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hello again
Apr. 17th, 2015 04:10 pmThis week, I have been mostly reading and cooking. This will come as no surprise to anyone.
Reading: I've been speeding through Arnaldur Indriðason's mystery series featuring Reykjavik police inspector Erlendur and his colleagues. They're good books, if rather gloomy, though occasionally Erlender's endless clinging-to-his-own-trauma gets on my nerves. The one I just finished, Outrage, switches protagonists to Erlender's colleague Elínborg, whose pragmatic and less self-absorbed viewpoint was something of a relief.
I think I'd call them crime novels rather than mystery novels, as they're often more interested in the impact and aftermath of crime, or the causes of crime, as they are in whodunnit. This is something I like, and the look into Icelandic culture is intriguing to me as someone who knows nothing about it.
The most recent book to be translated into English, Strange Shores (which was the one I read first because I picked it up randomly off the new books display at the library), ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I'm hoping the sequels make it into English soon.
There's something I'm interested in talking about if anybody has read these (here follows discussion of a minor character, cut for length, nothing plot spoilery) ( read more )
I've also been reading Paul Strohm's Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, I think out of nostalgia for academia. It's not actually a scholarly book in the sense of being aimed at specialists, more the sort of thing you'd assign to bright undergraduates (in the US--I'm given to understand that UK undergraduates read real scholarship) to give them some context for Chaucer, but it still recalls the good old days--yes, I really think of them that way--when I was working on my Ph.D.
More relevant to my current interests, I picked up a copy of Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity for just $3, thanks to a sale at work, and can't wait to read it.
Cooking: I've been cooking some of the recipes in Ottolenghi and Tamimi's Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Nothing fancy, just a few of the vegetable dishes, but I'm enjoying them very much. I have made my own hummus! Which turned out to be easy and delicious, and I will never buy hummus again. I've also tried roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini, and roasted cauliflower (the recipe calls for it to be fried, but I didn't want to) also with tahini, and a variation on the pita-and-vegetable salad fattoush that has cucumber, tomato, radish, and pita in a gorgeous creamy yogurt dressing with lemon. This last is my new favorite thing; I diverge slightly from the recipe by toasting the pita until it's very crisp.
I always thought I didn't like salads, but what I'm realizing is that I actually don't like lettuce. Salads that are full of other vegetables, I like enormously and will gobble down like a hungry salad-eating wolf.
I'm eager to try some of Jerusalem's meat recipes, especially the one for freekeh and meatball soup and the one for meatballs with fava beans, but I need to buy some lamb for those and I should probably wait for it to go on sale.
In baking, I've been attempting to make foccaccia using Ken Forkish's recipe from Flour Water Salt Yeast, but my results have been . . . odd. It's not an easy dough to work with, and seems to want to rise too much or too little or both. I'm beginning to fear that Forkish's recipes, which I like because of how precise they are, may in fact be a little too precisely calibrated, so that they can be hard to adapt if, say, your kitchen is cooler than Forkish's optimum temperature, as mine currently is.
And lest you think I have been converted entirely to salads, let me note that last night I baked Golly Polly's Doodles, a delicious peanut butter-filled chocolate cookie with a silly name. These are a bit labor intensive because of the hand shaping but not difficult, and I felt accomplished at having made a filled cookie, almost like a Real Baker.
So, how are all of you? Please do point me at stuff you posted or saw that I may have missed!
Reading: I've been speeding through Arnaldur Indriðason's mystery series featuring Reykjavik police inspector Erlendur and his colleagues. They're good books, if rather gloomy, though occasionally Erlender's endless clinging-to-his-own-trauma gets on my nerves. The one I just finished, Outrage, switches protagonists to Erlender's colleague Elínborg, whose pragmatic and less self-absorbed viewpoint was something of a relief.
I think I'd call them crime novels rather than mystery novels, as they're often more interested in the impact and aftermath of crime, or the causes of crime, as they are in whodunnit. This is something I like, and the look into Icelandic culture is intriguing to me as someone who knows nothing about it.
The most recent book to be translated into English, Strange Shores (which was the one I read first because I picked it up randomly off the new books display at the library), ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I'm hoping the sequels make it into English soon.
There's something I'm interested in talking about if anybody has read these (here follows discussion of a minor character, cut for length, nothing plot spoilery) ( read more )
I've also been reading Paul Strohm's Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, I think out of nostalgia for academia. It's not actually a scholarly book in the sense of being aimed at specialists, more the sort of thing you'd assign to bright undergraduates (in the US--I'm given to understand that UK undergraduates read real scholarship) to give them some context for Chaucer, but it still recalls the good old days--yes, I really think of them that way--when I was working on my Ph.D.
More relevant to my current interests, I picked up a copy of Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity for just $3, thanks to a sale at work, and can't wait to read it.
Cooking: I've been cooking some of the recipes in Ottolenghi and Tamimi's Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Nothing fancy, just a few of the vegetable dishes, but I'm enjoying them very much. I have made my own hummus! Which turned out to be easy and delicious, and I will never buy hummus again. I've also tried roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini, and roasted cauliflower (the recipe calls for it to be fried, but I didn't want to) also with tahini, and a variation on the pita-and-vegetable salad fattoush that has cucumber, tomato, radish, and pita in a gorgeous creamy yogurt dressing with lemon. This last is my new favorite thing; I diverge slightly from the recipe by toasting the pita until it's very crisp.
I always thought I didn't like salads, but what I'm realizing is that I actually don't like lettuce. Salads that are full of other vegetables, I like enormously and will gobble down like a hungry salad-eating wolf.
I'm eager to try some of Jerusalem's meat recipes, especially the one for freekeh and meatball soup and the one for meatballs with fava beans, but I need to buy some lamb for those and I should probably wait for it to go on sale.
In baking, I've been attempting to make foccaccia using Ken Forkish's recipe from Flour Water Salt Yeast, but my results have been . . . odd. It's not an easy dough to work with, and seems to want to rise too much or too little or both. I'm beginning to fear that Forkish's recipes, which I like because of how precise they are, may in fact be a little too precisely calibrated, so that they can be hard to adapt if, say, your kitchen is cooler than Forkish's optimum temperature, as mine currently is.
And lest you think I have been converted entirely to salads, let me note that last night I baked Golly Polly's Doodles, a delicious peanut butter-filled chocolate cookie with a silly name. These are a bit labor intensive because of the hand shaping but not difficult, and I felt accomplished at having made a filled cookie, almost like a Real Baker.
So, how are all of you? Please do point me at stuff you posted or saw that I may have missed!
