on shaping something enduring and sustaining

perfect songs, sung perfectly

Scholarly pursuits, at least for now, have ended. I'm in the sweet spot: between being an undergraduate student - the last socially mandatory educational rite, as far as most of us are concerned - and reaching the point where it becomes imperative to bring some definition to the terms of a post-collegiate reality. Many people have assured me that this, the initial post-grad limbo, was the most frightening period of their lives, but that they felt better about it once suitably terrified, or annoyed, or bored, or otherwise spurred into some sort of action that seemed to move them definitively out of it. 10 days in - after a deep tissue massage, quality time with meine mutter, and several excellent meals both of the homemade and professionally-prepared variety - I'm holding up just fine.

New Territory: Using the KITCHEN

My current bicoastal existence tends to land me in or near two of the foodiest locations in the United States: Portlands Oregon and Maine. Portland West has recently been tapped at the Food Cart Center of the Universe, as the food cart population evolves in variety, affordability, and atmospheric excellence. Portland East, meanwhile, is a more traditional sort of culinary paradise, with the unstoppable combination of a hyper-aware eating culture and easy/plentiful access to good local fixings inherent in the state of Maine's largely rural constitution. My college, it turns out, is no exception: I did some work with Bates Dining Services last year and discovered that the food program at Bates is about as conscientious as it has the capability to be, considering the 1800+ mouths the institution feeds on a daily basis nine months out of the year. Clearly, the places i live tend to care about what goes into their respective inhabitants' bellies.

Food culture is as closely associated with heritage as it is with locality, and last summer I took my first foray into the foreign yet personal territory of heritage cooking by attempting to prepare one of my grandmother's recipes. Grandma Mary's been gone for about fifteen years; the recipes that survive locate her in what seems to me a pretty unique cultural moment and place, as both mid-century New England suburban housewife and Jewish southerner. Endeavoring to eventually work my way through her repertoire, I thought a good place to start would be an old standby, stuffed cabbage. With a Sauvie Island potluck to attend, Dad and I set to preparing two versions of the dish - one meat, the traditional by-the-book approach, and one veggie (with mushrooms), our own adaptation, one July afternoon.

Once we started the preparation process, I got the lowdown on the significance of this particular dish in Joslin family history. The deal with stuffed cabbage was that, according to my Grandpa Bob, it was never as good as Nana's (his formidable mother). It turns out the the recipe was in fact not Mary's but Nana's recipe, and my grandmother's thankless task was to attempt to recreate it to my grandfather's taste periodically, a fundamentally futile undertaking. The difficulty of doing so certainly became clear to me and my Dad in attempting to decipher the instructions for preparation: every aspect of the directions, from the ingredients list to the order of assemblage to the time required for each stage of preparation, is as vague as the next. One of the ingredients is listed as "box of raisins" -- without the slightest indication of how big said box ought to be, or perhaps how many raisins it should contain. Dad suggested that this may have been intentional on Nana's part, which instigated a foray into familial history: stories of a mother-in-law's disapproval and, deliciously, society scandal (!). The storytelling turned out to be an integral part of the process, and along with some inspired guess work and improvisation established both of our versions - necessarily pretty loose translations, that is - of the stuffed cabbage recipe as instant hits. The process took three and a half hours, and paid off delectably.

such success.

While I may not be terribly prone to cooking for entire afternoons as I did that day, much of last semester -- my first living off campus at Bates -- was dedicated to cultivating cooking chops. My two regular dining companions, Limor and Hannah, were better about preparing for food preparation than I was, and between Limor's vegetarianism, my dairy allergy, and all of our busy schedules, we had our work cut out for us. Still, a few favorites dishes emerged victorious in our searches for easy/healthy/tasty meals, with a whole lot of help from the impeccable food blog Smitten Kitchen. The absolute tops was a seemingly bleak day when we had almost nothing in the kitchen to work with; luckily, SK published a recipe for spicy squash salad with lentils and goat cheese and between our two households we had all the ingredients, down to the element that arguably made the dish: smoked Spanish paprika.

Amidst my cooking kick, my friend Alyssa's boyfriend, Will, a photographer in NYC, made this little film. Using the vimeo as a platform for relaying cooking instructions, via a magazine-like visual format. It didn't escape the attention of NPR, and for obvious reasons.

Cooking Dinner Vol. I from William Hereford on Vimeo.

And so the fun continues. Now living in New York, I've become addicted to cooking risotto at home: my friend Evan and I followed this recipe, again from Smitten Kitchen, with mushrooms, artichokes and asparagus, when we were both home in December. I've been making modified versions of it every week or so since, and there's plenty more where that came from. New York may have some seriously spectacular restaurants, but it's to my own kitchen I'll head when seeking to satisfy my appetite for fine fare.

Typhoon Season

It's summertime again, which means the responsibilities and useful activities that are normally given first priority instead give way to enough delicious boredom to encourage a blog post. I tried blogging regularly in Europe, by anyone's estimation unsuccessfully, which leads me to the conclusion that i simply may not be a regular post kind of girl. Moving on: there's been enough excellent stuff punted across my screen that I feel inclined to share some of it. This one's a music post.

To start off, let me say that I love summer in Portland. The weather is perfectly mild and sweet, the days are optimally lazy, and I get a chance to catch up on all the new excellent music churned out over the course of the past nine months that I've spent toiling away in Lewiston. On this last point, contracting mononucleosis this season has had the undesirable yet unavoidable result of (largely) missing out. Even though only able to make it to a handful of shows since I got home, I thankfully have a host reliably in-touch local friendly types, ready and able to compensate for my summertime inexperience and bring me up to speed. Thus I present, courtesy of a certain KUPS radio dj in Tacoma, the newest contender for the ever elusive title of Most Epitomic Portland Band Of Our Generation: Typhoon.

Possible and presumptuous exaggeration. But this band is lovely, and as such I'm loving on them. There's something about their tunes and their vibe that's so preternaturally of this place, the city that feels like a town that's growing into a city but wants to stay a town, where i love to spend the best dozen or so weeks of my year. I might be projecting, but it seems to me that Portland's growing pains are echoed throughout the band's reverberative repertoire. It could be just that their songs play really well on the farm's ancient busted stereo. For some less subjective, bona fide support for their aforementioned nomination, try these on:

Exhibit A. They went over huge at PDX Pop Now 2010.

Exhibit B. Their next three shows are at the Enchanted Forest (! HOW many birthday parties I attended here in my youthier youth is anyone's guess), Pickathon, and Music Fest NW.

Exhibit C: perhaps the most potent evidence of all is their first music video, filmed in Portland and imbued with youthful Portland-y Portlandness:

and, for good measure, Exhibit D: this year's summer anthem/favorite track off their first album, Hunger and Thirst: CPR / Claws Pt. 2

For those with knowledge, I'm not going to nitpick over the fact that Typhoon is actually from Salem. They are integral to the portrait of my 2010 hometown summer. That's that.

Runnin' and Lovin' (if you wanna)

I can't say I'm all that enthralled with the entirety of the film created in conjunction with and set to Noah and the Whale's latest album, The First Days of Spring. This piece of it, however, is a true gem.

Love, At the Cellular Level

the

tide stretches, the air circulates without haste,

nothing in this instant alters the certainty of

a flow not be disturbed, the constancy of the

mind destines itself to other places; no longer

the seduction of certain arms tending to

lament, or lips saturated with praise, rather the

steady movement towards the present of dreams

and the water's constant documentation

- Lila Zemborain, Mauve Sea-Orchids

Even while acknowledging the psychological residue of a severe childhood hydrophobia that still lingers in my nerves, Zemborain's combination of aquatic images and bodily sensation feels oddly resonant. Probably because of it, actually. Whatever the cause, her work is beautiful, and I especially enjoyed hearing it read in the original Spanish.

Peter Funch: World Class Flaneur

This image is collaged from separate photographs of a single street location taken over some period of time. (My limited knowledge of blog formatting mysteriously allows only parts of the image to be displayed. Click on it for the fuller effect.)

Lovely.