What's for Dinner?

We had some more snow (about three inches) on Sunday night and while John was cleaning off the driveway, I was trying to answer that eternal question: "What should I make for dinner?" I wanted something easy, requiring minimal effort, warming, tasty, and that I hopefully had all the ingredients on hand. I settled on Crockpot Tortellini. It satisfied all of my criteria except I was missing diced tomatoes. I thought about using spaghetti sauce but I was afraid it would end up like tortellini soup. 

But John had cleaned off the driveway and even my car, so it was easy enough for me to run out and get a couple cans of diced tomatoes. I even thought ahead more than one day and got some split peas so I could make soup with the ham that I got out of the freezer for tomorrow. 

I don't follow the recipe exactly. I use smoked kielbasa instead of sausage, I use two packages of frozen spinach instead of fresh (in the winter anyway), I don't add cream cheese (too gloppy for me), and I use more than one measly teaspoon of Italian seasoning. I usually throw in some chopped garlic if I have a few cloves, or garlic powder if I don't, and I use a combination of mozzarella and parmesan cheeses. You could really make it however you like to suit your personal preferences. 

So we had a tasty dinner and I even have dinner planned for the next two nights. That's a win in my book!

 

A Few Photos

The cold weather over the past couple weeks has produced some rather picturesque river ice. This week has been a little warmer and caused the ice to recede a bit, so I'm glad I took pictures of it when it was it its peak with just a channel of water running in the middle.

One of the advantages of these extensive ice shelves is that they provide plenty of area for wildlife. In the past decade there have been an increasing number of bald eagles nesting along the river and they've successfully hatched eggs and raised offspring. It's now a pretty common occurrence to see eagles and their eaglets. The ice shelves make a perfect place for the adults to show their eagles how to rip apart the fish they might have caught. I'll spare you any of those barbaric photos, but this one just looks majestic.

 

 

I didn't take this picture but it's from a friend of John's brother. Everyone around here looks for piebald deer, and there are lots of photos sent around if anyone spies one. The snow makes a nice background for this one. 

 

 

This covered bridge is about a mile from where John grew up, so we've driven through it plenty of times. I tend to take it for granted, but snow always makes it look even more scenic.

 

 

My last photo isn't wildlife or nature, but two lovely people that I love. Justin was in a friend's wedding last weekend and both he and Jess cleaned up nicely. He never dresses up, so this occasion was photo-worthy.

 

I hope your weekend is full of fun and relaxation and a photographic moment or two! 

 

Unraveled Wednesday: 2/11/26

I’m happy to join Kat and the Unravelers today, with a completed hat and some progress on the Hitchhiker. 

The only red yarn I could find in my stash was Malabrigo Chunky, so I had to modify the Melt the Ice pattern for chunky yarn. I gathered modifications from others that had also used chunky and it turned out fairly well. I wore it last weekend when I had to leave the house to cat-sit for Justin and Jess. It kept me warm in 8 degrees and 40 mph winds, so that's a good thing. It's kind of a quirky hat but I like it and hope to see others in the wild. 

 

 

I have been working on my Hitchhiker and finally reached the point where I've run out of the black and white speckled yarn. This is progress and now all I have to do is knit with the ultra-soft gray Road to China Light for as many teeth as I feel necessary. 

 

I recently found out that The Fibre Co. is retiring from selling yarn, and that includes the Road to China Light yarn that is my absolute favorite. This is sad news indeed, but I also feel very lucky. I received a generous gift certificate from a very thoughtful friend and I bought some gorgeous maroon Road to China Light that I will be using for my next Hitchhiker. Yup, a whole Hitchhiker from this special yarn because of a special person. I have to make myself finish the current Hitchhiker before I cast on my dream Hitchhiker so I'm going to stay monogamous to my knitting. I do still have to knit thumbs for my mittens, but those can wait. 

 

In reading this week, I really enjoyed The Help, so I was both excited and a little anxious to finally read another novel by Kathryn Stockett. The Calamity Club marks Stockett’s long-awaited second book after her breakout success, and happily it delivers much of what I was hoping for: big-hearted storytelling, memorable women, and a deep affection for flawed characters trying to survive in an unforgiving world.

Set in 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, this novel brings together an unlikely group of women, each marginalized in different ways, whose lives intersect at just the right (or wrong) moment. Meg, Birdie, and Charlie are all compelling in their own ways, and Stockett does a particularly good job showing how class, gender, and circumstance limit their options while never fully extinguishing their grit or humor. These main characters join forces along with other underestimated women to take bold risks that might change their lives forever, forming a sisterhood rooted in defiance as much as friendship.

That sense of resilience, especially resilience found in friendship and shared defiance, is the emotional core of the book. Stockett vividly portrays the struggle for dignity and self-determination against the backdrop of the Great Depression, where economic hardship sharpens every choice and raises the cost of every mistake. It’s hard not to root for these women and their audacious plan, even as the stakes rise and the consequences loom.

These are women you want to root for, surrounded by men you mostly want to hate. That contrast is played a little heavy-handed at times, and while I admired the novel’s ambition and heart, some of it was a bit overwritten and went on a bit too long. Still, Stockett’s warmth, wit, and compassion shine through, and the ending is so very satisfying that it’s easy to let those flaws slide. This is a rewarding, engaging read and a welcome return from an author I was eager to visit again.

Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Spiegel & Grau for providing me with a copy of this book. It will be published on May 5, 2026.

What are you making and reading during this slightly warmer week? 

  

Read With Us: Gilead

If you’re in the mood for a book that rewards slow reading, deep thinking, and a little quiet awe, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a perfect choice for Read With Us.

Set in a small Iowa town in the 1950s, Gilead takes the form of a long letter written by Reverend John Ames to his young son. Ames is elderly and ill, and what unfolds is not a plot-driven novel so much as a meditation on life: faith, grace, forgiveness, love, regret, and the strange beauty of ordinary days. If that sounds heavy, it can be, but it’s also gentle, luminous, and surprisingly warm. So what are some good reasons for reading this book?

One of the great pleasures of Gilead is Robinson’s language. Her prose is precise and unshowy, yet often breathtaking. She has a gift for making small moments feel sacred: light falling on water, a child’s laughter, a simple walk through town. This is a book that makes you want to pause mid-paragraph just to sit with a sentence for a moment.

This is also a novel about empathy. Even when characters disappoint or frustrate us, Robinson invites us to see them whole, shaped by their pasts and their fears. That generosity of spirit is one of the reasons Gilead has stayed with readers for years and continues to feel relevant.

For discussion purposes, Gilead offers so much to work with. It asks big questions without insisting on easy answers: What do we owe the people we love? How do we live well, knowing we are flawed and finite? What does forgiveness really cost? The relationships, especially between fathers and sons, and between old friends carrying long histories, are nuanced and quietly powerful, leaving plenty of room for interpretation and our discussion.

If you enjoy books that are reflective rather than fast-paced, rich in ideas, and written with extraordinary care, Gilead is well worth your time. It’s the kind of novel that doesn’t shout for your attention, but once you settle into it, it has a way of lingering, quietly, long after you’ve turned the last page.

Kym, Carole, and I will be talking about the book, giving additional information, and doing promotional posts throughout February. Discussion day for Gilead is scheduled for Tuesday, March 17, 2026 at 7:00 pm Eastern time, so mark your calendars. We'll ask questions on our blogs that day and then host the always educational and illuminating Zoom discussion. 

I hope the promise of breathtaking prose, a book full of empathy, and one that I think will be the basis of a rich discussion will make you want to read Gilead. We hope you'll Read With Us and discover this quietly reflective novel. 

A Few More Good Things

Welcome to my version of a Few More Good Things! I've been looking for good things this week, and even the act of looking for them has improved my outlook. With further ado, here they are:

• We actually got above freezing for a few hours the week, and this happened on two different days. I'm still dressing in turtlenecks, woolly knit items, and fingerless gloves, but the slightly warmer temperatures were nice while they lasted.

• I visited Ryan earlier in the week and he made me lunch. My grandmother always said that food tastes better if someone prepares it for you, and I find that to be true. He made me supper on a bread slice (a combination of venison, bacon, and cheese on top of split halves of French bread and baked for a few minutes) and it was delicious.  

 

• I haven't rewatched Schitt's Creek, but I probably will sometime in the future. This list of gleeful words from Moira Rose made my day and hopefully some of them will make you smile also. I'm hoping I can use balatron in my conversation this weekend, and I'm pretty sure I know who I'll be speaking about. 

Please add anything good that you've noticed this week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend with plenty of good things! 

Unraveled Wednesday: 2/4/26

I’m happy to join Kat and the Unravelers today, with some completed thumbs, progress on the Hitchhiker, and something else. 

First, I did knit thumbs for the fingerless handwarmers. They fit well and I've been wearing them all the time. 

The Hitchhiker is progressing, albeit slowly. I think I've got enough left of the main color to finish the current strip of six teeth, but after that I think it will be more of the soft gray. That's fine, but the rows are getting a lot longer a bit too long. 

 

 

The "something else" is a Melt the Ice Hat. I bought the pattern thinking it was a small donation to immigrant aid associations, but then I remembered that I had leftover red yarn from the mittens, so I cast on. The pattern is written for fingering through worsted weight, and my yarn is bulky. After looking through the other projects knit with bulky, I cast on 72 stitches and I'm just using up my leftover yarn on ribbing. I'm thinking about unraveling the first pair of mittens that I knit (the ones with uncomfortable thumbs), but I do have a few more skeins of yarn coming this week. I may still unravel the uncomfortable mittens and use the yarn to finish the thumbs on the comfortable mittens since the yarn will be the same lot number, but it's not like I don't have plenty of projects to knit before my red yarn arrives. 

 

 

Last week Sarah said this book was bonkers, and she was right! I went into Best Offer Wins expecting to suspend my disbelief a bit in exchange for an entertaining, exaggerated look at the insanity of today’s real estate market. I’m more than willing to do that for a novel that provides a somewhat believable premise, but this book asked for far more suspension than I could manage.

The protagonist, Margo Miyake, quickly goes well past believable and into territory that feels completely disconnected from reality. What might have been a satirical or darkly funny exploration of housing desperation instead becomes implausible to the point of distraction. I found it hard to stay engaged once the story lost any grounding in how actual people behave, even under stress.

I also struggled with Margo herself. She is an unabashed whiner, and despite having $1.3 million to spend on a house, she refuses to settle for anything that deviates even slightly from her idealized life plan. Rather than coming across as sympathetic or self-aware, her complaints grew tiresome and made it difficult to root for her in any meaningful way.

The bright spot here was the audiobook narrator, Cia Court, who did an excellent job bringing energy and nuance to the material. Her performance was easily the most enjoyable aspect of the experience.

Overall, this one didn’t work for me. The premise had promise, but the execution veered too far from reality and left me more frustrated than entertained. I should pay more attention when books are described as bonkers!

What are you making and reading this frigid week? 

A Few More Good Things

I never post in the afternoon, but I've felt lifted up by Kym's Happy Hour, Vicki's Good Things, and Sarah's Good News so I needed to share a few more good things. I think this should/will be a regular Friday thing. Be sure and check out their blogs if you haven't already. 

Just in case you didn't read my frozen finch story over at Kyms, I'll repeat myself here. I got to see a frozen finch come back to life. Sunday as the storm was winding down I saw a finch lying down in my window feeder. Its feet were curled up and it was covered in sleet and freezing rain. I felt sad that this poor bird had died, but Monday morning when I came downstairs, I saw the finch sitting on the edge of the feeder and warming up in the sun. I was thrilled and put off getting my tea so I didn’t disturb it, but I just sat at the kitchen table, watching and hoping it would get warm enough. After about half an hour it did, ate a few seeds and flew into the closest oak to sit in the sun some more. It felt like a miracle! 

It's not a great photo, but I took this on Monday morning as she was reviving herself. You can still see some of the sleet/freezing rain on her wing feathers, but she did eventually manage to fly away. It was a wonderful way to start my day (and probably hers, too).

This one is going to sound a bit weird, but alpha-galactosidase is also a good thing. Before the storm, I made big pots of bean soup and chili. Even though we didn't lose power, John and I enjoyed eating the, but by Day 3, both of us were in gastric distress. I ventured out and got some Beano. The active ingredient is alpha-galactosidase which prevents gas and bloating caused by complex carbohydrates by breaking them down in your stomach. It works wonderfully and we're finishing up the last of the chili tonight. 

I took some venison stew over to my neighbors the other day and we sat and had a cup of tea. I asked what kind of tea it was and my neighbor said it was some kind of ginger-turmeric tea that she had gotten but she didn't really like it much. I said I loved it and she gave me the rest of the box. That certainly sounded like a fair trade to me. I think the tea is great!  

 

Feel free to add any good things you can think of in the comments and join me in the future for a few more good things. This doesn't mean that things are all okay in Minneapolis or many other places in the US but we all need a few good things now and then.