verbatim

Amazonian

I know we are all supposed to hate Amazon, but I don't. I love Amazon. Granted, I wasn't too happy last year when they were screwing over some of my Hachette authors, but I couldn't boycott. I just couldn't.

Let me first say that I also love my neighborhood indie bookstores, particularly the New England Mobile Book Fair and Newtonville Books. My first choice is always to buy my books at one of those stores. If they don't have what I need and I have time, I order it from them. But if I don't have time, and I need it tomorrow, I get it from Amazon.

But I get so much more than books from Amazon. Looking at my last few non-book orders: earbuds, tea bags, water filter, humidifier, wheelchair. And a few months ago I finally explored their "Subscribe and Save" program, which is amazing. You agree to get a delivery of a certain item every x months (you decide), and you get 5% off and free shipping. But you can cancel the subscription any time you want! I use this for things that we use regularly but that are a pain in the neck to buy at the store, like bags of dry cat food and giant packages of toilet paper. They arrive at my door just before we run out! (You can easily change the subscription schedule if you need to.) One more thing I don't have to worry about.

Of course I have Amazon Prime, which allows me to get free two-day shipping on almost anything. Often the items come the very next day. Prime also allows me to stream certain videos for free, which I always forget I can do!

I also finally got the Amazon VISA card, where you earn points for every purchase anywhere. I used it for quite a few of Julie's Bat Mitzvah expenses (flowers, booze, chair rentals, etc.) and earned so many points that for some time after, every time I put something in my Amazon cart it was free! I know that lots of people have credit cards that earn them air miles, but we don't travel enough for that to be worth our while. All these years I've been using my L.L. Bean VISA, which I still have, to earn free snowpants and parkas and boots and backpacks. Now I'm mostly using the Amazon one.)

Another thing you can do is have a portion of all your Amazon purchases go to the charity of your choice. All you have to do is begin all your purchases at Smile.Amazon.com instead of just Amazon.com. (I frankly wish it would happen automatically. I sometimes forget to go to Smile, and usually but not always a reminder pops up to ask if I want to go to Smile. Yes. Always.) My current pick is charity:water, a nonprofit that brings clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 

Finally, I get a few pennies every time one of you lovely people purchases something on Amazon by using one of my embedded links or buy starting your shopping trip in the Amazon search thingy in my sidebar (which is not visible in Chrome for no good reason I can think of). My goal is for that to cover my annual fee to Typepad for hosting my blog.

So, if you must, go ahead and tell my why I should still hate Amazon. Lalalalalalalalala I can't hear you!

Interwebby Things Worth Checking Out

Oliver Sacks, upon learning that he has terminal cancer: "There is no time for anything inessential." This brought to mind Roger Angell's amazing piece on aging in the New Yorker last winter, which this winter won a National Magazine Award. Takes my breath away.

I am not happy when people die, of course, but I am happy when I get to read an obit by Margalit Fox in the Times. She is the best in the business. Here's one for my fellow crossword-loving pals.

Meanwhile, some genius paired quotations from Samuel Beckett with photos of the horror that has been this winter in New England (so far!).

These confessions of a "comma queen" at the New Yorker made for some great reading for this editor, and I am delighted to learn that this essay is an excerpt from a forthcoming book. I am even more delighted that I will be able to meet the author in March—stay tuned for details!

Here's John Malkovich being everyone in every famous painting ever. 

And yeah, Misha still has it. Totally.

Take a wicked awesome tour of Boston with a David Foster Wallace/Infinite Jest junkie.

How to Braise

Remember a few months ago when I accidentally received two copies of a cookbook I'd edited for Michael Ruhlman? Well, lucky me (and lucky you, as you'll soon see), it happened again! Whoever keeps mistakenly putting my name twice on the publication shipping list, thanks!

Last time it was How to Roast, and this time it's How to Braise. As you have no doubt guessed, this is the beginning of a whole series of slim volumes, each describing a particular technique and providing a couple dozen recipes demonstrating the technique. (Next up: How to Sauté.)

So, what is braising? It's certainly not as well-known a term as roasting or sautéing. Braising involves searing food (usually meat) and then cooking it (usually for a long time) in liquid until it's tender. After the introductory section of the book, which tells you everything you need to know about this technique, the recipe section leads off with the iconic braise, Lamb Shanks. This is a classic example of the wonder of the braise, because you take a rather unappealing-looking cut of meat and turn it into the most elegant, rich, satisfying dish. And that's what Ruhlman find so exciting about braising: It transforms food in a way that most other cooking techniques don't. You're not just browning the meat, you're turning it into something else entirely.

There are recipes for braised beef and chicken and duck legs, but also a few veggies you might not have thought to braise, like radishes and Spanish onions.

As always, Donna Turner Ruhlman's photos throughout are both gorgeous and instructive, so you'll see not only a preview of the finished product, but also how each step in the process ought to look along the way, which is especially helpful for a technique that might be new to you.

Oh, and for those who've asked, yes, the Acknowledgments page is the first thing my family turns to whenever one of "my" books comes in the mail:

Anyhow, thanks to another paperwork error, I'd like to give away my extra copy of this book to one of my (U.S.) readers. Leave me a comment below about anything to do with braising—a recipe you love, a recipe you want to try, a question, anything. Be sure to leave your email address so I can contact you if you're the winner! I'll pick a random comment on Monday at noon (Boston time) and contact the winner for a snail-mail address.

Heritage Cooking

Way back in November, before all the Bad Stuff happened, I won a giveaway from Artisan Books! (You do subscribe to their e-newsletter, right?) The prize was a doozy: first, a signed copy of Sean Brock's amazing cookbook Heritage, which the New York Times Book Review called "the blue ribbon chef cookbook of the year, without a doubt." The back cover is plastered with glowing praise from the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, David Chang, and more.

The inscription with Brock's autograph is "Cook with soul," and that's also the first item in his manifesto, with an important expansion: "Cook with soul—but first, get to know your soul." And the second one directly addresses the title of the book: "Be proud of your roots, be proud of your home, be proud of your family and its culture. That's your inspiration." And this book is most definitely a reflection of Brock's Southern heritage.

Other items on his manifesto are "Do as little as possible to an ingredient when it's perfect and at its peak" and one of my faves, "Cook using your instincts. Cooking times are just guidelines."* The last item is "He who dies with the biggest pantry wins." And to that end, the rest of my haul from this giveaway was a gorgeous assortment of grains from Anson Mills, purveyors of "handmade mill goods from organic heirloom grain." Look at all this amazing stuff I got:

These will be perfect for trying Brock's recipes for Cracklin' Cornbread and Savory Benne Wafers. I'm also eyeing his Chicken Simply Roasted in a Skillet, Slow-Cooked Rib Eye with Potato Confit and Green Garlic-Parsley Butter, and Buttermilk Pie with Cornmeal Crust. Yum. Everything in this cookbook looks wonderful (thanks to gorgeous photography by Peter Frank Edwards).

I think it's time for me to get cooking....

*When I edit cookbooks, I always change sentences like "Sauté the onions for 15 minutes, or until golden brown" to "Sauté the onions until golden brown, about 15 minutes." To me, what I call the doneness cue (in this case, "golden brown") is the key. Depending on your onions and the fat you use, your pan and your stove, and your kitchen's ambient temperature that day, browning onions could take considerably less or more time than 15 minutes. I want home cooks to learn to trust their own judgment—if the onions are golden brown but it's been only 10 minutes, they're done; and if they're still not golden brown after 15 minutes, keep sautéing. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part the timing is indeed just a guideline, as Brock says. And it's an important guideline—it helps you plan your time in the kitchen so that everything is done when you want it to be done, and it lets you know if you're way off on something—so I'm frequently nagging my authors with "About how long will that take?" if they provide only a doneness cue. But I also nag them to provide a doneness cue when they give only a time guideline—if, for instance, they say, "Bake for 35 to 45 minutes," how will we know when to take it out of the oven? Ah, "when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean."

Book Group

The members of my book group were notified that we were required by law to read All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr immediately, since we were the last people on the planet who hadn't read it. So we did, and we met last week to discuss it.

Here's the summary from Amazon, where it was a best book of the month (8/14): 

Does the world need yet another novel about WWII? It does when the novel is as inventive and beautiful as this one by Anthony Doerr. In fact, All the Light We Cannot See—while set mostly in Germany and France before and during the war—is not really a “war novel.” Yes, there is fear and fighting and disappearance and death, but the author’s focus is on the interior lives of his two characters. Marie-Laure is a blind 14-year-old French girl who flees to the countryside when her father disappears from Nazi-occupied Paris. Werner is a gadget-obsessed German orphan whose skills admit him to a brutal branch of Hitler Youth. Never mind that their paths don’t cross until very late in the novel, this is not a book you read for plot (although there is a wonderful, mysterious subplot about a stolen gem). This is a book you read for the beauty of Doerr’s writing—“Abyss in her gut, desert in her throat, Marie-Laure takes one of the cans of food…”—and for the way he understands and cherishes the magical obsessions of childhood. Marie-Laure and Werner are never quaint or twee. Instead they are powerful examples of the way average people in trying times must decide daily between morality and survival.

That pretty much sums it up for me. It's a very long book (544 pages), but the chapters are each just two or three pages, so the reading goes fast. The chapters mostly alternate between Marie-Laure's and Werner's point of view, and the time frame shifts back and forth between certain days in 1941 and 1944. I really love Doerr's writing; there were many gorgeous turns of phrase that took my breath away. 

There's virtually no mention of the Holocaust in this book, because that's not the experience of the two main characters, although we as readers obviously know what's going on and what's going to happen in the larger picture. 

Everyone in the group enjoyed the book, although some people did not like that Werner was a sympathetic character, since he is indeed doing Hitler's bidding. That didn't bother me, because I felt that he was just a kid trying to stay alive in a very brutal situation. Indeed, with the exception of a few sympathetic souls, pretty much all of the Germans were portrayed as either monsters or buffoons.

I did not care much for the subplot about the stolen gem—it was there as a plot device to throw everyone together, but otherwise it did nothing for me.

Next time we're reading The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, which I have been dying to read. What are you guys reading?