Dracula

In my adventures in reading, I try to keep the genres changing so I do not fall into a rut and so I read things I might not normally. One of the more difficult genres for me to pick from is classics, not because I do not like classic novels, but because there are so many I want (or feel I should) read. Last week, I crossed another one off the list.

Dracula by Bram Stoker was a book I started reading online at my old job when I was on phone duty, but I did not finish it electronically. Before moving, I had a Half Price Bookstore gift card to use (no Half Price here - sadness!) and bought Dracula, among other things. I thought it would be much like Frankenstein in its build-up and execution, but it was less tense and foreboding. That is not to say there was not an element of darkness to it, only that it was infused with a hope from the characters.

Something I did not realize is that the book is epistolary. I thought it would make for a confusing read, jumping from character voice to character voice, but Stoker wrote each character with a distinctive voice and perspective, it was not difficult to follow in the least. The way each person is introduced and developed is smooth, with the exception of some of Lucy's suitors who seem like passing characters only to show up later in more significant roles. The novel never lags; each chapter is purposeful and moves the story forward, whether fully understood at the time or not.

The biggest "complaint" I have is that the story would have been so much cooler if I had not known the "punchline" already. It takes about half the book for the characters to figure out that (spoiler!) Dracula is the vampire. To have read the book before it was common cultural knowledge must have been surprising. However, since there is nothing I can do about knowing the twist, the method of "I know something you don't know" was employed when reading.

One of my tiffs with novels, classics especially, is that the end trails off. As a reader, I want the ends tied up, resolution to most of the major and minor questions and something that is not a "five years later..." scenario. Dracula wrapped everything up, not necessarily in a neat little bow, but the characters progressed in the short term and what each ended up doing suited them. They did not join up and become vampire hunters ala Ghostbusters. In fact, I would say that their lives returned to what they had (or were in the process of moving toward) before Dracula came into the picture.

Overall, Dracula was an excellent book. It kept me interested, did not bog me down with some of the writing styles many classic novels can do (sentence structure and verbiage), and was a lot of fun to read on top of it all. A book I would think about returning to on a rainy day...or a dark and stormy night.

On hold...

I am on hold with an insurance company right now. Been on hold for about 15 minutes now, which begs the question - when do you hang up? I need to speak with them, so if I hang up now, I will have to go through the holding again at some point. I feel like Phoebe on Friends - I will get the next available operator, but how long must I wait for him/her to become available?

After about 10 minutes, I begin to ask myself things like "Is my life, like this phone call, on hold? How long have I been on hold? Do I simply need to know the correct 'extension' for life fulfillment? Why can't people on hold choose what kind of music they like? What hold music would I be if I had to choose? What if I have been placed in an 'on hold' vortex where my phone call will never be answered and 'they" (you know...them) are sending me subliminal messages, reprogramming my mind to only eat Burger King or shop at TJMaxx?" Holding is dangerous.

(26 minutes and counting...)

***Update*** I hung up the phone at approximately 32 minutes. I am sure that, had I not hung up, I would still be on hold. It was a difficult decision, but I think it was the right one. Eventually, an alternate phone number was found that provided me with an actual human. But first I was put on hold...

Saturday in Raleigh

A Saturday or three ago, I went off on a grand adventure, the likes of which have never been seen. I roamed Raleigh. I know, I am such a sojourner. I had met a church friend for coffee at Third Place (fabulous cinnamon chocolate chip cookies) about a month in to me living here, and absolutely loved the coffee, shop, and area. It is in an area of Raleigh called Five Points (because five roads converge and one large and confusing intersection). There is the coffee shop, Lilly's Pizza (renowned throughout Raleigh), antique stores and NOFO at the Pig, a cafe/cute gift store. The store is a converted Piggly Wiggly and, in homage, they have cute pig sculptures around the parking lot...

Goal for NOFO: to eat on the patio there on a breezy sunny day and to buy something unique and fun at the store...or at least some fudge.

After wandering around there, I decided to see what was going on at the Farmer's Market. I wish I lived closer to the market, because I would go there for all my produce instead of the grocery store. It is nice to taste before you buy, talk with the people who grow and pick the food, and build a relationship with some vendors beyond "that will be $21.56."

When I went, there were tons and tons of strawberries. If one wished to, one could gorge oneself on strawberry samples. Come June it will be peach samples...mmm. There is always a great selection of veggies - from Vidalia onions to turnips to lettuce to peppers. I think the Farmer's Market is one of the few places where dirt on produce is a comforting sight.

Further down in the same produce building is a little garden/nursery where people can purchase decorative plants and trees and herbs. I looked for some basil, but it had already been sold out. Another day.

There are three buildings behind the main Farmer's Market area. One is where people can buy ready-made food - fried stuff and pulled pork type things, I believe. In the main building, there are vendors selling painting, crafts, candies, desserts (pies and cakes), parts of cows - I wish I had gotten a picture of the list - shanks and shoulders, butts and briskets. However, what brings me to this building every time is the vast selection of jams, jellies, preserves, sauces, dressings, and honey. Oh the honey. Clover, wildflower, with the comb, without the comb. It truly looks like nectar of the gods...

Also in the jam building are a few other selections, as can be seen below in example and on banners (fresh rabbit, anyone?). The cast iron items are huge and extremely heavy. Not sure who would want to get a loaf of bread out of an oven when the pan weighs as much as a 4-year-old child.



So far, the only things I have bought in the jam/honey area has been as gifts, so one of these days, I am going to stock up on some North Carolina preserves (think of a fruit and they jar it), sticky honey, and part of a cow.

The third "second level" building is a pork market.

I was wary entering here thinking I would come face to face with whole hogs hanging from hooks. (Alliteration is my friend!) Thankfully, all the whole hogs had sold by this point, or they are kind enough to house them behind the fridges. If you want anything that is from a pig - they are your people. Bacon, pork skin, loins, chops, and these, the closest thing to a whole pig they had...

It is a fun place to be whether you are looking to buy things or not. The vendors are kind and helpful both with what makes a good rutabaga and what produce is coming in and going out of season. All the food I have bought there has been top notch and perfectly ripened. In fact, one vendor even told Aaron and I when we went last summer to wait a day or two to eat a certain kind of peach because it needed to ripen a little more. They know what they are talking about and have oodles of proof to show and taste from.

For the curious who think if they visit they will miss out on the fresh Carolina food because there is no stove in the hotel room, fear not! There is a Farmer's Market restaurant across the street that serves food directly from the market. I have heard it is top notch. Or, if you are more interested in some seafood, how about the NC Seafood Restaurant?

Do you see why I want to live closer to the market? Fresh picked strawberries and seafood could quickly become a nightly dinner if I lived close.

It's a Miracle (Fruit)!

Just a quick little note/link today...still failing to find the balance between things I want to post on versus my post-work desire to vegetate or run errands. Vegetation is winning.

In one of my food blogs today, there was a link to a New York Times article about a berry called Miracle Fruit. Apparently eating the pulp of this cranberry-looking berry changes sour tastes to sweet tastes for about an hour. Thus, sugary things taste even more sugary and sour things taste like sugar. Like the setting of the article, I too think this would make for an awesome gathering of people, especially if it were people who were not that familiar with one another. Everyone experiencing something new tends to bond. And who doesn't want to pour Tabasco down your throat and feel what hot icing is like? Even though the berries are about $2 each, for an hour of altered food tasting is worth it, I think. It is like a drug trip for your taste buds!

Twisted and Oh So Good..

It was a slow and lazy Saturday afternoon about a month ago. I was relaxing on the couch, enjoying the offerings of full cable, watching Bobby Flay on "Throwdown." For those not in the know, Throwdown is a show wherein Flay is given an assignment to try and beat another chef/restaurateur at what they make best - hot dogs, cakes, Texas Chili, etc. On this particular show, Flay was challenged to make a better pretzel and dipping sauce that a place in Philly. Raise your hands if you knew Philly was known for its pretzels? Me either, but apparently this is the case. Bobby pulled of a surprise win and it got me thinking about my own pretzel-making experiences...

The first recollection of the pretzel creative process came my senior year in college with roomie Lisa and friend Brannen/on/an (I cannot remember how he spelled his name). I do not remember much more than me being the worst twister of the bunch. My ends would not stay together, my logs were too thin, the complications were numerous.

Next memory also has a little Lisa in it. At her wedding, her favors were cookie cutters tied to a little recipe book that had some of her and hubby's favorite foods (oatmeal cookies, possum and egg noodles some of the highlights). One of them was her recipe for pretzels. Now that I had a year or two of age on me, I thought I was mature enough to manage the twisting. Which I did (with Aaron's help) quite wonderfully. However, in the printing of the recipe, a critical step was left off. There was not baking the pretzels, so it was assumed by Aaron and I that after the dough was boiled, they were ready to eat. They were not. We tried boiling them longer, which made them more wet and spongy. Then we tried baking them but the damage had already been done. I later emailed Lisa and got the missing step, but always was a little leery that she had left another step off in a ploy to corner the market on her pretzels. Moral of the story, don't trust a Midwesterner with curly hair. (I love you, Lisa!)

Back to the Saturday...

Emboldened with a courage that can only come from a lack of anything else to do, I began looking for Lisa's pretzel recipe so I could make a batch. But wait...why make Lisa's when I could see if Bobby's was so good as to merit a Throwdown win? I checked out the recipe online and was happy to see I had all the needed ingredients, so to pretzel making I went. It is fairly simple to make...a lot like pizza dough. In fact, I bet it would make good pizza dough...or focaccia, mmm focaccia.

After letting the dough rise, it was time to test my twisting abilities. I did pretty well overall, with two or three casualties post-boiling that became cinnamon sugar pretzels. The boiling is where I veered from the recipe slightly. I used less baking soda in the water because I was almost out, and I did not see any adverse issues. I do not think the pretzels would have faired as well were it not for my use of a spider, which allowed me to remove the pretzels without breaking them. Popped them in the oven, waited patiently and look what came out...


Seriously. I mean, come on. You cannot get that at Auntie Anne's. The outside has a great crust, but not rubbery or dry (even after microwaving to reheat), the inside is dense, airy, salty with a little hint of sweetness. I wanted to eat them all.

And, if that were not enough, I had leftover cheese from an enchilada dinner so I made a version of the Queso Poblano sauce using chili powder and cayenne pepper instead of the poblano. I think it worked well - gave the sauce a nice orange hue, played well off the salty and hint of sweet of the pretzel. No wonder Bobby won this Throwdown. And, because the cinnamon sugar ones needed some dipping love, I made a quick glaze with powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla extract - yummy!

Since that Saturday, I have made another batch or two, each as successful as the first. Even though the recipe makes 8, I was did make 12 once, but that was pushing it. The less dough you use, the thinner the pretzel, and who wants a skinny pretzel? In addition, the thinner pretzels make it a little harder in the boiling - more apt to come apart during and after boiling (think getting penne out of water with a spoon vs. getting spaghetti out).

When Aaron tasted one, he exclaimed, "This is by far the best thing you have made since you moved here." (So maybe that was not word-for-word what he said, but it is the general tone and feeling he emoted.) And, I would have to agree. The question now is: who would win in a Bobby's pretzel throwdown -me or Bobby?

Ice cream minus cream

I have an ongoing list of things I want to post about, but now that I have a job (yippee!) I no longer have 8+ hours in the day to blog at my leisure. So, until I get to those planned posts, I will write about a dessert you can buy ready-made at any grocery store - Haagen-Dazs!

I was read on Serious Eats about low-calorie ice cream (not for the low-cal part so much as the ice cream part) and saw Haagen-Dazs makes a chocolate sorbet, dairy-free frozen dessert. Generally speaking, I am not a gigantic fan of chocolate ice cream, but this is not chocolate ice cream, is it? It is sorbet, which means no dairy, which in turn means my tummy should like it more (silly lactose intolerance). But the only sorbets I have seen previous have been fruit-flavored, which is fine, but sometimes a person needs a pint of chocolate frozen goodness.

Cut to a few weeks later and Aaron and I decide to make burgers. At the grocery store, we gather all the needed items and make our way to the checkout. I cleverly veer toward the ice cream section "just to see" if the sorbet was there. Approximately 10 seconds later, I had my chocolate sorbet and Aaron had his pomegranate chip.

Burgers were great and it was time for dessert; the moment of truth. Will it taste like a watery, fake chocolate or like ice cream? Verdict: I don't need no stinkin' cream to have my chocolate frozen dessert. The texture is smooth, creamy (yeah, I don't know how they pull it off, either) with a great chocolate flavor. The chocolate does not taste sweet or syrupy, but a deep, rich flavor permeates the mouth. So now I have a great alternative to a "special" ice cream to get from time to time, and Haagen-Dazs continues to impress me with its flavors. (See also: Sticky Toffee Pudding and Mayan Chocolate)

And, for the curious, Pomegranate Chip is also a phenomenal ice cream - sweet, tart, a little bitter - mighty tasty.

My First Souffle

After I moved here and unpacked my belongings, I needed to test my kitchen out. See if the oven worked, figure out where would be best to do my cooking prep, and get used to the new locations of the fridge, knife drawer, and pantry. What better way to do this than to try and make a type of food never before attempted by me - souffle!

Watching people on TV make souffle, I thought it was going to be a disaster. Egg whites, an oven I am not accustomed to, all those stories of souffles falling. I chose to make Gritty Souffle (found in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food: food x mixing + heat = baking) because I like Alton and his recipes, I got the cookbook for Christmas, and I had all the ingredients. The last reason is usually is the deciding factor. Some days, I will go to allrecipes.com and use their ingredient search in hopes of finding something I can make using, say, garlic, eggs, dried fruit, spinach, and bittersweet chocolate. Some days it is success, some days I go without. Hopefully the list I made would have resulted in a "without" day - garlic and chocolate? Not so much.

Back to the souffle. It is grits, but in a souffle. Or, if you want to make it sound a little more "high class" polenta souffle. It's French, it's Italian - it's Fritalian! The preparation of the souffle is close to Alton's recipe for Cheesy Souffle, but not quite. After making the grits, I was faced with a recipe step I was unfamiliar with - making egg foam (meringue, more or less). And, even though I added the cream of tartar with the egg whites at the beginning, and not after they got a little foamy, everything worked out just fine and fluffy egg whites were achieved.

Next most difficult task - folding the egg whites into the grits. It is important here to not stir, but fold, so that the egg foam does not deflate. I am not sure there is any way of knowing if I did this well or not until the souffle comes out of the oven and it is either a fluffy poof or a pancake. Waiting 45 minutes to find out was nerve-wracking. And, even after 45 minutes, the souffle could have fallen.

Thankfully, it did not and it turned out spectacular. Something it looks like was super hard. But it wasn't, it was rather simple.

It tasted pretty good, too. The garlic flavor really came out, and the garlic I used was not the best I have gotten and I used too much. I also did not have cheddar cheese (I cannot recall what cheese I used), so that would have better balanced the flavors. The best part of the whole thing is getting an "edge" piece because it has Parmesan cheese baked onto it (that is what Alton coated the sides with). Salty, crunchy, buttery, with airy souffle.