Lazy Sunday
Sometimes the need for a lazy Sunday just creeps up on you.
Sean and I had big plans for Sunday. We were going to go for a nice long ride, finish cleaning and organizing the garage… but then we woke up to a gray morning. And the gray morning turned into a gray day. Something about the clouds made it damn near impossible to even think of leaving our cocoon of a house, let alone get out of our pajamas. So stay in we did. We were class A-1 sluggards, and I loved it.
Between trips to the kitchen for snacks and tea, I spent my day nestled on the couch reading. It felt so luxurious. I kept asking Sean if there was anything that needed doing, to which he continuously replied that I needed to spend the day on the couch, with a cat, reading a book. I love this man.
I am not usually a mystery book gal. In my opinion, they tend to either be poorly written, or obvious. But yesterday I decided to try one out with Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden. It was a fun, well-written book with interesting characters. And while I’d figured out the mystery by a quarter of the way through, I enjoyed Morton’s ability to describe scenes that instantly captivate (I’ll admit the gloomy weather outside my window probably helped me get into a book that mostly takes place on the Cornish coast…).
A quick run-down of the story goes like this: In 1913, a dock master discovers a four-year-old girl who’s been left alone on a wharf in Queensland, Australia after all passengers on a boat from England have disembarked. He takes pity on her, brings her home to his wife, and despite efforts to find the girl’s family, no one claims her. Having hit her head while onboard the boat, the little girl doesn’t remember anything – even her name, so the dock master and his wife decide to keep her as their own and name her Nell.
In the present day, Nell’s granddaughter, Cassandra, is grieving her passing. Going through Nell’s notebooks, she learns of Nell’s mysterious past and her one-time search for answers. Cassandra takes over the search, which leads her to England to a small Cornish village, and finally, to a decrepit cottage and its walled garden.
I really enjoyed how Morton was able to cover several generations of a family in intermittent chapters without confusing the story line. I never felt the cadence of any one story was thrown off by switching between the story’s anchor years of 1913, 1975 and 2005.
My (few) complaints about the book are these: I felt like the love interest toward the end of the book was lame and weak. I would rather read a story where the heroine’s end decisions aren’t colored by the prospects of a man. Also, the epilogue was trite. There, I said it.
Few grievances aside, this was a great book to curl up with on a drizzly, cold and dreary Seattle Sunday.
Despite the fact that most of my movement on Sunday was moving tea cup and snacks to mouth, I still felt the need for a real meal at the end of the day. Luckily, I tend to make batches of soup far too large for our purposes, so a quick thaw of some white bean and ham soup from three months ago and a toast of a couple bagels, and we were set. This is one of the many reasons I love soup. Our dinner was nothing fancy, but delicious all the same.
White Bean and Ham Soup
16 ounces dried Great Northern beans
1 cup diced sweet yellow onion
3 cloves garlic, diced
1 tablespoon oil
1 1/2 quarts chicken broth or stock
2 bay leaves
2 cups peeled and diced potatoes
2 stalks celery, diced
3 carrots, peeled and diced
1 1/2 pounds to 2 1/2 pound ham shank
1/4 teaspoon black ground pepper
1 teaspoon salt
Soak beans overnight in salt water, drain.
In bottom of stock pot, add oil and sauté onions and garlic over medium heat until softened (about 4 to 5 minutes).
Remove from heat.
Add remaining vegetables, seasonings, ham shank, drained beans, and chicken stock or broth.
Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer, cover and cook 1 1/2 hours.
Remove ham shank from soup. Allow ham shank to cool slightly. Remove meat from bone. Discard bones, fat, and skin. Add meat to soup.
Continue cooking on simmer for an additional 30 to 45 minutes or until beans are soft.
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