Cookbooks of the Moment : Fall/Winter 2011

I read a lot of cookbooks (unsurprisingly). This is a small selection from the books stacked next to my bed right now*, and I’m still missing quite a few of my favorites. This was a very good year for cookbooks. I’m absolutely adoring all of these, and any one of them would make a fabulous holiday gift.

Image of stacked books from here. 1. Vegetarian by Alice Hart ; 2. The Food Lover’s Guide to Wine by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg ; 3. Cook This Now by Melissa Clark ; 4. Indochine by Luke Nguyen ; 5. Mourad – New Moroccan by Mourad Lahlou ; 6. Comfort & Spice by Niamh Shields ; 7. My Family Table by John Besh ; 8. Jamie Oliver Magazine, Christmas 2011 Issue ; 9. Canal House Cooking – Italian Summer ; 10. Home Made by Yvette Van Boven ; 11. Bourke Street Bakery by Paul Allam and David McGuinness ; 12. Moro East by Sam & Sam Clark.

What are your favorites right now?

* In fact, there are so many books next to my bed that they could form a small table, which, come to think of it, would be quite useful because I still don’t have very much furniture.

The South End, Lekker Home, Tea Pots + LevelUp

I’ve been having a lot of fun “re-discovering” the South End neighborhood of Boston. It’s definitely the up and coming place to live, shop and eat in the Boston area.

The South End has gone through massive changes over the past several decades, and I remember when it was a different place entirely. In the 80’s and early 90’s, my aunt and uncle lived in the South End in a gorgeous bow-front (with my two very young cousins), and ended up moving out when someone got stabbed to death on my aunt’s car. 

But the neighborhood has fought back, and people have come together. Small businesses have been the life blood of this community, and a lot of people took big risks that have been paying off. In food, Hammersley’s has been going strong for over 20 years now, Barbara Lynch has three outposts – B&G Oysters, The Butcher Shop, and Stir; Joanne Chang’s Flour Bakery + Café flagship is here, as is Ken Oringer and Jamie Bisonnette’s Toro (and Coppa, which I’m desperate to try).

In addition to eating, the South End is also the place to shop. Firstly, SoWa Open Market is Boston’s portal to Brooklyn and the Mission: a vibrant market, part farmers’ market, part craftsman market, part flea market. Then there is Hudson – not the jeans– where I might shop I had unlimited funds. They have an outpost in Wellesley where I used to go and covet things in college. And then, among the treasures of the South End is Lekker Unique Home Furnishings.

Lekker is one of those places that has the perfect gift for almost anyone. The store was opened by Natalie van Dijk Carpenter, a Dutch woman with incredibly good taste (lekker!) and curation skills.

The good thing about Lekker is that you can shop on a budget for yourself, or say for a hostess gift, and find some really excellent things. The store is filled with useful and stylish kitchen tools, candles, and local cookbooks. They also have some really graceful flatware and cutlery that I’d like to acquire. Or, if you are lucky enough to have generous resources, you can also find some fantastic furniture here.

I was particularly enthusiastic about that grey Jackson Chair, but it may in fact have been the most expensive item in the store at $3,650, alas.

This time, I got to go into Lekker with a hundred dollar credit from local Boston-based mobile payment service LevelUp. LevelUp allows you to pay with a unique QR code that is assigned to you – by whipping out your phone, opening the LevelUp app, and getting your code scanned at participating locations.

The big strength of LevelUp is that they work with community businesses to offer small credits at each location, and reward repeat shopping by offering better credits the more you frequent a particular establishment. The user interface is clean, and the process is simple. You store your credit card information securely, and can pay a tip with the app as well. In Boston, the majority of the merchants participating are restaurants, but it seems like a no-brainer to expand to all types of local businesses, particularly because of LevelUp’s low transaction fees.

I’ll be interested in how they scale in the longterm, and how they will compete with Google Wallet , Square, and whoever decides to throw themselves into the mobile payment space next.

I strongly believe that mobile payments and digital receipts are the way of the future, and am looking forward to the day when I can dispense of plastic credit cards and paper receipts completely.

After an hour of browsing – dreaming, touching the curved lips of the bowls and mugs, stroking the softest blankets, and sitting on each of the chairs in the shop – I ended up picking up the Hakusan Tea Pot  and set of cups (the white and brown one above, with the stippling on the porcelain). It’s a nice addition to my home, and great incentive to make myself happy with my tea project.

Lekker Home
1317 Washington Street Boston, MA 02118-2139
(617) 542-6464

Finding New Ways to Learn in Life + Improving Your Food Photography: Plate to Pixel

I believe that it is really important to never stop learning, and more importantly to actively seek out new learning opportunities. I think we all get into a rut sometimes, which is why it is so fun to make yourself happy by choosing to learn something new. I divide my learning into a few different categories:

1. Short term experiences. The idea here is to expose myself to many different things in sort of quick blasts. A lot of these are through taking a lesson of some type in order to learn the basics of a new skill or activity. Say, taking two weeks to try out new exercise classes, reading a book on a topic that I know absolutely nothing about, taking a cooking class, learning to play a handful of tabs on the guitar, finding someone who has a garden and needs a weeder.

Ultimately, some of these experiences will lead to:

2. Long term passions. These are the things that take a lifetime to develop. I like creating actionable projects to help me develop my passions. This blog is one of those projects. The Tea Project is one too. Another passion (without a real project) is developing my photography skills.

I’m particularly interested in food photography. With photography (and almost everything else in life), the key to learning is doing. It does help to have some fundamentals though. Classes are expensive, but incredibly worth it. A few years ago I took a class with Penny De Los Santos, and it was shocking how much a few hours of killer instruction changed my life. (Yes, my life.)

Another way I keep myself doing is having a camera on me at all times. It doesn’t have to be my Lumix (which I adore, for the record)– it can also be the technology that I keep in my pocket at all times: my smart phone. I love taking photos with my phone. I don’t have an iPhone, so I can’t use Instagram (sadness.), but I have a lot of fun using RetroCamera and FXCamera.

I also spend a lot of time reading about food photography  online. CreativeLive is a great resource that I’ve been spending a lot of time on. They have free streaming classes, and the ability to purchase previously recorded ones. (I’m a little bitter that I didn’t buy Penny De Los Santos’ food photography class while it was on sale). MattBites, Wrightfood, and White on Rice Couple  are a (very small) handful of some of the phenomenal blogs I draw inspiration from.

And finally, I love to read physical books. I take a lot of them out of the library – art books, technical books, and really constructive resources. This week, I’ve been reading Plate to Pixel – Digital Food Photography & Styling by Hélène Dujardin. Hélène writes and styles a beautiful blog: Tartelette – and I really admire her expertise and ability to share her knowledge. Plate to Pixel covers photography techniques, lighting, and styling. The book is not over-technical, and good for anyone ranging from skilled photographers who want to transition to food, to people who still can’t manage to take their thumb out of the frame. I think it would make a pretty great gift as well.

I’d love to hear about how you are learning too. What are your passions? What do you want to experience (for the first time) next? 

Tea Project: MEM Organic Earl Grey at South End Buttery

Tea Project #1
MEM Organic Earl Grey (pot, $2.95)
South End Buttery, South End, Boston

Here’s the thing. Sometimes, when you have a grand idea for a project that will make you happier, and you haven’t quite figured out all the details, you just start. And see what happens. You shouldn’t wait on the things that will make your heart soar. I have this plan, to taste 500 different types of tea – and to share the experience, the tea, the moment, the people, the places, and what I’m reading – and this is the start of the project.

I was at Lekker, in the South End, buying a tea pot, naturally, and solicited advice for where I could find a good cup of tea. Mara, the kind shopkeep, recommended South End Buttery. I had not been there, so I headed off for my first “official” cup of tea.

I took notes that looked like this:

South End Buttery. MEM Tea Imports. Organic Earl Grey, served in a metal tea pot, on a marble bar. Paired with turkey chili (which ended up being a very good hearty vegetarian chili, a fortuitous error), even on such an un-seasonally warm day at the end of November. Soundtrack: Lena Horne. Wait, make that Lena Horne, and then what can only be described as music that sounds similar to the Queer as Folk soundtrack. Glam pop? Crowd: Young, old, mostly hip South End crowd. I don’t think I’ve ever been more jealous of the variety of fall jackets. Dog friendly! They have dog treats at the door.

A remarkably small amount of Apple Macintosh Computers. As in, yes, I do believe I was the only one.

What I like about Earl Grey: It’s my favorite type of tea. Black tea, flavoured with bergamot oil (a type of citrus fruit). Maybe it was a mistake starting out with my favorite type of tea, so early in my project. But, I’m going to go ahead and say that I can drink different brands of the same tea. You wouldn’t limit yourself to one bottle of Riesling, why do the same with tea?

{What I was reading:}

Design*Sponge. They have this really great series of “Sneak Peeks“, where they showcase the homes of creative people of all disciplines.

My notes from TEDxCambridge. Still working on getting those typed up.

This article about how Twitter helps a small business thrive. (I’d like to think I had a small hand in that one – it’s all about Celia using Twitter at Omnivore!)

Thanks to this lovely post about breakfast at bigBang studio – re-discovering the WGBH Streaming Classical Radio Player. (Warning, it starts playing nearly immediately if you click).

Food in Jars.  Just what it sounds like. This happens to be one of my favorite topics. See : Strawberry Cheesecake in a Jar. I’m also happy to say that my back-ordered shipment of Weck Jars from Heath came in the mail last week, and I’m in love.

The websites of two small bakeries in the Bay Area making me hungry from afar: Marge Bakery and Starter Bakery. Both are wonderful choices for holiday treats.

Well, that’s it for now. We’ll see how this all shapes up. 

Designing a Passion Project: My Tea Project

(Coveted Teapot via Heath Ceramics)

“The answer, I believe, is identifying the things you love (particularly the little things) and seeking to experience them each and every day.”

A friend of mine emailed me a few days ago to let me know that she really liked this quote I had written. I was completely flattered, but also a little bit surprised because I didn’t remember writing it – sometimes the words just end up on the page – but sure enough, there it was, and it was a nice thought to savor this week.

And so, here, I’d like to introduce to you a little project I’m embarking on. While working on my life list, of the big and small things I want to do and accomplish and learn, one of my happy topics was tea. I love tea, I drink a lot of it. I love the moments that surround tea drinking, and tea culture. With tea, I’m calm and peaceful, creative, and sometimes challenged. So I decided to add tea to my list, 500 unique moments with tea, and I’m going to try to share as many as I can here with you.

There is something so wonderful about starting a new passion project, and adding a new sense of purpose to your life, and finding a new lens through which to look at the world. I’ve been having fun shaping this adventure – and I think it’s going to take on a life of its own as it goes along.

In designing this project, I wrote out a series of questions, and I think I’d like to share them with you, in hopes that maybe this inspires you to take on a project of your own. For this part of the process I really wanted to put ideas out there, without any intention of answering them (yet). I find this is a good exercise to start any type of project.

  • What is this project really about? Is it about tea? Is it about people? Places? Solitary moments? Shared moments? Moments where I feel alive?
  • How do I best communicate this project? Public vs. Private?
  • Do I want to take 500 pictures of tea? (Yes.) How can I make these pictures tell a story?
  • What do I want to write about? How do I organize my thoughts to share? How much, or how little can I share?
  • What type of consistency am I looking for? One cup a week? One cup a day? Should I have a schedule? Do tea tastings count?
  • What books do I want to read about tea?
  • What are the greater themes that relate to tea?
  • How much depth do I want to give to this project?
  • Does this stay on The Second Lunch? Do I dedicate a website to the project?
  • How can I subsidize the project?
  • What if I decide that I really want to have 500 cups of coffee? (This could have easily been five hundred types of cheese, another passion of mine, but that got nixed because 500 one ounce pieces of cheese could easily translate into 14 pounds in the long run. Tea is a little more up my alley.)
  • How long will this take? Is five hundred unique cups of tea enough? Can I double up? 500 blends of tea? Am I going to have to drink 1000 different types of tea? (aka.. will this spiral out of control).
  • What do I want to get out of this at the end? Is the visual record enough? Is there a book in the making?
  • What type of expertise am I trying to gain? Is this about savoring the experience? Cataloguing data? Keeping score? How do I make sure that I keep this enjoyable?
  • Am I allowed to quit?

And so here is where you come in: I’d love to solicit ideas to help me shape this project. Make it better. Make it more fulfilling for me (and for you). Do you have your own passion project? (Share a link here if you’d like!) I wholeheartedly welcome (and encourage) comments, or emails (sam at thesecondlunch.com) to help strategize. You will be thanked profusely, and who knows, maybe get something out of it in the long run.