I like wind

Tilting Quilting from Andrea Dorfman, interviewed by this joy+ride.

This makes me happy. And nostalgic for my clothesline.

Some egg-cellent links

The Eggling: crack, water and watch it grow.

My oven's working overtime today in preparation for a wedding and a baby shower for (different!) sisters. So while the bread rises, the frittata cooks and the pound cake bakes, I'm taking a second to share a few things I've been loving.

Have a happy weekend!

-Rachael

• "Mein" No More -- An artist expresses herself in the pages of Hitler's book, and has the last word.

• A Colorado writer's ode to dirt.

• An excellent Pen on Writing interview with Andre DuBus III, author of "The Garden of Last Days: A Novel."

• Electric Literature is a short story anthology available in eBook, audiobook, Kindle, iPhone and paperback. It promotes its short stories with single-sentence videos like the one below by artist Vance Reeser, who animated "Little Things" by Matt Sumell. Being the Luddite that I am, I've yet to purchase an issue, but I'm enjoying how the artist interprets the author's words.
  

How do you like your coffee?

"Coffee and Beignets" courtesy of navycrackerjack74.

Leave room in my cup for cream and space in my posts for pictures.

I appreciate your comments and shape The Slow-Cooked Sentence in response to them, so will continue serving up illustrated words. Pictures "magnetize the eye to the page and create an atmosphere for the rest of the piece," according to Skelliewag. The site, dedicated to helping freelancers, bloggers and entrepreneurs excel at what they do, has an excellent article on how to find great images for free.

Unless my images are self-generated, I find almost all of them through Flickr's Creative Commons page or Compfight, a Flickr search tool. All legally mine to use. All free.

Me.

And while on the topic of the connection between word and picture, you must check out this amazing puppet show told in 35 photos. Really. You must. It's at The Big Picture.

Have a happy weekend. I'll see you Monday, coffee in hand.

Tomato seeds

"Tomato" courtesy of eqqman.

More words on the broad subject of tomatoes:

A New York Times article investigates whether the tomato plant -- a member of the poisonous nightshade family -- is edible, plus a leafy tomato sauce recipe. (Thanks to my sister Kyna for the heads-up.)

Then check out "The night my world caved in" at Blog Nosh, which is a round-up of great blog writing. This essay, written by Dawn Friedman of this woman's work, takes on the issue of body image. I liked it.

And finally, a small fact, which I wanted to include in "Summer flesh," but couldn't make it fit, but now I can. ... The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the debate over whether the tomato is a vegetable or fruit. In 1893, it ruled it a vegetable, despite the plant's ovaries, because it's generally served with dinner, not dessert.

Localicious

Image courtesy of Chris Silas Neal.

What's a gal to do who has sworn off store-bought tomatoes, but who's own small plants are maybe two months away from offering up their first fruit, gloriously red and warm when plucked off the vine? I count the blossoms, longingly press my nose against the fuzzy leaves and inhale their perfume.

Backyard tomatoes are as local as one can get, and the new links in the right-hand column are local, if a bit more broadly defined. I start with the image above by Chris Silas Neal, who's not a local artist but whose poster (inspired by Great Depression-era art) is free to post locally, and then I riff from there ... a song, a birth, a lemony kiss, a free wheeling moment, a backyard bird ... local links I love and local loves that are linked. Each of them a tiny yellow flower filled with juicy promise. Go ahead, take a bite.

Sweet inspiration

In my home, cookies trump cleaning.

Lately, I've been thinking that the chocolate portion of this blog has been neglected -- not for lack of eating my favorite food, but because I'm eating it too quickly. And, well, once out of sight, out of mind. But I'll try and make amends by sharing my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. Okay, okay, I know I've said that before, but my faithfulness is fleeting and mostly I like whatever is in my hand.

As I've cooked up batch after batch of these cookies in the past few weeks, a fine sprinkling of flour has settled on top of the existing thick layer of dust in my kitchen. For you see, although I revel in the results of spring cleaning -- a sparkling home scrubbed free of grime and smelling like sweet grass -- it doesn't inspire me to action. But these cookies do, so perfectly balanced, crisp and chewy and loaded with warm, bitterwsweet chocolate. And I'm excited about a few other things too, all of which don't require rubber gloves, scrub pads and buckets of soapy water, but go quite deliciously with cookies. Check out "What I'm Loving" at the top of the right-hand column.

The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie
Adapted from Cook's Illustrated, May-June 2009

1 3/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
14 tablespoons (1 3/4 sticks) butter
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli's 60 percent cacao bittersweet chips)

Melt butter. Mix butter with sugars, salt and vanilla. Add egg and egg yolk. Stir in flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Form dough into large balls (about 3 tablespoons) and place on a greased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 for 10 to 14 minutes or until golden brown and still puffy. Edges will be set, but centers will be soft.

Fill me up

Threadless T-shirt design by Jeff Sapulettey.

Today I woke to an automated phone call from the school informing me of a two-hour delayed start because of the snow. So the kids and I celebrated with pumpkin pancakes (which I'm crazy about), and now I've corralled them all upstairs for the next 30 minutes so I can write.

I gotta write; it's my passion. Just like my neighbor Pat's got a thing for birds, and my toddler's drawn to destruction, writing feeds my spirit. The act of stringing sentences into coherent paragraphs keeps me chugging all day long.

Some passions inspire us for months, such as my daughter's desire to live life as a musical, singing her way through most conversations. (Which, incidentally, drives one of her brother's into his own fit of passion.) Other love affairs burn through us in minutes, like the hour my bigger kids spent running from drain spout to drain spout, filling buckets and then pouring them out in a wheelbarrow. Their short-lived mania didn't make a bit of sense to me, but it didn't need to. Our passions don't need explanation; either another person gets them, or they don't. But they do need to seize us by the heart and send us careening through our world. Our loves need to leave us gasping for air, panting for more, more!

So every now and then I'll share some of my passions with you. You'll find them in the right-hand column under the tag line: What I'm loving. But now I've gotta run. Apparently, the pancakes are no longer taking the edge off hunger, and the kids are yelling (passionately) that my time is up.

Inspirations

Photo courtesy of i:tzharr.

Dragon puffs of warm air rose from our mouths this morning as I walked my children to school. The cold, gray days of January have returned after a false spring, and I kicked mulch over the moss phlox that had been tricked into opening a few pink blooms.

"Go back to sleep," I tell it.

I'm mentally hibernating this winter -- stoking ideas, dreaming up possibilities, weighing changes. Some of my mood is triggered by the recession as I watch the corner gas station shutter its windows, and the food line lengthen outside the neighborhood church. My husband tinkers with our budget in order to squirrel away a few more dollars against a pay-cut. I buy more beans, and imagine squeezing freelance writing into my child-dominated days.

But my hibernating also comes from discovering silver threads of age in my hair, of the strand of fear that twisted itself around my excitement while sledding, of the stiffness I feel when I climb out of bed in the morning. Given family genetics and age, my life may well be half-lived, and this realization has me seeking inspiration from late bloomers like Cezanne, whose greatest work came late, and Mark Twain, who published "Huckleberry Finn" at forty-nine.

But it's not just the dead and famous who inspire me. During my holiday hiatus from this blog, I found things online that warmed my imagination -- whether with beauty, irreverence or plain yumminess -- some of them created, not for money or fame, but for the sheer joy of creating.

Here's what's got me happily hibernating:

You Won't Remember This Either.
My toddler's fascination with dogs.
Indecent Haiku.
Pumpkin pancakes recipe.
This Joy Ride: poetry+photos+inspiration.
These wine glasses featured in a video of the Wall Street Journal's wine columnists.
Late Bloomers.
The Indian Magic crabapples we planted this winter.
The hat worn by Aretha Franklin during the Inauguration. Oh yeah!

Guaranteed

Photo courtesy of Ana oMeLeTe

Catching a cold is one of the few things I can count on during the month of December. So while I sit on the couch with my cup of lemon-honey tea and box of tissue, I'm sending you elsewhere.

To chuckle: If You Give the Federal Government $700 Billion is a delightful parody of that insipid mouse-and-cookie book.

To change your habits: Polar bears aren't the only ones feeling climate change according to the National Arbor Day Foundation's New Garden Zone Map.

To chuck your Christmas cookie-making plans: The sweets in the comic strip Questionable Content are loaded with more than just chocolate chips.

To challenge President-Elect Obama to appoint a secretary of agriculture who will address our nation's nutritional and environmental deficits, aka corn consumption, sign the petition sponsored by Food Democracy Now.

To start the weekend off right!

The funniest thing I've watched in a while

"Business Time" by The Flight of the Conchords

Jemaine Clement also stars in "Eagle Vs. Shark," which is a fabulous and weird film. Watch it.