LAMB SHANK RECIPE, AND WILLA CATHER

Here you go, Donna: Basque Lamb Shanks. The recipe is from the Gourmet Slow Cooker: Volume II, a cookbook of recipes slightly more complex than the usual "toss the ingredients into the crock and cook on low for 8-9 hours." I added a few comments of my own at the end of the recipe (I always have an opinion on a recipe!).

While we were at Rosanna's, I found three novels by Willa Cather on the bookshelves in the barn: My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and O Pioneers. My Antonia was required reading when I was in school - I don't remember which grade and I certainly don't remember the book. I blew the dust off all three, brought 'em in, and was completely enchanted!

Death Comes to the Archbishop (written in 1927 and set in the 1850's) is centered in the Four Corners area, where we visited in May of 2006. Cather's evocative description of Acoma Pueblo and Enchanted Mesa sent me to our photographs. I took this one when we visited Acoma Pueblo, looking towards Enchanted Mesa. Here is her perfect description:

"From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left...

"This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape."

Makes for good reading!

Today we moved from Rosanna's to Queen Mine RV Park in Bisbee, a favorite. We'll be here for the next week.