Category: Extra Easy

Linguine with Olives and Parsley Recipe

by Maria

Linguine with olives and parsley recipe

I was flipping through a copy of Bon Appétit a few weeks ago, when I spotted this recipe. Don’t ask me what issue it was, because I don’t want to have to admit how many months I fell behind this summer. It was a 2015 issue, though. So, almost okay.

But I saw this recipe and I knew, right away, that this was The One. The One is that recipe that you think about for days and weeks until you finally scratch the itch and cook it and eat it and revel in it.

There’s been a lot of reveling over this recipe in our house. I cooked it two weeks back-to-back, and I may be bold and cook it AGAIN next week. I know, big stuff!

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Read, Eat, Drink: Why We Can’t Read Anymore and a Mother’s Day Menu

by Maria

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Hugh McGuire on reading

Do you read books anymore? I mean real, whole, chapter-by-chapter books? When was the last time you sat down with a book and read for an hour straight, without stopping to check your phone for a text or email, or taking a break to look up something on your tablet?

It turns out that online reading–emails, social media updates, articles, even this blog post–is stunting our ability to maintain our focus long enough to read whole chapters at a time in a book. As Hugh McGuire writes in this Medium article on Why We Can’t Read Anymore, which I love so much I want to quote it for days and weeks until people ask me to please shut up:

It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:

New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.
With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up with activity when new emails arrive.

So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will give us little floods of dopamine. Further, these patterns of behaviour start creating neural pathways, so that they become unconscious habits: Work on something important, brain itch, check email, dopamine, refresh, dopamine, check Twitter, dopamine, back to work. Over and over, and each time the habit becomes more ingrained in the actual structures of our brains.

How can books compete?

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Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

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In case you have a bad case of Friday brain (guilty!), today’s read is about as difficult as getting through Goodnight Moon. Kate Gavino, the artist behind the quirky illustrated site Last Night’s Reading, put together a hilariously on-point list of author wardrobe staples from A-to-Z. Because everyone knows you can’t call yourself a proper writer until you’re bedecked in cardigans, squinting through boxy glasses, and wearing argyle socks, right?

Here are a few of my favorites:

Flannel Heels

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Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

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As much as agents do our best to try to help writers and offer insight into the wild, whacky world that is publishing, sometimes nothing resonates quite like hearing directly from other writers. So here’s my favorite author blog post of the week–Colleen Hoover’s incredible story of how writing changed her life. Three years ago, she was living in a trailer, working 12 hours a day, and barely making ends meet. She picked up writing in her spare time and self-published her first book. She sold about 30 copies in the first week, but she kept at it. Today, she’s the New York Times bestselling author of 6 books and has a lucrative book deal with Atria/Simon & Schuster. And the best part of it all? In her words:

Three years ago, my husband and I dreamed about the day we would be able to build a new house. Tomorrow, that’s going to happen. On the same land where we happily lived in our single-wide trailer, we will be breaking ground on the house we will spend the rest of our lives in, and I still can’t wrap my head around it.

I know this started with the fact that I wrote and finished a book, but that was as simple as putting a pen to paper. Nothing would have followed had it not been for the support of my readers. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the motivation. And remember-

Dreams are free, so make sure you have a shit-load of them.

And THAT right there is exactly why we’re all in this crazy, unpredictable, shaky business.

You can read Colleen’s full story here.

Eat:
Raise your hand if you like bacon. Looks like…everyone on the planet. And the only thing better than bacon is bacon + pasta, especially when it’s Mario Batali’s Spaghetti Carbonara. This is (I think) the same recipe he uses at his restaurant Otto in New York, but you can make it yourself at home for, oh, a 95% discount.

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