Extravagant Gifts.

For M.F.K Fisher, a good holiday was characterized by “lots of books for Christmas, stockings, candy, and nice gloves.”

I can’t help you find the best assortment of candy and charms, but if you’re still shopping for books, you’re in luck. Here, some ideas for the hungry-thirsty-globetrotting (M.F.K. Fisher loving) readers on your list:

An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher

{The biography about the hidden life of the woman who was considered “the finest writer on food now using the English language.”}

Love In A Dish, And Other Culinary Delights

{A beautiful pocketbook sized collection of lesser-known Fisher works -- it makes a great hostess gift!}

M.F.K. Fisher: Musings on Wine and Other Libations

{New in June 2012, a gorgeous hardcover book with lots of photographs!}

If you’d like a signed copy, email me at writtenbyaz@gmail.com to buy one directly from me. If you like, I’ll even wrap and mail it to the recipient. Or, buy these books in store (from your local bookseller!) or online.

May you have the happiest of holidays and thank you for supporting books, bookstores, authors, and me!

xoxo

Anne

P.S. Looking to up your creative quotient in 2013? I’m teaching nonfiction book writing at Stanford this winter (it's online, there's no excuse not to sign up!) and an afternooncourse on food writing in at Book Passage in Marin on January 12^th. Share! Sign up! Write!

Capturing Fall: The Other Side

All you really need to know is that Tara sent me gorgeous Seattle leaves in the mail. 

Ok, I could tell you a little more. Like how once, in college, I boy I liked very much and who I had liked very much for a very long time brought me a whole bag of autumn leaves that he had collected. It sounds really romantic, right? Nothing else happened. 

Or,  how the day that I got the leaves was Sunday, not a weekday because we had been in LA for Thanksgiving with Sean's mom who is very, very sick. 

And on Sunday when we got home I was bustling around trying to make the house warm and cozy, and I must have gotten a bit too zealous because I slipped in the kitchen (new boots, wet floor) and fell and hit my head hard on the counter. And I didn't cry because it was one of those days that if I cried I would really cry (like, buckets and buckets of tears). And Sean thought this was very weird, so he left me there on the floor, in the kitchen, and just said, "Take it easy, ok?" as if he really didn't know what to do with me at all. 

So a bit later, while fingering the large tender lump on the side of my head, I decided to open my mail. There was a big stack of it: catalogues, bills, a few belated birthday gifts, and a small package from an address in Seattle I couldn't quite place. 

Tara had said she was going to send me leaves. And it sounded charming but I didn't quite believe it. I've only met her once, in a bookstore, in Seattle when I was promoting my book. It was a great conversation, but hardly the stuff that inspires such thoughtful gift giving. 

But here they were. Tara sent me gorgeous Seattle leaves in the mail, and they arrived on an afternoon when what I needed most was color and warmth and friendship. 

The leaves maintain their natural hues because they've been carefully dipped in wax, a process you can read more about here. And what's great about this is that means I can save them, packing them carefully  in the box they arrived in and squirreling them away till next autumn. 

It's just the kind of reassurance I need right now. 


***
P.S. And because this got a little (ok, a lot) deep and you might be feeling a bit mournful, I thought I'd pass along a recipe for pie! Pumpkin pie with pecan brown butter strusel! This was my favorite dessert on the Thanksgiving table and quite possibly my most favorite pumpkin pie ever. Make it. Feel better. The End. 

Bringing Autumn Inside

Dry and scatter your colored leaves. Don't worry if the edges curl up a bit, they look prettier that way. Invest in some tiny seasonal decorations like these felted acorns.

Buy pumpkins of all colors and sizes. These tiny ghost pumpkins march along our dining room table. Traditional orange pumpkins flank the fireplace. Gorgeous knotty squash from our CSA make beautiful decorations -- until we eat them. 

Treat yourself to nostalgic candies that make you feel like a kid again. I can't survive fall without candy corn; the peanut butter M&Ms are a more 'sophisticated' taste. Together, they're a magic combo.  Dahlia season is almost over, but the guy on the corner still occasionally sells big bunches for $5 a pop. 

Roast peppers over open flame.

Roast fall veggies in the oven. This acorn quash was stuffed with a crushed garlic clove, a mix of fresh herbs, and a drizzle of olive oil. The roasted 'meat' became autumnal vegetarian tacos.

Cook with bacon, ideally artisan bacon from a small shop you found while on vacation. Extra points for using a Lodge cast iron pan, homemade stock, and opening an old bottle of red wine to drink with it just because. 

Light a candle. Part of the reason I love fall is because it is a little mournful. The colored leaves that fall off the trees, overcast days, and cozy mornings offer the perfect chance for a little reflection. I like waking up early, lighting a candle, and having a few moments to myself in the dark. The Voluspa Golden Cypress scent from the 'Maison Rouge' collection is my favorite right now. 

How do you embrace this season?

Colored Leaves

Yesterday, as we were driving home to San Francisco from Southern Oregon I must've driven Sean crazy with my ongoing lists of things I loved about autumn: Colored leaves. Red leaves. Yellow leaves. Pumpkins, orange pumpkins, albino pumpkins, fires, fireplaces, candles. The smell of smoke in the air, blankets, boots, scarves, mittens, hats, steaming cups of coffee, apple cider. Picnics, poetry, crisp air, cold nights, fog. Leaves, leaves. leaves. 

In heaven it is always autumn. In heaven it is always autumn. In heaven it is always autumn. 

{Thanks to John Donne for the refrain and to Oregon for the inspiration.} xx

The Vacation Drink: A Mai Tai

Sean's dad lives in Hawaii, which means at least two times a year we visit. (Lucky us). Each trip we stay in the same boutique hotel, located way down Waikiki, in the shadow of Diamond Head Mountain, and on the edge of Kapiolani Park. 

This was the view from our room. 

Do you think you'd get tired of this? I didn't. And to prove it, I have about two dozen versions of the exact same photo taken from every possible angle and at every hour of the day. Sun rise, sunset, midday, dark. With billowing coconut trees and misty tropical rain.

The drink of the week was the Mai Tai. 

Seriously, I must have had close to a half-dozen Mai-Tais this trip, way more than any girl should consume in one vacation. Last February when we visited Hawaii, my drink of choice was the Pina Colada. I dreamed Pina Colada. But this trip it was the Mai Tai. Maybe because it's dark hue and sweet-tart taste reminded me a bit of these late days of summer? 

According to See Mix Drink by Brian D. Murphy, the Mai Tai was invented by Trader Vic in 1944. Vic concocted the drink one afternoon for friends who were visiting from Tahiti. After tasting it, one friend exclaimed, "Maita'i roa ae!" which means "Out of this world!" Vic liked what he heard and decided to name the drink the Mai Tai. 

To make your own Mai Tai you need the following:
1/2 oz. Oregat Syrup
1/2 oz. Orange Curacao
1/2 oz. Lime juice
1 oz. Light Rum
1 oz. Dark Rum

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Shake with ice. Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Garnish with a Maraschino cherry and a triangular hunk of fresh pineapple (the pineapple is not optional).

If you make a Mai-Tai at home, I highly suggest dressing them up a bit. The one in the above photo is missing the tiny neon umbrella -- something I consider to be The Essential Mai-Tai accessory.

Discovery

 

If you don't know about Remedy Quarterly you must, you must!

RQ is a charming magazine filled with food memories and the recipes that inspired them, interviews with food people, and vintage tips & tidbits. It was started by the very cool Kelly Carámbula who, in addition to being publisher, editor, and designer, also runs the beauty of a blog The Best Remedy. Kelly also gives great travel advice. Thanks to her, Sean and I ended up at the cozy and decadent Manka's Inverness Lodge for our first wedding anniversary. 

My essay about love, discovery, and a life-changing sausage from Rosamunde's Sausage in San Francisco is in the most recent issue of RQ. There's also a killer recipe for curry ketchup, which you're gonna need for all the knockwurst you grill and eat this October. Subscribe today or buy a copy at one of these fine local shops.

Coming to My Senses

The reason I decided I wanted to write a book about M.F.K. Fisher wasn't because I was obsessed with food and wine. It was because I related on the deepest and most cellular level to how M.F.K. Fisher used food as a metaphor to write about her happiness and loneliness and desire and love.

That piece in Serve it Forth about eating bread and chocolate on a cold hillside? Sure it's about the way a piece of dark, salty chocolate melted into a chunk of crusty baguette and how delicious it is to eat something decadent and unexpected after a long hike. But it's also about getting to the top of that hill. About standing with strangers while your husband (who you don't really get along with anyway) stays at home with his books and his poetry. It's about taking the bread and chocolate from an old man's hand and eating it as the chilled wind whips around your face and you stare off into the distance, alternately happy to be on top of a French hillside taking in the view, and sad because you never wanted to be there without him. It's about realizing that the old Frenchmen standing beside you have been through war and famine in recent years. And yet they are still hiking and laughing and sharing food with you, a young American girl who they can't really talk to and who they have nothing in common with except for this small shared snack.

Those people who think M.F.K. Fisher is just a food writer have it all wrong. 

When Alyssa Harad wrote to me and told me about her book, Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride, and asked me if I'd read it and consider offering a blurb for the back copy it seemed a random request. I don't even wear perfume. 

But that's the point. Alyssa's book isn't about perfume. It isn't about a fancy bottle or the familiar heady smell that hangs in the air at the mall or a celebrity's newest fragrance. It's about scent. It's about familiarity and treading into the new. It's about discovering who you are and pushing the boundaries  of who you want to be. 

Just like M.F.K. Fisher doesn't simply write about food, Alyssa Harad doesn't just write about perfume. She writes about scent and our sense of smell and how those two things are intimately tied to the people that we are and the women we want to become. Her book is beautifully written and evocative and deeply personal.

I loved this book. In the couple of months since reading it I've found myself picking up small vials of scent and ordering little round jars of solid perfume from artisan producers. Some days I wear nothing at all, others I tuck a little bit here and there and observe how the perfume changes over the course of the day, and how I change when I'm wearing something earthy or exotic or intensely floral.

I'm at the very beginning of my scent journey, that's certain. But just like learning more about food and taste is a lifelong quest, so is this scent business. I love the idea that no matter what my favorite perfume is now, it will change. And that someday, when I look back at these foggy, tomato and basil scented days, ripe with peach juice and mid-afternoon sunshine and sweat, it will remind me of this. August. 

Do you have a signature scent? What is it and how did you discover it?

Untitled

All I have for you tonight is a few photos. Photos from our vacation that I meant to post and write about immediately (and beautifully!) as part of an effort to be more committed to writing and to this blog. And then, I got busy. Except I wasn't busy, I was just avoiding.

For those who have been vacationing in a New York Times free zone, or who reached their limit on free articles like I did this month, you might not know that busyness, and the anxiety that is produced when we worry we aren't doing enough, has been a hot topic lately.

First, Tim Kreider wrote a piece called The 'Busy' Trap. Next, the chorus weighed in with odes to summertime, to hammock swinging, to long afternoons trapped by an all consuming book. {For the record, this wasn't supposed to be another voice in that clamoring chorus. I hope I'm at least successful in this.}

So the thing is, at first I really was too busy to write. Sean and I spent two blissful weeks in Pt. Reyes, where my daily schedule went something like this: Wake, make coffee, move to recliner chair. Work (a bit), think, write. Lunch. Write, think. Long hike. Shower, wine, read till the sun drops away. Dinner. Friday Night Lights. Repeat. Repeat.

Notice there's nothing in there about blogging or pinning or tweeting. And nary a facebook post came out of those 14 days.  It was amazing. I felt more me than I've felt in a long time and spent many hours thinking about how and why.

We drove back into the city on our first wedding anniversary, and I spent the entire next week (yes, week) trying to get over my post-vacation malaise while simultaneously trying to figure out how to incorporate my vacation spirit into my real life. My friend Megan was right, however. It doesn't really work.

Then, of course, after all that, after nearly three weeks of vacations and bottles of wine and mid-week holidays and work avoidance it really did get busy. And yet -- when I look at my calendar I actually have no idea what I did. I just felt busy. Not just busy, stressed. Disconnected. 

But why? I felt busy, and just as Kreider guessed, that busyness was a mask for anxiety. I'm sure it's because there's so much happening that can't be written about and posted next to a neat stack of chocolate brownies. These are serious things. Sean's mom went into the hospital, came out, and today went back in. Last week, during a family meeting, she asked me to blog about her death. It seems like that sentence should be attached to some sort of funny quip but it isn't. Not at all.

Normally, when I take some time away, I jump back in with lots of explanations and most of them involve the world 'travel' and 'busy' (and we all know that travel is busy, much of the time). But thanks to recent thoughts, that busy label seems much less authentic. Because, as I've just mentioned, it's so much more than that.

Summer Reading

I've been plowing through books lately, and consuming them with the same frantic, never-come-up-for-air feeling that I remember from childhood. Back then, I used to check out a dozen books from the library and then descend into the basement for a cool, dark escape. I'd spend days down there, only coming up to eat, run through the sprinklers, or to return to the library for more books.

These days my reading time is more limited. I'm lucky if I get in thirty minutes before sleep (I'm talking book reading, people. I read a lot of blogs and articles during the day. My favorite form of procrastination!)

But one of the best parts of vacation is that there is always time for reading. While in Point Reyes I developed a delicious habit: A mid to late afternoon long hike, followed by a shower and then a long (two hours, plus) cocktail hour devoted to book reading and wine sipping. Finally, when my glass was empty, my stomach gnawing, and a chapter finished I'd go in search of dinner. Just like I did when I was a kid.

Over the past couple of weeks I've devoured Rules of Civility, Bringing Up Bebe, Turn of Mind, and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.

On the 4th of July I finished reading The Help (I can't wait to finally watch the movie!) And now, two days later, I'm trolling around for something new. This is on my nightstand, but last night I fell asleep while reading The New Yorker article about Ben Stiller. I also want to re-read Coming To My Senses, which I first read earlier this year in proof and adored.

What's on your summer reading list?

Vacation Meals

Just a taste of what we've been eating while living in a cabin in Pt. Reyes for two weeks.

Le Weekend

Where did the week go?

It's the nicest Friday in San Francisco I've ever seen, and it's made me incredibly dreamy. Here are some of the things I'm thinking about:

A solitary mid-afternoon snack at Prune in New York City:

1/2 avocado with hojiblanca olive oil, salt, and lemon:

This neon pale pink lipstick with a cinematic name.
The pecan tart with butterscotch ice cream and whiskey sauce I ate here last night.
The delicate, delicious, not-budget-friendly House Kombucha
Becoming an Irish housewife and baking brown bread.
A lovely book by an even more lovely author (more about this soon).
Loss.
The basket of bright red strawberries I bought today at Bi-Rite Market and ate one by one while slowly climbing a hill.

Enjoy.

New York in Bloom

 As I look at the pink trees I start to bloom:

P.S. The other night I made a riff on this recipe from DIY Delicious. Our "real food" bowls were stuffed with quinoa, kale, avocado and pistachio and topped with leftover chicken and tahini dressing. It was the perfect chocolate egg recovery meal.
P.P.S. I borrowed the name of this post from one of my favorite blogs. You must take a peek at LA in Bloom

Bohemian Love: Una and Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers was the first poet to introduce the idea of wild and untamed California spaces to a national audience. The "California Poet," Jeffers was especially fond of the rugged coastline just north of Big Sur.

Robinson Jeffers smokes a pipe

In 1914, Robinson (or Robin, as he liked to be called) and his wife Una moved to Carmel. It was an escape: The two had met and become lovers while Una was married. Their affair was so scandalous it became news in the Los Angeles Times.

Una Jeffers before her marriage to Robinson

And no wonder. While Jeffers was tall, slight, and brooding, Una was a beauty, "rounded headed and wild eyed with wonder and delight." She was his disciplinarian and his muse. Her small writing desk was positioned directly one floor down from his, and when she heard him wandering their loft, she'd rap on the ceiling to tell him to get back to work. He must have liked and needed the encouragement, because it was after meeting Una that he produced his greatest work.

Una's writing desk. Photo by Susan Grey

Una inspired him in other ways. After one tragically still born daughter, Una gave birth to twin boys. The couple bought land on Carmel Point and began to build a cottage and tower from granite boulders that he pulled from the shore.

Tor House photo c/o Robinson Jeffers Association

Robinson built Hawk Tower as a gift for Una. She kept her favorite objects there: Photos, bits of plant and dried flowers, her musical instruments. She was a "tower woman." She felt a deep affinity with women in Irish ballads "who leaned from stone towers over tossing seas." Una also had a deep appreciation for the magical. She loved unicorns, and tiny porcelain figurines, woven tapestries, and other mementos with unicorn symbolism can be found tucked into the nooks and crannies of her home.

Vintage Hawk Tower photo c/o Robinson Jeffers Association

I'm sure Una had talent that ranged beyond inspiring her husband. Maybe she could have been a poet too, or a musician, or a painter. Instead she devoted herself to her husband and children and her home. She kept chickens, she gardened, she brewed amber colored wine.

I thought I'd be most inspired by the Tower at Tor House with its hidden staircase and views of the sea. Everyone dreams of a room of their own, right? But my favorite room in the house was the kitchen. It isn't the original kitchen Una cooked in -- that was narrow and small -- but it's a room she still spent time in. And it's easy to understand why: Views of rocks and sea, a fireplace big enough for a cauldron, redwood walls painted with cheerful inspiration quotes, a large table.

Photo of Una and Robinson Jeffers & family from Ordinary Times

I could just picture myself on a writer's retreat, reading the paper and writing at the table with big cups of coffee for fuel and long walks on the shore in the afternoons.

Una's friendly ghost is easily felt throughout Tor House, and I'm intrigued by this beautiful woman. Her deep love for the outdoors and for cooking, books, and music is so inspiring. I know she was so much more than Robinson Jeffers' muse, but I'm intrigued by the idea that without her, Tor House, Hawk Tower, and Jeffers' poetry might not have existed.

Una guarded her husband's "'sacred quietness' like a lioness." Who took care of her?

* You can find out more information about touring Tor House here. Quotes taken from Of Una Jeffers by Edith Greenan and "He Built Her a Tower' by F. Older.