Serves 6-8

2 1/2 pounds lamb shoulder cut into 2" stew pieces
extra virgin olive oil
2 bunches of scallions, chopped, white and light green parts only
1 bunch of fresh dill, chopped
1 head of romaine, washed and chopped into 1" pieces
2 eggs
Juice of 2 lemons (about 1/4 cup)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat a generous drizzle of olive oil in a heavy bottomed pot over medium-high heat. Sprinkle the lamb generously with salt and pepper and sear the chunks of lamb in batches. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the scallions and half of the dill. Add the lamb back to the pot and enough water to barely cover the lamb. Cover with a lid and simmer until the lamb is very tender, about 1 1/2 hours. Add the romaine to the lamb and cook until it is nice and soft, about 10 more minutes. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs with the lemon juice. Slowly whisk in four ladlefuls of the hot broth. Slowly stream the egg, lemon, and broth mixture into the lamb. Add the rest of the dill and simmer until it just thickens, about 5 minutes. Taste for seasoning and add more salt or lemon juice to taste.

This is a recipe passed down from my mother. It's a favorite staple that the whole family enjoys (including the toddler!), and a relatively simple recipe that can be tweaked towards individual taste. One can sub out the pork for turkey meatballs; mustard greens or other minced greens for a certain flavor or texture.

Instructions

Soak 2 bundles of rice vermicelli in warm water for 20 minutes and place aside.

Wash an entire Napa cabbage by peeling and washing each leaf, and cut each leaf in quarters. In a wok, stir fry the cabbage on medium heat until soft. Add bouillon to taste.

Prepare 1 package of ground pork by adding 1 tablespoon of cornstarch, 1-2 tablespoons of white wine, soy sauce, salt and black pepper to taste, a handful of minced ginger, diced onion, roughly chopped cilantro, chives or any greens of preference, bouillon––all to taste. Roll into meatballs, around 2 inches diameter, and place meatballs in boiling water until floating and set aside.

Place meatballs on top of cabbage in the wok. Add 1/2 carton of chicken stock and bring to boil. Put the lid on and then lower heat to a low boil. Drain and add vermicelli and add stock as desired as long as vermicelli remains submerged. Simmer for 10-15 more minutes. Serve hot.

Ingredients
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup chopped yellow onions
3 garlic cloves, smashed
2 heaping cups chopped carrots
1 1/2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
3 to 4 cups vegetable broth
Sea salt and fresh black pepper
1 teaspoon maple syrup, or to taste (optional)
coconut milk for garnish
dollops of pesto

Instructions

1. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and a generous pinch of salt and pepper and cook until softened, stirring occasionally, about 8 minutes. Add the smashed garlic cloves (they'll get blended later) and chopped carrots to the pot and cook about 8 minutes more, stirring occasionally.

2. Stir in the ginger, then add the apple cider vinegar, and then add 3 to 4 cups of broth, depending on your desired consistency. Reduce to a simmer and cook until the carrots are soft, about 30 minutes.

3. Let cool slightly and transfer to a blender. Blend until smooth. Taste and adjust seasonings. Add maple syrup, if desired. Serve with a drizzle of coconut milk and/or a dollop of pesto, if desired.

Feasting, in the medieval sense, involved so much more than just eating. Banquets provided the occasion for the enactment of highly ritualized ceremonies combined with spectacular displays of food and entertainment. These meals often culminated with the presentation of a show-stopping dish, the high point of the evening. A celebrated example is the great Feast of the Swans in 1306, when hundreds of knights pledged their service to Edward I and made public vows over a dish of two regal birds. The ritualization of eating formed the basis for one of the most popular French romances of the fourteenth century: Les voeux du Paon (The Peacock Vows).

Like all old tales, the story is highly allegorical and intended to be understood on multiple levels. It unfolds against the legendary backdrop of a brutal war fought between Alexander the Great and Clarus, King of India. One of Clarus's men, the young knight Porrus, is captured during battle and brought to the Chamber of Venus in the city of Epheson (Ephesus). Obviously, this is no ordinary prison. Porrus and his fellow knights find themselves, instead, in a courtly paradise, where a group of elegant ladies entreat them to play a party game: Le roi qui ne ment (The king who doesn't lie), a highly charged performance of simulated courtship--the medieval equivalent of Spin the Bottle. With the mood set, Porrus wanders through the palace gardens where he encounters a magnificent peacock splaying its feathers. Brutally, he kills it [FIGURE 1], not knowing that it was the pet of the princess Fésonas. Seemingly unbothered by this atrocity, she suggests roasting the bird and making a splendid feast out of it. At the ensuing dinner, the knights and ladies make a series of increasingly competitive vows over the peacock, binding the group together in their commitment to courtoisie (noble behavior) and chevalerie (knightly behavior), and also providing the content for the remaining 4,000 verses. While most of the women pledge their love, one lady vows to recreate the bird in gold, an object which in turn provides the occasion for another feast, and surely another adventure.

The romance survives in a number of deluxe copies that attest to its popularity among the nobility. The medieval illuminators of this text delighted in depicting the feast scenes [FIGURES 2-3], in particular, which invariably focus on the unfortunate bird, plucked of all but its luxurious tail feathers. As an emblem of courtly splendor, the peacock that is about to be eaten serves as more than just a centerpiece. It prompts a reflection on the ultimate meaning of all the pomp and circumstance surrounding it. Depicted in the most elegant fashions and trendy coiffures, the noble diners trade glances and gesture emphatically. Are they in on it? Surely not. Thanks to the artist, though, at least the reader will be.

—Joshua O'Driscoll

Being an artist isn't exactly like being a chef—both professions share a litany of affinities in their pursuits of intellectual and sensory tantalization, and both must feed a relentless appetite for innovation. But everyone needs to eat, no matter how humble the dish. Art has different stakes, and being an artist is a job that often goes unpaid and unrecognized. This isn't lost on Ben Kinmont, an artist who began a piece twenty years ago titled Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family, and opened an antiquarian bookselling company, specialising in cookbooks and culinary texts. Raised in an artistic family, Kinmont bore witness to the realities of a career in the art world, particularly during a time when art resisted the market, demanded alternatives for itself, and sought a way out of the white cube.

After launching the company, Kinmont was invited to participate in the Centre Pompidou's Nouveau Festival in Paris. There he distributed a large broadside printed with seven short paragraphs, each describing the path of an individual artist who stopped being an artist and became something else—paragraphs that are not unlike the size and scope of this one. The text, On becoming something else, makes clear these weren't chronicles of failures, or cautionary tales of a fallen genius, but rather a collection of instances where an artist's obsessions, concerns, and questions naturally led them to a place where their work was more effective, and that just happened to be in a different profession than "artist." Lygia Clark, for example, whose body-activated sculptures grew to be more and more concerned with their healing potential, saw her work evolve into a full-time psychotherapy practice. Just as the modern era saw art step off the canvas onto the wall, into the room, out the door and onto the street, onto land, and into life, these artists made art that went a step further and left art behind. The start of each of these paragraphs is punctuated, in bold type, by the declaration of the artists' metamorphosed field: activism, social work, farming, medicine, yoga.

In a column aligned with each paragraph is the name of culinary dish, a Parisian chef, and the address of their restaurant. Kinmont invited these seven chefs to design a dish inspired by one of the artists, making the broadside something of a menu. Laurie Parsons' turn to social work conjured beets roasted in a crust of natural grey sea salts from Guerande in Brittany in the mind of chef Alain Passard. Those visiting the Pompidou would need to go out into the city and find the various restaurants serving the dishes to complete the piece, effectively prompting the viewer to exit the art space themselves and enter new contexts in the outside world—specifically restaurants, which like museums, are often like small theaters for playacting a heightened charade signaling certain taste and class. The meal is not just the most quotidien daily ritual, but an opportunity to acknowledge the structures that governs us. Like good art, a well crafted meal builds a thoroughfare between histories and cultures, stretching out time, so something that exists only to be digested is simultaneously infinite, giving life for the future.

In constructing this constellation of once-artists, Kinmont implicates himself as one of their brethren. We don't need to ask a chef to select the perfect dish to pair with Kinmont's journey, as he already implied the best choice: distributed as an accompaniment to the broadside was the reprint of an essay by the influential fin-de-siècle art and literary critic (and notorious anarchist), Félix Fénéon. While well-known for introducing figures like Arthur Rimbaud and Georges Seurat to society, Fénéon's thoughts on pastry are less widely acknowledged. Kinmont circulated his 1922 investigation into the history of the pièce montée, the most flamboyant constructions of the French patisserie that since the 17th century have served as showstopping centerpieces at weddings and palace parties. The pièce montée typically involves multiple tiers of nougat pedestals supporting towers of choux pastry stuffed with cremes and jams, laced with spun sugar, and adorned with countless meticulously constructed details. Fénéon chronicles a history of artisans that fluctuate somewhere between chef, sculptor, landscaper, set designer, and architect. In fact these master cake-builders constructed confections so elaborate as to have "pavilions, rotundas, temples, ruins, towers, belvederes, forts, waterfalls, fountains, huts, mills and hermitages," often depicting Napoleonic conquests, adorned with fireworks, and overall "more heroic than the initial military operation." Seeing as though these masters were sought after by the very same collectors of Cezannes and Picassos, Fénéon surmises that "some day museums will have departments devoted to pastry work."

For Kinmont, Fénéon's history of chef-sculptors signals what he sees as a parallel art history, one that can't be found in halls of stately museums or royal collections—as these masterpieces have all been ceremonially eaten. It is their "extreme perishability" that begs the question: "What efforts of breathtaking artistic achievement have existed, but leave no trace except for their myths?" Like a pièce montée, Kinmont's On becoming something else is a construction of many small, glued-together parts, and an exercise in temporality, where something can exist as a work of art in one stage moves on to be absorbed into something else, and ultimately fall into other histories—ones that exist on the messy fringes of what we call art.

—Sarah Cooper

"I didn't know these muscles existed!," we say when we sense the unworked insides of our body, when we find ourselves sore in a new place.

"I didn't know these mussels existed!," we say when we recognize the disappearance of the California mussel, a threatened bivalve living in Pacific waters.

You are standing on Mussel Beach, a place where before human muscles, there were mollusk-ular mussels.

You may well wonder how oiled muscles overtook salt-watered mussels; how shaping biceps, butts, pecs, traps, and triceps is deeply entwined with mussels, barnacles, oysters, and clams.

Before the LA coast was shaped, before Venice was dug out and drained, you wouldn't have been surrounded by California palms, but by what frontier boosters called an "uninhabitable swamp." But the shellfish-laden wetland, where Mussel Beach sits today, had been a food source for the Kizh Nation for over 7,000 years, until they were enslaved by the Spanish to build San Gabriel Mission.

Before there was a sandy beach, there was an oil field. If this was 1938, you would be standing in between derricks pumping petrochemicals out of the ground.

When the oil ran out, these no-man's-lands became marginal-man's-lands: iron men and queer souls began to gather on the artificial beach and newly paved grounds to exercise and re-form their bodies.

The original Muscle Beach formed naturally in Santa Monica. The open-air gym fed off the unique demographics of LA's body-centric subcultures: beach boys, Nature boys, surfer boys, skateboarders, pin-up girls, acrobats, gymnasts; Hollywood stunts, hunks, and navy men.

As oil wells ran dry, gallons of suntan oil began to flow instead.

Over the past 100 years, mussels have experienced one of the highest rates of species extinction in the US. But mussels still hang onto the last rocks of Venice Beach as they train and fortify themselves against the elements—and us.

Mussels can also teach us how to toughen up. Just like humans, mussels evolved to exercise their muscles.

The rocky shore is the mussel gym, where mussels train to fight against daily cycles of fatigue and stress: air temperatures rise and drop, waves crashing or receding leave them exposed to the sun, cold currents intermix with hot currents, concentrations of chemicals and plastics in the water vary.

In the intertidal gym, mussels compete with other animals and plants for space. Chains of fused mussel shells may look lifeless, but they are constantly working out. With every wave, the shells are ready to quickly open.

To resist ocean acidification, California mussels are building thicker shells. For thousands of years, shell thickness has been relatively uniform. But the ocean chemistry is changing. Mussels from the 1970s were very different from the mussels of today. The crystals in mussel shells are becoming smaller and more disorganized. With more magnesium in the water, mussels are losing control over what they are actually doing. There is a new routine at the intertidal gym.

Remember. With every mussel you eat, you build muscle. With every muscle you build, you help cultivate mussels.
Those mussels do exist.
Eat, repeat. Be shellfish.

Grasp gently one of the finest ducks you can find (which presumably has shown no reluctance to wander into your hands) and throw it a few kisses with a smile directed from your heart and eyes half closed by the pleasurable expectation of finally (maybe) letting go.

Let the duck's acceptance of your loving ways catapult you into those altitudes you always knew were best for you. Soaring higher all the time, pamper your duck with new and unexpected embraces.

Now take a well-earned rest. And your lover who is, for the purposes of this recipe, sometimes your lover and sometimes your duck, and with whom you are, as is desirable, cooking will perhaps move you into his arms and bend you forward a little bit so that he may spread his gifted hand over your alert ass. It could be that your remarks about the mortality of cooks delight him or maybe he can't resist sampling the feast you are so eager to offer. And you, possibly because you have never had the opportunity to entirely deliver that which you have, in one way or another, promised and on the existence of which you may have (almost) staked your life, will possibly drop to your knees and kiss your lover's shoes because you hope like hell that he is the ideal dinner companion. (And if he reciprocates, why then, so much the closer.) The great chefs never tire of telling us that, since this dish takes so long to prepare, one may tranquilly make love not only during its preparation but also before the cooking begins as well as forever after the meal.

So there you are, hanging around the kitchen in ecstasy. It would not hurt, for possible future use (with the salad, maybe) to squeeze a lemon right now and to set it aside. Should your lover squeeze the lemon with all his might and say, "You wish I would squeeze your ass this way, don’t you," just let it go with a simple gasp. It is quite natural for the soul to be seized while preparing the darling duck.

It is not for everyone, not for the very young, for instance, but it would not hurt to drop a tear or two somewhere in the nearness of your duck because, remembering the past, you neither deny nor object that the future might someday bring another thousand tears or two.

It may seem that the actual culinary progress is rather slow. Yet experience has shown that a darling duck cannot be speeded up. When you finally feast upon it you will rejoice that you did not deny its preparation one less moment of your time. Is anything more important, after all, than that which will satisfy your hunger for heaven.

Another thing to be said outrightly about this duck is that, amazingly, (as implied), when properly treated, one cannot ever eat it away. It lasts for as long as you have the art and the heart to keep it going. Admittedly, an eternal duck is rare, but then it is, after all, the most desired feast of the world. I know that your oven has been preheated.

A duck is roasted, they say, with a steady moderately high heat which slowly penetrates the interior and gives the exterior a glowing color which attracts all the world, and an aroma which stimulates the faith of the cook. Sometimes, depending on circumstances, one may turn on all the heat and, sometimes, one may relax the oven. Although the darling duck has many faces, the central nourishment is always the same, a tasty, juicy, warm and tender flying darling. Loving pasta, in a different way, as much as I love duck, it has always vaguely disturbed me that the two could not be eaten together. In this fact, no doubt, lies a deep culinary secret. Perhaps, one must be thankful to have another love, like pasta, say, which can be enjoyed on those days when ducks inscrutably may not permit themselves to be enjoyed. For that matter, I'm crazy about lobsters, too. Your darling duck, you will find, loves independence and is, rightly, not at all bothered by pasta or lobster. It is wise beyond belief and cherishes your welcoming smile when, after extended moments apart, you once again close in upon each other.

Here are some of the aspects the darling duck might finally, for instance, take : it can lie on a bed of golden polenta or be surrounded by mounds of wild rice or set off by slices of roast potatoes or joined by a barley, onion and mushroom casserole. Maybe you have filled it with apples and prunes, or with sauerkraut, onions and apples, or stuffed it with cooked noodles (well, this is the exception which proves the rule), slices of cooked heart and liver and with cloves, honey, beer, egg yolks and cream (!), not forgetting the orange sauce with port wine accompaniment. Or, perhaps, you have marinated it in soy sauce and powdered ginger, or basted it with curry and honey and served it with rice, chutney and even bananas in oil and vinegar. Or perhaps you adorn it with pineapple slices cooked in butter and sugar, or you cut it into pieces and mix it with lentils, sausages, garlic, parsley and red wine. Some people even like it with an orange glaze and a Grand Marnier sauce. Or, maybe, you prepare a gravy of finely chopped innards with butter, flour and duck broth. Or you just serve it in its own juices and concentrate on the darling, unadorned duck.

There is nothing in the world which, properly and lovingly prepared, can match the ecstasy this firm and yielding darling is willing to offer you.

If it should happen that It doesn't work out on the first or fifth or sixth try (so much could go wrong!), the important thing is to keep your appetite for it alive and your hope of achieving it as strong as it was the first time around.

People who have stood by the promise of an eternal duck say that in fact, just trying for it keeps you flying more and more closely to its own ultimate altitude, there where the deepest, duckiest dreams of the world come true.

STILL, THE UNBELIEVERS SHOULD NOT GO AWAY HUNGRY. AND FOR THEM, HERE'S A CONCRETE LOBSTER WITH SPAGHETTI RECIPE:

2 live lobsters — 1 1/2 pounds each
1 cup canned tomatoes
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 clove garlic, minced
3 tablespoons water
1 small onion, chopped
2/3 cup dry white wine
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon oregano
Fresh black pepper
1 pound pasta, cooked, drained

1. Wash lobsters. Cut spinal cord by inserting knife where tail and body meet. Turn lobsters on their backs and split lengthwise. Cut each tail into three pieces. Cut off claws and crack.
2. Heat oil in skillet. add lobsters, cook over high heat 3-4 minutes until red. Add garlic, onion, seasonings and cook, stirring 2 minutes.
3. Add tomatoes, and tomato paste blended with water, and cook, turning constantly, one minute.
4. Add wine, parsley and oregano, and cook about 10 minutes, turning frequently.
5. Pour sauce over spaghetti and garnish platter with lobster.

Serves 2—4

Living on the edge
play of the fragility of our collective life
of our everyday
redirecting towards fullness towards
big thank you
full, waiting for you to keep filling
trust me up
& send the prayer through