Buddha's Hand - It's a Fruit!

One day on Twitter I saw a post by John (@bookmineset) showcasing a very interesting fruit. It was almost a year ago. The below conversation happened.

A snippet.

I never forgot the curious looking fruit.  It was always lurking there in the back of my mind.  Plus, I love to try new things.  One day last week, I was in my local Metro and came across a Buddha's hand.

 

I couldn't resist buying it, even though it was the most expensive produce on that display. $4.99 for that thing! I looked on the the internet (because that's where I look when I don't know something) for a way to prepare Buddha's hand. There were two that appealed to me. One was using it to infuse gin. The other was sautéeing it in garlic and olive oil (the suggestion is in the comments). I chose the second because that was an option I could share with my family.

 

This is the Buddha's Hand before I cut it.

After I cut the fingers off.

Sliced thinly, ready to be put in the pan. There's no pulp!

Frying garlic, because who doesn't love fried garlic in olive oil.

Throw in the sliced Buddha's Hand with the browned garlic.  It smelled so good.

Looks good with the green beans.

 

I should have added the Buddha's hand at the same time as the green beans. The Buddha's hand was definitely overcooked. The bitterness of the rind seeped into the flavour of the beans and made the actual slices of the Buddha's hand almost inedible. I also maybe should have peeled the rind off, but the website didn't tell me to do that, so I didn't. It ended up being a bit of a fail.

I did eat some of it raw, so I knew the flavour of the ingredient I was working with (something I recommend). It tasted nice, mild and lemony. The most surprising bit was that there was no pulp. I didn't expect a citrus fruit to be pulpless.  

I'd like to use Buddha's hand again, but I'm not sure when or how. It is pretty expensive just to be experimenting with, especially when, during that same shopping trip, I bought four limes for a dollar. Though the dish didn't turn out great, I learned some things about buddha's hand and maybe about citrus in general. 

 

One idea I had, for fun, is to do a gin or vodka infusion, with the fingers floating around in the bottle.  Too weird?  Or creepily fun.
 

 

The Well-Read Canadian

I might have failed again.  I posted Book Riot's "Well Read" list last week.  I did okay, having read about a third of the books.  John from The Book Mine Set put together a Canadian version of the list and I did worse.  I'm not even going to post my numbers.  I've read a lot of the authors on the list, like Rohinton Mistry and Carol Shields, but not the books that are listed.  I thought I was pretty well-read as a Canadian... I took an entire class on Can Lit in University.  Some of those authors became favourites and I've read more of their work.  What I have now is another mountain of books to add to my to-read list.  

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery- Anne of Green Gables

2. John Vaillant- The Tiger

3. Modecai Richler- Barney's Version

4. Rohinton Mistry- A Fine Balance

5. Miriam Toews- A Complicated Kindness

7. Susanna Moodie- Roughing it in the Bush

8. Wayne Johnston- The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

9. James Houston- White Dawn

10. Michael Ondaatje- In the Skin of a Lion

11. Robert Munsch- The Paperbag Princess

12. Christian Bok- Eunoia

13. Pierre Berton- the Last Spike

14. Margaret Laurence- Stone Angel

15. Seth- It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken

16. Ken Dryden- The Game

17. Farley Mowat- Never Cry Wolf

18. Carol Shields- The Stone Diaries

19. M. G. Vassanji- the In-Between World of Vikram Lall

20. Michel Tremblay- The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant

21. Elizabeth Hay- Late Nights on Air

22. Sheila Watson- the Double Hook

23. Robertson Davies- Fifth Business

24. Richard Van Camp- Lesser Blessed

25. Ann-Marie MacDonald- Fall on Your Knees

26. Kit Pearson- The Sky is Falling

27. Kenneth Oppel- Silverwing

28. Margaret Atwood- The Handmaid's Tale

29. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media

30. Alistair MacLeod- No Great Mischief

31. Alice Munro- The Love of a Good Woman

32. Guy Vanderhaeghe- The Last Crossing

33. Emma Donoghue- Room

34. Guy Gavriel Kay- The Summer Tree

35. Douglas Coupland- Generation X

36. Tomson Highway- The Rez Sisters

37. Leonard Cohen- Beautiful Losers

38. Phoebe Gilman- Something From Nothing

39. The Complete Poems of Robert W. Service

40. David Adams Richards- Mercy Among the Children

41. Joseph Boyden- Three Day Road

42. Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki- Skim

43. Ivan Coyote- Bow Grip

44. Naomi Klein- No Logo

45. Will Ferguson- Why I Hate Canadians

46. Lisa Moore- February

47. Mary Watson- Crow Lake

48. Alan Bradley- The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

49. Cory Doctorow- Little Brother

50. P.K. Page- Planet Earth: Poems selected and new

51. Lawrence Hill- The Book of Negroes

52. Timothy Findley- The Wars

53. Margaret Atwood- Alias Grace

54. Jane Urquhart- The Stone Carvers

55. Mavis Gallant- From the Fifteenth District

56. Hugh MacLennan- Barometer Rising

57. Joy Kogawa- Obasan

58. Wayson Choy- Jade Peony

59. Chester Brown- Louis Riel

60. Yann Martel- Life of Pi

61. Gabrielle Roy- The Tin Flute

62. W.P. Kinsella- Shoeless Joe

63. Elizabeth Smart- By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

64. Thomas King- Green Grass, Running Water

65. Sara Gruen- Water for Elephants

66. William Gibson- Neuromancer

67. Margaret Laurence- The Diviners

68. Marie-Claire Blais- A Season in the Life of Emmanuel

69. Brian Moore- The Luck of Ginger Coffey

70. Ethel Wilson- Swamp Angel

71. Stephen Leacock- Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

72. W.O. Mitchell- Who Has Seen the Wind?

73. Robert Sawyer- Flashforward

74. Roch Carrier- The Hockey Sweater

75. Eric Walters- Camp X

76. Bryan Lee O'Malley- Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life

77. Jeff Lemire- Essex County

78. Hubert Aquin- Next Episode

79. David Bergen- The Time in Between

80. George Elliott Clarke- Wylah Falls

81. Lynn Coady- Saints of Big Harbour

82. Michael Crummey- Galore

83. Esi Edugyan- Halfblood Blues

84. Rawi Hage- De Niro's Game

85. Bernice Morgan- Random Passage

86. Peter C. Newman- The Canadian Establishment

87. bpNichol- The Martyrology

88. Louise Penny- Still Life

89. Paul Quarrington- Whale Music

90. Sinclair Ross- As For Me and My House

91. Nalo Hopkinson- Brown Girl in the Ring

92. Vincent Lam- Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

93. Dennis Lee- Alligator Pie

94. John McCrae- "In Flanders' Fields"

95. Zoe Whittal- Bottle Rocket Hearts

96. Andrew Davidson- The Gargoyle

97. Al Purdy- Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets

98. Pierre Berton- The Arctic Grail

99. Stephen Galloway- The Cellist of Sarajevo

100. Lynn Johnston- Something Old, Something New

Which books have you read?

Word of the Week!

Dante and Virgil

From “The Man In The Black Suit” in Everything’s Eventual, by Stephen King:

Propitiate (pg 69) - (transitive, dated) To conciliate, appease or make peace with someone, particularly a god or spirit.
(I guess that’s what you do when you think the devil is going to eat you.)

From The Book Mine Set:

Asymtote - In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity. Some sources include the requirement that the curve may not cross the line infinitely often, but this is unusual for modern authors.[1] In some contexts, such as algebraic geometry, an asymptote is defined as a line which is tangent to a curve at infinity.
1. (analysis) A straight line which a curve approaches arbitrarily closely, as they go to infinity. The limit of the curve, its tangent "at infinity".
2. (by extension, figuratively) Anything which comes near to but never meets something else.
(I knew it was some sort of math thing, I just didn’t know what exactly.)

From here

So… a PDF program taught me a word (Win2PDF):

Prepend - (computing, linguistics, transitive) To attach (an expression, phrase, etc.) to another, as a prefix.
(The PDF program asked me if I wanted to Append, Prepend, Replace or Cancel; I had to figure out what Prepend was.)

Thanks for joining me.  Learn anything new this past month (or even year!)?

Wom, by Michael Joll

Wom is a weird story.  It does not match the picture on the website.   It is a story about post-apocalyptic survival.  At first it seems like it might be almost peaceful, but it lulls you into a false sense of security.  It's violent.  The entire story.  So many sentences punch at you.  It's not just the actual violence, but the way the story is written carries an urgent undertone.  Yet, the characters all seem alarmingly indifferent.  They lack emotions; the kind of emotions we would feel if in their situation.  I think that's done on purpose.  Except for a few spoken phrases, these people are nothing like us.  SPOILER!  Wom does not fight for her survival in the end, she just accepts her fate.

Is "Wom" short for woman?
<
Wom will cause a reaction in anyone who reads it.  You might like the story, you might hate it, but once you read it, I doubt you can ignore it.  Wom provokes feelings in the reader, though they are absent from the characters.  It is well-written, but as I write this, I still don't know if I liked the story.  Because of the content, I don't know if I'd read something by Joll again.

Thanks to John Mutford at The Book Mine Set for hosting Short Story Monday. 

The Hobbit (Graphic Novel Adaptation)

It has been a long time since I read J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit.  Influenced by a review I read at The Book Mine Set, I decided that I would read the graphic novel adaptation of The Hobbit, by David Wenzel and Charles Dixon.  After all, it was just sitting on a shelf.  (I bought it for my husband about four years ago.)  Some of what John at The Book Mine Set said, plus my own memories of the original novel, made me want to see (read) for myself.  Even though I had been planning on reading something else, it was a graphic novel and those don't take long.

I think The Hobbit adaptation is the longest graphic novel I've read.  I haven't read a lot, but I've been reading a few each year for the past while.  Enough to think that at 134 pages, it's long.  It wasn't even just the page count.  There were a lot of those descriptive/narration boxes everywhere (I don't know what they're actually called).  I'm used to the pictures telling the story, with dialogue bubbles and the occasional box.  It didn't make the novel bad, it just made it take a lot longer than I thought it would.
Reading The Hobbit graphic novel, I found myself having similar issues to the ones I had with Dracula.  It was a combination of knowing what would happen, plus not being sure if i was remembering it right and wondering if there were changes made in the adaptation.  It's been over ten years since I read The Hobbit.  It looks like I might have to read it again.  Especially with the movie coming out in December, I want to make sure I remember it right.

One, possibly minor problem i had while reading it, Why did I keep expecting the drawings to look like the actors from the movie, especially Elrond?  The book is separate from the movie.  Maybe part of that issue was that I expected the elves specifically to look different.  Not necessarily ethereal or wispy, but they looked so much like humans, that I had a difficult time identifying them immediately.  Otherwise, I thought the art was just fine.

If you like Tolkien's The Hobbit and you like graphic novels, you may like this book.  I liked it, but I don't think it really changed or enhanced my connection to the original story.  Would I read it before or instead of the original novel? No. It's good, but no way that good.  It was an okay little diversion and reminder of a great movie to come.

CanadianBookshelf.com: Discover Canadian Books, Book Reviews, Book Lists & more

John Mutford posted this link on his blog and I couldn't help but click.  If you want to learn more about great Canadian Books and authors, click below.

CanadianBookshelf.com: Discover Canadian Books, Book Reviews, Book Lists & more

Ponies, by Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson’s Ponies recently won the Nebula Award for best short story (actually tying with some other story that isn’t available online to read). I first became interested in reading this story after Teddy Rose reviewed it earlier this month. It sounded really interesting and the review was favourable, so I saved it, then after hearing it won the award, I didn’t want to wait anymore.

After the end of the story, the first words that came to mind were, Holy Crap! and, What just happened? The story was fantastic. I couldn’t believe the ending for a minute. When they describe the Ponies, they’re all very much in the My Little Pony vein. They’re brightly coloured with sparkle and shine. That’s how I was inclined to picture them, with their little girl owners running around, both wanting to have friends. It’s just such a crazy, sad and shocking story.

I liked how this place (with little girls who can only be friends if they have a Pony and only if that Pony is like all the other Ponies) takes bits of our contemporary lives to make the story seem more real. They have Wiis, Rock Band, Coke Zero and diet Red Bull. They also don’t use names; they seem to have user names based on their position in the social group. Barbara, the main character, is the only one with a real name. The names make me question whether this is happening “in real life” or if it’s happening virtually.

I can see why Ponies won the Nebula Prize. It’s incredible. Kij Johnson draws on our lives now to create the lives of little girls then. It’s something I can almost see happening, though I hope it never does. It’s a short, short story, only three pages when I printed it out. Ponies packs a punch for just three pages. I think it’s worth the time to read. I’m also interested in seeing what else Kij Johnson has written.

Sidenote: The artwork is from Chris Buzelli. It goes very well with the story. Tor.com has a gallery of his work, with a link to his website and bio.

Thanks to John Mutford for hosting Short Story Monday at The Book Mine Set.

Two Doctors, By M.R. James

Did Dr. Abell wish ill on Dr. Quinn? Perhaps. Quinn not only gained the desired services of Abell’s former servant Jennett, but was also taking his patients. Quinn wasn’t doing it on purpose; they all just wanted to come to him. There was something about Abell that put these people ill at ease, including their rector. The narrator is asking for help. He (presumably a he, given the era in which this story was written) has found a collection of papers in an old ledger he acquired. He is asking the reader if they also think there was some supernatural work at play.

Apparently, this is part of M.R. James’ style; he was the creator of the “antiquarian ghost story”. He used more realistic settings and stayed away from the Gothic. He wrote during the early twentieth century and his ghost stories are thought to be some of the best in English Literature. If this is the case, I wonder which or whether any current horror writers have read him.

I’m not sure what I thought of the story itself. Two Doctors was definitely interesting. Did I enjoy it? I don’t know. Maybe I’m too tired these days to be reading something written in such a dense style. Initially I was confused. The story is only eight of the pages in my Oxford Book of English Short Stories, but I found that I kept having to go back and re-read a paragraph or two that I just finished, so I would know what was going on. I didn’t dislike the story. It just left me feeling ambivalent towards it. I think it’s one of those stories I’m likely to forget in a few weeks.

You can read the story here or here.

Thanks to John Mutford at The Book Mine Set for hosting Short Story Monday.

If You’re Ever In Town… (Crazy Blog Hop)

I really like this week’s question from the Hop: "Which book blogger would you most like to meet in real life?"

I didn’t know how to narrow it down to just one. I decided to let everyone know about four bloggers, all of whom I follow and enjoy.

I’d really like to meet John Mutford at the Book Mine Set. I don’t know if/when that’ll happen since John’s way up there in the Northwest Territories.

Even though I’m not sure of her real name, I would like to meet Teacher from Whatcha Readin’, Books? We just seem to have really similar reading tastes and especially to dish over Stephen King.

I’d also like to meet Red, from What Read Red. I just always seem to end up on her blog!

Finally, I’d want to meet Mayowa from Pens with Cajones. He hasn’t posted in a while, but that’s because he’s working on his own writing!

It really was difficult to pick. There are so many great and interesting bloggers out there that I’d like to meet. My Google Reader is full of them. Who would you like to meet?

Very Short Stories

Below is a link to Wired Magazine.  They have a collection of very short stories.  Six words.  This is where John Mutford found his story for yesterday's Short Story Monday.  The stories are fun and interesting.  Some read has headlines, but many of them are whole stories. 

Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories

I enjoyed Margaret Atwood:
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

I also liked Joss Whedon:
Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

 Which one do you like?

Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula, By: Lindsay Hunter

1. Peggy Paula needs some help.
2. Something is wrong with her self-esteem.
3. She doesn’t seem to have any [parental] guidance.
(My three things.)

Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula comes from the Fifty-Two stories website, first introduced to me by John Mutford, host of this weekly event. It’s a great website filled with interesting short stories. Each week, a new one is posted, showcasing a different author. You may not like every story, but they’re all so different, I think there might be one for everyone.

Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula was written by Lindsay Hunter, a writer from Chicago, whose first book was published this past fall. She is also the co-founder of Quickies, a showcase for writers’ very short prose / flash fiction.

Peggy Paula was story 42 from 2010. So, I originally read it a while ago, but because of my real life (ie. morning sickness), I didn’t get to review it in a timely manner. This week, I wanted to restart my participation in Short Story Monday and this story was the first that popped to mind. Lindsay Hunter created a character that stayed with me. It’s a short short story, but Peggy Paula was so vivid, that three months later, I still thought of her. Peggy Paula seems as though she could be based on a real person. Peggy Paula is very much the opposite of who I am; I would never make the choices she makes, it makes me wonder how she got to be the way she is. I was intrigued by the story and will be on the look-out for more work by Lindsay Hunter.

Side Note: I think that is a picture of Lindsay Hunter. I got it from Goodreads.


Short Story Monday is hosted by John Mutford at The Book Mine Set.

The Year Of The Flood

The Year Of The Flood is Margaret Atwood’s latest novel about the world gone wrong. It is the same dystopian world she envisioned with the novel Oryx and Crake. The world has been decimated by a plague. The Year Of The Flood focuses on two women, who aren’t separated by a great distance, but each believes they are alone. They aren’t sure how long they are going to survive; their food sources are dwindling. Will they find each other or anyone else?

The Year Of The Flood is an intense read. So much happens in just over four hundred pages. I had to put the book down a few times to think about what had just happened. It was beautifully and intelligently written. The story was exciting and unique. It took the worst of human nature and accentuated it, then sprinkled it with the best. The Gardeners seemed like a crazy cult, but who were the ones to survive the Waterless Flood?

The main characters, Toby and Ren, are amazing people. Toby has been hardened over the years through her many trials, before and after The Flood. Everyone, including Ren, thinks Ren is weak, but she has to be strong to survive everything she has and not end up giving up on life. The last hundred pages are so exciting that I could barely put it down.

I read Oryx and Crake a few years ago, but I don’t think it’s necessary to read it first. The Year Of The Flood is not a sequel, it’s a parallel story. Many of the characters overlap, including the main ones, but I don’t think it takes away from the story. I want to re-read Oryx and Crake now, because I don’t think I remember the story as well as I thought. The first thing I thought about Jimmy was that I don’t remember Jimmy/Snowman being such an @$$hole. I don’t remember reading about some of the other characters either. I definitely need a break from the intensity though. Bad things happen to good people. Happiness is frail and fleeting. This book is about truth and possibility. The Year Of The Flood is one of Atwood’s best.

Other's Reviews:
The Book Mine Set
Kate's Bookcase
So Many Books 
Literary Musings
If you've reviewed this book, let me know and I'll add your link.
 

The Great Wednesday Compare #8- Archie Andrews Versus Nancy Drew

Vote for your favourite character over at the Book Mine Set.

This week:  Archie Andrews OR Nancy Drew.

Book Blogger Hop

This week, our host Jennifer is asking how we promote our blogs. In the beginning, I didn’t really think about promotion. I did the blog mostly for myself. I told some friends about it and they read it sometimes. I created my blog so that when I finished a book, I could write about what I thought and felt. Though an avid reader, I don’t belong to any reading groups and until the last couple years, I hadn’t found anyone with similar tastes in books.

After a while, I decided to venture out into the blogosphere. I found some interesting blogs and started following/subscribing to RSS feeds. I commented occasionally, but it was still some time before I started promoting my blog. I haven’t done anything extraordinary. I participate in a few different weekly events, like the Hop. There’s also Short Story Monday at The Book Mine Set and Top Ten Tuesday at The Broke and The Bookish. I also comment more often on all the great blogs I’ve found. I make sure to leave quality comments, taking the time to read a couple posts, the blogger’s profile if they have one and anything else that catches my eye. I agree with Jennifer in what she said about leaving good comments behind on your visits.

I don’t have a Facebook page and I don’t Twitter (though I’ve considered both). I don’t want to stretch myself too far; I don’t want to start, only to have it fade away into nothing or have it become a chore. I write my blogs because I enjoy it. I still think about Twitter and Facebook. Maybe one day I’ll join up and you’ll find me tweeting away. Until then, I’m happy here in the blogosphere.

The Seventh Future: Israel/Palestine, by: Margaret Atwood

Again I find myself having read a piece of fiction, unsure if it’s really a short story or not. Margaret Atwood posted The Seventh Future: Israel/Palestine on her blog, Margaret Atwood: Year of the Flood, about a month ago. I found myself drawn to it immediately. The Seventh Future is about someone who can see the future; he envision seven different future for the much disputed region. The seventh future that he sees is the one that is the most desirable. It would be hard work, but it is possible. The other six futures are different degrees of bad to worse. On a personal note, it makes me even more eager to read Year of the Flood.

Something I found intriguing is the debate on Ms. Atwood’s blog generated by this short piece of fiction. There are some very angry people out there. Someone blatantly call Margaret Atwood stupid. I was a little taken aback because I’m a fan of her work and I don’t think any writer who can create such amazing tales is stupid. Perhaps, what the person meant to say is overly optimistic or uninformed (which I don’t actually think). Yes, Margaret Atwood is a writer, not a politician or diplomat. So perhaps her opinion doesn’t have the same weight as people like Barak Obama or Tony Blair. However, her opinion is as valid as any one else’s. There are a couple people out there who really don’t like her or what she wrote. I thought The Seventh Future was insightful. I see each future that is laid out in the story as possible; the seventh is just the one we all hope for.

Thanks to John Mutford at The Book Mine Set for hosting.

Let’s Hop

The Book Blogger Hop is hosted by Jennifer at Crazy-for-Books. In honour of Book Blogger Appreciation week, each participant is sharing their love for a couple favourite blogs (like Crazy-for-Books).

Roof Beam Reader is a fantastic blog. Every week Adam posts Uncensored Saturdays and takes a look at books that have been banned and why. As a result, I learned that I’ve read quite a few banned books.

amused, bemused and confused has two things I love. Books and tea! Teadevotee has read many of the same books that I’ve read or want to read.

The Book Mine Set is probably the first book blog I started to follow. John Mutford writes insightful and interesting reviews. He hosts The Great Wednesday Compare every week and I can’t wait to see who the battle is between. I think my guy might lose this week.

I could go on about other blogs I’ve discovered, like The Lost Entwife and The Book Brothel and so many more, but there’s only so much time in the day. Plus, I hear my little one calling me (she’s almost 16 months!) I hope to find many more fine book blogs this hop.

Have a great weekend!

The Book Mine Set: The Great Wednesday Compare #7- Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy VERSUS Roland Deschain

Cast your vote at The Great Wednesday Compare. I have a feeling Roland is going to lose. Poor Gunslinger.

The Book Mine Set: The Great Wednesday Compare #7- Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy VERSUS Roland Deschain

The Book Mine Set: the Great Wednesday Compare #7- Hermione Granger VERSUS Fitzwilliam Darcy

Another fantastic pairing at The Great Wednesday Compare. Who couldn't you live without? Hermione Granger or Fitzwilliam Darcy. It's a tough call.

The Book Mine Set: the Great Wednesday Compare #7- Hermione Granger VERSUS Fitzwilliam Darcy

The Book Mine Set: The Great Wednesday Compare #7- Hermione Granger VERSUS Robert Langdon

Another great Great Wednesday Compare. My instincts say Hermione Granger would win over Robert Langdon every time.

The Book Mine Set: The Great Wednesday Compare #7- Hermione Granger VERSUS Robert Langdon

The Book Mine Set: The Great Wednesday Compare #6- Libraries VERSUS William Shakespeare

Which could you live without? I don't know.

The Book Mine Set: The Great Wednesday Compare #6- Libraries VERSUS William Shakespeare