Cookbooks, Retirement or not, and Babysitting

This is Morgan (three in August) in a picture that her folks captioned "Who needs a bunny if you've got a garden hose?"

The Grace & Gumption ladies are going to do a cookbook--and then Grace & Gumption II. That book may have become a cottage industry, all its own. The contributors met tonight--on my porch, of course, with wine--and someone said they were told it should be called Grace & Consumption, and I suggested Grace & Conspicious Consumption with a nod to Thorstein Veblen about whom the main thing I remember is he thought sheep should be grazing on the White House lawn. Not a bad idea. Sheep on a cowboy's lawn--makes me giggle.
I sort of engineered the cookbook, because I'm so interested in cooking and cookbooks, but what fun to find the recipes and kitchen habits of the women we wrote about. We figure we can write about household hints--adoption agency founder Edna Gladney had a lot of them, and Ninnie Baird of Mrs. Baird's Bakery has some too, like putting out cucumber peel to get rid of ants, which I recently tried and reported on. Electra Waggoner Wharton, the heiress who entertained lavishly in her mansion in the first decades of the 19th century, probably didn't cook much, but she sure decorated with smilax. And I found a recipe for Hollandaise by a more recent woman in my chapter--she made it with mayonnaise, mustard, soy and one other ingredient. It's not like any Hollandaise I ever heard of! So the cookbook project will be fun.

And then there's Grace & Gumption II: The Unsung Heroines. That's just my working title, but we had a brief article in the newspaper asking people to send stories of their female relatives. I haven't gotten much response, but I intend to pursue it and the ladies tonight were generally interested. G&G takes a lot of our time and lives, but it's fun--and we're such a good group.

Book projects like that are the reason I don't retire. I have so much fun doing what I do, working on these projects--and I can't imagine waking up and wondering what I was going to do that day. I hope, of course, to interest someone in that first mystery, but I think I'll go ahead and work on the second one. And I've been reading a lot about "boomer lit" and older heroines, and I have a start on a novel about a 70-something amateur sleuth. So many project, so little time.

Of course today I had another project and that was Jacob. His mom had a telephone interview, so I kept him while Jordan locked herself in the study and talked on the phone--for a loooong time. Of course this was at the time I was trying to get ready for the ladies--so I was half in the playroom, half in the kitchen. But I didn't want Jacob to wander to the front and scream for his mama, so every time he came into the kitchen, I took his hand and steered him back to the playroom. Pretty soon, he was coming to me, holding out his hand, and walking me back there. Then he'd pat the chair or daybed or wherever he wanted me to sit--when he patted the dollhouse floor I tried to explain that I really couldn't do that! In between I did make a good spread of blue cheese, cream cheese, onion, lemon juice and lemon zest. The lemon somehow softened the blue cheese, and one friend who said she didn't like blue cheese really liked it.

Now it's blessedly quiet, and the kitchen is clean. Scooby and Wywy and I are settled for the evening, and I'm going back to the last part of Eat, Pray, Love.