nine cool things on a tuesday

1. Happy February!! Pancakes, anyone?

We’re flippin’ out over Gwen van Knippenberg’s charming art. Known for their beautiful colors and minute detail, Gwen’s feel-good paintings capture the cozy comforts of home and family life, the joys of nature and gardening, and the sheer enchantment of simple things.

Based in the Netherlands, Gwen recently became a full-time artist after spending many years at home raising her four children. I love studying the people in her pictures and imagining their stories. She depicts children with a sweetness and warmth that’s so life affirming.

Naturally my favorites are the kitchen scenes, showing families cooking, baking, or eating together. Can’t you just imagine the heavenly aromas of the delicious homemade treats they’re making?

Look at the hug yourself adorableness of this baby and teddy in a washtub! And how good those clothes hanging on the line must smell after drying in the fresh air!

Continue reading

♥ miss edna lewis, my valentine ♥

“So many great souls have passed off the scene. The world has changed. We are now faced with picking up the pieces and trying to put them into shape, document them so the present-day young generation can see what southern food was like. The foundation on which it rested was pure ingredients, open-pollinated seed—planted and replanted for generations—natural fertilizers. We grew the seeds of what we ate, we worked with love and care.” ~ Edna Lewis (“What is Southern?”)

IMG_0222

For me, she’s the one. The more I learn about Edna Lewis, the more I love her.

Since today marks the 7th anniversary of her passing at age 89, it’s a good time to celebrate her remarkable achievements as an award-winning chef, cooking teacher, caterer, cookbook author and Grand Dame of Southern Cuisine with a love-in-your-mouth piece of her Warm Gingerbread. Mmmmm-mmmmm!

long view

Miss Lewis, as she was always known, grew up in the small farming community of Freetown, which is located behind the village of Lahore in Orange County, Virginia (about 66 miles from where I live). Her grandfather founded Freetown with two other freed slaves and started the first area school in his living room.

Long before it became chic to advocate fresh, organic, seasonal ingredients and field-to-table cuisine, Edna and her fellow Freetown residents were enjoying a bucolic live-off-the-land existence — growing, harvesting and preserving their own food, gathering nature’s bounty (seeds, fruit, nuts), fishing the streams, hunting wild game in the woods, cultivating domestic animals.

In The Taste of Country Cooking (Knopf, 1976), a classic of Southern cuisine edited by the brilliant Judith Jones (also Julia Child’s editor), Edna shares recipes and reminiscences of the simple, flavorful, uniquely American, Virginia country cooking she grew up with, lovingly describing how they anticipated the select offerings of each season and celebrated special occasions like Christmas and Emancipation Day with full-out feasts.

IMG_0206

We are reminded that there’s nothing better than a freshly picked sun-ripened apple, relishing a dish of Spring’s mixed greens (poke leaves, lamb’s-quarters, wild mustard), celebrating Summer’s bounty with deep-dish blackberry pies, apple dumplings, peach cobblers and pound cakes, sitting down to a Fall Emancipation Day dinner of Guinea Fowl Casserole, “the last green beans of the season and a delicious plum tart or newly ripened, fresh, stewed quince.” As Alice Waters says in her introduction, “sheer deliciousness that is only possible when food tastes like what it is, from a particular place, at a particular point in time.”

Continue reading

friday feast: happy birthday, langston hughes!

LangstonHughes

I can’t think of a better way to welcome February, commemorate Black History Month and anticipate all things love for Valentine’s Day than by celebrating the 111th birthday of noted Harlem Renaissance poet, novelist, social activist, essayist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes.

In light of recent events — the inauguration of President Obama, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday — I’ve been trying to imagine what Langston would say about all that’s going on in America today.

No doubt he will continue to be universally beloved for championing creative expression and human rights and remaining an accessible inspiration to people of all socio-economic backgrounds. Many of his iconic poems (“Let America Be America Again,” “I, Too, Sing America”), resonate more strongly than ever as our struggle continues to build a nation where “opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.”

Continue reading

betcha can’t eat just one: George Crum and the Saratoga Chip

 

Go ahead. Reach out and grab one.

Then munch to your heart’s content, because February is National Snack Food Month!

Potato chips are America’s favorite snack food — to the tune of over $6 billion worth consumed every year. But for all the chips we’ve inhaled in our lifetimes, how many of us know who invented them?


GEORGE CRUM AND THE SARATOGA CHIP by Gaylia Taylor,
pictures by Frank Morrison (Lee and Low, 2006),
Picture Book for ages 5+, 32 pp.

Enter, the perfect picture book biography, George Crum and the Saratoga Chip, by Gaylia Taylor, illustrated by Frank Morrison (Lee and Low, 2006). Like the perfect chip with just the right snap and crunch, this story, about a biracial chef who inadvertently invents these crispy rascals back in 1853, is both satisfying and inspiring.

Continue reading