MFK Fisher on peas “Every good cook,…, agrees on three things about these delicate messengers to our palates from the kind earth-mother: they must be very green, they must be freshly gathered, and they must be shelled at the very last second of the very last minute.”

MFK Fisher on the art of baking bread "...Inevitably, almost everyone with more than two words in his head or heart will try to use them to say how or why the smell and the sound are beautiful."

braising season is upon us

Massachusetts in October

'Seven Brussels Sprouts.' (1955) Delicately painted with meticulous detail, Eliot Hodgkin captures the crisp waxy green beauty of a vegetable that in the year this work was painted was very often boiled to oblivion.

Paul Cornoyer, Christmas in Madison Square Park

Eggs, fresh bread, a cool glass of wine, and a flower to rest your eyes on ~ I like the simplicity of 17th century German still-life specialist Georg Flegel’s ‘Snack with Fried Eggs’ (1630), State Gallery Aschaffenburg

'Still life of asparagus.' (1697) Adriaen Coorte's still lifes set against a plain dark background, are enormously appealing to the modern eye, his work fell into obscurity in the 18thC and 19thC; a reappraisal about his career was published in the 1950s.

Charleston in January

Your favorite dish is a self-portrait you didn’t realize you painted

a recipe for extinguishing sadness from tamar adler

boston in february

The Victorian critic and artist John Ruskin believed all beauty comes from nature. Look closely at his painting of a Bleinheim Orange apple (1873), and you'll see how Ruskin's lighting and shadow animate and dramatise a simple object.

note on dining alone from Elizabeth David's, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine "More important, to treat yourself to what you want, need, or are curious to taste, is the proper, and the only way, to learn to enjoy solitary meals, whether in restaurants or at home."

can't stop thinking about this "interest in results never conquers boredom with process"

Still Life with a Silver Jug and a Porcelain Bowl Willem Kalf, 1656

Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie Willem Clasz. Heda, 1631

can I get a hell yea