I go through phases of either listening to entire albums on repeat (Gretchen Parlato's latest release "The Lost and Found" comes to mind) or to individual songs. I become completely smitten with a tune and have to listen to it first thing in the morning, several times throughout the day, and then again just before I go to bed. In the case of "Midnight Running", Jonas was generous enough to send me the music and I am now transfixed both by the beauty of the song and by the mouth-watering challenge of learning and singing it. Doubly delicious.
Check out Manhattan Experiment on http://manhattan-experiment.com/live/ and have a look at Jonas' website http://www.jonasganzemuller.com/ I'll leave you with a video of the Jonas Ganzemuller Quartet playing Jonas' composition "Riverside Walk" at the Iridium Jazz Club, NYC:
Jonas Ganzemuller (alto), Nick Paul (pno), Jeff Koch (bass), Bastian Weinhold (drums)
I can't tell you how privileged I feel to be learning alongside musicians and people like Jonas and my other 24 classmates in the masters program at MSM. These feelings of gratitude, inspiration and bliss are especially prevalent as our time at school draws to a close-29 days until graduation y'all!
Onto food... I know I haven't written in a while-apologies and blame it on having a cold. I was struck down with bloggers-flu a few weeks ago and spent an entire week feeling sorry for myself and cooking comfort food. I did manage to take pics of the food but actually getting my fingers to fly across the keyboard and produce a blog posting proved to be too much effort. The following week I got hooked on "Friday Night Lights." Um, hello? Where had it been all my life?! I immediately started asking all my Southern friends about it only to be greeted with responses like, "Nicky, that show was aired ages ago. Which rock have you been living under?" The rock of loserdom, perhaps? Because, yes, it is THAT good. OMG. And, because I'm apparently a decade behind the times, there were four whole seasons for me to watch. Happiness except for the fact that I'm loaded with school assignments, a blog to attend to and should be mightily productive. No. My questionable priority list placed FNL at the top and a mammoth big band arrangement at the bottom. Such is life.
So, I was incapacitated for yet another week due to binge-TV-watching. The following week I flew to Lithuania for a jazz vocal competition (isn't that what all the cool kids do??). It wasn't altogether successful, but being unsuccessful has its perks. Yes. I got to inhale more FNL in between meeting rather fabulous singers and people and eating my share of potatoes, meat and other Baltic fare. I might also add that I spent copious time with my Kindle-it was not wise to start reading Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" upon arriving in a country where, according to British singer, friend and "Lonely Planet" expert DeutscheFin, "vegetarianism is coming." It is obviously "coming" from many, many miles away and I opted to put off my pledge-to-veg for when I returned to NYC.
So, one week sick, another week glued to my MAC screen, and another week in a small Lithuanian town. I returned to NYC to be bombarded with assignments, admin and a dusty apartment (why, please tell me, do NYC flats accumulate so much freaking dust?!). So no blogging for a fourth week. Oi va voy. And I suspected that my idea to blog about the comfort food I used to nurse myself back to health had now passed its sell-by date. "Hold on! Not so fast!" the fates exclaimed. I am now sick....AGAIN. But every dust cloud has a silver lining....I can blog about sickling-food!
So, without further ado and a-don't, here are some visuals:
The consumption of pasta-in any shape and form-allows me to wade through childhood nostalgia. My sister and I went through phases of eating noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Even if they were chicken-flavoured Maggie 2 Minute Noodles, we were devotees of the celebrated carb. Another phase saw us eating entire packets of Woolworths pumpkin tortellini sprinkled with enough grated gouda cheese to feed an entire termite family. The cheese would melt, become increasingly sweet and cheesy, and we'd each devour an entire plateful while watching junky TV. Other pasta adventures saw us frying pancetta or parma ham (or bacon when we had to admit that we weren't actually sophisticated enough to be using pancetta...nor were we footing the bill. Thanks Mum!) until crispy and saltily swathed in olive oil, throwing in a bag of frozen petit pois (peas) and mixing in al dente farfalle. Now, whenever I eat pasta, I think of my older sister and her fearless pasta conquests.
"Pasta For A Single Sickling" involves pasta of your choice (I try to use whole wheat to assuage my guilt of eating pasta in excess but sometimes you want the durum wheat stuff, white and calming), canned tomatoes (chopped because who has the time to wait for whole ones to break down?!), onion, garlic (good for a cold), mushrooms if, like me, you got a bit overexcited in the grocery store and purchased oyster, shiitake, enoki, and button 'shrooms, and grated cheese (lots and lots and lots of it). It's not the most sophisticated of pasta dishes, but when eaten out of a white bowl while throwing oneself a pity-party, it is perfection.
I must admit to being very lazy when it comes to cooking for my under-the-weather self. But I did manage to find a pocket of motivation to cook steel cut oats. I even googled the best ways to prepare them as their longer cooking time often persuades me not to make them. Lazy. I said it. The verdict is that soaking them over night and then spending the time washing the excess starch off them the following morning is time well spent. Here are the pics for proof:
Yours in good health, good eating, good listening and better weather (pretty please?).
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