Musings

Reflections on life lived by a coast

  • Home
  • Travel
  • Yoga
You are here: Home / Archives for storytelling

On Spices and Adventure

December 23, 2012 •

Photo of star anise spiceMy kitchen glows with warm bak­ing smells, pun­gent spices and exotic fra­grances from many lands.  What is it about the hol­i­days that causes bak­ers like me to indulge in spices and fla­vor com­bi­na­tions that we use at no other time of year? In our home car­da­mon, freshly ground nut­meg, crys­tal­lized gin­ger and other spe­cialty items grace our kitchen, but espe­cially at the hol­i­day sea­son…

Today’s bak­ing treats go beyond my nor­mal hol­i­day spice palette. These “triple gin­ger cook­ies” are densely nuanced with lay­ers of fla­vors and spicy aro­mas, sourced from plants that grow in places once roman­ti­cally named the East or West Indies — fan­tas­ti­cal des­ti­na­tions that required multi-year sail­ing voy­ages from which not all sailors returned.

Ingre­di­ents for today’s cook­ies (full recipe) were once unusual, exotic lux­ury items reserved only for the wealthy or pow­er­ful. Today they’re eas­ily come by if you live near nat­ural food stores or high-end gourmet mar­kets for food­ies. The com­bi­na­tion is amaz­ingly fra­grant:

  • Star anise, ground by hand with a mor­tar and pes­tle
  • The zest of two lemons
  • Three types of gin­ger: freshly grated, pow­dered, and crys­tal­lized — the pow­er­ful base notes to these cook­ies
  • Molasses as well as “nat­ural cane” or turbinado sugar

Through­out the bak­ing process the mélange of these ingre­di­ents fills our kitchen with aro­mas you can almost see and taste. They trig­ger sense mem­o­ries, reminders of Christ­mases past.

As I put the cookie sheets in the oven, I find myself rem­i­nisc­ing about child­hood Christ­mas rit­u­als and fam­ily vis­its. On the Sun­day before Christ­mas, no mat­ter the weather, my par­ents would drive an hour or so each way, on snowy New Eng­land back roads, to visit and exchange gifts with my pater­nal grand­par­ents and aunts, uncles and cousins. We chil­dren would be packed like sar­dines in the sta­tion wagon (pre-SUV days). Instead of our usual sotto voce bick­er­ing, we’d sing Christ­mas car­ols en route; snooz­ing on the way back, bel­lies full, dream­ing of Grandma Wilson’s steamed plum pud­ding with hard sauce.

Today’s spice com­bi­na­tion for the triple gin­ger cook­ies is much more pun­gent and sophis­ti­cated than any­thing my grand­mother would have served to New Eng­land chil­dren. I can’t imag­ine she’d com­bine star anise with almost a cup and a half of gin­ger in var­i­ous forms…

Exotic Spices, Ocean Voyages

The aro­mas from these cook­ies are so cap­ti­vat­ing it’s easy to imag­ine why the quest for exotic spices per­suaded mer­chant mariners to invest in long, high-risk ocean voy­ages into uncharted waters, hop­ing to con­nect with traders who could offer spices like these. The quest for spices (and streets paved with gold) per­suaded mon­archs to invest in adven­tur­ers like Christo­pher Colum­bus who was look­ing for a shorter route to the Spice Islands.

Maps and celes­tial nav­i­ga­tion emerged in response to man’s need to return, pre­dictably, to the sources of exotic trad­ing goods, like silks or the spices that pre­served meats or masked ran­cid fla­vors before peo­ple had access to refrig­er­a­tion. For­tunes were made for a mil­len­nium through com­merce in spices. Gen­er­a­tions of men adven­tured to for­eign lands to bring spices like these back to their home­lands. Lives were lost…

No won­der these pow­er­ful hol­i­day spices cap­ti­vate us, spark our imag­i­na­tions or trig­ger mem­o­ries and sto­ries of fam­ily feasts and hol­i­day reunions.

What I learn from shar­ing hol­i­day meals with friends is that we all have favorite hol­i­day spices and fla­vors, pref­er­ences that reflect our dif­fer­ing regional, eth­nic or reli­gious back­grounds.

So many rea­sons to be thank­ful for spices and won­der­ful tastes and tex­tures at the hol­i­days!

Swedish Bread and Childhood Memories

April 21, 2012 •

Before break­fast today I assem­bled the ingre­di­ents for limpa, a spicy rye bread that epit­o­mizes Swedish arti­sanal bread. The sharp fra­grance that emerged from the mor­tar as I crushed the fen­nel seeds and aniseed brought me back to child­hood mem­o­ries.

My Swedish grand­mother served limpa for cer­e­mo­nial fam­ily din­ners and spe­cial occa­sions. Limpa is a dense rye bread, enlivened by pun­gent seeds, and sweet­ened with molasses and brown sugar to off­set the bit­ter­ness of the orange peel.

It’s been years since I last tasted limpa. Some­how the fra­grance of the crushed seeds and the orange peel put me in a vir­tual time cap­sule, trans­port­ing me back to my grandmother’s kitchen, and the teas­ing and sto­ry­telling that enlivened our fam­ily gath­er­ings there.

Now the bread is ris­ing, aro­mas waft­ing through­out our home. I won­der what else will come to mind when my hus­band and I enjoy our first taste of limpa later today. What sto­ries will we tell each other over lunch? It’s a nice thought to look for­ward to.

Is It Time for Reading to Be Reinvented?

May 15, 2011 •

Why do peo­ple read books? For plea­sure or dis­trac­tion? For self-improve­ment or to learn some­thing new? For class assign­ments: text­books, lit­er­a­ture?

Are eBooks best suited for use cases that are fun­da­men­tally util­i­tar­ian, rather than plea­sure seek­ing?

Why do peo­ple read eBooks?

I’ve been pon­der­ing these ques­tions for a few days, sparked by an entrepreneur’s pitch. He dreams of rein­vent­ing how peo­ple read and expe­ri­ence books, at least among young peo­ple. He wants to host the con­ver­sa­tions that take place around books, via a new “social eBook app” for the iPad and other tablet devices.

A New App for eBooks

His eBook app will be enhanced by “a social wrap­per” — in order to encour­age online con­ver­sa­tions among read­ers of a book, or exchanges between book fans and the author. In brief, here’s the con­cept.

Read­ing as a social expe­ri­ence

Imag­ine a book opened in front of you. Each page of the book is dis­played on the right — pretty much what you’d see if you were using Apple’s iBook app on an iPad. On the left, where you’d nor­mally see the fac­ing page, his app’s UI dis­plays short mes­sages exchanged among read­ers of that par­tic­u­lar book — sim­i­lar to a Twit­ter mes­sage stream or a chat win­dow.

His notion of read­ing plus online con­ver­sa­tion may offer real ben­e­fits to stu­dents who must read the same book for a class assign­ment. As long as his plat­form allows peo­ple to express their ideas or ques­tions with­out the arti­fi­cial con­straint of the 140-char­ac­ter tweet, this tech­nol­ogy may lead to enhanced learn­ing and stu­dent engage­ment. Assum­ing, that is, that the books they need to read are made avail­able for his eBook app.

But I’d like to share my impres­sion about the impli­ca­tions of this approach for peo­ple who read for plea­sure.

First Impression — Not for Me

My reac­tion to the new con­cept was tepid, even though I own an iPad 2 and have been col­lect­ing apps for it. I’m a vora­cious reader: con­sum­ing between 100–200 books a year, for plea­sure, plus sev­eral dozen busi­ness books. You’d think I’d be the ideal cus­tomer for this enhanced eBook app given the value I place on read­ing.

But here’s why the propo­si­tion doesn’t appeal to me:

  • At my level of “addic­tion to read­ing,” the pub­lic library is the most cost-effec­tive source of books for me.
  • I love the look and feel of a well-designed book. So far, the eBooks that I’ve seen (iBook and Kin­dle for­mats) lack any real typo­graphic ele­gance — each page looks pretty much the same. Books become bor­ing as a result.
  • When con­verted to EPUB® for­mat, the book’s orig­i­nal page lay­out is dras­ti­cally scaled back when ren­dered by the dig­i­tal book reader. This sim­pli­fi­ca­tion can reduce mean­ing or com­pre­hen­sion — what­ever was intended by the way the designer laid out text, head­lines and images on the page to be printed.

For exam­ple, the sam­ple shown here con­denses a lot of infor­ma­tion to a sin­gle page, thanks to the design choices that are expressed through this lay­out.

sample-book-page-layout

But my most impor­tant rea­son for pre­fer­ring today’s book for­mat to a “social eBook Reader” is the desire to pre­serve the holy grail of read­ing: the state of flow, a won­der­ful emo­tional state that is the hall­mark of the world’s best books.

Reading & The Joys of “Flow”

When read­ing a well-told story, I’m immersed in the expe­ri­ence — caught up in the state of “flow.” My per­sonal bound­aries dis­solve when I enter the storyteller’s world: I feel the heat and dust of the North African souk, or the pen­e­trat­ing cold and damp of the Scot­tish high­lands.

Psy­chol­o­gists describe flow as a very desir­able state of mind (source: WikiPedia):

Accord­ing to Csík­szent­mi­há­lyi, flow is com­pletely focused moti­va­tion. It is a sin­gle-minded immer­sion and rep­re­sents per­haps the ulti­mate in har­ness­ing the emo­tions in the ser­vice of per­form­ing and learn­ing. In flow, the emo­tions are not just con­tained and chan­neled, but pos­i­tive, ener­gized, and aligned with the task at hand…. The hall­mark of flow is a feel­ing of spon­ta­neous joy, even rap­ture, while per­form­ing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on noth­ing but the activ­ity — not even one­self or one’s emo­tions.

While it’s pos­si­ble to achieve flow while read­ing an eBook, the expe­ri­ence of flow is so reward­ing that choos­ing to inter­rupt it for chat mes­sages is the last thing I can imag­ine doing when read­ing for plea­sure.

But this may be a gen­er­a­tional pref­er­ence… Per­haps teenagers and young adults are will­ing to sac­ri­fice the expe­ri­ence of flow in order to check in with each other. Or maybe their hyper-active, multi-task­ing world is not one that’s amenable to flow; not hav­ing expe­ri­enced it, they have no rea­son to want it. For them, is con­nec­tion prefer­able to flow?

Per­haps my real issue with this con­cept is that I pre­fer asyn­chro­nous to syn­chro­nous social­iz­ing, when it comes to the expe­ri­ence of read­ing a book.

Yes, We Engage Socially around Books

My friends and I are highly likely to talk with each other when it comes to books or mag­a­zines we’ve enjoyed. Books are com­mon top­ics of con­ver­sa­tion among us. We bring bags of books to social events, for shar­ing with each other — our own lend­ing library, if you will.

We always talk about books (or movies) when we go for hikes or long walks, and often over a glass of wine or a shared meal.

Some are avid book club mem­bers, and love talk­ing about a book with oth­ers dur­ing semi-struc­tured club meet­ings.

After fin­ish­ing a book that’s made a huge impres­sion, we’re quite likely to email a rec­om­men­da­tion.

Most of us already own an iPad or a Kin­dle; all of us have com­put­ers. So it’s not the device that’s the issue.

It’s just hard to imag­ine that we’d want to chat in real-time while read­ing for plea­sure, when we so enjoy talk­ing about books face to face…

The entre­pre­neur is actively seek­ing financ­ing, so I chose not to iden­tify his com­pany nor his prod­uct. I wish him the best of luck, as long as there are enough peo­ple who will value dig­i­tal books enhanced by a social expe­ri­ence.

On Photo Booths and Identity

January 29, 2011 •

When I lived in Paris, it seemed there was a photo booth on every cor­ner. The French, quin­tes­sen­tial bureau­crats, required photo doc­u­men­ta­tion on all kinds of per­mits and appli­ca­tions. Per­haps they still do.

Chris-Identity-Card-for-Sorbonne

The police required a photo on my carte d’identité, a doc­u­ment to be car­ried at all times (or risk depor­ta­tion). It was not enough to have a stu­dent visa… So dupli­cate pho­tos, and a trip to the neigh­bor­hood photo booth.

To live in Paris as a legally doc­u­mented res­i­dent meant sup­ply­ing dozens of pho­tos to a vari­ety of insti­tu­tions. (And often mul­ti­ple copies for each piece of doc­u­men­ta­tion.)

Photo IDs clipped to pur­pose-spe­cific doc­u­ments were required by the uni­ver­sity, for class enroll­ment, stu­dent meals, etc. But they also afforded access to dis­counts on bus and metro passes, museum entry tick­ets, school books and stu­dent sup­plies.

French-identity

It kept those photo booths busy…

Some of the pho­tos were SO ugly that all you could do was laugh. So bad they could almost be taken for police mug shots…

So when Apple intro­duced Apple Photo Booth, a free app for devices with a built-in iSight cam­era, I had to laugh. To me shots taken in a photo booth reveal peo­ple in the least flat­ter­ing ways pos­si­ble. And no sur­prise: most pho­tos shared via Apple Photo Booth are indeed unflat­ter­ing… You won’t find me using that app.

Update 3/2/2011: Given Apple’s intro­duc­tion of the new iPad 2 today, I may have to eat my words. Apple has promised a “new and improved” ver­sion of Photo Booth for the iPad 2 — an app that Apple claims is both lots of fun, as well as visu­ally com­pelling. If that’s the case, you may find me back in “the vir­tual photo booth.”

Where Has the Magic Gone?

January 28, 2011 •

I’ve been wal­low­ing in nos­tal­gia for the past sev­eral evenings, a side ben­e­fit of prun­ing files, orga­niz­ing pho­tos, and reduc­ing clut­ter. When you’ve mar­ried into a fam­ily of pack rats, as I have, this is a never-end­ing chore. But it has its pecu­liar joys. (Think, Mar­cel Proust.)

While wad­ing through fam­ily records, I’ve redis­cov­ered travel doc­u­ments from my time as a stu­dent in Paris. They have trig­gered fond mem­o­ries, and led to shared sto­ries over din­ner and a glass of wine.

Now that so much of the world has gone dig­i­tal, some of the nos­tal­gic magic of for­eign travel has been lost. Does this imply our per­sonal his­to­ries will be less rich, less redo­lent of mem­o­ries trig­gered by old doc­u­ments?

Just look at my stu­dent visa, for exam­ple. The col­or­ful stamps, the dis­tinc­tive shapes of dif­fer­ent coun­tries’ imprints. The hand­writ­ten details. It’s a cul­tural arti­fact from the pre-dig­i­tal mod­ern era.

French-student-visa

Rhapsody in Blue

From the appear­ance of the orig­i­nal doc­u­ment, it’s clear that the French con­sular clerk was using a foun­tain pen to write my par­tic­u­lars on the visa. The style and color of the hand­writ­ten details are dis­tinc­tively French. When I lived in Paris, every­one used foun­tain pens; and almost all pen car­tridges were filled with the same shade of blue ink.

That per­va­sive shade of blue is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to that milieu, my stu­dent note­books, the peo­ple of that time and place. To the love let­ters I wrote my boyfriend, now hus­band, from Paris — writ­ten with a foun­tain pen that often bled through the flimsy air­mail sta­tionery. Let­ters that appeared dur­ing my “arche­o­log­i­cal dig” into our fam­ily files.

Despite the con­ve­nience of writ­ing on a key­board, com­puter-gen­er­ated doc­u­ments lack the mys­tique of those penned let­ters. The for­eign stamps, the sketches in the mar­gins.

And with today’s dig­i­tally scanned and recorded bor­der cross­ing pro­to­cols, my pass­port remains empty, no mat­ter how many trips I take. So it’s hard to remem­ber when I’ve trav­eled where…

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

Recent Posts

  • Wet Sand, Wet Boots, Birds
  • Living with Vintage Items
  • Slowing Down
  • Reflections on My Camino
  • Going Off the Beaten Track in France

© 2020 by Christine Thompson. All rights reserved. • Log in