First, I need you to know that I cut my finger badly the other day and am finding typing to be more of a challenge than usual. There may be many, many more typos here than normal due to the large, bulbous bandage I'm sporting on my left ring finger. It's not a great look, and it's even less blogger-friendly. Oh well, press on I will.


I'm going to be making some marinated mushrooms this weekend. Once again, I'm aghast at the cost of the ingredients but I know the end result is so great that I'm willing to look the other way. (At least until my husband looks at the charge statement and asks "And just what did you make that cost $45?" I'll have to pay the piper then because he hates mushrooms and cannot fathom why on earth something he will never eat should create such a huge hole in the family budget. I might as well be canning mudpies for all the sense this makes to him.) The trouble with the mushrooms this year is that I know two people who absolutely adore them so I will have to be a better person and spread the mushroom love around. Both my father-in-law and my brother-in-law will find marinated mushrooms under the tree this year. This leaves precious little for me to enjoy, but is this not the spirit of the season? Assuming that I am happy with the result, I will of course share the recipe here - watch for it in a few days.


My husband has termed my recent reading "The Season of the Problematic Woman", largely because I've read biographies of both Hillary Clinton and Anne Hutchinson. Although the two women lived centuries apart and the fact that one of the portraits was admiring while the other much less so, it's amazing to me the parallels that existed in their lives. Both women are/were smart, outspoken and willing to live by their own lights in the face of dominant patriarchal cultures. They are/were also stubborn, impatient and blind to the (occasional) better outcomes that their actions might have yielded had they thought to step back. Although I have specific criticisms of each book (the title American Evita, for example, is something of a credibility issue) I recommend them both anyway. Read them together if you can - not just because I did (that was a coincidence) but because it's amazing to see how two similar women can be portrayed so differently and how the march of time hasn't changed very much about how intelligent, outspoken women with convictions are treated by their contemporaries.