Eating, reading, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

I have a deep love for Laura Ingalls Wilder--at first, when I was little, almost entirely because she was another Laura, but later because her adventures were so awesome. Now I have another reason to love: her written food-gasm. Pete Wells writes:

Some of Wilder’s accounts of hog butchering are exact enough to serve as manuals. If you have a big enough pot (and the fortitude to scrape out a pig’s cranium), you could follow her directions for boiling the head meat, then chopping, seasoning, cooling and shaping it. You would have head cheese. And while her description of Ma’s cooking off the fat in big iron pots over a wood stove might not inspire can-do confidence in a first-time lard renderer, it does, in fact, give a reasonably complete picture of the process, down to the skimming and draining of the crunchy solids, the cracklings.

Om nom nom. Plus, he includes recipes! Hurray, Laura Ingalls Wilder, greatest of writers and first food writer I ever cared about.

Friday is for naps

I was going to write posts for today but, it turns out, I have a lot of leftovers to eat. So nothing from me here, nothing from me at Pimp My Novel, lots of me at the fridge.

See you Monday!

Swine flu and the e-book team up, destroy America

Hand sanitizer out, readers. A new e-only extension of The Vaccine Book has been released, to directly address swine flu and the swiney vaccine. The author, Dr. Robert Sears, said:

Since I wrote "The Vaccine Book," several important changes have occurred that I wish I could have immediately updated. This is true for virtually any medical book, and it takes many months before such changes can appear in a subsequent book printing. eBooks can be immediately updated as new information comes out, and breaking health news topics can easily be added to compliment any health book.

Oh, whatever, "timeliness" and "necessary information." Clearly this is fat cat e-publishers trying to hide facts from the paper book reader. Plus there's also a government conspiracy to spread swine flu through the internet.

Waffle bacon: Life has meaning

Dear anyone who wants to buy me presents,

Please, for the love of all that is holy and a lot that isn't, purchase me a waffle iron. First there were waffle cookies, then waffle cake, and now waffle bacon (there's a video!). There are a lot of things I could say, but what it comes down to is this: I simply cannot continue to live without a waffle iron.

I am a holiday omnivore, and will pretend to celebrate anything you want me to in exchange for said waffle iron.

Sincerely,
Your best friend,

Laura C. Ombreviations