THE LOWLAND * COOKIE FUN

  

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri - I couldn't wait to read Jhumpa Lahiri's latest novel. It starts out pretty good - 1960s India, children in a neighborhood, student unrest, two very close young brothers with different world views. Somewhere along the line it lost me, though.  Although most of the characters were very nice, I wasn't really feeling them as real people about whom I cared.  And the not so nice characters weren't interesting enough to care about either. The author is a good writer, so the book is readable. I was just not that into it.  Somehow the parts that were supposed to be meaty weren't meaty enough for me, and the writing also got tangled up in the Rhode Island seasons and landscape which makes me crazy. If it's cold out I don't need a paragraph or a page of writing to explain it to me.

A few weeks ago, I ordered a copper cookie cutter in the shape of a Cross Country / Track running singlet (still cannot believe that I paid 20 bucks for one cookie cutter, but when you have an only child....) and my friend Jeanne came over and taught me how to decorate sugar cookies.  We made almost 200 cookies for the New Trier Cross Country Carbofest, and they were a hit: 

Then a few weeks later, I was on my own and upped the ante.  I had found a set of Pottery Barn letter cookie cutters at a sale ($4.00, so my cost/cutter is really coming down!) and made N T X C cookies (shorthand for New Trier Cross Country) along with a few singlets as accents to the plate.  These also proved popular with the hundreds of hungry runners who come to Carbofest to carboload before their cross country meet the following day:  

My friend Susan said the cookies must have worked, because a couple of weeks after that, the team won their Sectional Meet, and are now on their way to the State Meet this weekend!  I got busy again, and this time it didn't take the entire week - made one batch of cookies and decorated them with the names of the runners and coaches who would be on the bus to Peoria.  The rest of the cookies will be enjoyed by the NTXC fans at a tailgate party before the race:

 
The cookies say it all:  Go Trevians! Run Great at State!
Here are the Sectional Champs!  Congratulations to them all!  Peter is 4th from the right next to coach. It was a happy day.