How Santa's flying reindeer relate to psychotropic mushrooms and so much more from Spring Warren's memoir Quarter-Acre Farm

I'm so taken with Spring Warren's memoir The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a Year, just out from Seal Press, with gorgeous illustrations by Jesse "Nemo" Pruet. You can find out more about her gardening experiment on her blog Quarter-Acre Farm.

One thing I love about the book is that I have no intention of ever growing anything; I just don't see how I could in Brooklyn and even if I lived in somewhere less urban, I barely cook as it is. That's where I want to start (especially with Isa Chandra Moskowitz's new vegan cookbook Appetite for Reduction). But I'm enjoying Quarter-Acre Farm for the same reason I enjoy any memoir: it's teaching me something. And is whipsmart and funny too. Warren has a sense of humor and isn't trying to sell anyone else, necessarily, on doing what she did. She's sharing the ups, downs and odds and ends of growing her own food for a year, and how her family, friends, neighbors and animals (geese!) reacted.



Here's a little bit of trivia for you from Quarter-Acre Farm. If you want some great recipes and an entertaining look at how one woman went about setting up a home garden in Davis, California, I highly recommend it.

For instance, psychotropic mushrooms are said to be the source of the myth of Santa's flying reindeer. Lapland reindeer apparently love Amanita muscaria mushroom, which are not only hallucinogenic but they also supposedly stimulate the animal's muscular system. This made small efforts on the part of the reindeer produce surprising results--enormous reindeer leaps. These leaps then led to stories of flying reindeer, which were eventually assimilated into the folklore of St. Nicholas.

I mean, come on, how can you not love that? Followed by a recipe for mushroom soup! Her writing style is sometimes humorous, but mostly I'd say lively. It's engaging and makes you want to garden if it would provide so much sense of discovery about the world around us and what we eat (and some sobering thoughts on pesticides).

Also, not about gardening, but I'd never heard of cranberry beans before I started reading this book, and there they were in the Brunch Beans stew at my local standby, Saltie, making them my new favorite dish there. Highly recommended! I totally ate the bread first, though next time I'd recommend saving one or two pieces to sop up the stew. So hearty and perfect for a rainy day.

Lunch in Paris ... in Brooklyn!

If you're not coming to my kick-ass even though it's snowing erotica writing workshop tomorrow at Shag (you have 3 other chances, though each class is unique - February 13 and 27 and March 6), you might want to check out this event at The Brooklyn Kitchen. I've started Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard (sent to me courtesy of the publisher) and even though I know almost nothing about Paris or cooking, I'm enjoying it. See The Brooklyn Kitchen to sign up ($25). See also Elizabeth Bard's food-filled blog Lunch in Paris. Here's a photo from it:



And she's @ElizabethBard on Twitter and has a Facebook fan page (or rather, her memoir does).



Bouquet of roses, or bouquet of thyme? Elizabeth Bard, author of Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes and Giulia Melucci, author of I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti talk about finding love and loving food in Paris and New York. They will also show you how to whip up some pre-Valentine’s Day goodies – for lovers or friends. In honor of the long-standing French tradition of drinking in the middle of the afternoon, cocktail aficionado Mayur Subbarao of Mayahuel will be shaking some Parisian style cocktails.

Rachel & Julie

Or rather, my 2005 interview with Julie & Julia author Julie Powell:

After making all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, would you say it’s an art?
Cooking can be an art. I think that the role of the recipes in MtAoFC, and why it continues to be useful even though the recipes are kind of dated and belong to a specific time and place is there’s such an emphasis on the techniques, and they're such lucid techniques. It's like being given a paintbox or a lesson in oil painting or pastel. There are rules that apply to different materials and different techniques that you can then apply. To make it a true art, you have to go off on your own and find your own way of interpreting, it’s more like a toolbox than anything else. It’s a wonderful book, I find the book itself is a piece of art as literature, it’s an enormously well-written book. What they don’t talk about much is Julia’s skill as a writer and one thing that I think she does best is in the format of this very formal book, it’s not Nigella Lawson carrying away about her personal life, it’s not any number of cookbook writers who really put themselves at the center of their book. It’s a very formal book; it’s designed like a cooking class and moves from the simplest techniques to the most complex, but within that pretty formal format she somehow manages to imbue the thing with her personality and you can just hear her saying it, it’s her voice on the page. I think that’s an underrated skill. People don’t understand how hard that is, it’s a large part of the reason people feel so personally involved with her, she pops off the page as well as popping off the television. Ultimately it’s the tools for an art in the book. You can’t master any art out of a book but you can get the tools to begin.

Obviously, I want to see the movie, preferably this weekend. But really, I'm eagerly awaiting (aka, salivating over) getting my hands on a copy of her new memoir Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession.

Go hear Linda Furiya read tonight from How to Cook a Dragon

I'll be at the SXSW pre-party but otherwise I would totally go hear food memoirist Linda Furiya read from her excellent new book How to Cook a Dragon: Living, Loving and Eating in China. I'm about a third of the way through; it's about her moving there from San Francisco, to live with a guy, getting mistaken repeatedly as being Chinese (she's Japanese-American), culture shock, and such.

January 26th, 2009

7:30pm

at Greenwich Village
396 Ave of the Americas at 8th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-674-8780

Here's the official blurb, more from me on this when I'm done:

When Linda Furiya decided to move to China with her boyfriend at the age of thirty, she hoped to find romance and ethnic kinship. Expecting common ground with locals as an Asian American, Furiya struggled with her ambition as a food writer in a nation where notions of race and gender are set in stone. During the six years she lived in Beijing and Shanghai, Furiya experienced a wide range of experiences—loneliness, isolation, friendship, and love—tied together by one common theme: food.

Ultimately, Furiya surpassed these challenges and found inspiration from the courageous Chinese women who graced her life. The sensuous experience of preparing and eating authentic Chinese cuisine follows Furiya throughout her journey, and ultimately reveals the intimate, nurturing side of the Chinese culture and people. Part insightful memoir, part authentic cookbook, How to Cook a Dragon is a revealing look at race, love, and food in China.