The Great British Baking Show

7:26

7:49

It's 7:00 and we are both up, sitting by the fire, as the morning sky lightens.  For now, it's blue skies, a lake ready for ice skating with a few tents up already.  It's 25º but will warm up over the next 24 hours with scary winds forecast for Sunday, up to 75 mph.  We will be hunkering down, filling the bathtubs in case we lose electricity.

7:27

Yesterday was another day of yoga in the morning with Julie but then I did something different.  I drove off into the boondocks of Chautauqua country, on roads I have never been on, to a small village called Niobe where Finn's Auto sits.  He has been recommended to me as a great Subaru mechanic and I can see why.  He had at least twenty Subaru's sitting outside his shop.  Since I probably need new brakes, I made an appointment for him to check them out and replace the rotors and pads if necessary.  It's a twenty-minute drive from our house with nothing around so I am going to have sit and wait for my car, reading my Kindle for a couple of hours.

Not Wanted

When I returned home, Evie was ready to do some shopping.  Since she had just hard boiled some eggs, I had an egg salad sandwich with a bowl of her vegetable soup and watched another episode of Friday Night Lights with only a few more to go before I have to find a new series to watch during my lunch.  While Evie was shopping, I read some, napped and thought about taking a walk but it was still icy out on most roads and walks so I smartly stayed inside and read more of WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING.  I am really liking it. Evie didn't get home till midafternoon.  She immediately put things away and began putting together our dinner, a new recipe she found from the NYTimes.  By 6:30  it was ready,  boneless chicken thighs with a lemon/garlic/anchovy/caper sauce with rice.  It's a keeper, something I am sure she will continue to make and the best part, we have enough for another dinner.  Yum.  We watched Colbert, some news and ended the night going back to an old chestnut, The Great British Baking show because a New York Times article (see below) reminded me why we like it so much.

In yesterday's NYTimes,  op-ed writer Farhad Manjoo wrote that after Trump' election in 2016
"I wanted to find places where the American president-elect and his American opponents and their American controversies simply did not exist. I found such a place in a British reality baking contest."

The Great British Baking Show Judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood 

"For me, it was nice British people politely baking against one another... “The Great British Baking Show,” for those not in the cult, is an amateur baking contest, and it is one of the least American things you will ever see on TV.  It depicts a utopia: a multicultural land of friendly blokes and mums with old-timey jobs — Imelda is a “countryside recreation officer” — blessed with enough welfare-state-enabled free time to attain expertise in British confectionary.  To an American, the show suggests a time and place where our own worries have no meaning. And that, more than baking, is what “The Great British Baking Show” is really about"