Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Books

The only thing I have more passion for than Cooking, well is Running. But I have a third passion and that's reading. And if it's writing about cooking or running then I'm over the moon. Right now I'm reading Best Food Writing 2012 Edited by Holly Hughes.

Food writers have it rough. They have to sum up the sensory experience of cooking and eating foods in words. How many of us can say that we can do that and still convey the way that food has affected us?

One piece of writing affected me quite a bit, and that was "Sweet Spot" by Paul Graham.
An excerpt from the piece:
From Sweet Spot by Paul Graham
We have only the one tree, a haphazardly-trimmed 60-footer that turns orange in October. I’d never have thought to tap it if our old neighbor, a poet who worked in an Adirondack sugarbush with several hundred trees, hadn’t tapped his one tree. One, it turns out, can be more than enough and not nearly enough at the same time. I’ve tried to picture the yield from 1500 taps and can only get as far as a fleet of tanker trucks and an acre of fire.
The holes go waist-high on the western side, which receives more sun and delivers more sap. I sink two taps with a rubber mallet. I reserve a third in case one dries up. Immediately the juice starts running, dribbles to the metal lip and trembles in the sunlight before falling into the bucket with a flat plunk. It seems impossible that I’ll empty these buckets twenty, thirty times, but I will.
The sap, when I lift a drop to my lips, tastes of the purest, cleanest water.
I highly encourage you to pick this book up. It's already been a treat and I'm only 55 pages in.

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