Latest Obsessions

*Shanti Shack and Depanneur
I don't find myself in the Williamsburg area too often anymore
but, I was looking for sustenance during my craft show and I
stumbled upon these places.  I've been on a semi-detox lately
and they had exactly what I was looking for. From Depanneur
I picked up some raw juice and a delicious pickled beet sammy
with hummus, tomato, watercress and cucumbers.  For lunch
I found the Shanti Shack and picked up a grilled cheese (not as
healthy-I know) on 12 grain bread with tomato and avocado,
and a butternut squash salad with braised celery, walnuts, green
apple, micro greens, and raisins. So good! I wish that Sunnyside
had places like that.

*Lilacs
They are back! I can never get enough of their smell and
their dreamy purple hue. Lilacs represent love, so bring a
pretty bunch home to your sweetheart.

*Shrubs
Not the plant, the drink. A shrub is a drinking vinegar,
made with sugar, raw vinegar, and fruit/veggies.  I had a blueberry
one at Queen's Kickshaw on Sunday and it is totally going to be
my new summer drink.  Once I can get my hands on some rhubarb
a shrub will be made.

*Waking up early
I love being an early bird and enjoying the total silence
of the morning- not to mention the sunlight in the kitchen.

*Michael Pollan
"To cook or not to cook thus becomes a consequential question. 
Though I realize that is putting the matter a bit too bluntly. Cooking 
means different things at different times to different people; seldom is it 
an all-or-nothing proposition. Yet even to cook a few more nights a week 
than you already to, or to devote a Sunday to make a few meals for the week, 
or perhaps to try every now and again to make something you only ever 
expected to buy — even these modest acts will constitute a kind of vote. 
A vote for what exactly? Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to 
cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against 
specialization — against the total rationalization of life. Against the
 infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. 
To cook for the pleasure of it, devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to 
declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our 
every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. 
(Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien anyone?)
 It is to reject the debilitation notion that, at least while we’re at home, 
production is work done by someone else, and the only legitimate 
form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call “freedom.”