Breakfast

Maybe five or six (or seven) years ago my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, and I learned about the raw food diet. I was willing to try it out, and did so for approximately five days, if I remember correctly. A few years later, which was really only about three years ago, we were reminded of the raw food lifestyle by way of an article on CNN.com. After some back and forth, we decided that we'd try raw for a month. After our wedding. After our honeymoon, which was nine day cruise to the Caribbean. As you may be aware, cruises typically add on at least 25 or 30 pounds just because of the huge variety of food (I exaggerate - a bit), so of course, we couldn't start to be healthy just yet.

So anyway, we got married, went on our honeymoon, then came back and started the "30-day challenge". We kept an online food diary, mainly shared with family. I had evangelized the raw food diet to my mother when she was in town for our wedding, and she was dead set against even trying it. Then she secretly tried it as we were trying it.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) season is soon upon us again, and we cannot wait. We've been members of a local CSA for several years now, and finally this year we decided to just purchase the fruit share. Twice. We love fruit - that fruit from Hepworth Farms - so much that we decided to get twice as much.

In the meantime we rely on our local Greenmarket in Union Square. We bought so many apples a few weeks ago that we're overloaded. We do love apple crisp, though, and we've had it a couple of times already.

Since no work was permitted on the Sabbath, they prepared Saturday's meal in advance, assembling a stew, a cholent, with potatoes, barley, and sometimes a piece of meat. A sweet and savory pudding made from leftover bread simmered within the stew. Her mother removed the pot from the coal stove and covered it with brown paper, then tied it around several times with string. Sala wrote their name on the paper and carefully carried the large pot around the corner to Shimon the baker, who inserted it on a long paddle into the recesses of his giant oven. together with dozens of other pots from neighbors, each tied and identified, ready to be served hot for the next afternoon's meal.

-Sala's Gift by Ann Kirschner

Bread pudding is both good and weird at the same time. It tastes sweet and filling, yet I sit there thinking that it's a weird texture for bread - but yet again, it's not exactly bread anymore; then I think that it's a weird texture for pudding, but it's not exactly pudding either. It's almost like it is in this in between state of bread and pudding: not quite one or the other. A twilight zone of sorts.

One of our more frequent breakfasts is biscuits. I'm not a big one for biscuits and gravy, but I usually make some gravy for my husband. Me? I'm more of a biscuits and jam kind of girl.

The blind man had found a jar of batter in the refrigerator and was pressing waffles into shape between the hinged metal pans of a waffle iron. Luka could see the batter sizzling and darkening as it spilled over the circumference of the pan.

-The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

When I was growing up my favorite breakfast was buttermilk waffles with just butter. Syrup was sometimes applied, but I often felt it wasn't needed. Now my tastes have changed somewhat, and my husband prefers savory more than sweet breakfasts, so I rarely make myself waffles any longer. The Brief History of the Dead gave me a good excuse to have them this past weekend.

As you can see though, I wound up with pancakes instead.

They looked at each other now, husband and wife, with such a depth of feeling that the eight feet separating them shrank to nothing. Then, slowly, with a darkling gleam in her eye, Mrs. Marquis raised her plate above her head...and let it drop. A canvasback bone flopped free, the stewed apples few straight up, and the plate blew into a dozen pieces scattered across the red linen tablecloth.

-The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard

Edgar Allan Poe has always been one of my favorite poets. His poems, while dark and often morbid, have a certain draw to them. I guess I am not much for flowery poems - anyone can write that sort of thing - but Poe's poems are other-worldly and mysterious. So when I saw that there was a novel out there to be consumed that had Poe as one of its main characters, I had to grab it. I'm glad I did. This fiction of crime was written in a style that is more reminiscent of authors who wrote novels decades ago, and it had very unexpected twists. Poe was an interesting fixture; he seemed like one of those guys in high school or college that just doesn't fit in, but goes on to amaze people later in life. He was not the main character, however. That was left to an older, charming man (Gus Landor), who, sadly, probably never existed in real life. This murder mystery was an easy read, and hopefully we'll see Poe and/or Landor again. Good job, Mr. Bayard. I'm sure to read more of your novels.

I am still in the midst of reading The Shark God by Charles Montgomery, so I decided to share the results of this weekend's baking: vegan banana bread. This is a recipe that I make every couple of months or so, and have found it to be easy to make, delicious, and perfectly moist. For those of you who are vegan or who are trying to lay off of eggs, this is a great replacement for standard banana bread that uses eggs.

The van's doors were open, and several bags of contraband were heaped in the back, all taped up in clear plastic bags. A few of them had already been transferred to a waiting wheelbarrow. Tarquin was looking around furtively as another bear wearing faded Levi's and a BEARZONE T-shirt cut open a packet of the contraband and carefully drew out a spoonful. He sniffed it suspiciously, mixed it with milk and heated it over a lighter before adding some brown sugar and salt, then sipping the result.
"This is good," he said at last in a deep voice, making a few lip-smacky noises. "How much you got?"

-The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde

Reading Jasper Fforde's novels is like watching Monty Python or a Leslie Nielsen film (Naked Gun movies come to mind) - the comedy is cheesy and completely funny, but mostly the language and dialog are clearly representative of a writer who loves wordsmithing.