Libraries

I recently moved to a new town and was elated to discover a library in walking distance of my apartment, ever available as a peaceful work space and an outlet for idle book browsing. One day I decided to abandon my work and check out the library. My apartment is in a primarily Spanish-speaking area, so I quickly realized that half of the fiction section was in Spanish. (I now regret dropping the ball with the Spanish language Rosetta Stone I started in the fall.)

I looked for authors that I know and enjoy to gauge the inventory of the fiction section. For every author I searched for, I found one with a similar name who wrote a book about moms. For instance, where I hoped to find Virginia Woolf, I found Virginia Walf, author of Mom’s Day Out or Mom’s the Word. I quickly determined that I would have to use interlibrary loan to find books that are not specifically for and about moms. Or in Spanish.

Then, to my dismay, the library closed for construction, leaving me with only the enormous bookcase in my own apartment. After a month of patiently writing in the crowded Starbucks, the library has finally reopened. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll test out the renovated premises and search for some of the books I’d like to read this year.

Do you have an enormous bookcase might as well be its own library? Do you pass so many good reads onto enthusiastic friends that you forgot what was on the shelves in the first place? Maybe it’s time you invested in a personal library kit. The need to put little cards in the back of your own books must have occurred to you at one time or another, as you wondered whether your copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fell behind your desk or remains forgotten under a pile of sneakers in your brother’s closet? Perhaps it’s time to subject friends and family to library bureaucracy in your own home, complete with fines and a Dewey Decimal System.

Another idea for an enormous bookcase: Hide your heirloom treasures and embarrassing secrets in a hollowed-out book. This post from the blog Build Castles in Air will tell you exactly how to do it. Buried in between dozens of other books, no one will ever guess that your copy of Square Foot Gardening actually contains evidence of your latest crime spree.

Books for a New Year

It’s a new year and as good of a time as ever to breathe some life into this Battered Women blog. Let’s get literary.

I compiled a list of ten books I want to read this year. They aren’t all recent, nor are they all about food. Many of them are waiting on my shelf right now, becoming fully exasperated with my endless blogging.

Books I Want to Read in 2012

1. Welcome to Higby by Mark Dunn – I started this one on the train today. The story centers on a small town of eccentrics and religious fanatics. Mark Dunn writes really fantastic dialogue – a man preaching the gospel to a cat and a woman taking budgeting advice from her sassy, black guardian angel.

2. The Master and Margarita by Mikail Bulgakov – From what I gather, Satan ambles into Moscow like he owns the place, the relationship between Soviet society and artists is explored, and an enormous talking cat imbues a great deal of vodka. There’s also a story within a story about Jesus.

3. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender – A girl goes through life tasting the emotions of other’s through the food they cook. Liza enjoyed this book immensely and now it’s gracing the shelf of borrowed books in my enormous bookcase. (You might remember a previous post long, long ago about The Girl with the Flammable Skirt.)

4. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell – I loved the observant and precocious child narrators in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Swamplandia! appears to expand on one of my favorite short stories from the collection, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator.”

5. Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link –.One might mistake this for a Nancy Drew mystery based on the cover art. It’s a short story collection drawing from fairy tales, Greek mythology, and famous acts of cannibalism.

6. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino – Marco Polo tells stories about cities he has seen while traveling to Kublai Khan as his empire crumbles. Sounds magical.

7. Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski – Two starry-eyed teenagers embark on a metaphoric road trip through history. I need to tackle this now because Danielewski’s 27 volume project about cats will probably take a great deal of time to read.

8. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – This historical account of wizardry in England during the Napoleonic Wars told in witty British prose and footnotes was recommended to me by a friend. Totaling in at one thousand and twenty-four pages, it will likely take three months of the year on its own. It still pales in comparison to Danielewski’s cat saga.

9. Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting - From what I’ve read, it’s a collection of stories about women who hold unglamorous, unlikely jobs. The cover of this book features a woman holding a fish and reminds me a lot of Leonor Fini's painting "Le Bout Du Monde."

10. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – Not having read Lolita feels kind of like not having seen Planet of the Apes. Not that the two have anything to do with each other but for the fact that I also haven’t seen Planet of the Apes.

What are you excited to read this year?

The Importance of Eating Muffins

JACK: How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins, when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.

ALGERNON:  Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

JACK: I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

ALGERNON: When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.

- Oscar Wilde, TheImportance of Being Earnest

Muffins are irresistible to everyone, except celiacs, masochists, and people of that sort. Why else would a celebrated wit such as Oscar Wilde choose the muffin over an abundance of British tea time treats? What about bread and butter, teacake, or those queer, porous crumpets? Clearly they are all inferior.

There comes a time each year when I crave pumpkin. (Some call it “fall.”) My seasonal instincts are telling me to eat those bulbous orange squashes that grace the entrances of every supermarket. I thought a lot about making pumpkin muffins. I knew I needed to make pumpkin muffins or I would think about them day and night until that thought circuit became a reality. 

This vegan pumpkin coconut muffin recipe is adapted from a Mark Bittman recipe clip from the New York Times site. (Watch the video and catch the Milan Kundera joke at the end.) Rather than the usual half all-purpose, half-whole wheat approach, Bittman uses whole wheat pastry flour and a cup of produce puree. I veganized this recipe by replacing the stick of butter with a half cup of coconut oil, which I also rubbed all over my skin. Try not to get it on your cuffs.

Some say the best way to prevent muffin-provoked violence is to make enough for everyone. This recipe makes 12-14 muffins and one small bowl of vegan pumpkin pudding.

Vegan Pumpkin Coconut Muffins

2 ½ cups whole wheat pastry flour

¾ cup maple syrup

2 teaspoons aluminum-free baking powder

½ teaspoon aluminum-free baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup pumpkin puree (Bake and puree peeled pumpkin or buy it canned like a square. Your choice.)

½ cup coconut milk

½ cup melted coconut oil

¼ cup unsweetened coconut flakes

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ginger

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat to 375 degrees.

Combine the pastry flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a mixing bowl and stir. In another bowl, combine the pumpkin puree, coconut milk, coconut oil, and shredded coconut. Gently blend the two mixtures together and keep in mind that over-mixing will result in unpleasantly tough muffins. Grease a muffin tin with coconut oil or fill the tin with muffin cups. Pour in the batter.

Place the tin in the preheated oven and bake for 20-25 minutes.

As you wait, eat the remainder of the batter with a spatula. Rename the recipe “Vegan Pumpkin Pudding” and call it a night.

I try so hard not to look like one of those people who stuff their mouths incessantly, but it still seems like whenever anyone speaks to me I have a mouthful of corn chips. Call me Chipmunk Cheeks, but what can be done? Could I grow my own self-control with a green tablet in a tub of water and use the resulting spongy-thing to soak up my unbridled addictions? Probably not.

Eating and Reading

"It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of a novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.”

-          - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

I suppose Virginia Woolf never read novels while fasting for a Jewish holiday. One fateful Yom Kippur, my Jewish friend’s hungry eyes devoured The Particular Sadness of the Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. Her shrunken stomach gurgled as she read description after description of cakes and meals. Perhaps she stumbled upon the worst possible literature for her holy condition. Perhaps reading and eating need not be separate worlds after all.


Liza and I are college friends and writers. We like to collaborate but live far away from each other. Now that we have enormously useful college degrees in our possession and live in our respective states, we send each other recipes, discuss cooking oils, and revel in the glories of quinoa from a distance.

The last time Liza visited my house, we botched a batter for quinoa muffins with some disastrous homemade sunflower butter. Exhausted and downtrodden, we named our blog thus: Two Battered Women.

Think of Two Battered Women as the middle of a boring Venn diagram. The left circle is food, the right circle is literature, and Two Battered Women is that lemony shape in the creamy center, full of eating and reading, cooking and baking, and books about food.

Now, imagine that the two circles of the Venn diagram are actually sesame seed bagels filled with cream cheese. This should be interesting.