Really Random Tuesday #12: The Beatles, Bookmarks, and Pita Pizzas

Welcome to another edition of Really Random Tuesday! This is a noteworthy Tuesday, because the music of The Beatles is now available on iTunes. I will celebrate the occasion by purchasing a Beatles tune or two, probably Don't Let Me Down if it's available, and another song. (Photo of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from Wikipedia.)





Congratulations to Freda from Freda's Voice, the randomly chosen winner of my international bookmarks giveaway!

Freda, I will mail these bookmarks to you very soon. Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway. If you didn't win this time, don't despair! Other giveaways are posted on the right side of my blog, and I will be hosting more of them in the near future, so please stay tuned.

I was in a "cookbook mood" when I reached for this book from the shelf and discovered a tempting new recipe. Published in 1992, Quick Vegetarian Pleasures by Jeanne Lemlin, a gift from my sister to my vegetarian daughter, features recipes for meatless meals ready in a jiffy. Over the years, when the craving for homemade pizza struck, I tried all sorts of pizza crusts--made from scratch, from ready-made dough from the supermarket or "pizza man", from Boboli bread, and from English muffins--but I don't remember using pita bread as a crust. In the book, the author calls this "the most popular lunch" in her house, "served at least three times a week". Now I know why! I've already made them several times this past week, for lunch and dinner, and have topped the sauce and cheese with healthy veggies such as thinly sliced tomatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, black olives, and spinach, and I want to try broccoli (don't tell George Bush). These pizzas are very easy to prepare, and are really so simple that all you need is the idea, rather than the recipe, but the results are surprisingly gourmet. What makes this pizza even more sensational is that you use a combination of mozzarella and Muenster cheese, because the latter adds creaminess.

I used larger pita bread and cut them in half after they were baked, but you could use smaller ones. You could get experimental and try whole wheat pita bread, or a red Thai curry sauce instead of tomato sauce for a more exotic pizza. Or you could even add shrimp or grilled chicken and change this into a non-vegetarian meal. The options are limitless.

Pita pizzas are ready to bake for 8 to 10 minutes in a 400º oven.

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Really Random Tuesday is a way to post odds and ends--announcements, musings, quotes, photos--any blogging and book-related things you can think of. If you're inspired by this idea, feel free to copy the button and use it on your own blog. Leave a link in the comments if you’re participating and I'll add it to this post. Please be sure to visit Naida's blog, the bookworm, for her terrific Really Random Tuesday post.

Book Blogger Hop: A Challenge Taken to Heart

The Book Blogger Hop is a weekly event for bloggers and readers, a chance to socialize in a virtual way, to connect with other book lovers, make new friends and followers, and share an appreciation of books. Hosted by the brilliant Jennifer from Crazy-for-Books, this Hop lasts from November 12 until November 15, so there's still ample time to sign-up and enjoy the blogosphere's best BOOK PARTY! If you'd like me to visit your blog, please leave a comment.

Jennifer's Book Blogger Hop gets better each and every week! In addition to presenting a question-of-the-week, often submitted by other book bloggers, she posed a unique challenge last week. Admittedly, I was reluctant at first to take on her seemingly hefty challenge. To sum it up, Jennifer asked that we find a new blog and really get to know it throughout the week, to leave at least five comments on that blog, and then to post about the experience during the next Hop. Initially, I was not going to do this challenge, because I already have plenty to do, blogging-wise and other-wise. But I thought about it, and I realized that this was indeed the whole point of the Book Blogger Hop, to discover a new blog or two that you truly want to visit frequently. At that point, I decided to follow through wholeheartedly on Jennifer's challenge.

After some perusing, I decided to focus on Leslie's blog, Under My Apple Tree, which features mostly books, with a bit of nature, birds, flowers, food and photography, interconnected in an artistic fashion. These are some of my favorite things, so I thought this blog would be a good fit for me. I was undoubtedly also influenced by a book I recently finished reading, Heart With Joy. While I don't routinely read many young adult books, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, reviewed it, and even interviewed the gracious author, Steve Cushman. Anyway, in this book there's a wonderful character, "Old Lady Peters", who is an avid bird-watcher and teaches the main character in the story, Julian Hale, to also watch and care for our feathered friends.

To make things easy for myself, and to insure that I would, indeed, leave frequent comments, I added Under My Apple Tree to my blogroll (which allows me to know at a glance when a blog has published a new post). Throughout the past week, I visited this blog numerous times and left many comments. (Leslie may have wondered who I was and why I was suddenly leaving so many comments!) I will continue to follow this blog in an earnest fashion. Because really, as I've mentioned already, the point of blog hopping is precisely to discover sites that interest you in more than a superficial way.

Thank you, Jennifer, for giving me the push I needed, and for helping me to discover a very lovely book blog!

Each week, Jennifer presents a question for participating book bloggers to answer. This week's question is from Christina from The Paperback Princesses: If you find a book that looks interesting but is part of a series, do you always start with the first title?

Another interesting question! As a general rule, I do try to start with the first book in a series. For example, I've read all of the books in The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith in order, although I have yet to read the last book in this series (it sits patiently in my TBR stack). However, there are definitely exceptions to the "rule". I read--and enjoyed--the well-crafted thriller, The Rembrandt Affair, which is a part of the Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva, without having read any of the preceding books. I should add that this book "stood alone" quite well.

Thanks for reading!