Morel Mushrooms and Bonnie Jo Campbell are both really cool things from Michigan.

It’s time to celebrate things Michigan.

The first is that it’s morel mushroom season. For those in the know, morels grow in those places in the woods (or orchard, or certain sides of back roads, or (you fill in your spot) where you take care not to show anyone. The small window of time that you have to hunt them makes morels a coveted food. Friends and neighbors who know that you are a successful mushroom hunter will call or drop by just to see how many you’ve found this year, hoping that the number is high enough to lead to some sharing.

Hunting for mushrooms gets me outside and into the woods, and morels come up at the perfect time – just when spring is pushing out the long Michigan winter and things that are green are making their reappearance.

That’s one of the things I enjoy most about Michigan: there’s always something you can do outdoors. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed reading Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River so much, it takes you to the Michigan outdoors.

I was first introduced to Bonnie Jo Campbell when I read her collection of short stories, American Salvage. I was blown away. The stories were raw and honest, and they captured the voice of the working class of Michigan – a class my family is decidely from. Growing up,  my family didn’t travel to exotic places, unless you feel the U.P. is foreign, nor did we exotic foods, unless you consider wild turkey or venison strange. What we did do, very similarily like the Murphy family in her new novel, was spend a lot of time outdoors, a lot of time on the water, and a lot of time grilling out on any family occasion – summer or winter.

In Once Upon a River we are introduced to Margo Crane. She is related to the Murphy clan who live across the Stark river from her. The families have grown up on this river. Margo knows its bends and curves, and when tragic events cause her to run, it’s her getaway route.

Margo is what sold this story for me. Campbell adeptly creates an honest female character who isn’t silly. She is an atypical female lead for today: a dead-shot hunter, self-sufficient, not surrounded by a gaggle of girlfriends. She is flawed, but she is young and without a mom, and you feel for her when she makes decisions that aren’t perhaps in her best interest.

And while not envious, because it’s something that I would never want to know how to do, I do hold her in high-esteem for being able to gut a deer. This is a burly job. From growing up in a deer hunting state, I know many a man who can do this job, but only a small handful of women who are willing to do it.

I’ll just stick with hunting and cleaning mushrooms. It’s a little less violent.

The season has been successful so far. Here are some highlights of what I’ve done with them.

Here are some monster pork chops my neighbor gave to me. They come from a pig he raised.

Here are the same chops now covered in morels and onions. I threw large handfuls of both on a piece of foil and sprinkled olive oil, salt, white pepper, thyme, and sherry over them. I wrapped the foil tightly and threw them on the grill when the pork was almost done.

These are morels and onion that have been dredged in seasoned flour (Hungarian paprika, salt, thyme, pepper) and fried in shallow oil. I ate them with venison tenderloin that my dad gave me from his successful hunting season.

Here are morels that have been sauteed in butter and then scrambled into fresh eggs that I get from a coworker who raises chicken in her spare time. I threw in some leftover venison as well.

You get the idea.

Things that book nerds do!

I am a self-avowed book nerd. I do geeky things like keep track of the books I read and add up their page numbers. Last summer I didn’t pick a book from my summer reading pile haphazardly; I developed a specific order to read them in based on the time frame of the book and its genre.

Aforementioned reading list:

To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild (non-fiction World War One)

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (fiction World War One)

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (non-fiction Stalin and Hitler’s rise and World War Two)

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (fiction Stalinist Russia)

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (non-fiction World War Two)

(This probably suggests a Type-A personality, which I can admit to at times.)

Another geeky thing I like to do is set aside “biggies” to read during spring and summer break. Biggies are those books that, as an English teacher and book lover, I know I need to get through. The ones that are daunting because of their depth and length. Last summer I read Moby Dick; the summer before that, Bleak House.

Now it’s time for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This has been on my shelf for several years, mocking my hesitation at picking it up and giving it a chance. I’m about 100 pages in to its approximately 780 pages, and so far its everything I’ve come to love from the Russian – deep philosophical treatises on philosophy and religion, characters both debased and glorified, and strong storytelling. Fyodor Karamazov is horrifying and hilarious at the same time. Dostoevsky is a master at creating devils you want to get to know better.

I was good at creating excuses for avoiding these lengthy classics, but now that I have devoted myself to reading just one or two a year during break periods, I am finally reading the books that I always meant to. This summer: Don Quixote! (Yikes)

What do Edward Gorey, British Mysteries, and Meyer Lemon Poundcake have in common? You’ll See.

I judged a book by its cover a few weeks ago. Well, not necessarily just its cover; it was the cover’s illustrator that wooed me: Edward Gorey. I love this guy.

Here is a piece from one of his stories.

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His work is macabe and gothic, but at the same time whimsical – kind of like the book whose cover  his illustration adorns: Sara Caudwell’s The Sibyl in her Grave.

I found the book by accident, stuck between a stack of Raymond Chandler mysteries that I was searching through. It was a lucky find.

The Sibyl in her Grave is one of those old-fashioned British murder mysteries, but it’s not old. Caudwell writes a modern book; there are cell phones, insider trading scams, and even a hint of S&M (nothing naughty), but she also creates an atmosphere where the past resonates.

The mystery is primarily told through a series of letters. Most are written by Regina, an antiques dealer in Parsons Haven, to her niece, Julia, a city barrister. The letters start because of a concern with money; Regina and a handful of her close friends made a killing in the stock market and are now dealing with tax issues. This sounds dry, I know, but Caudwell keeps the voice of Regina light and humorous; no serious accountant or lawyer talk invades the narrative.

Intermixed with taxes is the story of Regina’s annoying neighbor, Isabella del Comino. She moved into Parsons Haven and had the audacity to bulldoze down her home’s beautiful gardens to build a rookery for her crows (she also keeps a pet vulture). The psychic is visited by a mysterious weekly visitor from the city, and quickly ends up dead of suspected poisoning.

Our narrator is Hilary Tamar, Oxford fellow and friend of Julia’s. Tamar walks us through each of the letters, and explains the events that happen in between. Never a detective in the foreground, Tamar’s “little gray cells” work quietly on the side, letting the reader come gently to this quirky mystery’s conclusion.

All the elements I enjoy in this type of British mystery are there: quaint towns with odd-sounding names; quirky characters that stay with you long after the book ends; an intriguing detective whose character is both central and periphery at the same time; characters who always have time, even in the midst of murder, to enjoy food and drink.

After all, if Regina and company can still enjoy tea time in the midst of tragedy, the least we can do as readers is to join them. I did by making a Meyer lemon poundcake based off a Barefoot Contessa recipe.

I like my lemon desserts to be packed with mouth-puckering lemony goodness, and this poundcake meets all expectations. It has fresh lemon juice and zest in the batter, along with a hint of lemon oil. It has a lemon sugar syrup poured over it when it comes out of the oven, and is eventually coated in a fresh lemon juice and powdered sugar glaze.

Recipe (adapted from The Barefoot Contessa)

Note: this recipe is supposed to make two loaves of poundcake. I made one. I had only a small about of batter that didn’t make it into my loaf pan, and I used it to make a mini round cake on the side. (We nibbled on that while waiting for the other to cool.)

Ingredients

• 1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 2 1/2 cups granulated sugar, divided
• 5 large eggs, at room temperature
• 1/3 cup grated Meyer lemon zest (I used about six lemons to get this)
• 3 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, divided
• 3/4 cup buttermilk, at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon lemon oil

For the glaze:

• 2 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
• ½ cup freshly squeezed meyer lemon juice

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour one loaf pan.

I creamed the butter and 2 cups sugar in my Kitchen-aid until they were light and fluffy. This took several minutes to get it to a blended, very light yellow. I then added the eggs one at a time, scraping the sides of the bowl down after each addition. While the mixer was still doing its thing, I added in the lemon zest.

The flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt were sifted together in a separate bowl as per The Barefoot Contessa’s instructions. In another bowl, I mixed up   1/4 cup lemon juice, the buttermilk, vanilla, and lemon oil in another bowl. I took turns mixing the dry and wet ingredients into the Kitchen-aid, scrapping down the sides of the bowl after each addition. Pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan and slid the pan in the oven for one hour. My loaf took a little longer than an hour to finish, so watch for browning edges, unless like me, you look forward to the crispy, caramelized bits. (Remember, you will have a little extra batter.)

After about 10 minutes, turn the cake out of your pan and onto a cooling rack that sits over a tray.

While the cake cooks, combine 1/2 cup granulated sugar with 1/2 cup lemon juice in a small saucepan and cook over low heat to make a syrup. Once the sugar is completely dissolved, it’s done. After your turned out cake has cooled down for 10 minutes, spoon the syrup over the top and bottom, letting each spoonful to absorb before adding another. Let cool completely.

Mix glaze ingredients together with a whisk until smooth. Pour over your cooled cake, and enjoy!

Oscar Night, 2012. A cocktail inspired by a movie, inspired by a book, inspired by another book….

I’m a sucker for the Oscars. To know me, you might be surprised by this. I don’t seem to make time to see movies, and I am not someone who follows celebrity gossip rags. These don’t necessarily connect to the other, I guess. There is a romance to the Academy Awards that I enjoy, and I can’t get enough of the red carpet previews – the jewelry, the shoes, the dresses – it’s a splurge to revel in a bit of star idolatry.

To celebrate the Oscars, saveur.com has created cocktails inspired by the best picture nominees. And since I’m also a sucker for food and drink inspired by books (and films), I’ve decided to mix up one (or two) to enjoy with my evening of star gazing.

The drink I chose to mix up for tonight is The Lumière, in honor of the film Hugo. I haven’t watched the movie, so I have no idea how deserving it is of a win, and seeing the hype about The Artist (see LA Times predictions here), perhaps it doesn’t matter anyway, but the book… it’s an original.

If you haven’t seen it, search it out. The author, Brian Selznick, played with the blending of genres to create a novel that’s part drawing and part text. The pictures look to be charcoal pencil sketches and they are intermixed with written text. The look of the pages – they’re bordered in black – and the absence of color create a mood that is modern and old at the same time.

On the first page, the narrator, Professor H. Alcofrisbas, instructs readers to savor the introduction to the story, to imagine it like you were watching a film. As you flip to the next page, and the next, and the next, what you get is 40some pages of dual-sided sketches that grow in size as they narrow in perspective. From these, you are introduced to Hugo, Papa Georges, and Isabelle, and taken into the setting of the story, a Paris train station in 1931. Click here to enter into Selznick’s website, where on the Intro page, you can watch a slide show of these first pages; don’t worry, I’ll wait.

One of the things I appreciate about Selznick is that he takes the time and space on his website for the book to give credit and thanks to the book and author who inspired his writing. It’s romantic to think that great ideas are conjured up in some mystically magical way, but in real life, art inspires art. I love how the creation of one book, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by Gaby Wood, can lead to The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

With that in mind, here is the recipe for The Lumière, taken from saveur.com, and seemingly inspired by The Last Word minus maraschino liqueur (recipe here), with St. Germain filling in for lessened amounts of lime juice and green chartreuse, with a bit of orange bitters thrown in for good measure. I threw my two cents in by rinsing my coupe glass in Aperol before pouring in the cocktail.

I will be drinking one of these, while eating a gigantic bowl of popcorn, while curled up on my couch to revel in red carpet hurrah and the handing out of gold statues. Oscar night.

 

Hemingway and daiquiris – or how to take a fake vacation

Sometimes during the long slog through winter, I find myself craving sunshine and the beach. I start dreaming of summer, and because jet-setting off to the Caribbean isn’t really an option for me, I make do with what I have.  This, in case you didn’t know this already, is a great imagination.

If you crank up the heat in your house for a bit, mix up something frothy, cold, and tart, and escape to the ocean that lives inside a good book, then a mini-vacation can be yours. Cheesy? Perhaps. Not nearly as good as the real thing? Undoubtedly. But it’s cheap, easy, and requires no real planning ahead.

Two things inspired this pseudo-vacation: a sale on grapefruit at the supermarket, and a 10¢ copy of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea at my library’s basement sale.

Now, I get it. Hemingway is probably not the first author that pops into your head when you think beach read, but I love his sparse prose. Every word feels like it matters because there are so few of them. Some people equate good description with loopy adjectives and adverbs. He doesn’t. I appreciate that, so curling up with one of his novels is relaxation for me.

The Old Man and the Sea is one of his that I hadn’t gotten to yet, but always wanted to read. The first handful of pages grabbed me – you get a sense of Santiago (the old man) immediately – and it reminded me why I enjoy Hemingway so much; it’s his simplicity.

Simplicity is close to the case with the Hemingway daiquiri as well. Accounts of this drinks history differ slightly online, but essentially, the original was a blended drink of citrus juices, lots of rum, and a small amount of maraschino liqueur.

I admit that I was somewhat skeptical of trying one of these drinks. My only experience with daiquiris in general involved a too large glass of sticky sweetness that provided more brainfreeze than buzz. But understanding the chasm that lies between a bad bar margarita and the real thing, I mixed one up and hoped for the best.

To make my Hemingway daiquiri, I made a few, minor adjustments to the recipe. The first is that I didn’t serve it over crushed ice, nor did I blend it. I also added a small amount of sugar to the drink after tasting my first batch. It was just a bit to tart for my taste.

 

Recipe:

1 ½ oz white rum (I used Prichard’s Crystal White – not authentic Cuban, I know)

.75 oz fresh lime juice (do not, I repeat do not use bottled)

.50 oz fresh white grapefruit juice

.50 oz maraschino liqueur

.25 oz sugar syrup

 

I mixed the ingredients in an ice-filled shaker, shook vigorously, and served in a chilled coupe glass with a lime wheel floating on the top.

 

Initial reaction to the drink – it’s tart, but also refreshing, and the beach in a glass.

Initial reaction to the book – comforting, I want to sit down next to Santiago and listen to a baseball game, waiting for tomorrow to come with another chance to go after Marlin.

Plane crashes and teen beauty queens! My First Book Talk!!!

In honor of speaking to you directly, I uploaded a video onto Youtube. Watch it to hear my fabulous book recommendation, Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens. It’s one of my new favorites because it’s funny, smart, and full of satire. Who doesn’t love laughing at people who watch reality television? Because of course, we would never watch it…

Comfort food – for the body and the mind

Food for the mind

                                    

You know those days where right after you give yourself a giant cheer for finishing all the work on your desk, you turn around and realize tomorrow’s pile is even bigger? It’s been one of those weeks. Most days I hunker down and work even harder. But every once in a while my brain and body rebel.

One of two courses of action usually restores the balance. The first involves an extra cheese takeout pizza and really bad TV. When that’s not enough, I decompress by cooking soup. Yes, you read right, I said soup – a big, rolling pot of homemade chicken noodle soup and one of my favorite books are the recipe for my mental recovery.

I plan ahead for these occasions by stockpiling chicken carcasses in my freezer. (I also have bags of shrimp shells and even occasionally the shank end of pig’s legs from summer pig roasts. They are the best ham hocks you can find!) I know this sounds strange, but trust me. When you can make stock using three or four leftover chickens, your broth will be rich and everything chicken broth should be.

The Stock

For this pot of stock I plopped four chicken carcasses into a stock pot with a bulb of garlic cut in half, a quartered large onion, several roughly chopped sticks of celery and carrots, and the greens of a large leek. I also added a handful of peppercorns, fresh dill and parsley, two dried chile de arbols, and several large pinches of kosher salt. After filling the pot with water to cover, I brought it to a rolling boil, then lowered the temp down to med-low and let the thing simmer for most of the afternoon. Time gives you a richer stock with more depth.

Except for an occasional sip of broth to see how flavors are developing, this pot needs no help – just the time to do its thing. This make sitting down to a good book that much easier.

The Book

One of my favorite books to curl up with when my mind needs comfort is Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher. It’s everything you want when you require a book to take your mind off more stressful things. It has a gorgeous and romantic setting, an old English Manor house that is the home of the Carey-Lewis clan. They are wealthy enough to live a life that you will enjoy imagining yourself into, but kind enough to not hate them for it.

Coming Home is a coming of age story. The story follows Judith Dunbar. At fourteen she is left at the door of St. Ursula’s School for Girls in Penzance, England. Her mother and little sister are sailing to meet Judith’s father who works for a shipping magnet in Singapore. With her family so far away, Judith is unofficially adopted by the Carey-Lewis family of Nancharrow, Land’s End. Judith and those around her experience joy, love and excruciating heartbreak as WWII rages. It’s an old fashioned story, but it isn’t trite.

Weighing in at 826 pages in its hardcover form, it’s easy to get intimidated. Don’t! Pilcher uses those pages to introduce each of her characters properly. From Gus and Loveday, to Athena, to Aunt Lavinia, you will come to love them, warts and all.

In Coming Home, Aunt Lavinia curls up at night with her favorite book on her nightstand. “Trollope was such a comforting man; reading him was like having someone take you by the hand and gently lead you back to a gentler past.” While Rosamunde Pilcher’s time period for the novel isn’t comforting – England and its territories during World War II, her characters are people you’ll come back to visit over and over again.

The Soup

After a long afternoon on the stove, I drained my stock through a sieve and ran it through a fat separator. I sautéed an onion, two fat carrots, two stacks of celery,  two parsnips and two leeks in olive oil until they were soft. I added the chicken stock and brought it back to a boil. I threw in diced chicken breast and thigh (I bought a rotisserie chicken – the meat is already cooked, and I can start restocking my supply of chicken carcasses back up), and then a bag of whole wheat egg noodles. Once the noodles were about done, I added in another large handful of fresh parsley and dill, and pinchfuls of kosher salt to taste.

Within twenty minutes, I was curled up on my couch again, a bowl of soup in front of me, and Coming Home open.

The work I avoided was still there the next morning.

The Night Circus: An enchanting reading experience and a sudden urge to eat caramel corn

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, is a transporter of a book. The setting, a circus powered by magic that travels from one exotic location around the globe to the next, is artfully captured. It’s the story of two protagonists, Celia Bowen and Marco Alisdair. Both have been trained in the art of magic since a young age, and both are bonded to a competition by their mentors, to battle each other for magical supremacy. Their ring: the circus. The book takes you on their journey from humble beginnings; Celia is orphaned at a young age by a mother who declares that her innate magical skill comes from the devil, and Marco, ignorant of magic, is hand-selected from a London orphanage and learns his trade from esoteric books. The two go from strangers to competitors, and from competitors to lovers.

As interesting as these two are, and they are joined by multiple intriguing minor characters, once the setting of the circus is established, they seem to fade into the background. Le Cirque des Rêves (The Circus of Dreams) is built of large black and white striped tents that show up unannounced in one city after another around the globe. Each tent is unlike the other, one more magical than the next, because the attractions are a product on the magical competition being held between Celia and Marco. From her conjuring, a carousel of creatures becomes alive. He creates an ice garden that stretches as far as the eye can see. As you get further into the novel, the magic becomes even more imaginative.

The Night Circus has been given some flack for Morgenstern’s lack of character development (see reviews here and here from the NYTimes and NPR respectively), and these reviewers have a point. The forbidden, but not unexpected, romance that flares up between the two should drive the story, but the setting is so well-crafted that it takes on a life of its own and becomes the main character. Our heroes become accessories to the tale of the circus.

Now I’m not sure that this is completely unintentional. Dispersed throughout the book are chapters where the narrator switches perspective and starts to speak directly to the reader. Using “you” as the form of address, the narrator walks us through our entrance into the circus and into the dark and winding alleys that, no matter how long you are given, you will never be able to fully explore. You never meet any of the characters as you’re invited in, only the circus.

It was in those chapters, ones where the narrator consistently reminds you of the smells of chocolate and caramel corn that waft through the air, which created the craving for homemade caramel corn.

Night Circus Caramel Corn

Using a recipe from epicurius.com as a template, I created a bowl of chili-chocolate caramel corn that is both addictive and evocative of the atmosphere of The Night Circus. It’s a curious blend of sweet, salty and spice.

I used ¾ cup of white kernel popcorn and popped it in a hot-air popper. Given what is in this recipe, I didn’t use the hot-air popper to save on calories. This was much more about ease – it’s one less pan to clean.

Into that bowl, I added ¾ cup of salted cashews, the crumbled bits of six thick strips of bacon that I had cooked in the oven at 375° earlier, and one 6oz chili-spiced chocolate bar chopped into small pieces. I sprinkled this mixture with cayenne pepper and kosher salt to taste.

After a good mixing, I poured the ingredients onto a foil-lined cookie sheet that had been sprayed with a non-stick cooking spray. Next, I poured homemade caramel sauce, to which I added a generous splash of rye whiskey and the zest of half an orange, over the popcorn. After another through mixing, I put the tray into a 300° oven and cooked for approximately 20 minutes (I pulled it out once I could smell it from the next room).

The bacon added a rich smokiness that cut through the sweetness of the caramel, and the cashews gave the snack a satisfying bit of crunch. The orange peel, with its slightly bitter citrus, added a unique flavor, and the chili flavored chocolate provided an addictive punch of heat at the end of your bite.

This is an exotic dessert fitting for an exotic tale. I ate a bowlful with the book in one hand and an Old Fashion, mixed with the same orange and whiskey in the caramel sauce, at my side. They were perfect companions.

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