Freelance Writer
Day one - Forgot how beautiful it is here.
Food notes on my Suite blog. Yummy.
Short walk down to the Fisherman’s Wharf area. A burrito with guacamole and delicious organic coffee from local roaster.
Heard on the pier: (woman in sweater, hat, sunshades, riding a bike with duck in a pet carrier: to man passing on bike - ) “Hey Bob, how’re you today? Watching the world go to hell?” Bob’s reply, laughing: “Yep, same as usual.”
This just in from a friend who heads her company’s eponymous effort…(her name is Green!) Thanks, Kelley!
Did you know you can use Lemons as a substitute for cleaning agents and fragrances, most of which are sold in aerosol cans. Here are some alternatives for home….
Going Blue
Heading to Monterey next week for the Seafood Watch Program’s Cooking for Solutions event. So exciting!
Alton Brown is hosting and they’re honoring Darina Allen who some call Ireland’s answer to Julia Child. She’s a tireless promoter of good, organic food and runs the Ballymaloe Cookery School. Allen’s authored several books and is a TV host, too.
I’m looking forward to reporting back on the sustainable food presentations, tours and Iron Chef-style competition.
Read the blog that won me the media scholarship here.
Remember the Seafood Watch Guide for your region can be downloaded to your mobile phone so it’s on hand when you’re shopping for your next seafood purchase.
Call me Genghis.
Has a ring to it. The Mongol invader took no prisoners, and possibly invented shabu shabu. Now people are using his name to deride feminists. Golf, shoes and food; so often at the center of these debates. Interesting, isn’t?
“In Her Shoes” just went live this morning in a blog called, The Glass Hammer. My article was prompted by the comments on feminism, Hillary and an interesting conversation with a friend who’s a young associate at a law firm about golf. I find it fascinating that choice of footwear and hobbies both figure prominently in so many of these discussions. (see the sensible shoes comments in Ms.JD, linked on Glass Hammer’s home page.) Golf and shoe keep coming up.
In New York Magazine’s article “Hillary and the Feminist Reawakening”, one of the comments linked to The Glass Hammer, leading me to their (earlier) article on Hillary and the spillover effect.
Follow all that? Hard to do in stilettos, I know. Sorry. Remember, Ginger did it all in heels and backwards but Fred got most of the credit.
The NYMag and The Glass Hammer comments show that sexism is alive and well. As if the question were open. Well, I had hoped we were entering the “post” era of feminism, that our work was someday going to be done. I knew better, but a girl can hope.
When Eric Cartman said “Get in the Kitchen and make me some pie!” we laughed because we think this little turd is playing tough, posturing with his outdated sexist crowing. Then we learn about thousands, multiple thousands, of men who signed on to a website about Hillary and sandwiches. Then you realize we only hoped Cartman was a throwback. Ouch.
Do pop over to TGM or NYMagazine, take a look; wade into the debate. Already the dialog has included some blame-the-victim thinking, some denial, some good stuff. Some younger women want to forget those who opened doors for them, to the golf club, to the board room. Dismiss them as “Genghis Khan Feminists.” Others want to take the “if I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist” tack. Good luck, it doesn’t work, but knock yourself out.
I just hope these young professional women aren’t surprised when they protest exclusion from the big deals because they can’t hang at the strip club with the boys. Or, if they’re dismissed with a “Whatever Hillary” comment by a male co-worker and don’t like it. Just don’t look for us older girls, the Genghis Khan Feminists, to get your back. We might be too busy baking or buffing our sensible shoes. Or, we might be out dancing in our stilettos. Just give us a little credit, most of us are still fighting the good fight. For all of us.
Blame it on the hippies I went to school with in New Paltz. They were way ahead of the Green Movement. They built a house on the campus with leading-edge environmentally sound design. Very cool. There was actually an Environmental Studies major at New Paltz.
Yes, I was one of those who read Frances Moore Lappe and yes I was, briefly, vegetarian. It made sense for me at the time, until I went to Germany and couldn’t find anything to eat but cheese and potatoes. Story for another day.
When I dropped out of sight a bit ago with the monster migraine from hell, I wound up missing the deadline for an in-flight magazine’s Green Issue. They had an entire issue dedicated to going green. In an in-flight magazine. Only I didn’t see any indication of how to buy carbon-offsets for the flight. I did see tons of things to buy to “go green”. Perhaps they forgot about the first R. REDUCE. then, RECYCLE, then RE-USE.
I urge you to ignore anyone trying to sell you something to prove your green cred. Remember the ridiculous NBC candlelight football analysis? Sometimes, a purchase can help. My new appliances use far less energy than my old ones did. And, they have greater capacity and better functions. I also recycled at least two or three of them - “free to good home” kind of deals. (More on the kickass kitchen later.) Most purchases are not of the truly balanced. The best purchase often is the one you don’t make.
In Culinary Travel Meets Slow Food I explore the interesting confluence of two trends: Slow food and culinary travel. We want to be environmentally good citizens, but we also want to take fantastic vacations where we learn to cook with top chefs (not those top chefs; real ones.) Slow Food urges us to eat local, organic, buy fair trade products, etc. Ballymaloe Cookery School and the Allen clan (Darina runs the school, is being honored at the Cooking for Solutions event; her mother-in-law was one of the first to bring back Irish artisanal cheeses, local farm products, etc.) in County Cork are pioneers in reclaiming Ireland’s agricultural and culinary history. and practice.
The school sits on a 100 acre organic farm and students really learn what farm to fork means. Students who fly to Ireland to take the courses, I mean. One of the articles I was planning to submit to Sky Magazine was going to be a tongue-in-cheek kind of walk through a day making “green” decisions. Awake in organic cotton sheets, put feet into slippers made from….fair trade coffee..turn lights on, but wait flourescents trigger migraines, but they’re much more energy efficient…One could go mental…
The concept has some potential, don’t you think? Maybe I’ll get to it.
Anyway, both the Balllymaloe school (carbon offsets or not) and Kingsolver’s book (recycled paper or not) are bursting with ideas, recipes, resources and more.
And I bet you’ll never look at a turkey baster the same way again.
~~~
Chris Rose, Times-Picayune columnist and author of “1 Dead in Attic,” writes a beautiful column, a tribute to blogger Ashley Morris, who died recently. Morris was of those larger than life characters that seem to be drawn to places like New Orleans. Taught in Chicago, lived, married, raised a family in New Orleans. Talk about a commute! But that’s how much he loved the city.
Rose and Morris had sparred online, Morris called him a douchebag. Then they found a common interest, preservation of historic street name tiles being destroyed by the crews laying new gas pipes. Another case of “improvements” that negate historic beauty. Morris decried the loss of street signs like the one “their” corner. (see similar sign, below)
Rose discovered that Morris was the same guy who invited him for a beer, gave him a cigar on Halloween when he gave his kids candy. Rose decided if Morris could be neighborly to the douchbag across the street (that would be Rose) then he had better be as big a man. Rose made a date to accept that beer. But that date will not come now.
I found these signs so charming I couldn’t resist taking a photo.
Other New Orleans Snippets:
Sazerac denied
I had read about the legislation when it was filed. I thought it sounded like a small but significant way to mark one of the things that make New Orleans special.
As with most NOLA stories, you scratch the surface and there’s a little more going on…one writer implies the sponsor gets campaign contributions from the Sazerac makers, another several get their knickers in a twist over the silly things legislators are wasting time on when so many more pressing needs are left untouched.
I suppose any and all of it might be true, probably a little bit of all of it…but still, what’s wrong with having a state cocktail? It’s not like absent the recognition of the Sazerac, people the world over will think NOLA’s gone straight.
I say hoist a Sazerac or an Abita to Ashley Morris and to NOLA. Then find a neighbor, bury a hatchet and share another one.
Junot Diaz’ first novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has just been awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Letters, Drama, and Music. The award is conferred “for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” See The Boston Review for an announcement along with links.
See your local library for a copy or buy the signed edition at Powells…
Diaz’ writing stays with you, the characters come to inhabit your life in a way that makes you wonder about them or miss them once the book is put down.
National Library Week.
Here’s my brother-in-law and niece on the San Diego town website.
Here’s another one of her with Curious George.
The picture at the Library of Yucan and Enna reading reminds me of many things. One, the wonderful start Enna will have in life, with her love of books and two terrific, involved parents. Two, how books were often my refuge in a childhood that was less predictable and less idyllic. On the occasion of my own niece’s and nephew’s birthdays yesterday, I dragged out old photos of them. Lots of pictures of us reading books. Patting the bunny and counting red fish, blue fish, etc.
Reading became a way for me to see other possibilities when I was a child. Books gave me a chance to imagine different worlds, whether they were in Hobbit shires, rabbit warrens, outer space, or in fictional families different from mine in some other, but important way.
I learned about Xi’an China from National Geographic that my folks always subscribed to. As a child I vowed to see the terra cotta warriors unearthed there some day. And I have. Took me a lot of years to get from that fantasy born at the coffee table in our Indiana house to XI’an. But, I did it. (Funny, I remember the TV was a lot less interesting then. You had to wait for it come on in the morning, staring at a black and white Indian head logo of our local station, until programming began. It ended with the National Anthem at some point in the evening.)
I learned about coral reef habitats and scuba diving and vowed some day, I’d learn to do it so I could exist if only for a moment, hovering weightless among the bright schools of fishes. I’ve seldom been happier than on those dives.
I learned about words themselves. I can remember the two large volumes of our household dictionary A-L and L-Z. I thought these two volumes were grand and they seldom disappointed me. When I saw a massive single volume on its own piece of furniture (was it an OED, perhaps?) at a friend’s house. Wow, “Someday.” I thought.
Where words came from, what other words they were synonymous with, or antonymous (might’ve just made that up..nope, checked it out here.) to. Endless hours following an encyclopedia entry on one new thing to another volume to discover something else, totally new. Which would lead to yet another entry…
Those books had heft, they smelled good, and you could trust them. Good qualities for any of us, come to think of it. Will Wiki be the same for Enna? I can’t imagine it.
I developed a love of language when I found out about French cooking, having found my father’s copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in the closet, under the stairs. I also found old, odd books of his elsewhere.
If there were no books in the house, what would my dreams have been? How might my life have been different? Who can say.
Just in case I’m right, and books really do make a difference, pick one up and read it today. Read one to a kid. Tell someone about a story you once read that changed your view or maybe your life.
Wooing with Words
“If I didn’t have bad timing, I’d have no timing at all.” That is a quip delivered, rakishly, by a really cute, otherwise unremarkable almost-date. You know the kind of guy I mean: the flirt at the party who ends up being a heel but who happens to have a really nice and pretty good-looking friend you had overlooked at first. That guy was NOT in the center of the adoring circle of women, tossing off clever one-liners.
Then, there are the dates and near-dates, the hits and misses that occur over literary tastes. Or, sometimes over literary ability. As in: does he even read? In “It’s Not You, it’s Your Books” - these are the questions, the literary litmus tests that are analyzed by an impressive panel of experts. A psychologist, a book critic for Salon.com, several authors, editors and agents all weigh in on the subject of reading material as a mate-assessment indicator. The range of questions discussed by the expert run the gamut between “I was happy if he ever read a book,” to “his literary tastes were too lowbrow.”
Bloggers with Book Deals
The New York Times ran another article on the same day about bloggers’ book deals and the possibility that the phenomenon of moving from blogger to published author, has jumped the shark, as they say. Am I the only one that finds this fascinating?
One could be dismissed for not being literary enough on the same day someone’s getting a book deal for blogging about cute kitties?
It was this article in the New York Times that made me remember the “bad timing” quip I have long since appropriated without attribution. (He didn’t deserve it, trust me.) You see, I have about the worst timing in life of anyone I know. There have been one or two notable near-misses (aka hits - think about it, go ahead - I’ll give you a minute…).
Most significant was the move from Boston to New York, which, if executed on schedule, would have meant never meeting my husband. He is not a “focus on me over here, with the clever quip” kind of guy, though no one would deny he has his moments.
But the bad timing episode that gets the most laughs is when I left a very solid corporate consulting career for the ‘dot.com boom’ - just as it was turning into an epic avalanche of pink slips. One after the other…
Ultimately, I decided to stake my claim as a writer. Working at the business of being a freelancer and also trying to hone the writing itself. Modest recognition has come along, but so far, no big book deal.
Was there a five minute window of opportunity I missed when the stars were aligned? Have I completely missed the trend again, this apex of writers discovered through blogging?
Who Reads and Who Writes
Something else is bothering me though. How it is that so many people are getting book deals when they’re frauds (the James Frey-Jones/Seltzer fake autobiographies)? And, how can publishers simultaneously dismiss bloggers and reward them. One just got a book deal for blogging about silly kitties.
Who is the literary audience that dismisses a suitor for his low brow lit (”He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!“) and do we imagine they are going to buy books of cats in silly poses? We’re not talking William Wegman’s Weimeraners here.
Online content editors make profits based on good content driving traffic. They are loathe to pay for it, even while pronouncing the importance of good content. “Content is King” but we should work for the joy of seeing our work on their website.
Even as I write this, another story breaks about a writer who fabricated travel guide assignments for Lonely Planet guides. He claims he was driven by the poor pay offered by publishers. “I was driven to deal drugs and fabricate stories” does not seem a solid legal defense, even if I understand part of his point…
For now, I will keep writing, refusing to believe that my fate lies with costumed kitties or a fake autobiography. After all, overcoming my drug-infested inner city childhood, my adult addiction and recovery taught me a thing or two about determination and rising above poor circumstances.
Those mean streets taught me a lot. I learned how to be resourceful and take what life has dealt me.
I am a survivor. Just ask my cat.
Garden ‘08 Begins.
With a great day ahead and a HUGE storm coming this weekend I decided it was time to make the first nursery visit.
Osteospermum, Diascia, Impatiens and Pansies in dark purple and white… Geraniums, Kalanchoe in fuschia.
Couple of herbs for us, couple for the cats…
Incompetence - How do I Love Thee?
Very few people understand what I mean about choosing incompetence. Each time I’ve completely changed careers, I’ve intentionally put myself in the position of being the least competent person in the room. Most of us work to attain a level of competence in a given field of work or study. We take pride in accomplishments along the way, get promotions or raises, or recognition for getting better at the thing we do. Not too many of us decide to jump off one ladder and start over at the bottom of another. I’ve chosen more times than most. It doesn’t feel all that great all the time, either. Those in one sphere are suspicious of someone who comes from another. “Who does she think she is? She’s never done this before!” “She’s either an idiot or brilliant, if it’s the latter, is she out to get my job?” It’s natural, I suppose to be wary of people who aren’t an obvious fit. It’s a great sense of pride, almost unequaled by other accomplishments when later, one of those insiders says “You’re one of the best I’ve worked with in this position and you didn’t know any of this when you started.” When you learn something new (not just fake your way through) but actually prove yourself, your new competence, in ways that others recognize, you have mastered that ladder-climb again. Think of the joy on a child’s face when they realize they’ve taken their first steps or ridden their bike with no training wheels for the first time.
Architecture that Brings Out Child-like Experience
From fear, to joy, to insight - this is the kind of progression you may see as that toddler takes her first steps. In this wild architectural example, you can see a similar progression. Architecture that defies convention, if not death. This article and slideshow are fascinating. Setting aside the “provocateur” nature of edge artists such as architects Gins and Arakawa, the concepts driving their work are so profound. It’s about unsettling us from the familiar, shaking things up in a way that enables us to approach the world as a child, with fresh eyes. Pay attention to the elderly in Japan who first experienced the Arakawa-Gins architecture there. Anyone with a Grandma nearby or in recent memory will be concerned about trips and falls on an uneven floor. They encouraged elder residents to begin on hands and knees, if necessary. The older residents became more physically active and able to navigate the challenging terrain. The CDC warns us that obesity and sedentary lifestyles cause many life-shortening illnesses. 12% of adults over the age of 75 get the minimum level of physical activity recommended by the CDC. Obviously, this is a dramatic example, and no one would suggest suddenly throwing granny out of her wheelchair and into this house. Tossing grandpa’s walker in favor of the undulating floor, no. But, what would happen if we shifted the paradigm earlier? If we didn’t resign ourselves to the “fact” that aging=death? Other cultures have fully functional elders because it’s not in their mindset that it should be otherwise. Even here, we are loathe to admit that people could have great skills, creativity, value later in life. Travel, new hobbies, love lives? Pshaw we say, not my grandma! Well guess what, maybe we’re wrong.
Breaking Barriers in Food
Profound epiphanies can be ours to experience if we allow ourselves to be unsettled. This is the power of groundbreaking chefs like Ferrán Adrià . While the moniker “molecular gastronomy” began to be debated, I raised a point I thought others might be overlooking. Even editor Tanya Steel remarked that I’d opened her eyes to a new way of thinking about this. Check her comments and my post here. He uses unfamiliar techniques but presents familiar flavors. The result is that someone can experience something like the flavor of spring peas for the first time again. Defying time by letting us have a second first impression. I’ve had this sort of conversation with people about why I love to travel. (Interesting that Adrià himself closes his famed El Bulli restaurant several months of the year to travel because it refreshes his focus and invigorates him. To me, few things are as exhilirating as waking up in a new place with no predictions about what you’ll experience that day. New tastes, new scenes, new sounds, new smells. Usually, when I get to this point, someone is either nodding enthusiastically or checked out.
Pushing Physical Boundaries, and Mental Limitations
When I read about parkour, a new sport (also known as free-running) that defies our conventional thinking about our bodies’ ability to move through space, I was thrilled in the same way. The new sport slacklining or baselining uses some of the same principles, call it mind over matter. “How untethered from the earth can we be?” is one of the questions you hear them raise in the videoclip in this article. The articles on the sport are full of the philosophical observations like those that underlie the Arakawa-Gins architectural philosophy, and the cooking of Ferran Adria. Keeping open to the “what if” potential in our lives is not always comfortable and safe, but it is one of the surest ways to feel alive. Even if we never cross a canyon on a high-wire, live in a house with undulating floors, or eat foams or pearls…keeping our minds open to the insights in such experiences will help us to actually live our lives fully, not just let time pass.
The Leather District Gourmet The Sixteenth Minute - My Sports Blog
Fuschia Geranium and Kalanchoe
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