Happy Insides

Books are pretty important part of our daily lives in the Barber home.  We read a lot of books in various genres and both of us actually went to school to become librarians.  I am sure you can only imagine that with 2 librarian types in the house we have quite a number of books and this with Jason's constant weeding of our collection.  In fact we just realized that we have three problems.  1) We are totally out of space on our current bookshelves.  2) We have been on a bit of a book buying spree lately so we have quite a few homeless books at the moment.  3) We can't bring ourselves to get rid of any more books to make room.  We have already weeded as much as we dare to.  Those three things brought us to the realization that we need a new book case...and soon.

So what does this have to do with our blog?  Well our love of books and our love of food have somehow combined to create a monthly series that we will call Literary Lunch.  As we have both realized recently a lot of books discuss food quite a bit amongst their pages.  That got us thinking that we could use the books we read as inspiration for some of the meals we eat.  These posts may or may not include a recipe, but we will discuss the book briefly and how the food fits into the picture.  You can look for meals posted on the 15th of every month.

So on to our first book/meal of choice.  We chose the book A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.  This is a pretty odd and amazing book and we definitely thoroughly enjoyed it.  The book is about Ignatius Jacques Reilly and his exploits.  Ignatius is an adult male that lives at home with his widowed mother and basically sponges off her as he takes time to critique modern society.  He has biting commentary for almost anything and everything.  His favorite pastimes include going to the movies to yell at the screen, eating, and spending time alone in his room or in the bathroom.  Along the way his mother begins to stand up for herself and makes Ignatius go out to find a job.  Ignatius manages to get a job as a hot dog vendor.  So without telling you any more of the story we present the A Confederacy of Dunces Hot Dog.