happy spring!
even though you make me sneeze, i love you dearly.
tulips & eucalyptus
– April 3, 2011Posted in: you're pretty
you’re pretty Archive
oranges for the caravaggisti
– February 1, 2011Posted in: you're pretty
Isn’t it funny what a simple,
accidentally gorgeous photo will conjure up?
At first I was just bemused by how utterly delicious these oranges were.
Citrus in California this year has been spectacular.
We were making cocktails with them. I turned around and was struck by what we had just made, with the collaboration of the angles of the setting sun, an accidental Caravaggisti still life. Or, Caravaggista, since we’re girls, and its now, and it seems our societal right to plunder language at will.
Long before I was a professional chef, I was an art student. I paid my way through college mostly with dollars that I had earned in kitchens and waiting tables. I studied psychology, fine arts and fiction writing. I had big ideas and many sleepless nights. I wrote, I took pictures, I painted, collaged, postulated endlessly, threw parties and cooked for friends.
I fell deeply, madly in love with Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. I fell madly & deeply in love with all those painters that came after him and hailed his dramatic realism and fantastical light. Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith & Holofernes is one of the great Feminist works of art before feminism & girl power even existed.
Thanks to art school & studying my overachieving ass off, I came to understand why Vermeer brought actual tears to my eyes. Have you ever had that happen? I stood in front of a collection of 10 or so Vermeers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an actual welling up occurred. A single tiny point of light on the rim of a glass.
I was lucky enough to travel to Rome in celebration of my 27th birthday. In honor of that I decided that I would like to create a Caravaggio tour of the city. The sort of awe, humility, wave of inspiration one feels when standing in front of something you have loved from a distance for so long. Its nearly impossible to describe. But there I was, standing in front of the Conversion of Paul. The Madonna of Loreto. The Calling of Matthew. A nearly homo-erotic John The Baptist. We saw so many of his major works on that trip through Rome & Florence, I can hardly remember them all.
That trip to Rome also solidified my love of great food. I had a simply seared steak over arugula. I squeezed lemon over it, drizzled a little local olive oil over it. I cut into it and the natural juices dressed the spicy greens in the most simplisitic form of ecstatic tastiness. That steak literally changed my life. I came home & started applying for culinary schools.
I had cooked professionally when I was younger & spent many hours pouring over food history. But once you eat truly amazing food. Once you’ve had mozzarella in the town Michaelangelo painted his first fresco, eat gnocchi and black truffle down the street from a Pontormo and a handful of Bronzinos, and swipe the last bit of a ragu from your plate with a crust of freshly baked bread across the street from a chapel housing a classic collection of Caravaggios, you change. I changed.
And it’s little moments like these that make me very happy to have chosen a life of food, art and words over any other that I could have. But then again, what else could a romantic with an endless appetite really do? And what other artist would steal my attentions like a queer outlaw with a penchant for the sumptuous?
perfect grapes
– November 21, 2010Posted in: you're pretty
yes, these grapes tasted as perfect as they looked.
a late harvest bunch from a southern california fruit grower. the winding vines. oh my. its as if they loved that grape so much they had to give it a bear hug.
perfect grapes for being fed. a juicy, floral sweetness with taut skin that when it pops, it makes you swoon for local produce in season.
pomaire ceramics
– November 18, 2010Posted in: you're pretty
Pomaire, Chile.
You are home to some beautiful ceramics.
If it weren’t for these perfect little pinch bowls I use for spices
& small ingredients, I would have never known.
I am so in love with these right now, using them whenever possible. They belong to my room mate, who is a native of Chile. She makes some jewelry using ceramic beads from the region. I share a kitchen & table with them that is home to a small collection of absolutely lovely ceramics from the region. I use these bowls for spices, condiments, to cover my tea while it steeps, whatever is remotely plausible. Something about them, so lovely. Unassuming in stature & color, perfectly weighted with a satisfying texture.
Pomaire, pronounced something like “poh-MA-ray,” is about 60 km west of Santiago. The town is nestled amongst hills that are rich in the clay used to make these bowls. The town is known for its pottery, where it has been a major occupation of the inhabitants of the region since the late 1400′s.
Not until the 19th century did Pomaire pottery become a true commodity for the region, when they began bringing wagon-loads of the stuff to market at the El Cardonal Market in Valparaiso. Since then, it has become a mainstay for most all Chilean homes. It is the preferred pan for the famous Pastel de Choclo, a traditional savory cake of beef & corn. One I may now be only slightly drooling over the thought of recreating as a black lentil & corn cake. Oh, man, I really want to eat that…
In these pictures in particular, I cannot get over how absolutely gorgeous the freshly ground allspice & cloves look in these unassuming little beauties. Thank you, Pomaire, for having such very good dirt.
the osage orange: a fruit you can’t eat
– November 2, 2010Posted in: plant love, you're pretty
This is an Osage Orange. Or a Bodark. Or a Hedge Apple or Horse Apple.
Okay, so mostly that picture is someone’s legs. But down below, that’s the “orange.” It’s pretty. Pretty Weird. Weird Pretty. It’s that sort of ugly pretty.
It’s not an orange. It’s not even really a fruit, orange nor apple. Rather, it’s a bunch of fruits inside a big bumpy green thing that makes your hands sticky no matter how barely it may get bruised. But it doesn’t stop you from always, always gathering them in Missouri in fall.
That’s where this one is from, Missouri. St. Louis, Tower Grove Park, to be exact. My girlfriend made a little homage to autumn with it on the cement by the pond that is built to look like a ruins. It was built sometime in the late 1800′s. Speculating that all kinds of folks were going to be walking through the area, there’s a ton of really beautiful things built up in the late 1800’s over there.
It’s funny because I have totally completely not thought of one of these fruits in somewhere near a decade, but then there it was: pale green & somehow weirdly magnetic because the green of it is just so damned pretty. Memory snaps you back.
I instantly curled my nose. Gross. Like a 10 year old, my instinct: eew, those things are gross. Yet I still went straight over to pick it up. I was totally magnetized by the prettiest green toady looking weird fruit laying over ripe in a pile of fallen leaves.
Once in my hand, I remembered. Eew, gross. Because they are super sticky & it totally sucks when one of them comes careening toward the gradeschool you playing & flailing around in a pile of leaves. More than likely that hedge apple/osage orange has come soaring from the hands of a neighborhood boy known also as “That Little Shit.”
That Little Shit, who is now running off snickering to their cover behind the hedges with his friend, You Jerk.
That was then & this is now. So, I picked up this weirdo lumpy beautiful thing & my hands immediately got glued by milky sticky juice & it smelled instantly of the faintest most florally pleasing scent of Orange. Pretty. That sap, it turns white on contact with air, it also is a base for natural latex. Weird.
It is commonly called Osage Orange because it grows in a region historically known as the home of the Osage Nation. Also known as the part of the country where I grew up, just like me, it flourished in moist rich soils of river valleys. These fast growing, sweet scented trees were prized for making the war clubs and bows of the Osage People. Bois d’arc, Bodark. Highly prized then as it is now for making tool handles, the hard, dense, yellow-orange wood is strong but flexible & polishes up real nice.
In 1804, Meriwether Lewis sent some samples of the wood to President Jefferson from the garden of Peter Chouteau, a founder of St. Louis & Indian agent who spent a lot of time around the Osage People. In 1934, FDR rediscovered this useful tree & put it to work for an ambitious soil erosion solution throughout the prairie lands. Using WPA dollars to empower out-of-work folks, over 18,000 miles of wind-breaking hedges were planted.
The densely growing trees also have crazy huge thorns that create a nearly impenetrable fence, they had been favored before the advent of barbed wire. I can attest to the size of these thorns: I still have a piece of one of these thorns in my hand from this one day when I was shaking rain from the leaves of a tree onto my friends head. I guess I had it coming.
The Maclura Pomifera (it’s real name) is also known to be a natural spider & mosquito repellent, which will be news for my friend Joy should she ever find herself playing in a pile of Horse Apple leaves. While the fruit is sticky, lumpy & weird, I suppose I can grow up. No longer will my reaction to the Osage Orange/Horse Apple be “Eeeww!” it will now be, “Wow, who knew.”
Oh, yeah, but don’t try to eat it, it will probably make you puke.
