Category: None
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The Signature of All Things
I close my eyes and imagine where I would like to be at my death. I think I’d want to be like Alma, hugging a tree far from home, perhaps a magnolia in Tahiti or a cinnamon in the Amazon. Alma Whittaker, the heroine in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, was the gifted…
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Good Tastes
“What does finesse translate to? It translates into giving a shit.” – Anthony Bourdain To say that folks are interested in fine food and fine dining feels like an understatement. Given the contemporary circulation of books and magazines, television series, and movies about food, it would be more accurate to describe it as an obsession,…
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Loose Screw
The first time I heard the phrase, “art follows money,” was during a guided tour of the Hearst Castle, built in 1919 by the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Resting on a 40-thousand acre hilly estate with a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean, it was described as “this is what God would have built…
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The Ideal Woman
Among the first movies I watched after immigrating to the U.S. was The Secret Garden, bedecked with beautiful garden footage in springtime. It’s the story of an unruly orphaned girl, Mary, who moved back to England from India when her parents died. Since no one taught her how to be a proper English girl in…
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Woman
That woman has been considered the secondary sex since the beginning of time is a mystery. Throughout the history of humanity, the construction of societies has been patriarchal, and current consensus sees matriarchal societies as exceedingly rare, if ever existing at all. In woman-led societies, the queen ruled together with men in her leadership ranks. …
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Candied & Brandied
Among the most popular methods to preserve fruits is candied, which is to cook them in sugar. Cooked fruits loosen their natural juice into the sugar to become syrupy and release their own pectin to thicken it. Fruit preserves are typically organized into jam, jelly, and marmalade. Jam is fruit bits and sugar stewed into…
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Learn A Language
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, learning French helped transform Lula Mae, a farm girl from rural Texas, into Holly Golightly, a New York café society girl. It’s a tall order, but I can verify that learning French improves English pronunciation, as it certainly did for me. Not only for the accent however, it also advanced my…
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Culturally Verbal
It is well accepted that the environment influences culture and language. We develop words for objects, build habits and beliefs based on the phenomena observed around us. The brain learns and forms its understanding of the world upon this information. Speech and language are so interwoven into our mind that it feels impossible to separate…
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Bilingual
I once met a girl who spoke four languages. I asked her how she kept them all straight in her head. Smoke puffing out from her lips, she admitted that it was getting very full, and that she didn’t think she could hold any more words in there. I told her that I didn’t know…
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Pickles
Pickling is among the simplest and quickest approaches to fermentation. It is mostly utilized for vegetables, where they are submerged in a brine along with herbs and spices of choice. As they are left to ferment, existing lactic acid cultures develop to give the vegetables and the brine a pleasantly sour taste. They are ready…
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