Nostalgia Baked Up in a Coffee Can

So the other day I was at work and somehow the subject of brown bread came up.  I can not for the life of me remember how we got there but there we were.  The coworker I was talking to was unfamiliar with it and had to Google it to see what I was talking about.  But I grew up eating brown bread.  I remember always having a can or two around.  Usually we would have two, one with raisins and one without.  I always went for the one without raisins.

I hadn't thought about brown bread in years.  But once it was mentioned and I started to think about it again I needed to have some.  So I went to the store and there it was, right next to the baked beans.  I bought a can without raisins and went home to see if it was anything like I remembered.  I turned it out of the can and it came out in the shape of the can just like cranberry sauce.  And it was molasses-y and dense just liked I remembered.

But now I was an adult, who baked.  So I thought I would try my hand at making my own.  So I searched for a recipe and found one at Bon Appetit. And I even had most of the ingredients in the house to make it.  Even though you need three different flours and corn meal.  My brother helped me out there.  He bakes a lot of bread and so he has all sorts of flour on hand all the time and he let me use some of his rye flour so I wouldn't have to go buy a bag of flour I was probably only going to use once.

The next issue was that it is supposed to be baked in a coffee can.  If you want traditional.  But I don't

get coffee in a can.  And even if I went out and bought some in a can just for this they all have those little ridges around the edges now for the freshness seal to stick to instead of opening with a can opener.  So I thought I was going to be making brown bread muffins.  But again my brother came to my rescue.  He had apparently thought of making some himself at one time and saved coffee cans for that purpose but he had never used them so he gave them to me.

So I was all set.  I pulled out all the ingredients and buttered my coffee cans and was ready to go.  And I hit a small snag.  The instructions said to stir the milk with the next three ingredients.  Only there was no milk on the ingredients list.  Now I know I should read the instructions thoroughly before starting but I usually don't.  I just glance through it to see if I need any special equipment or to see if there is something out of the ordinary in there.  So I knew I was going to need twine to tie tin foil to the cans and a pan deep enough to bake them in a water bath and all of that.  But I had missed the milk issue.  (Should I have realized that something was missing?  Probably, since there were really no wet ingredients mentioned.  But it didn't occur to me at the time.)  So I went to Google to see if I could find out how much milk I needed.  And I found the same exact recipe at Epicurious, only this one had milk on the ingredients list.  Two cups of it.  Which was more milk than I had on hand.  So after a quick trip to the store I was ready to start.

batter is really thick

After that it was smooth sailing.  After heating the milk and next three ingredients in a sauce pan it was mostly just mixing.  The hardest parts were tying the tin foil over the tops of the cans and getting enough 'very hot' water in the pan to come three inches up the side of the coffee cans.

And then it was just a matter of waiting an hour and a half.  Although, after the fact, I was thinking that might have been a bit too long.  The bread wasn't burnt but everything above the water line was slightly dry.  So I would check it earlier next time.

tied up so it won't get away

But it was a little taste from my childhood when it was done.  Not quite the same as the store bought stuff of course but definitely brown bread.  With the molasses flavor, nice and dense, and the grainy texture you get from cornmeal.  The only difference was now I liked the one with the raisins in it better than the one without.  And I also tried it with cream cheese instead of butter and that was really good too.

The recipe makes two loaves and the bread doesn't last long so I will have to find someone to give a loaf to next time because it is a shame to let it go to waste.

Weekend Cooking is sponsored by Beth Fish Reads. See the other posts here.

The Friday 56 and Book Beginnings

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda's Voice

Rules:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader
(If you have to improvise, that's ok.)
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it)
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky here. Add the post url, not your blog url.
*It's that simple.

Book Beginning is hosted by Rose City Reader. All you have to do is share the opening line of the book you're reading and what you think about it. Check out the other posts here.

Okay.  So it's a little late but it is still Friday so I'm going to post anyway.  Time has been getting away from me lately.  Suddenly a week has gone by and I don't know where it has gone.  So anyway...

This week my book is Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny.  A man wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who he is but he slowly realizes he is a prince of Amber and he needs to fight his brothers for the throne.

Book Beginnings:

It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me.

Friday 56: 

"Those damn hounds of his will tear this car to pieces, and his birds will feed on our eyes!" he said

Well, that's cheery.  So Corwin, as he finds out his name is, can not remember anything and he finds himself having to bluff his way along in what turns out to be a life and death situation.  It is a good way to get the reader up to speed because Corwin has to get up to speed himself.  It's an interesting fantasy novel with a good villain and some interesting characters that I hope you get to know better in the next books.  It gives you enough of a story so you don't feel gypped at the end but you want to read the next one to find out what happens.  

Zombie Survival Guide Review

The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks

(from the back of the book)

Don’t be carefree and foolish with your most precious asset – life.  This book is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now without you even knowing it.  The Zombie Survival Guide offers complete protection through trusted, proven tips for safeguarding yourself and your loved ones against the living dead.  It is a book that can save your life.

This is for any zombie book lover.  I love the pseudo-serious tone of the book.  It is told with humor but the threat of a zombie attack is presented as a very real problem, something everyone should be prepared for.  There is a lot of information here and you can tell that a lot of thought and possibly even research went into this.  A lot of different weapons and vehicles are described and their strengths and weaknesses explored.  You find out why guns are not always the best defense and what the good and bad points of holding up in a swamp are. It is humor and it makes you laugh.  But part of what makes it funny is that it does not read as a joke.  It is told with sincerity.  You get the impression that if there really was a zombie attack this book would help you survive.  The recorded attacks section in the back makes the point that you are not preparing for some possible issue in the future but that zombies are a present problem and have been a problem for a long time, maybe as far back as 60,000 B.C.  I like the way the evidence for ancient zombies is presented in a way that you can believe that it was happened upon in an archeological dig or something.  It’s just sketchy enough to sound real.  The accounts do get a little monotonous toward the end and some of the information feels like it is told over again as, for example, you get terrain types for ‘On the Run’, ‘On the Attack’ and ‘Living in an Undead World’ and some of the points are the same in each.  But for the most part the book is an interesting, amusing, informative, and entertaining read that keeps you reading.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang Review

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

The human race is dying out and a small group tries to save it by experiments in cloning.

The story starts when it is already too late to save the world as we know it.  A small group who realized the danger before the rest of the world was willing to accept the truth had started to prepare and plan for the future.  They decide the only way to save the human race is to create clones.  As the clones start to take over from the originals the story starts to explore the importance of individuality, imagination, original thought, and having differences.  It was a quick start and you were soon in the middle of the main issues as the original humans were starting to find themselves obsolete.  And it makes you think about what humanity is as the clones take over and it becomes apparent that they think differently, and do things differently.  The question comes up of whether they have saved the human race or created something completely new.  But even though I found the concept interesting it took me a while to get into this story.  Due to the very nature of the characters there is a lack of emotion at times that I found hard to connect to.  It took longer to get to know these characters and care for them.  In time I did, but it took a while.  I would say that if you are at all interested in post-apocalyptic stories (or clones) you should definitely give this one a try.

(As a side note, in the copy I borrowed from my library some of the pages were in the wrong order.  So if you are reading and the next page doesn’t seem to make sense look at the page numbers.  All the pages were there and never further than one page away from where it should have been so you can read everything in the right order if you realize what in going on at the time.)

Friday 56 (Feb. 10)

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda's Voice

Rules:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader
(If you have to improvise, that's ok.)
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it)
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky here. Add the post url, not your blog url.
*It's that simple.

My book this week is The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger.  Based on the games (which I never played), it is about a hero on the quest to kill an evil wizard.  

Friday 56:

I'm getting no nearer the completion of my great task, I haven't moved the first step in the direction of the lost scroll of my stepfather, and my poor, trusting mother is still unprotected on her rock in the middle of the Sunless Grotto, unaware of the demonic intrigue that Morgrom has set in motion to violate her virtue!

I haven't started this one yet.  It's going to be my next book.  But I needed a book since I'm still readinf Roots and I used that last week.  From this sentence it sounds like it's going to be completely stupid in a good way.  We shall see.  If I ever finish Roots.

The Marshall and the Madwoman Review

The Marshal and the Madwoman by Magdalen Nabb

(from the back of the book)

Why would anyone want to murder Clementina, the crazed, destitute old woman who swore a lot and tidies by night the narrow streets of Florence’s San Frediano district?

Starting with no clues, for nothing is known about Clementina, the Marshal sets out in the city’s wilting August heat to reconstruct her past.  His quest takes him into the homes and lives of the people of San Frediano, to a run-down State mental hospital, a fashion export agency, and back twenty-five years to the cataclysmic events that wrecked the old woman’s life.

This is the first book in this series that I have read and I felt I was starting a little behind.  It seemed it was assumed the reader would already know who the Marshal was and what his position was.  Only I didn’t and I had a little trouble figuring out how he fit into the Florence law enforcement structure.  The beginning felt a little slow but that helped set the stage for the slow pace of all of Florence in August.  There are a lot of interesting characters here and they are all written so they feel real and believable.  And the Marshall becomes involved with all of them, as every witness and suspect seems to have a problem that the Marshall tries to fix even though he has a murder to solve.  And as he tries to figure out who this old madwoman was he learns about the floods that devastated lives in years past, delves into the plight of the mentally ill and tries to work within the tight knit community that has its own rules.  So the book has a lot of parts.  But they are all woven in seamlessly so nothing feel extraneous or out of place and the book is about the community and the people and not just this one case.  I liked the writing and the story but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had read the others in the series so I would know the history of the characters that I feel like I was missing.

Friday 56 and Book Beginnings (Feb. 3)

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda's Voice

Rules:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader
(If you have to improvise, that's ok.)
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it)
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky here. Add the post url, not your blog url.
*It's that simple.

Book Beginning is hosted by Rose City Reader. All you have to do is share the opening line of the book you're reading and what you think about it. Check out the other posts here.

My book this week is Roots by Alex Haley.  I think everyone probably knows what it's about.

Book Beginnings:

Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.

Friday 56

"Where are you going?" they chattered, scampering on either side of Kunta.  "Is he your fa?"  "Are you Mandinka?"  "What's your village?"  Weary as he was, Kunta felt very mature and important, ignoring them just as his father was doing.

I have not gotten very far yet.  In fact, I'm only on page 18.  So it is kind of hard to judge yet.  I have a long way to go.  And of course my impressions are influenced by the fact that I know where things are headed.  So I think my feelings for the characters might be different than if I didn't know the trouble that was coming.  But at only 18 pages I already feel like I know Kunta's family and community.  I'm already emotionally involved.  So I'm sure the rest of the 500 odd pages will have the same impact.

The Omen Review

The Omen by David Seltzer

(from the back of the book)

A young nursemaid dies for the sake of little Damien…

A priest is speared to death for revealing the horrifying truth about the birth of Damien…

In a peaceful zoo, animals rend themselves to bits in a death frenzy caused by the sight of Damien…

For a world-renowned diplomat and his wife, “accident” follows “accident,” from Rome to London to Jerusalem, as they stalked by a terror they cannot understand, a terror that centers on their son Damien… and his ominous hidden birthmark.

Is ultimate evil to be released upon an unsuspecting and unprepared world because of Damien?

Right from the beginning the book has an ominous feel.  Seltzer manages to make characters creepy even before they do anything creepy.  So the whole book has a horrible dark feeling even between the big, blatantly scary events.  It was interesting watching Damien’s parents try to come to grips with things that are happening but cannot possibly be real.  The tension builds as things start to go wildly out of control and comes to a head in an exciting climax where you don’t know what will happen until the very end.  It is a fast moving, fast paced story that pulls you along.  And I think it has the right balance of big shocking moments and the dark brooding menace that gives you a good story and doesn’t rely all on shock value.