• Sourdoughs and SCOBYs

    My Sourdough Starters are on Five Continents

    November 25, 2024

    Every sourdough baker recalls who gave them their starter, or how they made their own. I have made it a practice to share My Three Starters (for those of you of a certain age, I apologize for putting the insipid jingle for My Three Sons in your head), though I sell them now, mostly so I am not inundated by too many requests.

    Now that one of my longest-running sourdough friends moved with her Cripple Creek starter from Germany to Australia, I can now say that sourdough starters I bake with are alive and leavening loafs on every continent except Antarctica.

    You’ll have to read Sourdough Culture: The History of Breadmaking from Ancient to Modern Bakers to learn whether sourdough cultures morph when they move to a new home. While you are reading, you will learn whether old sourdough cultures, like wines, improve with age.

    The sourdough map is constantly being updated and you can see who is baking with which starter on the live view of the sourdough map.

    Read More
  • Sourdoughs and SCOBYs

    Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies for Ice Cream Sandwiches

    November 20, 2024

    Unless you pay very close attention, you won’t taste the sourdough in the cookie. The long fermentation time, however, does cut the overall sweetness of the cookie, allowing the ice cream to shine. You won’t feel like you are about to get diabetes from eating this concoction. Nor will you have any difficulty finishing a whole ice cream sandwich.

    Ingredients

    • 200-210 g All Purpose Flour 
    • 200 g Brown sugar
    • 80 g Melted butter (6 TBS)
    • 1 Egg
    • 60 g Sourdough Starter – I use a whole wheat starter
    • 4 g Salt (1 tsp)
    • 4 g Baking Soda (½ tsp)
    • 2/3 Cup Mini Dark Chocolate Chips or to your liking!

    ICE CREAM:

    • Vanilla Ice Cream

    TOPPING:

    • Mini Dark Chocolate Chips

    Instructions

    1. In a small bowl, whisk 1 egg in a medium bowl.
    2. Melt butter until it becomes liquid (warm but not hot). Now add brown sugar, sourdough starter, salt, and butter to the medium bowl (with the egg).
    3. Mix ingredients together until combined.
    4. Now add flour, chocolate chips, and baking soda. Using the back of your spoon and/or your hands combine all ingredients until you form a ball.
    5. Place your dough covered in a small Tupperware or wrap it in saran wrap. Be sure the dough is tightly sealed so it doesn’t become dry on the outside.
    6. Ferment your dough (at room temperature) on your counter for 24 hours..
    7. Before baking, chill the dough for at least 30 minutes or it will be sticky and difficult to manage.
    8. When you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven to 350 f.
    9. Press 30 grams of cookie dough to fill a greased, smooth ring like an English muffin ring. A small mouth mason jar ring can work, but its ridges make the cookie difficult to extract.
    10. Without a ring the cookie will spread to more than double the diameter.
    11. Place on a baking sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes or until lightly browned on the sides. The centers will look soft.
    12. As soon as you can use a spatula to remove the cookies from the pan and ease them out of their rings. Allow to cool completely on a wire rack.
    13. Flip a cooled cookie over and place a scoop of ice cream on top. Use your scoop to gently spread the ice cream to the edges. Sandwich a cookie on top and gently press it all together.
    14. Optional: Roll sides into mini chocolate chips. Be quick during this process!
    15. Now place the ice cream sandwiches on a plate and place them in the freezer for 15 minutes (so it firms up a bit). And that’s it! Enjoy!
    16. If you’re not enjoying them right away, keep ice cream sandwiches on the plate in the freezer until it’s completely firm (this can be 2-3 hours or overnight) and then place them in a freezer bag or closed Tupperware

    NOTES: One recipe makes about 24 cookies or one dozen ice cream sandwiches. For other sourdough sweets and cookies see Jesha’s Sourdough.

    Read More
  • Africa,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Suspense

    In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy *** (of 4)

    November 20, 2024

    Investigative journalist Tom Klay works for a renowned globally recognized photo-journal called Sovereign but is really National Geographic. Even the building’s HQ is National Geographic’s down to the carpet, wall hangings, and tribal tchotchkes in the lobbies (the author once worked for NG). Klay, on assignment in Africa to track down ruthless elephant poachers barely escapes crossfire in the bush. A close colleague and a politician are not so lucky. Klay dedicates himself to tracking down the murderers.

    Tom Klay also works for the CIA, which you can learn from the jacket cover, but not from the author until you are nearly 100 pages into the book. Bryan Christie’s style is to introduce characters, conversations, and situations without explaining them until you have paid the price of reading in obscurity for a while. I suppose he does it to build tension, but it comes across as unnecessary and annoying.

    Tom Klay’s true nemesis turns out to be an international arms dealer, kabillionaire, and megalomaniac who is CEO of something called Perseus Group. Perseus Group sells arms to everyone, making profits from all sides of an arms race. The CIA’s relationship to Perseus Group, as well as its true intentions, are hidden behind mirrors, screens, clouds of smoke, and misinformation. The action hums along quickly enough to be engaging, but the book does not quite match the hype.

    Read More
  • America,  Book Reviews,  Europe,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION,  Polar

    The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides **** (of 4)

    November 4, 2024

    In 1776, Great Britain’s King George sent his Navy to put down a rebellion fomented by British colonists on the eastern shore of North America. Simultaneously, he sponsored Captain James Cook to explore the unknown west coast of North America. Great Britain was especially interested in the northern reaches of the continent, hoping Cook could locate the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada. For 300 years explorers had looked from the east. Why they thought a poke from the west would emerge in the Atlantic when no one had located an opening is one of those flaws in logic that comes with a 300-year quest.

    Cook was one of the most famous explorers of his era. He had already completed two global expeditions. His crewmen knew of his fame and kept detailed journals. His own notes were published. For more than two centuries, journalists and authors have chronicled Captain Cook’s life. Hampton Sides does the remarkable. He has read all the accounts and then written this book as if it were being reported in the newspapers. As readers, we live each day’s storms, make first contact with Polynesians, suffer the trials of monotonous food and freezing arctic temperatures, and the relief (if you’re a sailor) of landing on a tropical isle with luscious fruits and curvaceous females. Each event appears to happen in real time

    All the while, Sides overlays a 21st century perspective on the hazards and racism of colonization with the 18th century toughness needed to spend years at sea away from land, family, and home, instead living in tight quarters with the same handful of unwashed crewmen.

    Read More
  • African American Literature,  America,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  History

    Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead *** (of 4)

    November 4, 2024

    No one does a better job of capturing an era (early 1970s), a place (Harlem), or characters. New York City is on the verge of bankruptcy. Harlem and the South Bronx are in a perpetual state of fire as slumlords, in corrupt collaboration with city officials, set fire to apartments in order to collect inflated insurance policies.

    Ray Carney, a small time fence, and big time dealer of furniture–Can I interest you in this genuine leather Hathaway recliner?–comes out of retirement as a crook. He wants to please his daughter with tickets to the Jackson Five concert in Madison Square Garden. To access the hard-to-get ticket he exchanges favors with an old buddy with “connections.” His friends and acquaintances are people like Pepper, a quiet set of muscles who bangs heads for a living, and Zippo, a used-to-be firebug, burning things for joy, but today is a film school graduate, and Artiste making a Blaxploitation film. Chink Montague, Bumpy Johnson, and Notch Walker are Harlem mobsters fighting for control of city Harlem and the South Bronx. Black panthers and crooked cops strut the streets. Every character’s patter, eye twitch, and sidewalk shuffle is presented with perfect acumen. Don Graham, one of my all time favorite narrators, does the audiobook with brilliance.

    Whitehead’s description, I can tell you from having lived it, of 1970s New York City is so accurate that it feels like he is recording events with a monster sized VCR on his shoulder. His lovingly rendered accounts of 1970s oversized and overhyped furniture made me laugh aloud. Unlike his first book about Ray Carney, Harlem Shuffle, is a trilogy. The three parts of Crook Manifesto, give us an atmosphere that feels more real than life, but falters when a new story is told with only minimal relation to its companions.

    Read More
  • America,  Book Reviews,  Creative Non-Fiction,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION,  Politics

    I Hate it Here, Please Vote for Me by Matthew Ferrence *** (of 4)

    November 4, 2024

    Matt Ferrence, a colleague of mine, and professor of English at Allegheny College, perfectly captures what it feels like to be a liberal in the sea of conservative western Pennsylvania. Matt ran to be the democratic representative to Pennsylvania’s state legislature. Our district not only has twice as many registered Republicans as Democrats but is so hopelessly gerrymandered as to make many races–local all way up to our Congressman–uncontested. Democrats don’t even bother to run. Or, as was the case with Matt’s candidacy, are offered up as sacrificial lambs with little or no support from the Democratic party.

    On the political front, Matt does a bang-on job of explaining the self-fulfilling calculus of the Democratic party. Why invest political capital in races that democrats are sure to lose. Democratic failure to engage serves to reinforce rural America’s sense that it is not just fly-over country, but that working class, white American’s are forgotten and overlooked by coastal urbanites. Matt did his best to formulate a campaign that spoke to the needs of locals, but was trounced in the election.

    Matt is from this part of Pennsylvania, more precisely from coal country south of Pittsburgh, and describes in painful detail the conflict of feeling tied to this land and yet all the while being cast as an outsider. He is, after all, from two hours south, not really from here. He is, too, an academic, a liberal, and a believer in poetry. His series of essay puts to words, with great elegance, my own feelings of dislocation. His landmarks, physical and metaphorical, are places I know all too well.

    Read More
  • Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Memoir/Biography,  Prize Winner,  Speculative Fiction,  Uncategorized

    Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro *** (of 4)

    October 1, 2024

    Spooky. Kids in a residential British school called Hailsham are raised to be donors. Their days are filled with what you would expect: studying, confidential discussions among friends, bullies, first loves, rules and rule breaking, secrets after dark, favorite and despised teachers (called guardians), and the slow dawning of adulthood and the ensuing responsibilities.

    The world is seen through the eyes of Ruth and her two best friends Tommy and Kathy. Ruth recounts her memories from their earliest days in grade school through their adult years as full-fledged donors. We learn, as Ruth and her peers slowly learn, what it means to be a donor.

    I spent most of the book certain that the book was an allegory. Perhaps it was a story of how we are all trained by guardians to donate our lives to a Neo-economic system that saps our bodies as well as our souls. Or, maybe Never Let Me Go is an indictment of factory farmed animals. Or, just maybe, it is really just a very eery story about kids who don’t fit in with the rest of society and whose lives culminate in mandatory donations. Ishiguro is a Nobel prize winner in literature and his characters are perfectly rendered. His meanings, however, are by his own description, left to the reader.

    Read More
  • Asia,  Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  India/Pakistan/Afghanistan,  Uncategorized

    The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese **** (of 4)

    October 1, 2024

    In the fictional riverside town of Parambil, in Kerala, India, 12-year-old Big Ammachi is taken from her home at the beginning of the 20th century to marry a widower. The marriage goes well and Big Ammachi is a protagonist around whom many of the village’s 31 additional characters revolve. Big Ammachi lives into her 70s and through her we observe the integration of rural villagers into the development of modern Indian life.

    Additional stories include a century-long investigation into a mysterious genetic ailment that makes many male descendants of Big Ammachi’s clan fear water and suffer vertigo when their heads are submerged. There is a nearby leper colony whose inhabitants and doctors are fully lovable. A young female artist, Elsie, must fight sexism to practice her artistic gifts. A Scottish physician sent to work in Britain’s colony on the subcontinent serves as an intermediary between British exPats and Indians. The regional environment of canals, forests, tea plantations, rivers, and individual trees are also important characters.

    At times the 775-page book feels like it has no beginning, middle, or end. Though never tedious, it can be as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Still, Verghese, as he says in his afterword, has culled and retold the stories of his ancestors. He has done so in exquisite fashion.

    Read More
  • Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  FOUR STARS ****,  Judaism/Jewish Culture,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION

    Becoming Eve by Abby Chava Stein **** (of 4)

    September 14, 2024

    If ever there were an experiment, god forbid, that could demonstrate how we are born with inbred sexual identities and sexual predilections, this would be it. Abby Stein was born a boy into an ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Her fundamentalist sect of Judaism is so strict that all members are forbidden to access the internet and are barely taught the fundamentals English, learning Yiddish and Hebrew instead. Young boys are committed to a lifetime of Torah study. They attend Yeshivas (religious schools) 10 hours a day (or more) six days a week and learn no science or social studies and barely any of the other topics required by state curricula. They live the lives of their 18th century ancestors down to the clothes they wear, the language they speak, and the foods they eat, utterly and completely apart from mainstream America.

    And yet from the days of her earliest memories, without any knowledge that homosexuality even existed, no less such a phenomenon as transgenderism, Abby knew without question that she was a girl. She was raised as a boy, had a penis, eventually grew a beard, and fathered a child, and yet she always knew she was a girl. Becoming Eve is an extremely well told story of escaping fundamentalist Judiasm and a male body and the accompanying losses that come with such a transition. It also confronts the notion headon that any amount of grooming of young people might persuade someone to change their gender (take that Ron DeSantis and your fellow Book Banners), nor any degree of counseling could reverse someone’s sexual identity. If you were faced with years of counseling to the contrary, would you change your gender?

    Read More
  • Book Reviews,  Humor,  Judaism/Jewish Culture,  Memoir/Biography

    Feh: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander *** (of 4)

    September 14, 2024

    Feh, roughly translated from Yiddish, means yuck. It’s what you might say to yourself upon opening a tupperware container of leftovers that has sat on your counter unattended for two weeks. It is also how the author, Shalom Auslander, sees the world. Political divisions, internet conspiracy theories, twitter, climate change, systemic racism, indifference toward the homeless and dispossessed, Covid, and a news cycle of doom that spins every faster are all Feh. Everything about Auslander’s life is Feh. On the upside, Auslander is laugh-aloud funny. Intermittently, he is also a brilliant philosopher, literary critic, and analyst of religious dogmas. He drops pearls of wisdom so delicately they land gently upon felt cushions and simply lie there glowing. Then he has you laughing. There’s a rimshot for a well-timed joke every few pages. If only the package was not such a mountain of unrelenting depression.

    Read More