Showing posts with label "Heat Wave". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Heat Wave". Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2023

The Weather Report

Watermelon pie

 Donis here. I live in southern Arizona, so the weather report for the end of June is always the same. It's hot. The forecast for today is 105º F (40.56º C). They say it'll be 114ºF (45.55ºC) by Sunday and drop to a more manageable 110-ish after that. The average daily temp for the end of June in Phoenix is 106º. I understand it’s supposed to cool down to 102º by early next week. We’re all looking forward to that.

Why, you may wonder, would anybody live in such heat? I wonder that myself, every year about this time. By August, ill will have made a solemn vow not to live here one more year. Then October will come, and the winter, and rather like childbirth, I’ll be so pleased with what I’ve got I will have forgotten what I had to go through to get there.

There are Arizonans who brag about surviving or even loving the heat, just as native North Dakotans brag about the cold. But I'm not one of them. Three months of super heat is exhausting. I get cabin fever. I try to get any errands done in the morning, but banks and stores often don't open before nine or ten a.m., and it's already hot enough for sunstroke by then.

My writing life is not helped by my heat-induced ennui. I have to gear myself up for the task of writing. But then again, I suppose, and shouldn’t complain. We’ll be laughing up our other sleeves come January.

We expect this every year and more or less know how to live with it. But I've been getting weather reports from my siblings and friends in Oklahoma and it is really not pretty. My brother and sister-in-law in Tulsa lost all their mature trees and part of their roof in a storm a couple of weeks ago and then to add insult to injury, they lost their electricity (along with much of east and south Tulsa) for six days in the midst of a killer heat wave. They're smart and own a generator, so at least they had lights, computers, and didn't lose everything in their refrigerator. But no a/c. If you haven't tried sleeping in 96ºF heat and 70% humidity, allow me to inform you it is almost impossible. After a couple of miserable nights they bought a single-room a/c small enough to work with their generator and were at least able to sleep. The forecast for Tulsa (45%humidity) today and tomorrow is about the same temperature as here (10% humidity) in Phoenix. Everyone in Texas, Oklahoma, and environs is praying to the electricity gods NOT TO ABANDON THEM.

How did people live in the south before air conditioning? I'm old enough to remember, so I'll tell you someday when we're relating how we had to walk 12 miles to school uphill both ways. 

For those of you who still have the blessings of electricity, I'll share with you one secret to surviving in a southern summer: watermelon. A few years ago, I saw a recipe in my local newspaper for a watermelon pie, and I just had to try it. The newspaper recipe calls for a graham cracker crust, which would be delicious, I think. But my husband can’t eat graham flour, so I just made the filling–basically a watermelon pudding. It was amazingly easy. The hardest parts were cutting and chunking the watermelon and cleaning up the mess. Otherwise, it took about twenty minutes to make. Here is the recipe as I did it:

2 1/2 cups watermelon flesh


2 tablespoons lemon juice


2 eggs


1/4 cup cornstarch


1/4 cup sugar


whipped cream

Puree the watermelon in a blender until completely smooth. (about 2 cups of juice) Strain the juice through a fine-mesh strainer into a saucepan and add the lemon juice. Bring the juice to a simmer over medium-high heat.

In a heat-safe bowl, whisk together eggs, cornstarch, and sugar until smooth. Slowly pour the hot juice into the egg mixture, whisking all the while. Then pour the mixture back into the saucepan and continue to cook, whisking until thickened. Pour the watermelon pudding into a pie pan (or even better, graham cracker pie crust), press a piece of plastic wrap directly onto the surface of the pudding and refrigerate until cold. Serve with whipped cream.

I don’t care how odd it looks, it’s delicious!


Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Sybil's Summer Reading 2019

I’ve been doing a lot of reading this summer. Almost all fiction, which is unusual for me. In the past, I’ve split my reading pretty evenly between fiction and non-fiction. Part of the reason, I think, is that I have a stack of books I’ve gotten at various mystery conferences over the past few years and, well, I’m rather tired of having that large a stack that I haven’t read.

Here are my highlights from my reading so far:

I’ve been reading a lot of books by Camille Minichino. She writes under her own name as well as Ada Madison, Jean Flowers and Margaret Grace. I’ve been on panels with Camille and she is a delight. I also admire her. She got her PhD in Physics at a time when there weren’t many women in the field. Okay, there probably still aren’t very many women in the field. I’ve sampled all of her series and they are all great reads. My particular favorites, though, are her Sophie Knowles mystery series written as Ada Madison, featuring a mathematics professor, and her Postmistress mystery series written as Jean Flowers.

I’ve also been enjoying a lot of middle grade mysteries. Yeah, I know, I'm not the target demographic. Still, adults can enjoy them too! My favorites in the middle grade world are the Moon Base Alpha series. They are fun reads with a lot of interesting characters and situations that occur on the first moon base. I know I’m enjoying a book when I gasp as I’m reading and say no, no, no!

In the historical mystery area, I’ve enjoyed Heat Wave by Maureen Jennings, Art in the Blood by Bonnie MacBird and Dangerous to Know by Renee Patrick. Heat Wave is a new series for Jennings set in the 1930s. (She’s the author of the Murdoch Mystery series.) Art in the Blood is the first of a new Sherlock Holmes series. I bought it at the California Crime Writers Conference in June, largely based on the cover. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Dangerous to Know is set in the 1930s and features the famed costume designer Edith Head.

Probably my favorite of all though is The Skeleton Makes a Friend by Leigh Perry. I just love the Family Skeleton series, one of the few that I’d read over and over and over again.

There’s still more of summer left and I have a lot to read still. What have you been reading lately?