Happy New Year! Kumquat Champagne Cocktail

 Looking for a festive and slightly special cocktail to ring in the new year?  How about this incredibly easy and refreshing kumquat cocktail?  I picked this cocktail because kumquats are so pretty and cute and in dreary December I am always in the mood for bright citrus flavors.  Little did I know that the kumquat does hold special meaning for the new year  - Chinese New Year that is.  Kumquat represents prosperity and according to tradition (so says the internet), anyone who eats kumquat at the new year will be insured good fortune, prosperity and happiness.  With that in mind, this is the perfect cocktail to ring in 2014!  Happy New Year and I wish you good fortune, prosperity and happiness!

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Sweet Tooth and Mushroom Ragout with Creamy Polenta

Ian McKewan's Sweet Tooth has one of those standout food moments that bookcooker is all about.  The novel, which I must admit I thought would be a little sexier 007 than it was, is about Serena Frome, a smart, pretty, wispy Cambridge girl who finds her herself working for MI5 in early 1970's London.  This is not a path Serena would have found on her own  - she is the daughter of a bishop and a maths major with a suppressed passion for literature and bad taste in men.  It is through an affair with a much older and worldly professor that she finds herself working in the British domestic spy agency during the gloomy days of the cold war, British economic depression and the threat of the IRA.  It is the older professor that also introduces her to this earthy, sexy dish - forest mushrooms with creamy polenta.  Serena and Tony Canning, a professor at Cambridge were Serena is a student, spend secret weekends together at a cottage in the country. Tony teaches Serena about world affairs and they drink wine and good food that Tony cooks.  This dish was particularly intriguing to me (I love polenta!) and for Serena it was a symbol of the kind of sophisticated world she thought Tony was opening up for her.   Of course, since this is a spy novel, Tony was not what he seemed, he cruelly dumped Serena but she went to work for MI5 in London anyway.  Rather than the exciting and sexy experience you would expect, Serena's work and life was dreary and demeaning - until she was recruited into the "Sweet Tooth" project...

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Tell the Wolves I'm Home and Frozen Hot Chocolate

While frozen hot chocolate does not sound like the right kind of thing for December, it is a great nostalgic and refreshing treat even in winter.  This version is inspired by that classic New York City institution Serendipity who is famous for one thing - its decadent frozen hot chocolate that little tourists and NY princesses have been enjoying for decades.  The restaurant (and frozen hot chocolate) make a brief cameo in Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rivka Brunt which was a real sleeper hit for me.  I had not heard anything about the book before I picked it up and about 10 pages in I was deeply in love with the book.  It is an emotional coming of age story of an awkward girl  - June Elbus - living in suburban New York in the eighties.   I immediately connected with the character.  June, at 14, is a little weird, a little overweight, she likes to wear lace up boots and medieval style dresses and hang out alone in the local woods and pretend she lives in medieval times.  June is lonely and isolated and the only person in her life that gets her is her gay uncle Finn, who is a painter that lives in New York and is dying of AIDS.  This is the eighties so the disease is new and something to be kept under wraps.  In stark contrast with June's positive relationship with her uncle is the fractured relationship she has with her older sister Greta - the two of them used to be thick as thieves and then Greta became mean and is cruel and mocking to her younger sister.  The book is about these two relationships and June's rough passage into young adulthood.

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