New Cookbook Romance: Vegan Fire and Spice

Last week I was thinking about cookbook marriage: the cookbook relationships that last, that stand the test of time, that aren’t so sexy but are oh-so-reliable. But this week I’m thinking about the beginning of the relationship: that first flush of cookbook romance.

You know how it is. A new cookbook enters your life. Maybe you sought it out after reading reviews. Maybe you asked for a recipe after a potluck, and received a glowing review. Maybe the cover art grabbed you as you browsed in your favorite bookstore. Suddenly, you’re hooked.

New cookbooks, like new romances, occupy your time. This week I received Robin Robertson’s Vegan Fire and Spice. This is a book I researched, for two reasons. First, although I’m an omnivore, our family is committed to shifting to a more plant-based diet – Mark Bittman calls this approach “flexitarianism.” Second, I’m at the age where the things I eat have health consequences. Many vegetarian cookbooks rely on cheese and dairy products to replace some of the richness of a meat-based diet – I wanted to learn a different approach.

Like a new romance, new cookbooks expand your horizons. Reading them stimulates new ideas, diversifying – and hopefully improving – your cooking style. Last night I accompanied my family’s favorite meatloaf with a vegan potato salad I wouldn’t have thought of putting together, thanks to Fire and Spice. Robertson’s Veracruz Potato salad includes capers, cilantro and Serrano peppers, and is coated in lime vinaigrette. Of course, new romances, cookbook and real, require compromise, and I played around with the vinaigrette portion of the recipe, knowing what my family likes. And the salad was, indeed, a huge success – I’m already looking forward to the leftovers in my lunchbox on Monday!

I have another meal from this cookbook on the menu tonight: Japanese Soba Noodles. It includes ingredients my family loves, and I’m always trying to expand the grain menu beyond rice and wheat. We’ll see how it goes. Right now, Vegan Fire and Spice looks like it has serious work horse potential. But I also know these things take time to figure out! If the book is showing some wear-and-tear in the next few months, I’ll know this is the beginning of a long-term relationship in the kitchen!


Thanks, as always, to Beth Fish Reads for hosting Weekend Cooking! It's open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page.

Book Review: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Remember how you felt the first time you read Homer? Stretched and slightly confused, but in a good way? Reading Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony gave me that feeling again – for the first time in a long time.

Calasso’s landmark work is not just a retelling of the Greek myths – although the myths are central to the book. Rather, Calasso puts the myths, and their evolution, into perspective. Starting with Zeus’ rape of Europa, Calasso explores the Greek world’s uneasy relationship with their gods, and thereby tries to explain their relationship to the world.

Calasso finds patterns and subtle differences in familiar stories that I never noticed before. He writes poetically and persuasively. Speaking of the disaster wrought by the necklace given to Harmony by her mother Aphrodite for her wedding, Calasso explains the irony:

What conclusions can we draw? To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them but sets history in motion. A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories. And you could suppose that these dangerous invitations were in fact contrived by the gods themselves, because the gods get bored with men who have no stories. (p. 387)

This is a very enjoyable but by no means light read. First, the text assumes a fundamental understanding of ancient Greece’s philosophical terms. For a mythologist, this is just jargon. For me, it required a lot of trips to the dictionary – along with Wikipedia, I must admit. Likewise, even though I have a pretty good background in Classics, there were many myths and characters – especially from the older Greek Pantheon – with which I was unfamiliar. Again, these required a good deal of cross reference to understand Calasso’s arguments. Lastly, there’s the problem of chronology – while the book has numbered chapters, the structure is hard to understand. Some paragraphs seemed to bear no relationship to the paragraphs before or after them. I think this was intentional on the author’s part, hoping to emulate a kind of discussion with the reader. But there were times when I simply found it disorienting.

I would urge anyone with an interest in Classics or Greek mythology to read this book. I read it looking for a non-fiction title about mythology for the Read-A-Myth Challenge, and I would highly recommend it to the other participants in that challenge. I would simply urge readers to be patient – it’s not a book to be devoured in a day or two. I found myself reading a section, reflecting, sometimes re-reading and referencing, and then finally moving on. There’s just so much information here that I think to plow through it would be a disservice to Calasso’s accomplishment. Reading this book really will give you a completely different perspective on myths you thought you knew.

Thanks so much to JoV and Bina for hosting the Read-A-Myth Challenge! If you have room in your challenge schedule, I think you'll learn a lot from this one!

Since Calasso's treatise is about Greek mythology, and not a retelling of myth, I think it also counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge! Thanks to Jen for hosting.

Book Blogger Hop: What Am I Reading?

Today's Book Blogger Hop at Crazy for Books asks, “What are you reading now and why are your reading it?”

This week I’m tackling Brigid Pasulka’s A Long, Long Time Ago, and Essentially True. I read a review of it at The Black Sheep Dances,* and it sounded like just my type of book, both romantic and historical, and about a country I know very little about, Poland. It’s taking some time to get into it, but I actually have more time to read during the week. This counts for the What’s in a Name 4 Challenge and the Eastern European Reading Challenge.

I’m also planning to finish Robert Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony for the Read A Myth Challenge. This book is an academic treatment of the “utility” of the Greek gods in ancient culture, and uses the gradual shifts in the familiar stories to explicate changes in Greek society. I’ve found it very enjoyable, just a bit dense – I have to read it in small doses.

Thanks to Crazy-for-Books for sponsoring the Book Blogger Hop. Have a wonderful reading week!

Col

*At least I think it was on The Black Sheep Dances. I went to link to it and couldn't find it, so you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, Amy!

Weekend Cooking: Cookbooks I Couldn’t Live Without

I have a LOT of cookbooks, collected throughout the years, on a bookshelf in the dining room. Yesterday, one of my daughter’s friends asked a reasonable question: “Do you use all those?”

The answer was, not surprisingly, “No.”

Some cookbooks were gifts from friends who think of me and think “cookbook.” Some of the spines on those don’t appear to have been opened, although some others have a recipe or two that I go back to over and over again. Stephen Langlois’ Prairie: Cuisine from the Heartland is one of those, a gift from my Midwestern mother-in-law when I joined the family. The book opens automatically to Kansas City Strip Steaks with Herbed Maytag Blue Cheese Sauce. That one recipe secures its place on the shelf forever.

Other cookbooks were souvenirs of trips where the local cuisine had a dish that we wanted to be able to make at home. I bought Jan Robinson’s Ship to Shore after a trip to Barbados. I bought it for the Vanity Punch recipe – it’s a classic rum punch – but found the recipes from ships’ galleys fit my little Manhattan apartment so perfectly that it got a real workout for a while. Now it only comes off the shelf for cocktails and appetizers, though. Time has marched on.

So which are the work horse cookbooks of my current kitchen? Looking at the shelf, they’re easy to locate, battered and splattered and loved to dog-ears:

Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker’s Joy of Cooking. This is the present I give as a shower gift to young couples who are just starting out in the kitchen, because it has a basic recipe for virtually anything you bring home from the market.

Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. That book is out at least 2 or 3 nights a week. I love how every Bittman recipe is a starting point for endless variation on a theme. Having the book in the house helps me face the farmer’s market without fear, knowing that whatever beautiful veggie I bring home, I’ll have a recipe for it!

Anne Sheasby’s The Ultimate Soup Bible. This gorgeous Barnes & Noble title looks like a coffee table book, but has 400 soup recipes from around the world. It’s the kind of book you love having when your kid grabs “Malaysia” for the school’s international food fair. It even has a brilliant section of cold soups for summer. Sadly out of print now, if you find a copy, buy it!

Diane Seed’ Top 100 Pasta Sauces and Andrew Schloss with Ken Bookman’s While the Pasta Cooks share the pasta work horse chores. Seed’s book is a thin but comprehensive look at Italy’s regional pasta sauces – traditional and superb. Schloss’ book is the opposite – he often turns to non-traditional ingredients in his quick-fix dishes. It’s a great way to reduce your meat budget, while still getting the flavor, as in a pasta dish ½ pound of fish easily feeds a family of four.

Finally, Lorna Sass’ Pressure Perfect, recommended by a colleague when I invested in a pressure cooker, has become my go-to weeknight comfort food guide, for things like ribs, or stew or bean dishes. I cannot believe I lived without a pressure cooker for so long. Sass’ comprehensive guide to dried beans in the pressure cooker – which are so much tastier than canned – have earned it a place on my dining room bookshelf.

So how about you? What cookbooks can’t you live without? I’d love to hear about them!


Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. Thanks to Beth Fish Reads for hosting!

Saturday Snapshot: Ice in the Garden

Saturday Snapshot is a meme hosted by Alyce of At Home With Books. I have been meaning to participate for some time, and today I decided to jump in.

I love the tangle of garden in winter.



To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme bloggers are asked to post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken then leave a direct link to your post on the Saturday Snapshot site. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. All she asks is that you don't post random photos that you find online.

Book Review: Supreme Courtship

Humor is about the hardest thing to translate. You have to really understand a culture to crystallize the humor in it. Christopher Buckley, ultimate Washington insider,* really understands life “inside the beltway.”** Which is why he manages to make “nine old farts sending footnotes to each other” –a.k.a. the US Supreme Court – seem hilarious! Well, at least hilarious some of the time. And maybe that’s all you can expect from political satire.

The premise here is great. President Vanderkamp, a terribly earnest and therefore thoroughly disliked Ohioan, becomes miffed when two of the finest jurists of the age are turned down for a seat on the Supreme Court because Dexter Miller, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants the job himself. Throwing caution to the wind for once, he nominates TV judge Pepper Cartwright, a wisecracking, gun-toting, Prada-wearing Texas icon to the Court.*** Along with the arcane nature of Constitutional law, Buckley also expounds on reality TV, populism, and the nature of marriage. There’s something here for everyone, especially news junkies.

Part of the book works beautifully. There’s one exchange among justices made up almost entirely of Latin legalese that had me laughing out loud in the library. And Silvio Santamaria, clearly a send-up of the most despicable justice with whom I share an alma mater – Antonin Scalia – is a brilliant tribute to excess:

He was brilliant, with a wit as caustic as drain cleaner; good company if you were in his camp and look out if you weren’t. Silvio Santamaria didn’t take yes for an answer. He didn’t disagree—he violently opposed. Didn’t demur—he went for your throat. Didn’t nitpick—disemboweled you and flossed his teeth with your intestines. First-timers appearing before the Court for oral argument had been known to wet their pants and even faint under his withering questions and commentary (p. 71).

I actually hope Buckley gets back to Santamaria in another book – the character deserved more time!

Unfortunately, not all of the book hangs together that well. The romantic angle of the novel was weak – so weak it made me squirm a bit. And Latina bombshell Ramona Alvilar represented a very nasty and hackneyed stereotype. At times it seemed like a long time between laughs. But then, this is a novel about the Supreme Court, where things change at a glacial pace. Perhaps that’s what he was going for?

If you like Buckley’s other books, you definitely will not be disappointed with Supreme Courtship, as I wasn’t. It just wasn’t as sharp as Thank You for Smoking, or as gut-wrenchingly funny as Boomsday, but it does represent a broadening of social themes for Buckley, which I enjoyed. A solid 3 out of 5 stars – probably 4 if you’re the kind of person who actually enjoys watching 24-hour news channels when there’s no particular disaster to follow.

This counts for the Book Blogger Abroad 2011 Challenge, as it was recommended by yours truly! So thanks to Judith at leeswammes for hosting!

*Yes, Christopher Buckley’s work stands on its own, but it’s hard to separate his political sensibility from the fact that his father was William F. Buckley, Jr., which makes him a true American political scion. I probably wouldn’t agree with either man on anything, including day of the week, just on principle. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that Buckley was raised on this stuff, and can be funny about it.

**That’s Washington, DC, for those of us outside the beltway. People in DC are so inside the beltway they don’t even realize that other cities HAVE beltways.

*** Think Sarah Palin on the Supreme Court and you have the idea, although Buckley actually finished the book before John McCain plucked the woman who could see Russia from her house out of Alaska and onto the national scene.

Book Review: Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography

Many people who know my politics assume my daughter Eleanor is named after a famous American first lady. Far from it. She’s actually named for an infamous duchess: Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Of course, infamous is in the eye of the beholder, and virtually every contemporary account describing Eleanor’s escapades was inked by a man. Which is why I so appreciated reading Marion Meade’s Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography, a book that seeks to illuminate this amazing woman, both through painstaking research* and the intuitive piecing together of events that history left unrecorded. Meade’s attempt to see events from Eleanor’s perspective isn’t perfect, but it probably brings the reader closer to the truth than contemporary, male-oriented accounts ever could.

Brilliant, wealthy and impetuous, Eleanor – along with the land’s she herself controlled in Languedoc (now southern France) – represented the dynastic marital jackpot of twelfth century Christendom. Her father’s untimely death on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela prompted her hasty marriage to Louis of France. Meade speculates on the rationale for their marital problems quite extensively – and I think pretty persuasively – based on the very different relationship she maintained with her second husband, Henry of England. Before she managed a divorce from Louis on the well-established grounds of consanguinity (a burden the Pope had already removed), she gave him two daughters, one of whom was Marie of Champagne, patron to Chretien de Troyes.

With her second husband she had many more children, including two kings of England, Richard the Lionhearted and the ignominious John, who eventually was forced by his unhappy nobles to sign the Magna Carta. But it certainly wasn’t a “love” match, and their family feuding eventually took on civil war proportions, with some of the children siding with Eleanor and the king of France against Henry.**

While Eleanor has mostly been framed by the size of her patrimony, the depth of her perfidy and the acts of her progeny, what struck me most in reading Meade’s biography was her prodigious energy! She never seemed to stop moving, covering thousands of miles throughout her realm, even in years when she was pregnant. She represented a gentle touch to her subjects, probably a much needed one, considering Henry’s heavy hand. And she didn’t slow down much over her long life. The woman was crossing the Pyrenees on horseback at close to 80 years old, securing a granddaughter’s marriage and sealing a peace treaty!

Meade paints what I consider a deserving portrait of Eleanor of Aquitaine. To do this, she imagines motives and considers alternatives to “common knowledge.” Since male historians, many of them clerics with axes to grind, are the sources of the “common knowledge” about Eleanor, I can’t see any way around it, although as someone trained in historical method, I can see the potential problems with this strategy. I think anyone interested in medieval history will thoroughly enjoy this book, as well as those interested in history from a feminist perspective.

This book counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge. My non-fiction kick is tearing that one up, but I'm moving on to a bit of fiction at this point! Thanks to Jen at the Introverted Reader for hosting.

*You know a book is painstakingly researched when your Kindle says you’ve read 86% of the book, and you’ve already arrived at the footnotes!

** Kind of makes the squabbles at your last family gathering seem like a walk in the park, doesn’t it?