City of Gold

I watched the first season of Chef's Table when it was released. The episode about Niki Nakayama featured Evan Kleiman, NPR food critic. I listen to a lot of NPR but had never heard Evan Kleiman so I sought out her show Good Food. Now it's a podcast I rarely miss. Every week has a restaurant recommendation by Jonathan Gold and I listen to this part intently too ... though I don't live in Los Angeles.


When I heard that a documentary about Gold was forthcoming I immediately added it the to-watch list on Wunderlist (other recent additions: Queen of Katwe and Moonlight).


This week I ran across a blurb somewhere online that it was now streaming on Hulu.


With the house to myself, I watched City of Gold last night. It is a moving, funny, tender, and celebratory portrait of a city (which I've always considered kind of soulless - wrong), an artist, and the American dream. Its vision of community couldn't come a better time, especially in light of the last weeks and months.

In Others' Words

Taking It Home to Jerome by David Kirby

In Baton Rouge, there was a DJ on the soul station who was
always urging his listeners to “take it on home to Jerome.”

No one knew who Jerome was. And nobody cared. So it
didn’t matter. I was, what, ten, twelve? I didn’t have anything

to take home to anyone. Parents and teachers told us that all
we needed to do in this world were three things: be happy,

do good, and find work that fulfills you. But I also wanted
to learn that trick where you grab your left ankle in your

right hand and then jump through with your other leg.
Everything else was to come, everything about love:

the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem,

I feel as though I’m operating that crusher that turns
a full-size car into a metal cube the size of a suitcase.

At other times, I’m just a secretary: the world has so much
to say, and I’m writing it down. This great tenderness.


My friend Amy had her baby last week and her husband's name is Jerome. Once again Writer's Almanac delivers in a creepy prescient way. Always enjoyable, sometimes a gut punch.

A Clue

I feel as though all my life I have been traveling toward this spot, to wait beside this baby at the vortex of his joy. In the spooky silvery light, everything is a clue. There are clues all around me, but I cannot interpret them. I cannot even distinguish the mystery.

  -- Julie Hayden, 'Walking with Charlie' from The Lists of the Past

In Others' Words

This week I felt Josie's first tooth and observed the autopsy of an elderly person. Sometimes I'm reminded of this pendulum on which we ride, sacred, profane, joyful, heartbreaking, boring, exhilarating.


In Disgrace

Life is absurd. A man can count on that.
After the great triumph, you’re left standing alone,
Standing on the corner, holding your hat,
Trying to call a friend on your cell phone.
Men my age are arrested for public exposure
Who only needed to take a leak in the bushes.
They didn’t run through the park with no clothes or
Flash anyone. Life is like that. Some parts precious,
Moments of glory, and then the need for urination,
Then a disgrace in men’s eyes, and crying bootlessly.
Here I am, a man of a certain reputation,
But your love, darling, is worth all of that to me.
      Were I an outlaw, branded far and wide, No Good,
      You’d love me just the same. I know you would.

Ramon Montaigne

From the Writer's Almanac, listen to episode here

In Others' Words Wednesday

Via the Paris Review Instagram feed

In Others' Words

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

from 'The Country of Marriage' by Wendell Berry

June 25, 2011 at the Gramophone, St Louis, Missouri

Naming the Baby

Last night this poem popped up in my Feedly feed from today's Writer's Almanac; 'so perfect!' I said and read it aloud to Luke as we lie awake, catching up from almost two weeks (mostly) apart due to his tour and my vacation (St Louis and Michigan) and talking about the name for the baby girl we will welcome next month. We stayed up too late. Tired but happy today, happy to be home.

Listen to the poem here 

 

Naming the Baby 

by Faith Shearin

When you are dreaming of the name
you are also dreaming of who they
might be. They are invented in darkness —
under cloak of skin — and, for the better
part of a year, are a swelling
or a set of symptoms. The name
books are like a box of chocolates
and when you open them you see
how many kinds there really are.
There are names of people you
have known and disliked and names
that make the wrong sounds and names
that suggest your child will be
like everyone else's. There are names
that turn your child into a character
in a novel and names that recall
the time when your great grandmother
was young. Naming the baby is a way
of dreaming about a creature who is
almost but not quite. It is a way of
imagining the soul of a person you
are making but have not made.
The name is the first way you see
the baby: their title, the syllables
that conjure a shape from the lantern.

In Others' Words

To be of use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

By Marge Piercy

listen here ; read in memorial for the loss of two Boston firefighters [ Here & Now ]

Esther Perel's TED talk...

  ...is something you should listen to right away.

May I recommend her book Mating in Captivity... great reading.

Perel's recent feature in the New York Times.

In Others' Words

Conch

Hold a baby to your ear

As you would a shell:

Sounds of centuries you hear

New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby's code?

And which is the older --

The listener or his small load?

The held or the holder?

 

 

E.B. WHITE

 

 

Clementine and her great-grandma Aggie, Wyoming, August 2013

 

 

 

From Here and There Around the Web

I'm still stuck on page 67 of Don deLillo's End Zone but here are some interesting essays/Internet things I've come across recently:

When it pays to have someone else clean your house  I think this HAS to be true.  I also want someone else to clean my house all the time.  So do the people who share my house.

Margaret Mitchell's mother's no nonsense farewell note

What if the US (or Switzerland) gave every citizen $10,000 annually just for being alive?

The steak frites machine that is NYC's Balthazar

I had never heard of Dr. Who until I kept seeing my friend Aaron pinning Who stuff on Pinterest.  I still don't get it, but this Jill Lepore essay created a lot of context - I'm still 50 years behind however.

Chowhound - "It’s more than a discussion group. It’s a support group."

Also, have you checked out Hukkster?  It alerts you when items you are tracking go on sale.  Pretty cool.

I leave you with:

Raspberries

In Others' Words

'Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

 

photo by Doris, sitter extraordinaire!

 

In Other's Words

"Let Me Hold You While I May" from Yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation by Mary Jean Irion (1970)

The day is over; now I will sleep. It has been a normal sort of day, common like a rock along the path. Nothing about it would make one exclaim over it, as one might do with a shell or a glistening piece of quartz. It was just a rock, lying there along my way. But now, knowing that it is about to go from me forever, I hold it in my hand curiously, turning it this way and that, marking its shape and texture, weighing it on my palm. What was it really, this normal day?

It was routine, mostly....washing, ironing, a trip to the store, meals, dishes--the common denominators of women's days.

It was pleasant here and there...a letter from an old friend, my husband's telephone call for no reason, a back fence chat with my neighbor, half an hour with a good book, some loud laughs with the children at dinner time.

It was irritating now and then....a sticky ocean of spilled maple syrup, mealtime with one greedy child and one finicky one, the arrival of a bill unexpectedly high, a persistent salesman's theft of fifteen beautiful minutes.

It was deeply joyous at times... the whole house glorified with the strains of the new "Greensleeves" record; our unliterary twelve-year-old's first book (begun today, to be finished tomorrow) with its dedication--to wonder of wonders--his parents; our eight-year-old and her friend playing dress-up, painted and perfumed, scarved and veiled, clattering through the kitchen in spike heels and courtesaned innocence.

It was sobering and frightening in some ways...Mom's waning health and increasing discouragement; the big blow up after dinner about homework and learning to accept responsibility, and the guilt that followed my hasty words; the vague, huge uncertainties that draped themselves over us, cobweb-like, with the ten o'clock news from a tense and shadowed world.

It was blessed with love throughout...in a pig-shaped breadboard made and presented to me by my son; in the wave of feeling as I watched our little daughter sleeping in soft moonlight, her long lashes shadowing her cheek; in an hour alone with my husband at the end of day.

Just a normal day. A normal day! It is a jewel! In time of war, in peril of death, people have dug their hands and faces into the earth and remembered this. In time of sickness and pain, people have buried their faces in pillows and wept for this. In time of loneliness and separation, people have stretched themselves taut and waited for this. In time of hunger, homelessness, want, people have raised bony hands to the skies and stayed alive for this....

Normal Day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it will not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want more than all the world your return.


text via, image via

▲ ▲ ▲

This was featured on A Cup of Jo and I went hunting for the rest of the essay.  Since then I've been thinking about the 90s Sitcom Syndrome [wherein everything cool happens in New York City, or, at the very least, somewhere Far From Here] I've developed through reading blogs (exhibit no 1, Cup of Jo), scrolling through Instagram, reading magazines.  Been feeling a little less-than and this beautiful essay jolted me right out of it.

So here's to the quotidian and the banal and the pedestrian, the dishes in the sink and the hand-me-down couches, the chain link fence and the extra ten pounds, the clutter, the dust bunnies, the spit up rags on the chair, on the table, on the hand-me-down couch.

This is the good part.  The greatest part.  

Likes & Finds

Envy apples just showed up at Central Market and they are - YES - better than Honeycrisp apples.


L'Oreal Colour Riche le Balm in Heavenly Berry ($8)  So pretty, SPF 15, can apply without looking.


Letters of Note, a blog devoted to "correspondence deserving of a wider audience."  My favorite so far is this beautiful condolence letter written by the screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause to the aunt and uncle of James Dean.


The rediscovered deliciousness of cinnamon toast.   The first bite with the dissipating granularity of the sugar and the melted butter...how could I have forgotten?  And how can I stop making it every day now that I've remembered?


"The Sense of an Ending" by Ann Patchett on the loss of her beloved dog, Rose.  (Vogue September 2012)  Unfortunately I can't find a link to share with you --- it's in the giant September issue with Lady Gaga on the cover.  (Luke: 'What is this magazine?  [Flipping pages] It's just...pictures of girls with lots of eye makeup.')




via

Saw one of my favorite bands, Those Darlins, this weekend.  This song is just so great/hilarious/catchy, and I complimented the singer/songwriter Nikki Darlin on it after the show.

Night jogger... what are you running from?

 

At Home on the Range

via

The great-grandmother of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) was a writer herself and published this cookbook in 1947.  A great, great read- Potter's rat-a-tat-tat delivery, confident tone and wicked sense of humor are immensely enjoyable.  I excerpt here the chapter on bread -- reading the book was worth the last sentence alone. (This is the level of wit and writerliness that I wish the Pioneer Woman - another recently perused new cookbook - would achieve).
   

And breadmaking is so much fun. I can't believe that writing deathless music or painting a really fine picture can give any greater feeling of artistic creation that gazing on a golden loaf for which you are completely responsible.

BREAD is easy, too; just as easy as 2 times 2 equals 4, and, in fact, those are the only numbers to remember all through the operation. Ready, now? Get out a big bowl and put in it 2 crumbled yeast cakes and add 4 cups of lukewarm liquid. This can be water, cooled scalded milk, or half-and-half. Stir in 4 tablespoons of melted shortening (lard or butter), 4 tablespoons of sugar, 4 teaspoons of salt, and 4 cups of sifted flour and then see how little more flour you can add and still have a workable dough. Two cups may do it, and shouldn't need more than 4. Dust a breadboard or cloth with flour - always sifted, please. Dump the dough on the board and dust with 1/2 cup of flour.

Now relax. Sit down, light a cigarette, write a letter or make your own plans for the next 15 minutes while the dough 'tightens up; as we bakers say. I generally improve this shining quarter-hour by washing the mixing bowl, and like the fisherman's suspenders in Kipling's "How the Whale Got His Throat" which you are implored to remember, you'll see why later, 'oh, best beloved.'

Is your cigarette finished? Let's go. This is fun. Start to knead by punching the dough away from you, and pull it toward you and press down. Give it a quarter-turn and repeat the preceding act for 10 minutes or a little longer. Add just enough flour to keep the dough from sticking to your hands or the board, and before you know it, you'll have a satin-smooth elastic mass which, believe it or not, is your bread. Put into your clean mixing bowl - you see now why you washed it - 4 tablespoons (remember the magic number 4) of shortening or oil. Place the dough in the bowl and turn it till every part of the surface is covered with the grease. Then cover the bowl with a damp towel or napkin and leave it in a warm spot for 4 hours. It should double its size or a little more.

For a whole morning or afternoon go your ways, for what you have hidden in practically foolproof. If you wihs, take a peek in about 2 hours just to see if things are progressing, but don't seem disappointed if they seem slow. Like the watched pot boiling, dough seems to get active just when you've given up hope. Now for more fun. When your dough has doubled in size, attack it right in the bowl. Pretend it's your worst enemy and give it a great punch right in the solar plexus to deflate its ego. Give it a couple more good lefts and rights and remove it from the bowl to the floured breadboard and cut into quarters. There, madam, are four loaves of bread. Let them stand for a few minutes for another tightening. Shape them up and they are ready for the pans. Grease 4 pans 5 by 10 inches (glass or metal) and then place a loaf in each pan. Grease the top of each loaf and then put the pans back in the same warm spot for at least another 2 hours during which time they will more than double their original size. Again, don't worry about them falling for they won't, honestly. And they are better too high than too low. Have your oven ready at a good 375 and put in the bread. Bake it 15 minutes and then turn the heat down to 350. Bake the loaves for 1/2 hour longer, and here again too much is better than too little. When done, loaves don't need any help to get them out of their pans. Now get really excited. Take out your loaves, turn them out on a cake rack or clean towel, then- sniff, throw out your chest, and pat yourself on the back. And if you can resist cutting off a big warm piece and spreading it thickly with butter you're not the girl I think.

In Others' Words

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. 

                                                       Anais Nin

Skipping stones on the Rio Grande, Santa Elena Canyon, January 2012

The Head and the Heart

The head:



Just published.  Exciting.

and the heart:

Just received.  Smile on lips.

The man knows his wife.

The Head and the Heart, Rivers and Roads

Book Reports

The last few weeks have contained more-than-usual downtime and travelling, both instances in which I catch up on my reading list.  Lately this has been headed by recently published works of nonfiction recommended by you, gentle readers, or that I heard about via radio/newspaper/magazine.  All have been superb.

First up, An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler,

a collection of gorgeous essays on home cooking, with emphasis on using everything (no such thing as scraps!) and the emotionality of food preparation and consumption.  One might enjoy this more or less based on your Myers-Briggs type; if you are looking for America's Test Kitchen-style exactitude and scientific rigor, you will not find it here: 

Frying the leaves of parsley, rosemary or sage is a good if messy way of making an especially elegant garnish from something ordinary.  Fried herbs' colors and shapes crystallize.  Fried parsley becomes a little solider.  Fried sage is an exaggeration of the leaf's almost animal curve.  Fried rosemary looks like rosemary would in the realm of ideas. 
                                                     (My italics)

You will find beautiful prose, however, that is substantive and supple, and appreciation for the author's reverential approach to food, eating and entertaining.  The realization that all can be fixed by accompaniment by Parmesan and good olive oil (these words/phrases appear in the book 27 and 100 times, respectively).  And what to do when you are sick of cooking, sick of the neverending hunt for and consumption of food:

There are times when I can't bear to think about cooking.  Food is what I love, and how I communicate love, and how I calm myself.  But sometimes, without my knowing why, it is drained of all that.  Then cooking becomes just another one of hunger's jagged edges.  So I have ways to take hold of this thing and wrest it back from the claws of resentment, and settle it back among things that are mine. 

 This is a lovely book, and very much worth reading if one if interested in home economics, slow food, locavorism.  This book is a book of slow things (intuitive) to America's Test Kitchen fast things (tested and precise), with a common goal of culinary aptitude leading to togetherness and enjoyment.

Swift things are beautiful:
Swallows and deer
And lightning that falls
Bright-veined and clear,
Rivers and meteors,
Wind in the wheat,
The strong-withered horse,
The runner's sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:
The closing of day,
The pause of the wave
That curves downward to spray,
The ember that crumbles,
The opening flower,
And the ox that moves on
In the quiet of power.

Elizabeth Coatsworth

Next, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books by Leah Price:

Interviews and photographs of the bookshelves and libraries of 13 writers, plus Top Ten Most Important Books to each.  As the introductions states:

We display books that we'll never read; we hide books that we thumb to death...To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self.

                                                        

Fabulous, interesting, made me feel woefully under-read.  A wonderful little book.

 

If Walls Could Talk by Lucy Worsley:

A marvelous book about home life in Britain from the Middle Ages through the present: home design, sleeping arrangements, personal hygiene, sexual mores, childbirth, diet, sewage systems... just fascinating.  Worth a read and a re-read.

 

Also of interest may be William Broad's The Science of Yoga for you yogis and yoginis out there -- the science, mysticism, benefits and dangers of yoga practice.  You can read and listen to his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air that sparked my interest in the book here.

 

And The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by former FDA commissioner David Kessler MD -- I read this book about a year and a half ago, and am re-reading it now after my sister reminded me about it.  Now, unlike at the time of my initial reading, I prepare a much (much) greater proportion of the food that I eat from scratch, and this book (along with recent reads An Everlasting Meal, Ruhlman's Twenty, America's Test Kitchen volumes, Mark Bittman's books) makes it clear why that effort is so very paramount.  The first part of the book deals with the neurobiology and behavior of eating (it turns out rats will work almost as hard for a reward of Froot Loops as cocaine), and the second part the food industry's efforts to design foods that are hyperpalatable, addictive and easy to swallow.  This last component interferes with the recognition of satiety; less chewing means less work means more food gets eaten.  So, of course, there's room for dessert... 

[Another way to tenderize meat] is through needle injection.  Hundreds of needles are used to pierce the meat, tearing up the connective tissue.  "It's been prechewed," said Billy Rosenthal, former president of Standard Meat.

"Processing... creates a sort of 'adult baby food'".

This book enforces for me the importance - perhaps even the health mandate - of eating at home as much as possible.  [It also makes me feel under siege at restaurants, at the grocery store, at the pharmacy checkout].  The third, fourth and fifth parts of the book discuss ways to recognize that we are all rats existing a world of always-available Froot Loops, and how to be cognizant that food and the food industry manipulate the very chemistry of our brains, and how to gain insight and control.

Happy reading, all!



WPA poster (1941), via

Springing forward

Happy first day of spring!

The most vernal of vegetables, asparagus, nestled in the tastiest of cheeses (fontina and gruyere), spread on the puffiest of pastry, accompanied by a soft-boiled egg [the breakfastlunchdinner breakthrough of 2012].  Hello, spring.

photo via (by Kana Okada)

Asparagus and Cheese Tart (Food Network Magazine, April 2012)

1 pound asparagus, trimmed

1 sheet frozen puff pastry (about 1/2 pound), thawed

All-purpose flour, for dusting

1 cup grated fontina cheese (about 3 ounces)

1 cup grated comte or gruyere cheese (about 3 ounces)

1 tablespoon minced shallot

2 large egg yolks

3 tablespoons whole milk

1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest

Fill a large bowl with ice water. Bring about 1 inch of water to a boil in a large skillet. Add the asparagus; cook until bright green and crisp-tender, 2 to 5 minutes, depending on the thickness of the asparagus. Drain and transfer to the ice water to stop the cooking; drain and pat dry. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Roll out the puff pastry into a 10-by-16-inch rectangle on a floured surface. Transfer to a parchment-lined baking sheet and prick all over with a fork. Bake until light golden brown, about 12 minutes. Let cool slightly on the baking sheet.

Meanwhile, mix the fontina, comte, shallot, egg yolks, milk, nutmeg and a pinch each of salt and pepper in a bowl until combined. Spread the cheese mixture evenly over the puff pastry, leaving a 1-inch border on all sides. Toss the asparagus with the olive oil, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste. Arrange the asparagus on the tart and bake until the cheese mixture is slightly puffy, 15 to 20 minutes. Sprinkle with the lemon zest. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Spring is like a perhaps hand
by E. E. Cummings
III Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window,into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things,while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there)and without breaking anything.     What are your spring plans? Changing everything carefully - or seismically?

Feeling Full

from 'Feeling Full' by Anne Lamott (Oprah, April 2012)

All I ever wanted since I arrived here on Earth were the things that turned out to be within reach, the same things I needed as a baby—to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.

via