holiday meals

Normally my family uses tofu turkeys for their holiday entree, which are simple: you just take them out of the box and bake them. If you haven't tried tofu turkeys, they're simple marinated/seasoned tofu shaped like a happy turkey. They're gluten free and come with an easy-to-make gravy. And they're just so cute!

However, my sister-in-law is sensitive to soy,  and I wanted something we could all have. Many vegan entree options have gluten, but half the people at our meal were gluten-free, so I was pretty much left with one option: THE VEGDUCKEN. This recipe (and similar ones) was circulating around the internet for a while, just calling to be veganized. First, I have to tell you, this recipe is good, but poorly written. Or, at least, poorly organized--the list of ingredients isn't in any particular order. I ended up rewriting the whole thing in a Word doc just to make it make more sense.

Here's what I changed: I used vegan butter (homemade, but Earth Balance would work) and halved the butter for the layering/sauce, and never used any mint. This turned out just fine, and we had plenty. I used two flax "eggs" (2 Tbsp flax meal mixed with 6 Tbsp water) to replace the eggs, and to replace the parmesan cheese, I just used 2-3 Tbsp light miso. (Because of the miso, this means the recipe wasn't completely soy free, but you could use a soy-free vegan cheese like Daiya to make it so.) I used gluten-free breadcrumbs--the Hannaford store brand is just corn, sugar, and salt. Oh and my mushrooms were reconstituted dried. Finally, because I am allergic to nightshades, I replaced the eggplant layer with lightly steamed sliced celery root.

And here's the thing: even with all these (in some cases rather dramatic) substitutions, it tasted great. And went together really easily.

Here it is before putting the sides together and baking:

And here it is, baked and with some slices taken off.

I recommend carving it at the table and serving it one piece at a time; when we tried to cut several slices in advance they fell apart and were not as pretty to serve.

It serves a lot! I actually made two because there were 11 of us eating and my family are big eaters, but we never ended up finishing the first, let alone cutting into the second. And everyone really liked it!

We hosted Thanksgiving so we wouldn't have to travel with the baby, but our dining room is small so half of us ate in the dining room and half of us ate in the makeshift second dining room (the living room).

My side of the family! My brother is holding the baby in the back.

Christmas dinner was a much smaller affair, with just us and Kevin's mother, so we cooked the meal together. Our entree was Elizavegan's vegan tourtiere, made with sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes, and phyllo dough instead of pastry crust--which was a delicious substitution! The crisp of the phyllo went well with the sweet potato and made up for the lack of starch the white potatoes would have provided.

For Christmas dessert, I wanted to make something special. Inspired by The Great British Baking Show, which I watched in less than two days during my first week home with the baby, I decided to try my hand at a Swiss roll (also known as a jelly roll). And it went GREAT!

The cake is the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, spread out on a baking sheet and baked for only 10-15 minutes. I cooled it just enough to handle, then rolled it in a tea towel and let it cool completely.

After that I unrolled it, spread it with strawberry jam and Coco Whip (I didn't have time to make frosting), rolled it back up and decorated it. It was huuuuge, so I only used half of it to decorate and serve (halved, with edges trimmed off for neatness, it served 5 people). I couldn't believe how simple and yet elegant it was! I'll definitely make Swiss rolls in the future, hopefully with yellow cake that I can decorate with batter like they do on the show.

I also dressed my baby as a reindeer.

Finally, New Year's brunch is a big meal in my parents' house, with loads of food and plenty of relatives to eat it all. With a baby in the house we were lucky to make it till midnight, and were not up for making a huge brunch the next morning, but we did something a little special: Kevin made a delicious fruit and nut coffee cake (from Angelica Kitchen) and I made tofu florentine with a hollandaise sauce from Vegan Diner. I usually make the one from Vegan Brunch, but I don't find it too flavorful. The Vegan Diner one has a lot of flavor, but I think the wine comes through a little too strong. Still a delicious New Year's brunch!

Now the holidays are over, we're back to simpler meals... more on those later!

chocolate-covered katie's protein bars

Before you look at the pictures of the "3-minute" high protein granola bars that I made from Chocolate Covered Katie's recipe, you should look at hers. They are sweet and cute and pretty, and if you follow the recipe closely, yours will be too.

The recipe is also delicious. However, readers of this blog will know that I am almost incapable of making a recipe without somehow making changes, so naturally I changed a bunch of things. My version of her granola bars is NOT pretty. In fact, my granola bars turned out really ugly.

But I am not ashamed! They are still delicious, and a little more nutritious.

They're green-brown because I used hemp protein powder and added some spirulina, because I used almond butter instead of peanut butter, AND because I added cocoa powder. They are still delicious, and take less than 3 minutes to make. (A little longer to freeze, which makes them cuttable.)

In case anyone is wondering whether they have to be kept frozen (as Katie suggests), the answer is no! I only froze them to slice them. I've carried one around in my bag all day and it was still solid enough to be held at one end (similar to a Larabar in texture). We are storing them in the fridge just so they keep longer.

LONG LIVE THE UGLY GRANOLA BARS.

dessert friday: gluten-free mini tarts

I am fortunate enough to be able to eat gluten, but there are many people in my life (my mother and 2 brothers, my sister-in-law, friends, etc) who are gluten intolerant. So around holidays and family events, the food almost always needs to be gluten free.

For my sister-in-law's bridal shower, I was in charge of making a dish that was dessert-y but easily eaten as finger food. I used Vegan Pie in the Sky's gluten-free variation of the press-in almond crust to make mini tarts! (Note: in the cookbook, though not on the site, Isa recommends using 2/3 cup oat flour and 1/3 cup rice flour as the flour substitute.)

I pressed the crust into a muffin tin lined with paper cups. Since it was a fall shower, the fillings (also from Vegan Pie in the Sky) were cappuccino mousse and pear frangipane.

They were a little crumbly, but VERY well received and VERY delicious. So I decided to make some variations on the theme for my family's Thanksgiving dinner!

I winged these fillings on my own; a straight chocolate mousse (made of tofu, melted chocolate, and cocoa powder), and an apple-pie-type filling. They were both great but the chocolate mousse ones were my favorite of all 4 options!

If you plan on trying this at home, one note of caution: the individual tarts don't keep very well, because the crusts get soggy after not too long, and start to lose their structural integrity. They still taste delicious, though!

flour frosting

If you've spent much time around this blog, you might have picked up that I'm not normally a big frosting fan. I almost always halve frosting recipes and still have some left over, since I prefer it used sparingly. When Kevin and I go out to eat and order cake, I usually just taste the frosting and then eat around it. It's usually too sweet, and I don't like the greasy feeling it leaves in my mouth after eating it.

But this frosting has changed my mind. Referred to in old recipes as "boiled flour frosting," it may not sound too appetizing at first (that combination of words makes me want to gag)... but the actual product is AMAZING.

I have made both vanilla and chocolate varieties of flour frosting; the most reliable recipe I have found is located at the Obsessed with Baking blog. Warning: the blog and the recipe aren't vegan, but veganizing it is really straightforward. I swapped Earth Balance (margarine) for the butter, and soymilk for the milk. And it came out beautifully! For chocolate, I added 1/3 cup cocoa powder to the cooking phase and a little over 1/2 cup of melted chocolate chips (cooled) to the mixing phase.

So what's the difference between this frosting and normal frosting? To me, it tastes richer than normal vegan buttercream without feeling as heavy. It's also fluffier. It spreads beautifully, keeps for quite a while, and freezes well. My only suggestion is that when you thaw it from frozen, thaw it in the fridge. Thawing it on the counter on a hot day like I did can make it separate. (Oops.)

Have you ever heard of flour frosting? After I started telling my mother how excited I was to have found out about it, she told me that this is the kind of frosting her grandmother used to make! I love exploring/discovering my roots through cooking, however accidentally.

vegan sorbet at Picco

Last week I started a new job: I am an English instructor at a college here in Boston. I'd been applying for positions like this for a while now, and finally got this job, which is EXACTLY what I wanted. I love my colleagues, I love the school and its mission, I love the students I met during our orientation sessions--I am so happy to be starting this job! It makes doing VeganMofo kind of tricky, since it takes a lot of my time, but I'm hoping I'll be able to keep it up.

Anyway, as you may remember from my Vegan Eating in Boston post a couple years ago (which, I now notice, has since gone out of date--a few of those restaurants have closed! I'll update it again sometime soon), Picco is a a surprisingly vegan-friendly restaurant, and is home to some of my favorite ice cream since going vegan: their dark chocolate sorbet. It's so rich it tastes like ice cream, not sorbet. And the place is right around the corner from my new job! So when I received the job offer, to celebrate, I just walked around the corner, plunked down in a booth, and bought myself two scoops of sorbet: dark chocolate and strawberry.

Celebratory ice cream is the best kind of ice cream!

Today is my first day of teaching classes. Wish me luck!

vegan chocolate from Bees Knees Supply Co.

Bees Knees Supply Co. is a gourmet grocery store and deli that opened up right underneath my office this summer, so I had to check them out. I never went through their deli counters, but it looks like they have some sandwiches that could be made vegan, and some snacks that already are there. Their fridges and freezers have some vegan (non-hydrogenated!) puff pastry and canned cinnamon rolls, as well as some vegan pates and such.

But the REAL reason I would go down to Bees Knees during the work day was their CAFE/CHOCOLATE BAR. They have a great selection of teas, coffee, and juice, soy milk (and possibly almond milk?) available for all drinks, and at least one freshly-made vegan chocolate of the day.

LIKE THIS LUCKY CAT CHOCOLATE! It is filled with a raw chocolate ganache. (In addition to the prettier chocolates I'm showing here, they also have raw chocolate truffles with coconut oil rolled in hemp seeds, coconut, or sometimes chia seeds.)

Look at this little chocolate mouse! He's all shimmery! They do such a nice job of making the chocolates pretty there.

This one was called a "peace mouse."

It was delicious.

holiday meal!

Happy holidays to people who celebrate them this time of year!

I have been working on a wedding food post for a long time, and I prooooomise I'll do it before the end of the month, but at today's awesome Christmas dinner at my mother-in-law's (hi Tanis!), I promised a couple people I'd post links to the sweets I made to go with our meal. So Miki and Sarge, this is for you!

A big surprise hit today was the sugared cranberries. I used this recipe at 101 Cookbooks. It's very simple, though it requires a lot of sitting time.

Tart cranberries get a sparkly sugar coating. I had never heard of this before, but apparently this recipe is a holiday tradition for some people... I might make it one of mine now. They goes well with crackers and cheese/dip/pate for appetizers as well as a side during the main meal, and are a good compliment to dessert. So basically you can eat them at any time. Plus they look so pretty and wintery!

Unfortunately, as delicious as the dessert I made was, it wasn't very photogenic. It's Martha Stewart's Frozen Chocolate Peanut Butter and Banana Loaf.

Very rich, and verrrrry delicious. Texture-wise, it's along the lines of a frozen mousse. I replaced the whipped cream in the recipe with the cashew-and-coconut-based Rad Whip from the PPK, and it worked out great.

There were other awesome vegan elements to the meal, but for the sake of this entry not taking me forever, I'll just leave you with some pictures. (Thanks to the husband for taking them, since I was busy talking. As usual.)

My carrot salad (so much tastier than the lighting in the picture suggests!):

The husband's white bean, carrot, and caramelized onion puree:

My mother-in-law's excellent mustardy shallots and green beans:

My sister-in-law's raw beet and parsley pesto terrine (with her apple-cranberry sauce, which went with sweet potato latkes, of which we didn't get a picture)...

...and her appetizer: nut pate.

I'm still full.

ALSO, before I'm done bragging about my great meal, I also want to brag about the awesome gifts my husband and in-laws got me:

I WILL BE SPENDING 2012 IN THE KITCHEN, THANK YOU.

Kevin's Chocolate Mousse

Vegan chocolate mousse is one of those recipes that, when you first go vegan, every non-vegan in your life sees in a magazine or on a blog or something and gives to you, thinking 1.) it has a block of tofu in it, so they're not going to use it but 2.) you must need it because you're vegan. I mean, we've all seen this recipe, right? One block of aseptic-pack tofu (like Mori Nu), almost equal parts (10 oz) melted chocolate chips, mayyyybe some vanilla or sugar as the recipe varies. It sounds so simple, and so tofu-y, that I felt insulted the maaaany times someone was like "Oh. you're vegan? I saw a chocolate mousse recipe you'll love." So even though I've seen it at least 20 times since going vegan in 2005, I never made it until a year or so ago, when I needed a quick dessert.

The recipe is so simple and ubiquitous that I don't think I need to write it out. When I make it, I skimp a little on the chocolate chips, and add a couple Tbsps cocoa powder and a touch of instant coffee. Both of those things make it richer and darker, though in that case I add a bit of soymilk and agave to help keep it from getting too bitter. Put in cute cups, leave in the fridge for an hour or two, and bam! Firm, rich chocolate mousse. This is a delicious, basic recipe that tastes way more involved than the sum of its parts. It makes you look like a good host(ess) instead of a lazy one! And the fiance loves it. He loves it so much, he wanted it instead of cake or cupcakes of cookies this year for his birthday!

I've been thinking of trying it with various liqueurs, too, for a little kick. Citrus zest would also be a nice touch.

welcome to summer

I've been trying my best not to feel guilty about ignoring my blog, since I've been enjoying summer to the fullest. It's been a really busy summer so far! The boyfriend and I got engaged (so now he's the fiance!), for one, but also I've been to the beach, to an amusement park (more on that in my next entry), to upstate NY, to outdoor movie nights, to friends' pools, and in general just away from the kitchen. It's been so absurdly hot lately that I haven't been tempted to try too many new things when it comes to cooking, so today I'll be featuring other people's recipes.

The second-best thing about this summer (after the engagement, which has really got to be number one) is that I signed up for a CSA share through Red Fire Farm, a local, organic farm! A co-worker and I split one share. The boyfriend and I could probably eat an entire share's worth, but it's done by delivery to my office, which means the farm picks out what to put in my share--which means we get plenty of nightshades. So my coworker and I have an agreement that she will always take all the nightshades. (This works great for her as well as for me, because who would turn down fresh, local, organic tomatoes if they weren't allergic?!) In addition to the half vegetable share, I signed up for a flower share! So I get a pretty bouquet of flowers every week.

Week 1 had some sweet basil flowers in it; it smelled wonderful.

I love flowers, but it can be tough to keep fresh flowers around if you strive for ethical, environmentally friendly living. Many flowers available at flower shops are imported from places where workers are exploited, so they're not the most ethical way to decorate your home. (1800Flowers, by the way, often offers at least 1 or 2 fair-trade bouquets on their website.) Even if they're fair trade, though, they've come a long way to get to your vase. And even if you get domestic flowers, because flowers aren't food crops, there are no regulations on the spraying of pesticides or herbicides, which directly affect our environment (and possibly our health). But flowers are really pretty, and if you ask me there are few things as nice as having fresh cut flowers to decorate your home.

Week 2 -- Sunflowers!

SO finding out that the farm that does my CSA shares offered organic flower shares was the awesome!

 

Not that I'll ever turn down flowers of any type, but it's nice to be able to have fresh cut flowers in my home without any slight nagging guilt.

Check out the bright red stems on the red flowers! And what are those weird tall green flowers? They look like sea creatures.

Like I said above, I've been spending less time in the kitchen lately. I cook as much as ever before, but I am not in the mood for puttering around or innovating--I want to make recipes that I know will work the first time around. So I've been making recipes from blogs I trust.

This AMAZING chocolate tart came from Hot Polka Dot. It's not originally a vegan recipe, but I veganized it by using Earth Balance in place of the butter, flaxmeal mixed with water for the egg, and Mimicreme for the cream. I'm thinking it would also be REALLY tasty with coconut milk in place of the cream and coconut oil in place of the butter. Also, she used cherries, but the fiance (!) is allergic to cherries, so I went with strawberries. I cannot say enough about how delicious this recipe is.

Next up, homemade almond milk! I take my directions from Bonzai Aphrodite. I've used it several times for making homemade almond yogurt, but I always have to drink a little bit of it first, since it's so tasty and creamy.

Look how creamy and milky! Yum almonds.

Another tasty recipes I got from the internet was a Breakfast Beer Bread recipe from La Vida Veggie. I bookmarked it back in November, and finally had a chance to make it. It was great!

Very healthy, very hearty, very simple to make.

Finally, I've written about making C'est La Vegan's Cashew Goat Cheese, but I want to reiterate how fantastic the recipe is. I made two logs of it for a PPK potluck I hosted last month, and it was a giant hit.

I served it with crackers, and with a fig-almond spread based on a recipe from the BBC for Fig and Almond Balls. I made a bunch of changes in the recipe--I swapped dates for apricots, I added a lot of water because my figs were dried out, we didn't have any brandy so I put in a couple dashes of orange bitters, and I didn't age it at all. But it was DELICIOUS. And great with the "cheese."

I'll try to update again this week, if I can sit at my computer long enough to type out more entries--it's hot! I want to be like our cats Molly and Fritz and sprawl on the floor in front of the fan:

They love this spot because they are right between two fans.

...or in the shade like Vascha.

Under the cabinet behind the couch.

It's always so funny to me when I come home from work and find these lazy kitties spread out all over the floor to cool off.

I hope you're all enjoying your summer so far!

you deserve a cookie

I make cookies almost every week. I don't like making them as much as I like making cakes and cupcakes, because I find scooping cookie-sized amounts onto baking sheets more tedious, and also I find that the line between underdone/perfect/slightly burned cookies is basically nonexistent; for me, it's mostly luck. But cookies are the best thing when you've got guests coming or a party to go to or officemates to make happy and you want to make a lot of something quickly. And they're tasty, of course. However I feel about making them, I very much like eating cookies. I don't photograph them much, though, as cookies tend not to be super photogenic. They're basically all little brown and/or beige disks; my cookie pictures all sort of resemble one another, and never convey the tasty cookie experience. That's why while I make them often, I seldom display them here.

I recently noticed that "You [I/We] deserve a cookie" is a thing. A meme, if you will. Lots of people say it, and I don't think we can name any one particular source. It's an interesting meme--it's not flashy, it doesn't appear accompanied by cats or videos or songs; it's just something people say. Unlike some internet humor, it's not poking fun--it's nice. It's universally understandable; no mystery, no wondering if something went over your head: you did a good job, you deserve a cookie.

Well, guys, today I deserve a cookie. Yesterday I sent in my final payment on my student loans. Less than a year out of grad school, I am done paying student loans!!! There is no number of exclamation points that can convey how happy I am about this. So I present you with some cookies.

First, the prettiest cookie picture I have ever taken (due entirely to the light, not to my photography or baking skills):

Ginger Molasses Cookies with Lemon Icing and Basic Peanut Butter Cookies. I am not sure where I got these recipes, as the picture was taken before I owned Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, but that cookbook has recipes for both kinds of cookie. Anyway, these particular molasses cookies were a not sweet enough; hence the icing.

Martha Stewart's Hazelnut Cookies. I found a recipe for hazelnut cookies on Martha Stewart's website. (I think. Sometimes I just find recipes online, make them once, then I don't love them and don't intend to make them again, I don't save the link.) They are shortbready, so the only veganizing that needed to be done was substituting earth balance for butter.

These too were not as sweet as I'd anticipated, so I covered them with chocolate, and they became "nutella cookies," which my coworkers gobbled up quickly.

A BETTER hazelnut cookie was the recipe I made out of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I liked the sound of the Hazelnut Fudge Dreamies, but I'm lazy and didn't want to turn them into cookie sandwiches. (Nor, I think, did I have all the fudge ingredients on hand.) So instead I made them like normal cookies, then dipped them into melted chocolate.

I think they're cute this way! And less work.

I usually cut down frosting/ganache recipes in order to avoid having leftoves, but if you find yourself with some extra ganache, chilling then rolling it with various ingredients and shaping them into truffles always feels/looks impressive:

Left to right: Plain, orange zest, coconut, peanut butter, and coconut-orange truffles.

Also chocolaty: These are chocolate-chocolate chip cookies! The recipe is possibly from the Veganomicon but sans walnuts, I dunno.

They're blurry because I REALLY wanted to show you the ones on the left; I used up all my baking sheets while I was making these, so I put a few of the cookies into a little shell cake mold I have. They were so cute! But blurry.

Back to Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I've already admitted my predilection for citrusy baked goods, so it's probably not surprising that I loved the Citrus Glitters!

I added a little turmeric to the sugar I rolled it in, for extra lemony color.

If you don't own Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, I strongly recommend it. I find that veganizing non-vegan cookie recipes can be really tricky, and requires a lot of troubleshooting. The cookies in this book range from basic, which you can adapt to fit your own cookie needs, to complex and cool. And there are some great veganizations of cookies you probably missed since going vegan. (Like the Girl Scouts' Caramel Delites! [Samoas for you non upstate-NYers]) Like I said, I don't tend to take pictures of cookies, but I've made a lot from this cookbook. Here's a list of what I made and what I thought. You can find most of these recipes transcribed from the book on other people's blogs just by searching, but I'm too busy celebrating my newfound financial freedom to dig them all up myself.

• Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies-These taste amazing and are the easiest and quickest recipe I've tried from the book.
• Chocolaty Crinkle Cookies-These are my fallback cookies for when I'm baking for other people. Everyone loves them, and they take a lot less work than they look/taste. The dough is a lot more like a batter at first; I find that I have to chill it, in the fridge for 30mins or more, or in the freezer for 10-15, to make it a good texture for rolling.
• City Girl Snickerdoodles-Uses a lot of margarine. Taste amazing.
• Tahini Lime Cookies-An interesting tasting cookie. They have a complex flavor that is hard to identify if you don't already know what kind of cookie they are. They make you seem like a foodie.
• Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies, Peanut Butter Crisscrosses, Peanut Butter Agave Cookies, Peanut Butter Blondies-I'm grouping all the peanut butter cookies together, because I'm not a huge peanut butter cookie fan and I am therefore not the best judge of them. But I made them all, mostly for other people. All kinds were well received! The blondies were really dense, almost more like peanut butter fudge, but a little drier. I love that the cookbook has an option for agave-based peanut butter cookies, since they are hard to adapt on your own.
• Citrus Glitters-Picture above. Simple and sweet!
• Rocky Roads-When I had stale vegan marshmallows in my fridge, I chopped them up to use in this recipe in place of white chocolate chips. I've made this recipe quite a few times, but I have very little self control and ended up eating a lot more cookies than necessary, so we are on a break.
• Sweet Wine Biscuits with Sesame-Another foodie cookie. I wrote about them here.
• Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Brownies-I dropped the pan when I was taking these out of the oven, so they never set right, but they still tasted great.
• Pumpkin Pie Brownies-Tasty, and so cool-looking! I wrote about them in this entry.
• Big Fat Crispy Rice Squares-Rice crispy treats, but without the need for marshmallows. I wrote about them here.
• Peanut Butter Chocolate Pillows-These were tasty and it was cool to have a cookie with a surprise inside, but I didn’t think they were quite worth the work.
• Lazy Samoas-THE REASON TO BUY THIS BOOK. I missed Caramel Delites/Samoas SO MUCH, and though these are quite a few steps, the taste is spot-on and so amazingly good. I made them into heart shapes for Valentine's day for the boyfriend last year, and I think I managed to eat more of them than he did. (Oops.)
• Hazelnut Fudge Dreamies-I wrote about these above. Tasty and can be made simpler if you're lazy.
• No-Bake Pecan Chocolates-Really decadent, really delicious.
• Cookie Dough Scoops-I dipped these in chocolate after I made them. Best. Idea. Ever.

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.