I was just listening to a Slate Double X podcast about the branding of cooking memoirs; how food writing is the next step in the careers of many post-starlet types. They pooh-poohed Gwyneth Paltrow’s new age-y goop website and her cookbooks – frankly I can’t trust the food advice that comes from anyone who has had food issues or has a staff. The Double X folks identified two other new and unlikely food writers – I can’t imagine reading anything Jessica Alba or Blake Lively has to say about food or gardening.
I did enjoyed reading Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. The book was based on Powell’s blog about cooking everything in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She was actually cooking every day (after work) and blogging about it. (I only wish my blog would take off like hers did and that Nora Ephron could direct my life.) Back before she developed the fab and dynamic Food52 website, Amanda Hesser, who actually studied cooking and worked in restaurants, was slogging along, writing weekly food columns for The New York Times, which were collected into Cooking for Mr. Latte. It was adorable. And it made me want to cook. These two women have cooking chops.
As did M.F.K. Fisher, who has been even more of an inspiration. I wanted to have her kitchen, with the scrubbed pine table and a shiny array of copper pans and sharp knives. I’d also like her keen eye for turning a phrase as well as her grasp of cooking skills and methaphors. The reality is that I do have that scrubbed pine table – but it is in the dining room and is currently piled high with laundry and shoe boxes of income tax receipts.
Julia Child would be appalled at the state of my cookware. No copper pans and no pegboard system for organizing anything. I shove the scuffed Teflon frying pans in one of the bottom cabinets, next to the bag of Cheetos. The saucepans are stacked in the cabinet next to the stove, along with the battered cookie sheets, cooling racks and cutting boards. Some of the knives are carefully sorted by size and shape in a knife block on the counter, and others are tossed with wild abandon into drawer – paring knives, steak knives and the lone grapefruit knife are in one drawer; the butter knives (three silver patterns) are in another. There is a section for every kind of fork: salad, dinner, fish, ice cream and three sterling pickle forks. (That was the popular present the year we were married.)
I always have a couple of oddball projects going on that although they are not all food related, they are somehow kitchen-based. If you had a moment to consider the kitchen windowsill you would see coleus rooting in a vase, an avocado pit resting on top of a short drinking glass, green onions growing in another glass and a small blue bowl with a handful of sprouting morning glory seeds.
I pinched the coleus from the window box outside the studio, thinking I could root them and eventually put them in the window boxes under the Pouting Princess’s window. Those window boxes there are a trifle spindly right now, with a couple of tufts of blue daze and some leggy, salmon colored, trailing geraniums. A little variegated coleus will give the boxes a splash color when the geraniums are between engagements. In my perfect imagined world.
The avocado is just because. I’ll never grow a tree – I have never grown an avocado tree, but I like the thought of one. I suppose it would be nice one day to have an avocado tree, from which I could harvest an avocado and make the best guacamole ever. Perhaps I spend an excessive amount of time at the kitchen sink, stewing about these things. The grocery store and the farmers’ markets are not that far away, after all.
The green onions I read about on some obscure website last week. NEVER BUY GREEN ONIONS AGAIN! What a splendid idea! If you plunk green onions in water they will continue to grow, like tulips. So far, a week into the experiment, they are indeed growing. Well, some of them. It looks like it is about 50-50. Some are looking icky and moist and slug-like; the others might be viable the next time we want to do stir fry. In about another month. I think this might just work, but I would have to devote more of the windowsill real estate to growing green onions.
I have some morning glories already climbing up the garden arch I fashioned last week out of PVC pipe and some flexy metal tubing I found in the plumbing department at Home Depot. The morning glories will obscure the craziness of my building materials, thus the need to have more plants rapidly growing like magical beanstalks with dozens of blooms. Obviously I hope to get a painting out of this, so I will dazzle you at a later date with the beauteousness of the morning glory display.
And that is our kitchen. You can see some of my half-baked ideas cheek and jowl with my cooking trials. I finally got the corn bread recipe right. I did incinerate the bread for the bruschetta last week, but most of the burnt parts scraped right off. No copper pans. No goopy advice. No links to fabulously expensive shopping sites. No visible means for monetizing the green onions , the avocados or the morning glories. You know where the Cheetos are, so the next time you come over, help yourself. You can have some of the morning glory seeds, too. I am about to head outside and plant some nasturtium seeds. I have a vision that they will soon be trailing decorously from the studio window box, making the side of the house look just like the Gardner Museum in Boston…
https://www.17apart.com/2012/02/how-to-grow-green-onions-indefinitely.html
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”
-M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
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