I’m often asked what I love about cooking. It’s a fair question. I not only cook a lot; I read and write about it; I teach about it; and I find endless connections between food, tables and other things. The trouble is, when asked about my love for cooking, I often feel as though my…
Author: simoncareyholt
Seriously therapeutic chocolate tart
My beloved has left me. Actually, she’s gone to some exotic place for ‘work-related reasons’, but the long and the short of it is I’m left here beloved-less, alone, and on the verge of serious melancholy! We all have our coping mechanisms. Mine is chocolate, so, considering the clouds gathering overhead, I decided to act….
Jim Hearn on the professional kitchen
‘Dreams drive hospitality. While some people like to think of it as a component of the service industry whose responsibility it is to address the needs of the body, for those on the inside it is a weird and sometimes wonderful dreamscape of ungodly hours, ridiculous pressures, unkind owners, absurd customers, torture, humiliation and occasional…
Gopnik on wine
‘Between the rhetorical and the real lies ritual. And wine is a ritual thing before it is any other kind of thing.’ ‘ … it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is the alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let…
Gopnik on recipes
After posting my lemon and lime tart recipe yesterday, I was reminded again just how difficult sharing such a thing is in this medium. So much about cooking is intuitive. To give intuition words is fraught. I look through my mother’s tattered box of recipes, little bits of culinary wisdom scrawled on yellowed pieces of…
Another review
There’s another review of Eating Heaven by Sheelagh Wegman in the Tasmanian Anglican. You can read it here.
Lemon & Lime Tart
Headed to a dinner with friends, a ‘pie night’ in celebration of all things dough entombed! My contribution is more held than encased, technically not a pie at all. But entrusted with the sweet ending to the meal, I decided a tart would be a fitting and lighter end to things. I’m not sure where…
Gopnik on Cafes and Restaurants
I quoted yesterday from Adam Gopnik’s beautiful book The Table Comes First. As one who tries to write about tables and food, I bow down to writers like this. Gopnik not only writes well and ranges broadly, he sees in food so much more than food. The book is a delight to read. I don’t…
Gopnik on Coffee and Wine
‘French cooking was made not merely in the space between caffeine and alcohol but in the simultaneous presence of both, thus blending, in sequence, the two drugs by which modern people shape their lives. Good food takes place in the head space between them … Modern life is regulated by these drugs, morning to night–one…
Poetry at the café #2
The coffee lover’s psalm (with apologies to David) Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze. It maketh me to wake in green pastures: It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses. It restoreth my buzz: It leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of…
Feast Yourselves: a prayer
God beyond all our gods Lord of lords You offer us life’s bread crusty warm yeasty buttered dark– as healthful as good– and we gum day old white; in the midst of Your banquet we nibble away at the same Old Kraft cheese sandwich There is…
Two more reviews
Two more reviews of Eating Heaven. Fellow Baptist and good friend Darren Cronshaw has reviewed the book for The Missional Network. You can read his words here. And Wendy Rush over at the South Australian Rise Magazine has also been generous in the February issue. ‘ … an easy, revealing and thoroughly enjoyable read about our place…
Pastorchef!
Though church ministers do all sorts of odd things, it’s not often they get to host cooking demonstrations. You gotta love this job! Just yesterday, as part of the Feast•Pray•Love art exhibition and the wider Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, I got to foist my minimal cooking expertise on some unsuspecting folks at Collins Street’s…
A restaurant shepherd
A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting Esther Lou, a Chinese-American woman who has a ministry to kitchen workers in the Chinese restaurants of Los Angeles. She calls herself a ‘restaurant shepherd’. Industry statistics tell of more than 1 million immigrant labourers working in some 42,000 Chinese restaurants in the US. According…
Poetry at the table #3
Last week I attended Mass at St Francis here in the city. It was not a planned thing. I just happened to be in the neighbourhood. It’s a familiar place. In fact, I used to take my students there each year. In an introduction to spirituality, we visited several churches of various brands, St Francis included. I…
Poetry at the café #1
New year’s resolutions are fine, really. But when a friend told me earlier this year he’s resolved to give up coffee, quite frankly he crossed a line. I like coffee. Coffee is good and I’m sure there’s a sacred text somewhere that says so. To imagine my daily round without it is … well, it’s…
Interview with Eternity
Eternity is a national religious newspaper published monthly by the Bible Society. Not only has my ever-so-slightly-biased friend Kara Martin (faculty member at Ridley College) written a very generous review of Eating Heaven, they’ve now published an extended interview they did with me on the subject of the book.
Supper and justice
‘.. without supper, without love, without table companionship, justice can become a program that we do to other people.’ M. Davis, ‘Dorothy Day: The Only Solution is Love’ in Hospitality 17 (1), 1988.
‘Eating Heaven’ at Readings
Chris Gordon, Events Manager at Readings Bookstore, has offered some affirming words for Eating Heaven. As we move towards our Christmas Day preparations for the ‘Meal to End All Meals’, with expectations heightened by all around you, let’s remember why we do this every single year, even if we are not religious, spiritual or family…
De Botton on the Table
The popular English philosopher Alain de Botton has gotten a mountain of press over his book Religion for Atheists, and not all of it glowing. I’ve commented on it more generally here. But what he says about the table is worth a separate mention. In one of his early chapters, de Botton argues that embracing the stranger…
EATING HEAVEN 