Sunday, August 2, 2009

summer sunday lunch


This couldn't be more perfect as a summer lunch set-up: corn on the cob Mexican style, with chipotle chile powder and lime; tomato and onion salad; arugula and feta ditto.   The thing that looks like a baked potato is actually a small red rock keeping my table napkin in place, since it was starting to get windy.   

It's also, though, a kind of response, down to the naturalistic, non-traditional-food-photography detail of Alice wielding a pepper grinder, to the article in today's NYT about how we might fetishize cooking, celebrity chefs, and cookery shows, but we don't actually cook much at home any more - "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch."   And this article has, in turn, some wonderful staged photographs by Erwin Olaf.   A lot of his recent work has been more digitally manipulated than these seem to be, but they are nonetheless totally artificial - in the stage-set mode of Gregory Crewdson a few years back: here are kitchens that a modern day Miss Havisham might have paused her cooking in, thick with spiders' webs and goodness knows what other rotting and festering impediments to culinary activity.   They are like a nightmare version of advertisements for dream home smart kitchens, so they also function - whether deliberately or not - for every single granite counter topped center kitchen island work space Subzero Pro refrigerator that occupies an unsalable house somewhere out there in realtor hell. So I offer today's picture in homage to simplicity, too. 

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