Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

In 1996 a bomb explodes in a crowded New Delhi marketplace.  I am not giving anything away as the bomb detonates in the first pages of the book.  Although a dozen or so people die, two of them, a pair of young brothers we will get to know very well, the book is not nearly so tragic as you might expect.  Almost as if we are following bits of shrapnel from their emplacement in the exploding car through their airborne trajectory, the stories of everyone involved on the fateful day are observed as they hurtle through space and time. Mahajan's skill is to mix comedy and pathos in near equal proportions.  The bomb makers make bad bombs that fail to go off and we can feel their frustration.  One would-be bomber is all talk, no action, and cites Ghandi as a supporter, before landing in prison where he goes from all talk to complete silence.  The father of the murdered brothers is so self-obsessed that our sympathy for his plight wains.  A childhood friend o...

Anne Hillerman's father, Tony Hillerman , wrote 18 mysteries set in the Navajo nation of the American southwest.  His stories were respectful of Native American culture, strongly evocative of the landscape of the southwest, and award-winning mysteries.  When he died in 2008, he and his lead characters were sorely missed.  It is no small feat, therefore, for his daughter Anne to continue the series, but she does so, in this the first in her series, with aplomb.  The Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn (he is always referred to by the Navajo Police force as The Legendary Lieutenant), around whom so many of the elder Hillerman's mysteries circulate, is shot in the opening scene.  Spider Woman's Daughter is a mystery about who shot the author's father's main character.  Elevating Detective Jim Chee and his now-wife Officer Bernadette Manuelito to the lead allows them to find their own footing in the tribal detective world now that the aging Leaphorn is not on...

Sy Montgomery makes a very strong case that octopusses (that is the correct plural, not ocotopi) are so intelligent that they have both cognition and consciousness.  Montgomery's case is not built so much on biology, though there is plenty of evidence to go on.  Octopusses have both central brains and individual brains in each of their eight arms.  That means an octopus can work its arms in concert or independently and that simultaneously an octopus can do eight different things.  It can unscrew a bottle cap with two arms, feed itself with a third, while it explores, tastes, and touches additional items with its remaining arms.  In some ways, a human ability to walk and chew gum at the same time pales in comparison.  Mostly, Montgomery argues that octopusses have feelings, curiosity, personality, and moods and convinces us by interacting with octopusses on a weekly basis at the Boston aquarium.  She lets the aquarium's Giant Pacific Octopus tas...

In most years, my wife's brother Marty comes a few days before Christmas until a few days before New Years to cook. And cook. And cook. A brief look at the breads, all of which played supporting roles to Marty's main meals, will give you an indication of the week of extravagance. Part of Marty's spreadsheet for when things get prepped. Here's what happens in our kitchen (may take a while to load the video.). Our first specialty bread was fougasse to accompany Marty's frikadeller.  Frikadeller are oblong, exceptionally tender Danish meatballs and despite my best efforts I could not make a plateful of them look photogenic. Isaac is my professional fougasse shaper. As soon as fougasse comes from the oven we coat it with olive oil.  This year's olive oil was donated by Wisam.  His family pressed it on their farm in Palestine.  The oil is sumptuous, light, and tastes partly of vanilla. After the olive oil was brushed on, we sprinkled the war...

When I learned that Fazer , a Finnish Bakery, planned to be the first commercial bakery to sell insect bread to the public, I had to try it. Fortunately, Professor Beth Choate, in my department, is an insect ecologist who finishes her class every year with an insect meal.  She gave me some cricket flour. Before you lose your appetite, consider the fact that on average , every 50 grams of flour (about 1.7 ounces) contains 75 insect parts.  Makes some sense, really.  Only fields that have been sprayed to death with thick coatings of insecticides are completely free of insects when harvesters take grain.  Thus, you have always been eating insects, with the approval of the FDA, pretty much with all your food.  You just don't know it. I wanted to see if students would be able to tell the difference between cricket bread and a bread made with buckwheat flour that looked nearly the same. Two of these loaves were made with 15% cricket flour (about five tim...

Sue has known for a very long time that I like soft buns, but here's the proof.  I haven't spent a lot of time making buns, so before I prepared these, I checked a recipe.  This dough had a couple of table spoons of oil and an egg, neither of which I ordinarily add to my sourdoughs.  I also added spelt flour, which wasn't in the original recipe I consulted.  Spelt is an ancient relative of modern bread wheat.  It doesn't have as much gluten as bread wheat, but what it is missing in gluten, it makes up for with an earthy flavor that predates modern, industrialized farming. Just for comparison, here is the same dough, made on the same day, but baked as a single loaf at 475 degrees instead of 400 degrees and in a Dutch Oven instead of on parchment paper.  Look how much difference baking technique makes to the loaf (on the right) that comes from the same ingredients.

In the summer of 1911, a motherless fourteen-year-old farm girl, responsible for house sweeping, toilet cleaning, cooking, darning, dish washing, clothes washing, and room cleaning for four older brothers and an abusive father makes her escape.  She travels alone to Philadelphia where she becomes "The Help" for a wealthy Jewish family.  Joan Skraggs is impetuous, smart, and deeply curious about the world.  Joan's diary entries serve as our insight as she struggles to understand her first exposures to erudition, Judaism, kashrut , parental expectations and encouragement, mainstream Catholicism, anti-Semitism, love, and simply growing up.  The book won a Newberry Medal and Jewish book awards and plays heavily on literature that would be familiar to early teenage girls that love to read.  Think Louisa May Alcott.  I, of course, was way out of my element.  Nevertheless, The Hired Girl  focuses a lens on young adult fiction as well as the liv...