It’s officially less than one week until a global earthquake causes the entire world to shatter into pieces. I thought we had another year and a half, but subway signs—and sign holders have informed me that the true end of the world is not in December of 2012, but is creeping up on us quickly. According to subway posters and people raising awareness outside of City Hall earlier this week, the end of the world is really May 21, 2011! So now it’s time to grab your parachute and your bungee chords and try something you’ve never done before! Or, in my case, eat all types of food that I’d like to smother my taste buds with before this global earthquake officially hits. Because while some people like to live like they will be dying—I’d much rather eat like I am dying.
So let’s say this hypothetical earthquake does hit. What’s on the final week’s menu? In any ordinary situation where life didn’t have an expiration date shorter than the one printed on my recently purchased gallon of skim milk, I would be exchanging out my sweets and diving into a vegetables, taking out the juices and drowning myself in water – but this week—this hypothetical last week of life – no way.
A good friend of mine from London moved back to Paris a few years ago and met her now-husband on her first weekend back in the City of Lights. He is now a Senator, and this lovely couple invited us to join a private tour and dinner at the Sénat last night.
I’m a looky-loo. I real estate dream shop online, a lot!!!! Late one night when my husband was safely sleeping, I forwarded a photo of a house on a lake I had found and the subject said, “Lets buy this instead of doing an addition to our house. It’s MUCH cheaper.”
A few weeks ago a friend of a friend invited me to a pig roast. Having never attended one, I looked forward to what seemed like the perfect California outing: meeting new people and trying new food, all at a BBQ in February. Eating a pig that had been selected from a local, organic farm also sounded rather virtuous as far as meat-eating goes, and maybe in my heart of hearts I was thinking of the party as a kind of Omnivore’s Dilemma, Live. Besides, I like to say that I’ll try anything once, especially when it comes to food and I think that I might get an article out of it. I even started to string together a few premature sentences about The Pig Roast on the way over, dreamily trying out lines like “fork-tender localness”. (Michael Pollan I obviously ain’t.) Mental notebook at the ready, I pulled up to a trendy house in Los Feliz and quickly found myself among a crowd of strangers, each of us staring down at a charred animal the size of an eight-year old. The pig, laid out on its grill of cross hatched re-bar, turned a party of stoned hipsters into Lord of the Flies characters with edgier haircuts, everyone vaguely competitive and wondering what to do now.
"You've never had good Champagne." That was response I gave to someone who told me they didn't like Champagne. Because there's a big difference between low end sparkling wine and decent sparkling wine and Champagne. Sure enough, once he had a glass of lovely Nicholas Feuillatte bubbly he changed his mind.