Making Moroccan Cuisine by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Making Moroccan Cuisine by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sitting in my Parisian kitchen when Florence was a baby I sipped a Lavazza coffee, I thought of how bored I was with French food seasoned with thyme, bay leaf, and parsley for seasoning – this flavor combo is called bouquet garni.  French grocery stores sell the herbs in mesh bags, so you can easily put it in soup for flavoring.

I thought the dishes listed on Moroccan menus outside restaurant doors in Paris looked good, but Laurent always said the restaurants were too expensive.

I think he wanted me to learn how to cook.  I had some cookbooks in my bookshelves and used Mediterranean Cookery by Claudia Roden to cook Moroccan food.

I perused the pages of Roden’s book and learned about the traditional utensils and finally discovered that the clay pot with a high triangular lid in markets was called a tagine.

Moroccans prepared stews in tagine pots and called the stews, tagines, too.  You have fewer vocabulary words to remember, if a language is structured this way.

I made two tagines.  The first one was called tagine bel hout (fish tagine with tomatoes) and the second was a tagine made with chicken and vegetables.

I used a Moroccan preserved lemon in salt to make a Moroccan, baked fish dish made with lemony, flavored cilantro.  You can buy preserved lemons at the Super Market in France.  Preserved lemons in glass jars give North Africans in France jobs, so I bought them.

To make Moroccan baked fish, I boiled and peeled tomatoes and cut them in thick slices with olive oil all over the bottom of a pan.

I put chopped garlic, cilantro, and a little cayenne with oil between the cod fillets and put them on top of the tomatoes.  More tomatoes went on top of the fish.  Slices of preserved lemon went around the edges.  I baked the dish for 45 minutes after doing all the preparation work.

Laurent does not like preserved lemon, so I retained the technique without that particular ingredient.  I modified this dish when I lived in Stuttgart, Germany to go with the local ingredients of that country.

In Germany, I would place chopped onions on the bottom of a round, baking dish along with dry garlic flakes.  Then, I would place frozen, white or salmon fish fillets on top of the onions.  I placed sliced and peeled potatoes and put them around the edges of the fish.

This looks like a flower.  I put about ¾ cup of olive oil over all of it with some salt.  I covered the dish with a baking lid and baked the fish for one hour in a 500 degree Fahrenheit oven.  My Italian neighbors got the recipe before I left Germany.  I love knowing I started a trend with Calabrians around my building in Stuttgart.

Another Moroccan dish I showed my daughter Florence how to make when I was studying French children’s literature and francophone children’s culture at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin was Moroccan tangerine and walnut salad.  I used a recipe for this dish from Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco by Paula Wolfert.

The recipe had an exotic name, Shlada Bellecheen.  Basically, you thoroughly clean iceberg lettuce and crisp it in the refrigerator.

When the lettuce is chilled and crisp, you tear it up into bite-sized pieces and spread it out over a platter.  Then, you spread chopped walnuts over the lettuce.  The tangerine sections go around the edges of the plate.  The dressing was simple: lemon, orange-blossom water, and a little sugar.

Our family would eat this once a year on the holidays and put it in a cut blue-and-yellow fish-shaped plate on Thanksgiving.

When my francophone culture class at Edgewood College asked us to do a children’s culture project, I took in this salad as my project.

I told my classmates, “Royal women in Morocco cooked for their families to ensure religious purity.  What that really means is that they wanted to make sure their families were not poisoned.”

The young women in my class laughed.  They already spoke Spanish and had learned to speak French fluently in our French-only class.  They were all going to be French teachers for middle-school and high-school students in Wisconsin.

I also shared with them some more information about the salad, “In Detroit, we say that nuts are meat.  If you combine them with tangerines, which have an ovary around seeds, you are pretty close to having a full-protein according to Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian.

Children like this salad, because of the tangerines and sugar, but you should limit serving it to once a year due to the sugar.  You can certainly adjust the level of sugar you use.

Florence initially did not like this salad, but I think she takes it to work now sometimes.

I have some book recommendations for Moroccan food and general books on the Mediterranean below:

-Couscous and other Good Food from Morocco by Paula Wolfer

-Traditional Moroccan Cooking: Recipes from Fez by Madame Guinaudeau

The following books contain some information on Moroccan food:

-Little Foods of the Mediterranean: 500 Fabulous Recipes for Antipasti, Tapas, Hors d’oeuvre, Meze, and More by Clifford A. Wright

-A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden

-Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon by Claudia Roden

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Making Turkish Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Making Turkish Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I was hired as an art and restaurant critic by the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 100,000) based on the work I had done in my memoirs writing class with Beat poet David Gitin at Monterey Peninsula College in Monterey, California.  (“Just send in some college art history papers and the work you have done for me to the paper and call them,” he said.)

The first assignment I worked on for the Weekly was for the Turkish Festival held on the Monterey Wharf.  I took Florence with me to Border’s to hear the Turkish singers and band that was going to appear play the café at the bookstore.  We also met the artist who would be doing the ebru paper marbling at the Festival.

When I studied French children’s literature and francophone children’s culture at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, I had to study children’s culture of a francophone society as a class assignment.

I already knew much about the Vietnamese, who are a minority in France along with “White Russians” and Algerians.  The white Russians are aristocrats, who have fled the Soviet Union and Russia over the decades for political oppression.  The French were the colonizers of Vietnam and the rest of what was called “Indochina.” 

They fought in Vietnam before the Americans took over.  I also studied Khmer art by going to the Guimet Museum in Paris often when I lived there and going to exhibits on my “Louvre Supporter Card” that got me into all the museums of Paris for free.

Indochina was made up of today’s Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (former Burma). 

I had to give the Weekly this information to cover art openings in Carmel.  (There really are Monet paintings in bank vaults in our dinky Monterey Peninsula.)  I studied East Asian civilization, art history, and the languages of China, Japan, and Korea at the University of Chicago as well.  I obtained official transcripts for them from the University before I was allowed to be a “young mom” art critic.

I studied the culture of Islam for children from the perspective of religious ceremonies and food.  I took Florence out to discover Islamic children’s culture with me in Madison at a Turkish restaurant downtown called Husnus.

I had read about Turkish food in a cookbook before going out with Florence.  I ordered cheese and spinach borek for us.  These are triangular folds of phyllo dough baked in butter.

I told Florence that cheese has calcium in it that was good for building strong bones.  I picked up the spinach borek and told her that spinach has iron in it for making your blood strong. 

“The spinach borek is also made with onions sautéed in butter.  Onions help prevent colds,” I said.  All these sayings are a southern gardener’s drug store wisdom that has to be verified, of course, with your nutritionist, but I rarely catch colds. 

(Note:  The only time I caught colds was when I worked with the children of farmworkers and their parents in Monterey County.  Many of the Oaxacan workers form southern Mexico in the County come from a tropical climate.  They are not vaccinated in Mexico nor in the US.  I was sick several times, because of this, but was able to get over the infections.)

After the meze (appetizers), I ordered hummus and baba ghanoush for Florence and me with warm pita bread.  Both of these items were almost unheard of at the time.  Hummus is a chickpea puree made with a liquid-type of sesame seed butter, lemon juice, and garlic. 

You are only supposed to eat a little hummus at a time, because it is an appetizer.  If you make a meal of it, you can get fat quickly.  Hummus is incredibly inexpensive to make at home, but it takes time to make at home as the only good homemade hummus is made from scratch with dry beans.

Baba ghanoush is my favorite puree spread.  It is a pain to make at home.  It takes about 6 – 8 eggplants to get a small bowl of this spread made.  Basically, you roast the eggplants, add the liquid-type sesame seed butter, lemon juice, and garlic.

Turkish tabbouleh (parsley and bulgar wheat salad with lemon juice and olive oil) is made with more bulgar wheat than parsley unlike the Lebanese and Syrian versions that I ate growing up in Detroit, Michigan.

I told Florence, “I prefer buying the tabbouleh made at Magic Mill Market in town, because it is made with quinoa, which is a full-protein.  Quinoa comes from Bolivia and Peru.  These are two countries in Latin America high in the mountains.”

(Quinoa is now grown in the US in Colorado and in the Canadian Rockies.)

I told Florence what I knew about protein-combinations at the time and why this food was very good for building muscle and keeping you from catching colds.  I had studied vegetarianism while perusing the shelves in the various libraries at the University of Chicago. 

I told Florence, “If you all you eat is banana-nut muffins, you can probably knock out a welter-weight Muhammad Ali.  And, they are a lot cheaper than steak.  I ate those all the time at the University of Chicago.”

Florence nibbled everything and said, “All this tastes okay.”

“Yes, and it is not expensive, and I can make everything here.  The Magic Mill Market carries all the ingredients and so does Whole Foods, which is opening a store here soon.  I can make all sorts of gourmet lunches and dinners with the ingredients in these two stores.  If we eat at home most of the time, we can afford to go to nice restaurants four or five times a month,” I said.

After our discussion, I ordered Turkish baklava for dessert, which is made with pistachios and honey rather than walnuts like the Greeks do it.

“Your daughter is the only American child, who has come in here,” the waiter said as he handed me a Turkish coffee at the end of the meal with a piece of loukum candy. 

He also gave Florence a box of loukum candy for behaving like a little lady and trying the Turkish food.

I paid the bill and wrapped Florence up in her scarf and hat and headed out into the windy, cold Wisconsin day on one of our many visits to Husnus when we lived in Madison.

On the way home, I told Florence, “It is important to know about Turkey.  Turkey was the head of what was once the Ottoman Empire that includes modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and other countries.  Many of the foods eaten in Turkey are the same as those eaten throughout the former Ottoman Empire.  Some regions use spicier ingredients, but that is the only difference.”

Florence already knew what the food of Turkey was like when I took the family to the Turkish Festival on the Wharf to write about it for the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 100,000).  I wrote the following article about one of the most educational Turkish Festivals ever to be held here.  (We had been to several before I wrote about them for the paper.)  I have done some editing for items in the article that are no longer relevant.:

“I’ll admit it.  The real reason I want to go to the Turkish Arts and Culture Festival this weekend besides falling into a trance as I listen to Sahin Gunsel sing Turkish love songs while he plays the oud; tapping my feet and clapping my hands as I watch folk dancers in brightly-colored costumes; and seeing what Turkish towns look like at the Orhan Coplu art exhibit among other Turkish delights; is to admire skill of the belly dancers. 

I love the sheer veils, sequined tops outlined with gold coins, finger cymbals, and sinuous movements of this art form that began as a ritual dance, representing childbirth in a region extending from Morocco to Turkey.

I feel no guilt about sampling Turkish food made by women who learn to cook without cookbooks and measure.  Amazingly, the chefs at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the hub of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire, operated on the same principle.

An Ottoman chef threw out Empress Eurgenie’s French chef, who was seeking an eggplant puree recipe for his sovereign, because he arrived in the kitchens with paper and measures.

The Ottoman chef said, “”An Imperial chef cooks with his feelings, his eyes, his nose.!”

So, the French empress never ate Turkish food again unlike the fortunate souls who will attend the Turkish Festival this year.

Among the succulent menu offerings at the Festival are doner kebap, slices of ground lamb seasoned with garlic  that resemble Greek gyros and Levantine shwarma; adana kebap, ground lamb meatballs seasoned with garlic, onion, cumin, and red peppers, if the chef comes from southern Turkey; and borek – buttery phyllo crust-pie filled with creamy cheese and spinach.

Of course, there are dolmas, grape leaves stuffed with rice and seasoned with mint; musakka, baked slices of layered eggplant in tomato sauce; and kisir-cracked wheat salad with parsley, tomato, and onion with lemon-oil dressing.

Other Turkish delicacies to be sampled will be cucik, a yogurt and garlic sauce, which goes well with the doner kebap, piyaz – white kidney bean salad seasoned with parsley, dill, mint, and onion topped off with lemon-oil dressing; and Shepherd Salad, a tomato, onion, and cucumber dish made with the freshest vegetables available.

And, finally, there is the traditional ending to a proper Turkish meal – a cup of strong coffee.  When you have drained the last drop, then turn the cup upside down and let Ilge Ozersen read your fortune in the grounds remaining in the cup.

Don’t miss your chance to view the Turkish art on display, which includes Arabic calligraphy (Beautiful writing that enhanced a word’s meaning.  The calligrapher used his skill to decorate religious manuscripts with flowers and geometric shapes as well.

The Hadith, the collected sayings of Mohammed, prohibited the use of human form in religious manuscripts to prevent idolatry.  The artwork on view at this Festival featured manuscripts with gold gilding (Turkish artists painted gold onto their works rather than embossing as done in Europe.), tapestries (the decorations on the tapestries include figures such as sultans, Mosque motifs, and flowers), ebru (paper marbling), and carpets.

Women weavers have anonymously made Turkish carpets one of the world’s premier art forms, since time immemorial.  One-of-a-kind carpets carry tribal symbols, the guls, which vary in the same way that Scottish tartans do.

The weavers vary tone and minute details to create movement among the repeating shapes on the predominantly red carpets.

With artwork like this on the floors, the Turks naturally remove their shoes before entering a home like the Japanese do.  Flowery “Garden of Paradise” carpets can make a dessert lush and attest to the weaver’s skill in coaxing circular shapes out of an angular medium.

Festival-goers can also view silk prayer rugs decorated with a mihrab, the Mosque niche that points in the direction of Mecca, and a lamp that represents Allah.

A trip to the Turkish Festival would be incomplete without knowing a little about Turkey’s wise-fool priest, Nasreddin Hoca.  One day, the Hoca was discussing the completeness of creation with a friend during a walk.  Hoca said, “I think horses would have been much more useful to mankind, if they had wings.”

Just then, some pigeon droppings fell on Hoca’s turban.

“Allah knows best,” he said.

Florence giggled about that joke at home.

The Turkish Festival, lovingly prepared by the non-profit Turkish American Association of California, truly offers many delights not to be missed, including a children’s tent with folk dancing, face painting, and story telling.

End of Article –

  

I bought some extra pistachio baklava to go home in boxes to eat with tea and more discussion with Laurent and Florence both about how we took a trip to Turkey without spending any money on airfare or hotels.

The following books have information on Turkish cuisine and Mediterranean cuisine food in general, which includes Turkish food:

Books on Turkish Cuisine

-Classical Turkish Cooking: Traditional Turkish Food for the American Kitchen by Ayla Algar

-The Art of Turkish Cooking by Neset Eren published by Hippocrene International Cookbook Classics

-Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon by Claudia Roden

-The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean: 215 Healthy, Vibrant, and Inspired Recipes by Paula Wolfert

-Mediterranean Grains and Greens: A Book of Savory, Sun-Drenched Recipes by Paula Wolfert

Books on Mediterranean Cuisine in General, which includes Turkey

-A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs (with more than 500 recipes) by Clifford A. Wright

-Little Foods of the Mediterranean: 500 Fabulous Recipes for Antipasti, tapas, hors d’oeuvre, meze, and more by Clifford A. Wright

-Mediterranean Cookery by Claudia Roden

-A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden

I would get books like these at the library in DeForest, Wisconsin where we lived at the time.  The Library had free inter-library load with the University of Wisconsin and wealthy neighborhoods around Madison.

By Ruth Paget, Author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Lunching at Little Napoli in Carmel (CA) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Lunching at Little Napoli in Carmel (CA) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

When my husband was getting his third master’s degree (this one in the teaching of foreign languages), I would take my daughter Florence to Little Napoli in Carmel, California for an early dinner once a week as “Hollywood Etiquette” after picking her up from her Waldorf Charter School in Pacific Grove.

When I arrived at Little Napoli with my small child, I told them Florence was going to practice her “nice manners” for lunch.  We always got to sit at a table by a window in the round room in back that looked out over the garden.  The host would give us the standard menu and the day’s specials orally.

I know children do not initially like all foods, but our deal was that she could get one appetizer she liked all to herself, and I would order maybe one or two more appetizer plates.  I would order a pasta dish to share and desserts for each of us after that.  I would let the waiter know this is what I wanted to do before ordering.

I would get two or three appetizers like the following:

-slices of cheese focaccia bread made with Parmesan cheese

-deep-fried calamari – Florence would eat one and the rest were for me.  She did not like deep-fried calamari

-three-pepper salad in olive oil – Florence liked this salad.  I make it at home, but it is a pain to do, because you have to remove the pepper skins from roasted peppers by hand.  Claudia Roden has a very good technique for doing this in her cookbook for the BBC Series Mediterranean Cookery

-fennel-casserole made with Cabrales blue cheese from Spain. (The Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was one empire under the Bourbons at one time.  Many food products are still exchanged between Spain and Sicily on maritime routes.)

-fresh peas with pancetta (pork belly meat) sautéed in onion, butter, and olive oil with a little black pepper on top

-Capri Salad (insalata Caprese – you can take ferry boats from Naples to the islands of Capri and Ischia) made with basil leaves, tomatoes, and slices of fresh Buffalo milk mozzarella cheese and olive oil and turns of freshly ground pepper

Recipes for all of these items can be found in the following cookbooks:

-Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Naples and Campania

-How to Eataly: A Guide to Buying, Cooking, and Eating Italian Food by Oscar Farinetti

-Italia: The Recipes and Customs of the Regions by Antono Carluccio

-The Good Food of Italy by Claudia Roden

-Lidia’s Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine: Everything you Need to Know to be a Great Italian Cook by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manali

-Italy in Small Bites by Carol Field

-Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan

After our selection of appetizers, I would order one dish of pasta to share as a main dish.  These pasta dishes were usually on the menu as specials:

-pasta with peas

-pasta with squash

-pasta with cabbage

-pasta with fava beans

-spaghetti with clams

Those vegetables are “traditional” Italian vegetables as well in addition to tomatoes.  Before tomatoes were brought from the New World to Europe, all Europeans almost exclusively ate cabbage.

Clifford A. Wright begins his award-winning book A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean, from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs (with more than 500 recipes) with a recipe for cabbage soup eaten since the Middle Ages all throughout Europe.

For dessert, there was usually something on the menu like the following:

-crème brulee (not Italian, but Little Napoli knows how to make money)

-cannoli

-almond-chocolate torte

Florence asked once, “Why do I have to be on ‘nice manners’ here especially?”

I quickly responded:

1 - Clint Eastwood eats here along with other Monterey celebrities.  Stars, directors, and producers hate ill-behaved children when they are trying to get business done. 

2 - If you are filmed eating, I do not want you to look like a pig. 

3 - Everyone in Hollywood eats Italian, because it’s good for you and not always hideously expensive to prepare.  There are also many vegetarian and vegan dishes in Italian cuisine that help actors stay thin and lithe as well.

When we were done eating, we would go for a walk in downtown Carmel.  Conway of Asia was right across the street and still had Tibetan art as well as Buddhist art from Thailand and Persian carpets. 

After our trip there, we would go to the Phillips Gallery and look at sculpture by the Zimbabwean artist Gedion Nyanhongo.  (I wrote reviews of his work for the Monterey County Weekly – Circulation: 200,00 and Art and Antiques Magazine.)

Then, we would go home and sing to Gwen Stefani songs. 

That was enough for the day!

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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At the Hollywood Booth at Crown and Anchor Pub with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

At the Hollywood Booth at Crown and Anchor Pub with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of my favorite places to celebrate my birthday when my daughter Florence was little was the English Crown and Anchor Pub in downtown Monterey, California.

I do not like to eat cake for my birthday, but dearly love curry prawns (jumbo shrimp) over basmati rice with a Newcastle brown ale to drink.

There are many other selections on the menu that rotate with the season as well as pantry favorites such as:

-traditional fish and chips with coleslaw

-steak and mushroom pie

-lamb shank with ratatouille

(Thank you cookbook author Claudia Roden for popularizing this delicious dish for the British through your BBC show on Mediterranean cuisine, which resulted in your informative cookbook Mediterranean Cookery.  The photos allowed people to identify ingredients in markets.)

-prime rib with Yorkshire pudding

Bread pudding is always on the dessert platter, so I get that with ice cream and real whipped cream on top.  I do not eat like this every day, so I can enjoy meals like this about once a month without liposuction.

I skip coffee at the restaurant, but I like the combination of coffee, Jack Daniels, milk, and whipped cream that I make at home.

The ambience at Crown and Anchor is mostly nautical with its color drawings of ship battles, facsimiles of signed treaties, hammered brass plates with English pub scenes, Beefeater ale steins, and a tall statue of an English castle guard, complete with a towering black hat. 

I smile sweetly and laugh that one of my English ancestors was the captain of the ship Naiad, which was part of the British fleet that beat the combined fleets of the French and Spanish navies under Napoleon at Trafalgar, Spain.  I have mixed ancestry and I have researched all of them.

I looked at Florence and said, “That statue of an English guard is a good ‘photo op,’” I said.  Laurent took a photo of her by it.

“You need to have a good ‘visual’ to get yourself on TV to promote your films and TV shows when you grow up,” I said.

“You can practice photography with your iPhone,” I continued.

Laurent showed Florence the different functions on her iPhone: photo, video, microphone recording, and GPS coordinates. 

“Daddy studied photography in school when he studied engineering.  He can probably build those things.  He also taught teens how to do photography at a summer camp in France, too. 

Anyways, if you use the panoramic, you can make mom look really fat.  If you use the zoom, you can make my nose really big.  If you use that button, you can get video.  This how you turn on the microphone,” I said.

Part of the reason I showed her this at Crown and Anchor is that all the lawyers, judges, police, media peeps, and other Monterey notables have money, but don’t know how to use the technology.  They probably have to pay for classes at Apple, too.

“Take a video of me going into the London telephone booth,” I said to Florence.

“Normally no one is allowed in the telephone booth, but if you film quickly, I can sneak in and out of the booth before the owner notices,” I said.

So, Florence and I pretended to be going to the bathroom and I ran to the telephone booth.  Florence was filming as I popped in the telephone booth and waved my hands at her.

“Eh, nobody’s allowed in the phone booth.  Not even stage mothers pretending to be producers,” growled the bar stool chorus.  I smiled at them and pranced out of the phone booth.  You never know if Clint Eastwood could be at the bar in disguise.

Laurent tries to keep a straight face about all the stage mother politicking, especially when Florence or I make reservations for the “Hollywood Booth” under the large, ship model of the Titanic.

I showed Florence how to use the Internet Movie Database to calculate how profitable a movie is.  Big sales do not mean big profits, if your production costs are high.

“Those Harry Potter films might not be as profitable as people think, if you look at the production costs,” I told Florence.

Florence wanted to be an actress and wrote J.K. Rowling to be an extra in one of the Harry Potter films.  Her agent wrote back saying that only British actors were used in the films.  I thought that was discriminatory as heck.  Hollywood employs people from all over the world on its projects.  I fell out of love with the Harry Potter books at that moment even though I read most of them.

(Florence wrote to some other TV series that were on fan fiction and got a Scandinavian TV show to come to Monterey and film a show about a Scandinavian love boat cruise.  They hired her as an extra, so she got paid and SAG points.  You do make your own opportunities as Jon Bon Jovi sings about in his song It’s my Life.)

“Don’t feel too bad.  I think she does not have rights to Harry Potter merchandise,” I said.  I was wondering if she signed away electronic rights, too.

“Why is merchandise important?” Florence asked.

“You can make more money on it than ‘the art’ you produce.  Your creative work becomes a publicity vehicle.  I wonder if Fifty Cent got his stage name that way,” I said.

“Also do not build huge lists of people you do not know on social media or get a business page, if you want to grow an audience.  There are stalkers all over social media.

I am very unpopular at work for insisting that the FBI website for Internet safety be put up on the library webpage, and that librarians be trained in how to report suspected child abuse,” I said. 

Ho-chi Minh passed a lot of information this way in restaurants and bars I learned when I lived in Chicago.  I just loved having an English Bulldog restaurant for the same reason where you can even buy a Beefeater Stein as a souvenir.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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