Author: katedp

Superheroes are about power, you know

Power, having it and keeping it, is about tradeoffs. You are ultimately serving other people, and you need to remember that. That means, though, that you give up something of yourself, something of who you are. You are no longer wholly in control of what you do. You have to compromise; furthermore, if you want people to actually follow you, you cannot betray the trust that you will do what is the best for the them.

That’s what A Nation Under Our Feet is about. T’Challa is back from a stint with the Avengers, and his absence has lost his people. Of course there are people who want to take advantage of that.

This is the third book in the series, and it was totally worth my time. It made me think – because what are superheroes if not a meditation on power? This series realizes that and isn’t shying away from it. Recommended, especially reading all three volumes (18 issues, I think) in one sitting.

Corn muffins: better than you remember

Corn muffins, in my world, are a breakfast food. Hot from the oven, broken into pieces, butter and some maple syrup on them? They’re a pretty good breakfast food. Bacon is a fine accompaniment, if you want a little protein. They’re also good with chili, if you want them for a non-breakfast meal. Between my husband, my daughter, and myself, a dozen lasts less than 24 hours in our house.

Corn Muffins

7.5oz GF flour (I use ATK’s GF flour)
6.67oz corn meal
1.5t baking powder
1t baking soda
0.5t salt
0.25t xanthan gum
1.33c sour cream (we were short of sour cream, so I substituted plain whole fat greek yogurt – worked like a charm)
5.25oz sugar
0.67c milk
2 large eggs
10T unsalted butter, melted and cooled

  1. Mix dry ingredients (not the sugar, which is a wet ingredient) together in a medium bowl. Mix wet ingredients (but only 8T of melted unsalted butter) in another. Add wet ingredients to dry, mix until no lumps remain. Let rest for 30 minutes.
  2. Preheat oven to 500F. Spray muffin tin with vegetable oil spray. Portion batter evenly into muffin tin, brush tops with last 2T of butter. Bake for 7 minutes.
  3. Reduce oven temp to 400F, and bake for 7 more minutes.
  4. Let cool for 10 minutes in pan, and on wire rack for 10 more minutes. Serve warm.

A Coffee Table Book

Women in Science was fine and fun with its profiles of women scientists throughout the millennia. I appreciate its inclusion of women of color along with white women – inclusivity is important!

But it’s a coffee table book, full of beautiful illustrations and short profiles. Which  is fine – we all need a good book to display, to look through. But it wasn’t a book to read straight through. Maybe one essay a night with your second grader? That might be perfect.

Madeleines are wonderful and delicious

I cannot begin to tell you how thrilled I was to find a madeleine recipe in the second volume of America’s Test Kitchen’s Gluten Free cookbook. I bought a madeleine pan shortly before discovering that not eating gluten made me feel better, so it only got used a few times, mostly for bake sales. It’s hard to cook something you love but can’t eat. It was the first recipe I made out of the book.

Lemon Madelines

2.5oz GF flour (I usually use the ATK GF blend)
0.25t baking powder
0.125t salt
1 large egg + 2 large yolks
2.67oz sugar
4T unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1T grated lemon zest
1.5t vanilla

  1. Mix dry ingredients (sugar is a wet ingredient, remember) in a bowl. Mix all other ingredients in a large bowl until well combined and very smooth. Stir in flour mixture with rubber spatula and mix until dough is homogeneous and smooth. Let batter rest for 30 minutes.
  2. Preheat oven to 375. Spray pan with vegetable oil spray (I forgot to do this with one of my two batches and getting the cookies out was doable, but it was easier with the spray). Portion batter into molds of madeleine pan, about 2t per cookie. (Seriously, BUY ONE. Madeleines are SO EASY to make and everyone is so impressed when you can do it, but the hardest part is talking yourself into buying a specialized pan.) Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until edges begin to brown and they spring back when pressed lightly.
  3. Cool in pan for 5 minutes, then let them cool completely on a clean dishtowel.

I suspect you can make them without the lemon and they’ll be fine. I also made an orange-cardamom batch (I love cardamom) – you omit the vanilla, swap the lemon zest for orange, and add 0.5t ground cardamom to sugar mixture in step 1. So good.

It’s a quest!

Let’s review the required components of a quest, shall we? (Courtesy How to Read Literature Like a Professor)

  1. A questor
  2. A place to go
  3. A stated reason to go there
  4. Challenges and trials along the way
  5. The real reason to get there (hint: it’s almost always self-knowledge)

In The Wangs vs the World, (1) the Wang family is traveling to (2) their oldest child’s house in upstate New York from their family house in LA because (3) their house has just been repossessed by the bank and their family business and fortune has just gone up in smoke during the 2008 crash. They face (4) challenges and trials along the way, including their middle child deciding he’s marrying the first woman he has sex with about halfway into the trip, a car crash, and the last of their business product, which they had hoped to deliver to a client, dissolving. But they do eventually learn (5) their family is and has always been the most important thing.

I enjoyed The Wangs vs the World. It’s funny, it’s told from a point of view you don’t often see: an Asian-American family who had succeeded through hard work, sure, but isn’t doing very well right now. At all. Those two things alone make it worth reading.

Wednesday Shorts

I’ve saved up a lot of reading for today. Here’s the best of what I read:

A near-perfect breakfast food

Because sometimes you just crave pancakes, even when you’re gluten-free. Add maple syrup and bacon (sometimes I substitute raspberry jam for the syrup), and you’re good to go.

Pro tip: if you’re reheating pancakes, the toaster oven is a better choice than the microwave.

Buttermilk Pancakes

10.5oz GF flour (I use the America’s Test Kitchen blend)
1t salt
1t baking powder
0.5t baking soda
2T sugar
1.75 c buttermilk
2 large eggs
4T unsalted butter, melted

  1. Start heating skillet/griddle. Mix all dry ingredients together in bowl and wet ingredients in another. (I use a 4-c measuring cup for the wet ingredients. It works well.)
  2. (Redacted because the ATK GF Cookbook wants you to separate the eggs, and whip the whites separately to make the pancakes lighter and fluffier. I find that this makes the pancakes so tall they don’t cook well – the middle never gets all the way done. So you can whip the egg whites to a froth, but be forewarned.)
  3. Whisk wet ingredients into dry ingredients until batter has thickened and there are no lumps. (If you’ve actually done the thing where you whip the egg whites, this is when you fold them into the rest of the batter.)
  4. Use a 0.25c measure to portion batter onto skillet/griddle. Cook pancakes until the tops bubble and bottom is browned. Flip. Cook for a couple minutes longer. Eat immediately.

 

Pride and Prejudice-adjacent

The conceit of Longbourn is interesting: Pride & Prejudice as told from the servants’ point of view. And it was a delightful little book with, I thought, interesting insights into the Bennetts. But the main story was with the servants and their lives and loves, as it should have been.

Basically, it was a lovely little story, good for curling up with on a snowy afternoon.

Before the republic became the empire

If you (like me) mostly read popular history about Ancient Rome, you know the story of Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar backwards and forwards. The super short version is: Pompey and Caesar were both famous, powerful generals and politicians in the Roman Republic. By the time they were done competing for control of Rome – Caesar won, Pompey was dead – Rome was effectively an empire instead of a republic. (HBO made a fictionalized series.) But, for such a fundamental political change to happen, the battle had to have been much, much bigger than just a political rivalry between two men.

The changes started 100 years earlier, as:

  • Rome starts conquering land that is further and further away from Italy;
  • more money starts coming in from those conquered lands and staying in the hands of the elite;
  • the elite need standing armies to fight far away wars;
  • but those armies are loyal to a particular general and not to the state;
  • not to mention, the elite split into two main political factions; and
  • those factions start caring more about winning than they do about governing properly.

Basically, the state needed to be reformed as Rome grew in size and in wealth, and those in power refused to change. It lead to lots of war and death and power grabs.

The Storm Before the Storm talks about these earlier years much more coherently than I can here. There are compelling figures and a wide sweep of history that echoes to current American politics (but with important differences).

It’s worth your time if you (like me!) enjoy learning about ancient Rome.

Clothes matter

Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore was a delight. It was exactly what it promised to be: an examination of the standard uniform of various writers, mainly but not exclusively of the 20th century. Full of pictures and pithiness, clothes project an image of who the writers want you to think they are: rebels, an aloof outsider, cultured, whatever.

It should be said that clothes do matter; even if you claim not to care what you wear, you are still conforming (or not) to a standard. Grabbing the top t-shirt on the pile (and bragging about it) says so much about who you are and the position you have in society and the amount of respect you have for those around you (little, I would argue).

Clothes do not make the writer – dressing like Joan Didion will not make you write like her – but they are another way authors express themselves. And it  was fun to look at the photos and read what the various authors say about their fashion tics.

(PS I cannot imagine reading this book on a kindle/tablet. Get the hard-cover version and enjoy its design.)