Word Blur

The Great Kale-off of 2008

As a result of a Facebook status update, I got a lot of tips on how to cook kale (long story).  I actually feel pretty confident when it comes to kale, but there were some great ideas here, and since kale is everybody's new beloved, I share them with you:

J: I find that lightly steaming it works best, followed by a drizzle of olive oil and Bragg's Amino Acids.

S: Olive oil and garlic. You can add a little water, too, which helps to steam as the oil sears. Lemon afterward is a good add, too.

R: Blanch it... Or steam... Drain, and chop. In a bowl add tamari, sesame oil & crushed sesame seeds, small amount of rice vinegar and some finely chopped nori... Add the dressing sparingly to taste... Very nice aide plate if you take little palm-size mounds for each person...Also good if you add a little tahini to the dressing... Yum!

A: B.  taught me to steam or boil it and then serve over rice with goddess dressing- we use tomato tahini dressing too.

J: Crispy Kale. Roast it with olive oil. Kids love it. It gets kind of dry and crunchy in places. Hot oven (450), cookie sheet, just 15 minutes or so. Sprinkle with good sea salt after you take it out. 

Quiet

More twin study rehearsal footage, with Sigur Ros playing inaudibly in the background.  Shhh.

More Twin Study studies

More video from last week's rehearsal, showing where we're at in the part of the twin study that doesn't involve jumping.

Songs from a dark room

Some not great quality video from a rehearsal for Twin Study (working title):

DNA gone wild.  Personality test script.  Variation.  Sameness & difference.  Jumping.

Welcome to the working week

More micro-incremental choreography (serial dance?) from a working week I spent at a seminar on library assessment at NYU. Filmed in my dorm room, with ghosts of past, present, and future.

A perfect sentence

From the "How Not to Boil an Egg" chapter of How to Cook a Wolf:

"Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken."

The Wolf at the Door

I am officially in love with this woman, who I discovered via 30 Bucks a Week:

So, much so that I cooked a variation on this meal last night.  A few (I suppose luxurious) variations, based on the contents of my kitchen: I used chicken stock instead of water and fennel instead of peas.  This really made it taste like a homier version of one of my staples--pasta with braised onions and fennel.  This afternoon I recooked the leftovers casserole-style for lunch.

I added M.F.K. Fisher's salmon pancakes, from How to Cook a Wolf, which consist of tinned salmon with a couple of eggs and parsley.  My oldest daughter loved these--she ate a bunch of them.

I'm not sure that as cooked (or together!) these really were the most economical meals (and economical really matters for me this week), but I see the potential.  The pasta could have stood on its own and Fisher certainly would recommend serving the salmon pancakes with toast and a baked apple-it's all about toast and baked apples with her.

I'm a micro-food blogger

I love reading those blogs where people write about all the food they buy and all the food they eat.  I could read about the contents of someone else's stomach all day, but I'm not really up to the task of writing about food in that way here.  At the same time I'm trying really hard to cook from my farm share and on a pretty tight budget and I like the idea and sharing some of the minutiae of how I manage that, so I've been using twitter as a tool to track what comes in the farm share and what I eat.  I think I might be driving my twitter followers crazy; they keep gently taking the piss out of me--sweetly even.  Note the new sidebar with updates streaming in like crazy from my twitter feed.  And check out this list of food bloggers using twitter.

Unison (a work-in-progress)

This is a video I made for an installation last fall at the University of Vermont and as a way of starting a conversation with Bill Simmon, who shot this and accompanying footage. I edited it; Bill would have done so very differently (hint: better). In fact he has. It's a record of sorts, of a few different iterations of a group improvisational form executed in the waters of Lake Champlain. The performers have a set of minimal, gestural movements that they can execute in any order or relationship. Ultimately, they are trying to get to unison. Miraculously, they usually succeed. How?

How to Cook a Wolf

From the introduction to the revised (1951) edition:

"There can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts."

It's amazing to read this book, where you hear the arguments of Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, and Alice Waters pre-dated by sixty years. Basically, she's saying: cook real food & eat it, even if times are tight. Especially if times are tight.