As I write this, It’s already the day before Thanksgiving and I haven’t grocery shopped. I’m too excited about this project to grocery shop!
Some of you are familiar with the concept I have been fiddling with for over a year, The Women’s Survival Guide. This newsletter is the first step toward the ultimate goal of a web-based community for women in middle age. The main component of The Guide will be sharing experiences (submitters) and seeking information from the pool of experiences (seekers). The concept blossoms from there. Think Wikipedia for women, the possibilities are endless.
This is an experiment! Let's see where it goes in the next two months. If there is information you are seeking or if you have a suggestion for a Maven Interview, please let me know! Sign upfor the biweekly newsletter below and look forward to:
Interview with a (female) Maven!
Random question asked of Anonymous Women: Hear what they think!
A simple Recipe you won't Hate!
Surprises!
If you like what you've read, please share with your web of friends across the globe. The faster I can grow the base, the faster I can get to the real mission: Providing advice and experience to our peers who are seeking advice and experience.
Ready?
WSG: The Holiday Issue, Volume 1
Maven of the Week: Claire Messud!
Claire is a writer of "NYTimes" best selling fiction (The Emperor's Children, The Woman Upstairs, The Burning Girl, among others) and has a brand new and first non-fiction book out, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Why I Write. She is also a professor of English literature at Harvard, mother to two teenagers, two beagles and wife to James Wood.
1. This Holiday season, what’s the plan? Please provide a photo of your favorite holiday “thing”(ornament, dreidel, the like).
As for Ornaments, It's a glass camembert that our friend Susanna gave us about 15 years ago, not long after we moved to the area, as a joke because of how much cheese we bought (and enjoyed!) from Formaggio. It amuses me because it's not in any obvious way Christmasy, & it makes me happy because my dear friend Susanna gave it to me.
As for traditions, etc - James likes to do the full Christmas dinner with trimmings. He is the cook in the family - as his father was the cook in his family growing up - and he makes delicious things, very traditionally British (he is British). He is famous for his roast potatoes. His father, 92, still makes Christmas puddings and sends us one each year.
In my house growing up Christmas was rather fraught - my father was French and believed the celebration should be on Christmas Eve and involve smoked salmon and champagne. My mother, Canadian, believed in English Christmas dinner on Christmas afternoon. The compromise was champagne & smoked salmon before the roasted fowl, which we ate at supper time because my father felt a 3pm meal was uncivilized (I tend to agree). He also disliked turkey, which he found dry, and insisted on a capon, which was sometimes hard to find. Our family argued a lot at this time of year - now, understanding things better, I see that their expectations were so different. As a child, my father had been through the war in North Africa, a time of real privation and fear (nights spent in bomb shelters, ration cards & long lines for food, etc), for whom Christmas involved getting maybe some colored pencils and a notebook and if you were lucky a small piece of chocolate; while my mother was a pampered girl from Toronto who wanted nice things. And then part of my father wanted to give us nice things, because at last he could, but he didn't want us to be blasé about them.
2. Did you learn anything from this Thanksgiving that you will apply to your next holiday celebration?
The weather on Thanksgiving was awful. So we turned on the gas fire & the television, & watched a funny movie together with the kids - a silly French farce from about 15 years ago. We all laughed out loud.
3. What do you do to relax?
In the pandemic, I spend so much time on the computer, and my eyes get tired. Being outside in nature is the way I relax. The ideal is a winter beach walk, with dogs.
4. What are you excited about?
Through all of this hard year I've held onto lines from the Louise Glück poem "October": "You are not alone / the poem said, / in the dark tunnel." I'm excited about the beautiful and inspiring works of art that have sustained me and continue to. I'm excited about a new year, a new administration, a vaccine. I'm excited for light in the dark tunnel.
5. What category/subject would you add to The Guide? Why?
I'm keen for a discussion of fading eyesight. It was initially so traumatic, and nobody had ever spoken about it. Now I'm used to needing reading glasses, but the eyes keep getting worse, and all sorts of little things are tricky. Menus in restaurants (if we ever go again to restaurants), the print on pill bottles, but also seeing a spot on the forehead or a whisker under the chin. Maybe it's just better to be blind - we get less judgmental, because we don't see the flaws? It's commonplace & normal, so nobody talks about it - but I'd love to know how other people experience it & what they do about it.
A Recipe You Wont Hate
POPOVERS: From Martha Stewart
Ingredients:
3 large eggs, room temperature
1 1/2 cups whole milk, room temperature
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons coarse salt
Vegetable-oil nonstick cooking spray
Directions
Step 1
If eggs and milk are cold, before combining, submerge whole eggs in warm water 10 minutes and heat milk until just warm. Preheat oven to 450 degrees with a nonstick popover pan on rack in lowest position.
Step 2
After you have combined eggs and milk in a large bowl, whisk together until very frothy. This should only take about 1 minute. Have the flour and salt measured out and ready to go.
Step 3
Add flour and salt to egg mixture. We tested out a blender and an electric stand mixer when making the batter, but concluded that whisking by hand produces the most tender, airy popovers.
Step 4
Whisk flour and salt into egg mixture just until batter is the consistency of heavy cream with some small lumps remaining. See those air bubbles? They are what will cause the popovers to rise.
Step 5
Remove popover pan from oven and coat with cooking spray. If you prefer a standard muffin tin, only coat (and fill) the outer cups; they get better circulation in the oven. (Also, reduce baking time by 5 minutes.)(eh, I don't really agree...but, you can try both ways and see what you think)
Step 6
Fill popover cups about three-quarters full with batter. Bake 20 minutes, then reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees. Continue to bake until golden brown and dry to the touch, about 20 minutes more.
Step 7
Popovers lose their crunch if they linger in the pan, so turn them out on a wire rack immediately and poke a small opening in the side of each with a paring knife to let the steam escape. Serve right away.
Question of The Week:
What positive thing has come out of your Covid experience?
Answer 1: Creatively, I found the time to focus in a way I don't when I have the freedom to do whatever I want. I've been surprisingly productive, though it took a month or so to kick in.
Answer 2: I got to slow down a bit and get started on a new career in real estate!
Answer 3: The Sunday evening ZOOM calls with family. We are all scattered around the country from Boston to Hawaii and our Zoom calls have kept us connected. The call are especially important to Grammy who lives alone and has an underlying health condition and is therefore very limited with her personal contacts. I suspect that we will continue the weekly calls well after the threat of COVID ends.
Answer 4: Grateful that my kids have what so many others do not- safe, secure place to live, and do school work. Because of all the focus on underlying health issues, we set up a home gym and I definitely focus more on being healthy.
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womenssurvivalguide@gmail.com
Thank you for taking the time to read the first WSG Newsletter!
I am not a journalist, which you may have noticed. But, I've worked in the real world, have three teenagers, a husband, a dog and live in Boston.
I look forward to creating the next newsletter for you!
xo
Kim Druker Stockwell
My current mantra: Remember to breathe deeply.
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