Everything Before Us

Everything Before Us by Wong Fu Productions is coming out tomorrow and even through my body’s current trials and tribulations I am SO excited!

You can pre-order it, but since it comes out tomorrow I’m personally just going to wait. It’s Vimeo, not a theater, so it’s not as if the theater near me is going to fill up or sell out. Watch the trailer below if you haven’t already seen it!

In case you still don’t really get it, or just like it in writing, the description from the video reads:

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High-Strung

The trials of the high-strung person are so vividly captured in another one of Lev Yilmaz’s super-relatable Tales of Mere Existence.

It’s worse if you were raised to keep it quiet. Then when you can’t, and because you’ve been taught to keep it quiet you also have no idea how to express it all in a way that makes sense to anyone, your friends and family have no idea why you’re suddenly freaking out and all fronts of being a calm, cool, collected person go out the door.

Coping mechanisms?

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Honeycomb Candy with dark chocolate and other nonsense

That’s what I did today with Mr. Chokkattu.

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Recipe from the SORTED boys, whom I met the other week when they visited NYC for the Today Show, cheerily enough. I think I love them more now that I’ve met them. They’re a little shorter than I thought they would be, but at 5’1″ that’s not really a thing I can get hung up on, haha. This one’s my favorite picture. Credits to Mr. Chokkattu, linked above.

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Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce

I’m making Julian try this. His family can thank me later.

rachel's avatarrachel eats

Even with the inevitable post holiday – back to school feelings it is nice to be easing back into the ebb and flow of our daily life, especially where food is concerned. This is one of our favouries, simple, judicious and delicious.

Marcella Hazan’s Tomato sauce with butter and onion

This sauce never ceases to surprise and delight me, a bit of soft red alchemy.  Just three ingredients, a large tin of plum tomatoes – San Marzano if you can find them – a thick slice of butter and a yellow onion, peeled and cut into two. You simmer this trio together – slowly and steadily for about 45 minutes, a stir here, blip blip, a squash there – and something almost magical happens, the three ingredients come together into thick, soft red, full flavoured, velvety sauce, luxurious and simple at the same time.

The flavour is rather surprising…

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Happy Birthday Olivia Giacobetti!

Ms. Giacobetti is 49 years old today. She is my newest woman crush that I should have high-lighted a long, long time ago.

Olivia Giacobetti is an amazing French perfumer who has created fragrances such as Frederic Malle’s En Passant (my favorite Frederic Malle), Diptyque’s Philosykos and Ofresia, a whole host of L’Artisan fragrances including the infamously difficult to get Tea for Two (my favorite L’Artisan!), and fragrances for Hermès, Guerlain, and Penhaligon’s. I love her for her delicate simplicity and the subtle way she crafts her fragrances. I have loved everything she has touched that I have smelled so far, and can’t wait to smell more.

The L’Artisan website claim that she was inspired by the depictions of perfumery in the film le Sauvage which means I need to seek this film out with English subtitles in a hurry (or learn French. I feel I have more of an incentive to learn it than even mandarin.) She trained from the age of 17 at Robertet, a huge French distillery known for developing new ways of obtaining natural raw material from its distillation sources before opening her own firm Iskia, which I unfortunately couldn’t find any information about. And she does all this while staying oh so effervescently lovely.

She is currently working as creative director at one of the oldest perfume houses, Parfum Lubin.

Ancient aromas of Italy’s Santa Maria Novella

Little has changed in the pharmacy over the years. Compare this photograph to the next, taken several decades ago.

When I went on the American Music Abroad tour in Europe, we visited France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland and the beautiful cities I visited still haunt my stagnant legs and beg me to come back. I wouldn’t consider myself a Europhile, as I’m a tad too patriotic for that, but I do love the land and the history and the majesty within the old world and the people who walk on it, and I would like to join those people again one day soon.

Now unfortunately, my group did not get to visit Italy which with its sumptuous intellectual and creative history has had a little pining space inside of me since I started listening and playing Vivaldi and Paganini transposed for the piano. But now with another one of my interests illuminated in the destination (as if music, art, and chocolate weren’t enough), the waiting is going to be maddening.

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