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National Vichyssoise Day 2023
Since virtually anything can happen these days, it’s National Vichyssoise Day. Honestly, I’ve heard of it but I’ve never had it, so I found a French chef to give us the how-to.
🍂Mid–Autumn Weekend🍂
Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt. ~William Allingham
Okay, so it’s been a grueling hard damn week. I can still count on the odd moment when I go to grab some coffee creamer out of the fridge and I see God’s artistry right out back.
I’m so blessed to have a miniature forest out back of my house with a spectacular spectrum of 🍂Fall colors🍂. It’s such an uplifting treat.
We’re deliberately located in the middle of nowhere. We like being closer to nature and farther from people. We’re snobs like that. Sorry, we just like peace and quiet.
For the time being, that’s holding for us. Sadly, a lot of farmland around here is being sold off to developers for blocks of townhouses and McMansions. We may need to move farther afield in a few years.
For now, we have room. We have peace. We have quiet. Who could ask for anything more?
Eat This Fast, There’s A Leek
How to Make Potato Leek Soup (Vichyssoise) | Chef Jean-Pierre
Without having ever tasted it, this recipe video gives me a pretty good idea of how phenomenal these flavors are together. It sounds a little funny and kind of frou-frou, but this seems really delicious.
I like French food, so I’m glad that today is associated with a savory soup that can be eaten hot in the current season or cold in less desirable times of the year.
Another great thing about this time of year is that you can use your time in the kitchen to provide warmth to the house in terms of actual temperature, ambience and function.
Many is the time throughout the warmer parts of 💐Spring🌷 and basically all of 🌞Summer🔥 when I am generally forbidden to cook food. Hence my preference for any day under 55°F.
Nothing New Under The 🌞 Sun
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. ~Salvador Dali
I’ve mentioned this before, but there is literally nothing new in storytelling except the individual storyteller’s personal angle.
The core elements of story go back to the dawn of human speech. Some people tell a story better than others.
When you experience a good story, it’s not hard to dissect it and figure out what made it better than another rendition of that story.
Since good storytelling is quantifiable in this way, it tells us that telling enjoyable stories follows established patterns or tropes.
We take bits and pieces, scramble them and come up with new enjoyable stories. They’re new, enjoyable and ultimately an imitation of something that’s already out there.
This might be deliberate. You might start with an existing story and add a twist to come up with a basically new story.
For instance, if we start with one of my favorites, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and tweak the particulars, we wind up with completely new stories that conspicuously are not.
- So, A Christmas Carol but in Depression Era America, you get An American Christmas Carol.
- You could take A Christmas Carol but the principal character is a mean TV executive in New York City in the 80s, you get Scrooged.
The core story is that some guy went through some events that led him to become jaded and unpleasant. A visitation of ghosts leads them back through a redemption arc to become the nice guy they used to be.
If you believe Joseph Campbell, the lion’s share of heroic tales are essentially reformulations of the same story. That might be a gross oversimplification, but it still illustrates the overall point I’m making here.
There’s a show (I thought it was The Brady Bunch but it must have been another show) in which the kid submits a script to their favorite TV show. The show airs the episode as written by the kid. His dad takes him to the studio to confront the showrunners. The guy at the TV studio opens up a drawer full of duplicate scripts that were created independently, without knowledge of the other screenwriters. This happens all the time!
There are some basic storylines that people come up with that are a collection of tropes. They’ve seen these in movies or TV. They had these stories read to them in children’s storybooks. They’ve read them in the books they had to read for book reports in school or in their own reading for pleasure. Stories over a campfire, anecdotes overheard at parties or in public spaces, all these things add up to a grab bag of tropes.
Since these are common stories in our culture, somebody from Utah, Alabama, Maine, Alberta, New Queensland and East Anglia can all write virtually identical stories without ever having met or collaborated in any way.
That’s okay. These pieces fall together in common constructs because good storytelling is quantifiable.
That’s it for today. Go enjoy the 🍂Fall colors🍂 and have something with Pumpkin 🎃 Spice in it.