Category Archives: Terroir

For decades, one of my Fall soups has been an 18 bean.  Not this year!  5 seem to have gone the way of Covid.  We could only find 13 bean mixes this year, So the labels willhave to change.

Potato leek was next, and that will be followed by butternut and pear.

Trying something a little different this year in how we store them.  Instead of recycling yogurt containers, we’re using freezer bags.  Lay them flat before freezing and then storing upright like files in a filing cabinet. Should be able to get more of them into our small freezer.

In 1948, as civil war ravaged Greece, children were abducted and sent to communist “camps” inside the Iron Curtain. Eleni Gatzoyiannis, forty-one, defied the traditions of her small village and the terror of the communist insurgents to arrange for the escape of her three daughters and her son, Nicola. For that act, she was imprisoned, tortured, and executed in cold blood.

Nicholas Gage joined his father in Massachusetts at the age of nine and grew up to become a top New York Times investigative reporter, honing his skills with one thought in mind: to return to Greece and uncover the one story he cared about most: the story of his mother.

Eleni takes you into the heart a village destroyed in the name of ideals and into the soul of a truly heroic woman.
A powerful and immersive piece of work. Incredibly insightful into the values, roles, societal and cultural expectations of life in rural Greece at the time (pre to post WW2 and the following Civil War), and how they impacted on and constrained a woman’s desperate attempt to survive and protect her children from the barbarism, hardship, famine and persecution brought by civil war. At times an excruciating example of how jealousy, paranoia and power corrupt, and how the lust for power not only brings out the worst in mankind, but as is so often the case, enables the worst of mankind.

Eleni, Nicholas Cage, 0-345-32494-3
A Place for Us, Eleni’s Children in America, Nicholas Cage, 0-395-45517-0

Recently hauled Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings off the bookshelf.

It’s a more remarkable manuscript than I recalled.  I thought I would skim through the pages to refresh my memories.  That lasted about 20 seconds. An hour later I picked myself up off the floor after leaning on the bookcase reading and reflecting.  The next morning I found myself in the same position.

It is beautifully written and profound.

Read Slowly. Absorb and Reflect.  It’s full of wisdom.

Markings, Dag Hammarskjold. Translated from the Swedish by Leif Sjoberg and W.H. Auden. Forward by W.H. Auden