We went to the mall...

...to buy a Bible. (Long story. See below.) I brought this home instead:




I was a weird child (don't nod your heads too vigorously, people!) and remember lugging home the library's collection of ancient French cookbooks when I was 12 or so. While I was drooling over rabbit recipes and strange sweetmeats, sauces and techniques I couldn't even pronounce, my father put his foot down. He just about forbid me to cook from them...something about "froofy Frenchy stuff"...though it may have had something to do with higher grocery bills when the extra butter and fresh cream were added to the cart. This book is a different animal. Translated by the lovely Clotilde over at Chocolate and Zucchini, it's a BEAST. 975 pages. Clotilde's blog has been my recipe-go-to for several years now, and when I found this monstrous tome (5 pounds?) at the bookstore today, I realized that I couldn't pass it up again. We'd looked at it last year and I'd huffed it off...the price seems to have dropped some since then. I'm really excited to have an honest-to-goodness cookbook in the house that covers EVERYTHING. My mother had her Better Homes and Gardens, held together with duct tape...but my books are quirky and un-authoritative: a vegetarian one here, a reprint of Elizabeth David's Italian book, a fat South American collection and assorted church and local society spiral bounds given as gifts. They've been useful, but I still find myself googling recipes more often than I'd like. This should change that...

I just hope I don't drop this one on my toe.

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The mall is an endless source of amusement for unashamed people-watchers like me and my husband. I was amused by the gentleman sitting in the plush chairs on the 2nd floor, holding his laptop TO HIS MOUTH so he could use the built-in-microphone for (what I assume) was a Skype call. It looked like he was using the world's chunkiest flip phone! Then there was the young couple who had just bought their toddler a Carnaval costume. Said child was obviously not going to be cooperative without wearing said costume RIGHT NOW! so she stripped in the middle of the corridor and waited patiently for daddy to help her into her shiny green dress...

We've been on a mission to find a bilingual Bible for hubby, as mine was the original paperback version and now looks as if it's been through a bad fight with a vicious squirrel. The pages are tattered, the cover is gone, and it flops and wobbles now that the spine is losing rigidity. Yesterday we visited two local bookstores. At one, the store employee tried to guide me to the dictionary section. Not an English-Portuguese dictionary! A Bible! (These words cannot be confused in EITHER language.) They didn't have one and were no longer able to order them. They did have a strange holographic Michael Jackson "Thriller" book that probably cost the equivalent of half a month's rent, though. The other bookstore, in two gigantic floors of books, had a Religion section the size of a fingernail clipping and two Bibles: one in French, the other a Portuguese translation of an obscure English version. The staff there gave me the "You are an alien creature who is mysteriously speaking our language" look when I lobbed my query at them. Apparently, Leblon is too cool for Bibles.

So this week I guess I'll take my hunt to Tijuca or Centro, where people care about selling things that other people want, rather than displaying shelves full of unsold and unsellable merchandise! But that is definitely a cultural rant best left for another post...