never again

I have a serious fixation on candy corn. I'll admit that it's not a classy candy. It has no exotic ingredients and it's not crafted by French monks. You could argue that it has a slight honey taste, but eating a handful of them is really just like mainlining sugar. Most people I talk with turn up their noses at bad memories of a stale bowl of the candy sitting on a coffee table. I'd eat those ones, too. Each week, A, loving wife that she is, looks the other way as I toss a bag of candy corn into our shopping basket. It's an insatiable addiction.

Still, when it comes to my corn, I'm a bit of a purist. Candy corn is best consumed in October. It also should not taste of chocolate like the so-called "Indian Corn." The most leeway I am willing to allow is for a mellowcreme pumpkin, which is little more than GIANT candy corn. Therefore, I don't want to see "Bunny Corn," "Reindeer Corn," "Cupid Corn," or "Veteran Corn" when it is inevitably created. Other holidays don't need their own candy corn; Halloween needs candy corn.

And I need candy corn. So when I came across a recipe for homemade candy corn, it seemed like the perfect, mildly neurotic cooking activity for last weekend. As candy goes, it even seemed simple. No candy thermometer. No esoteric ingredients. Food coloring was the only ingredient we didn't have on hand. And here is where ethics collides with fun - New Seasons carries only a few large bottles of standard food coloring (none of the primary-color sample packs) and a couple shades of all-natural alternatives for a lower price. Thanks to their ethics (and my stinginess) we bought one bottle of beet coloring instead of a bottle each of industrial red and yellow dyes. I ended up with pastel pink rainbow corn.


Making the candy was the most tedious process imaginable. For some reason, I disregarded the fact that every single person online who has tried the recipe complained about the time it took. Chalk it up to sugar-induced mania on my part.


The process starts out alright - you heat the ingredients, knead in the dye, and roll out ropes that you press together into three-color bands. Then comes the shaping. You cut and cut and cut and end up with piles of rough triangles that need to be individually pressed and rolled between your fingers to take on that classic kernel shape. Sticky hell.


Two-and-a-half hours later, we finally had enough to fill a 99 cent bag. But hey, at least A didn't have to shamefully hide my candy addiction underneath our bulk grains and organic produce at the grocery store.

time off (hardly)

That's right: P & A are hitting the road for a weekend of food-addled wanderlust. Is this a photo of how we pack for a trip? No, it's just one shot of the overwhelming mess that is our recent move. You heard that correctly - we just finished a rapid-fire move across town and we are already leaving the place. Why? Because we're crazy. Crazy for food.

We're setting off on a pseudo-vacation for Labor Day weekend to attend Slow Food Nation. For the past couple of months, we've been managing the blog for the Portland chapter of Slow Food USA, so we will be traveling to San Francisco to listen to speakers on sustainable foodways and to taste as much as we possibly can (all strictly on assignment, of course). We'll be visiting the Victory Gardens, sampling street foods, exploring the market vendors, and participating in guided tastings of the best American artisanal foods. Plus, when we're not at the festival, we'll be eating in San Francisco.

And, immediately after we return, we'll launch ourselves headlong into the Time-Based Art festival. P will be blogging their events for the third year at Urbanhonking.com. The shows at TBA are always challenging, always exciting, and always surprising. This year, there will be more free performances and visual arts than ever before and the line-up for the late night program (THE WORKS) looks awesome.

We're still pouring over the program and making our plans, but as of now, here's who we're stoked about:
Reggie Watts (who'll blow your mind)
Antony and the Johnsons
Jerome Bel explaining contemporary French performance art to traditional Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun
Zidane
Fritz Haeg

So it may be a little quiet around here for a few weeks, but you can always follow along on the Slow Food PDX blog or the PICA TBA blog. Maybe once it is all over, we might actually have the time to see friends again. Or, you know, finish moving in.

blood, sweat and quiche

Last weekend, we may have made the meal of the year. I know it's a bit early to declare something like this, but truly, it was spectacular. We had agreed to watch my in-laws' puppy (a task that, however adorable this puppy is, made me vow to forgo puppies and children for the next ten years) and consequently found ourselves stuck inside for most of the weekend. Undeterred by this turn of events (it was raining, anyway), we spent most of the weekend making food: muesli, sourdough no-knead bread, chocolate chip cookies, lavender shortbread with sea salt, and the aforementioned meal of the century. What else were we to do? Little Oscar, only three months old, needs to go outside to do his "business" after nap-time or active play, which by my calculations was about 95% of our waking hours. So, we cooked.

THE MEAL was truly restaurant quality (and easy to boot): poussin marinated in paprika and olive oil, then broiled and placed over lemony sauteed kale and onion resting on a bed of pillowy soft polenta, the whole meal drizzled with a pomegranate reduction. It was based on a Mario Batali recipe with the addition of polenta we'd recently acquired from Ayers Creek Farm (read more about them here). It was also a triumph of eating locally, something we've been working into our lives more and more these days. The kale and onion were direct from Oregon farms, the polenta from Ayers Creek, and the poussin sourced locally by Viande Meats. I tell you all of this not to gloat, nor to preach, but simply to provide a contrast to a time when things were not so easy.

Eating locally provides plenty of pleasures. There are nights (most nights) when I am astounded by the variety, the bounty, the incredibly tasty (and surprisingly easy) combinations that come forth from within a 100 miles of where we live (see above, for emphasis). However, as with anything, there are also the lows...the nights that look more like last Thursday. These nights roll past 8:30 with P retreating from my grouchiness to the bathroom to shave, while I hungrily pick at my chicory salad until all that remains is a pool of dressing, both of us waiting for the quiche in the oven to finish its long journey from raw ingredients to plate. [I should qualify this by admitting that we have never been very successful when making quiche. I know you may laugh at this. Quiche is supposed to be one of the quick fixes of home-cooking: mix up the eggs and milk, toss in some vegetables and maybe some cheese, throw everything in a tart shell (pre-prepared for extra convenience) and pop it in the oven for 45 minutes. Voila, dinner! Ours normally take twice that cooking time and never seem to have quite the firmness that we desire.]

There were a few hurdles during the meal that, had we been making this meal a year ago, probably would have pushed us to change course. The first, and probably most significant warning sign came in the form of dairy. We had decided to substitute milk for the cream the recipe called for and had picked up a gallon of whole milk from a local dairy. Or so we thought. P decided to take a quick swig before measuring the appropriate amount and immediately scrunched up his face. "Nonfat."

Oh, the horror.

Call me creamist, but I maintain that there is no earthly reason to drink/cook with anything less than 2%. You might as well be drinking water and, frankly, water tastes better. The evil fascists (actually very nice, friendly staff people) at the neighborhood grocery store must have cruelly switched bottles on us and, in our excitement to buy from a local dairy (with a returnable glass bottle, no less!), we had fallen for their scheme.

But, before I make you think this post is simply a diatribe about the evils of watery milk, let's just say that I blame the milk for the endless cooking time of the quiche and leave it at that.

The real problem with the evening was not that it was a night where everything seemed to be going wrong, ending with us eating dinner a full three hours after we had started cooking. There were many points during the cooking, and the waiting that followed, at which we could have abandoned the meal for something faster. At around 8:00, P noticed that I was getting a hungry look in my eye (never a good sign) and mentioned that maybe we should grab some food at a nearby restaurant. But the more we cook at home, the more I make a point to eat consciously, the less I feel like going out, and especially not for just any food.

Cooking locally and from scratch can become a sort of addiction. Once you are in the rhythm, you realize that cooking from scratch is not the chore that its made out to be (rarely the ordeal that I describe above). It can be incredibly soothing to watch the flour, water and yeast combine as you mix a bread dough and incomparably satisfying to taste the finished project. And there's the second layer of the addiction: taste. Home cooked food tastes differently than food you'll find in a restaurant. Of course, it tends to be less rich and salty, but the flavors can often be more distinct, whole and comforting. Eating local foods in the season in which they're meant to be eaten only heightens these tastes. Lately, it's the meals we make at home that I crave on a regular basis, the special occasion restaurant food that I want to taste on just that - a special occasion.

To compound these feelings, there is the inevitable guilt and confusion that I find when eating out at many restaurants. And no, this is not a concern about weight gain. Whereas before I used to eat a pile of take-out Thai without blinking an eye, now I find myself blinking both and, often, losing my appetite. When you know many of the people who grow the food that you eat, it's hard not to think of them as you bite into the factory farm chicken, the green beans from South America and the watery slice of tomato (in the middle of winter, no less). Not only that, but I've tasted eggplant in the height of the season, when the flavor is rich and fruity, the color vibrant, and the flesh firm, but tender. Eggplant in January just isn't the same.

Faced with this barrage of questions, and given my view that eating seasonally, knowing your growers, and putting some of your own labor into the food that you eat makes it taste better, I think I'll take a three hour quiche every so often. Again, see the opening of my post for more reasons to stay the course. Not that it matters here, but it was, without a doubt, the best quiche we've ever made.

bring an umbrella.

So while Amanda and I have just surfaced for air after seeing 18 performances in one week, she has gone off on a three day work retreat in the wildness. That leaves me to fret about things far beyond my control. Like the weather.

Months ago, October 6th seemed like an arbitrary choice. We both enjoy the fall and wanted to have an autumn wedding. It couldn't conflict with TBA or run up too close to shows at my gallery. Other than that, we both are fond of October and felt that early in the month offered the best chance for nice weather. And that was the last it crossed our minds.

An evening wedding in the fall? Sure, that makes a lot of sense. Revisiting the rooftop terrace for the first time the other evening, we both said the same thing. "Damn, it's windy up here." Suddenly, our summer-weight attire that we bough back in April seems woefully light for the bracing chill of an autumn night. At least we'll be in front of the fireplace. It is all of you poor saps that will be huddled together for warmth. Maybe this way it will seem like the crowded seating arrangement was intentional.

But the other factor that we had failed to consider was light. Thanks to a little phenomenon called axial tilt, the sun doesn't always set at the same time year round. Most people know this, but for some reason, we chose to schedule our ceremony for 6:30. Thankfully, when I looked into it for the first time last night, I found out that sunset on the 6th shouldn't occur until around 6:41. And get this, we'll have "civilian twilight" for another 18 minutes or so! We don't even need candles because the sun will do the mood-lighting for us.

According to the National Weather Service, we have a 35.6% historic chance of rain and, thankfully, a 0% chance of snow. The average precipitation for October 6 is .10", while the most we ever got was 1.24" in 1981. The hottest it's been was a balmy 89 in 1952, but it was once only 37 degrees in 1974. Luckily, the temperature averages 47-68 degrees. I'd say that's pretty comfortable. But should it matter that back in 1962, the weekend of our wedding brought in one of the worst tsunamis to ever strike the Pacific Northwest?

I've become a weather fanatic - checking and cross-referencing multiple sources to find the report that I want to believe. However, all of the meteorologists will tell you that beyond a few days in advance, forecasting is little more than guesswork. This just means that I'll have to start putting more stock in predictions the closer it gets. In the meantime, I was considering getting a subscription to a Farmer's Almanac to access their "80% accurate" long-range forecasts, but when I went to one of their websites, they predicted the 4th-7th as being "very unsettled" and their front page advertised a "Worst Wedding Weather Contest." Maybe I should just invest in a pig spleen. And you should invest in some blankets and ponchos.

At least I haven't begun worrying about the weather for our honeymoon. Why did I insist on Montreal over Hawaii?

i feel just like peter mayle, only i don't think i'm making any progress.

With all of our talk of two-month marks and the stresses of August, I didn't even realize that it was September. But maybe that's a good thing, isn't it? Amanda is probably right - we are reasonably organized and we are being pretty efficient. We're looking ahead at the final month to our wedding with no illusions. We are prepared to face it together. Just 36 more days, then a big party (with, you know, a ceremony and some minor speaking roles for both of us), and then we are off on our honeymoon, free to relax is Montreal.

IF ONLY WE KNEW HOW TO RELAX IN FRENCH!

Suddenly, September isn't quite enough time to accomplish everything we need to, which now, in my mind, consists of gaining conversational fluency in French.

In high school, I took French for four years because it seemed like a better way to meet girls than Spanish class. I traveled to Paris and Rennes and watched Beethoven dubbed into French with the young daughter of my host family. And I understood it. I continued studying the language when I went to college and there I plateaued. In intermediate classes it felt like we were covering the same rudimentary grammatical rules ad nauseum, but to move up to the next level of courses meant translating 50 pages a night of A Remembrance of Things Past. At a certain point, the classes became far too much work for a non-major - nightly essays, five days a week of instruction time, conversation circles, presentations. "Patrice," the professor would say, "we need more majors like you - those literature courses are when the language really gets interesting." I dropped French that year. I planned on keeping up with the language on my own, reading Tintin comics, convinced that the classes weren't all that useful. "Study abroad?" I'd think," I'll just go somewhere English-speaking."


After returning from an American art school in Florence, I began to realize what a mistake it had been to abandon French. While I was Italy, I'd seen the result of an American education exclusively in English. It was bleached-blonde girl wearing her boyfriend's ASU sweatshirt and throwing up outside of the American bar across the street from Piazza Santa Croce. I was terrified - I couldn't be one of them, I was meant to be a polyglot. Remembering how easily French once came to me, I decided to audit an intermediate class, hoping to refresh my skills.

On the first day, the underclassmen around me passed the time until the class began recounting their high school boarding experience in the south of France. When I'd taken intermediate French my Freshman year, most students couldn't count past 17. As an icebreaker, we were supposed to say something we enjoyed eating that began with the same first letter as our first initial. Do you know what I said?

Je m'appelle Patrice, et j'aime manger du pizza.

There was no way I could blame that on just having lived in Italy. It was the only food I could remember. I slept through class the next day.

What can I say now?
Desole, je seulement parle un peu de francais.

* * *

Feeling ahead of the game, back in June, Amanda and I set out our plans for learning French. We'd listened to tapes before we went to Italy, and while we did struggle the first few days, we at least learned to yell "fire!" in a melodramatic Italian accent. I said I'd dig up my old conjugation guides and grammatical dictionaries and we could practice with one another. Amanda's idea had something to do with unlocking the subconscious learning zones of your brain, where language flowed intuitively. It also involved a bottle of wine for each practice session. After a few nights of rousing Amanda out of her early evening, French lesson slumber, we kind of let it slip. And now we have 36 days left.

The other day, I did a Google search for a campy image of an old "Learn French Quickly!" kind of ad, that I would put as the image for this post; something we could all laugh about. The image above is what I found and it in no way comforts me or soothes my nerves about my lack of French proficiency. Okay, deep breath, I recognize some of the words, right? Eat with pleasure ... without .... fatigue ... the good sausages ... of the ... prodigal pig? What the hell does that mean? There is no way I will ever be able to follow French directions if I can't even explain why the pig is so bountiful.

Understanding written words will probably be the least of my problem in Quebec, a province that has made a case for separatism on the basis of linguistic differences. From what I understand, Montrealers have surmounted much of the former divide between Anglophones and Francophones, but even if the two languages coexist in relative harmony, Quebecois French is a separate dialect (a basilect, in fact, since I spent so much time on Wikipedia today) known as joual, that developed pretty much independently from continental French since the 1600s. There goes any academic French that may still be lingering in my brain.
Additionally, the province has the Office québécois de la langue française, a governmental department that patrols signage and storefronts, ensuring that English does not eclipse written French either in order or size. Tirer must appear first and in larger letters than Pull on doors. Yes, they have english on signage, but I'll probably have to bring along a magnifying glass to find it.

So I am clearly in the right mindset for a honeymoon, eh? We could have gone to Hawaii and lounged on the beach, our lips veritably playing with the sounds of the Hawaiian language - words that are far from being essential to getting around on the islands. But no, I wanted to go to a city that will probably be waist-deep in snow when we arrive. I now spend my breakfasts studying my old textbooks and grammatical guidebooks. I whiled away most of a slow afternoon at work quietly reciting the name of a Montreal ice cream place to myself, trying to understand the bilingual double-entendre. Havres aux glaces. Havres aux glaces. Havres aux glaces. My tongue felt clumsy against the roof of my mouth with the -re sound. Late in the day, I found this demo of a natural-sounding online vocalizer that AT&T is developing. I listened to the pronunciation. That's it? Have a glass? I could have figured that out just by looking at it. Maybe I have less language troubles than I think, so long as I can figure out a way to have this program do all of my speaking for me. Still, if that's Montreal's idea of a pun, maybe humor won't translate.

Counterpoint.

In the true spirit of one who is about to pledge her love and support to a certain P-erson, I would now like to contradict everything that certain someone has been saying for the past few months.

Well, not everything.

We're getting married, it is true. We (Patrick) did make all of those invitations that you now have in your hands/on your fridge/framed in your living room. We (Patrick) did want to have a summer wedding after seeing those admittedly dapper suits the Decemberists wore. And we (Patrick...okay, me too) did get the hell out of the country when the two-month-mark rolled into town.

However, I would just like to say that we have done it all with, I think, a lot less stress and heartache than one stereotypically associates with planning the "happiest day of your life." I read Harry Potter the entire time Pat printed those invitations. Wedding planning has not barred our participation in an assortment of fine activities (Exhibit A: the Decemberists concert). As for going to Vancouver...the nightmarket was a much stronger pull than panic about the wedding was a push. Things have been busy, yes. But, things are always busy during this time of year, it being summer and all - that glorious time of year when the excessive sunshine makes everyone shockingly social.

The fact that at times this summer I have wanted to draw back blissfully into wintry hibernation has stemmed only in part from the wedding planning. When it comes down to it, I have actually been enjoying the process, enjoying the planning - and I like being with Patrick now more than ever. I may be going out on a limb here, but I would say Patrick has been having a pretty good time as well.

The reason I feel the need to write this is that people have been asking me lately (more and more as the wedding gets closer) how things are going, whether I am nervous or even panicked, how I am dealing with the insurmountable stress that planning this wedding must certainly bring. I find myself falling into the role everyone seems to expect - making faces and talking about how much work it has all been, how crazy it is making me and how I will be so glad when it is all over. I actually have to stop myself from saying these things, because the truth is, I don't feel this way at all.

If I have learned anything during the wedding planning, it is that the wedding industry has created the self-perpetuating monster that is the modern-day-wedding. When did we decide that a couple has one day to show the world how exciting, romantic and glorious their relationship is (and that they must show this by throwing the most lavish party possible and making themselves miserable along the way)? Seriously, treating the wedding as the ultimate measure of how happy a couple is and how successful a marriage will be is akin to expecting winning the title of Prom Queen to decide your future happiness and popularity. I never did win, so I guess you can say I'm a pretty hopeless case at this point.

For the record, I would just like to say that this wedding will not be the end all be all snapshot of P and my relationship, and I couldn’t be happier about that. It will, however, be a pretty great party. Now bring on that sangria; it is August, after all, and I think I'll have another glass.

we'll have plenty of time to take care of that later...

an improvement over our earlier to do lists

A and I went to a friend's wedding recently (as in, "over a month ago") feeling pretty good about where we were at with planning. At the very least, I was feeling good and blissfully ignorant and Amanda's list-making had been worn down by my regular rejoinder of "we'll take care of that in August." August, I imagined, would be a month when our only concern would be passing the pitcher of sangria while we leisurely took care of all those remaining details surrounding the wedding. Between our quickly filling-calendar for July and the inevitable stress of September's one-month mark, August became the receptacle for my procrastination.

Now, this wedding was the first that we had attended since we had announced our engagement; our first in-action look at what we were up against. Until this point, much of our planning had been based on the gauzy, soft-focus romance of how we remembered our friend's weddings (drawn exclusively from our blurry snapshots and champagne-addled memories). Here is what I remember from most of our friends' weddings:

There was food. It was held somewhere. I'm pretty sure they ended up married.

When you boil it all down, wedding's are just overblown, formal, expensive parties, right? If that was the case, then we had nothing to worry about. Our two main priorities had been securing the event space and the caterer and did we accomplish them? Handily. Promptly. Now top my glass off and make sure some of those boozy orange slices make it in.

Then we arrived at our friends' wedding. What started off as a night of Amanda making awkward introductions between me and people she had forgotten she had gone to grade school with, quickly devolved into an evening of conspiratorial whispering between she and I, dissecting their ceremony and reception:
"They have programs, is that on our list?"
"How far are we on compiling music for the reception?"
"Do we need a separate bouquet to toss?"
"Shit, they have, like, a dozen cakes! Maybe we need more cakes?"
"Look at the bride and groom - we won't get to sit the entire night of our wedding!"
"We won't get to eat!"

Great, the two things we had actually taken care of in advance would go unused by us. Meanwhile, everything that all of our guests would be expecting was still waiting to be taken care of in August. Damn, I just spilled my sangria all over myself.

We chose to get married when we did partially because it seemed like the right length for an engagement. We had seen so many of our friends have l o n g engagements with drawn-out waiting periods in the middle. We thought seven and a half months was short enough to be efficient, but long enough to take care of everything. If I could reschedule everything, I would have a one, maybe two month engagement. Like ripping off a band-aid, it would hurt and then it would be done with. And isn't that just the kind of lovely metaphor more wedding's should aspire to?

As I've said before, the wedding industry is huge and maybe a little bit evil. It's really quite easy to get overwhelmed by all of the details that, somewhere in our history, have been incorporated into our cultural idea of the perfect day. While originally we'd been overwhelmed to the point of catatonia, we have found that you can just as easily be overwhelmed into taking on too many projects. Most nights we spend making favors and invites, calling for various appointments and drawing out elaborate play-by-plays of the ceremony. Which reminds me to say that you should never look at wedding books - they overwhelm couples directly into that Martha Stewart automaton mentality. I really think that if we had maybe glanced at even one more wedding book "for ideas," we would be sitting on our living room floor this very minute, trying to figure out how to make individual birch-bark wrapped boxes to hold hand-picked and home-perfumed rose petals for our guests to throw. At least our place would have smelled nice. But I don't think I would have been able to find our to-do list under all of the birch clippings and glue-guns.

we're still getting married. seriously.

I know that we haven't been posting at all very much lately (and as I hear it, you haven't been looking very often, either), so just to let you all know, we are still getting married. We're just hitting that mid-point in the planning process when the wedding feels like a dull buzzing in the background of our migraine. Or maybe thats just the heat. Because it is 102 damn degrees in Portland today! As soon as it cools off, we'll post about the planning process and the very special torture that it is to plan the happiest day of your life. For now, since our apartment has started to look like a Jo-Ann Fabrics with all of our wedding craft projects, here are a few photos of why exactly we are so damn busy:
















That's right, I made the brilliant decision to test run my temperamental new old 1950s hand-operated letterpress on our own wedding invitations.



































































I only have to do this 200 more times.