Reading in the Garden

Getting Creative with Meals.   Can you guess what the meal in the picture is?  No, it’s not roadkill, although it does resemble something that’s been run over by a semitruck.  What we have here is a delicious Mock Duck. It was made with red lentils and rice. I found this recipe in the  Wartime Recipes  cookbook.     After reading numerous historical fictions about WWII, I really wanted to find a cookbook that offers different versions of coffee substitutes that are mentioned here and there in books:  coffee made from acorns ( The Paris Architect  by Charles Belfoure); coffee made from carrots, acorns, parsnips ( The Girl from the Channel Islands   by Jenny Lecoat); or chicory  coffee ( The Rose Code   f r om Kate Quinn).  Sadly, this cookbook did not have any such recipe. It did, however, offer other recipes from a time when food was scarce, especially coffee, sugar, eggs, butter, and other items.   The Mock Duck recipe caught my eye, because, it too, was mentioned in   The Rose Code, 

  Worth the Six Hundred Pages  Top secret codebreakers during WWII, a royal wedding, friendships, love, betrayals, a madhouse, and even a Mad Hatter literary society—this book has it all!  I was drawn to this well-written, mesmerizing, historical fiction like a magnet.   The book toggles between the early 1940s when three women work at Bletchley Park in England.  This is the top secret location where the codebreakers work frantically to decrypt German, Italian, and other messages. The story then pivots to 1947, right before the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Philip of Greece, and a mystery surrounding a woman imprisoned in a mental institution.     Although this beefy book wanders outside my comfort zone at 626 pages, I was hooked the entire time.  It wasn’t like other longer books where I wished they would end already, where I think the author should have and easily could have lopped off a lot to bring it down to a still-engaging read.  This book kept me going. I loved the cha