Saturday, June 25, 2011

Books And Brioche

Books and Food! The two loves of my life after my naughties (ok maybe tied with my naughties).

I found a book club through meetup.com after being inspired by one of Nina Badzin's recent post. I've always wanted to join a book club but have never really made the effort to find one. One of my biggest concerns was how opinionated I am... I have strong feelings about books and I don't think I should have to censor myself. My second concern is my choice of books. If you're my friend on GoodReads.com you know I have an ummm immature taste in books. I'm currently trying to remedy this by reading through Time's 100 novel's everyone should read list but over all I'm a young adults or urban fantasy addict.

Then I realized a book club would be great because of those two concerns. I like to be opinionated and my reviews on GoodReads.com isn't always enough to satisfy my need to opinion-ate. And what better way to expand my reading list then by reading books others have suggested.

So for this first book club meeting we read Follow the River by James Alexander Thom. 


I was a little apprehensive when I read the synopsis...

"This is a true story about a young woman during the French and Indian War who witnesses much of her family and village massacred and then is taken by Indians. With her two young sons, and a baby due any day, she travels hundreds of miles on horseback and foot to the Indian camp, then has to make a heart-wrenching decision - stay and marry an Indian, even as her two sons are taken away to another Indian camp, or leave her baby in the care of another Indian woman and travel on foot with nothing but a tomahawk and the clothes on her back back to her home and husband."

Wait what? Leave her kids? So she could go back to civilization and be with her husband? But I read it, and hated it because yes indeed she leaves her kids in the hands of the savages. Top that off with 200+ pages of walking through the woods, eating roots, and having diarrhea, the book was a huge fat bust in my opinion. This of course made me worried about the meeting because I STRONGLY hated the book and the main character. 

We meet yesterday at Stella's - which incidentally had TERRIBLE food - and it was a group of 6 other women. 3 who were regulars and 3 who were new like me. 


After ordering food, discussing the upcoming books and doing a little "tell me something about yourself" we get to the point where we discuss Follow the River. As it turns out it's one of the girl's FAVORITE book of all time. After she talks about why she loves it. Teardra the book club leader asks me what I like about it... Pause... "Nothing." Then I go on to explain and it turns out everyone else hated it too. Over all it was a lot of fun, the other girls were nice - even if they were a little condescending about my genres of choice.  The next meeting I'm going to is at Blue Plate (a restaurant that I love) and the book is Matched by Ally Condie, a book that I'm truly looking forward to.

And now the best part: Brioche. At 10:30 last night after book club I thought to myself "what would be better than chocolate brioche for breakfast?" So I dragged myself out of bed and made some dough. I followed this recipe loosely http://www.cookyourdream.com/2010/02/chocolate-brioche-and-monthly-mingle.html.

I was pretty worried because when I say loosely I mean, I used the right ingredients and proportions but didn't follow the instructions at all.

Still the results were fantastic! The only thing I'll do different next time is put more chocolate in the middle.




Happy Reading and Happy Baking!