A Small Issue With Word Choice in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt took me back to Savannah. It was an enjoyable nonfiction book that was meant to read like a novel; I thought it read like excellent journalism.

The book was well edited, but I did spot one word choice issue I think would have been better off corrected. In a chapter about a cotillion for college-age Black women, Berendt writes, “The debutante, escorted by her father, walked to a small platform, mounted the steps, turned toward the audience, and curtsied.” The problem with that sentence is that the young women are officially escorted on this night by college-age men, not by their fathers. Two sentences later, Berendt writes, “Then her escort approached from the other side, took her hand, and led her down from the platform as the announcer read his name and those of his parents, his school, and his major.” Two more sentences in the same paragraph refer to the young men as the “escorts”: “One by one, the debutantes and their escorts were introduced in this manner.” and “The escorts were dressed in black tie, wing collar, tailcoats, and white gloves.”

It would have been better to say “accompanied by her father” in that first sentence I quoted, so as not to confuse the issue of who was doing the escorting.

Two Different Drivers in The Bullet That Missed

I just finished reading The Bullet That Missed, the third novel in the Thursday Murder Club series of mysteries, which features four clever detectives in their 70s: Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron. I found a mistake late in the book that really should have been spotted by one of the many editors and copy editors listed in the acknowledgements. It doesn’t affect the plot; it just makes you wonder if you read those sentences correctly.

On page 285 of the hardcover library edition from Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, it says that “Ibrahim drove Elizabeth and Stephen” to the big mansion where the climactic action is all set to go down. On the very next page, it says, “I think Bogdan should probably have been with her, but he had to drive Elizabeth and Stephen up here.”

Tony said he spotted that mistake when he read the book. We are far from the first people to have noticed the issue of the two different drivers of Elizabeth and her husband, Stephen; there’s a thread about it on Goodreads. And that thread says the error was corrected in later editions to make Ibrahim the driver of Ron and his girlfriend, Pauline.

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Tony and I returned from a brief vacation in Savannah, Georgia, on Sunday. My friend Jack recommended I read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction book about a real-life murder in that beautiful city that is said to be so much better than the so-so movie directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack. I plan to pick up the book from the library later today.

The Shell Seekers

My friend Kathryn lent me The Shell Seekers, a novel by Rosamunde Pilcher that was published in 1987, the year I graduated from high school. I’m so glad she did. It’s a wonderful, multigenerational story about family, art, greed, and love. The title object is a painting that the main character, Penelope Keeling, has to figure out what to do with when she passes on. There’s so much more to the plot than that, but that’s one of the key drivers.

The copy of the book Kathryn let me borrow is a paperback published by St. Martin’s Griffin in 2015. It includes Pilcher’s introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of the novel. Ironically, one of the chief reasons Pilcher cited for writing this novel about familiar greed was that her children wanted her to make some good money after a string of novels that had sold only modestly.

As usually happens, while I was reading, I noticed a few editing-related issues I wanted to point out to my blog readers. These issues didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this fantastic work of art.

At the top of page 101, a “he” should have been a “the.” The entire sentence reads: “In the beam of his headlights he saw he house, square, white and Georgian, with the pleasing proportions and symmetry of that period.” I would have inserted a comma after “headlights” and a serial comma after “white.”

On page 168, the comma after “after” should be placed after “that” instead. (The British spelling of “meager” is used in that same sentence.)

In the next paragraph, the new-to-me word “chuntered” appeared in the following sentence: “The taxi chuntered down the dark, semi-deserted streets, and the rain poured down and it was still piercingly cold.” Merriam-Webster.com gives “mutter” as a synonym for “chunter,” so it’s used literarily, not literally, here. I would have followed M-W, which lists “semi” as a prefix not requiring a hyphen in most cases, and made it “semideserted.” I also would have inserted a comma after “down” because of the new subject “it” that follows.

“Chunter” comes up again on page 241: “The wind was light, scented with thyme, and the only sounds the occasional bark of a dog, or the pleasant chuntering of a distant tractor.” I see no need for the comma after “dog.” I would have inserted “were” or a comma to show the omission of “were” after “sounds.”

The second half of the following sentence on page 293 bothered me when I first read it: “The first rays of sunlight were slanting into her bedroom through the open window; these lay warm on the carpet, picked out the deep pink of the roses that patterned the curtains.” All I would do to it now is replace the comma after “carpet” with an “and.”

The “The” before “reached” on page 365 should be “They.”

Finally, the somewhat-strange-to-me word “a-brim” appears on page 376 in the following sentence: “The tide was high, the harbour a-brim with raging grey water.” M-W says to make that solid: “abrim.” It means simply “brimming.” (“Harbour” and “grey” are the preferred British spellings of “harbor” and “gray.”) “A-brim” comes up again a few pages later, on page 387, in the following sentence: “Since saying goodbye, she had been a-brim with the anticipation of seeing him again.”

The Cutest Spelling Error Ever in a Funny Novel

I just finished reading Paul Rudnick’s 2023 novel Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style. Like the Washington Post’s critic, I found it to be delightful. It was consistently funny and, at times, touching. It also had the cutest spelling error on page 214 of the paperback edition.

Instead of calling the grumpy farmer “crotchety,” the sentence starting with “I was like” implies he does a lot of crocheting.

The novel was otherwise well copyedited. The only other error I spotted as I was reading (without purposefully looking for issues) was an extra closing single quotation mark on page 220.

The quotation mark after either “new” or “Julian” should be deleted. Probably the one after “new.”

Good Wine, Wrong Preposition

Whoever had the final say on the design of the bottle for the 2022 Cline Family Cellars Ancient Vines Zinfandel—which stood up nicely to the spicy and delicious Korean cuisine Tony made for us last week—likes words. Lots and lots of words.

I’m OK with almost all of the words, but I have a quibble with the “of” in this last sentence of text before the website URL: “In order to survive, the ancient vines pushed their roots deep into the sandy soil and reward us with a wine of intense depth, dark fruit flavor, and a plush velvet finish.” The “of” works fine with “intense depth,” but it doesn’t work with “dark fruit flavor” or “a plush velvet finish.”

Even though there’s already a “with” in the sentence, I think the “of” has to be changed to “with.” That preposition works with all three objects.

Jane Eyre and The Thursday Murder Club

My last two reads have both been wonderful: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, the first in a series of mysteries¹ about four retirees living in a fancy nursing home who study police cold cases and solve real-life murders.

Like with Middlemarch, it took me some months to get through Jane Eyre, the Penguin Classics edition of which runs 489 footnoted pages. And I did enjoy reading the footnotes, which provided definitions or literary references I would never have understood/gotten otherwise.

Both books, though different in many respects, were strong on characterization. Jane was a principled, resilient, and charismatic girl/woman to root for. And the four main characters in TTMC were all believable as real people. As the series progresses² and the bodies start piling up, believability will inevitably become harder to buy into, but whatever happens in the remaining novels in the series, I’m going to enjoy spending more time with Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron.

JE wasn't as difficult a read as Middlemarch, but it wasn't easy either. Brontë can give Mary Ann Evans Cross a run for her money when it comes to complex sentences. Here's one from page 133: "I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement: the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house — from the grey hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me — to that sky expanded before me, — a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight-dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance: and for those trembling stars that followed her course, they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them." That sentence is punctuated by eight commas, six semicolons, three em dashes, and two colons.

On Saturday, Tony and I watched the film adaptation of TTMC on Netflix. If we hadn't already enjoyed the book so much, we might have reacted more kindly to the movie, which wasn't bad but paled in comparison. A number of characters were left out or minimized, and the plot was truncated a good deal. The motive for one of the murders was changed, though the perpetrator remained the same. I think it would have been better as a TV series to allow for more or all of the twists and turns to play out.

¹The fifth novel in the TMC series, The Impossible Fortune, comes out at the end of the month.

²Tony currently has The Last Devil to Die, the fourth book in the series, checked out from our local library.

"A Few Days" Isn't 24 or 48 Hours

I noticed what seems to be a time reference error—or at least an inconsistency that drew my eye—in an article about making Summer Peach Sorbet in the June 2025 issue of Food & Wine. The introductory text to the recipe (above) says to macerate the fruit in the refrigerator “for a few days.” But the recipe itself (below) says to macerate the fruit “at least 24 hours or up to 48 hours.” That seems like a contradiction.

Maybe for a busy home chef without a commercial-sized refrigerator, the editors decided two days was the maximum amount of time to bother macerating the fruit. But for whatever reason the change was made, I think an explanation for not macerating the fruit “for a few days” in the recipe would have been a welcome addition somewhere in the text.

The Most Difficult Novel I've Ever Read

I finished reading Middlemarch last week. I started reading this novel, written by Mary Ann Evans Cross under the pseudonym George Eliot, in early October.

It wasn’t just the book’s length (811 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition published in 1981) that made it the most difficult novel to get through I’ve ever encountered. It was also the challenging vocabulary—like that found in the novel about the anthropology grad student. I should have read this book on Tony’s Kindle to make it easier to look up definitions.

And it was also the complexity of the author’s sentences, which had me frequently reading sentences and even whole paragraphs more than once. Here’s my nominee for the most difficult paragraph in Middlemarch. It takes up most of page 568:

Lydgate, relieved from anxiety about her, relapsed into what she inwardly called his moodiness—a name which to her covered his thoughtful preoccupation with other subjects than herself, as well as that uneasy look of the brow and distaste for all ordinary things as if they were mixed with bitter herbs, which really made a sort of weather-glass to his vexation and foreboding. These latter states of mind had one cause amongst others, which he had generously but mistakenly avoided mentioning to Rosamond lest it should affect her health and spirits. Between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons who are continually thinking of each other. To Lydgate it seemed that he had been spending month after month in sacrificing more than half of his best intent and best power to his tenderness for Rosamond, bearing her little claims and interruptions without impatience and, above all, bearing without betrayal of bitterness to look through less and less of interfering illusion at the blank, unreflecting surface her mind presented to his ardour for the more impersonal ends of his profession and his scientific study, an ardour which he had fancied that the ideal wife must somehow worship as sublime, though not in the least knowing why. But his endurance was mingled with a self-discontent which, if we know how to be candid, we shall confess to make more than half our bitterness under grievances, wife or husband included. It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us. Lydgate was aware that his concessions to Rosamond were often little more than the lapse of slackening resolution, the creeping paralysis apt to seize an enthusiasm which is out of adjustment to a constant portion
of our lives. And on Lydgate’s enthusiasm there was constantly pressing not a simple weight of sorrow, but the biting presence of a petty, degrading care such as casts the blight of irony over all higher effort.

For my next novel, I think I’ll choose something light, maybe a P.D. James mystery. Tony and I are enjoying Dalgliesh, the latest TV series about James’s detective-poet, on Acorn.

Two Pies and a VFD

I made an Easy Vegan Pecan Pie for our Christmas dessert, and it was a big hit with our guests and us. The recipe, from the cleverly named website It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken, was perfect: pecans, bourbon, vanilla, a hint of cinnamon, and loads of sugar, including brown sugar.

I deviated from the recipe only to use agave in place of the corn syrup (a substitution endorsed by the recipe’s creator, Sam Turnbull) and arrowroot in place of the corn starch, so I could avoid consuming products of the corn industrial complex.

For New Year’s, I made a Cranberry Chiffon Pie. It was somewhat disappointing but not at all bad.

My main gripe was that I could taste the pomegranate juice used in the recipe almost as much as the fresh cranberries, with the result that the pie tasted more like a Cranberry-Pomegranate Chiffon Pie to me. Maybe the recipe creator tried cranberry juice, but the result was too tart?

I had planned to buy or make some vegan whipped cream to decorate the top, but the vegan whipping creams I found contained either oats or fava beans, neither of which would be good for Tony.

I decided not to make the decorative Sugared Cranberries because I didn’t feel like buying sanding sugar for this one recipe. As it turned out, I needed to make an extra run to Sprouts to buy more cranberries because I burned the cranberry-pomegranate jam the first time I attempted it because I was trying to get ahead on other steps in the process at the same time and wasn’t paying enough attention to my jam.

I once again, for both pies, used a Wholly Wholesome gluten-free and dairy-free crust. Someday, I’ll try making my own GF and DF pie crust, but Tony and I are both pleased with this store-bought kind. And making the filling was a good deal of work in and of itself: First, you make that jam—the recipe actually calls it a “loose jam”—out of the cranberries, pomegranate juice, and sugar. Then you dissolve gelatin in water and cook egg yolks combined with milk (I used cashew milk), salt, and more sugar. Then you add the gelatin to the egg yolk mixture and then that combined mixture to the cranberry-pomegranate jam.

The most time-consuming part was making meringue, which I chose to do by hand for some reason. I’m pretty certain my meringue got to the called-for stiff peaks stage.

Finally, you add the meringue to the cranberry–egg yolk–gelatin mixture, put the completed filling in the prebaked pie shell, and chill the pie until the filling is set.

I made the pie on Dec. 29, the Sunday before New Year’s, because I had plenty of time that day and didn’t know whether I would the next two days. We polished it off on New Year’s Eve.

On New Year’s Day, I made my second attempt at Eggnog Vegan Frozen Dessert. I was pleased with the final result but dissatisfied with the texture of the base after it was cooked and after it was chilled, so it’s still not ready for my cookbook.

This time, I tried incorporating two vegan eggs (instead of just one) into the custard base, and I tried cooking the base for longer—10 minutes—to try to improve the level of incorporation. The longer cooking time didn’t seem to make much difference; there was an awful lot of leftover vegan egg when I strained the base.

There were also little clumps of offputting, slimy egginess in the base after it was made and after it was chilled, and this base didn’t take on a pudding-like texture in the fridge like my bases always do when I let them chill overnight.

However, after I processed the base in my ice cream maker and froze the finished VFD solid, the texture was good. The VFD had little specks of egg throughout, but they didn’t bother me any.

The taste was perfect—a melding of bourbon (1 tablespoon), vanilla (2 teaspoons), and freshly grated nutmeg (1 heaping teaspoon). I used bourbon instead of rum this time because I already had a small bottle on hand that I’d bought for the Easy Vegan Pecan Pie.

My next attempt, which I may or may not blog about, will probably utilize only one vegan egg, and I will cook the custard for more than 10 minutes, hoping the smaller amount of vegan egg and longer cooking time will finally do the trick. I’m looking for a better texture at the in between stages of the VFD base, because I don’t think people will trust the recipe when they start to see unpleasant eggy blobs in their base.

A Handful of Errors in a Special Martha Stewart Holidays Magazine

There must have been some last-minute changes that didn’t get properly reviewed. Or some pages were rushed through production. Something had to have gone seriously wrong, because there were several mistakes in the Martha Stewart Holidays publication I bought at Whole Foods and anything with Martha’s name on it is typically scrupulously edited.

Let’s start with the cover, which is the scene of something that may not be a mistake but isn’t usually done. I would say “In The” should have a lowercase i and t, because short prepositions and articles tend not to be capitalized in headlines. Of course, the editors decided to lowercase the h in “holidays,” so all capitalization/lowercasing bets may be off.

I found what I would call two errors on the same page that was part of a package titled “The Thanksgiving Playbook.” (As far as I can tell, none of the articles I’ll mention are on marthastewart.com.) The first one is admittedly nitpicky.¹ I think leaves should be deleted after "1 bunch fresh sage." You don't get sage leaves in a bunch; you get sage sprigs in a bunch. And there's no "leaves" after "parsley."

The hyphen after white isn’t wanted in the stuffing recipe above. With the hyphen, it seems to read like “white-green and light-green parts only.”

In a collection of pie recipes, there’s an error that could have been caught by a spell-check²: fruit and filling need a space between them.

From an article titled “As Hue Like It,” there’s a comma splice, or comma fault, at bend in this caption; a semicolon should separate the two independent clauses that start with “The shammash has” and “position the other,” the latter of which has the implied new subject “you.”

Finally, in a collection of recipes headlined "The Main Event," the it that has all on both sides of it in the above caption needs to go away. Maybe there had been a concern about having all twice, separated by a comma, and an incomplete fix was made.

¹The adjective nitpicky, the nouns nitpick and nitpicker, and the verb nitpicking are hyphenless, but the noun nit-picking takes a hyphen, so says Merriam-Webster.

²M-W is fine with spell-check, spellcheck, or spell check as the noun's spelling but likes spell-check for the verb. The noun spellchecker definitely doesn't take a hyphen.

Missing Mushrooms in a Food & Wine Recipe

In the September issue of Food & Wine, there’s a collection of recipes under the headline “Autumn Pairings” and the subhead “Our favorite sommeliers share their go-to dishes and wine pairings for when the weather starts to cool.” One of the recipes is for lumpia, fried Filipino spring rolls that contain ground pork, napa cabbage, carrot, and scallions, among other ingredients. What they don’t contain is mushrooms, which is an issue because “mushrooms” are mentioned in the accompanying wine pairing note.

Maybe mushrooms were used in either the lumpia or the sauce at one point but were later taken out of the recipe. Or maybe the wine was initially going to be paired with both the lumpia and the recipe on the previous page, Cream of Mushroom Soup. At any rate, the association between mushrooms and the Chenin Blanc was taken away somewhere along the editing process, but the mention of “mushrooms” wasn’t taken out of the pairing note.

That error has been corrected on foodandwine.com, where the umami is attributed to the lumpia.

A Love Letter to Rioja

I’ve been meaning to write about wine here for a while now, because my favorite part of my job at Bloomberg Markets magazine was editing Elin McCoy’s Drinks column. I learned so much about wine from Elin, who is still writing about drinks, especially wine, for Bloomberg.

Today I’m going to share my love for Riojas, Spanish wines made mostly from Tempranillo that are often sold at a bargain price. Riojas are typically released when they’re at their best or almost at their best to drink, so you don’t need to have a wine cellar or huge wine fridge to enjoy them at or near their peak. Because they tend to be good values at retail, they’re also typically one of your best bets on an extensive wine list at a restaurant. If the food we’re eating calls for a red, we’ll often choose the Rioja.

Here’s wine educator Mark Oldman, in Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine, on pairing Riojas with food: “Like lighter styles of Pinot Noir and Chianti, Rioja’s lighter body and refreshing tartness make it one of the most versatile red wines for food, perfect for when your table is divided between red and white fans.”

Riojas carry one of three designations: crianza, reserva, and gran reserva. Crianzas are the least expensive. Reservas are more expensive but are likely to be of higher quality. And gran reservas are the most expensive (though rarely exorbitant) and of the highest quality; they’re made only in select years.

I’ve been buying the 2019 Herederos del Marqués de Riscal Reserva Rioja regularly at Whole Foods of late. It usually costs $22.49, but it was on sale the other day for $20.29. I also always get a 10% discount because I buy at least six bottles. (After doing a little research, I see I should be buying it from Total Wine instead.)

Tony and I get notes of vanilla and rose, with some peppery spice and a hint of citrus. This wine may not be for you if you love big, juicy fruit bombs, but it’s a steal if you enjoy elegant wines that will complement your meal.

Basset Tracks Vegan Frozen Dessert

I made my fourth test batch of Basset Tracks Vegan Frozen Dessert yesterday, and it was a success. I need no further tweaks to the recipe.

Basset Tracks was originally created as a dairy ice cream for my Huge Hound Frozen Desserts company in New Jersey. You can read about it here, at hugehound.com. In that same blog post, I wrote about making Anise Hyssop VFD, for which I utilized my own homegrown plants of that licorice-flavored herb.

As you might have guessed—or read in the blog post—in addition to being an homage to the huge hound in Huge Hound Frozen Desserts, Basset Tracks also references Moose Tracks, the national brand of ice cream. The original Moose Tracks (Denali Flavors now makes more than 20 flavors of ice cream) consisted of vanilla ice cream with a fudge swirl and peanut butter cups. My version, which is free of the most common allergens, consists of vanilla VFD with a chocolate swirl, a sunflower butter swirl, and chopped-up sunflower butter cups. It’s delicious!

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I figured I’m due to give an update on the VFD cookbook I’ve been working on. It’s coming along, but it won’t be ready anytime soon. It’s a tremendous amount of work, and as you can see from what I just wrote, I’m still in the recipe-testing phase. In addition, I’m making sure I have good photos of my VFDs, which is something of a challenge for me, because I’m not the most skilled photographer.

I also just bought the veganfrozendesserts.com domain, so I’ll eventually have a new website to use to promote the book.

Editing Changes I Would Make in One of the Best American Short Stories of 2023

I’m having a fine time reading The Best American Short Stories 2023, but as you can tell from the title of this piece, I’ve got some issues with one of the stories in the collection. As always, my intention in writing this kind of blog post is to point out these issues in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness, and, of course, to hopefully demonstrate that I’ve got solid editing skills. And the issues I found don’t at all prevent enjoyment of the story, which is “My Brother William” by Danica Li and which initially appeared in The Iowa Review.

“We cried when we were separated at school and the other kids made fun of us for it.” I would insert a comma after “school” because “the other kids” is a new subject.

“Towards the end of my stint with the website I flew to go visit him.” Another comma issue: Different publications have different rules about when a comma is needed after an introductory phrase, but because the introductory phrase in this sentence is so long, I can’t help but think a comma is needed, not just wanted, after “website.”

“—consciousness becoming like the trillion bits in a kaleidoscope which every ten seconds was given a vigorous shake—” The “which” should be changed to “that” because it’s the beginning of a restrictive clause that is crucial to the meaning of the sentence.

“Yearly its staff racked in journalism awards and fellowship grants, book contracts, top prizes in the field, plum speaking engagements.” I believe “racked” should be changed to “raked.” I don’t see any definition of rack that makes sense in that sentence.

“… secretly I thought that it was because our life paths were diverging, mine taking me deeper into the real world, him taking him deeper into worlds of his own creation.” Just like there’s (correctly) “mine” before “me,” the first “him” should be changed to “his” because Li is referring there to William’s path, not to William himself.

My Favorite Floral Arrangements From the Past Year

As I say on my About page, I enjoy making arrangements from flowers I buy at grocery stores. I figured I’d create a blog post featuring photos of my top 10 favorite arrangements from the past year. Here they are, in reverse chronological order:

This first one, from the end of September, consists of gerbera daisies, rice flowers, and what I refer to as fuzzy green filler.

This bouquet is a blend of roses and ranunculus, aka buttercups.

This one, from July, is all mums.

Purple alliums, white mums, and orange gerberas.

This photo, from May, is currently on my About page. Here we’ve got two kinds of mums and hypericum berries.

Astrantias, two kinds of mum, and leafy green filler.

Yellow and red ranunculus, carnations, and a filler named lepidium.

This arrangement from January utilizes sunflowers, mums (again), chamomile, carnations, and a filler I believe is called solidago.

For Christmas, I combined roses, mums, and winterberry.

Finally, from last November, here are carnations, mums, and leafy green filler.

Lemon Meringue Pie Fruit and Carrot Cake

I couldn’t resist the lure of a second tropical fruit named after a dessert, so I purchased some lemon meringue pie fruits from Miami Fruit. LMPFs are also known as rollinias, biribas (in Brazil), or, unfortunately, snotfruits, and they’re said to taste like either lemon meringue pie or peach cobbler.

I would occasionally get a hint of lemon but found them to be rather light in flavor overall. The texture of most of them was on the slimy side but nowhere near as slimy as to warrant the name snotfruit. They contained a lot of seeds, which I separated out from the flesh in my mouth and spit out.

The fruits varied in size and shape. They got blacker as they sat. I put some in the fridge once I was pretty sure they were ripe so we didn’t have to eat them all in, like, three days. I ate most of them when they were noticeably mushy to the touch. Maybe they only needed to not be rock hard.

Official taste tester Tony, my husband, got some lemon flavor from the first one he tried, but as the days progressed, he got less of it. I gave one to my friend Charlie, who didn’t find it to be all that amazing, but my coupled friends Bill and Chris really enjoyed theirs. Bill definitely got lemon meringue pie, which is his favorite dessert, and it reminded Chris of guanabana. (And this Specialty Produce webpage tells me it’s in the same family as guanabana.)

Bill is trying to germinate the seeds, so there may be more LMPFs in their future—and possibly mine.

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I’m so old-school, or maybe just plain old, I have two accordion folders of recipes I’ve clipped out of magazines over the years: mostly from Martha Stewart Living, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine, with lesser numbers from Gluten Free & More (and its sad-trombone-sounding previous incarnation Living Without ¹ ) and Gourmet. While winnowing out some recipes I decided I’ll almost certainly never make, I came across a winning recipe from the May 2015 issue of Bon Appétit called Carrot-Walnut Loaf Cake in the Breakfast Treats section.

The recipe was in a section of the magazine called r.s.v.p. that allowed readers to ask for a recipe from a restaurant or food shop. In this case, a reader from Brooklyn requested the recipe from New York's Breads Bakery. Breads is still in business and still making this carrot cake, though apparently now with currants—a small type of raisin that's dark in color and also called a Zante currant—instead of golden raisins.

Because the recipe called for beating a lot of air into the eggs and sugar, I figured I had to use actual chicken eggs instead of vegan eggs for this recipe. Aquafaba eggs might have worked well, but Tony can't eat chickpeas, so the liquid from canned chickpeas is also a no-no.

The recipe is pretty much perfect, but the second time I made the cake, I used slightly heaping half cups of raisins and walnuts, so I'd have a little more of those flavor and texture enhancers throughout the loaf. I also slightly heaped the tablespoon of flour the nuts and raisins are coated in to make sure they don't all sink to the bottom of the pan.

The recipe is available at Epicurious, with no credit given to Breads.

¹ I can actually understand why the publication was called that during its earlier years: There just weren't a lot of great options for people who needed to avoid gluten and other harmful subtances back then, so the focus was on finding ways to live without the bad things.

A Post in Which I Catch the Same (Small) Mistake in Two Novels

I recently re-read a wonderful comic novel by Andrew Sean Greer called Less. There’s a scene in Less in which Robert Brownburn, a lover of the title character, Arthur Less, wins the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, so it’s a case of life imitating art that Greer won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2018 for writing Less.

I’m currently reading John Boyne’s The Absolutist, a not-at-all-comedic novel about World War I and its aftermath. In between those two books, I read Greer’s follow-up to Less, which is called Less Is Lost. I enjoyed it, but not quite as much as its predecessor.

In both Less and The Absolutist, I found the same small mistake, one I wouldn’t have bothered to write a post about except for their exactness. On page 91 of Less, the article a is missing before moment:

At the top of page 75 of The Absolutist, the same mistake appears. (There’s also a missing word, probably at, after We look.)

Isn’t that a strange coincidence?

A Card Game Recommendation

Tony and I have been enjoying a non-word-related card game called Lost Cities. It wasn’t too difficult to learn, and I don’t know that it can ever truly be mastered, which adds to the fun. As with a lot of card games, we’ve gained knowledge about what to do in certain situations through multiple plays—situations like “Holy shit! The game is almost over, and I’ve got three expeditions I need to close out.” or “I’ve got an awful hand. Which card am I least likely to regret playing?”

The gist of Lost Cities is to score points by successfully carrying out expeditions to discover you-know-whats. There’s no storyline really; the details of each expedition are only hinted at in illustrated cards that are numbered 2 through 10 and must be played in ascending order. The basic game has five expeditions, in yellow, white, blue, green, and red. I got the version with a bonus sixth expedition, which is purple, and we’ve been playing the six-expedition version almost exclusively since our second game day. (We usually play on Sunday afternoons.) We played with only five expeditions this past Sunday, and the match was low scoring and ended too fast, so I think we’ll be sticking with six-expedition play.

In addition to those numbered cards are three wager cards in each color. Playing one or more of these cards lets you multiply your points by either 2 (one wager card), 3 (two wager cards), or 4 (you guessed it: three wager cards). These special cards can only be played before you start laying down numbered cards. I wish there were a second chance at using wager cards: maybe after you play a 5 or 6. The game is so well designed, by prolific game designer Reiner Knizia, the option to use wager cards sometime other than at the beginning surely came up during testing and was rejected.

It’s not uncommon to get in your initial hand of cards, say, two wager cards for an expedition and no other cards at all in that expedition’s color. If you’ve got a lot of high cards for other expeditions, which you will want to play later in the game, and no other wager cards, you feel like you don’t have much of a choice but to gamble on that expedition. In that situation, your daring move is just an act of desperation.

The big point I’ve left out so far is that it costs you 20 points to fund your expedition, so if you manage to place cards valued at only 14, for example, before the game ends, you’ll lose 6 points on that expedition. If you had started out with two wager cards, you’ll lose 18 points, because losses are also doubled, tripled, or quadrupled.

Each player is dealt eight cards at the beginning of a game, and that’s the number you will always have in your hand at the end of a turn. Every turn, you must play a card on your growing lines of expeditions or into the discard piles of different colors that sit between the two players. You then take a card from the top of the deck or from the top of a discard pile. (You can’t discard a card and then immediately pick it up.) I’m certain the number of cards was also tested extensively, and eight must have been the right number for making decision-making neither too easy nor maddeningly hard.

Speaking of eights, if your row of cards for a given expedition (color) is eight cards or longer at the end of the game, you get 20 bonus points. The bonus points are not multiplied if you’ve played any wager cards.

You’re supposed to play three consecutive games to determine the overall winner, but sometimes Tony and I stretch it out to four, if the person in the lead at the end of three games is willing to do so. A game is over when the last card in the deck is drawn; it can’t be played, which lends an air of anticlimax to the final turn.

I started out more cautious, usually initiating only three expeditions per game, but I’ve learned from Tony that the winner is often the boldest player. I’m more likely to discard cards that could eventually come in handy for me, hoping I can scoop them back later if I need to, but almost inevitably, Tony will grab them before I can. I’m also more likely to discard a card I know or strongly suspect Tony can use, but never something so helpful as a 7, 8, 9, or 10. Tony hangs on to cards that would be helpful to me like he’s trying to turn them into diamonds. Ha!

He’s right to do that because foiling your opponent is the only way to consistently win at this game. During a game this past Sunday, I discarded some purple cards that helped Tony get a row of eight, cementing his victory.

I decided to buy Lost Cities after watching this video from British game enthusiast Actualol in which he names his top 10 games for couples and this video from Homestead, Florida–based board game site The Dice Tower of Mike DiLisio, Zee Garcia, and Tom Vasel listing their top 10 casual, two-player games. Lost Cities was Actualol and DeLisio’s #1 game and Garcia’s #2 game.

Baking With Buckwheat and Fun(?) With Fractions

Inspired by a dog biscuit recipe that’s suitable for dogs on a renal diet,¹ I’ve started baking with buckwheat flour. Buckwheat is naturally gluten-free, but as with any food product, it’s ultimately only as GF as the equipment it’s processed on.

My usual go-to brand for baking ingredients is Bob’s Red Mill, which I like because it’s employee-owned and reliably high in quality. Bob’s buckwheat flour isn’t labeled as being GF, so I’ve been purchasing Arrowhead Mills’ instead; it’s both GF and organic.

In addition to Missy’s biscuits, which she adores, I’ve twice made brownies, once with a hint of cardamom, and three times made chocolate chip blondies, once with walnuts, once with hazelnuts, and once without nuts. I’ll share my thoughts on the recipes below.

First, though, let’s talk about buckwheat. Here are some buckwheat facts I cribbed from this highly informative page on the Artisan Grain Collaborative’s website:

• It’s a complete protein, meaning it contains substantial amounts of all nine amino acids the body can’t synthesize and so must be obtained from food sources.
• It’s high in fiber.
• It’s not considered to be a grain because it’s not part of the grass family, Poaceae.
• Instead, it’s a pseudocereal grown from a broadleaf plant that’s related to rhubarb and sorrel.
• It’s native to China.
• Buckwheat flour is dark in color because buckwheat typically isn’t hulled before being ground.

Buckwheat flour has a distinct flavor that’s grassy, nutty, and earthy. I often like it better when it’s blended with flours that have less-assertive flavors, like white rice and oat, but it worked great on its own in my first batch of powerfully chocolatey brownies.

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I found my initial recipe for Missy’s biscuits—the one that started me down the baking-with-buckwheat-flour path—at PawsomeOldies.com. I prefer this recipe from Fanny Urbanhomesteader on YouTube. The dough is easier to work with, and the end result seemed more like a traditional dog biscuit to me. But it’s a bit more work, stamping out the biscuits with a cookie cutter and rerolling the leftover dough to make additional biscuits. (I actually didn’t use a roller; I just pressed the dough with my lightly floured hands.)

If you read the comments on Fanny’s recipe, you’ll see two from me. One is in response to an assertion by another commenter that pumpkin purée is “very high in sodium,” which is ridiculous. The other is in response to what I believe was a legitimate concern about using baking soda in a renal-friendly dog treat. I suggested substituting sodium-free baking powder for the baking soda and baking powder because it had worked for me. Baking soda and baking powder often aren’t interchangeable—for reasons outlined very well here by baker and photographer Sally McKenney and here at Bob's Red Mill's website.²

I also mentioned replacing the whole wheat flour with a blend of 1 cup white rice flour, 1/2 cup gluten-free oat flour, and 1/2 cup GF buckwheat flour. That was the second time I made them. The first time, I used only buckwheat flour.

I didn't mention it, because I feared wearing readers out with too much talk of substitutions, but I also replaced the water with store-bought chicken broth that's free of added sodium. (Some commenters do go on about replacing four, five, or six different things and then have the nerve to complain the recipe sucked. That takes chutzpah.) We've also been giving Missy two servings of broth a day to keep her hydrated. She loves her some flavored water.

I got 70 biscuits out of the recipe. I placed the unbaked cut-out biscuits tightly on two half sheets because I wasn't concerned they would spread out and meld together.

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The enlarged image above shows the recipe I used for the brownies. It's on the back of the Arrowhead Mills buckwheat flour bag, and let me tell you, those fractions are tiny in real life. Even with my reading glasses on, I wasn't sure I was seeing the right numbers.

My first batch followed the recipe exactly except for substituting coconut oil for the butter.

For my second batch, I got the idea to insert a note of cardamom into the chocolate from this buckwheat brownie recipe³ created by Chicago-based baker Greg Wade. I incorporated 1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom into the dry ingredients, and that turned out to be a good amount. The cardamom was tangible but not intrusive. I also used 1/4 cup of white rice flour in place of an equal amount of the buckwheat flour.

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That's the recipe I used for the nut-free blondies; it was also on the bag of buckwheat flour. (These recipes aren't available on Arrowhead Mills' website.)

Because it's a drop cookie recipe, I had to convert it to a bar cookie recipe. Thankfully, ⁴ King Arthur Baking Company—which, by the way, is, like Bob's Red Mill, employee-owned—has a handy-dandy guide to doing just that.

I had a concern about the article's mention of having to multiply baking time by 3 when your dough is "around or over 3/4" thick" when pressed into a small pan. That's because 3/4" to 1" thick was given as "the general rule of thumb" for how thick your dough should be at the start of the article. Read my comment and the response from King Arthur's Barb and let me know whether you think my concern was valid and expressed well. Maybe I should have mentioned I was assuming the baker in question would be using only one small pan and all of the dough they had created?

Because I've twice mentioned this issue before on the blog, including once in a post about a blondie recipe, I won't make a big deal out of how the ingredients appear in different orders in the list of ingredients and the recipe instructions.

I liked these blondies better than Tony did. He found them to be too soft.

I made these gluten-free blondies from The Bojon Gourmet twice, first in a 9-inch-square pan, and then, after I’d bought two 8-inch-square pans, in a pan that size. Tony raved about the first batch, which contained walnuts. We liked the second batch even better; that batch is the one pictured above, with toasted hazelnuts that were a little too toasty, just before the pan went into the oven.

The Bojon Gourmet's Alanna Taylor-Tobin says in the directions that the final amount of cookie dough doesn’t look like enough to make a pan of blondies, and that's accurate and the reason I bought the 8-inch-square pans: It really didn't look like enough dough in the larger pan. But this recipe works like a charm and will probably become a staple in our home.

On another TBG page, about GF flour options, I found a suggestion to substitute arrowroot, which I always have on hand for my Vegan Frozen Desserts, for tapioca flour, which I don’t often keep in the pantry, so next time I’ll use 2 tablespoons of arrowroot instead of the 2 more tablespoons of white rice flour I went with in place of the tapioca flour. I used buckwheat flour in place of the oat flour.

You may have noticed that none of these recipes called for xanthan gum, which is often crucial for holding together GF baked goods, but I agree with the recipe creators that none of them really needed it.

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My last bit of questionable fun with fractions involves my remaking the Blueberry-Lemon Pie that was Tony's favorite pie from last summer. Last time I made it, I followed the filling recipe exactly except I omitted the two pats of butter, and in place of a homemade, buttery double crust, I used a store-bought GF and dairy-free crust on the bottom only. I found when I put the filling in the thawed crust that it was disconcertingly high and likely to bubble over a good deal without the top crust to contain it. I removed about a cup of the filling, and the pie turned out great.

This time, I purposefully went with only 5 cups of blueberries in the filling, as shown above. Since I'd reduced the volume of blueberries by one-sixth, I did the same with the other filling ingredients.

To find out how much less sugar I needed, I divided 3/4 cup by 6. That's the same as multiplying 3/4 x 1/6, which comes out to 3/24, which can be reduced to 1/8 cup. To find out how much sugar I needed in total (minus that 1/8 cup), I subtracted 1/8 from the equivalent of 3/4 cup in eighths, which is 6/8 cup. 6/8 - 1/8 = 5/8, so I had to use 5/8 cup of sugar, which is equivalent to 1/2 cup (4/8 cup) plus 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup).

To figure out how much less cornstarch I needed, I first converted 5 tablespoons into 15 teaspoons. Then I divided 15 by 6: 15 ÷ 6 = 2 3/6, which reduced to 2 1/2. To determine the new amount of cornstartch, I subtracted 2 1/2 from 15: 15 - 2 1/2 = 12 1/2 teaspoons. That's equivalent to 4 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon.

Although I don't exactly miss word problems from elementary school math class, I felt a sense of accomplishment from solving that real-world math problem. But I enjoyed eating the pie more.

¹ Our Missy was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease in September. She's been doing well on her two blood pressure medicines and a low-sodium, -phosphorus, and -protein diet.

² I might have suggested using sodium-free baking soda too. And maybe also some sodium-free salt, based on what the Bob's Red Mill page says. I'm glad the recipe worked out OK without all of that extra fuss.

³I have a quibble with the image for this recipe: It shows a design on top of the brownies, which was probably made using powdered sugar and a stencil or a doily. (Does anybody have doilies anymore?) The recipe doesn't say how to make that design, so I think the photo should have been of unadorned brownies.

⁴ Thankfully acts as a sentence adverb in this sentence. That means it's an adverb that applies to an entire sentence, not just a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.

Gluten Free & More Is Back

Like bread dough after a second proofing, Gluten Free & More has risen again as a print magazine. There’s no word on the mag’s website on how and when it emerged from its merger with Simply Gluten Free, but its return surely must have something to do with SGF founder and editor-in-chief Carol Kicinski being charged with four crimes related to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by supporters of Donald Trump.

According to the plea agreement regarding her case on the U.S. Department of Justice website, Kicinski pleaded guilty to one charge, “Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1).” Kicinski signed the agreement on October 27, 2022. There was no indication on the webpage about her case of when her sentencing would take place. The page was last updated on November 10, 2022.

According to the plea agreement, she faces a maximum of one year in prison, a $100,000 fine, and supervised release of up to one year. The federal court could also require her to pay back the federal government for any costs associated with her imprisonment, term of supervised release, and period of probation, if they are part of her sentencing. She also agreed to “allow law enforcement agents to review any social media accounts operated by [her] for statements and postings in and around January 6, 2021, and conduct an interview of [her] regarding the events in and around January 6, 2021 prior to sentencing.”

Two editing-related points, because this joint is supposed to focus on editing: I don’t know how federal legal code is written, but the way the part that’s pertinent to Kicinski’s case is phrased—“knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so”—isn’t grammatical in my eyes. You can’t remain “in … grounds.” If I had my druthers, I would make it say, “knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or enters or remains on any restricted grounds without lawful authority to do so.”

I also think the wording should be “on and around January 6, 2021” in the plea agreement. That preposition is used for specific dates; in is used for less-exact time frames, like “in April” or “in June 1968.”