Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Morning. Sleep with scattered images of pigs running through flooded woodlands on the end of a vast sea reclaiming what always belonged to it and it alone. Woke up and walked out before coffee to see what the sky had brought us. Water on all sides, but a slight rise of earth and grass has … Continue reading Remembering Harvey / Chapter Three / One Hundred Years Of The Same Morning.
Storm coming. Storms having come. We made the decision not to leave the house, not to pull out on the highway in my 2003 Chevrolet Cavalier loaded with ourselves and the cats. I strapped myself to the iron fence like Ahab lashed to the great whale. Catastrophe in the air. What would the night bring? … Continue reading Remembering Harvey / Chapter Two / Pulled Pork And Gin.
Recently gave a talk about Houston to a group in Stockholm featuring the build-up to and experience of Hurricane Harvey. Returning to almost two years ago and stitching together what happened between the evening of Friday, August 25 and Saturday, August 26 offered a view of what in means to hail from H-Town. Begin the … Continue reading Remembering Harvey / Chapter One.
Blooming. They’re out. A glorious walk through the King’s Garden in Stockholm to view the Cherry Blossoms. From a a fifteenth century royal kitchen garden to an open space for military drilling in the nineteenth century to pavilions with cafés in the twenty-first century, the Kungsträdgården features Cherry Blossom trees blooming and signaling the beginning … Continue reading Cherry Blossoms At Kungsträdgården With Tulips, Blueberry Tarts, Cognac And Coffee And The Art Of Fugue.
After a meal, a walk helps aid digestion, at least, that’s what I’ve been told repeatingly, and as Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes, ‘Man lives not on what he eats, but on what he digests,’ says an old proverb. We must therefore digest to live: rich and poor, king and shepherd are equal in the face of … Continue reading A Walk After Goulash With Brillat-Savarin, Blackpink, Walt Whitman And Tomas Tranströmer.
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.
Spring lamb. First born and first kill. Three to five months old and now on our table, well one of its legs. An offering for new growth and warmer days. Flesh and sign of a flayed god and his ascendance into blue skies. Once upon a time a celebration at the end of fasting. The … Continue reading Spring Lamb With Roasted Vegetables, Agnus Dei, William Blake, the Tenebrae Choir, Broadway And Seventeen Years Of Therapy.
Still a ring of water, a mirror for the sky amidst the ice, but more and more melts each day now and shadows have the sun to thank for shedding its grey veil. A shadow now has its rock. In reading W.S. Merwin’s “The Widow” from The Lice, the first lesson is humility. How easily … Continue reading W.S. Merwin And A Walk Into The Deep
The seeming definition of a ghost, someone there and not there–reflection in a shop window shading in a blurred face and dark suit through which paintings and photographs may be seen or not paintings and not photographs because it’s not that easy to say, and other blurred faces and clothes passing by and passing into … Continue reading Ghosts On A Walk And Premonitions Of April From W.S. Merwin.
The end of March juggles winter and spring, often choosing both. Ice and melting ice, snow and melting snow, bare branches and first blooms, and over all blue, blue sky and marshmallow clouds. W.S. Merwin’s poem, “It Is March” from The Lice muses on appearances and disappearances, revealings and vanishings. It Is March It is … Continue reading March Dust: W.S Merwin And The Precariousness of What We Haven’t Done.
