Salon article about my favorite food show!

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/12/02/cooking/index.html

TV chefs that don't bite
If you really want to learn how to cook -- as opposed to learning how to "entertain" -- stick with these two shows.

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By Sumana Harihareswara

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Dec. 2, 2004 | My mom served up boiled sweet potatoes, seasoned only with salt and pepper, this Thanksgiving. My boyfriend might have done the same, last year. But for our own intimate Thanksgiving dinner for two this year, Leonard expertly braised his sweet potatoes in butter, cream and sugar, yielding yams so perfect I gobbled them down with embarrassing zeal.

As Leonard gets to be a better and better cook, I find myself inviting people over to his house for dinner, and last month I finally stopped trying to convince myself that my jeans had just shrunk in the wash.

How did my engineer boyfriend learn to cook so well? Certainly not from watching the food shows the cable TV channels dish up in abundance. The personality-driven recipe files of Emeril Lagasse, Nigella Lawson, Rachael Ray, Jamie Oliver, even Jacques Pepin entertain us, but they don't teach us much cooking. And "Iron Chef"? That's just a neo-feudalistic game show that happens to involve food.
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about the Glory and Sara stories

(you know, I really ought to refresh my memory when writing in a setting. I thought Sara's name was Emmy, when it was really Glory's mother who was named Emmy. Oops. Fixed now. Reference is the story Glory Hodgett.)

There are stories I write that are about characters, and their environment is secondary to the story. Witness the Mouse stories, which are located somewhere or other, quite possibly in the Midwest. And there are stories that are about the environment. The Glory stories are an example of those.

The place that Glory and Sara live in is fairly specific: the Sierra Nevadas, near the foothills, north and east of a dying former mining town known as Copperopolis. It's a sere and dusty volcanic landscape down below and a forbidding series of spiky mountains and deep valleys above. The dirt's red with iron and not good for growing much other than tall fir trees and giant bugs. It's a hard land, subject to devastating natural forces--deep snow, floods in the spring, fires in the summer and fall.

I spent quite a bit of time in the area as a kid, as there's a ski area nearby that my family went to all the time. I was never much of one for the snow. The best time of year was the summer, when we would go up and play on the hills.

There were people who lived in the mountains, way in the back end of nowhere. These were the mountain men. You could always tell them because they all shared a common look: grizzled and bearded, their faces lined deeply, their skin tanned leathery by the sun. Some of them were trappers, other loggers, others just guys who couldn't handle life among people and so dug their own septic systems and put up cabins on land that might or might not have belonged to them. We'd see them in the grocery stores, with their battered pickup trucks, stocking up on canned goods. Then winter would come and they'd vanish for the season.

There's a lot of land in the Sierras. Most of it's vertical.

The place has a kind of hard magic about it. My idea of peace is a cloudless winter night there, the full moon illuminating fresh snow bluely. Mostly, I remember the red dust and the dry hills.

That's the place that's in the bloodstreams of the characters. There's a lot of room for weird wildness in there, even in the present day. Glory isn't one of my favorite characters, but she seems to be somehow necessary: a fae in a place that is definitely not the setting of a fairy tale.