The Trees The Trees

I read Heather Christle's The Tree The Trees while waiting in line at the DMV. When you go to the DMV it always takes an hour and a half. I don't know why so many people go there unprepared, completely flabbergasted that they have to sit in a room with strangers for an hour and a half. I'm good at waiting. I'm a master of it. If I had the money I would ride a train back and forth from home to Philadelphia, just so I could wait for my destination, no other options or responsibilities hovering in view.

Reading poetry in a very loud place, with screaming children, pop music ringtones and the ever present bingo-esque call for persons in line ahead of you, is surprisingly easy. It's a pleasant bureaucratic white noise. But I find it completely impossible to read verse on a screen. I have no idea what the difference is, but backlighting makes all efforts futile. But I hope you do not share my affliction, so you can enjoy the passages I share.

From "JE M'APPELLE IVAN"

I am alone     I am a real bear     with a head full of
hazard and light     I live in nature     live with no
friends     and no equity     who needs it     I have
my face     I have my hands     which are as I speak
mauling the air     one time I took a trip     I lay
horizontal on a marvelous raft     I did look up
regard the blank stars     and accept them as holes in
the frame

This past weekend I went hiking, since nature decided to finally stop snowing out of season. Making my way through a nice carpet of bluebells I stopped at a steel gate. I'm not sure what made me stop and stare at it for so long. But eventually I glanced down and at its foot was an almost invisible turtle. He was camouflaged beak to feet with dried dirt. He stayed still for a very long time, and I resigned he was dead. I took a step closer and saw his tail twitch. He was alive, but not by much. Dried up and nearly a hundred yards from water, I guessed he was a victim of the flood that had been through the area a few weeks earlier. I found a wash basin half-buried in dirt, another product of the flood, and placed the limp 25lb snapping turtle inside. I carried him the hundred yards to a river and began washing him off. On closer inspection I realized his shell had been severely cracked. Rotting flesh was beginning to poke through the crevices. He opened his powerful snapping jaws wide, either in pain, fear or aggression. Or all at once. I put him in my car and drove home, ignoring the smell of putrification and river fish. I washed him off again with clean water once home, but it only reveaed more of the damage. It's a Saturday evening, and veterinarian offices won't be open until Monday. With little money in my bank account I'm not sure what help they would be anyway. A call to the local wildlife rescue reveals that their facilities are full. Google tells me that severely damaged turtle shells are irreparable and usually fatal. The only option left. Return him to his home. Perhaps that's where he wanted to be all along. I put him back beside the river and leave him to the wild.

From "WHEN THE SUN WENT DOWN THEY KEPT GROWING"

now I understand     you are the owner of a small
piece of time     like anyone else     tonight
everyone's sending me flowers     and I am upset
thinking maybe where I am the earth will collapse
I mean     they are light enough     but gather this
many together     and some are peonies     I can't
understand how they even stand up     babies can't
do what they do     I don't want to be over     any
time in the next hundred years

I'm at the DMV because I bought a new car. New as in new to me. New as in 2008. The paperwork involved seems more painful than what the monthly payments will be. Everyone I talk to seems surprised I'm 27. Maybe it's the barrette in my hair. Or the Hello Kitty perfume. I want a "Virginia Wildflowers" license plate because that seems nice. Although getting the "Pro-choice" one and gauging reactions is tempting. I want a personalized plate as well, to match the flower theme. But so many of them are already taken. MTN-LRL? No. RED-BUD. Nuh-uh. PEONY!? Keep dreaming. I've never hated like-minded strangers so much. PHLOX is available and the DMV website congratulates me on finding it, but I think I know why it's never been taken. LILAC is there as well, but inappropriate for a red car, I feel.

"1998"

one time this real moon was trying to arrest me     I
was like     I don't even know what I did wrong
has the whole world gone away     why didn't
anyone tell me     never much good at escape     I
thought I'd try complete surrender     dropped every
weapon I had     then the moon was like     listen
you slice of the future      you can cry but you can't
make me change

There's a theme of time and perpetuality in Christle's collection. The perpetuality relates to nature. And time to us. We are mortal. But nature is enduring.


From "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME"

I know where I'm going to die     right here     in my
own honest body     I avoid my body by sleeping
for instance I've just woken up     now here come
my galloping arms     my head the malletless gong
so many days I do not understand     one plows
forward     one gathers     it rains     each month
maintains its own atomic number     a year does not
have a skeleton     it has an uncracked egg     I have
to eat it     I have to get married     my friend the
golden onslaught married stuff in bloom

From "THE ACTUAL FUTURE"

           now I'm going to talk about the future
of my peer group     the actual future     when I turn
into a human     and have to take vacations to
weep into myself

A sincere and fervent desire to write "to weep into myself" in the "Comments" section of an absence report form.

From "THIS IS NOT THE BODY I ASKED FOR"

the thing is     you can't send it back     so     today
I'll accomplish a lot     I will compare my head      to
an eight by twelve glossy photo     of a man on a
fabulous jet-ski     what I see right away is the noise
we both have that in common     I'd like to jet-ski
straight out of this life

My number, F-204, is finally selected for bingo. I go the desk, lay out my folder containing the car's title, a completed VSA-17A, SUT-1, VSA-5, VSA-14, and check for $342.75, precalculated based on the 3% tax on the car, $10 titling fee, and cost of registration for one year. We only need the title and check, she says. Okay, I say. What do you do for a living, she asks. I work in a library. Oh, she says. I figured it was something like that. I admire your presentation and organization skills. Thanks, I tell her.

I finish the transaction and walk out with plain tags. I was thinking about the turtle and forgot to ask for the wildflower ones.

Heather Christle's The Tree The Trees is available at Octopus Books.

60 pages
4,885 pages / 20,000 page goal

Crapalachia

Didn't see it coming that a book titled Crapalachia would end up making me bawl like a toddler (see also, my forthcoming review of Kevin Sampsell's A Common Pornography). But Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia: a Biography of a Place filled me with enough nostalgia and death anxiety to make my SSRI pretty much defunct. God, but it is wonderful.

McClanahan's writing is superb; minimalistic but beautiful and poignant when it needs to be. He doesn't tell us what we need to feel while reading. Or manipulates readers with "emotion porn." What happens just happens. There's humor mixed with tragedy, because that's life, regardless of where or how we live.

It's been said that the poor living in the hills of the Appalachian mountains, better known as "hillbillies," are the last group it's still seen as socially acceptable to ridicule. I'm not so sure about that, since the same could be said about those who are overweight (damn, that's two strikes against me). But I do know that that the kind of people I grew up with, went to school with, my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and myself, have been exploited, humiliated, manipulated, and ignored by the rest of the country for what seems like forever. Because, POVERTY! Hilarious, right!?

In the appendix to his book, McClanahan mentions that his work shouldn't be roped into the genre of  "Appalachian Minstrel Show." In other words exploiting its people and culture, reducing it to cariacture, to entertain and make money. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just watch the lineup on TLC or the History Channel for more than 5 seconds. But then he calls out certain authors in particular, like Lee Smith, which seems a bit pompous. I've been to one of her readings and she's anything but a minstrel. She grew up in the area she most often includes in her novels, and has every right to write about them in her own way. Appalachia belongs to all Appalachians. Or at least to those who pronounce it correctly.

But I still can't recommend Crapalachia enough. It's a creative semi-non-fiction biography of a very real place, and the people and memories it holds. Here are some passages:

I saw the graves filling up all around her and saw how Grandma would be here beneath it one day and then Nathan and then one day Stanley, and then one day...me. So I saw her whisper, "Oh lordie," and claim she was dying like she always did.
     I wished we were already back at home so I could eat some more peanut butter fudge. Nothing lasts.
     I snapped the picture and it was like she was already gone.
     It was like I saw that she was dying right then--real slow--and she knew the secret sound. It's a sound that all of us hear. It's a sound that sounds like this. Tick. Tick. Tick.

AND NOW A MOMENT TO ONCE AGAIN

REMEMBER THE THEME OF THIS BOOK.

      The theme of this book is a sound. It goes like this: Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It's the sound you're hearing now, and it's one of the saddest sounds in the world.

I love the author's interjection there. "REMINDER! This book is about mortality! Just like everything is!"

I knew he believed in something that none of us ever do anymore. He believed in the nastiest word in the world. He believed in KINDNESS. Please tell me you remember kindness. Please tell me you remember kindness and joy, you cool motherfuckers.

      I looked at Ruby now and I saw all of the things she knew. She knew how to do all kinds of things no one else knew how to do.

     She knew how to render lard and make soap.

     She knew how to make biscuits from scratch and slaughter a hawg if she had to. And she knew how to do things that are all forgotten now--things that people from Ohio buy because it says homemade on the tag. I looked at the quilt she was working on. The quilt wasn't a fucking symbol of anything. It was something she made to keep her children warm. Remember that. Fuck symbols.

 Fuck symbols.

192 pages
4,825 / 20,000 page goal

A Feast of Crows

A Feast of Crows. More like A Fast of Interesting Characters. Not that there's a lack of named persons in this book, but we only hear from like, four of them. From a cast of hundreds. And not the ones we're really interested in (except you Brienne, you BAMF).

~ BEWARE, spoilerish info below ~

Behold, FoC! Be thrilled by tales of Cersei, sitting in a castle! Or Sansa, sitting in a different castle! And Samwell, sitting in a boat! Are you a Daenerys Targaryen fan? Like Tyrion's whoring and japes? Well fuck you, they're not in it!

GRRM put a blurb at the end of this massive door stopper explaining (apologizing?) that he realized the book he wanted to write would be too long, so he decided to split it up, into this and its followup, A Dance With Dragons. But instead of splitting it chronologically he split it up by character chapters. Meaning we're only hearing from half the characters we're supposed to be hearing from. A Dance With Dragons will apparently tell the side of the other kajillion characters.

But after this one, I don't know if I can handle another open-ended, snail-paced disappointment. Given its title, I pray to the Seven that Daenerys finally gets her ass, and those of her dragons, over to Westeros. Or that white walkers make it past that blasted wall. Or Jaime and Brienne just make babies already. But I feel like GRRM keeps setting up all these grand threads for epic things that could happen -- frozen zombie apocalypse, dragon takeover, nights becoming dark and/or full of terror, winter FINALLY coming -- but doesn't know exactly how to write these things. They're all just sitting there as possibilities. And I honestly don't see how they could all go together anyway. It would be a clash of every fantasy fiction trope imaginable.

What I really want is for the peasants to revolt and set up a democracy. Just draft a magna carta and throw it in front of King Tommen. That kid'll sign anything.

1104 pages
4,633 of 20,000 page goal

Internet Lovelies

With the lone exception of George Clooney, no one in America ever comes out and says that not everyone wants to get married. The social compact, as expressed in political platforms, revolves around marriage and family life. The acceptance speeches at both of last summer's presidential-nominating conventions were addressed to only two demographic groups: "working families" and "families who work." That's fine, working families need the lion's share of social programs--the housing, the schools, the health care, the roads to get from the housing to the schools and the health care. But what about a shout-out to those of us single professionals who shell out gazillions of dollars in taxes to educate and care for all the working families' progeny?

Sarah Vowell, Link

Being a single, working tax payer is one of the most socialist things you can be. Add to that having a job providing free books to the public and my faded Communist Party tee (featuring Karl Marx with a lamp shade on his head and martini in hand) is looking more and more appropriate. 

I was able to meet Sarah Vowell last week, which was a pretty big highlight in what has been an overwhelmingly lightless winter. February and March can go straight to hell. Sarah is one of my favorite writers. I've read all six of her books, a read-count only surpassed by JK Rowling in terms of author loyalty (though that's more to do with addictive tales of child wizardry). She made an appearance at my alma mater, where she read from her most recent book, Unfamiliar Fishes. I was hoping she'd mention something about her next project, but she told the audience she wasn't ready to discuss it publicly. However she did read from something new, discussing the diaries of a grumpy cartographer who helped map the newly expanded western United States. It was absolutely hilarious, and I'm hoping it's a hint at what her next work will be. Books about cartography and map obsession are pretty big right now, with last year's publication of Ken Jennings' Maphead and Simon Garfield's On the Map. I'm not mapped-out yet, so bring it on.

Question: when you meet an artist, writer, musician, etc., you admire, what are you supposed to say to them? Other than blurting out something along the lines of I LIKE HOW YOU PUT WORDS TOGETHER. Or THE NOTES YOU PLAY SOUND GOOD. Because I'm lost when it comes to proper creator-fandom etiquette. They're just human beings, after all. Human beings who've heard from a thousand other nerds that they enjoy the things they've created. If you have legitimate questions, maybe that's different.

I remember several years ago when I went to a Rob Zombie concert (this librarian used to be pretty metal, albeit not with the best taste), my friend and I payed major dough so we could be the first ones let into the pit, to secure the coveted first "row," center stage. We did, along with about 50 others, and were so early that the band was still on stage doing sound check. There they were, and there we were, 10 feet away, in broad daylight and silence, and all 50 of us had no idea what we were supposed to do. There was a lot of feet-shuffling and checking of watches. Then two hours later when they took the stage, we all screamed our heads off because they were actually performing. Meeting artists when they're human, outside of the music, books, paintings or films in which they usually reside, just seems so awkward and surreal. Like you've suddenly been confronted with the fact that you're actually a stalker. A creepy stalker who's been paying for years to gain access to their inner-thoughts and emotions through the fourth wall of artistic creation.

Or maybe I'm over-analyzing this, and should just stand in line to get my book signed like everybody else.

Here are some more internet lovelies.

I don’t know about you, but any given week, I associate with, hang out with, deal with, talk with, laugh with, put up with, experience life with people who are gay, straight, bi-, brown, white, black, male, female, trans-, old, young, comfortably well off or strugglingly poor, and every mix and match possible. We are real people and we have real issues. Our lives are just as complicated as anyone else’s and just as ripe for storytelling as anyone’s.

The books I read growing up, the role model my uncle became, my own experiences and those of the people I loved, all of these conspired to make me hungry for stories, and I don’t want to be meeting the watered down worlds that don’t include facets of people that I know exist.

 Karina Cooper, Link 

Last year, when I was 33, people kept mentioning that it was my "Jesus year," the age Jesus was when he died. As in, I guess, if I hadn't saved mankind by the time I was 34, I could pretty much be counted as a failure. I'm much more concerned about my "Byron year" of 36. As in, if I haven't committed incestuous acts, gone to war, scandalized an entire nation, driven past lovers insane with jealousy, and written a few half-good manuscripts, then what the hell am I even doing with my life?

Jessa Crispin, Link

We played things on vinyl, because we were 22 and thought we were the first people to appreciate a variety of things, including wooden floors and theories of translation and our old telephone. Our landlord from upstairs would ring the phone at unsociable hours because all hours were unsociable and speak Quebecois French that I brain-translated into my-French then brain-translated into English and I have no idea what it meant but I think it meant, “Are you cold?” We called into work or university sick or university or work called into us sick — let’s just not move, either way. We made a lot of fried eggs and took it in turns to moonwalk out to the dépanneur two blocks away for cigarettes. I wore my yellow knitted socks and my pink silk dress and my grey woollen jumper and had my first encounter with the brain-dentistry of clinical depression. Once we didn’t leave the apartment for three days. The experience snowily, sleepily dusted all surfaces of human interactions — at breakfast: “We haven’t left the apartment for a week!” This was conversational exaggeration and at the same time possibly true.

Heather McRobie, Link 

That whole essay is wonderful. Check it out.

The division V.P. offered me a job after my two-week gig, which I cordially declined. I imagined myself waking up before dawn, raking bristles across my teeth, and taking the train eastward towards a spoiled sun which believes it is the center of our universe. We tell it stories of other stars, and it spits flames. Every downtown is a Jenga game about to end. Part of me wonders, regrets, what I would have become had I repeated yes like Molly Bloom. I will admit this world makes me, sometimes, want to put a rat inside someone’s asshole and record the contortions of their face simply out of aesthetic curiosity. Fortunately there is the internet, where I spend my time refreshing. The office was on the 36th floor, its spotless floor-to-ceiling windows pretending not to exist. I saw myself calmly walking to the edge and jumping off, my shadow morphing into the exact shape of my body the moment before the moment. “Sorry, waking up would be too much,” I say, unaware of the ontological metaphor. I exit his office in silent Cole Haan loafers.

Jimmy Chen, Link

 
Taken out of context the rat statement may not make sense in the passage above, but it's a reference to American Psycho. Click the link to read the entire essay. Or just go ahead and read everything Jimmy Chen's ever written, actually. I like the way you put words together, Jimmy Chen.

Balloon Pop Outlaw Black

Patricia Lockwood's poetry collection Balloon Pop Outlaw Black from Octopus Books feels like the most unified anthology of poems I've read in awhile. It's a collection in the true sense of the word.

Inside this book cartoons are words. And words are objects -- personified and three-dimensional. The first third of the collection is about the word "popeye," as you may be able to tell from Lisa Hanawalt's amazing cover art. And a recurring theme is the physicality of words themselves.

Example:

From "The Church of the Open Crayon Box"

Fat geese fly in any letter you like but you need
red meat for once, and write a splayed-hide word
like "Deerslayer," and take hold of the ending

                                          and drag it home,                                            

and

From "The Father of the Fictional Alphabet"

The letters must be forged--the father of the fictional alphabet

wears protective glasses, and holds flat and round sounds

in the roaring fire and uses a seashell for flux, and then drops

each letter in a bowl of cool water, and they steam in the shape

              of themselves, and the father of the fictional alphabet

rivets them to the machine: on all sides, in brass letters, it says:

              and it belches black smoke and itself,

and white mice run in wheels inside it, a clearie marble

rolls down a track, and here is a slot for quarters where

you buy a chgnk chgnk sound. The letters have whirligigs

in them, the letters release hundreds of helicopters, the letters

have snakes that slip between stones, the letters grow parrot-

head flowers, and the letters are bodies settled with blackflies.

I'm absolutely in love with the poem "Good Climbing Trees Grow Us", which I couldn't pick just part of to share. So do yourself a favor and buy the book, or check it out in issue 11 of MAKE.

But here are some other passages I loved:

From "When We Move Away From Here, You'll See a Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung"

After supper, he sits on the porch with a
long black shotgun and waits for a
buffalo to wander into view. He uses
every part of the buffalo--he uses them
down to their eye whites, he uses the
very lines that make them up.

He walks to the city to be counted in
the census. A wind gets itself up and
ruffles him relentlessly, but miniature
monuments hold him down.

His paper is usually stacked neatly,
especially when still in original trees.

Lives where? In voices: hills and valleys. Lives
all in the alphabet as if it were a rowhouse.
Lives at the peak of the tallest chalk hill.

Or lives: nowhere at all. He wanders the desert,
written on old skins, moaning,
"Where is home, where is home?" And
waits for a tent peg to be driven
through his skull.

From "The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace"

She moves as smoothly as the moment of a mousetrap, and
when her cartoon needs a mousetrap she gives one to him.

Even the act of extending an arm toward him produces a trombone.

And as she watches herself extend an arm, a collapsible
spyglass leaps out of her eye.

When she tiptoes across the lawn, so does a small green rose bush.

When a wrecking ball swings out of nowhere, she is riding it;
she makes a round cutout in the enemy's house and then
rides the cutout home.

Imagine her body as a barrel of gunpowder, uncorked,
spilling black along the ground behind it.

When she spreads her arms and sinks down, she brings a
detonator into the world.

87 pages
3,529 / 20,000 page goal

Guest Post: Review of 'Burning the Furniture'

My good friend Dusty from the blog Dusty On Movies was kind enough to share his review of Dan Smith's memoir Burning the Furniture with me. So put down Justin Bieber's latest book and read about someone who's had actual human experiences.

Everyone has an interesting life story. If you really get to know someone you'll find they have a fascinating history regardless of class or race. Not everyone, however, is fit to write a memoir. A good memoir requires a writer with both talent and courage. "Burning The Furniture" shows that Dan Smith has both in spades.

Dan has been writing and editing various local newspapers and journals for a long time. Currently he's the editor for Valley Business FRONT Magazine and offers some personal thoughts and opinions on his blog. He's also responsible for putting together the annual Roanoke Regional Writer's Conference, which sold out this year. My interest in local writing and journalism steered me towards Dan's writing, especially his blog where we could argue and debate all sorts of things.

It was probably the numerous blog visits that led Amazon.com to list "Burning The Furniture" in my suggested reading. Everyone knows that Amazon and Google keep close watch over where we visit so they can pester us with ads more accurately. In this case they did a good job. I bought the memoir for $3.99 in Kindle format and let Dan know about the purchase. He was happy to hear I was reading it, but shocked to find out it was now an ebook since he hadn't been notified of its conversion.

Prejudice is so easily formed. I had all sorts of notions about Dan's background and upbringing with zero facts supporting them. It turns out that his story was much deeper than I could have ever expected.

Dan's story starts out with poverty. He had seven siblings, an alcoholic father who died when Dan was 13, and a mother who suffered from depression and agoraphobia. His mother often couldn't pay rent and was always ready to move as eviction drew near. Growing up as a carny would probably have required less moving.

 

I was particularly moved by Dan's account of taking his black friends to a public swimming pool. At that time and place it was simply unheard of. When they arrived the local swimmers assaulted Dan and his friends with rocks. Dan was appalled. His friends weren't surprised. He found a sheriff by the side of the road and reported the incident. He got this response:

“Let me tell you boys something,” he said as level serious as he could get. “We don’t take to white people and niggers mixing here in McDowell County and we don’t take to niggers swimming in our water. You’uns is lucky you didn’t get killed back there and if you stay around here much longer or even think about coming back, that just might happen. Now you nigger-lovin’ trash just git on out of here.”

And Dan's reaction:

I don’t remember ever before or after being as angry as I was at that moment. My face felt hot and my body shook with rage. I glared at that tall, thin, red-haired trooper with the Smoky the Bear hat, knowing that if I lost my temper we would all suffer a lot more than we had. Coot reached over and put his hand on my arm. I slammed the gearshift lever into drive and threw gravel behind us as we sped away. “Goddammit!” I screamed. “What kind of country is this? Who the hell are these people?” I pounded on the steering wheel, even as I floored the accelerator.

For sure, things have gotten better since then. Still, I find myself reacting this way far too often in today's society.

As the story continues, Dan's courage reveals itself even more. The mistakes of childhood can easily be recalled then brushed off as a youthful indiscretion. To write about your struggles in adulthood takes a lot more gumption. Dan attacks his struggles head on: alcoholism, failed marriages, fatherhood regrets, lost jobs. He leaves no stone unturned. This also becomes a source of inspiration because he sobered up, has a career, and has a good relationship with his kids and grand kids. Everyone faces adversity and makes mistakes, but not everyone has the character to face that adversity and learn from their mistakes. Even fewer have the ability to write about it eloquently. Dan Smith is one of those few.

Memoirs are mostly successful based on the name value of their authors and not their inherent quality. Personally, I'd rather read a great memoir from a local author than some ghost-written fluff piece from a celebrity. I'm sure Arnold Schwarzenegger's memoirs will always outsell Dan Smith's, and that's a damn shame. "Burning The Furniture" is short, but satisfying. You won't regret investing your time in this one.

 

Cookbook Margin: Boeuf Démodé

Alternate titles:

Vegetable Margin
Virtual Margarine
It's My Blog and I Can Cook if I Want To

I have a pretty decent cookbook collection. It's not huge, but that's only because I've resolved to actually cook from the ones I own instead of succumbing to the temptation of buying more. And how tempting they are. I'm a sucker for heavy hardcovers; 300+ glossy pages of food porn, full of hard-to-pronounce dishes with obscure ingredients you're embarrassed to ask about in the grocery store ("excuse me, I totally know what a kumquat is, but...where are they and what do they look like?").

So if I'm going to cook my way through my cookbooks (so I can then buy more, a continuous loop of samsara), I may as well blog about it. Cookbooks are books too! And finding good ones can be a challenge. You never know how a recipe is going to turn out until after you've paid $30 for the ingredients and dirtied an entire sink full of dishes.

First up is a dish from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table, which I bought over 2 years ago after reading about it at Bookslut. I made the very first recipe, for gougères, which turned out beautifully. The cookbook itself is gorgeous, with big glossy pictures that make you feel like you're in the kitchen of a French country villa, and not in your shitty apartment surrounded by empty Lean Cuisine containers. Every recipe is described in detail, with extra info about the dish's background in French cuisine, which is really interesting. You can tell Greenspan has thorough knowledge of every dish, and feel like you can trust her completely. But even so, I didn't break open the cookbook again until yesterday.

Emily Dickinson wrote "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," which I'd like to revise to "Cook the recipe, but cook it slant." I don't think I've ever followed a recipe 100% as written. I always change things around, which can occasionally cause kitchen catastrophes. But it's how my mom cooks and how my grandmother cooked, and they're the best ones I've ever known. So every recipe I share will be my version of it. Then I highly recommend you check out the original recipes from the books themselves.



Boeuf Démodé 
my version of Boeuf à la Mode from Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan

• 2 lbs chuck, round or rump roast, cubed into 1 inch pieces
• 1/2 large white onion, cut into large slices
• 1 carrot, cut into chunks
• 2 celery stalks, cut into chunks (save the leaves)
• A bouquet garni -- 2 thyme sprigs, 2 parsley sprigs, and the leaves from the celery stalks, tied together with string, or in a piece of dampened cheesecloth
• 1 750-ml bottle of red wine
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 cups beef broth
• 2 anchovies, drained, rinsed and patted dry
• 1 tbsp tomato paste
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour

Be prepared: The beef must be marinated overnight, and will require a Dutch oven or covered casserole dish.

Put the beef into a tupperware container, bowl, or sturdy ziploc bag that can hold it, the vegetables, and the wine. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss in the onion, carrot, celery, and bouquet garni and1 tbsp of the olive oil. Pour in the wine until the contents is covered (save yourself a glassful of the wine if possible -- you're done for the night). Cover the container or seal the bag and put in fridge to marinate overnight.

The next day, strain the container over a bowl, reserving the liquid. Remove the beef from the vegetables and place on paper towels. Set aside vegetables and bouquet garni. Pour the liquid into a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat until reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Add the beef broth and bring back to a boil, then remove from heat.

Center a rack in the oven and preheat to 350 degrees F. Have the Dutch oven or casserole with a cover at the ready.

Pat the beef dry using paper towels. Put a skillet over medium-high heat and pour in the last tbsp of olive oil. Working with a few pieces at a time, sear the cubes of beef on all sides, just enough to brown them and form a light crust. Transfer the beef to the Dutch oven.

Return the skillet to medium heat and toss in the drained vegetables. Cook, stirring, until the vegetables are softened and browned, about 10-15 minutes. Transfer the vegetables to the Dutch oven.

Once again put the skillet over medium heat. Pour in 1/2 cup of the wine-broth mixture and stir in the anchovies and tomato paste. Cook, stirring, until the anchovies break up and "melt," a matter of minutes. Pour in the rest of the wine-broth mixture and stir to blend, then toss in the reserved bouquet garni. Pour the contents into the Dutch oven.

Put the Dutch oven over medium-high heat, and when the liquid comes to a boil, cover the pot tightly with a piece of aluminum foil and the lid. Slide the beef into the oven and cook undisturbed for 1 hour.

Pull the pot out of the oven, and remove the lid and foil. Using a large spoon or ladle, remove approximately 1 cup of the broth and put into a medium bowl. Gradually add the flour, while whisking vigorously. Continue whisking until there are no clumps. Season to taste with salt and black pepper, and pour back into the pot. Taste the sauce again, and repeat the process if needed, adding more flour if too thin or salt and pepper if bland. Return the pot to the oven for another 30 minutes.

Remove from the oven and serve immediately, or store for a day or two covered in the fridge, which will only enhance the flavor.

Behold! The only cute bowl I own.

Feeling completely guilty for making such a carnivorous recipe, I also decided to make one from the cookbook Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World; I'm sure completely bewildering the guy bagging my groceries. It was supposed to be Vegan Coconut-Chai Cake, a version of Vegan Chai Latte Cupcakes with Vegan Buttercream Frosting from the book. It turned out horrifically, which I'm not sure is more attributable to the changes I made (pretty much just using a different kind of tea and making cake instead of cupcakes), or the fact that "Vegan" and "Buttercream" should never ever appear side-by-side in a sentence.

But it's okay. Now I'll be able to trade it in for a shiny new cookbook I can drool over.