Chocolate: A Love Story (and a giveaway)

About the Book:

With gigantic vats of churning chocolate, desserts like their famous chocolate pizza, and 12 varieties of hot chocolate served in custom mugs, Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man has turned their line of hip, colorful themed restaurants into an international sensation.. Chocolate: A Love Story is a vibrant new cookbook that includes 65 original recipes narrated in the quirky, captivating voice of Max Brenner, the restaurant's visionary founder and "bald man." Bold original illustrations inspired by Art Deco poster graphics, full-color photographs, easy-to-follow, delicious recipes, and a serving of Max's unique vision for spreading "chocolate culture" around the world make this book a must for every chocolate lover.

About the Author:

Max Brenner is a confectioner, businessman, and above all, a passionate lover of chocolate. He began his career as an apprentice throughout Europe, where he worked in the best kitchens alongside renowned pastry chefs. It was in Europe that his love for chocolate evolved into passion, leading him to open a small chocolate workshop in his homeland of Israel. Many years later, Max Brenner: Chocolate by the Bald Man is now a thriving international brand, committed to spreading Max's vision of Chocolate Culture to the world.

My Thoughts:

What's not to like about a book full of chocolate recipes? There are tried and trues like chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, sacher torte, and chocolate chip cookies (but these cookies are spiced iwth cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves and have both milk chocolate and dark chocolate chips). There are also some that are new, at least to me--like spaghetti with chocolate sauce, topped with strawberries and toasted nuts. Once all the Halloween candy is gone, I'll have to pick a couple of these recipes and give us all a chocolate fix.

However, there are things not to like about the book. The first is that several of the recipes call for raw eggs, and there are no notes telling you to use powdered egg whites or to pasturize the yolks. Secondly,I didn't care for the artwork and general tone of the book. There were few pictures of the food, and lots of 1960's pop-art style drawings. The names of the food had a '60's revolutionary sound to them: "Alternative mild chocolate mousse, Revolutionary rice pudding, Meaningless sweet spaghetti, Contentious chocolate chip cookies". I guess that style of art is one of those things you either love or hate, and I don't love it.

The recipes themselves are a bit more complicated than those found in the average church cookbook; however you can make them without committing days and every dish in the kitchen to the effort.

Giveway:

The nice folks at Hatchette sent me an extra copy, so I'm passing it on to a reader. To enter, leave me a comment with a favorite chocolate recipe. If you copy if from somewhere on the web, leave a link to the source, but I want recipes, not just links. If you copy it from a book or food package, make sure to credit your source. Make sure your comment has your email address in it. I'll give you up to three entries for three recipes. I'll give you another entry if you blog about this contest and leave me a link to your post. US only--this book is heavy, media mail is a must!

Links:

To purchase from Amazon Chocolate: A Love Story: 65 Chocolate Dessert Recipes from Max Brenner's Private Collection

Max Brenner's Homepage (has chocolate for sale)

Publisher's Page:

Thirsty: My Review

About the Book:

It is 1883, and all of Klara Bozic’s girlish dreams have come crashing down as she arrives in Thirsty, a gritty steel town carved into the slopes above the Monongahela River just outside of Pittsburgh. She has made a heartbreaking discovery. Her new husband, Drago, is as abusive as the father she left behind in Croatia.

In Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s debut novel, Klara’s life unfolds over forty years as she struggles to find her place in a new country where her survival depends on the friends who nurture her: gutsy, funny Katherine Zupanovic, who isn’t afraid of Drago’s fist; BenJo, the only black man in Thirsty to have his own shop; and strangely enough, Old Man Rupert, the town drunk.

Thirsty follows a chain of unlikely events that keep Klara’s spirit aloft: a flock of angelic butterflies descends on Thirsty; Klara gives birth to her first child in Old Man Rupert’s pumpkin patch; and BenJo gives her a talking bird. When Klara’s daughter marries a man even more brutal than Drago, Klara is forced to act. If she doesn’t finally break the cycle of violence in her family, her granddaughters will one day walk the same road, broken and bruised. As the threads that hold her family together fray and come undone, Klara must decide whether she has the courage to carve out a peaceful spot in the world for herself and her girls.

About the Author:

Kristin Bair O’Keeffe grew up in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Her maternal grandfather, a Croatian immigrant, worked as a steelworker in U.S. Steel’s Clairton Works all his life. Nearly every weekend as a kid, Kristin visited her grandparents’ home in Clairton on a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River. As she played tag with her sisters, the smokestacks filled the sky with their gaseous utterances and the barges toted their haul down the river.

Kristin’s articles and essays have been published in Poets & Writers Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Baltimore Review, San Diego Family Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Her column—The Fiction Writing Workshop—appears monthly in the popular ezine Writers on the Rise. In 2008, her work was translated into Chinese and published in China’s most popular weekly news magazine, Oriental Outlook Weekly, and she is featured in the Bylines 2009 Writers’ Desk Calendar.

With a B.A. in English and journalism from Indiana University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago, Kristin has always combined her love of writing with teaching. She is a passionate writing instructor with fifteen years of workshop experience at U.S. colleges and universities, including Boston College, Endicott College, Montserrat College of Art, University of New Hampshire, and Columbia College Chicago.

My Thoughts:

O'Keeffe is a gifted writer, one who knows how to use words to paint pictures and draw out emotions in people. Thirsty is a novel about pain--the pain of domestic abuse, the pain of working in a steel mill, the pain of losing loved ones, the pain of racial prejudice and the pain of alcohol. It certainly wasn't a fun light read, but the ending was hopeful.

The main characters are Catholic Croatian immigrants. Early in the book a large number of butterflies come to Thirsty, a mill town near Pittsburgh. It is locally seen as a miracle and it draws people back to the Church. However, O'Keeffe notes that the priest "threw away the collection of Latin prayers he had compiled over the years and recycled every few Sundays without the parishioners even noticing the repetition. Instead, he opened his Bible to the most poignant passages and spoke to the people from his heart in their common language--English". Since this supposedly happened in 1884, I'll have to point out that the mass was said in Latin at that time, and no priest would have changed it to English. However, even the Latin mass had a vernacular homily on the readings of the day.

I found the ending happy, but not realistic.

Links:

Author's Website

Purchase from Amazon:Thirsty: A Novel

Jackson: Giveaway Time!

About the book:

The Jackson Packing Company is in trouble. The old-line family-owned firm, once one of the largest in the country, now struggles merely to survive in the fiercely competitive meatpacking industry. When a major marketing agreement is cancelled, bankruptcy is imminent. More than two thousand people will lose their jobs, but the secretive company continues to avoid public scrutiny, the coming calamity known by only a few.

Assigned the job of unmasking the firm, Rachel Brandeis, an ambitious young reporter from the East Coast, spends weeks exhausting every possible resource. When at last she succeeds, however, that only signals the beginning of an attempt to save the company by selling it to its employees. To succeed, decades of animosity between company officials and the union representing most of the workers must be wiped away. At the center of the turmoil stand CEO Skip Peterson, obsessed with saving his family’s firm, and skeptical Union President Homer Budge, reluctant allies deserted by many of their former colleagues as they attempt the near impossible.

About the Author:

T.P. JONES lives in Berkeley, Calif., with his wife, Elisabeth. He was born in Foxborough, Mass., and received his bachelor’s degree from Trinity College. He earned an MFA from the University of Iowa and a master’s in mathematics from the University of Connecticut. Jones worked as a math teacher at a business college before retiring to focus solely on his writing. He is eagerly awaiting the publication of the next “The Loss of Certainty” installment, The Gamble. Visit www.thelossofcertainty.com to learn more.

Giveaway (NEW RULES):

Thanks to the nice folks at Phenix & Phenix, I have three copies of this book to give away. Here is how you enter:

For your first entry, just leave a comment with your email address. For a second entry, Go to the author's website. Read about the characters in this book. Leave a comment telling me which one you'd like to invite to dinner, and tell me why. Make sure you leave an email address with your comment. For a second entry, read the excerpt, and then send me an email at ruthjoec@gmail.com telling me the name of the publisher of the Tribune. For a third entry (you have to do two and three first) leave a comment with the name of your favorite city in the mid-west. Blog about this contest for an extra entry and leave me a comment with a link to your post. Good luck! Contest ends November 20. US and Canada only, P.O. Boxes are ok.

My Blog Peeves

In the last few months I've started reading a LOT more blogs--that's what happens when you learn how Google reader works and start surfing all the wonderful blogs out there. Obviously, not every blog is going to appeal to me--some will cover genres or topic that really aren't my thing, while others will just plain be poorly written. On the other hand, there are some blogs that look interesting, which I'd like to read, but which I end up skipping. Why? These are my pet blog peeves:

1. Jump posts. If you write a really long post periodically, I don't have a problem with it being a jump post (one of those where you have to "click here" to continue reading), but I don't want to have to click through to read every post.
   
   
2. Partial feeds, linked to jump posts. This is the quickest way to get booted from my to be read list. I understand that if you have ads on your blog you want me there, rather than in my reader, and so I'll tolerate partial feeds, but if I click through to your blog and find a jump post, I'm going to jump up and close the window.
   
   
3. Noisy blinking bling that makes your site slow to load.
   
   
4. Too much canned content. I know a lot of tour groups make you publish their stuff if you get books from them, but PLEASE add an original thought or two. I'd really like to know if you liked the book.
   
   

So what are your pet peeves about other people's blogs?