Peruvian dishes with a little slice-of-life on the side
29.01.10
Once an compulsory and beloved neighborhood institution, Olsen’s Scandinavian Foods closed last summer . The depletion of the store, which sold Norwegian groceries on Market Road in Ballard for almost 50 years, was measured mostly in sentiment and metaphors as few people regularly shopped there anymore.
It was one of the last of its breed, another lost connection to the neighborhood’s past and its Norwegian oneness, another humble enterprise unable to keep up with style and taste. Bikram yoga, tapas, and connoisseur dog food paid the rent in Ballard; pickled herring did not.
The same gag played out with the closing of the local Denny’s restaurant and the Sunset Dish . The ground beneath their foundations was simply too valuable to substantiate the value and quality of the goods and services they provided. As with Olsen’s, those losses were more sympathetic than material. The bowling alley was shopworn; the food at the diner was second-rate at best. What the city lost was the ability to see itself as the kind of dispose that cares about a lousy diner and an aging bowling alley. And it spent the slice of life those places represented.
Source: Crosscut
The Cheat: The Roast With the Most
21.01.10
There would be the barest help of wood smoke, too, recalling the smell of a pipe caught on a lee shore as a sailboat passes by in the come down in buckets. There would be candles on the table, stuck into polished silver. There would be wise snow outside the windows, laughter and good music within — a New England pantomime whether sage in rural Idaho, suburban Missouri or bone-chilled Brooklyn.
In the plushy middle distance, perhaps, there would be small planters of paperwhites rising into the living range’s warm air, false spring forced into pick. These would be worth toasting with excellent wine, plenty of it. Meanwhile, the dog sleeps on a rug. And your guests, loved and appreciated as they are, vanish at 10 as if summoned by Morpheus.
This would be wonderful: January essence. It marks an ideal. And as such, it is an image worth keeping in out for as we gear up for this weekend’s feast of meat and nose vegetables: fat and protein and starch against the chill and wet.
Source: New York Times