Veggie Living - Lentils and Sweet Potatoes Braised in Smoky Tomato

Lentils and Sweet Potatoes Braised in Smoky Tomato
This is good over brown rice, quinoa, or simply on it's own. It really needs some sort of green side as a complement for a full meal.

Serves 6-8

2 Tbls canola oil
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 1/2 cup brown lentils
1 28oz can diced tomatoes (or 5-6 medium tomatoes cored and diced)
4 cups water or stock
3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
salt to taste.

Heat the oil in a large skillet or pot over medium heat. Cook the onion and garlic, stirring frequently. It is fine for the onions to brown and sear a bit but don't let them actually burn. When the onions are soft add the red pepper flakes and paprika stirring constantly until fragrant - about 30 seconds.

Add the lentils, tomatoes, and water. Bring to a boil then lower the heat so that the mixture bubbles gently. Cook until the lentils begin to soften - between 10 and 20 minutes. Add sweet potatoes and continue to simmer until the lentils and sweet potatoes are fully cooked - another 10 or 20 minutes typically.

Add salt to taste and serve.

An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gunnie Rose is a tough gun wielding teen who hires out her serves as a gunman. At the beginning of An Easy Death, she’s part of a squad but disaster strikes and Gunnie Rose is the only one who survives. She finishes the job and gets herself home but needs to find more work and soon. So, as much as she hates it, when two Russian wizards offer her a job, she takes it.

Fantasy westerns just aren’t common. Sci-fi mixed with westerns show up regularly. There is something about space and frontier narrative that just goes together. Less so fantasy. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, and the grittiness of the setting took some getting used to. The thing about westerns is that they have that whole gritty individual takes on the world thing going. Gunnie Rose is taking on the world. It beats her up and down but in the end she wins.

Hooray for strong female protagonists.

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The Masked City by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After the events of The Invisible Library, Irene and Kai get assigned as librarian in residence in the same world that they kicked Alberict out of. Everything is going fine until Kai is kidnapped (dragon-napped?) by rogue fey. Irene must then go against library orders to chase him into chaos heavy fey territory with no support in order to rescue him.

It felt a little like Cogman wanted to underscore two points. 1st - The main character is Irene, so don’t get too attached to Kai or Vale or any of the other characters. 2nd -Irene isn’t a “good” guy. She’s a book thief and a covert operative. She is also deeply principled. She chases Kai because she is responsible for him...so, she says. She alienates almost everyone in the process.

Part of what really worked in The Invisible Library was the interaction between Kai and Irene. So, having the two separated for the most of the book was a little disappointing. In fact, I missed Vale too even though he gets annoyingly self-righteous. I think Masked City did a good job at fleshing out the rest of the universe and filled out out the major players in the rest of setting, but did it at the expense of the main characters. From a pragmatic point of view, Cogman succeed in laying the groundwork for a series of conflicts and a whole cast of allies and antagonist. So, while I’m not as gooey eyed over this one, it’s worth the read and I’m looking forward to the series continuing.


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Systems of Discipline

I teach at a school where each of the students needs, for one reason or another, a second chance. The reasons vary. Sometimes it's academic or emotional. Sometimes it's addiction recovery. A lot of them, however, have made incredibly poor decisions that either poisoned their social scene or got them kicked out of their previous schools. Regardless, many of these kids benefit from more than the usual watchful teacher eye. Not because they are bad kids, but because our presence (and intervention) becomes like an external reminder to check their behavior. The hope is that the external check becomes internal over time.

It doesn't always work and the kids are kids...they don't often appreciate the interference until much later in life. This system is rough on the teachers too. We monitor technology use and conversation. We have to account for the students' locations and issue and maintain a two tiered discipline documentation system. The only way for it to work is to be consistent and sometimes it feels more like being a warden than an educator. We educators get a bit ground down and have little time to take care of the more normal teacher duties like grading. It takes time, but for whose kids who are essentially good people but impulsive, it can have great results despite the flaws in the system.

I had the opportunity a couple of days ago to see a very different type of school. At this school the kids maintain their own discipline. The teachers don't watch the students the way do and seem to inherently trust them. The kids walk the halls without passes and show up for classes on time, for the most part, without the use of bells. The students seemed more mature and more relaxed. They were still kids though. I saw inappropriate technology use and kids cutting up in class but for the most part this didn't seem to require teacher intervention. It was an interesting experience.

Now, I have to acknowledge that the two schools deal in some very different student populations. The kids at my school often don't know how to disengage or deescalate social situations and they engage in activities impulsively instead of thoughtfully which leads to academic issues. In some ways they are not capable of self-moderating which is how they ended up with us. However, I also sometimes wonder if the reason that we spend so much time in discipline conference is because we have so many rules. Truly, our student handbook looks like mish mash of legal precedent gone awry. We can't do without rules, obviously, but it could be less complicated and confusing. It often feels like we can't just say - "Hey, look that interferes with your work." Instead, we have this tome that we cite page numbers out of.

It feels adversarial.

Armada by Ernest Cline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ernest Cline’s second book is about Zack Lightman, a high school kid with a talent for video games in general and an anger management problem. He’s a pretty normal kid until he sees an alien spacecraft right out of his favorite game lurking around the skies of his hometown. Then everything changes.

It’s not a new idea: what if video games are some kind of training for interstellar battle. Cline is pretty clear that it’s a recycled idea within the narrative, but he develops and refines it. He wraps earlier cinema and games into an elaborate conspiracy theory and then makes it all real. In some ways it is a similar technique to Ready Player One which read like 1980’s retrospective on pop culture.

It was a good read but there is something about Cline’s writing style that makes it hard to immerse in. I haven’t quite figured out what the problem is, but I find that I can only read a chapter or two at a time no matter how much I might be enjoying it which is odd for me. I tend to persevere because many of my students are a fan of Cline and I’m generally glad that I kept at it by the end.


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October Monster Lists

I'm at such a weird crossroads with so many things. Reading is constant though, it's grounding in fact. I'm still behind in my non-YA but I'm making up ground. I was about 12 behind and now I'm only eight behind. It's slightly more impressive when one considers that I've continued reading YA too.  It's progress anyway. I'm still increasing the Non-YA list to equal the YA list until I get back into balance. The problem is that I keep tripping across YA that I read in a day or less. It's like eating candy.

Non-YA

1. Bradbury Stories by Ray Bradbury
2. The Lost Plot by Genevieve Cogman
3. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
4. The Universe in a Single Atom by Dalai Lama
5. Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
6. Reading Reasons by Kelly Gallagher
7. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
8. An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris
9. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
10. Alice by Christina Henry
11. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
12. Simply Ramen by Amy Kimoto-Kahn
13. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
14. When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning
15. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
16. Mastering the Art Japanese Home Cooking by Morimoto
17. The Pho Cookbook by Adrea Nguyen
18. Ringworld by Larry Niven
19. Cooked by Michael Pollan
20. Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
21. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
22. The Song Rising by Smantha Shannon
23. Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer
24. The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard
25. Takashi's Noodles by Takashi Yagihashi
26. The Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farahad Zama (Library)

YA

1. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
2. The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
3. Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle
4. Amulet book seven: Firelight by Kazu Kibuishi
5. Amulet book eight: Supernova by Kazu Kibuishi
6. The Diabolic by S.J. Kincaid
7. Relish: My Life In the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley
8. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (Finished 10/3/2018)
9. Legend by Marie Lu
10. Prodigy by Marie Lu
11. Champion by Marie Lu
12. Grip of the Shadow Plague by Brandon Mull
13. Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary by Brandon Mull
14. Keys to the Demon Prison by Brandon Mull
15. All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven
16. When I Was the Greatest by Jason Reynolds (Finished 10/3/2018)
17. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
18. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
19. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
20. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
21. The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey
22. The Curse of the Wendigo by Rick Yancey
23. The Isle of Blood by Rick Yancey
24. The Final Descent by Rick Yancey