Beef bourguignon or “How I Cleaned Out The Freezer Before My Wife Came Home From Her Trip Soup”

Granted, not all the wine went into the soup...

Friends ask me, from time to time, if I’m still making soup. Well, yes…but it’s a bit more haphazard than it was during the Year of Soup. Actually, it’s lot more haphazard, which happens to be a lot truer to the spirit of soup than obsessing (though I can’t say I ever really have) over anything like a specific soup.

Soup isn’t about a set of ingredients, it’s about making the most out of the ingredients you have.

Like the soup that’s simmering on the stove.

My gal’s been away all month, and comes home in two days. I realized it was my last chance to clean out the freezer. So I made soup. Continue reading →

A Stroll Down Memory Science Lane: Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

The downside of the history of technology is that it goes hand in hand with the atrophying of human capabilities as they are turned over to machines that do them much better. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of memory. When the Greeks started writing down what had been oral histories somewhere about 2500 years ago, they started a trip down the slippery slope to our current state of affairs, where anyone who can actually remember the names of someone they met at a party is considered a unusual, and anyone who has actually committed, say, poetry, to memory runs the risk of being considered a savant. Continue reading →

Javits NYC February 2012

February 8th, 2012, at the Javits Convention Center in NYC.
It was cold.

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Bon Appétit! Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian Closing

Julia’s Kitchen is one of my favorite exhibits, especially because, like me (or the other way around, I guess) she has pegboards everywhere with all her kitchen “tools” hung from them.

Well, it will be back, and better than ever, in a new exhibit on American Food and Wine late next summer meanwhile here’s a gallery of shots of it in its current display.

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Barnes & Noble Book Browse

Stopped in to the Potomac Yards Barnes & Noble last weekend for my frapachino and book browse. There were clerks in the SF isle (which has been sandwiched at the back of the store between pink preschooler stuff) so I didn’t get my usual shots of stuff to read. I did note that there’s a new Jack McDevitt out that I haven’t read. But will.