April 18, 2007
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For Featured Grown-ups…
Food and Paper, when it is TOO MUCH
Food and paper plague me. They surround me. Look at my coffee table; you can barely see the wood for the three-by-five cards spread out, chapter-by-chapter. That’s what I get for writing out of sequence. Look at my refrigerator, I have more unusual ingredients in there than anyone needs, never mind the one in the garage, and I only cook for one. Every eating space, excluding the dining room, shows traces of my addictions.
I love to read and write about food. My computer desk is littered with tea cups and articles. To the left is a seed catalogue and stacks of books about food, as it relates to cancer. I am always creating new dishes, and as I cook, I write. Except for the small, clean square above one stool at the island, alongside the cutting board, my countertop is strewn with papers and pen, Food Day, which is our local newspaper, and food magazines.
Why can’t I just pick one of theirs’ and follow it? I never use recipes; it’s more fun to play with new tastes. Once I’m satisfied, I move to my computer, plate in hand, where I name the dish and begin entering the recipe. Reflective bites may change the measurements, and I look up and include cancer-fighting properties of the main ingredients.
I’m always hunting for new ideas. I have a recipe to the right of me for fiddlehead ferns that I am playing with, which will get buried by the end of the week with pages from the Investor’s Business Daily. I save stock tips to enter into my watchlist. You talk about paper; I have IBDs on every surface in my house.
It’s why I like to go on vacation. Yes, I bring food and newspapers with me but no more arrive. I like to stay where there is a kitchen but I plan my meals ahead so that I’ve frozen and brought everything I’ll need.
At lunchtime I take a break from the stock market, leaving CNBC down low, and move to my café table over by the fire. I like to read while I eat, catching up on charts of stocks I’ve been watching. Afterwards I drink tea and watch the ticker tape, cuddling on the couch with Bridget, making notes with the paper and pen I keep by the TV. It’s a never-ending cycle of food and paper, and it has become a problem. I need to lose seven pounds, and it’s not going to happen unless I can free myself from these two loves, which feed off each other to keep me trapped in a sedentary cycle of clutter.
Comments (28)
I have to laugh out loud at this post. Were I to live alone I’m sure the piles of paper I have would move over much of my breakfast counter. You do keep yourself busy with the cooking, tasting, then finding all the properties to fight cancer, are you on a website publishing these? Or are they for someone you cook for?? marilyn
It is wonderful that you have passion for business and cooking. I would leave the clutter alone but go out for a walk more often.
It’s perfect. I love the sense of your day found within this. And the soft chaos that wraps it all. (and no recipes for me either, well, maybe as a starting idea…)
i can picture you in the middle of this gentle chaos, happy and at home. it’s a beautiful picture!
I think I live in a similar environment, although I don’t use cards to do my fiction. It’a all in my head.
BTW, go over to my blog. I’m hosting a writer who is doing Hen Lit and I thought you’d be interested.
Lynn
I think clutter is my middle name!
“ I like to read while I eat,”
I like to read while I walk, or should I say “walk while I read” since it’s the reading I’m doing primarily, and the second for exercise, since sitting down all day gets you nowhere in the scheme of things.
Food and paper. My two favorite things.
great post! hmm…you need to lose 7 lbs.? eat the paper. =) *see my entry for an explanation*
thanks for sharing!
be well,
~c
Visiting your website and I liked this post.. I can relate about certain cycles/behaviors sabatoging plans and goals:) Although I am the throw away everything type!-haha If my sweetie leaves anything on the kitchen counter that’s not on the leather folder holder that I bought for his papers, I throw it away.. I have thrown away bills by accident-lol I certainly have other habits though that are a challenge when it collides with my goals..
Take Care, Jamie
Have you ever read any Ruth Reichl? At my mother’s favorite cousin’s house, I fell upon her “Comfort Me with Apples,” the second book in her autobiography. Reichl is an author and food critic and, according to Amazon, is very well-published. The book of hers I read delighted me, and she is an author I intend to find when I exhaust my and my mother’s book collections.
Stationery and office supply shops and stores are simply wicked! Right now I am pleased to have curbed my spending habits with some severe frugality, but I just reapplied for an editing job and, if it goes, I’ll let myself buy pretty pretty pens. So bad!
Your life sounds a lot like my life – buried by my obsessions, which do include a lot of food and paperwork. And cancer-related stuff. My m-i-l is fighting lung cancer, although her doctor wants her to eat anything at all with calories so she keeps some weight on. She has surgery in the next week or so (wish they’d give us a date).
Definitely sounds like a fun way to live. I hope I learn to cook well sometime!! Goodness knows I’m already obsessed with paper.
I hate going to people’s houses that look sterile. I walk in and look for piles of books, or at least book shelves, filled with books rather than knick-knacks, although maybe the right kind of knick-knack that signified travel and activity would be okay. I want to look at someone’s private home area and SEE what they do, what they love, what they read, what they listen to… If all there is is a tv, I don’t have much to talk about.
So are you writing a cookbook? Seems like you should. It sounds like it would be unique.
RYC: We didn’t get the thunderstorm or hail, though I think my sister (about 7 miles south and much higher) got hail. Oh, wait… I think I do vaguely recall a single “boom!” But the sun today was glorious, anyway. And it was nice not to need a coat. PC-PSA=Personal Computer-Public Service Announcement. I hope it was helpful.
It sounds like a comfortable clutter that you surround yourself with. It sounds like home.
I like to read while I eat, too.
I have a real problem with paper overload, too. It’s all over my kitchen–and every other room in the house.
Lynn
The photos are from friend of friend
After the fall of Saigon, Vietnamese live all over the world.
Sedentary cycle of clutter I like the way ha rolls off the tongue. And I can identify right now too. I HAVE to get my crap in order. I need a day out of the rest. if I could put the world on pause for 10 hours and me keep going, I would be clutter free.I think…maybe.
So the paperwork inspires the food which in turn produces more paperwork… good post…
clothes. I have way too many clothes cluttering everywhere i look.
Great combo of topics and good writing!
It’s not paper in general for me, but books definitely. Always stacks laying around to be read, stacks laying around to loan out, stacks laying around to put on the shelves in their proper spots.
Great post. I can see you at your coffee table amid all the disorganised organization (or is it the other way round?)
Can I suggest, perhaps, immediately filing EVERYTHING? (Not the food, of course.) Seriously. Why not have a clothesline strung somewhere to hold all of your story notecards? (Easy enough to rearrange that way.) Create a file manager for your recipes (sorted any way that works for you: alphabetically, by main ingredient or course). *That wasn’t grammatically correct, but I can’t think of how to fix it, at the moment. lol!* If you have to spend half a day getting organized, you’ll find you really WANT to keep it up, just so you never have to do that, again. I can be a paper whore…and will be, if I don’t watch myself. I keep trying to give in to electronically keeping track of everything, but after the computer woes I’ve had, I’m a bit leery. Only by trying to stay organized do I feel like I’m actually in control of the paper wars around here.
I love you, Pru…GFW
What is it with paper? It is starting to be impossible to keep it from spreading to every surface!