Food Mill

I made three mistakes at the library. Two were big ones. Too often I fall for the larger books, as if, somehow, the author must know what he/she is doing to have created such a huge volume. I should know better.

One in particular, Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, looked so interesting at first inspection that I just knew it had to be great. Well, I’m about 400 pages into it, a third of the way, and I’m wondering if I should continue to invest myself in it? I love the language that he uses, but the story line mystifies me. What’s the point? In fact, I’ve turned the pages back a hundred times, looking to see if I’ve missed something that would tell me where I was…

I’m a sucker for great written language. Umberto Eco is a favorite author as is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Maybe it’s because I was raised on the books of Richard Halliburton. I read them all. And I remember them as ‘large’ books, filled with ‘language’. Were they really large books, or was I really small?

Funny; I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Richard Halliburton and saw this… “While many of Halliburton's stories recount his own irresponsibility and document attitudes which today would almost universally be condemned as racist…” Well, if he was a racist, it went right over my head. But then again, growing up in the all white city of Manhattan Beach, in the 40’s and 50’s, racism was not a word we heard. What was ‘race’?

On a different note; we bought a food mill to process the many Sweet 100’s tomatoes that are ripening. But no instructions came with the darn thing. No matter, I can always Google it and come up with something. I did try it out of course and came up with about a quart of skinless tomato sauce. I will add to that amount and then cook it up with fresh spices and ground turkey, for a winter time spaghetti sauce.

Now what will I do with a food mill after the last tomato has been picked? Will it grow dusty and forgotten in the back of a cupboard?