memories of food

i read a sweet story by brett martin in GQ on his meeting with chef jacques pepin at a low moment in his life. it illustrates the powerful healing capacity of sharing a meal and it's worth the long read. i also watched the great netflix series chef's table, which tells the story of 6 world-famous chefs. very inspiring and i burned through the six episodes far too quickly. all of this got me thinking about memorable meals. many of them came before the age of instagram and the incessant documentation and sharing of every plate, so they linger in the echoes of laughter of remembered conversations, the clink of glassware, the memory of garlicky tenderness of the cubes of beef at that tapas place in manila, the way my eyes welled up with tears at the deliciousness of the walnut-encrusted shark filet at the linn street cafe in iowa city, those foie gras pops so good we ordered a second round for dessert at elan in nyc, the time my sister licked limoncello off the table at that italian place at serendra in manila (hmm, the food must be good in manila).

we are so bound to food and so often we eat it mindlessly rather than thoughtfully, simply fueling our bodies because we have to instead of fueling our souls because we should. i go in streaks here at home, at times more conscious (read: creative) about what we have for dinner and other times being stuck in a rut of the same omelettes and BLTs. but again and again i return to the feeling that most of my moments of conscious happiness and contentment are spent in the kitchen; i feel better about everything when i'm cooking.

it's easier to be creative in the kitchen in the summer, when produce is delicious and abundant. when i can step out into the garden and pick strawberries for a sorbet or shortcake or broad beans for a hummus, or asparagus for a risotto. it is deeply satisfying to make our dinner from our own garden. and while our summer meals can bit one-ingredient intensive during the short time when asparagus or those broad beans are in season, there's just something about eating those things only when they're here that makes my soul sing. we appreciate them so much more because they are fleeting and they become so intertwined with long summer evenings in the garden. they're the food that memories are made of.

what are you eating this summer?

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speaking of food, did you know that personal gardens at russian dachas produce 40% of the food that's consumed in russia? and there are also people like rené redzepi of noma who are thinking about food and using local producers.

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salad as art!

not my cart

not my cart

we trudged through some heavy readings on the subject of industrialized food for our virtual food & culture course a month ago recently. amy wrote about it very thoughtfully and it's been tumbling around in my head for far too long, so i thought it was time i wrote about it as well.

....clearing out draft posts, i'm leaving this one from December 5, 2013 as it was...incomplete.

food dilemmas

our blog camp goes to MIT course continues, this week with further readings on food paradoxes. i allowed myself to be inordinately annoyed by one of the readings - cheap meat: flap food nations in the pacific islands by deborah gewertz and frederick errington. annoyed by the insecurity of the academics writing it, insecurity that led them to constantly justify and repeat themselves throughout in a most off-putting way. perhaps i am too far from academe now to appreciate the capricious ways of gaining tenure. it mainly just made me think they were really insecure, which weakened their thesis somewhat. and it's sad because their thesis is a good one - put simply, it's that there is power and economics behind what's available on the shelves of our grocery stores. and if you're poor and powerless and live on a remote pacific island, you just might find yourself eating the fatty belly (or flap) of a sheep.

i was so irritated by the book that despite the many readings ahead, i went off-syllabus and started reading margaret visser's the rituals of dinner. this was appropriate because this past weekend, we engaged in our own yearly dinner ritual - the annual gathering we have with the swedish side of the family, to eat crayfish, sing silly drinking songs in swedish and drink too much snaps and wine and beer and catch up with everyone.

i suppose at one time, these crayfish parties came about because crayfish were in season and could be caught in the waterways of sweden. now, we get them frozen in a dilly brine from china. all we do is thaw them out, arrange them nicely on a big serving dish, throw on some fresh dill and serve with homemade bread, aioli and an assortment of beautiful savory tarts.

we wash them down with plenty of seasonal beers and snaps and wine for those of us who prefer that. we sing swedish drinking songs and toast and we talk and laugh and see members of the family that we pretty much only see on those occasions. and it's a wonderful ritual and we wouldn't miss it for the world, even if the crayfish do come from china these days. we don't even talk about that, actually. even tho' we are otherwise people who buy organic and eat in season and go in for paleo new nordic hay-infused homemade yogurt, the fact that our crayfish aren't local is a topic of which we don't speak. tho' it should be a dilemma for us, it's not. because making it so might get in the way of our yearly gathering and we love that ritual. if we couldn't have the crayfish due to the food miles or the potential pollution to which they've been exposed in their chinese homeland, we might not get together at all. because although it's not all about the crayfish, somehow it's all about the crayfish.

i can't help but feel even more strongly what i thought in the very beginning of this course, that, especially in the so-called first world, we all engage in our own brand of logic when it comes to food and our food choices. we can justify it all, or we can just ignore and choose not to more closely examine the things that don't necessarily align with the way we see ourselves.

interestingly, on the subject of those fatty belly flaps from our reading, it seems that at least here in denmark, those on the cutting edge of the culinary world (e.g. noma and the new nordic food folks) are making those cheaper, fattier cuts of meat trendy - you can order pork belly in fine restaurants these days, so these things change just like spring and winter fashions. and once the flaps have gone upscale, what cut of meat will be left for the pacific islanders? and what about the chinese who would like to eat their own crayfish?

there are so many food-related dilemmas, it could almost put a girl off eating. naah...

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if you'd like to check out what the others in our virtual course are thinking about these issues, go to the flipboard magazine i've created - it's called food & culture, i've flipped all of our blog posts into one iPad-friendly flippable magazine for your reading pleasure.

what's for dinner?

in this age of sharing everything via instagram and facebook and twitter, what's for dinner has become a much more public question. i'll admit to feeling the pressure of it and i only share the good and inspired days in my dinner list group on facebook. but there are a lot of ordinary days in between. and we still have to eat dinner. it's the one meal of the day where we really do try to sit down together. this long, glorious summer, that may have been at 9 or 9:30 in the evening, decidedly southern european times. now that school has started again, we've tried to move it back to 6:30 or 7, but it's not easy.

another thing that makes it hard is all of the competing fads according to which we are supposed to eat. paleo is very big in denmark right now, thanks to very hot and fit chef, thomas rode putting out a paleo cookbook (which i'll admit i plopped down 249kr. ($44) for the day it came out - look at that cover, could you have resisted?). i'm really surprised by all of the cabbage they apparently had at their disposal in the stone age, but hey, i'm game if i get to spend the dinner hour with thomas. but paleo may just be the new name for low carb, as it demonizes wheat and prioritizes meat. it also has a big element of eating local and in season in it, at least in thomas' version. that, i can get on board with, especially in the summer, when we've got an array of produce to work with.

i've long been attracted to the idea of a raw diet, but feel it would simply be too difficult to feed a family on it.  plus, those hard core raw people often look rather thin and sickly. but i do keep threatening to go raw around here for a week, during the height of the summer produce season (right now would be the perfect time). i say threatening because my family is dead set against it. i guess they just don't think bacon would be that good raw.

we have a couple of meals a week without meat. i don't think any of us would ever really like to embrace full on vegetarianism or veganism, but we do think it's environmentally defensible of us to eat less meat and to consider meat to be a smaller part of our meal, rather than the centerpiece. i made a nicoise-inspired salad for dinner on sunday evening and could use one large grilled tuna steak for the three of us, instead of buying three and giving us each a big tuna steak as the centerpiece of our meal. easier on the wallet and on the tuna supply. plus it was actually enough that there were leftovers for another meal the next day. that was thanks to plenty of freshly-dug potatoes, beans from the market, boiled eggs, salad, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes and mozzarella that made up the rest of the salad. the grilled tuna was just the crown on top. and we all felt like we had our fill.

other food fads at the moment in denmark are ny nordisk mad (new nordic food), inspired by michelin star restaurant noma (which was the nr. 1 restaurant in the world in recent years, but fell to nr. 2 on the latest list). it is big on local ingredients, including things like hay and foraged beach detritus, and that has trickled down to the everyday kitchen in the form of a general sense of pride in nordic ingredients (pork, fish, cabbage, grains like rye and barley), tho' it has yet to make a liquid nitrogen unit an everyday kitchen utensil.  fasting a couple of days a week is also big. i have a friend who lost 10 kilos (20-ish pounds) doing that.

i think that underneath the food fads is actually a basic desire to be more conscious about what we eat. if you're following some strict no-carb diet, you have to think about the food you prepare and eat. the industrialization of food has taken us far from thinking about that. we just open up a package, warm it up in the microwave and scarf it down, all without putting much thought into it. but if you're eating raw or vegetarian or new nordic or paleo, you have to put some thought into what fills your basket at the grocery store and what you're making. and maybe at the base of it, we'd all like to do that.

hmm, i wonder what's for dinner tonight?

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great piece in scientific american on women LEGO minifigures.

food for thought

shark burger with guacamole

the first real readings for our MIT food & culture course include a couple of articles from the new york times (one by michael pollan and one by mark bittman), an older piece (from 1970) by margaret mead and an even older (1942) piece from a wartime book called how to cook a wolf by m.f.k. fisher. they lay out a set of food dilemmas, from wartime shortages to a world where there's enough food for all, but we don't make sure that all have enough food to fad diets and general eating anxiety.  and tho' i look upon myself as a considered cook, conscious of such things as the food miles my produce has traveled and whether it contains gene modified grains, to whether the chicken had a good life before it arrived on my table, these articles left me feeling a bit like i'm not doing nearly enough and perhaps i should just pack it in and stop eating altogether.  but then i remember the perfection of south african avocados and sauvignon blanc and i dismiss that thought. you see, since they come from the same timezone as me, they're ok food miles-wise. (that is a prime example of julie logic, by the way.)

humor aside, we're all engaging some sort of logic that suits our purposes when it comes to food. i deserve this chocolate or this glass of wine because i had a hard day. it's ok that those shark steaks are from a porbeagle shark that's on the vulnerable list, because they were caught by nice fishermen from the faroe islands. and man, are they delicious (especially if you chop them up in the food processor, throw in a few spring onions, some bread crumbs and egg and turn them into shark burgers). i can just do with the ordinary milk because the store is out of organic and i don't want to make another stop. or it's ok that my avocados come from the other side of the world because it's in the same timezone as i am. this is how we shrug off the guilt of eating.

because eating has somehow become a guilty pleasure. there's so much to think about:  are the cows that made my milk or this steak producing too much methane and contributing to climate change? were these chickens that laid these eggs crowded in little wire cages, with no possibility of ever going outside? should i choose danish cucumbers, which are grown in big energy-consuming greenhouses or ones from spain that were grown outside, but had to be brought here in a truck? which is more environmentally sustainable? and without strict labeling laws, how can we ever really know the truth about the food that's available on our supermarket shelves? let's face it, they weren't exactly flashing neon lights about all that horse meat they were mixing into various ground meat products earlier in the year.

these questions are some of reasons we wanted to move to the countryside and have our own animals and our own garden, so that we could have a much better idea of where our food comes from. but even that's not enough. unless i special order, i can't buy chicken feed that doesn't contain GMO soybeans. i've taken to buying the whole grains - wheat, corn, barley and oats and mixing it myself, together with seashells for good eggs and for their digestion in general. we're by no means self-sustaining and have yet to have our own pigs, but we feel we're taking steps in the right direction. i'm content to only eat strawberries during the glorious few weeks when they're in season and can be picked in my own garden. but do i go without bacon just because we haven't managed to pull ourselves together and source a few pigs? i'll admit i haven't gone that far. nor would i do without olive oil just because we can't really grow olives in our climate. we're spoiled for food choice. and it just may be our demise.

the readings for our course have, thus far, raised more questions and concerns than they have answered and i'm neither done thinking, nor writing about this. stay tuned.

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brilliant website design and great stories - narratively.

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amazing photo project - strangers together

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i want all the neon signs.

cognitive dissonance

ok, so i write in library books. so sue me.

i recently read william gibson's book of collected essays, distrust that particular flavor. they represent his non-fiction that's appeared in various magazines (wired, rolling stone, nytimes magazine) and other places over the years. it gave me so much food for thought that i immediately reread it. many thoughts and reactions are tumbling in my head and i still haven't synthesized them all.

but in the meantime, i wanted to share some of my favorite bits (it's my blog and i can use it as my memory if i want to):

"...there's often something in a good translation that can't quite be captured in the original."

"If you are fifteen or so, today I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, an anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture."

"...every future is someone else's past, every present someone else's future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now."

"...imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written."

"I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been."

"A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response."

"It was entirely a matter of taking dictation from some part of my unconscious that rarely checks in this directly. I wish that that happened more frequently, but I'll take what I can get."

talking about the digital age:
"All of us, creators or audience, have participated in the change so far. It's been something many of us haven't yet gotten a handle on. We are too much of it to see it. It may be that we never do get a handle on it, as the general rate of technological innovation shows no indication of slowing."

"Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes."

on Singapore, which he, like me (and i swear i had no idea, tho' he did publish the piece in Wired in 1993) characterizes it as Disneyland with the Death Penalty:
"Singapore's airport, the Changi Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world."

great turns of phrase:
cognitive dissonance
democratizaton of connoisseurship
terminal documents

on collecting:
"The idea of the Collectible is everywhere today, and sometimes strikes me as some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we produce."

"eBay is simply the only thing I've found on the Web that keeps me coming back. It is, for me anyway, the first "real" virtual place." (he wrote this in 1999.)

on Tokyo:
"If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technology-driven, you pay attention to Japan."

"Something about dreams, about the interface between the private and the consensual. You can do that here, in Tokyo: be a teenage girl on the street in a bondage-nurse outfit. You can dream in public. And the reason you can do it is that this is one of the safest cities in the world, and a special zone, Harajuku, has already been set aside for you."

on the media:
"Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society."

"This outcome may be an inevitable result of the migration to cyberspace of everything that we do with information."

"This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician, and corporate leader: The future, eventually, will find out you. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did."

"A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of the deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily."

"Dystopias are no more real than utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either - except, in the case of dystopias, in the relative and ordinarily tragic sense of life in some extremely unfortunate place."

"If you wish to know an era, study its more lucid nightmares."

On Greg Gerard's Phantom Shanghai:
"Liminal. Images at the threshold. Of the threshold. The dividing line. Something slicing across accretions of cultural memory like Buñuel's razor."

on history:
"History, I was learning, there at the start of the 1960s, never stops happening."
my own scrawl in response to this (because you know i wrote in this library book):
"...it just seems like it does when you're in the midst of it."

"...history, though initially discovered in whatever soggy trunk or in whatever caliber, is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries."

on whether we'll have chips in our heads:
"There is another argument against the need to implant computing devices, be they glass or goo. It's a very simple one, so simply that some have difficulty grasping it. It has to do with a certain archaic disctinction we still tend to make, a distinction between computing and 'the world.' Between, if you like, the virtual and the real...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't."

"So, it won't, I don't think, be a matter of computers crawling buglike down into the most intimate chasms of our being, but of humanity crawling buglike out into the dappled light and shadow of the presence of that which we will have created, which we are creating now, and which seems to me to already be in process of re-creating us."

perhaps this is why we like reality t.v.:
"We sit here, watching video of places a few blocks away, and feel--pleasurably--less real."

on the real cyborg:
"...as I watched Dr. Satan on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We all were. We are today. The human species was already in the process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed...And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted."

"The world's cyborg was an extended human nervous system: film, radio, broadcast television, and a shift in perception so profound that I believe we've yet to understand it."

"We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous sytems. Invisible. We cannot touch it. We are it. We are already the Borg."

"There's my cybernetic organism: the Internet. If you accept that 'physical' isn't only the things we can touch, it's the largest man-made object on the planet....And we who participate in it are physically a part of it."

So much food for thought here, don't you think? in any case, it seems we're already in the matrix.

into the fog

it was deliciously foggy this morning. i took at least 20 minutes extra getting to work because i couldn't stop taking pictures along the way. fog is somehow so mysterious and magical. it has a spookiness to it as well, but this morning, it wasn't the spooky kind, it was pure magic. it was warm, balmy and still as could be. it was quiet save a few audible drips from the overnight rain falling from the trees. the fog settled the magic heavily down on the landscape.

there was a hush over the countryside and even when i photographed a friendly cow that seemed to want to pose for me, i felt like i should do it quietly, not to disturb the magic in the air. i had this feeling that to make noise would be to make the fog disperse and the magic dissolve and i definitely didn't want that to happen.

fog lends a timeless quality to the landscape. i had to fight the urge to just leave the car and walk down this path into another place and time and forget all about making my way to work. in my imagination, because of the fog, the path would have led somewhere completely special and unique, somewhere not accessible on an ordinary morning. somewhere accessible only in the fog.

first things first

poring over decorating books is a nightly activity.

when you move into a new house, especially one where you know you're going to do a whole lot of work on it before you truly settle in, you are selective about what you unpack. you have to have enough things out for your everyday life, but you don't necessarily need that special checkerboard cake pan at the ready. i found that i immediately went to work unpacking the kitchen. because if the kitchen feels relatively normal, you feel like you can more or less function on an everyday basis. this kitchen, with its horrible pepto bismol pink cupboards (going to remedy that this weekend), has loads of cupboards, so i've managed to put things away and then forget which of the many cupboards i put them in...now where were those measuring cups again? but the teacups are in place, as are plates and pots and pans and a selection of the most essential cookbooks. oh, and the liquor cabinet - at least with the essentials (read: hendrick's gin stash) at hand. a girl does have her priorities.

the second most unpacked room is the bathroom, because that also needs to feel more or less normal for you to function on a daily basis. makeup, contact lenses, hairbrushes, flat iron, husband's razor and towels are all at the ready. as far as our bedroom, work clothes are hung in the closet, but there are still loads of boxes along the sides of the room. luckily, we have a whole large room just to stash boxes in, so we've done that. the only problem is that in frantic searches for various essential items, those boxes keep shifting around and it's becoming impossible to find anything. i'll have to try to get some order in that area this weekend.

for the child, the first priority was the satellite t.v. package we had promised her (a horse, a saddle, an iPhone, a season pass to Legoland, an iPad, satellite t.v. - the kid made out like a bandit on this move). her father dutifully went down and acquired the box for that on saturday and got it up and running. to her relief, she now once again has her fill of hannah montana on a daily basis.

for me, it was essential to get the iMac out and set up my desk area, tho' i'll admit that the computer feels rather useless without an internet connection (just got confirmation that it comes on tuesday - YAY!). but i have had time to process loads of pictures, so that's a good thing. i do, however, out of habit, find myself rather frequently hitting that little firefox icon down at the bottom and feeling a twinge of sadness when it tells me that i'm offline. oh well, it's probably good for me.

several boxes of "essential" books have been unpacked - the decorating books above are being used on a nightly basis as we readjust our thinking about what we're going to do with the house - e.g. tear down at least part of it. surprisingly, since deciding to do that we've felt much more free about the whole thing and less constricted. it really opens up the thinking and lets husband's inner architect run free.

it somehow felt important to cook in the house right away. i brought the first meal along from the old house--i had made extra veal parmesan so we had a pan of that to begin with the night we moved in. it seemed right to bring something from the old kitchen to the new one. the next day, i made our favorite focaccia. there were leftovers of it that got a bit dry, so i cubed the bread, tossed it with some spicy sausage and garlic in a pan and we gobbled that as an appetizer the next night. eating good food you make yourself in a new place sets the tone.

this weekend will bring lots more settling in, a bit of painting and definitely some riding. happy weekend one and all!

a simplify update

sometimes you have to buy something in order to not buy something.  buy it to not buy it, as it were. i recently wrote over on domestic sensualist about the dinner box that we order from the company that delivers our weekly friday box of organic veg. we've been subscribers to this veggie box for more years now than i can count and in the interest of being a locovore, i've been quite faithful to the "dogme" kasse - which features only danish-produced veg. i'll admit it's a bit hard to stay faithful to all that root veg here through the winter, so when årstiderne introduced these mealtime boxes, i switched.

the idea with the box is that you get three full meals (two of the meals stretch to leftovers and a second day, so it's not a 3-meal box, but more like a 5-meal box) - meat, veg, condiments, even bread, pasta, quinoa and the like. today is the fourth week we've had it. and it may sound rather expensive at 445 kroner per week ($82), but what i've figured out is that i'm spending FAR less on groceries overall. all i've bought this week at the store is milk, bread and cucumbers (the child goes through cucumbers like you wouldn't believe), nutella (ditto that on the child), some tea and a big tub of greek yogurt. in a normal week, i'd probably spend 100-150 ($20-35) kroner per day at the grocery store, just buying whatever struck me for dinner. now, the dinner ideas are already here at home and the daily grocery store total is under 50 ($10) kroner. and bear in mind everything in the box is organic, so i don't have to worry about chasing that down at the store (it can be hard to find certain items).

this week's box has a whole organic chicken, a package of cubed bacon and a package of ground beef. additionally, there is fresh full grain pasta, grated topping cheese, a jar of capers and a container of vegetable juice (bloody marys for friday evening anyone?). the veg includes carrots, potatoes (they are always there), one of those celery roots of which i'm not that fond, tho' they add good flavor to a soup, some greens, a head of very fresh lettuce, tomatoes, a lemon, 3 medium onions, a big handful of fresh lovely ginger, a zucchini, a cauliflower, and a red pepper. that's actually quite a lot of food for the money. as an extra i ordered danish-milled flour in durum and spelt so we can make bread this weekend. the box comes with three suggested recipes and they've totally gotten me out of what had been a cooking slump, inspiring me to spend and enjoy my time in the kitchen again. and if you factor in the value of your time and not spending as much of it standing in line at the grocery store, because they bring the box right to your door, the box is very good value for money.

other than that on the simplify front, i've been very good about not buying things. i've kept my fabric purchases to a minimum (i haven't given them up completely, after all, i am making birds for sale now, and i have a baby quilt order, so it's arguably a business expense). i've bought no electronics (so the iPad isn't out yet) and no clothes or shoes, despite everything being on sale. there was a panic last-minute lego buy for sabin's birthday, but the child needs birthday presents and lego is a good investment.

they made fun of me at blog camp, saying i'd decided not to buy stuff i already had and didn't really need and that i'm not imposing any really hard restrictions on myself. and to an extent that's true, but the exercise has made me more conscious of what we spend our money on and more concerned about buying quality and not crap. i think twice before grabbing those big fluffy towels that are on special because really, we don't need any more towels. and i've restrained from buying any new model iPods (tho' i'm certain my restraint will not extend to the iPad once it's released here), because one for every room of the house is enough.

it's also true that i've just not really been tempted at all to buy things, since it's been so snowy and i've mostly been at home. there is a whole world of shopping out there on the internet, but aside from the odd fabric purchase (hello fabricworm), i've exercised remarkable restraint - nothing at all from amazon (for me, i did order some of sabin's birthday prezzies there) and not a single sheet of pretty paper.  i do have my eye on a gorgeous crocheted blanket, but have thus far restrained (tho' i could easily talk myself into it in the interest of it having been made by a cooperative that's helping women in a cape town shantytown) because of the not buying it project.

i've also been doing a better job of looking around at what i already have when i'm going to make something...from the embellishments on my birds to fabric that could be made into a dress i keep dreaming about, to the japanese pattern books i have lying around, waiting for me to learn japanese. i think i'll have to make that dress today, to get it out of my system, making it in my dreams twice should actually make it sew up rather quickly. i'm off to do that and some more birds. i didn't get any up on etsy yesterday because i ran out of stuffing. but i should get some up this weekend. i'll put a note here when they're up.

"biteynins"

i find myself thinking about food. again. and vitamins. since i've had a head cold for a week now, i've been pounding vitamins. and i don't think it's helped one bit. in fact, the only effect i've felt from the vitamins is nausea when i take them on an empty stomach. admittedly, i do think they improve my fingernails when i take them regularly. but otherwise, i might as well rub them on a doorknob (as my dad would say), for all the good they do.

maybe I should just get my vitamins from good, wholesome foods, i thought (wondering if fois gras can possibly be seen to fall into this category). and then, i ran across this article...the case for real food and this one too, outlining all kinds of studies that show that vitamins are not really all they're cracked up to be. and then i began wishing that i felt more energetic and motivated to cook, but the problem is that when you're sick, you just want to lie around and have someone bring you big mugs of steaming, sweet tea, you don't want to stand at the stove, even if it is for your own good.

i loved taking my "biteynins" when i was a kid and sabin loves hers too, but that's because they're purple and pink and tasty and shaped like the flintstones (in my childhood) or they're like elmo-shaped gummy bears (in sabin's) (which is probably a big red flag in and of itself). but maybe i should have just had a carrot and i should definitely just give one to sabin. we should be getting our "biteynins" the old-fashioned way...by eating them in their natural state, enjoying the real flavors and the pleasure of having prepared the food ourselves.  and then we wouldn't get that vitamin nausea feeling either. i sure hope i feel better tomorrow so that i feel like cooking again!

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roasted pepper salad ala nigella

this is a vitamin bomb and pretty too!

8 red bell peppers, roast in the oven, then remove the skins and slice them into bite-sized pieces

1 pomegranate (nigella has a brilliant method of cutting it in half and wacking it with a wooden spoon to rain the lovely little seeds down on the salad)

1 handful chopped fresh parsley

dressing: 

3T pomegranate syrup

2T olive oil

1T garlic oil (mine was canola)

salt & pepper to taste

*inspired by a similar recipe in nigella lawson's new christmas cookbook, in which nigella goes mad for pomegranates (in a lovely, sensual, very sexy way, of course).

making me smile this morning

i just got this book from amazon:

"it is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking:

the arrival of a friend;

one's present or future thirst;

the excellence of the wine;

or any other reason."

--Ancient Latin saying

and now for something completely different

while perusing various blogs this morning, i came across this very interesting graphical depiction of coastlines on marinebuzz:

not only is it artful, it's also quite interesting. there were, for me at least, some surprises. like that norway has the second largest coastline after canada. since greenland is officially part of denmark, it would make denmark almost a close 3rd, as it is, denmark's little green dot is pretty significant, when you consider it's about equal to india. i guess all those islands make for a lot of coastline. if you want to see a bit more detail on all the countries that are just colorful dots, click here. i think i may actually print this and put it on my inspiration board.

the spirit is willing...

....oh, ok, i admit it, the spirit is also very weak. in theory i want to live more simply, not have so much stuff, not define myself so much by the stuff. i love the IDEA of that. however, i'm trying to put together a brand new kitchen here. like the kitchen of my dreams. and that involves stuff. pretty stuff. stuff like this:

hans j. wegner's classic "y" chair

i know, we already have 4, but we need 8

we're gonna have guests!

and this tom rossau lamp was just so gorgeous.

so i heard myself say, "give me two."

oh. and one of those, please.  in red, to match my retro smeg fridge.

and i do so adore a good café latté. 

and it has that retro feel to go with the...

yes, i believe i already mentioned the smeg fridge.

what is even more worrying is the high i get from such an expedition. the sheer elation that infuses my being when i acquire (or even just order) gorgeous, high quality kitchen and dining room items (disturbingly close to the happy feeling i had last week when i bought my iMac and brought it home and just gazed upon it, caressing it ever-so-lightly). it makes me SOOOoooo happy! like jump for joy, do cartwheels right there in the middle of shop (luckily i did not, as they have a lot of breakable things), engage in insane happy dance kind of pure happiness. i will appreciate these things in my new kitchen. we will use them every day. because they are good quality, they are an investment in sabin's future as well (ok, that smacks a little bit of self-justification, I GET THAT).

as soon as the house is done, we're totally on track towards a simpler life...i'm sure of it.

the minimalist

just read this very interesting (if rather unexpectedly (given where it was published) badly written) piece on eating less meat in the NYTimes and thought i'd share (despite the hack writing..the thoughts are good).  i'm going to give it a whirl.  meat as a treat.  and more spinach.  can't go wrong there!

what is the world coming to?

my jetlagged brain awoke me at about 4 a.m. it was full of a jumble of thoughts. a strange mixture of images from murakami's wind-up bird chronicles, some gorilla show watched on animal planet before bedtime, work colleagues, returning a rental car (that's a weird one, i haven't rented a car in months) and the shipload of water that recently arrived in barcelona. needless to say, these thoughts were not immediately conducive to falling back asleep.

my sunday berlingske tidende had a 4-page in-depth reportage on rising food prices around the world. the article looked at ordinary items that go into people's grocery carts. here in denmark, a loaf of good rye bread has risen 20% in the past two years. milk has risen 28% and eggs 15%. however, it's worse other places--take china, for example. food prices across the board rose 22% in april alone and the price of meat has risen 46% in a year. the article indicated that this was not ordinary inflation, but the disturbing signs of a new era.

an era in which climate change has already had drastic effects on farming around the world. an era in which the use of corn for production of ethanol to feed thirsty american cars rules over using the same corn to feed people or to feed the animals that feed people.

either the world needs new priorities, or we, as individuals, need new habits. the far east had better get used to eating less rice--recently, the philippines imported $2billion in rice from thailand because they had only 2 months' worth of rice reserves. either the philippines has to make more efficient use of its' rice-growing fields (which won't happen overnight), or people have to get used to eating less of their staple food.

the article interviewed danes in a large grocery store and found that people had noticed the rising prices, but that most hadn't really changed their habits as of yet. but, that's because this is a wealthy society--people's salaries have risen in tempo with the rising prices, so it doesn't feel the same. we might consider the odd meatless meal, but overall, i personally continue to choose the more expensive organic foods whenever they are available. this is a luxury choice to have. and it may not be here for long.

what about poor people in developing countries who don't have that choice? the article showed a woman in haiti sitting on the ground making "clay cakes," a blend of clay, salt and vegetable fat dried in the sun and used to close the hunger gap caused by the fact that rice and bean prices in haiti have risen 100%.

articles like this always make me think about what sort of world we have left to sabin. what will be her reality as a grown-up? for one, i suspect the flying around the world she has become accustomed to as a child will be a thing of the past. it will simply be so environmentally indefensible to fly that people won't do it except when they absolutely must. i fear that will make her awfully sad. she expressed amazement just yesterday at the fact that a teenage friend of her big sister had never flown in his life. she's been flying since she was 3 months old and loves it and sees it as an integral part of her identity.

but, it's not all gloom and doom here on a monday morning--perhaps the food crisis will cause people to eat more locally-produced foods and to eat less processed foods, to eat less meat and more vegetables from their region. maybe we'll all waste less of what we buy--i know that i myself throw far too much away because i am a sucker for those 3 for the price of 2 kind of deals.

maybe the smaller farmer, who is using ecological, organic methods will have a better chance in a world where the big countries aren't exporting all of their grain at lower prices than it can be produced for locally and handing out indefensible farm subsidies. perhaps the market for a lamb fed locally on green grass in the pasture down the road will increase, so that the meat we do eat will be worth it--both taste-wise and environmentally-speaking.

and, humans have an amazing adaptability and spirit of invention which cannot be discounted. there will surely be more wind power. someone will come up with an effective method of desalinating water. hopefully, boeing and airbus are already working on planes that use alternative energy sources that leave a smaller carbon footprint, so sabin won't have to give up flying.

it's difficult from this vantage point to know what will happen. but, here and now, we need to change our habits--use more of what we buy, throw less away, choose what goes into our grocery basket in a more conscientious (and conscious) manner, don't let the water run forever until it's cold enough to drink, take a shorter shower. there are countless ways that we as individuals can collectively make an impact. so that the world is still here in a reasonable state for her to enjoy:

seasonal eating

Gonna read the paper, looking for the news about food supply - what a really bad news!

There are hard times in front of us, I think. Battles because of water, food, energy. We get too much people for this little planet.

I hope to go a good part of my way in this life, I´m not keen on being reborn...

my friend Gabi wrote me the words above this morning. coincidental (or perhaps not? but that's a whole 'nother post) because these were the exact thoughts on my mind as i went to sleep last evening and i was just mulling them over as i sat down at the computer this morning. these thoughts are on my mind thanks to reading barbara kingsolver's animal, vegetable, miracle.

i've been thinking about this whole "food miles" issue for awhile now. last winter, i ordered from my organic veggie box people (årstiderne) the "dogme kassen," which includes only produce from Danish farmers, so at least i know it hasn't come from halfway across the globe (Denmark is, after all, only about the size of Wisconsin). i'll admit it got a little boring with the root vegetables week after week and so i broke down after a couple of months and changed our weekly box to "kuk kassen," which might have the occasional spanish tomato or italian fennel.

aside: i'm a little disappointed to look at it right now and see that this week there will be a hokkaido squash from argentina!! not sustainable! i must change back to the "dogme kasse," which will no doubt start to have more exciting things in it now that spring is here. and it does--new potatoes, rhubarb, oyster mushrooms. yum. next week, that's what we'll get.

i'm only at the beginning of barbara's book. in the book, they're anxiously awaiting the first quivering spears of asparagus. it's that season here as well and i too am awaiting them (perhaps i should weed my asparagus bed). we don't have the space for a garden large enough to sustain our family through the summer, so i can't actually wholeheartedly embrace the project of growing our own food, but we will plant tomatoes and cucumbers in the greenhouse. i might even give it a go with aubergine and peppers. i can already imagine how heavenly it will be to step into the leafy greenery of the warm greenhouse and breathe in the smells of tomatoes ripening on the vine.

we can make wiser choices in the grocery store as well, not eating things when they're not in season (especially tomatoes and strawberries). during the two weeks that the danish strawberries are in season, they are heavenly and no doubt we appreciate them that much more because they're not always there. there is an enormous difference between them and the rubbery ones that are picked before they're ripe and trucked up here from spain. i vow that we will only eat things like that when they are in season.

as gabi pointed out this morning, the battle has only begun, so we must begin to think of ways of living that are more environmentally sustainable. i sometimes shudder to think of the world sabin will inherit. however, as TheElementary pointed out in a previous comment this week, human beings are amazingly adaptable. so, at the same time as i fear that life as we know it is changing, i also can't wait to see what lies ahead. the very near future surely holds some asparagus...

monday morning food for thought

women vs. women by charlotte allen from yesterday's washington post.

i wish it made me mad, but i fear it rings too true for that...