Mortal Beloved

I heard on the radio this morning that starting tomorrow, four planets – Venus, Jupiter, Mercury and Mars – will be visible to the naked eye for the next month. I imagine this would be quite the sight to see in the wee hours of the morning. While I probably won’t get the chance to see the planets myself, I have been gazing up at the stars a lot lately....

Star light, star bright
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Please make me finish Beloved tonight.

Book: Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
Year: 1987

clatter’s nutshell summary and review:
In theory, I was supposed to love this book. I was supposed to lose myself in its spellbinding powers and feel all sorts of things that no other author has ever made me feel before. The only thing I'm really feeling is this: For the love of Oprah, please don't make me read that again.

I've read Morrison before: The Bluest Eye affected me the disturbing ways, and Sula, well, I don't remember much about that one. But this is the Toni Morrison I’m supposed to read. This is the Pulitzer Prize winner - the one that takes the cake, the one that established Toni Morrison as a game changer, the one that John Leonard of the Los Angeles Times says he “can’t imagine American literature without.” Hm, well folks, I can. And I feel just fine.

I was a comp lit major, so I like weird, scratch-your-head literature (you know, the-books-that-make-you-go-huh). Sometimes, that is. When I decided I needed to have this novel under my belt, I suddenly felt an immense amount of pressure to understand why every major book review called Beloved a triumph! A masterpiece! Dazzling! Magical! Astounding! Overpowering!

Overpowering, yes. Now there's an adjective I can get behind. I was so overpowered by the thing that I felt the need to set it aside with 80 pages to go in order to read two other novels and countless magazines, watch season five of The West Wing, season two of Bones, and most of season five of How I Met Your Mother. Sorry, Toni.

But finally, after weeks and weeks of putting it off, I picked up the dusty paperback from my nightstand. In a reader's world, 80 pages is nothing. It’s like running the last .2 miles of a marathon. No biggie. But when I opened the book and started reading it again, I realized that I just. couldn’t. do. it. With those mere two-tenths of a mile to the finish line, I walked off the course. I didn’t collect my medal. I didn’t even get my highly coveted finisher t-shirt. What a loser.

Maybe there are a lot of folks out there that love this book and had no trouble crossing the finish line, but I'm not one of them. Could it be that I'm not as smart as I thought I was? Or, or! Might it be possible that I'm the smartest and bravest one of all to say what everyone else is really thinking: "Meh. I've read better." Throw me overboard. Curse my name. Burn me at the stake. Do what you must to chastise me. But please, whatever you do, don’t revoke my comparative literature degree!

So, uh, can we just skip the other parts of the review and get to the recipe? Cool, thanks.

Recipe: Jalapeño cornbread muffins
Date: January 4, 1987
NY Times: “Food: The Homecoming,” by Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey.

In honor of Cinco de Mayo last week, I decided to whip up these jalapeño cornbread muffins to go along with a batch of tortilla soup. Amanda pairs the muffins with a tasty-sounding black bean soup, but I decided to stick with my tried-and-true tortilla soup recipe. I was feeling a little under the weather (after my Airborne failed me), and I thought the spices might clear my stuffy nose.

As I simultaneously prepared the soup and muffins, things were going swimmingly. Seasoning the soup, I grabbed the black pepper grinder out of the cabinet, took off the cap, and began to twist. That's when the [bleep] hit the fan. Or that’s when I like to say, the pepper hit the pot.

Tens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of whole black peppercorns surged from my once trusty Trader Joes’ plastic grinder with such gusto, that they were everywhere: in the soup, on the stove, on the floor, and maybe even a few between my toes. Disaster. I wish I could say this was the first time such an occurrence has taken place after refilling the grinder and not securing the head, but that would be a lie. I also wish I could say that I'm the first one in my family to have experienced this (not mentioning any names) but that too would be a lie. A curse, I tell you.

I managed to save the soup, along with a few lonely peppercorns that managed to stay in the grinder. The muffins came out lovely too, but I admit that the whole mishap disturbed my kitchen feng shui – whatever that means. Just watch your step, ok? You might slip on a loose peppercorn.