Pumpkin Cheese Bread and "The Cookbook Problem"

 

As you may have noticed, my blogging has gotten pathetically sporadic for the last year or so.  I am not sure what has caused the malaise, but there is no doubt I have been uninspired.  I have been reading plenty, but just have not been as inspired to make recipes from the books - sometimes it feels forced, and often the things I make for a book are not inspired by the seasons, which is how I usually like to cook.  So I have been thinking a lot lately about how to jump start my creative juices so that I am excited and inspired by the blog again.   I don't want to give up on the original bookcooker idea of reviewing books and making recipes inspired by those books, but I am going to focus on something else for a little while - the cookbook problem.  Well, more specifically, my cookbook problem.  As people who know me can attest to, I am a bit of a shopaholic, mostly clothing and shoes (and OK, bags too) but also books and really the worst of it is the cookbooks.  I see a new cookbook and just get so excited that this one will have the perfect recipe, the one that will change my life!  I don't spend too much time flipping through at the bookstore (or the Amazon page nowadays), I just flip flip a couple of pages and zip zip my credit card.  Now that most cookbooks have Kindle additions, the cookbook addiction has become serious, and my love of cookbooks have become a problem.   I have SO MANY.  And even worse, I NEVER COOK OUT OF THEM.  That isn't true for all of them (I always cook out of Barefoot Contessa books and my Martha Stewart Baking Handbook has many batter splattered pages), but for the most part, I buy em, flip through, then up on the shelf (or onto the kindle) they go... and stay.    So, reflecting on the overwhelming number of cookbooks I seem to have and never use, I decided to start by counting them.  So I have 176 cookbooks.  Is this a lot?  It sure feels like a lot for someone who is not in the business of cooking for a living.  Add to that that I don't really use these cookbooks that much (I get so many recipes from the web), I realized I had a problem.  A consumption problem - the thrill of the purchase without any of the follow through needed to really enjoy and learn from all these beautiful cookbooks.  So, for the next little while on this blog I am going to attempt to work my way through all of the cookbooks, making at least one recipe from each.

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Still Life with Breadcrumbs and Berry Scones

I recently read Anna Quindlen's "Still Life with Breadcrumbs" as part of a new book club organized by one of my old camp friends.  This is not a book that was on my list or that I was even aware of, but I really liked it a lot.  It is rare these days that a book (or a movie or tv show...) is about a woman over 50, Still Life with Breadcrumbs is a nice break from the norm.  The book is about Rebecca Winter a famous photographer who has fallen on hard times, is struggling to make ends meet, and hasn't taken many photographs lately.  In an effort to save some money (and perhaps find some inspiration) she escapes her Manhattan apartment to a modest cottage in upstate New York.  It is in this small town (after a few days alone in the cottage with a raccoon, questioning her sanity and her decisions) that she walks into Tea for Two cafe and orders the first of many scones from the proprietor, the chatty Sarah.  While she spends a year in the small town, she consumes many of these scones, finds her artistic voice again and finds love.  Along the way it is an insightful, funny and moving read.

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Greens, Biscuit and Telegraph Avenue

I am a big Michael Chabon fan.  The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay is one of my top 10 favorite books.  I was excited about when Telegraph Avenue came out - Chabon always creates characters that are quirky and unique but who I emotionally connect to (even though they are almost always male).  Alas, Telegraph Avenue didn't do it for me in the way Chabon's previous work has.  It took me over a month to get through it, which is a departure for someone who usually reads books in a week or two.   In the end I made it through and am glad that I did, but I am not sure I would recommend the book to others.  Telegraph Avenue is a street in Oakland that is traditionally African American but runs from Oakland into Berkley so serves as a symbol in the book of the particular Northern Californian mix - hippie, African American, affluent liberal whites.  The novel is about race, gentrification, growing up, love, marriage, family, fatherhood, sexual identity and friendship.  To me the book felt overstuffed - with ideas, with themes, with obscure movie and music references, and with long descriptive sentences.  It was hard for me to connect with the characters because of all of this other stuff.  While I didn't love the book, it did present good food inspiration.  As soon as I read the words "yeasted biscuits" I was intrigued.  I have made regular buttermilk biscuits often and lamented that they did not rise as high as the ones I would get in hipster Southern restaurants.  I hoped yeast would get that sky high look I had yearned for.  In the book, one of the main characters, Nat, makes these biscuits, along with greens and fried chicken, in an attempt to win over some people in his neighborhood to support the used record store he owns with his best friend Archie in an epic battle with a hip hop superstore looking to move into the neighborhood.  I decided to focus on the greens and biscuits - together a great warming winter supper. 

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Healthy Carrot Coconut Muffins

I have been in a major yogurt rut lately.  I eat yogurt for breakfast practically every weekday - it is healthy, easy and genuinely yummy.  But every day, ugh, I am sick of it.  While I eat yogurt every day, what I really want to be eating every morning for breakfast is a delicious warm muffin or scone.  I am a major carb addict, I am never successful for more than 24 hours trying to eliminate all carbs from my diet.  I just can't do it.  Well, I probably can do it, but I really don't want to.  Of course, as much as I want to, I can't eat a muffin every day, so yogurt it is.  That is, until I found this recipe for Coconut-Carrot Morning Glory muffins that has very little fat, no refined sugar and is made with whole wheat flour.  I am late to the coconut oil bandwagon, but I believe that is the reason these muffins taste so rich and are also somewhat healthy.  While I still shouldn't eat them every day, I did the week that I made them.  Sue me.

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Apple Fest: Apple Ricotta Toasts

We're almost at the end of apple fest and soon will be moving on to pumpkin fest (oh yeah, and this is still a book review blog too, right?  The Marriage Plot and Game of Thrones coming soon).   This Apple Ricotta toast is something for the easy but indulgent breakfast/brunch hopper. I saw it on Food and Wine's website, and the recipe is from April Bloomfield, whose Spotted Pig restaurant I love in NY and whose cookbook, a Girl and Her Pig, I am also a big fan of, for the pictures at least, I have not made anything from it yet.  This toast attracted be because it was different than the usual apple breakfast concoctions - muffins, breads, pancakes and because it had fresh ricotta, which is one of my favorite things to eat.  The recipe calls for thickly sliced pan de mie or other fancy bakery white bread. I went with Trader Joe's Texas Toast and I must say it was a revelation.   I generally don't eat white bread, so have never had this before, though I have seen it often on my sister's kitchen counter.  The bread was perfect for this dish   - it is a thickly sliced enriched white bread - kinda like challah but not quite as rich, making it a good base for the buttery apples and cheese.   Since the bread is so thick, one piece of toast is the perfect portion per person.  This is something you could whip up as a treat for yourself or as a dish for guests.  And while the bread and cheese are great, in truth this is all about the sweet buttery pile of apples.  Enjoy.

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Shadow of Night and Currant Buns

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness is the first book I have read electronically rather in paper form, which is my usual preference. I recently got an ipad but did not immediately switch over to reading on my ipad, because I am a traditionalist and like the feel of a book in my hands.  In addition to being a traditionalist, I also sometimes have attention span trouble, I am easily distracted, especially when it comes to the internet, so I was worried that I would read a lot slower on the ipad because I would be constantly switching reading, checking facebook, and buying sweaters on J.Crew.com.  I put these concerns aside with  Shadow of Night, the second book in Harkness's All Souls Trilogy, because I simply could not wait to go to the store and buy  the book, I was so excited for the book I wanted to read it as soon as it was released.   For me, it was the perfect ipad choice, since I was engrossed in the book and was not distracted by other ipad features, mainly the internet!  Regular readers of the blog may recall that earlier this year I reviewed the first book in the All Souls Trilogy, A Discovery of Witches.  I loved the book, though admitted it was a tad on the cheesy romance side.  I also loved Shadow of Night, and found that either I was used to the cheesiness or it had subsided a bit.  The second book picks up just moments after the first book ends, with the two main characters, Mathew de Clermont (the vampire) and Diana Bishop (the witch) plunged back in time to Elizabethan England.  The story picks up with Mathew and Diana searching for the mysterious Ashmole manuscript and struggling to manage their volatile love affair.  As with the first book in the series, what is fun about Shadow of Night for me is the rich historical references and detail.  Here, the book is set in the past and it is thrilling to read about a present day character getting to interact with historical figures like Christopher Marlowe.  Second books in trilogies are often placeholders - we know that all the real action will be saved for the concluding book, but Shadow of Night was engrossing even if it did not advance the ball, suspense-wise, too much.  More about the book and these currant buns after the jump.

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The Kitchen House and Southern Cornbread

I have had a hard time finding the time to sit down and write my book reviews lately!  A big part of the reason is that I am having a bit of a tech overload  - I finally got an iphone (I have used a blackberry for years and still do for work) and then a couple of days later I decided I needed an ipad too.  As a result, I have been distracted by apps, apps and more apps - the exact reason I resisted getting an ipad for so long - I didn't want it to take away from my reading time!  Oh well.  I have put the ipad and iphone aside this evening so I can finally write about The Kitchen House, which I read in a three day frenzy a few weeks ago.  If you are looking for an engrossing book that will really engage you, The Kitchen House is it.  The book follows the story of a young (white) Irish girl who becomes an indentured servant on a Virginia plantation circa 1791.  She lives with the slaves who work in the "Big House"of the plantation owner, the Pyke family,   works with the slaves and becomes part of their family.  A white girl who will eventually gain her freedom living amongst slaves is clearly a situation that will cause drama and strife and the book chronicles the troubles of the Irish girl, Lavinia, the slaves of the Pyke plantation and the dysfunctional, destructive Pyke family itself. Once I got into the book, it was hard to put down - it is filled with dramatic turns and moments where the characters make such bad decisions you find yourself screaming at the book.  The cornbread above was an easy choice for a dish - even though this book is called The Kitchen House, in light of the extreme poor conditions slaves were forced to endure, food was not plentiful.  But good food was celebrated, and this simple cornbread is surely something that Belle, the cook and Lavinia's surrogate mother, would have made. I have heard The Kitchen House compared a lot to The Help, I see the similarities and will speak more about this after the jump.

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Soda Bread Scones

Happy Almost St. Patrick's Day to everyone.  Although I am far from Irish, St. Patty's Day gets a lot of play here in Boston, since there is such a large Irish-American population here and Bostonians in general like to drink, and for most people, St. Patrick's day means lots of drinking!  But for me, in addition to the drinking (a St. Patrick's Day drink will be coming later in the week) it also means Irish-American Soda Bread starts turning up in stores. I know that the soda bread with raisins and caraway seeds is not "real" Irish Irish soda bread, but I love the combination of sweet and salty in the Americanized version.  The problem I often have with the store bought variety is that the loafs are so big and dense, only the edges are really good, and the middle is either underdone or the whole thing is a massive dry hockey pock.  I thought breaking up the soda breads into little scones would solve this issue when I made some at home this weekend, and it really did help.  This are appropriately dense but also tender and moist.  I made these with currants and caraway seeds, but raisins would be just as good. 

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Mary Ann in Autumn and two San Francisco Classics

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City Series were some of my favorite books in my late teen years.  My mother introduced me to the books, which in turn introduced me to a world much more interesting than my own.   For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, the books are a series based on a column written by Maupin for the San Francisco Chronicle in the seventies.  Honey, these books and columns are the original Sex and the City - a fun and risque portrait of a city and those that inhabit it without any superficial obsessions with Choos and Blahniks (don't get me wrong, I will always watch Sex and the City reruns).  The original series has six books and chronicles the lives of a varied group of individuals living a funky apartment in San Francisco in the 70's and 80's.  The three main characters are: Mary Ann Singleton, a conventional young twenty something who just moved to San Francisco from Ohio, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, a somewhat flamboyant gay man and Anna Madrigal, the mysterious and kooky older woman that is the landlady at 28 Barbary Lane, where everyone lives (her welcome gift to new tenants is a joint).  There are more characters in the original series, but this 2010 novel, Mary Ann in Autumn focused on those three.   I guess by reviewing this new novel I am telling all of who that have not yet please go out and read the original six novels - they are fun and quirky and addictive!  For this quintessential San Francisco author I made two quintessential San Francisco dishes (at least they are so to a girl from Boston!) - fresh Sourdough bread and Cioppino.  The Sourdough bread is a bit time intensive and requires planning, and the Cioppino is the opposite - you will only need 30 minutes a bunch of the best fresh seafood local to you.

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Fall of Giants and the Original Salvation Army "Doughboy" Doughnuts

Ken Follett likes to write really long books.  If you have read his work before, you have likely read the large tomes "Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End," which both, in about 1000 pages, tell the story of two generations of characters in England in the middle ages, with a real focus on the church and the introduction of the architecture of grand cathedrals in England.  Follett has a knack for sharing a lot of useful information (about history, about architecture) via some juicy stories, and he has done it again in Fall of Giants - which I liked much more than his previous books.  Part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much is that I am a bit of a history buff - I am particularly interested in 20th century history and Fall of Giants is an epic about World War I.   Unlike most war books which tend to tell only one side of the story, in Fall of Giants WWI is seen from multiple sides of the war - the main characters are from England, the United States, Russia and Germany.  It was also a riveting account of the domestic events that shaped the WWI period that were so earth shifting at the time - the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of the Labor (and Labour) movement and the fight for womens' suffrage.  Follett weaves all of this major history with love stories, secret marriages, illicit affairs, and unwed mothers - the epic told from the perspective of the every day.  As I was thinking about what to make for the book, I googled around "WWI food" and what kept coming up is the WWI Salvation Army doughnut  recipe.  More about the book and the recipe after the jump

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Let the Great World Spin and Soft Pretzels

Let  the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is the same style of book as The Imperfectionists and A Visit From the Goon Squad which seems to be so popular these days – the book is broken up into the stories of seeminingly unrelated characters that as the book goes on, the reader discovers are connected.   The book takes place in 1974 in New York, and the unifying thread (pun intended!) is a man's miraculous tightrope walk  between the World Trade Center Towers.  A frenchman, Phillippe Petit, really did walk across the Twin Tours on a tightrope in 1974.  The novel is told from the perspective of several disparate New Yorkers and what was going on in those individuals' lives the day of the tight rope walk and how it effected them.  In addition, McCann weaves in a few chapters told from the perspective of the tight rope walker himself, but doesn't identify him as Petit.   Despite a really interesting concept, I did not enjoy this book and much of it felt like a bit of a chore to get through.  Parts of it were moving and it is certainly well written, but there is a dour pall over the book that made it difficult for me to get through - the mood is so dark.  This is not surprising giving the time  and place the book is set in - New York during the bad old days of the 70's when crime was high, the economy was bad, and it was the end of the Vietnam War.  New Yorkers were disillusioned and struggling - and this is depicted in the characters McCann creates.  I wanted to go with a quintessential NYC food for the book, and was not up for making hot dogs from scratch! Maybe someday!  While the book was a bit of a struggle to get through, making these pretzels was a breeze...

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Backseat Saints, Biscuits and Hot Pepper Jelly

This post has taken forever for me to get out!  I read the book weeks ago, then made the biscuits and bought the ingredients for the hot pepper jelly.  The biscuits alone were not right for the book - I needed the spunky and spicy jelly in order to represent the spunky and spicy (and slightly crazy) main character in Joshlyn Jackson's Backseat Saints, Rose Mae.  So I made the biscuits, photographed them, saved three and brought the rest to my sister, my brother in law reportedly quickly ate them all, but still, I could not get my act together to make the hot pepper jelly!  Finally, this weekend, after a few weekends away and friends visiting I got around to making the jelly. I think the process of sterilization is what held me up - I was just scared of it.   I will only give rough directions on this process after the jump, but will refer to you better sources - I don't want to be responsible for anyone getting sick!  More about the food and the fun book after the jump.

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The Finkler Question and Homemade Bagels

Harold Jacobson's The Finkler Question is a funny book about anti-semitism, which seems impossible to do without being offensive, right? But Jacobson does it.  The book won the 2010 Booker Prize, which is how I heard about it, and I usually love Booker Prize winners (e.g. Wolf Hall, White Teeth).  It took me some time to get into The Finkler Question, but about 100 pages in, I became hooked, and thoroughly enjoyed Jacobson’s funny, cringe-worthy and slightly ridiculous book. I think the book provides insight and humor as to Jewish identity generally, but there are certain aspects of it that are particular to the UK (e.g., there appears to be a much larger and more vocal anti-Zionist community in London than there is in the US).  The book is primarily told from the perspective of Julian Treslove, a non-Jew whose two closest friends, Libor and Sam Finkler, are Jewish.  Julian is obsessed with Jews and the experience of being Jewish, and for much of the book he actually tries to become Jewish by claiming he was the victim of an anti-Jew hate crime and dating a Jewish woman.  Treslove is a real cad - he has two children who he barely sees, sleeps with his friend’s wife, and is generally morose, self-obsessed and unreliable.   Treslove, in his head, decides that he will call all Jews "Finklers" since his friend Sam Finkler, whom he has known since childhood, thoroughly represented to Treslove the embodiment of Jews .  Thus, the book’s title is a play off of the phrase "The Jewish Question," coined in Western Europe to describe the issue of Jews in Europe (e.g., Nazi propaganda touted its concentration camps as the  "the solution to the Jewish Question.").More about the book after the jump. I would not necessarily recommend the book to everyone since I think there are some inside jokes that some folks will not get.  But anyone with particular interest in this issue would find it funny and thought provoking (Jew or non-Jew).  For the recipe, I wanted to make something stereotypically Jewish, so I went with bagels, which I have never made at home before.  This recipe is from Peter Reinhart, and while it was actually quite simple, it does require some non-typical ingredients. 

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Doro Wat (with Injera) inspired by Cutting for Stone

Abraham Vergese's Cutting For Stone is a grand, romantic medical and family novel which is mostly set in Ethiopia.  I love Ethiopian food, and Doro Wat is probably my favorite dish.  Google tells me that Doro Wat is often referred to as the Ethiopian National Dish, and I have seen it described this way on menus.  It is a firey hot stewed chicken, served with hard boiled eggs and injera - a  crepe like pancake made with fermented sour batter that is served with all Ethiopian food.  The injera serves as the utensil with which to eat the food.  As the main character Marion comments in the book, you can tell an Ethiopian native from a foreigner as to whether there hands are clean after eating Wat - for Marion, he noted that his hands were clean while his fathers were stained red at the finger tips.  Doro Wat is mentioned a couple of times in the book, most memorably for me at the beginning, when a young woman doctor Hema, arrives back to Addis Ababa and the hospital she works at after a long and harried (including near plane crash) journey from India, and immediately requests Doro Wat at her arrival.   I also attempted some injera, but did not have the time to ferment the dough so used some soda water to give it the characteristic bubbles.  This recipe took a lot of effort, as before you can make the Wat you need to make a spice paste (Berbere) and spiced clarified butter (Nitter Kibbeh), but the end result was tasty, though not as tasty, I must admit, as in an Ethiopian restaurant . 

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