Feeding My Passion

As a very good friend of mine just said about my lack of progress on my food-related photo essay since we were in Santa Cruz much earlier this month, “Your project is kind of stale.” I don’t think she was trying to be punny, but she’s got a very playful sense of humor, so I don’t know.

That was yesterday, today is a brand new day! I’ve got access and an appointment for the “fast food” section of my photo essay on Thursday evening, kind of a naturally perfect situation. It’s a family that I met soon after I moved here (Merced, Calif.) that is very physically active (the father coaches soccer, the mother is a yoga instructor, their sons all participate in one sport or another), and like many families, they are busy, so they often grab some fast food on Thursday evening, which is their busiest day of the week, after they all get done with their soccer practice/yoga class/whatever. And there I will be, bearing witness to their meal, from discussion about where to go, to going, pickup, and partaking.

Huge load off of my mind.

And I have access, at least verbally, to the other two sections of the essay: big organic and foraged. Just waiting for the other two shoes to drop from this 4-legged creature. Stay tuned!

I made this photo from the kitchen in the Branding Iron, a restaurant that’s been in Merced for more than 52 years. When I was a kid growing up in Merced, it was the best place in town (probably still is) and when my grandfather gave me a choice of any place in town when I turned 9, I chose The Branding Iron.

Wow, that sounds really familiar!

So that was day 1 of my first 30-day series. This is day 30 of my second 30-day series. Besides having a much better camera this time (thanks to my brother-in-law) than than the one I started with, I’m also feeling much better about the photos I’m making under any circumstance, even in this dark environment. And it’s not just the higher ISO. Moments are better, expressions are better, rapport is better. I had A LOT of catching up to do with my classmates, but now I feel confident I only have a lot of catching up to do with my classmates.

I’m all about the food in one form or another, even if I don’t eat it. We were staying at my youngest sister’s place at Soil Born Farm’s Hurley location, where she lives with her boyfriend, Ryan (they’ve been together more than 10 years). We didn’t have the pleasure of their company this time since they were in New York visiting friends.

However, some of the other farm animals kept us from getting too lonely or bored. The chickens are cooped up, but one of them can fly out of the coop, and seems to enjoy getting out and walking around. I started stalking it, cornered it, and then picked it up and put it back in the pen with the rest of them. Then the same bird expressed her displeasure with me by flying at me! The nerve!

They just got a couple of piglets, very cute. Those are Ryan’s mother, brother, and father, great folks.

My mother was quite determined to get the last of the chocolate transferred into the fondue pot. The fondue was good.

My family has a fever, and the only prescription is more ice cream. Fortunately Gunther’s in Sacramento scratches our near-constant itch.

My dad had mocha almond fudge, my mom had baseball nut (vanilla ice cream with raspberry swirl and peanuts) and Swiss orange chip. I had baseball nut and peanut butter cup, on a sugar cone. My sisters weren’t there, but they sure wished they were.

This may look familiar. Yes, I made pictures of my friend’s sculptures for an earlier daily assignment.

Kamila liked my detail of the mermaid sculpture and wanted prints for her birthday, but she also wanted to see the entire sculpture. Because I wanted the light to match for all of the pictures, when I made the overall picture, I re-made the detail, plus a couple of others I hadn’t seen before. She is happy with the results, and so am I.

I used to choose photo subjects based on how interesting they were, not on how interested I was in them: The young playwright with a new play in production; Columbia’s last street sweeper; the large, amiable, and expressive veterinary student. My inability to work myself up to make better pictures or to finish these stories for class felt, and in some ways still feels, like a curse. Whether or not I become a professional photojournalist, I consider my failure to do justice to these stories to be just that, a failure. Mostly I think my intrusion was a waste of my subjects’ time, and to them (in a very empty gesture at this point) I apologize.

I’d like to say I’d do better with those particular subjects now, that I could justify their trust in me, their willingness to let me into the parts of their lives they did allow me to document. But that isn’t necessarily so. What I can do now that I couldn’t do before is be very honest with myself and with my subjects, and in some cases I’d find other subjects that were a better match. The closest analogy I can think of is being faced with the possibility to have a romantic relationship with someone who you know deep down will not work out, no matter that they’re a good person, intelligent, visually attractive, and interesting.  No need to give it shot, right? Better to wait for a better match. But class assignments have deadlines, and so I did what I thought I needed to do. It wasn’t the fault of the assignment, the fault was mine, and the remedy was to wake up, which was, and still is everyday, my responsibility alone.

Before (before what? before who? Yes, it was a who, but that’s another story), my heart wasn’t yet awake, nothing set me on fire, and while I didn’t really know this, the way I expressed it was by getting into relationships (photographic and romantic) that I shouldn’t have. And so the failure was mine, but I failed because I didn’t know myself first.

With all this talk of failure and fault, it may seem like I’m being rather hard on myself. To adapt and bastardize Anne Lamott’s metaphor, I am not using the club of truth to bludgeon myself, but to point toward the warm sun breaking through the clouds. I do regret the inconvenience I caused, no matter how slight, and it does sadden me that those subjects, having given access without anything to show for it, may deny the right photographer access in the future. Mostly I rejoice that I can love deeply now – myself, others, humanity, life – and that love makes me honest with myself and others in ways I could never have imagined. I’m profoundly grateful.

While I don’t know quite what possessed Shakespeare to put such wise words into the mouth of a duplicitous windbag like Polonious, I think his advice to his son, at least as I interpret it, is some of the most compassionate I can imagine:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

One of my favorite things to make from my favorite cuisine in the world, Vietnamese goi cuon. The filling ingredients are pretty flexible, though I’m partial to these: red leaf lettuce, hothouse cucumbers, green onions, rice vermicelli, cilantro, bean sprouts, poached shrimp (cut in half and place in the wrapper skin-side out so the pink shows through like it does here), and mint. We added carrots for a little color, and you can put in other herbs as well, red parilla, thai basil, rau ram, watercress, poached pork, vietnamese chicken or pork sausage (a delicious and subtle forcemeat).

They’re so easy and inexpensive to make, that you can play around with them, people can make their own (I’ve taught classes and friends how to make them several times now.).

We served them with hoisin peanut dipping sauce and Thai tom kha gai (chicken coconut milk soup). Actually, “tom” means boiled, “kha” is galangal, and “gai” is chicken. Since the important thing is the galangal, you can actually vary the protein. The recipe I’m using now is from the inestimable David Thompson’s Thai Food, and he gives a couple two major variations of “dtom khaa” (his Anglicisation), the other with trout which I’d like to try sometime. Here are his head notes for the dtom khaa gai we made:

Although this soup’s name means ‘boiled glalngal’, it has become associated in most people’s minds with chicken. However, many othe ringredients can be used in a dtom kha: fish, shellfish, mushrooms of all kinds, quail and pork are some possibilities.

He also has five variations of tom yum (dtom yam in Thompson, hot and sour soup, made most often with shrimp in the US).

There is a pair of bald eagles nesting at Yosemite Lake, a man-made reservoir and recreational area about 3 miles away. Occasionally they tour the neighborhood, and I ran outside with my camera when I saw one fly by.  It was perched on top of an electrical pole eating a rodent. The longest lens I have is an 85mm, which converts to a 127.5mm on a Nikon D200. So yes, this frame is very, very cropped.

The sky and field behind the after a strong Spring rain.

Columbia, Calif., is a state park, an old gold rush town in the foothills that’s either been very well preserved or very well re-created (or imagined).

I used to go there as a kid both with my family and with classes on field trips. I remember really only two things, the candy shop, and from the candy shop I most remember the gigantic jawbreakers they sold (don’t know whether they made them there), and I remember the blacksmith shop where I once bought a ring made from a horseshoe nail. Which I promptly lost, on a flight I think. Bummed me out for days if I remember correctly. Anyway, the candy shop still sells gigantic jaw breakers (and I saw more than a few kids with them) and I bought a new ring made from a horseshoe nail. Still have it.

The last few pictures are of a very rare stone corral that’s one of two stone corrals on the road to Sonora.