An Embarrassment of Riches

A Different Kind of Normal - by Helen

How do you pick books? From the bestseller list? From blogs? Recommendations from friends? By reading reviews in newspapers and magazines? By browsing and scanning the shelves? By using Ask the Librarian?

Attracted by the unusual cover, I recently read The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry. What a terrific surprise! Ginny is a young woman with Asperger's syndrome. She hates loud noises, being touched, and frequently hides in the closet when life becomes too much. Over the years, she has saved scraps of the use of the word "normal" gleaned from newspapers and magazines to prove to herself that normal has many different meanings. She has been sheltered and protected by loving parents but now they are dead in a tragic accident.

She must learn to cope with her grief and with her sister who wants to protect her. Ginny has long used thinking about the tastes and textures of food, and cooking techniques to help calm herself. Now she discovers that she has the ability to cook up family ghosts from their handwritten recipes. What she learns about cooking and ghosts, grief and love and the many ways of being normal make for a lovely book. I dare you not to be touched by this surprisingly good novel.

The Samurai and the Fruitarian - by Jen

I'll start with this: I don't hate to cook. I just hate to cook for my current captive demographic, which includes a child who begs for sushi in his wretched school lunch every day and a child who maintains a firm company policy of automatically rejecting anything that is not a fruit. Which kids in America scorn spaghetti and meatballs for dinner? Mine. Or homemade macaroni and cheese? Mine again. In all honesty, we would do best to just cut out the middleman and throw the children's portions of most any given meal directly into the garbage.

What We're Reading Now

Zoe is reading the laugh-out-loud funny 52 Loaves, about a man who sets out to bake the perfect loaf of bread from scratch. This entails traveling around the world to see how bread is baked in other countries, planting the wheat, harvesting, winnowing and on....

Zoe is a delivery driver for the library system.

La Douceur de Vivre - by Laural I savored My Life in France by Julia Child for months.  I didn’t want it to end. Julia and Paul Child were inspiring people.  They loved food, wine, art, travel, friends, family and France. They loved with gusto!

Julia met Paul Child when they worked for the United States government during World War II. After the war they parted ways only to discover that they didn’t want to be apart. To make a sweet story short they married. After the war Paul continued working for the United States government in Europe: France, Germany and Norway. Mrs. Child accompanied her husband to his new postings. Julia decided to go to the cooking school Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and found her calling as a chef,  best selling writer and TV personality.

This memoir is peppered with Paul’s photographs and touching stories about their life together. Join the crowd and make a reservation for My Life in France. And while you're waiting, find books, movies and more about and by the lovely Julia here.

Home, Heritage and Healing - by Helen

There is something about digging in the dirt, planting a garden and pulling weeds that is nurturing and healing. For me, reading about it is an equally healing experience especially when the writing is as visual and thoughtful as the writing of David Mas Masumoto. I have read and reread his book, Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring. He is a third generation Japanese-American peach farmer and his description of life on his farm is such sensual writing that you can almost taste the peaches.

One hundred years ago his grandparents arrived in America with dreams of owning land, farming and raising a family. They rented land, planted fruit trees and grape vines; survived the Great Depression and continued with their work of raising food and family. But December 7, 1941 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed their expectations of a better life in America. The family was interred in the Gila River relocation camp in the Arizona desert and lost everything.

Then Masumoto's father was drafted. "Lock up our family behind barbed wire in the middle of a desert and then draft me?" He was on his way to Europe when Germany surrendered. In 1950, he took a chance and bought a small farm in the Central Valley near Fresno, California. He lavished care on his trees and vines.

"Good pruning is really the art of taking away, like a sculptor chiseling at a rock, working to uncover life inside. Dad paced around the grapevine, paused and clipped, leaning in and cutting: eyes darting back and forth, searching for the strong canes, locating spurs for next year's growth. He worked with the past and saw the future--adding to a living timeline."

In his biography, Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Masumoto writes, "As we move on, we leave behind our stories in interior and exterior landscapes. The looming fog of death, the passing of time, the nature of change all lead us to greater self-awareness, and to a final transformation We mourn the loss of our people and miss them. But we continue to tell their stories."

This, indeed, is the continuing story of how the family cared for his father after a stroke, how working on the land even in a limited way was healing and life-giving, how the family continues to raise organic, juicy fruit.

This book stirred up so many of my own memories. Everybody has a junk drawer in the kitchen or the garage that collects odd bits of wire, screws, batteries and small tools, but this is nothing compared to my Dad's barn of objects too good to throw away because 'I might need it sometime to fix something.' And he most often found a use for many of his treasures. I was tickled by the chapter "Perfect Junk" in which Mr. Masumoto talks about the farmer's junk pile at a farm conference. An old farmer responds, "Out here we don't call them 'junk piles'. We call them 'inventory'."

Masumoto writes a whole chapter on the varieties of heritage flavorful peaches. It reminded me of the grocer in our small town calling my mother to say, "Lois, the Elberta's are in." We girls then knew it was time to bake pies, to peel and can and sample a few rich juicy morsels of the Elberta peaches. I remember, too, the Red Haven and Hale peaches. Now I long to taste a fresh Sun Crest peach straight from one of the Masumoto trees.
 

What We're Reading Now

Jane is reading The Food of a Younger Land, edited by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky picks up the baton of the dropped WPA project "America Eats", pulling together the submissions of recipes, anecdotes and photos from all across America in the 30s to early 40s. It's an amazing eye-opener of how quickly things have changed in our world!

Jane coordinates classes and training for staff and patrons.

Plumbing the Depths of a Good Story - by Ruth Sometimes once is not enough for me - seeing the movie Amadeus over and over again, eating corn on the cob four days in a row when it's in season, visiting Britain multiple times, walking along Nye Beach, and hiking in the Columbia Gorge.  For some authors, writing a story just once is not enough.  In recent years, a number of books for teens and kids have come out that are based on books written for adults.  This week I read a fantastic book for older kids and teens called Chasing Lincoln's Killer by James Swanson which is based on his Edgar Award winning book Manhunt: The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. Swanson first describes the days leading up to the assassination, the prior plot to kidnap Lincoln, and the final plan to kill three of the most important political players of the day:  President Abraham Lincoln, Vice-President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward.  He then takes the reader through the assassination and assassination attempts, the various get-aways, the eventual discovery of the culprits and their fates.  He gives just the right amount of detail about the major figures in the story, keeps the action moving, and provides well-placed illustrations including photos of the people involved, newspaper clippings and a map detailing the route of the assassins. 194 pages was probably enough for me, but if you want the full scoop, you can read all 448 pages of Manhunt.

Several other non-fiction adult books and their younger companions to check out are:
Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex and Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex
Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and The Cod's Tale
Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal and Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food

A Gift that Can't be Beat? Home Cooking! - by Laural It’s that time again - holidays are fast approaching and I am looking for things to make for gifts.  I found a great book in the library collection called Food for Friends: Homemade Gifts for Every Season by Sally Pasley Vargus.  There’s a wide variety of recipes offered in this lovely Ten Speed Press book. The recipes cover many savory and sweet edibles: from breakfast items like Five-Grain Pancake and Waffle Mix, Chai, and Mexican Hot Chocolate.  Preserved fruits, vinegars, and salsas are also covered. Of course there are cake and cookie recipes available in an abundance.  But I zeroed in on the interesting and wide selection of liqueurs one can make for gifts: Raspberry Framboise, Sweet Blackberry Wine and Strawberry Cordial are some of the beverages I hope to make during the summer months. I might attempt a batch of Orange Ratafia.  If you don’t like coriander you might not like Orange Ratafia because there is at least of a cup of coriander seeds in this recipe.  Luckily, everyone in my household loves coriander.
I will admit I don’t like cookbooks without photographs unless it is the Joy of Cooking. This book didn’t disappoint! Almost every page has an inspiring full color photograph illustrating the presentation of the gifts or the preparation of the recipes.
For more books like this in the library catalog, see this list. Have fun cooking!

Come Eat, Y’all! - by Tama

Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table by Sara Roahen

Until recently, what I didn't know about gumbo was pretty much everything. I'd happily eat it if someone else made it, but I'm rarely that lucky. I had no clue about the religious fervor some people feel when it comes to okra in or okra out. And what the heck is filé? Dang, I didn't even know the Hank Williams song.

Now Roahen has pulled me into her world of the amazing food of New Orleans--is it street food? It can be, but is not always. She's made me want to visit every gumbo shack she mentions. And I want a Sno-Bliz from Hansen's if it's hot out--but can I stand the summer steambath that is New Orelans? Doubtful. I want Sazerac in my drink. What is Sazerac? I barely know, I barely care, but I want it. I want to eat boiled crawfish. I want red gravy. I want oysters during the high season. And I want to eat in a culinary speakeasy.

There are heartbreaking stories of businesses wiped out with Katrina, some resurrected afterward, but some lost forever, along with their owners.

This is on my "Best of 2008" list. In fact, I might need to buy it, and I hardly ever do that, being as I work for the library and all.

General Tso to Go - By Ruth

  When I was in high school, my mother and I used to go to The Chinese Kitchen on the odd Friday or Saturday evening.  I'd order spicy Mongolian Beef and she'd order a number of blander items such as Sweet and Sour Pork with its neon orange sauce and chow mein.  It was a tasty and inexpensive weekend treat, and we often headed there when I came home on weekends in college. Post-college, I was introduced to the mysteries of Dim Sum by a Chinese-Swedish boyfriend and finally learned how to use chopsticks! 

In the intervening years, I've become more fond of Thai and Vietnamese, and eschewed the seemingly less healthful and tasty Chinese  fare, but occasionally I get a hankering for Sesame Beef, General Tso's Chicken, or Egg Foo Yong.  I never thought much about the authenticity or origins of these menu items until I picked up Jennifer 8. Lee's entertaining and engrossing book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.  Chop suey, I already had questions about, but imagine my shock when I learned that the crispy sweet tang of General Tso's chicken really belonged to another general!  And fortune cookies might possibly have come from Japan!  Really? 

Lee began her quest for the origins of America's favorite "Chinese" dishes when she heard the story of the multiple Powerball winners who had all chosen the same number because of a series of digits in a fortune cookie.  From there, she went on a multi-state, multi-national quest to find out what about Chinese-American food is truly Chinese, and why Americans have developed such an abiding taste for the cuisine.  Along the way, she uncovers fascinating factoids such as there are more Chinese restaurants than McDonalds in the US (in my neighborhood, it's 2-1 in favor of Chinese) and delves deeply into questions such as what is the connection between the Jewish and Chinese communities and what was the kosher duck scandal in the 1980s really about?  If you're not craving Pot Stickers and Broccoli Beef by the end of the book, I'll be surprised!

Baking a Cake? Do you know why....? - by Helen When baking a cake, do you know why room temperature ingredients are essential? The science is that "adding cold ingredients will cause the batter to "seize," or shrink and deflate, which will compromise the cake's texture, making it dense instead of light."

    This is just one of the many explanations in The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. She is famous for using locally grown, seasonal vegetables at her Chez Panisse restaurant. This latest book is filled with her ideas about using the freshest ingredients, cooking simply and making the meal one of delightful togetherness. (And, she recommends tasting as you cook. What's not to like?)
    Nearly every chapter explains something about why we do this or that in the kitchen. Do you know any other books that explain the science of cooking or baking?