Driving Audhumla

Autumn nostalgia: Japan style

Based on all the Japanese novels I've read over the years, autumn is regarded as a time of nostalgia. Maybe it's the changing color of leaves, the earlier sunsets, or the chillier weather, but there's something about that season that most Japanese writers like to use as a setting. I can't count the times I've read phrases about the smell of roasting chestnuts, or the mixed joy and sadness of walking under maples amid falling leaves.

I've been in Japan twice during the autumn months, once in late November when I was as I was walking along the banks of Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo's Ueno Park on a grey day. The leaves of the lotus that clog a third of the pond were browning and drooping, and a few tufted ducks paddled in a desultory fashion in the pond's open water section. Cormorants roosted in the bare-branched cherry trees edging the pond.

It was hard to imagine what a crowded and bustling place the park would be during cherry blossom-viewing season because part visitors seemed to have their winter faces on already. Most people were walking briskly around the pond, rather than pausing to take in the beauty of the setting. It definitely had that kind of somber beauty that is so key to the Japanese aesthetic vision.

The other autumn trip took place in mid-October. I spent most days interviewing lawyers whose firms had just opened offices in Tokyo following a change in regulations that would permit them to practice law in Japan in a limited way.

I had one Sunday free, so decided to take the train down to Kamakura on the Izu peninsula. It takes a little more than an hour on Japan Railway's Yokosuna Line, which departs from Tokyo Station four or five times an hour. It's a commuter train that connects Tokyo to Yokohama and bedroom communities beyond, so if you travel on weekdays, be prepared to experience some of the legendary crush associated with rush-hour trains in Japan.

Once I stepped out of the Kamakura station, I felt like I had stepped into the pages of one of my favorite Japanese novels.  The surrounding hills were aflame with Japanese maple trees in red and gold. And right away I encountered a kuri man rolling his charcoal-fired cart up the street, filling the air with that famous fragrance of roasting chestnuts. Here's what I saw right outside the station.




Kamakura is popular enough with Western visitors that I didn't attract the kind of attention that I sometimes get in rural Japan and China, although I was trailed throughout my entire time there by a college student who wanted to practice his English conversation skills.  We actually ended up eating bowls of noodles together at a little café outside the gates of one of Kamakura's many temples.

 Of course I had to see the Daibutsu, which is a giant statue of the Amida Buddha. It's about 40 feet tall, and has been a popular pilgrimage site ever since it was cast back in 1252. I had previously seen Nara's much older and larger giant Buddha statue, so wasn't blown away by its sheer size. As usual it was mainly being treated as a photo backdrop by individual visitors and organized groups. People also like go climb around inside the statue. Statue interiors don't have much appea for me and I thought it was much more interesting to shoot a photo from the back side.




I went to so many temples that day that I can't remember where I shot this photo. It was quieter, and the Buddha was in a much smaller scale. I liked the effect of this statue's green patina against the orange leaves.




When I returned from Japan, I pulled Kawabata's Izu Dancer off my bookshelf and read it again. It's set on the Izu peninsula, which was a favorite hangout of Japanese literati.

Izu Dancer, the debut novel by Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari, is a sweet tale of unrequited love between a student from an elite Tokyo high school, and a young member of a troop of dancers traveling through the Izu peninsula, performing at various venues.  It's a much beloved book in Japan, and has been made into films several times.

Kawabata took me back to Kamakura and that nostalgic beauty of that time and place. I don't know if I ever will have the chance to return to Kamakura. Certainly the walking tour of the temples is beyond me now. But I so often think of that day whenever I see Japanese maples in flaming colors before the leaves begin to fall.  

Quilts and how not to make them.

That first quilt I ever made could probably qualify for entry into somebody's worst-quilt sweepstakes. Boy, did I ever not know what I was doing.

My youngest was going off to college with the knowledge that her father was terminally ill, and I wanted her to have something she could wrap around herself and be surrounded with memories of home and good times.

I decided to make a series of blocks from fabrics that she could relate to some family events. Shopping for appropriate fabrics proved not to be difficult, as lots of so-called ``conversation prints'' could be found that fit in a wide range of themes.  So there were blocks that covered favorite things like picnics and holidays, including even one for Mozart's birthday, which we always celebrated with aplomb.

I brought home a rotary cutter, mistakenly thinking I could just lay the fabric out on the table top and cut away. Ooops! That meant a quick second trip to the fabric store to buy a mat on which to cut.

Anyone who has mainly sewn garments has a bit of a transition to make when it comes to quilts. Garments generally have a five-eighths inch seam allowance, while quilt are sewn with a mere quarter inch. For garments, most seams are pressed open, while with quilts they are pressed to one side. In my garment-sewing days there was a lot of easing and use of a steam iron, while quilts pieces rarely have to be eased together, and, I found at least, using a steam iron can often cause the fabric to stretch.
 
I probably made every mistake that could be made on that quilt, choosing a high thread-count sheet for backing that resisted most of my efforts at hand-tying. I didn't know about chain-piecing, so laboriously started and stopped, lifted the presser foot, cut threads and began again what seemed like a thousand times. Some of the fabric I bought was, I discovered, inexpensive for good reasons too many to iterate here.

The finished quilt was lumpy and irregular, but the daughter took if off to college anyway, and, I hope, it provided her with a measure of consolation and connectedness during that first year away from home.

Undeterred by my first lumpen attempt, I let hubris get the better of me, and decided next to make a lone star quilt. For those of you who aren't quilters, let me explain that a lone star quilt is made up from diamond-shaped blocks, which means that each piece will have at least two bias edges, and fabric cut on the bias (diagonal to the weave) wants to stretch and will do so at the last provocation.

That second quilt suffered from what I'll have to call ``volcanism.'' Once I got all the pieces together -- and that required some major wrestling and wrangling -- the quilt rose up in the middle like a volcano. There was no way I could get it to lie reasonably flat. I fought it into submission, but there were myriad tiny unintentional pleats on the finished top.

If that wasn't enough of a stretch, my third quilt was one I made for my husband, using a pattern designed by Ruth McDowell. As in Ruth McDowell quilter extraordinaire and MIT graduate. Each block featured four frogs arranged in a geometric pattern, and had, if I remember correctly, something like 20 pieces, most with bias edges.

I carefully made templates for each piece from a flexible plastic, and then, cutting around them with my rotary cutter, managed to gouge and nick and trim them so they had little resemblance to the mathematically precise pattern McDowell designed. Precision is not part of my psychic makeup, to put it mildly.

 Nonetheless, the finished queen-sized quilt was great, I thought, although if I were to pull it out now and take another look, I'm sure I'd groan. My husband liked it, and that's what counts.

Since then I've probably conjured up more than 100 quilts in all sizes for all occasions. And I've seduced a number of my friends into the joy of quilting, too. Like many quilters I have a stash
of fabric that is way too big, and to which I continue to add more anyway, because I can get drunk on color and pattern.

Earlier this year I told some of my friends that when I die -- not something I'm planning to do any time soon, by the way -- I want them to hold an outdoor quilt show, stringing clothesline from tree to tree up in Tilden Park. And everyone for whom I've ever made a quilt is to come and hang them all on the lines. And then they are to weave flower head wreaths for themselves and sing and dance in the meadows under the flapping quilts.

Favorites over the years? I loved the Odin quilt I made for my dad, using am image from a runestone of the Norse deity riding his eight-legged horse, with the prow of the Oseberg Viking ship prow rising up out of the sea. My father wasn't very fond of it, and hung it in a back hall so no one could see it, but it made me happy to have made it. 



Another is the quilt we used for our Samhain altar cloth. It has four big blocks, each one with four witches whose pointy hats grow out of a snail's trail pattern. Each witch has a different colored face and expression on her face. My idea was to celebrate the diversity of women in our Pagan community, but to do so in a fun way.




A number of years ago I made a quilt for a little girl who had neuroblastoma, one of the most dreaded childhood cancers. She wanted something with princesses on it and her mom said she loved pink and purple. I think I succeeded in making her a quilt she loved without my having to go all Disney princess.




For my favorite niece I made a wedding-ring quilt using a more geometric pattern than is usually seen. I appliqued an image of Norse goddess Freya at the top, scattering flowers and blessings on the newlywed couple. Must have worked because the bride got pregnant the first night she slept under it. Here you see the quilt.




When my youngest got married, I made two quilts, one for her and one for her husband. Hers has diamond-shaped blocks, with each one centered with an image of something I wanted to call in for her. Here's a small section of that quilt.



Her husband's was comprised solely of square blocks of floral fabric, with lots of roses. The idea was that I was calling in a marriage that would be a bed of roses for him.  Here's his quilt and I knew he was secure enough in his masculinity that a rose-covered quilt would be just fine for him.





When I was growing up, I was told that artistic talent belonged to others in my family, that my slot was as the family's gawky too-tall intellectual. And it's true that some of my attempts at drawing and painting have been pretty pathetic. But oh my, hand me fifteen different fabrics and I will be so happy, and, I hope make something that I, at least, consider wonderful and beautiful. 

Captured by the Kacho

He showed up at my hotel in Ginza 15 minutes early, beating me at my own game of conspicuous punctuality. After the de rigeur bowing and exchanging of business cards, we headed to a taxi, the first one I'd encountered in Japan since my arrival in Tokyo two days earlier.

The cab had lace antimacassars on the seat backs, and the driver was clad in a business suit and immaculate white gloves. He pressed a button on the dashboard and the door to the cab swung open automatically.

Our destination was Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, the busiest transportation hub in the world. We were to catch a train that would take us away from Tokyo, at a time of day when most of the station's 3.5 million daily users were arriving there on their way to work in the city.

I've been six feet tall since shortly after my 13^th birthday, so I am easily a head taller than most Japanese people. So as we pushed forward into the station, I was like a salmon trying to swim upstream against a shoulder-height river of black satiny hair rushing past me.

I was with a kacho, which is a mid-level manager, from a Japanese conglomerate. He was a PR Kacho, taking me to view his company's vineyards in Yamanashi ken (county) on the back side of Mt. Fuji. Aim of the trip was for me to interview the winemaker for a story I was writing about the Japanese wine industry.

Kachos occupy an interesting position in Japanese companies, they aren't often highly compensated, and are expected to work unrelentingly long hours. They are beginning to have a fair level of autonomy in their careers, in return for their loyalty to the company and their lockstep seniority.

Dining out at fancy restaurants is a rare luxury for most Japanese. But when a kacho  has the responsibility to entertain a foreign visitor, one of the big perquisites of the job is the ability to use the company's expense account, often to visit restaurants that would be otherwise unaffordable or even unattainable, in terms of access.

I can't remember this particular kacho's name so let's just call him Watanabe-san, Watanabe's being one of the most common surnames in Japan. He was solicitous, and I think anxious that I might come away with a bad impression of Japan in general and his company in particular.

The train trip to the vineyard took a couple of hours, winding through snow-covered hills (this was in January). We had to change trains at one rural station, and I remember standing on the platform looking out at a snow-covered persimmon tree on which the bright orange fruit stood out as sharply as Christmas tree balls.

When we finally got to the vineyard, it was impressive. Viticultural methoods were a little different from what I had seen back in the U.S., with some accommodations made to a higher propensity for mold in Japan's more humid climate. The leaves were gone, but they had left some bunched of grapes hanging on the vines, with an open  white sheet of paper carefully placed at the top of the bunch.Watanabe-san explained that this was to keep mold from migrating from the leaves to the fruit.

Even though it  was a chilly January day, we had lunch at a table set up out in the vineyard, looking out over rolling vine-covered hills to that perfect cone of Mt. Fuji. I was eager to see what the winery chef would decide to serve, and was somewhat taken back when the meal proved to be a bowl of beef stew, probably the very last thing I expected to eat there. But the stew was piping hot, so, while it was a surprise, it was just right for such a day.

I don't remember much about the wines except that they weren't much to my taste. They were made with unfamiliar grape varieties, mainly Koshu -- a white wine grape -- and Muscat Bailey A, which produces a light red wine. The grape varieties had been chosen for their ability to tolerate long freezing winters, and the humid region's propensity for mold, and those are not necessarily the qualities that make great wine.

Once we got on the train heading back to Tokyo, Watanabe-san started asking me what kind of food I liked and where I wanted to go for dinner. I hadn't expected that dinner was part of the experience, but, to be polite said that would be lovely and anything would do.

He kelp pressing me for more details, so finally I just said ``Nihon ryori,'' which means Japanese cuisine, figuring I'd get a chance to have some really good sushi in the land from whence it comes.

We had to stop to change trains again, and this time the station was full of school girls, all clad in the middy-blouse and skirt uniform that is standard at most Japanese schools. Clearly they didn’t see foreigners that often up close and personal, particularly a very tall western woman traveling alone, so they stared and stared as they gulped quick bowls of noodles.

Our train came but once we were about 10 minutes out of the station, it stopped. The conductor kept making announcements to explain the situation. I knew just enough Japanese to be befuddled by what he was saying, as he kept using the word ``tako,'' which I knew was the Japanese word for octopus. I could not figure out why an octopus would have anything to do with a train stalled in the foothills near Mt. Fuji.

Finally Watanabe-san explained that ``tako'' is also the word for kite, and that a kite had gotten tangled in the overhead wires and shorted them out. The train, of course, was electric.

So we sat for some hours, as darkness fell and it began to get colder and colder. Finally the line was repaired and, several hours later, we drew into Tokyo's Shinjuku station. Watanabe-san parked me on a bench in the vast station and headed over to a pay phone to make several animated phone calls. This was, of course, in the days before everyone was carrying around cell phones.

Finally satisfied, Watanabe-san came over to collect me and the two of us got into another taxi that had been summoned through one of the phone calls. We drove for about 20 minutes and finally stopped in front of an unimpressive doorway, behind which a flight of stairs was visible.

Watanabe-san said we had arrived at the restaurant and seemed to be excited and eager to ascend the stairs. I don't know what I expected, perhaps something with tatami mats and low tables.

Instead, we were met by a waiter wearing black knee breeches, black stockings, black shoes with large silver buckles, and a white shirt with billowing sleeves, rather like a pirate might wear.

He ushered us into the dining room which had heavy dark wood tables and wing-back chairs upholstered in a dark floral design. The walls had dark wood wainscoting running up to a chair rail, with a floral wallpaper above. Prints of 18^th century sailing ships framed in dark wood hung on the walls.

The table was set with heavy white linen, and had candles in silver candlesticks. Each place setting had an army of silver cutlery arranged in perfect geometric order extending in each side from the silver charger.

The waited handed us menus, which were written only in Japanese. So I asked Watanabe-san to order for me. A lengthy consultation with the waiter ensued, and finally he went off to turn in our orders. He returned with large glasses of the wine we had tasted earlier in the day up in the vineyard, so I assumed that this restaurant must have been one of the winery's customers.

Eventually our food came. Watanabe-san had ordered the same meal for both of us. It came in lidded silver porringers with pierced-work handles at one side.

 I lifted the lid and what did I find? More beef stew. Certainly exquisite beef stew, with each piece of carrot and potato meticulously cut to the exact same size. The beef was beyond tender, although I really hope they hadn't used that incredibly pricey Kobe beef for such a mundane dish as stew.

I was mystified by the food. This didn't look like any Japanese food I had ever eaten before, and the restaurant certainly had no elements of décor I would have recognized as Japanese. Then I took a look at Watanabe-san's face. He was, as one might say, in hog heaven. He was thrilled at the meal, and was eating each bite with great relish.  

Watanabe-san's English was not terribly nuanced, so it took a while for me to craft a question for him that, I thought, wouldn't be too impolite. I wanted to ask him why in the world we were eating beef stew when I'd told him I liked Japanese food.

Although Watanabe-san got an embarrassed look on his face after hearing my question, he quickly insisted that this really truly was Japanese cuisine.  I gestured to the waiter in his knee breeches and to the sailing-ship prints on the wall and asked Watanabe-san, ``Nihon ryori honto?'' (Really Japanese food?) Again he insisted that this was true Japanese cooking.  

So then I asked him what kind of Japanese food this was. His reply came quickly: ``Oranda ryori.'' Oranda? I'd never heard of a region in Japan known as Oranda. In fact, the only time I'd ever heard that word was in connection with a kind of long-tailed goldfish.

What in the world could Oranda be? Then I remembered that Japanese has a lot of loan words from English and other European languages. So what sounds like Oranda in English?  Oranda, Oranda?

Then all of a sudden I got it. Oranda . . . Holland. This had to have been  Dutch-inspired Japanese food.

 The Dutch came to Japan in the early 17^th century, and after they sided with the Tokugawa Shogunate in crushing a rebellion by Catholic Christian Japanese, they were the only European nation permitted to remain in Japan.

They were given the former Portuguese trade concession on Dejima Island in the Nagasaki harbor, and for the next century provided Japan's only window to European science and technology. The Dutch left their mark on Japan, including a number of loan words that became Japanized, such as ``biru,'' which came from the Dutch word for beer (bier), ``garasu'' for window glass (glas), ``renzu'' for lens, and ``dansu'' for dance (dans).

And apparently they left some of their cuisine behind, including beef stew. After I returned from Japan, I did a little reading about Dutch cooking and discovered that ``hachee'' is a popular beef stew containing carrots and potatoes, onions, and a little vinegar. I'm pretty sure that's what we had that night.

Watanabe-san had never been to this restaurant before, and it seemed that a beef stew was a big treat for him. Plus, in a restaurant with high tables and chairs, plates and silverware, he didn't have to worry about embarrassing issues relating to meals with foreigners such as whether I could sit on the floor and eat with chopsticks (of course I can), or would find raw fish to be too yucky (which I definitely do not).

After dinner Watanabe-san was eager to take me to a bar, also on the corporate nickel, but it had been a long day, and, besides, I wasn't that eager to go to some little hole in the wall, as most Japanese bars are, and sip his company's very expensive whisky for hours, as is the prevailing practice.

He seemed disappointed, realizing that his ride on the winery's expense account was ending for the night. He summoned another cab, which took me back to my hotel, and after a few more rounds of bowing and a declaration of undying friendship, he finally left and I headed back to my room.

For Watanabe-san, this meal was a very big deal. For me, with two big bowls of beef stew in one day in Japan, of all places, it was something else. Not bad, of course, but certainly not what I expected, or hoped to find. Who could ever have dreamed of going to Japan to eat beef stew, much less what was undoubtedly an incredibly expensive beef stew?     

What can you do with a big shiny purple vegetable?

One summer when I lived in New Orleans, I stuck a few eggplant seedlings into the ground, never expecting very much would come of my efforts. Certainly in the Pacific Northwest, I'd never seen anyone grow eggplant successfully, and somehow got the notion that they were rare and difficult to grow.

I hadn't factored in Louisiana's rich delta soil, or the long hot summers characteristic of that region. It seemed as if less than two months later, I was bringing laundry baskets full of football-sized eggplant to work in efforts to share the bounty.

I don't come from eggplant-eating people. In fact all the members of that Solanaceae family are rare ingredients in Nordic cuisine. We had tomatoes in our salads of course, and maybe an occasional green pepper, but the vegetables more common to our way of cooking and eating are the root vegetables and brassicas, both of which do well in short, cool growing seasons.

But for some reason, my mother made a dynamite ratatouille. When I stop and think about it, I wonder where she ever learned that such a dish existed, much less acquired a recipe. Certainly I never saw any food containing an eggplant when I stayed with my maternal grandmother on the ranch in Ellensburg.

In the early autumn, sometimes when I walked into the kitchen after school, I could smell something magical. I'd open the oven door, lift the lid on the brown crockery bean pot, and there it would be, ratatouille in all its glory, bubbling away. It was a glorious mixture of eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic, simply layered in the pot, with only added salt and pepper. (Olive oil, a staple ratatouille ingredient, was unknown in my house. In fact, in my first years of cooking on my own, I had some major cooking disasters based on my mistaken assumption that olive oil was the juice one poured off a can of olives).

I used to sneak some of the still-cooking ratatouille into a cereal bowl  just because I couldn't wait until dinner time.  And once I figured out the role of olive oil, it became one of my favorite dishes to cook.  It doesn't really take a recipe, in my opinion, as it's a seat-of-the-pants approach, depending on what's available. Certainly great tasting ripe tomatoes add a great deal, but I've even made pretty great ratatoulle with almost marble-hard cherry tomatoes. Many people use summer squash, too, but I find if you add too much, it can make your ratatouille awfully runny.

I like to use the big Black Magic eggplants, but any of the half dozen either kinds I've found in local farmers' markets work just as well. Eggplants come in a wide range of colors and shapes, with some of them the white or green skinned and as small as an egg. It's more work to peel lots of small eggplants, and my preference is for peeled eggplant in ratatouille.

If you're here in the Bay Area and looking for unusual eggplant varieties, check out the Old Oakland Farmers Market, which operates on Friday mornings beginning at 8 a.m. You will see more varieties of eggplants  (and other unusual produce) than you ever dreamed possible. But get there early as the best  stuff goes quickly. 

Did you see the great Disney animated film ``Ratatouille''? Here's the recipe Disney created. It includes tomato sauce, which I never use, and a lot more summer squash (probably for the color effect) than I like. But hey, it's endorsed by the Mouse Kingdom.

However, here's a link to a recipe using unpeeled eggplant that I conjured up a few years ago for my friend Mark's Seasonal Chef website. You insert slices of tomato into slits cut into halved eggplant, cover with chopped celery,  onion and garlic and once it's baked, you have a ratatouille-like effect.

Caponata is another favorite dish made with eggplant. I learned my version from the Time Life Foods of the World series published back in the 1970s, but a zillion other very good recipes abound.  I've served it hot as a vegetable side dish, and cold as an element of an antipasto. It's also very good spread on some excellent toasted French bread.

Some people don't like capers very much, but for me, that are an essential element in caponata. And yes, as is the case with this recipe from Williams-Sonoma, you do add raisins and sugar. Caponata is a Sicilian dish, and sugar and dried fruit are sometimes seen in recipes from that region.

And then there's the Turkish take on the baked eggplant genre. It's called Imam Bayildi (which means ``the imam fainted,'' supposedly because he was horrified at how much costly olive oil his wife used to prepare the dish). It's a great dish to make when you have an abundance of eggplants, as each person gets a half eggplant that is stuffed with onions, garlic, parsley and, of course, tomatoes.  This particular version calls for half a cup of olive oil and don't stint. Besides, as the Mayo Clinic says, olive oil is good for you (all those monounsaturated fatty acids).

You can make your fainting imam dish either on top of the stove or bake it in the oven. I'm of the oven persuasion but your mileage may vary. Here's a pretty good recipe that gives you both options.

As you may have figured out by now, eggplant and olive oil go together like milk and cookies. Eggplant likes to soak up as much olive oil as you will give it. Eggplant Parmesan takes full advantage of this vegetable's affinity for olive oil. Most recipes, including this one,  involve slicing the vegetable crosswise into inch-thick slabs, breading and frying them, and then placing them in a baking dish in layers, alternating with a good marinara sauce,  and Parmesan and Mozzarella cheese. 

In India and Thailand, eggplant is frequently used in curry dishes, sometimes in combinations with other vegetable such as green beans. There are a lot of pretty complicated eggplant curry recipes to be found on the web, but this Thai version  has the virtue of simplicity, and it can be cooked fast enough for a just-came-home-from-work-and-what-do-I-cook night.

So far all the eggplant recipes I've listed have been vegetarian-friendly. Not so Greece's moussaka, which includes either ground beef or lamb as part of a many-layered baked eggplant dish. To make a good moussaka, you will also need to be able to whip up a bechamel sauce, which is used in the layering process.

You will note the inclusion of cinnamon and allspice in this moussaka recipe, and yes, they are essential, in my opinion. Too often we thing that spices like cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg don't belong in savory dishes, but when used judiciously, they add just the right note.

The simplest way of all to prepare eggplant is one of the best, made preferable with long skinny eggplant, such as the Japanese or Chinese varieties.  I just slice them in half lengthwise (without peeling them). paint the cut side very liberally with olive oil and run them under the broiler until they are soft and custardy.

Baba ganoush takes advantage of eggplant's propensity for getting all soft and smooshy when exposed to heat. This is another very simple dish that leaves you with a flavorful eggplant spread, really good on pita chips. Before you start this one, make sure you have some tahini (sesame paste) on hand. Here's a Persian version, but  really, baba ganoush is common throughout the entire Middle East.

If you are looking for eggplant on the other side of the Atlantic, be sure to ask for ``aubergine.'' That French name for eggplant is a favorite term designers use to describe that deep purple color that is, well, just like an eggplant skin. Italians know eggplant as ``melanzana,'' and  In India, eggplant is called  ``brinjal,'' so when you see that term on a menu in an Indian restaurant, you will know eggplant is an ingredient.

Now is the hour of eggplant abundance. And I'm a firm believer in eating foods in season. There are two big shiny purple footballs in my refrigerator that will be tonight's (and probably tomorrow's and the next day's) ratatouille. Now all I need is some good French bread.

Wanderings in journalism's vineyard

An inch wide and a mile deep, or a mile wide and an inch deep: those are the two kinds of knowledge and background journalists bring to their jobs. 

Me, I've spent time using both. Got my first gig after I walked into a suburban Seattle newspaper office with a bottle of pre-phylloxera Ch. Lafite Rothschild in hand. I was there to promote an auction of rare wines being conducted by the chain of wine shops where I taught wine-appreciation classes. 

The newspaper had been looking for a wine writer and there I was. Spent the next several years holding forth on such issues as the qualities oak barrels from different species of oak trees bring to red wine, the emergence of the Willamette Valley wine industry, the non-vinifera grape varieties with which Japanese vintners were experimenting, and the reasons that cabernet sauvignon wine made from grapes grown in some regions of California could have an unpleasant hint of bell pepper aroma.

My most recent job was with what I call the Very Big Media Company, where I wrote a daily report of the developments in intellectual property law. The Very Big Media Company serves the global business community, and my job was to cover developments in patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret law, and write about them in a way that is understandable and interesting to non-lawyers. In other words, I was writing about what could be perceived as very wonky subjects that, nonetheless, could make huge differences in corporate bottom lines.  Most of what I've written over the past few years can be found on the Internet if you Google my name and``intellectual property.''

In between? I've written about everything from legal issues around the AIDS epidemic, the menus served at offshore drilling rigs, potato exports to fuel McDonald's worldwide french fry sales,  Norway's witch persecutions, Cajun music, wearable devices to monitor blood-sugar levels, the rise and decline of an employee-owned regional airline, and even profiled some of the captains of the Mardi Gras carnival clubs known as krewes. A couple of years I doubled as a performing arts critic, and oh how I miss those two seats on the aisle in the 10th row for ballet and opera performances.

It's been a great run and I've loved every minute of it and hope to continuing laboring in this vineyard until they have to pry my cold dead hands away from a computer keyboard.  I mean, what's not to like? I get to learn new things every single day, and then can sit down and write about them.

Writing has always been the easy part. I've never understood writers' block. In fact, the tips of my fingers almost start to itch when I am away from the computer and start thinking about something that I could write about.  Once someone asked me what was the favorite present I ever received as a child. He was taken aback by my response. That best present was a box of stationery I got at my seventh birthday party.  Here was a whole box of blank paper I could fill with whatever I wanted.  And I think I wrote my way through that box within two weeks,  sending letters to family and friends.

And before I joined the Very Big Media Company, I wrote often in this blog, which has been somewhat neglected of late. The title, ``Driving Audhumla,'' was chosen when I took off, in the summer of 2005, on a round-the-nation trip in my then-Taurus with a personalized license plate  It referred to the name I had given my car. Audhumla is the great cow in Norse mythology, so I chose that name for my car, figuring she'd get me here and there on many adventures.

I'm now driving Audhumla II and we've had some grand road trips, too. This photo is of me and a friend's Australian cattle dog riding around in Audhumla II from about three years ago.

These days, given the ubiquity of wi-fi and Internet access, I can write and post to this blog from anywhere in the world. It's all so much easier with today's technology. I can remember when portable computing was a new thing and I'd be sitting in a hotel room, trying to hook up one of those little portable computers we referred to as ``trash 80s'' to an acoustic coupler so I could send in a story at the slower-than-crawling speed of 300 bauds.

I suspect I'll be writing here more often for a while. Want to keep my writing chops up while I'm on a quest for great new work. And I'm sure I will also continue posting on Facebook regularly.  Job-related suggestions and connections are more than welcome.