Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Saeed and Nadia live in an unnamed, but all too familiar, Middle Eastern city where government forces are slowly losing the battle to Islamic militants. The young couple meet in college, before it closes, when  Saeed finally finds the courage to ask Nadia out for coffee on a Friday. When Nadia asks him why he isn't going to be praying, Saeed has to stumble for an answer. Later, when Saeed asks Nadia why she remains fully covered in traditional robes even though she is not religious, Nadia replies, "So men don't fuck with me." What follows is a courtship interspersed with car bombings, government reprisals in the form of long-distance shelling and air raids, and neighborhood by neighborhood success of young combatants drunk on power as the government slowly loses control of its country. Escape from the city is condensed: an enormous sum of money is handed to a trafficker who might steal the money or actually provide safe passage. In Exit West , transport is acco...

In the small town of Carricklea, Ireland, Connell is the lone high school son of a single mom, Lorraine. Lorraine cleans house for Marianne's upper-crust, and as we are going to discover, dysfunctional family. Marianne and Connell are high school classmates, best friends, and so intellectual that their relationships with their high school classmates are tenuous. They are also on-again, off-again lovers and sexual partners swimming their way upstream against the currents of peer pressure, economic class distinctions -- real, imagined, and magnified in British society -- damaged childhoods, impending adulthood, and university attendance in Dublin. Admittedly, my plot and character descriptions sound mundane, but Rooney's development of Connell's and Marianne's relationships to one another and to maturation is so microscopically accurate that their every failure is a painful reminder of our own, and their successes generate unbridled celebration. Normal People  is S...

Rye breads are tricky because they have almost no gluten. To compensate many rye bread recipes contain only a small amount of rye flour, the bulk being given over to wheat flour whose gluten allows for an ample rise and light crumb. When the rye content of a recipe increases a baker can knead for an exceptionally long time to encourage what little gluten there is to bind together so the bread will rise, or the recipe calls upon yeast to supplement a sourdough culture. Commercial yeast can lift nearly anything. Danes, like citizens of other northern European countries too cold to grow much wheat, consume a lot of rye bread, much of it made with 100% rye flour. This Danish rye made with soaked flax seeds and a tablespoon of barley malt syrup was leavened using only a rye sourdough starter. The dough was not kneaded, but simply allowed to ferment for eight hours at 67 degrees. It doubled in volume and the result was a richly flavored, slightly sour, malted, full-bodied rye bread....

The action, when it finally does occur, spans the late stages of the Cold War. American spy agencies are working hard to destabilize the revolutionary government of Burkina Faso because its Prime Minister is showing tendencies toward communism. The CIA recruits Marie, a French-speaking native of Martinique and New York, and daughter of a New York cop to act as a honeypot for the PM. Marie's intangible strengths include a commitment to an American system of justice, which is not very just toward blacks like herself, and an innate ability to read people's inner thoughts. Usually. The author does a fine job of bringing 1980s Burkina Faso to life. She also captures New York City of that era and the mind of Marie, a cross-cultural loner trying to do the right thing. Moreover, who has ever read a book wherein the lead spy is both female and black? My guess is that the uniqueness of American Spy's  protagonist, Lauren Wilkinson's careful research, the embedded conflict of...

Aziz Ansari does his best to analyze dating in the age of social media, internet, and cell phones. He discovers it is difficult to find a perfect companion, while overlooking the possibility that there are no perfect mates. Relationships require care and feeding if they are to flourish. Ansari partners with sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, who is an under-acknowledged co-author, and together they run some focus groups to learn more about dating and romance. Their one observation of note is that we are in an age when internet research has persuaded nearly everyone that with enough googling, a shopper can always find a better deal (or having made a final decision, be stuck with regrets when higher quality at lower cost does appear.) This carries over to choosing a partner. Why continue past a first or second date when a dating app contains hundreds, if not thousands, of potentially better choices? Because of the Internet, it may be more difficult than it was before to settle on ...

Making a beautifully scored, huge sourdough boule for Thanksgiving is an obvious bake to make (if you aren't making lovely little sourdough potato buns.) It's the loaves that follow Thanksgiving that are depend upon a little more thought. To accompany turkey sandwiches on Friday, I made a schissel rye with caraway and nigella seeds. The powerful herbal fragrance was a perfect complement to a schmear of Russian dressing, a slice of turkey, tomato, avocado and lettuce. A tradition begun by my father many years ago is to make Jambalaya with some of the leftovers. My mother's tradition is to make pot pies with leftover turkey meat, gravy, sweet potatoes, string beans, mashed potatoes, and Brussel sprouts.  My son Isaac has taken over his grandfather's Jambalaya and this year produced a warm Cajun dish with arborio rice, andouille sausage, hot peppers, tomatoes, onions, celery, green peppers, and garlic. Isaac doesn't measure anything, but is a wizard at get...