David Dubrow's Blog, page 62

Breadhead Friday: Struan!

Struan is of Scottish descent, and according to master baker Peter Reinhart, "It was originally conceived of as a once-a-year harvest bread, incorporating whatever grains and seeds were available from the previous day's harvest."

At first glance, Reinhart's struan bread recipe looks like a major pain in the neck.  You need wheat or oat bran, coarse cornmeal, brown rice, and oats, only one of which I typically have in the pantry (the oats).  And you have to cook the brown rice.  Never having had good brown rice before, I put off making this bread for years because of it.
Loaves risen and ready for baking
But then I caught a wild hare and decided to go for it.  The Saveur recipe for brown rice actually turned out a very nice, tasty product that I'll make again.  There was a lot of weighing, measuring, mixing, and kneading, and as I shaped the cold struan dough after an evening's rise in the refrigerator, I had to ask myself: was all that worth it?
A bit dense.  Note the yellow flecks of cornmeal
Yes.  Yes it was.  It was delicious.  Now I know why so many people raved about it.  The cornmeal gave it a pleasant, subtle crunch, and the addition of the other grains added depth of flavor without making it bitter.  Obviously I'll have to work on the shaping a little more in future efforts, but overall I ended up with two really tasty sandwich loaves that were worth the work.  
You owe it to yourself to make a struan bread at least once in your life to see what the fuss is about.

Is Professor Xavier an Archangel or a Principality?

You can't browse through the Paranormal Fiction section of a bookseller without running into something with an angel on the cover.  There are whole sub-genres devoted to romance between angels, romance between angels and demons, romance between angels and humans, angels and vampires (!), etc.  If there's a supernatural creature out there, someone, somewhere, is going to want to have sex with it.  Or write about someone having sex with it.

This is not to disparage the genre: people like what they like.

Call me a purist, but if you take a thing too far away from its essential nature, it ceases to be that thing and becomes something different.  If obedience to God is an integral part of an angel's being, then it will cease to be an angel when it defies God.  Without God, an angel is no longer an angel.

The idea of angels acting in defiance of an absentee God is all over modern fiction, particularly the TV show Supernatural .  In an increasingly secularized media culture, this divorce of angels from religion, from God Himself, simply turns angels into superheroes.  X-Men.  Beautiful, winged X-Men, but mutants all the same.  They can fly around, have super-strength, perform miracles, but lack the thing that makes them actually angels: faith in and obedience to God.

The angelic fiction sub-genre has plenty of room for latitude.  If there are sparkly vampires and Teen Wolves , there can be superhero angels.  A fallen angel doesn't have to de facto become a demon, an idea I explore for the Watcher angels in The Blessed Man and the Witch .

Nevertheless, magical powers and feathered wings do not an angel make.  Secularizing an angel takes him away from his core and transforms him into a superhero.

Whereupon I Give Away the Whole Store

The difficulty of depicting angels as properly angelic and God as an all-encompassing force for good in fiction is that we do not live in a culture of moral absolutes.  Likewise, we cannot rely on an ultimate moral arbiter if we cannot or will not define evil.

Kristen Lamb's point about the value of Dungeons & Dragons alignments in characterization is well-put, but it falls apart at the macro level, especially in dealing with the apocalypse.  It can be argued that the end of the world is always an individual situation, as each character will react to it in an individual manner according to his ethics and situation.  But when you deal with the larger issue of a God that ends the world, aided by His angels, character alignments don't hold up for Him, and even Lawful Good characters can protest the injustice of it.  Even if it's being done for the best of reasons, according to God.

This is the central concept behind my Armageddon trilogy: the relevance of Biblical ethics in today's ultra-modern society.  Nowhere in it do I preach, nor is it my intent to advocate for a particular moral stance within the text.  Rather, it's an attempt to bring prevailing Western belief systems into immediate conflict.  Mankind in the face of Armageddon is the ultimate existential crisis.  So how does one resolve it?  Is it possible?

During a rare moment of respite near the end of  The Blessed Man and the Witch , one character says, "We must be guided by our own ethics, not what we think God wants us to do. We must get comfortable with the idea that we can disagree with Him and still keep our integrity."  To many of us, this is an absolute impossibility.  It can't be done.  For others, it's a necessity: the God of the Bible is the ultimate source of evil, oppression, and ignorance.  Both points of view cannot be correct.  But can they both be ethical?

For Hell's point of view, there's this: “I know what I am, but you lie to yourself every day. You’d burn the world clean of everyone who doesn’t kowtow to your…God, and call it goodness.  That’s if you win.  You wanted Armageddon. You started this war, but we’re going to fight harder. And when we win, the world gets to go on. That’s not so bad, is it?”  In a nutshell, Hell claims to be fighting for its own survival.  Despite the unspeakable ugliness of Hell's tactics, isn't that reasonable?  Don't they have a right to resist God's plan to end the world, if the alternative is an eternity of torture in the Lake of Fire, or oblivion?

Between Heaven fighting to create the Day of God (or, in the series, the New Kingdom, the merging of Heaven and Earth into one eternal paradise) and Hell fighting to maintain the status quo (or so it claims), there are those who don't want the New Kingdom, but properly refuse to ally themselves with Hell.  As one character puts it at the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, when everything's at stake, "We offer a better way: freedom. Freedom to strive, to progress, to no longer be subject to the whim of an angry God or a monster that feeds on torment."  Put that way, how can you disagree?

You can, though.  You definitely can.  Especially if you've embraced the God of the Bible as an all-encompassing force for good.  After all, if there's a choice between the salvation of your eternal soul and the death of your temporary physical body, why would you choose anything but God's side?  Especially when you'll be given a new body of spirit made flesh at the beginning of the New Kingdom, when Heaven has crushed the forces of Hell and turned the Pit into the Lake of Fire.  If Heaven wins.

There are more questions asked than answered, obviously.  And there's no way to make every character happy (no way to make every reader happy, either).  Sometimes it's the struggle that matters: working these things out for yourself.  If my sympathies lie anywhere, it's there.

Delicious and Easy Saturday Night Pizza

A casual trip down the frozen food aisle of any American supermarket or a few minutes of watching network television will show you that we love pizza in the U.S.  My family's no different.  However, we're no longer fetched by TV commercials, Domino's blandishments, or chichi artisan pizzas that cost fifteen dollars for a burnt flatbread with goat cheese and arugula, because I make delicious pizzas to our taste about once a week.  And it's very easy to do.

The recipe I use is taken, in part, from this Quick Rustic Ciabatta Pizza recipe.  I have just altered it a little.
Required Special Equipment A stand mixerA kitchen scale
Required Materials Parchment paperSpray oilOlive oil
Equipment That Is Good to Have but Not Necessary A pizza stone (if not this, a cookie sheet)A pizza peel (if not this, a second cookie sheet)
Ingredients 250 grams of bread flour (8.8 oz) - King Arthur brand flour provides the best results7 grams salt (.25 oz)1 tsp quick-rising yeast1 cup water
Your favorite pizza cheeseYour favorite pizza sauceYour favorite toppings
Directions:
Mise en place
Put the flour in the mixer bowl.  On one side of the bowl, put your yeast.  On the other side, your salt.  Cover them up with the flour a little: this keeps the salt from killing the yeast early in the mixing process.  Add the water, and with the paddle attachment, start mixing on slow speed.
It will look like this after twenty seconds or so
Once the ingredients are incorporated, turn the mixer on as fast as it will go.  This will not burn out the motor.  Keep it on the highest speed until it cleans the sides of the bowl: about five minutes or so, depending.  It will come together, trust me.  As it mixes, get a non-reactive, transparent vessel like a plastic pitcher and put spray oil on the inside.
Dough coming together
As it begins to transform from a batter to a dough, don't leave the mixer alone.  The mixer has a tendency to move a little, and you don't want it to hop off the counter.  Once it cleans the sides of the bowl, turn off the mixer and put the extremely wet, sticky dough into your prepared vessel.
It will look a lot like this
Cover the vessel with plastic wrap and put it in a warm place to rise.  You want it to triple in size.  Depending on the warmth of your rising/proofing place and the warmth of the water you put into the dough, this can take 90 minutes to two hours or more.  

Before the rise
If you have a pizza stone, put it in the oven and preheat the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit 45 minutes before you plan to bake.  If you don't have a pizza stone, put a cookie sheet into the oven and preheat the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit 30 minutes before you plan to bake.  If your oven's temperature goes higher, take it to 550 or as high as it will go.  You want that oven very hot.

Tripled in size
Once the dough has tripled, tear off a sheet of parchment paper large enough to cover your pizza peel or the back of another cookie sheet and pour a tablespoon of olive oil onto it.  Spread the olive oil over the parchment paper at around the size you want the pizza to be and dump the risen pizza dough onto the oiled paper.
The dough on the oiled paper on the peel
Rub your hands on the oiled paper to get them slick and press the dough out into a rough pizza shape with your fingertips.  It doesn't have to be perfectly round.  I occasionally get them into that perfect circle shape, but it's not a big deal when I don't.  This is a homemade pizza, not a professional one.  The imperfection makes it yours.  Once the dough starts to really resist shaping, leave it alone for ten minutes to let the gluten in the dough relax.

Right after the first pressing/dimpling - note the air bubbles
After ten minutes, re-oil your hands and press the pizza out into its final shape.  Then spread the sauce onto it.  I have a delicious pizza sauce recipe that I'll post at a different time.

Saucy dough - yes, it's coming off the paper a little at the bottom there
Slide the sauced dough, along with the parchment paper, onto your pizza stone or cookie sheet in the oven and bake it for about 6 or 7 minutes.  If you put the cheese and toppings on now, the cheese will get very brown and crackly.  Which isn't bad if you like it that way.

Two minutes into the oven, and the bubbles are getting bigger
Get your cheese and toppings ready, and after that 6 or 7 minutes, open the oven and top the pizza.  There will be a good bit of steam that escapes from both the baking pizza dough and the sauce, and it'll be very hot, but if you top the pizza quickly, it's not a bad experience.  Just don't burn yourself.


Nascent pizza ready to be topped
I use a prepackaged cheese blend and turkey pepperoni typically, but we've also made some really delicious pizzas by putting on leftovers like burger pieces, grilled chicken, meatballs, sauteed peppers and onions, etc.  The dough's the canvas and you're the artist, so go wild.

Topped and ready for final baking
Bake for another 7 or 8 minutes, or until the crust gets golden brown and the cheese is melted.  The parchment paper will darken but not ignite.  Probably.  It never has with me, and I've done this in several different kitchens.  Still, be careful.

Done and out of the oven - note the char
A slice - the air bubbles in the crust give it flavor
You'll note that I don't add extra flour or water to the dough: just a little oil in the preparation process.  Despite that the dough is made of only four ingredients: flour, salt, yeast, and water, it's really, really tasty.  Crunchy, chewy, and holds up to sauces and toppings.  It's a pizza you can look forward to.  
Is it as easy to prepare as a frozen Freschetta from a box?  No.  But it's vastly better, and you know exactly what's inside it.  It came out of your kitchen and you made it to your personal tastes.  With rising and shaping times, it can take between 2 and 2.5 hours to make, but it's worth it.  

Book Review: Antediluvian by R.M. Huffman

R.M. Huffman's research, writing, and attention to detail take familiar fantasy elements and transform them into something extraordinary in this pre-Flood adventure novel, one that is definitely worth your time.  It's a fascinating story about the world-that-was described so sparingly in the Book of Genesis, where morning mists covered the Earth in lieu of rain, Watcher angels gave into lust to lay with human women, and dragon-like sauropods were used as beasts of burden.  The offspring of these human-angel couplings, the giant Nephilim, are major figures here, as are the more recognizable Biblical characters of Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah.

The narrative begins on a small scale, as the descendants of Adam, living in post-Fall Eden, are brought into cultural (and sometimes physical) conflict with the sons of Cain, living in the massive, decadent city of Enoch.  It explodes from there into a larger story rife with horrific murders, shocking betrayals, and even a tragic seduction.  Noah, the protagonist, is forced by events to move away from the more pedestrian role of farmer and architect into freedom fighter and prophet.  
The lavish descriptions, speculative world-building, and vivid battle scenes make this a world you can look forward to visiting again in the upcoming sequel.  Four stars.

R.M. Huffman can be found on his website: http://antediluvianworld.com.

Don't Ask What's in His Belly

This is a 250-word piece I wrote for this week's Flash Fiction Challenge at Indies Unlimited.  A picture is provided for the challenge, as well as a few lines of context/setup, and from there you're to write a 250 word (or less) story that includes elements from the photo, the context, or both. The photo in this post is not the picture from the challenge.


“Why is everybody yelling and running?”
I swallowed warm spit and fought for an answer that would make sense to him.  “It…ah, it’s…you’ve been in the water a long time, Andy.  Years.  Decades.”
“No I haven’t.  I just went in a couple minutes ago.”
Trying not to breathe in his stink, I just shrugged.  “Don’t I look any different, Andy?”
My little brother shook his head, and a pale gray crab dropped out of his eye socket.  It scuttled toward the water.  “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing with a ruined forefinger over my shoulder.
My confusion and loathing turned instantly to terror.  “Stay BACK!” I shrieked at the approaching Jonah, whose face crumpled into shocked misery.  “Go back to your mother.  Now!”  I’d apologize later.  If there was a later.
“You know that kid?”
My first instinct was to lie.  “No.”  A quick glance showed me that Sara was hustling Jonah away.  “Well, yes, actually.  He’s my son.  He’s only four.  Look…Andy…”
The remaining parts of Andy’s face that still had flesh on them writhed in bewildered amusement, as if I’d made a joke that he was on the cusp of getting.  “Very funny.  Let’s go swimming.”
I slipped my camera into the pocket of my swim trunks.  “Who’s that coming out of the water?”  
“Just some friends I met.  They’re really cool.”
I didn’t wait for the octopus that was trying to wriggle through the splintered gap in his ribcage to free itself.  I just ran.

From Little Acorns Do Mighty Horns Blow

There's a video I'd like you to watch.  It's not terribly long at close to seventeen minutes, and once you get the general tenor of it (no pun intended), don't feel as though you have to watch the whole thing.

Just imagine it: you're walking to your apartment building or along a quiet, snowy trail, and then from nowhere, this booming horn sound hits you.  Not just for just a few seconds, but a few minutes.  Bizarre, isn't it?  Even creepy.  I personally don't believe that it's a prophetic sign of any variety, but it's definitely an odd phenomenon.


Two years ago, I was pointed to this clip by James L. Paris's friend and colleague Robert G. Yetman Jr.  I'd worked with Bob on several projects in my professional career, and I'm proud to call him a friend.  He's a U.S. Army veteran, published writer, self-defense expert, former investment manager, and a lot more.  I interviewed him on Poisoned Eden some time ago, and was pleased to be able to ask him, in all seriousness, "Can you give us any investment strategies for dealing with the Zombie Apocalypse?"

The video fascinated me, and when I moved on from Poisoned Eden to write novels, I incorporated the "strange trumpet sounds" phenomenon into The Blessed Man and the Witch .  This wasn't an idea shoehorned in: the Book of Revelation describes seven angels winding trumpets at the end of the world.  I just took the idea and altered it.  I turned Gabriel's Trumpet into an actual person: the Herald of Armageddon.

Without this video, there probably would have been no Blessed Man and the Witch (or BMW, as writer R. M. Huffman has referred to it).  At the very least, it would have been in a much different form.  So thank you, Bob: you gave me the acorn from which this trilogy tree is growing.

Frank Herbert Would Get His Ass Kicked in a Knife Fight

I just got finished a reread of Dune .  The ecology, philosophical and religious aspects of the novel, of the universe he built, are incredible.  I'm looking forward to reading the sequels, of which there are many.  Even if you didn't know a lot about the author, even a casual reading of Frank Herbert's most famous novel would tell you that he did an incredible amount of research on life cycles, planetary ecology, Middle Eastern culture, the nature of aristocracy, and how science and religion can clash.  Herbert was a brilliant man.

But he didn't know a single thing about knife fighting, and it shows.

Part of my problem with how personal combat was portrayed in the novel was the strange hierarchy of fighters in the Dune universe.  To briefly sketch out the background, personal shield technology had been developed so that most fighting men had force fields around them that they could turn on and off.  A fast-moving object like a bullet would be deflected by a shield, but a slightly slower object, like a hand holding a knife, could slip through.  So for personal combat, you had to go fast on defense and slow on attack.  Also, if someone shot you with a laser weapon (called a lasgun) while your shield was activated, both you and the person holding the laser would be obliterated in a massive nuclear explosion, known as the Holtzman effect.  In essence, Herbert wanted to eliminate guns of all kinds in his science fiction universe.

The best individual fighters in the known universe were both attached to the main character Paul: Duncan Idaho, a "swordmaster," and Gurney Halleck, a former prisoner of Paul's enemies.  They developed a form of fighting that was so good, it rivaled and maybe even beat the most feared armies known.  What didn't work in the novel was that all of this had to be told to the reader, and not shown.  Herbert went into great detail about how the gigantic sandworms of Dune created the spice melange, but when it came to fighting, he fell back on what he knew, which was fencing.  It was unconvincing.

Fencing isn't anything like fighting with knives.  It's a long-range form of fighting (or, well, sport).  A knife fight is, by its very nature, an extreme close-quarters encounter.  Blades don't touch in a knife fight.  You can't elevate it into a fencing duel; it's too quick.

The winner in a knife fight is almost always going to be the one with more will, more speed, more strength, and more reach.  He'll get that all-important first hit in.  Let's also keep in mind that the idea of a knife duel is an entirely constructed fantasy, not unlike West Side Story .  The vast, vast majority of us don't get into knife duels. Someone looking to cut you isn't going to give you a chance to defend yourself: he'll wait until your back is turned and shank you.

There aren't a lot of places that teach knife dueling.  Filipino martial artists do flow drills that approximate it like sumbrada and hubud-lubud, but they're intended to ingrain fighting reflexes, not draw out a fight into a duel.  So the lack of resources available to Herbert isn't surprising.

Nevertheless, the fight scenes lacked authenticity.  An awesome book despite that.

The Rebar Knife - A Beautiful Thing of Hideousness

In March of 2009, I traveled to Sedona, Arizona to shoot an instructional video series on survival skills.  The shoot took the better part of a week, and it rained on and off the entire time we were there.  During the shoot, we learned flint knapping, improvised weapon construction, do-it-yourself smithing, and plenty of other primitive skills.  The best part of the shoot for me was the smithing, something in which I'd been interested since childhood, and the video we produced on that topic was called The Poor Man's Forge .  In it, the author took a piece of rebar and forged it into a knife using a forge he'd constructed out of recycled materials.

As you can see, the knife is ugly.  It's hideous.  It's got hammer marks, a small notch from testing the edge on a penny, and one of the sections of handle rope is gone.  I love it.  It's what it's supposed to be: functional, brutal, and effective.  It started out as a length of rebar, which is made of all kinds of scrap steel melted down and made into lengths of bar or wire.  It used to hold up a building.  Now it's a different sort of tool.

Note the strange sunset of colors from the middle of the blade to the back.  This is from the heat-treating process that produces a hard edge and a soft back, which is what you want.  You want it to be able to flex a little if it has to, but maintain the hardness of the edge.  The smith who made it, a true artisan who has produced some really beautiful pieces, deliberately left the hammer marks in to show that it isn't supposed to look good.  It's supposed to do its job, which is to scale a fish, skin a deer, carve some wood, or whatever else you need to do with it.

This is the back of the handle.  In Filipino martial arts, this is called the punyo.  To make this part of the knife, the smith first shaped the blade and determined the length of the handle.  He then heated the other end of the unfinished rebar to the proper color (a bright yellow), hammered it out, and curled it on the edge of the anvil.  This was a process that took many heats, a great deal of time, and dozens of hammer beats.

I'm not a knife guy.  I don't love knives, as such.  But I do admire craftsmanship.  And despite its deliberate, inherent ugliness, the rebar knife is a thing of beauty.  It's the ultimate symbol of transformation.

A Crack in My Skull

Shen Hart of The Review Hart posted this picture and asked writers to write a flash fiction piece about it, something that seems to be part of a larger story.  I took up the challenge, and here is what I wrote:

     “The same one every time?”
      “Every time,” I confirmed.
      “And when she turns around…she has no, uh…”
      “No face.  Right.”
      He shook his head.  “Jesus.  That’s fucked up.”  His mouth opened to say something else, stayed that way for a few seconds, and then closed itself.
      “Yeah.”
      “So what does she do with the rainbow picture?”
      “Nothing,” I told him.  “It just hangs there.”
      Pushing his plate aside so that it hit the ice-choked tumbler with a low clink, he scowled.  “Okay, forget it.  Getting information from you is like pulling teeth.  Find another oneiromancer.  Or try the haruspication girl down the street.  She’s good with goat guts.”
      I held out a hand as he started to get up.  “Hold on!  Wait.  Just…it’s not easy to talk about.  I’ve tried other ones.  No one’s been willing to take my case.”
      On his feet now, he motioned with his head at the door.  “Thanks for the burger and all, but there’s no way on the gods’ green Earths that I’m going to risk my soul on a trip into the deathscape you call a subconscious.  Screaming teddy bears, faceless girls… there’s something else you’re not telling me.  So forget it.”
      My fingernails scraped along the seam in my skull, the rough line that separated opaque bone from translucent yellow crystal.  “Just give me a second, okay?  I’ve…I’ve got to get this out of my head.  You can see that, can’t you?”  I meant it literally: the dream had manifested itself as a black tumor, spreading hair-fine tendrils through the visible parts of my brain.