Be gone a week to the coast of North Carolina with my family and some of my siblings. Taking a stack of books, beach chairs, handwork, journals, and food. Lots of the last word! About to enter some timelessness with no computer but we will surely watch the Olympics!
Photos here from a coffee birthday for friend and another friend just back from 5 weeks in England. All to get you in the mood for the Summer Olympics!
I worked pulling weeds this morning and trimming the bushes and then it got hot! My vegetables are at a stand still. Maybe it is the heat. The herbs are doing very well. How's your garden?
What do you do when you encounter what's called "writer's block?" When
I do it's important to be reading—three or four different books at a
time, so those books begin to have a conversation with each other. Then I
begin to engage what that conversation is about, and words come out. If
I don't have words, it's a sign I'm not reading enough. I read mostly
nonfiction, classics, a lot of C.S. Lewis, contemporaries, John
Piper ... a lot of theology because I'm trying to figure out how to make
theology very practical, for the kitchen sink, for the moms with a lot
of young babies.
Great title of the cookbook that I just picked up at the library:
Tender: A cook and his vegetable patch by Nigel Slater
See his beautiful website of a cook who writes. I am taken in by the first paragraph and the layout and photos of where he lives in England:
I keep lists. Some copied into notebooks in neat italic script in
blue-black ink, others scribbled almost illegibly in soft pencil on the
back of an old envelope. Most remain in my head. There is the usual
inventory of things I need to do, of course, but also less urgent lists,
those of books to read or read again, music to find, plants to secure
for the garden, and letters to be written (few of which will ever see
the light of day). One list that has remained in my head is that of
favorite scents, the catalogue of smells I find particularly evocative
or uplifting. Snow (yes, I believe it has a smell), dim sum, old books,
cardamom, beeswax, moss, warm pancakes, a freshly snapped runner bean, a
roasting chicken, a fleeting whiff of white narcissi on a freezing
winters day.
Also picked up this book which makes me think of Melissa: Masala Farm, Recipes and Tales From an Uncommon Life in the Country by Suvir Saran with Raquel Pelzel and Charlie Burd Chronicle Books, September 2011
subtitle: IN which a city boy from India meets country farm in Upstate New York and has many culinary adventures
Emma is cooking from this cookbook tonight. I've a few favorites from it:
