I’ve been trying to capture this one for awhile. The clouds and fall colors in the background help make it happen this time.

This tree was nearly on fire as I glanced outside my window this afternoon. A few of us took a break to photograph it.

When my Dad sent the clipping from The Wall Street Journal, which hailed the book as “half cookbook, half culinary sermon,” I set it aside for a slower day, or as the reviewer said, “The Lost Art of Real Cooking is best for that rainy weekend or vacation lull when lengthy meal-preparation and a brief but satisfying dinner-table pay-off actually sound like fun.”

On a half-whim (and partially to rid my desk of newspaper clippings), I bought the book. From its introduction, Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger guide the “gentle reader” away from industrialized food and instant-ready recipes and back into the kitchen with simply written recipes (I confirmed the pizza dough recipe is legit) and only a little rage against the machine:

For the past half century, Americans have been convinced that cooking is drudgery, an odious task to be avoided at any cost, so that time might be freed up to do other more Important things. We were enticed with a constant stream of ingenious gadgets meant to make our lives easier, as well as products cheerfully advertised as being Quick, Convenient, and Simple to prepare. For the sake of saving labor, these new products were highly processed, packed with artificial flavors, and additives, and were usually seriously lacking in the single most indispensable attribute of gastronomic pleasure: Honest Good Taste.

Once again, I have trumped the long list of “Books I am Currently Reading” to read…. a cookbook. How strange! How exciting!

“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it– tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest– if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself– you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we all still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose it, we lose all.” (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 146.)

Spinach burger. Lime potatoes. New tastes. New leaves. New roads.

A kind of strange, industrial-feeling shot taken above my steering wheel, the sun lined up just right with a radio tower to produce an interesting orb.