Riddle me this:

 If broccoli is the new kale . . . 






and 50 is the new 30 . . .  

and teff (an Ethiopian grain) is the new quinoa  . . . 

and "Orange is the New Black" . . . 

Then, _________________ (in your opinion) is the new ___________________?

Get the picture?

Fictitious Dishes

Some of my favorite book scenes involve characters sitting down to a meal.  Remember Leopold Bloom’s kidney breakfast in James Joyce’s Ulysses?  Or how about Esther Greenwood’s famous crab stuffed avocado lunch in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar?  Don’t get me started on all of the apple pie, ice cream, and coffee in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or the decadent party bites featured in F. Scott Fitzgerals’s The Great Gatsby. 

Dinah Fried put together a spectacular book, Fictitious Dishes:  An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals (HarperCollins), showcasing her own photos based on said famous meals.  Fried, a designer, art director, and graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, has done a glorious job of visually representing these fictitious meals.  Check out the book’s website and pick your favorite among the sample photos displayed on her page.  Better yet, order the book as part of your coffee table collection.

My favorite?  At least today, I’m salivating over Holden Caulfield’s (The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger) grilled cheese and malted milk lunch – well, mostly the malted milk.  What about you?

Click here to check out photos of some fictitious dishes!  

For the Artsy Foodie

Talk about making you want to eat your vegetables (and fruit).  Vegan photographer Amber Locke uses her artistry to celebrate her passion for healthful eating.  She captures the natural beauty of vegetables and fruits in her stunning limited-edition prints.  This print, in particular, captured my fancy – violet and white kale, papaya, limes, passion fruit, pomegranate, clementines, black cherries, strawberries, kumquats, and cucumber.  I may just serve you such a concoction if you come over soon for lunch (although I certainly don’t promise to make it look this pretty).   Take a peek at some of her other offerings on her blog (www.ambaliving.com) and see what might inspire you.  From artichokes to zucchini, Locke has a visual feast for every taste. 

Happy 2015!

Happy Day!

 



Go outside.  Now!  Plant a tree.  Water a flower.  Breathe the fresh air.  Gaze at the clouds. 

Take care of our world.

Happy Earth Day

 

 

P.S.  In honor of the upcoming lovely weather, I am taking a break from blogging.  See you in September. 

 



 



Today is the Day

Today, for you, are some of my favorite quotes about living in the moment.  Which one is your favorite?

1.  “What day is it?" It's today," squeaked Piglet. My favorite day," said Pooh.”

 – A.A. Milne

2.  “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

3.  “Forever is composed of nows.”

― Emily Dickinson

 

4.  “Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.”

― Walt Whitman

 

5.  “Be present in all things and thankful for all things.”

― Maya Angelou

 

6.  “Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.”

― Albert Einstein

 

7.  “Learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, rest this afternoon.”

― Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown's Little Book of Wisdom

 

8.  “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”

― Henry David Thoreau

 

9.   “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.”

― Benjamin Franklin

 

10.  “Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”

― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

 

 

The Buck Stops Here

Tuesday, April 8^th is Equal Pay Day – the calendar date that marks the approximate extra time the average American woman would need to earn as much as the average man did in the prior year. According to the federal government, women make an average of 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.  Women, think about everything that has happened in your life from January 1^st through April 8^th.  You’ve lived many a storied day, I’m sure.  Now, get your head around the fact that if you were being paid as much as men in your field, you’ve effectively been working for free these last 98 days.  Sobering thought, no?

 

How do these pay discrepancies happen?  Because most people don’t know what other people make.  There is a big giant cloud of secrecy regarding wages that allows employers to vary employee pay for any number of reasons, including discriminatory ones.  

 

Enter the Obama administration.  Tomorrow, on Equal Pay Day, the president will put forth two new executive actions aimed at reducing or eliminating pay discrimination.  The first, an executive order, will prohibit federal contractors from retaliating against employees who talk about how much money they make.  The second action, a memorandum, will require federal contractors to report data to the government showing the compensation provide their employees by sex and race. 

 

The effects of these actions?  Transparency.  We can only fight battles we know about.  And, granted, these actions only affect the approximate 1 in 5 women who work for government contractors, but are significant in that they will hopefully establish transparency among all industries and professions.  These actions don’t require listing of employee wages or true confessions during lunch meetings, but they will do away with being punished for seeking such information, and they encourage healthy comparisons. 

 

I applaud this important step toward wage equality.  Once we can see that women in the same positions as men get paid the same wages, we can move onto to other, more slippery, realms of wage inequality, like those that financially favor occupations deemed “male” (Math/Science professor) over very similar occupations deemed “female” (Humanities professor).  But that’s another blog for another day, yes?