Novel Eats

Easily the best vegan cinnamon rolls recipe out there. Gooey, fluffy, perfect. Learn how to make these NOW.

I love it when I see a new Daring Bakers challenge that allows for easy veganizing and gives me a chance to try something truly new. This month’s challenge was all about the phyllo dough – you know, that paper-thin (or thinner than paper-thin) stuff you buy in boxes in the frozen foods aisle at your local grocery store. As with pretty much most challenges, we had to make the dough. The other stuff, the filling, was a piece of cake.

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.

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.