Take a frying puck

We have a lot of cookbooks in our house. Shelves and shelves of them. It is sort of a hobby; we pick them up on our travels though often end up cooking just one thing from each, over and over. Icelandic cookies; chicken casserole the Martha's Vineyard way; New Orleans gumbo. Then there are the cookbooks to which I turn all the time, again and again, familiar, reliable friends: Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food,  Pastability by Lizzie Spender, the San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook, and of course, Joy of Cooking (its first edition would be my Desert Island book). Another favourite is one called Sugar and Spice by 'Durham Expatriots [sic] and Friends', assembled from recipes chosen or created by a group of us about 15 years ago, most with small children, and almost all ex-pat(riate)s living in the north of England.

In fact, I made Irena's mushroom-and-pea risotto only tonight. In her recipe notes, Irena mentions her sneaky addition of peas to the dish because her little girl is 'going through a picky-eating phase'. That little girl is now at university. It's a book is full of recipes and memories.

Sometimes our cookbook choices misfire, as when we bought a book of Jewish Greek cookery in the only synagogue in Crete (Etz Hayyim, in Chania: http://www.etz-hayyim-hania.org/) and walked away with a copy written in German. My husband is particularly fond of cookbooks from days of yore (I note that we have, but never cook from, Mrs. Charles Darwin's Recipe Book), or from cuisines now dead and gone (Roman, for instance).Mainly, the recipes don't matter all that much; the books themselves are fun to read qua books. The best are both, like the new one I bought in Asheville, North Carolina last summer, produced by the local Junior League-- there are still Junior Leagues!-- called Mountain Elegance. Most of its dishes require some type of canned soup (which is good; I have canned soup), but the best part is looking at the names and affiliations. For instance, 'Dorothy Jane Schafly Brown (Mrs. Elbert S.)' contributed 'Crunchy Broccoli Rice Casserole', requiring a tin of condensed cream of chicken soup. My margin note reads 'add garlic'.

All of which is to say that I'm happy to contemplate almost any cookbook although, sadly, cost and space prevent us from acquiring all of the ones that catch our eye. We don't as yet have many (any?) Canadian examples.The cookbook advertised in yesterday's newspaper caught my eye, and could be a candidate, though I think on balance it is unlikely to find space on our shelves:

Being a 'hockey mom' is well-known here as a demanding and self-sacrificing role, and anything that relieves stress in that situation must be welcomed. I have to admit though to a dubious curiosity as to what recipes those pro players contributed. Puck in a pan? Or... I know! Frozen food! In any case, I'm filing it under 'completely Canadian'. 

My Life in Pictures

I like words. I write. I am writing. I have written. See what a dab hand I am at conjugating verbs. It turns out, though, that I do an awful lot of pictorial recording, too.

My laptop contains 21,076 photographs.

This fact came to my notice because I recently uploaded all of these photos to The Cloud  (funny terminology, isn't it; makes me think that if it builds up too much, cumulus-style, we could have a storm, coloured pixel-drops raining down and making puzzle-puddles on the pavement. Disaster.). A friend had mentioned a new app that safely, securely, and, critically, limitlessly, stores photos, cost-free if accessed prior to a rapidly-approaching deadline. 'Great,' I said. 'Please send me the link. I'll get right on it.' She did, and I did: I began uploading. And kept uploading. And kept uploading.

At first I thought there was some mistake, some glitch, and I emailed the company. 'I must have pressed a wrong button,' I told them  (using words, not pictures). 'Your program has been running for over 24 hours and shows no sign of finishing. And for some reason it reports that I have more than twenty thousand pictures. That can't be right. What to do?' Reassurance came from their helpful customer-service person, or perhaps persona.

'There, there,' Ariel replied (approximately). 'In fact, you do have more than twenty thousand pictures. It takes a long time. Sit back and wait.'

Three days later, program still running, the purple pop-out window cheerfully reported that 18,072 of the 21,076 photographs had reached their heavenly destination. I sat back and continued waiting. And wondering. This laptop is only about five years old. Downstairs, buried in the basement, is my old desktop hard-drive, which stores photographs from the days when prints came back from Boots or Costco or Walgreen's along with a CD of electronic duplicates. And there were another two thousand-odd pics stored on my iPhone (four years old).  Plus of course the endless boxes of antique, solely-paper-printed pictures.

Why, I ask myself? Really, why on earth do I take and insist on keeping so many pictures? Is this urge to preserve images to do with human nature, an imperative that has been with us since we adopted and adapted to the practice of using tools? I wonder just how many cave paintings actually existed. Or does my photo-mania reflect a modern culture-bound syndrome? I know I'm not alone, though perhaps I am on the extreme end. Surely some anthropologist-- not me, obviously-- has given these questions some serious thought.

Lascaux ...or iPhone? 

I told the friend who first pointed me toward this wonder-app about my horror in confronting the results of my snapping habit. 'Ha!' she retorted. 'I've uploaded 82,000 images.' I'm not so extreme, then. Is this cause for relief, or for greater concern?

Really, we're all nuts. And that's my professional anthropological opinion.