…is living well, or so they say.
Long day of turning today, then cobbled together this little rascal. Tomatoes and fresh basil from the greenhouse and a fresh mozzarel from a local boutique cheese maker. Olive oil, salt and pepper. About as easy as anyone could wish. I think they call this a Caprese salad, or something like that. With sourdough toast it was mighty fine.
Meanwhile wingnuts coast to coast are lining up to eat pig swill at their local Chick-fil-A. I’m good with that.
I ate this whole thing in almost no time flat, btw.
That certainly does look tasty, that’s my kind of a meal. Only difference is that i may have splashed some balsamic vinegar on it. I’m down with the sourdough too. Dark bread would work too.
Beats the fuck out of Starbucks Appreciation Day.
Amy
Yeah … I had a little pool of bv on the plate, and dunked the sourdough toast in it. Forgot to mention it.
Great minds and all that.
Fresh sourdough bread would have been better than toast, but I haven’t had time to bake much lately, or do much of anything besides crank out work for the Labor Day show.
They’re busting my balls now for a list of work, and I don’t even know what I’ll end up having on hand come showtime. I’ll have plenty, but no way to know what all it will be yet. Don’t usually get my ass in this kind of crack, but there it is.
I can’t wait to see your portfolio of work for the show. That’s pretty exciting. It that in the New Mexico gallery you went to visit awhile ago?
Seriously, apparently they had a Starbucks day to counter the Chick a Boom thing.
The Caprese salad:
Really is a thing of beauty. However, lest I gain a reputation as an effete esthete who is overly fond of attractive meatless meals, I will now turn to the ugly business of politics:
1. Romney, it is being rumored, has decided on Ryan – and his campaign will announce whoever it is at 9 a.m. tomorrow (eastern time, I guess).
2. Fareed Zakaria has issued predictable mea culpas in the face of his blatant plagiarism of New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. (I never have gotten the Zakaria lovefest. Well, maybe I’ve gotten it but simply haven’t been capable of participating.)
As for Ryan: The worst possible choice. I’m voting for Jill Stein (the die is cast), having decided I’d rather vote for Alec Baldwin or Piers Morgan than either Mitt or Barack, but I’m still disappointed he picked a guy who credits Ayn Rand with transforming his life.
Starbucks:
Sadly, I missed the Appreciation Day, but I am kind of partial to the French Roast beans sold in supermarkets, provided they’re on sale.
No, this is a local show that I do every year. They set up a giant tent on the lawn out in front of a historic hotel in a tiny little mountain town. It draws a lot of people though, tourists for sure, but also Artsy-Fartsy people from up around Aspen and as far out as Vail and the other chi-chi ski places.
It’s been a good gig over the years, with decent sales over the weekend at the actual venue, but also with orders that come in at other times as a result of the exposure. (That’s the reason I’m so lashed to the mast right now — I thought I had enough of new inventory, but got hit with a flood of sales from the upscale market in Aspen. Wedding presents, housewarming gifts – that kind of thing)
It’s actually my main social event of the year, where I pretend to be an actual human in a social setting. It’s pretty nice, with great organization by really sweet and supportive people, and it’s in a beautiful setting.
It’s perfect for me, and only a 20 minute drive. It’s a great weekend where I get to visit with people I really like, and whom I see rarely otherwise.
Plus, the organizers take care of all the shit I hate fooling with. They take a 30% cut, which is better than most galleries, and they do all the advertising, the actual sales transactions, and they take care of the sales tax. I just have to show up with a bunch of stuff, set up the display, then pack up at the end and wait for the check in the mail a couple of weeks later.
Many brick and mortar galleries are fucking bandits, and treat the non-famous artists like shit. They take a big cut, often charge a setup fee, then are real slow to pay, and some of them, if they know you’re far away and can’t keep an eye on things, will even pretend they didn’t sell anything when they in fact did. The bigger and more prestigious the gallery, the worse the problem often is. LA, NY and Taos/Santa Fe are just the worst. I fucking hate dealing with most of them.
An artist buddy of mine got so pissed at a gallery in Taos for ripping him off that he loaded up a van with new work and set up on sidewalk in front of the gallery and sold at wholesale directly to the public in protest. And with a big sign explaining what was going on too. Good for him.
Fuckers.
Gunny you are a rich man. If I tried to recreate that platter taste for taste in London… I could do it, just about, but I’d have to buy honest-to-god tomatoes flown in from Italy or somewhere else sunny, and it would end up costing more than a brand new hardback at the no-discount bookstore.
I salute you! And imagine eating it. In my fantasy I have a second plate along side, of figs, so ripe they can hardly be grasped without rupture, and wrapped in thin-sliced salt cured ham.
My daughters taught me a new dish the other day, and I admit when they first told me I had my doubts, a lot of them, but trust me: watermelon chunked up, mixed well with crumbled feta cheese and lots of chopped mint. And a squeeze of lemon juice over the top.
Delicious!
Like bim I now clear my throat to talk about, well, you know, real stuff.
I say that with tongue firmly in real tomato deprived cheek.
Ryan.
Ryan…
What a choice. A really interesting choice, in the sense that it opens a door into Romney’s strange mind and throws strong light where before we supposed we knew what we were looking at but were still relying on hunch and supposition.
This is what the choice of Ryan says to me in any case: that Mittens has thought long and hard about where he is strong and where he is weak, with what sort of voters he is making headway and with what sort he is losing ground or not gaining, how he can reach the places he isn’t reaching, and he comes up with….
Ryan.
So now we know that the man looked into his soul and into the eyes of the people he has been meeting and he has come away thinking, oh god what they really need, what they are asking me for, what will swing it for me is…. ideological purity.
He thinks what he lacks is sufficient dogma. He’s gone and picked an attack dogma. A guy who has never so much as sullied the smallest of his fingers with the least smear of human empathy or human interaction.
It’s like the British in Singapore, bolting down all their heavy artillery aimed seaward. Never even thinking that they ought to defend themselves on the the landward side.
Romney thinks this is an election above all about ideology.
If he really does choose Ryan today, as the papers are saying he will, then today is the day he has lost the race. By categorically misunderstanding even the nature of the struggle in which he was engaged, much less the human beings with whom he would have had to engage in order to win.
Bim -
I’m no fan of Starbucks coffee, but liked their mochas and mocha frappucinos back when the budget allowed, and before i knew that a frap was 800 calories or so. On the rare occasions that i still go there, i still insist on ordering “small, medium, or large” instead of the stupid other size names they made up. In NY i liked to be even more perverse by ordering in Au Bon Pain’s (not quite as stupid) size names. Way to stick it to the man, eh? I will admit a grudging sort of like for Cafe Verona.
But the ridiculousness of having a Starbucks Appreciation day to counteract Chick a Boom to me is in being a useful idiot for just another another corporation. I like Gunny’s homemade and home grown idea a lot better.
We had the same here the other night Gunny – except in New England our homegrown tomatoes and basil don’t even need a greenhouse. The mozzarella and olive oil were from our local Aldi.
gunnison: that looks delicious.
All I can offer this week is an egg and bacon quiche with a hint of onions, in vintage, cheddar cheese shortcrust pasty
I thought ‘Starbucks Appreciation Day’ was a joke. It wasn’t?
What did people do? Order a coffee, dissolve a chicken stock cube in it, smack their lips ostentatiously and say “I really appreciate Starbucks” to each other?
(I’ve never had a Starbucks coffee. What with them putting mint or vanilla or rhubarb ice cream or whatever it is they put in the stuff. Disgusting. Coffee is espresso. And you’re only allowed sugar and maybe milk. [That's Sqiuirrel going all Italian.])
Squirrel -
Sadly, dead serious.
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-chickfila-starbucks-gay-20120806,0,2945774.story
Squirrel -
Did you catch the Fareed Zakaria plagerism brouhaha? Caught for the second time.
Amy,
I’ve never been able to bring myself to go to Starbucks on a regular basis (must be the years of being broke), though I occasionally get an iced chai since it’s so dessert-like and therefore something of a treat. What I have noticed, however, is that the beans are often rather reasonable at the supermarket. I’m a pretty careful shopper; the only things I’ll pay full price for are Greek yogurt and organic baby spinach.
There’s something very high schoolish about Appreciation Days in general. Team spirit has just never been my thing.