Sunday, October 28, 2007
Karen's New Hobby
I've never been much of a flower guy. I mean, I've enjoyed -- even admired -- floral arrangements at dinner parties I've attended. But mostly, I've associated displays of fresh flowers with grasping wedding planners, Protestant funerals and rich fuckers with too much time on their hands. Well, what a shock to discover the visual and olfactory joys of fresh flowers at home. Karen has struck up a friendship of sorts with one of the flower vendors in the mercado. For fifty pesos (a little under five dollars), she comes home with an enormous, brightly colored, great smelling array of fresh flowers, which she prunes and plucks, mixes and matches, and places around the house. And as it turns out, she has a great eye! Each day, she carefully excises the droopy or dying ones, makes little design tweaks, and makes our fifty peso investment last for almost two weeks. My compliments to the woman I love. And my apologies to the rich fuckers with too much time on their hands who read this blog.
Errata
I believe I claimed in an earlier post that while the chicken down here is phenomenal, the beef is generally lean and tough, best suited for pounding, chopping and stewing. For the most part that's true, and we've adjusted our choice of recipes accordingly. But I have to say I was blown away a month or so ago to discover, in our new Mega (American-style supermarket) these richly-marbled strip steaks. I can't remember seeing a more beautiful cut of prime beef, even when we paid insane dollars for top-of-the-line mail order beef. FYI: The final product, grilled over mesquite, had us moaning. It seems that every month we have one less reason to consider moving back to the States. (Now if I could just find a local source for The Macallan...)
Puttin' On the Guatemalan Dog
Most guys I know are deeply devoted to their most lived-in items of clothing, and become fiercely protective of say, a ratty Creedence T-shirt, a scuffed-up and resoled pair of boots or a bleached-out Levi jacket that dates back to the 70's. That's how I am with old jeans. Recently, however, Karen's constant carping and my unfortunate tendency to stick a foot through the ever-widening hole that had appeared on one knee, caused me to face a harsh reality. Trash 'em or patch 'em. Karen graciously helped me shop for a remnant and then labored for an entire morning (sans sewing machine) to make the thing work. Thanks, babe. Hopefully, this will buy me another decade.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Food For Thought
From Alice Waters:
“…tell yourself cooking is a meditation. I like to do it. It's relaxing for me to come home -- it truly is! -- and wash the salad. I love to see the salad in the sink. To spin the salad. I like to dry it. I like to pound to make a vinaigrette with my mortar and pestle. I enjoy grinding coffee and putting it in the filter and warming up the milk. It's part of a ritual that gives my life meaning and beauty.
“…this is a crazy kind of life. It's over before you know it. And so you have to find ways of slowing it down. And this is an everyday delightful way to slow it down. Take time. Take a moment. The most important value of [cooking] aside from nourishment is that there's pleasure in the doing. It's pleasure in work. It's something that we don't understand in this country. Work is over there and pleasure's over here, and we work our whole lives so that we can go on a cruise ship. It's just insanity, and some people don't even make it to the cruise ship.
"So we have to figure out about everyday pleasure. It's trying to bring people back to their senses. Put the smells in the house. Make the chicken stock so it makes people hungry. Burn the rosemary, make the bread. These are all aromatic ways to bring people back to the table."
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Waking Life
P.S. Yesterday, reading an interview with the writer/director (Richard Linklater), I came across this quote:
I love the athletes who thank God. It's like, if you hit a home run, then God was with you but not the pitcher? I'd like to see someone once say, "No thanks to God, except for creating the universe. But beyond that, we know you haven't done shit for about 15 billion years!" [laughs]
