Food blogging: brainyfood.tumblr.com

Life blogging: mittenstrings.tumblr.com

Ingredients:

• 6 cups low sodium veggie broth
• 1 head of garlic, cloves peeled and crushed
• herbs to taste (I used oregano and thyme)
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 4 cups veggies (I used grated zucchini, chopped broccoli, and chopped celery)
• 2 eggs
• pepper

I brought the broth and garlic up to a boil together, added the olive oil and herbs, and let them roll — covered — for about half an hour.  The broth got super fragrant and lovely.  Then I added the veggies and let them simmer together uncovered for about 15 minutes.  At that point, take the soup off the heat.  In a small bowl, I beat together the two eggs with some freshly ground pepper.  I added a few ladles of the soup to the egg to temper it and beat that together, and then I added that to the soup (it clouds the broth and adds protein!).

It turned out really nicely and the best part is that I think all the garlic totally knocked out my cold.  Hurray!

push by sapphire

Indeed, I still haven’t seen Precious.  But this morning, in less than three hours, I devoured Push by Sapphire, the novel that the film is based on.

And yeah, I get why this is such a powerful phenomenon now.

What a remarkable novel.  It’s the kind of novel that takes you into the depths of human suffering and misery — pushing you into places you aren’t sure you are capable of survive — while simultaneously reminding you of the joy and power and potential of human beings.  “Push” is literally the command the wise teacher gives protagonist Precious: when you’re too tired to write, when you’re too sad to read, when you’re too downtrodden to work, you much push through, push past, and push forward.  “Push” moves from being what Precious hears as she labours through the birth of her father’s children to being the mantra that helps her believe in a better possible life.

Sapphire’s characterization of Precious is so full and life-like, and the pace of the novel is almost breathless.  I understand all the concerns that have been raised about the use of dialect in the novel, but for me it helped to make Precious real and her own person, rather than a construction — it made her life real, both the horrors and the triumphs.  The novel is painful to read in parts, but it’s also gloriously uplifting.  The journey Precious takes is tragic, but it’s also incredibly brave.  Her strength and her ability to seek help make her singularly fascinating.  You can’t help but cheer for Precious.

the queen's fool

I’ve noticed this in a few of Gregory’s novels — this sort of subtle (and in this novel, not-so-subtle) rewriting of the heroic, strong Elizabeth I into some kind of common whore caricature of society’s worst fears of a woman in charge.  I wish I knew why Gregory insists on doing this.  At first I thought she was trying to balance the historical record somewhat in order to reverse some of the demonization of Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart.  In this goal, Gregory succeeds — the Marys are always sympathetic characters in her books, pushed aside, abused, and maligned by Elizabeth I, who always comes across as cut from her father’s cloth.  In the end, I think Gregory’s dislike of both Harry Tudor and Anne Boleyn lead to her construction of Elizabeth I.  There’s no redemption possible for Elizabeth given her lineage — she is destined to be as evil as her parents, at least in Gregory’s novels.

On the one hand, I understand — the Marys are historically maligned (not wholly without cause), and there is a level at which I admire Gregory’s desire to resurrect them.  I’m not sure why that has to happen at the cost of Elizabeth, however.  Instead of doing something complicated and interesting that demonstrates the power of the patriarchy, Gregory falls into her own saint/whore dichotomy in her construction of these women.  Elizabeth plays for power, certainly, but does she do so for any other reason than her own limited options within the sphere of her birth?  And is Mary’s devotion to fail!husband Philip really something honourable?

The protagonist of this story is neither of these women; this time, Gregory writes not from the perspective of a Royal but a commoner, Hannah Verde, a Jewish immigrant from Spain who lost her mother in the Inquisition and now lives in England as Christian Hannah Green.  Hannah can read and write, and also possesses the gift of second sight.  She is begged to the court as a Holy Fool — while betrothed to the frankly insufferable Daniel (d’Israeli) Carpenter — and such begins her life of intrigue.  Hannah comes of age in the world of the court, unable to decide whether she wants to live as a courtly woman, pass for a man and lead an independent life, or dissolve into the bounds of wifely duty.

This is one of Gregory’s slowest novels, and I had a hard time getting through it.  I ultimately wasn’t that interested in Hannah and was turned off by the construction of Elizabeth as a literal whore.  I think this isn’t one of Gregory’s stronger novels — I’m looking forward instead to reading her new book about the Plantagenets.  I think she’s done all she can do with the Tudors and it just isn’t interesting anymore.

I wanted a new muffin recipe to try — I’ve done apple and banana fairly recently, so I thought it was time to try a blueberry recipe.  I also needed it to use buttermilk because, well, I have buttermilk and that stuff needs to be used up pronto.  I found this recipe and made a few tweaks.  They turned out to be delicious.  But I think next time I would use frozen blueberries rolled in flour.  I used fresh blueberries and they are freaking gigantic, so the berry-to-muffin ratio is a little off.  Although you do get these awesome pockets of blueberry jam-like bursts.  Freaking great.

• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup flour
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon soda
  
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
  
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1 cup blueberries

Grease muffin tins and preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Combine oats and buttermilk.  Set aside.

Mix together dry ingredients.  Set aside.

Add vanilla, egg, and oil to the oats/buttermilk combo.

Fold in the dry ingredients.

Fold in the blueberries.

Bake for about 12-15 minutes.  Yield is approximately one dozen muffins.

Interesting.

I finished reading New Moon yesterday.  For those blissfully unaware, New Moon is the second installment of the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, a woman who cannot write her way out of a brown paper bag.  Horrible writing.

I read New Moon because I work in pop culture, and I don’t like to let a phenomenon pass me by without some awareness of what is going on.  As a scholar, I’m primarily interested in what people are reading or watching and why they like it.  I read Twilight and got extremely, extremely angry, but I thought I couldn’t get more angry, so I read New Moon too.  But it turned out I can get more angry!

how to identify a terrible novel

Okay, here’s the thing.  Shitty books don’t piss me off, generally.  Everyone likes different things and I’m totally happy to enjoy books of all types and all levels.  Not everything is great literature or even literature, and I sure do read my share of cheesy fiction.  But here’s the deal: Dan Brown is a terrible writer who can serve up a fun plot; the Shopoholic books are poorly written but funny and sweet; Harry Potter is pappy kidlit that is actually doing something interesting with mythology and writing.

And then there’s Twilight.  The plots are slow, boring, and predictable.  The characters are weak, flat, and incapable of growth.  The prose is muddy and lethargic.  The vocabulary is childlike (and she must use the word “loping” 9000 times).  The descriptions are ineffective and bland.  The relationships are ill-conceived and dull.

In short, this is a series with no redeeming features.

And normally, I’d even be okay with that.  I’d be confused by what readers get out of it, but I wouldn’t hate it the way I hate this.  My problem with Twilight is much deeper: I think it’s fucking dangerous.

Meyer’s perceptions of gender and romantic relationships are deeply, deeply disturbed.  Bella seeks out abusive relationships.  Edward is controlling, cruel, and paternalistic; he laughs at Bella’s worries, mocks her wishes, and puts her in harms way.  And I watch young girls — and young women as old as my freshman/sophomore students — swoon for this bullshit.  I’m disturbed by the constructions of men in this novel (if one isn’t dangerous, one isn’t masculine; violence and cruelty are markers of masculinity in the novel).  The nice, normal, age-appropriate potential relationship in the novel, Mike Newton, is such a non-starter for Bella.  Kindness, decency, and consideration in a romantic partner are all essentially scoffed at in the context of the novel.  Only darkness is romantic.  Only pain is desirable.  Only violence indicates love.

That, my friends, is fucked.

So that’s why I shudder when I overhear my students describing a boy as “such an Edward” or aspire to a romance like Bella experiences.  It’s so disturbed, and more frightening to me are the adults who buy into this shit.  Because I get why a 14-year-old is attracted to this story, but when you read about women leaving their husbands and kids to find their own Edward, you have to wonder what the hell has happened to people.  Because there’s nothing worth striving for in Twilight.  This world is disturbed.

roasted peppers, caramelized onions, and feta

The job market sucks and I am full of fail.  Didja know?  Anyway, I’ve made a pact for the rest of the week to only do things I am awesome at.  So I’ve been in the kitchen a lot, and also in the bath with a book a lot.  And at the gym a lot.  But mostly, I’ve been in the kitchen a lot.  And I made pizza from scratch yesterday.

If the idea of making your own pizza crust intimidates you, don’t let it.  It’s honestly super easy.  People get all wound up about working with yeast, but there’s no great secret to it — feed it some sugar, have a warm place for it to rise, and be patient.  It’s fun and it feels like a hell of an accomplishment when you make it work.  Also, it impresses people who are themselves scared of working with yeast.

I use Jamie Oliver’s pizza crust recipe because it never lets me down.  He’s been kind enough to post it on-line, but it’s also in Jamie at Home if you have it.  I halve the recipe for starters, and from the halved recipe I freeze half (after raising!) and still have enough for two thin-crust pizzas.  Like… It’s a lot of pizza dough.  A lot.  Halve the recipe.

fancy ham, red onions, and tomatoes

For toppings last night, we had two different pizzas (giving enough for one normal person and one road cyclist, and two lunches for the next day).  The first was roasted red peppers, caramelized onions, and feta cheese.  (To caramelize onions in a hurry, chop an onion, pop it in a pan with some olive oil, and as it cooks add some balsamic vinegar.  Cook until the vinegar is cooked off.)  The second was prosciutto, fresh tomato, and red onion, with a mix of Italian cheese (parmesan, asiago, romano).  Also delicious.  I rolled the crusts out super thin and baked them for five minutes at 350 before adding the toppings; this ensures a crispy, never soggy crust.  Just wonderful and fresh — one of my favourite dinners by far!

Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes is a masterful epic in the truest sense of the world.  The scope of this novel is incredible; it takes the reader from a small village in Africa to London, England by way of South Carolina, New York, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.  The protagonist of the novel is Aminata, a woman who experiences in her life the joys of absolute freedom and the shackles of abject slavery, and every step in between.  There are about a million blog posts out there about the majesty of this novel, so I won’t spend an eternity on its beauty and its polish, but suffice it to say that every celebratory thing you have heard about The Book of Negroes (or, in America and Australia, Someone Knows My Name) is absolutely true.  This novel is stunning in every sense of the word.

the book of negroes

I think what caught my breath in my throat the most in this novel is the banality or even the “well-meaning” (in very very very very heavy quotation marks, I caution) nature of evil.  There are the objectively evil characters in this novel, of course — the cruel slave-traders and -owners who see Aminata and her compatriots not as people but as chattel or possessions.  Those people are rightly villanized, and they disgust us as readers.  But other characters — those who seem to understand the horror of the trade but participate anyway because they feel powerless against it, or those who believe themselves to be better than average slave owners because they recognize Aminata’s humanity (yet still possess her flesh) — are the truly terrifying, because they demonstrate just how much damage is done through assumptions.  A woman like Aminata is done the most disservice by people who make assumptions about what is best for her, what she ought to want, what they “know” to be true.  Hill does a brilliantly subtle job of underscoring the process of detraction through assumption in multiple ways; notably, no white character ever meets Aminata without exclaiming over how well she is able to speak and how articulate she is.  As I would ask my ENGL 1103 students, “What’s the underlying assumption here?  What has this person just told us they believe without saying much at all?”

The other beautiful thing about this novel is that Hill has constructed a tragedy without pity.  The tragic characters all have such full, well-developed selves that we waste no time pitying them; we want them to achieve their goals and live out their dreams.  Hill makes every character real, sometimes heartbreakingly so, and sometimes bone-chillingly so.  The characters — especially this perfect example of an engaging protagonist in Aminata — are what fuel the entire novel.  They are achingly honest and beautiful.

If you haven’t read this yet, you must.  And here’s an interesting piece on why the book has two titles.