Saturday Odds and Ends

A bit of whimsy for your weekend pleasure

Jordan sent this from a lake house where she and

some friends are celebrating a birthday

Who can resist? I watched the Kentucky Derby today, or as someone described it, “the most exciting two minutes in horse racing.” Oh my goodness, the mud! As the stable boys led their horses out, I wondered that they didn’t flounder in that deep mud—horses and stable boys both. And near the end of the race, I could see that the horses were having trouble with their footing. What a miserable sight. I always feel a bit sorry for the jockeys at the rear of the pack with almost no way to catch up, and so I felt today. I also wished for a mint julep. I remember one year when I was invited to a derby party—had two juleps and was home in bed, leaving the kids o fend for themselves, by six. Never again!

Special investigator Mueller always looks so solemn, though I have seen one or two pictures when he was jovial. One obviously doctored meme today showed him laughing at Trump and saying, “You misunderstood. Not Nobel. No Bail.” But if anything can make that intense man laugh, the antics of Giuliani and Trump ought to bring some amusement. When I was young, my then-husband used to tease me about being clumsy. I had a good friend in Missouri who was equally clumsy, and he called us “the dance team of Ox and Klutz.” It’s all I can think of as I watch those two tripping over each other, lying to explain away their previous lies. Sorry, guys, it ain’t working. I got a good laugh out of several opinion columns today.

But I also felt a lot of indignation about all the ongoing crap—forgive my language. Trump’s speech to the NRA, obviously toadying up to them and forgetting everything he ever said about gun control; the ongoing situation in Puerto Rico; the part of our population who blindly accepts his moral transgressions, whereas they called for Clinton’s head and would have called for Obama’s if he’d given them cause—well, actually he did by being black. I am heartbroken about the hate Trump has opened up in this country, the destruction of women’s rights over their own bodies, the desolation of our environmental and worker protections. But I am blathering about stuff we already know. What we don’t know is how much longer we have to put up with idiocy, deceit, lies and corruption. And I, for one, think Trump is mentally incapable of handling day-to-day life let alone the presidency.

A quiet day today, and I worked on the cookbook. Every time I think I’m ready to send it off, I find more to do. But tonight, my dinner experiment went better than last night. I made pasta with anchovies and breadcrumbs. Lesson learned: the way to make good, crisp crumbs is to rough chop a piece of artisan bread in a processor—I used sourdough—and sauté those crumbs in a saucepan with a generous glug of olive oil. Stand over them and stir constantly. They were—I say modestly—a culinary triumph. The pasta sauce was simply garlic-infused olive oil with a whole lot of anchovies mashed into it. I liked it, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really like anchovies.

Now I’m going to indulge in reading a mystery—Ellery Adams Murder in the Locked Library