Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Look at Afghanistan's neighbors and you will begin to understand its historical importance.  Iran, to its immediate west captured Afghanistan when Persians ruled most of this part of the world, but they were not the first.  Coming from the west Alexander the Great Hellenized central Asia before the Persian Empire ever existed.  Afghanistan has also been conquered by Mongolia (Genghis Khan), China, Russia, Great Britain, the United States, and the Taliban. Which is why Steven Tanner's military history is an interesting lens with which to focus upon a country surrounded by towering, cave-riddled mountains, impassable deserts, and Siberian winters.  For all its rich detail, however, the overriding observation is one which most of us already know:  Afghans are tribal.  Their origins are in isolated mountain villages, their interactions with one another rare, and with the outside world rarer still.  They unify only to disperse invaders and then retrea...

The olive trees in this cover photo of Amos Oz's new book, Judas , stand in front of the church of Gethsemane.  Reportedly, they have survived more than two millennia.  In front of one of them lay the sleeping Jesus.  Judas planted a kiss on his head identifying him to the Romans.  Throughout history, Judas has been portrayed as the ultimate betrayer, and hence, the archetypal Jew, the man responsible for the crucifixion of God's son, bringing upon himself and upon his people, the Jews, centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Amos Oz, a Jewish Israeli, reinterprets the story of Judas, portraying him as the one Jew (Jesus and all of his disciples, after all, were all Jews) wise enough to perceive Jesus's godliness.  Judas, anxious to demonstrate Jesus's spiritual abilities urges Jesus toward Jerusalem for his showdown with the ungodly Romans.  Judas's re-interpretation is placed in the hands of Shmuel Ash, a downtrodden graduate school drop-out.  T...

There are of course as many ways of making focaccia as there are crusts and toppings to invent.  Nevertheless, while attending a bread conference at Johnson and Wales culinary school, I learned this life changing recipe.  Salamoia is a salt-preservation technique used in parts of Italy. The crust is a basic white bread crust and you can use whatever recipe you are most comfortable with. I employed my Cripple Creek sourdough and mixed in some spelt flour.  The trick to making a focaccia is to fill a shallow baking pan with olive oil and then to press the leavened dough toward the edges with your fingertips.  It will not reach the edges on the first pressing so after another hour or two a second pressing will get it closer.  A third fingertip nudge may also be helpful.  I could have used more dough in the pan since a thicker crust would have been nice, but crust thickness is really a matter of preference. You need to plan ahead.  To make the salam...

Part of what makes bread distinct from, say, a tortilla, dosa, or barley cake is that it rises.  It rises because wheat, and to a lesser extent, rye, contain gluten, which when kneaded and leavened by yeast or sourdough forms a tight protein network that expands as entrapped bubbles of gas within the bread's structure grow.  Those bubbles are released by yeast.  Inside the oven, when the gas bubbles are heated they enlarge again.  Gluten holds the bread together as it rises and springs again inside the oven.  The air pockets you find inside the bread when you slice it -- small, fine, and regular in a sandwich loaf or large and disoriented in a baguette -- are evidence that the whole thing worked. White bread flour has the highest gluten content and therefore provides the lightest breads.  Whole wheat, with its bran and germ, by proportion has lower concentrations of gluten forming proteins. The greater the ratio of whole wheat to white flour, then...

New York City's detective squad is a cobbled together band of blue-collar brothers and sisters who have to chase down gang bangers, drug deals gone wrong, hold-ups at Korean grocery stores, muggings on subway platforms, lovers quarrels turned deadly, and squabbles between simmering neighbors that end with razors, knives, bats, and guns.  In short, its nasty work and the lead detective in this story, Billy Graves, is working the midnight shift when most of the worst stuff happens, and even when it doesn't it sure feels that way as the fatigue of working night after night takes its toll. A "White" is the criminal known by the detective to have definitely committed the murder, but who walked free on some technicality and forever lives under the skin of the detective determined to finally capture his or her perp.  After twenty years on the squad all of Billy's teammates have a white they can't let go of. Patrick Anderson of the Washington Post captured my ...

At the beginning of the Cold War, America had no on-the-ground spy in Moscow.  At a time when competition between the United States and the Soviet Union included everything from sports matches to direct military conflicts, albeit in other countries around the world, knowing something about what the opposition was capable of on a field of war was absolutely necessary.  The best way to find out was to have someone tell you, smuggle documents, or hand photographs taken in secret to a CIA case manager. A painting of Adolf Tolkachev , by Kathy Krantz Fieramosca, hangs at CIA headquarters. Illustrates SPY (category i), by David E. Hoffman © 2015, The Washington Post. Moved Friday, July 3, 2015. Adolf Tolkachev hated Stalin and the Soviet authorities with such ardor he courted the CIA until they finally paid him the attention he deserved.  Tolkachev was a missile engineer with access to the very documents that could tell the CIA, and thus the U.S. military, precisely w...

During the last year of World War II, 1945, the Russians invaded Germany from the east.  Bent upon revenge for the Nazi invasion of their motherland, Russian soldiers were often less than disciplined with respect to civilian rules of war as they beat their way toward Berlin.  Salt to the Sea  follows three young refugees thrown together in a flight for their lives: a Polish teenager who has been separated from her family; a young Prussian man who is able enough that he should be fighting in the Nazi army, but who's father was killed by the Nazis, so he is eager to escape a late conscription; and a Lithuanian nurse intent upon assisting all in need, which is to say, nearly everyone.  Together with an orphaned German boy and an aging German shoe-poet they scramble through frozen woods in a desperate attempt to reach the sea and an ocean-going vessel that will carry them away from Germany before Russian troops arrive. Wilhelm Gustloff, 1938 They reach the Wil...