Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

To accompany an Indian meal we were planning I laid out small rounds of sourdough to fry into naan, Indian flatbreads. After several hours the yeast in the sourdough had leavened the rounds.  Because my sourdough was very active, the yeast in the sourdough worked faster than the bacteria.  The result was a fast rise, but not very sour bread. I rolled them flat, but not too thin.  About the thickness of a light sweater. Delaney fried them in hot peanut oil.  They puffed, bubbled, and crisped. Isaac cooked up an awesome mung dal with tomatoes, onions, and potatoes.

As is my habitual means of cooking I often begin in the fridge to find what has been lurking.  If I find anything that can serve as a base (my, that's a lot of leftover rice), or something accumulating in overabundance (last week, for example, we had three bags of kale), or an item past its sell-by date, but probably not past its use-by date, I think about how to turn those things into something edible. Especially for not-quite-past the use-by date, I figure I can turn it into bread.  Anything dangerous is not like to survive a roasting at 475 degrees fahrenheit. I made this baguette with apple juice concentrate that had been in the fridge since Passover.  That would have been about a month ago.  The vague sweetness of apple and sour from the sourdough turned out a loaf that was soft on the interior, very fragrant, and a little bit like an apple brandy. This loaf, FIG AND FENNEL, in contrast to my loaves where I make it up as I go follows a recipe I learned in England.  I

On the upside, Tana French writes with such apparent ease that putting down one of her books requires an act of will.  Her characters are richly nuanced with ambition, self-doubt, workplace conflict, fatigue, frustration, and desire.  In short, she puts onto paper people who are a lot like us.  Her plots truck along and her sense of Ireland's suburban landscape and modern Irish women and men navigating their newfound place in a global economy feels like we are on holiday with an expert tour guide. On the downside, Cassie Maddox, this book's lead detective finds herself amidst a plot that is largely unbelievable.  A dead body appears in an abandoned farmhouse whose looks are identical to Cassie's.  Identical?  Moreover, the ID found on the body is an ID that Cassie once used as an alias while working undercover.  So back undercover she goes, assuming the name of the old alias, Lexie Madison, and the personality of the dead woman to join a household where Lexie was once

Coates selects an essay per year from his publications in The Atlantic  to correspond to the eight years that Barack Obama served as America's first African American president.  Together the essays serve as a well-researched and devastatingly clear lesson on a country founded upon enslaved African labor and four hundred years of entrenched racism.  The cumulative power of the book is the tiny taste of what it must feel like to awake every morning with what white Americans consider colored skin.  Home ownership the single most common form of wealth accumulation in the U.S., has been systematically denied by banks, governments, and white neighbors.  Schools remain as segregated and unequal as ever.  Imprisonment of blacks, largely a function of mandatory drug sentencing, has removed a disproportionate of black men from society, while the opioid crisis, a scourge among whites, has drawn national hand wringing and lamentation.  Obama, the first black President, argues Coates, had to

One of the fun things about making homemade bread is that you can add all kinds of items from the fridge or pantry and so long as you do not kill your yeast, or in my case sourdough, the bread is likely to turn out very well.  I hardly recall what went into this loaf, but I think I remember four kinds of flour, some leftover beer, and a not inconsiderable quantity of heavy cream I was trying to use up. And this loaf had two cups of cooked buckwheat groats mixed in.  I feared they might become hard and crunchy after they were baked.  Fortunately, they remained soft, imparting a kind wild nuttiness.

Hodgman was a staff writer for The Daily Show and regular contributor This American Life .  He's a practiced story teller and genuinely funny guy.  Vacationland  is a memoir of how he came to own a house in the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts and then another home in down east Maine even while owning an apartment in Brooklyn.  There are lots of humorous accounts of how one learns to cope with owning an old house:  sneaking your way into the town dump; facing off brave raccoons; plugging your own septic system with ancient cheerios.  The saving grace for this quick read is Hodgman's full understanding of the privilege afforded him by his wealth and whiteness.  Owning more than one home, vacationing in Maine among the prep school set, or simply walking in western Mass or coastal Maine while being black he lets us know is not a choice most people of color ever get to make.  In a subtle way, Hodgman is the joker speaking truth to power.

Nobody Owens is a rare mortal capable of conferring with the dead and living.  In fact he was raised in a graveyard after the rest of his family was murdered by one of the "Jacks of all Trades."  In this particular case, Jack the Ripper dispatched his sister and parents.  His parents are a childless dead couple, his guardian is a vampire, and his instructor a pleasant female werewolf from Transylvania.  His best friend, however, back when he was five years old, is a human girl.  In Gaiman's capable hands, this coming of age story explains how Bod (short for Nobody) navigates a life outside the cemetery where his life is in grave danger among the living and inside the cemetery where his life is devoid of friends and there is insufficient stimulation for a growing young man.