This just in

Jessie and Gab are currently covering a show for Tea Party at Church, right down the street from my house. I, on the other hand, am staunchly refusing to come out of my cave, and they are okay with this. In fact, they're keeping me in the loop and making sure I don't miss out on anything. Such as this amazing only-in-Boston graffiti exchange:

Why I love my friends, Reason #23474.

In case of emergency, break glass and read Kahlil Gibran

I'm fairly sure that every month, I write that things have been crazy, but this October was truly a wild ride. Perceptions were shaken, life plans were changed, relationships were scrutinized, and Thao & the Get Down Stay Down released an album that was, as promised, a "festive" heartbreak album that sucker-punched my friends and I in the collective solar plexus when we weren't looking. Know better, learn faster, indeed.

At some point this summer I had some good conversations about "sacred texts": works of literature, film, music and art that form and inform each person's worldview. These can be as goofy as a showtune or Yes song or as profound as the Bhagavad Gita.

Among my sacred texts are the poems of Khalil Gibran, published in The Prophet in 1923. While these poems have comforted many people since then, Boston has a special claim on Gibran: born in what is now modern-day Lebanon, the poet immigrated to Boston's South End as a child in 1895 and spent many of his formative years here.

His cousin and biographer, also named Khalil Gibran, created many statues around Boston, including a prominent one in Copley Square where I stop sometimes. The square, a sweet little patch of grass bordered on all sides by busy streets and surrounded by the looming majesty of the John Hancock Tower, Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library, is a nice place to stop and find refuge; it's a metaphor for the way I feel when I stop to read Gibran's poems. Like I've found a place of silence in the midst of troubles grown disproportionately large and emotions rushing past and creeping confusion. (Luckily all the texts are online here, for easy access in case of emergency.)

Lovely photo of Copley by Ed Karjala via Creative Commons.

Today I shared Gibran's meditation on love with a friend who was in pain:

...But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears...

Meanwhile, I found myself taking comfort in his meditation on joy and pain:


Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, "Joy is greater thar sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

I think if I were to compile a book of all my sacred texts, it would be very thick, perhaps even thousands of pages, with lyrics and photos and golden fall leaves stuck between the pages ... I'd love to hear from other people about what texts they consider sacred, beyond the obvious ones.

I have this paradox to blame for 99 percent of my problems

...but bein' hungry ain't one.

[via Graph Jams, FYVD]

My first Herald byline: "Passover play not to pass up"

It's funny how life works -- though one of my best friends, Jenna Scherer, has been the Boston Herald theatre critic for as long as I've known her (about 2 years), it never occurred to me to pitch a story to our fair city's second largest newspaper until this month. But a paragraph in the Craigie on Main newsletter (which I highly recommend, it's hilarious and informative), about an upcoming production at the Central Square Theater about food and nourishment, caught my eye. And while I normally send play-related news directly to Jenna, I felt that in this case, the story was calling to me. Jenna generously agreed to put me in touch with her longtime editor, and this story was born.

I began by having a great conversation with the play's star and creator, Belle Linda Halpern, who shares my love for the Food Project and for Michael Pollan. I then went on to speak with two local food luminaries who made cameos in the production this weekend, and who have played important roles in my development as a food writer. The first was David Waters, the CEO of Community Servings, who was one of the very first people I interviewed as a budding journalist back in the day, when I was interning for the Boston Business Journal. The second was Tony Maws, the chef at Craigie -- a place that has been very good to me as a customer, and very good to the Boston local food community at large.

I then had the privilege of being edited by the consummate professionals at the Herald. To put this pleasure in perspective: In the past month, I've spent as much time futzing with Moveable Type slideshows for Bostonist, creating Googlemaps for an interactive city guide, trading Twitter and Facebook messages with sources, and wrangling photos via iPhone and Nikon digital and Flikr Creative Commons and iStockphoto, etc. as I have simply writing my stories down. Because I am busy and work in a competitive industry, I'm dashing off articles and submitting them as fast as I can, and I'm lucky if the person uploading it to the site (me or someone else) catches my spelling errors, much less gives me feedback on how I can make the whole thing more readable and interesting. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to bang out a clever story with a punchy lede, to sit across the table from someone and talk about memories and missions that are meaningful to them, to see my byline on a piece of flattened wood pulp that exists somewhere outside the Internet.

Journalists love to talk about the fact that print journalism as we know it is dying, but I don't think they talk enough about the ways in which print makes life worth living -- especially for us journalists. This experience was one of them. It slowed me down, it made me a better and more careful writer, and it was fun.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm still in favor of moving away from killing trees for the sake of making art. I love being able to share my work and ideas with people outside my geographic vicinity. I love blogging and uploading and learning new things, and I always will. And I love being the first person to post on a new restaurant or piece of news. But there's still something about actually clipping a clip that takes me back to the first time I saw my first byline in the Buffalo News, ran my eyes over those three slightly smeared serif words -- three tiny words amidst a cacophony of crime reports, blurry pictures, tawdry advertisements for laundry detergent -- and thought, "Yes. This feels right. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

So thanks, Herald, for that.

My girls (and my boys)

"I don't mean to seem like I care about material things, like a social status ... I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls..."

It has been well-documented that this Animal Collective lyric makes no sense.

"A social status" is not a material thing, and four walls of adobe anything (slats? slabs? Adobe CS4?) still leaves you without a roof, but this does not change the fact that everyone -- including this grammar nerd right here -- loves the song "My Girls." In fact, Idolator's Christopher R. Weingarten (among others) has already broken this phenomenon down here, so I don't have to.

We all agree that what Panda Bear seems to be saying is this: all you really need in life is your crew. And when I reflect on this summer, I feel so grateful for the times I was able to spend connecting with "my strong women," as I call them. Thanks to them, I've been having the time of my life, and redefining what it means to really be a strong woman. I'm fortunate to be surrounded by several working models, from my mother to my mentors to my fellow Party Cats. Together, they have formed a loving network of ladies that has helped me to grow beyond belief and to laugh -- like, throw-my-head-back, spill-my-beer, give-me-a-second-I-have-to-breathe belly laugh -- every single day. To my girls -- you know who you are -- thank you.

Of course, there's also the love I have for my boys, who have helped me to maintain my strong womanhood throughout the summer by providing generous helpings of "mencouragement" along the way. To my brother, who's often mistaken for my twin these days and who introduced me to the song "My Girls"; to my dad, who raised me to be tough, "level-headed" and fun-loving from the beginning; and to my boys, Alexis B., Mike S. Mike Y., Matt L., Roger M., Tyler B., and Josh H., who have never let me forget what I'm worth -- thank you. This song goes out to you.

Making art (and tofu) on TeaPartyBoston.com

The fall editorial lineup for Tea Party Tastes, the newly-launched food feature on my friends' lovely, photo-rich Boston lifestyle blog, is looking fun and exciting. Maybe it's because it involves news of Boston's famed Chocolate Bar, which allowed us to drop some serious Wonka references. Maybe because I know we have a lot of fun food profiles in queue, with hilarious interviews with some of Boston's most talented artists. Maybe because many of these interviews will include the question, "If you were a particular kind of cheese, what would you be?"

Jed Hackney, the Chocolate Bar's new pastry chef, said that if he were a cheese, he would be “Constant Bliss” from Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. A phrase that also describes his sugary cider donuts.

It's also because, since my relationship to this site is personal and non-transactional, I feel comfortable writing about people in the food world whom I would consider friends -- people who may have begun as sources, but who have since invited me into their homes, into their kitchens, onto their farms -- and now they are something else. They are people I'm more likely to call at midnight for a drink than during the day for a quote. They're people with whom I'd prefer to collaborate rather than simply chat. (Collaborate is one of my favorite words -- along with frolic, it's probably my #1 active verb.)

What this means is that instead of working on service pieces, guides, features, etc. in a strictly technical sense, my hope is that this fall, me and my people are going to make some art together. We are going to riff. We are going to ad lib. We are going to graffiti our words across the Internet and hope that someone wanders along and likes what they see. We will do it because we are compelled to point out the genius of the people who are creating things in this city in the same way that bees are compelled to make honey, that birds are compelled to sing, that Jessica Simpson is compelled to soldier on doing whatever it is that she does despite all those "mom jeans" comments. We do it because we must create -- not because we must create something we can "monetize."

---

I was talking about writing recently with my friend Patrick, who appears in this Tea Party feature about tofu-making. Patrick's a talented photographer who was until recently living in Japan, and who is now making his way through Mumbai, India. He broke his ankle in Japan and came here to Boston to recover for six weeks at his parents' place, and in those six weeks we came to be friends.

We may have failed to make tofu, but Patrick succeeded in capturing perfectly my quixotic (and messy) approach to cooking. Since I normally photograph horribly, this is a doubly amazing feat.

Patrick told me that he feels compelled to travel so that he can continue to capture beautiful images, and has arranged his entire life around indulging this sense of wanderlust, constantly leaving everything he knows behind in favor of something entirely unlike anything he's ever known. It drives his life. Getting paid for it is always secondary to simply doing it. (Although I did hire him for a job, and did pay him -- I'll post the results when that project drops later this fall.)

Patrick is a great natural storyteller. If I ask Patrick for the background story behind this or that shot, he'll tell me with glee. On the night I first met him, he told us about hitchhiking across Hokkaido in the company of a scissor salesman, about how it felt to see this stranger open his truck and see a thousand gleaming blades in the back of the vehicle that was carrying him across the country. On the night that I last saw him, he told an hour-long story about living on a farm with a crazy Belgian and a fat kid from Hong Kong named Sony, dodging unmarked yakuza cars and learning that his landlord (probably) belonged to a cult. Other images like this one or this one came with equally entertaining stories that stood as examples of his fearlessness -- as did his willingness to make tofu in my tiny kitchen based on a recipe he scribbled down in a Moleskine several months ago.


And so before he left for Mumbai (where he was going to meet up with Shu, another incredibly talented photog friend of ours), I told Patrick that he had to write about his adventures, that the world would be a better place for it.

He shook his head. He said no. I was surprised.

I pressed him. Why not? Finally, he said, in a very small voice, "But ... but what if I write something and people don't like it?"

I laughed. "What if you took pictures and people didn't like it?" I asked. "Would that stop you?"

He shook his head again. No.

"Just think of it like that," I said. "Think of it like breathing. Think of it as something you have to do, or die. It doesn't matter if people don't like it." And as I said it, I realized that I truly believed this.

The bottom line is this: for me and for most of my friends, there will always be some projects we do for the money, and some we do for the love, and it is important to be doing both. Right now I am more than paying my bills with the money I make from doing what I love -- I am, as they say, living the dream. But often, the money doesn't matter to me (at least as much as some people tell me it should). I will always write. I will often choose to write with and about my friends, because that is its own reward. I will always crave collaborators, whether they are fellow crackpot cooks, aspiring artists, or intuitive editors -- people who can help me shape my ideas and bring them to fruition. And it doesn't matter to me whether or not people like the results. (But of course I hope they do!)

Wheeler's piece in Tasting Table!

This actually came out last week -- sigh -- I am resigning myself to being woefully behind. But can you blame me? It is so gorgeous outside these days -- when given a choice between updating my blog and going for a run along the river at sunset with the dog, it's a fairly easy decision to make.

Anyhow, here's the link to my piece on Wheeler del Torro, who's a bit of a local legend here in Boston.

I first heard about him through my friend Emilie Hardman of the Conscious Kitchen, whose photography accompanies my piece. Back in the day, Wheeler -- who's now a bit of a celeb, with a cookbook and cameo appearances at hipster parties around the country -- just made small batches on the side and delivered them to people he liked. To hear Emilie tell it, it was like meeting with a member of the mafia -- he'd call from a phone booth down the street or something, show up in his van, and make a drop. But instead of unmarked bills or body bags, she'd get delicious vegan ice cream, which she'd then pair with her tasty vegan desserts and serve to her customers.

Finally this guy got a brick and mortar store, and immediately started throwing highly illegal parties in the evenings which eventually got broken up by the police. (The Weekly Dig's Cara Bayles once wrote up a hilarious rundown of one of these busts for the Dig Blog.)

Anyhow, my friend Morgan was reminiscing about these parties (I never attended one, but she said they were great, obvs -- as if something that combines civil disobedience AND vegan ice cream could be anything but) and she inspired me to pitch a piece about Wheeler to TastingTable. Et voila!

Of course, it never would have happened if Wheeler didn't have the ability to sell ice cream nationwide, which is half the story. Turns out he'll ship his vegan ice cream in dry ice to anywhere in the continental U.S. for a price, and even make batches of custom flavors for you if you're willing to buy the whole run (a few pints). Hence, the peanut butter peppermint line in this story.

The crew and I had the privilege of trying his pepper curry and chocolate nut ice creams at the Ice Cream Showdown in Union Square a while back. (This was yet another one of Christine's amazing events, which she put together with the help of Grand, one of our favorite stores in all of Boston.)

Wheeler could not be coaxed to smile for the camera -- it was about a bajillion degrees out, and he had been scooping gloopy ice cream for free for two hours already -- but you have to love that he was rocking a cape:

Berkshires, ho!

I've lived in Boston for six years, and until recently, had never been to the Berkshires, just three hours away.

I made my first venture out there a few weeks ago in the company of Christine Liu, Hugo Liu (no relation), Jenna Scherer, Keyse Angelo, Carolyn McKibbin and a few other friends, old and new. Christine used her mysterious Citysearch superpowers to net us:

- a bus ride to the Berkshires via Local Motion



- a breakfast of muffins from the Channel Cafe, plus much-needed ABP coffee


- a tour of beautiful Moon in the Pond Farm (where we met a pretty adorable and VERY BIG black pig)



- a full picnic lunch at farm-to-table resto Route 7 Grill



- a tour and ice cream tasting at SoCo Creamery for dessert (we couldn't resist the Cookie Monster ice cream, made with real smushed-up fresh-baked cookies)

- a tour of Berkshire Mountain Distillers, which supplies places like NYC's Death & Company with quality homegrown spirits. (They let us play with their ingredients. It was fun.)



All this, for TEN BUCKS.


I will repeat: TEN BUCKS.

I bow to Christine's skillz.

Christine, aka Foodie Moses, leading her people to the distillery.

Now I'm headed out there once again to Lee to visit my girl Allison (a.k.a. LA food blogger Alli411) at her cabin. Am looking forward to seeing my ladyfriend -- and enjoying three hours of solo time on the way up, catching up on magazines (BoMag's new Best of Boston list just came out) and Anaïs Nin (I'm loving her journals so much), doing some journaling of my own, and looking out the window at the lush mountain scenery. And very likely eating more delicious farm-fresh food.

So many of my weekends have been taken up almost entirely by freelancing that it's almost mind-boggling to think of how little of my next 48 hours will be given over to working or even participating in planned activities. My prospective to-do list for the weekend looks something like this:

1) Put on flip-flops.
2) Pick blueberries.
3) Open the bottle of Rioja I'm bringing.
4) ?

I'm excited.

With thanks to Jenna Scherer and Darcy Hoffman for their images.

Twitter migration

A few months ago, I wrote about what it was like to maintain a Twitter feed for "work" purposes. To me, this meant focusing on generating useful information and commentary around one subject (in my case, food) and using the service to reach out to other folks in the field.

I like writing about food and talking to food people, so maintaining @go2foodnews ended up being one of the most interesting parts of my job at go2. It was also a useful way of contacting sources and, at least in a small way, a useful way of directing traffic toward our site.

However, it's now time for me to step out from behind the go2 Spork of Truth and strike out on my own.

There are a dozen other useful ways for businesses to use Twitter, and I'm sure at some point I'll share some thoughts on that in this space. However, I'm probably going to use my new feed, @ryanroseweaver, as an individual, just for fun -- which is of course the most maligned and damn-near-useless purpose of Twitter. So it goes. I promise not to tweet about my breakfast too much, though. Or use it to send gushy fangirltweets to @sarah_haskins and @st_vincent every day, even though it is tempting.

Citysearch: Eating the World

Now that I'm a free agent, I'm slated to do several more reviews for Citysearch, which, in addition to launching some rad new lookbooks, is also plumping up its editorial offerings on the main site. "Eating the World: A Gastro Globe Trot" is my first "roundup" for Citysearch in this new incarnation, officially speaking, but one of many that I've done for Ms. Christine Liu over the years, both recreationally and professionally (during our Weekly Dig days).

Don't ask me why, but Christine and I (and our assorted friends) just really like making lists of things, whether it's "most obnoxiously sexist journalism cliches" or "weirdest potential party themes." For example, Easter weekend this year was a doozy, as we helped to host a rabbit-themed party on Saturday -- to which our friend Matt showed up in a bunny suit at 1am -- and an egg-themed party on Sunday, which involved some truly creepy-looking tea eggs and some pretty inventive "flip"-style cocktails, courtesy of Pomodoro bartender Stephen Shellenberger.

Bottom line: we're really, really into themes. So when Christine mentioned she was looking for a roundup of "global cuisines" around Boston, I was over it like white on Turkish/Persian/Albanian/Vietnamese/Malaysian/South Indian/Brazilian/Tunisian/Ethiopian rice. You can view the results here.

(Note: the intro is all Christine, including her "smile high club" line. We're quite different, style-wise, but we make a good team. The photo of Tamarind Bay above is all her, too, from her own review of TB on Citysearch.)