Well Read Enough

I recently discovered that through the Danish library network I can request any book in any Danish library in the country be sent to my neighborhood library, and they have a wide selection of books in English (and Books in American). Since I have more free time on my hands I'm wanting to become better read. I've been looking for good top 100 lists of fiction and nonfiction books and have been a little ho-hum about the lists I've found.

So far there is the The Random House Modern Library list, the (Since 1923) TIME list, the Book magazine best fictional characters list, and the BBC Big Read.

I want to go with the BBC list because I've already knocked off 18 of the top 25 (it helps that five of those are Harry Potter books) but most of the books seem a little kiddie and I wouldn't expect to see The Princess Diaries in the list of modern classics I'm looking for. And I don't even recognize more than half of the titles from the TIME list. So I'm leaning Modern Library list. Unless you all, I'm sorry Y'ALL FOLK, have any other suggestions? Or a favorite from any of the lists?

Bee-Bop

It struck me at some point this week that John has suddenly left babyland behind and is acting more and more like a full fledged toddler. Michael recently introduced him to our iPod and every day when Michael comes home from work, John will reach out for his iPod and will then spend 5-10 minutes listening to music. He'll hold an earbud to one ear and start bobbing along. The only baby-like thing about the whole production is he'll usually try to stick the earbud in his mouth at some point.

The YouTube video is here.

Photo Friday Saturday

Sweden, originally uploaded by TilleyShots.

John and I took a trip to Sweden today with a few people from church. It's not often you get to say, "Oh, I went to Sweden today..."

Tzatziki

Tzatziki is a Greek yogurt dip and one of the first new recipes I made when we got to Copen- hagen. It all started when we went to the grocery store looking for yogurt and found this big tub that clearly was yogurt (we weren't so sure about some of the other stuff). We brought it home, tasted it and realized this isn't like American yogurt. It tasted a lot like sour cream and had a very rich, creamy texture. A Google search revealed that it is a goats milk yogurt that isn't widely available in the U.S. outside speciality grocery stores. I bet a place like Wild Oats or Whole Foods would have it though.

But what to do with a huge tub of Greek yogurt? I headed over to Real Simple recipes, typed in 'Greek yogurt' and tzatzkiki was the first recipe to come up.

Tzatziki (Greek Yogurt Dip)
1 cup low-fat Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill
1/4 cup grated cucumber
1 small clove garlic, finely chopped

In a small bowl, combine the yogurt, dill, cucumber, and garlic.

I've made this recipe four times now and the key to tzatziki is to be sure that all the cucumber juices from the grating go into the dip. The sweetness of the juices balance the sour flavor of the yogurt.

I love to dip this with cucumber slices but it is also great with carrot sticks and red pepper slices.

To Market, To Market

I enjoy cooking as a hobby and my recent lifestyle change is giving me more opportunities to expand my culinary abilities. Back in the Homeland, we belonged to the Ragamuffin Cooking Club, a group of people connected through work, school, church or random chance meeting who all shared a desire to become better cooks. In that spirit, I thought I’d post about my experiences with food, kitchen challenges and especially new recipes I’m discovering over here.

I have to start by talking about two things: grocery shopping in Copenhagen and my limited kitchen equipment. First, there are three-tiers of grocery stores that I’ll call: Independent Vendors, “Kroger” and “Big Lots”. Independent Vendors include green grocers, bakeries, butchers, and fishmongers. Your Kroger stores are expensive but have just about everything you could possible be looking for. Your Big Lots are small but numerous, carry different items from week-to-week and are as cheap as you’re going to find. We largely shop at the Big Lots stores because, despite the fact that in Denmark all food purchases include a 25 percent sales tax, we’re trying to cut our monthly grocery bill by 33 percent compared to what we used to spend in the Homeland. Thus a typical Saturday requires that we shop at at least three different Big Lots stores. It helps our budgeting goals a lot that we have to carry the food home in bags the we provide ourselves; it's either provide your own bags or pay for plastic bags at the store. A heavy, $4, one liter of Coke doesn't seems so necessary when you have to carry it three blocks home.

The other challenging thing about grocery shopping here is there are no preservatives in the food. Which sounds great at first. I mean who among us is willing to stand up and say, “Yes. YES. I want to put toxic chemicals in my body!” Well, after finding produce rotting in my refrigerator less than 48 hours after purchase on at least four occasions (and irregardless of whether I bought it at a Big Lots or a Kroger-like quality store), I stood staring at a bag of half rotten potatoes thinking, “Yes. Toxic chemicals. Sign me up!”

I’m ever-so-slowly learning that my American way of grocery shopping – meal plan on Saturday, go out and buy everything I’ll need for the week – isn’t the best idea. And the many, many green grocer stands are starting to make a lot of sense. “Eeegghhmm… so you buy your fruits and vegetables the day you plan to cook with them… ahhh….”

Second, my kitchen. Our Danish kitchen is darling. It has beautiful wood countertops, a sweet round sink and a brand new glass top range with four burners. We are lacking a dishwasher and an oven. For baked goods, I have what amounts to a large toaster oven to bake in. I’m learning it’s more than meets the eye since, after five collective failures, I’ve managed to bake chocolate chip cookies and homemade biscuits. There are a few equipment deficiencies like I don't have a blender, food processor or a mixer, but I'm learning to work around those things.

For dishwashing, I have Michael. :)

Library Time

One of our favorite "date nights" back in the States was to go to a bookstore and read for a couple of hours. Not exactly the kind of thing normal romance is made of but we enjoyed it. It was food for conversation. Here they have bookstores of course, but they primarily carry books in Danish (I know, surprise). Now that I'm in possession of my Danish CPR card, also known as the Magic Card that, like it's American counterpart the social security number, is the ticket to everything Danish; a bank account, access to the free healthcare system, and a library card.

A very kind Danish woman set up my account and took the time to show me how to check books in and out (which you do yourself), and directed me to the small selection of "Books in English" and "Books in American."

The pickin's are slim.

I came home with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another classic I'd never read and a board book partly for John but mostly for myself. I need to expand my Danish vocabulary. I'm hoping to find the Danish children's book that tells you all the names of the food in hopes it will make grocery shopping easier.

Baby Einstein

I'm feeling a little less like a overly-concerned, psychotic parent for deciding with Michael not to let John watch television after running across this piece in the latest issue of TIME.

A few pertinent excerpts:

In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers. . .

The [University of Washington] research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form...

Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen...

This growing evidence led the Academy to issue its recommendation in 1999 that no child under two years old watch any television...

Though the popular baby videos and DVDs in the Washington study were designed to stimulate infants' brains, not necessarily to promote language development, parents generally assume that the products' promises to make their babies smarter include improvement of speaking skills. But, says Christakis, "the majority of the videos don't try to promote language; they have rapid scene changes and quick edits, and no appearance of the 'parent-ese' type of speaking that parents use when talking to their babies..."

As far as Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. "There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better," he says. "But that's not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation." His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. "Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal," says Christakis, "and by comparison, reality is boring."

I've always been a little weirded out by the whole Baby Einstein thing and had read just enough before John was born to think that television in generally is a bad idea for small children. Thus we made a conscious decision to not set him in front of a television or watch very much ourselves from the time he was little bitty. We did attempt to not make a big deal about it and it's been pretty easy even when we're visiting friends and family to keep John away from the tube. He rarely shows any interest even when he does have access anyway.

I'm definitely not trying to down people that use Baby Einstein or let their kids watch Dora. (Though I'd hope it's not for two to three hours everyday. I mean, wow.) I'm sure I haven't done the stay-at-home mom thing long enough to really appreciate the times when you just need you child to sit down and be still long enough for you to take a shower, make a meal or just mentally regroup. And I just have one and I'm sure the more you have, the more tempting it is to pop in the DVD and take a few precious minutes to breath through a paper bag.