salad

Pulled Chicken
Confession, I wanted to make a different barbeque sauce to go with the pulled chicken this week and so I spent the weekend clicking on links on epicurious and foodtv.com and random food blogs until I found a recipe that sounded amazing – Brown Sugar and Coffee Barbeque Sauce.  Unfortunately what I realized later is that if you add even a little bit of cumin (1 tsp in 32 oz of tomatoes) to tomatoes it will taste like chili no matter how much brown sugar or molasses you add to your pot.  So, I scrapped that and made my usual barbeque sauce at the last minute.  As a result, I am still in search of a new barbeque sauce recipe.

Recipe previously given: “They’re breaking down the hegemonic structure of the heteronormative language system” edition

Lightly Pickled Cucumbers

Recipe previously given:  Farmer’s Market Addiction

Tomatoes
I defy anyone to not be entranced by these, and I say this as a child who really did not get why my mother thought that fresh Hanover tomatoes were all that.

Cole Slaw

Recipe previously given:  Fried Chicken Dinner