More Pictures Worth a 1,000 Calories

I'm obviously cleaning up my hard drive, but here's some more...

My chocolate chunk cookies and Oreo cheesecake are big faves with friends.

I made this with the leftovers for the little ones I made for a party. I have to post because for some reason this is the only plating of mine I like from photos.

We were invited to dinner at a friends who loves Mexican so I made mini-carnitas & roasted red pepper canapes. I made my own mini flour tortillas and they were gone within minutes.

My grandmother's recipe for gigot d'agneau farci a la provencal (leg of lamb stuffed with abricots and homemade sage sausage trussed with fresh sage and then roasted while being periodically basted with lavender honey.

I have a recipe for this somewhere on this blog, but this is my tonkatsu kare don (breaded pork served with curry & rice) with completely from scratch Japanese kare.

1 hour fougasse, not nearly as good as the other version I posted a recipe for, but will do in a pinch. I don't cut it the traditional way when I make this version but only because I don't consider this traditional.

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Problems with Blogger

I've been having some problems with Blogger since I fiddled with my CSS - so a lot of my posts are randomly appearing and disappearing. As soon as I have the patience to look at all the code (and see what tiny little thing I probably forgot to close or add which is going to make me rip my hair out), please pardon the mess.

I'm especially sorry to my subscribers because this has to be super annoying for you, but I'll try to get to it. A few people emailed me about posts they wanted to re-read but couldn't find, so I'll see what is going on with those and email you individually with working links this evening and then tackle the code tomorrow.

Thanks for your patience!

Enjoy this cute yet slightly inappropriate video.

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More Pictures Worth a 1,000 Calories

I recently baked up my Facebook photos and found lots of photos that I use to torture my friends stomachs so that they come round (or from far and distant places) so I can cook for them.

I've been trying to get better at photographing food, but I'm not sure I've really made an improvement. Tackling the aesthetic side of food is something I plan to explore this summer from plating to photographing to setting a gorgeous table. If you have any recommendations, they're greatly appreciated.

I posted these two dishes - the first is a oven roasted thick pork chop rubbed with fennel and cumin in a roasted fennel and apple puree and the second is a pork chop cooked osso bucco style for a challenge I gave myself to cook cheaper cuts of meats.

 This looks like a pumpkin pie, but what it really is a poitron pie.  Poitron is something I grew up eating a lot of being from the south of France from roasted to soups cooked with cream & bacon right inside the vegetable itself, but since pumpkin is harder to find in France (well you can find them in the markets sometimes in the fall), I decided to see if this pumpkin like but sweeter squash could be made into a pumpkin pie. It really can, and it may be slightly even better. You need to roast the poitron and then mash it, which is no more or less time consuming than preparing your own fresh pumpkin for a pie. My only problem with these poitron as pumpkin experiments is that on this particular pie my crust was a bit too thin and got a bit scorched since the poitron as a pumpkin replacement needs more time in the oven.

Poires amandines chocolat. This was the perfect dessert for our Révillion meal in Amsterdam this New Year's after the decadence that was my grandmother's recipe for goose stuffed with foie gras & Agen prunes, bacon wrapped asparagus, and my mascarpone & chive whipped potatoes. Very easy to make too and went really well with the Oban whiskey I thought it'd be a bit of fun to serve it with.

Lots of pictures of Korean food, with the last being a dumpling soup called mandu guk with some mushrooms added.

My famous fried chicken. While I've given lots of tips on making fried chicken I don't know if I've ever given anyone my main go-to fried chicken recipe what my friends call "Ama's Kickin' Chicken". I think every cook has that one thing they excel at and for some reason mine happens to be anything to do with meat, especially if it's breaded and then deep-fried. If you're up on the food trends in the states then you know KFC now means Korean Fried Chicken and well, there's a reason so try some if you can!

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Neil Gaiman & American Gods

If you don't know by now I'm a huge fan of author Neil Gaiman (and I love his wife Amanda Palmer too). I've read all of Gaiman's Sandman, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Stardust, and Anasi Boys. Recently a friend of mine who borrowed my copy of The Graveyard Book passed me a copy of American Gods.

I have the UK edition published by Headline Review (ISBN 978-0-7472-6374-6), which starts with an introduction on this version of the book, which is different from the previously published version.

"...My editor was concerned that the book was slightly too big and too meandering (she didn't mind it being too odd), and she wanted me to trim it, and I did..."

Gaiman goes on to say the instincts of his editor were spot on because the book won a lot of prestigious awards (Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and the Bram Stoker award).  So short story long (?) when Headline wanted to reissue Gaiman's novels he had a whole book that he wanted people to read.  This edition of American Gods is 12,000 words longer than the one that won the awards, and it's the version of which Gaiman is "the most proud".

Here is the blurb from the book for those of you who haven't read it:

IS NOTHING SACRED?

Days before his release from prison, Shadow's wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash.  Numbly, he makes his way back home.  On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.

Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break....


Now I'm going to be slightly mean here, but please don't hold it against me. As I stated previously I am a huge fan of Gaiman's work, just not this one.  I so wanted to like it, but I couldn't read it.  First I couldn't read it without thinking it was a very poor imitation of a Haruki Murakami novel (let's be honest as great as Gaiman is he is no Murakami) and then I simply couldn't read it at all.

Every writer ends up writing a book which is a vanity project. I think American Gods is Gaiman's vanity project book, something he wrote more for himself than anything else, and as the reader you either like it or you don't.

Also I hated the name Mr Wednesday. Maybe this is nitpicking but to me Wednesday as a name should only ever refer to Wednesday Addams (of the Addams Family). To say he was Mr Wednesday but not Thursday is a Chesterton reference someone of Gaiman's stature should not have made. Anyone who reads Gaiman has to be aware that he at one point or another read a fair amount of GK Chesterton and really liked it. Why he felt the need is beyond me, but it detracts from my being able to immerse myself in the story.

And with an "odd book" (Gaiman's words, not mine), one thing that is absolutely essential is that the reader lose themselves in the writing.  Nothing should feel out of place or unusual unless that is the writer's intention. Especially with some of the fantasy/magical surrealism sort of things Gaiman is trying to pull off in American Gods. The quotes, which are disappointingly from real people who wrote real books as opposed to Borges quotes from imaginary people and imaginary books, don't do anything for the story.

I suppose I will try to read it again sometime because I remain shocked by my dislike of it, but for now I'm going to move on to something else. Gaiman has a new book coming out soonish (The Ocean at the End of the Lane) and I've managed to beg myself an advanced reading copy from a friend at HarperCollins, so hopefully it will be better and I'll be able to get the bad taste out of my mouth, but sadly for this blog I've promised not to review it until it's released (I think in June?).

But fingers crossed. Considering the last book of Gaiman's I read was The Graveyard Book and how much I loved that, well, maybe my hopes and my faith in Gaiman's consistency of output were unrealistic.

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World Book Night

I would have posted these for World Book Day, but I didn't have much spare time today, so thankfully there's also World Book Night. Unfortunately I still don't have teleportation capabilities, but I can use technology to offer everyone who visits my blog a book!

I'm not sure about rights, etc, as these are PDFs that have been hunted down over a long period of time, so if I've made a boo-boo by putting a book up please let me know and I'll take it down ASAP.

Beware as they're all quite geeky, but definitely interesting!

Vertebrate Paleontology (3rd Edition)

Elementary Number Theory (William Stein)

Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines 

Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

Xenology

Enjoy and spread the love [of books and other love of course]!

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Illustrator Francois Place

This is how I discovered the work of Francois Place...

One day about three years ago I was trying to find a place I'd never been before in one of the most infuriating quartiers of Paris - Montmartre.  After having gone up and down a few of the steep staircases Montmartre is famous for, I decided to have a cigarette break to calm my nerves and there on the windowsill of where I stopped to fish out my smokes was a book called "Du pays de Jade à l'Île Quinookta".  Since it was early morning and the garbage bins (called bacs) had not been taken, I thought someone had bothered to fish this book out of the bins, but had left it there.  Maybe I was wrong and I actually stole someone's book, in which case I'm very sorry, but actually not really because this trash was a treasure.

If one visits the bookshops and comic book shops of Paris, you will see a lot of illustration similar to Place's style and I am not well-versed enough to say that Place came first or second or third, or whatever the particular details might be.  His Wikipedia page (in French) is rather sparse, and his Amazon page simply lists the books he's worked on, but if ever one day I should be lucky enough to be able to have my own works illustrated, I would definitely put him on top of a very short list.

They say pictures are worth a thousand words, so I'll cut this post short, and maybe you'll see why I fell so in love with a book that was saved from a rubbish bin and then saved from a window sill to be part of my library and a source of inspiration.

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How to Write Good

Found this on the Villanova website (university in America) and had to share.


How to Write Good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

2. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

3. Employ the vernacular.

4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

6. Remember to never split an infinitive.

7. Contractions aren't necessary.

8. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

9. One should never generalize.

10. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

11. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

12. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

13. Be more or less specific.

14. Understatement is always best.

15. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

16. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

17. The passive voice is to be avoided.

18. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

19. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

20. Who needs rhetorical questions?

21. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

22. Don't never use a double negation.

23. capitalize every sentence and remember always end it with point

24. Do not put statements in the negative form.

25. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.

26. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.

27. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

28. A writer must not shift your point of view.

29. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)

30. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!

31. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to the irantecedents.

32. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

33. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

34. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

35. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

36. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.

37. Always pick on the correct idiom.

38. The adverb always follows the verb.

39. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; They're old hat; seek viable alternatives.

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Marwencol lies beyond Belgium, outside art

Last night as we started watching Marwencol, the documentary about Mark Hogancamp and his doll village whose name is a portmanteau of Mark, Wendy, and Colleen, Mr Z turned to me and said, "This is what Mark Chapman did before he shot John Lennon, but his dolls turned their backs on him." (I couldn't find anything about this online, but I'll track it down.)

I scanned other reviews of Marwencol for mentions of what struck me particularly hard about this documentary.  The reviews talk about Marwencol being "affecting" and a story of "loss" and "coping" through art.  I don't disagree with that, but there was little mention (maybe I'm being generous to the filmmaker here) of what I found to be particularly shocking.  It wasn't just that Mark Hogancamp was play acting the events that led to his losing 38 years of his memories, the entire contents of a life, but how his fantasy world was taking over.  The real world, the one he had no choice but to live in, was slipping further and further away.

Mark shows what he did to the VCR that ate one of his best porn tapes.

Colleen is addressed as Mark's first love.  We see how much care and attention he pays to what he calls Colleen's doll, her alter-ego has just had her hair done.  Colleen herself points out Mark's attention to detail.  The sparkles in the doll's top coordinate with the sparkles in the doll's pants.  Her husband warns her to be careful in light of Mark's obsession of her.  A little while later, as Mark tells Colleen how their dolls are engaged and how the wedding plans have been made, she reminds him that they are just dolls.  His reaction is to have another one of Marwencol's residents, Deja Thoris, the Belgian witch of Marwencol poof Colleen's doll out of existence.

Deja Thoris, the Belgian witch of Marwencol

Later it is revealed that Mark returned from his nine day coma and consequent 40 day hospital stay to find a closet full of ladies shoes and boots.  He asks his roommate who they belong to.  "They're yours," his roommate Tim tells him.  Tim has his own doll in Marwencol, a well-deserved one since he helped Mark after his hospital stay when the hospital threw him out and there was no more access to therapy treatments to help him reacquire all that he had lost in the senseless attack.

Nothing is said about the shoes until much later, when Mark is told he admitted to his attackers that he was a cross dresser.  You start to understand Hogancamp better now.  You see he was a victim of a hate crime, and the rules of his make believe town starts to make sense.  "Everybody has to get along," Hogancamp says.

Captain Hogie, Hogancamp's alter-ego marries a Russian soldier named Anna after Anna proves her love for him by rescuing him from the hands of the S.S., the dolls that represent Mark's real-life attackers.  It is a bloody fight, and it is not the last documented during the film.  As Mark is propelled to artist status, his pictures are shown in a magazine and a gallery show is arranged in New York City, where Mark feels free to don a pair of high heels and seamed stockings in public.  Before leaving for the big city, back in Marwencol Anna and the other dolls help Captain Hogie put on a pair of stockings.  Here Hogancamp finds the acceptance he did not find in his real life. 

Anna and two other girls storm the church in Marwencol where Captain Hogie is being held by the S.S.

Before the attack Hogancamp's drunken journals are full of impressive sketches, a gift that is ripped cruelly from him when his skull is caved in.  He does not remember the taste of alcohol or the need to consume it.  The snapshots of Marwencol are beautiful.  It is obvious that Hogancamp has an artist's eye, and while he can longer "draw anything he wanted", he has taken thousands of pictures. 

I feel drawn to him when I see him snap away with his Pentax K1000 with its broken light meter.  I had one myself when I was a teenager, the light meter was also broken, but I never had Hogancamp's style or ability or patience.  I watch him use tweezers to tighten a knot for a tiny scarf.  His dexterity is amazing, but his clumsiness in the rest of his life is hard to watch.

He wants to be loved.  He wants to find his real life Anna, someone to play in Marwencol with him. Someone who will accept him as he is and he knows he is more broken than any of his well-tended dolls.

The opening shot of the documentary called to mind the work of Henry Darger, and the world inhabited by his Vivian girls, but whereas Darger's work is inhabited by young naked girls collaged from newspapers he gathered from the trash and magazines (which have led to some claiming Darger might have been a pedophile), Hogancamp's world is inhabited by women.  He loves women.  He loves their shoes and makes them the heroines of his fantasy world, but he accepts that he will probably never find his Anna.

The editor of the magazine that first published Mark's work talks about setting up a disability trust for him, but beyond the mention that Mark was cut off from public assistance for his therapy, not a word is said about finding more help for him.  Hogancamp has already been stolen in bits and pieces, his fantasy world invaded by forces just as deadly as the S.S. by those who will not respect the rules of Marwencol.  At the gallery showing there are negative comments and the typical art world bullshit - best depicted by two New Yorkers who stand behind Hogancamp and snigger as he speaks on camera about how he wishes he'd worn heels to his opening because he feels safer in them.

When the gallery show is over Mark returns to Marwencol.  He is wearing wide legged capri pant jeans with stockings, his feet shoved into black mules studded with rivets.  Captain Hogie is posed until Anna is in his arms, and they kiss.

Mr Z calls Hogancamp's story a tragedy and despite what the reviews say, I agree if only because despite what Mark has found for himself, he knows too well what he's lost.

If you'd like to see more of Marwencol, or to donate or purchase Hogancamp's work, you can do so through the official website or Tumblr.

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Switching Off, Blog Anniversaries, & Snowstorms

To celebrate the four year anniversary of my blog, I decided to celebrate by undoing the hoo-doo that I did to my laptop so I couldn't connect to the Internet for an entire month.

I shouldn't be so dramatic.  I didn't completely deprive myself of the Internet for 30 days.  I shut it off on my laptop and used Mr Z's laptop when he was at work on Tuesdays,Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I also had access to the Internet on my phone, which I used when Mr Z was around and I needed Internet access.

This experiment resulted in some interesting findings:

1. If Twitter were crystal I'd have meth mouth to rival Amy Winehouse (too soon?).
2. While it is possible to read Wikipedia pages on a Samsung GII, your eyes will not thank you for it.
3. I primarily use the Internet to look up recipe ideas, tweet, play Settlers of Catan online, and leave sassy comments on Gawker.
4.If I could have found a way to play Settlers of Catan on my phone this whole reconnect to the Internet thing wouldn't have happened and I pretty much plan to disable my Internet for at least 4 scheduled hours a day because I got so much done in a month.
5. I don't need to be online as much as I thought I did.

That being said, I was sort of surprised when I looked at my blog stats and saw how long I've been at this. I don't blog with regularity and I've always sort of wished I had that discipline, but to see the stats has given me a sort of push.

Here are some my stats:

First post - Shutter Speed - A short story about overhearing things from the courtyard outside my Paris apartment while doing laundry that's full of typos posted on March 1, 2008.

My most popular posts of all time include subjects such as Bob Marley, my obsession with my Samsung GII, Karen Blixen, Lee Miller, Man Ray, monsters, the Droste Effect, a Lost Generation, and Surrealists.

Most of my readers are from the US followed by my readers in the UK, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands (hoi!), Spain, and Poland.

Now stats are a nice way to feed one's slightly malnourished ego, but it's also a sign that maybe I should step it up a little.  Especially if my writing is going at a nice clip at the moment.  I had an idea to start a blog that would contribute to my aspirations to be a writer. I'm sort of working out how I'd like to do that now, but I definitely plan on doing something.

Aside from having been paid to blog (which is much easier than coming up with things to blog on your own let me tell you unless you already know cause in that case I will shut up about it now), I'm kind of not a natural blogger. It sort of reminds me that after having read Anais Nin's diaries that I remembered I had all these diaries from when I was little until I was in my 20s. I was super excited.  I went to the trouble of driving ten hours to dig them out of storage to see what treasures there would be in these notebooks and diaries and sketch pads. Most were less than 1/2 full. I had to accept I was never going to be some prolific diarist one day.

I really tried to keep this blog interesting and worked on a premise of "quality over quantity", but it's hard to blog when your life gets boring.  That's why there's so many posts about cooking because my life has to get pretty fucking boring before I decide to eat sandwiches for more than two days in a row.

I've been peeking at blogs and Tumblrs of other successful authors, Neil Gaiman being what I consider one of the greatest in the bunch. JK Rowling's is adorable and full of nifty code and great graphics. Yet none of them appeal to me entirely.

I want to make it completely by myself meaning code, graphics, and all - and although I'll be quite handy at the code bits the graphics bits will be a real challenge. I suppose we shall see. I have lots of sketches and things about I could scan.

So do please keep a look out for the announcement that my new website is up and running. It shall be forthcoming. Ever presently and such.

Silliness aside though thanks for reading. It's gotten me to a point where I found the courage to put myself out there a little more.

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His name should be Terry Dreary...

I am a big fan of libraries.  I grew up with one because I was lucky.  My father was a bibliophile who was fluent in 25 languages and his library was my favorite place in the entire world.  What made me unlucky was that I was a bibliophage from the very moment I could read, often reading a book a day, and while my father had about 15,000 books by the time I was reading, only a small portion of those were in a language I could actually read.  Reading was pretty much all I had.  My parents were both in the diplomatic service and we moved at least once a year if not every couple of months.  We were often in places where getting books in French (or worse, Korean) wasn't possible.  I brought along books with me, most of which I'd already read a few times, and I was always begging my father to buy me more.

For at least two months out of the year we returned to France as a family.  We usually started with a June trip to Paris and then would take the train down to Marseille to meet my grandparents who would then drive us to their house near Saint-Remy, which was sadly fairly bookless.

My grandmother ran a bed and breakfast for most of my life and sometimes the guests would leave books behind, but the books left behind were not interesting to me.  I often read them anyways if I could, but I wanted to read good books, great books.  So my grandmother brought me to the library in another town not too far away because the closest town didn't have one.

Madame Martin, the librarian is someone I will always remember fondly.  She was like my father when it came to books.  She never told me not to read anything, even when I decided I wanted to read Flaubert because my father loved Flaubert even though I would say she probably shouldn't have let me read Madame Bovary at such a tender age, but I suppose it didn't matter because I didn't get the more racy stuff.  I just thought Emma was boring and mean, but reading Flaubert? When my father saw I was reading it he spoke to me about Flaubert as if he were a magician and not a writer of books, and when he told me about Flaubert's obsession with le mot juste (the perfect word), it became mine too.  I took up the task of learning 5 words a day because I thought in order to find the perfect word one must know all the words to pick the right one.

The other great thing about Madame Martin was that she listened to me.  Not like most adults listen to children, but really listened to me as I tried a combination of puppy dog eyes and charm to talk her into letting me take out two more books than I was allowed.  She believed me when I said that I would read each and every one of them in the two weeks before I needed to return them.  And I did.

When I came back to the library she asked me the usual questions and I told her which ones I liked and which ones I didn't and then she put 7 more books on her desk and checked them out for me.  One of the books in that particular pile was C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe".  I loved it.  I couldn't believe when two weeks later, after I confessed to having read it three times by staying up late at night and reading in my closet with the light on, she told me there were six more books in the series and if I liked C.S. Lewis then there were many other authors she would introduce me to.  It was heaven.

After that summer my father started to take my love of reading more seriously.  He made a point to send me books when he was away and we wrote letters about the books he'd sent me to read and books I wanted to read and the books he loved and hated.  He made me lists of books I should try to find on my own and read one day.  For a little girl who spent most of her time alone (I didn't go to school) and away from her father, reading the books he sent was a way of being with him even when we were apart.

When I went off to the US to attend school properly I didn't speak English.  I spent a lot of time in the school library and when I could get permission in the library of the town my school was in because they had books in French.  It was in this library that I hid when the kids made fun of my English and my accent and just about every other thing they could, but it didn't matter because I had books and I'd show them!

I spent hours and hours pouring over grammar books and listening to cassette tapes and within a year I spoke English well enough that almost no one could tell it wasn't my native language.

When the kids stopped making fun of me and I had made friends I didn't abandon the library.  I had a plan actually.  I'd started my reading of the fiction section by pulling the first book on the shelf - Alcott's "Little Women" off the shelf and read it cover to cover and when I was done I went to the next book on the shelf and my plan was to read every book on every shelf from A - Z before I graduated.

But I wasn't in high school long.  I tested out of nearly every subject and was taking all my math and science classes at the nearby college who like many others, were recruiting me.  How does a girl who has never been to school one day in her life before the past two years test out of high school they asked my parents - who told them I was smart but when they asked me I had a much simpler answer.

One thing I left out about the wonderful Madame Martin whom I loved dearly and kept in touch with until she passed away when I was 25 was that those 7 books she would choose for me every two weeks weren't always books full of adventure and fun, but also books about math and science and history and interesting people who had fascinating lives and did amazing things.  And those books, they were my teachers, and now as I try to write a book of my own they continue to teach me.

There are a lot of things being said about why libraries shouldn't be closed and why they should.  If you have any doubt that libraries are not important, then I hope my story will, despite that I didn't grow up impoverished with no other access to books, show you their vital place in a world that considers itself "civilized" because it is for those who cannot afford books that libraries must remain open and free and the wonderful places they've been in the past for the sake of the future.

For me personally I look back on my odd childhood and wonder would I have done all the things I accomplished in my life without the books I read as a child, a teenager, and as an adult.  Would I have completed my double doctorate from MIT if it hadn't been for a woman in a small French town taking an interest in me?  An interest that even my book loving father didn't seem to understand?  Obviously reading The Chronicles of Narnia didn't exactly get me into MIT, but it did keep me from being a lonely little girl and gave me the desire to be great.  And while there are problems in life that books and libraries can't solve, I look at my own library, 2,000+ books strong and growing at every opportunity and all I hope is that anybody who wants to read a good book can because that's what libraries do.  They make books available to everyone. 

What Terry Deary said in this article in The Guardian is the kind of drivel I expect to read in The Mail. How any writer would want to deny books to anyone is beyond my comprehension.  That he doesn't seem to care how public libraries actually contribute to people buying books when they can afford them just goes to show how out of touch he really is and it's sadder still to me because he writes for children.  No, Terry Deary doesn't want to get his 6p for lending his books, for him that is not an investment in the future.  He wants the 30p he would get for selling his book in a bookshop, never you mind that being the 10th most borrowed author from libraries means that lots of people are reading his books many among them probably children since that is his genre.  No, no.  Let's screw the future for 24p.

I hope his greed and poor attitude come back to bite him in the ass.  I hope the librarians, who buy his books to make them available in their libraries are more reluctant to do so in the future.  I hope that he understands exactly who he has insulted - his readers past and present, librarians and those who help to keep the libraries running, and those who know what the true cost would be if the public library system disappeared forever.

Deary adds, "Books aren't public property, and writers aren't Enid Blyton, middle-class women indulging in a pleasant little hobby. They've got to make a living. Authors, booksellers and publishers need to eat. We don't expect to go to a food library to be fed."

 I just wanted to close this post with that so you can see what a fucking idiot he is because his attempt to sound clever is bumbled best in this particular quote though "car libraries" lending "Porsches" also illustrates his true motivations rather well, but the food libraries quote is slightly better at showing just how out of touch he really is because he's not bitching about Amazon (who fucks authors and publishers much more effectively than any library ever could) or how ebooks might be changing the model for book publishing and how that might be having some impact on the industry but rather calling to close libraries because he only makes 6,000 a year.  If he feels so strongly, why not just not let your books be sold to libraries?  Funny how that isn't mentioned, which means 6,000 a year must be better than nothing.

I'm sure the lovely librarians who in Deary's world would lose their jobs and their incomes can find another author who would happily accept 6,000 pounds a year to be the 10th most borrowed author in British libraries.  And I'm even more sure they could find an author more deserving too because I've read a few of his books.

Save libraries people.  As Neil Gaiman put it, "don't borrow from the future to pay for today".

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Samuji Makes Me Remember

If you know my blog well you know I used to work in fashion. I say work but what I mean is that I lived and breathed fashion. I blogged, I showed, I sewed, I knitted, and I had a fabulous life full of clothes and shoes and bags and the multitude of accessories most of which, in homage to Mr T I seemed to wear all at once.

It's been a few years since I left the world of fashion behind. Yves Saint Laurent died and some of my passion for fashion went with him. I suppose you could say I'm old school. I prefer substance over style and never really cared what the trends were because I wore what I loved and what I loved most was rare vintage.

I spend my days now in Doc Martens and practical, comfortable things.  I rarely wear makeup, haven't worn heels in ages, and my favourite handbag is from a tiny French brand that isn't popular, but really should be (I'll blog about them another time).  That's why when I was in Amsterdam with my friend Suvi, who works for the Finnish brand Samuji, I was surprised at how much I loved everything she wore (which was of course all Samuji as that's the perk of working for a brand).

There were adorable dresses, sweaters, and this gorgeous jacket in a shade of green I never really wore but loved when I saw this particular coat:

 

Suvi was nice enough to send it to me to wear for an upcoming day of escorting my friend Aki, a buyer for a very posh Japanese department store and some of her boutique owning friends around Paris. I am really into coats and jackets, but rarely see ones I like so this coat was a real treat.  I can't wait to come up with an outfit to put underneath it.

The fabric is just luxurious as the jacket is mainly wool and mohair.  You can't see it in this photo, but the coat has a number of great details.  The belt is extra long so you can tie a great bow and the coat is meant to be worn as if it's 2 sizes too big for you.  I'm fairly short (165cm) and unbloused the jacket comes about 2 inches above my ankle, but the line makes that not a problem and when I blouse it up just above the waist as it's intended to be worn, better seen in this photo, it looks great too.

It has a three button front and a collar that pops up nicely, roomy pockets (I hate coats without big pockets), and a really lovely mint green cloth lining with the sleeves lined in white satin.  The stitching is really fantastic as well.  It's a really well-made coat.

And I like that although the shape is slightly left of classic, the coat itself retains its sense of being a simple, classic coat that can be worn season after season.  I don't part with coats easily, as there are so few I tend to fall in love with (except really fabulous, luxe vintage fur coats I have a collection of those), but I can't wait to wear this and build outfits around it (I can't wear a coat over an outfit that doesn't suit the outfit especially my shoes) and it looks pretty great with my Doc Martens, so the possibilities of being comfy and stylish thanks to this great coat will be endless.

Though I do have a great pair of vintage mustard suede boots I might have to try with it as well!

Definitely check out Samuji, right now it's my favourite brand.

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Books Are My Version of Holiday Snapshots

I don't take a lot of pictures when I travel.  I don't know if it's because I'm very observant and detail-oriented that I try to take in everything and that I've got a vault for a memory, but I don't often take pictures because I keep them all in my head.

Instead I remember my days by the books I bought. The first day in Amsterdam coincided with the book sale on the Spui. I was so early that I had to wait around, but some good books were found.


Lafcadio Hearn "Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan"

Ernest Hemingway "A Farewell to Arms" Modern Library 1st Edition in immaculate condition with dust jacket and protective cover, plus no marks of any kind inside the book

Martin Gardner "The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938 - 1995"

"Lovers, Mates, and Strange Bedfellows: Old World Folktales" Arranged and Edited by James R. Foster

The last book is a sort of tongue-in-cheek collection of folktales that center around love, love, and more love that the book's preface calls "a precious part of our literary heritage" and that "no liberties" have been taken with the substance of the narratives.  The volume contains 40 folktales with titles such as "The Girl Who Was Half-Married", "The Perspiring Lover", and "Hacon Grizzlebeard".

Definitely an interesting addition to my lifelong obsession with building a collection of fairytales & folktales to rival the Opies.

I actually bought all three of the books from the same bookseller on the Spui that morning, but because I was so early, I passed three times before I had spent as much money as I wanted to on my first day of vacation.

Martin Gardner for those who aren't familiar was a fascinating person.  He wrote often about mathematics and science and had a wide array of interests and talents.  I learned of Gardner from his book "My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles" as a teenager, and was later amused to learn that the same math geek whose puzzles I so enjoyed had annotated Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", which somehow managed to debunk and add nonsense to the original book.

Some of the more amusingly titled essays to be found in this collection include: "Klingon and Other Artificial Languages", "Puzzles in Ulysees", and "The Significance of Nothing".  All the essays are worth reading and like I said Gardner is a great read, perhaps the closest that America ever came to having their own Borges (Henry Miller doesn't count).

For those familiar with Lafacdio Hearn's "Kwaidan" and how little there seems to be of his work in English nowadays, you'll understand why it's always "yes" to adding some more Hearn to the library.  Few foreigners ever lived abroad anywhere and produced such beautiful writing as a result.  I would put Hearn slightly above Pierre Loti and just below Karen Blixen, but she has long been one of my favourite writers (I discovered her at age 10).

And to prove I am both pretentious about my literature and superficial I bought Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" because it was a beautiful edition, but just between vous et moi I have never read anything by Hemingway from start to finish save "The Old Man and The Sea", which I loved, yet I can't go more than 4 pages into Hemingway without thinking of something else I'd rather be reading or doing.

Near the University of Amsterdam there is a passage.  If you walk through it to take a shortcut to the Oudezijds Achterburgwal when the booksellers aren't set up inside it's usually rather bleak, but that particular day I scored a free copy of G.K. Chesteron's "The Complete Father Brown".  On another visit, this time when the booksellers were set up almost lost the chance to bring home a copy of John Fante's "Full of Life".  It'd been put down for a moment, and there was another interested party, but I hovered and the moment he said no, I snatched it back.

So yes, don't mess with me when it comes to books.  I don't like to let them get away.  Book purchasing is not like sport fishing to me.  I have a whole ritual of search, purchase, and then a gloating period over good coffee.

Five books bought, and one found for free.  I thought there would be more but my favourite bookshop in Amsterdam wasn't open any of the times I passed by, so who knows what goodies I missed?

So since I've no real pictures from Amsterdam (though I have a sneaking suspicion some were taken), here are the books.

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The Patchwork Project Part I

My bedroom is a disaster. I have piles and piles of clothes I don't wear anymore and don't know what to do with because there is no more space in my closet. I'm sure many a girl, especially ones who like me do a lot of thrift shopping, understand what I mean exactly by disaster - don't you?

This didn't stop me however from doing a little inspiration hunting on eBay of course. I am looking for the perfect dress. I don't know what it is, but it's big and comfy and stylish and well, perfect. In my investigation I saw a patchwork dress.

In the 90s I like many of my peers dressed "grunge". I had multiple pairs of Doc Martens in an array of colours, lots of flannel shirts that I paired with distressed "air conditioned" jeans, and this one patchwork dress (it was from Express) that I adored.  It had a patch with a shade of green that matched my 8 hole DMs.  I wore it as often as I could until finally a few years later my boobs came in and the bodice was too tight.

I'm back to wearing DMs again. This is partly a fashion decision and partly because they're so damn comfy once you break them in.

TIP: Take them on vacation with you to Amsterdam and forget you put them on the terrace.  When it rains that night, as it probably will, put them on not realising they are wet and be forced to wear them anyways because for once you swore you were not going to bring 11 pairs of shoes when you will only end up wearing 1.  Then walk for hours in a city most people zip around on bicycles in.  They were broken in before dinner.

Seeing patchwork dresses made me want one, but search as I might I couldn't find the one I wanted.  The patchwork dress I bought at Express when my mother was stupid enough to give me her credit card to do my school shopping unaccompanied (we wore uniforms at my school). Problem is, if any ever made it to the year 2012 I can't seem to find it.

So I decided to make my own.  Old clothes = lots of patch fabric possibilities.  Plus I could stitch the patches directly on to an old dress I like the shape of, but for whatever reason don't wear anymore. I even went so far as to think if I couldn't find an old dress to stitch the patches on, I could make a patchwork ensemble. I almost like the idea better. I could do a blouse, jacket, and skirt. I love skirt suits.

Since it's 3 in the morning and I can't go digging through my bedroom, I wanted to get some inspiration. I drew a sketch for a dress and a sash and decided to scour the Internet to see what Patchwork Project 2012 should be inspired by.

I typed in patchwork runway and got lots of results to drool over.

Louise Goldin, Balenciaga, Missoni, Kenzo

 

Basso and Brooke

Chloe

Missoni

Dries van Noten

James Andrew

(I like the left dress better.  The right side dress is just boring.)

 Basso and Brooke

Junky Styling

Jenny Postle

Not sure who designed this dress, but I really like something about it's geometric-ness.

No mention of patchwork would be complete without mentioning a little about its history in fashion.  Patchwork has been around in "modern fashion since the 50's (The technique of making clothes and using a patchwork style has been around a lot longer.  Long enough to play a part in the traditional and national fashions of Austria, Germany, and a few other countries.) and primarily, like quilting, born of frugality. This was the era of the circle skirt and the poodle skirt, which were shortened loop skirts similar to the Southern Belle dresses worn in the Civil War era.  The amount of fabric needed to make a circle skirt could be expensive, so some crafty women bought up smaller scraps of fabrics and stitched them together.

Here's a beautiful example on sale via Etsy:

It doesn't have a petticoat underneath it to show the volume of the skirt, but the thick pleats hint at how much fabric was used to make this dress, though it looks as if the fabric design itself is patchwork.

Despite making an appearance in 60s fashion, patchwork really had it's heyday in the 70s.

And I'll end this post here.  Stayed tuned for The Patchwork Project Part II where I'll go through my clothes, sort them into ones I'll use, and be able to see my bedroom floor again.

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What Dreams May Come

Last weekend I had my neighbours over for breakfast and dinner. They've been flattering me since I sent over a plate of my chocolate chip cookies, made them some authentic fougasse, and asked them to sample my Thai-Mexican fried chicken.

To be complimented on my cooking by anyone is always a great treat for me, but to be complimented by French people makes me shy. I think it's because I am greatly inspired by American cuisine and naturally assume that French people won't appreciate it. I fry a lot. I use lots of flavour combinations not found in French cuisine. When I'm asked I refer to my cooking style as hodgepodge, a word that has no real translation in French but prompts me to attempt a poetic and delicious sounding explanation.

I didn't think anything about it when my neighbour started to ask me questions about what kind of a restaurant I'd want to open in Paris. What I would serve, when, how, and where. Then he told me he wanted to introduce me to his cousin who is looking to invest in a restaurant; how he's been talking about my cooking and thinks I'd be a brilliant choice to be its chef.

To be truthful I wish I'd answered his questions differently, but I didn't know it was a test of sorts. More than once I've leaned towards the idea that I should make my living involved with food - and in Brooklyn I did for four months. I ran a small take out place out of my loft. I had paid my rent for the year, had a little pocket money, and didn't really care about making a profit. I stuffed menus under the doors of my neighbours, many of whom had suggested I start a take out place after dinners at my place, and had so many orders the first week I had to put a badly hand painted "first come, first served" sign on my front door.

For one month my little takeout place (called Chez Ama) served something different every night until my customers started writing their requests on the menus. They wanted more fried chicken, chicken & sausage gumbo, lamb curry, and what they called my "fancy Chinese food" (which was just authentic Chinese food).

So before I meet with the cousin I need to get my thoughts in order.

If I could open my restaurant anywhere in Paris, anywhere at all, I'd want to have a lunch stall at the Marché des Enfants Rouges.

Located in the 3e arrondissement, between rue de Bretagne and rue Charlot, it's quite a happening spot. There's a few types of cuisine to choose from - couscous, Italian, Japanese, African - and lots of outdoor seating that means it's packed on nice days. The market closes before dinner, so lunch would be the only meal to serve, and because it's always packed the clientelle are more accepting of delays and hiccups.

It has its downsides as a location. The competition is delicious. My favourite Japanese restaurant would be one of them. I couldn't see the other restaurants being happy about a fusion cuisine restaurant when they're marketing themselves as authentic straightforward examples of the cuisines they offer. Plus the places in the market are expensive. The Japanese place offers a sort of bento lunch around 12,00 euros. It's not a lot of food for the money, but delicious and fresh and I don't mind shelling out for it now and then.

I could think of other locations where the lunch traffic would probably keep a restaurant in business even if the dinner crowd was much quieter, but dinner is more fun to cook.

And what would I cook? I think that depends on what I can find. I'd want to source locally. I wouldn't cook in season because the variety is limiting, but as locally as possible when possible. I'd offer two or three choices for entrees, plats, and desserts - with a few favourites always on the menu.

But the cooking would be home style. Nothing fancy or poofy or posh or chic just to jack the prices up. Just delicious food at reasonable prices using the full repetoire of my cooking abilities.

I'd serve American, French, Korean, Thai, Mexican, Indian, Lebanese, Filipino, Chinese, Moroccan, Italian, Japanese mixing up taste, ingredients, and cooking techniques. Food I'd serve at home to friends and with the same kind of feeling. Lots of mismatched dishes rescued from flea markets and sidewalk sales and thrift shops in a cosy room with large tables and comfortable chairs. I'd come out of the kitchen now and then, and wouldn't have to make excuses when the cooking drags me away like I do at home.

So if my blog strays from book talk to cook talk, it's because I'll be giving a lot of thought to the recipes I'd want to use. Maybe my dream will become reality. Maybe not. That's the beauty of food really. Even if taste testing everything means my bathroom scale might be groaning a bit more in the future.

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Japanese Kare (Curry)

I'm a huge fan of Japanese kare. It is a staple of Japanese fast food and can be made at home quickly thanks to the pre-packaged bricks you can find in most Asian supermarkets. Just fry up some onions then brown some beef, potato cubes, and carrots, cook some rice and you've got a meal in under 45 minutes. But the pre-packaged curry is full of MSG and things with chemical sounding names. I wanted to see if I could make it from scratch.

I found plenty of recipes online for making kare roux from scratch. The overwhelming consensus in the twenty or so recipes I peeked at was to melt butter into flour, add spices, and heat to thicken up - much like making gravy.

The recipe I used called for:

3 T butter
1/4 cup flour
2 T garam masala
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 T of ketchup (or tomato paste)
1 T of tonkatsu sauce (or Worcestershire sauce)
Lots of fresh ground black pepper

But even glancing at the recipe I saw it had flaws, the first being, how much salt? The pre-packaged curry mixes are notoriously salty, using MSG to achieve the right salty taste. Japanese kare is greatly inspired by Indian curry and those call for plenty of salt too.

Now I used tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce, but as I tasted the curry there was another flavour missing. It didn't have that slight sweetness. Now ketchup would have sugar, as well as tonkatsu sauce, and maybe that explains why the sweetness was off?

It was also missing a sort of creaminess. I thought that the original recipe calling for butter instead of oil would give the kare its usual creamy taste, but it didn't.

I went back and peeked at the recipes again to fill in the gaps of the recipe.

A common ingredient in the other recipes was just straightforward curry powder. Garam masala is used to finish spicing curries in Indian cuisine and is combination of ground cloves, cinnamon, black & white cumin seeds, black & white pepper, and black, brown, & green cardamon pods.  Curry powder contains spices not included in garam masala such as ground coriander, turmeric, mustard seed, and ground ginger.

Truthfully to my palate the recipe I used as is was inedible. So inedible that I almost considered chucking it all together and making something else for dinner instead of the kimchi tonkatsu curry don (bread pork filets smothered with spicy curry and served with rice and kimchi that is served in fast food joints and street food stalls in both Korea and Japan) I was looking forward to. In the end I decided to try and save it. Here's what I consider an improved upon recipe, that is even more flavourful than the packaged stuff, and better for you too.

3 T butter
1/4 c. flour
1 tsp curry powder

1. Dissolve the flour and curry powder in the butter over very low heat.  Once you have a "paste", add:

1/2 c finely minced onions
3 cloves finely minced garlic
1 inch of finely ground ginger
1 T sugar

2. Fry over low heat until fragrant and add:

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (or more or less depending on your tastes, but it should be spicy)

3. Slowly add 1 1/2 - 2 c. chicken stock, making sure to slowly dissolve the paste into the liquid. Stir constantly over med-low heat, until the curry thickens enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Stir in garam masala, 2 T of whole milk, and remove from heat.

4. Set aside uncovered, stir occasionally until curry cools completely.

5. Prepare whatever you will serve the curry with.

* If you want to make tonkatsu kare,  salt the pork filets and let sit in the fridge for an hour before dipping them in egg wash and coating them with a nice coating of panko (Japanese style breadcrumbs), and fry in sunflower oil until golden brown and cooked through. Let pork filet rest about 10 minutes.

Serve in a large bowl with a rounded scoop of rice (I pack rice into rice bowls and then overturn them into the serving bowl), cut breaded pork filets into strips, scoop the kare into the bowl around the rice, and garnish with pork strips (and kimchi).

** If you want Japanese beef kare, peel and halve an onion and cut into thin half moon slices. Saute the onions in 1 T of sunflower oil, add beef and brown, followed by potatoes and carrots. Add the kare to the meat and vegetables, and let simmer over low heat until potatoes and carrots are tender through. Serve with steamed rice and pickled radish.

Bon appetit or, rather,

잘 먹겠습니다 ! (jal meokkesseumnida)

どうぞめしあがれ ! (douzo meshiagare)

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