Falling

From the garden

These days

I am heavy with gratitude. I will waste no days while I am alive, except those days which wasting makes me feel more alive, in the sun like the plants with the friends whom I love, glorious idle after work is done.
Ah to move! to rest. I sing to myself in the garden, among the vines.

Heavens

Snowin'

If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?

May I always be blessed with the monotony, the dull sameness of identical days, my indistinguishable todays and yesterdays, so that I may enjoy with an open heart the fly that distracts me, drifting up randomly past my eyes, the gust of laughter that wafts volubly up from the street somewhere down below, the sense of vast freedom when the office closes for the night, and the infinite rest of my days off.
Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself being anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn't be able to.


Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

I Believe

I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake
in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,
the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,
used tires, taverns, saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,
abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,
gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls
who haven't quite gone totally wild, river eddies,
leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil,
turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages lost in the woods,
the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands
of birds I've talked to all of my life, the dogs
that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow
me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose,
the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see
from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling
to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.


Jim Harrison - I Believe

Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine

The aims of New Nordic Cuisine are:

1. To express the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics we wish to associate with our region. 
2. To reflect the changing of the seasons in the meals we make.
3. To base our cooking on ingredients and produce whose characteristics are particularly excellent in our climates, landscapes and waters.
4. To combine the demand for good taste with modern knowledge of health and well-being.
5. To promote Nordic products and the variety of Nordic producers – and to spread the word about their underlying cultures.
6. To promote animal welfare and a sound production process in our seas, on our farmland and in the wild.
7. To develop potentially new applications of traditional Nordic food products.
8. To combine the best in Nordic cookery and culinary traditions with impulses from abroad.
9. To combine local self-sufficiency with regional sharing of high-quality products.
10. To join forces with consumer representatives, other cooking craftsmen, agriculture, the fishing, food , retail and wholesale industries, researchers, teachers, politicians and authorities on this project for the benefit and advantage of everyone in the Nordic countries.

- Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine, 2004 (Meyer n.d. a)

Nordic Food Lab

Heat

--> The heat descends. There’s something almost unnatural about it, freakish, atomic, condensed. Summer here’s a short season, but the orchards and vineyards grow lush fast nonetheless soaking up the last bit of spring rain before the hot light stays long in the valley. Cherries ripen – I spent part of yesterday head in a laden tree, sketchily propped up on an old plank fence pulling the sun-warmed glowing coral and carmine fruit from far branches with fingertips, my arms sticky with juice and sunshine. The heat shimmers aromatic on the ground and I roll a cherry around on my tongue before squishing the warm sweet and sour pulp against the roof of my mouth. The lake shines blue and silver below me; the sun bakes my skin brown as dirt. I blink into the bright, and time sears along in a flash.

Silver Sea

Very soon the open sea which they were leaving was only a thin rim of blue on the western horizon. Whiteness, shot with faintest colour of gold, spread round them on every side, except just astern where their passage had thrust the lilies apart and left an open lane of water that shone like dark green glass. To look at, this last sea was very like the Arctic; and if their eyes had not by now grown strong as eagles', the sun on all that whiteness - especially at early morning when the sun was hugest - would have been unbearable. And every evening the same whiteness made the daylight last longer. There seemed no end to the lilies. Day after day from all those miles and leagues of flowers there rose a smell which Lucy found very hard to describe; sweet - yes, but not at all sleepy or overpowering, a fresh, wild, lonely smell that seemed to get into your brain and make you feel that you could go up mountains at a run or wrestle with an elephant. She and Caspian said to one another, "I feel that I can't stand much more of this, yet I don't want it to stop."

C.S. Lewis - 'The Very End of the World', Voyage of The Dawn Treader, 1952

Creekside

Naissance de Venus

Alexandre Cabanel - Naissance de Venus (The Birth of Venus), 1863

Birch

A sous chef's gift from a Russian deli inspired Jordan Kahn to lay out this luscious woodland landscape worthy of Turgenev. A frozen birch-sap granite is served with a base of soft mugwort mousse, sweetened with red-currant syrup, accompanied by shards of dried pine meringue and a side of frozen milk skin, and blanketed in dried hyssop leaves, wild fennel, and red coriander.

NYMag

frosty morning

Piper and I planning a shoot - more at Pontouf

great Saturday

Sunshine, ocean, drinks, and oysters with amandakaterina, her Mr., and Ms. Wallace!

landlock

hazy summer, driving, gravel road, dust, green grass, high clouds, blue, window open, warm air
look left, big green hill, blowing grass
sailboats littered, upended, tattered, hundreds, white on green, bellies up, masts toppled, spilt up and down steep green, unruly sails gape, far from blue water
drive and dust and warm
white on green dots recede, spontaneous prairie artifacts
road, haze
blue green
warm air gravel crunch
sun-eyed blink
dry boats behind
drive and dust and warm

JOSEPH ADDISON:

Reading the Iliad is like traveling through a Country uninhabited, where the Fancy is entertained with a thousand Savage Prospects of Vast Desarts, wide uncultivated Marshes, huge Forests, mis-shapen Rocks and Precipices. On the contrary, the Aeneid is like a well ordered garden -

ariel

lord's day on the prairie

bathternoon in rain city

16 & Pregnant