Lessons from Thanskgiving...

Dear Clara, We’ve finally arrived at just about my favorite holiday of the year.  And not just mine.  I think everyone feels this way to some degree.  I confess that I really didn’t appreciate Thanksgiving for what it is until I went off to college and realized what a gift it is to be able to come home and sit around a shared table to take stock of good things around us.  Thanksgiving is such a unique holiday in that it’s something celebrated by nearly every American, regardless of religion or geography or race or anything else.  Everyone does it their own way, but just about everyone does it.

For us, we're in a bit of an inbetween stage.  Sometimes Thanksgiving is at our house far away from home, and sometimes we still go home to celebrate.  But in the ones that I’ve kept watch over, here’s what I’ve learned always makes the holiday come together:

• Always have room for one more: Thanksgiving is all about the opportunity to come home and be around your closest family and friends.  But not everyone can travel, not everyone has someone nearby, not everyone’s plans worked out.  Always have room for at least one more person at your table; you’ll be grateful you extended the invitation I promise.
• Share with those unfamiliar with the holiday: Thanksgiving really provokes a bit of a fascination amongst those who are non-Americans.  As you travel the world, or meet travelers at home, share this holiday with those who otherwise wouldn’t get to experience it.
• Set your table the night before: You’ll thank yourself the next day.  Also, set your champagne in the refrigerator the night before as well.  There’s no start to the holiday meal without at least one decently cold champagne toast!
• Count up how many oven dishes you have: It’s amazing but nearly everyone I know, myself included, have found themselves in a position where everything just won’t fit in the oven.  Abroad, where ovens are tiny, this is even easier to overlook.  Do a double check of what needs to go into the oven and when it needs to be there, to make sure you can fit everything in.
• Make an effort to be grateful:   Regardless of anything that might happen on this holiday, it is first and foremost about gratitude and mindfulness.  Set some time aside, whether on your own, or as a shared experience around the table, to really think about your blessings and what you’re grateful for.  Even in tougher times, we are still given so much, and we should take this opportunity to acknowledge what we have and how we can share it best.

And remember that I will always be grateful for you.  All my love,

Mom

A Very Paleo Holiday

By Megan Flynn

A few days before Thanksgiving last year, my mother called to let me know that she had transformed her diet into one resembling that of a cave-woman. She had gone Paleo. No grains, no dairy, no sugar. And just in time for the holidays.

“So,” she said, “I’m still going to make mashed potatoes because I don’t want to push it on anyone this year, but do you really think I need to put butter and sour cream in them like I usually do?”

After trying to convince her that yes, she most certainly did need to put butter in the mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving, she tried to convince me that yes, this time next year she most certainly would be making a Paleo-friendly meal for all of us, and that we were going to like it.

I was still really looking forward to going home for Thanksgiving, because who doesn’t love Thanksgiving? The food, the football, the family; it’s all good. Throw in some cocktails and the fact that my parents live on Smith Mountain Lake, and there’s really nothing else I’d rather be doing that weekend. Even if it means eating sausage and kale for breakfast in the morning.

On the day before the holiday, my family went to a shooting range and I found myself in the kitchen with nothing to keep me company but a mound of apples and even more yams, just waiting to be peeled. I was going to attempt to make a flourless, sugarless pie for my mother and anyone else who was brave enough to try it. I first made a traditional pumpkin pie, full of flour and sugar, for those of us who weren't willing to sacrifice our traditional eats for something as silly as life-long health. When that pie was in the oven, I began my challenge. And then something amazing happened: I got excited.

My skepticism and the negativity that surrounded it began to clear as I peeled the fruit and pre-heated the oven. I smiled as I rolled out the homemade pie dough, and I caught myself singing along with the radio as I cleaned up the counters and waited for my mysterious creation to bake.

The pie was terrible.

But we had a good laugh about it and my mom, who refuses to give up, swears that it makes the most perfect brunch with a side of bacon and eggs. It’s those moments—when something doesn't work and you laugh about it with the people you love the most, when the best parts of a holiday weekend are the quiet moments spent together around a table with a glass of wine—those are the things that remind us what the holidays are about. After Thanksgiving comes Christmas, and I know that when I once again return to my parents’ home, there will be no cookies set out for Santa. There will probably be no cookies at all. But I’m discovering more and more that I don’t really care.

One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that while traditions are important, the people with whom you share them are irreplaceable. And here I am, a whole year later; my own diet completely changed to resemble that of a cave-woman, and I eat sausage and kale for breakfast all the time, and that sugarless pie sounds like a perfect side dish for brunch, and I know that even though we may say that holidays are about the cookies, that’s not always exactly the truth.

So whether or not there is sugar in your coffee; even though you’re confused about the uses of coconut oil and the lack of flour in that crust, what really matters is that you've found your way home once again.

XIII. Provence

I am walking along the Mediterranean coast with the groupe des randonneurs that I joined as my required extracurricular activity from ACCP. What I had expected to be rigorous hiking turns out to be a group of mostly retired people who amble through woods every Tuesday afternoon. I convinced Leah and Bridget to join as well, and we’re laughing at how ridiculously slowly we are moving. We hadn’t fully comprehended the meaning of the verb randonner when we signed up for this. We thought it was hiking. This is ambling, maybe. Strolling.

We are the only ones wearing shorts and are obviously American, and so the other walkers are delighted to meet us. At the break halfway through the walk, we are plied with treats and spécialités personelles of every sort from our fellow randonneurs — homemade cake, figs stuffed with almonds, provençal cookies. I finally have to say no to coffee. Leah, Bridget and I tried so hard to be friendly and gracious that after the break we feel a bit nauseated.

Wild rosemary grows everywhere in this dry climate. As I walk along the cliffside road back toward the bus, the clouds rolling in over the sea, I pick some and crush it between my fingers to release the sharp, woodsy fragrance.

“Try eating it,” says one of the smiling women walking near me. “It’s good for the digestion.”

Dressing

Wine colored jeans. An eggplant hued henley. Chocolate brown leather ankle boots. The elements of my favorite fall outfit are best described through the language of food: wine, eggplant, and coco. In these last few weeks, with the weather turning cooler and the days darker, I had expected to find myself retreating to the warmth and comfort of the kitchen. What I didn't expect, however, was that my wardrobe would also do the same.  That cheerful looking orange pumpkin I roasted in the oven last night? It made me long for a bright soft scarf of the same color. Or what about that deep, blue-green kale? Perfect for a cozy v-neck.  I find myself wanting to eat as I dress and dress as I eat: In a spectrum of colors and flavors. In different styles, but with a similar taste. My dinner plate is my fashion muse, apparently.

It seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this appealing connection between food and clothes. In flipping through a Lands End catalogue recently I came across a slew of vegetable and fruit named garb. There was a  "spinach leaf" sweatshirt and an "aubergine plum" turtleneck. A "boysenberry" pea coat and a "brown spice" t-shirt. My favorite descriptions might have been of the boozy variety: punch, claret, merlot, mulled wine, wine berry, bordeux. So many different names for so many similar colors.

I wondered what these names are meant to convey about these products? A turtleneck that is both the color of plum and eggplant must be very purple, yes. Superficially this naming system tells us what a product looks like. But I think the food language is meant to add something. It adds truth and authenticity, maybe, by connecting the wise earth to the piece of clothing. A turtleneck is just a turtleneck. But food is different, it is memory and nourishment, it is flavor and experience. And food is also, apparently, selling us some clothes.

So long, Vogue

By Rhea St. Julien After several years of an admittedly tumultuous relationship, I am breaking up with Vogue.  My subscription is up, and I am finally pulling the trigger and not renewing.  If this blog were a movie, I’d segue here into a montage of me + Vogue in better times, reading sandy articles on the beach, discovering Claire Dederer and Cheryl Strayed, ripping out amazingly curated spreads by Grace Coddington and Irving Penn to create collage art.

But our relationship has not all been Happy Days with scissors.  Like everyone else on the planet, I was appalled by Dara-Lynn Weiss’s article about shaming her child into losing weight.  I have grown increasingly tired of the pieces on Connecticut garden homes refurbished by gazillionaires, and the lack of diversity reflected on the pages.  However, I was willing to overlook all of this, because Vogue isn’t pretending to be anything else than it is.  The magazine is sold as the flight of fantasy of a particular Manhattan woman, and if I don’t like their point of view, I can just skip those articles or join the conversation surrounding them to shift the culture.  Somehow, what pushed me over the edge from giving them a pass to writing CANCEL on my invoice was a subtle message in an otherwise innocuous, seemingly empowering article.

I was drawn in by their profile of fascinating congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a woman who manages to balance motherhood, congressional leadership, and extracurriculars such as softball teams and fundraising for cancer awareness.  The tale of her own breast cancer battle was riveting, but then they slipped in this absolutely ridiculous paragraph:

“By 2011, the only lingering effect of her treatment was weight gain brought on by the drug tamoxifen.  Having ‘never gained an ounce in my life,’ she found herself 23 pounds heavier.  ‘Like every woman who goes through weight gain, you’re just not happy,’ she says.  ‘You’re not comfortable in your clothes, you’re mad when you walk in your closet, you hate going shopping.  I didn’t feel good about myself.’  After a press event in her district promoting a small business called the Fresh Diet, she decided to sign up.  Seven months later, she had lost the 23 pounds and dropped from a size 8 back to a size 2.”

First of all, I’m sorry, the only lingering effect of surviving cancer was weight gain?  What about the scars from surgery, the months lost to recovery, the strain on your family, the emotional damage from confronting mortality in such a raw way?  If you fight cancer and win, and you’re worried about your dress size, CANCER WINS.  You learned nothing from your brush with death, and I just can’t believe that a woman so intelligent and powerful really feels that way.  I suspect they took her comments about her body image struggles out of context in their attempt to trivialize and glamorize the congresswoman.

Also, what’s so terrible about being a size 8 (ahem, ahem)?  The fact that they even put the sizes in there shows that it was a nod to diet culture rather than a well-rounded portrait of a woman’s experience with cancer.  I realized I needed to stop giving money to a publication that was insulting me.

It really bothered me that this blatant body-shaming message was slipped in to a profile of a political leader, a piece that was well-written and interesting.  The subtlety of it was what shook me, left me thinking about the lasting effects of such a paragraph, like when, in the 90′s, they found all those messages about sex in Disney movies.

Recently, my review of Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From The Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture was published on the Equals Record, and in my piece, I say that I’m going to try to keep my daughter away from the princess craze as long as I can, and to expose her to different forms of what it means to be a woman than the overwhelmingly narrow cultural ideal.

Well, if I’m going to do that for my daughter, I need to stop “playing princess” myself, and reading Vogue is a way that I, monthly, escape to a world where women are saved from the effects of aging (The Wicked Witch of Wrinkles) by state-of-the-art surgeries and creams (Prince Botox), I dream of having a Fairy Godmother that will bring me a $3,450 biker jacket for the ball, and my confidence is boosted by how modern day royalty (celebs) are really down-to-earth, just like me.

It’s time to put down the princess wand.

I am searching for a new way to be feminine.  Am I a woman because I paint my lips red, wear a dress on the daily, shave my legs and flat iron my bangs?  Of course not.  These are the ways I am fashioning my body right now, and I have chosen other forms for it throughout my life---letting my prodigious body hair grow in college (my husband and I got together, actually, when my leg hair was so long I could French braid it), wearing the same pair of dusty Carhartts for months, forgoing make-up even in the face of period zits.

Right now, my look is very traditionally femme, but, my love for fashion will not die with my Vogue subscription, and I could see myself dressing like one of my icons, Patti Smith, or Georgia O’Keefe, my hair a wild mass of black and gray, my pants pegged and baggy, my white shirt crisp enough to cut a fingernail on.

There is so much power in womanhood---this is one of the major reasons I chose to have my baby as naturally as I could---I wanted to experience that feminine power running through my body in the most primal way possible, to let it change me in the process.  And it did.  But now, despite Operation Rad Bod, I feel crappy about that amazing body that brought me a baby, about two weeks out of every month (if you guessed that those are the week before and the week of my period, then ladies, you are correct).

Vogue is absolutely not going to help me with my quest for a learned experience of the deeper meaning of femininity, beyond waist size and wardrobe.  So, I’m taking this whole experiment to the next level, and trying to limit my own exposure to damaging cultural messages about women, especially since I’m going to limit my daughter’s.  I can’t be wresting the Bratz doll out of her hands while I’m filling my own with pictures of Kate Moss’s wedding.

Perhaps, I’ll spend all the time once consumed with Vogue reading things like this, an excerpt from Dear Sugar’s column entitled Tiny Revolutions:

“You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be ‘hot’ in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits.

You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, I’m right here.

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that?”

So long, Vogue.  It has been fun.  But it has not been real.

Republished with the author's permission from Thirty Threadbare Mercies, Photo:  Some rights reserved by JeepersMedia

Reaching for Sweet Things

“So there is a girl sleeping in the front room,” I hear my grandmother whisper to my grandfather. “Did you know that?” I listen through a cracked door. She has just said goodnight to me very warmly, despite the fact that I am mostly a stranger to her these days. The room I am staying in is a blank walled cube with a vaulted ceiling and three big windows. In the mornings I wake when the sun comes in, when it is quiet and bright. The shape of the space reminds me of a hamster carrying crate, the cardboard kind you’d get at a pet store. Four straight walls, a milk carton style top. The ever present sense of fascination and fear I feel while staying in this room makes me feel a strange kinship with those small furry creatures. Bewildered. Alert. In this house I feel wonder at all the new things I see, and also a heart pounding anxiety in facing the unknown.

My grandparents both have Alzheimer's Disease. My grandmother is further along than my grandfather. I have recently been recruited to spend weekends with them so their regular home health aide can take time off. Their regular caregiver is a beautiful woman who moves through their home with grace and kindness, who tiptoes through the land mines of potential conflict as though it were her sixth sense. Instead of correcting, she redirects. Instead of asking "don't you remember?" she slips into their world and accepts their state of being. This is only my second weekend, and so far I have stepped on plenty of land mines. I have, for example, identified myself as their granddaughter, to which they say, defensively: Of course you are, we know that!  Now I've learned to say it less directly, more casually. And I usually add: Well, you have so many, it's hard to keep track of us all. A concession which they gladly take.

Food is also land mine. What to eat, when to eat, where to eat. Too many questions and decisions, too much room for confusion. Long menus with complicated descriptions are overwhelming, and so it helps to pose two options. Would you like the chicken, or the pasta? Because one of those is what you usually get. These are key words and phrasing. You usually do this, so does that sound good? The answer is always: Yes, I will do what I usually do.

Last Saturday morning we had breakfast at home. I made french toast---my favorite childhood breakfast---then arranged pieces of cut up fruit into little bowls and set them at the table next to two small plastic boxes of pills. The next morning I made "sunny side up" eggs, also an old favorite. Each morning I feel like I'm entering into a new world where there are new social codes, new conventions, new people. Our one moor, the one common thing we have to keep us from drifting apart, is food. As volatile as it can be, it is also our touchstone.

As we are finishing breakfast, we talk of lunch. Then we talk of which day this is, we talk of the weather, we talk of the newspaper (which one of us will read out loud, sometimes going into imagined stories of the people in the photos on the front page.) But it always comes back to food. Well, we just had breakfast, so what is for lunch? Breakfast then lunch then dinner -- a sequence of time based actions that is retained. I think talking of food is also comforting because it is a ritual, a measurement of time. Our day is held up by meals. When do you want to have dinner? My grandmother asks. We could eat at five, would that be ok? I will say, repeating this answer to a series of questions new to her, but the same to me.

When I was little I remember standing on my tiptoes in my grandmother’s kitchen and reaching my hand into the wooden bread box on the counter top. I must have been very small, because I clearly remember the discomfort, as I reached, of my armpit digging into the edge of the counter. But it was worth it. If I were lucky, I'd come out grasping a handful of Starbursts.  I would separate the pinks from the rest and squirrel away my cache in my pocket, saving those cherished pale beauties for last. I would sometimes mould many flavors in to one pastel blob, rolling and kneading the hardened corn syrup into a sticky ball, which I would later nibble, pretending it was a special kind of apple.

That breadbox is on their counter still, but I’ve not been able to open it since being here. It’s as if opening that box and finding no Starbursts would mean something. That my grandparents, as I had known them in my youth, are lost forever? That my happiness is no longer so easily accessed, that my inner life is now more bland? That we've lost the time of tiptoes and reaching? Yes, maybe all of the above.

Still, I stay with them in their kitchen and make them the breakfasts of my childhood, pretending that those french toasts and sunny side up eggs can link our two worlds and the past to the present. Maybe next weekend I will buy some Starbursts to hide in the old breadbox. I entertain the idea of catching glimpses of pink wax wrappers beneath loaves of brown bread.  I know that a gesture like that won't make my grandparents feel any less lost or confused. It won't make me less worried for them. It won't bind my shattered heart, which breaks, each day, into smaller and smaller pieces as I brush my grandmother's hair, hold her hand, fold her clothes, paint her nails. But I will do it anyway. I will do what I usually do. I will gesture, reach, and imagine. Just like I will say to my grandmother, for the fifth or sixth time in a row, We could eat at five, would that be ok? 

Yes, she will say, that will be fine.

Greetings from Grrls Meat Camp

The morning is chilly and bright. A sheen of frost covers the picnic tables and the wooden deck, the nearby pond is shimmering in the morning light, and the towering evergreens sway in the breeze. This idyllic setting belongs to the YMCA’s Camp Duncan, located just outside of Chicago. Inside the cozy cabin kitchen there are biscuits in the oven and sausage gravy simmering on the stove. After breakfast there will be an entire 250 pound hog delivered to the back porch, followed by lessons in whole animal butchery, pate and sausage making, and grilling and smoking. This is Grrls Meat Camp.

I first learned of Meat Camp via Kate Hill's Kitchen at Camont blog and through last year's Washington Post coverage of the inaugural event.  It's a gathering of chefs, butchers, bakers and enthusiastic home cooks. It's a weekend of food, fun, and ultimately of camaraderie and encouragement.

The group's Facebook mission statement reads: "To inspire, educate and foster sisterhood through a cooperative collaboration of women . . ." with an aim of "giving voice to those working with animals and meat on farms, butcher shops, restaurants and home."

It was an inspiring weekend, and not just because of all the delicious food.

It was a salon, of sorts, with conversation focused on sustainability, ethical farming, and our shifting food systems.

Even more moving, perhaps, were the personal stories shared of learning a craft that didn't typically welcome gender diversity. At Grrls Meat Camp, though, we were all in the front row. We all had access to new knowledge and experience, and were encouraged to participate.

At one point over the weekend I over heard a conversation between two of the butchers who were discussing the most physically difficult parts of their job. "If you have the right tools, you can do anything. Anything is possible if you've got the right tools." It's true of butchery, sure, but it struck me as some advice for life's work in general. "The right tools" could mean sharp knives and saws, but also the strength an individual receives from a supportive community. Many women I met this weekend were self-educated and self-motivated, their successful careers the products of their own initiative. Even the professional food photographer who was busily shooting stills of the beautiful dishes coming out of the kitchen agreed: No one taught her to be a photographer, she taught herself. So, even if you have no desire to butcher a hog or some beef hip, these lessons from Meat Camp resonate with those of us finding our way---in the kitchen, and beyond.

Kitchen Meditation

The potatoes are cold in my hands, imbued with the chill of the refigerator. My husband will only peel potatoes after they’ve been sitting in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes, but I prefer to do it quickly and go on to other things. Dusty brown peelings curl off into the trash can, the little pile growing fast as the white flesh of the tuber is revealed. When the potatoes are chopped and placed in boiling water, I raid the crisper for other vegetables: Carrots, onions, fresh garlic (a staple in my kitchen), celery, corn. I have a method for chopping each different vegetable—the carrots are sliced in half long-wise and then diced into half-moons; the onions are gently scored in both directions across the top, so that when I cut off an inch from the onion’s face, I’m rewarded with a shower of evenly-chopped pieces falling to my cutting board.

I vividly remember a conversation I had shortly after getting married, when I was still part-time in college and struggling to get the degree I knew was out of my reach for the time being. “I want to like cooking,” I had said into the phone. “I feel like it’s the kind of thing that I should enjoy, that I could enjoy. I feel like it’s something that could bring me a huge amount of satisfaction. But I’m always just too tired.”

And I was. Even with a light class load, by the time I got home from my one or two classes in a day and finished my homework, I’d exhausted my slim supply of energy for that day. I made dinner each nigth with my husband because I believed in good, home-cooked food, and I loved eating the fruits of our labors—but I rarely enjoyed the experience. Always, I felt that frustrating sense that the true joy of cooking was just out of my reach, the kind of thing I ought to feel, but didn’t.

I baked bread, and ended up so tired I could hardly enjoy the finished product. I made muffins, and thought that cleaning the muffin tin might be the death of me. I cooked soups and puddings and even, on occasion, things like pasta from scratch, reveling in the knowledge that I could identify every ingredient that went into our meals—but ultimately, feeling utterly spent by the task.

Two years later, when I began the true transition from part-time studenthood to full-time homemaking, I was surprised to discover that suddenly, I was beginning to love cooking. All at once, as I began to spend less time in the classroom and have more time for the kitchen, I was feeling all those things I had thought I should feel before. Baking became a celebration. Chopping vegetables became a game. Doing the dishes afterward became a meditation.

Now, as I sweep a neat pile of onions and carrots from my cutting board into a pan for sautéeing, I think about that time of transition. Cooking still tires me, of course; it’s a physical task, one that requires time spent standing up, and often one that demands strength in the kneading or rolling out of dough. But in my life as it stands now, that’s all right. I may be tired afterwards, but I have the liberty to spare a few minutes for rest and recovery.

It is, I think, a perfect example of the unexpected joy the last few years have brought me—my adult life in a microcosm. For such a long time, I was frightened of my plans being changed, terrified of being forced to find something new to define myself. And yet, when that change did come, it wasn’t meaninglessness that lay on the other side—it was just a different kind of purpose, a different shape to my days.

A different shape, but a good one.

I pour extra-virgin olive oil over my pan of vegetables, letting the rich, fruity scent of the oil assail my senses, hearing the crackle and pop as it hits the bottom of the hot skillet.

And in this quiet kitchen moment, I know what it is to feel peace.

Freedom from Food

This morning’s bowl of stale corn flakes made me very happy. Lunch was perfect, too: a limp lasagna noodle covered with a thick layer of oily cheese and a lone, soggy artichoke heart. I loved it all because I didn’t have to make it. I didn’t even have to wash the dishes. I haven’t had to think about preparing food for the last 24 hours, and it has been a pleasure unforeseen. My thoughts are usually so congested by obsessing over what to eat, how to eat it, where to buy ingredients, how much money to save or to spend. But waking up this morning and knowing I had no say in what to eat today? It was a gift. This week I find myself at an artists residency program. I say “find myself” because I was invited off the waitlist, whisked away from my normal life and into the resplendent Blue Ridge mountains. Here in the company of poets, painters, and musicians, there is no room for cooking. Literally. We are not allowed into the kitchen. But what lacks in culinary counter space is made up for in the form of a private writing studio with a big desk and view of a rocky, cow-dotted field. There is lots of time, space, and freedom from household chores. But the freedom I am enjoying most? The freedom from food.

It’s not that thinking about what to eat is a problem, not at all. It’s actually one of my favorite topics in conversation, especially with the many adventurous eaters I have for friends.  I love looking at beautiful food photography, too, and I enjoy reading cookbooks front to back for their stories as well as their recipes. The problem is that food and writing about food is the weak link in my chain of focus and concentration when I’m at task on a different creative project. I think it’s because cooking is such a outlet for expression that it does battle with my writing on a regular basis. A weekend afternoon, for example, will be laid out before me, ripe with potential for new words and ideas. Instead of writing, though, I find myself poking around in the grocery store pondering butternut squash soup with garlicky croutons. We have to eat: It’s the most justifiable and enjoyable distraction.

During this writing retreat, however, I’ve come to scrutinize my obsession with thinking about food. My first day here has felt like a week. During this long day so much has happened (when actually so much has not, but that’s a form of “happening” when it comes to the imagination, right?)  This food void and the sense of freedom that came with it reminds me of Barbra Ueland’s book If You Want to Write. I flip to the chapter titled “Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect it for Their Writing” and wonder how many more hours I could spend writing at home instead of planning meals and hunting down recipes?

This is not to say I don’t want to make dinner most weeknights, can tomatoes for a few days at the height of tomato season, or throw an all out dinner party on the occasional weekend. It’s more of a realization that my dinnertime daydreams need to be budgeted. The mental energy saved will be at the expense of fantasies about blueberry coffee cake, pumpkin bread pudding, and homemade pasta. But maybe those dishes might just benefit from this new thought-diet of mine: less time thinking, more time doing.

Same, too, for the writing.

IX. Provence

Agnès has a small dinner party one Friday night and asks me to stay through the drinks before I go out to meet friends. I don’t pass up opportunities to speak French, plus watching my host mother in these kinds of social situations is oddly fascinating. The two male guests are old boyfriends of hers who still come over and have her cook for them sometimes. Both quiet and sullen, they don’t say thank you when Agnès sets plates full of steaming food in front of them. I think that that she might have a type. The shorter of the two scoots his chair up next to mine in the living room. As I sip my small plastic flute of rosé, he asks me a few questions about myself: where I’m from, what I’m studying, why I’m in France. Then he asks me how many children I want to have.

In the United States, this kind of question would be considered out of place. Rude, not to mention weird, and none of any strangers’ business how many children I want to have, or if I even want to have any. But here, it’s not. Not as weird as I think it is, anyway. French culture — while so socially progressive in some ways — can still be so backward that it makes me want to scream.

But I’m starting to realize that I can’t change it. So I stare at him for a beat, unblinking, and answer, “Thirteen.”

Stupid Charming Things

An olive wood salt cellar will not make you dinner. It can’t chop an onion or boil water, and even it if it could it certainly wouldn’t wash the dishes afterwards. I tell this to myself while pacing around a fancy kitchen goods store, salt cellar in hand, trying to talk myself out of buying yet another kitchen luxury item that is at odds with both my lifestyle and my budget.

My husband and I live in a dilapidated boathouse-turned-cabin that was built in the early 1800s. The kitchen isn’t really a kitchen at all. It’s a room with a freestanding Ikea cabinet, a mini fridge, a convection oven, and a hotplate. Last spring I placed a heavy cast iron Dutch oven on the hot plate, causing the heating element to collapse into the stainless steel base. I remedied this by propping up the feet of the busted-in side with two Christmas lima beans.  So, not only do I cook on a hotplate in a glorified boathouse, but the utility of said hot plate is dependent on lima beans. Not exactly the kind of kitchen where you’d expect to find a pricey,  imported-from-France wooden salt cellar, hm?

This sort of retail conflict happens more than I’d like to admit.  I have a soft spot for stupid charming things: Tiny glass salt and pepper shakers, cheese knives, vintage Fire King coffee mugs, pinch bowls, and pretty much any kitchen item colored sage, mint green, or celadon. I shouldn't be allowed within fifty feet of a flea market or estate sale. And I certainly shouldn't have been poking around in any fancy kitchen goods store, that's for sure.

Over time I've gathered that this addiction to stupid charming things is not uniquely my own.  When I worked at a high-end gift shop in Park Slope, for example, I saw firsthand the pull of lovely objects on others. Thanks, just browsing, an innocent shopper would say. Then, moments later, I’d be ringing them up for a ten dollar trinket. Sometimes it would be a bookmark, a set of overpriced sticky tabs, a travel candle. If it wasn't any of that, it was the tiny glass animals. We stocked a bowl of them---itty-bitty little glass "sculptures" no larger than a penny.  You need a tiny glass cat, right? An elephant? What about an alligator? I felt like a drug dealer as I encouraged customers to dig deeper into the bowl. There’s a unicorn in there some place. I’d say. Then they’d ooh and ah and toss bills across the counter in glee. The glass animals were cute, sure, but were they worth anything more than that initial dopamine bump linked to the act of buying? I'm fairly sure the answer is "no."

A new object might be liberating at first, I think, because it baits the mind and our perspective in that moment, leading us from a place of sameness to a place of newness and wonder. Take my example, where I imagined the possibilities of cooking in a kitchen so well-appointed that flaky sea salt is homed in a dainty and sculptural bowl which was created precisely for that purpose by an artisan in a far away land. A new life opened up to me, one where I didn't find mouse poops in the measuring cups or stinkbugs in the mixing bowls.

Which brings me to narrative. Which brings me to identity. Objects do have a role in the stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves. In that moment at the fancy kitchen store, I wanted to use that salt cellar to tell myself I had good taste, that I understood and appreciated fine objects. I also wanted to pretend that I had no hotplate, no lima bean, no rustic boathouse kitchen. Mouse poops in measuring cups and stink bugs in mixing bowls? No, no, not me---I own this precious vessel, this hand crafted gem, this beautiful, stupid, charming thing.

Here's where I want to say that I stopped desiring the salt cellar. I want to say that I made these realizations about the false connection between things and self worth and identity and I immediately overcame my materialistic instincts. But I didn't. As I put the salt cellar back on the shelf I also added it to a mental wish list of presents my husband could get me for Christmas this year.Then I sulked out the door with a vague and absurd feeling of pity for what I perceived to be a salt cellar-shaped hole in my heart.

For I have sinned

I am about the furthest thing from a Catholic imaginable, it's true.  But last night I was lying awake feeling guilty for a litany of failings and vices from the past weeks.  'How Catholic of me,' I mused.  And this is not to say that my own Jewish culture doesn't have a lot to offer in the guilt department.  As I flopped back and forth under the covers, I told myself to stop spinning about my various shortcomings and try to focus on all the ways I might have been effective or kind recently.  As so many of us writing here have acknowledged, it is not easy to take those night-time demons to the mat, especially when the hours are small.  Part of the struggle is feeling alone, trapped in your mind with what you imagine to be shameful thoughts and deeds. When I was finally awoken by the chattering of the baby in the early morning, it was something of a relief.  As I extracted her from the crib and set about to start the day, I decided I would engage in something of a "confessional" exercise.  Perhaps if I purged my consciousness of some of the low moments, I could make room for fresh experiences.  Forthwith, a detailing of seven mortal sins of late.  Here is hoping that cracking open my humanity can start to heal what ails me.  At least it might make you feel superior and then you can write about all the ways in which you experienced Pride :)

Wrath - I am typically fairly internal when it comes to anger, which, if you read any study on health is not ideal.  Apparently, people who externalize anger (at least express it, if not outright explode all over the place) tend to have lower levels of depression and can experience improved communication.  This article from the American Psychological Association (and there are a host just like it in the literature) describes some adaptive qualities of anger and how to use it to your benefit.  At my worst, I employ the tactic of stuffing down things that irritate me and then completely coming unglued over something relatively innocuous much later on down the road.  This is totally unproductive and moderately to profoundly confusing for loved ones.  I am working on addressing problems in the moment and being honest about my needs.  This is tricky and can feel risky to someone like myself who likes to avoid confrontation.  But ultimately, the confrontation always happens, just maybe displaced, which is no good for anyone.  Onward.  Upward.

Greed - I want more time, mostly.  Of course, I always desire too many cookies, clothes and earthly possessions, but hours in the day . . . what I wouldn't give.  The truth is that I could manage my time better.  There is certainly some whiling away the hours on Facebook/Instagram, spending late evenings watching Boardwalk Empire instead of answering emails, iChatting with a friend rather than ordering groceries.  The balance of stealing some time to which I feel entitled ("me" time) and organizing the day around prioritizing important tasks is the struggle of all good people, right?  And listen to my language: "stealing" some time . . . from what or whom?  Still and all, I want more time for work, more time with my family, more time to noodle on the internet.  There, I said it.

Sloth - Um, please see Greed.  And then sprinkle in all the moments where I sit in the chair at the studio or on the couch at the apartment thinking 'Sarah, stop flipping through the magazine and move on to the next thing.'  How about the time last week when I recalled I had read a study somewhere (I'm big on studies) indicating that dogs have fewer allergies when you bathe them less often, so . . . On the whole, I tend to push myself to make it all happen and there are times when I actually take great pleasure in physical labor and menial tasks.  There can be a wonderful meditative quality to folding, organizing, washing, etc.  But I realize I tell myself that things are just super busy now and fitting it all in will get easier over time.  This is, of course, an exercise in self-delusion.  Everything will just continue to get busier and the tasks and demands on time will simply compound.  Operation Pull it Together in full effect, then.

Pride - I post about 74,000 pictures of my daughter on Facebook every day with captions extolling her adorableness.  I talk about her accomplishments (at 9 months, these include things like almost, maybe, no definitely, actually probably not - but it really sounds like it! - uttering, "mmmmm…" when I feed her bites of something) ad nauseum.  When people ask me about her I always start with, "She is totally @#!&-ing awesome."  Sue me.  I am a new mother.  I got nothing for you here :)

Lust - There are days when I want power and I want it badly.  This is typically applicable in my business.  I want to be huge enough and famous enough that clients line up at my door, the phone rings off the hook and my inbox is brimming with messages where the inquiry goes something like this, "We really want to work with you, exclusively and specifically, and as such, we are writing you this check with a large sum.  Please deposit this check immediately and then show up on the day of our event with whatever florals and decor you feel are appropriate.  Thanks so much."  Until then, I suppose I will continue to work really hard to prove myself in the industry, hone my brand, secure the trust of clients and exceed expectations in the execution of events like my business depends on it.  Because it does.  The mogul situation is still out of reach, as it turns out.

Envy -I always think everyone else has it easier, is doing it better, knows something I don't and so on.  I believe this to be a fairly universal issue but it doesn't make it any less potent. I am particularly uncomfortable with this aspect of my personality, as my life is so relatively rosy.  As previously discussed, I have greater flexibility and more human and capital resources than most working people.  There is real suffering all around me in this big city and my concerns about finding the time to update my website or whether my daughter has enough of whatever thing-of-the-day should consume scant mental energy.  No excuses here.

Gluttony - The unending battle with cooking at home and eating "like a real family," wages on.  We over-indulge in take-out and restaurant meals where we are inevitably served too much of less healthful food.  This is a symptom of multiple larger issues in our house (see above struggles with time management, for example) and the remedies aren't coming easily.  I picture us coming together for dinner each night, discussing important matters of the day, laughing, sharing locally sourced food we have lovingly prepared, nourishing our bodies . . . then I scrape the sauce from the (recyclable?) plastic container from Dao Palate onto day-old rice, popping it into the microwave and feel awful.  Fill the refrigerator weekly, take a cooking class (or seven), continue to try and carve out the time.  How hard could it BE?!  HONESTLY.

Well, now I see why people are into this process of recounting wrongs and requesting absolution. It does feel somewhat cleansing.  The accountability piece is where things get dicier.  Maybe writing it down will catalyze forward motion.  And reading it over will help me be a little more gentle with myself as I strive to be a better . . . well . . . everything.  Wait, is that Greed or Pride or maybe Lust?  Sigh.

 (image via)

A Pumpkin for Your Thoughts

Last week I baked a small orange pumpkin stuffed with breadcrumbs, cheese, herbs, and bacon. I cut a jagged hole in the top of the pumpkin and scraped loose the stringy flesh, which I then gathered up in my hands and lifted out onto the counter. As I clawed at the slimy insides I felt clumsy and childish. The pulp slipped through my fingers again and again, and suddenly I was visited by images of my childhood. I thought of my favorite Halloween costume and the similar clumsy feeling it stirred up in me: A bright green caterpillar costume with a series of stuffed arms, each strung to the next with fishing line so they moved all as one. I remember lagging behind while trick-or-treating with my sister, stumbling across lawns and tripping into bushes. Nostalgia and fall are like those connected caterpillar arms to me. If I’m feeling nostalgic, I think of fall. If I think of fall, I feel nostalgic. Lift one arm and up go the rest. But that's problematic sometimes, because when I think of the words “Fall" and "pumpkin” my mind calls up generic images like those from commercials. I don’t want my feeling of fall to be summed up by the little drawings of leaves on the chalkboard at Starbucks. I want the real deal. I want my fall back, not a fallback.

What I’m longing for, I think, is to have a keen awareness of the present moment.  I also want to be specific about the past, and I want to observe how my impression of a memory shifts over time. When I was preparing the pumpkin, for example, I realized I could glide along the surface of a general fall feeling. But the alternative was that I could focus on the more particular aspects of the feeling and encourage it to become animated by my imagination, and in doing so allow it to occupy my consciousness for a while. I had to think really hard to let my frustration melt away and into those scenes from childhood. For the first time I felt like cooking was a meditative practice, a medium for a wandering mind.

But maybe it isn't about a wandering mind after all? Maybe it's about a mind being led down a carefully marked path, a path marked by a menu and a task. That pumpkin dinner showed me I could time travel but stay grounded in the moment, too. I was stunned by the fact that I could experience a complete break from the present moment while still operating within it. That split between the past and present, I think, was possible because of the constant thread of physical feeling---that lack of coordination and efficiency which reminded me of the time when I so horribly navigated sidewalks, curbs, and front porch steps in that caterpillar costume. (It was like running in a sleeping bag, really.) A whole string of very specific memories came rushing back to me after that, to the point where I clearly could hear my dad’s voice saying “I’m testing it to make sure it isn’t poisonous” while eating my hard-won candy. I laughed and flailed my many arms in protest. The memories were more honest and clear when I saw them through the lens of my pumpkin and my hands, rather than through the soft focus of my typical "general fall feeling."

I realized that my love of food and my interest in the way memories work don’t have to be colored by nostalgia to be interesting. I found a lot of pleasure in thinking about these memories without yearning for them to return. I felt grounded by my gourd, yet I was still sensing a very specific and vivid memory of a distant fall that I hadn’t thought of in years. That simple rustic dinner became a strange experience in thinking about thoughts. That’s what I like about the play between the seasons, food, and memories:  Our perception of each can expand or condense our awareness and our focus on the moment. My dinner, the pumpkin, the Fall---invitations to think back, but also to think on.

The F Words: Ally Kirkpatrick

We have an exciting treat today in F Words land, folks. One of The Equals Project's newest contributors, the ridiculously overtalented and supercool Ally Kirkpatrick, is here to talk about being a lady and an eater (and an emerging cook). Her blog, The Green Cabin Year, is a chronicle of her life in a teeny little house in rural Virginia. She didn't always live the bucolic life, though---she just recently moved from Brooklyn, where she worked as a barista while writing the nights away. I have to say that I am seriously psyched about her joining our family here at Equals, and I think you will be, too. Tell us a bit about your day job. For the last ten years I’ve pretty much been a professional dishwasher. You could also say I was a barista, too, since I made cappuccinos and espressos part of the time. Dishwashing was half the work, so I got pretty good at that, too. It’s a useful skill, I think, to be able to bang out a huge bus tub of dirty dishes really quickly and effectively. Every coffee shop or cafe I ever worked at (eight different places between Boston, DC and New York), washing dishes was an important part of the job. City cafes get really slammed. Coworkers will like you if you can wash the hell out of some pint glasses, and the customers like seeing you hustle because you get them their iced latte faster.

Sometimes it was good. Sometimes I really hated it. Like when I worked at this one place in the East Village that had terribly steep stairs that would get wet and slippery with each load brought up and down to the sanitizer. I totally busted my ass one time, falling down the steps one at a time like “duh dunk, duh dunk, duh dunk.” I just sat at the bottom for a minute absorbing the reality of what had just happened, thinking “So, this is my life, I guess. This was the most exciting part of me week . . .” then I got up and washed a bunch of lipstick-stained demitasses.

But I’m making it sound worse than it was . . . It was mostly, like 98% of the time, an absolutely wonderful job. Every cafe I worked at had fantastic staff members and regular customers. People I’ve met through washing dishes and pulling shots have become my closest friends. Some of my regulars from the coffee shop came to my wedding a few years ago. Some of my best friends I met over sudsy dishwater.

That said, I’m glad I don’t work full time in a coffee shop anymore. I’m still washing dishes, but now it’s as a kitchen assistant for food writer Cathy Barrow. It’s the best job ever. During the cooking classes Cathy teaches I wash dishes and listen in as she gives instruction. It’s a much more interesting situation than when I was working in coffee shops. Now as I’m washing dishes I get to learn all about cooking, canning, pasta making, etc. I’m learning a lot. Before I would just binge on muffins in the mop closet waiting for the dishes to come out of the sanitizer. I kinda used food to cope with not loving my job. Or maybe it’s that I loved my job, but just wanted more out of life. I wanted to be a writer, and no shameful mop closet muffing inhaling can address that void. I’m still cleaning the hell out some dishes. But I get to learn new things and I have much more time to write. I also get to take home lots of delicious food.

How did you learn to cook? I really don’t know how to cook. I know how to follow a recipe. I know some basic techniques. But as far as actual cooking, as far as being a real home cook, I’m not there yet. I’m trying to learn how to make one big meal instead of all these disconnected spazzy little meals. Does that make sense? “One big meal?" For example, I made scones yesterday. It took me two hours. Then all I ate all day was scones. I felt like crap, obviously, and I never want to make scones again. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I’m trying to learn how to eat. Cooking is the easy part. I know how to season and taste and adjust. What I’m figuring out now is how to do that in my mind, working towards following my wants and hungers and then interpreting those feelings, translating them into plans for a meal.

Do you prefer to cook alone, or with friends or family? I love cooking with my husband Jake. He cooks like he’s dancing, except he doesn’t dance. If he were a dancer his cooking would be like ballet. He’s very graceful in the kitchen, but has a lot of energy and expression. I like working with him because of this. I stay out of the way a bit and just watch, follow his lead, help with one specific thing (chop this, stir that.) It’s always best when one person is in directing the meal, I think, that way you know who’s calling the shots, who’s choreography you’re minding.

With my mom, I love being in the kitchen with her, too. My husband makes things up as he goes, depending on what he has in the fridge that day. My mom, on the other hand, is a big fan of cookbooks and follows recipes more closely. This means that it’s better for us to work on separate tasks if we’re in the kitchen together. She’s knows where she is in her process, I know where I am... with her it’s more like a line dance. We’re in step with each other but on different planes.

Then there’s Cathy. Working in Cathy’s kitchen is just amazing. It’s different than cooking with anyone else I’ve ever cooked with because there’s this childlike wonder that washes over me every time she brings up a favorite dish she makes, or every time she sends me to the pantry for some special jar of something.

I should also really enjoy cooking by myself. I put on Beyoncé or Robin and gyrate around the kitchen like a moron and my dog just looks at me like he’s concerned for my life.

What's your favorite thing to make? Coffee. My favorite thing to make is, and will forever be, coffee. Espressos, cappuccinos, macchiatos, cortados, pour-overs. All of it. I love coffee the way people love wine. I love the story of each coffee: where it came from, how it was processed and roasted, how it tastes in different preparations. Maybe I’ll grow to love making food one day, but for now I suck at it too badly to find peace and enjoyment out of the process. I think because I’ve been making coffee for so long and competing in barista competitions and such that I get a lot of pleasure out of the ritual and the process of brewing coffee.

If you had to choose one cuisine to eat for the rest of your life, which would it be? What cuisine would you say belongs to Deborah Madison? I want to eat Deborah Madison Cuisine.

What recipe, cuisine or technique scares the crap out of you? Anything involving shellfish, because I’m very allergic. Also, recipes that call for hot peppers. Not because I don’t like eating them, but because I always worry I’m going to rub my eyes by accident while prepping them and end up with stinging, watery eyes for the rest of the afternoon.

How do you think your relationships with your family have affected your relationship to food and cooking? Most recently my relationship with my family has made me more interested in foraging. Pawpaws, morel mushrooms, black walnuts, fiddle heads. These are all things my husband and I have been finding on my parents property in Virginia. We just moved here in this past spring and I found myself obsessed with foraged foods. It’s trendy right now, I guess, but I got into it because of my dad, who is possibly the least trendy person in the universe (don’t worry, he won’t read this.) He spends a lot of time in the woods as a hunter and told me about all these hot spots for morel mushrooms up in the hills. I also learned to butcher my first deer this year because of him. That was a relationship to my food I hadn’t experienced before. My husband and I were in the driveway of my parent’s suburban home with this deer my dad had shot that morning laid out on a card table. We had this beautiful deer before us, and we didn’t know what to do with it. So we used my dad’s ipad and learned how to process it step by step from YouTube. It was an exhausting experience, both physically and emotionally, but it was an interesting connection to food – seeing the whole deer-to-venison process – and it made me more mindful about my meat consumption. I still eat meat, but I’m edging further and further away from animal products. You can’t butcher a deer and not feel awe and respect for the animal. I felt a lot of sadness, too, so I think I need to figure out how that needs to impact my eating and cooking habits.

Even today, home cooking is strongly associated with women's traditional place in the family and society. How do you reconcile your own love of the kitchen with your outlook on gender roles? There was an article on Propeller that I read recently by Mary Rechner that addressed this issue in a way that was really meaningful to me. I want to write fiction. If I worry about food all the time then there may not be space for writing fiction in my life. On a personal level I reconcile my love of the kitchen by having a fiercer love for private writing time in my studio. Let me mention that I don’t actually have a writing studio… but you get the idea. My kitchen and my (imaginary) studio are two places I make sure I spend a certain amount of time each day. I want to think about writing and ideas two thirds of the time. One third of the time I want to be canning some jam or stuffing my face with scones.

But on a larger level I’m completely perplexed and can’t reconcile it at all and I feel very worried about it. I’m totally confused on this issue and don’t know what to think. In the meantime I’m reading Propeller polemics and Emily Matchar’s blog New Domesticity [Meg: Me, too!] and thinking “Right on! Fuck canning and baking pretty tarts! It’s pointless domestic posturing!” but then at the same time as I say that I’m canning and baking pretty tarts and not working at all on a short story.

Tell us a bit about the recipe you're sharing. When did you first make it, and why? What do you love about it? The recipe I’m sharing is for fresh Sriracha from Food52. I made it for the first time this summer and I love it because it tastes good on everything. Wear gloves and don’t rub your eyes!

Fresh Sriracha By edamame2003, republished with permission from Food52 1/2 pound red Fresno chiles, coarsely chopped 4 garlic cloves 1 tsp. kosher salt 1 cup distilled white vinegar 2 tbs. palm sugar

Visit Food52 for the full (delicious and surprisingly simple) recipe.

VII. Provence

My host mother in Aix is a frustratingly loquacious woman named Agnès. She has never left the country and spends most of her time pattering around the apartment in her slippers, fussing over pillows and arranging stacks of magazines. Her social interactions outside of her son seem limited to a few men she used to be in relationships with and now come over every once in a while and sit in the kitchen while she prepares meals for them. She has a heavy torso and thin, spindly legs. At the beginning of my stay, I feel sorry for her.

Though the French dinner is typically a more family-oriented affair, ours consist of Agnès and I sitting at her small dinner table watching the news. She provides a running commentary while I nod and say mm-hmm at intervals. Sometimes I wonder if this is why she offered to host students---so someone is obliged to listen to her.

But one warm evening the television is off, and Agnès tells me a French joke over red, ripe tomatoes and mozzarella.

God, she says, is looking at the earth after its creation. He notices that France is the most beautiful of all the nations---mountains, lakes, beaches, oceans, plains, forests. Every part of the landscape is diverse and breathtaking. And so, to make it a bit more even for the rest of the world, he creates the French people.

I laugh a little too hard.

How about ginger tea?

As the years pass, my culinary taste has changed and I realized I have gained different habits, and fallen in love with new dishes or ingredients I never thought I could stand. When I was a teenager, for instance, I found sushi quite repellent. Raw fish surrounded by rice and rolled up in seaweeds? A dish like that made no sense to my Italian palate. Wasabe? How could anybody find pleasing to burn up their mouth with a green paste? And then, when I turned twenty-five, my boyfriend at the time (and now husband) took me to a sushi restaurant in Washington DC. Could I tell him “I hate sushi please take me in some Churrascaria instead!”?? That was a very cold winter night, but despite I would have rather eating a warm dish and definitely not a raw piece of salmon, I started to realize that sushi wasn’t so bad, at least drowned in soy sauce.

But ginger! No, I really couldn’t stand ginger. A piece of soap would have been better! (That was the taste I compared ginger to…) Sushi AND ginger was too much for my discriminating taste.

So when did I start to enjoy ginger and find its flavor so enjoyable? Just very recently, and I had to go to another continent to learn, once again, that even little things that seems so odd and senseless can be instead very lovable.

“Do you want some ginger tea?”

I can’t actually recall how many times I was asked this question in Myanmar. When I landed in the country, I thought I was just going to live a new adventure, to see new places and take the usual thousand pictures I like to take. I would never have expected I was going to bring home a new culinary habit---using ginger in my daily life and actually falling in love with an ingredient I had thus far kept at distance.

The story is that, while in Myanmar, I got sick for a couple of days. I had very high temperature and there was no western medicine that helped me feel better. But I didn’t want to miss a day. After all, Myanmar is not around the corner, and the chance I’ll visit it again isn’t granted. So I behaved as I was feeling great---while my face was red and burning, my spirit was in fabulous shape. But our guide, a very nice woman called Kin (not sure it is spelled this way!), had the solution (yes, she was much wiser than me and thought there was no way I could enjoy my time like that). She asked for ginger tea in every house, shop and temple, and no kidding I was offered about ten cups in ten hours. And please keep in mind that drinking tea brings other consequences, too! But anyway, by the next morning I was feeling great, filled with energy and strength (and purified!). I am still not sure if I felt so good because of the tea or because of all the attention I got. It is nice when total strangers take care of you so generously.

How weird is the taste of ginger? Hot, fragrant, explosive, peppery, and somehow also sweet. Ginger doesn’t have too much space in Italian cuisine. My mother rarely used ginger in her cooking, and I've never heard of pasta with ginger something in restaurants, haha!, so the taste was pretty much weird to me. Now I find myself searching for new recipes online and trying them out in my kitchen. I discovered ginger doesn’t discriminate.  It crosses cultures and culinary boundaries and makes its way into every cuisine and type of specialty food, from Fiji to India, Jamaica, Nigeria and China. So I learned that Chinese consider ginger a yang, or hot, warming food, which, when blended with a cooler yin food, helps balance and harmony. And surprisingly ginger can even be found in some bars crushed into a Mojito! Also, ginger’s spicy flavor is a big hit in both chocolate and cheese.

But most importantly, if someone will ask me what the best cure for cold and sore throat is, from now on I will give him a piece of fresh ginger to chew.

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life---and travel---leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks---on your body or on your heart---are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” Anthony Bourdain

One more short story about Myanmar and a village with no name at www.alicepluswonderland.blogspot.com

Cookbook Confessions

It was a weeknight at Barnes and Noble. The lights were harsh as usual, the whole place too well lit.  Or maybe it just felt that way---I wanted privacy for the deed I was there to do. I needed an off-the-beaten-carpet spot. Perhaps a corner near an under-trafficked genre . . . what about by that sale table of puppy calendars from 2011? Finding every discreet inch occupied, I gave up prowling and slumped back into the curve of a heavy wooden chair.  It was the worst possible place. In the middle of the store. At the end of an aisle. I carried on my despite the indiscreet location, desperate for my ends. On my lap was a stack of newly released cookbooks. I felt like I was about to do something bad.

And I was.

But let me explain.

I am learning to cook. No one I know is going to teach me how to cook. This isn’t because I know no one who is capable in the kitchen. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I have several friends who are culinary professionals and I have worked beside some very talented chefs. My husband, too, is a natural around food, both in terms of consumption and production. He can improvise a meal in minutes. Yet here I am, still needing inspiration and some serious planning before even boiling a some water. I try to remind myself that becoming a good cook is a process. A journey.

This journey into cooking, as with learning all new things, takes one step at a time. My kitchen’s true north, thus far, is my discovery that there exists no better culinary cartographer than a slick new cookbook. They are my collective compass with their vivid photography, exciting personal narrative, delicious recipes; my ladders for scaling walls of recipe boredom, my ships for crossing the choppy sea of a weekday dinner.  Food is an adventure when presented in a beautiful book, and I hunger to be whisked away to France, Morocco, New York, the Deep South . . . They say you eat a meal first with your eyes.  I would add to that the grumbling imagination we feed far before the food is on the plate. At times my mind is sated in simply reading the lyrical titles printed on a pretty cloth bound spine.

Yet here is where I hit another wall: money. That cookbook compass can be quite expensive. I try to be patient and wait for these books to come at at my local public library, seeing as my tasting menu aspirations are really on a lunch special budget. But that never works. They're always snatched up in a flash. There are, for example, twenty-six holds on Tamar Adler's "An Everlasting Meal." More like an everlasting wait . . .

Which brings me back to the bookstore.

The man sitting behind me is breathing loudly and snarfing a candy bar. (Turns out the word “snarf” is in the dictionary, by the way.) Nearby, children are arguing over a wooden train set. Then I look around, eyes darting, and . . . and . . . I do it.

I take a photo of the cookbook on my iPhone. And then another. And then another.

It’s just like sexting, except that the rump pictures happen to be of roast beef in Around my French Table. 

Here’s my MO: I take a shot of the front cover so I remember the author’s name and the title. I take a shot of the index, then a shot of one recipe for a trial run.  I only allow myself to poach that one recipe, as if that makes my illicit photography any less rude. This photo test shoot is my trial run. I tell myself I'll buy the book if it delivers the goods.

Later that night, when I get home, I sit on the couch with my glowing phone an inch from my nose. I peer into the images, sliding back and froth between the choice shots, zooming in on certain spots.

It feels a little dirty at first, but I’m consoled by the fact that though I won’t be taking any of these cookbooks out to dinner, at least I’ll be making it for myself.

Time is on my side

While my daughter is still an infant, I am trying to adhere to a schedule of spending at least two solid weekdays alone with her, despite the fact that I own and run a business.  “Alone,” in our household, means that my husband (who also works for himself) might tag along and spend some portion of the day with us, as well.  This is quite obviously living the dream and I mean that in all sincerity.  Like so many people, all I ever wanted in life was to create a family and to have one in which the adults prefer palling around together to any other activity.  The addition of the portly, charming baby (who, I might add, has been impressing even total strangers of late with her glittering, two tooth-bud smile, full-body laugh and enthusiastic hand-clapping) is just the definitive bonus.  We have these epic moments, often only the two of us, where we find ourselves sitting on a blanket in the park in the middle of the day, staring up at the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.  We are saturated in, practically oozing happiness.  But lest you think we are busy having it all (wait for it, Schadenfreudes) you should know that organizationally, domestically, we exist in a state of utter chaos---a ceaseless game of whack-a-mole. There are, as they say, absolutely not enough hours in the day and it is my perpetual struggle to prioritize appropriately.  On the days when I am solely focused on the baby, I make an effort to really and truly be present during her waking hours.  I have the great privilege of a somewhat flexible schedule and the even greater privilege of being her mother.  It is in this spirit that I strive to keep work emails and tasks tucked away in my pocket or purse.  I look at the mounting pile of laundry or the creeping clutter in the apartment and decide that it can wait.  I shrug off the light sense of despair over the two primed walls that we were supposed to paint last winter.  I tell myself that she will never be exactly this age again and that I will look back on this first year and know I didn’t miss a thing.

I am acutely aware that most women (or men, for that matter) do not even have the option to do this and I feel almost a sense of responsibility to parents everywhere to take full advantage.  Of course, this means I have to work harder and smarter when I am on the clock.  It also means that I am on the clock longer and at odd hours.  Ultimately, it means that we sort of live in a college dorm and have to run to the bodega at 7:30 PM to buy an $8 roll of toilet paper because we ran out and nobody had the chance to get more.

Meanwhile, as is my wont, I am plagued by the notion that everyone else must be doing it better---they have to be, right?  During a recent trip to the playground this was confirmed, as I zeroed in on a few other mothers and observed their whole set-up.  Each one seemed to have the diaper bag completely dialed in, down to the perfectly portioned organic snack foods in an eco-friendly/non-petroleum/possibly Swedish baggie.  Their strollers were tidy and their children even had on accessories.  They had brought galvanized tins of French sidewalk chalk and appeared to have organized play-dates.  When I arrived on the scene, my daughter was assiduously chewing on the rubber case from my iPhone (almost certainly made in China).  My stroller was pandemonium---it included incongruous items like dog poop bags, my diluted vitamin water bottle and a calcified, half-gummed whole wheat dinner roll from a restaurant adventure the day before.  I plunked my daughter on the padded playground surface and watched as she crunched fall leaves between her fingers and attempted to stuff them in her mouth.  She was not wearing shoes or a bow in her hair but she seemed pretty thrilled.  We did not have an adorable German tube of bubbles (why is everything good European?) and I hadn’t even remembered my nursing cover.  We embarrassed the family with an awkward lean-to situation using a cotton drape, which she repeatedly tore away with a whipping motion, exposing my breasts to the most populous borough in the city.

So, I am coming around to the idea that I actually only have so much bandwidth.  The letting go of certain practical elements of daily life in favor of more time for human relating seems a fairly obvious choice to me.  While I aspire to be a person who deftly balances her infant on one hip while folding fitted sheets or doing the taxes, it turns out that I only can/am willing to (?) do one thing at a time.  Most tasks, therefore, are sort of shined on or phoned in until they have the good fortune to be in the pole position.  I keep the goals small, so then when we have a fully stocked fridge or I send out a birthday gift, I feel like I have summitted Everest or passed the California bar.

Although I mostly feel good about the way I am partitioning my time for now, like every working mother I grapple with needing and/or wanting to be in two places at once.  Who knows how this will all change as she gets older and as my business evolves?  It is a little disheartening to realize that I did seem to need the “excuse” of a baby to finally feel justified in prioritizing enjoyment.  Why didn’t I do this before?  And why do I still feel like I’m “admitting to something” when I tell you I spend entire days, in the middle of the week, not just being with my baby, but actively trying to do little else?

Needless to say, I want my daughter to be proud of her mother as a role model and an entrepreneur.  But I am hoping she doesn’t have to feel this from a remote place.  I want her to experience that I am as available to her as I am to my work.  She will doubtless have a wide array of things to discuss with her therapist about her home and family.  I figure I won’t just hand her the line that her mother always had too many things on her plate.  I want her to work a little harder for her gripes.

On place and pawpaws.

We slide the boat down the muddy bank and into the creek. The water is high and brown with silt from a heavy rain the night before. Scout, our black and white spotted pit bull mix, chases bobbing sticks and floating yellow leaves, his toenails clinking and hissing against the metal belly of the boat.  Jake paddles us along with an old kayak oar as I sit at the bow and scan the shore. We’re out looking for pawpaws this morning, a tropical tree fruit that looks like a mango and tastes like banana custard. I’d never heard of a pawpaw until moving back to Virginia. My curiosity was piqued, of course, by this curious sounding wild edible. We spot a thicket of pawpaw trees along the bank. They are thin-trunked and have big green leaves that look like floppy rabbit ears. Jake maneuvers the boat up to the shore and I grasp a branch in my hand then bend the whole tree gently over the boat. We pluck bunches of fruit from the limbs and I think of the word “bower.” I think of this word later when writing this column, too, when trying to describe the feeling of being closed in by the arch of a bent tree. I look up “bower” in the dictionary and I learn that it is also a word for an “anchor carried at a ship’s bow.” I like this very much, to have been within a bower made of pawpaw trees, and for the pawpaw tree to have also been a sort of bower in the other sense, anchoring us to the shore.

This experience made me recall a piece of writing I once read in Ecotone, a literary magazine about place, that’s published by the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. In the essay that came to mind---“Naming our Place”---David Gessner thinks on the relationship between words and things in nature. The part I thought of while picking pawpaws was this, which Gessner writes about Barry Lopez’s book Home Ground:

“Skim through this encyclopedia of terms for particular places, and if you’re  like me, your synapses will snap like popcorn. Just take the B’s, for instance: berm and biscuit and board and borderland and boreal forest and borrow pit and bosque and box canyon and braided stream.”

Add to that list bower, and my synapses do go pop!pop!pop! At the sound or sight of certain words I think of that morning on the creek. I think of the soft light filtered through the big rabbit ear leaves. I feel the silky pawpaw in my hand and taste its crème brulee-like pulp. I experience that sense of place for a second time, almost more clearly now as filtered through my imagination. It's thinking about the particular words for that place ---the bank of the creek, the bend of the tree, the shape of a bower---and  linking my experience and memories to those words, that focuses and clarifies my memories.

And that’s Gessner’s point, I guess, because he continues: “These are physical words describing physical places, and they have heft to them, and distinctness, and we can say of them what Emerson said of Montaigne’s sentences: ‘Cut them, and they will bleed.’”

I wonder if we could say of words about food:  “Eat them, and they will be tasty,” too?  While hearing or reading the word "pawpaw" may not literally fill me up, I'll still feel sated in a way.  Bower. Bank. Pawpaw. The words elicit a sense of a very particular place and time. Of balancing on my tip-toes in the bobbing boat and anchoring myself to shore, of the a cool round pawpaw smooth in my palm. I can't eat these words, but I can use them to tether me to that beautiful morning on the creek. And that, I think, is quite appetizing.

V. Provence

There is a woman who sells American and English pastries at the market in the Place des Prêcheurs. She is beautiful and reminds me of the photographs I have seen of Cherokee women. For a school assignment we have to interview an aixois, someone from Aix, so one day at the market I ask her if she might be willing to talk to me about her life in the south of France. She agrees. Her name is Juliette, and we meet the following week for coffee at her favorite café on the Cours Mirabeau, the main, plane tree-lined street in Aix. She is so impressed with my French that she invites me to come to her house and bake with her later that week. It happens to fall on my birthday. Juliette makes me a cheesecake and tells me about how she spent a year in Wisconsin when she was sixteen.

“There is no better city in the world,” she says, “than New York.”