Sunday, August 30, 2009

A Note From Vancouver & Alaska

Soup at the Granville Island's Public Market, Vancouver

While I was traveling from Seattle to Vancouver to a cruise through Alaska (Thank you Shulmans!) I was reading Thomas McNamee's "Alice Waters & Chez Panisse," about Alice and her friends starting up her restaurant in Berkley and then beginning the organic, local and slow food revolution. It was good and led me to a slew of cookbooks I want to read next (The French Menu Cookbook, French Provincial Cooking as well as Water's stuff and MLK Fisher-- thank you, Erin.) 

I ate a lot of soup in Alaska. There was a mango soup, and a cold pink thing with cherries, a navy three bean soup and lobster bisque. The best meal I had in Alaska however, wasn't the soup. It was a quick meal we had after kayaking in Ketchikan. It had been raining and we just had kayaked out to a nest of bald eagles and there was a teenage eagle sitting in her nest and the father looking on from another branch. When we kayaked back to the small boat that had taken us out to the sound the owner of the boat made an easy smoked salmon spread with capers and cream cheese and onion. And it was lovely and well deserved. Food taste better when it's deserved.

This is part of Water's note on the restaurant's philosophy. "At the table we are nourished and gladdened, put in touch with the source of life ... It is central to both the deepest and most joyous of human activities: generosity, companionship, nourishment, growth."

I feel a big shift from summer to autumn. I love autumn. So does my grandmother. It's our favorite season. In the beginning of fall it feels as if you have great potential to make changes. To try harder and to be better. 

So here we begin again.

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