Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

It was a great idea (especially in 2010), pulled off with panache. The author, Kevin Roose, took a leave of absence from Brown University in the second semester of his freshman year. Instead of studying abroad with other Americans in Madrid or Paris, Roose enrolled at Liberty University, America's flagship school for evangelicals, thus moving from one of the most liberal to one of the most conservative universities in the United States. Most of what Roose describes would not be a surprise to anyone following Jerry Falwell's political agenda. If you are not so familiar, then this book is a good introduction to a university that insists that no liberal views are permitted on its campus. Students "learn" that evolution never happened and the earth is only 6,000 years old. Abortion is murder. All homosexuals are faggots. Women should marry early, support their husbands, and bear many children. Prayer is infallible. Muslims are infidels. Also, not very surprising, Roose di...

One of my recent goals is to work through Maurizio's recipes in The Perfect Loaf.  Maurizio's recipes are incredibly precise and I find that sometimes the first time through I don't always get the same results he does. But his focaccia was a winner on the first try. Maurizio suggests pushing add-ins like tomatoes and olives deep into the unbaked dough. I topped the dough with basil, oregano, and flaked sea salt. Next time around I would add more tomatoes and olives. But what a meal. There is also great joy for me in inventing breads and last week I needed to deal with some russet potatoes that were not going to last another week. I boiled and mashed them and added them to a sourdough loaf and then bulked up the dough with spelt flour and raw oats.  Making potato breads are tricky because the potatoes contain a surprising amount of moisture hidden inside them. That's why I cannot provide a recipe. I just keep kneading in more flour until it finally matches the water con...

The protagonist of The Lost Man  is Nathan Bright, the oldest of three brothers. Nathan lives alone tending  cattle on a marginal farm in the Australian outback whose dimensions are so large that it takes hours and hours of driving dusty dirt roads to go end to end. The main character, however, is the outback itself. Hundreds of thousand of acres of near-desert flatness, summer daytime temperatures beyond human capacities, and unparalleled nighttime darkness.  Somewhere midway between Nathan's farm and one managed by his middle brother, Cameron, is the mythical stockman's grave. The book opens when the youngest brother, Bub, and Nathan meet at the grave where Cameron has just died of heat and dehydration, something an experienced farmer like Cameron would not have fallen prey to accidentally. Moving at the slow pace of a rising summer sun, but with the inescapable intensity of midday in the desert, the secret lives of the three brothers, their wives, and children emerge f...

David Starr Jordan was obsessed with making order from the chaos of nature. At the turn toward the 20th century, and importantly not so long after Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species , Jordan set out to name and place within a taxonomic category every fish he could capture from planet earth. A wife and child died early in his life and yet he persevered with such fortitude and public success he rose to become President of Stanford University. Adversity and chaos continue to track Jordan when among other calamities the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed thousands of his specimen jars, displacing archetypal samples from their floating labels in a shower of broken glass and formaldehyde. Within hours, Jordan was sewing labels to the gills of fish he could still identify, picking himself up and restarting his mission. Lulu Miller, whose own life has been overtaken by chaos and disorder, finds herself obsessed with David Starr Jordan, hoping that in understandin...

Peter Wohlleben is either way ahead of his time or a flake. His hypothesis from page one forward is that trees are like people, except when they are superior: they live longer and are stronger than humans, for instance. He makes his case by translating recent scientific discoveries about tree ecology and biochemistry into human analogies like smell, fear, pain, compassion, and anxiety. So, for example, an acacia forest being nibbled by giraffes will release chemicals into the atmosphere that downwind acacias recognize. The receiving acacias produce chemicals in their leaves that make them less tasty to other giraffes. Wohlleben calls that speech and smell. Older trees in German forests can share nutrients with younger trees. It is an easy enough experiment to run. Traceable radioactive isotopes introduced into old trees appear in the stems and foliage of younger trees after they have traveled down the trunk, through an interconnected root system, and upward into the new stem. Wohlleben...

Secluded in a remote wintry forest on the Polish-Czech border an old woman talks to herself (with capitalized nouns), to animals, and periodically to old men who also live by themselves in houses in the woods. When given any opportunity by the author, she speaks at length about astrology. It snows a lot, nights are long, slush and ice are everywhere, and animal poachers roam the forest picking off deer, wild boar, rabbits and anything else they can shoot. Old Lady collects and preserves the dead animals she finds on her freezing rambles and complains to police and military authorities until she is virtually foaming at the mouth. After a quarter of the book I wondered if it was perhaps an allegory on partisans hiding in the woods during World War II. Animals, standing in for Jews, were randomly shot and disappeared by hunting parties and military authorities. Occasionally, poachers, and even the Police Captain, are found murdered, apparently done in by the animals themselves. By half wa...

The decades long civil war in Northern Ireland, like all civil wars, was vicious, and for outsiders, difficult to comprehend. Patrick Radden Keefe's take on The Troubles, as they were known, is to put the lives of four important players under a microscope. Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and Dolours Price were leaders in the Catholic uprising by the Irish Republican Army. Together, when they were not in jail, they spent much of the 1970s and 1980s attempting to dislodge Protestants and the British military from northern Ireland. The fourth, Jean McConville, mother of ten children, and perhaps a spy abetting the British government in tracking down members of the IRA, was kidnapped and murdered during the height of The Troubles. In a well-told story (listen to the audiobook, if at all possible), an interminable war of attrition grinds on and as is so often the case in civil wars (the Arab-Israel conflict, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan) is built upon e...

Making sourdough crumpets (or by flipping them over, English Muffins) is surprisingly easy. Using this recipe published by The Washington Post as a base, Susan and I have tried several variations. We have even made some from 100% whole wheat starter. The object of a crumpet is to make it crisp on the bottom side and have lots of holes on the top. When it is eaten still warm from the griddle or direct from a toaster all those holes fill with melting butter and jam. A crisp bottom prevents a mess from pouring through. The recipe is simple enough: 1 cup of mature sourdough starter 2 tsp of sugar (although that makes for an awfully sweet crumpet. 1 - 1.5 tsp of sugar suffices) 1/2 tsp of kosher salt 1/2 tsp baking soda (increasing toward 3/4 tsp of baking soda for a really acid starter created a lot more bubbling action resulting in a crumpet with more holes) Having well oiled crumpet rings are essential for achieving a round shape. Whisk all the ingredients. Pour 1/4 cup of batter into ea...