Sharing a meal through the USPS

I'm food obsessed. Possibly more obsessed with talking about food than actually eating it. There's nothing I love more than sharing a meal with people I love. Especially a home-cooked meal. It's so intimate.

I love finding out what people cook at home, what their favorite quick meal is on a Monday night, what they bring to work for lunch, first food memories, guilty pleasures and most hated vegetables.

So, in an attempt to satisfy this craving for food connection and a current obsession with soup recipes, I decided to share some fabulous, soul warming soup recipes with some of my favorite people...wrapped in my first block print, shared through the venerable USPS. Maybe it's silly. But I loved making up the little packages and it's an awesome way to share a meal. I hope it makes people start sharing their recipes and sharing their meals.

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Stuff that's inspired me this past week that I hope to write about more:
Lee Friedlander @ the SFMOMA
Serving dinner @ Glide Memorial with my work mates
Little Star Pizza before The Walkmen @ Noise Pop
Sharing drinks with Ms. Sienna after she blazed through the CA bar exam
Zine writings about the Fallen Fruit collective, a wild foraging CSA, and mushroom hunting

Next trip to NYC...

...I have to hit up these awesome grocery stores: World Food Without Leaving the Hood.

Adventures in Mission Bay

Despite warnings of a nasty storm with 50mph winds, my container garden crew headed out on an adventure to inspire our planning.

First stop Flora Grubb an amazing container palace focused on drought tolerant plants complete with an outlet of the local espresso wonder Ritual Coffee.

Vertical containers, definitely an inspiration.

Texture+color=goodness

Then off to Building Resources, the best alternative to Home Depot anywhere, get your recycled, reusable household and garden gear here. But what makes BR better than Urban Ore (it's sister center in the East Bay) is that there are container gardens tucked into every corner.

There's stuff planted in everything from dresser shelves and bathtubs to old BBQs

You can find red, yellow, and green light covers from stoplights. Old photo equipment. Doorknobs in every shape & size. Chandeliers, suitcases, windows, doors, and toilets. And this awesome vending machine.

Today. An epic day spent inside, at work.

Found

This is my art box. My first. Started about two years ago now when I decided it didn't matter that I couldn't draw or paint or anything else really and just decided to make stuff anyways. I cleaned it out for the first time last night to make way for new good things. It was totally inspiring, I found so many collections, project ideas started but never finished...Some of what I found: small notebook that will fit in any purse; saved boxes, anything from paperclip boxes to kleenex boxes, that I hoped would help build my first diorama (i love dioramas!); inspirational items: lots of greens & blues & food photos; Sycamore bark; string; collections of envelopes, cut outs of houses, and maps; photo paper and travel paints.

The Castro on Film.

Went to the Castro Theater to see Blade Runner in all it's rereleased glory on the big screen. So good. They're in the midst of filming a Harvey Milk biopic starring Sean Penn. I was hoping to find Castro in a complete retro state--but life seemed normal in the hood except for several signs like this one saying that businesses are open as usual on the strip, and a renovated Castro sign.

Back from the Lone Star state.

Three days without my computer--unbelievable! I survived. Day 1 was a hellish day of delayed flights, too much time spent in airports, too much airport food and too few vegetables. Caught up on the New York Times, made progress on Invisible Man and read Tales of the City (almost as good as the miniseries, but to love either you have to have some nostalgia for San Francisco of the seventies)

I love that you can almost make out the curve of the Earth....

An epic rich blue took over as the sun set--this picture doesn't come close to showing it, but I wanted to make sure to remember it.

The Dallas aiport. Abandoned.

Day 2. All day meeting in the Austin office. Overlooking a wintry lake, it's sleeping trees full of birds. Basically an all day bitch-fest about how we can make our organization better. I hope we can actually enact change. It's so hard and slow going.The Austin crew set up an authentic Texan night out on the town. Started with Lone Stars and Shiner Bock's at Scholz' Garten.

A true Texas honky tonk--the Broken Spoke. I'm working on an IMovie of some of the two-stepping & live country music.

Wanderings

A Meal in the Park--three different edible greens here, stinging nettle (good for allergies - the spiky leaved one) chickweed and miner's lettuce (heart-shaped leaves). Yum.

Don't eat this! Don't even touch it. Poison hemlock, nestled in the with the chickweed and miner's lettuce.

Mistaken Identity: i thought this was remnants from the oil spill in Nov....nope think it's some sort of jellyfish?

Experimentation.

Leaving the comfort zone...

Trying to make my first block print. It's so hard, but I'm loving it. I wanted to send out a bunch of soup recipes to help make the people I love warm and happy in the midst of winter. Hopefully I'll get this project done before winter is over...
Today: coffee at the Blue Danube in the Richmond with D. then wild foraging walk through Golden Gate Park! I'll learn how I can eat my way through the park. Radical.

photosphotosphotos

How, exactly, do you move to Canada or Europe?

No, I'm not upset that Clinton took California.

I just watched Sicko last night and I just don't know if I can keep living here. If I want to keep living in the States. It's not even that I learned about how our health care system is cruel and unjust...It's that finally I put it all together: the fundamental motivation behind a socialist democracy versus a capatalist democracy is at it's core so vastly different. It's the difference between helping others and only helping yourself. I don't really understand how you can live in the world without wanting to help other people. I don't ever want to understand that.

Our country is so driven by the vicious cycle of wealth and debt, dissatisfaction and fulfillment, instantaneous gratification and prolonged depression we can't even see straight anymore. We all feel so disconnected from our government that we don't recognize how it's policies so drastically shape our everyday lives. Just imagine how your everyday life would be different if you had as many paid sick days as you needed, or five weeks paid vacation (the minimun in France) or free child care and beyond comprehension, free college!

Go see Sicko--even if you hate it, it will make you think.

A love of trees in winter.

An hour of sunshine before the rain spent at the Arboretum in the park. Fast becoming my favorite place in winter.

Life at the Embarcadero & a confession

I can't help it. I love watching how this view changes all day long, everyday. Sometimes there's tugboats, and sailboats, and huge ships loaded with shipping containers. Sometimes there's waves big and small, sometimes the water's smooth as glass. Sometimes the east bay hills are a vibrant green or covered in a sheet of fog or purple with the setting sun. Sometimes it's so grey you can't see five feet from the window, other times it's so crystal clear you can make out all the buildings on campus at Berkeley. I can't help it, there's going to be so many photos of this view.

My confession: I'm addicted to cookbooks. I read them, like a book sometimes. Where I go to get my fix: the library. Every library, no matter how small, has a killer cookbook section. I just discovered the cookbook section at SF's main library. Holy shit. It's ridiculous. New must have cookbook: World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey. If you're in a cooking rut. If you're feeling creatively challenged. If you want everything from making a simple meal to learning how to make your own tempeh. If you just want a great cookbook. Check. It. Out.