Reading, Lately – with Oyster.

First, here’s dinner tonight. I heated up my cast iron pan with a glug of olive oil and a spoonful of butter. I seasoned some large sea scallops with salt, and pan seared them in the pan, just a few minutes on each side. In a large bowl, I made the salad – baby spinach, an avocado, and a ripe mango. When the scallops were finished, I took them out of the pan, and added a single clove of minced garlic to the pan juices. I cooked the garlic for about 30 seconds, and transferred the juices, oil and butter to a bowl, and added the juice of a lime. I poured in a bit more olive oil and whisked it all together, making this one delicious pan-sauce vinaigrette. The scallops went on the salad, I dressed everything, and tossed gently. Dinner!

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You know how people look back fifty, sixty, seventy years and think “Ahhh, the good old days…now that was the life!” And then smart people realize that that life was fairly terrible back then, and societal norms were actually restricting and oppressive?

Yes, okay.

I was going to make that a metaphor for my reading habits – how years ago I used to read voraciously, except that most of the time I was reading kind of crappy novels, and so my 100+ books a year didn’t actually mean all that much because of a lack of quality reading material. Except, that’s actually a terrible metaphor, because I was reading 100+ books a year, and not wasting the rest of my time with bad habits, so even though those books weren’t all Nabokov, the fact that I was reading more often… well, that made my life better in general.

Right. Books. Let’s talk about them then. For the past two weeks I’ve been trying out a new app called Oyster – which touts itself as the “Netflix for Books” – a reading app for iPhone.

Well, I already use what I’ve thought of as the Netflix for books, which is my multiple public library accounts, which allow me to download hundreds of thousands of e-books and audiobooks on my phone through Overdrive. For free.

But the fact is, Oyster is very pretty, and Overdrive, not so much, so I thought that for the $9.95/month that Oyster is charging it couldn’t hurt try out the service for a bit and see how I liked it. While I’m never going to give up the delights of print, a proper reading experience on the phone is important to me, as I typically always have the device on me, and count on a digital library to entertain me when I can’t have a book in hand.

Set up is fairly easy – download the app – still, I believe, in locked beta – request an invite, get the invite two days later, and then boom, access. They make you choose five books that you’d like to start with – mostly I believe to get you to search through their content, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to bypass this step and start reading.

While there aren’t necessarily NYTimes top best sellers, Oyster has a good selection of literature, non-fiction, and much to my enjoyment, cookbooks! (I actually have this Adam Roberts cookbook, but it’s always nice to be able to pull up a cookbook on your phone while out and about.)

This month on Oyster I’ve read: The Art Forger, by B.A. Shapiro, about art heists, forgery, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum (my favorite museum). And then I read Scott Jurek’s Eat and Run, about his career as an ultra marathoner. I’m almost finished with the Runner’s World “Running on Air” by Budd Coates, a whole book about breathing, which might sound bizarre, but actually I found to be fairly useful.

Now I’m reading Onward, by Howard Schultz about how he re-vitalized Starbucks. I find the book interesting, if somewhat self serving, but I’m only a quarter of the way through.

My main complaints about Oyster are that the books you are reading aren’t all downloaded on your phone, so if you are in a non-service area, or if, say, you are in the middle of your office with low service and your office wi-fi happens to be down, you are not guaranteed to be able to pull up a book to entertain yourself. This certainly saves space on your phone, but limits the usefulness of the app. (Oyster says in the FAQ that they download the last 10 books read onto the phone, but I’ve not been able to pull up books a few times now in this situation. It’s possible that this is a bug in the app, so I’d like to see if this fixes itself in newer builds – additionally they mention the possibility of high data costs of roaming while reading Oyster books abroad, so this makes me curious about how the books are actually being served to the phone vs. being stored.)

At the moment, there is also a limited selection – 100,000 titles, and not all of them full books, although, for $9.95/month, I decided that as long as there are 2-3 books that I want to read per month, it’s a fairly decent value. I suspect that they’ll be getting more additions soon.

The third frustration, and perhaps the most problematic: the cataloguing and search is terrible. This might be by design, but there are limited ways to search, and it’s very hard to search by specific topic. The search bar seems to have a weak algorithm. I’d love to see the ability to search by publisher, and be able to drill down by topic better – or to see most requested books in each category.  I like the idea that each book has a “related” feature, but in reality this feature isn’t all that useful.

For instance, in the screenshot above, you’ll notice a section “Similar to Onward” (the book about the business of Starbucks that I’m currently reading.) While the idea of a “similar to” feature is neat, in practice, you’ll note that two of the books “Fresh Pantry Rhubarb” and “Fresh Pantry Lettuce” aren’t all that similar at all. (Unless there’s a plot twist that I’m not seeing coming – maybe Howard will quit his coffee empire and become a hipster farmer?)

The keyword search feature is similarly frustrating – I expect to be able to search for two word keywords, but when I searched “food memoirs” and “food literature”, this is what I got – despite the fact that there are actually quite a decent amount of both types of books in their selection – you just have to dig and dig for them. It’s sort of a trial and error – to find books, I’ve been clicking the related button many times, and trying to go farther and farther down the wormhole in order to find interesting titles.

If Oyster can improve these three key issues, then I think they’ll have the edge on other reading apps. That said, until I run out of books to read, I’ll be a decently happy paying customer – and hopefully they’ll continue to improve!

Next up on my Oyster reading list: Bill Bryson’s ‘The World at Stage’, Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Spirit of Place’, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, ‘The Widow Cliquot’, Clifford Wright’s ‘Mediterranean Vegetables’ (a cookbook), Steven Sieden’s ‘A Fuller View’ (about Buckminster Fuller), Annie Dillard’s ‘The Writing Life‘, and ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ by Italo Calvino. Admittedly, because if there is one feature I love best it is the list making feature, there’s quite a few others that I have added.

What’s on your reading list? Have you tried Oyster? 

When at a loss for dinner, make one of these!

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I’m curled up in bed tonight flipping through my new Nigel Slater: “Eat: The Little Book of Fast Food” – there really isn’t anything better than that. November is here, and although I love my winter kitchen, I’m not quite ready to brave the great outdoors in the most frigid months to come. Boots? Winter running gear? A warm jacket? All of these seem too daunting to think about. Fortunately today reached nearly 70 in Boston, proving, along with a World Series win this week, that anything is possible around here.

Here’s a list that I’ve been mulling over. I started writing it just for myself, and then realized that it might actually be useful to share here.

Let’s be honest, life is not a Pinterest board. Life as a devoted food lover is difficult. Sometimes, you want to cook an entire meal out of Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc cookbook. And sometimes, you want to cook a box of Annie’s Macaroni and Cheese and call it a night. Here’s the secret: most nights I want to cook a box of Annie’s and call it a night. In my quest to find a mid-point between the two, I have a list of meals on standby – a backup plan for my weekly meal plan. Not all of these are 20-minute meals (though many of them are), but they are all things I like and make on a regular basis. Most of them are base recipes – ideas that allow for a hundred permutations to keep things from getting boring. When I have a craving, and need a little more guidance, I’ll identify the basic combination I’d like, and I’ll flip through one of my many cookbooks to find inspired variations – maybe a spice combination, or an ingredient I hadn’t thought about. These are largely meat meals, although you can just as easily make most of them meatless.

In no particular order, things that I like to eat for dinner:

lamb chops (or chicken, or pork tenderloin, or butter beans) with salsa verde – sometimes when I’m at a loss, I’ll start first with a sauce – with the knowledge that I’ll always be able to find something to cook with it. Salsa verde is one of my favorites – herby, with a little bit of vinegar to make you pucker. You can also spoon it over roasted vegetables, potatoes, fish, you name it.

crispy chicken thighs with baked baby potatoes and tomatoes – I like tray bakes where you can just squash everything in a pan, and roast it at around 400 for just under an hour. (Usually I’ll steam the potatoes in the microwave first, so that they are soft and quicker cooking.) I’ll also make this with italian sausages, or kielbasa.

meatballs of any kind – in Turkey, meatballs are called kofte, and they are ubiquitous. I have a special kofte spice from the spice bazaar in Istanbul that I use a lot of. Or, I’ll use a different type of seasoning based on my global mood. I’ll fry these on the stove top, and eat them on salad, or with a Turkish shepherd’s salad of tomato, cucumber and parsley.

citrus mustard chicken – I’ve been doing permutations of this one for a while – there’s a good recipe for apricot-mustard baked chicken in “Dinner, a Love Story”.

tex-mex soup – sometimes it’s chicken tortilla, sometimes I go for a spicy bean soup. Back in the early 90’s, we used to take a can of refried beans, some chicken stock, and a can of Rotel, simmer it for 30 minutes and call it dinner – I think that it was probably a Weight Watchers special, but variations on this are still pretty darn good. I also make a lot of no-tortilla soup – usually with leftover rotisserie chicken.

baked fish, potatoes, and green things of choice – on Sunday, I’ll head to the market to see what I can find. Sunday is one night that I can commit to buying fish and eating it fresh. Sometimes it’s salmon, sweet potato, and brussels sprouts. Other days scallops, new potatoes, and asparagus.

dinner salad – chopped salads, “BLAT” – bacon, lettuce, avocado and tomato salad, or crabmeat salad with lemon, avocado, and tomatoes – are some of the usuals. I have a few salad-specific cookbooks that I poke through for inspiration, and quite honestly salad ideas are the first things I turn to when I get a new cookbook.

yogurt marinated grilled chicken – the nice thing about marinating chicken and then grilling it (or roasting it), is that you get a flavor packed meal, and it makes it’s own sauce. I’ll marinate in yogurt and Indian spices, or Moroccan spices, or Israeli spices. Then I cook it! This goes well with green salad.

baked chicken (or eggs) in tomato sauce – sometimes it’s a creamy tomato sauce, sometimes it’s Marcella’s quick tomato sauce, sometimes it’s a jar of Rao’s. When I want it slightly more exciting, I’ll add a tablespoon of curry powder and finish with a little cream.

Indian carrot salad with ground lamb (or) Vietnamese cucumber and carrot salad with ground beef – the idea here is to use well seasoned ground lamb or beef, to top a crunchy vegetable salad that is loaded with fresh herbs, and dressed with a bright dressing. For the Indian version I season my lamb with a homemade curry powder, and make an acidic dressing with lemon, cumin, ground coriander, and toss with plenty of fresh coriander (cilantro). For the Vietnamese version, I cook the beef with five spice powder, and make a dressing with lime and fish sauce, and top with lots of mint, cilantro, and basil.

chicken sausage and grilled pineapple – sometimes you just want a little sweetness. I’ll grab the chicken sausages with apple (or the Chardonnay ones from Trader Joe’s in a pinch), and then grill them with some pineapple wedges. When I eat this, I rarely make a vegetable, and feel a little bit like a picky three year old. But it’s good!

refried beans, eggs, and tortillas – Sometimes I’ll cook up some ground meat to mix with the beans, and usually I’ll eat mine over some greens instead of with the tortilla. This one has long been a house favorite.

I could keep going, but this list will keep me cooking for a while. What are some of your go-to easy peasy meals?

New Castle

One of my favorite places to be in the Fall is next to (not in) a body of water. Rivers, oceans, reservoirs, lakes, creeks, anything will do. I pace the Charles River to think, meander on the Harbor Walk daily before and after work, and head to the ocean when I can. I love when the sky is white-grey, the water blue-grey, and then that moment when you turn around and everything on land is vibrant in contrast – deep greens, auburn, gold and twinkly. In New England you blink and winter will cast that grey light on everything, so I’m doing my best to soak in the colors right now.

These were a few shots from New Hampshire this weekend, the little island town of New Castle, right next to Portsmouth. There have been houses here since the early 1600’s, and with a view like this, it’s not surprising why.

I’m nearly incapable of being in front of the camera without being silly.