Soup's On!

Welcome! I'm so excited to be part of this week's Progressive Dinner Party; I'm picking up new recipes as quickly as I usually get new book ideas! Now that you've enjoyed your appetizers, please pull up a chair and we'll begin with the soup and salad course.

At my table, I'll be serving Southern Peanut Soup. My brother-in-law, who's quite a good cook, particularly of soups, first introduced me to this soup many years ago. Then he had the audacity to never make it again. But I still love him anyway; well, I do now that I know how to make the soup.

Southern Peanut Soup

2 T. butter
2 T. onion, grated
1 rib of celery, thinly sliced
2 T. flour
3 c. chicken broth
1/2 c. creamy peanut butter
1/4 t. salt
1 c. light cream
2 T. chopped roasted peanuts

Melt the butter over low heat in Dutch oven. Add onion and celery. Saute for 5 minutes. Add flour and mix well until blended. Stir in broth and simmer 30 minutes. Remove from heat; strain broth to remove onion and celery. Stir in peanut butter, salt and cream until well mixed. Serve hot. Garnish each serving with a teaspoon of chopped peanuts.

For another soup course, visit:

Review From Here - www.reviewfromhere.com - Creamy Tomato Soup

And for salad, stop by:

Rundpinne - www.rundpinne.com - Grandma's Cranberry Salad
Bermudaonion's Weblog - www.bermudaonion.wordpress.com - Pear & Blue Cheese Salad
Booking Mama - www.bookingmama.blogspot.com - Strawberry Poppy Seed Salad

Be sure to check out Book Blog Social Club for all of this week's festivities. My family is going to be trying new recipes for weeks!

Sunday Salon - December 6

It's snowing here this evening with a big snowfall predicted for Tuesday. Looks like the kinds of days coming up that will mean curling up with books and hot tea. For tonight it meant going over my bookshelf inventory and seeing what's on the shelves that I can use for the challenges I've already committed to for the coming year. Thanks to my hubby for being such a pack rat--he minored in English so we have a lot of novels sitting on the shelves left from those classes that are going to be a big help!
For the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge, I think I would be a very bad host if I didn't aim for the top level so 20 books it will be. Here's what I've settled on so far:

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Sonnets From The Portuguese by Elizabeth Barret Browning
Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I'd like to pick up a couple of the non-fiction books to fill out the list.

For this challenge, I have to pick out titles with the following words in the title:
Food - Five Quarters of An Orange by Joanne Harris
Body of Water - Heather Graham
Title - Secret Lives of the First Ladies by Cormac O'Brien
Plant - In The Woods by Tana French
Place Name - Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Music Term - Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

For this one I needed to pick three to six books or movies written about, by or based on the Brontes. I'm hoping to watch a couple of movies which I've yet to decide on. My books, as of now, are:

Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Agnes Gray by Anne Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
I'm going to re-read Chesapeake to start this challenge. After that, I'm not sure which one I'll read next--so many to choose from!

Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge - What's To Read?

Okay, when I was watching The Gilmore Girls on the WB network, I knew Rory Gilmore was an avid reader surrounding by a smart mom and spent a lot of time in school. Stands to reason that there would be a lot of books around. But I had no idea how many that was until a friend guided me to a list of almost 300 books.

Now I know I'm slow getting this challenge up, but the good news about this challenge is that with this many books to choose from, it makes a great crossover challenge.

If you're reading the Women Unbound Challenge, you'll find on this list "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir, "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf, "Out of Africa" by Isak Dinesen and and "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath. For "Woolf In Winter" you could also add Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway. Crossing over with All About The Brontes, you could read "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. The Shelf Discovery Challenge has crossovers with "Deenie" by Judy Blume and the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene. If you're participating in the Really Old Classics Challenge, you can crossover "The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, "Bhagavad Gita," and "The Iliad" by Homer. Wow, I just figured out that I could sign up for about three more challenges!

For the Gilmore Girls challenge, there are three levels. The first level is "Emily." Emily Gilmore is the matriarch of the family and a pretty demanding old gal. But to reach her level, you'll only have to read five books from two categories between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2010.

The second level is "Lorelei." Lorelei is a smart cookie who has devoted her life to making her daughter's life better. To reach her level, you'll need to read ten books from three of the five categories.

The highest level is "Rory." Rory is kind of a big deal in her small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut and the person most responsible for all of the books on the list. To join Rory, you'll need to read twenty books from four of the categories.

There will be a couple of mini-challenges along the way and at the end of the year, there will be a drawing for a book of your choice from the list or a DVD collection of a season of the television show.

Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge

"Gilmore Girls" ran on the WB Network from October 2000 to May 2007. The "girls" were mother and daughter Lorelei and Rory Gilmore. Lorelei had made her share of mistakes but when the show started, she was doing her best to make sure her prep school daughter stayed on the right track. Which was complicated by Lorelei's wealthy, meddling parents and a small Connecticut town full of real characters who all seemed to think they had a say in Rory's life. Between Lorelei, Rory, friends, family and school over 280 books were seen, discussed or read during the shows six year run.

When a friend recently found a site that listed all of the books referenced on the show, by episode, I started to get the idea that it would be fun to see how many of them I could read. Until I really started to think about how many books that was. That's when I decided it would be more fun to have a lot of people read some of the books.

If you click on the button on sidebar, it will take you directly to the challenge blog (or click here) for all of the details and the very long list of books you can choose from. The challenge runs from January 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010 and there are five categories of books you can choose from and three levels of participation. Movies of any of the books count and crossovers from other challenges count. You could end up reading anything from "Eloise" to Sylvia Plath, from "Babe, the Gallant Pig" to Arianna Huffington's "Pigs At The Trough."

There will be a grand prize at the end (still working out the details on that) and some mini-challenges along the way. Hope you'll be able to work this into what I already know is your very busy year of challenges!

100 Followers Giveaway!

Thanks to all of you who have helped me reach 100 followers! As a thank you, I'm giving away copies of Melissa Senate's "The Secret of Joy," Claire LaZebnik's "The Smart One And The Pretty One," Yona Zeldis McDonough's "Breaking The Bank," and Elizabeth Brundage's "Somebody Else's Daughter."

We're going to keep this simple. To enter, please leave a comment with a way for me to contact you by Tuesday, December 12th. U.S. addresses only, please.

**Update**
I probably should match the day of the week to the actual calendar date! Oops. So, the drawing will be Saturday, December 12th!