Tickle your tastebuds while adding to your "To read" pile


 
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"Life Without a Recipe" 
by Diana Abu-Jaber

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I asked you to choose a novel you love and pair it with a delicious dish... and your pairings were so creative and so imaginative and mouthwatering that it’s obvious I am a rank amateur in the face of your expertise.

So, today: your pairings in all of their delectable glory!

My friend Jay wants to whip up a scrumptious seven-layer cake and work our way through the nine circles of hell in "Dante’s Inferno."

My new friend Jay wants to take us out to the ballgame, where we’ll read New York Times bestselling journalist Dan Barry’s “Bottom of the 33rd” as we munch on peanuts, popcorn and stadium dogs.

Rico tweeted a luscious recipe for poblano chiles in walnut sauce and paired it with a book I love — Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate." Roxane has set her table with lobster bisque, green salad with maple mustard dressing and blueberry cobbler while we read Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Country of Pointed Firs.”

I got an email from Laura who has a buttermilk biscuit recipe she thinks pairs nicely with Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” And, yes, several of you emailed with the fava beans. Can you guess which novel that goes with?

My pal Robert Stephens wants a plate of oysters with Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” and sent me a passage on Twitter from the novel that reads: “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

Liz is partial to a can of beer, a tin of sardines and Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.” Tammy will savor dandelion greens, sautéed morels over acorn grits and maple syrup cookies (yum!) as she reads Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower.”

If you love this idea of delicious book and dish pairings, you cannot miss the novels of Diana Abu-Jaber. They are stuffed with delectable dishes and wonderful settings and characters.

So, read adventurously and bon appétit, my friends!

 — Kerri Miller | MPR News
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