9 January 2024 Tuesday

And like that, the holidays commence, reign, and end. I put the decorations away today, having gotten back from my whirlwind tour of the Northeast, specifically Cleveland, Akron, and New York City. It was a wonderful time. And food.

 Most of the cooking was done for me in Ohio, a real treat of ham, salmon, roast pork, sauerkraut (for New Years) and a great upside chocolate orange cake for my birthday.

Here’s a photo of Brandywine Falls. A well-earned picture considering I slipped in the mud right on my butt about seven times before I took it.

A time to slow down, a time to be at peace. Everything, in fact, felt peaceful this trip, including NYC, even Times Square seemed to be moving slowly, hoping that Christmas will never end. Indeed, when I left the city on the morning of 8 January, the city was still fully decked out in boughs of holly and etc.

While in New York, I stayed with a dear friend and her family in Brooklyn. She hosts a cookbook club that meets once a month, and for January I was invited to cook a dish or two from one of the nominated cookbooks. The featured book this month was Craig Claiborne’s Herb and Spice Cookbook from 1963. The book is divided by the featured herb and/or spice, and by some strange coincidence, some divine providence, a number of us were drawn to the fennel chapter.

  Perhaps, after all that Christmas feasting and cookies and candies, we were craving a palate cleanse, something earthy and sweet, yet fresh and digestive. Fennel it is.

 Remember Popeye the Movie? There was a song, Everything is food. It has a weird lyric that I can’t exactly remember, but I sing it every time I make a recipe like Claiborne’s Fennel Flavored Spaghetti Sauce. Yes, there was a lot of fennel in it and everyone tasted it, but the chief ingredient was meat. Meat meat meat meat meat meat. I felt like my skin smelled of cooked meat afterwords. It still might.

First, none of the above listed meats was used in my Fennel sauce. But it did have lots of meat in it. My friend and I went to the meat district of her neighborhood and stood on line (New York!!) for forty five minutes in order to purchase the most beautiful ground lamb, ground pork, ground beef, sweet Italian sausages, hot Italian sausages I’ve ever seen.

  These recipes from the early 1960s show America at its most devil-may-care when it comes to food and ingredients. This dish, supposedly Fennel forward is most note worthy because of its flagrant, wanton use of dead animals. Lots of animal meat. It was heavenly, especially I imagine for the dead livestock. Everything is meat, meat, meat. Everything is food and chow. Everything is food. We enjoyed seconds for breakfast the next day.

If music be the food of love, play on. I went to New York to see a couple of shows, Here We Are and Merrily We Roll Along, both with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. I wouldn’t mention this in my food and cooking writing, expect to say this was a cathartic experience in my life. Like the greatest meal I’ve ever had, but I had it with my ears and eyes. Thank you, Sondheim for giving us more to see.

 BTW, I am moving away from photographing the food itself in favor of using photos of the environment I was in that inspired the food. Pictures of food are horrible, and I hate them. End of sermon.