alice in wonderland

the day so far has been a string of logistics' nuisances.
my private class was postponed last minute when i had been rushing all morning to kind of fit errands, school drop-off and groceries in a frantic schedule. then i was supposed to have lunch at 1pm and even then got postponed to 2.30pm. bummer!
resorted to making the most of the waiting time by cooking and immediately forgot about all delays and mishaps as soon as i started deseeding and marinating some tomatoes.
i love cooking and relish it almost as a form of art therapy. i enjoy the silence and the loneliness that comes with it and the fact that my usually flippant attention spam becomes super focused and molecularly careful to the slightest scent, colour, volume and noise as soon as i get started around the kitchen.
as i was busy slicing and chopping i started thinking of alice b. toklas - the lesbian lover of gertrude stein who colected her recipes and peculiar anectodes in the very famous "the alice b. toklas cookbook". i love that book - it is funny, a tad mad (including recipes for hashih based brownies) but never tedious. it also ends up offering a great portrayt of the very same ms. toklas - her circle of artist friends, her love for stein, her overenthusiastic culinary investigations - like when she embarks on a rather futile chase for the perfect gazpacho recipe in spain.
what i adore about her pages is that she always seems to lose herself into her cooking - and when she is cooking for her guests she tries whatever she can to adapt to their tastes, even with improvised bouts of sudden artistic hyperactivity.
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A short time before serving it I covered the fish with an ordinary mayonnaise and, using a pastry tube, decorated it with a red mayonnaise, not coloured with catsup – horror of horrors-but with tomato paste. Then I made a design with sieved hard-boiled eggs, the whites and the yolks apart with truffles and finely chopped fines herbes. I was proud of my chef d’oeuvre when it was served and Picasso exclaimed at its beauty. But, said he, should it not rather have been made in honour of Matisse than me!
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her book has become a classic - to me rightly so... but i find her writing especially striking more than for her cooking tips, for the admirable dedication and passion for food (and life) she never fails to express.