Part Three: And, finally!

Marshmallow Dream Bar and Iced Tea/Lemonade not fixing your wagon (the wagon that broke under the curse of a paltry potato)? What you REALLY need is to collapse on the couch with two packets of Green Tabasco Cheez-Its and a David Sedaris book.

That's better.

Read it Or Weep

Warning! this isn't about eating. Books are delicious, but inedible. If you dislike over-sharey memes, you can skip this whole post.

Here's the deal: Bets passed this meme on a while back (it was on Ravelry, but I missed it there), and since I aspire to read all the good books I can get my hands on I held onto the list so that I could post my results one day. Apparently, the list below contains the top 106 books most often marked “unread” on LibraryThing (I'm a Goodreads user, myself).

The instructions I received from Bets were to "bold the ones you’ve read, note the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish." I also noted the books I haven't read but bought, planning to read. I still could read them one of these days. I still own them, after all. They're on the shelf!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina -- I own this.
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (in high school)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion -- I own this.
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose -- I own this.
Don Quixote -- I own this.
Moby Dick -- I own this.
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (college)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities (high school)
The Brothers Karamazov -- I own this.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies -- I own this.
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (college)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway (college)
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex -- I own this.
Quicksilver -- I own this and got about 50 pages from the end.
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (high school)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (high school)
A Clockwork Orange (high school)
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath (high school)
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables (high school)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ***I LOVE THIS BOOK!**** [That's Bets' note, but I totally agree.]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune -- I own this.
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present -- I own this.
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere - Why haven't I read this?!
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (high school?)
Slaughterhouse-five (high school?)
The Scarlet Letter (high school)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (high school)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow - I thought we had a copy of this, but couldn't find it when I went to look on the shelf.
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Raising a stylish eater

"I have a thermos bottle with cream of tomato soup," she said.
"And a lobster salad sandwich on thin slices of white bread.
I have celery, carrot sticks, and black olives, and a little cardboard shaker of salt for the celery.
And two plums and a tiny basket of cherries.
And vanilla pudding with chocolate sprinkles and a spoon to eat it with."
"That's a good lunch," said Albert.
"I think it's nice that there are all different kinds of lunches and breakfasts and dinners and snacks.
I think eating is nice."
"So do I," said Frances,
and she made the lobster-salad sandwich, the celery, the carrot sticks, and the olives come out even.

-- from Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban (pictures by Lillian Hoban).


I found a copy of this classic picture book for way less than a buck at a church basement sale in Cold Spring, NY. I remember reading this (and other Frances books) numerous times when I was a child. Perhaps those multiple readings of the book - terminating with the page quoted above, which I have made my profile quote for the time being (even though it meant displacing Werner Herzog, one of my honorary uncles) - led to my variety-is-the-spice-of-diet eating habits today.

A cautionary tale for picky eaters, Bread and Jam for Frances is also about aspiring to new heights when it comes to menu planning and school lunch eating. I'm sure my love of the book had something to do with my occasionally taking chopsticks or salt and pepper shakers with me to school in my lunch sack. If only I could have found a doily and a tiny vase of violets (two items Frances has on her desk at the end of the book) to complete the staging and styling of my "sack lunches," I'd have been in book-nerd-slash-food-nerd heaven.

Come to think of it, "desktop lunch stylist" doesn't sound like a half bad job title to me.

Impulse buy: 1080 Recipes

[I first posted a version of this on Bakespace last fall, but I'm transferring it over here.]

I bought a new cookbook back in October (1080 Recipes by Simone Ortega and Inés Ortega). That's the big guy on the left in the photo above. It had just been released in English and I couldn't resist the illustrations and design by Javier Mariscal (it's a stunning Phaidon book). Amazon tells me the Spanish original edition of this book was published over thirty years ago.

I think this book is beautifully designed, and there are many recipes in it I'd like to make, but when I gave it a test run the instructions in the recipes I tried were a little vague. I like to follow explicit instructions the first time I try a new recipe, even if I deviate from them, and that wasn't always possible. Still, I guess it may improve my food prep skills to stretch and intuit the missing steps and specifications.

Here's what I ate:
Recipe 412 (green beans with vinegar and egg yolk sauce) had a mild but pleasant flavor. I wanted the instructions to tell me if the water I covered the beans with was supposed to cook away or if there was still supposed to be a lot left after the 15-20 minutes the beans simmered (for me, there was). I wasn't sure whether I was meant to drain them or add the sauce and make it into a soupy mess.

Recipe 328 (baked eggplants and tomatoes with grated cheese) was delicious, but quite mushy. I assume that the recipe means for me to use small eggplants, since it counts on 1 eggplant per person. 1 large eggplant was more than enough for two of us. I had trouble getting my oil to stay at the necessary heat to fry the eggplant, and then the fried eggplant turned soggy while I was finishing frying it in batches. Since the recipe only specifies to "cook them" I didn't know how well they should be cooked. Perhaps I did it for too long.

Recipe 77 (classic Béchamel sauce) was delicious and worked as written.

Recipe 117 (caramel sauce) did not "[thicken] a little" as I cooked it at the end. Mine only reduced, but stayed perfectly thin and liquid.

Recipe 969/970 (baked apples with cream and caramel) wasn't bad. My apples did not get as tender as I would have liked, but I was unsure whether to add more water to cook longer once the water in the dish had evaporated. I used honeycrisp apples and the flavor was amazing. Also, once they were done baking the cored hole in the middle was filled with liquid, which I had to pour out in order to stuff them with whipped cream. No big deal, but since the recipe didn't mention that would happen I wondered if I'd done something wrong.

I am ever second-guessing myself in the kitchen. But I'm not a bad kid.

I digress: eating their words

[Yet another version of a post first shared with the good folk over at Bakespace.]

I have too many cookbooks by my count, but I also am aware that many people own far more cookbooks than me. Of course, I'd have more cookbooks myself if I had a bigger apartment.

It's a little odd that it's so important to me that all of my cookbooks reside in my kitchen. as the other rooms and books are just steps from there, but that's the way it is. Luckily, I was enabled a bit when someone gave me shelves for my birthday to house some of the cookbooks.

I like to keep all of the books I consider "food writing" in with the cookbooks, too, though not all of these books have recipes in them. I didn't read much that would qualify as food writing until Thanksgiving a few years ago when I picked up Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me With Apples at Jim and Martha's house. I had to read it quickly so that I would finish it before the end of the long weekend, but it was a lovely book. I also picked up and enjoyed Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, so I continue exploring the genre.

Here's what I've been reading since:

1. Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. I related to Julie in part, I'm sure, because she is around my age and lived not far from where I live. There were other similarities, leading me to feel her pre-midlife-crisis angst a little too personally. This made a nice counterpoint to:

2. Toast by Nigel Slater because both books interweave a sort of sexual awareness along with the discovery of food and flavor. Toast tasted more like a memoir, though, as opposed to the blog-becomes-book Julie (no offense, Julie!).

3. Hotel Bemelmans by Ludwig Bemelmans (yes, the one who wrote and illustrated Madeline.) is an entertaining look at the New York hotel industry in the 20s and 30s. Having Anthony Bourdain write the introduction was unnecessary. I don't need the book's author put into modern perspective as "the original bad boy" to bite.

4/5. The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten are collections of articles on various foodie topics, and I enjoyed reading them, but the humor I felt was lurking didn't always come through cleanly. I don't think Steingarten would do much more than sniff and nod at my culinary dabblings, but that's okay. I'm a curmudgeon myself sometimes (though when it comes to film more than my diet). There's no-doubt-dated food science information in the books, as some of the articles collected were written 10 or more years ago, but I love the author's suspicion of picky eaters and lactose intolerance.

Next up? I'm going back to Bourdain. I picked up A Cook's Tour in the hopes it would inspire me to higher levels of gastronomic adventure. Please share your favorite food writing/memoirs in the comments. I've never been one to shy away from a list or a pile of books-to-read.