All posts by Karen

About Karen

Karen (she/hers) is a Culinary Literacies Specialist at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre library. When not in the kitchen, she can be found knitting, reading, and repeating.  |  Meet the team

Stress Baking and Tartine

Book Cover of Tartine: A Classic Revisited by Elizabeth PrueittHow’s the baking situation going on with you? Have you started a sourdough starter yet? Baked banana bread (or peanut butter bread)? I don’t know about you, but stress baking has reared its beautiful head and filled my house with bread! This post is going to be quite focused on one croissant recipe by a very famous bakery and me trying it out (though I think they’re more famous for their sourdough bread & recipe books than their croissants, to be honest): Tartine.

Have you heard of Tartine? It’s a bakery in San Francisco with a bit of a cult following among home bread bakers from what I have seen online. You might have heard reference made to their bread books in a reverential hushed whisper, or perhaps gushing enthusiasm that you’ll find might be hard to put a stop to once your conversation partner starts to go off on which breads they either want to make from the book (all of them) or which ones they’ve tried and how they came out (BEAUTIFUL CRUMB, LOOK AT THAT EAR, DELICIOUS BEYOND WORDS is the general tone – I have baked no Tartine sourdough recipes as of yet, but I can gush about Sullivan Street Bakery’s sourdough recipes, also high hydration, which have never led me astray; oh wait, I already have). I’ve personally mostly seen references to Tartine No.3*, which goes beyond the basics by focusing on specific grains outside of the generic bread flour or whole wheat flour you might find at your local grocery store. I’ll hook you up with some of the Tartine bread recipes below the cut sourced from the web, but we’re actually not here to discuss those sorts of carbs. No, we’re here today to talk about the buttery, flaky carbs that can be none other than the elegant and yet oh-so deceptively simple croissant. In fact, Prueitt, the author of this Tartine book, notes:

The real test of perfection is in the basic unadorned croissant, however… The cross section of a perfectly made croissant should have a center like honeycomb, with a discernible swirl pattern and a buttery, wheat-y, lightly-yeasted scent. The outside should be shatteringly crisp, contrasted with a center that is pillowy soft (Prueitt, Tartine: A Classic Revisited)

True that, Prueitt.

I’ve made my way through a number of different croissant recipes at this point, and if anyone’s interested in figuring out which to try depending on what you’re looking for in your croissants (flakiness? bread-like fluffiness?), leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you, but I’ll try to focus mostly on the one included in the new Tartine book** available on Hoopla in this post, which also has recipes for croissant variations (yes, this means you too can make their morning buns!), cakes, doughnuts, pies, and more! If stress-baking is your jam, 1) ME. TOO.; and 2) Tartine (and Hoopla) have got you covered.

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On Armchair Traveling and Pipe Dreams

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Book Cover of Epic Runs of the World by Lonely PlanetYou might be wondering why I’m choosing to highlight our travel collection in light of the current situation that makes traveling in the immediate future a bit of a pipe dream… and you’d be absolutely right to wonder! In fact, I’m writing this post with a bit of a self-delusional fervor tinged with a bit of optoomuchism, as Penelope Lumley in The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place* put it (i.e. overly optimistic in light of what is known, or perhaps more of a strategic optimism to prevent total deflation). I’ve changed all of the linked titles to those electronically available via Overdrive (either VPL or Markham) or Hoopla Digital, so please, join me in dreaming a little too hard about leaving our front doors and traveling to destinations beyond the grocery store! Join me on an armchair travel.

What’s Armchair Traveling, you ask? Armchair travel is when you travel wherever you so desire using the transportation vehicle that is your imagination, and it can be quite fun, whether you’re the sort to armchair travel as you read novels taking place in another part of the world, sucking you into the time & place in which they are set; if you lose yourself in learning all about the history of a place and time; or if you’re the armchair traveler that gets a kick out of imagining and planning all the fun adventures you’re going to have (or not have, if you prefer lounging on a beach) when you read about some place and/or time that’s… well. Not here or now.

Just a note before we start: I started this post before Canada started taking measures towards travel, back when we were told that the risk of COVID-19 to Ontarians (Canadians? I forget, now, how widely that net was thrown) was low. I’ve changed most if not all of the titles I refer to and links I link to electronically accessible resources we have access to, but let me know if I’ve missed anything! And the majority of the following are going to be focusing on Lonely Planet’s handbooks and inspiration tomes, but you can also peruse the rest of our travel guides on Hoopla Digital here as we think about future travel plans**.

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Disappearing Earth

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Book Cover of Disappearing Earth by Julia PhillipsI’ll confess that before reading Disappearing Earth, I hadn’t heard about the indigenous Even people of Russia, nor of Kamchatka (my knowledge of history and geography, let alone the two combined, is woeful at best), but I can say that Phillips’ beautiful rendering of the landscape of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and descriptions of the women living in the town (or the wide vicinity of it) in the novel made me want to find out more. (In fact, one of the characters in Disappearing Earth, the mother of the disappeared girls, also notes how she is unfortunately more ignorant than she’d like regarding the history of the treatment of indigenous peoples in Russia because it wasn’t in the curriculum when she was in school; she notes how her daughters would’ve known more, because they’re taught in school now about the indigenous peoples of northern Russia: what is taught, I’m not sure.) Disappearing Earth begins with the kidnapping of two girls – Alyona and Sophia, aged 11 and 8 – while they were walking around by themselves along the beach in late summer. But it doesn’t follow the same path other novels that start with a kidnapping might: the format itself is a twist on the thriller/investigative mystery genre, the portrayal of the useless and often misguided police officers only incidental to the much larger story told through different women in the area affected in various ways, large and small, by the kidnapping. This centering of women explores the ways in which women, especially indigenous women in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, lack power in their lives; and immediately brings to mind the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women in North America (see Highway of Tears by Jessica McDiarmid, for which other resources I’ve also listed in a previous post). Which, interestingly enough, Phillips herself admits in an interview with The Paris Review:

I don’t think of myself as engaging with the Russian literary tradition at all, really. I feel like what I brought to the story and the place were very much American concerns and American ideas. As much I tried to accurately reflect what I was seeing, what I was seeing was deeply informed, if not completely informed, by my Americanness.

(Julia Phillips in interview for The Paris Review: The Ideal Place to Disappear)

So then… why this isolated Russian Far East peninsula of Kamchatka?

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