This autobiographical novel was written by a good friend of mine whose own family experienced some of the horrors of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. The main character, Hope Winterfield, and her husband make their living as antique dealers in Texas when her elder brother, Robert, a doctor with HIV, convinces them to move with their three daughters to the LA area to help him out. Because their antique business is not doing well and she wants to help her brother, they move, thinking that if it does not work out, they can move back to Texas.
Robert has an ex, Anthony, who is also his business partner, who hates Robert’s new love, the charming, handsome, younger man, Cody. Hope takes the job Robert has offered her, only to discover the dynamics surrounding the job, her brother, friends she has known for years, and many others are nearly overwhelming and that quite often nothing is as it seems. Added to all this is Hope’s difficult mother who often denies the realities of her own life. This is the tale of a family and complicated family dynamics where the main characters have to decide what it most important in life and what they should value the most and fight for.
These are easy to make and about as nutritious as a cake like treat can be. I used regular flour but might try almond flour next time.
3 cups lightly packed shredded carrots
1 heaping cup coarsely chopped walnuts
1 Tb. grated ginger or more to taste
2/3 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp BP
1 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
2/3 cup avocado oil
1 cup unbleached flour
Grease an 8 inch square pan ( I used glass). Put the oil, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and spices in mixing bowl and combine. Add ginger, BP, and baking soda. Add carrots and walnuts. Stir to combine. Finally, add the flour and stir. Pour into the baking pan. Use spatula to level because mixture will be thick. Bake at 335 for 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool before cutting into bars.
Translated from French and written by a Senegalese author, this novel takes place during the time of colonialism and the slave trade. In Paris of 1806, a famous botanist, Michel Adanson, is dying. He never has finished the botanical work to which he dedicated his life, and as he lays dying, his last words are the woman’s name “Maram”.
His daughter finds an unpublished memoir hidden in a cabinet. It is the story of his younger life, what happened to him in Africa, all addressed to his daughter so she can understand his story and the meaning of his last word. It is a tale both strange and sad, filled with healers and magic and tragedy. Maram, a fabled revenant, a woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, was captured and sold into slavery but managed to escape. While working on his quest to find new plants, Adanson hears about this woman and becomes obsessed with finding her. His guide, Ndiak, the son of a chief, accompanies him everywhere and they become friends. This is a story of adventure, romance, and the horrors and cruelty of the slave trade.
Note: The author won the International Booker Prize for his other novel, “At Night All Blood Is Black”. Readers of this will miss several books I am reading because I am a judge for a literary context and cannot discuss what I am reading for the next several weeks.
Cook pasta according to directions on the package. Remove the middle vein from the Swiss chard leaves and chop. Cut leaves into bite sized pieces. Sauté onion, garlic, ginger, and chard veins in olive oil. When translucent, add the leaves, and cook just long even for them to wilt. Add the drained pasta, stir, and serve in warm bowls or plates. This is nice with a green salad. However, if you want to make it a one dish meal, double or triple the amount of Swiss chard used. You can also use spinach or other greens.
Serves two. This recipe could be doubled, etc. to serve more people.
This is a sort of travelogue, memoir, and recipe book. The author begins in Odessa and travels south from there to the port of Constanza in Romania as well as various other seaside towns in Bulgaria, then to Istanbul. After spending more time there she heads east to all the ports and some inland cities near Turkey’s Black Sea coast.
I hope to learn new information and become a little more enlightened when I read–especially when reading non-fiction. This book did not disappoint. Here are a few of the things I learned:
-Odessa is a very old and once a very international city. At one point it had the second largest Jewish population in Europe. Now only about 1/3 of the residents are Jewish. Many of the restaurants serve traditional Jewish food even if not Jewish. Once in the past, Mark Twain visited there and made it famous for its ice cream.
-In Constanza, Romania, she witnessed a huge Navy Day celebration with booming gun salutes. Once upon a time, this city was famous for its Casino which now is just a glorious ruin. Here a breakfast mainstay is polenta with a mushroom topping. The author apparently liked the food because this section contains more recipes.
-Varna is the main seaport city in Bulgaria. The author’s main quest here was to see the gold, yes, gold. Once upon a time, this city was a major Roman port. Now the Museum of Archeology houses a spectacular collection of ancient gold. “Breastplates, bracelets, burial gifts, regal-looking head pieces, figurines, and pendants–all gold–shone for attention. The silent Midas room was deafening, ringing out with finery, treasure and opulence. And the loudest, biggest treasure of all, was the smallest. Tiny pendant earrings, almost inconceivably old, dating back 6000 years….these earring are the oldest ‘worked gold’ in the world. They belonged to the first known culture to craft golden artifacts, and they lived here, on Bulgaria’s section of the Black Sea in what some archeologists consider the oldest prehistoric town. But it was not gold that made this area wealthy; it was salt which was mined nearby. The world salary comes from the Latin word ‘salarium’–a Roman soldier’s stipend to buy salt.
-She goes to Istanbul and then on to Turkey’s Black Sea towns, Amasra, several a bit inland, Sinop, Trabzon, and Rize. Sinop has a particularly good harbor. There is a saying that the Black Sea has three safe harbors, July, August, and Sinop. This is in an area often targeted by Cossacks who crossed the Black Sea to raid these more prosperous areas. The town also houses an infamous prison where Russian convicts taught Turkish cellmates how to make model ships for which the town is now famous.-More than 3/4 of the world’s hazelnuts are grown in this area of Turkey. However, that did surprise me as much as the tea, yes, tea. When I think of Turkey, I think of that thick, strong Turkish coffee. However, Turkey is the fifth largest grower and exporter of tea in the world. The tea grows in the fog and mist on steep slopes that end at the sea. Several photos in the book illustrate the lush green mountains covered in tea bushes.
-When I think of Hagia Sophia, I think of the spectacular building in Istanbul, the one that has withstood invasions and earthquakes. But there is another one. On the western edges of the city of Trabzon, there is a smaller, more tranquil Hagia Sophia, one of the Black Sea area’s most spectacular monuments. It was built as a church in the 13th century, converted to a mosque, then to a cholera hospital, then a museum and finally back to a mosque in 2013. The ceiling and walls are covered with frescoes that for a long time no one knew existed until they were restored.
In addition to all the tales of her adventures and the ordinary people she meets, the book is filled with recipes that are specialties of the areas she visited. I’ve taken some ideas from several to experiment with new dishes like combining Swiss chard and sultanas (golden raisins) with chopped onions and garlic sautéed in olive oil and served over Basmati rice.
“What’s an army anywhere but a bunch of state-sanctioned mass shooters funded by our tax dollars. Do the deed as a civilian and you get the chair, do it as a soldier and they’ll pin some tinfoil your chest.”
“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big and grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be a nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough…People don’t know what’s enough. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”
In a rather ordinary, small, dismal Connecticut town an elderly woman, suffering from dementia, saves a 19 year old boy from committing suicide. She takes him in and this act of kindness transforms both their lives in unexpected ways. While taking care of her, he also finds a job at a local fast food restaurant where his cousin works as well as several others whom many would consider lesser people. They help each other, form tight bonds, and develop unlikely friendships that reveal how caring and empathy can make all the difference in people’s lives.
This novel is touching, sad, and joyful all at once. These are poor ordinary people trying to survive the best way they know how. For many readers it will be a glimpse into the way many people in this country (and, indeed, the world) actually live–poor, struggling to survive, but also kind and caring.
As in Part One, I am only going to provide mostly quotes from the book.
The Rise of the New West:
“The demographic shift west continued with the Cold War. In all past wars, the nation had abruptly turned from military production to peacetime economy, but after WWII, the global tension between capitalism and communism continued to bolster the new war industries. Between 1950 and 1959, defense took up 62% of the federal budget as it expanded 246%, up to $228 billion annually, and much of that money moved west…Eisenhower, and after him, John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called ‘the military-industrial complex.’
“Westerners and southerners agreed that desegregation, which gave Black Americans benefits paid for by tax dollars, offered prime evidence of a communist conspiracy. In 1958, Welch, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers…started the John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism…Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism.”
“In the mid-1950s, the new television sets in all those new homes were tuned to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza to see hard working white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government…The shows all embraced the myth of the American West where cowboys worked hard, stood for what is right, and protected their women from bad men and Indians…the land unpeopled by anyone of color or women, except as they fit into the larger tale of the individualists.”
“Bozell started from the same point as James Henry Hammond had in South Carolina a century earlier, and for much the same reasons…the Constitution strictly limited the functions of government, and that restrictions on property holders were an infringement on liberty.”
“…a key Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, identified Nixon’s election as the moment that marked the ending of the New Deal era.”
“…in 1967 men determined to stop the church from embracing rights for people of color and women launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention…to turn religion away from the new ways and back to fundamentalism. These fundamentalist purged moderates, insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible, barred women from positions of authority, and in 1998 oversaw an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message advising wives to ‘submit…graciously’ to their husbands.
“Milton Friedman explained that if the government stopped worrying about protecting workers and consumers and instead cut taxes and permitted money to accumulate at the top, wealthy people would invest in new businesses…This argument, which echoed precisely what the southern slaveholders had claimed, gained traction in the West, where blaming eastern liberals for the nation’s problems became an article of faith…In the 1970s, a secretive Christian organization know as The Family began to sponsor prayer meetings in businesses, colleges, and government. By the mid-1970s, they were effectively mobilizing white evangelicals as a voting bloc.”
Oligarchy Rides Again:
“When Reagan tapped the 35 year old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on “Conscience of a Conservative’, set to bring Goldwater’s dream to life…The administration turned to tax cuts. When computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues but instead would explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers…To protect the tax cuts that lay at the heart of his vision, Reagan and his team supported…the plan to organize business leaders, evangelicals, and social conservatives into a political juggernaut.”
“Now in control of Congress, Gingrich’s Republicans set the terms of the political debate…In April 1995, an internal memo identified tax cuts as the central principle of Republicanism…and explained why: ‘All reductions in federal spending weaken the left in America….Defunding government is defunding the left.'”
“From the beginning in the 1950s, Movement Conservative leaders had recognized that they could not win over voters with policy, for the activist state they opposed was quite popular. So they shaped their message around vignettes that made a compelling story…leaders stayed in power by deliberately crafting a narrative that harked back to western individualism. The hardworking individual–the cowboy–was endangered by the behemoth state…They invoked the corollary to the American paradox, arguing that equality for women and people of color would destroy the freedom that lay at the heart of democracy.”
“Party operatives had talked of cutting down black voting under a ‘ballot integrity’ initiative in 1986, and they bitterly opposed a 1993 Democratic expansion of voting registration…The Florida legislature took the lead passing a voter ID law to ensure that everyone who voted was a US citizen…the Florida law quickly became a purge of black voters, people presumed to vote Democratic… (this was 1997) This purge paid off in the election of 2000, when George W. Bush of Texas ran against Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore…Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College…the 1998 purge would decide the election.”
What Then Is This America:
“In the 2018 midterm elections, female candidates began to articulate a new vision of the country to replace the old American paradox. They emphasized community and fairness over individualism and the race, class, and gender roles that individualism has always implied. Women and voters of color are helping redefine an America for the twenty-first century…In 1612, English colonists were starving in Virginia…One hundred and seventy-five years later, America’s Founders put that idea into practice in what George Washington called a ‘great experiment’: a government based on the idea that human beings had the right to determine their own fate. Could such a government endure? Our country’s peculiar history has kept the question open.”
Rather than summarize or evaluate, I am going to provide some quotes from the book. I will say that if you want to understand the current state of affairs in the United States of America, this book provides excellent insights based on history.
From the Introduction:
“America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior…it was a key figure of the new democratic republic…the ringing phrase ‘all men are created equal’ did not actually include everyone. In 1776, it seemed self-evident to leaders that not every person living in the British colonies were capable or worthy of self determination. In their mind, women, slaves, Indians, and paupers depended on the guidance of men like themselves…So long as these lesser people played no role in the body politic, everyone within it would be equal. The principle of equality depended on inequality. That central paradox–that freedom depended on racial, gender, and class inequality–shaped American history as the cultural, religious, and social patterns of the new nation grew around it.”
From The Triumph of Equality:
“The accomplishment of white male equality under the law was extraordinary…They argued that their new system made their new nation different from the Old World, which was split between a corrupt aristocracy and the lazy poor.”
“On March 4, 1858, prominent South Carolina slaveholder James Henry Hammond gave a speech in the Senate–to which he had been elected the year before despite the fact that he admitted two years earlier he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces…The greatest strength of the South was not its economy…but rather ‘the harmony of her political and social institutions.’ Every society had ‘a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life’…the people who make up the ‘mudsill of society supporting that other class that leads progress, civilization, and refinement.’ The men in the latter group are wealthy and well connected…In the South whites had made an ‘inferior race into mudsills, dull but loyal people who are content to have their labor directed by their betters.”
“Now a national figure, Lincoln articulated a democratic vision for America, one that refuted the mudsill version of Senator Hammond…he explained that Hammond’s theory divided the world into permanent castes: capitalists driving the economy and workers stuck at the bottom.”
The West:
The last stand of the Alamo became the foundational event for western American history, offering a vision of self-sacrifice and heroism. It prompted the formation of the Republic of Texas, and inspired Texans under Sam Houston to defeat Santa Anna’s troops…In the retelling of what happened at the Alamo, what got lost was the reality that the defenders were rebelling against the Mexican government in Mexican territory, and that they were fighting to defend the right to enslave people. The myth also ignored the fact that many of the defenders were Mexican opponents of Santa Ana, and that some of the defenders–including Davy Crockett–surrendered.”
Cowboy Reconstruction:
After Lincoln’s death, Johnson wanted no part of Lincoln’s and the “Union’s democratic vision. To rebuild the South, Johnson turned not to the Army, or to the ex-slaves who had supported the Union, but to former Confederates. He offered pardons to all but 1500 Confederate leaders…states codified the racial violence that swept across the South in the summer of 1865. As employers cheated workers out of wages, gangs beat and raped African Americans into submissive behavior, and whites attacked their black neighbors, southern state legislatures created the Black Codes.”
The West and The South Join Forces:
“The resurgence of the South’s ideology came from the nation’s new bloc: the western states. Easterners had made the mistake of thinking the westerners would join their coalition, only to discover that due to their peculiar history and extractive economy , westerners had more in common with white antebellum southerners than with easterners. By the 1890s a few wealthy men dominated western society. Poor white men had little opportunity. people of color and women even less, and leaders worked to keep it that way. Still, as in the East before the Civil War, the myth of the individualist convinced Americans that the west was the land of opportunity…Theodore Roosevelt’s war record took the western ideal and put it on the national stage. By the end of the century, Americans embraced the cowboy image and vowed to spread it across the globe, putting into law that some people are better than others. Once again freedom was hierarchical.
“In the early part of the twentieth century, southern towns began to erect statues of Confederates, making them into western style heroes and individualists. The rewriting of the past created momentum for women’s suffrage…Rebecca Latimer Felton was a reformer who wanted educational and prison reform as well as women’s suffrage. She was also in favor of lynching her black neighbors who wanted equal rights…The Ku Klux Klan reformed and rebounded in the 1920s…Meanwhile in the West, immigrants and Indians were falling victim to a legal system that established castes. In Texas, officials were hardening a racial system that classified migrants across the Mexican border by race. In Arizona, a state law singled out ‘treason against the state’ as punishable by death aimed at Apache and Navahos who might fight the legal system ensnaring them. In Oklahoma…corrupt legislators arranged affairs to steal valuable land from Indians.
Plov is a common dish throughout Central Asia and is the national dish of Uzbekistan. All plov contains rice and usually meat like lamb or beef. Here is a vegetarian version. I found a vegetarian recipe and modified it using the ingredients I already had. The original recipe used chickpeas but I had already cooked Peruano beans so used them.
1/2 large purple onion, coarsely chopped
1/2 fennel bulb, coarsely chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 cup kalamata olives, chopped
1 drop coriander essential oil
1 drop cumin essential oil
1 drop cilantro essential oil
Chili flakes (optional and amount to taste)
1 cup cooked Peruano beans
2 cups greens (I used spinach and arugula), coarsely chopped
1 heaping half cup of basmati rice, rinsed
butter or olive oil for sautéing
Heat the oil or butter in a heavy casserole dish. Add onions, garlic, and fennel. Saute until tender. Stir in the spices. Scatter the beans and olives on top of the onion mixture. Do not stir! Add about 1/4 to 1/3 cup water. Layer the greens on top of the beans and olives. Flatten the greens with a spoon. Do not stir! Let greens wilt then layer the drained rice on top. Pour in enough boiling water to just cover the rice. Cook on high heat until the liquid has boiled off. Poke holes in the rice to allow steam to escape. Cover pan with lid and turn off heat but leave pan on the burner. Let the rice steam for 20-30 minutes.
To serve, stir the contents and serve in large bowls. You can add extra fresh herbs and lemon if desired. I just served as is and found it delicious. You do not have to use essential oil but can use ground herbs or fresh. If using essential oil, use a safe brand for cooking. I used Edens Garden but have used others, e.g. Doterra.
I enjoyed the previous book by Caroline Eden so much I searched for this one. I doubt I will ever make it to Samarkand or Tashkent, places sort of on my bucket list, so what I do is read everything I find about these fabled cities on the Silk Road. The sub-title of this one is “Recipes and Stories From Central Asia and The Caucasus”. It starts with Samarkand and the story of Tamerlane, the legendary hero who conquered a lot of this area and a large portion of surrounding areas in 1370. He was a military genius who loved chess and made up his own chess game with twice the number of pieces.
What foods show up in both the stories and recipes? Beets, fruit–dried and fresh for which the area is famous, tomatoes, cucumber, pomegranates, cabbage, lentils, rice, lamb and mutton, and all sorts of kebabs and flatbreads. I learned there is a huge beach on Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. It is one of the world’s largest alpine lakes and in summer people from Russia and all over Central Asia flock to its shores. People who own guest houses there make all their money for the entire year in the brief summer between mid-July and mid-August.
In the remote mountains of Azerbaijan lies the small town of Gyrmyzy Gasaba above the Qudiyaleay River, a town where all the people are Jewish. Even though Azerbaijan is a predominantly Shia Muslim country, the people in this town have peacefully lived here for hundreds of years. This town is considered the last surviving pre-Holocaust Jewish town untouched by WWII.
If you are a lover of apples, then consider this country, Kazakhstan, the place where apples originated. All apples in the world today come from the original apples here. The name of the largest city, Almaty, whose older name was Alma-Ata means fatherland of apples. In Ile-Altalan National Park on the northern slopes of the Tien Shan mountain chain thousands of acres of wild apples flourish.
Even though this book was published less than ten years ago in 2016, a lot of people must have been interested in reading the stories and recipes because the copy the library found for me is not in the best condition. Before I return it, I will copy some of the recipes to try.
writingontherim 