Romancing the Blog has a column today by Julie Cohen on romance novel writers as sensualists. Romance novel writers, she says, seem to really, really appreciate food, booze, good-looking men and music more than the general population. But much of the article focuses on the important role music plays in her creative process.
I’m a romance novel reader, not a writer, and I’m not sure I’d describe myself as a sensualist but ooooh I love me some food. My officemates (the ones I can stand to talk to) and I will literally recap our weekends centered around what we ate. I will describe in excruciating detail the lamb shanks I braised in red wine and broth, and they’ll tell me about the pad thai they made completely from scratch, and all of us end up feeling desperately hungry about 2, 3 hours before lunch rolls around.
(Anyone want the lamb shank recipe? It’s time consuming (takes about 3 hours from start to finish) so it’s not practical to make on a weeknight if you have an office job, but if you enjoy cooking from scratch, it’s well worth the time and effort.)
I’m allergic to alcohol, however, so no booze for me. Oh well. It’s not as if I have many inhibitions while sober, anyway, ha!
Oh, and I love me some music. I will drive hundreds of miles to see a band I love (like Radiohead) if they’re not playing in my city. Will? Shit, I’ve done it. Several times in the recent past. If I had the time and money, I’d love to follow certain bands around on their summer tours. I also like to read to music. The background sound provides me with a sort of focus, and certain albums become completely entwined with certain books. I was listening to Franz Ferdinand at the same time I was reading Pat Barker’s WWI trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye In The Door and The Ghost Road), which I thought was a funny coincidence (you know, Archduke Ferdinand gets iced by some pissed-off Serbians, and whoops, here goes WWI…). The books and the music were completely incongruent, but somehow they worked. I became obsessed with both at the same time, so the connection is particularly strong—Franz Ferdinand quite literally became the soundtrack to the books. I can’t listen to Franz Ferdinand now without thinking of certain characters, and I know that re-reading certain scenes in the books will call to mind “Matinee” or “This Fire.” (Anyone else think the first few lines of “Matinee” are really flippin’ sexy? “Take your white finger / slide the nail under / the top and bottom buttons of / my blazer… Relax the fraying wool / slacken ties and I’m / not to look at you in the shoe / But the eyes / find the eyes.”)
Right now I’m listening to quite a lot of Grandaddy, The Futureheads and Stereolab, and when I split time like this between different bands the soundtrack effect isn’t nearly as strong (if it exists at all).
So yeah. What are y’all listening to? Making anything good for dinner? Wanna swap some recipes? The weather’s been crazy warm here (yesterday was a record-breaking 74 degrees, and it’s not cooling off today) so I’m thinking of heading off to a new sushi joint that just opened near my house. Mmmmm, raw fish….
Right now? Primal Scream’s SCREAMADELICA. Sad, I know, but I’m answering the call of my salad days [read: I need to pretend that I’m 21 again]. 😀
My sister works at Godiva’s Chocolate, and she is from the devil. Her house is something out of a scene from William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, when the duchess discovers the duke is watching the extraordinarily beautiful Annette polishing the pewter. It’s a sweet, sweet trap from which I have no escape or defense.
But cooking—alas, I love food, but I have three recipes: goop, crud, and spaghetti. Thank god my husband’s mother feeds us four times a week, as she is the Queen of Indian Cuisine. Tonight I am making goop (chicken, carrots, peas, potatoes and Masala Maza’s Madras Coconut Curry) over basmati.
Cooking from scratch? Eegh. For me, it always ends up tough, ugly or inedible. Someday, I will cook like my mommy-in-law. Until then, I have jarred stuff.
Music: should I admit that I was listening to Juice Newton today? I was having a nostalgic moment. :red:
Maili: Ooooh, Screamadelica. I haven’t listened to that in years. I’ll have to go dig it out.
And Meljean, re. cooking: for years and years I couldn’t cook worth a shit. Fried rice and spaghetti-sauce-in-a-jar were about as fancy as I got. But about 5 years ago it all clicked for me. My mom’s a great cook and believes in making EVERYTHING from scratch, so I think her genes lay dormant in me until I turned 22 and something in me just snapped and said “Bitch, you need to try making lasagna that’s better than that frozen TV dinner crap you’ve been shoving down your piehole.”
The one area in which I’ll consistently cheat, though, is with curries. Bring on the cans of paste and jars of sauces! I’ve seen what it takes to make really good curry paste from scratch, and I’m not nearly ready to take that task on.