Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Four women work the night shift on an assembly line at a Japanese factory that makes take-out meals. Arriving and departing in a desolate warehouse district in darkness they work a refrigerated floor dishing cooked rice, laying slabs of pork, applying sauce, and stacking finished boxes. During daylight each of the women is burdened with indifferent husbands who womanize, gamble, ignore, or beat them, demanding, rebellious teenage children, and the thankless responsibility of caring for frail, aged in-laws. This is an image from the Internet so you get the drift.  https://foodsafety.suencs.com/?p=10531 Very early in the narrative (so no real spoiler here) the four women commit a terrible crime, but one that might also result in a great financial payoff. Out  is a mystery turned on its head. The question of who committed the crime is known immediately, leaving two questions still to be resolved. First, will the four friends get away with it. Second, and the greater ethi...

I recently purchased this book, Mastering Pizza , by Marc Vetri. The book is terrific. Making good pizza is not too hard, but making great pizza is difficult. It is hard to get enough heat inside a residential oven. My sourdough crust, following Vetri's recipe, was quite thin. It would have been crisp if I could have raised my oven temperature to the prescribed 700 - 800 degrees. Even with a pizza stone I couldn't radiate enough heat to make the crust really crisp before the top started burning. Still, check out this video and see if you don't start feeling a tiny bit hungrier.

Frank McCourt's first book, Angela's Ashes , recounted his impoverished childhood in Ireland. His mixture of pathos, humor, and superlative Irish story telling put readers in peels of laughter and tears of despair. Angela's Ashes  won the Pulitzer Prize. 'Tis  begins with McCourt's introduction to adulthood as a very young immigrant in New York City. With an impeccable eye for the sights of 1940s New York, a nose for the city's smells, and an ear for the voices of other working class immigrants of Greek, Italian, and Caribbean origin, McCourt again paints a picture of his conflicted past, this time American. New York in the 1940s and 1950s comes alive as a city pulsing with opportunity and breathtaking racism. As McCourt works his way up the economic ladder from bellhop to school teacher you can feel his imposter syndrome, root for his advances, and suffer the indignities of what feels like an insuperable class divide. Frank McCourt can spin yarns chapter aft...

We belong to a CSA that supplies us with vegetables. During the winter in Northwest Pennsylvania, aside from a few greens raised in hydroponic greenhouses, we receive more root vegetables than any family of any size could possible process. We have eaten curried sweet potato stews, baked potatoes, cabbage and kohlrabi slaws with Asian dressings, and carrot soups. Parsnips, however, bedevil me. They aren't bad roasted and there are some interesting parsnip stews and soups, but I have been having a difficult time keeping up with new shipments. So I boiled up a bunch, milled some fresh whole wheat, used my whole wheat sourdough starter that comes from the Cripple Creek gold rush of 1893, and out of my oven came some of the most beautifully formed breads I have seen in quite a while. The interior was moist, but not gummy in the least, the crust was firm, and the aroma was naturally sweet with a hint of the growing season now just a distant memory. I'd share the recipe, but I...

Pachinko is a Japanese gambling game that is part slot machine and part pinball. Fleets of small steel balls tumble past obstructions before dropping into collection buckets worth money or disappearing into worthless drains. Much of the game of Pachinko depends upon the interaction of the player with the loud, musical, highly chaotic descent of a group of balls launched (the player chooses the speed, but not much else) onto the playing surface. Pachinko is a lot like life. A Pachinko machine. An operator adjusts the pins that determine where the balls land. Min Jin Lee delicately and with great sensitivity envelops the lives of four generations of a Korean family. Their saga begins under the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s. The second and third generations live most of their lives in Japan as second class citizens, roundly despised by most Japanese nationals. In Japan, the Korean family of the story copes with Japanese discrimination, depending upon the characte...

Making a sourdough bagel that tastes good is not nearly as difficult as making one that looks good. The chewiness of a good bagel -- in contrast to a cinnamon raisin or blueberry bagel, which are forbidden in my house -- comes from the use of white flour with very high gluten levels. The dough is heavily kneaded to build the gluten. Look how smooth the surface is on each pre-bagel. But then look at how my bagels dimple when I boil them. After boiling, they get seeded and baked. Here is a bun that also did not look great, but oh my the taste.  Jewish rye, potato, onion, poppy, sesame rolls. Oy, with a schmear of cream cheese or some pickled herring, you should only try one. Finally, some breads that don't only taste good, but also look good. Turns out my son Isaac and his girlfriend Delaney are master babka makers. These weren't sourdough, but next time they will be. Hah! Preparing raspberry jam, pistachio, almond, chocolate chunk babka. Some more ...

John Carreyrou is the reporter for the Wall Street Journal whose investigative reporting brought down Theranos and its wunderkind founder, Elizabeth Holmes. Before its demise in 2018 and subsequent bankruptcy it was valued at $9 billion. Carreyrou does a masterful job of reassembling his notes into a logical chronology beginning with Holmes desire to develop a method of testing blood with just a finger-prick and high-tech, nano-assays. By working her connections and charisma across Silicon Valley -- and the willingness of venture capitalists and a goggle-eyed Board of Directors -- Holmes became a front-page phenom with ample cash flow. Only her technology never worked. Holmes pitched in effect a pyramid scheme by lying, bullying, and obfuscating for years with a product whose misinformation endangered the lives of those who received its unreliable results. This book is a warning about demagogues that believe in their pronouncements more than the truth (I'm thinking of you, Donal...