Stay With Me

DO RE MI FA SOL LA TI DO

Voice is the blogger’s primary tool.

Voice isn’t something you choose and put on, its who you are. Voice has attitude, but it is not merely attitude. Voice is a point-of-view, but for a food writer, it is the point-of-view that’s been reduced by the heat of life, boiled down to its essence, filtered again and again through the constant accumulation of intellectual and sensory experience.

Voice is who you are and who you wish you were. It is where you come from and where you dream of being. Voice is the words that you choose and the cadence in which you combine them. Long before you start typing, however, voice is what you notice, how you see it and what you choose to write about.
When your subject connects with a current topic, a public fascination, a fleeting, though widely held concern you connect.

The person I wish I were has already settled on a menu, shopped and done most of her prep, her pre-dawn chopping keeping time with Hildegard Von Bingen as she chants Gregorian in the background. The woman I am is still trolling Thanksgiving blog posts, looking for help, looking for diversion and looking for friends. Some harvest-themed leads kept me reading far too late to consider chopping at dawn. Here they are.

101 Cookbooks: “Placerville, California is apple country. This time of year, apple farms line nearby country roads and all manner of apple products are sold – apple pies, dumplings, fritter, ciders, doughnuts, sauces, cookies, and of course…caramel apples.”

Fresh 365: “I love how a taste or scent can magically transport you to another time and place. Thumbprint cookies do just that, taking me back 20 years, to my friend’s kitchen, which was always a perfect place to snack after school.”

Farm House Table: “When my grandmother made pastry, she used the palm of her hand for a measuring cup. After years of practice, she knew the soft weight of a cup of flour or exactly how much sweet cream butter to cut into the dough.”

Chocolate & Zucchini: “It’s been a bit of a mushroom fest around here lately: Maxence and I went foraging in the forest of Rambouillet earlier this month, and we came back with six and a half kilos of mushrooms between us (that’s fourteen pounds).”

Lick My Spoon: “I recently revisited one of my favorite cozy neighborhood gems, Firefly, and was just smitten with their Fairy Tale Pumpkin Soup with Gingerbread Crouton, Golden Sage and Brown Butter.”

Lottie and Doof:  “Traveling at the start of Autumn had me in constant awe of the bounty of food at the markets in Europe and happy(ish) to return to my kitchen and actually make something.”

Seven Spoons: “We’d had apples and pumpkin already for our pies, yet I still had the lingering twitch to make another. One with walnuts. And maple. As you do, this time of year.”

Smitten Kitchen: “I know everyone says that this whole early-baby thing “goes by so fast” and “blink and you’ll miss it” and I believed them, I really did. But I hadn’t prepared to take a bite of this cake last week and push it away disinterested because it’s “too fall/wintery for right now”, look at the date on my phone and realize that, holy gingerbread (see how baby-friendly we’re getting here at SK?!), it’s freaking November already.”

Photo credit: Library of Congress/OneBigTable.com