"BookClub" news and stories

• South Florida book clubbers are setting their tables to match their assigned reading, whipping up Jell-O salads in honor of "The Help" and making candied apples to celebrate "Water for Elephants."
• Readers rush to the aid of a Pakistani ex-pat seeking to recreate his late mother's carrot rice pudding.
• The Desperation Dinners team proves you can make faux maque choux in 25 minutes.
• Dried mulberries and melon seeds line the shelves at a Persian grocery store in Plantation, Fla.

Not too surprisingly, a lot of us who love food and food blogs also love to read. Sort of makes you wonder, then, why nobody has thought of a book-of-the-month club for foodies before now.

Writer and recipe developer Meena Agarwal writes a popular blog called Hooked on Heat, showcasing her take on modern Indian cuisine. Besides chronicling her days as an obsessed cook, Agarwal confesses to being an obsessed bookworm as well.

This month, she started the Cook's Book Club; a Book Club for Foodies. Every month she would choose a food-related book, with the help of reader suggestions, read it, and then choose a dish to make inspired by the story or one of the characters. Sounds like a yummy idea to me. What did the blogosphere think?

"The response has been amazing so far!" Agarwal wrote me. "I always knew there were a lot of book lovers in the food blog world, but had no idea there were these many willing to participate!"

Book selections will be mainly fiction, she says, "since that would help bring out the creativity in creating a dish for the book." Reader suggestions are encouraged.

But better clear your plate. April/May's book selection is already underway: "Serving Crazy with Curry," by Amulya Malladi. June's book will be "A Thousand Splendid Suns," by Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling "The Kite Runner." Find further selections here, (scroll down).

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