Here is the Humble Garden video for 2008 (I shoot these with my MacBook Pro, forgive the quality). In it I share my family, our organic vegetable garden, our chickens, our LaMancha diary goats and our guard Llama. I also share a bit of my Colombian culture through the music so turn on your speakers and enjoy.

Let me know what you think! Hope we do not seem too odd to you!

Just a note to let you know that your feed isnt busted and that my blog is not melting down. As part of the migration process, various trackbacks are pinging in new comments and some of the posts with internal reference links have been changed. This is why you are getting older content in new feed items.

So sorry about that.

I really appreciate your subscribing to my feed and I am sorry that this has been happening. There may be more in the coming days, I apologize in advance. This is likely the most onerous to those of you who subscribe to the comments feed.

I am hoping it all settles down very soon!

Nika

Did you know that the 2006 Menu For Hope raised $60,925.12 ?! Thats just mind-bending!

For the winners of my prints and pinwheels who are visiting here – you do not need to register with blogger etc – just drop me an email at nika7k at yahoo dot com. After I verify your winning status, I will prepare and send your winning prize! Thanks again for bidding in the Menu For Hope!

My winners are:
UE27 Picture and Pinwheel Cookies helenjane
UE28 Picture and Pinwheel Cookies Ida
UE29 Picture and Pinwheel Cookies she
UE30 Picture and Pinwheel Cookies lmg
UE31 Picture and Pinwheel Cookies Stuart Spivack
UE32 Picture and Pinwheel Cookies Gerald San Jose

I can’t thank you all enough for participating. I have got some serious baking in my near future! I already have the prints ready to go so its a matter of rigging up packaging that gets you pinwheel cookies and not pinwheel crumbs!

Michael over at Chicken Fried Gourmet suggested that more food bloggers might do right by writing a bit about their own homes/worlds.

This is my “Where do you live?” post.

I have lived all over the US and was born outside of it. I had moved 15 times by the time I graduated high school and then I moved a lot more. As a result, when I decided I wanted to have kids and a family and all that, I wanted to stop moving. My husband and I lived in the South End in Boston, MA when we decided to stop renting and buy a house. We soon mapped the concentric rings of expensive living radiating out from Boston. We ended up looking at housing WAY far away from Boston (with still working IN Boston). We settled on a tiny little town called Wales, some 70 miles from Boston. We chose this place because we found some beautiful land and we built a house.

This place is not about food. Closest grocery store is something like 15-20 miles away. We have one restaurant that serves Italian-American food of the suburb variety. We have one gas station that has some food and some alcohol. We have no stop lights, this is a SMALL town. If we want to go out to a restaurant, we drive to Worcester or Boston. We dont eat out much! When I want to go to Whole Foods, its about 70 miles or so to the closest one (the one I prefer is in Cambridge).

We love it here because we are hermits and telecommute. Culture? Not detectable.

Below is a quickie tour of some of Wales.

In the appreciation of Mr. Momofuku Ando, the late inventor of ramen noodles (1-9-07 ed New York Times by Lawerence Downes) Downes said,

“Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything”.

Mr. Downes does a beautiful job of summing up the pros and cons of ramen-eating, it all rang so true. Its a beautiful appreciation of an interesting man who sought to make cheap good eats and who ended up feeding a globe of students.

I am not ashamed to admit that I rather like ramen noodles or that my kids like them.

I am sure there are a million million different ways to make them. Here is my way. I boil it 3 minutes, drain completely, add a bit of butter and then about 1/4 of the seasoning MSG package. I mix and wolf. Sometimes when I am really hungry (tho I did this more back in the grad school days), I add a raw egg after draining the noodles. I put it back on the stove until the egg is cooked (I am not all that fond of salmonella).

My husband makes it more like a soup.

Thanks to the ramen-conditioning I received as a youngin I have moved on to more adventerous territories like nuclear hot Korean ramen and miso soups directly from Japan that have no english on the package whatsoever. I just wing the directions and try to guess at the intended flavor(s).

Momofuku-san, we will raise a bowl of noodles in your memory today.

Some interesting links:

Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum Wiki entry

Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum (新横浜ラーメン博物館, Shin-Yokohama Rāmen Hakubutsukan) official site

Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, Tokyo Food Page

I am not sure what it means but I spent the day yesterday cooking massive stews and soups and homemade corn tortillas. I scrubbed all my pots and cleaned the kitchen like a fool. I didnt mind either, which for me is novel, I hate cleaning too .

For me, at my age, my 40th New Years was relatively free of reminiscing. Its something I do not really like to do anymore because living in the past is tedious and I need all the energy I have to live in the now. I did give thanks once again for our new baby, Baby O. That is a good thing to remember. I did give thanks for the entire family and the opportunities I have had this year to grow creatively.

I will not indulge in that guilt-ridden consumer trend that sweeps through the US this time of the year. I have lived way too many years on diets (Oh NutriSystem, how many times, I shall not count them) and have begun to break free of that insidious group think. I have three kids to teach healthy food attitudes to, thats a huge responsibility. What I put in my mouth and theirs ARE the lessons, not any lecture I could give. I dont mind telling them that I love pralines, loathe malted balls, and such. I will never tell them to watch their weight or that birthday cake has to many calories to have a second helping.

SO many “will nots” huh.

What I will do this year is love more, hug more, smile more, cook more, create more, live more.

I hope you will too!

A bit of navel gazing today.

Why do we blog?

Why do I blog?

The truth is that it is a way to have a conversation with you about something that I find, obviously, endlessly interesting: Photography. It so happens that I find food most accessible and mutable. Food photography is not so much about making us hungry to eat or showcasing any sort of culinary or food styling talent I may have or develop but rather, its about the technical and aesthetic process that goes into shooting beautiful and interesting food.

Why not shoot quirky images of poodles or drainage pipes?

I shoot food because it is easy to care about and become invested in the subject. The nature of food photography is such that you fall into and consume the image almost effortlessly.

I make it public here because your side of the conversation helps me grow and understand the impact of my photography on the viewer. For this reason, every comment you all have given me has been worth its weight in gold.

That seems to be a good enough and re-affirming reason to blog.

Things are settling down from the whirlwind of the birth and integrating the new little guy into our lives. Lots of cleaning has been happening (millions thanks to my mom who has been a HUGE help and who unfortunately just left today!).

With the cleaning came some much needed organization. One thing that came together was some of the books I use for culinary and photography inspiration.

I love reading the Culinary Institute of America‘s “The Professional Chef, Seventh Edition” and “The Advanced Professional Pastry Chef” books. These text books are jam-packed with very useful information that builds a good foundation for any cook. They also have some great pics.

I am going through my new “The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers“, learning as I go.

The technical and artistic aspects of food photography are discussed in a clear and simple voice by Lou Mann in his book “Digital Food Photography“.

But when I want to become truly inspired I look through some books I got recently from StockFood. These food photos are divine even though they are stock images!

There is much to learn from these catalogs of books if you pay attention to the details and try to put yourself in the pro-photographer’s shoes.

Whats on your shelf?

Our oldest daughter Q celebrated 10 years on this earth so we had a bit of a bash. It was pretty low key, just family.

Since the birthday is near Halloween the party takes up that theme.

We made birthday cupcakes with cute scary decorations.

And then we sat down to Q’s requested dinner, lobstah (and shrimp and scallops!)

Kawaisa or Kawaii – When being cute becomes a meta-cultural and political phenomenon. It is such a huge concept in Japanese popular culture that I refer you to the following links for further academic study of this odd but fascinating cultural mania:

Kawaii wiki entry
All Things Kawaii
Onatoko – Japanese street fashion
Phoophie.com – Kawaii stationary and more – online store

Kawaii is a term used, as I have seen in practice on Flickr, in appraising exclamation for something that is unbearably cute.

Americans tend to have this visceral response to baby animals. If you would like to get in touch with that feeling surf over to Cute Overload and you find yourself bent over in paroxysms of cute-agony, wailing “No, dammit, that is too cute”.

One of many types of intentional kawaii products or product types that are starting to filter into the American experience is anything made by Re-Ment, a Japanese company that makes extremely small and very realistic household items like collanders and serving dishes and whole kitchens!

The Re-Ment I have been seduced by is the food items they make such as little sushi trays and bento boxes and other types of food that are alien to the American home kitchen.

I bought one (from Japan through a group called J-List – surf the under-18 section. Japanese culture is not sexually repressed when it comes to female nudity, especially if its anime and kawaii) that was cute but I had NO idea what it was. My friends at Flickr who read Japanese were able to tell me that it is a Tuna Stew. The little ladle comes out of the stew, ths stew comes out of the little red pot, the little bits of stew and rice come out of the little tupperware containers, etc. Its fascinating. It also collects dust in my funky cabinet so I thought I would take a few shots and share them here. Voila!

Enjoy Re-Ment, enjoy Kawaii, enjoy tiny food.

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food, tiny, mini, re-ment, japan, japanese, kawaii, kawaisa, cute, hello kitty, popular, culture, otaku, sushi, tuna, bento, infantile.