will work for food
in which we celebrate autumn, recap the New Haven pizza I mean gig, provide a link for the Cutting Room Tickets (of course), and then just kinda talk about food
hey hartlist,
You guys… Fall is MY SEASON.
ok, important business first: here’s last week’s Chrysalis if you missed it, here’s where to get tickets for the Hallows Eve (Eve Eve Eve) show at The Cutting Room 10/28, which is getting more exciting by the day, this coming Sunday will be another pre-record, The Chrysalis 55: MMM DELICIOUS, and The Great British Baking Show is back on Netflix. I am Team Jurgen. (This Sunday I’ll be celebrating my niece’s 8th birthday, speaking of delicious. But I will post at 4PM! If you subscribe on YouTube you get a reminder. )
This morning I went down to my cousins’ coffee shop in a jacket and boots and the ‘morning meeting ‘ conversation was sprinkled liberally with plans to make Ina’s Bolognese (or, real bolognese if you’re my cousin) or maybe my annual pumpkin chili (it involves a bottle of pumpkin beer and is delicious). I usually make it for Halloween but why wait, I thought, as I scurried to the store to pick up ingredients… and walked back sweating through my jacket in the bright sun. So.. too soon, you say? Prepared, say I. (Have I mentioned the Cutting Room show yet?)
In case we don’t know each other, for many years I wrote a food blog with my sister called A Mouse Bouche: The Hart Sisters Eat Life. We had a modest readership and occasionally got to do fun things like go on Emeril Live! and cater desserts for the Elevator Repair Service gala (we transported chocolate bacon bark for like a hundred people in 90 degree weather). The blog was a natural outgrowth of our many emails to each other from our (at the time) day jobs, which discussed mostly theatre and snacks, and those were a natural outgrowth of being raised by two theatre professors amid a food-obsessed extended family. I (‘The Boo’) was doing a lot of regional theatre and became the default “field reporter”, writing about various Road Food finds and actor housing kitchen creations. ‘The Mouse’ had a NY-based theatre company and was (and is) more of a deft and inventive home cook and discoverer of recipes. Also, if you subscribe to the notion that people are either “cooks” or “bakers” (and if you do, why can’t you also subscribe to my YouTube Channel?)… I’m the one who bakes. I think it’s miraculous (you just follow the instructions and you get a cake??), whereas The Mouse finds it boring. (Even though she can make a mean cookie.)
Before I go on, if you have a springform pan and there are still prune plums around (and even if there aren’t), make this on Sunday and then eat it while listening to the Chrysalis.
Anyway, if this were A Mouse Bouche, I’d be drawing an overwrought metaphor between the cook vs baker idea and the different ways we live and create, but I’m honestly too tired from promoting the Cutting Room show on October 28.
:)
I’ll leave you with this; I had an interesting conversation with a director recently who thinks writers fall into two groups: “planners” and “planters”. Planners set up the whole thing in their head beforehand and then write following that map. Planters (guess which one I am) just hit the ground running, following their instincts and ‘finding’ the story along the way. What do you think? Which are you? Do you cook or bake, plan or plant?
It’s an interesting idea. Then again, there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe in dichotomies, and…
I’ll show myself out.
‘See’ you Sunday
Rebecca