Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Peter Reinhart  is an award winning baker, author, and instructor. He is also one of the nicest and most supportive baker/author/instructors I've ever met. Reinhart is native of New York City, so when he set out to make authentic New York Deli Rye he recalled from his youth, he knew what he was looking for. The key ingredient, as laid out in The Bread Baker's Apprentice , are a pair of onions, cooked in oil until they just begin to turn translucent. The onions are mixed with sourdough starter and left to infuse for about a day before the full dough is assembled, kneaded, and baked. After the final bake, the onion shards have largely disappeared -- you can see a few darkened specks in the crust -- but they leave behind a subtle, pervasive aroma and characteristic flavor that will send you immediately to the store for corned beef, pastrami, and some grainy mustard. Don't forget a sour pickle. During the day I was letting the onions and rye sourdough culture do th...

Anna, the protagonist of this WW II era story, is a kind of Rosie the Riveter. After beginning as one of the girls in the administrative pool at the Brooklyn Naval yards, as a 19-year-old she lives her dream to become one of the boys that SCUBA dives into the harbor of Wallabout Bay. The book's description of 1940s New York is so expertly delivered you can only envision the luncheonette's, men in fedoras, and bustling traffic existing in black and white. The characters that surround Anna are also well drawn, but taken as an ensemble seem rather pointless. Anna has a crippled younger sister. Her father works for the underground black market but disappears for the middle half of the book and near the end survives 21 days at sea on a raft in the Indian Ocean. Anna's Aunt is a floozy. Her paramour is a gangster running shady nightclubs. Her mother returns to Minnesota. And so on. It is hard to tell why this book made the long list for the National Book Award in 1917. It feel...

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 ...