The White Queen and a Pavlova

I consider Philippa Gregory chick lit of history buffs.   I have read all of her books on Tudor England, including her most successful, The Other Boleyn Girl.  Gregory covered the Tudors from all possible angles - telling the stories of all of Henry VIII's six wives as well as his daughter Queen Elizabeth.  As soon as I finish any of her books I jump on wikipedia to read the real story of the historical characters in her novels.  Gregory is extremely accurate in her depiction of historical events, and always acknowledges when she takes fictional liberties.  The White Queen is the beginning of a new series for Gregory, focusing on the predecessors to the Tudors, the Plantagenets - these are the folks of the war of the roses.  The White Queen tells the story of Elizabeth Woodville, an ambitious noblewoman who catches the eye and heart of King Edward IV, the first York, King.   The novel is romantic, swooney (I know that isn't a real word!) and also violent.  Gregory depicts both the bedroom and the battlefield vividly.   Elizabeth was called The White Queen because the banner of her husbands family, the Yorks, is a white rose (while the banner of their enemies family, the Lancasters, is a red rose.)  I decided on a large white pavlova for The White Queen, topped with fluffy white whipped cream, but then topped with blood red berries to represent the bloody battles in the book.

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Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna and Pan Dulce

I am back from my moving hiatus and back in the kitchen, and a new one at that! Sorry to be MIA for so long, but moving has a way of throwing everything off kilter, especially your kitchen.   Well my kitchen was the first room I unpacked in my new place so now I am ready to blog, even if I can't find my fall clothes!  I am thrilled to be starting back with Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna.  She is one of my favorite authors and her books don't come out that often, so I have been anxiously awaiting The Lacuna to come out in paperback.  The book did not disappoint, both from the perspective of a reader and a cook!  Food is an integral part of the book, as the lead character, Harrison Shepard, serves for many years as the cook to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.    And the famous cameos don't end there, Trotsky also features in the book, which spans from the twenties to the McCarthy era 50's, from Mexico to Washington D.C. to Asheville North Carolina.  For me it seemed quite different than other Kingsolver books, but I loved them and I love these books two.   Since there is so much food here, I will cook for two weeks from this book.  First sweet, then savory.  I start with Pan Dulce, which Harrison was especially skilled at making and which was Diego Rivera's favorite.    These are Mexican sweet morning buns - basically a challah bun covered in a thick layer of frosting.  Yum.   After I sampled my handy work I immediately scared down a second one.  I felt ill afterward for sure, but who cares, these are irresistible!

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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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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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