Category: France

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Thinking About The Rona While Cooking Viltkött Bourguignonne And Talking To Hannibal Lecter, Agent Smith And Luis P. Villarreal Who Are All Listening To Nina Simone Sing “Black Swan.”

Nymphs and Satyr as painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and dated 1873.  My eyes were reeling with such images lost in my forest, but having found my way out of branches and roots and the winding, gyring paths of Dr. Seuss and Quantum Mechanics, I’m back home to cut a filet of elk into stew pieces … Continue reading Thinking About The Rona While Cooking Viltkött Bourguignonne And Talking To Hannibal Lecter, Agent Smith And Luis P. Villarreal Who Are All Listening To Nina Simone Sing “Black Swan.”

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A Walk And A Reverie With Apples, Cheese And Cognac Or How To Embrace The Pandemic And Meet Pan.

How does a journey begin?  Well, with a walk.  A church and a cemetery affords the beginning.  Bare branches on the edge of spring with stubs of brown-green grass and a path of graded small stones.  An avenue of trees really, as we look down the path past grave markers and towards the dwellings of … Continue reading A Walk And A Reverie With Apples, Cheese And Cognac Or How To Embrace The Pandemic And Meet Pan.

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Roasted Spring Lamb And Veg With Several Calls To The Suicide Prevention Hotline.

Five hours roasting at 150 Celsius or about 300 Fahrenheit and Maillard Reactions abound as lamb bone, flesh and skin browns, fat melts and a wondrous dark, umami aroma fills the kitchen and house.  Carbohydrate molecules and amino acids change and change in dry heat as colors and taste merge.  Fat molecules with the aid … Continue reading Roasted Spring Lamb And Veg With Several Calls To The Suicide Prevention Hotline.

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More Terror and Terroir Of Love As We Still Ascend, As We Must Ascend With Dante Alighieri, PJ Harvey, Diotima And Her Ladder, The Supremes, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe, Nick Cave, Jaufre Rudel and R.E.M. With A Pour Of Caol Ila And A Slice Of Smoked Eel.

Last I left Love, I considered Nick Cave’s dark turnings of the lover’s call, playing off of Dante’s first sonnet of beatific and cannibalistic vision.  Yet, Dante a few sonnets on in Vita Nuova, also broods on the havoc Love causes, so one might say with Marc Antony in Shake the Spear’s Julius Caesar, “Cry … Continue reading More Terror and Terroir Of Love As We Still Ascend, As We Must Ascend With Dante Alighieri, PJ Harvey, Diotima And Her Ladder, The Supremes, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe, Nick Cave, Jaufre Rudel and R.E.M. With A Pour Of Caol Ila And A Slice Of Smoked Eel.

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An American Cooks Gumbo In Nacka, Reveling In Migration And Public Transportation, While Surrounded By Cuisines And Travelers Of All Kinds And Sorts.

Out and about on a day of shopping for my first gumbo in Sweden, which affords a moment to celebrate living in such a cosmopolitan, community-friendly city as Stockholm.  For instance, I’ve found public transportation in the Greater Stockholm area affordable, clean, efficient, quick and yes, multicultural.  I pay two hundred and fifty dollars for … Continue reading An American Cooks Gumbo In Nacka, Reveling In Migration And Public Transportation, While Surrounded By Cuisines And Travelers Of All Kinds And Sorts.

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Onion Pie With A Cold Eye Cast On Fear And Hate In America.

Early 1960s America and Nietta Dunn defies Jim Crow laws by sitting at the H. Green lunch counter in downtown Lexington.  African-Americans may buy food, but they may not sit at the counter.  Here’s the thing, food doesn’t work well with fear and hate–not when planting, not when harvesting, not when cooking, and especially not … Continue reading Onion Pie With A Cold Eye Cast On Fear And Hate In America.

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Drinking Houston

Drinking Houston means great beer, spirits and wine procured at Premium Draught   and Spec’s.  And the great Islay pour I first experienced at Warren’s Inn in Old Market Square downtown, remains the great dram I pour in my library.  Ah, Laphroaig!  Especially the Cask Strength. Drinking Houston with books has been a mainstay for me … Continue reading Drinking Houston

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Sausages And Cooking Murder.

Louis Vincent Palliere renders in bright colors the infamous Slaughter of the Suitors” by Odysseus and Telemachus, note those gorgeous capes tripping hues between orange and red. I love cooking sausages.  All sorts of sausage.  Beef, chicken, lamb and pig; andouille, bloedwurst, boudin, bratwurst, chorizo, hot dogs, kielbasa, knackwurst, linguiça, longaniza, merguez, morcilla, saucisson, soppressata,  … Continue reading Sausages And Cooking Murder.

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A Comedy Of Eating: Watt And More . . . Including Sex. **Warning. Adult Views Of Eating Expressed.

John Hurt as Krapp in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape carefully, cautiously, contemplatively and then completely eats a banana, at first by letting it hang out of his mouth, just hanging there, caught between the air and its fruit shorn of peel, and the inside cavern of Krapp’s mouth, and then biting it off and … Continue reading A Comedy Of Eating: Watt And More . . . Including Sex. **Warning. Adult Views Of Eating Expressed.