coping by cooking

chilled coconut cucumber soup with dungeness crab

when i can't deal with existential uncertainty, i frequently take down my big bamboo chopping block and my messermeister chef's knife and start chopping.  i'm in love with vegetables, and prepping them floods me with a sense of well-being.

putting together a meal satisfies my need for something finite and contained when my head is going to the far ranging places i've tried to forbid it from wandering to.  when the mind is out of control, i can choose my pan, my high, low, or medium heat, my sliced, diced or minced onion, and so on.

grilled marinated mushrooms & zucchinni, deborah madison's pita bread

i've already (over)shared that the past couple of months have been dark and difficult.  my cooking has slowed down a bit. it's been that bad.  but i have managed to keep at least a couple of nice meals a week coming to the table.

sockeye salmon grilled with pernod & sage leaves

to reduce the stress during a hard period, i added rotisserie chicken night, inspired by my little brother who encouraged me to eat a rotisserie chicken with delicious rice, with my fingers, phillipines style,  once a week.  he told me it was the most comforting meal possible, and he might be right.  being my mother's daughter, i had to add a salad, or on the really bad nights, a sliced cucumber with lime and salt, inspired by my sister katie.

i was looking through old photos and found these shots of a dinner party i prepared with my friend alice in seattle one summer, using a beautiful book she gave me called good fish by becky selengut.  all recipes use sustainably sourced fish.  the salmon and grilled mushrooms are things we always eat with alice and jim in seattle.  the grilled mushrooms are the best food on the planet, and it doesn't matter how many i make, they're gone instantly.

i'm starting to feel my culinary energy returning.  what is everyone cooking these days?  does cooking help you cope?  if not cooking, then what?

ExistentialLIST

1.  Started the day at The Secret City.  The theme of "Ancestors."  Katherine Gleason presented her work on Alexander McQueen; Susan Birnson had everyone taste her canned cherries and apricots (lemongrass, etc--turns canning on its head); we saw Toshinori Hamada present traditional Japanese dance; we listed to Andru Bemis and his banjo, and The Secret City Singers sang Sweet Honey in the Rock.  

2.  Went from there to the dramatic conclusion of the marathon Moby Dick reading.

3.  Headed to the New Museum for the vintage Bowery artists exhibit and Rosemary Trokel exhibit.  Have you heard of her?  I hadn't.  And I have a hard time finding a good link to her online.   There was also a tattoo artist tattooing humans in the New Museum's window.  

4.  The conclusion of our year-long GITP blog experiment looms.  I'm still not sure what all these posts have added up to, if the daily blog practice has helped me in any way.   Still feel in so many tight places.  I still haven't accomplished many of the goals I set on 12/31/11 with Lara.  In fact, I feel like I've barely made a dent.  

fall in zion

mo's face tells the real story

today is our second and final day at zion.  things haven't gone quite as smoothly as one might hope (hint: zofran was the hero of the day yesterday.) i sometimes think i've learned not to have unrealistic expectations, then realize, no, i still need to lower them quite a bit.

lula wisely decided to stay ahead of our group & to pretend she didn't know us.

you would think after twenty plus years of motherhood and teaching, i would know not to get my heart set on a specific outcome

but no!

it's really hard to divest oneself of hopes, and to do that thing i've been trying to learn for so long, that is to live in the moment, to acknowledge, as john cage says, "what authentically is."

no tights in the park, but rock climbing chic.

enough of the meta-vacation.

i'm here right now, watching sponge bob with moses and waiting for everyone to wake up, hoping to get my kids to do the emerald pools hike today (hint: yesterday we did a completely flat river walk, one mile, and it took two hours.  two slow, tear-filled hours.)  i really want to see the artist-in-resident cottage today (is this where messaien wrote les canyon aux etoiles?) and at least one other thing.  is that too much to ask?

one thing i love about southern utah is all the ccc projects.  so inspiring.  and so much fantastic stone masonry.

in history's declivity.

and then, of course, it's really hard to find any words to describe the sandstone cliffs of zion.  i think music might be a better way to try to reflect the experience of standing in such a dramatic history of geology, time, earth.