Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

A ragtag band of five misfits escaping military and domestic conflicts in rural Nigeria find themselves thrown together as a family as they head toward Nigeria's largest city.  Lagos is Nigeria's Dickensian, teeming metropolis where survival depends on equal parts ingenuity and luck.  The small band of five move down the economic ladder as the city swallows them alive.  living beneath a bridge among a small city of squatters.  They succumb to corruption to land small jobs while they try to maintain their humanity. When things can get no worse than their life sleeping beneath a bridge, they take over an abandoned house whose original occupant, unbeknownst to them, is the country's secretary of education.  When the Secretary shows up with $10 million in stolen funds the misfits hold the money and the secretary and become Robin Hood.  They give the money to schools.  The irony of the book being that had the money not been stolen and captured by vagab...

It is always a little hard to believe that a mason jar of bubbly glop will inspire a dough of flour and water to become bread.  I added mashed potatoes to the sourdough starter in the picture. For this version I boiled four medium, red potatoes with their skins on.  I used just enough water to cover the potatoes.  When the potatoes were soft and the water cooled I mashed them and used the thin soup-like mixture as the liquid for my bread.  There is something in potatoes that sourdough yeast really love because potato breads rise quickly and happily.  To this one I also added maybe 15% organic spelt flour.  The rest was something King Arthur calls Special Patent white flour.  I purchase it in 50 pound sacks. I'm getting better at shaping rolls with both hands at the same time and these came out chewy with tiny sheets of red potato skin randomly flecking the rolls.

Consider the Lobster  is a compilation of previously published, exceedingly well-crafted essays that begin on page one with a detailed visit to the annual AVN awards, the nation's premiere ceremony for pornographers.  Wallace introduces us to actors (men with one significant talent) and a few augmented actresses, who in the 1990s when the VCR was transferring the industry from sticky movie parlors to home bedrooms, were being paid to accept increasing levels of degradation.  Mostly we meet directors and producers who are just plain icky.  The awards ceremony itself is laughable in its specificity and self-promotion.  But mostly it is Wallace's dry-witted, head-scratching wonder at the magnitude of an industry that even twenty years after the essay was written still make it worth reading. Turn the pages and there is a short piece on the hidden humor in Kafka (and the cluelessness of college students that need to have jokes explained to them), a passionate re...