Archives

The Promise of Apple Blossoms

May 6, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Spring, when she sashays in, always takes my breath away. Such vivid raiments cover her, so radiant that Joseph with his coat of many colors could only turn green with envy. The eye hardly knows where to light, much as a honey bee – turned loose in a field of daisies – darts from one nectar-filled delight to another, drunk on the experience. Apple trees always draw me close. I suppose it has to do with the apple tree that […]

Categories: Food writing, Art, Apples, Photography, Poetry • Tags: Haiti, Food writing, Apples, M. F. K. Fisher, Photography, Art, Meditations, Still life, Apple blossoms, Kenscoff, Susan Branch

Look Up, Look Down: Escaping to the Real World

April 19, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

When spring peeks stealthily through the trees, the smell of the air transports me – as it were – to my grandmother’s vanity table. There I used to sniff her talcum powder, inhaling an aroma reminiscent of flowers, patting my face with the fluffy white powder puff, until I looked like a singer in a Japanese Noh drama. Memories like this pour forth when I walk through a lush garden not far from a busy street on a campus teeming […]

Categories: Gardens, Photography • Tags: Gardens, Meditations, Photography

Lighthouse stairs, Corolla, NC (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

Fallow Time, or, The Rewards of Lying Low and Following Winding Paths

November 28, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The photographs said what I couldn’t. The winding paths on Roanoke Island, site of Raleigh’s Lost Colony, ending up in as-yet-unseen destinations, presented me with an unanticipated gift, fruit of the fallow time thrust upon me recently. What does it mean to be fallow? Uncultivated, unplowed, untilled, unseeded, unplanted, unsown, unsowed, empty, neglected, unused, idle, dormant, resting, inactive, inert, barren, unproductive, unyielding, unfructuous, unfruitful, fruitless, uncultivable, exhausted, depleted, worn out, impoverished, poor, bare, bald, arid, dry, waste – according to […]

Categories: England, Food writing, Photography • Tags: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fallow time, Julia Cameron, Meditations, North Carolina, Outer Banks, Photography, Roanoke Island, Southern Food, The Lost Colony, Walter Raleigh

Libraries, Passageways to the Universe

November 6, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Without libraries, I would not be the person I am today. Without free access to books that libraries (and taxes) provide, I would have been bereft indeed as a child. My family only owned a couple of copies of the Bible foisted on my father by Baptist grandmother and volumes of novels from the Book of the Month Club, in highly excerpted form. For me, as you can surmise, libraries represented Paradise. I spent many hours in the public library, […]

Categories: Art, Books, Libraries, Photography • Tags: Architecture, Books, Libraries, Meditations, Photography

A Lesson from the Day of the Dead

November 2, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Time comes to a halt on All Souls Day (Todos Santos), November 2, a day of ancient ritual. I learned that lesson when I spent the day with a Mexican family in Puebla, Mexico. To miss this celebration of death was simply unheard of. Our place was the cemetery, where the grandparents lay under thick slabs of cement, their fading photographs a testimony to the relative shortness and impermanence of earthly life. After packing up various mole sauces, tortillas, pozole, […]

Categories: Photography • Tags: All Saints, All Souls' Day, Day of the Dead, Death, Meditations, Mexico, Photography, Puebla

The Zen of Artichokes

October 3, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I love autumn. If it’s not the leaves and all the color, then I find poignancy in the drying and dying weeds littering the ground. They embody survival to me. One plant I particularly love is a thistle-like plant, filled with tiny seeds attached to billowy white parachutes. The least puff of wind forces the seeds out of their pods and they float in the wind, just like paratroopers, over the landscape, falling where they may, taking root at times […]

Categories: Agriculture, Cooking, France, French Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Local foods, Photography • Tags: Artichokes, California, France, Italy, Meditations, Normandy, Photography, Thistles, Writing, Zen

Another Holy Trinity of the Kitchen: The Magic of Milk, Eggs, and White Flour

September 21, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Every time I pour crêpe batter into my 8-inch Teflon*-lined crêpe pan, I see deep scratches, the ones that Habiba made with the fork she used while cooking a three-egg cheese-and-herb omelet one wintry Moroccan morning. The scratches don’t affect the pan’s performance, just as wounds and scars don’t fundamentally change who we are and how we function in the world. Pots and pans, like sugar-burned hands and fingers cut by dull knives, bear pale scars. These blemishes remind me […]

Categories: Agriculture, Cattle, Cooking, Eggs, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Milk, Morocco, Photography, Techniques • Tags: Crêpes, Eggs, Flour, France, French Cooking, Meditations, Milk, Photography

How Cooking Transforms the Aching Soul

September 12, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Living today’s hurry-up-run-run-run-faster-faster-text-text lifestyle tends to blunt contact with more earthy things, like cooking. The act of cooking offers something that the stiffest drink or most potent tranquilizer cannot. Dare I say it out loud? It’s even better than sex, in a way. Especially when chocolate is involved, but that’s another story … . For me, cooking offers a glimpse of the spiritual, but it’s also a calming and mindful activity. After all, I must be in the present moment […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Peaches, Photography, Pies--Sweet • Tags: Cooking, La Cucina, Lily Prior, Meditations, Peaches, Photography, Pies, Spirituality

Lemons – Tiny Cathedrals of Gold

April 6, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Lemons, their pitted, nay, prehistoric, skins secreting golden oil, Shielding sourness, evoking memories of a grandmother’s kitchen, A grandfather’s garden. Born in the East, fruitful India, A kiss of cold, albeit fleeting, spawns the yellow Immortalized in stone, paint, and clay. A fruit reverenced, Blossoming from mountain and lake, Urging cooks to slice, pierce, and squeeze, Inspiring miracles among the pots and pans. Lemon curd … Lemon pie … Lemon chicken … Preserved lemons … Limoncello … Such richness! Pasta […]

Categories: Cooking, Italian Cooking, Italy, Lemons, Lent, Lit & Food, Photography, Poetry, Uncategorized • Tags: Food Photography, Italian Cooking, Lemons, Meditations, Mint, Pasta, Poetry

Seeking Honey, in the Bee-Loud Glade

March 30, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

The journey begins, with a glimpse, through the kitchen window, of golden dust shimmering in sunlight, a phantom shadow darting through the air. Hive-bound, the soaring bee dips and kisses the blue-hued flowers once more. Life blossoms with the promise of fruits and grains to come. Auriferous, gilt-laden with pollen. Honey. Nectar. Food for the common good. Alchemy. Sweetness dwells in the honeycomb, high up in trees or resting in sunken hollows of the Earth. A drop of honey calms […]

Categories: Cooking, Honey, Lit & Food, Photography • Tags: Back to the land, Bees, Blueberry Jam, Honey, Honeybees, Meditations, Photography, Poetry, Religion, Spirituality, Sustainable agriculture, William Butler Yeats

Panis gravis, or Bread, Endless Nurturer

March 23, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A whole world dwells within each tiny seed. Of porridge, of bread, of love it whispers – in all these lies the promise of wheat. With it all comes both the caress of crumbs and the sour stink of brown bread and garlic, the pain of brokenness … and the bitter bread of exile. But yet there’s this … In the beginning, the pure green frenzy of genesis, sprouting skyward. And then, suddenly, fields swaying in the wind, like breakers […]

Categories: Bread, France, French Cooking, Photography • Tags: Bread, Cuisine Francaise, Fougasse, France, French Cooking, Meditations, Pain de France

Water, the Essence of All

March 21, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Begin with a washing of hands, cleansing and purifying, before approaching the stove, as to an altar. Pouring water into a pot, do you remember the source? Rain, clouds, rivers, streams, lakes, oceans … Transformation, from elements and compounds and chaotic matter to life. Essence. Alchemy. In your hands, a cook’s hands, water shape-shifts into magical forms: liquid, gas, solid. Water … Boils, blanches, poaches, simmers, steams, freezes … Water … Becomes soup. Steam … Becomes tamales. Ice … Becomes […]

Categories: Bread, Eggs, Photography, Soup • Tags: Acquacotta, Bread, Meditations, Photography, Soup, Water

What Do You Mean You Don’t Need Cookbooks? (Or, What Good are All Those Cookbooks on Your Sagging Shelves?)

May 24, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ll admit it: I collect cookbooks like some people collect plastic pigs or miniature silver tourist-spot spoons or wine corks from bottles they’ve downed. My cookbook collection, like all collections, began small.* When I served with the Peace Corps in Paraguay, my landlady — the mechanical dentist’s wife — giggled when I threw my suitcase on the lumpy mattress in my hut and pulled out my old American standbys — Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook and Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, proudly showing […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Local foods • Tags: Cookbooks, Cooks, Meditations, Paraguay

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life