The American Robin is one of the most familiar song birds of North America. With their gray upper parts and reddish orange breast they are easy to identify. During the fall and winter they roost in large flocks spending most of their time in the treetops. In the spring they move into backyards and nearby parks and can often be seen running across the lawn or tugging on a worm.
I took this photo last weekend at a park near my home. There was a small group of robins poking around in the leaves on the ground and a few were in the trees eating berries. Last week there were a few in my yard, perhaps checking out nesting sites. Spring is around the corner.
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Saturday Snapshots is hosted by Alyce. Head on over to At Home With Books to see more great photos or add your own.
Good Mood Food: Simple Healthy Homecooking
by Donal Skehan
Genre: Cooking
Publisher: Mercier Press
Publish Date: March 16, 2010
Format: Paperback | 288 pages
Simple, healthy homecooking is exactly what you will find in Good Mood Food. The recipes are simple with easy to understand instructions and beautiful pictures. They use fresh, healthy ingredients and most are readily available.
The book is divided into sections such as breakfast foods, main dishes, snacks and desserts. I liked the layout. Each recipe was on one page on the right with a full color picture of the finished recipe on the left page. Turn the page and you move on to the next one. Unfortunately the type of binding used does not allow the book to stay open. A perfect cookbook, for me, is one that will lay flat on the table so I can reference the instructions and ingredients while I’m cooking.
This book was published in Europe so I had to translate temperature and measurements but that was not a problem and shouldn’t deter anyone from trying these recipes. I used one of the many conversion sites on the net, Traditional Oven is one of my favorites, to convert the measurements.
There are a number of recipes that I want to try. The first one I choose was Apple and Oatmeal Muffins. I made a few modifications substituting cow’s milk for goat’s milk and added a little more cinnamon. (I know goat’s milk is healthier but I didn’t have any in the house.)
Apple and Oatmeal Muffins
Ingredients
2 eating apples, grated
100g / 3½ oz raisins
90g / 3½ oz rolled oats
105g / 5 oz wholemeal flour
90g / 3½ oz brown sugar
200ml / 7fl oz goat’s milk
1 egg
2½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
Preparation
- Preheat oven to 200°C / 400°F
- In a large bowl mix the flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon.
- Add the egg and milk to the center of the dry ingredients. Using a wooden spoon gradually incorporate the dry ingredients to form a thick, wet mixture.
- Fold in the grated apple and raisins.
- Spoon even amounts of the mixture into baking cases in a muffin tray.
- Sprinkle with a little rolled oats and bake for 25-30 minutes.
- Makes 8 to 10 muffins.
- These can be frozen. I put a few in individual baggies for breakfast during the week and they came back perfectly.
The author has a blog, The Good Mood Food blog, which is worth checking out. Lots of recipes with great photos of the finished dishes.
Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Participation is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs.
The Story of Stuff
The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better
by Annie Leonard
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Free Press
Publish Date: February 22, 2011
Format: Paperback | 368 pages
Rating: 4 of 5
Americans live in a consumer society. We are constantly bombarded by advertising and encouraged to buy more and more. Purchasing something new is supposed to make us happy. We are even told it’s patriotic to shop, spend money, get the economy moving. But how many of us ever think about what it takes to produce all this stuff and ship it to stores or our homes and then haul it off to the dump to dispose of it when we are done with it. After reading The Story of Stuff, it’s difficult to look at ‘stuff’ the same way again.
I consider myself a green person. I reduce, reuse, recycle, conserve energy, grow my own veggies, compost everything I can and generally try to be a good citizen of the planet. After reading this book I have learned there is much more to the life cycle of a product than most of us ever realize. The author takes us through the five stages with a chapter on each: Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption and Disposal. Each stage consumes resources and creates pollution, and not just here in the US but around the world.
An eye-opener for me was learning that while recycling is good it’s not the solution. We are consuming resources faster than the planet can replenish them. The problem is excessive consumption. The author found that when she asked, “Are we consuming too much?”, it was not a very popular question. Our economy now depends on consumption at an ever accelerating rate.
As consumers we’ve become resigned to the fact that our stuff is disposable. It wasn’t always this way. Things used to last years and years. Now they are designed with planned obsolescence and fall apart quickly and cannot be repaired. That particularly resonated with me. A few months ago my printer stopped working. This was a perfectly good printer that I really liked and I wanted to get it repaired. Seems simple enough, right? Wrong. The cost to fix it was almost as much as buying a new one. I did some research and in the end I opted to fix it anyway because the ink cartridges it uses are half the cost of the newer models plus this kept my printer out of the landfill. All too often it doesn’t work out this way and the item ends up in the dump.
The Story of Stuff is a wealth of information and knowledge on the hidden costs of consumerism and what we can do to make it better. The author presents the facts without being preachy and writes in a humorous and engaging style. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves, does buying more and more stuff make us happier?
Watch The Story of Stuff online movie on YouTube.
Visit The Story of Stuff webpage.
About the Author
Annie Leonard has spent nearly two decades investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues. She has traveled to 40 countries, visiting literally hundreds of factories where our stuff is made and dumps where our stuff is dumped. Witnessing first hand the horrendous impacts of both over- and under- consumption around the world, Annie is fiercely dedicated to reclaiming and transforming our industrial and economic systems so they serve, rather than undermine, ecological sustainability and social equity.
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A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for review as part of The Free Press Blog Tour.
The Story of Stuff was printed on recycled paper.
Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.
Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. This month’s host is Laura @ Library of Clean Reads.
Last week my new books were:
The Sandalwood Tree: A Novel by Elle Newmark from the publisher for review.
In 1947, an American anthropologist named Martin Mitchell wins a Fulbright Fellowship to study in India. He travels there with his wife, Evie, and his son, determined to start a new chapter in their lives. Upon the family’s arrival, though, they are forced to stay in a small village due to violence surrounding Britain’s imminent departure from India. It is there, hidden behind a brick wall in their colonial bungalow, that Evie discovers a packet of old letters that tell a strange and compelling story of love and war involving two young Englishwomen who lived in the very same house in 1857.
A Lesson in Secrets: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear from the publisher for review. This is my first Maisie Dobbs novel. I hope jumping in to the middle of a series will not be a problem.
In the summer of 1932, Maisie Dobbs’ career goes in an exciting new direction when she accepts an undercover assignment directed by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and the Secret Service. Posing as a junior lecturer, she is sent to a private college in Cambridge to monitor any activities “not in the interests of His Majesty’s Government.”
One of my favorite birds is the Northern Cardinal. They are not migratory and they don’t molt into a dull plumage like many of the other songbirds. They keep their vibrant colors year round and are a delight to see against the dull winter landscape. Cardinals are found in the Eastern and Central United States, Southern Canada and Mexico. Seven states claim the cardinal as their state bird.
I have several pairs that frequent the feeders in my yard although they often prefer to eat the seeds that have fallen on the ground. Their favorite seeds are safflower. If you want to attract cardinals, try serving this type of seed. As an added bonus, squirrels don’t much care for safflower; grackles and starlings don’t like it either.
Both the male and the female cardinal sing. That is unusual for song birds, usually only the male sings, but the female cardinal will sing to her mate and even sing while sitting on her nest.
Any day now the songbirds should begin singing again as they look for a mate. I can’t wait to hear those cheerful sounds for it means spring is near.
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Saturday Snapshots is hosted by Alyce. Head on over to At Home With Books to see more great photos or add your own.
What great books did you hear about/discover this past week? Share your FRIDAY FINDS! This weekly event is hosted by Should Be Reading.
I read a review for this book a few days ago at Leeswammes’ Blog that aroused my interest. I generally enjoy books that personify animals, ie Watership Down, but this book has stuffed animals as their characters. It’s a murder mystery story that takes place in a town of stuffed animals! How fun does that sound? Yes, I like quirky too.
Tourquai: A Novel by Tim Davys
A horrific crime sets off a disturbing chain of events in Tim Davy’s Mollisan Town. Like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, as well as the allegorical worlds of Neil Gaiman and Jasper Fforde, this sinister sequel to Lanceheim and Amberville illuminates our reality through a giddy paradoxical conceit—as in Tourquai, the stuffed animals who populate Mollisan Town will be forced to confront the deepest issues of love and servitude, free will and destiny, life and death.
Under My Apple Tree 