Favorites 12.3.13
Pistachio butter: It's a nut butter. For me that's enough to at least spoon it onto a corner of investigatory toast. But should I also mention that it's delicately sweet and the most peculiar hue of harlequin green?
Wood stoves: Unlike other forms of heat (forced air, electric, et cetera), the fireplace delivers a nice even-keeled warmth. The flickering light and crackling embers are just a bonus mild sedative for anyone within reach.
Portuguese wine: I'm no wine connoisseur. Nor do jetset to the Iberian peninsula often. But a friend gave me a nothing-special bottle that she'd procured in Lisbon, and when I took a sip it tasted like … like the dew that collects at dawn or something.
Impromptu road trips: Yes, yes, there are times when you want a definite plan detailing things like what you're gonna do and where you're gonna stay. But sometimes it's good to just get in the car and go somewhere else. Walk the glittery nighttime streets of a different city, eat pizza from a joint you've never been, encounter old friends who stash you away on an air mattress in their spare room. Maybe the next day you'd sleep in impossibly late, eat an impossibly huge breakfast, and walk into the impossibly wild wind coming off the water along Alki Beach—the bay filled with whitecaps and freighters before you, the skyscrapers spreading out beyond that like rows of teeth.
From The Top
I like this poem by Jane Hirshfield because A) cooking (as well as weeding the garden and repainting your bedroom) totally is redemptive; because B) "da capo" is a cute Italian phrase for "from the top" — like in music; and because C) as I've said before, there's always hope—for me and for you.
Da Capo
Take the used-up heart like a pebble and throw it far out.
Soon there is nothing left. Soon the last ripple exhausts itself in the weeds.
Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery. Glaze them in oil before adding the lentils, water, and herbs.
Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt. Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat. You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Blackfish
Of a Sunday morning, I sat down to watch Blackfish. Have you seen it? Crikey!!!
Centered on a performing killer whale called Tilikum (who's killed a couple people over the course of his captivity), the documentary's actually a tough look at greed and the innate, really unavoidable cruelty of the captive-animal industry.
Let's set aside the discussion about how keenly intelligent whales have long been known to be—how they navigate complex emotional landscapes and live by tight-knit social structures that we burn to the ground every time we snatch one into captivity.
Instead, let's reflect on nobility.
Let's talk about the ink-black underbelly of the corporate race for dollars, how SEA WORLD LIES, as most (all?) corporations do—like a motherfucker, in fact—even when human lives are at stake.
Let's explore the reason that a captive-animal industry even exists—because we're curious, us humans. We want more than just to glimpse a dark fin cutting through silver ocean waters—we want talk to and touch the behemoth creatures; we want to KNOW them.
And finally, let's start a new story with ourselves and our kids and shit—something about treating everything with respect. I mean, let's find some goddamn grace or whatever. Ok, I'm done.
High Temple Of Chocolate
The next best thing to the coffee already being brewed when you crawl out of bed in the morning (which NEVER happens) is when you come home from what could be described as the longest day evah and there's a tidy brown package sitting on your doorstep from mom and dad, and inside this tidy package are a couple treasures wrapped gently in newspaper along with a note that says "from our trip to Sicily"—and these treasures turn out to be CHOCOLATE. Yeah, the dark evening sings when you get to bite into a thick bar made in the old style with cocoa beans so freshly ground you can feel the grains sliding over your teeth. Cut with butter and sugar, spiced with the deep mysteries of a foreign land. It nearly saves your life, this type of thing.
Sicily is, your google machine will tell you, the "high temple of archetypal chocolate." I am simply lucky enough to be bound by blood to someone who has journeyed there.