Sunday I hosted on of my book clubs at my house. This book club is currently doing a theme of books based around food. For my selection I chose Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley. I read about it on NPR Books shortly after we had settled on that theme for our next go around of books and it seemed perfect. The book is a graphic novel, which appealed to me being somewhat different than our normal selections. Everyone really enjoyed the book and the food I made from the recipes in the book was all quite delicious. It’s not a very good picture, but here’s what we ate.

Tortellini topped with homemade pesto. Salad made with a homemade dijon vinaigrette, shitake mushrooms, homemade chai, 2 types of cheese whose names I don’t remember, bread, and homemade chocolate chip cookies. All the homemade recipes came from the book. One thing I learned from the book was that I have been cooking mushrooms wrong my entire life. I’ve been crowding them and not just leaving them brown but stirring them way too much. I’ve always liked mushrooms, but cooked the proper way it turns out they’re even better. The chocolate chip cookies were also a big hit both at book club and at the party I took them to the day before. They’re nice and moist and have a good flavor. I look forward to trying out some of the other recipes in the book.

After book club I spent the rest of the day being lazy, which was nice because the rest of my time off I’ve been on the go pretty much non-stop. After spending the entire past TV season seeing my Twitter feed blow up over Scandel I decided I would catch up with it before season 3 starts in the fall. It took me all of season 1 (which was only 7 episodes) and the first 6 episodes of season 2 to really get into it. I kept waiting to figure out what everyone had been raving about. I still don’t know that I’m as in love with the show as everyone else, but I’m definitely getting more into it. It’s way more over the top melodramatic than I care for. Though I’m not sure why this show feels like that way to me when I loved something like One Tree Hill which was even more melodramatically ridiculous and yet never bothered me in the way this show does sometimes. I’m going to keep watching though. One thing is definitely true that this show burns through plot like nobody’s business. It reminds me of the first couple of seasons of  The Vampire Diaries that way.