Never let it be said that the maxims learned from picture books don’t stick with you. There’s a Russian Jewish folktale that I am reminded of every winter around about the end of January/mid-February when the weather is unendingly vile and my parents are sending me unsympathetic emails about how they’ve taken a picnic and sat outside in the sunshine reading a book in the forecourt of a 15th C country chapel.
It could always be worse. Read the rest of this entry ?
Michael Pollan wrote a book a few years ago called Food Rules: An Eater’s Manuel. I’ll confess that I haven’t actually read it, mostly because the reviews I’ve read make me think that it’ll annoy me and I’m all about avoiding things that I know will irk me if they’re not essential to being a responsible adult. I mean reading the newspaper every day frequently makes me want to bang my head against the wall, but I still do it because see above about being a responsible adult. I can, however, avoid food manifestos without sacrificing a claim towards being a grown up. That being said, it’s fairly hard to read food blogs regularly without picking up on what some of the big rules are. Read the rest of this entry ?
The first decade of the 21st century is now officially over (anyone want to take bets on how long it is before VH1 does a Best of the Aughts series?). I feel like this should be more momentous than it actually seems to be, mind you I thought this about Y2K too and that passed by with more of a whimper than a bang. I thought about doing a roundup of how my eating habits have changed in the last decade, but honestly I can barely remember what I had for dinner last Friday much less what I was and wasn’t eating ten years ago. However, I think I can remember back as far as January 2010, so here are the things I discovered, things I’m cautiously optimistic about, and things which I tried and failed to develop an appreciation for in 2010. Read the rest of this entry ?
The third thing was totally snow. Not, I’ll point out, snow in Boston (because when Boston got 20” of snow, Logan airport was open again the next day). No, it was snow in London which was much much worse. Through an unfortunate confluence of bad luck (lots of snow in a short period of time), poor planning (not enough de-icer fluid) and incompetence (‘we were prepared for the snow on the runways, but were surprised at how it piled up around the planes’ – which, what? Did you think that snow was selective about where it fell?) Heathrow shut down for something like 5 days just before Christmas. This resulted in an unsurprising, if tedious, amount of chaos. Read the rest of this entry ?
Monday Night Dinner 