China Study Cookbook Recipe #1

Veggie Fajita Wraps -- Great!  

I used a little extra virgin olive oil to start off with, then added the broth--I think the health benefits of extra virgin olive oil are worth a little added fat.  I also subbed squash for the broccoli and totally missed the part where you are supposed to create the wrap with lettuce, tomatoes, salsa and avocado.  I just used a little vegan ranch dressing.

Whatever, they were great!  I'm still cherishing the leftovers.



:-(   I just realized that most grocery store tortillas and wraps have hydrogenated vegetable oil in them.  I feel violated.

And what the heck is interesterified fat?  New one for me--it's where they take vegetable oils and apply catalysts or lipase enzymes to rearrange the fatty acids such that the linoleic fatty acids at the sn-2 position are replaced with a saturated fatty acid.  Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid; an omega-6 which is not necessarily good for you, but still required by the body in small quantities.  So what they're doing is to remove an essential fatty acid, replace it with a saturated fatty acid, and make the vegetable fat look like a a laboratory engineered animal fat.   This is an oversimplification--for full details you can look it up yourself.

Studies on the health benefits of interesterified fat seem to come out either neutral or slightly positive--but who cares?  Why is there any saturated fat in my tortilla?

And if I wanted to eat man-made chemicals I'd eat a bowl of Special K cereal!

Rant and review

What kind of inconsiderate idiot dog ears pages in a library book?   A lot of pages.  And leaves them turned down!
 Hanging is too good for them.

But now, on the the review.

Isn't it funny how some authors can be excessively wordy but you still want more?  Diane Setterfield is the Lay's potato chip of authors.  I recently "read" George Eliot's classic, Middlemarch, which is 904 pages in paperback.  ("read" = listened to the audiobook)  At a rate of one hour per day, Middlemarch took six weeks, but after a few days I'd become so engrossed that I didn't want it to ever end.  But it did, and I was glad--

Because my next audiobook was The Thirteenth Tale by Dianne Setterfield.  I was engrossed from the first page, and it just kept getting better.  Madness, mystery, literature, love, obsession, ghosts.... 

Ghosts?  Can cats see ghosts? 

Undetermined.

Can't do it

I'm going to do something uncharacteristic and embarrassing.  I'm going to give up on a book.

The Death Of Adam:  Essays On Modern Thought by Marilynne Robinson




I can't read it.  No doubt it's erudite, coherent and mind-expanding to some readers--but not to me.  I guess I'm too stupid.  If I read it out loud and stopped at every other paragraph to look up a word in the dictionary, I might be able to follow her arguments.  I pride myself on having a decently large vocabulary, but, "tendentiousness"?  "asserted advantage"?  "hermetic"?  "which were occasioned by the promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility"?

I give up.  I can follow Stephen Jay Gould, with difficulty, but I always find him worth the work.  I'm not so sure about this.  I couldn't even read the introduction, which is 27 pages long and doesn't tell you squat about what the book is about.  Then I tried a few of the more interesting looking essays, but even the last one, which appeared to be about global warming, didn't seem to say anything deep or insightful.
So I give up.  Undoubtedly it's me.  Or as she would say,
  "...indubitably, the fault engendered by lack of understand in in the mirror of the inscrutable reader."

I don't have much to say about

         

                                   Godless by Pete Hautman



It was an unusual story and well written, but most of the characters were kind of flat.  Or maybe the right word is compressed...flattened...hemispherical.  Missing the why.

The story showed nicely how some people can sort-of believe in something even when they know it's nutters .  Other people, slightly unbalanced already, go nutters over it--some with absolute belief, others with absolute rejection (because it conflicts their own nutty beliefs.)   It's the rare but sensible soul who recognizes the nuttiness inherent in a belief in things that cannot be seen, heard, felt, or subjected to scientific experimentation.  But hey--that's my own belief..

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

I had gotten the impression that this book was a crossover between Captain Horatio Hornblower and Eragon, but I was wrong.   It's Captain Horatio Hornblower x How To Train Your Dragon.

As a teenager I used to read and re-read the Horatio Hornblower novels constantly, so I was pleased with the similarities.  And the historical accuracy--assuming that C.S. Forester did his research well, Ms. Campbell did, too. Whole sections might have been borrowed directly from the earlier Hornblower novels, only in a tactful way that wouldn't compromise copyright protection.   In one case I thought I'd caught her putting a quote in the wrong mouth: 
[Regarding Bonaparte invading England]
                  "I don't say they cannot come, but they cannot come by sea."

But when I went back and looked it up, she'd attributed it to Lord St. Vincent, which is probably correct.
The Wikipedia article on C.S. Forester says that he deliberately kept Captain Hornblower away from major naval battles in order to "avoid entanglements with real world history."   I'm not sure how true that is, but there's no such reticence in His Majesty's Dragon.  Captain Laurence and Temeraire are right in the front lines.   Battling--cannon balls, muskets, talons and all.

Q: is it talons or claws?

Food of the week

Kale!



I made braised Kale with onions, tamari and Mirin, from the Cookus Interruptus website.





Starting with Kale on counter

 

I proceeded to Kale in bowl

In pan







On floor


















And finally, (slightly overcooked) Kale on plate!








I wasn't crazy about it.  Maybe that's because I cooked it a little too long, or maybe it was absence of garlic in the recipe.  I like my greens with a healthy dose of garlic--I'm not aware of any vampire-ish tendencies in them, but the garlic seems to give them something warm and friendly that these greens were lacking.

Travels with bears

Not--John McPhee wisely prefers his travels with bears visible but far in the distance.  The bear parts are the best in the book--

There is an old adage that when a pine needle drops in the forest the eagle will see it fall; the deer will hear it when it hits the ground; the bear will smell it.


Coming Into the Country is a rambling, three part book about Alaska. It doesn't try to be an encyclopedia or a reference work, but simply the story of The Country, as told through the minds and hearts of people who live there.  The first part recounted the author's journey via canoe and kayak on the Salmon river in the Bear Mountain range, and it was good, solid travel adventure.  I liked very much.

But the rest of the book didn't agree with me so well.  It was stories of people, mostly--little natural history but a lot of human stories about life and living and death and walking a razors edge in a cold, lonely country.  What kind of person builds a cabin on a stream a thousand miles from the nearest outpost, and lives there through the arctic winter?  What people come to live in the town of Eagle, population 300 or so, and why do they stay?

Usually I love this sort of storytelling (Blue Highways and Travels With Charley are two of my favorite books to re-read) but this one just seemed to go on and on, dragging without power to charm or amuse.  Possibly it's my fault, not the book's.  I just got tired of it.