Eating What You Read: Food from Fiction

The Chronicles of Narnia alongside HazerBaba Turkish Delight


I have a little obsession to share--making food from fiction.  Reading and cooking are two things I've liked for a long time and it seems only natural to put them together.  Even as a kid, I would find myself wanting to eat what the characters in the books I was reading ate.

The Turkish Delight from the Narnia books probably tops every one's list for memorable food from fiction, but there are plenty of others too.  In addition to Turkish Delight, I found myself wanting to eat the tuna sandwich described at the beginning of A Wrinkle in Time, the wild mushrooms sauteed in garlic and butter from Stardust, and drink the raspberry cordial from Anne of Green Gables.  One memorable sick day in middle school I read all of Silver Woven in My Hair, eating chunks of bread and cheese in solidarity with the Cinderella-like character in the story.

When Charlotte was a couple years younger she wanted to read The Tawny Scrawny Lion almost every night.  One day I decided to make the carrot stew that featured so prominently in the plot.  It was surprisingly filling--just as it was in the story.  Even baby Ariadne loved it.

Last winter when one of our favorite cartoon series, Legend of Korra, was about to come to an end, we went on a recipe hunt for some food to accompany the last episode.  I discovered a great recipe and a new favorite blog at www.fiction-food.com. Charlotte liked the Spirit Cake so well she had it when we celebrated her 6th birthday party with extended family.

Though the cake from the cartoon looks like the one above, Charlotte, my little fruit-lover, couldn't help herself and decided to add even more berries--artfully arranged, of course.  

So, when some friends launched a book club about a year ago, I started making notes and bringing food to meetings.  The kids' homeschool book club set a high bar.  Some of the more memorable snacks there included skyr from Icefall, sweet potato soup from The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic and dessert pizza from The Candymakers.

The noodle pudding made with sultanas and ginger and described as 'golden ingots' from The Yiddish Policeman's Union was a favorite of mine (it tastes better than it looks).  

Sherlock Homes' housekeeper was always making beef pies from The Beekeeper's Apprentice, which also turned out to be quite good.  Paw paw jam from The Glass Castle was less well received, but worth a try (I did not make this one, since raw paw paw was impossible to get at that time of year). When we read Americana our friends Sam and Wick made fried plantains that were downright amazing.

At this point, it is more or less expected that I will make some sort of culinary effort and I get warnings like 'don't make burnt toast'  for Ocean at the End of the Lane and 'no library candy' from City of Thieves.  





















Recently I've started a middle school book club.  Above, Nova and Charlotte are making Swedish cremes from The Watsons Go To Birmingham--1963 (the author's wife contributed the recipe to The Kids' Book Club Book).  Next month's books are The Very Persistant Gappers of Frip and The Little Prince.  I wonder what we'll make...

A Colorwork Cardigan for Charlotte

I have been making an effort to knit sweaters for the kids since about 2011.  Charlotte got the first one, when she was a toddler.  A friend had sort of dared/goaded me to get back into knitting, claiming I was never really going to do it--just talk about it.  My pride was hurt a little, and in a rebellious move, I abandoned all the scarves I've half hartedly started (and never finished) and went straight for sweaters.  They were what I'd always wanted to knit anyway.  I never looked back.  

 

Charlotte's most recent sweater has been my most challenging project to date.  I wanted to do colorwork, and knit in the round.  She wanted a cardigan with flowers or diamonds that was pink and purple.  This Dale of Norway baby sweater was the one pattern we found that really satisfied us both. Knit in the round with a steek and a pattern that was arguably diamond or floral, we were set.  Using larger needles and thicker yarn, I sized it up from 3/4 to a 5/6 and switched the colors, keeping dark and light the same as the original but going with purple, magenta and pink instead of red, orange and pink.  I cast on in August.  The colorwork section went so fast, I thought I'd be done by September at the latest.  I was oh so wrong.  

Getting to this point took months.  Knitting purple stockinette and only purple stockinette is really boring.

 

This was somewhere around Halloween, when costume making took over.  Followed by Christmas.  In February I was certainly going to finish (I don't even remember what happened to January)...then I broke my arm.

By the end of March all the knitting was done!

Steeking and adding the button band were much harder than I'd anticipated--by far the hardest part of the project, mostly because I chickened out about sewing the stabilizing stitches by machine.  Repairs were in order.  I will spare you the details.  By the time I had finished steeking (cutting) and adding the button band, the sleeves were too short (despite careful measuring).  Luckily sweaters that are knit top down are pretty easy to adjust.  I took out the colored edging, put the stitches back on the needle and kept going.

Here is one lengthened cuff and one original.

The 'finished' picture below just goes to show how much color can be distorted by different cameras in different lights.  The true color is much closer to the one above.  Hopefully I'll get a better shot later on.  

Gardens and the Getty

We were in LA for a wedding late this summer.  Charles was in the wedding, which meant while he was off doing photos, I got a chance to explore.  You are who you are, in the Midwest or the West Coast.  True to form, I searched out a museum and a garden.



It turns out the Getty Center was an excellent choice.  Perched in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains, overlooking the city and the ocean, the Getty gave me a great perspective on the Los Angeles.  Getting there was an experience in itself--parking is below (or uber drop off, as the case may be), from which point all visitors take a dedicated tram up the bluff to the museum.  A bevy volunteers greets the tram as passengers disembark.  On the top of the bluff everything manmade is white--Bright white, off white, soft white, Meier white (Richard Meier, the architect of the Getty Center, was so fond of a particular shade of white it was named after him).  An open, airy sense pervades the space.  Though the arcitecture is unabashedly modern, there is a quality of mediteranian antiquity about the place, a comfortable, lively, grandeur.  I learned later that the columns were in fact constructed of the same marble as the coloseum in Rome.  It seems I was feeling exactly what I was supposed to feel.



From the tram I embarked on a garden tour--a decent from clean white lines into lush green.  Alluring water features (some turned off because of the drought) and unexpected flora pulled us down a zig zag path to the garden below.  We were all given umbrellas at the start of the tour--for sun, not rain--and it was a hot sunny day.  When I had had enough sun I retreated to the cool interior of the museum and the art it held.  Early photography, including the photo series that proved horses lift all their feet of the ground at once and helped launch animation, was my first stop.  From there I saw medical-style scans of paintings by renaissance artist Andrea del Sarto, showing revisions and alterations, marble busts making faces (still renaissance!), a giant vase from the Parisian Word's Fair and bronze sculptures from antiquity.  I did not get to half the galleries.  Some day, perhaps I can tour the Getty Center again with friends or family.

The morning after the wedding, having gone to bed several hours before my spouse, I again found myself with a little free wandering time.  Our hotel had a free bike to check out, so I went for a ride around the neighborhood, ending up at the UCLA botanical gardens just as they opened up.  A giant white tree, visible from our hotel room over a mile away, gorgeous succulent gardens and a very informative medicinal garden a few of the things that stand out from these gardens.  At one point I spotted a humming bird.  It stayed in my vicinity for the better part of five minutes, zipping away to a tree and then back again.  After the first couple of minutes I admit I took a horribly boring video, attempting to capture for ever an experience completely ephemeral.  Rounding a bend, thinking I was almost done with surprises, I found stand of bamboo nearly covered in writing.  From English to Chinese, people declared love (and probably other things) to all who would look.

   

   

Not long after we were winging home, over the Grand Canyon and beyond.

Chuck's Birthday

For Chuck's birthday, I surprised him with Curry Wurst, his favorite from Berlin.  This fusion street food is Turkish and German in equal parts, as far as I can tell, the key ingredients being sausage (wurst) and a curry sauce.  Charles tells me french fries with mayo are the usual side dish (this strikes me as Canadian--or maybe Americans are the weird ones, dipping their fries in ketchup).

 

Dessert was a salted caramel tres leche cake from Cafe Latte.  

Charles said what he would most like to do was go to the movies with the family.  After 19 years hanging around this guy, I can say the movie going experience is near and dear to his heart.  We went to see the (then new) Pixar flick, Inside Out.  Somehow I did not get a picture of the kids.  I think they were moving too fast that day.