Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Not once does Stephen Greenblatt or William Shakespeare mention Donald Trump by name but it is obvious from page one that at least one of the authors has Trump on the brain and the other predicted him 500 years ago. What Greenblatt does best is make it painfully clear that tyrants of all ages and locations bear many of the same character traits: insecurity, bullying, toady advisors to whom they have no special allegiance, narcissism, abusive relationships with women, and an absence of empathy. Shakespeare's tyrants like Richard II, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and King Lear seen through a Trumpian lens are sadly familiar. Their adherents are the same group of people either willingly hoodwinked out of desperation for their personal plights or self-serving jerks who think they can ride the tyrant's coattails for personal gain. It is in some ways encouraging to recognize that Trump is not unique to America or our era: his type has been around since the beginning of power struggles. The...

Growing grain in colonial America was a difficult endeavor. New England soils were rocky and hard to plow. The weather was cold and rainy. Wheat was especially prone to infections by fungi and molds. Settlers anxious to make bread had to be creative and use whatever flour was in abundance. Native Americans were master farmers of corn and settlers referred to all corn meal as Indian flour.  Rye is more tolerant of cold, wet conditions than wheat and was also relied upon for nutrition. The combination of Rye and Indian was, when cookbooks were first printed in the 1800s, also referred to as Ryaninjun, and in this version of the recipe, Thirded Bread, because I have used one third of each type of flour: rye, corn, and wheat. Depending upon what was available, the bread might have a lot more of one kind of flour than the other two. This bread is also quite similar to Boston Brown Bread and back before the days of Keurig and pour-overs, like in the 1950s, when coffee came in large tin c...

Detective Antoinette Conway has finally achieved her goal of reaching Dublin's murder squad, but Antoinette is not only the first woman to enter Ireland's male bastion of investigators, she is also the daughter of a dark-skinned (absentee) father. Conway is hazed mercilessly by her fellow officers who spit in her coffee when gets up from her desk, pat her backside, pee in her locker, throw away her files instead of handing them in, and mess with her computer.  Conway proudly stands her ground and when she and her partner are handed what should be a routine murder case -- girlfriend is reported dead in her living room right after her boyfriend is seen leaving the house in a hurry -- she does a full-on investigation.  As mysteries go, this one is just the right amount of tortuous to make it a page turner, but what Tana French does best is introduce us to the routine doubts and in-our-head-rebuttals that all of us endure. She does it by introducing complex, slightly flawed charac...

  Every summer when I traveled to Cape Cod, one of my favorite breakfasts was a loaf of raisin bread fresh from the Flying Fish bakery in Wellfleet. To be honest, I'm not even sure they still make it; they've become more of an upscale eatery. Still, every September, when I get back home, I try to make it. I got it right with this recipe from Maurizio, Cinnamon Raisin Sourdough . I made a few variations: I added my starter right from the get-go and I subbed dried cranberries for about 40% of the raisins. But oh my. Getting the cinnamon to stick around through the bake was a complete success. Too often the flavor of cinnamon simply dissipates, but these loaves, four of them, were still aromatic when I made toast three days later. Right from the oven, the fruit was well distributed, the crumb was open and full of holes to absorb lots of butter, and the crust was so crackly that as I sliced a flaky snowstorm burst onto the cutting board.

  Two aging Irish criminals - one with a bum leg and the other with a bad eye - are sitting in the ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain. They are searching for the daughter of one of them who ran off three years ago. The daughter is pretty, petite, has dreadlocks, maybe a dog, and is hanging out with other European hippies and should be on a ferry going or arriving from Morocco. At least that is the information they have extracted from similar looking hippies they have cajoled and badgered. They know the day the daughter is supposed to be traveling so for 24-hours, the two of them sit in the terminal reminiscing and shooting the shite. They recall their days of running hashish from Morocco to Ireland and the time when they had too much money and what it was like to be living on the cliff edge of prosperity and panic. They speak of loves gained and lost and all in all a day goes by when not much happens, boatloads of humanity arrive and depart, a few drinks are had with a best bud, an...