If anyone out there in Cyberville has a clue as to how to get the smell of toasted cumin out of a plastic mini-prep, I’m all ears. It’s true that I’m the jerk who probably melted the plastic of said mini-prep by adding toasted cumin seed to it straight from the stove without cooling it first, but someone somewhere must know how to rectify this sorry state of affairs. I tried scrubbing, I tried soaking in soap and then in white vinegar. I even tried steel wool both to the chagrin of the skin on the knuckles of my right hand and also to no avail, and I’m ready to say Uncle.

I’ve been a little overly, well, scrubby about things lately. I mean the cumin smell in the plastic isn’t exaggerated at all, but it is sort of indicative of a kind of OCD-like desire I’ve been having to scour things clean and to contain stuff. The result of cleaning and organizing is great; certainly it makes life a lot easier, but building what is essentially a bomb shelter in your chemical room (yes, I did this a couple of weeks ago) may not signal the height of rational behavior.

In the Clark Kent portion of my life I’m a goldsmith. And being a goldsmith that actually forges and welds gold myself, I’m required to have a space with a hood to contain the fumes from various chemicals I use that either remove or add oxidation to metal. When I moved into the studio space that I live and work in (if you’re curious, you can see pictures of the space here), there was a back office area that conveniently already had a hood built in, which was great, but it also had a pile of crap in it (panes of glass, 15-20 carousels of slides, a slide projector, apple boxes, a slab of iron that weighed at least 500 pounds, a ladder, sand bags and rusting C- stands). Which would be fine if I hadn’t already spent the first several weeks of my occupancy ripping down walls, painting and cleaning up the previous tenant’s meshugas. So I “organized” these things into a few corners, brought in the bedraggled fridge from the kitchen (it makes a great beer locker) and added my chemical tables to the mix. And then there were the extra boxes that soon piled up (what if I need to move my Le Creuset 15.5 qt french oven someday?) , the odd items that I was holding in storage for my gay boyfriend (whose computer and SCALE--why I don’t know-- I am babysitting while he is teaching in China) and a panoply of shit that almost reached the ceiling. Looking through the glass windows into the room was giving me heartburn.

I have made it through my first week in Umbria, having suffered through a mild case of jet lag and uncomfortable travel shoes, to find myself relaxed, no longer pronouncing my Italian “gi” as two syllables and with a gullet continuously full of Prosecco and Chianti. This would probably mean that getting out the post about the last stateside soupapaloooza! from TWO weeks ago is kind of important so I can move on to the really fun Italy stuff like handsome famous butchers and hand forged copper pots; both of these things appealing to the true inner geek in me. But I would not be doing anyone any favors if I failed to mention the delicious American soup and the great party that we had back at the loft so many time zones ago.

I’ve never been a huge fan of corn. My mom, the Tiny Dancer, loves it and prepared it all the time when I was little, but I hated the way the silks would get caught between my teeth and there was something that, to me, seemed so undignified about the sloppiness of nibbling it off the cob. I was a fairly persnickety kid, shocking, I know. I also hated the way she considered corn a vegetable, which it kind of is not. “Kind of” because it’s a crop that is usually harvested to be dried and made into a grain, though the fresh corn we eat is technically vegetable because of how we eat it. It’s still sugary as all get out and I consider it more of a grain, and grains and sugars have a tendency to make me kind of grumpy, which no one needs to be around to see. I’ve generally steered away from the corn vendors at the street fairs and at places like Café Habana in New York despite their tremendous gravitational force.

spring pea and poblano with cumin and mint crème fraîche and fried serrano ham: there’s a whole lot of cumin goin’ on

white corn with poblano cream puree: LAX CDG BLQ (updating in umbria)

Why? Because soup is cheap, delicious and easy. Kind of like me.

a weekly attempt to eat well and to savor life. or to see how much food I can get on my clothes.