The World Examining Works

Vegetables/Morocco

 

These first few photos are of the veggie market in the souks on the way to the Musee de Marrakesh. It's a pretty humble market where everything is laid out on the ground. Note the woman on the right with her toddler on her back --from the size of the shoes probably almost three....

Tagine dishes on the left.

Artichokes! beets, eggplant, beans, cauliflower. What a feast and all grown quite nearby.

How much chopping and peeling to be done and how delicious.

Mint and herbs to be added.

And maybe a parsnip says the pregnant cat....

who would rather look about her than pod peas.

Up by the Mellah market the strawberries are in season. I think they are resting in clover.

 

All photos taken March 2013.

The Outer Garden of the Bahia Palace and Some Fruit and Flowers Too...

 

The two previous posts were about fish and flowers and I sort of wanted to post veggies and got sidetracked. Herewith the garden of the Bahia (Beautiful) Palace in Marrakesh.

The garden itself is rather a mishmash of tended and untended but was lovely in February...

There were

 

yellow daisy type things and 

a yellow bush.

I always imagine restoring these outer buildings

 and living there with the cats

 and the banana tree.

Ah! rose petals in a fountain in Essouira

where lemons abounded at Dar Baba

and oranges lounged in a nice ceramic dish.

The oranges are so much sweeter than here

and so many of them....!

 

 

Fish

 

Hm....fish

the fruits of the sea and madly picturesque and jolie laide...

so beautifully laid out here in Essouria where they'll cook one up for you just caught from the ocean.

They set out in little blue boats

full of important equipment

and mend nets.

The sea, like the fish, is beautiful and

frightening at the same time. Here a poor dead fish in Sidi Ifni.

and more strange creatures on the ground.

Here a silver of sardines -- much bigger than the horrid little canned ones we were forced to eat as children.

More silver creatures in Ifni

and pink ones too.

 

A rather different life from Rupert Brooke's philosophical English river dwellers:

Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!

 

 

 

 

Things I could Buy/Morocco

 

In Tiznit, south of Agadir

I discover a very elaborate headdress of Berber design. 

And pretty headscarves on the ends of posts.

I think this mannequin is waiting for the shop keeper to return from lunch.

 

In Marrakesh the clothes themselves are OK --though almost certainly made in China. It's the dummies I find alarming.

 

In Essouira, something right out of JAWS...

A bus ride from Tiznit......

and very beautiful melons...

 

Hearts and Flowers and All That Good Stuff

 

What a day for cynics to sneer and the rest of us have fun!

Flowers from the deli

all baby's breath and red cellophane

An apple to tempt one

or a cookie like a heart

Hearts on the deli window

and flowers too

the Empire State Building was actually a sort of pink but looks purple here

We end with white flowers....

Happy Valentine's Day

 

 

Cake

 

 

One of the best things about birthdays obviously. Here a stupendously wonderful Carvel ice cream cake.

 

Here is a young man who forced down his sandwich extra quickly to get to the cake.

Here is a young lady who has never eaten cake before --let alone ice cream cake. (The perks of turning one!)

Investigation

and ingestion.

No fork required really.

Seasonal

 

A rather gray morning up in Union Square. I think soup was being devoured at ten in the morning.

Wreaths and potatoes -- an excellent combo. I bought Butterball ones.

Santa was wandering about, but without his full costume --maybe it is being readied for the big night.

Waiting to see Santa in ABC Carpet. Everyone looking downwards....

Back home we have the tree up with the little old houses that I think are German

a splendid old ball with the silvering coming off --very shabby-chic --

and some of the little German angels I bought when the children were small

and lastly Gretchen who will be having her very first Christmas.

 

Merry Christmas 

Natural and Unnatural

 

I'm a great fan of fruit and veggies to look at, take photos of, paint and even eat. How the pears glow in the chill November sun!

This is a most useful thing. A wreath made entirely of herbs which would be wonderful to have in a chill dank kitchen but would dry up in an instant in an overheated apartment.

Perfectly exquisite very very small cauliflowers. I buy a tiny one just for me since R. thinks they are boring and tasteless.

Windfall Farms micro mesclun. $16 for a quarter pound. The most expensive greenery on the planet. A treat just to look at it. I buy $7 worth which is enough for small salads for two.

The pears, when inspected at home, prove to be picturesque but a little wrinkly round the neck. (Avoid obvious comparisons here....) The brown leaf looks sere, which is an excellent word.

And now for something completely different....

a stupendously awful/wonderful window display (23rd St between 7th and 8th)

he looks as if he has a canteen hanging off his nose

while she probably has jaw-ache from that rictus of a smile.

 

Season's Greetings...etc.

Thoughts on English Food

 

For some reason people used to enjoy being rude about English food --probably because until somewhat recently lots of people boiled everything to death. Nowadays English food is rather splendid and enjoying something of a Renaissance.

To start with the traditional cuppa. Here at M&S on Oxford Street. Note the asrounding blandness of the color scheme. I had already eaten the miniature cookie that came with it --just like in Belgium.

More reviving tea. Here the kettle has boiled on an Aga. Note the all-important teacosy.

Rosie has a great selection of tea pots for all occasions. What  a jumble of china from low to high from swanky shops and from estate sales.

Good heavens! We used to have the Rector, Mr.Porter, to tea once in a very great while. How splendid it would have been to have the right teapot to hand.

Breakfast tray. Weetabix (my poor brother is Peter Wix --so guess what he was called at school....) Marmite.....Yum.

Apples decorate the church for Harvest Festival. If anyone needs to know how to pick apples and store them, I can supply information.

Lunch. A pork pie! Ham. Branston Pickle. Beans and beets from the garden. I think the cucumber came from a shop.

And last of all --  supper the piece de resistance: Toad-in-the-Hole. A splendid one. Gastronomic bliss!

 

My story Jane in Winter is rather full of traditional English food.

 

Foreign Details: File under Overload

 

Travel is meant to broaden the mind. I think it just confuses me. I just got back from England where I spent the first half of my life, but is now almost a foreign country. I'm overwhelmed by echoes from the past.

A shop in Spitalfields -- Jack the Ripper territory --where I never ventured as a child since the buildings were black as your hat. It's now rather chic.

 I search for typically English things: here a roller towel -- something that doesn't exist in America.

Here a poster of where my brother worked for many un/happy years and charming lampshades by Cressida Bell.

I go on a bus through Picadilly Circus where large numbers of people are rushing about as people do in cities....

but some of them sit.

Normal life: invitations and CD's and socks.....

not to mention the Aga and the teacosy

and my friend Rosie's piece de resistance: Toad in the Hole. Bliss.

And another roller towel with more jolly color than usual.

The next day I go to the Imperial War Museum where one is bombarded with so much information the mind reels.

A bus from The Great War recalls Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Here technicians work on a plane from the Second World War....

and children make notes....

Here a horribly bad photo of Edith Sitwell from the current Cecil Beaton show....so I think I'd better stop and go and look for more roller towels, and maybe have a nice cup of tea.

 

On a completely different note: Urban Intersections opens at The Quidley Gallery today featuring one of Robert's paintings. Do go if you are in Boston.