I’m here to report on what might be one of the worst customer experiences ever. And I mean “worst” from my store’s perspective. AssholeGentleman walks into the store and asks a friendly bookseller to help him find a book. Friendly bookseller finds the book for then customer who then asks if he can use the computer behind our info desk for a second. He then proceeds to look the book up on Amazon, drops the book on the counter, says he’ll get it from them, walks out. This is a true story that happened this prior weekend.

I was chosen along with some other booksellers from around the country to participate in a cookbook challenge. Our colleague’s at Vroman’s made their dinner last Saturday night, same as we did, and claim they won! Not so, my friends. The other participants are Third Place Books, Chapter One Books, Vintage Books, Watermark Books, Chester County Book Company, Books & Books, The Book Mark, Garden District Book Shop, Town Center Books, Northshire Books, and Book Loft. The challege: use Frank Stitt’s Bottega Favorita to cook for a dinner party. The cookbook comes from the Bottega Restaurant, an Italian trattoria with a bit of a Southern-US flair to it. Sounds fantastic. I already like throwing dinner parties. Now I have an excellent excuse to throw another one.

Aside from the appetizers in the cookbook, we started the meal with cheese and crackers, and some American proscuitto from one of Kentucky’s best artisan ham shops, Father’s Country Hams. The proscuitto had the texture and depth of the best Italian ham, but with a smokier kick to it.

The first dish was a decidedly un-Italian one: Onion dip. With potato chips. Who doesn’t like that? At Bottega, they make their own chips in house, but we did pretty well with store-bought chips and the Bottega dip recipe. As we discovered throughout the evening, the recipe was simple and the flavors were complex. A mixture of charred red onion, chives, sour cream, salt, pepper, and mustard spent the night in the fridge and emerged incredible.

Our pal Bronwen brought us two additional appetizers. First, Vegetables a la Greque: A quick-pickled mix of carrots, onions, garlic, and fennel. Again, simple and fresh beats overworked and contrived every day of the week.  We overlapped with our competitors on the third appetizer: Beet and ricotta crostini. Bronwen made both the bread and cheese herself, as well as roasting the beets and nuts. Suck it, other bookstore!

Then, on to Tuscan white bean soup. It sounds impossibly simple:  Sautee your garlic, carrots, rosemary, and leeks, then add your simmered beans, simmer more, and pour over some greens (the recipe called for escarole, but we used chard) that you’ve sauteed with more garlic. Absolutely fantastic. And check out the knife skills on the diced carrots!
Next, the animal part of the meal: A fish dish. When I told them about a recipe for roasted fish with fennel, onions, and baby artichokes, the guy at New Deal Fish Market suggested striped bass. He didn’t steer us wrong. We did make a mistake with the artichokes: You can substitute artichoke hearts for baby artichokes, but you can’t use much more than the heart. We tried, and ended up with number of tough chunks. The rest of the dish was fantastic though.

Finally, we had dessert: a cream cheese tart. The recipe’s introduction asks “how can something so simple be so delicious?” You could say that about most of the dishes in the cookbook, to be honest, but this one in particular is amazingly simple. It’s basically butter, cream cheese, sugar, nuts, and cinnamon. And it’s awesome.

Around the time we were putting the dessert into the oven, we realized we’d forgotten to start the meal with cocktails. So, obviously, we had to go back and make everyone the Tegatini. Despite the fact that we all hate the idea of any beverage with a cutesy name ending in “tini,” this was yet another example of simple, excellent flavors: A shot of gin, half a shot of Aperol, shaken and served with a twist. Half a bottle of gin and most of a cream-cheese pie later, some of us were ready to go out dancing… and the rest of us slumped into the couch to watch Planet Earth.

Our overall impression of the food was simple and delicious. While planning the menu, we thought each recipe looked simple. Too simple, even. But it seems like Stitt cut out all the fluff and pretense in his recipes and left only the flavor.  Our photo skills are not quite as good as the folks at Vromans (what kind of lighting do you guys have?), but you can see more pictures of the food and us enjoying it on my Flickr page.

I’ve in a flurry of reading, finishing books left and right, all starting two weeks ago. I spent a Friday home sick which gave me a chance to finally finish Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood. I should thank whatever made me sick that night for giving me something so wonderful to take my mind off of the nausea! Okay, I admit that’s weird, but really it’s a great book but one I find very hard to describe. Aliens arrive on Earth many many years after we’ve wiped ourselves out to resurrect the human race for unknown purposes. There’s a lot going on in the three books with allegories about human’s destructive personalities, nature, female and male relations, etc.

I wanted to follow Octavia Butler with some non-fiction so I started on Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness by Lisa Hamilton, coming from Counterpoint in May. You can deny the growth of the farm to table movement but who has written about the farmers themselves? Hamilton profiles three unconventional farmers in different areas of the country. These aren’t used to be corporate but went back to the land for a more fulfilling life people, these are people whose roots are in the land but who recognize that the current agricultural complex does not work. It’s a great read. Hamilton’s skillful profiles show the possibilities of a different system.

Then in what seemed like a week, I read four books! First was Border Songs by Jim Lynch, whom I met at a meet and greet thrown by Random House. Second, the fabulous The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. Third, I read The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Okagawa based on Junot Diaz’s recommendation–it’s so good! Last, I finished Goat Song by Brad Kessler, which is perfect for someone who has always dreamt about buying a farm to raise goats and make cheese. Perhaps the upcoming vacation is inspiring more reading?

I’ve got two great, unrelated links for you.

First, Ann Kingman, sales representative for Random House was interviewed by Susan Henderson at Litpark. Do you want to understand how a book gets from the publisher into the store? Or why shopping at independents is so important? Then read the interview. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

As publishing becomes easier and less expensive, the number of books will increase. And I think that there will be an even more important role for people to act as curators for the volume of content that will come.  When faced with an infinite number of choices, we will still need someone to put a book in our hands (or the virtual equivalent) and say, “Read this, it’s fantastic.”

Second, what I assume was John Updike’s last review/essay for the New Yorker is available on line. He writes about Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever called Cheever: A Life. One of my fellow booksellers Mark just finished this book and wrote a staff recommendation for it:

This terrific book goes immediately to my top shelf of literary biographies. John Cheever lived in endless turmoil with his contradictions—the erudite high school dropout; the closeted bisexual who despised gay men, guilt-ridden, manipulative and rampant in his pursuits; the snob most at ease with workers; a man who idealized husband-and-fatherhood, and an alcoholic compulsively unkind to his children and estranged from his wife. Given a lesser biographer all this could be merely lurid, but Bailey’s clean, low-key style and generous insights tease out the strands of harsh judgment and emollient self-deception in Cheever’s journals, and convincingly trace them into the effort and effect in his stories and novels. I don’t expect to read anything better this year. Brilliant.

Definitely will have to read this one. Also, Blake Bailey will be appearing at my store on Tuesday, March 10th at 7pm if you live in the area.

As mentioned in the previous post, I’m heading to Cancun on Friday for a week of vacation. Just in time too. We’re expecting a foot of snow tonight and I’ve about had it with Winter. As usual, I’m nerdily deciding on what books to bring with me. I want some Mexican literature, maybe some Carlos Fuentes, whom I’ve never read. Also, has anyone read Underdogs by Mariano Azuela? That sounds good too. I’m also into the idea of reading travel literature while traveling. I purchased copies of Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney, Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, and Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski. I want to bring some regular ol’ fiction too. I still haven’t read Lush Life by Richard Price. Worth bringing? Any suggestions are welcome!