Socca is a chickpea flour pancake/flatbread.  It's vegan, grain and gluten-free.  Top with your favourite ingredients for a beautiful and wholesome lunch, dinner or snack.  SOCCA WITH TOPPINGS:  Once socca is ready take it from the oven, add ingredients on the top and broil for another 5-10 minutes (until cheese melts/ingredients start getting some colour).  https://vegeregis.com/green-socca/ 

On the winter morning of January 31, 1861, Abraham Lincoln stepped inside a secluded farmhouse seemingly adrift on the vast Illinois prairie.  The president-elect had left his hometown of Springfield only once in the eight months since garnering the Republican presidential nomination—in order to finally meet his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, in person—but he had one special goodbye that he needed to deliver in person before departing Illinois for his inauguration.  Inside that cozy farmhouse tucked underneath a blanket of snow, Lincoln bent down his lanky frame and embraced the wizened woman he called “Mother,” not the woman who gave birth to him, however, but the stepmother who helped to set him on the path to the White House.   Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who gave birth to the Great Emancipator on February 12, 1809, had instilled the virtues of honesty and compassion in her son and sowed the seeds of his intellectual curiosity.  Although lacking a formal education of her own, Nancy Lincoln impressed the importance of learning and reading on her young boy as they moved about the Kentucky and Indiana frontier.  Fourteen months later, Lincoln’s father, Thomas, returned to his former haunt of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and called on Sarah Bush Johnston.  The pair had known each other from the Lincolns’ former time in Elizabethtown, and as soon as the widow Johnston, who had lost her husband in an 1816 cholera epidemic, answered the knock on the door, Thomas proposed.  Once he agreed to pay off her late husband’s outstanding debts, Sarah accepted the matrimonial offer.  Widow and widower wed on December 2, 1819.  Thomas Lincoln brought Sarah and her three children back to his small Indiana cabin to live with his two surviving children, Abraham and sister Sarah.  In 1861, Lincoln confided to a relative that his stepmother “had been his best friend in this world and that no son could love a mother more than he loved her.”  When Thomas Lincoln died in 1851, Sarah found herself a widow once again. Lincoln helped to support his stepmother and maintained a 40-acre plot for her on the Illinois plains.  Christopher Klein  https://www.history.com/news/the-two-mothers-who-molded-lincoln 

Homemade candied ginger is WAY better than store-bought, much fresher and more vibrant.  It will bring your baked goods to life, plus they’re fabulous just to snack on!   PLUS there’s the additional bonus of an amazing ginger simple syrup you’ll get at the end of the cooking process that is phenomenal in drinks!   Add it to the following:  Banana bread, sugar cookies, citrus salad, granola bars, cakes, pies, muffins, cupcakes, shortbread, pancakes, waffles, sprinkled over ice cream, lemon bread, pound cake (try my Preserved Lemon Ginger Pound Cake), ginger snaps, cranberry relish, pear or apple crisp, homemade jam, and the list goes on and on!  Or add it to this delicious Healthy Homemade Granola or this phenomenal Pineapple Mango Coconut Crumble with Candied Ginger.  Kimberly Killebrew See recipe and pictures at https://www.daringgourmet.com/how-to-make-crystallized-ginger/comment-page-3/ 
 © 2022 · The Daring Gourmet · All Rights Reserved

 

Books to take on a long retreat:  “The Literary Life,” by Robert Phelps and Peter Deane.  A browser’s paradise  A year-by-year scrapbook of 20th-century Anglo-American literature.  *  “The Art of Eating,” by M.F.K. Fisher. Celebrating the sensual.  *  “On the Shoulders of Giants,” by Robert K. Merton.  A lighthearted “Shandean” history of the dwarfs-perched-on-giants catchphrase.  Read entire list compiled by critic Michael Dirda at https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/when-it-all-becomes-too-much-and-you-head-for-the-hills-what-books-would-you-bring/2022/01/11/0fc01f76-6f1f-11ec-a5d2-7712163262f0_story.html

 

FEBRUARY EVENTS  1:  New Moon  *  1:  Chinese New year   *  2:  Groundhog Day  *  4-20:  Beijing  XXIV Olympic Winter Games   * 13:  Super Bowl LVI  Kickoff will likely happen at 6:30 p.m. ET.  Fans can tune in to the game on NBC.  halftime show:  Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar  * 14:  Valentine’s Day  *  16:  Full Moon  *  21:  President’s Day 

January 28, 2022  The bidding war for parts of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's library is over, and it's clear that fans of the late Supreme Court justice have deep pockets.  The collection of Ginsburg-iana went for $2.3 million in the auction run by Bonhams, the auction house said.  The sale included more than 1,000 books with inscriptions from fellow justices, some of Ginsburg's old annotated law textbooks and gifts from Gloria Steinem and Annie Leibovitz.  Honorary degrees from Brown and Smith were also available, as were collections on Judaica, opera and women's rights.  Dan Berman  https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/28/politics/rbg-auction-results/index.html 

Scottish food, drink, and verse are celebrated on January 25, the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns.  Burns is regarded as Scotland’s national bard.  He composed hundreds of songs and poems in both Scottish and English.  Burns Night celebrations run the gamut from simple gatherings of friends to elaborate ceremonies.  A piper may signal the start of proceedings, which soon give way to the Burns Supper.  The star of the meal is haggis, Scotland’s national dish.  Burns’s ode To a Haggis is recited before the haggis is carved and served to guests.  The event traditionally closes with a group rendition of Auld Lang Syne, perhaps the most-famous work attributed to Burns.  Michael Ray  https://www.britannica.com/story/the-haggis-burns-night-in-scotland  Read Address to a Haggis by Robert Burns at http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/toahaggis.htm  See haggis recipe serving eight at https://www.196flavors.com/scotland-haggis/ 

Thomas Jefferson sells the bulk of his book collection to the United States government for $23,950, reestablishing the Library of Congress after it was burned down by the British the previous year (January 30, 1815) • Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters premieres at the Moscow Art Theater (January 31, 1901) • The first Oxford English Dictionary is published by James A.H. Murray (February 1, 1884) • Great American Iconoclast Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is published (February 1, 1962) • David Foster Wallace’s prescient Infinite Jest is published (February 1, 1996) • Eugene O’Neill’s first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, opens at the Morosco Theater (February 2, 1920) • The still-controversial Ulysses is published in Paris on James Joyce’s fortieth birthday (February 2, 1922) • James Fenimore Cooper’s highly influential The Last of the Mohicans is published (February 4, 1826) • Six-year-old Elizabeth Bishop goes with her aunt to a dentist’s appointment; 50 years later, she will publish a life-changing poem about the experience called “In the Waiting Room” (February 5, 1918) • The first issue of Reader’s Digest is published (February 5, 1922)  Literary Hub  January 30, 2022 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2489  January 31, 2022