Food, Hilarious Food

A wise and clever foodie once assured me she starts learning any new language with food and kitchen words. I love food, I enjoy advertising, and I love humor in translation, especially when I can't tell if it's intentional!

"Angry Korean Fried Chicken ... So, So Angry" in Berlin, Germany

"Kakastöke Pörkött ... Rooster Testicle Stew" in Budapest, Hungary

"Holy Monkey! ... Tea & Dumplings" in Stockholm, Sweden

"Lovely Toffee Muffin ... Lovely Strawberry Muffin" in Östersund, Sweden

"Daffy's Junkfood House" in Östersund, Sweden

"Godstransporter" Restaurant pager at Daffy's in Östersund -- OK, I know it translates to "freight,"
and that's perfectly reasonable for one of those vibratey alert pucks they give you at restaurants,
but wouldn't it be better if it was a kind of divine Trek-transporter device? Yes, it would.

Wasa: We're Doing It Wrong!

My friends, I've made a discovery. I have realized the errors of my ways and am humbled before Foodstuffs. It was an honest mistake, though possibly shameful that I have persisted in it for 3 decades. I was misguided, or perhaps unguided.. Left to my own devices in pantries and grocery coop aisles, I admit, I thought they were simply Bad Crackers.

Crackers the culinary equivalent of particleboard; too fibrous for fun, too dry to be interesting, and always (I thought) subtly threatening to leave splinters in my soft palate. Overpowering in their sheer granular density to all but the sharpest of cheddars, insufferably hard even with soup, and requiring way, way too much chewing . No matter which flavor I tried – from the burnt sienna rye to that weird wafer stuff, the multigrain rainbow in between – I just couldn't like them. Maybe, if you were “raised by hippies,” like I was (that's not a slight, Mom & Dad, it's just a cultural signifier – you were feeding us tofu and dressing us in veleur for too long to deny it, and I love you for it), or if you've ever (like me) grocery shopped with only change in your pockets, or (like me) have more sense of adventure than good sense, you've had similar collisions with Wasa. And lived with the regret.

But friends, as I stand before you today (sit on a hostel bed typing from several thousand miles away), I can assure you; We Just Got It All Wrong. Wasa isn't the enemy. We weren't even making bad choices, we just weren't operating the cracker correctly! I have seen the true and benevolent face of Wasa, and I can share with you the secret: They're For Breakfast!

Listen, this changes everything. Wasa is quite possibly the road to morning-eating success for anyone (like me) who simply cannot deal with waking up to clingy, doughy, sweet food. Wasa is a clean, near-neutral canvas upon which to paint your most delicious breakfast dreams (near-neutrality is key, there's truly no point in eating beige). Particularly well-suited to the savory breakfast (as all reasonable and benevolent foodstuffs ought to be), Wasa's deep grain flavors provide the kinds of bass notes often missing in early-morning meals. These are the foundation for fantasy open-faced sandwiches, for breakfast! They are made Hard On Purpose, so they can be piled high with any/all your favorite cheeses/meats/vegetables/dairy-based semi-solids, becoming a veritable Edible Plate. (Which is good, because for those of us with morning-impaired manual dexterity, forks and knives are an unnecessary danger.) (Also, seriously, Pile Up. One swipe of cream cheese means nothing to Wasa. These things can still taste like performance-art food if you don't show some ambition.) They are made Indefatigably Crunchy a) so even if you do apply a solid inch of semi-solid dairy-things, you still get to chew something and b) because contrasting food texture is neat. Texture wakes up your mouth. And those splinters, they aren't endangering your gums, they're optimizing your dental hygiene routine like the little cleaner-fish that hang out in the mouths of resting sharks.

Breakfast revolution and shark similes. Let the healing begin!

Gifts of Love

All through the mid of January I threw myself into designing a bittersweetsweet workshop. Fusing my two great loves in the world of wellbeing; the female and the aromatic. I had a two-hour window to perform a conjuring of living, breathing, healing sensuality, and I meant to make the most of every second. Figured it would mostly attract women in the night of winter, curled up inside woolen selves, missing sunshine and skin. Well, figured there'd be more like me out there. And I'm speaking now from the other side, from 4 weeks of steeping myself in sandalwood and jasmine at night, brewing honey into syrup with roses, vanilla, sweet wicked damiana by day. And remembering that, while it's our roots that place us deep in the world (like our crowns keep us hooked into the inspiration of the cosmos), it's that second chakra that keeps us solid in the world of the human (just as that third eye translates celestial inspiration into every day's insight.)

Which is certainly not to equate being a woman immersed in aromatic medicine with some kind of ambulatory womb, but is to say; if this life is about being in this body, and the thing that differentiates this body from others is skin and sensation and a particular sweetness of anatomy -- okay.

So I took all the time I might have to look outwards to perfect recipes and stretch the variations, to make little altars every day to the idea and flavors of intimacy in friendship, solitude, fantasy and memory. And it's good I think that I've been alone in this room, on these sharp winter days, to do this magic. It's gotten a little tangled, a little humid, like a dense sponge quietly living. The other, meatier side of solitude. Not the windy, heady heady satisfaction of the single mind, focused at leisure on a single point. More the deep silk and quicksand sensorium of this singular body, and the participatory insight of physical being. More incorporation, more direct experience, more living in nouns.

St. Valentine's, Modern Day of Consensual Acknowlegement that Love is a Powerful Thing We All Thrive Within, is my second-favorite holiday. I have not, for many many years, passed it without an Other to shower with all the gold of my imagination. I wrestled with that while I infused, composed and created the little labors of love with which others with shower their Others this year. And it's good now. Open hands, steady feet. And this wide gold mirror before me.

The World Scent sent me Whirling

It's a tricky thing, talking about the way something smells. Unlike our other senses, we have very little common vocabulary for scent, and what we like and don't like is tremendously subjective -- sometimes incomprehensibly so. And all this is biochemically/neurologically strung just so, with all the imagery of Irish lace or dewy spiderwebs you could want. We smell differently. Not just the fragrance of each of us, also the way each of us perceives fragrance. And the way each of us are able to perceive the fragrances of the world. (The winning 2004 Nobel Physiology Prize work explains this beautifully.) And then, there are thousands of chemical compounds in the world, and limitless combinations thereof.

But that's not why it's tricky to talk about. All that is actually totally beside the point; the biology gets us there, but to hang the experience on the wonderful, exquisite and astounding hardware that makes it possible is like talking rods and cones while watching the the Perseid meteor shower under the purple skies of Utah's red desert. (Which I haven't done yet, though it creeps higher on my list of backpack plans every year.) The experience includes and transcends the biological hardware, and the chemical software.

The experience of scent transcends sense of self and preconception, more than any other sense, scent brings us to the immediate moment. And as quick, scent floods our minds with memories and associations, and tickles our body into physiological rapport. Talk about synesthesia! Each inhalation of scent is a microcosm complete, a dream and a true transport and a visceral root. The inhalation breathes into us an expanse that touches our cores and our voids, and the exhalation looses it all to the breeze. I think scent is difficult to discuss because at its depths, scent is a truly an internal -- an individual -- experience, and one that calls up all our own personal myths.

After smelling the concentrated essential oils of strong herbs, deep flowers and sacred woods-- and the fragrant growing world of a Northern California mountainside -- for four days, I think something in my metaneurology has grown. I notice scents more, but I'm also sure I sense scents more. The world smells so beautiful.

Home is There

Give me a backpack for a house and a good pair of hiking boot wings, and I'll be happy with the sunshine and the starlight. Give me a blank book and a properly weighted pen, and I'll entertain myself for days. Street food and the odd wild blackberry and my belly's glad, as long as there are noodles somewhere in it's future. And it turns out a rolled up tarp or nearly empty laundry bag makes a fine pillow.

All the world is a bowl of pleasure and care, and there is still nothing so fine, precious or incomparable as watching the sunrise in the park you have loved since childhood, the gold light of late Wisconsin summer, and warm freshpicked tomato sandwiches with cheese from folks who kiss your cheeks at the farmer's market.

The road is huge and beautiful, and home is always at its end.

Delight & Wonder #1

Have you noticed we taste each bite of food during our exhalation? You probably know how intrinsically intertwined smell is with taste, how smelling is the better part of tasting, but now I also think that smell and taste are two terrific way-stations on the same sense-pleasure circuit.

Try this: Take a bite, a smallish one, of something delicious. Chew with your mouth closed. With each inhale, chew, and pay attention to smelling the delicious that's still on your plate. And then exhale, chew, and taste. 

What do you think of that magic?