a taste of fall

Time keeps sprinting by.  It is October already, and Toulouse keeps trying to hold on to the last bits of warmth from our Indian summer, interspersed with days like yesterday, over cast and blustery, hinting at the autumn to come.  In perhaps my perfect Sunday, I got up late and biked over to the market.  Elizabeth, the American who is living with the de Saint-Exupery family this year, was waiting for me, and we got to know each other over veggie-shopping and lunch, full of discussions with topic headings such as "Philippe being adorable" and "where to find the best chocolatine in Toulouse".  She studied here two years ago, and is back now to be an assistant teacher at local elementary schools, in English.  The rest of the afternoon was full of cleaning and slowly caramelizing onions while I worked my way through my latest book, The Tale of the Roes: The Passion That Inspired The Little Prince, the memoir of Consuelo De Saint-Exupery, Antoine's wife.  Romantic, real, and beautifully written, she gives insight into the world and life of one of the most effective and curious writers of last century.

But in the true spirit of fall, we started the season off with many good friends gathered around my table.  My decorated apartment was having its debut, and the dirty dishes and empty wine bottles staring at me in the morning light speak to the fact that it went well.  So because recipes are more fun than stories full of inside jokes, the summary of last night is as follows:

Roasted Tomato, Avocado and Caramelized Onion Salad
serves 5-6

The title says most of what you need to know.  This is the perfect liaison between summer and fall, making use of the last great summer tomatoes while still warming you up with a roasted sweetness.

The most time consuming part is to caramelize the onions, but they are so so good.  I made them while I was still coming up with the rest of the evening's menu, and they are incredibly easy for all that they take a long time to do right.

2 medium onions
3 large summer tomatoes or a few cup of cherry tomatoes
2 avocado
1 large head of fresh lettuce

Dressing:
Dijon mustard
lemon juice
salt
pineapple juice (or what you have on hand, orange or apple would also be fine)
honey
olive oil

Chop the onions into small pieces and heat a fair amount of olive oil in the pan before adding them, over low heat.  Cook 30-40 minutes, keeping the heat low and stirring every few minutes, until they are a lovely translucent with hints of amber.  There are lots of ways to caramelize onions -- with a lid, without, adding sugar towards the end, etc -- so as long as you are patient and they aren't burnt, it's pretty hard to go wrong.  I then stored them for a few hours while I made everything else, and used the leftover oil in the pan to flavor the broth for the risotto -- the benefit of not having many pans....

The rest of the salad is simple, but oh so good, and also easy to prepare just as guests are arriving.  Once the tomatoes are in the oven, they take care of themselves, and slicing avocado or tossing salad are tasks easily delegated to sous-chefs.

Roast some market tomatoes (cherry tomatoes would be especially cute) sliced into wedges with a little olive oil and sea salt, in the oven on high heat for 20 minutes or so.

While they're cooking, wash some lettuce and slice wedges of avocado -- I used 2 avocados for 5 people, but I love avocado.

Mix all of the dressing ingredients together.

I tossed the lettuce in the dressing and then constructed each salad on the plate -- lettuce, a few slices of the roasted tomatoes, a spray of avocado, and some beautiful pearly caramelized onions.


Leek, Mushroom, and Courgette Risotto
serves 5-6, approximately 1 hr cooking time

a large pot -- 5-8 cups -- of broth, I boiled the middle third of the leek stalks (above the truly edible part but below the enormous leafy unruly part) in vegetable bullion with a little bit of leftover broth from making lentils during the week, and the water from rehydrating the dried mushrooms

olive oil
2 large leeks
2-3 cups fresh mushrooms
1 cup dried mushrooms, optional, conserving the water for the broth
1 fresh zucchini (courgette)
spices

2 cups arborio rice
white wine, or a tablespoon of lemon juice with water (about 1/2 c liquid)
parmesan cheese
coarse sea salt

Chop up all your veggies, fairly finely, and heat the oil in a big pasta pot.  Saute the leeks and fresh mushrooms over medium heat until the mushrooms lose their liquid, and then add the zucchini and rehydrated mushrooms.  I added some dried rosemary and thyme for a little flavor, oregano would also work well, or some garlic.

Add the arborio rice and stir to coat with oil.  Add 1/2 cup of white wine, or a tablespoon of lemon juice with a little less than 1/2 cup of water, and stir.

Add 2 cups of hot broth and stir.  This first time you can let it sit and cook for a few minutes.  For the next 30-40 minutes, add a ladleful of broth every few minutes and stir continuously.  The point is for the risotto to get to the right consistency, so add extra broth or feel free to leave some out at the end -- just continue adding broth each time what is already present is absorbed, until the rice is cooked to creamy goodness.

After about 30 minutes, add half the parmesan cheese and let it melt in.  Serve hot, with the rest of the cheese to sprinkle on top, and salt and pepper to taste.


Butternut Squash Tart
serves 5-6 (or leaves you one extra piece for breakfast)

Fall for me really lies somewhere between warm risotto and pie just out of the oven, so when I saw the beautiful bright orange squash at the market, I knew what I had to do...

a big hunk of squash. er. 2 cups of it sliced up or so?
cinnamon
nutmeg
a pat of butter

1/4 cup maple syrup
1 egg
1/2 cup condensed milk, skim if you like
salt

pie crust
water
coarse sugar

Peel and chop the squash into fairly small pieces, and put in a tin foil makeshift pouch in an oven-proof dish.
Chop the butter up into small little squares and sprinkle around, and add a little cinnamon and nutmeg.
Fold the tin foil over to enclose the squash (ish) or cook in a dish with a cover, I'm sure that would also work nicely.
Roast in the oven on fairly high heat for 35 minutes or so -- until the squash is soft and fork-pierce-able.

Mash the squash in the dish (now minus the tin foil) or a bowl, and add the beaten egg, maple syrup, salt and condensed milk.  If your mixture is too watery, you can always add a little flour, but it should be fairly wet.

Lay out your pastry crust (in it's parchment paper if you like) in a pie tin and pierce it with a fork a few times. Pour in the filling and fold over the edges to wrap it up nicely.  If you brush the crust with a little water and sprinkle it with some sugar, it makes it all crystally and finished when you take it out of the oven.

Bake on medium heat for 20-30 minutes or until it is cooked.  You don't want it to be watery or the dough to be raw, and you don't want it to be burnt, so find a time to pull it out of the oven sometime between those two points.  :)

Enjoy.  If you have whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, there are probably worse things in the world you could do than serve them as an accompaniment.

symphonie des psaumes

At the end of three weeks, I'm exhausted, but happy.  We had Brigitte (a stager from NDT) here to teach us Symphonie des Psaumes, the first of the three Stravinsky pieces in our program.  Stravinsky wrote this piece in 1930, where the choir sings the texts from three Psalms (38, 40 and 150) throughout the three movements.  Kylian choreographed it in 1978, early in his career, and set it within a constrained space smaller than the stage where chairs and a box of brown flooring mark out the walls of the church that holds all of our movement.  

The music, in natural Stravinsky fashion, makes a mess out of the idea of meter -- we spent the entire first week or two (or three) trying to count fast enough in every language at the same time, all while the meter was changing and the melody was swinging wildly over the underlying tempo, leaving us frantically searching for the 5's, 8's, 7's, 6's, 3's, 12's and 14's.... This led to the recent discovery that counting past 8 in French is a lost cause; as soon as I'm supposed to find neuf-dix-onze-deuze I completely lose the correlation between the music and the steps and the counts, because it took me two counts to figure out what silly number came after neuf! Maria, one of our principals, has been laughing about it with me in rehearsal, where she has often caught herself, mid run through, realizing she started counting the next 1 after 8 counts, instead of 12, and so trying to do math while dancing to say, "ok, I got to 3, 3 plus 8 is 11, plus 1 more is 12 and then I start again at 1!" -- of course by this time you're another 8 counts late, so you're trying to add those together too, and it quickly spirals out of control.  There's a lot of looking at each other in this ballet, and praying (fitting, given our setting).

I've been particularly beat up -- it's a physical ballet, lots of deep lunges and tricky partnering, deep contractions, so we're bent in half and walking in a deep plié so the inside of our wrists are the most forward and upwards part of our body, attached to the invisible chord pulling us all the way across the stage -- and I got lucky enough to be one of the two couples in both casts.  First cast my partner and I do all of the corps de ballet sections (the whole ballet is only eight couples, arranged in different patterns throughout, but with four soloist couples and four other couples who are in the group pieces and the pas de 4 and pas de 8, etc) and second cast for one of the four main pas de deux couples.  It has truly been a blessing to come back to Kylian, where I can feel like I can continue to build on the pieces I was just starting to dig my fingernails into in June with Petite Mort.  There are so many ways in which I can feel my dancing being stretched and pulled in the best of ways, learning to pare away my physical bad habits and mold myself into his way of moving, with simplicity and clear intention.  This feels as different from Petite Mort as Mozart is from Stravinsky, meaning in so many ways and in none.  It is still all about finding how to work with your partner, how to let your body relax into tension, pull out and extend from each exhale.

On top of that, this past week we have had Gilbert Mayer here as a guest teacher.  He is one of the iconic professors from the Opera National de Paris -- both the company and school at the Paris Opera --  and brought classical ballet (and how it is to be done in the école francais) back with a vengeance.  It is really amazing how hard we work, how long we have been dancing and taking class every single morning, and yet there are so many things that are still wonderfully too hard.  We finished the week by filming a full run-thru of Symphonie with each cast, and then being made to sit and watch it (dancers notoriously hhhhhaaaaate watching themselves on video) -- leaving us amazed at how much better it has gotten over the three weeks, and just how far we still need to go before we're even close to being satisfied.

Summer summaries...

So I've been horribly neglectful the last few months, and I sincerely apologize, though I don't feel too horrible because most of my free time was taken up by preparing for about 99% of my blog readership to visit, and then going home, so.... ;) they got the updates regardless.

Mm, The Tempest was a modern program we did in May at the Halle aux Grains theatre, but my memory is mostly muddled by constant apartment visits, searching for my new home. Just before heading to the theater for opening night I found it: after many "fine" or "maybe acceptable" slightly dingy options that I could've turned into a home with a fair amount of work, I visited the apartment I'd had a special feeling about all week, and it was magic. Mountains when the weather cooperates, river, trees, flowers, a balcony, 5th floor with an elevator, light, airy, clean... I snatched it up quick as I could. 

After mid-May, the days filled up fast, preparing for Nanette's last program.  I danced Concerto Barocco, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, and Petite Mort, and couldn't have been happier.  Concerto is ultimate Balanchine, 8 corps girls and 2 soloists to a Bach violin concerto with two solo violins (plus one boy to carry the girl around in second movement). It is 20-25 minutes in white leotards and pink tights, and the corps never stops, never leaves the stage, and carries the piece.  Slaughter on 10th Avenue is just great fun, Balanchinian broadway with girls in flapper dresses, Richard Rogers music, and tap dancing.  It was funny to me to realize that American culture includes knowing how to do the Twist and the Charleston and jazz hands, and a lot of Europeans don't have that innate sense.  I have long thought of myself as a mishmash of cultures, with no real precise cultural heritage but instead the specific surroundings that molded me into who I am.  After almost a year in France, I finally found an area where I truly identified myself as American with a smile and a high kick.

The major accomplishment of the program for me, however, was Petite Mort.  It's the kind of ballet dancers dream of performing, choreographed by Jiri Kylian to Mozart -- in other words, the best of the best.  My partner Jérémy and I had a great time with it, nerves and high expectations met equally by the movement and joy of doing it.  We were second cast to Paola and Valerio, two experienced Italian principals, and so had the chance to watch a more veteran approach before throwing ourselves into it and bringing a whole different quality to the pas de deux.  I came offstage, exhausted from doing all three programs in one show, but exhilarated and ready to perform it again and again and again into forever.  That kind of ballet.  

Through this whole program I had the incredible luck to have my family here!  Nana and Papa first, and then Logan, Mum and Dad, to watch the last shows and hang out in southern France for a while.  We went to Bordeaux for the Fête de Vin, and toured wineries in Saint-Emillion, they went and saw prehistoric caves... and we ate and visited museums and wandered Toulouse, with Papa, Dad and Logan joining forces for a bit of bricolage setting up my apartment while I was at work most days.  After Nana and Papa headed back to Canada for a family reunion and I finished up work (two extra weeks working with Kader, the director-to-be, tacked on to the end of the season), it was FINALLY time for les vacances.  

The first afternoon of freedom, Logan and I went paragliding in the Pyranées -- talk about running headlong into vacation -- and, with Mum and Dad, we stayed in a mountain lodge before going river rafting the next day.  Sunday we headed to Rome, the city of the Colosseum, Saint Peter's basilica, Michelango's La Pieta, and the fettuccine alfredo Logan spent most of his life thus far searching for.  Then Florence, full of art and beautiful bags and amazing food, with our two days in the city mostly spent taking the marvelous advice of my friend Clare who'd spent a semester studying there this spring, and went about 12 for 12 on recommendations.  A midnight private tour of the battlements of the town hall/museum with live music drifting up from the street (cue me and Logan waltzing with the city behind us); to-die-for gelato (coupled with the rationale that yogurt is a breakfast food, frozen yogurt definitely should count as an acceptable accompaniment to our croissant...); an unforgettable meal at Il Santo Bevitore, including potato foam soup with poached egg and truffle oil (as an example) and bathroom stalls marked by tiles of a simple red rose, and le petit prince... I can't wait to get back there. Then we had a quick stay in Venice, a city of romance and water, lightning storms over the canal and artisan masks, and winged lions harkening back to an era where Venice was the center of the Mediterranean world.... 

Then, back to Toulouse and on to New York, and then home for five full weeks, enough time to see so many old friends and bask on the dock and take a full course at the UW, which filled in all the time between my yoga, ballet, and Gaga classes.  It was called "Culture, Ecology and Politics in Seattle" and was wonderful -- both because the content was interesting, the teacher was great, the readings were thought-provoking... and because it reminded me about how good I am at being a nerd: taking notes well and knowing the answers to questions in class and having superb highlighting skills. ;) This post is already too long, but I could gush about my family and being home for hours.  I'll just trust in the fact that most of my readership spent time with me in person this summer anyway, and move on.  Besides, what more can you want, life has to be pretty blissful when I have this as the view from my bedroom window: 

Another "layover" in New York... for nine days... on my way back to Toulouse was wonderful -- apartment hunting with Sophie, learning secret family recipes from Dan's mum, getting to watch him and Max play tennis, getting caught in a downpour with Paul and Sophie, a Yankee game (and loss, thank the baseball gods), wonderful music and making new friends, catching up with Jin and Eduardo, getting to say a heartfelt hello to Alma (that'd be Alma Mater, the statue on the Columbia steps).... New York is always good.  It was the first time in a few years, however, that it didn't immediately feel like home -- a sign, I think, of how I really have become attached to my little space over here on the far side of the Atlantic.  And what a pretty little life I have set up for myself here:

I've been back two and a half weeks now, and my life is already feeling all sorts of lovely and full, with yoga and all day rehearsals of Kylian, and good new books (on my new Kindle too!) and long brunches and picnics out by the Garonne, market veggies and my new apartment starting to feel like home.... Life's good. All of sudden, here we are, at the start of year two. On y va. 

the ides of march

 I wrote this a few weeks ago (clearly, given it's almost May), but had some technical difficulties/life to live, so it's taken a while to get up.  We've been reabsorbed into the chilly gray rain epitomizing April showers and The Tempest rehearsals (including our first run through of the "Tempest" scene accompanied by real life thunder, lightning and hail... naturally it left us feeling preeeeetty powerful).  In efforts to get caught up, I'll post this now and see if I can't get something a little more recent out soon....

As I'm sure has now been heard around the world, Toulouse was struck by tragedy a few weeks ago; a gunman on a moto-scooter committed a series of attacks, first against French soldiers and then, apparently unable to find another soldier that morning, against a Jewish primary school. There are news sources that can give all the various factual details and background, so I'm going to leave most of it to them, but here are the basics:  Mohammed Merah was a 23-year old raised in Toulouse who claimed allegiance to al-Qaida after visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his shootings were to protest the French forces currently as an occupying military presence around the world (thus the soldiers), the recent French legislation discriminating against strict Islam (such as banning the full face veil), and the deaths of Palestinian children (thus the sick retribution against the Jewish school). He was found by the police two days after the school shooting and after a 30 something hour stand-off trapped inside his apartment, he was shot in the final raid as the police tried to arrest him.

In total, he killed seven people, three soldiers in two incidents and at the school, a teacher and three children. There have been many horrifying events in this world, throughout human history, and certainly many insipid horrors too embedded in our everyday normalcy for us to notice that cause all sorts of pain, but there is something particularly evil about the cold-blooded murder of children that makes me think that the only way for such an act to be worse could only be in terms of scale. I do not want to imagine there being anything more horrible than executing innocent children, and there is no way children of 3, 6, and 8 years old are anything but the most beautiful kind of innocent. He killed the younger two and their father, a professor and rabbi at the school, as soon as he got off his bike and started firing, and then chased the other children while firing wildly, before catching the beautiful blonde 8 year old by the hair, holding her for long enough to change to a new gun after the first one jammed, and then putting a bullet in her head.  It makes me sick. Evil is not a word or concept I use or think of too often -- normally I acknowledge our world of grays, of motives and a need for understanding and reason and multiple points of view -- but I can't think of any other way to describe something like this. There had to have been a piece of his humanity that was just fundamentally broken. 

The pictures are from as close as I was allowed to go to the school the next day, where the police blockade was holding back the media storm and many other Toulousains had a similar idea of leaving flowers, notes, and candles. The number of hand-drawn cards was a clear reminder of how children were caught up in this tragedy specifically and directly, affecting both students at the school and anyone with empathy around the world.  


The following piece of the whole event was dramatic, but with so much less importance than the rest of it that I'm not all that convinced I need to talk about it, but given there were some Facebook posts of "I think I just heard gunshots" I figure I might as well talk about it a little.  Two days after the school shooting, French police tracked the shooter to his apartment, which they raided at 3 am, where they were engaged in a small firefight, wounding I believe three officers and trapping the shooter in his apartment.  I woke up to a text from a coworker making sure everything was ok, (not knowing any of this had happened while I was fast asleep) and quickly checked the news to realize that it just so happened that the shooter lived 3 blocks down from me. A little jumpy, my bus was in the opposite direction of the flurry of activity, so I went off to work where the news was on all day, and the door man and I worked out a thumbs up-thumbs down-big boom hand signals in case something happened while we were in rehearsal.  Merah was saying he was willing to give himself up to authorities (and had admitted guilt to all the shootings and claimed a link to al-Qaida) but in the afternoon. My worry then was what exactly he was wanting more time for -- just to be alive, to prove he had power over the police, to prepare some of the videos he had taken of his murders, or to build a bomb in the apartment. By afternoon, he moved the goal posts and it was at 10 pm that he was going to surrender... By 10 pm, it became clear he was just playing with negotiators, and declared he wanted to die with guns in his hands.  


I went to tea with a friend after work, thinking it'd all be done soon, to no avail, but was reassured by Christine, the mother of the family, that it was all quiet around our house.  Lots of watching the news but not all that much discussion in front of the children, it was nice regardless to have them as a presence right next door.  From our doorways, however, we could see the red lampposts of police lights just over a neighbour's house, reminding us precisely how close all of this was. I was on skype with Mum, Nana, and Papa, all together watching curling in Pincher Creek, when "a little jumpy" had a lot more energy put into the system, as loud bangs sounded all too nearby. The police -- at 11:34 pm now -- had set off flash-bangs to try to scare Merah into coming back to negotiations after he had cut off all contact with them. I found a live news feed focused only on the stand-off, where I spent the next few hours thinking that suuuurely it would be finished soon, as we were now over twenty hours into the episode. Talking to friends from home and drinking hot chocolate, I tried to wait it out so I could see how it was going to finish. Finally around I think 2 or 3 am, I decided there certainly wasn't anything my being awake was going to accomplish, so I went to sleep, knowing it would all be over when I woke up.... Not. Shaking my head at how it could be lasting this long, I headed off to work again, where after class we finally got the news that the police finally raided the apartment and Merah was killed in the shootout that ensued. It was over, at least, though unfortunate that he couldn't be taken alive so we could know more about his contacts and networks and future plans, and he could be forced to live with his guilt for the rest of a long long life in prison.

joyeuse pâques

Happy Easter everyone!

I have lots of other tidbits to catch up on, but for the moment I just thought I'd share a little bit of Easter magic... In my family, the Easter Bunny is quite the poet, leaving long rhyming clues for the kids to follow from one to the next in order to find the baskets and really good candy before we're set loose to find the rest of the eggs scattered around the house and garden.  The past few years have been a little hard on the poor rabbit, given how far apart we all are.... But what do you know, E.B. (that'd be Easter Bunny) got the last word, as per usual.  Here it is:

Fwd: What do you think I am, transcontinental??

Taisha Barton-Rowledge	10:57 AM (8 minutes ago)
to Russell, Lorinda, Mackenzie, Logan, Russ, Sheralyn, Darrel, Laura

Hey family!!

This came through to me again this year, not sure if you got it directly from E.B. 

as well or not, but I thought I'd send it along.  I love you, fly safely today Dad, and 

Happy Easter to all!  

xoxo love you,

Taisha

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 11:59 PM, E. Bunny <eastermagic@gmail.com>wrote:

Well once again I find that my favorite family is a little scattered,

Must be trying to fool me, as though geography even matters.

But after all these years I'm really quite smart,

And the only map I look at covers the geography of the heart.

So once again my magic might have to be in a virtual letter,

(An old rabbit like me is becoming quite the trend-setter)

And while emailed chocolate still hasn't quite come through,

I've got Willy Wonka working, see what he and his gadgets can do. 

And despite what the oldest daughter might say,

Chocolate isn't the most important part of this day.

Instead it's the love you all carry for each other,

For your mother and father, your sister and brother. 

So despite all the distance between each of you,

Know that rainbows can stretch from here to Timbuktu,

You'll always be connected by the feelings you feel,

Even when you can't be there to all share a meal. 

Well my dears, love on each other and take care of yourselves,

I'm about to rest for the year, take a trip to see some elves.

You can count on each other through any commotion,

Love'll always be there, across any continent or ocean. 

Maybe some year, for once, you'll all be in the same state,

And you'll know where to find me, just look to the gate.

Baskets of love,

E.B.

balsamic eggplant gnocchi

I spent the weekend wrapped up in a yoga stage ("stage" being one of those lovely words that I only really know in French, meaning something between a retreat, intensive, and internship... in this case meaning four hours on Saturday after rehearsing in the morning and then five hours today in the yoga studio downtown, working with Camélia, the teacher of my teacher/grandmother willow/guru lady).  Lots of thinking and acknowledging thoughts and trying to figure out my own heart, which lead me to spend the evening quietly by myself, cooking and smiling. So, voilà, the fruits of my labour:


Balsamic Eggplant Gnocchi
-- This fills up two hungry people.  Gnocchi satisfies all sorts of cravings, so this doesn't really need a side dish, but if you wanted, it would be great with fresh citrus-y greens and a glass of good red wine.  I love gnocchi's texture, but if you don't have any on hand I'm sure would be great over almost any pasta (except somehow in my head spaghetti... Angel hair, fettucini and any shorter tubular pasta all seem like they'd have a good chance), and it's fun to have a non-tomato veggie sauce in the repertoire. Gnocchi has a fair amount of protein (a large portion - 200g - of gnocchi is around 400 calories and 13 g of protein), but if you really wanted to amp that up you could add some tofu to the sauce as well. If you don't have bouillon, just salted water will do, but a little extra flavor is always nice. And naturally, the veggies can substituted in and out at will, depending on your tastes and who you're serving and what you have within the nearest meter or two. Malheureusement, I happened to leave the goat cheese out, meaning naturally I had to suffer through a cheese course after dinner, a few slices of a crisp granny smith apple with goat cheese, which was pretty perfect.  Dessert should be on the light-and-fluffy side, maybe just fruit or a pudding or lemon meringue... All told it takes 50 minutes or so to cook, but 20 minutes of that is downtime while the eggplant sits. --

You need:
1 medium eggplant/aubergine
salt
paper towel (not to eat, clearly... but to gather anyway)
1 yellow onion
3 small carrots
4-5 white mushrooms
1 large clove of garlic
handful of corn, either thawed from frozen or canned
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
herbes de provence
1/2 of a vegetable broth bullion cube
1 packet of gnocchi, flour or potato (mine was 400 g, for 2 people)
goat cheese for sprinkling (or if that's not your thing, I'm sure a good parmesan or feta would also be all sorts of yummy)

Start by slicing off the ends of the eggplant and then cutting it into rounds about a half inch / one cm thick.  Line a bowl or colander with paper towel and place one layer of eggplant inside, then sprinkle with salt.  Repeat the paper towel - eggplant - salt - paper towel until you've used up all the eggplant, and let sit for 20-30 minutes.

--I can't remember where I learned this (the Moosewood cookbook maybe?), but it draws the moisture out and helps the eggplant cook with more concentrated flavor, while being less goopy and I think also needing less oil. Happy day all around. Feel free to have a glass of wine, do some yoga, or see if you can't plan out the rest of your life in the 20 minutes or so that you have before you need to start cutting up onion... --

Heat the olive oil in a fairly big sauce pan, just enough to get the whole bottom of the pan slippery.  Dice the onion and cook over medium-low heat for about 5-7 minutes, until the onion starts to become soft and wonderful smelling, stirring occasionally. Toss in a pinch of the herbes de provence when you feel like it.

Wipe off the salt from the eggplant if you can with the paper towel, and cut it into cubes.  Toss it in with the onion and keep stirring every so often.

Cut up the mushroom and carrots, relatively small, and dice the garlic.  After letting the eggplant cook for about 10 minutes (aka your cutting and dicing time), just as it starts to become soft, add the other veggies and garlic, stir, and let them cook as well.

After a minute or two, add a splash of balsamic vinegar, making sure to stir it in as it bubbles away.  I wanted to taste the eggplant, so I used a fairly small glug (that'd be the official measurement) to make sure the other flavors came through, but as per everything, to taste.

Add the corn, for a little pop of color, and keep stirring and cooking for another 5 minutes -- about as long as it takes for the gnocchi to be ready.

Boil a large pot of water, with the vegetable bouillon dissolving as the water comes to a boil. Add the gnocchi, and cook as the packet instructs, which should be to wait for the gnocchi to pop up to the surface and then cook another minute or so before straining or scooping out with a slotted spoon.

Serve! Gnocchi, vegetables, and then top with the goat cheese and let the heat of the food make it just the right amount of melted and gooey. The eggplant should be soft and almost creamy, the gnocchi their own firm-but-squishy texture, and the carrots and other veggies with just a hint of crunch. All that's left is to enjoy!

le printemps

The beginning of March and spring is here in full force -- I'm sitting out on the back porch in my petit coin de soleil (little corner of sunshine) as I type this, my new favorite spot for reading and lunching. Afternoons in the sun have been full of trampolines and children, good books and simple, extraordinary food, lounging along the Garonne River (beside a bare-chested Julian!!) and meeting exciting new people.  Life's been pushing forward in spurts recently, racing ahead without me and then stalling out as soon as I arrive, but with the arrival of real solid sunshine I think I've found my footing again.

Isaure, sur le trampoline 

I guess firstly, I should talk about the big news that's shaped the past few weeks:  I had my meeting with Kader, the director-to-be, and am really excited about some of the things he's passionate about bringing to the company, and so signed my name on a contract that will keep me in Toulouse through July or so of 2014.  Two and a half more years stretching out in front of me in one place, that I love but also happens to be on the other side of the world from home, naturally set off a mini wave of homesickness, mostly manifested in staring at pictures of the Seattle skyline on Pinterest.  Luckily the ridiculousness of said wallowing and inevitability of missing home at the same time I'm committing to being far away wasn't exactly lost on me, so I had a pretty good sense of humor about it :)

And while three full years is longer than I've committed myself to anything apart from maybe chocolate, I am also realizing how nice it might be to settle in one place for a little.  Three years in France becomes a whole different affair than a nine-month-lark, and it gives me a chance to really invest in my life here.  It's exciting to think about a new apartment and how good my French will be and getting to watch the kids grow up, not to mention the places I can travel to from here and the far-away possibility that it might be more than just a few years.  That remains many steps down the road; part of what I am trying to keep defining now is the answer to what I want to accomplish with my dance career. I know now that dancing can make me really truly blissfully happy, that having this as a career is one of those "shrug your shoulder and grin and shake your head about how incredibly lucky you are" type things. I have had a few people in the past week or two repeat exactly that back to me, some version of "oh, so you're living your childhood dream dancing in the south of France?" and um, yup, that's exactly what I'm doing. So the next question becomes what do I want to do this to accomplish, what's the bigger picture, at what point would I be willing to let go of this really wonderful life to search for the next, different, really wonderful life? It is going to take some mulling, naturally, but it's all of a happy sort.

So beyond that, the day to day routine of the past bit.... We've been rehearsing Allegro Brillante by Balanchine, which is fun and hard and lightning fast (naturally I'm the tallest girl doing it by a few inches), but also natural and clear and I know at least what it's supposed to be.  It is not there yet, but I know what it is supposed to look like, what I need to work on and how to get to a good final product -- a nice alternative to Jacopo's piece, though I can't help but hunger after the chance to really get to work on and perform something closer to that, where all my boundaries are pushed in different directions and you never quite know what is going to arrive when you're out there on stage.

Philippe, sur le trampoline

I have also tucked myself into the youth/student chapter of Amnesty International in Toulouse, which has been great fun. It is so nice to be around students, and a different social circle, and to throw myself into a cause completely separate from dance (and brainstorm ways to make the worlds intersect). I'm off to a concert in a few minutes actually, where we'll be outside asking patrons to sign petitions asking free various political prisoners before and after the show (and get to see a free concert in the meantime). It feels good to be involved a little more directly in some of their activism, to see what they're doing and be a little more aware of the happenings outside the dance world or mainstream media headlines. Combining that and good books -- I've given up watching TV on my computer for the 40 days happening to fall between Mardi Gras and Easter but having nothing to do with Catholicism -- and yoga intensives and good friends and sunshine, life here is pretty good. La belle vie dans le printemps, all that :)

jacopo

The past month has flown by, I really can't quite fathom how on Earth it's March already. The four weeks following the January program (for the not so bright ones out there that'd qualify as February) were swallowed up by rehearsing Spazio-Tempo, an incredible contemporary piece by Jacopo Godani. I'm second cast -- which probably we're not going have time to rehearse and perform -- so mostly taken it as a few weeks of vacation from ballet, throwing myself into just workshopping his choreography and style of dancing.

Jacopo is an Italian fireball, shaved bald ex-Forsythe dancer with a slightly protruding belly and a mouth that would make a sailor blush, no matter if the sailor was Italian, French, English, Spanish, or Japanese. He and his assistant, Francesca, ran a shock-and-awe campaign for pretty much the whole time they were here, trying to jolt the dancers out of the habits built into our bodies in thousands and thousands of hours of class and rehearsal, to throw away the classical movement style and approach carrying our body from a whole different direction. Not the easiest task in 3 or 4 weeks, but an incredible experience. His movement style is wriggly and interesting and relaxed -- think of how to get from point A to point B in the simplest fashion, a straight line using muscles and form.... that's the opposite of what Jacopo wants. He wants interesting, complicated, natural (well, not natural for ballerinas), defined by the ends of your fingers, the tips of your toes, and originating from your pelvis. Crude, funny, demanding, vulgar, bit by bit Jacopo got across his theory of movement, the energy he wants between dancers on stage, how he plays with the music, and his method of dancing where you relax and let the bones move and the movements happen even more wriggly as you push harder, rather than using the muscles to force it.

Naturally, the weeks have been chalk full of quotes and laughs.  The reigning favorite is "It's almost as though you're all swords, and I want your body to be a fucking nuclear weapon" -- one of his core philosophies is that classical ballet is an antiquated art form, made for the aristocracy of Louis XIV's court, and the world has evolved since then.  Why would you want to dance like they did two hundred years ago, when you can dance like someone from the 21st century?  Being stiff and held upright and poised and coiffed.... all of that is old.  Instead let the norms of the surrounding world into the studio, walk like a person, have pas de deux's where both people are partnering each other rather than just the man lifting the woman as some perfect object, look into each other's eyes.  Don't look out to the audience, look at each other, build the feeling of a "fucking communist revolution" in the ranks of the dancers, where we all shout out loud the counts to be sure we're together, race together against the music to hit the last position and hoooooollllldddd.... until Crash! the musical cue hits and we race to the next stopping point. This is not a ballet about a prince and a princess reigning over their court, but a group of 12, intermixing and challenging each other and pushing each other on for the whole half hour of the piece.

Philosophy of the feeling of the piece aside, there's also the actual executing-the-choreography piece.  He wants movement that is completely counter to classical ballet -- relaxing instead of holding, letting joints and bones move while muscles bounce and rebound instead of place each thing exactly so -- while retaining the line and pointe work and vocabulary of classical dance.  Equally though, he rejects the early 20th century versions of modern, where lines were straightened instead of curved, the weight was dropped down, pointe shoes discarded. Instead he's looking for something different, closer to Forsythe, but looser, lighter, shapes defined in space so fast that the path of the fingertips is crucial because it is what leave the traces in the audience's vision that hover after the body has moved on to the next step. To get the results though usually requires Francesca in your face, yelling "move from your ass!" as you try to get your body to be subject to your mind rather than the years of training you've drilled into your muscles, or him calling across the room: "Open your ass hole!" as you try to do a pirouette (while moving the whole top of your body in a wave, naturally, despite the 2 in diameter of your pointe shoe tip that you're balancing on).... And my personal favorite as an illustration to Julian as he held his arms out in a circle directly out from his chest and let Pascale, his partner, drop through them to kneel on the floor -- "it's like you're the asshole, and she's the turd coming out.  pfffttt" with a little hand wave to illustrate exactly how she was supposed to drop out of the space he defined.  What fun :)

This is all for the program at the end of March, so we have a few more weeks to work on it and get it into our blood before he comes back and kills us all as we get into the theatre.  I can't tell you how many things where, if we do them not quite how he wants, he "will come up on stage and slit your throats!" which is decent enough motivation. More to come soon on the rest of life and the other half of this program -- Allegro Brillante by Balanchine (that'll be me) and Tchai Pas and Por Vos Mueros by Nacho Duato -- but for now, there's a snapshot at least of Jacopo.  If I got you interested, just above is the link to the pas de deux that I'm learning, performed by Dresden, so you can get a visual sense of what he's asking for.  See if you can't spot the asshole and turd moment ;)

janvier

January was mostly consumed by rehearsals for the New York Dances program, where we finally got a chance to set aside Nutcracker and focus fully on Jerome Robbins' Moves and Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs. I had a fantastic time working on both, and loved getting to do Moves every show -- there was something really powerful about performing a ballet without music, a tension that exists between you and the other performers and the audience, where everyone is drawn in by the simplicity of the piece. In just leotards and pink tights (which I don't know that I've worn since I was in school and required by dress code), with a black backdrop and no accompaniment other than the sound of pointe shoes on the floor and the dancers exhaling together, Moves has had everything pared away until only pure dance is left. I was worried sitting in silence for a half hour would be hard for the audience, but most of my friends who came actually found it to be the most engaging piece of the evening. 

Me, Lucille, Juliana and Tanya on stage rehearsing Moves

Sinatra I rehearsed (as second cast) a lot, even getting to do the costumiere in the studio (in Oscar de la Renta, no less), and am going to get a chance to perform in March at St. Pierre-et-Cuisine, an old church turned cabaret theatre. Valerio hurt his back the week before the shows, and so Paola ended up performing with Julian with only 3 days of rehearsals (meaning run-throughs on stage, not real working rehearsals to really get to feel each other). It was hard to see my partner usurped by another woman ;) -- but mostly really exciting/nerve-wracking to watch Julian perform so well under a lot of pressure with almost no preparation. Mostly in consisted of me sitting in the wings watching on the monitor with little bounces every time they got to a hard lift or section, and then a sigh of relief after it went well every night.  

Julian and Paola in "All the Way"

I also got news the weekend before we went into the theatre that Lily Gallacher, an adorable little girl at home, passed away. Lily was the little sister of Nancy, who had been one of the baby mice when I was Mother Mouse in PNB's Nutcracker six years ago, but I have stayed in touch with the family since them, and you couldn't possibly think of a more open and loving family.  There's nothing good about this story, no person to be mad at or long list of a full life's worth of accomplishments... just her beautiful smile and loving presence and gratitude that all of us around her got a chance to benefit by being close to her joyful spirit while she was here. But it is also times like that, of loss particularly, but also the other big moments, of joy or fear or disappointment, that make you realize how far away home is.  Not that it isn't lovely here, and skype is a marvelous invention, but it also is too far to just pop back whenever someone needs you. Those of you working on teleportation devices, step it up, would you? 

the city of lights

Our train arrived at the Gare Austerlitz just after 5 pm on New Years Day, and we headed to our AirBnB to settle ourselves in.  We were staying in the 19e Arrondissement, just off the 7 Metro line, in a room we booked through Airbnb, an online community of people who rent out their extra rooms or apartments to travelers passing through -- cheaper than a hotel, cleaner and nicer than a hostel, and with a local connection in case you have any questions.  The young couple we stayed with, Peggy and Jeff, were great hosts, despite the fact that I'm sure it's a little strange to have strangers traipsing through your home. As soon as we dropped off our bags and got about fifty different recommendations for what we should do with our three days, complete with one of those great huge tourist maps, we headed out for dinner with Mackenzie's friends from UPeace who were also in Paris for the holidays. 

So, the characters: Maeve is English, and currently working as an investigative journalist in London, where she hangs out in an office frequented often enough by Julian Assange that one can tell his recent presence by a lacking of chips -- (in a British accent) "where have all the crisps gone?! Really Julian, again....." Marion, who is technically French but really what we decided to dub a "globe floater" given her constant travels, is working with at-risk youth in El Salvador to try to reduce violence there. Agathe, a childhood friend of Marion's who volunteered to be our Parisian tour guide, works for a French Senator (aka old white men). 

We all headed down to the Palais Royale and frolicked in the cold and the rain down past the lit-up pyramids in the courtyard in front of the Louvre before walking down the Seine to the Marais (the young hip quartier, which is also the historically Jewish district.  Marais means marsh, which is where the Jews were once placed...) where we had some fantastic falafel.  Ironically, the restaurant we ended up going to was exactly the one (Chez Hanna, I think?) that I went to with Lyse and Nina in October, but I was so hungry at that point that I had absolutely no complaints about going somewhere I knew was good.  

After filling up on houmous and fried eggplant and falafel and pita, we shimmied over to the extraordinarily French part of our evening at Le Philosophe, a French wine bar/restaurant with all local organic produce and an ad for a anti-fast-food documentary showing sometime later this spring on the back of the menu. There, we ordered five different glasses of wine -- three reds: a Bordeaux, a Bourgogne, a Gamay, and two whites: a sweet Sauturnes and a dry one, whose name now escapes me. A full lesson on wine tasting and bluffing your way to classy sommelier status followed, with highlights including learning about how most red wines you can describe with red fruits, aka: "mm, yes, blackberry, definitely blackberry" or "yes, this one has a hint of cherry, I think, and a little plum" BUT NOT "well, I was going to say grape, but...."  ;) Too much fun :)

Monday we met back up with the girls at the fountain Saint-Michel, skipped through the Notre Dame, and popped over to the Hotel-de-ville.  There they were hosting a free Sempé exhibit, showcasing hundreds of his drawings, cartoons, and New Yorker covers.  It was so much fun to get to wander a museum full of laughter, it was a very different experience than most stuffy art galleries, and that many of his works together gave you a sense of scale, an idea of how consistently funny he had to be, and was. The little twists on every day situations that force a smile, the sense of scale that he created in many of his drawings, his use of color to draw the eye in a blur of black and white... it was really marvelous to be able to see such a long string of works and really get a sense of the artist who made them.

From there, a hankering for crèpes settled over us (what else to do with Maeve's last few hours in Paris?) so we tucked ourselves into a corner creperie for lunch.  I think Mackenzie even got fancy with the French and ordered something with a variation in it (actually, I'm pretty sure she just said she'd have the exact same variation as the girl before her, but shhh). I was also lucky enough to be nearby to Mario, one of Sophie's good friends from Columbia, for his last few hours in Paris, so he joined us there and for our tea-shopping afterwards. I love that I can have friends of friends all over the world -- Mario and I had never met, but it turns out I loaned his cousin a book for our history class together during my one semester at Columbia. It was one of those really lovely easy meetings where technically we didn't know each other, but because Sophie's been in both of our lives, it becomes infinitely easy to imagine a world where we're great friends, even after only a few minutes squabbling over who could buy the other coffee.  

So a little wandering and a few books of French poetry later, we put Maeve and Mario on trains back to London, and Agathe went off to buy some furniture, so Mackenzie, Marion and I wandered around the streets to a fondue restaurant for Mackenzie's first ever cheese fondue. Gooey melted goodness :) Again, Mackenzie was working her French language skills with the waiter like you wouldn't believe, and the whole evening was full of great food and superb company (and some more good wine).  

The next morning dawned collllllddddd on Mackenzie and my day set out for just the two of us to wander the streets of Paris. Our first stop was MontMartre and the Sacre Coeur.  Despite the low clouds, there still managed to be a pretty spectacular view of Paris from the top of the hill, as well as the last day of the Christmas market (aka vin chaud!!). Despite how horribly touristy all the shops around the Sacre Coeur are, we actually found some great post cards and nice Paris-artwork posters for Mackenzie to bring home (you know, one step up from "my sister went to Paris and all I got was this crummy t-shirt"). We wound our way down from the top, stopping at a FANTASTIC little bakery with its own "Pain" recipe book of just bread and beautiful photographs.... that I can't remember the name of. Besides bakeries, we allowed ourselves to duck into More walking through winding streets, to a cute little local recycled-leather shop with beautiful bags and wallets that Peggy recommended for us, and then on to Galleries Lafayette and the Opera Garnier lit up at night... pretty spectacular.  Mackenzie and I just frolicked in the rain in front of it for a while, jumping over puddles and imagining what an incredible sensation it would be to perform in a building like that. Not that Theatre du Capitole isn't beautiful, but... there are no golden angels in the ramparts....  Is it so bad to dream of golden angels?

For our last day in Paris, we spent most of the day with our good friends Monet, Rodin, Renoir, and Degas at the Musée d'Orsay. As per usual, the line outside wound around the square, meaning we had a 45 minute or so wait, which luckily was made infinitely more fun by having a beautiful 8 month old baby right behind us.  Naturally, because I have no qualms about kidnapping, we played pattycake and peek-a-boo and all sorts of fun games to pass the time together; though it's possible my favorite part was glimpsing people's smiles when their part of the line happened to pass by close enough to hear her giggle. Once we were inside, of course, it was marvelous... Some of my favorites:  Monet never ceases to take my breath away. There were also a lot of paintings by Camille Pizanne that I really liked, which captured a similar feeling, just slightly more human, slightly less magic.  The curator put two tall Renoir portraits next to each other on the center wall of the room in the impressionist section -- "Danse à la compagne" and "Danse à la ville" -- each showing a dancing couple, captured waltzing in the country with a straw hat on the floor in the lower corner, and in full coat and tails and above-the-elbow gloves in the city. Sculptures hold a special allure to me, given that I work in a three-dimensional art-scape myself, and I really loved the marble "Pan et les Orsons" of a young faun watching two bear cubs play, and of course the Rodin.  The North Carolina Art Museum just opened a whole wing of Rodin, so it was fun to see a few repeat sculptures that felt familiar (though familiar maybe isn't the best way to describe the Gates of Hell, oh well).
With the little time left before meeting up with Sasha and Lauren (good friends who are a Russian-American pairing, both dancers who arrived this year) for our train back to Toulouse, Kenzie and I dashed back to the Opera Garnier to go inside (well, the bookshop, anyway).  It's really just gorgeous, and by chance they had a video of the Paris Opera doing Jerome Robbins' The Concert playing, which I'd been telling Mackenzie about to try to explain how dance could be more things than just pretty. One last kiss blown over our shoulder and we were off to the Gare Montparnasse, laden with cider, bread and cheese to get us happily all the way home.

le fin de 2011

Apologies for the delay in getting this post out, I wanted to find time to be able to sit down and really capture all of the fantastic stories I had from Nutcracker and Mackenzie's visit and celebrating New Years in Paris.... which meant that I never actually had a chunk of time where I was motivated enough and free enough to do it justice.  I'm learning to break down such long daunting tasks into mini-chunks, which is how the words below will happen themselves into being.  So, without further ado, we travel back in time....

Mackenzie in Toulouse

So Christmas evening I got one of the most wonderful presents a girl could dream of -- my sister waiting for me at the "Entrée des Artistes" as I came out of the show. Jeanne (the 13 year old dancer in my host family) was in the show on Christmas as well, so along with Christine (the mother) we had a wonderful girls-only Christmas dinner. I made butternut squash risotto (it's possible Mackenzie flung some of it across the room when the pressure cooker released some steam, but we'll blame it on the jet lag) and we stumbled our way through the language barrier, Mackenzie fearlessly tackling her third language and then going promptly to bed around 8 o'clock. 
Boxing Day became our Christmas morning, full of Laura Kastner's home-made cinnamon bread (yummmm) and poppycock from Mum, and a whole suitcase full of presents from family and friends in Seattle. Sending out infinite thank yous to everyone who sent me little pieces of home -- bonus points to the Lehmans for the homemade cookies. ;) The afternoon we spent having a really lovely coffee with Eloise, who is a Toulousain singer, who also worked for two years for Amnesty International here, again mixing French and English. Mackenzie ordering a "cafe au lait, s'il vous plait" was a grand success! From there we sped off to Vanessa's birthday gathering, where we introduced our European friends to the genius that is The Big Bang Theory -- the television show, not the cosmological event. 
Tuesday and Wednesday I had shows, so Mackenzie came and saw her first non-PNB Nutcracker ever. After 10 years of the same version, I think it was a little disappointing to not be able to say exactly what was going to come next, but she liked it anyway. She also got a chance to see us rehearsing "Moves" for the January program one afternoon, so she has a bit of an idea of what's coming next. Crèpes also featured prominently -- naturally -- of the savory and sweet variety... I'm proud to report there was no chocolate-sauce-from-the-plate licking, but I think the dishes were about as clean as we could leave them without resorting to such tactics. We also wandered around the last days of the Christmas Market in the Capitole plaza, picking out gifts -- beautiful handmade journals and silk scarves for Mackenzie, a wooden toy train for one of the new additions to our Ballet du Capitole family, and some vin chaud, naturally. 
Thursday we had the day off, so in the afternoon we went over to Julian's apartment overlooking the river and happily ate a fantastic meal he cooked for us. He got a new Italian cookbook about a month ago with very precise pasta recipes (things are done Just So) that he's been trying out, so I've been a willing guinea pig quite a few times now. It's fun to get to share Kenzie with my friends, and vice versa, get to see my worlds blending a little :) She and I stopped at a bar on our way home to have a Kir and an Armagnac, so she could say she'd officially tasted the drinks of the region, and to talk about all sorts of mad plans we have to save the world.
Friday morning Mackenzie spent doing Physics reading while I took class, and then we went out to a nice lunch at O3C, the restaurant/salon de thé where Julian works most Mondays. Their specialty is their crustades, which is basically a scrumptious tart that takes 3 days to make because of something to do with all the layers in the pastry and comes in all sorts of fantastic flavors like cheese, carmelized carrots, or pumpkin (not to mention pear and apple and other sweet things). From there Julian took us to Palais de Thé, the bulk tea leaf shop where they all know him by name and tea preference for a little bit of tea shopping, and then I headed back to the theater for that night's show.
New Years Eve -- and the closing show of Nutcracker -- was great, with everyone excited to be done and on a real vacation. There's always a little bit extra energy when you know there's a bottle of champagne waiting upstairs in the dressing room to help make packing out easier :) It's a little weird to think that that could be my last Nutcracker for a while, and given how little I've been able to predict my life so far, maybe ever. In the States Nutcracker is such an omnipresent feature of ballet life, imagining really getting away from it is exhilarating and frightening at the same time. Kader is French though, he didn't grow up with such deep rooted Nutcracker traditions, who knows when the next time we will bring it back will be, or where I'll be over the next few years.  Unfortunately, that it might be my last Nutcracker wasn't really what I was paying attention to during the final curtain call of the run, because Raffaele, the new Italian boy, tore something in his knee during the coda at the very end of the ballet, so mostly I was trying to smile real big at the audience and see what was going on in the wings to see if we could tell how bad it was.  They got a doctor there minutes after the show ended, and he's alright, but I think facing surgery and a long recovery, which sucks. I dislike those reminders, both because it's obviously hard to watch your friends get hurt, but also because it makes you think about how short this career is, and how you never know when you'll come down from a jump a little bit wrong and have it change everything. 
After the show we hauled bags of pointe shoes and makeup, champagne and tapenades over to Julian's to ring in the New Year. Good music, good friends, and flutes of champagne topped off with some dried strawberries (being winter and all) made a truly wonderful evening. A few hours of sleep later, Mackenzie and I were up in time to skype into the Pacific Northwest New Year before hopping on the train to Paris.