Christmas is Like a Lite Brite

I recently was reminded of one of my favorite toys from my childhood. It was a Lite Brite. Light Brite was a creative toy where you put colored pegs into a board, perhaps following a pattern. The board was black and was lit from behind. So when you looked at it with the lights off, it was colorful and Christmas-tree-like.

My happy Lite Brite memories shot me out of the gate to decorating for the holidays.

Not wanting to wait several weeks so that a freshly cut real tree wouldn't dry out, I bit the bullet and splurged on a beautiful faux tree at one of my favorite stores. I also got a few little goodies for my babies to express their good cheer as well.

As soon as I cleared off the dining room table, I ran downstairs to dig out the boxes of ornaments, lights, figurines and other items. Then I got right to work. Here's the tree:

Then, up when the lights. It's so warm and cozy in here and I'm full of peacefulness looking at my adult-style Lite Brite.

Getting back to the goodies for my boys, here's Petey to wish you all some happy holidays!

And Elvis likes the tree too! He's having happy puppy dreams.

May you all share in the warmth of the season!

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Butternut Squash Casserole

Last week I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office, flipping through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. I will admit that I go straight for the last pages of the magazine because that's where the recipes are. And that's where I found the original recipe for this dish.

I love butternut squash. Its so awesome when it's roasted. It's sweet and savory and so colorful too. And the texture is so awesome.

So it was just me in the waiting room, and I knew I had to make this dish. My first instinct was to rip out the recipe from the magazine. But I decided to be big, and I resisted, and as soon as my appointment was over I went running home to look up the recipe online.

I'm sure that the recipe would have been wonderful without the changes I made, but I wanted to add some more protein and make it a meal in a bowl. So I added spicy apple chicken sausage.

For the pasta, I chose a noodle called campanelle. I'm guessing that campanelle means "bell" or "little bell" (campana in Spanish). And they do look like little bells!


They are really pretty when they're cooked.



The results were really nice. It was a hearty, warm-you-up-on-the-insides kind of meal; the perfect flavors for this time of year. I'll admit that I was expecting it to hold it's shape once it was cooked and it did not. But I didn't load it up with gooey cheese either.

I liked this dish a lot and I can see myself making it again. But since it didn't hold it's shape, I thought of an alternative approach for next time: add more liquids so it's sort of in a sauce. I'm thinking of milk with a flower thickener and going a little heavier on the Parmesan than I did this time.

So once you get through all that leftover turkey and the sides, here's a dish you may want to consider making!



Ingredients
1-1/2 lb. butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut in 1-inch cubes (3 cups)
2 Tbsp. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
8 oz. dried noodles (I used campanelle)
4 tablespoons butter
6 shallots, minced
6 chicken sausages (I used apple flavored, but Italian would be good as well)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 8-oz. carton mascarpone cheese
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup fresh Italian (flat-leaf) parsley, chopped
1 cup panko (Japanese-style) bread crumbs or soft bread crumbs

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Toss the squash, oil, and salt and pepper in a bowl. Place the squash into an 15x10x1-inch baking pan. I line my pan with tin foil because it saves me from washing it, which can be tough if any of the vegetables stick to the bottom.

Roast, uncovered, for 40-45 minutes, until the squash is lightly browned and tender. Stir the mixture twice during the roasting period.

While the squash is roasting, cook the noodles according to package directions in a large pot. Drain them and set them aside.

Saute the shallots in butter. Remove them from the pan and set them aside.

Remove the casings from the sausage and cook it in the same pan you just used so that it crumbles. You might have to actually chop it some with your spatula.

When everything is ready, add the noodles back to the pot. Then stir in the lemon juice, mascarpone, 1/2 cup of the Parmesan, 1/4 cup parsley, and 1/4 teaspoon each salt and black pepper. Mix it up well and transfer it to a greased baking dish.

In small saucepan melt remaining 2 tablespoons butter; stir in bread crumbs, remaining Parmesan, and parsley. Sprinkle it onto the noodle mixture. Bake, uncovered, 10 minutes, until crumbs are golden.

Serves 8-10.

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Quick Green Chile Stew ♥ Recipe

Today's vegetable recipe: A quick-quick and flavorful stew made with canned beans and canned green chile sauce but surprisingly good. Weight Watchers 4 points (Old Points) & 5 points (PointsPlus). Vegan.

~recipe & photo updated 2011~
~more recently updated recipes~

So here it is, the Sunday before Thanksgiving. For the next few days, kitchens all across the U.S. will be busy-abustle. The fridge will be packed. The counter space will be at a premium. The cook will be up to her elbows in flour. Family and friends will be arriving. And oh my, there's so much to do. Trouble is, despite all that food, there's nothing to eat, not til Thanksgiving dinner anyway!

So consider this a public service announcement: the one recipe to throw onto the stove to fill people's bellies, quickly, healthfully, flavorfully, inexpensively. Make time for this -- you'll be glad.
Keep Reading ->>>

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Book Club Books - My Reading Group's Book List

My book club's many-year reading list. Book ideas for book clubs and reading groups.

Because books clubs are so popular, especially among women and especially (I believe) among food bloggers and food-blog readers, I'm sharing the books my reading group has read -- we've been reading together since 1994!

Our book club is plenty social, but at the same time, serious about our reading. We hire a 'professor' and we read books in series, by theme. So our list may well inspire other reading groups, both new book clubs thinking about what books to read and established groups looking for new book ideas.

Naturally, we're always looking for new themes, new book ideas. If you've got a favorite, please leave a comment. If your own book club publishes your reading list online, let me know and I'll add a link here. The more the merrier!

More About the Red Wine Book Club

"Writers we admire and reread are absorbed into the fine print of our consciousness, into the white noise of our thoughts, and in this sense, then can never die."

- Ian McEwan on the death of Saul Bellow

#1 19th CENTURY WOMEN AUTHORS
Ethan Frome- Edith Wharton
The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath
Their Eyes Were Watching God- Zora Neale Hurston
Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
Wide Sargasso Sea- Jean Rhys
The Yellow Wallpaper- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Awakening- Kate Chopin

#2 MORE WOMEN AUTHORS
Frankenstein- Mary Shelley ♥
Beloved- Toni Morrison ♥
The Woman Warrior- Maxine Hong Kingston
Housekeeping- Marilynne Robinson
The Country of the Pointed Firs- Sarah Orne Jewett

#3 AMERICAN AUTHORS
Bastard Out of Carolina- Dorothy Allison
The Worn Path- Eudora Welty
Why I Love at the P.O.- Eudora Welty
A Good Man Is Hard to Find- Flannery O'Connor
also Good Country People & The Artificial Nigger
Betsey Brown- Ntozake Shange
Native Son- Richard Wright ♥
My Antonia- Willa Cather ♥
Written on the Body- Jeannette Winterson

#4 SENSUALITY
The North China Lover- Marguerite Duras ♥
Madame Bovary- Gustave Flaubert
The Immoralist- Andre Gide
The Vagabond- Colette
Giovanni's Room- James Baldwin
A Year in Provence- Peter Mayle (GUY THING)

#5 OFF-THEME
Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
Animal Dreams- Barbara Kingsolver ♥

#5 WAR
Red Badge of Courage- Stephen Crane (Civil War)
Goodbye to All That- Robert Graves (WWI)
All Quiet on the Western Front- Maria Remarque (WWI)
Testament to Youth- Vera Brittian (WWI)
The Caine Mutiny- Hermann Wouk (WWII)
Dispatches- Michael Herr (Vietnam)

#6 AFRICA
Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad ♥
Things Fall Apart- Chinua Achebe ♥
Out of Africa- Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) ♥
The Joys of Motherhood- Buchi Emecheta
July's People- Nadime Gordimer ♥
The Famished Road- Ben Okri
Middle Passage- Charles Johnson (GUY THING) ♥

#7 MEMOIRS
The Liar's Club- Mary Carr
A River Runs Through It- Norman McLeod
An American Childhood- Annie Dillard
This Boy's Life- Tobias Wolff
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood- Mary McCarthy
King of the Hill- AE Hotchner
Angela's Ashes- Frank McCourt

#8 HISTORICAL NOVELS
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil- John Behrendt
Paradise- Toni Morrison
A Take of Two Cities- Charles Dickens
Jewel in the Crown- Paul Scott
Corelli's Mandolin- Louis de Bernieres ♥
Angle of Repose- Wallace Stegner ♥ ♥
The Confessions of Nat Turner- William Styron
Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood- Rebecca Wells

#9 JEWISH LITERATURE
The Shawl- Cynthia Ozick
The Dean's December- Saul Bellow
American Pastoral- Philip Roth
My Name Is Asher Lev- Chaim Potok ♥
The Assistant- Bernard Malamud

CLARKSVILLE RETREAT
Einstein's Dreams- Alan Lightman

#10 ASIA
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China- Jung Chang ♥ ♥
The Joy Luck Club- Amy Tan
Some Prefer Nettles- Junichiro Tanizaki
Kitchen- Banana Yoshimoto
The God of Small Things- Arundhati Roy
Leave It To Me- Bharati Mukherjee

#11 CANADIAN FICTION
The Stone Angel- Margaret Laurence ♥
The Handmaid's Tale- Margaret Atwood ♥
The Stone Diaries- Carol Shields
The Beggar Maid- Alice Munro
Herland- Charlotte Perkins Gilman ♥
The Love of a Good Woman- Alice Munro

#12 NATIVE AMERICA
Black Elk Speaks- John Neihardt
Yellow Raft Blue Water- Michael Dorris
Ceremony- Leslie Marmon Silko
The Man Who Killed the Deer- Frank Waters (GUY THING)
House Made of Dawn- N. Scott Momaday
Education of Little Tree- Forrest Carter ♥
The Lake Dreams the Sky- Swain Wolfe
The Quiet American- Graham Greene

#13 ON OUR OWN
Half a Heart- Rosellen Brown ♥
The Poisonwood Bible- Barbara Kingsolver ♥

#14 IRISH AUTHORS
Dubliners- James Joyce
The Woman Who Walked into Doors- Roddy Doyle
House of Splendid Isolation- Edna O'Brien
The Last September- Elizabeth Bowen
Inland Ice- Eilis Dhuibhne
Van- Roddy Doyle

#15 GOOD BOOKS
A Town Like Alice- Nevil Shute ♥
The Adventures of Huck Finn- Mark Twain ♥
To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee "MOM THING" ♥
Anne of Green Gables- Lucy Montgomery
- Charles Dickens
The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway

MISSOURI SELECTION
Farewell to Manzanar- Jeanne Wakatsuki ♥

#16 BLOOMSBURY
Mrs. Dalloway- Virginia Woolf
The Hours- Michael Cunningham
Seabiscuit- Laura Hillenbrand (GUY THING) ♥
A Room with a View- EM Forster
A Room of One's Own- Virginia Woolf

#17 SCIENCE FICTION - we loved this entire series!
Stranger in a Strange Land- Robert A Heinlein
The Time Machine- HG Wells
Left Hand of Darkness- Ursula Le Guin
Brave New World- Aldous Huxley
The Sparrow- Mary Doria Russell ♥ ♥
Children of God- Mary Doria Russell ♥ ♥

#18 MAGICAL REALISM
Leaf Storm - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The House of the Spirits- Isabel Allende
Like Water for Chocolate- Laura Esquivel
A Wild Sheep Chase- Haruka Murakami (GUY THING)
East, West: Stories- Salman Rushdie
Love Medicine- Louise Erdrich
Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress- Sijie Dai ♥

#19 MYSTERY
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd- Agatha Christie
The Alienist- Caleb Carr
Thus Was Adonis Murdered- Sarah Caudwell
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman- P.D. James
Devil in a Blue Dress- Walter Mosley

#20 "CROSSROADS"
Mrs Caliban- Rachel Ingalls
The Life and Loves of a She Devil- Fay Weldon
Excellent Women (Penguin Classics)- Barbara Pym
The Secret Life of Bees- Sue Monk Kidd
Blue Shoe- Anne Lamott
The Dogs of Babel- Carolyn Parkhurst (GUY THING)

#21 LOST & CONFUSED
Life of Pi- Yann Martel
One So Bad We Won't Admit to Reading It!
Traveling Mercies- Anne Lamott ♥
Patron Saint of Liars- Ann Patchett

#22 UNDERGROUND THINKERS
The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison ♥
Notes from the Underground- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Slaughterhouse - Five- Kurt Vonnegurt
Beneath The Wheel- Herman Hesse

#23 SUMMER OF FAULKNER
As I Lay Dying- William Faulkner ♥
The Sound and the Fury- William Faulkner ♥
Light in August- William Faulkner ♥ ♥

#24 INSIDE OUT
"The theme flips the phrase 'on the outside looking in'. In each work, the narrator is physically, psychically or socially detached. In addition, these are touchstone authors and texts on the themes of time, memory, and place. In a topsy-turvy way, these books are literary window peeping."

Sula- Toni Morrison
A World of Love- Elizabeth Bowen
Portrait in Sepia- Isabelle Allende
Jacob's Room- Virginia Wolf
Summer- Edith Wharton
Cat's Eye- Margaret Atwood

#25 ISLAM
Minaret- Leila Aboulela
Midnight's Chidren- Salman Rushdie ♥
Reading Lolita in Tehran- Azar Nafisi
The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseini ♥
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close- Jonathan Safran Foer

#26 FAMILY
The History of Love- Nicole Krauss ♥
Gilead: A Novel- Marilynne Robinson ♥ ♥
On Beauty- Zadie Smith
Three Junes- Julia Glass ♥
The Memory Keeper's Daughter- Kim Edwards

#27 Canonical Classics
The Memory Keeper's Daughter- Emily Bronte
Lady Chatterly's Lover- DH Lawrence
Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
Howard's End- EM Forster

#28 Vampires
Dracula - Bram Stoker
I, Vampire - Michael Romkey
Salem's Lot - Stephen King
Interview with a Vampire - Anne Rice

#29 Christmas
Peace Like a River - Leif Enger

#30 Looking Back: The Narrative Art of Remembering
Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway
Here is Where We Meet - John Berger
Running in the Family - Michael Ondaatje

#31 Booker Prize Winners
The Gathering- Anne Enright
The Inheritance of Loss- Kiran Desai
The Sea - John Banville

#32 Mark Twain
(The Entire Mark Twain Collection (300+ Works) is available on Kindle for just $.99, no I didn't misplace the decimal point, for a buck.)
The Diaries of Adam and Eve and Other Stories
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Life on the Mississippi
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories

JOINT BOOK CLUB & POTLUCK
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals- Michael Pollan

CHRISTMAS
A Christmas Memory- Truman Capote

#33 ALL-MALE AMERICAN REVIEW
The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway
Tender Is the Night- F. Scott Fitzgerald
East of Eden- John Steinbeck
Catcher in the Rye- JD Salinger

#34 ANTEBELLUM FICTION: FROM BATTLEFIELD to HOME FRONT
"Historical fiction has long been a popular genre; it attempts to capture the manners and spirit of period with exacting detail. In particular, antebellum ('before the war' - usually references the American Civil War) fiction focuses the readers attention on not only the battle itself, but imagines the psychological and philosophical struggles of its protagonists. This series is a collection of novels that go beyond the battlefield to capture the struggles on the home front. " ~ Kami Hancock

Cold Mountainby Charles Frazier
Little Womenby Louisa May Alcott (also available free for Kindle)
March: A Novelby Geraldine Brooks
The Shackby William P Young (Christmas book)
The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil Warby Howard Bahr
Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States by William Wells Brown

#35 Defining Home
"Is it the places from which we come, or the soil where we plant our roots that defines who we are becoming? These novels offer insight into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires." ~ Kami Hancock

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

---

About the Red Wine Book Club
When I moved to St. Louis, I left behind friends I loved, many in the book club started by Lisa from My Own Sweet Thyme and me. (Imagine: the host was expected to mail reminder invitations! Via the post office!) Nearly immediately after arriving here, I was invited to join a wonderful book club, a men's and women's group with high intellectual aspirations. Its reading rhythm however, didn't work for me and I missed the camaraderie of a women's reading group.

So I gathered my best friends, we hired a 'professor' (usually a grad student) to help us select our books and guide our discussions. Fourteen years and four professors later, we're still intact, we're still reading and we're still ... drinking red wine. (Yes, ours is a social as well as intellectual group.)

'GUY THINGS' Ours is a women's book club but every so often, we invite/prevail upon the men in our lives to join us for a special "Guy Thing" book club. These gatherings are often as much party as book club but we always do hold a book discussion.

Enjoy! ~ Alanna

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