Mushrooms and mayhem (No, not those kind of mushrooms! Jeeze.)

Philip Pullman’s Tiger in the Well totally rocks. It starts out slow and a little confusing, but after the second book, I could hardly put it down, like I fell asleep at midnight last night with it open on my chest, struggling to make it through the last hundred pages, woke up this morning and headed down for cereal with the book open. Trickster’s Choice by Tamora Pierce was good too, very nice change from my usual reading. And Susan Minot’s book, Rapture, I kid you not, is a story about a blow job. Actually, it’s about relationships, Minot’s stories usually are, this one though is centered around a blow job. I mean, how cool is that? I guess it’s not if you’re not into that kind of thing, but the relationship between these two people is told during sex and it’s very skillfully done as the narrator weaves in and out of these two people’s minds, introducing other characters, and taking them to exotic places when they actually never leave the same position on the bed.

So when I wasn’t being morally deranged this weekend, I made my famous chocolate chip cookies (look on the back of the Tollhouse bag and add milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and butterscotch chips, and throw in some toffee bits for chewiness) and a new recipe from www.bringingithome.tv. Italian Stuffed Mushrooms and boy were they good. I didn’t use the stuffing mushrooms, but substituted portabellas and used homemade dried tomatoes instead of sun-dried, since that’s what I had on hand, but they ended up awesome. Dad liked both mozzarella cheese and parmesan on top. I’d suggest a mix of the two for sticky oozy goodness and the sharp parm flavor. So those are my cooking tips for the year and thank the computer gods for spell check or that would have been really hard to read. My foreign language skills suck.