Ratatouille—Or brown isn't all bad

 

As autumn approaches, my farmers market picks reflect my hang-on-to-summer mood. I want peaches and blueberries as long as possible. I’m not ready for apples. When I can no longer get fresh local peaches, I will buy those farmers’ apples and be happily up to my elbows in homemade applesauce, cinnamon wafting through the kitchen. Just not yet.

Part of holding on to summer is a preference for milder temps, but also, I prefer summer’s greens, bright reds, peach blush, and blues to autumn’s oranges and browns. When I made my traditional ratatouille last weekend, I lined up the veggies on the counter just to enjoy their colors. Eggplant is purple! Even the garlic has purplish stripes. Green zucchini and parsley. Red tomatoes, and a red pepper I forgot to get in the picture. The first sauté looked so bright.

 

But when I added the eggplant, the whole dish took on a brown effect. Cooked eggplant is no longer a summer color; it is a grayish brown, like winter’s dirty slush. Ratatouille’s flavors simmered together taste amazing in any season, but I don’t enjoy looking at the cooked dish. In a couple hours prep time, it goes from looking like summer to looking like winter. (Seems like a good spot here for a joke about aging or an adage about life transitions or positive focus, but I’m too tired to think of one.)

 

As fall inevitably encroaches, I’ll have to keep reminding myself of all the things I love that are in fact brown—squirrels (majorly cute), Paddington Bear (endearing), turkey gravy (yum), oh, and applesauce after a major cinnamon dump.

The Right Kind of Fool ~ my review

I lost count of the number of times I paused reading Sarah Loudin Thomas’ novel, The Right Kind of Fool, because it was just too scary. I thought, “If thirteen-year-old Honor is going to climb out the bedroom window and run off into the nighttime forest on Rich Mountain yet AGAIN, I am going to have to wait till daylight to pick up this story.” Then I’d put the book down until a time not so near my bedtime. Sometimes I was so afraid for Honor’s safety that I’d wait days, but then my curiosity and trust in the gentle voice of the author won out.

 

In the summer of 1934, a man is murdered on the mountain, and Honor finds the body. His father and the sheriff investigate. Honor’s father and mother are still at odds after many years of living apart, he on the mountain and she in the small town of Beverly, West Virginia. Honor, who is deaf, is smart, sensitive, and observant enough to have significant clues to the murder, if he can successfully communicate them. During the murder investigation, suspects deny, confess, and dodge, resulting in many plot twists—many involving the dense forest on Rich Mountain.

 

I love how Sarah Loudin Thomas tenderly unfolds layers of Loyal’s and his father’s and mother’s emotional vulnerability. Regarding relational roles, it is a testimony to author Thomas’ storytelling skill how each character brings his own motives into the light, ponders them, figures out the right thing to do, and chooses to change and grow. The Right Kind of Fool is truly a redemptive story. In fact, if I had not trusted the author based on her gentle voice in another novel, I probably would have abandoned this novel after the second or third scary part. Thomas has crafted an intriguing, positive, character-driven mystery here.