Tonight my book club will be discussing Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany. I am a little fearful about sounding like a curmudgeon because it seems like I don't like any of the books we read for book group that I didn't recommend. This month's book is about Egyptian immigrants in Chicago most of whom have some tie to a particular department at a university there. I don't know if it was because it was in translation but the American characters especially didn't ring true. I likewise imagine if I and all the Americans I know in Jordan wrote a book entitled "Amman" - it likewise wouldn't ring very true for Jordanians. My book club is also a potluck dinner and tonight I am bringing a yellow cake with a praline icing. I was actually intending on bringing vanilla fudge but the fudge didn't set right so I baked a cake and spread the soft fudge on top and am calling it praline icing.
Last weekend, we was also our monthly dinner club. This month's theme: Breakfast for Dinner. We made a mushroom strata (a savory bread pudding) that was tasty but we were cheaters because it is in fact someone we have made before (and in fact had served the same dish to half of our fellow dinner club members). The most delicious dish by far was Banana and Peanut Butter stuffed french toast which Scott said was a Paula Dean recipe. It was unbelievably good - you should make it this weekend or better still for Christmas morning - although we should warn you that we left this dinner club feeling leaden (or the way you would imagine you'd feel if you ate a lot of bready breakfasty dishes at 8:00 at night).Yesterday, I met someone who has been to Trinidad many times and really likes it (more frequently we get praise for the tourist destination Tobago). It is possible that Peter really likes Trinidad because he is an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) enforcement expert and apparently Trinidad because it has a domestic soca music industry to protect actually cares about music and other IP piracy (unlike Jordan which has no such industry to protect - and would probably also be a nicer place to live if it had a music industry).
2 comments:
That's interesting about the intellectual property/soca connection. Perhaps the government is interested in protecting its own people, but its promises to try to make a dent in the pirated U.S. DVD/music industry seem laughable from my point of view. Such things are changing all the time, though; maybe the Summit of the Americas will spur them into further action.
If only that dish didn't have bananas....
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