The Farm Report

‘Tis the season for many things, and I bet one of them is over-eating.

If you’re going to be a glutton, do it right – and get some food for thought while you’re at it.  Feast on some great food books.

Some are cookbooks and some are books about food. Stay tuned to the end of this column and you will get a recipe for a dish that will change the world as we know it. It is my holiday gift to you.

As a teacher, I get all kinds of excuses. My favorite one was “I couldn’t make it to class because a transmission fell on my head.” And it was true.

I thought I’d have to use the classic dog-ate-my-review-copy excuse when my pooch wolfed down most of the UPS parcel containing Love Soup (W.W. Norton, $22.95) by Anna Thomas.

In vegetarian cookbook circles, Anna Thomas is the Shakespeare of the form.  EvenAlanis Morissette, who once played God in a movie, hangs with Thomas. Here’s an online cooking experience courtesy of the Huffington Post.

But as an animal-flesh-eating swine, I didn’t see myself as the ideal person to review the book, since I’m not part of the target audience. So I gave the gnawed-up copy to my friendAngela, a vegetarian whose commitment is beyond reproach. The publisher kindly provided me with a non-chewed copy and I passed that on to Angela as well, so she could work on the recipes she missed because the dog ate them.

I have nothing but praise to report from the Bill’s Book Blog test kitchen. Angela is a tough, discriminating audience, but she thinks Love Soup is one of the best cookbooks she’s used. Angela is a gourmet and an engineer, so you know her endorsement means a lot. Weight Watchers Inc. has also given Love Soup its seal of approval.

As Dear Ol’ Mom used to say, “If you can read, you can cook.” Even those of you who are intuitivelittle-of-this-little-of-that cooks might enjoy trying something new.

One of my favorite smells in the world is baking bread, so I was naturally attracted to My Bread (W.W. Norton, $29.95) byJim Lahey.  I’m proud of my cooking (don’t forget the life-altering recipe at the end of this column), but have done little baking, other than the occasional birthday cake. This book has been fun to mess with because there are so many things to try – carrot bread, apple bread, beer bread – that this can get you through the winter with a different recipe a day. No reruns.

My Bread is a selection of the Gourmet Cookbook Club and it reminds me of two things – how sad it is that Gourmet no longer exists as a magazine (it’s going to stay around and some sort of Internet “brand”) and that its great editor, Ruth Reichel, wrote a wonderful memoir of life in the world of food,Garlic and Sapphires (Penguin, $16). I once did a piece on Memphis barbecue that required me to eat ribs four meals a day for four days in a row. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Reichel’s book is hilarious with a lot of good inside baseball. It’s a good stocking stuffer for the foodie in your life.

If you have a big-ass stocking, I suggest stuffing it with Secret Ingredients (The Modern Library, $18), David Remnick’s wonderful, wonderful (think Johnny Mathis) collection of food writing fromThe New Yorker.

This contains classics of gastronomical journalism, including Calvin Trillin’s  history of the Buffalo chicken wing and John McPhee’s journeys with Euell Gibbons to find something to eat in the forest. My favorite is “A Really Big Lunch,” Jim Harrison ’s tale of mid-day gluttony.

This book is a feast of good stories. Here are just a few contributors: Woody Allen, Nora Ephron, John Cheever, M.F.K. Fisher, S.J. Perelman, Steve Martin, Malcolm Gladwell, A.J. Liebling, Don DeLillo, Susan Orlean, and so many others.

And don’t forget the cartoons. Some of them date from the magazine’s James Thurber and E.B. White era. All are hilarious.

Secret Ingredients is not just the best book about food I’ve ever seen; it’s also a model anthology. It’s still available in hardcover, but depending on budget, this Modern Library paperback might be the wisest $16 you spend this holiday season.

Another good food book without recipes is The Gastronomy of Marriage (Random House,  $15) byMichelle Maisto. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to write an autobiography through the prism of cars that we’ve owned.

This looks at life and marriage through a series of meal memoirs as a couple falls in love across the dining table, gets married and enjoys the musical feast of a shared life.

A classic “food book” (and much more) for all Floridians: Oranges (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14) byJohn McPhee.

And when the holidays are over, You: On a Diet (The Free Press, $25) by Michael Roizen andMehmet Oz, with the invaluable collaboration of my talented University of Florida colleague Ted Spiker.

OK, as promised (drum roll!), my holiday gift to you:

My Nuclear Green-Bean Casserole

Get four big-ass cans of green beans. Get the regular American cut. Squared off. None of this tapered-off French-cut shit. Don’t even think about fresh beans. They’d be wasted.

You will also need about two mahonga cans of fried onions, two curds of sour cream, 4-6 cans of cream of mushroom soup (depends on your taste) and about six cups of sprinkle cheese. (I suggest medium, but if you want it sharp, suit yourself.)

Set aside one of those cans of onions. Drain the green beans and throw the rest of the crap into a disposable aluminum pan. Trust me: You don’t want to cook this bitch in anything you’re going to have to clean.

So mess the stuff up. Use a wooden spoon and poke that shit all around together. Get it together in a mixture the approximate shade of the wall paint in military housing, circa 1964. Try to avoid surprising pockets of sour cream or cheese here and there. Mix it up good. To make sure that you spend the appropriate amount of time mixing this shit, allow yourself to consume one beer as you mix. DO NOT SLAM THE BEER. Take your time. Sip it. So no Mad Dog 64 for this. Needs to be a sipping beer, like Bass Ale. If you spill a bit into the casserole dish, don’t freak. It adds to the flavor.

Smooth it out. Use the back of the wooden spoon like a paint brush. The casserole dish is now your palette. Go all Van Gogh on the motherfucker.

Once this is done, spread the last can of fried onions on top. Bake it at 350 degrees for an hour, or until you start to smell the onions burning. A few burned onions are OK, but it’d suck if you had a kitchen fire on account of this. I disavow all knowledge of this recipe in case of lawsuits.

This will change your life.

Happy holidays and bon appetit, dudes and dudettes!

It’s an adage about writing: “See the war through the eye of the single soldier.”

I use that line when I talk to students about storytelling. Great writers draw us in to big issues by telling the story through one person’s eyes.

As E.B. White used to say, “Don’t write about Man. Write about a man.”

Few writers did this better than Ernie Pyle, but even the great ones have to do a lot of on-the-job training.

Pyle became American’s most beloved correspondent in the Second World War. He was a college dropout who later drove around the country with his wife, writing columns about all of the interesting people he met on the nation’s blue highways.

However, Mrs. Pyle did not enjoy those trips and had to be institutionalized. That was in 1940 and partly to escape the hell of his personal life, Pyle went to Europe, arriving just before the Battle of Britain in 1940.

In one of his first dispatches to American readers — he wrote for the Scripps Newspapers, and his columns got nationwide play — Pyle told about going down into the subway stations (the “tube,” as the Brits called it), and seeing families sprawled on the tiles, huddled in fear of the explosions above. As he beholds the scene, Pyle speaks in only vague terms and at one point, if memory serves, he actually writes, “Oh, the humanity!”

Even masters were once apprentices. That dispatch wasn’t typical of Pyle. Soon he attached himself to a military division and followed them through training in England, through deployment to Africa and finally to the invasion of Europe. He said he wrote from “the worm’s eye view,” and he eloquently told the stories of the common infantry soldiers, the “dogfaces,” who fought that war. Along the way, in 750-word dispatches, he created a literature of war reporting.

Read his articles today (“The Story of Captain Waskow” is perhaps his most widely anthologized) and they provide a model of literary journalism. It’s amazing to think that three or four times a week, he could find and write such great stories.

But he did, all because of that seeing-the-war-through-the-eye-of-the-single-soldier stuff.

Today, we’d call that approach a no-brainer. But what’s funny — funny, as in tragic — is that so few writers have followed the Pyle example.

Writing about the Vietnam War, both John Sack (in M) and Michael Herr (in Dispatches) matched Pyle in storytelling power and precision. Now and then I have my students read Herr’s Dispatches. “It’s giving me a headache,” they whine. I just smile. “That’s the idea,” I say.

Herr follows the Faulknerian approach to punctuation, rarely using commas, so readers never have a moment of rest. He’s constantly filling your head with Hendrix and the Doors and he seems obsessed with smells, especially the body odor of others. In short, he engages all of your senses. He tries to make the reader feel what it feels like to be in the middle of war.

You read Herr or Sack or Pyle and you don’t need a writer to tell you how to feel. You read it, you shut your eyes and you say, “Christ… the humanity.”

I tell you all this because few people have written more eloquently about war than Pyle, Sack and Herr.

And David Finkel.

Add his name to that short list. Finkel is a graduate of the University of Florida, a reporter who built his portfolio at the St. Petersburg Times before heading to the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Middle East.

Now he has published The Good Soldiers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), the best book on war in a quarter century.

The daily reporting on the War on Terror, wherever it’s been fought — in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere — is a litany of faceless numbers, body bags, roadside bombs and an enemy for whom death is not a fear but a reward.

Scan the headlines, read a couple of paragraphs, and then most people probably shake their heads and turn to the sports section.

Finkel puts a face on this war, and you can’t turn away from it. To write The Good Soldiers (just named one of the 10 best books of 2009 by the New York Times), he spent a year at Baghdad’s Camp Rustamiyah. He saw the war from the worm’s-eye view, and that was on a good day. The book contains vivid, in-your-face accounts about the day-to-day life of the kids in the army, and what they deal with. And many of them are kids. Last year, he mowed your lawn. This year, he takes his life into his hands every time he gets in his Humvee.

One of the most telling early scenes in The Good Soldiers comes when Battalion 2-16 ends up taking over an abandoned building and must deal with the body of the decapitated enemy soldier floating in the open cesspool out of the new building that is now “home” to the soldiers. It’s revolting, stomach-turning and heart-breaking all at once. Though he was the enemy, and loathsome though it will be to retrieve the body, the soldiers decide that every one of God’s creatures deserves a burial.

Vivid, as I say. When the 2-16 suffers its first death — a young soldier named Jay Cajimat is incinerated in a roadside bombing, his hands and feet seared off — we feel the real loss behind those numbers we read in the newspapers every day.

“I’ve never come across a story with the potential of this one,” Finkel told a fellow journalist. “It’s pretty horrible there. There’s never a pure, easy moment. You have to be alert all the time — even when there’s nothing going on, the smart thing to do is to always anticipate.”

Finkel writes with the voice of authority. In The Good Soldiers, the “surge” that we read about becomes real.

The soldiers of the 2-16 and Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlaurich were part of that effort, and Finkel marched with them.

“I learned that I can stick with a story for a year,” Finkel said. “It’s the most essential story of my lifetime.”

We live in a very weird world. If you’re in front of me in line at Publix and I commit the offense of talking to you (“Hey, that wheat germ looks right tasty”), you’re likely to call the cops.

But if I go online and friend you on Facebook, you’ll tell me all about yourself – what movies you like, what turns you on, what music is on your iPod. I  can learn your e-mail name (“GatorBootyGal”) and, if I’m lucky, see pictures of you puking your guts out  during some ill-advised bar crawl.

It’s strange not only what we share but how compulsive we have become about sharing. And it goes beyond sharing. In person, we can be private, almost secretive. Behind one of these keyboards, we’re eager to tell you our most intimate secrets.

Maybe this is driven by loneliness. Maybe it’s the modern way we’ve come to deal with lives of quiet desperation. Part of it might have to do with the delirious pursuit of fame. People want to become famous not by actually doing anything noteworthy. They just want to be famous, as if fame is a birthright.

This has been much on my mind lately because of The Peep Diaries (City Lights Books, $17.95) by Hal Niedzviecki (above). This book has preoccupied me since it came out in the summer and I’m wondering if it might end up being one of those prescient, influential books like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd.

As everyone else starts the December look back at the year, this is my dark-horse nominee for most significant book of 2009.

Niedzviecki looks around at all elements of what he calls Peep Culture. We have self-obsessed bloggers pontificating into the night. We have video diarists masturbating for strangers on Webcams. We have millions of  people willing to humiliate  themselves before other millions for a chance to be on reality television.

Just since the book was published, we’ve had masterpieces of assholery to further underscore Niedzviecki’s points – the Colorado morons with the balloon-boy son and the egocentric douchebags who crashed a White House state dinner. In both of those cases, all they wanted was undeserved fame.

Of course, I’d feel differently about them if they could cure cancer or feed the hungry. Then I’d have their pictures tattooed on my ass. But for now, they are publicity seeking imbeciles.

Midway through the book, Niedzviecki gives a case history of a family that did one of those wife-swap TV shows. The family was Jewish, lived in the country on a farm with seven horses, and all had a pretty good sense of humor. They were to swap wives with an urban family. They figured the entertainment would be in the city-and-country culture clash.

Instead, the television producers clearly misrepresented both families. Scenes were taken out of context and a religious conflict was invented. The whole week was falsified . . . invented . . . and yet was called “reality television.”

How did the Jewish family feel when the mother was portrayed as intolerant of her adopted Christian family?

They didn’t care. They just liked the rock-star treatment they got from the network and the flicker of fame that came with their brief moment in the sun. Truth and humiliation didn’t matter. Fame did.

Of course, beyond all of these factors, Niedzviecki recognizes the insidious uses of this knowledge we so freely divulge and the hundreds of breaches of privacy we endure each day.

The Peep Diaries is an important, deeply thoughtful book that deserves a wide audience.

Our measuring stick for suspense is Alfred Hitchcock. No doubt the late English filmmaker altered the bathing habits of millions with Psycho (I know that I gave up showers for baths for a year after seeing it) and because of The Birds, we don’t look at our fine, feathered friends in quite the same way.

Still, great as those films are, the best Hitchcock films were the ones that followed the pattern of the innocent-person-caught-in-a-nightmare.

Think North by Northwest, where Cary Grant is mistaken for a spy. Or The Wrong Man, when Henry Fonda is jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. Or Strangers on a Train, when a chance encounter with nutty Robert Walker sets a murder into motion.

It’s that sweaty-palmed paranoia, in which real fear rises from the vapor and grips you around the throat. That, to me, is the source of the modifier “Hitchcockian.”

So when I tell you that Liz Balmaseda’s new book Sweet Mary (Atria Books, $24.95) is a Hitchcockian thriller, think that sort of story.

Because the heroine of the book, Dulce Maria Guevera, is just that: an innocent caught up in a horrible case of mistaken identity. Or maybe not.

Balmaseda keeps you guessing.

As a journalist, Balmaseda was all about answers, Any good reporter or columnist knows that the point of journalist is to serve the public . . . to give people what they need to know . . . to answer questions, not ask them.

She was so good at the job she won a Pulitzer Prize for stories about immigration and shared a second Pulitzer with her Miami Herald colleagues for the Elian Gonzalez story.

She’s a product of the same newsroom that gave the world such gifted writers as Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan and Fabiola Santiago.

So you might think that her first novel might be about a journalist or at least involve journalism in some way.

Nope.

The heroine here, Mary, is a real-estate agent. In fact, the novel opens with a long scene showing Mary at work. She’s immediately likeable, interesting, vivacious, a single mother, trying to sell a huge and decrepit house to a wealthy out-of-towner. She’s someone we want to know.

Of course, there are allusions to problems: the ex-husband, the mother and father who won’t let her irresponsible little brother grow up (he’s a doltish adult now), and her inability to refuse to help when asked. This Mary – she has a big heart.

And then the SWAT team shows up at the door.

Mary is hauled to jail and her son Max is taken by the Department of Children and Families. In a nightmare of mistakes and ineptitude, Mary is charged with being a drug smuggler.

It’s obviously a mistake, but proving she is not the woman in question is hard. There are too many accidents of similiarity

When the SWAT team comes knocking, Mary’s support system is gone. Her parents are off on a cruise and her worthless little brother is incapable of help. Luckily, Mary has a friend who hooks her up with a high-powered attorney.

Things are getting back on track. Mary’s bigtime lawyer is able to sell this as a case of mistaken identify. But by then, the son is with Mary’s ex-husband and his brittle blonde wife and wresting him back is the real problem. After all, Mary had been accused to being a drug smuggler and where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

It’s a nightmare, a true Hitchcockian nightmare. And just when you think this will turn into some revenge fantasy, with Mary going all Rambo on the ass of some pencil pusher in a DCF office, Balamseda throws us another curve.

Gee, maybe Mary isn’t as innocent as she seems.

With a sudden plot turn, we begin to doubt a lot of what we think we know about Mary. Again we’re reminded that people can be total, unpredictable ciphers.

Many skilled journalists bobble the ball when they turn to writing fiction. But Balmaseda balances this story deftly.

She left the Herald and has been working as a Palm Beach Post columnist. Before Sweet Mary, she’s done a couple of as-told-to books, but we hope with this excellent book, she will begin producing novels at a Hiaasen-like rate.

And by the way, check out her Web site, www.lizbalmaseda.com. She has a recipe for Sweet Mary’s official drink, the Mango Sour Happy Hour.

As a public service, we present the recipe below:

§ 1 ½ ounce rum (Bacardi Gold recommended)

§ 2 oz fresh mango puree

§ ½ oz of sour mix

§ ½ oz fresh lime juice

Serve frozen or over crushed