$2.50 bouquets of daffodils
reading The Wind in the Willows aloud
Girl Scout Cookies
dreaming about spring dresses
yoga dates with friends
the discovery of vanilla pudding in chocolate chip cookies
bedtime reading of The Pursuit of Love
My month is apparently all about cookies and books. What are you happy about in March?
Remember back in 2008, when I interviewed Cathy Erway of Not Eating Out in New York? Back then, Cathy was a cute girl with a cool blog, but in the two years hence she’s become a veritable force. She is the “Brooklyn food girl,” holding cooking demos at the green market, judging cook-offs, hosting a supper club, and writing for Edible Brooklyn. And now our hometown girl has gone and written a memoir with recipes about her experience of exclusively eating in in a city that loves to eat out. Her publisher is giving away one free copy of The Art of Eating In to one lucky Pink of Perfection reader. Leave a comment about what you love about eating in by midnight EST this Sunday February 21st. One winner will be chosen at random. US mailing addresses only.
I know Twitter isn’t a completely useless media development because it brought me to Tea. Known more formally as Tara Austen Weaver, Tea & Cookies’s namesake is warm and utterly real. If you can sense a kind, salt-of-the-earth nature in 140 characters, you know it’s the real deal. And today is a huge day for Tea. Her book, The Butcher and the Vegetarian, just hit the shelves. It seemed like a more than fitting time for a celebratory chat.
Tell us about Tea & Cookies. What made you decide to do the blog? What are the biggest challenges? What inspires you, your food, and your posts?
Tea & Cookies was a total accident. I was sick, I was bored, I had been reading a lot of food blogs. One day I started one—but I never put my name on it or told my friends. I didn’t plan to keep it up once I was healthy and back at work, but by that time I was hooked and couldn’t stop.
The site has always been about what is inspiring me at that moment. It’s a personal place where I talk about what I love—food, travel, tea, pretty things, amazing people. The name for the blog was an accident as well, but now I think of it as my tea party where I get to chat with lovely people about things that make me happy. It’s a joy.
The hard part is staying motivated and finding the time for it all. I burnt out after finishing the book and had to step away for a little while. I thought about stopping entirely, but the site has brought so much that is wonderful into my life—people who have become dear friends, a wonderful community of other bloggers, amazingly kind and generous readers. I would miss it terribly if I gave it up.
How did your experience blogging affect the process of writing a book? Do you approach the two forms differently, and if so, how?
Writing a blog is like going for a lap swim each morning—a slight effort, but ultimately a nice little workout that leaves you energized. Writing a book is like swimming the Atlantic. There are sharks, there are storms you couldn’t have predicted or prepared for, but there are huge triumphs as well. A regular writing schedule like blogging is good practice for a book, but I’m not sure anything prepares you to lose sight of the shore.
In my case I knew the book was going to look very different from the blog, as it covered material I had never written about. If my blog is about putting forth what I want to write about, the book pulled out things I was scared to write about. It was much harder, though ultimately more rewarding.
The Recipe Club is rich in the best kinds of ways. Picking your way through thick, beautifully designed pages of recipes, letters, and emails over forty years of friendship feels finding a secret box of mementos in a closet (kind like Griffin and Sabine for foodies). But it’s the sustenance of friendship that makes this book so satisfying. I loved most what my girl crush Lynne Rossetto Kasper said: “Food and love without the schmaltz and warm fuzzies is what kept me turning the pages of this book. If you’re lucky enough to have that one true best friend, you’ll find all the love, prickliness, laughter, blood curdling honesty, and joy here.” One reader will be picked at random to win a free copy from Harper Collins. Enter to win by leaving a comment about a memory of food and friendship by 12 midnight EST, Friday, January 29. Only US mailing addresses.
Update 02/01:
And the winner is Dana! Thanks so much to everyone for sharing your awesome stories.
To put it quite simply, I am in love with this book. For anyone who has wanted to sit at the knees of women older and wiser and cull time-tested knowledge of how to live with savoir faire, How to Sew a Button is your charming, funny, can-do guide. Erin Bried traveled the country interviewing grandmothers so that we could all be armed with Girl Scout-ish know-how whether we are suddenly asked to waltz at a ball (would that this particular situation cropped up more often) or are charged with building a roaring fire on our next camp out. This book offers up the curriculum we might have gleaned had home ec not been ushered out of the school systems, but in the infinitely more appealing form of a whimsically diagrammed text written by a woman you wish were your best friend. Random House is giving away a copy to one lucky Pink of Perfection winner. To enter to win, leave a comment about your most valued how-to skill by Friday, January 15, midnight EST. Sorry, but only US mailing addresses may enter.
Update 1/19: Congrats to KBG in DC! And thank you to everyone who left a comment to enter — what a skilled bunch you all are!
image via victoriapeckham
The bonus of being in school, despite Saturday afternoons writing long-winded papers about transcendentalism and institutional food, was the daily possibility to have one’s mind blown right open. A poem with a just so turn of phrase or listening to friends talk about concepts they were studying, working it out for themselves in the retelling, all held the capability for daily rapture. I used to sit in a coffee shop near campus with painted black benches and tables and bright red chairs. The near floor-to-ceiling windows of the south-facing storefront ensured that clear, white sunlight spilled on the pages of my book even in the doggiest days of winter. There, I fell quietly in love with Walden and worked my way, thrilled and on fire, through Luce Irigaray. I suspected, of course, that the time of being in school is especially rich with learning (that is, after all, the point), but I assumed that daily life itself would somehow be filled with philosophy, great art, and critical analysis. This is, in a nutshell, the cruel realization that awaits after one receives her diploma. Surprise!
There were years there, though, after college when I relished being away from the — excuse the colorful phrase — blowhard tendencies of academia. I read mystery novels (and abandoned them if they weren’t to my liking), I shed the phantom worry on Sunday nights that there was an assignment I needed to be chipping away at, I fully embraced my love of reality television without having to connect it to greater ideas about the state of our culture and its social mores. And yet, (you felt that coming didn’t you?), in the past few months I find myself gravitating to Big Ideas, Fine Art, and Great Books. If there is a vein of truth and mystery that runs beneath the surface of everyday life, I want more than ever before to tap into it.
Someone crudely and rudely suggested that this was because I had obtained the “life goal” of “snagging a man” and yet hadn’t moved on to the next stage of popping out babies. Interesting theory, I guess, but I find it more likely that a curious mind can only lay relatively fallow for so long — challenged only by new recipes, sewing patterns, and The New Yorker — before it craves more. Is this a feeling any of you are familiar with?
Not quite having the means to sign up for a class, I turned to our fine interwebs to find sources of mind betterment and blowing. Here, my friends, the spoils:
Quilting for Peace is, in my estimation, the best kind of craft book. It contains 15 simple, flexible patterns to get you piecing together a quilt of your own. But as creative people know, the magic of crafting doesn’t come from the simple how-to instructions but the stories surrounding the process. In the case of Quilting for Peace, these are stories told by quilters different in every way but united in “a firm belief in justice and people’s responsibility for each other; and a faith in patchwork’s ability to absorb the maker’s care, respect, and on occasion outrage, and to let whoever touches the quilt feel those as well.” To enter a giveaway for the book, click here.
How did you learn to quilt?
About eight years ago, my mom showed me the basics of piecing and tying so that I could make a baby quilt for a friend’s first child. After that I taught myself pretty much everything I needed to know with the help of a Singer machine-quilting paperback from the Eighties. I’m learning how to hand-piece now.
What inspired you to write Quilting for Peace?
A little bit of healthy competition with the knitters. I loved Knitting for Peace and wanted to show that quilters did just as much to make the world a better place. I was also inspired by an exhibit I saw at the New England Quilt Museum about nineteenth-century quilters who used their craft to provoke social change as well as to comfort those in need. They used their quilts, for example, as a way to participate in politics, work for social justice, and raise money for the causes they believed in.
You conducted interviews with dozens of people to write the essays in Quilting for Peace. What was that process like?
The quilters I talked to were so different from each other in many ways—women (and a couple of men) from ages 15 to 80-something, on four continents and in 14 U.S. states; quilters who are liberal and conservative, who live on farms and in suburbs, in city apartments and even on a houseboat, some of whom have been quilting for decades and others who have only recently learned to sew. And yet they share a remarkably similar way of looking at the world: a mix of pragmatism, hope, and determination, an instinct for what’s needed in the face of sorrow or tragedy, the resourcefulness to make things happen with little money and on short notice, a sense of humor, and a knack for rallying others. I admire them all a great deal. I wish quilters were in charge of everything!
The new way I jet set is by checking out a different volume of “Foods of the World” from the local public library and studying the photos. It’s a perfect arrangement really, because the books are so old that the images—though all new to me—come equipped with a built-in nostalgia. Vienna is by far my favorite volume. And what’s not to like? This is a place where jaunty cabbies in bowler hats enjoy picnic lunches of brats and lager; where little boys in boiled wool jackets stroll at the “nibbler’s market,” and where coffee is served with schlag—such a cool term for “whipped cream”—and drinking it turns you into a MGM movie star because the coffeehouses themselves glow with a supremely flattering golden light. Or so it all seemed in the 1960s, when my book was printed.
I’ve taken to fetishizing those coffeehouses, with their rosebud-dotted porcelain espresso machines and racks of loaner newspapers because the recession has officially whipped, creamed, and conquered our beloved coffee pot. Giving up cable was nothing, eating beans and rice has been a thrilling adventure in cowboy cuisine, but to go from curated blends of java beans that specify not just what day but what time they were roasted to a rubbery can of Folgers has been tough. Blindfolded or not, I miss the richness. But saving money is fun! So this morning I curled a little orange rind around a skewer and added it to my cup, allowing the citrusy oils to make up for the otherwise anemic brew. I loved it, and wouldn’t mind combining it with a dusting of cocoa or cinnamon either—as a more virtuous alternative to schlag, of course. But when I get to Vienna, man, some day, some way, I’m going whole hog with what’s known as a Mozart: a mocha with cherry brandy and schlag.
Can you think of some other ways to tart up cheap coffee? –Katy
