Tag: literature

Mei Ning, 30 Minutes or Less: Ultimate Chinese Recipes (Kindle 2016)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29495654-30-minutes-or-less?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=SRrtZAdF6K&rank=1

Easy basic recipes that don’t require a lot of special ingredients

Here are super-easy recipes for your favourite Chinese dishes: eg. Cashew Chicken, Kung Pao Chicken, Pineapple Shrimp, Shrimp Lo Mein, Beef and Broccoli, Beef and Snowpeas, Orange Beef, Shrimp Fried Rice, etc. All these use either chicken, beef or seafood, and they literally take less than 30 minutes to prepare.
One tends to think unfamiliar cuisines will be difficult to cook, but not in the slightest. Each recipe is straightforward and easy to follow. Most require little special skill—just bung them into a wok in the right order, and Bob’s your uncle.
Another potential stumbling block is ingredients. If you need special unfamiliar ingredients which you need to get from a Chinese supermarket and may not even recognise on the shelf, it can put an amateur chef off. These recipes require nothing more exotic than rice vinegar, bamboo shoots, soy sauce, chili sauce, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce or fish sauce. Many of these you can even get in a regular supermarket.
If you don’t have or don’t want to invest in rice wine, I’m sure a white wine could substitute.
I have never before seen a recipe for Fortune Cookies, but this has one.
It suffers from a lack of colour illustrations, probably the main attraction for a cookbook, I believe.

S. P. Somtow, Homeworld of the Heart (Diplodocus Press 2020)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53322007-homeworld-of-the-heart?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=9tpfmiqEey&rank=1

Sajittang is a village with a starport at the opposite end of the galaxy from Uran s’Varek, where pilgrims would sometimes come to see the whisperlyre. One day came a visitor who was more important than all the others.
The old man, Tash Toléon, Rememberer of the tomb of Shen Sajit, welcomes Hokh’Ton Elloran, the Inquestor, who was once Sajit’s lover. The story evolves as the Rememberer tells the Inquestor the story of Sajit, whose songs are loved throughout the worlds since the Dispersal.
He tells the Inquestor about meúr, the concept that the thread of time is spun a multitude of times. Thus, there were more than one Sajits.
Growing up on Attembris, a stranger gives the young Sajit a gift—a songcube. As he grows he finds he has a gift—he can create songs. He and his family are moved to Nevéqilas, where he will receive training with Arbát. Around their breakfast circle are four storage benches, one of them locked. He knocks on it, and something knocks back.
He learns his parents’ secret—they have a doppling kit; they are making another Sajit, which is harám. He names the boy Tijas. Tijas stands in for Sijat, and they take turns inside the box. It seems he has the same gift. He loves the lessons with Arbát and learns Arbát’s secret.
Both boys come before prince Oritec. Their planet is destined to fall beyond. A new pleasure city is built, populated by citizens who had been frozen in skins of stasis. The dopplings search for a certain woman cloaked in shadow, a sacred whore of Aërat. The child collectors are coming, and Sajit has to fight for those he loves.
Beautiful sci-fi. Not my favourite genre, but I had been impressed by one of this author’s historical fiction novels.
It doesn’t get so caught up in the high-tech futurism that it forgets to be beautiful literature. The world-building is a bit tricky getting one’s head around at first—I really wanted a glossary, and I wished there would be no more than 3 strange words or unknown technology to a paragraph—but it’s gradual enough that one is not overwhelmed with questions, and artful enough that it’s not info-dump. I love the description of Sajit’s music—407 divisions in an octave, each with a colour as well as a tone.
Each chapter begins with an excerpt in Highspeech, script and all, from one of the songs of Sajit.
Book 5 in the Inquestor Series, with evocative B/W drawings by Mikey Jiraros

Juhea Kim, City of Night Birds  (Ecco 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209801563-city-of-night-birds?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_20

Once-famous prima ballerina Natalia touches down in once-familiar St. Petersburg, the city of her first fame, her first love. She hasn’t danced in two years. A string quartet plays Vivaldi, ‘not far from where [they]’d lain’.
Dimitri—Dima—has sought her out. He offers her a job—to dance Giselle. An added incentive, the role of Albrecht will be danced by a primo, TaeHyung Kim. Has her injury healed enough to allow rising to this challenge?
‘Your injury,’ says Dima, ‘it’s mostly in your head.’ Natalia remembers other wounds she needs to heal, an absent father, a struggling single mother, from whom her fame estranges her, other loves she lost. The relentless, punishing rehearsals as she pirouettes her way to the top. The back-stabbing of jealous rivals.
The most important loves in one’s life are ‘those who turn your weakness into strength’. There is one person above all others whom she dances to impress. The greatest performance of her career, the Moscow International, and he wasn’t even watching.
To be the prima ballerina of the decade takes more than rehearsals; she must dig deep inside herself to something beyond talent, muscle and choreography.
The glamourous yet cut-throat world of professional ballet is beautifully written—the terrifying teacher, the friend-rivals ‘like geese that fly in formation’—as is the intimate peeks into Russian culture. The metaphors are superb. Plunged into the beautiful and fully immersive world of competitive ballet, you taste the cold vodka and the hot tea sweetened with raspberry jam, feel the blisters from pointe shoes and the relaxation of the banya (sauna), hear the air-kiss greetings of the Parisian glitterati.
This book treats the strong emotions—shame, ambition, desire, disappointment, elation, jealousy, love. ‘Art at its highest form is dangerous,’ and this novel aims for the heights.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Haley Holmes, Healthy Thai Cookbook: 75 Authentic Thai Recipes to Make in your Home Kitchen (2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220652143-healthy-thai-cookbook

Sumptuous Thai Recipes

This cookbook has 75 of the most appetising Thai recipes you might want to make, and each is illustrated with a beautiful colour photo.

The recipes are divided into categories of type of preparation, rather than according to which meat they use. For example: Soups, Salads, Fried Dishes, Stir-Fry Dishes, Dipping Sauces, Condiments, etc. The most prolific categories being, of course, Red, Green and Yellow Curries. The author suggests making curry pastes in bulk and freezing them in cubes to pop into your wok with whatever ingredients you’re making your curry with.

The most important principle of Thai cooking, says the author, apart from, of course, using fresh good-quality ingredients, is the ‘harmonious balance’ between the six types of taste: sweet, sour, umami, salty, bitter and spicy. Bearing that in mind, you might need to get your hands on an exotic ingredient or two (e.g. lemon grass, galangal, rapa cabbage leaves, makrut lime leaves, tamarind paste, sambal oelek).

I once had at a Thai restaurant Red Duck Curry with Pineapple (Gaeng Daeng Bpet) which was astonishing. You’ll find that recipe here.

I can’t wait to try making Red, Green and Yellow Curry cubes, Green Chicken Curry, Red Duck Curry (with pineapples), Deep Fried Tofu with Peanut Sauce, Steamed Fish with Lime Juice, Pork Satay Skewers, Mango Coconut Ice Cream and Coconut Flour Pancakes.

Karen Russell, The Antidote  (Knopf 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214537790-the-antidote?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Mky5laHzOB&rank=1

6 stars–best book I’ve read in months, absolutely top-quality literature

Harp’s earliest memory is the killing of the jackrabbits, crying and dying.
Orphaned—Dell’s mother Lada ran away with ‘a roustabout’ and got murdered—she has come to live with Uncle Harp in Uz, Nebraska, in the middle of the Depression and a four-year drought. It is an ‘edgeless prairie’ where ‘cored cottonwood trees told a millennial story written in wavy circles’, plagued with grasshoppers, locusts, jackrabbits and indigo beetles.
‘The Antidote’ is a career prairie witch, a ‘bank’ for her customers’ ‘deposits’—memories, sins and secrets. But like the dust storms washing away the prairie, she finds herself empty, bankrupt like the farmers around her, facing her customers’ fury.
She recounts the daily occurrences in Uz in a unique Voice. Other chapters pass the narration to Dell, Harp, the government photographer or ‘the Scarecrow’, sometimes aided by the town gossip, Dottie. In the face of catastrophic weather, urban legends abound. The unorthodox way of expressing things lends unmistakable personality to the narration.
Dell’s chapters are a charming child’s-eye-view. This provides useful distance, as if it had been an adult telling the story, it would have been too bleak. Poignantly, the Antidote’s chapters address the son taken away from her at the Home for Unwed Mothers.
The mood is eerie, echoing the emptiness of the land, with a sadness due to the difficult circumstances, but tinged with wit. The desolation of the farmers, ‘like a dog trying to quench his thirst with his sweat’, is evocatively portrayed. We only gradually learn the nature of the magic she practices, Harp’s miraculous wheat or the photographer’s time-bending negatives, as Dell exposes her family’s and the whole town’s secrets. The beautiful writing and the atmosphere of mystery keep you wanting to read more.

Tory Peter, Super Easy Carnivore Diet Cookbook: Quick & Delicious Recipes for Beginners with a 60-Day Meal Plan to Achieve Weight Loss, with Full Color Pictures  (2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219165253-super-easy-carnivore-diet-cookbook?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=1GtfYyewY4&rank=1

Principles of a protein-heavy diet, colour illustrated recipes and a 60-day mealplan

The first chapters go through the science and basic principles of the Carnivore Diet. Then it goes into recipes for Breakfast (lots of egg recipes), Lunches, Dinners, Soups and Broths. These are not Julia Child—just simple recipes you can easily buy ingredients for and prep in a few minutes.
Absolutely every recipe is illustrated with a colour photo. It also include a comprehensive 60-day Meal Plan.
My motivation is for weight loss, but the Carnivore Diet is also good for improving energy, mood stability and other health benefits. Homo sapiens is primarily a carnivore species, so evolutionarily, we were meant to live this way.
We should be eating more fish, and there are several fish recipes. We really should be eating more offal, and this book contains some offal (liver, heart) recipes. Bone broth is very nutritious, though you have to boil the bones for a very long time before the yummy, nutritious marrow comes out. I get ‘beefy marrow bones’ from a butcher who will saw them sideways for you, so the broth reaches the marrow inside.
A trick for limiting carbs is to use other flours (almond, etc) instead of wheat flour.
I’m looking forward to trying Beef Heart Salad, Fish Casserole, Carnivore Chicken and Dumplings, Herb-crusted Lamb Rack, Slow-cooked Lamb Broth and Smoke Salmon Cream Soup.
I would say a downside is that meat is more expensive than plant-based and carb-heavy ingredients, but if it gets me skinny, it’s worth it.
Despite purchasing the ebook for real money, I had a terrible time accessing it, as my PC wouldn’t open it. I was finally able to download it to my Android phone.