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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Sag Harbor and Ice Cream in Waffle Cone

So this will be a kind of throwaway post, I apologize in advance.  I felt kind of blah about the book, blah about the dish, and obviously, could not get a clear photo of the ice cream!  So let's just speed through this so we can move on to the next post!  The month of August will be crazy for as I am moving, but I promise to be back in tip top form come fall, in a new kitchen and hopefully with better photo skills!   Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor is a coming of age tale about a middle class African-American teenager whose family spends their summers in Sag Harbor, Long Island.  The book takes place smack in the middle of the 80's, and the main character Benji spends the summer of his freshman year of high school working at an ice cream shop - that classic 80's ice cream shop where waffle cones and mix ins were huge.  This is about the time when the ice cream world started moving away from classics like butter pecan and rum raisin and instead started smooshing gummy bears into ice cream.  The book was OK, amusing at times but a bit slow. I struggled a tad to get through it.  Ice cream was the obvious choice.  I will explain after the jump why this recipe didn't turn out as I would have liked...

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Syrian Styled Oyster Po Boy and Zeitoun

Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is a non-fiction account of one man's experience during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian immigrant to the United States who owns and operates a home contracting business in New Orleans and lives with his wife Kathy and four children.  The book reads like fiction, and tells the story of Zeitoun's "perfect storm"  - the combination of the tragedy and chaos of Katrina with post-911 prejudice towards Arabs.    Eggers does a great job of narrating Zeitoun's experiences with a reporters voice, though it must have been difficult to write in such a neutral voice since what happened to Zeitoun at the hands of the U.S. and local government is shocking and would make even the most moderate person angry.  More details on the book after the jump.  For the recipe, I wanted to combine a classic New Orleans food with some Middle Eastern flavors.  Po boys on pita is what I came up with.  Homemade pita, fried oysters, with typical shawarma condiments - lettuce, tahini sauce and pickles.  Yum!

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Honey Cupcakes for for Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave is a wonderful novel about two women, Little Bee and Sarah O'Hara, from different worlds, who in the worst circumstances imaginable find a way help each other.   These cupcakes, like the book cover for Little Bee, are cute, but let me be clear - the book is not cutesy in anyway  - it is truly heart wrenching throughout.  The title character, Little Bee, is a teenage Nigerian refugee, who, at the novel's start, finds herself in a stark British immigration detention center.  Little Bee is not her real name, but a name she created as she fled her country.  She is a refugee, has been through hellish, traumatic experiences and lost her family, but her immense strength enables her to be kind and loving to Sarah and her child.   I made these honey sweetened cupcakes with honey buttercream for Little Bee.

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