Stir

My birthday presents keep coming in.  I've been known to celebrate the whole month of July and this year is no exception.  Since my birthday, I received a selfie stick from Lauren

which, as you can see, still takes practice to use...and a Seahawks 12th man flag from my best friend, Marge, who came over to visit after we arrived back in town.  I'm now ready for Seahawks football to start and you can't live in Seattle without a 12th man flag.  It's been a steady stream of visitors since we arrived June 28th of people stopping by with housewarming presents and birthday presents.  Can't complain about that!  Last night, my sister surprised me with another birthday present of a night out for dinner and then to the Book Larder, a local community book store that holds multiple events each month. Last night, they hosted guest author, Jessica Fechtor, of Stir and author of the food blog, Sweet Amandine.  I haven't read the book yet, which was just released June 23rd but it is an intriguing story of how she endured a brain aneurysm, her recovery process, and how her journey to recovery began in the kitchen, lead to a food blog and now her first book. It's a very inspirational story.  I love stories with medical backgrounds anyway, working most of my career in a hospital.  And I've seen first hand how food has such an effect on peoples' recovery from illness.  This book is right up my alley.  I liked the format of this book tour event at the Book Larder because they had Jessica in conversation with Molly Wizenberg, a local food blogger of Orangette and author of A Homemade Life and Delancey.  

It was a very inspirational evening, to say the least.  I loved the part where she read out loud the part of her book on her description of food and her illness:

     When I tell people that I am writing a story of a bloodied and broken brain - and oh, by the way, there will be recipes, too -  I get some strange looks.  Food is not suppose to top the list of things you think about, apparently, when you're recovering from a near-fatal brain explosion.  The thing is, I did think about food. A lot.
     And it's not really all that strange.  Thinking about food means thinking about everything that goes on around it.  The dash from the breakfast table out the door, the conversations that shape us, the places and faces that make us who we are.  What besides food could I think of that would encompass my life so roundly?
     Illness takes away plenty of big things.  You can't work; you can't play.  Worst of all, though, is the way it robs you of your everyday.  That's true whether you're sick for three months or three days.  If you've ever had a shower after a fever breaks, a first bite of solid food, traded your bathrobe for your favorite sweater, then you've felt it, too.  Getting well means finding your everyday.  I found mine in the kitchen.
     In the years before I got sick, I spent a lot of time in there.  Kitchen business is physical.  That was important to me during my first, healthy years of graduate school.  After swimming around and around in my brain all day long, looping through the library after each paragraph written or chapter read so that I could remember what my legs were for, I wanted nothing more than to rub butter into flour, to feel the mild burn in my wrists and dough between my fingertips.  I brought cakes to seminars, soups to neighbors, and mailed biscotti to faraway friends.  I talked about food with anyone who would listen.  Wrote about it, too: in the margins of my research notebooks, the pages of my journal, and summertime missives sent from study programs.
     Food has power.  It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together.  It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block.  At the same time, it draws us inward.  Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people.  A parsnip, for me, is Friday nights.  It's a soup pot simmering with a chicken inside, silk curtains, and my grandmother smelling brothy, salted, and sweet.
     But there is something simpler going on, I think, namely that it feels so good to eat.  Because we're hungry, yes, but also because food allows us, in some small way, to act out who we are.  My aunt puts cream in her ginger ale.  I put peanut butter on a spoon.  And cottage cheese on baked potatoes, and milk in tea, and yogurt on top of granola, not the other way around.  My brother has a recipe:  "Mustard. Bread. Mustard sandwich."   Eli comes from a family that puts ketchup on pasta and fries French toast in oil.  He cuts off the crusts and saves them for last and eats them like bread sticks, with jam.
     Food - like art, like music - brings people together, it's true.  It  begins, though, with a private experience, a single person stirred, moved, and wanting company in that altered state.  So we say, "You have to taste this."  We say, "Please, take a bite".
     It is a pleasure not only to taste, but to have taste, to feel our preferences exert themselves.  It feels good to know what we like, because that's how we know who we are.

And Jessica even signed my book.  Happy Birthday to me.