From-the-Editors-Desk

The Great Memorial Weekend Read: A Partial Report
May 30, 2010

This letter, unlike most, is being written in spurts. Friday afternoon, Saturday, morning, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday afternoon. After all the weekend is a long one, it’s a specially planned one, and it’s been a blast. I actually started it last Monday by using my weekday evenings for the preparation necessary to a fully self-indulgent weekend. So when Friday night arrived I was ready with the food and the books.

I am crazy about gazpacho. I’ll eat anyone’s recipe at any time. However, I have a particular fondness for my own which, I will admit, is not a true gazpacho because it does not contain stale break. I also blend all the ingredients whereas most don’t. But it’s the perfect summer soup, full of fresh garden goodness. I would live on this soup if I could. It’s my own recipe, having been altered beyond recognition from an award-winning recipe I found about twenty years ago. For years, I wouldn’t share it. Then I gave it to my mother. Now I am willing to share with whoever is interested.

Gazpacho
2 bottles of either Trader Joe’s Vegetable Juice or 2 46-oz. cans of V-8
2 teaspoons each salt and sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
2 tablespoon dark fruity olive oil
2 large cloves of garlic
2 pounds of tomatoes, cored and quartered
2 Anaheim chilis, seeded and chopped (ripened to red if possible)
2 yellow chilis, seeded and chopped (ripened to red if possible)
1 cup seeded, skinned, chopped cucumber
3/4 cup chopped green onions
2 ribs chopped celery
2 chopped green onions (both green and white parts)
3/4 cup chopped red bell pepper
1/2 cup chopped yellow or orange bell pepper
1 cup chopped carrots
2 ripe Haas avocados
1/4 cup chopped parsley leaves
1/2 cup firmly packed fresh dill
10-15 large basil leaves

Combine all ingredients. Whirl in batches in blender until well blended; there  will be and should be some coarseness. Chill for at least four hours, preferably overnight. Serve in chilled bowls or cups and sprinkle each with fresh ground pepper. (For a spicy version, add one un-seeded jalapeno or habañero chili.)li.)

Note: I tend to cook with flair, in other words, I don’t always follow the recipe especially after the initial try. This weekend’s gazpacho was made that way. I had the recipe on the computer but had forgotten to print it out. So I made it from memory (helped by the vegetables and herbs I had purchased). I know I used two bottles of vegetable juice, three avocados, most of the carrots, several large tomatoes, and the other ingredients in a “this looks right” amount. Doing it this way can be a little risky since it’s been at least nine months since I last made it, but it turned out perfectly. So know that you don’t have to stick to the exact amounts noted above.

Also: I do not skin my peppers or tomatoes. This means that you will have small bits of the “skin” in your soup. I love it, but if this bothers you then skin them prior to throwing them in the mixture.

Dinner proved to be bigger than I expected: the steak was small but the salad was huge and that combined with the gazpacho  had me staring at the ear of corn with a glazed expression. I managed to eat half but that was it. I was done. I took my book and moved the five feet from the patio table to a comfortable chair where I was able to indulge myself in my first book, Two for the Road. It’s a charming book with all the buoyancy you’d expect from interesting writers with a lightweight subject. But it has moments of tenderness as when they visited Havana, North Dakota to visit a café they had read about nine years earlier in an obscure publication. The café had opened in 1913 when Havana’s population was a thriving community of 450. By 1984, the family farmers who had supported it were becoming scarce and it closed. But the town’s citizens felt they had lost their one place to meet and share their lives. So they got together, put in labor and recipes and money, and re-opened it. When the authors, having made a special trip just to eat breakfast there stepped inside they found more than good food. They found new friends.

“Welcome!” called out a big pink man wearing a red apron and tending pancakes at the grill behind the counter with two spatulas, one in each hand.

A woman sitting at a table with two gents in soft, worn overalls stood up and came to the door. without a word she swept a hand toward her table, beckoning us to site down and join her threesome. As we followed her, conversations at the other tables started up again, slow and quiet. It seemed to us that everyone else in the room wanted to eavesdrop and hear what we had to say for ourselves.

Those friends were still there when in 1996 they returned for another visit.

The townsfolk all knew we would be leaving that morning so they gathered a bunch of the tables, together, enabling a large group of us to eat caramel rolls and drink coffee together. “This is what I call a gravy and potato café,” declared Harvey Peterson, whose wife, Gloria, was known for the raisin sauce she made for ham. . . .  He recalled how empty the town had seemed when the Favana Café closed. “Now look at what we haven” he said with a measure of pride, gesturing to a dining room crowded with Havanans, including oldsters bragging to each other about grandkids’ school scholarships and baseball hitting averages, young families marshaling their members for a nearby T-ball tournament, and working farmers engaged in an incredibly prcise discussion about the spring wheat they raise—“the best, the highest, protein”—verses white wheat, winter wheat, and soft red wheat.

“The Farmers’ Inn holds our community together,” Mr. Peterson concluded.

It’s not a book I’ll read a second time but moments like those above make me happy I am reading it now.

Saturday morning brought an unexpected thrill of a discovery at breakfast. I made Çilbir, a dish of poached eggs on a bed of garlic-flavored yogurt, for the first time. It sounded weird but the author promised it would be “surprisingly delicious.” And it was! It’s also easy, which means it is likely to become my choice for future weekend breakfasts.

Çilbir
2 1/4 cups thick, plain yogurt
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2-3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
4 extra-large eggs
1-2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon Turkish red pepper or paprika
A few dried sage leaves, crumbled
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Beat the yogurt with the crushed garlic. Spoon onto plates, spreading it in neat circle to create a thick mattress for the eggs. Serve at room temperature as a contrast to the hot eggs. (Alternatively, heat it by placing the dish in a cooling oven, or by sitting it in a covered pan of hot water.)

Fill a pan with water, add the vinegar to seal the egg whites, and bring to a rolling boil. Stir the water with a spoon to create a whirlpool and crack the first egg. As the egg spins and the white sets around the yolk, stir the water for the next one. Poach each egg for 2-3 minutes so the yolk is still soft.

Lift the eggs out of the water with a slotted spoon and place them on the yogurt.

Quickly melt the butter in a small pan. Stir in the red pepper or paprika and sage leaves, then spoon over the eggs. Serve immediately.

Note: I also added a bit of ground sage but left out the salt and pepper. Since I was cooking for one, I used one large egg, cut the rest of the ingredients to half or less the called-for amounts, and felt fully satisfied.

Saturday night’s dinner, and the friends who will shortly join me for it, have and will take up more time than I originally thought. Though I had done an extensive amount of preparatory work I spent more time in the kitchen this afternoon than I had planned, thus losing a couple of hours of reading time. I am still on Red Highways, and given that the wine will likely start flowing soon I anticipate that it will be tomorrow morning before I get back to the book.

I was right.

I finished my first book by mid-morning Saturday, then set to work preparing the chicken tikka’s marinade and the new salad greens. Then, great anticipation, I picked up my second choice of the weekend: Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland. It was a bit disheartening realizing how far behind my hopeful reading list I am at this time—since I am writing this in batches as the weekend progresses—but choosing books for a special weekend is, I realize like piling my brunch plate too high because my eyes are “bigger than my stomach.” It just happens. I’ll read what I can read and save the rest for another time. A literary doggie bag, as it were.

As of now, late Sunday afternoon, and despite the distraction of the Sunday New York Times I am nearly finished with Red Highways. It’s proving to be a particularly engaging read since I have come to believe that the extremes on both political ends do more damage to the country than anything else. The trend toward extremism and societal viciousness and humor based on hate and hurt is distressing. Sometimes it’s so bad I just check out of it. And I know I am not the only one.

I don’t know how I found out about this book, but I know it had been on my To Buy list for a while when I ran across it at the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I considered it an auspicious encounter then and also when I found it tucked above a row of books while looking for this weekend’s reads. It turned out I was right.

Rose Aguilar is a journalist and political blogger who also hosts a show on an NPR-affiliate station, and offers political commentary for the BBC. Her admittedly liberal leanings (she’s from San Francisco, the bastion of political activity and near-rabid liberalism) didn’t change much, but her six-month road trip, which resulted in this book, came out of a private party at which her views were challenged by four older conservative men. Despite the alcohol-fueled arguments that ensued, one man asked to be added to her e-mail news list, noting that he respect[ed] you because you give a damn.”

That request led her to realize that her political and social circle was a relatively small and closed one. So after the 2004 election, which John Kerry lost, she began to realize that “it was time to leave my comfort zone. I needed to turn off my computer and get out into the streets to find out why people vote the way they do and if we’re as divided as we’re led to believe. . . . to engage in real conversations, hopefully respectful conversations.” So they set out to visit places far from their circle: Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, and Montana.

What follows is one of the best books I have read on the real country. Not those of politicians, or of religious leaders, or of Washington DC pundits, or of corporate media. Instead, they find what many of us who tire of the official stories or the extreme ones would like to think exist: people with whom we may disagree but many of those who come to their beliefs in good faith and with thought, those who are open to being challenged (politely) and who care, deeply care about choices they see being made without any regard to them or their lives. It’s not all roses, and there are hard feelings and hypocrisy  but the number of people who think and talk and consider regardless of their views dominate the book. Aguilar’s style is to get people to talk (she is a journalist, after all), but for this book the conversation is two-way. It is an intimate, almost affectionate portrayal of the true heart of American citizenship—and it feels more real than just about any other political book I’ve ever read.

Its honesty stimulated more than my mind, it also stimulated my appetite so as I finish this issue off to indulge in my Sunday night dinner of cold chicken, grilled portobellos, gazpacho, salad, and ice cream (it’s hot here!), I will leave you with this thought: Good reading does more than entertain, though it should certainly do that. Good reading should also confront our comfort zones, stimulate our thoughts, perhaps create a slightly different person. This weekend, which is still not over, is doing that. I won’t get to all my books any more than I am eating everything I had planned. But that matters much less than does the fact that I am enjoying my books and my meals and that they giving me a damn fine inaugural Great Memorial Weekend Read.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
Unfortunately, there are no book fairs coming up this weekend.

The Pub House:
Quarry Press is one of the imprints of the Quayside Publishing Group, and it focuses on  practical general reference books in  for enthusiast in Home & Style, Cooking, Crafts & Hobbies, and Pets. Among their books are these are particularly caught my eye: Sandwiches, Panini, and Wraps because new ideas for lunch and picnics are always welcome; Designer Faux Finishing because what bibliophile can resist a description that includes a way to “transform their homes into leather-worn libraries, ancient grottos, or French streetscapes”; and More Making Books by Hand because making miniature books of your own can be such fun.

Imaging Books & Reading:
Ireland’s Solis Lough Eske Castle was first built around 1474. The current one was constructed in the 1860s but destroyed by fire in 1939. It was then renovated and now is a fabulous vacation and event place. And on its grounds stands this wonderful sculpture: Woman Reading. It’s enough to warm any Gaelic bibliophile’s heart.

Of Interest:
Duke University Library has a superb online exhibition: “Conscience of a Nation: John Hope Franklin on African-American History.” Even though it opened in January it is still available in its entirety online. The exhibit focuses on four periods that Duke University deems “crucial to understanding the history of African Americans in the United States,” using historical documentation from its collection of the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library. Among these are letters, broadsides, bills of sale, illustrations and images, narratives, reports, and more.

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren

 


 

 
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