A briefing just popped up on my phone from the New York Times. It reads, “It will be colder in the Midwest today than in Antarctica.” Terms like polar vortex and instant frostbite are broadcasting from Zoraida’s radio upstairs. All of this frostiness has me reflecting on an ill-fated ice fishing trip I organized last February…
Fisherman’s Eggs Recipe & Andres Segovia
This pairing is inspired by the 1958 movie version of the Old Man and the Sea, starring Spencer Tracy (I never read the book. So what?); The old hazy camera tech makes it feel like a memory and the story deals with the willingness to risk annihilation in order to achieve something, be something, or…
Flamenco Food Vibes
Here is a documentary from Tao Ruspoli that features, Juan Del Gastor, my flamenco teacher in Sevilla. He comes from a long line of Flamenco Gypsys that includes gods like his uncle Diego Del Gastor. I got some hilarious cooking lessons similar to the one Ruspoli is receiving in the video. Del Gastor has a…
Paella Recipe & Camarón de la Isla
Nothing will ever match my first wood fired paella. When I was twelve and my family lived in Spain, we took a road trip out to the farmhouse of some family friends in the dry Spanish countryside near Pamplona. When we arrived there was a stout old man standing over a fire, roughly shoveling heaps of shrimp and vegetables the…
Buttermilk Pancake Recipe & Willie Nelson
Don Fonda was a king in the realm of pranks and wisecracks. He would spin yarns to us grandkids about his days working at the telephone company—like the time he switched around the gas gauge and the speedometer in a co-worker’s truck, or the time he drove a fussy trainee deep into the Adirondack Mountains, looking at him suggestively the whole way, and then finally…
Sole au Vin Blanc Recipe & Rhye
The interesting thing about time is that it can expand and contract within the same number of counted minutes. How well we enjoy our minutes depends on how well we slow them down. When you are in the early stages of love, six months can seem like a blissful two years and one night can…
Soldiers and Dippy Eggs Recipe & Syd Barret
Philadelphia has a well-established reputation for grit. It worked out well that I spent the ages of 20 to 21 there being flat broke. I had no phone but the payphone on the corner, no tv, no bed, just a roll mat and a couple of chairs found on the street. My roommate, appropriately nicknamed Crumb—and…
Arepas Recipe & Juaneco y su Combo
¡A COMEEEER! This menacing screech (meaning time to eat) followed by sequential ear-piercing claps was the rude awakening my father saddled my sisters and me with on weekend mornings throughout our youth; I can still feel the shivers going down my spine. In order to put an end to it, we’d carry ourselves downstairs like zombies to…
Salmon Tartare Recipe & Kamasi Washington
My strongest New Year’s Eve association was created back in 1999 at Times Square. My father and I bundled up for the sub-zero temperatures and, with much determination but little sense, headed down there around five. When you secure a spot you are corralled in by police barricades and you can’t leave if you want to…
THE MUSICAL INGREDIENT 