I’ve been trying to bake more bread over the past several months, and after reading a lot of information on The Fresh Loaf about more advanced bread baking than the sandwich loves in the The Joy of Cooking I got a copy of Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes with the intention of improving my bread-baking skills. I’ve read it from cover to cover.
If you’re not already comfortable in the kitchen then Bread is probably not the book for you. It appears to be written for professional bakers. However, I believe that the place to look for the best advice on how to do something right is in literature written for people who do that thing for a living, and Bread is no exception. There’s a ton of great information, from explaining the differences between different kinds of wheat to how to shape different of loaves of bread, to how to weave quite complicated decorative breads out of individual strands of dough. I’ve only baked 3 loaves of bread since I finished the book, (and 2 of them were from the same batch of dough), and already my bread is orders of magnitude better than it was before I read the book.
While the recipes in the book make are naturally somewhat repetitive to read, (I skipped some of details of some of the recipes), the whole first part of the book is full of information and walks us through the steps involved in making bread, and the ingredients that bread is made from, filled with Mr. Hamelman’s personal stories and history. This background information helped me to really understand not only how bread is made, but why it is made the way it is made.
I’m excited to continue experimenting with bread recipes from Bread and with my own creations using what I learned from it.
I’ve had a ton of time this week when I’ve had to be away from the desk with nothing to do, and in that time, plus a bit of evening reading, I read the brick known as The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. What a week!
I had read a book by Ken Follett years ago, but Pillars of the Earth really made him a household name, at least around our household. It’s a big, solid, book that spans fifty years and nine hundred and eighty three pages and in that time I became very attached to the main characters. Mr. Follett paints a picture of a gritty, dirty England during the civil war of the 1100s, (from just before the reign of Stephen I until just after it), where the King had relatively little power and much of England was effectively controlled by the various lords of the country. The book is the story of the struggle between one of these lords, William, a Bishop, and the Prior of Kingsbridge, a fictional town in England. The book is graphic at times – if you don’t like violence then this may not be for you, but that’s not the whole story, it’s just a small part of it and it gives the story a dirty realism that wouldn’t be there without it.
I really enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth and was slightly disappointed when it ended. After nearly a thousand pages and fifty years it’s easy to get attached to characters. I’m excited to read the sequel, A World Without End, but I might take a bit of a break before attacking it – it’s also a brick.
After my surprisingly fast read of A Christmas Carol I read something very un-Christmaslike: A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton – a whodunnit. I’ve read a few of the Alphabet Mysteries featuring Kinsey Millhone before but not this one. We have a few more around the house too that I can read. Also great is that since this A is for Alibi was published quite a while ago the book we have is a paperback that fits pretty easily in the pocket of my winter coat.
There isn’t a whole lot to say about A is for Alibi that hasn’t been said before, I’m sure, so I’m not going to do any huge analysis of the book or anything. It’s a good detective novel, worth reading, a great escape, and there’s a ton more where it came from.
Christmas is coming, and with that in mind I decided last week that my next book should be a Christmas classic. I was divided between Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, (on which the ballet is based), and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Originally I wanted to read The Nutcracker, but the used book store didn’t have a copy, and the only copies in the library are in French, (oddly enough, 2 of the 3 were translated first from the original German to English, then from English to French – that’s one too many translations!), however, I was able to find an anthology of four Dickens novels that contains A Christmas Carol.
It turns out that A Christmas Carol is much shorter than I thought it would be. I’ve had to spend some time waiting for things over the past couple of days and was able to read the whole book while waiting. It took me a bit to get used to Dickens’ style of writing, (I don’t read that many older books – although there are some on the bookshelf waiting to be read), but once I got into the flow it was great, especially since it’s starting to look a lot like Christmas here in Montréal. Even though I have seen several film versions of A Christmas Carol I was pleased to see that there were still surprises for me in the book, which made it even more enjoyable, and I realized that last year’s Jim Carrey film is the closest to the original story that I have seen. I was also delighted to see, after reading about the book Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl a while ago to see that the Ghost of Christmas Present had “seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam” as part of his feast.
A Christmas Carol was a great way to pass a couple of days when I couldn’t be working. Now, I’m back to looking for my next book. Maybe I can find The Nutcracker and the Mouse King in english.
Remember the film The Hunt for Red October? You’re probably aware it’s based on a Tom Clancy novel of the same name, (if you weren’t there’s your new trivia fact for the day). I’ve seen the film a few times over the years but hadn’t read the book until recently. I wasn’t sure if the book would be that enjoyable since I already knew the outcome, and a lot of the thrill of reading a Tom Clancy novel is wondering what happens next. I had no need to worry the book was great, even though I already knew the ending.
When a book is made into a movie it often has a lot cut out, the plot is condensed, and things are generally “hollywoodized.” This is exactly what happened to Red October. For example in the Film Jack Ryan ends up on the American submarine the USS Dallas for a while. In the book he never gets on the Dallas, but instead spends time on the British carrier HMS Invincible. The British involvement is entirely eliminated from the movie, (surprised? Welcome to hollywood).
No matter how you look at it both the film and the book very entertaining, and interestingly, the film doesn’t disappoint as many film adaptations of books do, (maybe it’s because I saw the film first).
