PICTURE OF THE DAY

Can anyone tell us if this is a blue heron we saw yesterday?

DAILY RAMBLING
Another brilliant day, another walk in the park. This has been a most extraordinary spring in terms of the weather. Probably a bit drier than many would like, though. I've lately begun reading two blogs (ugly word) about farming. Heirloom Harvest is a local Community Supported Agriculture establishment, where members pay a fee and do some work on the farm in exchange for a supply of organic produce during the season; I'm keeping an eye on it to learn more about the place, in case we want to join next year. Small Farms is a new blog and mostly about California so far; little slice-of-life pieces and enthusing about food.

Yesterday I picked up Ari Weinzweig's Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating (again). It's weird to think that, as recently as my childhood, you couldn't find a decent extra-virgin olive oil in most of this country, that artisan cheese and bread were confined to outposts of post-hippie oddity (like California and Ithica). That no one here had heard of edamame, and hardly anyone who wasn't Thai ate Thai food. Now, odds are good that your local grocery store has six or seven kinds of olive oil, countless soybean products, a couple of dozen cheeses, possibly an in-store bakery, and at least half of a Thai kitchen. A lot of these will be cheap, mass-produced versions of these products, not the lovingly hand-crafted food that AZ rhapsodizes about, but the fact that they're there at all is astonishing.

I'd like to try one of those $200 balsamic vinegars some day, would like to believe that a $50 wine wouldn't be wasted on me, wish that I was a truly mindful, soulful cook and consumer--but as I confessed to Dave last night, there's also a big part of me that wants to mindlessly eat a half pound of chocolate while reading. I guess one of the reasons I've taken to writing about food so much here is an attempt to encourage myself to pay better attention to what I do in the kitchen. As Ari says, far more succinctly than I did in my rambling a while back, "If we're going to do it two or three times a day for the rest of our lives, we might as well make our meals as enjoyable and interesting as possible."

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