From the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library  Find the perfect gift for the movie buff, music lover or bibliophile in your life.  Purchase gently-used books, music and DVDs at our Friends of the Library book sale Dec. 6 - 8, use our Give 3 Get 3 program for personalized suggestions, or check out our list of books that will make great gifts for children, teens and adults!  From greeting cards to 3D printed mementos, use the Library's Tech Tools to create handmade holiday gifts.  Make something special with our Cricut Machines, 3D printers and scanners, laser engraver or recording equipment, or use our digital Local History collections to create personalized home decor with Toledo flavor!  A Library book named in someone's honor:  Know someone who is passionate about a certain book or who is an avid reader in general?  Why not name a Library book in their honor through our Bookplates gift option.  A gift to the Library Legacy Foundation:  Make a donation in honor of a loved one to our Library Legacy Foundation - it's also a gift to the community, as it supports the many resources, services and programs offered by the Library.

Carrot tops!  We've been seeing these nutritious greens popping up on restaurant menus and food blogs in all kinds of interesting ways:  whizzed into pesto, blanched and dressed with sesame seeds or snipped into a pretty salad of shaved carrot coins.  And yes, despite what you may have heard, carrot tops are edible.  You might already be tossing them into stocks, but how about showcasing their herbal, earthy, subtly carrot-ish flavor in one of these recipes instead?  Their texture can be a little tough, so go for the leafy tops rather than the stems, and blanch them if needed.  Link to recipes using carrot tops at https://www.thekitchn.com/5-ways-to-eat-carrot-tops-183415  

Playing Baseball at the Library of Congress by Katherine Walden   While working as a Library Research Intern at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum in the summer of 2016, one of my responsibilities was responding to research inquiries.  Midway through the internship, an email came in from the Library of Congress’ Music Division with a few questions related to a baseball music exhibit they were putting together.  While most of my School of Library and Information Science coursework focused on digital humanities, digital preservation, and archives, my undergraduate degree was in music performance and I have done extensive research projects on baseball music intersections as a PhD candidate in the University of Iowa’s American Studies program.   I answered the Library of Congress’s specific research questions but also took the bold step of saying “here’s me, a grad student who actually studies baseball and has worked extensively with baseball music collections.”  My specific job description involved working on the Bibliography of Baseball and Music, a research resource the Library began in the 1990s alongside the first iteration of a baseball music exhibit.  They were developing a second baseball music exhibit and planning a library-wide baseball exhibit.  The original baseball music bibliography the Library released in 1994 identified about 400 baseball songs in the Library’s print music collection.  Through the work I did in the fellowship and the help of additional Music Division staff, we were able to locate 1,000 additional physical items, and identified in total 2,000 baseball-related songs that were submitted for copyright registration.  https://www.slis.uiowa.edu/sites/slis/files/8%2031%20final%20corrected%20sml.pdf   In May 2018, Katherine Walden accepted a full-time position as a Digital Liberal Arts Specialist at Grinnell College.  She has previously worked at the Iowa Women’s Archives, Library of Congress, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and Nashville Symphony Orchestra.  Her dissertation, “Remapping and Visualizing Baseball Labor:  A Digital Humanities Project,” (projected completion May 2019) uses digital humanities approaches and tools to analyze how Minor League Baseball relates to and complicates Major League-dominated narratives around globalization and diversity in U.S. professional baseball labor.  https://clas.uiowa.edu/american-studies/people/katie-walden

To Mark Twain, San Francisco was coffee with fresh cream at the Ocean House, a hotel and restaurant overlooking the Pacific.  He also had a decided fondness for steamed mussels and champagne.  But most of all, San Francisco was oysters—oysters by the bushel at the Occidental Hotel, where the day might begin with salmon and fried oysters and reach its culinary climax at 9 p.m., when, Twain wrote in 1864, he felt compelled “to move upon the supper works and destroy oysters done up in all kinds of seductive styles” until midnight, lest he offend the landlord.  Every indication is that his relationship with the landlord was excellent.  Having abandoned Mississippi riverboats in 1861 for fear of being drafted into the Union or Confederate army, Twain had lit out for the West, where he mined silver and crushed quartz in Washoe (in present-day Nevada), and began working as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.  In 1864, the 29-year-old writer on the verge of fame arrived in San Francisco, a city he called “the most cordial and sociable in the Union,” and took lodgings at the Occidental, where he would live for several month-long stints (likely as much as he could afford) during the next two years.  Andrew Beahrs  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-decades-long-comeback-of-mark-twains-favorite-food-88119462/  See also Mark Twain Makes a List of 60 American Comfort Foods He Missed While Traveling Abroad (1880) at http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/mark-twain-makes-a-very-long-list-of-american-foods-he-intends-to-eat-after-his-travels-1870.html

"Let's make ev'ry day Thanksgiving Day, full of courage and comfort and cheer.  Let your voices ring loud and clear, three hundred and sixty five days of the year."  Hugh Martin (1914-2011)  Sylvia Lange's "Uncle Hugh" was a prolific Broadway songwriter, penning such favorites as "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "The Trolley Song", and others.  But what most people don't know is that he also wrote a Thanksgiving song.  Just a couple of years before he passed away at the age of 96, he invited Sylvia into the studio with him to make a scratch recording of a song he'd just written called "Thanksgiving Should Be Every Day".  This is that sweet little song, written and played by a man who was 94 at the time.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEMoX06cP8&feature=youtu.be  2:18

Sister Pie is a bright corner bakery in Detroit’s West Village on the east side of town.  Each day, we serve pies, cookies, breakfast, and lunch.  The menu at Sister Pie is nontraditional in flavor combinations, rustic in execution, and constantly changing to honor the local agriculture of Michigan.  We strive to test the limits of our creativity while challenging and pleasing the palates of Sister Pie enthusiasts.  We make our pie dough by hand daily and most often communally.  As we grow and change, so does our mission:  Sister Pie aims to celebrate the seasons through pie; to provide consistently delicious, thoughtful, and inventive food; to foster a welcoming environment for employees and customers through transparency, community engagement, and education.  In the fall of 2012, Lisa launched Sister Pie on Thanksgiving out of her parents’ Milford kitchen.  She baked and sold forty pies, which may not seem like much now, but it felt like a heck-ton then.  As 2013 began, Lisa enrolled in the d:hive Build (now Build Institute) business class, joined FoodLab, and continued to sell pies and cookies via email blasts to family and friends.  When Sister Pie celebrated one year of business, Lisa packed up her rolling pin and moved into a shared commercial kitchen in Hannan House on Woodward.  The team grew with the addition of one eager intern, Anji, and she sliced apples for hours so that Sister Pie could bake 150 pies for their second Thanksgiving holiday.  In 2014, SP picked up wholesale accounts at Germack, Socratea, Shinola, and Parker Street Market.  Business was booming!  That May, Lisa and Anji campaigned for a $5,000 Kiva loan in an effort to take Anji from intern to paid part-time employee.  They achieved their goal in less than 48 hours, and Anji started officially working 15 hours/week at Sister Pie while maintaining a job as the graphic designer at Germack.  In the early summer, we set our eyes on the corner shop at Parker and Kercheval.  We began to rent the space and host “Future Sister Pie workdays”--family and friends would join us to help demolish walls and strip wallpaper.  During this time, we entered the Hatch Detroit contest and beating out hundreds of applicants for a Top Ten position.  We rallied for votes like crazy, and ultimately made it to the Top Four at the Hatch-Off. Lisa performed a 5 minute business pitch and participated in a Q&A panel.  WE WON!  A $50,000 grant was in our hands, and the journey was only just beginning.  With the continued help of friends and family (and a new employee!  Maddie from Ann Arbor!), we spent the better part of 2014-into-2015 tirelessly working toward the bakery of our dreams.  In February of 2015, we launched an Indiegogo campaign with a $25,000 fundraising goal. The contribution perks varied from a dozen buckwheat cookies to a Design-a-Pie experience (the Banana Pete’s origin!).  Sister Pie opened on April 24, 2015 to a line out the door and a dozen new employees, and we’ve been hustling ever since.  The upside to pie is two-fold:  we get to showcase Michigan’s abundance of farms and local produce (it’s second only to California in agricultural diversity in the country!) and simultaneously we fulfill our growing desire to foster family-style community in the workplace.  Pie is for sharing--a delicious way to come together for, truly, any reason at all.  According to the earliest notes written about SP, Lisa dreamt of opening a “future bakery-breakfast and lunch spot-community-focused gathering locale of delicious awesomeness in Detroit.”  She was inspired by Tartine and Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, Avalon International Breads in Detroit, Zingerman’s Bakehouse in Ann Arbor, and Bakeri in Brooklyn.  "Sister Pie" was inspired by a term of endearment that Lisa and her younger sister, Sarah, share for each other:  “What’s up, sister pie?  I love you, sister pie!”  The concept then grew to be inspired by an image of women (sisters, mothers, grandmothers, friends) gathering around a kitchen counter, pitting cherries, and rolling out pie dough.  We want to take care of our people; most importantly, our staff.  We want to build a business for employees that pays a fair and living wage; provides growth and learning opportunities; fosters a family-style community; embodies Sister Pie’s vision of sisterhood; continues to challenge traditional, profit-driven business practices; and maintains a mentality of continuous learning to keep improving, together, in the ways we provide for and empower staff.  We take care of each other.  Read more and see pictures at http://sisterpie.com/about/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  November 21, 2018  Issue 1990  325th day of the year