February Book Club

Good news for you recipe lovers!

The following two recipe pages were updated this morning:

• Breakfast Recipes (Now includes a section dedicated solely to protein pancakes!)
• Desserts, Baked Goods & Sweet Treats

That’s just a lil’ peek.

Happy cooking, baking and eating!

Lunch

Today’s lunch was inspired by Ryan’s breakfast.

Ryan and I will often eat similar if not the exact same breakfast, but sometimes we do our own thing. While I ate my bowl of chocolaty oats, Ryan enjoyed eggs and officially sparked a craving in me.

I knew my lunch would include scrambled eggs since 7 a.m.!

I made my eggs by combining three eggs, milk and shredded mozzarella cheese in a bowl before scrambling them on the stovetop and adding fresh spinach.

A lightly-buttered whole wheat bagel rounded out the meal.

Moving right along…

February Book Club

It’s that time again! It’s time to select the book of the month for the February Book Club!

The following books were taken from your recommendations on the PBF Facebook page. Please vote on the book you would most like to read below. On March 1, I’ll post my review of the book along with discussion questions for us to talk about in the comments section of the post.

Also, if you post a review of the selected book on your blog before March 1, please email me at pbfingers@gmail.com and let me know so I can be sure to include your review in the link up of book reviews that will be included in that post as well.

Let’s get voting!

• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

• The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

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