A motley expression

Author: Kristina van dykes

Ladislas Segy, an expert on modern and African art writes in his book African sculpture, that for a background of it, one needs to explore a dozen different branches of science - the history of African kingdoms, archeology, ethnology, anthropology, the study of mythology, folklore, linguistics, ethno- psychology, psychoanalysis.

The objects with their simplicity and unity are well described as for their source and purpose. The fact that contributions are not from a single author goes to show the wide range of expertise required to understand African art.

Kuba cups and Divination pestle from Luba with pictures of real people and their coiffures showing the inspiration point, show how the art derives from their way of life.

When objects serve as authority or status symbol, the rituals involved are explained.

Shoulder masks. Multi- Figure altar. Caryatid stool. Serpent sculpture. Aesthetically these were totally new to me.

Staff from Kongo is a story in wood.


June 27, 2010


5/5

How food moved from hearth to the restaurant

Author: Adam Gopnik

If you look at the contents, there's many emails to Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Initially I thought she might be an expert whose views are welcomed by the author in to his book like a field reporter back to the TV station or the call to the expert on 'who wants to be a millionaire'. This aspect of the book comes into life progressively. Even with the passivity of a relation between an admirer and his dead literary idol, the dissonance of an irredeemable past and the author's reaction to it pulses the one way communication with human pathos.

The author writes about the history of the restaurant not from when it was a restaurant but how preexisting cafe culture had to be merged into it to thrive. He also breaks myths about WW and restaurant timeline.

All appetites have their illusions, which are part of their pleasure. The author feels that the cookbooks stoke a fire in the readers that they know is not a wave that is success-ably ridable.

Is the mystery of good cooking - talent or a secret ingredient and is the chef willing to share it? Being in the critic business, he makes us see the ambiguity of taste and the writing we use to describe food and wine.
 His entry pass takes him to may places where he learns of the latest in modern cuisine. A NZ study about food miles and energy involved is counter-intuitive. What El Bulli is closing?

When you are cooking, do you find yourself capable of anything else? I find myself going back to the recipe to see if I missed anything.

Like species of plants and animals that go extinct, spices like Silphium too face a similar fate.

I hadnt read of Adam Gopnik except for a line of his quoted in How to cook like a man. This book links us to another food author Lisa Abend.

Out of 'The Great Gatsby' what does a daisy mean?

The myths associated with different flowers and their meanings are the crux of this book. The author writes how the flowers get their meaning by their behavior like the Camellia standing for 'an everlasting union between lovers' as its calyx falls with the petals unlike in other flowers where it stays even after the flower dies or by the games played with the flowers. To make the flowers hold so much charm in them, like the gifts given to Perseus, takes us into a magical world. Imagine every Irish girl of a time always remembering to put clover in her shoes before walking down the aisle.
I didnt like a perfume used by an old lady at the apartment office. I think it was Gardenias. But when I get there I might like it too for its help in treating 'menopausal symptoms of insomnia, depression and headaches'.
Thus reading when I came across Carnation, I couldnt wait for its story and significance. Its like waiting for your Zodiac sign. We had them in our house for our baby's cradle ceremony and befittingly they stand for maternal love.
If next time someone attempts to get you to kiss unwillingly  under a Mistletoe, dont forget to look for the berries.
Up until now I thought only Sunflower did the solar blooming. Its a surprise that many others like Heliotrope, Daisy follow the sun.

St Chad of Mercia

From the tagine land

Today I had chicken Fantasia for lunch. It had tomao sauce around brown rice and chicken all over. Mourad says that when Moroccan food is served in big platters, that is how it is. Sauce all around, vegetables at the center and meat underneath. You work into the center finishing the sauce. The author gets us acquainted with how you eat a plate and serve a guest. The spices used in Moroccan spices are used in many other cuisines, so its not the spices, the author says but how they are used that make a dish Moroccan.

Couscous can be made with hands and at home. Warqa

 Bored with the classics, he came up with zaalouk a different way of cooking eggplants than the Baba ghanoush that we are familiar with. The author is not afraid of stirring up things by trying out different ways, but in the end he goes by what his restaurant patrons like.

The author provides us with alternative ways of retaining the essence by urging us to buy Air Chilled Chicken. Meat lovers will find ways of communicating with butcher, if you follow his suggestions of how to order meat. I hadn't heard of lamb chops until I came to the US and the author explains why it might be so. Next time if you are near a hamaam, check if they have tangias cooking away somewhere.

Icecream with fig leaves?

Basteeya at Aziza.

Presentation: Rolling round thick cheese slices in colorful spices on the side. 

The strange land of babies

Author: Anne Enright

The author goes to literature (Kafka's cockroach man) and painting (Rouault) in her freakish moments of trying to absorb the motherhood quirks.

Pelvis as chalice.

Waiting for the water to break she feels like a Burco boiler  with the tap left open.

The author when slipping into sleeps describes it as 'I have untied my little boat and gone floating downstream'. How relaxing is that. All those days when sleep is hard to arrive, we might be stuck in the dock with many other boats around. This morning during the shower, I imagined myself being in a green forest at that moment.

Kidney dish

The author questions the part played by evolution in the beauty adaptation. His inspiration for the book - a commonality in the song of two different species encourages us to keep scrutinising things that interest us.
The shape of a shell. Even when I imagine it, it seems so luscious.
According to him abstract act opens up art and the possibility of its occurrence in things around us even more like how removing the strict rules of form on poetry unshackles it.

Origins of classic foods

Author: Ann_treistman (also author of 73 Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep. Wow everyone has their 2 cents about how to help a baby sleep.) The link has a slideshow for other foods like sundae, mayo (this is what I like best on MacD's)
This is the kind of question one is likely to ask of deviled eggs. What with the egg white solidifying to form nice little saucers of their whipped up yellows. McDonalds fries start from frozen fries for quality control.
For a long time I had Froffles until at a hotel I used a machine to make waffles. Have you used  pancake machines? The elevator button pressing kids have fun punching in a big number to see the assembly line in action. As much fun it is watching a machine do something for a first time, its fun to watch a person make pretzels. While industrialization has made chicken popular, pretzel making machines and bagel making machines 
put stores selling hand crafted goods out of business.
Popcorn and cotton candy machines at fair. With cotton candy, it is funny to know that they were once made by hand, a laborious process.
With chicken fried steak, a cook mistook the order and made it.
Thomas Jefferson has had an influence on American food thinking of mixing hot with cold (baked Alaska), made waffles popular by bringing a machine from France. So did WWII participants bringing with them all the foods hey liked.
Cereals and their intended audience.
If Key lime pie is so easy to make, why havent I made it yet. Besides anything that involves condensed milk can never go wrong.
When I read of Puda as Indian, I asked my husband if he knew about as I never heard of it. He said its an abbreviation Punjab urban development authority like Huda (Hyderabad ...) (All those boards next to big digs) but now it has merged into HMDA. M is for Metropolitan. Back to edible Puda, from the ingredients, it just seems another name for chile.

Comparing meatloaf in essence to Kofta gives me a new angle to look at the meatloaf recipes with and see if they can work for Koftas.
Imagine the times when sugar was scarce.

cake decoration: More than art

Ever wonder how a tiered cake is made. Its supported with dowels. The piping styles of shell, flower and their repetition on the page reminds me of the time I was learning different type of stitches on a piece of cloth. Its amazing to see how with just the basic shells and some creativity how different effects can be brought about.  Interestingly embroidery styles are also used for decorating cakes. Laces you have seen. Eyelets, have you? Smocking??

Making rose buds, translating a 2D projection into a raised 3D calls for more skills than texturing a painting.

Marzipan shaping into fruits is sculpture and painting at work.

The take your breath away skill is 'bridge and extension work and hailspotting'.

Dont change your mind

After the stove is on. Today I burnt the seasoning for susheela. Reason: My plan was to make poha. While I took out the packet of poha, I realized it was thin poha which is better served fried. So y the time I put that back in the packet and took the puffed rice and soaked it, the seasoning in a hurry got burnt.
Mise en place atleast at a macro level.

Dinner follows menu

Yesterday when I was looking for cilantro, I realized there was spinach in the fridge. Today afternoon, I was all up for making the best of weekend, to make rotis. That spinach image from yesterday subconsciously got married with roti and I said
"We are having palak paratha for dinner".
I have never had it before. Getting a general idea from the recipe, I sauteed the spinach. It finally ended up with so much water, that I didn't have to add any extra. In fact, I kept adding dough to get it to a thicker consistency. While rolling out the parathas, I was amazed at how thin they would roll out and match the pan size. It reminded me of all the gimmicks we used as kids to make soft rotis. Hot water, oil. Like true North Indian style, we had them with thick curds.
The spinach worked into the dough consistently. It was funny in the beginning, a mush feel when my hands encountered soft spinach during the dough preparation.
I am reminded of onion paratha, I used to have 10 years ago (bought from a home kitchen) when I had no kitchen and stayed as a paying guest. Bread and Kissan jam were the go tos.

Never in a Chef's jacket

Author: Alyssa Shelasky

The author of ‘Apron Anxiety’ is a writer. The way she lands writing assignments is interesting. She is one of those people who seem to be in the right place to find people and things to write about. Almost till half into the book, the author paints a stark picture of her self as an absolute food illiterate, happy making the same kind of sandwiches months together. Her boyfriends turn out to be ‘more imaginative eater’ than her. With one such love a ‘Pioneer Woman’ story where the author relocates for love not to the boondocks but a city nowhere vibrant like New York. She puts herself into the kingdom of food, which is what exactly her fiancé is tied to more than to her. Her foray into the cooking scene with her blog fame involves a brush with ‘foodie mafia’. She finds herself content as a homecook with an apron. In the day of foodie mania where the food world is wowed with foams she sticks to simple delicious food.

Her culinary journey starts with a desire to feed her loved one. As her kitchen confidence increases, so does her audience. Friends and neighbours and so do the emotional ties with them. She is no longer a kitchen-phobe when she cooks for the chefs who work at her fiance’s restaurant. She is open to positive criticism about her cooking. While sharing the stories of her life, she also shares the recipes that let her celebrate or tough out life - a down day with a pizza made from store bought dough (not a purist) to a Rainy Day Rigatoni. She’s an optimist always appreciating how good the place smells after she has cooked something, like that itself was the end result of the kitchen labor.

Once she realizes the power of food, she starts wielding it. The author finds joy in conceptualizing and creating menus. That’s a long way from a person with just a ‘like’ for food to a someone who executes meals with desired colors in mind.

Her realization that ‘everyone hurts and everyone is hungry’ is a credo that makes her want to cook for others to brighten up some lives.

The writing flows smoothly like a batter without any lumps. The author managed to meld the people, food and recipes without overdoing any of them.

Athletic Ali G

Author: Mark Titus

A general storyline of sports memoirs - a person shows athletic promise, a coach/mentor recognizes the talent and motivates the athlete.
This memoir has none of it. Still the author was part of a team that played in NCAA and NIT basketball games. That's not all of it. The author wrote a successful blog `Club Trillion' and had thousands of fans cheering him wearing his log logo T-shirts towards the end of his 4-year stint at OSU as a bench warmer.
When I picked this book, I even needed help understanding the title, visually I thought he meant more like `don't write me off'. Basketball lingo -Layup, walkon is new to me.

Mark Titus describes in slow detail when he is about to take a shot in the last 15 seconds and plays mind games with the readers about how he did the shot and its outcome.
If the book is not a detailed account of turning points of the games he played during his OSU walk-on time, how moments of glory have been stolen from him, it is 'prank time' where he does not mind pulling one on anyone - coaches, teammates.
From this book, you will take home a different side of athlete unlike the industrious, practicing kind. The author descries how he fit in with the team and how he didn't. Whenever he bemoans a great loss to the team, something wrong has happened to him.

The author notes on his blog that the book is meant for 18-35 age males. Not being a part of that demographic didn't hurt the book but the writing style is not what I usually read. For all the inspiration that the sports athletes are, I now wonder about the writing style of them each.

His story of how he started the `Club Trillion' is interesting. Once he begins explaining the rules of the club membership like a pro, he knows he has arrived. His book romanticises the `truant style' of life (even if just in sports), that will work out for one in a million. Still he has a following, not just from fellow bench warmers, but from people from all walks of life - mechanics.

Similar to college dropout successes and lottery winners, his is a too good to be true story(even if for a little while), but not reproducible. But like them he amassed great funds for charity.

Very interesting read

The content i.e details of Bernini's sculpture is very interesting to know.

The author makes us look at the sculptures in an expert way by mentioning things like - one sculpture having an inaccurate centre of gravity. The concept of one medium used to look like the other being immoral was new to me.

And just one sentence that I needed to know, about how Bernini viewed his work -' he considered most of his works far inferior to the Beauty that he knew and conceived in his mind'. Bernini's work and his interest in it seems like 'progressive improvement'. So It was interesting to know that he was inspired in a way that didnt stop at one work or with the greater beauty that he saw, he never seems to have been at loss for inspiration.

My favourite is Cornaro Chapel.


Oct 5, 2006, 5/5

Excellent novel

Author: Khaled Hosseini

'The Kite Runner' by Khalid Hosseini is a great novel with exactly all the story and style, all perfect.


If you write like Hosseini, you will never have to think twice before giving your works for anyone to review.


In his official site, Hosseini calls 'Amir', the protagonist. But while reading the book, you would like to call it the story of Amir or that of the Kite Runner or Amir's father and of all the characters in the book. Rarely do you come across a book where each character has been so well etched.


There's so much to say and wonder about his writing style. He introduces you to the world of his characters by use of certain phrases and next time you come across them , since they are no longer new to you , you comfortably get under the skin of his characters.


'Rich' is the word that springs up to your mind when you see lots of words at work describing scenes. This surely is not the kind of description readers have been fed years on, the one which you need to read over again to see whats been told. Writing dialogues comes so natural to him.


In short, Hosseini has learnt the art of using words to work for him in a very infectious way each adding cumulatively to the effect of the next and the previous.


Sep 3, 2005, 5/5

Untroubled

Author: Ana Castillo

Just a little background of New Mexico's history and you will be ready to understand why the connection of the people to the land is different from those of other Native Indians. 'So far from God' shows how having moved away from the land of their ancestors, people fail to connect to it in the same way as their predecessors.
Although it deals with serious issues, it does not fail to make you laugh out loud when weird things happen to Sofi's children and she's still one piece. And all this when you thought you were beginning to feel pity for Sofi beset with troubles for children.

Aug 4, 2007, 5/5

read for a class.