1. Feeling inspired
Writing a many-paged thesis is, for me, the first longest writing assignment I've ever had, and from the start, I've taken it on with gusto. I like writing! I told everyone and myself, and I do. I haven't been lying... but it is long and sometimes, I'd like to hasten it along, to reach that finish line. I think that's why listening to podcasts like Longform are especially helpful... they remind me how caring about the research and writing can have a worthwhile payoff.
The latest episode featured an interview with Lisa Belkin. She answered questions about her latest book, Genealogy of a Murder which was nine years in the making. She explains how she researched how the lives of three people intersected on one day. I look forward to reading the book. But it's the idea and her research to pull it off that I especially like. To a much smaller degree, I hope to pull off something kind of similar... in my case, it's how the lives of a collection of families intersected in a small town's creation that interests me, and I hope, can be written in a way that interests others too.
2. A short essay on recipes and cooking
On Conversations with Tyler, Seth Godin had this to say about cooking:
Lacking all humility, I am a really good cook. The reason is, I don’t follow recipes. I dance with them by understanding what the person who made the recipe had in mind. Having created recipes myself — there’re some on my blog — when someone’s making a recipe, they don’t test — unless they’re Kenji — the difference between half a teaspoon and three-quarters of a teaspoon of something. They’re not sitting there doing 4,000 variations. They just make the thing, and then they write down the way they made it, but the way they made it is not the only way to make it.
There is a project here. I cook every night because I like the short-term nature of the project. You can visualize the outcome, and if you understand the components, you can make it. It will be slightly different every time, but it will be delicious because you understand. When I find people who don’t like to cook or who say they are bad cooks, it’s simply because they’re trying to follow a recipe, and that feels like being an indentured servant.
I do not dance with recipes, ingredients, cooks or guests, but hearing an opinion about recipes so different from one's own is interesting... Maybe I can dance with opinions the way Seth dances with recipes. Dance... that's a funny word choice... I'm trying to imagine… Dancing in my mind is the romantic ballroom kind, the Maria in a shrub-walled terrace kind... take the lead, I'll follow... in fact, I like a good strong recipe telling me what to do, moving me around my linoleum-floored kitchen, flushed from the heat of the oven. Seth is older than me, but perhaps the dance he imagines is the modern kind? The tag-you're-it, improvisation-on-the-dance-floor-and-people-clapping-along-to-the-beat, kind?
Recipes are my teachers. I am thrilled when I can compare how an ingredient, or a meal, is treated according to cooks with greater experience and better intuition. Take arborio rice. I first made risotto based on a recipe by Ricardo Larrivé. (I once tried to make it without following his recipe and ended up with flavourless goo.) With leftover risotto, you can make the somewhat laborious arancini - but I rarely do. Perusing Rosie Daykin's Let Me Feed You led to the discovery of "Risotto Cakes" which were delicious - both an interesting twist to serving risotto and easy to do. But also, there is Ina Garten and Deb Perelman who have risotto recipes that provide a different way of cooking arborio - an oven method that promises less hassle - and, in Perelman's case, new flavours in the form of a more breakfast-y take. Just this week, I made falafel, twice. The first time based on the usual chickpea filling, the second time, using Melissa Clark's farro-lentil filling and spices, just to see which one we liked better, to feel how the ingredients came together differently. Unlike Seth Godin, I need recipe writers with me in the kitchen! I am so grateful to the kind and thoughtful ones who never make me feel like an indentured servant.
3. Rhubarb!
Something about warm weather and the end of the school year makes for delightful impromptu gatherings, ones in which the only invitation is a text like "I made rhubarb cake, wanna come over for a piece?"
4. I'm in the yard
That's my plan for the day... print off what I need to read to help me write the next chapter and bring it outside, to read in the shade. I might pull a few weeds while I'm at it...
5. Scenery here
I know dandelions are a weed and I fully support my husband chasing them off our lawn, one inhospitable spray of Killex at a time. However, their run of city parks make them an inevitable photo subject...
