High-Rise cocktail

Hello, everyone! So, it's been about six months since I've ruffled the waters of this reticent food blog. I'd like to imagine that it's been absently humming to itself, completely relaxed in a warm, summery field, somewhere along the coast of the internet. I won't offer meandering excuses as to where I've been or fluffy reasons for a long absence, but they involve an archaic, finicky oven and the need to replenish a disappearing blogging mojo. I'm still trying to deal with the latter, but I *think* I have managed to grab onto its tail (my mojo's spirit animal is an elusive, prickly arctic fox).

Instead of confections, I've resurfaced with a libation (my very first!). You will be smitten with this coy, little intoxicant, I promise.

sir thomas sharpe's dark chocolate + garden mint cookies

Rain

a symphony orchestra.
there is a thunderstorm
they are playing a Wagner overture
and the people leave their seats under the trees
and run inside the pavilion
the women giggling, the men pretending calm,
wet cigarettes being thrown away,
Wagner plays on, and then they are all under the
pavilion. the birds even come in from the trees
and enter the pavilion and then it is the Hungarian
Rhapsody #2 by Lizst, and it still rains, but look,
one man sits alone in the rain
listening, the audience notices him. they turn
and look. the orchestra goes about its
business. the man sits in the night in the rain,
listening. there is something wrong with him,
isn't there?
he came to hear the
music.

~ by Charles Bukowski, from Selected Poems

September feels both aloof and intimate this year. The days are hot, damp...marvelously slow & yet bittersweet in their attempt to casually hold onto mid-July's warm embrace. A small fistful of russet-tinted leaves have fallen onto the still verdant earth. They remind me of overexuberant guests who always arrive too early for the party; yet you can't help but get swept up in their contagious, breathless excitement. September is my birthday month, but I can always sense autumn's approaching grey skies & deceptively soft chill. I have no quarrel with autumn, don't get me wrong, I'm only all too aware of what follows, and I will never be ready for it.

lemon meringue pie

"There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath
the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation
when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it." 

                                                              ~ from The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950 - 1962

wild Ophelia's triple berry pie

"When I start to think, I freeze. And when I freeze I write like a lady who came from a clean, honorable, intelligent and quiet home. And what sort of writing is that?" 
                                                                                             ~ Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters

I've spent too many costly sympathies on an ill fated Ophelia and spun too many broken, unfulfilled yearnings into The Lady of Shalott's loom. For once, I would like to live, to write...to be uninhibited. Mornings & spring are heavy with promise, and something far more dangerous, hope. There's a fleeting, blissful moment when I first wake up; the tree outside my window is lush with foliage, the sun is bathing my no-longer-flannel sheets and, best of all, the worries & burdens & what ifs have not yet burst through the confines of my tranquil mind. If only I could hold onto that serenity and wear it like a bee-sting necklace, infusing frozen, distraught veins with a doses of halcyon weather, as needed.

This post & its photos have been waiting for me to (re)find myself; my own authenticity. I'm too easily disappointed. When lofty plans & far-fetched wishes tumble to the ground, I tend to retreat inward and wallow a bit too long in a state of melancholy. This blog is not immune to my occasional bouts of despondency. But that part of me IS a part of me. After 30 + years, I'm beginning to accept that I'll always be 'sometimes' moody, but maybe I can tap into the depths and turn a sorrow that's sprung from lost grasps at imagined perfections, into an untamed savage beauty. (My mother is half Irish, after all.)  I'm still organically lost and hunting through the overgrown moss-green forest of my (as of late) unkempt mind, but I this site is my child and it's been neglected far too long. And however fanciful, I'm still holding a candle for Tom Hiddleston (even through choppy, rumor-filled waters). There are perks to the idiosyncrasies of being a practical idealist.