The Goldfinch and Welsh Rarebit

If I could make a dish with vodka, Oxycontin and tragedy that would be perfect for Donna Tartt's engrossing and heartbreaking The Goldfinch.  Tartt is one of my favorite authors  - but she is rare among contemporary novelists in that she takes about 10 years per book.  Undoubtedly the anticipation adds to the enjoyment of her books, and it is the anticipation that powers the reader through her hefty tomes.  The Goldfinch is like those before it is long - but it is worth the effort and I different in some ways from Tartt's previous works.  What I loved about The Secret History and The Little Friend was the hidden mystery and subtle but constant sinister atmosphere underlying the story. With The Goldfinch Tartt adds something else to the mix - a character that the reader really emotionally connects to - Theo Decker.   Many reviewers have dubbed The Goldfinch "Dickensian" and there certainly is that spirit in this book - it spans many years, has a wide array of eccentric and interesting characters and most importantly tells the coming of age story of an orphan.  Theo is a young pre-teen who lives in New York with his beautiful and engaging single mother.  On their way to a parent teacher conference at Theo's school the mother-son pair stop at the Metropolitan Museum to peruse a collection of Dutch artwork Theo's mother was interested in.  A huge bomb explodes during their visit  - Theo's mother is killed but Theo miraculously survives.  But with his mother's death (and the unreliability and absence of his father) he becomes like an orphan if not literally one.  The book traces Theo's coming of age and entrance into adulthood - documenting how the trauma of the bombing and the loss of his mother scars his every moment thereafter.  This welsh rarebit pictured above represents one of the rare good and comforting things in Theo's life - his friendship and eventual home with a quiet quirky antique dealer known as Hobie.  More about the book and the dish after the jump.

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Stone Arabia and Whiskey Sliders

I read Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia right after The American Heiress, and it was a tough transition.  I can be schizophrenic with my reading preferences - I want something dark and challenging one day and something frothy and light the next.  Stone Arabia was a challenge after the easy breezy American Heiress and I must say I almost threw in the towel, even though the book is short - around 250 pages.  The book is about a middle aged brother and sister - Denise and Nik.  Neither is successful or happy in their lives.  They used to be LA rocker kids in the late 70s and early 80s- Nik in a band and Denise a sunset strip teenage groupie.  Those were their glory days and they are long gone.  There is not much of a story so to speak but more of an introverted look at Denise and Nik and their lives now, in their late forties, and when they were kids.  I guess what I think the book is really about is how much it sucks to get older.

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Pickled Shrimp and Black Water Rising

I have wanted to make pickled shrimp for a while now, so when I was perusing the amazing cookbook Texas Eats to find inspiration for something to make inspired by Houston, Texas, these shrimp jumped out at me.  Pickled shrimp are not mentioned in Attica Locke's Black Water Rising, but they seemed somewhat appropriate since the book is set in Houston and the gulf and bayous of the city are a strong presence in the story.   The book is about Jay Porter, a young struggling attorney, and the mess he gets himself into by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  On the night of his anniversary, Jay takes his pregnant wife Bernadine on a boat ride on the Houston bayou that was a half-hearted attempt at romance.  The couple and their boat captain run into trouble when they hear screaming and gun shots, and then pick up a woman in the bayou who is fully dressed and shoeless.  By rescuing the woman and not reporting what happened to the police, Jay sets off on a path that will cause him immense stress and put his family in danger.  Neither Jay nor the reader knows what happened that night on the bayou or how the woman he rescued is involved, and it is the quest for answers to these questions that drives the plot forward.  This novel felt like a departure from what I usually read - it felt like a Grisham novel with more depth and less law.   I didn't love this book, but do plan on trying one of Attica Locke's other novels.  More about the book and shrimp after the jump.

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The Marriage Plot and Cocktails with Madeleine, Mitchel and Leonard

I struggled with what to make for Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot.  The book is about the difficulty and aimlessness of three Brown seniors upon their graduation.  The food in the book is minimal and not good (cafeteria food, maybe some ramen, some cheap vegetarian food experienced on a trip to India).  In the end what I came up with was an imagined impromptu cocktail hour with the three characters - Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell.  I made something to represent each character - the classic crisp gin martini for the waspy Madeleine,  Parmesan cheese crisps to represent the depressed but brilliant Leonard and Indian spiced nuts to represent the soul searching Mitchell.  To some extent, each of these ideas was a stretch, nevertheless I think each element brings a little bit of a character to the table.  Eugenides is the author of two previous well known novels - The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex.   These two books and The Marriage Plot are totally distinct from each other - it is actually hard to believe they were written by the same author.  The Virgin Suicides is a dreamy, yet edgy novel about teen desire, while Middlesex is an epic story of a hermaphrodite.  The Marriage Plot is different still, though it is perhaps somewhere between these two - the story is somewhat small - focused on the three characters  - seniors at Brown in 1982 - and their flailing attempts at early adulthood.  The book is a bit autobiographical - Eugenides graduated Brown at the same time and followed a similar path as one of the main characters, the fellow Greek Mitchell Grammaticus.  While the characters are a bit grating in the way smart, precocious Ivy leaguers can be, the book is absorbing and it is easy to identify with their struggles to find themselves and to find themselves on solid ground.

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Restoration and a Tuscan Feast

When you read a book set in Tuscany, it is difficult to choose one dish to make!  While food is certainly not the focus of Olaf Olafsson's Restoration,  I could not resit making a few simple, fresh and hearty Tuscan dishes this week.  The book is set on at a Tuscan villa and farm owned by a British expat - Alice, and her Italian husband during World War Two.  As Italy became a battle zone,  Alice turned the villa into a hospital of sorts, and then a school and home for refugee children from the north.  One day, a mysterious Icelandic woman, Kristin, shows up at the villa severely injured from a train bombing.  Kristin is a struggling artist and has a connection to Alice that Alice is unaware of.  The book alternates between two stories - Alice's and Kristin's.  Alice's story is about life on the farm,  her grief the loss of her young son, her careless affair, and the difficulties in her relationship with her husband Claudio.  Kristin's story is about art, about her struggle to become an artist, her obsessive love affair with her boss, and about a dangerous forgery.  To me, Kristin's story was much more engaging and believable while Alice's story, told through diary entries that are written as a letter to her missing husband, were cliche and less interesting, perhaps because I found Alice kind of boring and unlikable.   More about the book and the Tuscan feast after the jump.

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Snowdrops and Chilled Borscht

This borscht is way more virtuous than what A.D. Miller's decadent, morally suspect Snowdrops called for.  The book is set in Moscow after the fall of communism, in the Putin era, when everyone was out to get rich and there were no truly "legitimate" businesses.  In this setting Miller puts Nick Platt, a British attorney in his late 30's who meets two beautiful Russian women on the subway platform and is quickly pulled into a deadly scam.  Nick knows that these women are using him, but he lets himself be used - because they are so beautiful, because he is so lonely.  The book is written as a confessional by Nick to his fiance in London years after his time in Moscow.  In order for her to really know him, he figures, she needs to know the worst of him.  The book starts with Nick describing a "snowdrop" which in wintry Moscow is a dead body found when a pile of snow melts as winter thaws.  From here Nick moves backward to tell the story of who the snowdrop was and how Nick lost himself completely once he met Masha.  More about the book and borscht after the jump.

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Open City and Akara Fritters

I wish I could say I loved Teju Cole's Open City, because it got rave reviews and seemed promising when I picked it up.  Unfortunately, I found the book very hard to get through and when I did get finally get through it, I did not really feel like the work was worth it.  Perhaps it is because I just need a little more plot to push me through a book.  I read a lot of dry stuff  for a living - as a lawyer I pretty much read all day, so when I read for fun I want a little escapism and storytelling.  What Open City basically is is a narrative of what is going on in the main character Julius' head as he walks around New York.  Just like the thoughts in your own head - sometimes this stuff is interesting and sometimes it is a total snooze.  Julius is a doctor of Nigerian and German descent who is living in New York and finishing up his residency in psychiatry at what I assume is the hospital associated with Columbia University.  Julius is what you would call a lost soul - he does not have strong connections to any people or community in New York.  There are things in life he loves - such as an old professor and classical music - but even these things he seems to treat in a detached manner.   I think it is this detachment that really made it hard for me to dig into Open City because the book felt aimless and without any real emotion.  The book reads this way because this is how Julius' thoughts are  - but for me this made for a tough read.  These Akara fritters were more successful for me - they are not inspired by the book in any way other than that Julius grew up in Nigeria and this is a Nigerian dish.  They are made with black eyed peas and a small amount of habanero chile that delivers a nice amount of heat.  Paired with a red pepper dipping sauce, they were a winner.

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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.

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What's For Dinner? Teriyaki Turkey Meatballs

Just a couple more food or drink only posts before my next book review of A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  Both getting through the book and having time to make the recipe have delayed me, so I promise back to a book post very soon.  In the interim, here are some flavor bombs for your dinner - Turkey Teriyaki meatballs.  I threw these together on a recent weeknight easily and they turned out to be pretty amazing.  They could obviously also work as an appetizer/snack, and in fact I originally envisioned making these for that big football game last week.  But, I didn't get my act together in time to do it, so instead they turned into a special dinner.  The recipe after the jump.

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The Widower's Tale and Maple Bacon Wrapped Scallops

The Widower's Tale is another winnner from author Julia Glass, the author of Three Junes, The Whole World Over and I See You Everywhere.  Glass once again turns to the delicate and complicated relationship of families as the subject of this novel.  The main character of The Widowers Tale is Percival (Percy) Darling (what a name, right?) a 60-something retired Harvard librarian who is a cranky, odd New Englander.  His wife passed away many years ago, leaving him on his own to raise his two young daughters.  Although he is very much a part of his adult daughters' lives, his relationship with both of them is fraught under the surface with unsaid things stemming from their mother's death.  As the novel begins, Percy has just opened up an old Barn his beautiful property by a pond in a leafy/wealthy/sort of rural suburb of Boston to the local pre-school. The opening of this pre-school sets in motion a series of events that causes trauma to both Percy and his entire family.  More about the book and this classic after the jump.

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The Imperfectionists and Roman Artichokes

I did not know when I picked up Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, right after Visit From the Goon Squad, that is was a similarly styled book.   Rachman's book chronicles the lives of a handful of people who work at (or in one instance read) an struggling English language paper in Rome.  There is no specific plot which ties all the characters story together, rather, like The Goon Squad it is almost like individual short stories, characters in one story show up in the others of course because it all about this one newspaper.  In between each person's story is a history of the paper, from its founding in the 50's through its eventual demise, roughly in the present.  Like The Goon Squad, this book was a great success.  There is a lot of humor in here, as well as some more serious stuff.  But it is the funny stuff I liked best.  To go along with a book set in Rome I made Carciofi alla Guidia, which translates to Jewish Artichokes.  I had these wonderful things in the Jewish quarter in Rome too many years ago and it is a dish Rome is known for.  Also, one of the characters in the book, Herman Cohen, makes them for his visiting friend.  It is a great way to use some wonderful fresh spring artichokes.

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Remarkable Creatures and "Fossil" Herb Crackers

Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures is an enjoyable, if not particularly exciting, book about two women fossil hunters in England in the 1800's.  The women, of different classes, form an unlikely friendship, their love of fossil hunting drawing them together.  I found this book less inspiring than Chevalier's other books (The Girl with the Pearl Earring, The Lady and the Unicorn) which gave a behind the scenes look at some of the greatest works of art.  This was intended to give a behind the scenes look at the beginning of the discovery of dinosaurs and the concept of evolution, and I found this subject matter drier.  To go with the theme of fossils, I made two kind of homemade crackers with herbs - the herbs  - rosemary and sage - mounted on the crackers with egg white, look like fossils.  These crackers are easy and delicious bites for a cocktail party.

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Await Your Reply and AgroDolce Caponata

It is hard to know what recipe to make for a book that opens with one of the main characters getting their hand chopped off, ya know?  Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply is a dark, bleak book with lots of unhappy characters, untimely deaths and really no upside at all.  That isn't to say I didn't like it.  I did, it was gripping it at times.  But this is not the book to read if you are looking for a happy or light beach read (I will be giving you some serious froth next post).  When describing this book to others (and I told a few people about it in hopes of getting some ideas for a recipe), I first refer to the movies "21 Grams" or "Babble."  These are movies that tell the dark stories of seemingly unrelated people throughout, with the connections between the stories and people eventually revealing themselves.  This is exactly what Await Your Reply does - it tells the story of Ryan (he of the chopped off hand), Lucy, an eighteen year old runaway, and Miles, a sad middle aged man searching for his twin brother who is schizophrenic.  All the characters are in precarious situations, all of them are deeply unhappy and all of them are somewhat connected to stolen identities.   There is no food in the book, the book takes place across a nondescript Midwest landscape (sometimes Nebraska, sometimes Cleveland, sometimes Michigan, but the author doesn't give these places any local color, they are all depicted bleakly).  I was going to make some sort of mistaken identity food (e.g. a meatloaf and potato concoction dressed up to look like a cupcake), or make a pizza with three different sections/toppings.  I settled on something agrodolce - the Italian word for sweet and sour.  I thought it fit a key character in the book, Miles' brother Hayden - specifically the agrodolce concept - the "agro" suits the character better than the term word sour (and I know that agro in Italian probably means "sour", but you know what I am trying to get at - "agro," meaning agressive).  I picked this agrodolce Caponata since it would be great use of summer vegetables!

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Steig Larsson and Swedish Pizza

Swedish author Steig Larsson's so called Millennium trilogy has become a phenomenon of the publishing world, much like Dan Brown’s books or Harry Potter. The three books, first published in Sweden (in Swedish) were major best sellers in Europe before being translated into English and becoming hits in the U.S.   Part of the hype surrounding the books is caused by the fact that the author, Larsson, a Swedish journalist, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 50, before the books were released in the United States. But the books are also deserving of the hype because they are dramatically plotted, tightly wound thrillers – the type of book you don’t want to put down. I found this to be the case with the second book in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, in particular.  While reading the book I actually looked forward to going to the dentist and being kept waiting for 20 minutes or so before my appointment (which is the typical waiting period my dentist puts me through) so I get in some more reading time!   I have read the first two books in the series, the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, is being released this week, and according to Michiko Kakitani of the New York Times, it is even better than the first two.  As for what recipe to make, it was tough to come up with something, because (1) the books are pretty twisted and dark and do not make you think of food and (2) the characters, especially the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, seem to subsist on lots of coffee and lots of fast food  In particular, there was a lot of mention in the second book of something called "Billy's Pan Pizza", which I discovered via google is a popular frozen pizza in Sweden.  So I decided to combine the pizza idea with something Swedish, and settled on gravlax, a cured salmon kind of like smoked salmon, but less smokey.  The gravlax was super easy as was the pizza dough, enjoy.

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Ham & Cheese Knishes

If you have not had them before, Knishes are wonderfully rich dense baked dumplings, usually filled with meat, potatoes or other vegetables such as broccoli or spinach. They are a traditional Jewish-American food and so are therefore usually kosher – they are made of either meat or dairy, never mixed, and don’t contain non-Kosher foods such as pork or seafood. I decided to make Ham & Cheese Knishes since they are a “twisted” version of the traditional knishes – decidedly not Kosher, just like the characters in The Believers. I have eaten MANY knishes in my life but never made them before. I was surprised at how easy they were. I improvised these – taking the traditional potato and onion filling and simply adding ham and cheese. This recipe made about 16 apple sized knishes. I had some extra dough left over, which is fine as it can be used to fix and holes in the dough.

INGREDIENTS

Dough
4 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons white vinegar
2 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup warm water

Filling
2 cups chopped yellow onion
1 -2 Tbs of oil
2 lbs potatoes (I used red potatoes)
1 cup ham, chopped
1 ½ cups shredded cheese (I used Gruyere which worked very well, I think any good melting cheese that goes with ham would work1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
1 egg beaten (for eggwash)

Instructions

Put all dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer with a dough hook (I made this with a standing mixer and it worked great. It can be done by hand, I just haven’t done it). Stir the dry ingredients together for a few seconds. Add all wet ingredients to the bowl.

Start the mixer on low for the first minute and then turn mixer to medium-high and let knead for approximately 8 minutes, until the dough is somewhat elastic.

Take the dough out of the mixer, form into a ball and divide in half. Place each half in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rest for about an hour.
While the dough is resting, you can make the filling. Sauté the onions in about 1 – 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil on medium to medium low heat for approximately 25 minutes so that the onions are dark brown. The onions should brown slowly so keep the heat low so the onions do not burn.


Peel the potatoes, cut into large chunks and put in a saucepan covered with water. Bring to a boil and cook until the potatoes are cooked through. Drain the potatoes and mash with a potato masher or potato ricer. Add sautéed onions, salt and pepper, cheese and ham.


This is how it looks all mixed together.



When the dough has rested, preheat the oven to 375 and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Take one ball of dough and roll it out into a long rectangle. I found that I did not need any flour on the rolling pin or rolling service, since the oil in the dough made it not too sticky.

After you have rolled out the dough as thin as you can, take it with your hands and stretch it in all directions so that it is so thin you can almost see through it. You may create holes when stretching it which is fine. Patch up with extra dough if this happens.



When the dough is stretched out, put half the potato mix in a thin line about one inch from the end of the dough.


Then take the end of the dough and roll it over the filling and keep rolling like a jelly roll. Pinch the ends of the jelly roll so that the filling will not leak through. Depending on what size you want your knishes, cut the roll about every two inches and pinch the ends together so that the filling is covered by dough. To cut the knishes from the roll I used my hands, not a knife. Turn the little knish cylinders so one pinched end is down and put an indent with your thumb in the top end. Line them up on the baking sheet so they are not touching.

Brush egg wash over knishes. Bake in over at 375 for approximately 50 minutes, until they are golden brown. They can be served warm or at room temperature. These would be delicious with deli brown mustard.

Yum!