Sunday Brunch/The Invisible Man: crashed sweet potatoes

Just like last year, around here, Sundays during VeganMofo are all about brunch food! However, I also like to write an entry for Banned Books Week each year, and from time to time I do a "food from literature" feature, so this is a multi-purpose entry.

Unfortunately, I have been so busy this week that I didn't get a chance to write about Banned Books Week until it was already over--it ended yesterday. But just because it's no longer Banned Books week doesn't mean you can't support the cause! Here's what I wrote about Banned Books Week last year:

I wrote about my feelings on banning books in my 2010 Banned Books Week entry, so I'll spare you a second diatribe, but if you care about intellectual freedom, first-amendment rights, or just about being able to read some really good books, I strongly recommend you participate. There are lots of ways to show your support for not banning books. The easiest, and in my opinion, the best, is simply to find out which books are most often banned, and borrow or request them from your library. Libraries can use records of how often a book is checked out to help support the argument against banning that particular book, so not only do you get to read a good book, but you support intellectual freedom! If you're handy with a camera, and have always wanted to read, say, the opening passage from Nabokov's Lolita to an audience, another way to show your support is with the Banned Books Week virtual read-out. You can upload yourself reading passages of your favorite banned books on their YouTube channel! Finally, your local library may be having Banned Books Week events, and I'm always a fan of supporting local libraries. Get involved!

Despite being an avid reader in high school and an English major with a focus on American literature in college and grad school, I never had to read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man for a class. It was always on my personal "to-read" list, but it was one of those that took me a while to get around to. When I finally picked it up last year, I couldn't believe no one had ever told me: Read this. This is an important book. So I'm telling you now. Above and beyond the story itself, Ellison's writing is beautiful, intelligent without being obscure, powerful without being heavy-handed. But the story he's telling is even more powerful. There isn't enough space here to do full justice to the symbolism-heavy plot, but in brief, a nameless young black man trying to make his way in 1940s America becomes first disillusioned with the struggle to conform to white America's expectations of blacks, and then with the political movements supposedly working for his rights; he aims to find ways black people in America can truly be seen by society.

Anyway, there is a pivotal moment for the narrator early in the book; he has spent much of his life conforming, as I said, to what white people expect from him. While he can't deny the color of his skin, he rebels against his upbringing, and struggles to be completely different from the Southern, small-town black men he was raised among. His--and society's--condemnation of his identity make his life difficult well through his education and his move to Harlem to seek out a job. When things seem their bleakest for him there, he stumbles upon a vendor selling baked yams (sweet potatoes) from a stand. The narrator buys one, and this baked yam, which to him is THE Southern food, THE black man's food, reminds him of his roots, his past, his heritage--and his identity. His sudden surge of pride in his racial heritage is the impetus for a larger event later in the chapter, one that shapes all of the rest of the events in the book. Oh man it is such a good book I'm getting excited writing about it.

Anyway, as you can see, the humble yam has a huge significance in this book. Ellison's narrator has this fantastic 5-page revelation about yams, and describes them in delicious detail. I remember reading this passage on the T and being so hungry for baked sweet potatoes. (For the record, in the US and Canada, the words "yam" and "sweet potato" refer to the same sweet-fleshed, often orange vegetable. The dry, starchy tuber known as a yam in Africa, South American, and parts of Asia is almost nonexistent in the US.)

But you all know how to bake a sweet potato, right? It's simple: Wrap a sweet potato in foil, put the oven on high, and bake it till you can pierce it with a fork. There's no fun in telling you how to bake one...

UNLESS IT'S A CRASHED SWEET POTATO!

I used oriental (white-fleshed) sweet potatoes because that's what I had. I doubt Ellison or his narrator would approve. 

I saw a recipe for "Crashed Hot Sweet Potatoes" on the dlynz blog, and I knew it was for me. I can't have hot pepper, so mine weren't Hot; all I had to do to adjust the recipe was leave out the chili pepper ingredients and sprinkle in a little allspice and extra black pepper for a warm flavor. You parboil thick slices of sweet potato (she says she might not parboil them next time, but I found this to be an essential step), crush them slightly, press the spice mixture onto them, then drizzle with olive oil before baking. They make a fantastic side to any meal, but as we like potatoes as a side for our brunches, I especially recommend it alongside a nice scrambled tofu!

Ellison's narrator rhapsodizes about baked sweet potatoes for 5 pages, but when it comes to this recipe, I'll just leave you with these three words: It. Is. Awesome.

Portrait of a Lady: European Potatoes

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I mostly stick with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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People who read Henry James tend to have really dramatic opinions of him: he's either an amazing, complex writer, or he's the most boring author in the English language. I will let you all know right now that I come firmly down in the "Henry James is a genius" camp. I've read almost all of his works, and both my entrance essay and my writing sample for my master's program mentioned Henry James. 19th century realism is serious business for me.

BUT, for all the James I've read, I have always been a little embarrassed to admit I had not yet read Portrait of a Lady, one of his most well-known works. I decided to remedy that problem this fall.

The theme sounds ridiculous today, but the vast, vast majority of Henry James's fiction deals with a sophisticated Europe corrupting naive, pure Americans. An American who spent the majority of his life in England, James saw America, the New World, as having a fresh start, full of enterprising and moral people. They tend to be honest, sincere, a little awkward, and not in the least bit cunning. Europe is the exact opposite. James's European characters never say what they mean; they go through the forms of courtesy and morality but only to mask their real motives and intrigues. Inevitably, the corrupt, decaying Old World has a tragic, if not fatal, effect on the ingenue New World. They don't always do it on purpose, but James's Europeans, if not Europe itself, are downfall of his American characters.

Remember that James was writing at the end of the 19th century. The United States were still following Washington's precedent of isolationism. The Monroe Doctrine nicely kept Europe away from the Americas. We were removed enough to have our own culture, and access to culture was one based not on old, prejudicial class systems but on hard work and good decisions. James loved the idea of America, and was disappointed whenever Americans looked to Europe as an example of refinement or just of something better.

ANYWAY, Portrait of a Lady deals with these issues, but not in a dry history-lesson way like I did above. A young American woman, Isabel Archer, comes to England to meet her extended family, and while there comes into a lot of money. (Which, for James, is also a corrupting force.) Suitors are suddenly everywhere! Isabel is too innocent and pure to be protective or suspicious of herself or her money, and a few cunning, greedy people conspire to trick her out of her money, and out of her chance of a happy life, basically. There are good people, of course, who try to help her. IT'S SO GOOD AND INTENSE AND AWESOME. There's also a giant SECRET that you spend a good half of the book trying to figure out and then THINKING you have it figured out but no, that can't happen in this book, right? IT DOES. So yeah, I recommend this book, even though it's tragic. I've read reviews of it that found its ending ambiguous; let me know if you've read it, because I didn't think it was ambiguous at all and I'd be curious to hear that perspective.

So, onto the food! The best part. Okay, so James does offer a little proof that it's capable for Americans to interact with Europe without being corrupted. That proof is named Henrietta Stackpole. Henrietta is a journalist who ventures to Europe to 1.) write letters back to her paper about her impressions of Europe and 2.) try to meet European nobles. She has no interest in assimilating; she is American, and very much wants to maintain her American perspective. She does not put Europe on a pedestal like so many of James's more doomed Americans; she really believes America does everything better. She is a bit of a comic character (and has the most adorable courtship in all of James's works, in my opinion!), but she is also James's most viable option for intercultural communication without a tragic outcome.

When Henrietta first visits Isabel in England, she sits down to eat with Isabel and her relatives and starts quizzing the family about their connections to the House of Lords right away. She's not starstruck--she wants to discuss British politics. In part to shut her up, Lord Warburton (swoon!) says "Won't you have a potato?"

"I don't care much for these European potatoes," Henrietta says firmly.

Obsessed with food as I am, I had to know how European potatoes were prepared that Henrietta Stackpole's American tastes were against them, so I did a little research. While mashed (or sommmmetimes baked) potatoes were the rule in American kitchens in the 19th century, they were more likely to be served roasted at a wealthier English home. Obviously, they were talking about real (not sweet) potatoes, but since I can't eat potatoes, you're getting the sweet potato version.

European Potatoes
Only white (Japanese) sweet potatoes will work for this; the orange ones get too soft. Obviously you can also use (real) potatoes, but your cooking time might be 10-20 minutes longer. You can use any oil, but I stroooongly recommend olive since it's so tasty.

White Sweet Potatoes (Japanese Yams) - one small-to-medium potato per person
Oil (any kind works, but I prefer olive. At least 1/4 cup, but the more you use, the crispier they'll get)
Salt

Preheat your oven to 425. Fill a pot with water and set it on the stove on high. Chop potatoes into large chunks; I'd say at least 2 inches. You can peel them if you want, but I like the skins. Put the chunks into the water as soon as you chop, since white sweet potatoes start to brown when the flesh is exposed to air. Bring to a boil, and allow to boil for at least ten minutes, until you can poke the potatoes with a fork. (It doesn't have to go all the way through, though--as long as the edges are tender.)

Here comes the weird-sounding part. Pour all the water out of the potato pan, then put a cover on it... AND SHAKE IT LIKE CRAZY. The idea is to bang up all the edges of the potatoes, so they get crispy.

They'll look like this when you're done.

Now take out a deep baking pan large enough to fit all the potatoes in a single layer. I've used a roasting pan and my glass baking pans, and both were fine. Pour the oil into the pan. Here's the part where the amount is up to you: the more you use, the tastier and crispier they'll be, plus they won't stick as much to the pan. But you want at least enough to easily and completely coat the bottom of the pan. Add the potatoes, and roll them around a little (with a spoon is cleanest) so all sides have touched the oil. Sprinkle on some salt.

Bake for 20 minutes, then remove from oven and use a spatula or spoon to flip them. The down-facing sides should have browned and all the side should be starting to get crispy. Return to oven for 10 more minutes, then check again: all sides should be crispy and golden to golden-brown. Remove from oven, sprinkle with a little more salt, and serve!

(The baking time can vary based on how long you boiled them and even how much oil is involved, so you may find you need a bit more time.)

They are good for brunch or for dinner! Because of the oil, they're a little decadent and VERY filling.

Next month I'll try to get back to once-a-week posting.

Garden of Eden: Pesto-stuffed Tofu

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I mostly stick with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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I never would have heard of Hemingway's The Garden of Eden if I hadn't found it on the "free" table on our street. It is not among his better-known novels--and for good reason. His estate published it posthumously, editing it down from about a thousand pages (in three different editions) to a mere 250 pages. It's not, to be honest, very good. In part, that's probably because Hemingway wasn't done with it, but also because he may never have wanted to publish it. It's not a great plot, and the narrative is really unbalanced (though these issues might have been repaired had Hemingway been alive to do it himself). So you wouldn't want to read it for the story. But the novel is also a really interesting perspective into the author's lief (several critics have said it's semiautobiographical) and the social mores of ex-pats in the early 20th century. If you liked A Moveable Feast, or even Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, you may like The Garden of Eden.

The plot centers around David, a newly wed writer, and his wife Catherine, a fun/crazy/young woman who comes from money. They hadn't known each other long before they got married, and now they're taking a long (as in MONTHS long) honeymoon around Europe. David is insecure about his writing and about taking money from Catherine, who could easily support them on her inheritance, and Catherine is uncomfortable with who she is, wishing she could spend half her life as a boy and the other half as a girl. Through David, we see Catherine go from being the whimsical and original girl he met to the destructive and psychologically troubled woman he married. She makes a lot of aggressive moves in their relationship, including bringing in another woman. The ways in which the three of them deal with each other, and how society does/doesn't see them, is the really interesting part of this book for me. Catherine's psychological decline over the course of the novel is subtle but chilling. And, because Hemingway had not yet pared the language down to his usual brusque diction, the narration flows in a stream-of-consciousness, emotionally-rich river of words. It was a very fast read, too (I read it in pieces throughout one day, but I think it took me less than 4 hours).

Food and drink play a gigantic role in this book, perhaps because so much of the novel is sensual (as in "sensory," not "sexy," though I guess that would apply too). The characters all drink a massive amount of alcohol, which plays a double role here of stimulating the characters' senses and deadening them, depending on what they need or want. And because the characters aren't getting the sustenance they need from their interactions with others, food takes center stage in certain scenes.

Nothing they eat is vegan. It's caviar and brioches and fish, eggs, and/or bacon for almost every meal. But I was inspired by how elegant and yet basic their meals were. A protein in a rich sauce, vegetables on the side. So I came up with this meal:

Pesto-Stuffed Tofu
This dish calls for pesto, but you should use your own favorite pesto recipe,as I don't have any set way of making pesto to advise. (I change my recipe up every time I make it). Pesto from a jar is not quite as tasty, but would work, too. Serves 4.

The ingredients you need:
1/3 cup prepared Pesto (homemade, storebought, whatever you've got)
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup vinegar (or lemon juice; see below)
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 block (14 ounces) extra-firm tofu

Blend your pesto with the garlic, oil, and half the vinegar in a blender or food processor until creamy. It should still have bits and pieces of basil visible, but you want it to be a spreadable consistency. This is because you want the pesto to do two things: 1.) to be a spreadable consistency, and 2.) to be have sharp enough flavors to sink into the tofu. However you normally make pesto, add extra acid. I recommend vinegar above, but if you usually like lemon juice in your pesto, add that instead. I like using vinegar so I don't end up with lemon-pesto-tofu, but it's your call. Anyway, if the pesto is still not creamy, add the remaining half of the vinegar a little at a time. You can then add a bit more oil and/or water if necessary to make it creamier. You'll end up with less than a cup of pesto.

Now you prepare your block of tofu. Set it up on its side, and measure where you'll make your slits. I only made two slits above, but I recommend making three cuts instead, since otherwise the pesto flavor doesn't permeate the entire block. Anyway, make your slits in the tofu, leaving 1/2 to 1/4 of an inch on either end NOT SLICED.

Like so. Note the creamy consistency of the pesto to the side!

Now spoon pesto into the slits. It takes a couple spoonfuls; you want it full and sort of oozing out a bit, but not uncontrollably. Use the dull edge of a butter knife to push the pesto all the way to the edges of the slits.

Now smooth off the excess pesto. Marvel at how you just stuffed some tofu!

Put it in a baking pan or on a baking sheet, lighty greased. Bake at 425 for 10-15 minutes, until the edges have browned and dried out a little.

Remove from the oven--but you're not done yet! Take some of your leftover pesto mixture and smear it along the top and sides.

I left the sides with the slits uncovered this time, but intend to cover them next time. Return to the oven for another 10 minutes.

Cut into 4 long slices. Eat with a simple salad and roasted vegetables while looking out at the Mediterranean and contemplating how your childhood elephant hunt has affected your current choice of partners. Or if you're not a Hemingway character, just enjoy with a simple salad and roasted vegetables.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: Tea Cakes

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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Today marks the start of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week. I wrote about my feelings on banning books in last year's Banned Books Week entry, so I'll spare you a second diatribe, but if you care about intellectual freedom, first-amendment rights, or just about being able to read some really good books, I strongly recommend you participate. There are lots of ways to show your support for not banning books. The easiest, and in my opinion, the best, is simply to find out which books are most often banned, and borrow or request them from your library. Libraries can use records of how often a book is checked out to help support the argument against banning that particular book, so not only do you get to read a good book, but you support intellectual freedom! If you're handy with a camera, and have always wanted to read, say, the opening passage from Nabokov's Lolita to an audience, another way to show your support is with the Banned Books Week virtual read-out. You can upload yourself reading passages of your favorite banned books on their YouTube channel! Finally, your local library may be having Banned Books Week events, and I'm always a fan of supporting local libraries. Get involved!

Every time I look at a list of banned books, I'm startled by the titles I see: with some, I can't even begin to imagine how they're controversial; with others, I can't believe parents want to deny their existence to their children. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is in the latter category. That is, I get why some people find it controversial: not only is there racism, but the book admits the existence of sex. But there's nothing graphic, and both those themes get the serious treatment they deserve. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a beautifully written, moving book about the importance of being true to yourself, to your feelings, and to your goals and desires. It's about working for what makes you happy, and it's about how love can change and transcend any situation.

Granted, I'm a little biased--I love this book. When I first found it, I read the line "There are years that ask questions, and years that answer" and I was a goner. (I was in the middle of a year that asked questions, and the next time I read it was a year that answered.) Even beyond its well-composed plot and interesting characters, this book resonates with anyone who has longed or searched for something. Janie, the main character, is a black woman who wants to find love. She wants a relationship in which she's treated as an equal, in which she desires and is desired, in which she is able to be herself and is appreciated for that self. Apparently, if you're a pretty black Floridian woman in the early 20th century, that's asking too much. Other characters try to point out to her that she should be happy as long as she has safety or stability or money or anything good at all, but for Janie, that's not good enough. And we understand through Janie that when we long for something--anything, not just love--nothing else will come close. We can't settle, and we shouldn't have to. The book emphasizes how important it is to our psyches to pursue our dreams, even if they can't last.

Also, there's a lot of food in this book, and I'm down with any book where food matters. When picking something to make for this entry, I had quite a few recipes to choose from, but I settled on the most obvious choice: Tea Cakes.

Tea Cake is the man whom Janie loves. His real name is Verigible, but Tea Cake is a nickname, one we can presume the ladies gave him for, well, how sweet he is. "Are you as sweet as all that?" Janie asks, upon meeting him, and with that comment starts up their whole romance. Non-human Tea Cakes are basically sugar cookies, but southern. There seems to be some controversy over whether they should be flat and crisp or puffy with soft insides. The recipe below is for the flatter and crisper variety, but you can roll them thicker than 1/4 inch if you want them softer. You can glaze them, ice them, or create sandwich cookies with them by spreading jam in the middle, but their real raison d'etre is to be eaten plain alongside a nice cup of tea, whose flavor they won't overpower (hence the name).

Confession! Because I am a yankee and didn't know about tea cakes before this, I wanted to turn to an expert for a proper recipe. The following is an adaptation (and veganization) of Paula Deen's Southern Tea Cakes.

As Sweet As All That Tea Cakes

Makes 1.5-2 dozen, depending on how thick you roll it and how big your cookie cutter is. This recipe can scale up if you want to make a lot, in which case I recommend using a mixer.

1/2 Cup sugar
4 Tbsp (1/2 a stick) margarine, at room temperature
2 Tbsp soy yogurt
2 Tbsp soymilk
1/4 tsp vanilla
1 1/4 Cup flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder

Cream together the sugar and butter with a fork (for those of you who don't know what "cream" means, mix them until creamy or well-combined). Mix in the soy yogurt, soymilk, and vanilla. Add the flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix until it forms a soft dough.

Form the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30-60 mins. You can skip this step if you want, but you'll have to use a lot more flour rolling it out, since it's such a sticky dough.

On a lightly-floured surface, roll out the dough to about 1/4 inch thickness. Using a cookie cutter, biscuit cutter, or an inverted drinking glass, cut into even circles. Gather up the scraps, reroll and cut, until you're out of dough. (Like Janie when Tea Cake went gambling with her money!)

Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake at 350 for 10 minutes, until the edges are very lightly browned.

If you want to enjoy these in the style of the characters in the book, eat with tea while telling your life story to a neighbor on her porch.

Or move to the Everglades with them. Whatever you like to do with your Tea Cake is none of my business.

What are your favorite banned books?

"Food from Literature" is on summer break. Here are some pickles!

Last month I promised you two "Food From Literature" posts in June... and I have not followed through. While I've been doing a lot of reading, the heat has meant that i haven't been as interested in trying new, long-cooking recipes. I've felt so guilty about falling behind on that, though, that I got stressed out and stayed away from my blog altogether.

And then I realized: it's summer! There is no reason to be stressed, nor is there any strong argument for sitting in front of my computer typing blog entries when I could be enjoying the weather! Plus, this time of year is when students take breaks from academics--so I am declaring a summer hiatus of "Food From Literature." We will resume in the fall! In the meantime, I won't feel guilty for post content/lack thereof.

I think I write about pickled vegetables a lot, but I love them. I love them so much that when my parents accidentally ordered a case of half-gallon jars of dill pickles for their natural food store, they gave two to me and the boyfriend, and it took us surprisingly little time to go through them.

One half-gallon jar of pickles.

Once, when I was making the Beer Battered Tofu recipe from Vegan Brunch,, I had some leftover batter. I don't like throwing away food if I can help it, so I looked around the kitchen for what else I could batter and fry. And then it hit me: PICKLES.

They're on the left; the tofu is on the right. Deep-fried pickles are a special treat, obviously, but ohhhhhh man if you have the opportunity to try them, you should.

I love summer, and I love almost everything that comes with it. (The one exception being how hot our apartment gets. But I'd rather be hot than cold, so it's tolerable.) One thing I'm really looking forward to this summer is when the farmer's market starts selling local watermelons! I love watermelon, and I recently ran out of my stash of Citrus-and-Spice Pickled Watermelon Rind. I made them two summers ago, and as you can see, I had quite a few:

And this was after I halved the recipe! I got the recipe from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen, and I LOVED it. The pickles don't taste like watermelon, but the syrupy, spicy brine (spiced with cloves) does taste like sweet, down-home pickles my elderly Scottish and Irish great-aunts used to make and bring to family events. Basically, they taste like summer, and like childhood. I love Bryant Terry's book, but if you can't get it, you can find the recipe here.

Whew, and now onto July! Maybe our hot apartment isn't the one thing I dislike about summer; I also dislike how quickly it goes by!

The Confessions: Apples!

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712 and died in 1778. In his 66 years, he was a notary, an engraver, a secretary, a music teacher, a composer, a writer, a philosopher... and more. He lived in Switzerland, France, Italy, England. He was honored as a genius and maligned as a heretic, often at the same time. He was active in political, religious, and social issues. He wrote reference books, plays, political tracts, operas, novels, and critical essays. He made friends quickly and made enemies faster, including Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and members of several European courts. Rousseau is most famous for The Social Contract, Discourse on Inequality, Emile, Julie, and finally, the focus of today's entry: The Confessions.

In The Confessions, Rousseau sets out to record everything that has ever happened to him. He clearly states his goal in the beginning: "I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself." He wants to be completely honest, though of course he can't help but be one-sided and biased (but that can be part of the fun of reading an autobiography).

There are two reasons that I think The Confessions is important: 1.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau was himself an important historical figure. His writings influenced the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution and much of Western thought since the 1700s. 2.) The Confessions is one of the first autobiographies that was written for the sake of writing. Oh, sure, autobiographies existed before Rousseau: Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Margery Kempe, and plenty of Puritans wrote autobiographical works... But those books were all written to serve religious purposes. They were religious confessions (Rousseau’s title plays off that theme), tales of conversions, material intending to convert the reader, etc. Rousseau wrote only to explain and expose himself. Soon after Rousseau's secular autobiography, plenty of authors jumped on board with the idea--but he started it. As a nonfiction reader/writer, I find it interesting to see how he navigated previously uncharted territory. If you (like Rousseau) had never encountered an autobiography, what would yours look like?

Rousseau wrote The Confessions in installments. At first he planned to publish them during his lifetime, but he ended up wanting them published posthumously (mostly because some important ladies were scandalized by how frankly he portrayed them and their affairs [among other things], and suppressed its publication to save their reputations). Rousseau and his books were already being banned across Europe for their supposedly heretical content; it was probably unlikely that The Confessions would have been a success during his lifetime anyway.

Mostly I found The Confessions dry and slow. Rousseau stops to reflect on almost everything, and is constantly feeling sorry for himself. It's too bad his presentation is so dry, because his life was super dramatic! In between the reflections on how sad he is or how unfairly Diderot treated him that one time, Rousseau did some wild things. In his teens he ran away and traveled across Europe, faked his way through teaching subjects he didn’t know, was involved in a few tense love triangles with a woman twice his age (with many women, actually), fought corrupt consulates in Italy, had five illegitimate children with his common-law wife, dealt with an evil, scheming mother-in-law, fell miserably in love with a woman half his age, was exiled from France and from Switzerland, had a whole town turn against him in the middle of the night, told Poland how to frame their constitution--and that's not even most of his adventures. The problem for me is that all the cool stuff gets lost in the minutiae of his day-to-day remembrances, which include who he visited, how often, whether or not the other guests were witty, how long his walk home was, and how his urinary tract was that day. He talks about organizing his papers and letters a lot. He goes on walks and reflects fondly on walks from the past--which he already wrote about 100 pages ago.

But at times, Rousseau is witty and interesting, and toward the end of the book he approaches a psychotic break as his paranoia about everything and everyone increases. Rousseau’s writing also shows us that small, seemingly insignificant scenes in our lives can have profound effects on the way we live, think, and perceive. For example, as a teenager he stole a piece of ribbon from his master, and blamed it on another servant. Both he and the girl he blamed it on were fired. Though he’s writing this 40 years after the incident, Rousseau still can't get over the guilt he feels for that event, and admits that he has been so ashamed of it all of his life that he never told anyone. He doesn’t think he’ll ever live down that lie. I think we all have moments like that; negative or positive, small events can influence who we are, who we become.

The food in today's entry comes from another such incident, in which Rousseau tried to steal an apple. Rousseau doesn’t feel guilty recounting this tale; he was an apprentice to a cruel, gruff, stingy engraver who beat him regularly and gave him very little. I think a lot of Rousseau's later influential ideas of equality and justice come from his early years, this harsh apprenticeship included.

The passage in which the apple appears is cute and playfully written. Rousseau, as a boy, is not allowed in the house's pantry, but there's a lattice at the top of it, through which he can see some delicious-looking apples.

Like the ones in my fruit bowl!

He climbs up on a stool and ingeniously combines several kitchen implements to reach the apples above him through the lattice. He finally spears one--only to discover it won't fit through the bars of the lattice. He gets MORE kitchen utensils to cut it in half--through the lattice!--and finally cuts it in half... only to watch both pieces fall back into the pantry, out of his reach. ("Compassionate reader," Rousseau says here, "sympathize with my affliction.") The next day, he returns with an idea of how to improve his method. He gets back up on the stool, takes his improvised tools and sticks them through the lattice--and suddenly his master jumps out from the pantry! He'd noticed the fallen pieces of apple the day before and decided to catch young Jean-Jacques in the act. Rousseau takes a beating from this, but also some ideas of justice, such as how people are likely to rebel against overly cruel masters/governments/judicial systems.

I don't have an apple-related recipe for you today, and I'm not sorry--it's finally getting nice enough out that my metabolism is happy with plenty of raw fruits and veggies. So just enjoy the pretty apples! (And a pear.)

Wide Sargasso Sea: hot chocolate on a stick

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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When I was in the seventh grade (that's around age 12-13, for you non-US readers), a friend of mine and I read Jane Eyre around the same time. She enjoyed some of it; I disliked it. But we could agree on one thing: the super-dramatic, gothic twist to Rochester's life story--the fact that he had locked away a crazy pyromaniac wife named Bertha who liked to creep around the house at night--that was awesome. We both wished Bronte had given more attention to Bertha. Bertha was the most--strike that, the ONLY interesting character in the book, and there was only one good passage that actually described her.

That friend and I grew apart, but a couple years later she told me she'd read a book called Wide Sargasso Sea, which was the story Bertha's life before Rochester. She (my friend) recommended it; she’d found it depressing, but good, and really liked revisiting the story of that character we had obsessed and laughed over as preteens. I never got around to it, and since I'm perverse in my book selection, the more I heard the novel praised over time, the more I figured I wouldn't like it. After all, everyone praises Jane Eyre, and even after all the time I spent studying literature in college and grad school, I still don't like that--why would I like its prequel?

But then I found a falling-apart copy of the book in a "free" pile on my street. I thought, "okay, it's a small book, and I don't have to pay for it, so it will be neither a waste of time nor money." I read it.

Guys. I hated it.

Author Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, more than 100 years after Jane Eyre. Its main character is Antoinette, a young white girl living in Jamaica with her mother and disabled little brother. Racial tensions are high: Antoinette's family is too poor to fit in with the other white people, who are all wealthy, and the badly-treated black people in Jamaica neither trust nor like any of the whites, so Antoinette and her family become increasingly poor, ashamed, isolated, and helpless. The mother, who's already a little crazy, goes crazier when rebelling former slaves light her house on fire and the little brother dies; Antoinette's stepfather has the mother committed and sends Antoinette to a convent. Fast forward to when Antoinette is old enough to marry; Antoinette's stepfamily basically bribes a young British guy to marry her. They love each other intensely for about a week, when Rochester (her husband) realizes they don't know, trust, or like each other. So he starts to hate Antoinette, who in turn starts to hate him, then she basically goes a little crazy because her life is so terrible and losing the one person she (thinks she) loves is the last straw. Rochester takes her back to England, where we get a creepy little epilogue telling us how/why she's so creepy in Jane Eyre.

Sorry, I'm being flip because of how much I disliked the book. The book does hint at the racial, sexual, mental-health and economic issues at play in 1830s Jamaica, but really, it only hints at these things. Mostly the book doesn't cover anything in depth except all of the ways in which Antoinette's life sucks.

When I taught first-year composition classes during my MA program, I would deal with particularly difficult-to-read student essays by playing what pedagogical theorist Peter Elbow calls "the believing game." That is, read the paper with the assumption that the author knows what s/he is doing, and s/he did the things I don't like on purpose, to prove a point or to somehow further his/her argument. So here's me trying to play the believing game with Wide Sargasso Sea: Rhys is attempting to give dignity to a stock character not only in Jane Eyre but in gothic fiction. She turns Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the dark, crazy wife in the attic, into Antoinette, a shy, reflective, friendless, troubled young woman limited by resources and societal conventions. While she does become the crazy wife in the attic, she gets there because the role of a woman in 1830s Jamaica and Britain do not allow her enough of a chance to express herself or her desires.

A decent attempt, but I don’t think Rhys developed those themes enough for me; the novel didn’t seem to make Antoinette’s life story “the plight of woman” but “the plight of one really, really unlucky person.” And why does it have to connect to Jane Eyre? Rhys’s Antoinette does not have to be Bronte’s Bertha; in fact, I think Rhys trying to tie the two tales together is what bothered me the most. A few details in Wide Sargasso Sea contradict points of Jane Eyre. The name "Antoinette" alone! I get using her middle name, because not many people nowadays would take a main-character "Bertha" seriously, but still, in Jane Eyre, the middle name is Antoinetta. Rhys also changed Mason from Bertha's family name to her step-family name, and changed the way in which Rochester met/married his wife, making his story a lie in Jane Eyre. In fact, Wide Sargasso Sea makes Rochester out to be a bitter, mean, greedy alcoholic. While I didn't like Jane Eyre enough to defend Rochester's character too much, Rhys is basically retconning him to be a big, bad liar, casting his role in Jane Eyre as one that is much more manipulative and sinister, and it doesn’t work for me. Why couldn't Rhys have written a feminist novel about white women's limited roles in 19th-century Jamaica using characters who didn't already exist in someone else's story? By the time I got to the final part of the book, set during the action of Jane Eyre, it felt like I was reading messily-researched fan fiction. It's like if 100 years from now, some fan of Twilight deciding to write a prequel about the life story of that red-headed female vampire who keeps trying to kill Bella, only with a few details changed because THAT WAY IT'S EVEN SADDER AND HAS MORE LOVE STORY IN IT. It felt like writing from a fan-girl who felt like she had SO MUCH TO CONTRIBUTE.

But back to “the believing game.” Maybe part of my annoyance of it is that the novel is set in Jamaica and I'm in the Northeast during a harsh winter! There were good parts to the book. Like... the hot chocolate! Actually, nope, even the parts with the hot chocolate were depressing, because Antoinette drinks it at her mother's funeral and then right before she finds out she's supposed to marry a man she doesn't know. But the people around her know that to comfort her, a mug of hot chocolate was the way to go.

So! If a friend of yours is depressed, whether it's because of the never-ending winter or because s/he is engaged to a stranger who might eventually lock him/her in an attic, consider giving him/her hot chocolate! It's a warming and delicious way to show you care, and that you are not likely to lock him/her in an attic yourself, because people who do that only drink rum.

What is this, you ask? This is, in my opinion, the coolest way to give someone hot chocolate: on a stick!

I saw the recipe for Hot Chocolate on a Stick on the Giver's Log website, and thought it was a great homemade gift idea. (As you know from my post-holiday entry, I love edible gift-giving.) None of those namby-pamby dry mixes; this stuff is real chocolate, gently melted and mixed with cocoa powder and powdered sugar to create the perfect thing to stir into a warm glass of soymilk. I actually imagine it would work okay in water, too, but I haven't tried it. Anyway, you can see the recipe at that Giver's Log link; I didn't change anything. I do want to say that I don't find chocolate as finicky as that author does, so don’t be intimidated by her very detailed instructions. I used half baking chocolate and half chocolate chips for my meltable chocolate, and I used these cute silicone ice cube trays from IKEA as molds:

My sticks are not as pretty as the ones at the Giver's Log; I used some coffee stirrers from a cafe, a few wooden chopsticks, and a couple plastic spoons. Once the chocolate hardened, the silicone made it really easy to remove from the mold, but I imagine a basic ice cube tray would also be pretty easy. If it gives you some trouble, simply dip the base in a bowl of warm water, which should soften (but not melt) the chocolate enough to get it out.

The advantage to the cross shape, in my opinion, is that it dissolves faster, but also that you can do cute things with them, like line them up or hunch them together.

As you can maybe tell from how much one little book annoyed me, the long, cold, snowy, icy winter is beginning to get to me. At Desdemona’s recommendation, I started taking vitamin D during these darker months to stave off SAD, but of course I still miss the sun. So while I'm waiting for warmer weather, I'll keep consuming copious amounts of chocolate, drinkable and otherwise--and I'll read some better books. Those of you who read Wide Sargasso Sea and enjoyed it, what am I missing? Those of you who liked Jane Eyre, what makes you prefer that novel to, say, something from Dickens?

Before I go, I wanted to share with you one denizen of the Boston/Cambridge area who doesn't care what time of year it is: our lime tree!

It flowered this winter! I actually took these picture a couple weeks ago; in place of the flowers, it has now started to grow a little lime. It did this once before, back when I first met the boyfriend, and we’re psyched that it's doing it again.

I'm a little worried the cats might be psyched about it, too.

Super Sad True Love Story: Dduk bok ki

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month I'll combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I usually post a warning about potential spoilers here, but since this is a recent book and you might (should) read it soon, I'll avoid mentioning specifics.

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In Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, Lenny, a man rapidly approaching 40 but wanting desperately to live forever, falls in love with Eunice, a clothes-obsessed 24-year-old who thinks Lenny looks like a rhesus monkey. The book goes back and forth between Lenny's journal entries and Eunice's email and IM exchanges, showing their very different reactions to what happens between and around them as they start a relationship in a politically, economically, and technologically volatile world. It's set sometime within the next 50 years, when corporations and nations are synonymous, books are rotting and smelly, clothes are see-through, and everyone carries around devices that keep them connected to the internet (but not to each other) at all times. Basically, it's a dystopian love story in a dystopian near-future.

I really liked this book. It reads quickly and lightly, so it is mostly a fun read, but it has enough issues and ideas that it leaves you thinking afterwards. The United States of this story is one of social, political, and economic unrest. Everyone wants to be younger, thinner, more desirable, and none of them have meaningful connection with other people. International relations are strained, and some of Lenny's friends are suspected of nefarious dealings with the ubiquitous Bipartisan party. Currency is unstable but everything important in the characters' lives costs money.

One girl in my book club complained that the book takes on too many issues: she thought that any one of those themes I just listed could be a book unto itself, and the relationship between Eunice and Lenny gets in the way of Shteyngart exploring those themes, or the themes get in the way of Shteyngart exploring the relationship. I disagree with her; I think the real pleasure of reading this book was seeing how Lenny and Eunice's feelings for each other and for their families eclipse everything else in their worlds. The narration is entirely through their personal journals and emails; yuan-pegged dollars and political uprisings take a backburner to Lenny and Eunice's feelings for each other not because Shteyngart can't juggle all of those elements, but because to these lonely people, the attempt to really connect with each other is more important. The book seems to say that though the society around them discourages interpersonal connections or emotions, these things are a necessary part of human experience. No matter how strange or different society becomes, we will always have the same feelings, the same emotional needs.

My description of the book makes it sound much heavier than it is. Though there are heavy themes, the writing is very light, with a lot of humor. Shteyngart's humor is sometimes slapstick, sometimes dark, sometimes subtle, and sometimes absurd. (I had to use the word "absurd" somewhere in here; he's the author of Absurdistan.) There's a funny "trailer" for the book on YouTube, which isn't really about the book at all.

Super Sad True Love Story shows that while basic human connections may have broken down in society, people still yearn for interpersonal relationships--both romantic and familial. Both Eunice and Lenny think about and talk to their families often. Eunice and her family, in their emails, often mention her Korean mother's home cooking, which is why I decided to write about this book for this entry: one of the foods that reminds Eunice of home is dduk, which is one of my favorite foods to work with.

"Dduk" (also spelled duk, tteok, etc) is usually translated as "rice cakes," but this is misleading. Dduk is more like a thick rice pasta; it is made from pounded rice flour combined with water to produce various shapes. Usually dduk comes as slightly-larger-than-finger-sized tubes, but my favorite shape is the quarter-inch-thick ovals. You can find dduk at korean or chinese markets, usually in the fridge but sometimes in the freezer section. They are almost always vacuum-packed. The last time I looked, I even found brown-rice dduk! (This was really exciting, since refined grains are on the "sometimes foods" list for me.) Store them in your fridge, and if you don't use the whole package at once, store the remainder in the freezer. Package directions may vary, but mostly you just throw them in a pot of boiling water for 5 minutes, or if you're adding them to soup, add in the last 5 minutes of cooking.

Dduk is often served stir fried (dduk bok ki) or in soup (dduk gook). I prefer it stir-fried, because it soaks up sauces so well. For a quick meal, you can saute cooked dduk in any stir-fry sauce and add veggies. But I prefer to have dduk as a side dish. I also prefer the sliced dduk, but which kind you use is up to you.


Dduk bok ki with seitan and zucchini and a side salad.

 Dduk bok ki for people who can have nightshades would include 2-4 tablespoons of chili paste, so feel free to add some if you can have peppers. It is still delicious nightshade free.

Nightshade-free Dduk bok ki
Dduk hardens when refrigerated, so you want to avoid having leftovers. This makes 2 generous side servings, or 3 medium ones (for me, "medium" is the serving in the picture with the seitan, above).

1/2 package (1 lb) dduk (I like the sliced kind, but the tube-looking ones are more traditional)
1/4 C soy sauce
1 Tbsp agave (or 4 tsp brown sugar)
1 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
1 1-inch piece of ginger, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 to 1 tsp black or sizchuan pepper, depending on how much heat you want

2 tsp canola (or vegetable) oil

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. While it's heating, combine all of the other ingredients except the canola oil in a medium-sized bowl. Mix well.

When the water boils, cook the dduk according to package directions. (If there aren't directions, plop it in the boiling water and let it boil for 3-5 minutes. Stab one with a fork at 3 minutes, and if the center is still hard, give it another couple minutes. If not, it's done.) Drain it, then run cold water over it and break up any that have stuck together.

Heat the canola oil in a wok or a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the dduk.

These are the brown rice kind; the white rice kind will obviously be paler.

Now pour the sauce over top of the dduk and cook 5-10 minutes, until all the liquid has been absorbed, stirring often. Test to see if it needs anything; you may want to add a little more sweetener or a little more soy sauce, depending on your tastes. Serve as a side dish to any korean- or chinese-themed meal, or as a delicious late-night snack.

what to do with 8 cups of pomegranate juice, brought to you by POM Wonderful

By the time I was in the third grade, I had read all of the fiction in my elementary school library. The librarian, eager to support a young nerd's love of reading, recommended me to the nonfiction sections of the library that closest resembled fiction: folklore, history, mythology. Of all the books I read from the school's dusty, not-updated-since-before-I-was-born nonfiction stacks, three have still stuck with me: a biography of Lady Jane Grey, a collection of pre-1900 American ghost stories, and most influential of all, Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

One of my favorite myths in Mythology was that of Persephone. (I assumed it was pronounced "Purse-i-fone," but hey, I was 8.) No matter how many times I read the tale, I still wanted to yell at her when she was about to leave Hades's kingdom: "Persephone, don't eat that pomegranate seed!" Having read the folklore section, I already knoew that you are never supposed to eat food otherwordly entities give you, because then you'll be under their spell. Not to mention the fact that Hades had a whole FEAST in front of her, and when she finally caved and ate something, all she chose was a seed? I found it frustrating. But then, I'd never had a pomegranate. I wouldn't eat my first pomegranate for 12 more years, and when I did, I understood right away why Persephone caved and ate some. They are delicious!

So back in November, when the nice people at POM Wonderful contacted me to ask if I was interested in trying a case of their 100% Pomegranate Juice, of course I said yes. Pomegranate juice gives you all the deliciousness of pomegranates without the work, mess, or chewing. When 8 lovely 8-oz bottles of POM Wonderful's awesome pomegranate juice arrived at my door, I was really excited to try some pomegranate recipes.

But first I had to line them up and photograph them, since I'm weird and obsessive like that.

So, what to do with 8 Bottles of pomegranate juice?

Bottle 1: I just drank it. I always water down juice (I don't really like sweet drinks), so I ended up mixing the pomegranate juice with seltzer to make a spritzer. It's good stright, though, if you're into juice. If you've never had pomegranate juice or pomegranates, for that matter, imagine a darker, richer-tasting, slightly sweeter version of cranberry juice. Also, if you haven't tried pomegranates or pomegranate juice, seriously, try some.

Bottle 2: Pomegranate Tofu with Walnuts.

I was inspired by this chicken recipe.

First, I dredged chunks of tofu in cornstarch, flour, salt and pepper, then sauteed it in a tiny but of oil until browned.

The goal was to give the tofu a crispy layer that would soften and resemble a skin as it cooked. For the record, It worked, but to be honest, next time I'd do without the coating and just brown the tofu. It's easier, and no one really needs their tofu to have a skin. So the instructions below are for skinless tofu.

1 16-oz block tofu
2 Tbsp olive oil, divided
1 large onion, finely chopped
1.5 Cups walnuts, roughly chopped
1 cup fresh pomegranate juice
2 Cups water
2 tsps lemon juice
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp pepper
optional: 1 tsp cornstarch, stirred into 1-2 Tbsp water

First, press the tofu if you have time, to get out excess moisture. Cut tofu into bite-sized (or larger) chunks. Heat 1 Tbsp of the oil in a large skillet over medium heat and saute the tofu, allowing to brown lightly on each side. Meanwhile, chop the onion and the walnuts. Remove the tofu from the pan; add the remaining 1 Tbsp of oil to the pan, then add the onions and walnuts. Cook until the onions are wilting and starting to brown, stirring as often as you need to not to let the walnuts burn (but they should brown, too).

Add the remaining ingredients, and cook until the mixture boils. It will not look very pretty, but that's okay--it is delicious.

After the mixture comes to a boil, add the tofu. Now your goal is to cook it until the sauce reduces enough to glaze the tofu and thicken a bit; 10-20 minutes, depending on how high your definition of "medium heat" is. You do want some liquid at the bottom of the pan throughout cooking so nothing burns or browns. If you have a lot of walnut meal, it may thicken as it cooks, so you may need to add more water (up to a cup)--and if you want it to thicken more than it's doing, you can add the optional cornstarch mixture, then stir another 3 minutes. This serves 3-4.

If you read my edible gift post, you already know what I did with Bottles 3-6: Homemade Grenadine.

Grenadine is a great mixer for alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as a useful, beautifully colored addition to baked goods. Most grenadine you find in stores is far removed from its pomegranate roots, containing little more than high fructose corn syrup and food coloring. As I said, I got the original recipe from The Cupcake Project, but I deviated a little, so I'll give you my version here.

3 Cups pomegranate juice
1 1/2 Cup sugar
1 more Cup pomegranate juice

Put the first 3 Cups of pomegranate juice in a saucepan over high heat. Bring it to a hearty boil.

Reduce the heat to medium, and let simmer until reduced by half. Remove from heat, stir in the sugar until dissolved.

Here's where I differ from The Cupcake Project: once all the sugar has dissolved, whisk in the remaining 1 Cup Pomegranate juice. Why, you ask? Well, boiling and reducing pomegranate juice takes away much of its characteristic tartness, and gives it a mellow, thicker, cooked taste. Adding the extra cup of fresh juice gives it back the kick it lost while making it taste a little lighter, all without detracting from the new grenadiney taste.

Store in a tightly-sealed container in the refrigerator. It will keep for a long time; at least 4-6 weeks.

I like to mix grenadine with seltzer for an Italian soda, but it is most commonly used in cocktails (including non-alcoholic Shirly Temples).

Bottle 7: Pomegranate Granita

Granita is basically Italian ice. It's a chunkier, icier sorbet, and it goes GREAT as a light dessert or as a complement to cookies. It is very easy to make granita, but it's one of those things people assume you spent a lot of time on. I like pomegranate's tartness, so I didn't sweeten it very much, but if you don't want it very tart, increase the sugar to 1 Cup. If you want it tarter and with more intense flavor, add another cup of pomegranate juice.

1 Cup pomegranate juice
1 Cup water
1/2 Cup sugar

Pour the pomegranate juice into a glass baking dish. Set aside.

Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan and stir them over high heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat, pour into the glass dish. Put the glass dish in the freezer. Every 20-30 minutes, remove from the freezer, use a fork to break up all the ice that forms on the top, sides, and bottom of the dish, stir, return to the freezer. In 2-3 hours, you will have an Italian-ice-like dessert!

This serves 2-3 if you give each person a bowl of it; 4-6 if you have dainty little cups of it to accompany a richer dessert.

Bottle 8: Maple-Pomegranate Sauce.

The boyfriend made this, because he is a champion. He combined equal parts pomegranate juice and maple syrup, the seeds of one pomegranate, and 1-2 Tbsp cornstarch (I wasn't paying attention) to make the most delicious pancake topping I've had in quite a while.

And that brings us to the end of the case of pomegranate juice.

So empty, so sad.

I am a big fan of pomegranates, so I already liked POM Wonderful before they sent me anything, but I am an even bigger fan now that they gave me the opportunity to spread my love of pomegranate to you readers. I've noticed that POM now sells containers of pomegranate arils (the seeds), which saves you the work and mess of having to dig them out of the fruit yourself. So you can feel like Persephone by daintily sampling one seed any time you want!*

*-And then, if you're like me, you can feel like a nerd for remembering and being excited about emulating a Greek myth.

Great Expectations: hearty rolls and stew

I love food and I love to read. As a result, the first week [or the third week...] of each month, I'll combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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This time of year, everyone pays attention to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which, despite all the corny movies and TV specials based on it, is a good story. But for my "food in literature" post this month, I want to talk about another of his famous works: Great Expectations.

A lot of people read this book in high school or at least college, but I somehow avoided ever having to read Dickens in an academic setting, so in reading this book, which everyone else implied was long and heavy, I found a pleasant surprise. It's long, and it's a dreary story, but the characters are very much alive and interesting, and the grime and gloom of Dicken's Victorian England is positively palpable. Few of the characters are really likeable, but you want to give them the benefit of a doubt; it is their environment that makes them who they are.

And what an environment! The settings in Great Expectations could be characters on their own. We visit and revisit the graveyard, the swampy Kent marshes, Miss Havisham's ruined mansion, the dingy London apartment, the ominous lawyer's office--they build up around the characters and the reader like a tall wall. Dickens's Victorian England is gray, depressing, and oppressive. But there are respites! There are some good people, and in this book, the good people are accompanied by good places--and good food. I always invoke food in literature as a depiction of comfort and emotional (as well as physical) nourishment; Great Expectations seems to do the same. Joe, the Pockets, and Wemmick are some of the most likeable characters in the book, and the homes of these people are the few sources of warmth and light that Great Expectations offers. And with all of these people, Pip eats food.

There is a fair amount of alcohol, and some tea, but we do not see many of the characters' meals. Because food does not appear often in the book, when it does appear, it is obvious that it has an important role. Early in Pip's life, we see that the abused little boy takes a great deal of comfort in eating bread with Joe, his sister's kind husband. At the uncomfortable Christmas dinner, Joe gives Pip extra gravy to try to make up for the boy's treatment. When Pip comes into money, one of the first things he does in London is eat with Herbert Pocket--buttered chicken and parsley, strawberries for dessert. And when he meets Wemmick, a trusty advisor and friend, Wemmick invites him back to his eccentric but endearing house for a homegrown meal.

As I said a couple weeks ago, I was originally going to recreate a vegan version of a Pork Pie. But then I read what pork pies are; ground-up season pork surrounded by pork-flavored gelatin in a pie shell. I thought about grinding up and seasoning tofu, making an agar-tofu-jelly, and baking that, but it still doesn't sound appetizing. More revolting than comforting. I realized, though, that Pip never ate the Pork Pie; it was not a source of comfort to him. The bread that he and Joe share early in the book and the simple meal of stewed vegetables that they pull from Wemmick's garden are not only more appetizing, but much easier to veganize.

Wemmick's stew isn't vegan--he adds fish--but my Autumn Root Stew is actually probably pretty close to the recipe Dickens had in mind. This time I added a cup or so of chickpeas for protein.

Pull-apart rolls are fond memories from my childhood, and this reminded me of Pip's fond moments eating bread with Joe. I like to add some whole wheat flour (not whole wheat pastry flour!) for extra heartiness, but you can do all white flour if you prefer. You'll probably end up using a little less water, though. If you want to replace MORE of the white four with whole wheat flour, add a couple Tbsps of gluten flour to make it stick together and rise better, and you may need more water.

Hearty Pull-Apart Rolls
Makes 12 rolls

3 tsps active dry yeast (you can also use a packet, but that's less yeast, so give it a little more rising time)
1 tsp sugar
1 Cup warm (not hot) water
2 Tbsp oilve oil, divided
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/2 Cups all-purpose flour
1/2 Cup whole wheat flour
Vegan margarine, to top (optional)

Mix the yeast and sugar in the bottom of a large bowl. Add about half the water. Give this about 5 minutes to sit. Meanwhile, gather your other ingredients.

Add the rest of the water, the salt and 1 Tbsp oil. Stir to combine. Add the flour a cup or so at a time. After the 2nd time, you probably won't be able to stir much anymore, so use your hands. Once it's all fairly combined, turn the dough out onto a lightly-floured surface, and knead for 5-10 minutes, sprinkling extra flour over the top if it's too sticky. The key to really nice, light bread is to keep the dough as wet as possible, so ideally you want it a little sticky, but not if that makes it too tough to work with. Roll the dough into a large ball.

Use the remaining 1 Tbsp oil to grease the sides of a large bowl. Put the ball of dough in the bowl, turning to coat it with the oil. Set a dish cloth over the top of the bowl, and leave in a warm place (our kitchen is cold, so sometimes I preheat my oven briefly, then set the bowl on top) for at least two hours.

After two hours (or more), punch down the dough and remove from the bowl. Lightly oil a pie plate. Divide the dough into twelve equal parts. (I find this is easiest to do by dividing it in half. Take one of the halves; divide that in half. Then divide each of those smaller halves into three. Voila, twelfths!) Roll the twelfths into balls, and space them fairly equally in the pie plate. They won't touch; that's okay. Cover again with the dishcloth, leave to rise for at least another hour. Preheat the oven to 375.

Depending on how warm your kitchen is, after an hour the rolls might be touching. If not, don't worry; they rise more in the oven. Remove the dishcloth, then bake the rolls for 20-25 minutes. You'll know they're done because tops will be golden brown and will sound hollow if you tap on them.

Remove the rolls from the oven, and rub a tablespoon or two of butter over the tops of the rolls. It pools in the valleys between rolls--yum. Allow to cool for a couple minutes before pulling them apart (or bringing the pie plate to the table for others to pull apart).

These are best warm, but they're also good for breakfast the morning after, dipped in agave (or maple syrup) and cinnamon.

I've been wanting to do an "edible gift guide" post all December, but unfortunately, the people for whom I'll be making said edible gifts read my blog, so I've had to wait. This weekend I'll finally give people their presents, so expect an "edible gift guide" after that. And Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it!