As expected, and as it was proper, this year Thanksgiving celebration was certainly not a typical De Paz family thanksgiving party. Our late lunch was a more intimate affair, but not less thankful and, maybe for the same reason, more deeply felt. Johnny and Jess came over from Charlotte for a week. As they are […]
It has been an uncertain spring. What with criminally delusional Tzar wannabes, record hot temperatures and the hallucinatory visions of encroaching droughts hand in hand with floods threatening of much worse to come, every new shoot in the garden, any breath of not scorching breeze and every new timid flower seem like veritable miracles, tentative […]
(April 08, 2020/ Photo: Jorge Ibanez) Last evening, late afternoon shortly before dinner, our neighborhood owl was owling away somewhere in the backyard trees thick canopy. I went out to see if I could spot it, but it was not in our backyard owl-tree near my bedroom window where it likes to perch, but rather […]
(February 27, 2020/ Photo: Jorge Ibanez) Well, maybe not so fast. Having just completed my one year exploration of international breads, I made a purpose of moving on and apply the same disciplined curiosity to new explorations and new discoveries in what was opening up as a new branch of my life line. Baking was […]
(January 31, 2020/ Photo: Jorge Ibanez) As I come to the end of an amazing year of revelations, discoveries, agonizing indecisions and huge acts of faith and acceptance, I sense a world of new horizons opening ahead of me. For one, I am wrapping a yearlong exploration of breads, bread baking and techniques, my previous […]
(August 30, 2019 / by Jorge / Photo: Michael Hoffman) I recently read a beautiful article in Aleph:Faena , <em>The Art of Getting Lost</em><a href=’https://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/on-the-art-of-getting-lost/#’> (1)</a>. It makes the case for both that, considered practically, getting lost is a decision (or at least an act of acceptance) and that the experience itself can nurture […]
(July 22, 2019 / By Jorge / Photo: Jorge Ibanez There is a Goethe quote that has circulated for quite some time in the internet and in self-help circles, that Wanda and I embraced from a long time ago and held on to in moments of challenges and tribulations. It is really a combination of […]
(June 15, 2019 / Photo: Jorge Ibanez) Back when we had our bakery, my go-to source for bread ideas was Bernard Clayton’s bread bible <em>The Complete Book of Breads</em>, a monumental work of culinary research. Of course, those were home recipes and it took some calculations to translate them to a commercial yield size and, […]
(December 20, 2018/ Illustration: segment of illustration for book cover by Juan Ibanez) This morning Alta delivered the box of my poem book, Mearcstapa. This has been a project postponed for decades (funny that as you age you can say this about more and more ‘things’) and the most recent step in my Kick the […]
(November 30, 2018/ Jorge Ibanez / Photo: Jorge Ibanez) Well, wasn’t this a ‘de Paz’ Thanksgiving…. This festivity, based on an absolute falsified ‘historic’ anecdote, has taken such a hold in Puerto Rico that you would swear the Pilgrims landed near Yabucoa (God forbid, Catholics were bad enough!!). And, although not yet a deserving […]