Brining, figs and books

So I experimented with chicken brining for the first time! My foodie friend Ray introduced me to this process; I was surprised at how easy it was, and how much it improved chicken breasts, especially for grilling. Anyone else out there try brining before? I especially love the word "brining."

What's happened to me in the past few years? I used to hate cooking. Now I'm all excited about trying pork brining next. Something happened to my brain when we moved from a downtown condo into a house in residential North York. :-)



Thanks for the comments about my figs and pluots post, everyone. Some useful things I've learned as a result:

Some pluots are also known as dinosaur eggs. (Thanks, Sherman and Tibicina)

One way to prepare pluots is to cook them in the microwave then serve them slighty warm with yogurt and maybe a drizzle of maple syrup and lemon.(Thanks, mvt)

There are two types of figs: green and purple. Tibicina, who is lucky enough to have figs growing in her yard, advises serving figs (halved or quartered) with any soft, sweet cheese or fresh cream, and says that they're good with brie. "You can also cut an X in the top, put cheese in the middle and bake them just until the cheese is slightly runny. Again, I'd suggest softish, mild cheeses like brie or white stilton (not regular stilton, the white kind which doesn't have the blue veining) or ricotta or marscapone. They might do well with some of the relatively mild goats milk cheeses, depending on taste. They can be good with a drizzle of reduced balsalmic syrup or wrapped in prosciutto or both."

Amanda Page likes her figs either raw or prepared as follows: "Slice a cross in the top and then under the grill (broiler). In the mean time, toast almond slivers in a pan. Put them to one side and heat honey in the same pan until it foams and thickens a little. When the figs are a little brown, put onto a plate, drizzle the hot honey over the top, and then sprinkle the almonds." She also has a yummy-sounding Fig Quesadillas recipe online.

But I'd liked to stop drooling on the keyboard now and turn the subject from food to books...



A few years ago, I mentioned that Rand's brother David was featured in Time magazine. David Bellavia recently published a book called House To House: An Epic Memoir Of War, and it was released last week.

You can see the video in Simon & Schuster's book video channel, also on YouTube:





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