Brooding Over Butternut

I have spent so long trying to find another good poem about orange or about squash that I probably could have written my own in less time.  But I did finally find a marvelous one for today's All About Orange installment of Now Serving: Bidding Butternut Bonne Nuit.

First, the poem.  Which is actually part of an art installment and it goes with the picture below, neither of which is my own:









Conversation - Poem on Edward Weston's "Squash" (commissioned for a centennial project of the Yale Art Gallery)


"Delve for me, delve down, delve past your body, crowned
by its hidden stem, into shadowy alarm;
you will not vanish past our dark-shed charm,
throat over throat, ankle to ankle, bound
in our different arches, summer-nicked and browned
interlocking rings in the chain of wrist and arm."

"Lie for me, lie, and I will feel you turn.
Mark out the summer's bending time. Yes, learn
to cradle the concrete ground to softness.  Stay.
Measure me past my stem, though your shadows churn;
Close yourself over; encompass me like clay."

-Annie Finch (2000)


Sigh.  I wish i could write like that.  But I am not a poet, I am a painter (ha ha).  And sometimes, a cook.  And sometimes, I paint with food.

Springing Forward

The daffodils have popped, the cherry blossoms are starting to unfurl, the redbud branches are breaking out in a rash of pink petals, and the weather alternates between 30 degrees and 70 on the same day, which can only mean that spring has arrived in DC.  To celebrate my favorite equinox and the return of Persephone,  i will tell you a tale of rebirth on the home front called Stairwell to Heaven.

Once upon a time, during The Hadean Age, and even for some time after the initial kitchen remodel, there was a stairwell from the kitchen that descended into the hellacious basement like a carpeted version of the River Styx.  One passed from the relatively pleasant world of the now-remodeled kitchen -

- into a terrifying underworld:

Eventually the basement was also remodeled, but that's another story for another time.  Flash forward several years and a new, beautiful stairwell in the back of the new addition rendered this one obsolete.  This provided a tremendous opportunity to nearly triple my kitchen storage space, which had been the bane of my culinary existence.  I had 7.5 kitchen cabinets total, 5 of which were dedicated for all the dishes, bakeware, pots, pans, glassware, storage containers, linens, and electrical devices.  As a result, every item was stored like Russian nesting dolls.  Getting any single item a multi-step process, and there was always the risk that in the process of obtaining it, the rest would cave in or come tumbling out.  

So moving the stairs opened up a world of storage opportunity that i seized upon the moment the contractor finished screwing down the subflooring, whereupon i immediately started shopping for shelving and flooring options.  After several trips to Ikea and The Container Store and every other place specializing in storage, i realized that the most economical and best construction option was to build the shelves myself from wire closet shelving hardware and oak boards (all the better to support a 40lb ice cream maker with, my dear).

So here is a step-by-step guide for converting your former stairwell into a heavenly kitchen pantry:

So Funny, I Had to Officially Repost It

So those few of you who still read this blog because it occasionally has something to do with home improvement might relate at least a tiny bit to the feeling i have that runs nearly nonstop in the background of my mind as if it were an operating system, namely the continuous processing of visual stimuli through a design filter of this is simply divine vs. holy hell what were they thinking?! Of course, most of the time it's less at the end of the spectrum and more along the lines of that's a cool idea or this would be so much better if they just...  I'd like to say i'm not a judgmental person but this is clearly contradicted by the inspirations or imagined improvements i silently make in my head to pretty much everything the hand of man has touched.  If i have a belief in god it is due entirely to the fact that about the only place that does not inspire such yearnings to rearrange is nature, which i generally find to be perfect - from the environmental and civil engineering to the architecture and interior design.

Anyway, for those of you constantly envisioning a way to improve every room of your house and everyone else's, the office, or the building down the street, this McSweeney's repost is for you: When Aesthetics Get in the Way of Larceny.

Rhymes With Orange

I have decided to update everyone on my progress toward achieving the two resolutions i made for 2011, as well as provide a modicum of content relevant to this blog's Original Intent (which has subsequently been amended by a long Bill of Rights, Wrongs, and Revisions, all of which are to be interpreted liberally and not literally, in case anyone reading this in 200 years might wonder).  First on the list of resolutions, as evidenced hereby:  i continue to survive.  Unless you're a conspiracy theorist and believe i have met an early demise and someone else is the author of these odd ramblings.  In which case, you would not only need to suspend your disbelief that there could be two people with such an enormous propensity for tangents, but would also need to believe that someone else stood to gain both from my demise and the continuation of this blog, the financials of the former and logic of the latter would challenge the credulity of even the most dedicated tea partier.

Secondly, i have made progress in increasing my use of the color orange.  Although i technically resolved to "wear more orange," and while it looks like i'll have another 3 week reprieve, my financial future is CRAP (Continuing Resolutions Are Pernicious), and so I questioned the wisdom of purchasing the perfect orange Valentino linen blazer on Gilt.com that would have done much to spruce up my Congressionally-challenged wardrobe and increase considerably my ocherous vestment options.  I now question that questioning, but it's too late now - the sale is over.  So i've expanded the role of orange in my life more generally, and thought i'd make March, normally a month associated with color (albeit green) All About Orange.