storied recipes & other tricks

Having fun with my camera phone! Learned another new trick today...

Pictures can show you things you might not see in the normal way--a trick of focusing--of seeing things as they really are and not the way people want them to be--looking for things the eye doesn't see...ghost-lights, the truth...
Joanne Harris, Lollipop Shoes

Upstairs the slider is open, wind is blowing, sky overcast, the air smells like a New England beach! How? Why? Wind from the Gulf? Pacific? Seas so far away. Tricks of the senses. Ghost of the ocean that covered this land millions of years ago? The foal and its mother are back in our field (pictures will be forthcoming as soon as I can get out there). Small pleasures (like baby) are returning to my stretched-thin life.

nice work if you can get it
Attended an editing meeting at friend Bonnie's home. She is an award-winning (Gourmand International) writer and chef (How to Cook a Crocodile) and whenever we gather for a meeting at her place, she calls it a "tea" and bakes something extraordinary. Today it was an apricot brioche! FYI the result of our meetings will be a book called Storied Recipes. Not an ordinary cookbook by any stretch of the imagination - a bedside read, a kitchen reference. It will be published in October and there will be a launch party and feast one night during the weekend of the Taos Wool Festival. So if you're in the area, you are invited. More info to come.

I love being in the kitchen of a real cook and master baker. In my next life I want to go to culinary school in France and become a pastry chef. Create artistic masterpieces with sugar and eggs and vanilla. Read about chocolate (ala Joanne Harris's entertaining novels and French cookbook), take pictures...