Tonight on Radio National’s The Spirit of Things, the program Food for Body and Soul includes an interview I did with the delightful Rachael Kohn on Eating Heaven. You can download the podcast here.
Author: simoncareyholt
Ethos review
Just yesterday the Ethos Centre for Christianity and Society included a review of Eating Heaven by Megan Curlis-Gibson in its Engage publication. The review includes reflections on much more than the book. It’s worth a read.
Review in Australian Christian Writers
The author Anne Hamilton has provided a lovely review on the site of Australian Christian Writers, an organisation, I’m afraid to say, I didn’t even know existed. But now I do! Thank you Anne. You can access the review here.
‘Eating Heaven’ launched
It was a great relief last night to see the book Eating Heaven officially launched. Because my writing is atrociously slow, whenever something finally eventuates, my sense of relief is beyond reasonable. Still, it was an affirming night full of supportive friends, generous words and lots of book sold! Readers Feast bookstore was the venue, a wonderful neighbour to Collins…
Poole’s ‘You Aren’t What You Eat’
Not long ago I read Stephen Poole’s biting little book You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture. In the final chapter I scrawled in the margins ‘I am drenched with sarcasm’. Truly, it drips from every page. Still, despite the lasting damp, Poole’s critique should be heard. Poole takes aim at the current cultural obsessions with…
Southern Fare III
With my beloved far away in rural Texas, I’ve been re-reading Michael Lee West’s Consuming Passions, a delightfully written memoir of food and family in the South. It makes me wish even more I was there with her. West’s personal observations about gender in the kitchens of her Tennessee childhood illustrate how much has changed in…
Southern Fare II
Another installment from Michael Lee West’s southern memoir Consuming Passions on family, identity and recipes …. Even when I’m all by myself, I never cook alone. My grandparents are dead, along with my father and some favorite aunts … but my family lives on in their recipes. I bring Mimi’s chocolate cake to potlucks and Aunt Tempe’s…
Southern Fare I
My beloved is in Texas; returned to the place of family, sweet tea and barbecue. In honour of her travels (without me!) I’ve been re-reading Michael Lee West’s Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life. It’s a wonderful book, an easy-to-read memoir of family and food in the South. For the most part, the stories centre around the…
Gopnik’s ‘The Table Comes First’
The table comes first, before the meal and even before the kitchen where it’s made. It precedes everything in remaining the one plausible hearth of family life, the raft to ride down the river of our exitence, even in the hardest times. The table also comes first in the sense that its drama — the…
Poetry at the table #2
At Collins Street the first Sunday of the month is communion Sunday, the day we break bread together and swallow shots of unfermented grape juice from the tiniest glasses. The older I get, the more this odd and simple ritual means to me. There is something about the feel of the bread in my hands, the sacred…
Kitchen Table Memoirs
I’m not long back from a few days in Christchurch, New Zealand, with the wonderful communities that make up the church formally known as Spreydon, now Southwest. More of that later. On the way home I passed the transit hours (always too many) reading Nick Richardson’s Kitchen Table Memoirs: Shared Stories from Australian Writers. It’s a…
More on communion
After yesterday’s post, and just to confirm for my good Anglican friend Geoff my definite ‘anglo-catholic’ tendencies … …the breaking of bread at holy communion can break you right open. It’s like the gates to your heart have opened and everything you have ever loved comes tumbling out to be missed and praised and mourned and…
Poetry at the table #1
On Sunday night at Collins Street we sat around the table set with bread and wine, the ‘elements’ of our faith, and reflected on the incredulity of bread as a sign of God. Bread: it’s a staple of the mundane and the necessary; an international language of sustenance and gathering; a sign of commonality yet a reminder…
Dinner time
As after-dinner conversations go, this one was not my best. One of my offspring wanted to address aspects of our family life that were a cause of discontent. High on the list —the long list — was our practice of family meals: “Why can’t we be normal?” Apparently, ‘normal’ is the practice of allowing each…
Chelminski’s ‘The Perfectionist’
If you’re a fan of biography, especially from the kitchen, then Rudolph Chelminski’s The Perfectionist is a delectable read. It’s a captivating and honest account of the rise and tragic fall of Bernard Loiseau, the irrepressible, larger than life and entirely likeable star of modern French gastronomy–a man who lived in obsessive pursuit of excellence, even immortality, amidst…
The Cafe
Today, the cafe remains a place where awnings, tables and chairs awaite you; a place where you may arrive feeling blue, and then, for no apparent reason, find the mood magically lifting; maybe an idea comes to mind, a friend approaches, the coffee is served. Or perhaps the sun comes out, a breeze stirs, or…
Bill Buford’s ‘Heat’
Another good kitchen read. Staff writer for the New Yorker, Bill Buford was commissioned to write a profile of celebrated New York chef Mario Batali. To do so, Buford wrangled his way into Batali’s kitchen as his ‘slave’. Eighteen months later, Buford had progressed from lowly kitchen hand to line cook, along the way spending…
Gay Bilson’s ‘Plenty’
In Plenty: Digression on Food, the legendary Australian restaurateur Gay Bilson provides a compilation of intelligent observations about food and culture in Australia. She does so through the lens of her own experience in three notable Sydney restaurants. It is a pleasure to read. For me, Bilson provides one of the more eloquent testimonies to a…
Soup and democracy
I like soup. During these cold winter months I make a large pot every weekend–pumpkin and ginger, corn and asparagus, chicken noodle, lamb and veggie, lentil and chorizo. For me there’s nothing as comforting, no meal as intimate or satisfying as a bowl of soup served with a good sourdough. It warms the soul as…
Jung’s ‘Food for Life’
I prattle on a lot about eating as a spiritual act, and I believe it. But to say it’s a spiritual act does not claim eating as eternally positive. Halos and cornflakes don’t always go together. To claim eating as spiritual is to affirm it as an act of meaning. As the oft-quoted culinary philosophy…
EATING HEAVEN 