Steampunk on crack

I read this Publishers Weekly article about Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan this morning. I was already desperate to read it and now I'm even more so. The collaborative relationship between Westerfeld and illustrator Keith Thompson is fascinating and inspiring.


One bummer of the new HarperCollins job? No more review copies from all the houses like I got before. But I will gladly pull out my wallet for this one. Just have to wait one. more. loooong. month.

Extra! Extra! Ultimate Croissant saves the world!

Publishers Weekly recently posted an article, "Comics Publishers Enter the Kitchen."  Not surprisingly, food is entering the world of manga.  In particular, I loved the bit about Yakitate!! Japan, which features a 16-year-old boy that has "other-worldly baking powers."  Thank god someone was blessed with them because we all know I have no such powers.  Here is a great quote from the PW article:

Says one character when a classmate offers to teach him how to make croissants for a competition, “Just learning how to make it won’t do jack for us… what we need to make is… the ultimate croissant that can defeat even Suwabara!!”

Yes!!!!  

Eat, drink, and fight the forces of evil with pain chocolat!

"You jump, I jump. Remember?": Trusting your cookbook's author*

Thanks to my pal Ellen, I now subscribe to Publishers Weekly's "Cooking the Books" newsletter. In the latest email, there is a brief interview with Ina Garten. The interview isn't all that illuminating, but I did love this quote at the end:

"I think it’s served me well that each of my books has more than just recipes, that it has a story and a reason for being. The thing about a book is that it has a personality, whereas a recipe on the Web doesn’t. There’s a trust that comes with a person."

She hits the nail on the head. I had never been able to articulate that, when it comes to my cookbooks, there is a trust relationship with the cook who wrote the book. For instance, I trust Ina implicitly: she tells me it's good and I should make it...you bet your arse I'll make it. Another example is Jamie Oliver. We're friends and he's done some good things for me...but he's also a pretty flaky friend: he doesn't tell me how high the heat on my stove should be and why, oh why, didn't he give me a specific cooking time? And Jamie doesn't seem to know anything about my life as a full-time working mom in a metropolitan area. So he and I have a rocky relationship: we love each other and then hate each other. Someone else who I trust with the health, pleasure, and soulful nourishment of my family and me? Joanne Harris and Fran Warde (My French Kitchen and The French Market). They have charmed and seduced me, and we have the most lovely relationship these days. I encourage you to trust them as well.

Eat, drink, and develop trust relationships with your cookbooks.


*Yeah, I quoted Titanic in the post title. I still love that movie. Judge away.

A Nibble of This and That

I was a tad more eager than usual for this week’s NYT Dining section because I was really curious to see the Letters section re: last week’s “The Fat Pack Wonders if the Party’s Over” by Kim Severson. Alas, no Letters section in the physical paper and no section in the online version. Not one that I could find, anyway. No one had anything to say, that was printable, about that article? Really? I was hoping for some great discourse and was totally disappointed to not get it.

Once again I find that combining food and children’s literature in a single blog isn’t entirely random. Check out Allison’s post over at Shelftalker about Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls written by Marjorie Winslow and illustrated by Erik Blegvad. Allison has included a couple of the “recipes” in her post and it sounds so “completely and utterly charming.” I’ve put a hold request on the one single copy at Queens Library.

As part of the prerequisites for NYU’s Food Studies program, they require you to have some hands-on experience that extends beyond your own home kitchen. So I’m looking through the course schedule at the Institute of Culinary Education (aka ICE) with absolute delight. A Greenmarket cooking class! A knife class! A “Fine Cooking” class! A salt class! Where to start???? I’m thinking of the knife class – it’s only a 3-hour class I can take after work so I don’t have to worry about too much commitment at this point. If it goes well, I can do the “Fine Cooking” class, which is much more money and five 5-hour classes. Between those two classes, I will have satisfied the prerequisite. I’m on my way!

I recently heard about the journal Gastronomica and thought a subscription might be in order. So I went to the website to check it out and read an intriguing letter from the editor that is in a similar vein to our earlier discussion about NYT’s “Fat Pack” article. She discusses the juxtaposition of providing healthy, delicious, affordable food to disadvantaged families and communities with the idea that good food – or any food, really – should cost more. Those ideas seem completely contradictory to each other. She’s right, though: I live in a lovely part of Queens with decent restaurants, a fish monger, a cheese store, and a great market for my other needs. And I spend a significant portion of my income on food. But I work in a disadvantaged neighborhood, right across the street from the bus depot, and it is incredibly difficult to find healthy food around here. I usually bring my lunch to work but, occasionally, I’ll forget and need to buy lunch here. You wouldn’t believe the difficulty in doing that. There’s a market nearby, but the produce is sub-par and comes from everywhere but New York. Forget good bread or any unprocessed cheese. Everything comes frozen, in a can, in bulk, or vaccuum-packed. Not surprisingly, you’ll see a significantly larger number of overweight and obese people in the neighborhood I work in as opposed to the one I live in. During my info session, the director of the Food Studies program repeatedly threw around the term “food crisis in this country” and I don’t think that’s stating it too strongly. Darra Goldstein’s letter just added one more voice to the dull roar.

On that note, the Sustainable Table has a wonderful blog and they posted about a curriculum package by Equal Exchange. It teaches kids about fair trade, food production and sustainable living. This seems as good a place as any to start turning this thing around.

Snow* and Best Books of 2007...already?!

Apparently I’m not the only one excited about the upcoming holidays and the end of 2007: PW has just released their Best Books of 2007 list. I was unsurprised to see some titles: At Night by Jonathan Bean is just a gimme, you know? The Invention of Hugo Cabret is on the list – gasp! We’re going to see it on every Best of 2007 list. And I got warm fuzzies when I saw Before I Die – a well-deserved spot on the list.

However, I was enormously dismayed not to see Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban on there. It was an exceptionally well-crafted novel: equal parts humor, poignancy, coming-of-age, and conflict. It was smart and it didn’t condescend. So what happened to it in the shuffle? Perhaps it’s too quiet, too endearing, too…something? And where – oh, for goodness sake, where! – was Let It Shine by Ashley Bryan?! That omission is glaring and I think some readers are going to have something to say about that. Like me.

Lastly, since when did “children’s fiction” become ages 7-18??? I missed that somewhere.

Thanks to Fuse #8 for the info.

EDIT: Kirkus also came out with their Best of 2007 list.

*Apparently the omnipotent weatherpeople are forecasting possible snow showers this weekend for the NYC Metro area. Mwah?!

As if you needed another reason!

As if you needed another reason to love Ashley Bryan! Nevertheless, Alison over at PW gives us many more reasons. If you do anything today, go over to her blog and check out her wonderful pictures. Stained glass, puppets, toys suspended from the ceiling, dolls, hearts drawn by children, whimsy, comfort, happiness: Ashley Bryan's home has it all. And to welcome all these people into his home and let Alison take such lovely pictures of his private space. Wow. I'm overwhelmed. It's rare to get an intimate glimpse of a person's personality in just a few pictures, but Alison managed to give us one.

I can't say enough about it. Go check out her blog post now.