Life in the key of E flat minor

I am a chocoholic. I only recognize chocolate as a proper dessert or sweet treat, outside of a few exceptions. I will scoff at bananas foster, cherries jubilee or apple pie. However, one fantastic exception is a shortbread biscuit: a solid yet flaky cookie that's heavy for its size and tastes buttery with a hint of sugar. I can't control myself when they are around. Can you hear the bagpipes? Today is my father's birthday. And one of the many traits that I share with him is this love of shortbread.  Since I'm traveling from Glasgow to Oban (in the above mentioned Highlands) today, I baked some shortbread fingers with love and sent them home last week via my mother so that the delicate slightly-sweet treats will be there for my dad in the morning.  All the while, I've been picking up different brands of commercial shortbread. Detail of the opened package - it didn't stand a chance Shortbread is simple to make; traditionally it's made from th...

As I prepare for my 40th birthday holiday through the British Isles, I remember that I never posted this entry about my September vacation. I microblogged my trip through Europe using twitter and foursquare, even creating my own hashtag for the vacation, #CJintheUK, and tweeted happily along (usually when I could find abundant free wifi.) I think that it makes an amusing travelog to follow - complete with foursquare check ins, twitter conversations and selected uploaded pictures. (I am including the time and date stamp which came from the backlog in HootSuite, which is presented in Eastern Time.) I didn't really edit the tweets, except for an occasional misspelling which I caught, a foreign word needing to be italicized or if a tweet needed a little clarification. I left in the hash tags, probably to the chagrin of some of you, though I thought that it could be interesting to see what topics or words I was tagging in order to make my tweets searchable.  For those of you who don...

For bookclub this last weekend, I had picked 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith since I had thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Edinburgh as well as Scotland and wanted to read something based in that area. You may know him for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series which was made into an HBO show. I obviously chose Scottish and English food for the theme. I knew that I was going to make my shortbread fingers as well as serve some ginger and whisky malt preserves that I had picked up in Marks & Spencer over some good soft cheese. But I needed an entrée. I searched for ideas and but only found haggis as the quintessential Scotch food. First, I wasn’t confident that I would even find any haggis if I looked for it and it is a rather maligned food (though I found it evocative of Philadelphia’s scrapple.) I dug deeper and focused on googling "Scottish/Scotch entrée" and found Fife Miners’ Stew. Since Fife, the council area, is across the Forth from Edinburgh, I...

It’s January again and it looks like we all survived the Mayan Prophesy.   So I figured that I would work on my resolutions for the upcoming year.   I have a mediocre track record with my resolutions, but it doesn’t stop me from making them every year.   While I will build upon some of the ones that I have made before – ranging from the inane (wearing sunglasses as often as possible) to the meaningful (going to the gym regularly), I’m adding one more to the list: writing a page a day. I always wanted to be an author and have a book published that people want to read, but I haven’t really put “pen to paper” and written that book, yet.   So the goal of this resolution is to ask myself daily to type out a page. Hopefully it will be a page about the story I want to write into a novel, but if not, as long as it’s an exercise in getting myself to write habitually and daily, I will consider that a success.    I simply open Microsoft Word to start a new doc...