Potato Peel Pie

Typically when I host book club, it can be challenging to serve a dish that hearkens back to the book. That was not the case when our club recently read the wonderful The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Without question, I knew I would have to serve a potato peel pie. Googling a recipe was easy. Luckily, so was making the pie. Peel the potatoes. Boil the potatoes. Combine the peels with some flour, salt and onions. Press the peels into a pie dish. Make a mashed potato filling. Bake. Sprinkle with beet root. And tada!Everyone bravely dug in, declaring it an appealing side dish with a roast beef, for example. The potato peel pie crust really did have a surprisingly nice flavor and texture, and you can't go wrong with a mashed potato filling. Even our youngest members tried it, although they were more game for the chocolate cake I served in case the pie was a bust. The last word: great book, pretty darn good pie.

A Must-Read

This is the working cover of my fellow Class of '96 Scripps alumnae/book-club buddy Margaret Dilloway's DEBUT NOVEL!!! Isn't it gorgeous??? Hard to believe I know someone who's about to get her first book published. (I still have some Werther's Original chocolates in a bowl that she left here last spring before she moved to Hawaii.) Oh, and she wrote this book while birthing and raising three children. Word is that it will be released in August 2010. I absolutely cannot wait to read it.

P.S. She has a beautiful blog too! Do yourself a favor and read this post, in case you've been forgetting to believe in yourself lately.

Just a Small-Town Girl

Young Zippy was fodder for an excellent book-club discussion at my place a couple of Sundays ago. She really brought out the small-town girl in all of us as we reminisced about running roughshod in our neighborhoods until the street-lights came on, riding bikes to school, and even just playing in our front yards-- things parents don't let kids do a whole lot of anymore. Funny stories came out in our discussion too about pet-sitting mishaps and crazy neighbors. But we also greatly appreciated Zippy's more sentimental and even heartbreaking side. One of our members liked this book so much that as soon as she finished reading it, she turned right back to page one and started all over. This was the second time reading it for me, and I don't reread that many books.For those of us who wondered whatever became of the inhabitants of Zippy's world and especially her mother, one member told us about the sequel to Zippy called She Got Up Off the Couch. I just picked it up and have barely finished the preface, but I can already tell it will suck me in the same way Zippy did.
I hope we have a book-club discussion about this one. And I'm extremely bummed I missed the discussion about this one from before I joined the club. Just finished it and I'm still reeling.