Read this: The Skinny Girl Dish: Easy Recipes for Your Naturally Thin Life

So, despite my love for the Kindle, in addition to magazine reading being lame on it, I can't wrap my head around reading cookbooks on it.  I want to touch cookbooks, pass them to my husband, possibly burn the corner of it while cooking dinner*,  and gaze lovingly at them in full color.

So, I bought The Skinnygirl Dish: Easy Recipes for Your Naturally Thin Life in paperback.  Which, since it doesn't have pictures, I could have bought it on the Kindle.  After I read The Martha Rules and Martha talks about her ideas for Everyday Food, and how it was really critical to their success that EVERY recipe have a picture, I'm totally annoyed when cookbooks don't have pictures for each recipe.  I received** Rachael Ray's Book of 10 and I'm so bored by it because it doesn't have pictures.  I can't get interested in the food because I can't see it.

But I wasn't bored by The Skinnygirl Dish, and the book really spoke to me on more of a "how you should cook" level and less of a recipe level.  Months after reading the book, two great tips have really stuck with me.

1)  Don't be a hero.  There's no reason to make, say, spaghetti sauce from scratch if you can get a good bottled sauce.  Having a chef say, "Hey!  Cut corners!"  was refreshing after Martha-style sense of do it all from scratch.

2)  Go with what you have.  Recipe calls for whole milk and you only have skim?  Use skim.  It calls for almond extract and you only have vanilla?  Use vanilla.  This book really freed my mind to think about experimenting when cooking.   I'm a follow the rules, make a plan type of girl, not a fly by the seat of my pants type at all.  But reading this book gave me the confidence to use chocolate milk when my buttermilk was yucky when making pound cake, instead of whining about the fact that the buttermilk was yucky and then talking my husband into running to the store and gave me the great idea to add chocolate chips to a formerly healthy banana bread recipe.

And in case you didn't know, Bethenny Frankel is on the Real Housewives of New York, a terribly addictive reality show on Bravo and she was a contestant on the Martha Stewart version of the Apprentice, a show I'm still grieving that I didn't audition for (I was sick when the auditions came to Austin).

*This did happen to me.  It was a small leaflet type Pampered Chef cookbook, but I managed to set the corner of it into my gas stovetop and then wonder several minutes later what the burning smell was.

**I received it, ironically enough, when I attended the Martha Stewart show.  We'll talk about that soon.

Read this: Poser: My Life in twenty-three yoga poses

We've already discussed my love for the Kindle.  But I've really failed to explain to you how much I read. And because of the sampling feature of Kindle, I also read a lot of samples and then never buy the book, therefore saving myself money on books I would hate, but would read all the way through because I spent so much money on the book.  As I get close to my 100th Kindle book download, still a few months shy from my 1 year anniversary with the Kindle, I feel it's time to share with you things I've read (or reading) that I think you should read too.

Right now, I'm currently 83% of the way through Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses    And I'm in love, mostly because this author in the first few chapters nailed some of my feelings about parenting that I really haven't seen in a way that wasn't an entire book lamenting current parenting in a way that makes you feel worse about your feelings and you don't have interest in reading while you are trying to actually, you know, parent.

I love my children with my whole being.  I hated breastfeeding.  (In case you don't have small kids now, you must breastfeed for a year.)  Child1 ate for 45 min to an hour at a time.  She took her time eating and really enjoyed it.  I figured out how to surf the web, watch TV, and read books during this hour I spent every two to three hours (timed at the beginning of the feeding, not at the end -- so I fed the baby for an hour, had a one to two hour break, then repeated.)  In case we haven't met, I'm a voluptuous woman BEFORE I had children and keeping my breasts under wraps has been a huge part of my fashion choices.  The thought of unleashing these puppies in public seems incredibly at odds with my life goals, and the thought of say, being in a restaurant for an hour with my breasts hanging out while my child ate sounded terrible when I could be at home on the couch all comfy and exposing myself to no one.  I support any mother who wants to NIP (that's nurse in public for the uninitiated), but it wasn't a choice that I felt comfortable with.  So, I was housebound with Child1 for a long time.

The breaking point for me was when I was watching my husband clean the kitchen 4.5 months after my child was born and thinking to myself, "I would love just to get up whenever I want and clean the kitchen."  Yes, I was jealous of my husband's ability to clean the kitchen on a whim.   After realizing how ridiculous that thought sounded, I dropped a feeding, and kept dropping until I was done six weeks later.  

And the guilt that followed was terrible. Child1 was born in the late fall -- cold and flu season.   I was convinced she was going to die or suffer from a disease and it would be all my fault.  With both my children, I pumped at work, and with Child2, I just stopped producing enough milk at work to sustain him (after overproducing milk during my maternity leave.)  Everything I read to produce more milk said to get more sleep (as if I didn't have a newborn), reduce stress (I'm back at work) and pump more often (no thank you!)  So I started dropping pumping sessions.  And more guilt followed, as my spring Child2 came into cold and flu season.  

So, you can imagine my bonding with the author, when in the first chapter, I read:

Lucy wasn't yet ten months, and I wasn't supposed to quit nursing until at least a year.  If you think this sounds like a frivolous dilemma, or not worth losing sleep over, then that just goes to show you were not a new mother in a liberal enclave at the end of the last century.  . . . . I padded around in a complicated gumbo of guilt and relief.  . . . Inside, I secretly exulted.  I had my spleen to myself again.  

My new BFF Claire goes on to find meaning and solace in yoga, though not in a spiritual sort of way, and more like a getting out of the house when you have a baby sort of way.  I've done yoga off and on for the last 10 years, and it's not my thing, really, though I enjoyed Mommy and Baby yoga when I was on maternity leave (otherwise known as an activity I can take the baby to and get out of the house).  The book uses yoga poses to describe her life over the course of a decade.

Another thing Claire spoke about was whether or not she meshes with her hometown (Seattle) and eventually she and her husband move.  This just made me really realize that I don't really mesh with the whole Keep Austin Weird vibe here in Austin.  I'm not moving, but it did make me start thinking about what would be my spiritual hometown (Paris perhaps?)

A Love Letter to: Publishers on Amazon.com

Dear Publishers:

As I've mentioned before, I have a Kindle. Which I love.  Every time I hear about a book that sounds interesting, I get on my iPhone or computer and send myself a book sample.  When I finish one book, I read some samples until I find something else to read.  As a result, I'm reading a lot more.  And I'm enjoying the books I read a lot more.

Originally, Amazon had priced all books on the Kindle at $9.99.  After the iPad and Apple came out with their own e-Reader software, allowing you publishers to price books at any price, Amazon was pressured to do the same.  And occasionally, this plan does something completely ridiculous, like PRICE THE PAPER COPY OF THE BOOK HIGHER THAN THE ELECTRONIC VERSION.

Take Eat, Pray, Love.  I'm watching a commercial for the new movie, starring Julia Roberts, and it looks like fun. It's all Julia in her perkiness.  And I think, "Hey, even though I've already decided not to read this book because of the reviews on Amazon, but this movie looks like fun, so I'll download a sample and see."  Only to discover that the cost of the Kindle version of the book is $12.99 while a paperback version is $8.25.   This book, published in 2007, is the same cost as the author's new book published at the beginning of the year and only available in hardcover.

So Penguin Publishing, I get it.  You don't really care if I read the book.  And hey, I'm fine with that.  I already rejected your book once.  Now I have a sign that it really wasn't meant to be.

Sincerely,
Me

I Am Not Cool Enough For: the Twilight Saga

I read Twilight.  I wanted to like it.  I really did.  But I didn't.  There was a lot of staring.  A lot.  And it's a book, so all that staring was quite impressive.  And there was so much missing in the dialog, apparently you were supposed to infer things by the staring, soI kept thinking that I missed a page or something (this was also after I had bought a book that had been mis-bound and so it literally skipped from one part to another, so I was particularly sensitive about this.)

I found the whole thing so boring, I've lost interest in typing about how boring it was.

I did see the movie.  It was just like the book.