inherited no. 6

i told myself i had to stay in tonight to work on my ghirlandaio chapter and/or preparation for my class that meets monday. but the thing is, uva just switched to this new student registration system that has things all sorts of wackadoodle, and right now it only looks like two people are enrolled in my class. maybe more people will show up monday, but if not, the class will be canceled, and that makes preparation seem extremely unappealing. so now blogging has become a form of procrastination. that and trawling the internets for new music. to ease the nagging guilt i thought i would at least post an inheritance that's marginally related to what i'm supposed to be doing. you remember muriel, right, she of the watch and pastels and sesame street chitchats?


in honor of the closing days of summer, here's a favorite snapshot of grandmother. muriel kept an entire album of photographs taken from behind, it was her favorite kind, so it seems fitting that among the masses of photos i've collected, there's this one of her.


this tiny book is what i want to show you, friends. its pages are cracked and yellowed and it smells like the inside of old wooden drawers. also, it originally cost 60 cents. can you say awesome? i was only subconciously aware of this book's existence until a few years ago when one of my professors was listing off a short bibliography of general books on drawing i might consult. this was before i had irrevocably signed my life away to the study of these fragile pieces of paper, but when he mentioned this little text, it suddenly came into focus in my mind. oh, yes, i thought, i know that one, my grandmother owned it. and then, when i opened it, and it fell immediately to the page pictured below, well, something clicked.


on the page opposite the opening lines of text was the drawing that had pushed me over the edge into a full-fledged and unabashed love of the drawing hand. this is the one that, more than once, has single-handedly caused salty drops of water to spill over onto my cheeks. and that's all fine and dandy, la ti da, but then, to think that my grandmother must have stared at the same drawing, to think that she knew a piece of me before i knew it myself, before it could be known at all, well, that's just sort of mindblowing for me.

book love.

as you may be aware, i am practically incapable of cooking. it's not like i want to be that way, it's just that i am too tightly wound to get all free-spirited in the kitchen. i don't like making mistakes or do-overs. plus i live alone, and that does not bode well for any baked goods that might issue from my kitchen. well, it bodes well for the baked goods but not for my hips. still, i love a good cookbook. and by good i mean it must be lavishly illustrated and devoid of detailed instructions for deboning some piece of meat. tessa kiros's apples for jam may be my favorite cookbook OF ALL TIME. i cannot wait for her newest book, venezia, to come out in september.

who could resist those red shoes on the cover? and yes, m.d., you'll notice a surprisingly pleasant combination of pink and red. this cookbook is a combination of recipes and memories, and it is organized by color, which is pretty much the snazziest thing ever.
here are some more snapshots of its interior.

each chapter starts with a list of recipes for that color and a photo or two. here's brown with a photo of the family dog and a few doodles by tessa's children.

and then each chapter has a memory for that color. and here you see a chocolate loaf. a LOAF OF CHOCOLATE, people.

i love this photo combination. that's raspberry ripple ice cream from the stripes chapter. (and the vertical stripes in the photo are courtesy of my blinds.)

um, yeah. i don't think i need to say anything here.

there are little passages of handwritten text throughout the book, and i love tessa's script. they're often paired with the children's illustrations. the kids are given credit on the title page with this endearing notation "illustrations by the mice." i love it, almost as much as i love these little horses.

what it comes down to is that i want to show you all the photographs and illustrations and recipes in this book, but that's not exactly feasible. so please go buy it so we can gush over it endlessly. thanks, and you never know, maybe i'll get all crazy in the kitchen as a result of tessa kiros's cookbook genius.