day trip to red hook

eve and i took the train to carroll and walked the long hot way to red hook...

which was so quiet and old-seeming, like a mixture of cambridge ma, durham nc, colonial williamsburg, and williamsburg williamsburg.

this puppy was named stan

 and we encountered him at steve's authentic, which sells all key lime pies, only key lime pies, from a waterside house that felt like a blast straight from florida.

beyond the pie, i had the best baked good i have ever had in my life, at baked. it was like a homemade twix bar situation (reminded me of that "millionaire's shortbread" i ate in edinburgh), so we're talking buttery biscuit base, caramel in the center, chocolate on top. i was screaming!! it was so good!!

paper moon farm and brigg's barbecue, caswell county nc

 

eve and i drove 45 minutes from durham to visit maddy's beautiful farm, paper moon. maddy is a solo farming inspiration to me (though living in a trailer through all those summer tornado warnings is petrifying to think about). here and here are some photos of her goats.

the very enjoyable briggs bbq in yanceyville.

Internet favorites for March: two favorite New Yorker articles

I think about these two all the time:

Jonathan Rosen about passenger pigeons, 6 Jan 2014:
In 1813, John James Audubon saw a flock—if that is what you call an agglomeration of birds moving at sixty miles an hour and obliterating the noonday sun—that was merely the advance guard of a multitude that took three days to pass. Alexander Wilson, the other great bird observer of the time, reckoned that a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals. To get your head around just how many passenger pigeons that would mean, consider that there are only about two hundred and sixty million rock pigeons in the world today. You would have to imagine more than eight times the total world population of rock pigeons, all flying at the same time in a connected mass.

Burkhard Bilger about Sandor Katz and wild fermentation, 22 Nov 2010:
The ants, collected from his woodpile in the winter when they were too sluggish to get away, had a snappy texture and bright, tart flavor—like organic Pop Rocks. (They were full of formic acid, which gets its name from the Latin word for ant.) He brought us a little dish of toasted acorns, cups of honey-sweetened sumac tea, and goblets of a musky black broth made from decomposed inky-cap mushrooms. I felt, for a moment, as if I’d stumbled upon a child’s tea party in the woods.

ps: all the other internet favorites

from the museum of natural history in berlin

edited to add:
derek parfit
bringing animals along
secret riches beneath a temple

lazy summer

keep thinking about that moment in "bill cunningham new york" when he's receiving his award for officier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres and he says with his voice suddenly breaking, "it's as true today as it ever was. he who seeks beauty will find it." the moment was so special that both eve and i exclaimed aloud like we had to honor/increase/participate in the revelation by adding our own voices to it...

favorite on the lower east side

russ and daughters

home of the most immaculate bialys

evie took this photo of me at my great aunt's house on grand street

one of my very favorite stores in nyc: top hat, 245 broome street.

life/death

above: the site of the death of a bird.

stores, italy, 2009

plums that were in the icebox, 2013

Foods for sadness

 Totto Ramen, Manhattan

If you're too sad to eat normal food, here are some fail-proof options:

1. Greek Gods honey flavored yogurt With 47% your daily value of saturated fat per serving, to accompany your breaking heart on its way down

2. Totto Ramen If you can manage to drag yourself from your bed up to Hell's Kitchen, this is the best sad-person soup I've ever had

2. Green and Black's Milk Chocolate with toffee Pace Bernachon, this one has such a sticky, dulce-de-leche-ish high-pitched taste that just tastes like something you could eat even when you're too sad to eat (and it tastes uncannily just like the Carrefour organic milk chocolate that they sell in Italian Carrefours)

Center for High-Energy Metaphysics, 2011

  Cooking for 32 at Harvard's only co-op.