bookcooker: Ten Thousand Saints and Straight Edge Samosas

This week, with Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints, I am moving from a young adult book about teenagers who have to kill each other(The Hunger Games) to an adult adult book about teenagers who also end up killing each other, but here it is very real and non part of some futuristic game. The kids in Ten Thousand Saints are not the admirable, brave, loving survivors of The Hunger Games, but rather they are surly, badly behaved and careless. That said, despite this seeming unlikability, Henderson tells their story in way that compels the reader to at least feel sympathy for them. The book revolves around three teenagers in the mid to late 1980's who get caught up in New York's punk/straight edge scene. The book both vividly depicts the wayward youth characters and the place and time they occupy. We as readers follow the three main characters, Jude, Eliza and Johnny as they deal with a horrible loss and try to muddle their way through a very difficult situation (which is entirely of their own making). These baked ~~vegan~~ [sorry for my stupidity, of course the egg wash makes these non-vegan, leave that step out for a vegan version!] samosas are not closely inspired by the book, rather, because some of the characters become straight edge (giving up drinking, smoking, drugging and eating flesh) and are into the Hare Krishna religion, I decided to make something vegetarian and Indian. More about the book and these samosas after the jump.

Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints is a real whopper of a first novel. In it, she tells the story three young people who have lost their way. I would say Jude is the real focus of the book, and when we meet him he is living in Vermont with his hippie mother (who is a glassblower who makes her living crafting and selling bongs) and spending most of him time finding ways to get high with his best friend Teddy. Jude and Teddy resemble Beavis and Butthead to some extent, they do not seem too bright and seem to have no interested other than getting wasted, but they clearly love each other in a goofy way. Jude in particular seems to always need to find some way to get high - whether by smoking weed or more dangerously huffing anything he can get his hands on (air conditioners, turpentine). In the first few chapters of the book, Henderson creates a character in Jude that I really disliked - he was obnoxious, aimless, unhappy, mean - and then she amazingly, through one anecdote, made my heart ache for this guy. Jude is the product of a broken home - he lives with his mother and his father (a stoner hippie drug dealer) is absent, living in New York. Jude recalls the night that his father brought his world crashing down when he was seven years old - heartlessly revealing both that his Dad had impregnated a friend of his mothers and was leaving the family and that Jude was adopted when he was a baby from his teenager mother. He does both of these things in a really callous way (and then bolts) and suddenly I understood why Jude was such a jerk and found that despite his behavior I could not help but route for Jude a little. Then, SPOILER ALERT (do not continue to read if you don't want a major plot point revealed), Jude goes and does something that neither the reader nor he himself will ever forgive himself for. After a night of partying with Jude, Teddy and Jude's father's girlfriend's daughter Eliza, a rich girl from New York, Teddy dies of a drug overdose. Both Jude and Eliza contribute to his death, Eliza but giving him cocaine at a party (she also took his virginity) and then Jude, after Eliza leaves, encourages Teddy to huff from an air conditioner - which combined with the cocaine stops his heart. Before his death, Teddy was clearly the lovable heart of the book - he is goofy but sweet, and has a horrible drunk mother that abandons him. His death understandably sends Jude over the edge and he remains in his bed for weeks. Henderson kicks up the drama another notch by revealing that Eliza, through her coupling with Teddy in the bathroom at a party, is pregnant with Teddy's baby. Eliza is like a character out of an after school special - she does cocaine, sleeps with inappropriate men, has daddy issues and jumps from fancy private school to fancy private school. Eliza is the daughter of Jude's Dad Les' girlfriend. Les is involved in Eliza's life and a better step-Dad to her than he is a father to his own children, Jude and his sister Prudence. After Teddy's death Eliza also spirals into depression, since she feels somewhat responsible for Teddy's death but is afraid to tell anyone about it. Shortly after Teddy dies his older half brother Johnny also comes into the picture. Johnny is Teddy's half brother and he lives in New York and is in a hardcore straight edge band. He is also a renegade tattoo artist, a hare krishna devotee and a closet homosexual. Eliza and Jude breaks the news of Teddy's death to Johnny and also the news of Eliza's pregnancy. These three quickly form a little family, with Johnny as the leader and pied piper, and three vow to keep secret that Teddy is the father of Eliza's baby. Instead, Johnny and Eliza quickly get married and pretend the baby is his. This happens because of Johnny's immense guilt of being such a distant figure in Teddy's life and his grief - he wants to redeem himself by raising Teddy's baby and also have a little bit of Teddy left in the world. Jude, who formed a crush on Eliza the minute she stepped off the Amtrak train in Vermont, does not like the way Johnny has come in and taken Eliza's affections. What these three characters have in common is that they are all a result of deeply flawed parenting. To some extent the book is a warning to parents who want to be "cool" - if you are too cool and too caught up in your own issues, you will lose control of your kids and they will get in trouble. Equal in importance as the human characters in the book is Henderson's depiction of the hardcore punk straight edge scene of New York in the late 80's. The city that Henderson describes is not the cleaned up, Disney-fied New York of today, but the gritty, dangerous, disease ridden place of the recent past. Johnny in particular feeds off of the hardness of his surroundings, and maintains a sense of control by living the straight edge lifestyle - no drinking, no drugs and no meat. For someone in a rock band in New York in the eighties, that is no easy task. No detail is too trivial for Henderson in her recreation of this world, and while most of the time that is really interesting, occasionally it gets to be too much. Throughout the book, as these three kids journey to find a way to cope with Teddy's death, there is a subtle sense of foreboding that they will screw up again and someone else will end up dead. By the end of the book I was exhausted because of course these are teenagers and these characters are so real they really do grate on your nerves a little. But I did care about them, and I wanted the roller coaster they were on to stop. Henderson closes the book with an epilogue set in 2006 where we get to see how Jude turned out. I wish Henderson had let us wonder on what happened to these characters as they grow into adulthood, because I thought the epilogue was not particularly creative (having just read a similar type of epilogue in the Hunger Games trilogy which in turn was just like the epilogue in Harry Potter). Epilogue aside, this is an incredibly creative and well written novel and I look forward to what Henderson writes next.

Straight-Edge Samosas, adapted from here.

I call these straight edge samosas because they are baked and almost vegan. I am not sure whether most straight edge devotees are vegan, i think at the least they are vegetarian, Johnny and Jude for a while adhered to a strict vegan diet. I knew I wanted to make something Indian, inspired by the meals Johnny and Jude shared at the Hare Krishna temple, it seemed like a fun project to try to make samosas a little healthier. I was worried that baking samosas would make them dry and blah, but in fact I think I may even like them better this way. They are not greasy and all and are actually good as leftovers, which fried samosas would never be. They are especially good dipped in this garlicky herb sauce. Do not be afraid to make your own samosa dough, it was really easy to make and very tasty. I will admit and you can see that I really just did not get how to form these into the perfect pyramids I see when I order these in a restaurant. I guess I am just awful at geometry, sorry!

Ingredients (makes about 20)
For Samosa Dough
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons oil (I used canola)
6 tablespoons (or more) water

For Filling (makes more than you need to fill the samosas, delicious on its own or as a side dish with meat or fish)
4 medium potatoes
2-3 tablespoons oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
1/2 jalapeno pepper, chopped, seeds included (feel free to use a hotter chili, this is just what I had)
1 tablespoon ginger, grated
1 and 1/2 cups of frozen peas
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon garam masala
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Optional 1 egg, beaten with 1 teaspoon of water or alternatively try 2 tablespoon of vegetable oil
For Herb Dipping Sauce
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon grated ginger1 cup mint leaves
1 cup cilantro leaves
1/2 jalapeno pepper, with seeds (see above, a hotter chili would be great)
1 teaspoon of sugar
juice of 1 lime
salt and pepper to taste
oil and water

Directions:

For dough, put flour and salt in a medium bowl. Add the oil and stir with a fork until the oil is incorporated and the mixture is crumbly.
Add the water a tablespoon at a time and incorporate with the fork until a dough forms. You may need more than 6 tablespoons of water, I used 7.
Turn out the dough - it will still be crumbly and in pieces - onto a lightly flour work surface and knead until the dough is smooth and not sticky. This could take up to 10 minutes.
Put the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and let rest for at least 30 minutes (at room temperature).
To make filling, start by boiling the potatoes whole with skins on until tender. Let cool until you can handle them then peel them and chop into 1 inch pieces.
Heat the oil (I used olive oil here) in a large skillet. Add the onion and cook until lightly browned.
Add the garlic, pepper, ginger, peas and cilantro. Saute over medium heat for a couple of minutes.
Add the potatoes, salt and the dried spices. Saute for two minutes and then let cool slightly and set aside.
When you are ready to make the samosas, preheat the oven to 400 and line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.
Divide the dough into 8 small balls.
With a rolling pin on a lightly floured work surface, roll out each ball into a circle. Since we are baking these, roll out the dough until it is very thin, a couple of centimeters in width.
Cut each circle in half or three pieces. Put about 1.5 tablespoons of filling in the center of each piece of dough and then do your best to form it into a pyramid. You probably will be better at this than I was so I leave you to it.
Put the samosas on the baking sheet and brush each with the egg wash or the oil.
Bake for 20-30 minutes until lightly browned.
For sauce: while the samosas are baking, put the garlic and ginger in a good processor and pulse till they are in tiny pieces.
Add the herbs, pepper, lime juice, sugar and pulse until the herbs are basically pureed.
Add oil and water (equal amounts) until it is the desired dipping consistency (probably 2 tablespoons of each.
Add salt and pepper to taste, pulse one more time, and serve.
Serve the samosas hot with the dipping sauce alongside.