broken suns

the result of a morning spent seeing how thinly my husband could slice the brittle and crumbly caps of a bag full of chanterelle mushrooms. i see the rays of a galaxy full of  broken suns. my husband sees a four egg omelet stuffed full of sauteed mushrooms. we each got what we wanted.

chanterelle mushrooms

something becoming not itself

i’m sure you can still recognize these as watermelon slices, but i loved how close they came to looking like something that is not a watermelon slice. at some point, my eyes were drawn less to the giveaway pink flesh and more to the patterns of lines made in space by the arcs of the green rinds. if there were only green rind lines in this photo, would you still recognize them? would it still be a watermelon?

watermelon (Citrullus lanatus)

all grape juice is clear

one thing you learn when you spend time in a wine village is that all grape juice is clear (with a minuscule few exceptions), which means that any color in wine, even the deepest red, comes from the skins essentially “dyeing” the juice. in case you needed a visual, the clear circles are grape slices, and the colored circles are grape halves.

green grapes

on a roll

when i think of cabbage, i think of umbrella leaves, or boiled beef and cabbage, or cabbage rolls, or a certain heavy scent in the water of the next morning’s stock pot. i do not think of involuted and spectacular abstract art.

red cabbage

rorschach broccoli

these are finely sliced broccoli stems, although they look to me like amoebae, or possibly viruses, or maybe the embryos of keith haring figures. whatever they are, they began the day as a single stalk of broccoli, and ended the day as inconclusive and exclamatory abstract shapes. i hope they enjoyed the journey. i certainly enjoyed my role as alchemist, turning organic matter into abstraction.

broccoli stems