Parenthetical.net

Warm weather, Shakespeare on the Common… picnic time! I adore picnics. The trouble with them, though, is that everything has to be cold, and in my fridge I had primarily zucchini and eggplant — traditionally warm foods.

Internets to the rescue! Inspired by this recipe from the NYTimes and this one from A Sweet Life, I tossed some eggplant cubes and zucchini spears in olive oil, salt, and lemon juice and roasted them at 350 until just tender. Toss again with more olive oil, chopped mint, and capers, and stick ‘em back in the fridge overnight to chill. This morning I added some ground cherries because I am obsessed.

The even bigger winner, though, was a cold zucchini yogurt soup inspired by this recipe from Tobias Cooks! Having no onion, I fried a bit of garlic (ok, a lot of garlic) in olive oil, then added zucchini chunks. Having no potato, I used a parsnip instead for the starchy thickener. Add water to the whole thing (and some white wine, to make up for the fact that I also had no veggie stock) and boil until the veggies are blendable.

I toasted a handful of almonds and ground them in the food processor. Then I added the boiled veggies and pureed, using a little almond milk because it looked too thick. Finally, some salt and a couple of big spoonfuls of Greek yogurt, and back to the fridge for chilling. YUM. It’s definitely parsnippy, so I’d like to try it with the more retiring potato flavor next time. I bet it would also be good with mint, but as I have enough mint in my yard to put a cup of it in everything I cook until winter, I decided some self-control was in order.

Soup, salad, gluten-free Cracklebred crackers, leftover blueberry hazelnut bars made with gluten-free flour, my hilariously excellent picnic backpack (thanks, Redbeard’s mom!), a truly excellent production of Othello and some smooches… a perfect picnic.

It’s an eventful year for Frankie: she starts a new school (the formerly all-boys St. Seb’s, at which girls are welcome officially if not in practice), her normally outgoing mother becomes so depressed she won’t get out of bed, and… y’know, boy stuff. It’s YA, after all.

I didn’t love it like I loved Jellicoe Road, nor did it bug me like Finnikin of the Rock did. It’s a less complex book than either one, which suited me just fine.

At first I thought it was going to be a book about Frankie convincing her parents to let her go back to her old school, Stella’s, or growing in strength in the painful anti-feminist environment of St. Sebastian’s. But it turns out that her mother was right, she was being stifled by the Stella girls, and she actually blossoms at St. Seb’s. It’s fairly rare in YA that the parents turn out to be right about issues of personal growth, and I found it refreshing.

My favorite part of the book is Francesca’s growing relationship with the boys of St. Seb’s. In late high school I hung out with a lot of boys in exactly this way: we didn’t have deep-and-meaningfuls or see each other on the weekends, but we spent long hours shooting the shit during free periods. These relationships provided drama-free companionship, as well as the all-important honing of my crude joke and insult skills, which serve me well to this day.

I’m making this book sound lighter than it is. Frankie’s mom’s depression is serious and scary and not handled lightly at all, and it pushed the hell out of my buttons. I hope this is not too personal, but this story perfectly gets at one of the reasons I don’t want kids. Frankie writes about depression as the potential for illness lurking inside her, and as happy as I am most of the time, it’s inside me, too. There are days — once a year or less, but still — when I curl up into a catatonic ball, and if I had kids and a co-parent relying on me? That’s scary and not okay. I appreciated seeing depression dealt with in a way that isn’t neatly resolved.

Also reviewed by: author Maggie Stiefvater at YA Reads (Maggie overemphasizes the angst, so I figure that compensates for my overemphasis of the lightness); Misrule: The Home of Australian Children’s Books Online; and Not Enough Bookshelves, which sets up a fascinating UK/US Cover War.

(Neither are the cover I had. I think I like the UK cover better than the one I read, and I definitely like it better than the US cover, which is too cute and flip. This is the sort of “slice of life” book that benefits, I think, from the dreaded “photograph of a pretty white girl” cover. Many of my students gravitate to those covers above all else, because they tend to signify “realistic fiction with some humor and romance and school drama” — all of which does indeed describe Francesca. It has so much going on that no one cover will “cover” everything, but the UK cover would at least draw in the sort of readers who will like it.)

…and am somewhat sorry.

One of my Summer Projects is to get a handle on vegan and/or gluten-free baking. (Yes, I realize that summer in Boston is perhaps not the ideal time to turn on the oven ever, let alone on a weekly basis, but this is when I have free time. Insert inappropriate joke about naked cooking here.)

Anyway, this afternoon I made a half-batch of the Almond Pie Crust from Jennifer Katzinger’s Flying Apron’s Gluten-Free & Vegan Baking Book. The fat she calls for is palm oil. I raised my eyebrows at this, because I know palm oil — I didn’t eat a damn thing cooked without the stuff for the entire month I spent in Ghana. It’s tasty, but the flavor is distinctive and overpowering, and it turns everything bright orange.

But fortunately I brought a bottle home with me from Ghana (how many people can say they’re cooking with local palm oil in New England?), and I was determined to resist my usual recipe-flouting instincts, because how else will I learn?

The resulting “dough,” made with mostly brown rice flour and some almond meal, was super-soft, more like batter. I added some sorghum flour (I’d run out of rice flour) until it was workable. I pressed it into two mini-tart tins and then decided to freeze them for 15 minutes while the oven preheated even though the recipe didn’t call for it. I was worried they’d melt before cooking if I put them in the oven as soft as they were, but palm oil firms up very quickly in the cold.

I pre-baked the empty shells on the lowest rack at 375 until the tops were fairly dark, then added strawberry pieces, which I’d mixed with sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, and cornstarch. Back in the oven for another 10 minutes or so.

The verdict: The texture is pleasantly light and crumbly, though sturdy enough to hold its shape coming out of the tart mold. It wouldn’t roll, so it wouldn’t do for a double-crust pie or galette. The tartness of the strawberries sort of works with the earthy sweetness of the palm oil. But the whole thing sure is bright orange and palm-y! Next time I’ll try it with Earth Balance fake butter. Maybe the dough would even be rollable if I used a hardened fat rather than a liquid oil.

This one isn’t GF (sorry, S!), nor is it vegan, but it is dairy-free. It also isn’t very good, so you aren’t missing out. I started with Heather Van Vorous’s Lemon-Glazed Sticky Bread recipe from Eating for IBS, and then heavily adapted it for my own purposes such that it is now an entirely new recipe. Because even when I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I still can’t resist experimenting. Whee!

3/4 c vanilla soy milk
4 egg whites (You can get a carton of just the whites! It’s brilliant!)
juice from 1/2 lemon
1 qt. home-canned peach slices in light syrup
2 c white flour
1 1/2 baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Glaze: juice of other 1/2 lemon
2 heaping T sugar

Preheat oven to 350.

Whisk together the first 3 ingredients. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Dump the wet ingredients into the dry, then add the can of peaches, juice and all. Stir quickly, just until it’s all combined.

Pour into a 9×5 loaf pan greased with a little Earth Balance fake butter. Bake for an hour, or until it’s done (toothpick in the middle comes out clean, you know the drill).

Whisk glaze ingredients together. When bread comes out of the oven, poke the top all over so the glaze will soak in, then pour it over the bread. (This would be better if I’d had more than one lemon in the house; oh well.)

It did rise (…ish), but it came out with a custardy, heavy texture; no crumb at all — maybe ’cause there’s almost no fat? I brought it to a last-day-of-school party for my 7th grade advisees, and it was generally deemed “weird” but with a good peachy flavor.

Remember back a month ago, when we Bostonians were boiling our tap water and freaking out about it? I promised to donate $10 for each day of the “crisis” to a water charity, as a reminder of how stunningly lucky we are to have safe water come out of taps in our homes the other 361 days of the year.

It only took me a month, but I finally made good on this: $50 is on its way to Water for People. (That’s $10 x 3 or 4 days, plus a little extra.)

Will you join me?

Thanks to some health problems and the end of the school year, I’ve been a posting slacker. I promise to clean up the backlog soon, etc. etc. Anyway, my newly restricted diet plus S’s own dietary restrictions have led to some bold experiments in gluten-free, animal-fat-free (vegan with egg whites) cooking. Some have been successful. Some not so much. Read on for dietary restriction meal ideas, or just to mock our pain…

The winners:

We are huge fans of Pamela’s gluten-free mixes. Her pancakes are a breakfast staple, and I actually prefer them to regular pancakes at this point. Mix up some pancake batter with egg whites only, cook it thin on a griddle with oil instead of butter, and voila: crepes! We filled them with a stir-fry of spice-rubbed tofu, green beans, red peppers, and a lot of garlic.

Yesterday morning we used the same pancake mix to make muffins: again with the egg whites (which might be better for some gluten-free baking, actually, as heaviness can be a problem with non-wheat flours and losing the yolk lightens things up), and some stewed rhubarb for the liquid. Good stuff! We rounded out breakfast with a tofu scramble, including asparagus and roasted red peppers (and S’s suggestion of turmeric to make it look more like eggs, which I didn’t think mattered to me but turned out to be oddly comforting).

Last night’s dinner was corn pasta with pesto, and Stuff From My Freezer Gazpacho. Tonight’s was white rice with pesto, asparagus, roasted peppers, and chard. Are we sensing a theme?

The losers:

Today was not a good day for baking.

This morning’s “biscuits” (made from a non-Pamela’s GF bread roll mix, with baking powder instead of yeast as the rising agent) were weird little grey spongy patties that tasted like baked matzoh balls.

And tonight’s lemon “cake” (an assortment of flours, plus silken tofu) had yummy batter, but baked into a dense, slightly gritty bar with the flavor of a lemon Girl Scout cookie. It was improved by the addition of a ton of rum-based simple syrup and some strawberries from my garden, but then, what wouldn’t be? (A, J, and Roommate S were kind enough to profess enjoyment.)

I’m trying to see the whole grand Dietary Restriction Experiment as like writing a villanelle — the restriction of the form leads to greater creativity. Or if I’m in a less optimistic mood, soy pesto pesto soy, repeat ad nauseum. Is the glass half-full or -empty? Either way, it likely contains tofu.

Jazz runs a business in Berkeley with Steve, her best friend and longtime pine-object. (They sell personalized postcard photos of local landmarks to ex-hippies, which I think is hilarious.) She’s psyched to spend the summer growing their business and doing some more quality pining over Steve. Until her mom, do-gooder extraordinaire, announces that she has received a grant to start a clinic at the orphanage where she was raised. The whole family is off to India for the summer!

Jazz, her brother, and her dad are proud of Mom, but they’ve never taken part in her charitable ventures. Jazz, in particular, had a bad experience with a homeless woman she hired to work at her business, and has now firmly decided that she’s “not cut out to be a do-gooder.” She’s so determined that this is the wrong path for her that even when her dad and brother join her mom at the orphanage with projects of their own, she avoids the place like the plague. (This was the one note that rang false to me — Jazz’s refusal to have anything to do with the orphanage felt contrived and heavy-handed.)

Jazz is lonely and depressed and sure her summer is going to suck, until she befriends Danita, a girl her age from the orphanage who’s cooking for her family for the summer. Danita has a business idea of her own, and Jazz discovers that her talent for business can help people in need, too.

This book could easily have begun and ended with, “I’m going to write a book that showcases the value of small business loans to women in developing countries!” Or, “I’m going to write another book about a girl finding herself and falling in love with her best guy friend, because there really aren’t enough books like that!”

Instead we get a javelin-throwing business owner, a little brother obsessed with bug collecting, a well-run orphanage that is not to be pitied, and an endearing love interest — plus flawed, lovable characters and some delicious, glowing descriptions of India, Indian fashion, and Indian FOOD! (Can Danita come to my house and make some tea for me, too?) It’s a warm, fuzzy book that it would be hard not to love.

I’d had Mitali Perkins on my list for a long time, and was even more embarrassed that I’d never read any of her books when I had the pleasure of meeting her while wandering the exhibit hall at ALA this January. Now I can’t wait to read my next Mitali book!

Also reviewed at: Fluttering Butterflies, Chicken Spaghetti, and the kindred-spirit-named Semicolon Blog.

Callie Tate lives on a wealthy farm of pecan trees and too many brothers in turn-of-the-century Texas. One day she gathers the courage to ask her intimidating grandfather about the two different kinds of grasshoppers she sees in the fields, and he tells her to figure it out herself. From her eureka moment — they’re the same species, the yellower of which survived to get older and fatter because they blended in better with the drought grass — she and Granddaddy are inseparable students of scientific inquiry.

Evolution was a Newbery Honor book this year, and it sure does have “Newbery” all over it, with the cute 19th-century pinafore and the spunky-yet-wholesome heroine who loves science and her granddaddy. All of which is to say, I adored it. It might seem too “good for you” for some kids, though.

It’s episodic and slice-of-life, without much in the way of overarching plot. Calpurnia is yet another “tomboy” who bravely strives to shrug off the limitations her society places on women. If actual history had had as many of these girls as YA fiction does, we would have won the vote a hell of a lot sooner. (Can we get a novel about a 19th-century girl who loves needlework and looks forward to marrying a boy from a good family? Didn’t those girls have interesting lives sometimes, too? Especially since, quite frankly, most of my students are more likely to be the modern equivalent of this girl than of Calpurnia or Caddie Woodlawn.)

I loved her relationship with Granddaddy. I loved that he wasn’t secretly a sweet doting grandfather just waiting to emerge; he was in fact as hopelessly absorbed with his own interests as he looked, but Callie fit right into that single-mindedness. (The scenes in which he forgets that she’s a kid and wants to share a celebratory shot of liquor with her? Priceless.)

And I loved the promise of a new millennium — kids might be frustrated by the lack of resolution to Callie’s problems (I sure would have been), but I know what happens after that snowy Jan. 1, 1900. The telephones and automobiles that are so novel in Callie’s town take over the world. The 19th Amendment passes in Callie’s 32nd year. More and more women go to university, become scientists. I like to think Calpurnia V. Tate is one of them.

Also reviewed at: A Fuse #8 Production and onehandclapping.

Remember when I asked you for summer reading list suggestions? I finished the list a long time ago, of course, but it’s finally on our website. (That link will open a PDF.)

The middle school section at the beginning is the part you helped with. (And those yellow highlighted books, by the way? Are links to YouTube videos of booktalks by my colleagues and me. I can’t bear to watch mine, but feel free to mock my ridiculous facial expressions and hair-fiddling.)

Thanks to all of your for your fantastic suggestions! Special props to those of you who suggested:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Susan Cooper
Lloyd Alexander
Watership Down
Island on Bird Street (replacing one of the seven — yes, really — Holocaust books on last year’s list)
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (which I’d never heard of and totally want to read now!)
Of Nightingales That Weep
Hatchet

…all of which I included. Many of your suggestions were already on the list, and some were (sorry) too old or too young. But I loved hearing what all of you read in middle school, and your ideas definitely helped round out my list!

Naomi and her little brother Owen are content living with their great-grandmother in a trailer park — Naomi carves soap into animal shapes, hangs out with the (clearly flaming, even though the text doesn’t say so explicitly) librarian at school, and watches Wheel of Fortune every night with Gram and her best friend Fabiola. But then of course their mother Skyla shows up, and of course she sucks with all the flaky, dishonest, alcoholic suckage a problem novel can muster.

Fortunately, the book doesn’t stop there. Skyla and her creepy boyfriend want Naomi to come live with them, for reasons that may have to do with baby-sitting the boyfriend’s daughter and may have to do with child-support welfare checks. They don’t want Owen, because he has a physical disability which Skyla finds embarrassing. Gram is legitimately terrified that Skyla is going to get custody of Naomi, so what does she do?

She freakin’ picks up the trailer, hitches it to the truck that belongs to Fabiola and her husband Bernardo, and all six of them take off for Mexico in the middle of the night to try to find the children’s Mexican father. Obviously. And that’s when the story really gets going. Ryan’s descriptions of southern Mexico are gorgeous, and she follows my #1 rule of writing realism for children: Pick a Quirk, Any Quirk.

Without the soap carving, Naomi’s story would just be yet another children’s novel about overcoming an alcoholic, absent parent. Her art lends the story specificity. It turns out that Naomi comes from a long line of carvers who compete every year in a Oaxacan festival called Noche de Rabanos (Night of the Radishes). Of course this is where she ultimately finds her father, and herself.

I normally find problem novels eye-roll-inducing, but I loved this one thanks to carving, Mexico, and radishes. (Check out some pictures of carved radishes. They’re stunning!)

Also reviewed at: Inkweaver Review, A Fondness for Reading, and Books and Other Thoughts.