Staying Sane & Reading Aloud

Last weekend, I took a rather impromptu trip to LTUE (Life, the Universe, and Everything Symposium) and attended Mary Robinette Kowal's class on how to give a book reading. It's not the same as hearing the explanations, but Mary's amazing and has posted a treasure trove of information on the subject (the first one's here).

One of the things that fascinated me was placement -- talking towards the front of your mouth, in the middle, or towards the back.  Once upon a time, I took a singing class, and we talked about this, too.  Forward makes your pitch brighter, backwards makes it darker.  While reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom for the thousandth time, I practiced placement, reading one page forward, another in the back, and playing with my voice.

Suddenly, a book I can read with my eyes shut became fresh.  I'm a person who likes to learn.  I'm basically home with the little ones, and I struggle to come up with creative ways to fill my brain all day while still being highly engaged with them.  Usually this takes the shape of cooking (I swear toddlers are designed to shake vinaigrettes).

But now I have another tool. I'm not aiming to be a professional book reader, but I already spend a lot of time everyday reading out loud.  Now I have some resources to proactively improve.  I'm accomplishing and learning something when I read, in addition to teaching and spending time with my kids.  This is the best kind of multi-tasking.  My day is a little happier and a little saner -- and so is theirs.

Unicorn Hair Soup from Ella Enchanted

Mandy dosed us with her curing soup, made with carrots, leeks, celery, and hair from a unicorn's tail.  It was delicious, but we both hated to see those long yellow-white hairs floating around the vegetables.
                                     --Ella Enchanted, Chapter One

I've been sick.  This soup from Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted was the first thing I thought of.  Wouldn't it be lovely to have some unicorn hair soup to make everything better?  Soup sounded great anyway.  I'm going to admit that the actual vegtables didn't -- I ended up eating broth with just the "unicorn hair," but here's how to make the whole thing.

Unicorn Hair Soup

1 leek
2 carrots
2 stalks of celery

Some chicken bones
1 tablespoon of butter
1 long piece of peeled ginger

Prep the veggies, reserving the end-bits.  For the leeks, this means taking off the dark green parts, the roots, then splitting the leek down the center, then slicing thinly.  Fill a big bowl with cold water and swish these around; leeks inevitably have dirt between the layers.  Dice the carrot and celery.  Mmm...look at those veggie ends.

Toss the veggie ends and the chicken bones into a rice cooker, crock pot, or pot on the stove, then cover with water and simmer away.  Taste, season with salt, then strain.  Okay, so you could just use store bought chicken stock...but why not make it?  It's super-easy, healthy, practically free, and -- most importantly -- tasty.  I always keep a baggie in my freezer to stash chicken bones and vegetable trimmings.  I just throw everything in my rice cooker and let it go, but you could also make stock by bringing it all to boil on the stove, then reducing to a simmer for a few hours, or letting it go overnight in a crockpot.  Taste it.  If it's seems bland, add a few pinches of salt.  If it tastes watery, let it cook longer and reduce.

Add the diced, prepped veggies to the pan with a pinch of salt and cook on medium-low until they soften.  I'm afraid in my eagerness for throat-soothing soup, I skipped this photo.  Sorry!

Meanwhile, use a peeler to shave thin, long pieces off the ginger.  It's the right color, I love to eat it when I'm sick, and in a perfect world, unicorns would taste like ginger.  If you really like ginger, peel a lot.  If you're wary about it, use less.

Slice these thin pieces into "hairs."  The thin pieces, taken the long way across the ginger, should be with the grain anyway, so these end up looking quite a bit like hairs (despite my struggling photography). 

Add the "hairs" and four cups of the broth to the vegetables.  Simmer for about ten minutes, or until the ginger softens.  I'm afraid I neglected taking a picture of the end product, but I loved having little ginger hairs in my soup!  And then, of course, I tossed the peelings from the brown, outside part of the ginger with a lemon in the rice cooker, and lemon-ginger tea was born.  I know.  I use my rice cooker for everything. 

Fruited Tallew Rice from The Way of Kings

[Barm] barely spared Kal a brown-eyed glance, then told one of his servants to go fetch some flatbread and fruited tallew rice.  A child's meal.  Kal felt even more embarrassed that Barm had known instantly why he had been sent to the kitchens.
                                           --The Way of Kings, Chapter 37


The food in Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings enchanted me.  The flora and fauna of the world is different than ours, and there's a culture of food appropriate for men, women, and children.  My memory held the food as a large part of the book, so I was surprised flipping through the book that food isn't mentioned on every page.  Sanderson managed to evoke a lot with a few cunning details.

I'm sure I'll be coming back to The Way of Kings for more recipe fodder -- I already have a few things in the works.  Anyway, on to the recipe!

Fruited Tallew Rice

1 1/2 cups pearl barley
A piece of pork fat (or 2 tsps of lard or bacon fat)
1 tsp salt
1 cup dried fruit, diced
1 tbsp honey or amber agave nectar

Put the barley with three cups of water in your rice cooker and hit go.  Cooking barley can be done on the stove top (bring water to boil, add barley, cover, reduce heat, simmer for about 50 minutes), but it's a lot trickier and you have to watch carefully for the spren of food-that-doesn't-suck to pull it off when it's done but not burnt. Why barley?  Tallew rice isn't found in our world, but later it's described as puffed with water.  Barley puffs well, it has a mild taste, and I can imagine it growing in the climates were people eat it.  I actually tried millet first, but the flavor was too strong.

Salt the bacon fat and toss it into a small cast-iron skillet on medium-low heat.  Let some of the fat render out.  In the chapter, other people are eating fresh pork, so I imagine Bram would have some fresh pork fat on hand to make children's food on the side.  Lard works just as well, as would bacon fat (but if you use bacon fat, don't add more salt!).  I couldn't find, and didn't remember, any mention of cows (butter) or oils, making pig fat my go-to for this recipe.  You can adjust this to taste, but you need at least enough to get the bottom of the pan glossy.

Add the dried fruit and continue cooking on medium-low until the fruit softens and turns glossy, about 15 minutes, then remove the fat.  Stir in the honey or agave.  Before you toss out the fat, taste a piece of fruit.  If it's not pleasantly porky, cook longer.  The barley's going to come out chewy, and soft fruit is a nice contrast to that.  Since we don't have native fruits, like simberries or methi, be creative!  This would work fine with raisins, but I'm all for picking less familiar flavors.  I used dried cranberries and sultanas, convenient because they don't need to be chopped.  Apricots or figs would also work great.  I'm not sure what kind of sweeteners they'd have -- maybe bees, maybe something comparable to agave -- but either one of these brings an extra layer of flavor to the pan that granulated sugar can't.

When the barley's done, fold in the fruit and serve.  The whole thing gets a nice, mild sweet-savory taste from the fruit.  The next day, these flavors mellow into the barley even more.  Unlike long grain rice, barley doesn't harden up in the fridge, so it's fine to eat cold (very non-authentically, my husband poured milk over it like breakfast cereal).  My kiddos gave me strange looks when I tried to take pictures instead of feeding them -- yes, that is an actual impatient child's hand in the photo -- then gobbled it up, so I think the flavors passed the kid-friendly test.

I promise to work on my food photography skills for next week!  Thanks for reading. 

Requests?

I've been thinking of new things to blog.  I love food.  I love books.  Why not create recipes for foods in novels, then share the recipes and pics here?  I felt like a genius!

Alas, the internet proved I am not the only person to come up with this idea.  I'd thought to do the classic prune stew in The Hunger Games, but it looks like there's a dozen of those on the internet.

Still, I think I'd have a lot of fun doing this (and none of the stew recipes looked like what I'd envisioned, so we may yet see that).  I enjoy inventing recipes and I'd like to think I'm good at it.  I haven't mentioned it on the blog, but I did have a recipe published at Better Homes & Gardens (it's here; byline's given in the Nov 2010 issue).  I don't have any book reviews posting in February and I rambled about writing this week...so to launch off this new column, I want to post a new recipe every week of February.  We'll get back to boardgames in March.

Any requests?  If you're an author, I'm happy to whip up something from your book, or if there's something you've just always wanted to try, let me know!  I want these posts to be interesting.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Cooties: Book & Board Game Match-Up

The Book (by Eric Carle): As a tiny green caterpillar eats his way through the book, he is transformed into a beautiful butterfly. -- Amazon Book Description

The Game (from Hasbro): The original build-your-own-bug game! Build your very own silly and colorful Cootie. Start with a body; add a head and a hat. Finish it off with a pair of lips, an antennae and a twirly tongue. Your Cootie will never be the same twice! Includes four Cootie Bugs with parts, plus die and gameboard. --Amazon Product Description

The board game I actually play the most often is Cootie.  My three-year-old loves it.  There is no strategy to this game.  No clever trade-offs.  The real reason it's fun?  I get to play a game with my kid.  And we get to build these cool bugs.  The game play is super-simple.  Roll a dice.  Take the corresponding piece.  But we learn to take turns, read numbers on the dice, and did I mention we get to make cool bugs?  We've actually gotten this out so much that the cardboard box fell to pieces, and the game itself now rests in a plastic shoebox.

Likewise, my copy of the classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar fell to well-loved pieces.  There's something intrinsically fun about holes in a book.  Turning the page and seeing the hole change from being in an orange to being in a strawberry never ceases to feel like magic.


These two fit together for simple reasons.  Bugs.  Fun.  Kids.  I figure after both of these, we'll be able to count to six and name the days of the week.   More than that, these are both gateways, allowing the little ones to experience two things they always see the adults doing -- reading books and playing games.  Both of these were favorites of mine when I was little, and there's something sweet and nostalgic about enjoying them with my kids.

Why I Celebrate January 3rd

I know.  I should probably be recapping 2011 and laying out goals for 2012.  But I've already talked about goals this year (here), and yesterday was my favorite holiday:

January 3rd.  Tolkien's birthday.

This is a holiday that I usually celebrate with my brother.  On good years, we're in the same place and can play our own Lord of the Rings edition of Scattergories.  Baring that, I call.  As neither was possible this year, I made seed cakes instead and thought of Bilbo Baggins running around pleading with dwarves not to break plates.

I read Lord of the Rings as a young teenager.  I loved it.  It's still the only novel that, when I put it down, I have to remind myself that it's fiction.  The histories and cultures felt that real.  After watching the people of Rohan, how could I not go read everything I could find on Vikings?  Now I can talk about longhouses and legal codes long enough to substitute for anesthesia.  Fascinated by culture, I read a few anthropology text books and started reading about the Maya, too.  I learned some Quenya, which sparked my linguistic interest.  The next logical step was Michael D. Coe's Reading the Maya Glyphs.  Yes, I was quite the nerdy teenager.

Tolkien didn't just provide me with a rich story.  His story made me a kinder person.  His story sparked curiosity in me about the world around me.  One of my children is named after a Hobbit, in fact.  Prophetically, he eats with one.  Hopefully, on some future January 3rd when we feast on seed cakes, he'll share my love for this story that made my world a better, richer place.

*Recipe Note: I don't have ale, so I substituted water with a bit of honey to bloom the yeast.  Also, I poured them into a muffin tin, both so they'd be easier to dish out to the little ones and to shorten the cooking time.  It made about a dozen muffin-sized cakes, which baked in about 18 minutes.  The eating took less time.