Finocchio

No Place Like Home

We have been worrying ourselves silly these last five months over the travails of Martha.  Our pastels have seemed paler somehow, our linens less crisp.  Our eyes would well up with tears each time we saw sans serif type.  We have been imagining nasty, nail-breaking work, drab gray surroundings.  After all, we know the destruction prison wrought for poor Oscar. 

At last, she has been released, and it feels like Spring.  "The experience of the last five months in Alderson, West Virginia has been life altering and life affirming," she writes. 

"Right now, as you can imagine, I am thrilled to be returning to my more familiar life. My heart is filled with joy at the prospect of the warm embraces of my family, friends and colleagues. Certainly, there is no place like home."

Welcome home, Ms Stewart.

Food In The Movies

I have been continuing to think about food in the movies, especially where food signals or signifies something (or is assumed to do so).  The Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate would be an example of this, in which a character's preference for strawberry ice cream (even when chocolate is available) signals his homosexuality to other characters.  A bit like sitting in a hotel lobby with Plato's Symposium open in your lap, the bookish equivalent of a green carnation in the lapel.

Perhaps most intriguing of all are those movies in which the food is imaginary -- either completely so or imagined to be something else.  Charlie Chaplin dining on a boiled shoe in Gold Rush is paradigmatic.  The delicate spaghetti of laces, the thin cutlet of sole.

Foodie Movies

Those charming foodies -- we adore them.  Readers of Chocolate & Zucchini have been compiling a list of their favorite "foodie" movies.  The list thus far includes:  Tampopo, Babette's Feast, Big Night, Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat, Eat Drink Man Woman,Touch of Spice, A Chef in Love and Who's Killing the Great Chefs of Europe.

No doubt it says something deeply unflattering about us, but the movies that immediately came to mind were, well:  Eating Raoul, Delicatessen, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, Suddenly Last Summer and, of course, Soylent Green.

Your suggestions?

Menu For Hope

Parisienne Clothilde Dusoulier, whose food blog, Chocolate & Zucchini, is always a pleasure, provides a Menu For Hope, a "twelve course menu of Southeast Asian inspiration, complete with recipes, drink pairings and translations" collaboratively created by several food bloggers to raise funds for tsunami relief efforts now that media attention has waned.  The need continues, as it does for crises elsewhere as well.  This menu is a charming gesture, and we wish Mlle. Dusoulier well in it.