The Exotic World of Cooking For Mr. Latte

Cooking For Mr. Latte
Amanda Hesser
W.W. Norton 2003 336 pages
Library Book.

A few pages into Cooking for Mr. Latte I started feeling inadequate. Somewhere around their first cooking at home dinner date... Cornish game hens? Creme fraiche and thin layers of smoked salmon on brown bread? I am pretty positive these things have never seen the inside of my kitchen. Smoked salmon has appeared, maybe, but there was an everything bagel involved.

Reading, and drooling over multi-course dinners, braising, homemade ice cream, visiting the butcher, making homemade marmalade and a recipe for salt-crusted shrimp suitable for dining solo... I started feeling somewhere between sheepish and jealous. I definitely felt outclassed. Sure, she makes reference to cooking in a tiny apartment kitchen. But I was having trouble believing it. I was having trouble believing the economics, too, of eating out that often.  I feel extravagant at the farmer's market! I feel a little fidgety when I buy something other than the store brand chicken broth. I seek out cookbooks with "quick!" "cheap!" "easy" in the titles.

I started picturing Amanda as that sort of fantasy movie and TV woman, living in New York in a crazy gigantic apartment, working for the New York Times, eating dinner out almost every night, and shopping at gourmet stores.

I had the same problem with Julie and Julia. There's a decadent glamor to gourmet foods that makes me feel a little too, well, underdressed, to have it in my kitchen as anything more than a wary acquaintance. Delicious though it may be.

Then the penny dropped.

New York Times food writer. So..... work is probably picking up the foodie tab. Talk about the dream job for someone with French culinary experience (cooking school) and both foodie appetites and cred.

Left to my own devices--- I'm probably much more like Mr. Latte. Only, scruffier. I cook comfort foods and easy, unfussy things that turn out tasty. I love one-pot, stick-in-the-oven, hands off cooking.

In the past, to impress, I have made soup, stews, steak, and Crock Pot things. The one cooking class I ever took was called, rather whimsically "How to Boil Water." I haven't roasted a chicken since. (Which is a shame, actually.) I'm easily flustered by recipes that call for separate instructions for their sauces.

I loved reading about Amanda's world, though I felt like a visitor there. I love foodie prose and memoir generally. Though every single time, it gives me some kind of existential crisis about whether I could write a similar book. I dog-eared a few recipes. (I know, I'm a dog-earing sinner.)

They were:

• Grilled cheese


• African Lamb Stew


• Oven fried chicken


• Lamb pita


• Quail eggs with five spice powder- less about the quail eggs than a reminder that I like five spice.


• Canned tuna with beans and red pepper (this was after she took a trip to Spain to a place that featured artisanal canned stuff.)


• Broccoli salad


• Baked zucchini

The other recipes were intimidating. I love good food. I get a little nervous about cooking for others. But I love making people happy with something tasty I've made. I just like to keep it simple.

And yet... I really liked this book, and I think I will get a copy of my own. I liked the moments where she seemed more ordinary, even insecure. Where she and Mr. Latte had to talk things out, and figure each other out. I appreciate that she emphasized the work of the relationship, just as complex as the work of the kitchen.

Predictably, I am now wondering whether I could write a foodie memoir that people would like to read... even if I don't cook anything French.

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For every book I read in 2011, I'm donating $1 to the New York Public Library.

Lord of Misrule- Think I'm Missing Something

Lord of Misrule
Jaimy Gordon
294 pages

I added Lord of Misrule to my library selection because I was intrigued by Agnes Krup's review of it for Women's Voices For Change.

And... I think I liked her review better than I liked the book. She called it "a horse race of a book," and devoured it in one sitting. I grazed on it, and took days and days to finish it.

We meet a bunch of scarred, crazy, only sometimes funny losers who more or less live in the stables, or in nearby trailers. They are disillusioned, tired, broken, but they all have a passion for horses. Or know how to make a business out of them. Or both. The horses are every bit as disillusioned, tired, broken and losing as they are.

Medicine Ed, in his early seventies, has spent his life grooming and warming up horses for others, limping from having been kicked by one of them many years earlier. He knows a thing or two about herbs and spells, and nothing going on around the track fools his sharp eye. So when pretty young Maggie Koderer breezes in from out of nowhere and haughtily demands stables for the five horses her no-good boyfriend Tommy is bringing in a trailer, Ed smells trouble.

I didn't mind the imaginative stretch it took to picture a dusty racing track, for a city girl in between blizzards. I've read books that enliven the romance of the race track, evoking it for the nonbeliever. Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. My Racing Heart by Nan Mooney. Both written by racing's spectators, bridging the gap between the track's world and the reader.

The way Gordon writes Lord of Misrule has more of the interior monologue and humid rhythms of a poem, of Southern accented stream of consciousness. I found myself dipping in and out of the story, enjoying the turns of phrase well enough. But many times, I found the shifting perspectives hard to balance against keeping track of the narrative. Between Medicine Ed contemplating Maggie as "the frizzly haired girl"; the disconcerting second person narrative for Tommy's repugnant predatory thoughts; and never being entirely sure whether the woman in the humid trailer referred to Deucey or Maggie; I got confused when I tried to lay the story out in some semblance of linear precision.

But, letting language and phrases wash over me like poetry, focusing more on sound than small details, it was a heady, even magical experience. It's definitely an atmospheric novel- the way everyone's lives and emotions are bound to the race track binds up the language itself.

I feel like I respect the craft of this book, the intensity of focus on the racetrack's world. Which doesn't mean I enjoyed the book entirely. I can tell it got under my skin, in the way of a dream you can't entirely shake.

It may be that reading this as a library book (one that is about to be overdue and needs to go back tomorrow) does this book a disservice. Language this rich, and characters this flawed need lingering over. I wish I could renew it, but it's on hold to someone else. Who might enjoy it more than I did.

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For every book I read in 2011, I'm donating $1 to the New York Public Library. Donate now to help them keep me in books!

Hard Times and Historical Fiction

My sweet spot for historical fiction, memoir, and nonfiction runs roughly between the late 19th century and 1950 or so. I've read a lot of good writing about World War II:

Connie Willis's Blackout books.

A Fierce Radiance by Lauren Belfer.

Nothing But a Smile by Steve Amick.

I just finished reading My Own Two Feet, by Beverly Cleary. Her excellent memoir covers events of the late 1930s-- just as the Depression is ending, and World War II is a distant rumbling in Europe.

As I finished reading the memoir, I found a connection between all of these books. The nation is at war. People on the home front are deeply connected to "the war effort."

And to the sacrifices that need to be made. Scrap metal, gasoline, nylon. Sugar, meat and eggs.

There are ration books, and shortages in stores. It's for the war effort. Everybody pitches in. Army women going to a dance share a dress. Birthday cake? save sugar ration for a few weeks.

The simplicity of community spirit about that, the collaboration, appeals to me deeply. Reading about those hard historical times gets comforting because of that level of collaboration. I know the times were hard. But unifying. I get a bad case of nostalgia reading about that communal spirit. It must have been hard, but there's a forthrightness about the characterization. You save, you plan, you ration. It looked easy, or if not easy, matter of fact to an idealized degree.

When I watch the news, or, more likely, see footage of troops watching football games from faraway countries, I remember... there's a war on.Multiple wars on multiple fronts.

And then I go to the grocery store. And it's heaped with stuff! Meat! Nylons!  Strawberries in January!

Reading Beverly Cleary, I marveled at the economic shifts. $150 for a whole year of college! One hundred fifty dollars!!! Last night I went to a charity auction where people raised twice that for a single night's date. Yes- it was for charity. But it's the scale that amazes me. A nickel buying a sandwich and a glass of milk for Beverly Cleary's lunch. A nickel disappears in the handful of change I get back after spending $40 at the grocery store. Wow.

I don't blog about politics. Because I'm much more comfortable sounding like I know what I'm talking about when I write about books. But I find myself feeling perplexed by the cultural shifts that have made now possible.  Credit and debt. No draft.  Factories elsewhere. The ability to ship food from all over, cheaply. These are just guesses at what's fed the difference between then and now. I am not going to say that I would rather have lived then, by any means. I like antibiotics, and being able to wear pants, and the Internet, and all these wonderful things I'm lucky enough to take for granted.

I live a lucky, easy, life. I couldn't write this if I hadn't been so lucky, no matter what. I haven't had to make a lot of sacrifices or do without things. I may yowl and complain... but I'm lucky.

I'm feeling more than a little sheepish, though. And resolving to be less extravagant.  Or at least eat my vegetables before they get vile in the crisper....

Not Finishing the Book: Bloodline

In retrospect... reading a book just because it was the #1 book the week I was born... probably not a great idea.

I got a few chapters in before I decided everyone in the book was awful, and reprehensible, and I didn't want to watch them being awful to each other for hundreds of pages. This book had it all- creepy domineering husbands, philandering husbands, race car driving philandering wives, conniving Welsh businessmen, a money grubbing ski instructor. Murder. Shady business deals.

Bleah.

I prefer to deal with awful people in books when they're not the ones running the show. Give me a mystery, where the awful conniving people are the criminals brought to some kind of nasty justice. Where there's an intrepid and not morally bankrupt investigator serving as the book's moral compass.

I wonder if Bloodline coinciding with my birthdate of right before Memorial Day had anything to do with it. It would make sense. If this were a trashy beach read I might have... nah, I still wouldn't have finished it.

But it's not like I don't have a good pile of books to read!

Wizards of Mars, New York, and England

I am reading, and thoroughly enjoying A Wizard of Mars: The Ninth Book in the Young Wizards Series by Diane Duane. I love the way the series has progressed.

Kit and Nita are young wizards, trying to balance the demands of their magic with ordinary teenage lives in the New York area. I love the series for its keen sense of geography and place. Anchoring it in Long Island and New York city, and Ireland gives the narrative a solid substance to balance forays into imaginative settings, like undersea worlds, the moon's surface, or Mars. I also love the series for the way emotional complexity has evolved. Kit and Nita are growing into teenagers, as well as being able to do more complex wizardry. Diane Duane incorporates both facets into the plot with a fearlessness that shows respect for her readers.

Comparisons to the Harry Potter universe are inevitable. It surprises me when I hear from Harry Potter fans who haven't read, or heard of Diane Duane's Young Wizards. When I think about Diane Duane's worldview of wizardry in comparison to the Harry Potter universe... I see that Diane Duane has crafted a more thoughtful, nuanced wizardly concept, where magic comes with social and environmental responsibility as well as fun special effects. Magicians work with concepts of physics and mathematics, and with ethical dilemmas in very complex ways, to get their wizardry right. It feels like a respectful way for magic to coexist with the normal world. Wizards are engaged in the real world, not separated into a shadow world via Platform 9 3/4.

I set up a chart of the differences, but will put it behind a cut tag, for those who haven't read Diane Duane yet. If you haven't read Diane Duane, get to it! Start with So You Want To Be A Wizard and keep reading.

Because Diane Duane's mythology evolves over time, and there are no movies to act as refreshers (I wish there were! Or a TV series!), it's a really good idea to read the books in close succession. They're so good that you wouldn't want to do it any other way.

Service Included (book review)

Service Included: Four Star Secrets of An Eavesdropping Waiter
Phoebe Damrosch
William Morrow 2008 227 pages.

I love good foodie lit, whether fiction or nonfiction. Caressing descriptions of really good food, written by the obsessed yet articulate. I love the gossip of the kitchen and the restaurant behind the scenes (though Anthony Bourdain's description of brunch was so raunchy and disturbing it put me off brunch buffets permanently.)

Even so... Phoebe Damrosch's chronicle of being a waiter at Per Se, Thomas Keller's very swanky restaurant, was hard to get my head around in spots. Not Damrosch's fault. Her writing is clear and conversational. Every food she described was evoked almost well enough to taste... without making me feel forlorn that I didn't get to eat it.
Part of that was the food itself. Per Se and Thomas Keller's West Coast restaurant are in the stratosphere of food culture. The kind of place where dinner could run to a tab of thousands of dollars, with fancy foie gras and wine and truffle oil. Working there required a several weeks' long training course, after which there was still more to learn, as the complex menu changed nearly every day.
That's a level of commitment I admire even as I am not sure I can quite get my head around committing to dinner at that level. It seems cultish to participate in such an experience, as either a waiter or an eater. Unforgettable, sure, but... cultish. And overwhelming.

As much as I enjoyed the level of description, the way Damrosch evoked her learning curve and her experiences waiting tables at Keller's restaurant, I wasn't entirely comfortable with it until one of the later chapters in the book, where she acknowledged:

Sometimes, when I had a moment's pause, I looked out over the dining room at the sculptural desserts, the woven silver breadbaskets, the elaborate napkin fold, and wondered how something as simple as eating had come to this... I often thought of the contrast, and the absurdity, of rattling off the names of the cows that produced the milk used to make the butter while standing in the concrete jungle of New York City.

Until she acknowledged the sheer strangeness of such meticulous and performative cuisine, I'm not sure I had bought into her story completely. Although her prose is friendly, clear, her images easily visualized, the level of food culture she's part of seemed more alien than foreign. The jacket copy gives a nod to Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, but that seems like an overly facile comparison. The moods of the two books differ wildly. Damrosch seems like straight reporting, an unadorned memoir. By contrast, Bourdain seems like a likable delinquent kid, raising hell just to shock. Both are fun, of course, but they tell their stories for different reasons.

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For every book I read in 2011, I'm donating $1 to the New York Public Library.

Last Days of Summer (book review)

Last Days of Summer
Steve Kluger
Harper Perennial 2002 358 Pages.

I had been keeping an eye out for Last Days of Summer because of how much I love My Most Excellent Year. It came in to the library for me, and was the fast, fun read I had hoped for. It looks like I'm on a kick for coming of age novels set in the summer. Maybe that will change before the piles of slush on the street melt.

I love a good baseball coming of age story. I love it more if it's about vintage baseball. Give me anything nostalgic and romanticized about the Brooklyn Dodgers or anything with a baseball diamond set before I was born. I will read it and reread it.  Shoeless Joe. In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. And yet, I would rather reorganize my closet than watch actual baseball. Baseball fans are fun to read about, even though all the players' names and ERAs and RBI's are an alien language. Jocelyn, and several other friends laugh at me for this.

Joey Margolis is an awkward, unhappy kid. He's the only kid in his neighborhood who's Jewish, growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. His father left him and his mother. The other neighborhood kids beat him up.  He loves baseball, but absolutely not the Dodgers, though he lives within sight of the stadium. The entire novel is told in letters. Joey writes heartfelt letters to his idol, New York Giants third baseman Charlie Banks. (Joey also writes letters to FDR, surprisingly canny about politics for a 14 year old, but that's a side plot.) Joey is persistent and kind of a pest. At first, Charlie is mostly a jerk, but he writes back.

Both Joey and Charlie, the misfits at the center of this novel are kind of jerks. Joey is lonely and miserable and worshiping his hero. Charlie is grumpy about being pestered by a kid who won't stop writing. Both sets of letters leave all the lumps and bumps in- misspelled words (from both of them) and a heftier helping of the F word than I was expecting. Both Joey and his idol have growing up to do. And they do it reluctantly and sarcastically.This is not a warm, cuddly coming of age story about heroes and wishes and growth.

"So don't get the wrong idea and think we are friends. Or anything like it. The only reason I am writing to you is on account of it being 2:00 in the a.m. in Philly and they just traded my roommate Gridley Tarbell to the White Sox, a fate I would not wish on a dog."

Let's talk about expectations and warm, cuddly coming of age stories. Especially because I reread My Most Excellent Summer recently, this grumpy novel came as a shock. Joey and Charlie growling at each other on paper took some getting used to. I got to like the reluctance of their friendship, fueled by Joey's wild persistent chutzpah, and Charlie's frustrated and unvarnished honesty. The relationship that evolves between them doesn't feel forced to be a feel-good character transformation for either of them. They're still very much themselves. Which is what makes this strange misfit novel about strange misfit friendships work.

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For every book I read in 2011, I'm donating $1 to the New York Public Library.

Not finishing the book: Liar's Poker

Dear Liar's Poker,

It's over between us. We've spent a good long time together since you came to me from the library's hold shelf. Almost three weeks. And yet, I don't feel that I've gotten very far with you. I'm only on page 70, and, honestly, I'm not getting as much from you as I was hoping. Spending time with you is mildly interesting. But staying together feels like too much work.

I'm saddened by this, of course. After how much I loved The Blind Side I hoped you would charm, intrigue, and instruct me the same way. I hoped I would find an introduction to the world of stock jocks and bond traders as fascinating as I found football history.  But, alas not. Maybe it's because reading about the booming 1980s is depressing now that the market has tanked. I'm not having that much fun reading about a trading floor where the phrase "big swinging dick" is a term of exalted praise. Maybe I'm making a mistake looking for an emotional connection of some kind, instead of just mild anthropological interest. The spark just isn't there.


I understand that it's not you, it's me. Maybe it's just bad timing. Maybe somewhere down the line, we'll meet again and have a whirlwind romance of pages turning, impossible to put down.

But right now? It's just not working. So we'll be parting ways. Hopefully, when you go back to the library, you'll find someone who can love to spend time with you.

Sincerely,

Me.

The Secret Life of Bees (book review)

The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
Penguin 2002 302 pages

This has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while. When I started it, I couldn't remember whether I'd read it before. Reading it in January was a great idea, though. A coming of age novel set in a South Carolina summer in the 60's is the perfect antidote to gray slush piles and more snow on the way.

This is another book I stayed up far too late reading, because I didn't want to leave its world. The draw of reading about warm, sweaty climate while waiting for my feet to warm up had to be part of it. The language and imagery were wonderfully musical. I'm going to have to track this down as an audiobook, and add it to my arsenal of things to listen to at night.

Lily is fourteen, aching for the mother she lost when she was a young child. The family housekeeper, Rosaleen, is as frustrating to Lily as she is nurturing. T-Ray, Lily's father, is a mean bastard, definitely the sort of father it makes sense to call T-Ray instead of "Daddy."

Running away from home, with Rosaleen in tow, brings Lily to three sisters, named for summer months, who live in a bright pink house and raise bees. May is almost childlike in her joy and fragility. June isn't sure about taking in a white girl and a black woman busted out of jail. August is just... wonderful. Reading about her teaching Lily about bees made me wish I could be a beekeeper too. (This from a city girl who freezes up at any buzzing insect sound.) The sisters are delightfully odd. And of course, they're exactly what Lily and Rosaleen need.

Also what I needed. Reading this kind of magical, lyrical, sweet book, makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. It was hard to put down, even though I needed sleep. It was hard to disengage from the mysticism of three black beekeeping sisters, or their welcoming wonderfulness.

It's going to be hard to figure out what to read next. I'm still half in the dreamy Southern beekeeping world, still expecting those welcoming cadences from my prose. I want to read something that will pull me under its spell that much, in a friendly sort of comforting way. My library list, alas, has been throwing me all the nonfiction I've ordered lately. Which is all right. I just have to get into a different mood.

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For every book I read in 2011, I'm donating $1 to the New York Public Library.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side
Michael Lewis
339 pages

I checked this out of the library in November, and am kicking myself for not writing a long review of it at the time. I just checked out Liar's Poker, also by Michael Lewis, and even the first few pages remind me of what I liked so much about The Blind Side.

I got engrossed in The Blind Side almost immediately. It's a clearly written combination of solid football history, and really focused, human biography. It's a fascinating level of detail and context.

I like football, but I'm a relatively recent fan. I've only been watching for a handful of years. As such, I know enough to understand a game I'm watching. But I miss out on a big chunk of the historical context and overall strategy. Especially on the defensive side, because so much of what I know about football comes from fantasy football, which is heavily focused on the players who run, throw and catch.

The story of Michael Oher grabbed me immediately. It's a bit of a Cinderella story, writ large in the world of sports. Michael Oher has nothing, not even a home, when Sean Tuohy sees his amazing talent for playing football. To get him to play for Briarcliff Academy, Sean Tuohy and his wife, Leigh Anne, take Michael in, transforming his life. Suddenly, Michael is living a dream- a loving family working hard to help him succeed in school, an affluent life, and a spot on the football team.

In addition to providing focused, emotional portraits of Michael and his new family, Lewis's book stretches back into football history to provide an excellent and detailed context, exploring the ways football strategy has shifted and evolved. Michael Oher is both big and fast, which makes him an ideal left tackle. Reliance on the left tackle is a relatively new shift in football history, which Lewis explores thoroughly yet concisely.

Neil saw me reading the book and scooped it up the instant I was finished. Neil is English, and has only been watching NFL football for the past year or so. (I can proudly say I've turned him into a Jets fan!) Here is his take:

It was a brilliant combination of insightful and interesting commentary on the evolution of football strategy and a great piece of biography. Both of which things would have made fantastic books on their own.  In combination they're truly inspired.

As Neil was finishing the book, he asked me if I knew of any other, similar books about football history. Unfortunately, I'm stumped. I can't think of a book that will capture football history that's so well grounded in the humanness of the stories. Neil and I aren't looking for some overarching, encyclopedic tome, although we're looking to gain comprehensive knowledge. What we want are similar, good stories about football, carrying the information with compassionate emotional heft.

Starting to read Liars Poker reminded me of what I loved about The Blind Side. Good football history and an uplifting story were only part of the equation. The rest is Michael Lewis's talent for engaging prose that grounds information in character-focused storytelling. In other words, excellent narrative journalism, that works as a good introduction to a subject.

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I checked this book out of the New York Public Library.

For every book I read in 2011, I'm donating $1 to the New York Public Library. Donate now to help them keep me in books!

Burning Bones (book review)

Burning Bones
Christopher Golden and Nick Hautala
Pocket Pulse Paperback 2001
222 pages

Jenna Blake is a 19 year old college student with a job I might have envied if I had been any good at the hard sciences in college. She's the assistant to the town medical examiner. (She's a pathology assistant, which is apparently called a diener.) In addition to various intern-ish lab tasks like writing and filing reports and helping with paperwork, she assists in autopsies, and works with the police on investigations. All while she's studying like a disciplined student, and getting good grades. And having relationships, one of which has just ended as we meet her in this book. A well-adjusted college student who has a job, good grades, time to date, and fight crime? This is how you can tell she's a fictional character.

Essentially, she's like Nancy Drew in CSI-land. Like Nancy, Jenna has two best friends: her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend.  She's also up to her elbows in corpses a few afternoons a week. Which makes for a bit of funny daydreaming during her Gross Anatomy lecture, when she's hearing a lecture about heart abnormalities, and thinking about taking heart tissue samples from the victim in the M.E.'s latest case.

I'm pretty sure this is officially designated a YA book, and is part of a series. It's my first encounter with the series, but there was a reasonable amount of backstory and character development, to give me a handle on the recurring personae: Dr. "Slick" Slikowski, the M.E.; Danny and Audrey, the cops; Yoshiko and Hunter, Jenna's friends. The evolution of the mystery took some getting used to. I'm not sure I'm willing to accept how it turned out, even if the characters agreed that the ultimate solution was improbable and freakish. Still, up to the final moments, it was a good blend of action, suspense, and was on the grisly side.  Lots of gruesome burned victims showed up on the autopsy table.

I found this floating around on the bookshelf at my parents' house. Dad gave it to me at some point in college, possibly after I finished a semester of a class about forensic anthropology. I have no idea why I let it go unread for so long. It's a fast, fun read, a good straightforward mystery. From poking around the NYPL's online catalog, I gather it's part of a series. So maybe I was being a purist and holding off until I figured out what the start of the series was. I will keep an eye out for other books in the series. I think these are strictly library books though. Engrossing reads for a few hours, but not things that need permanent spots on my bookshelves.

Tangential New Year's resolution: I've got to go through my shelves and be ruthless, and then take a whole bunch of books to donate or sell. Maybe when the snow melts.

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For every book I read in 2011, I'm donating $1 to the New York Public Library.