BLACKBIRD PICKING & THE MERCILESS EDITOR; 4 & 20 TART

In the language of our people, this will be a quickie.

I just finished picking a gallon of what I am almost certain are blackberries from my back field this morning, in a still-warm, too loose camisole and my dirty slogging boots. The boots are a pale robin’s egg blue, the berries black, the sun coming up, the straps slipping down.
You can see dichotomies are only slightly lower on my personal food chain of loves than ironies.

I’ve been picking berries for several weeks now, a task to which I am well-suited and with which I have a long history. There is a lineage to which I belong: of berry-pickers, Scrabble players, note-pluckers, painters. Compulsive all of us, in issues of small gestures of placement, the scrutiny and one-at a-timeness, whether additive or reductive.

I like to think my compulsive nature serves me at these times.

There has been some question of what to call them—are they black raspberries? Are they blackberries? Are they, in masterful, uncoy three-year-old summation, “backberries?”

Oh, I know myself--and if I am not careful, I confuse myself with my words. Still, I tend to know better what I am doing, gain confidence once I pluck a name for it.

Let's scrap certainty for anything literal and call them “Blackbirds,” then. I like everything about this word; it multi-tasks; it has inherent forward flight and references some past (I once sang Sing a Song of Sixpence badly but honestly and I believed upon request, 200 times in a row).

I suppose it is a risk to give something a name and especially wings when you’re unsure of your audience. “They” also say it’s a great risk to think we can pluck words for our own or keep them for pets, furthering the case for a bird name—you can’t get to them so easily, to own them.

But I'm no risk-taker, merely a picker; a plucker and namer.

I am very conscious that each berry is an action, a choice, has an entirely different flavor, depending on the chosen and the chooser. There I go confusing myself with my words again. We all need to believe that the component of choice goes both ways.

All I can say with certainty is that what I choose becomes a handful of words crushed to my mouth, a pie, a post. And what I take, I hope, gives some kind of life back to the bushes.

This year has been different, with new insights. I have always picked what I’ve seen at the sides of roads or conversations, simply blazed or backed into, protecting my eyes. Though there is meditation and contemplation in berry-picking, it’s funny that up until now, I always believed that what I was doing was random. Somehow, I had it worked out that the entire act was random, based only on the fact that I had not planted any of these bushes—that they were in existence before and outside my control. Maybe I did stumble on the bushes, but I selected carefully, painfully what I took.

I did it: I picked the glittering, wobbly, dark ones that suited my vision of what a berry should be and that I believed sang only to me. I have always been especially fond of those berries with their backs to me, as if I will not see them, and perhaps unduly fond of the scratches incurred while seeking those.

These bushes at the back, from this morning, are wild, and difficult to get to in ways that are maddening and possibly dangerous. This entire flank of bushes in the lower field backs up to someplace rough and a drop off you can’t see, but you can hear is there, if you are listening. It was there I recently discovered an old well. Unplacably familiar noises come from back there, songs and words I can’t decipher but must assume are some kind of benevolent encouragement meant only for me, else never come back. Of course, being compulsive, who am I kidding.

Then, also, there is the whole copse of berries in the barnyard. I have lived here for years, and till this year let it be overgrown. Berries I either never knew were there until now, or which have sprung up spontaneously, from the sun-warmed skull of Athena—from my own wishing them into existence now.

Which is more likely?

And I know that I am reckless, even in my order. I know, without looking, that by 10 am I will ditch the boots or anything which keeps me from feeling the unevenness of the ground beneath my feet, that I will look like the victor in a hillbilly barfight after a lost weekend in Ocean City: gasp-trashy bra-strap sunburn, scratches and track-marks up and down my forearms, my feet inconsolably black despite an hour’s soaking. Hands, like Lady Macbeth’s, stained red with ghosts.

“Oh,” gasped 5 year-old Sylph, running across the field to me this morning, small, confident and reverent-hungry fingers reaching past thorns, finding, plucking--me watching her train her eye on a single berry and pulling just that one, not minding the soft tear-scratch of the thorns and actually smiling just a little:

“they’re jewels.”

I fear she has the gene.

Damn words: potholes, portholes, birdholes, keyholes.

Sigh. When I want to get closer to my thoughts, I cook. So here’s the Blackbird Pie; The 4 & 20 Tart, on a nest of kitchen twine & lemon peel. It wasn't quite what I envisioned, but it is good.

BLACKBIRD PIE, OR 4 & 20 TART RECIPE:
[Wasn’t that a funny thing to set before the King? ]

CRUST:

1.5 C unbleached flour

1.5 cups toasted sunflower seeds, almonds, hazelnuts (or other mix)

1/4 C. light brown sugar

sea salt

1.5 sticks chilled, cubed butter

2 egg yolks

Grind nuts in a food processor, add other ingredients, pulse and gather dough. Reserve 1/3 dough to make cookies and bird top to tart. Press into a 10" tart pan, prick.

FILLING:

4 tsps water

6 egg yolks

1/2 C light brown sugar

2 C half and half

vanilla bean, split length-wise

1 cup sour cream

Make a custard (sigh, again with the brooding custard), cook and stir everything but yolks; temper tolks and return to pan and stir until thick. Cool.

BERRIES: Blackbirds, about 4 cups

Assemble: crust, custard, top with berries and bird cut out from crust. Bake at 400 degrees about 35-40 minutes. Cover crust when it gets brown.

People always say, but why did you make that--why that recipe?
As if I had any choice at all in the matter. See, the recipe was already there--I just named it.

Though I wish I was special enough that it chose me, specifically, I know in my heart that if I have any choice at all in the matter, it was only whether or not to act.

To paraphrase Yoda: Do or Not Do, there is no Why.

MADAME RHUBARB: DISOBEDIENT DIGESTIF OR SENSIBLE MINX? (and frozen custard recipe)

My yearly rhubarb post is late, but it’s been stewing. There were rhematic and rheumatic unintended consequences to something I wrote recently, ones I hadn’t even considered. Rhubarb: rheum rhabarbarum—rue, barb.
Okay, this part is intentional.

With pure intentions--er, ingredients--like this, how can we go wrong?

Take a risk with your heart and it sours, and you can take your lumps and an antacid and move on. Take a risk with your heart in print, and the world tweets, I mean "risks" with you on Twitter.

Know that for every post you see plated here, there are 5 more on burners and ancillary heating elements, hanging out of cupboards or curing on hooks in inconvenient eyesight in my home and range of swinging into a forehead: on scraps of paper, in the margins of books “lightly in pencil,” on ubiquitous post-its. I don’t have much occasion to write on soft, damp cocktail napkins anymore (oh, how I loved their rank, nutritionally void dampness for a time!), but I have written on a diaper and on my own skin, on shopping lists even now crowding out staples, and on the generally sturdy fabrics and upholsteries of my late 30’s. Also, on writing in blood: I have never written with it, but have recently composed with its sweeter, anime form, beet juice.

There are concepts I know intellectually: things turn out pretty much as we already know; an untempered egg will scramble a custard; no one ever died from a broken heart; sorry doesn’t fix everything. These we dutifully swallow to call ourselves grown-up--doesn’t mean they ever go down easy.

I "know" that for every person who reads and takes home a doggie bag of meat here, there are five who pick at their plates and/or never really dig in, several more that won’t digest properly because of their own strictures and GI temperament, and at least one, who, like my favorite joke on this earth, will eschew it altogether like a cannibal avoiding a clown, because it tastes funny to them.

No one can explain taste.

I would know the numbers if I kept the statistics anymore, but for the obsessive-compulsive at heart and stomach, a blog can become one’s cud without certain stops in place. I can only tell you that you are probably in the company of 11 confirmed subscribers.
I confess (“I confess!”--absolute absurdity on a blog) I almost always mean one or more things at once, I’m a complicated magical pudding in the middle kind of girl who purports herself as simple and harmless and you know what?-- ALL of those things are true. We often think things are mutually exclusive when they—sweet irony alert!—just AREN'T.

Guilt free: no consolatory morning-after recipe needed for pure intentions. I suppose the worst you could say is that I’m a somewhat disobedient but ultimately sensible minx who occasionally (just occasionally now), means what I said the very first time and just that.

The thing about mistaken intentions is this, and then I’ll leave it: “Thank God it’s fatal, not shy.” Andrew Bird, whose whistling skills I greatly admire, said this. We think everyone can or should be able to cook and whistle, only it isn’t true (I can’t whistle, by the way).

Another way, have you ever been watching someone on stage, and realized as an after-beat that--waitaminute--they were unaltered but by passion and no other substance than ordinary blood and bile? How the eff are they doing it then, you asked, almost UNWILLING to believe they could say or do it--that they would choose to, without filters?

Madame Rhubarb is like that: like a former drunk who’s spent a long time learning something about restraint, to use her voice, her tone, her faculties FOR and not against herself—a stone cold sober girl who does it anyway—chooses to do it & with wild abandon, who doesn't feel like apologizing because there is no need.

And we are deeply uncomfortable about that. It makes us Heretics (read the words, I love all them all and they deserve space).

But why is it so uncomfortable??? Because it feels…disobedient, to witness passion without apology and because I think there is something like a perceptible smugness to being okay with the process over the product which causes sincere discomfort .

People sometimes confuse what I do here. SIGH. I will let you in on a Little Secret: while we avoid it everywhere we can, we must now assume that our concepts of "harmless" sometimes differ. Maybe “First do no harm” was good enough to be innaccurately ascribed to Hippocrates and for the field of medicine, but for Bacchus and Minerva & the realm of the tongue and the pen, that doesn’t begin to cut the rhubarb mustard.

Where craft is concerned, I think our creed must be this: “First, do what you need to that is good"—then I’m certainly not opposed to the corollary, “do no harm.” It has to be.

Writing serves no higher or lower purpose than to be heretical, hopeful, romantic, disobedient.

"What was going to happen? This question, as I’ve said, seems to be at the root of most romantic encounters, and at the root of disobedience, too."
-Jane Hamilton, from Disobedience

I can’t begin to navigate the rhubarbed wire wrapped around a single human heart tonight—it's not my job, but dammit, I can cook. Let’s make ice cream, and share a spoon.

Disobedient Frozen Rhubarb-Ginger Custard Recipe:
[For my Dad, who gets and loves rhubarb, exactly for what it is and without expecting something else]

This is in stages, motivated by freshness of the ingredients (who’s going bad and how fast). None of them are hard in and of themselves. It’s all very simple once you get to the point of throwing the switch on the ice-cream maker. Of course, it’s always simple after the hard part is done.
I am pleased to say I have no idea how it will all turn out; I am sitting here listening to the machine turn. Your guess is as good as mine.

Three Ingredients: Rhubarb-ginger puree, Brown sugar scalded custard, whipping cream.

RHUBARB GINGER PUREE:
De-leaf & chop 4 stalks of rhubarb and put into a saucepan with ¾ C sugar, a peeled and chopped piece of ginger root (about the size of the fat part of your palm, right under the thumb), and a little pomegranate or blueberry juice. Simmer, cook down, squeeze the juice of one lemon, seeds and all (you're going to puree it anyway), over the mix and keep adding juice or water until it’s a syrupy consistency. The rhubarb will string out, become soft and fall apart.
Cool and puree.

BROWN SUGAR CUSTARD:
Sounds hard and good, but this is all it is: scald 2 cups of whole milk and 2 cups of half and half in a pot. I like copper because it feels magic to me, but it’s entirely unnecessary.
Whisk in ¾ C of dark brown sugar, and bring the heat down.
Separate 6 egg yolks, temper them with a cup or two of the scalded milk mixture, then return to the pot and keep simmering gently and whisking until the custard coats the back of a spoon. Chill.

Put the custard into an ice-cream maker or a stand-mixer fitted with the well-frozen ice-cream bowl & attachment. Add 2 cups super-cold whipping cream, while running. Dribble in the rhubarb puree. Run for 30 minutes or until it thickens up. Taste, swoon, freeze.

It's all about consistency: still not thick enough to be misunderstood. Back in the machine.

A final note on this recipe:
You know, I have tried to resist Facebook, but really, so far it’s brought only good & in the past year reconnected me with what may be the only uncomplicated male relationship of my life. Equal parts destiny and that esteemed "harmlessness" you can hardly always make the claim for, it could simply be that any two people who meet while working in a library, not-yet of legal drinking age, are doomed or exhonerated.
He comes to me now in 40-year-old commentary, both real and imagined, having resumed pointing out the red lipstick on my teeth (a thing both impressive and scary to have taken on as a teenage boy), but also taste the words that come out of me, the hypocrisies and the gifts.

“Be carefullllll” I heard him whisper-smile over the steaming custard as I stirred, “this is exactly the kind of dish bright, lonely girls make.”

He’s right, I'm sure. Hot girls like beets. Girls with inconsolable grudges make rhubarb puddings.
Maybe not...or maybe also, the Sensible Minx eats what and whomever she wants, no matter who’s reading.

CHEF ANDREW LITTLE, THE SHEPPARD MANSION, HANOVER'S SUCCULENT SOURCING SALON & the RECIPE HE GAVE ME FOR FORTNIGHT STEW (phew!): part 1 of…?

Chef Andrew Little and Kathy Glahn touch, talk and taste pea tendrils

It’s not often I can’t put an experience into words (an easy 2600 of them at that)--even with my mouth full. And while it doesn’t necessarily say much that I can do that, it is always, always instructive for me when I can’t.
In our peculiar society, heckling’s a pitcher of margaritas on a whitehot strip of sand, mockery goes down like a cool glug of water, and garden-variety disapproval?—it’s commonly gulped as air.
But true praise…now that’s the curious lump in the throat, requiring pause and precision to get it down right (and yes, something like two whole weeks of thought behind it).

Several weeks ago, CHEF ANDREW LITTLE most graciously and rather startlingly (now why is it that graciousness and plain goodness should startle us?) invited me up to meet the farms and the real people from whom he sources his ingredients for THE SHEPPARD MANSION, then spend the night behind the scenes of the restaurant.
Who knows what I expected? I just told him he had my soft and hard palates for the day and that I was willing to don waders and slog through a pit of country ham with him. And I was: Erin Brockovich that I am (okay, okay FINE, sans cleavage and desperate only to unearth really good food, not environmental toxins), of course, I bit.

So for over two weeks now, I’ve been stewing over what must be described as 13-hours of bliss-in-process—and it was a process, starting with anticipation and the drive up (rolling hills, sun on MD and PA trees, first day to let arms out of sleeves), to boot-sucking through the long grassy mud at Sheppard Farm (highland beef) and RETTLAND FARM (pig and chicken--“Um, do pigs get ticks?”), to the warmest soft-wet air and the mystery of provocative figs which made me want to please live in Kathy Glahn’s greenhouse forever—all of this before I ever ate a thing (wait—I did nibble on some micro-greens right out of the seed tray there). Doesn’t it say something I spent 10 hours with and getting to know the the food before I actually ate any of it? This is impressive, because restraint ain’t my forte. I’m not a Wait To Eat Until The Second Date kind of girl, and this was quite possibily the longest food foreplay in my history.

halibut with Kathy Glahn's micro-greens, carrots, asparagus & savoy cabbage..and my favorite, lick-your-wrist rhapsody, the rhubarb mustard.

Speaking of time, this is a PROCESS—in this world, Chef Little's world, food is everywhere, it is primal—but it's a slow and urgent process, not an event.
Obviously, being a part of and trying to plate for you this unexpected-yet-everyday pleasure process is tripping up the usual down-and-dirty “It's FOOD, he’s a chef, you’re a hoarfrost, do the math!” approach you've come to expect from me. You expect me to describe the food as something guttural and sexy and eyes-rolled-back-to-lizard brain—and you will be right and rewarded—but I cannot and will not describe it as food porn. While exciting beyond my wildest wettest food dreams, it’s been hard to write this (everybody leer and shout, “how hard was it?!”), that would simply be inaccurate, because porn is something ultimately unsatisfying and objectified and purposefully removed from reality. Porn is not real dirty. Walking tandem in the mud and talking with Chef Little, who is pig-in-shit happy to tell you all about their plans to build a real food culture in little ole Hanover, PA?—that is real dirty.

Highland calf at Sheppard Farm, plenty of MUD.

So, I was sitting at a table off the kitchen in The Sheppard Mansion later that night, in little black dress mode, reasonably cleaned up after this day of happy farm-touring grime, (wet washcloth and a place to change gratefully accepted from the lovely Karen Van Guilder + the sheer determination of my stomach), having met this exceptionally good (have you ever noticed that "good" usually means that while you might be kinder or have better karma, your grammar could be suspect and your hair is very likely two decades behind?--not this time) group of people: Heather Sheppard Lunn, Beau Ramsburg and Kathy Glahn, respectively. I was scribbling pensively on the 400th little piece of paper, breaking pencil points and trying to stay out of the way in the kitchen (though I had been given free range by said Chef to poke, ask and snap away), when I suddenly grasped that no, it wasn’t just my blood-sugar crashing (oh foolish girl who doesn’t eat breakfast this very day!), it was the not-unpleasant swoony experience of spinning on an axis within another orbit, because this was HUGE. Too huge for a single post--even a Hoar-sized one.
I was officially in the locavortex with Chef Little and I hadn’t even eaten a bite yet.

The manna of the day/pretzel roll of complete conversion

Sooooo many people have asked: "I can't believe he invited you to do all that stuff--What did he want from you?” (like I have anything to offer other than an earnest mouth and my eye). He just…wanted me to see and to taste the pleasure process, I think—is that really so radical?
What you have to understand is that Chef Little is a total hard-ass—and really, that serves all of us very, very well. He is a stickler for detail and consistency in every aspect of food on a level that reaffirms my faith in mankind, who I desperately fear has lost the view that these are absolute necessities. When he says he sources locally, he means three miles--not three hundred.

Understand also that Little is not talking about Local with a capital L because it’s cute or trendy or “gee, isn’t it nice to support the local folks?”—“Local,” like assorted other words, too often becomes a cardboard badge or a pair of blinders without context and understanding ("organic," "retro" and even magnifcent "luddite" are other such words reduced in scope this way).
This is not some Alice Watersed-down ride-the-zeitgeist interpretation of the current fashion that is "farm to table." What’s going on in Hanover is not a group of disconnected people throwing their stuff in the pot—it is a collective of exceptional people bringing their particular exceptional gifts to the table—and this I would call a salon, in the true sense of the word...

a succulent food sourcing SALON.
Rettland Farms pig...and in pulled pigs' feet salad with crawfish, Johnny Jump-ups & thyme oil.

Cooking this way is a commitment for Little, a renewable daily decision if you will--and above all, it is a question and decision based on QUALITY, not PROXIMITY. Because close just isn’t good enough.

How is it we are so accustomed and deadened to shampoo-bottle sound-bytes like “responsibly-crafted” and "shop local" that we're often willing to sacrifice accountability and excellence in the things we actually put in our mouths?--THAT seems radical--and reckless.
If Chef Little wants to develop a local food culture here, he is also insistant that it be culturally conversant—and in this scenario that calls for awareness and eating in context—which means knowing exactly where that pea shoot, that pork rillette, that beef tenderloin came from--and every server knows the intimate lore and genesis of the dishes to a tee, because they MUST (pop quiz, JeremyJessicaErinSamBrianLisa!--what the hell's a subric? what's a fingerling potato and will it touch me back? explain the pork rillette and exactly where it came from! why do you think old people are the most likely to order the sweetbreads?). Because it matters. Two people plant the same seed in different or even the same ground, two entirely different plants. Animals raised by different hands are distinctly different animals.

YET, The Sheppard Mansion faces food irony and challenge in its very name. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the word “Mansion” is the albatross in the room here, but it’s not a yurt, it’s a mansion (um, in south central Pennsylvania)—and though that’s an inaccessible fancy-pants, special occasion name, Andy Little is not any of these. (Okay—a little inscrutable when he’s at work in his eerily quiet kitchen [and where were the towel-snapping salty stories peppered with expletives that Anthony Bourdain led me to believe were de rigeur?—some of this may have been for my benefit, but I was assured that the chef DEMANDS a quiet precision and order to his ship]).

A Little action...Everybody better speak softly & carry a BIG accountability.
Look, this is a man who opened my door for me and drove me from farm to farm in his parents’ minivan (hasn’t moved his car in a year and is Vespa-bound) with Darryl Hall & John Oates perched brazenly in the dash (theirs, he swears) and has Hanson as his Blackberry ringtone, so…come on. Intensely verbal oddball genius, yes—fancypants, no.
Although the ultimate goal is huge—let’s call a spade a spade--making this area of snack-ridden and hotbrownandplentyof it, economical at all costs PA relevant in the food-world—the immediacy and simplicity of the message is, well…quite Little: KNOW FARMS, KNOW FOOD (join the Facebook group).

It seems to me though, that even under the most venomous of circumstances one might only be able to judge Pennsylvania as “awfully sensible with a desire to make all pennies count.” Pennsylvania is nothing if not sensible, so it must be a matter of time before the surrounding areas (an easy-peasy drive from Philadelphia, DC or Baltimore—and I could run if you put some of that halibut on the end of a stick) GET IT. Remarkable real food made by real people right here?—and seriously—I will be FULL?

Impossibly, I will now use the movie French Kiss to illustrate some points— Meg Ryan, who is a bit high-strung (hey!), has misguidedly gone to France with one intention--to re-snatch her fiance and return HOME, but along the way, she suffers beautifully thwarted expectations of locality when she encounters jewel thief Kevin Kline, which ends up being sort of charming/morally okay because it turns out to he comes from a long line of provincial wine-makers, and just wants the money to buy a piece of land of his own (sob). Which brings us to, you know, the scene with the wine-tasting. Meg has stumbled on Kevin ("Luc")'s true nature, by finding his adolescent sommelier's box of vials--of herbs, spices, and essences--and most importantly by seeing him in this context of locality. He has her drink and savor the wine again, this time guiding her taste with his knowledge, and really, with the benefit of having grown the grapes on that soil for generations. Of course, it's a movie and okay never mind it's doomed--that's her tipping point, and exactly when she falls in love. There is something critical to her experience of tasting the wine and standing on the land where the grapes were grown which influences the taste, and her experience of the taste--and her emotions.

Now, some argue (a relentless poetry professor of mine, and Robert Frost also shared this view) that there is no context for art (sorry to use "THAT WORD" Chef Little!)—that biographical knowledge of an artisan or let's just say "maker of things" is unnecessary or irrelevant to what is made. I don’t care a whit about anyone else’s bedroom policies, former or present addictions, or politics (save I’m a snoop and voyeur, of course), but it DOES make a difference that a real person made something and that something of that real person shows up in the final product—how can it NOT?—and would we want it to?

It’s simply so much more effort to reconstruct goodness and taste in an external or lab-setting (cough, Alinea)--and for what--just to say you could? Why, when you could just bend right over and pluck the juicy thing that is so ripe and perfect it’s begging to be picked—in fact, it practically rolled over for you? Theoretical food makes no sense to me. Certainly, one of Andy Little’s well-trod angsts is that we seek the taste of something but not the real thing itself, when it’s right in front of us. Well, making nature yield to us is just a very, very bad idea, based on every word written and moment on celluloid that exists since the beginning of time.

The only architecture we can place on nature is around it. Herb & flower garden, The Sheppard Mansion.

Why are we so eager to be skewered on an antenna, dusted in a powder with the “taste” of pleasure, and covered in a foam with the “feeling of orgasm?”—People, I WANT THE REAL THING. The good news is, we can still have it. You can celery rib a thing for her pleasure, or you can just, um, go get it, directly from the source (I apologize to any high school student forced by one Ulric Berard to read Michener’s tome, The Source—George C. Marshall class of the late 80’s, I’m talking to you!!!—who is still stung by the mention of the word, but think of it this way: the word has a new, redemptive meaning). I’m all for experimentation and scientific what-ifs. Suspension bridges, ships in bottles and blown glass are all fascinating—I just don’t want to eat any of them.

Pared down, what compels me are things which arouse in me an overwhelming need to touch and put them in my mouth, exactly as I find them on the ground (nothing changes from childhood)—is there anything else? Are there other guideposts? Don’t all questions and interactions in life boil down to one simple question (or two)?: “Do I want that in my body--yes or no?” And "how desperately do I need it?"

This is a simple, but huge process--and all we can do is start with our respective roots, hooves and trotters planted firmly in the dirt, and go from there. Maybe that’s all we’re supposed to do. It's all I can do today, any way. Chef Little calls this “spreading the gospel”—which sounds ominous, but is really only as simple as a Halsa-hair commercial, circa 1979 ("and they tell two friends…")

And now I will tell you about MY absolute tipping point in this process-of-bliss, my most favorite metaphorical moment in 7 million amazing moments of May 9th, 2009--and I may well be the only one there who remembers it. We were trudging back from visiting Beau Ramsburg’s hogs, when I suddenly found myself, in my cute but truly amateur black garden clogs, completely stuck and isolated in this muck. Beau and Andy had taken the higher, grassy, been-there, ticks-be-damned ground—and here I was, just positively suctioned stuck in this fat mud wake on the other side of the truck rut between us (yes, that’s me: food lover and Elizabethan fool). Stripped of balance and with shameless possibility, I didn’t really think about it: I just reached out instinctively and grabbed for his hand, someone I’d never met until hours before, and he hauled me out, up and over the rut so easily. We didn’t say anything in particular about it, I'm not sure he even looked at me; we all just kept walking along again. It was nothing more than the physical execution of a friendly shrug--or was it a paradigm shift?

Indeed, there is a planetary insistence which is incredibly appealing about Chef Andrew Little--he's a big guy (but I think I could take him for a tray of those pretzel rolls and of course rhubarb mustard), but this isn't what I mean.
I can't decide if I want to be him when I grow up, or work near him often and with ease, or simply swallow him whole (in a purely filial, ourobouros kind of way, you sick, sick people).

What passed into me that day was this: never to try to adjust for the salt or bitter or even the unexpected sweet in life’s recipe by giving up and expecting less. Don’t EVER confuse snobbery with standards, with ideals and the simple desire never to compromise them. Stay in the orbit of good things.
To be in the presence of such good people working collaboratively made me feel hot and burnished and hopeful as a new penny—I mean, if we all agreed that pennies had a really promising future in their own right, color-wise, heft-wise, just because-wise, not just as a part of some greater “global economy.”

I would like to tell you about each of these local characters today, but I can’t--so I am going to come back to each in their own due time and explore further the concept: "What do you bring to the table?"—because each of these people brings something unique and excellent and responsible to the table. It DOES matter.

And, in case you had any doubts, if a Chef Little falls in the woods and no one is anywhere near, I am certain it makes quite a sound.


pre-pleasure process, and post-pleasure process. now who's the happier Hoar?

MORE ON HANOVER, COMING SOON!
“The Lightning McQueen of Bulls”
“Is that a pig post, or are you just glad to see me?”
“Tomato LA-DY!” (I'll bring the Air Supply cassette)
“The Silence of the Hams”