Coconut chocolate brownies
These brownies have coconut milk in them, which makes them soft and almost pudding-like. They also have flaked coconut and chocolate chips, which makes them delicious! They’re not terribly sweet, and I used very very dark cocoa, which almost has a savory flavor to it, according to my taster. You could use regular cocoa, though, and they’d still be tasty.
Here’s the Beastie Boys with Root Down (Pp balloon mix)
Almond cake with ginger and bittersweet chocolate chips
My boys go through phases with food – they’ll love something for a while and eat it every day, and then one day, they just don’t want it any more. It takes me a while to catch onto these mood swings, so I often find myself buying something they used to like, and then having to figure out some other way to use it up when they reject it. One such item is vanilla yogurt. Malcolm used to eat it by the tub, so I’d buy a big carton of it, and he’d scarf his way through it in no time. Lately he hasn’t wanted it. So I decided to use it in a cake. Yogurt makes cakes nice and dense, and I combined it, in this instance, with almonds. I whirled the almonds and yogurt together in the blender until they were perfectly smooth and creamy. This cake also has candied ginger, chocolate chips, and a few spoonfuls of marmalade, so it’s a lovely cake, simple, but complexly flavored. Comforting yet piquant. If you don’t have vanilla yogurt, you can use plain, but you might want to add an extra smidge of vanilla flavoring, and be generous when you measure the sugar.
Here’s Done by the Forces of Nature by the Jungle Brothers
Galette Bretonne
Galette bretonne
Here’s Space Boy Dream, by Belle and Sebastian, which is a nice expression of a flight of fancy.
Blueberry meyer lemon cake
This is a simple cake. A cake you can have with a cup of coffee in the morning, a cup of tea in the afternoon, or a glass of wine after dinner. We always have something like this around the house! Some little sweet thing in the cupboard. It’s easy to make, and nice to eat. Meyer lemon zest, when baked, has a lovely piney flavor. Combined with the sweet tart citrussy kick of the juice, a few spoonfuls of marmalade, and a handful of fresh blueberries, this was a pleasantly juicy cake, with an unusual flavor.
Here’s Billie Holiday with Too Marvelous for Words.
Salt-sprinkled pastry cake
salted top cake
Here’s Darn That Dream by Billie Holiday, which I used in one of my first short films.
Spinach mozzarella cake
Here’s The Meters with Mardi Gras Mambo.
It feels so good to get your appetite back after you’ve been sick. I love that moment of realization that what I’m experiencing is hunger and not nausea. I like to be hungry – it makes me feel healthy and alive. I know that it’s a privilege to feel this way. Not to feel hunger, of course, which is fairly universal, and is decidedly horrible if you don’t have food for yourself or your family. I know it’s a luxury to enjoy hunger, to know that you have a meal coming – that you have all the food you need and more – and to know that you’ll relish it more for being hungry for it. It strikes me that we complicate hunger these days – we eat when we’re not hungry, we eat more than we want, we have appetite suppressants, for god’s sake! What an insane idea! What an indication that we have too much, that we’d need to simulate sickness to try to make ourselves more healthy. This is one of those times that I look at my boys, and they seem to have it all figured out. They have good appetites, it seems as though they’re always hungry. So they eat what sounds good to them, until they’re full, and then they stop. It’s so simple! It makes so much sense! And it has so little relation to the way most adults eat. It’s harder to earn our food these days. We sit all day at desks or computers, we snack constantly, we don’t “build an appetite.” I love the idea of a healthy appetite – not just for food, but for learning, and living, for ideas and enjoyment and music and art. I like the idea of voraciously reading or writing or drawing or cooking – it seems all connected in our spirit, and when one fades, they all fade. Just as you can be sick in your belly, you can be sick in your soul or your heart or whatever you call the part of you that makes you feel creative and curious and alive. And you can spoil these appetites, too, with too much snacking on all the noise from the computer and the television and the tabloids, so you lose that keen edge of hunger. I’ve read that all animals instinctively know what kind of food they need. If they have some sort of deficiency in protein or a nutrient, they’ll seek out foods rich in those things. Humans must have that, too, under layer upon layer of ideas about what we think is healthy or we’re told we should or shouldn’t eat, under all of the nonsense that passes for knowledge. And we must have this instinct, too, about what we need to feed our minds to make them healthy and alive, so that they can work and grow. Of course, sometimes it’s nice to cuddle on the couch with your ten-year-old son, eating junk food and watching dopey historical dramas! Sometimes that’s what you’re hungry for, and that makes it good for you, too.
I’m better, but I still feel a little blurry in my head today, so I hope you’ll forgive all the nonsense I’ve been prattling! There are some clear ideas under there somewhere. When I first regained my appetite, I wanted soft, mild comforting foods. I wanted mashed potatoes and popovers, and I wanted them all at once! So I combined them. David said that these are the food equivalent of a warm snuggly blanket. They’re flavorful with rosemary and black pepper, they’re soft with mashed potatoes and eggs and cheese, they’re nourishing, and they’re delicious! We ate them with carrot parsnip and apple soup, and it was a lovely meal! They do pop up, but, obviously, not as high as regular popovers, and they deflate pretty quickly. But they still taste lovely!
Here’s Bob Marley with Them Belly Full.
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I was ridiculously excited this week to learn that a person can log into the OED online using … a library card number! I’m so tickled to think of my library card being as useful and valuable as a credit card – the key to uncovering unknown riches!! I think it’s awesome! (Full of awe, profoundly reverential. He did gie an awesome glance up at the auld castle.) I’m a logophile! I love words, I always have. The sound of them, their weight and flavor in your mouth, their shifting meanings. I’m a vague, blurry sort of person, and I’m more than comfortable with the instability and ambiguity of meaning – I’m delighted by it! I’m not clever enough myself to play with words, but I have endless admiration for those who do. My idea of a good time is to discover the hidden meanings behind language, and to see how much fun the author is having as they set you their riddles. Nabokov’s subject matter is often disturbing and depressing (to me) but his playfulness with language (with three languages!) is thrilling. “Haze, Dolores…What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil (“Dolores”) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask? Is “Mask” the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling…” Or fellow polyglot Tom Stoppard who bemoans the complexity and insubstantiality of language with loving relish…”Rosencrantz: What are you playing at? Guildenstern: Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” And of course Stoppard is playing with the words of the writer most seemingly in love with words, one William Shakespeare. ““Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?/ Hamlet: Words, words, words./ Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?/ Hamlet: Between who?/ Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.” I wish we gave words more weight and thought today, and didn’t devalue them as we sometimes do. Well, I wish that I did, anyway, to speak for myself!
I have to admit, though, that sometimes I find words overwhelming. I was going through some boxes in the attic the other day, and I found decades worth of notebooks and journals from every stage in my life. What a lunatic I am! Scribbles and notes and nonsense and sketches. Screenplays I filmed, screenplays I will never film. Stories I started, fell in love with, fell out of love with and never finished. Ideas for stories, random thoughts I penned while not trying to think of ideas for stories, usually in increasingly frantic and illegible handwriting. Little asides directed at whoever was sitting next to me as I wrote. Words words words!! No method, all madness! And why do I keep them? Why do I keep this dusty spider web of ink? I don’t know!! I should start a giant bonfire, and set the words free, to float into the air around us. If you’re a scribbler, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about! And it’s not just my nonsense that overwhelms me, it’s other people’s words, too. In a bookstore or library, the sight of all of these collections of words, so carefully crafted and combined, so ardently arranged, now sitting quietly on some shelf or another, bursting at the bindings with stifled words. It wears me out to think about it! But it’s beautiful, too, these worlds of words, so easily misunderstood, so accidentally powerful, so tricky, so musical, so full of life. Words words words.
toffee ice cream
And that’s more than my fair share of words for the day! Here’s Word Play by A Tribe Called Quest.
In which Claire, who speaks no French, bakes her way through the cake section of a French cookbook from 1962.The other day we talked about Jean Renoir’s use of windows, and the way he creates scenes with an intimate yet public space, theatrical yet moving (in two senses of the word). I mentioned the film Boudu Saved from Drowning, which stars the remarkable Michel Simon. Well, as it happens, I’d never seen the whole movie all the way through – just a few scenes in film class. But it’s available on DVD, now, so we watched it last week!! It was so good! Thought-provoking, and beautifully acted and filmed. Full of wildness and grace and beautiful space. And the special features! O! The special features!! In recent American movies they’ll have a “making of” featurette, or a few interviews with the actors, and it’s always the same thing. “It was such an honor to work with [fill in name of major star}. She’s so…in the moment…she never does the same thing twice…it’s thrilling just to watch her work.” And then there will be a segment on the costumes, “It was just an honor to dress [fill in name of major star]. I mean she’s not even human! She’s like a mannequin. Just like a mannequin come to life. It’s just thrilling to watch her work in her clothes.” And then there’s a little segment about how much fun they had on the set. “The hi-jinks!! The practical jokes we played. What a good time we had making millions of dollars! Don’t you just wish you could be me! Don’t you want to get my face tatooed on your face?” But on Boudu Saved from Drowning, the special features are wonderful! There’s an interview with Michel Simon and Jean Renoir. It’s black and white, from 1967. They’re sitting in a cafe. Renoir is drinking a glass of wine, and Simon seems to be eating berries from a small, stemmed glass bowl. It’s so beautiful. Okay, maybe they are talking about how nice it was to work together, but I believe them! Their memories are so gentle and affectionate. (Maybe I do want to get Michel Simon’s face tatooed on my face!) And then there’s an interview with a filmmaker who has lots of fascinating things to say about the film, which makes you want to watch it all over again but pay attention this time!! And my favorite part is an interview with Eric Rohmer, the filmmaker, and Jean Douchet, the critic. This one is in black and white, too. The men are sitting side-by-side in a theater, facing the camera. They both seem nervous, they don’t know where to look. They fidget and cast sidelong glances at one another. Douchet has wild hair and a world-weary air, and he seems to have a cigarette glued to his fingers that he rarely smokes. Rohmer is delicate, with a slight beard and a shy, earnest air. And they hold forth on the film. They have so many ideas about the film, so many observations on the way it sounded and looked. They discuss sweeping themes and they remember each small, intimate gesture of the actors. They find significance in a bag of groceries hung in a window, in the summer heat, in salt spilled on a tablecloth. It’s beautiful to watch the way that they form grand, mythical theories about the film, and then shape their experience of the film to fit this mythology. They’re trying to seem cool and blasé, of course, this being the 60s, but they’re jumping and beaming with love for the film, so pleased with themselves for having discovered it as it unfolded before them, full of gifts that Renoir has hidden for them to discover. Wasn’t he clever to have made a simple film that’s about so much? Weren’t they clever to figure it out as they watched? This is the way to watch a film! This is a way to go through life! Noticing everything, maybe even things that aren’t there! Joyfully forming grand theories, talking about them with a friend, and building on them as the days go along. At one point they’re discussing sound in the film, and Rohmer says, with a shy glance at Douchet “…and we hear all the sounds of nature – the singing of the birds and such, which is wonderfully rich and well-worth analyzing.” This kills me!! Is he talking broadly about Renoir’s use of sound? Or is he talking about the singing of the birds – each bird with its own song, full of meaning that we can discover and share?
Gateau alcasien
Here’s Edith Pilaf singing La Lulie Jolie
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hot cocoa cake
Cocoa cake – bird’s eye view
Here’s Bob Dylan’s rambling, charming Highlands. I love this exchange…
Well, it must be a holiday, there’s nobody around
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face, with long white shiny legs
I said, “Tell me what I want,” she say, “You probably want hard boiled eggs.”
I say, “That’s right, bring me some.”
She says, “We ain’t got any, you picked the wrong time to come.”
Then she says, “I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me.”
I said, “I would if I could but I don’t do sketches from memory.”
I love Time out of Mind! As a bonus track you get Standing in the Doorway, cause I can’t stop listening to it.
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Out of the Ordinary 