Saturday, July 10, 2010

This is not a food blog

I love food, I love to eat and I like to cook. I even have not so secret dream of opening a bakery. Recently I realized that I don’t necessary like to read about food. May be this is just an oversaturation of food blogs, extensive dining and food sections in newspapers and magazines, cooking shows, diet fascination, and eating disorders. It feels like the normal interest to the basic human need became an obsession. The realization that we are society without traditional food and eating culture drives us to compensate with madness. May be this is a temporary fad and it will go away after more people will start feeling this way?
This is not a way to create a culture. The culture comes from tradition, tradition comes from family. Young people I know who cook and eat well are not the one who read food blogs and watch 24/7 food network. These are kids who come from families which managed to preserve food culture. There are several attributes which characterize such families. They eat what they cook (not prepared food), they often cook what their mothers cook and they eat at least one meal at home together every day.
How to get there from where we are now? I don’t know. I will think more about this. But current media obsession leads to eating disorder not to tradition and culture.
Sorry no pictures today.

Friday, July 9, 2010

I'm back!

Today is exactly 10 weeks since I broke my foot. And even though I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch, this is my first blog entry since then. I finally understood why I didn’t write anything. Sitting on the couch and being isolated creates a huge luck of data input. The internal storage has plenty of data, but because I’m somewhat depressed that data doesn’t look that hot. Today was a bit of a break- through initiated by Patrick’s friend food blog. She is a good writer, not like me. I think she is Harvard educated. Definitely more prestigious and may be even better school than Tashkent State University. She has a nice food blog with lovely description of her experience preparing pies and muffins and bread. But there was something wrong. May be the entries were too long for the genre, or the ratios of text and pictures was not to my liking. I for sure like texts with a lot more pictures. Here is one at the entrance of Madison Square Park.

And then Alla Pugacheva! My recent experience of going back to old Russian favorite movies and pop music is dismal. The prime example is Russian 80s adaptation of Mary Poppins. Back in Russia I thought it was a lovely film. But couple years ago it was shown on RTN. Wow! What a pitiable amateurish attempt for a musical. It was embarrassing. Especially when you’ve seen an American version. However, yesterday one of my old friends from Tashkent (living in NJ now) posted on facebook a youtube video with Alla. I went to youtube and listened some more. Not all of them are great. But what a relieve! She is real and she is good!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukq8wPlFwJ8