1. What have I been reading?
I recently finished Caste by Isabel Wilkinson and especially liked the beginning sentences of its epilogue. She writes:
We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow, as more than the dust that we are. Even the longest-lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life, or life's potential, when our lives are so short to begin with.
It's a continuation of a thought from a previous post. Wilkinson's thought parallel's Stella Levi's in Michael Frank's book about her life as a survivor of the Auschwitz titled One Hundred Saturdays. In it Michael narrates a question Stella was asked: "Many years later, a girl in Madrid asked Stella: 'After Auschwitz, do you believe in God?' and Stella answered, 'If you're asking me whether God was there, this is not a matter for God, but for man. It was not God, a god, who made this place, it was man." These two books have been an immersion in the ways in which we hurt each other and the ways we can help each other.
2. Drawing a Parallel between art and writing
Sandi Hester recently published a Youtube video titled "Painting from Family Photos." At the 14 minute mark, she shows how she makes a series of sketches based on a particular photo. She describes how, once she had a rough sketch down, she wanted to play more with the narrative, so she opened a larger sketchbook, took out her paint and drew the scene again "noticing what's fun" and "trying to be loose." The crochet blanket with its triangle pattern progressively crept up the bed and took it over by the third iteration. Cookies appeared on the night table, clothing changed. In a way, writing, even nonfiction, is not that different. Reworking the draft of a chapter, I can focus on what's fun, try to say things less stiffly, and dwell on a scene at greater length. It's the work that goes into any academic writing, where students have to "struggle with the details, wrestle with the facts, and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into language they can communicate to someone else" (How to Write a Paragraph quoting a report by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges). It takes work! Roger Ebert wrote that he would "haunt art supply stores, as if somehow one could purchase what one needed to be an artist" and I've often felt this way in bookstores, thinking maybe the right book would solve whatever inadequacy I felt at the moment. Which leads me to cookbooks...
3. What's Cooking?
Among the cookbooks I've borrowed from the library are Ottolenghi's two recent test kitchen ones and On the Himalayan Trail. What I appreciate most about them is how, by choosing to sample from their recipes, I get to think about food differently. Romy Gill who travelled to Kashmir writes, "Perhaps the most surprising difference between Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim cuisines, though, is the fact that Pandits will cook without onions or garlic: two of the staples of the majority of Indian regional cuisine" (p 12). By making "One-pan crispy spaghetti and chicken" and "Magical chicken and Parmesan soup with pappardelle" from Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love, I appreciate how flavour is built using (lots of) tomato paste, and how stock is slightly thickened by blending a few ladlefuls of the stock and the vegetables together.
Our family's palates and tastes and preferences are constantly shifting. Two years ago, I thought I might settle, once and for all, the question of a menu plan by setting one up for the whole year. The thing is, I'm not done learning, the kids haven't stopped growing and that restless desire for novelty awakens the moment you've closed the door on a routine you've coddled to sleep. The menu plan from two years ago no longer fits my children's new aversion for chicken, nor my new interest in less meat-dependent meals. C'est la vie! Now, although I do plan menus from week to week and have a wonderful repertoire of family favourites, my recipe binder contains lined loose leaf sheets of notes... the things we plan and what got done, alongside the new thing we tried and the comments that go with it. This week I made "Tuna and potato croquettes with egg remoulade" from Ottolenghi's Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things. It was a delicious introduction to remoulade, but only for the adults... the kids had cinnamon toast with peanut butter.
I think I wanted to add these thoughts to that menu planning post, triggered in part by Andrea Zittel's comments, captured in Mason Currey's book Daily Rituals: Women at Work. Zittel said "Having a pattern helps ensure that you fit everything into a limited amount of time, but too much of a pattern and you get stuck" (p 121). Although this is in reference to her daily routine in her life as an artist, it could apply to any routine, any plan... I think it's funny how she is also recorded as having said "Cooking is one of the few dilemmas that I'll probably never fully solve" (p 122). She is wiser than I am, for I am always trying to solve it! I think I should think of it as a hobby in order to avoid finding it like the young Françoise Sagan, who said: "The material problems of day-to-day living bore me silly. As soon as someone asks me what we should have for dinner I become flustered and then sink into gloom" (p 266). I prefer the older Gustave Flaubert's thought: "Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough" only, instead of "look" in this case, the verb "work" would be better.
4. A bit of history
Like the time I investigated the comptometer with my mother-in-law, a recent conversation in which we were discussing the local brewery Little Brown Jug, lead us to asking her if her relatives drank beer when she was little. Her answer revealed that St. Boniface had a local brewery we'd never learned about, called Kiewel's (see here). I like these occasional moments when past and present connect over a small concrete detail.
5. What it looks like here
Winnipeg was snowed-over anew thanks to a Colorado-low on Wednesday. Although I feel impatient for the carefree days of going out with only a light sweater on, there's a postcard-like charm to fresh snow.
