You're viewing all posts tagged with food
“
And in Paris, I read so many great ones. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, which I found in the $3 bin outside Shakespeare & Co. The copy was disintegrating, so I paper-clipped the pages together and read them while sitting on the bench outside the store. The Children’s Hospital**** by Chris Adrian (oh, and I read A Better Angel****** and The Great Night this year, too), which was probably my favorite reading experience. I spent thirty minutes or so every morning reading it, before the city woke up, sitting on the Seine and eating a pain au chocolat. There are probably still crumbs in my copy. I also read The Great Gatsby and A Moveable Feast and reread Wuthering Heights.

- from a year-in-reading post by Kelsey Ford, who had me at pain au chocolat.

And Paris.

And Gatsby.

(this post was reblogged from kelsfjord)
Click for high-res photo
Played tourist in our own town today. Theo Chocolate factory in Fremont. Great tour guide. Delicious samples. Best explanation I’ve ever heard of what “fair trade” means. Also, first time wearing hairnet AND beardnet. Click for high-res photo

Played tourist in our own town today. Theo Chocolate factory in Fremont. Great tour guide. Delicious samples. Best explanation I’ve ever heard of what “fair trade” means. Also, first time wearing hairnet AND beardnet.

“

By mistaking my physical self for the world and exerting my power over that, I could experience the sensations of triumph while remaining essentially harmless: preoccupied, physically weak, inhabiting a world more narrowly circumscribed, in these ways, than my mother’s had been. When I think on those years, the waste of time is what I most regret; all that thought and worry, those physical trials. I could have learned Greek or Latin with that time. I could have built a boat and sailed around the world. But these regrets are subsumed, finally, by sheer relief at having been released from that tiny box of thought, subtly, almost without my noticing, somewhere around the time I published a novel. That was my first, tentative brush with the world beyond myself, and it led me to imagine what real power might feel like.


An eating disorder is partly a disease of consciousness, of perspective — hence its insidiousness, and also its contagion. Attitudes toward food are taught and learned, but once food becomes entangled with notions of good and evil, it can be nearly impossible to extricate. Nor can one give it up altogether. Eating disorders have become part of our culture, and they’ll multiply and reproduce with lives of their own. We can’t take them back. But unlike our mothers, who were as blindsided by their arrival as we, I and my generation know exactly what they are. I don’t have children yet, but when Marcia spelled out D-I-E-T, I made myself a promise: If I ever have a daughter, I’ll keep the cult of food consciousness outside her range of vision for as long as I can, so that when it finds her some other way, as it surely will, she won’t see me as its silent advocate.

- Jennifer Egan in 1997

(via The Essayist)

ONE MORE THOUGHT (added a few minutes later): Since posting, I’ve been thinking about how we’ve approached this differently. As with anything, we won’t fully know for decades whether we’ve made the right choices for our kids. But I’m struck by that last bit of the Egan quote: “I’ll keep the cult of food consciousness outside her range of vision for as long as I can, so that when it finds her some other way, as it surely will, she won’t see me as its silent advocate.”

When it comes to the insidious forces our kids grow up with, I’ve assumed — maybe wrongly — that anything short of vocal dissent will be perceived as silent advocacy. Consider a white mom in 1950s Alabama who decides to keep racism outside of her daughter’s “range of vision for as long as I can, so that when it finds her some other way, as it surely will, she won’t see me as its silent advocate.”

Click for high-res photo

Our spaniel barks when we tie him up outside shops. Our Lab mutt sometimes chews through her leash. Because of this, I rarely wait in the long weekend line that stands between me and my favorite pastry. I lucked out this afternoon. We walked by Cafe Besalu a bit after closing time. They were still selling pastries, and somehow they hadn’t run out of the almond croissants that usually disappear by noon. So I got one. This led to me standing outside Besalu, eating my first almond croissant in months and hearing my son giggle as he asked, “Dad, why are you groaning?” My giddy taste buds reminded me that I’ve been meaning to repost something I wrote about Besalu back when I had a photography show there in 2007. It used to be online, but it preceded this blog and vanished when I switched to a new ISP. I felt bad about that since Besalu’s owner, James Miller, once told me that my words popped up pretty high in Google searches. Besalu has great reviews from the NYT and many other sites and publications. James doesn’t need my help. But I’m pleased to put my appreciation on the record again and push back a bit against the online grievances of those who resent paying anything more than Egg McMuffin prices for handmade pastry.

****

Here’s my pretentious little story about how good Besalu’s pastries are. I lived in Paris for a year when I was a kid. Around the corner from my elementary school, there was a pastry shop that had the good sense to pull a batch of pain au chocolat from its oven just in time for the end of the school day. You had to be careful to let them cool slightly because the chocolate inside was still molten. They were very very very tasty.

Now, by the time I moved to Ballard in 2001, I’d had pain au chocolat plenty of times since that year in Paris. But I didn’t give them much thought. They were simply food. So I got caught totally flat-footed the first time I walked into Besalu and ordered a pain au chocolat. With the first taste, I was right back to being nine years old, walking down a sidewalk in Montparnasse, switching a pastry from hand to hand to keep from burning myself. Never before or since has a taste freed something so vivid from my memory.

Best of all, though, is that all Besalu’s pastries are made by hand right before your eyes. James and his crew work as hard as just about anyone I know.

Before breakfast yesterday, we pulled an especially striking apple from a produce bag. I set it aside and tried, after breakfast, to do justice to it. The image above is out of focus, obviously. My only defense is that I did it on purpose, believing that sharp details only seemed to distract from the colors and forms that made up the apple. This photo and my other 97 tries can be seen here or in the embedded video below. I wish photographers — great ones, not me — routinely posted slideshows like this. It would teach us so much more about the process of photographic creation than any lecture or coffee-table book ever could. Click for high-res photo

Before breakfast yesterday, we pulled an especially striking apple from a produce bag. I set it aside and tried, after breakfast, to do justice to it.

The image above is out of focus, obviously. My only defense is that I did it on purpose, believing that sharp details only seemed to distract from the colors and forms that made up the apple.

This photo and my other 97 tries can be seen here or in the embedded video below. I wish photographers — great ones, not me — routinely posted slideshows like this. It would teach us so much more about the process of photographic creation than any lecture or coffee-table book ever could.

Getting food ready tonight, I looked down and liked the pose struck by this banana peel. So I shot it. Just with my phone. Even before I shot, I had two clear reasons for planning to run the image through Lo-Mob: 1) In living color, our counter is not photogenic; 2) The yellow of the banana peel would distract from the form of the banana peel. Now that I have a moment, it would be nice to re-shoot the peel with my Nikon. I’d welcome sharper focus. But the peel is in our compost now. I could pull it out. I could contrive to recreate the scene. That would spoil it. The whole point was that I dropped the peel, looked down, and found it looking this way. That pleasant accident is what I wanted to document. The snapshot will do. Click for high-res photo

Getting food ready tonight, I looked down and liked the pose struck by this banana peel. So I shot it. Just with my phone. Even before I shot, I had two clear reasons for planning to run the image through Lo-Mob: 1) In living color, our counter is not photogenic; 2) The yellow of the banana peel would distract from the form of the banana peel.

Now that I have a moment, it would be nice to re-shoot the peel with my Nikon. I’d welcome sharper focus. But the peel is in our compost now. I could pull it out. I could contrive to recreate the scene. That would spoil it. The whole point was that I dropped the peel, looked down, and found it looking this way. That pleasant accident is what I wanted to document. The snapshot will do.

onion half

My Nikon is twenty feet away. I may go grab it. Lately, though, I’m getting something out of denying myself the chance to use it, out of seeing what I can coax out of my phone’s camera and the Lo-Mob app that I bought by accident back in August. The weirdest part of all this is that Lo-Mob is a total aberration for me. In my normal shooting life, I don’t use Photoshop or do even the most innocuous manipulation.

This is all strange. Good strange. But strange all the same.

Click for high-res photo
We moved all our furniture to have some work done on our house. No clue where my camera is, so more cellphone camera tarted up with Lo-Mob. Click for high-res photo

We moved all our furniture to have some work done on our house. No clue where my camera is, so more cellphone camera tarted up with Lo-Mob.

this morning’s random inspiration