Foodie Lit

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Foodie Lit: A genre of novel and memoirs filled with food stories and recipes

Susan Weintrob, our Foodie Lit writer, is a food blogger and reviewer on her website, expandthetable.net. Susan grew up around food and its prep. Her father owned a deli and catering business, which taught her the key components of the industry. "Writing food blogs is an amazing opportunity. Cooking and talking about food is simply fun and takes me back to memories of my Dad."                                                                                                                                              Join Susan as she shares her reviews and fantastic recipes-

https://www.expandthetable.net/

Happy Thanksgiving from Everyone at indieBRAG!

Geri Clouston
Find award-winning, reader-recommended books about American History @ https://www.bragmedallion.com/award-winning-books/#!/historical-fiction/ Anadama bread, an old New England (many say Maine) recipe, often appears on my Thanksgiving table. What distinguishes this bread is the inclusion of cornmeal and molasses, creating a darker, crusty loaf with a hint of sweetness. So delicious with your meal and yummy, toasted. I learned to bake bread at a Maine music festival, where my husband taught and performed. A pianist at the festival was a professional baker and cook, and made bread each week for the staff. She invited me to bake with her, and I did for 6 wonderful summers. Her Anadama Bread is one of the best I’ve ever tasted, especially with the option of adding cheese chunks (picture at bottom), which partially melt, leaving little nuggets of flavor. Not as common outside of New England, once you taste it, Anadama bread will make a regular appearance at your table! Happy Thanksgiving!                                                                         Anadama Bread Yield: 4 large loaves 3 1/2 c water 1…

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Foodie Lit, Uncategorized

Susan’s Sweet Challah for Rosh Hashanah

Geri Clouston
  If there is one recipe that helps define the Jewish Sabbath and holidays, it is challah. The challah is made around the world in Jewish homes. The aroma of baking challah fills a home with the smells of holidays, traditions and memories. Baking challah is both a physical and a spiritual activity. It connects the baker to customs and culture and is considered a blessing in the home. I have been making challah for 45 years and have developed my own sweet and savory recipes. I bake this sweet challah for the fall holiday season, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. It was a favorite of my mother’s. Rather than the traditional braided challah loaf used for most of the year is the round challah made for this time of year, symbolic of the end of the old and beginning of the new year- the circle of life. We make it sweet in hope that the new year will be sweet; we bake it with our own hands to bring love into our home. Happy New Year. These are the candlesticks I use lighting for Shabbat and holidays, with the yellow ribbon symbol for bringing the hostages home. Susan…

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Foodie Lit

Aunt Bea’s House, “Visitors”, and the Smell of Baking!

Geri Clouston
Aunt Bea's Legacy A mystery with a romance, Aunt Bea’s Legacy combines what many readers love: a quaint English village, some friendly and not-so-friendly ghosts, twists and turns in the mystery and romance and a surprise ending. And I love a mystery whose ending I can’t guess! The main character, Lucy Dixon, is a chef. I love reading about her baking and canning, living on a small working farm. Very inspirational for those of us who dream of orchards and berry patches and herb gardens. Lucy is an appealing character. While a confident chef, she is unsure of herself in terms of relationships and life’s choices. She decides to leave her London chef’s position to stay at her aunt’s house in order to find out how her aunt died. What are the noises that haunt the house, from footsteps to crying, from screams to eerie images? Is this why her aunt was found dead with a fireplace poker in hand? Her aunt’s will requires Lucy to live at River View for one year to inherit the house. Her love for her aunt, who helped raise her after her mother’s death, is part of the reason for her increasing love for…

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Foodie Lit

Amani’s River – Ncima and Collard Greens, From Mozambique to Southern Tables

Geri Clouston
  In Amani’s River, an intense, well-written historical novel by David Hartness,we are taken inside the mind of Aderito, a 10-year-old American who travels with his father to Mozambique. Aderito's father wants to help his family, caught in the brutal violence of the Mozambique civil war, which raged from 1977-1992. Aderito becomes an unwilling child soldier in this civil war. ​A quiet, studious child, Aderito is transformed into a murderer after his kidnapping by the Renamo rebel forces, fighting against the repressive government forces.  Both forces were accused later of war crimes. Beaten, starved, and drugged, Aderito thinks, “This felt as if it were the end.”  But it was not. ​Memories of his former life fade. “Mixed with emotions, I felt the moral thing to do was to spare his life... However, the thing expected of me was to show my manhood and kill him for his sins. I couldn’t contemplate right from wrong, and so I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.”                     The Renamo commander controls Aderito’s life. “All I knew was that my new father said it (killing) was the best thing to do.”  Trying desperately to fit into his new dystopia,…

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Foodie Lit

Shaindel packs a suitcase filled with apple strudel for her and for Elta to eat on the voyage to America-

Geri Clouston
Sherry Ostroff'sThe Wall at the Sugar Factory “I had no answers for Elta. None that would be truthful, anyway….. I knew that we needed a home. My daughter needed to live in a place where she wouldn’t have to live in constant terror. A home where she wouldn’t have to be fearful that murderers might come for her in the middle of the night. Where people didn’t hate her…..” So thinks Shaindel, a main character in Sherry Ostrioff’s excellent historical novel, The Wall At The Sugar Factory, based on her own family’s history.  Shaindel and her daughter survived a pogrom, a government or military orchestrated violent attack on Jews. Shaindel’s husband and most men in her village were murdered by the Russian and Ukrainian military. Women and girls were raped and murdered, homes looted and burned. Fear was in the air. Shaindel had hoped that a mother and child would not be targets. But she knew better.     Part of my family was from the Ukraine, coming to the US in the 1880’s. None had a good memory to share. Shaindel’s home was destroyed, her husband murdered at the wall at the sugar factory. She and her 3-year old daughter…

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Foodie Lit, Uncategorized

On the road with Apple Turnovers!

Geri Clouston
In J.R. Ridgley's 16Wheeler, main character Carrie Marshall recently a widow, recently without a job and recently adrift in what was an orderly and planned life, takes off spontaneously to visit her grandchildren. She doesn’t check the weather and is stranded in a freezing snow storm, hearing her dead husband’s voice berating her judgment, as he so often did in life—her dead cell phone, lack of food and emergency supplies. Trucker John Graham, a widower with grown children, is constantly on the road to escape his life after his beloved wife died of cancer. His life is in his rig, the cab with a microwave, refrigerator, shelves, a bed and internet. His friends are truckers he sees at truck stops and talks to on his CB. His kind heart has him stopping for the car he sees on the side of the road, rescuing Carrie. And turning him from a suspected predator to a hero who saves her life. Like Noah’s Ark, the rig becomes the world for John and Carrie, adrift in the world. I will never look at an 18Wheeler in the same way again! The aroma of baking apples reminds us that fall is around the corner, even if…

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Foodie Lit, Uncategorized

Grab a Meat Pie and travel back in time!

Geri Clouston
        “Had Anna been allowed to choose, she'd have become a professional time-traveller. No luck there, so instead she became a financial professional with two absorbing interests; history and writing.” (annabelfrage.com) Like his Grandmother Alex before him, Duncan Melville finds himself on a crossroads during a terrible thunderstorm. Instead of falling backwards 300 years as she did, he falls forward in time, from 1716 to 2016, landing like his grandmother, at the feet (well, actually in front of a modern automobile driven by Erin Barnes!) of a person destined to be important in his life. Living in 2 time periods can be enlightening, confusing and, for a reader, so compelling that it is difficult to do anything else until  you read to the novel’s end! The crossroads are symbolic of life choices. For Anna Belfrage, they “…represent a moment in which there are multiple choices and you never know beforehand what will happen if you choose road A or road B. Obviously, my poor time travellers don’t get a choice, they’re just thrown through the nexus to land in an entirely new time. There are days when Alex, the female protagonist of The Graham Saga, still hasn’t…

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Foodie Lit, Uncategorized

Memories of the Deli-

Geri Clouston
Laurie Boris' Boychik Reading this book took me back to the tastes and smells of my Dad’s deli—the sour pickles, the corned beef sandwiches, the lox and the deli salads. Set for much of the novel in Brooklyn in two neighborhoods, Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg, both neighborhoods with which I am very familiar. Like main characters, cousins Eli and Artie Abramowitz, my dad was born in Williamsburg and was only 2 years younger than Eli. His dream was to own a deli, which he did many years later. In Brooklyn Heights, a wealthy neighborhood then and now, another main character grows up, Evelyn Rosenstein, daughter of Murder Incorporated mobster. What happens when these characters meet is an absorbing story, filled with romance, crime, and dreams, where Hollywood and life intertwine. Evelyn grows up in a wealthy but troubled family. Even at 17, she is chauffeured by a bodyguard everywhere and resents the lack of freedom she sees others have. She loves the Jewish traditions and thinks, “She liked lighting the menorah with her mother on Hanukkah. She liked the Seder dinner. They felt like invisible threads connecting her to Bubbe and Zayde, and all the family going back for generations.”…

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Ahh! Summer Reading & a Lovely Tomato Salad

Geri Clouston
Eagan Whitcombe gets up before dawn each day. He eats a thin watery gruel, often his only meal for the day, and goes out onto the streets to gain clients who need their chimneys cleaned. He negotiates his own prices and works alone, often in unsafe conditions. He eats if he can. He gives most of what he has earned to his master. He sleeps on the floor of a basement, in which he is locked in all night. Eagan is a chimney sweep. He is 6 years old. You won't be able to put down A.M.Watson's historical nove, Infants of the Brush. My mom is not a vegetable eater and I am always hiding veggies in puréed soups and stews. Yet my mom ate an entire tomato of my Summer Tomato Salad! This is a seriously delicious and easy salad, even more delicious with tomatoes from your garden, farmer’s market or local produce in your supermarket. Sliced tomatoes marinating in a simple Balsamic Vinaigrette with a little salt on top create this summer wonder. Use a variety of tomatoes for a pretty look. I used some from my garden and some from Costco. Wow!   Summer Tomato Salad ​ Serves…

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