WRITING IN HOTELS part one

 Wendall -- every other Thursday

This week, my post is more pictures than words, as James and I are trying to both pack and unpack—our new apartment still resembles a bit of a bombsite and we are also getting ready for our trek to San Diego to see so many friends, authors, and readers at Bouchercon 2023. 

 

 

Right now, though, the thing I’m most looking forward to is staying in the hotel. 

 

Bouchercon's host hotel -- the Marriott Marquis!

 

I love hotels. Any hotel. Or motel, for that matter. I associate them with happy family vacations when my brother and sister and I were young—my Dad always made sure there was a pool and sprung for “Magic Fingers” just to watch us laugh. Once I had my driver’s license and could travel on my own, my heart leapt up every time I spotted a Motel 6, a Howard Johnson’s, or a Holiday Inn on 1-95 or the Jersey Turnpike.

 

Ice cream! Clams! Orange roof!

 

Seeing a hotel summons up my first visits to Europe, Australia, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and really, anywhere. For me, they scream travel, adventure, new restaurants, memorable sunburns, wake-up calls, free coffee and body lotions, and fresh sheets I will never have to wash.

 

When I worked on the film Young Guns, I lived in a hotel in Santa Fe for four months. I was in heaven.

 

Charlie Sheen once climbed into my room from this balcony, to hide from double-booked girlfriends...

 

Now that I’m a writer, hotels are still where I do my best work. I almost always go away alone at the beginning, middle, and end of every book, for the concentrated time I can create in a hotel room and its surrounding restaurants and bars, where I can work over coffee or a glass of wine. 

 

Here are my favorite places in Carpinteria.

 

Corktree Cellars.

Spaghetti and meatballs and notebook at Little Dom's

.

Esau's great breakfast. Michael McDonald eats there. The back of his head is below.

There are a few hotels I’ve gone enough times, that they actually will always give me my “lucky” room, since, like many writers, I’m superstitious about things like that. So today, I’m going to share a few images of my hotel writing life in two LA-adjacent hotels, in Downtown LA and Carpinteria.

 

Here are a couple of photos from my "lucky room" in Carp.

 

 

 

 I love to write on the balcony, even when it's freezing in the morning.

And for "staycation" writing, the Westin Bonaventure is my favorite. They also always give me my favorite room...

 

By (obviously windy) day.

By night.

 

These are a few of the everchanging views from my lucky room.

 

 

And a few shots of the space age interior.

 

 

All the rooms are octagonal.

And some of my haunts when I actually leave the room...

Nick & Stef's for their Oaxacan Old Fashioned.

Drago for happy hour wine.

And when I'm really splurging, Bottega Louis, for the most expensive pizza in the world.

 

I'm sure more wonders await us all in San Diego, and will report back about Bouchercon, and its host hotel, the Marriott Marquis, when next we convene.

 

Here is my Appearance Schedule there, if anyone wants to stop by and say hello:

COZIES AND COCKTAILS

Wednesday night Aug. 30 8:30pm  Check schedule for location

 

SPEED DATING

Thursday Aug. 31 at 7am(!) North Tower Pacific Ballroom 15-17

 

HUMOR AND HOMICIDE: How Authors Kill At Both

Saturday Sept. 2 at 1:05 Rm 3 GB 3

--- Wendall

Tomatoes for Two

 Sujata Massey

It’s entirely possible to buy tomatoes in many parts of the world without being able to speak the language. In Spanish and German, it’s called a tomate. In Hindi, they say tamaatar, and in Gujarati, tamota. In Turkish, domades. 

 

There seems to be one theme emerging, but there’s a second linguistic direction followed by those who speak romance languages. The French named the tomato pomme d’amour (love apple). The aphrodisiac philosphy carries over to the name pomidor in Russian and pomodoro in Italian.

 

I was born in England so I used to say toe-mah-toe, but now that I’m in the US it’s toe-may-toe. Doesn’t sound as romantic, but I do believe tomatoes are the binder of happy meals and marriages. 

 

Last Sunday, my husband Tony and I agreed it would be a good idea to buy 30 pounds of Roma tomatoes at the farmers market in order to stock up for the fall and winter. 

I actually only needed about five pounds of tomatoes to make a highly spiced Indian tomato chutney.

On the other hand, Tony needed a huge amount. He wanted to make a few gallons of a pureed tomato, garlic and onion sauce that could be a base for many dishes. He’s been making this sauce for us for years and ensures a good store for most of the year by carefully pouring 2-cup quantities and freezing them. But now that he’s got his own vacuum-sealing equipment, he could do it in air-tight blocks to be stored in our large standing freezer (another recent husband purchase). 

 

I don’t know if you are getting the dynamic of our 31-year-marriage yet, but it involves what you might call differences of opinion.

 

Two people, two tomato-buying expeditions ensued. On a Friday, I bought 5 pounds of Roma tomatoes from a roadside farm stand. On Sunday, when we went to the Baltimore Farmers Market, where I found the only farmer selling bushels and larger of tomatoes, including Romas, which everyone knows are the preferred sauce-making tomato due to their lower level of water content. I paid for the beauties, and Tony lugged a 25-lb cardboard box packed with Romas to our car. When he got home, he located the cotton gloves he’d wear under vinyl gloves to protect his hands from slipper tomato juice, and he located the vacuum sealing machine and roll of heavy-duty freezer plastic. The knives came out, and operation tomato sauce was underway.

 

At the start of marriage in our twenties, I’d have been at Tony’s side helping him blanch a few hundred Roma tomatoes in lightly simmering water, and then deseed, as well as the eyewatering task of chopping onions. But Tony’s cooking style is longer and more perfectionist than mine, so I’ve leave him to cook some dishes undisturbed.

 

When his sauce was on its first simmer (yes, it gets cooked twice!) and all his rigamarole was in the dishwasher, I returned to the kitchen to start prepping. My recipe was a lot simpler, and I had many fewer tomatoes to chop. Still, I had to do some math to calculate the right amount of vinegar and sugar and garlic and ginger to use. Just slivering the fresh ginger and garlic took me an hour and a half. 

 

I am always looking for shortcuts, so I decided to try simmering my chutney in a slow cooker. After a night’s cooking on low, I was disappointed that the temperature was just a bit too low for the chutney to thicken. So, I poured the warm mixture of tomatoes, spices and vinegar into a ceramic-coated Dutch oven, and after I brought it to ha happy boil, I lowered the temperature to simmer and partially covered the pot.  About four hours later, the red chunks swimming in vinegar had reduced by half into a rich reddish brown, sticky concoction. I added just a tiny bit more sugar and salt to taste, and the chutney was ready to cool in the fridge.

 

At the end of our tomato weekend, the kitchen smelled of vinegar and garlic, and we were happily exhausted. Both tomato recipes are listed on my website. Tony’s sauce is European, and my chutney is Indian, but we are united as a couple who will share these savory tastes over the upcoming six months. 

 

Here’s what one can do with a simple tomato-onion-garlic sauce:

Add Italian herbs and make a marinara sauce

Add ground meat and make it a ragu

Add cumin and chilies and other ingredients to make a Middle Eastern, Mexican or Indian gravy to blanket a baked dish or curry

Add milk or cream to make cream of tomato soup

 

 

Here are some ways to use a tomato chutney:

Serve it as an accompaniment to a classic Indian meal

Add it to a cheese, vegetable or chicken sandwich

Serve it with grilled meat or fish

Peel hardboiled eggs, split them, and put a dash of chutney down the middle

 

Bon Appetit!

Not What I Expected to Say Today

Annamaria on Monday

I started out today thinking that  this blog would entreat you to join me as a warrior against plastic.  I have been telling anyone who would listen my little spiel on that subject, which I intended to enhance here with current scientific data to convince you to take up the cause.

I collected a few articles as research, but then only three pages into the first one, from National Geographic, I was stopped in my tracks.  Between 2004 and now, the article said "...scientists  have located micro plastics all over the globe, from the floor of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Mount Everest."

STUNNING!  And very depressing.  I thought today to invite you to become a warrior in a war that has already been lost.

One of the greatest artifacts of human kind,
seen from the angle here that shows David's fear
of the giant.  This is how I feel right now.

I don't get depressed easily, but after reading the above, it took me a few minutes to recover my dropped jaw.  And when I looked up, my desktop computer was doing what it does just before it goes to sleep.  It was showing me random selections from the 20K+ photos in my file.  The images I saw helped me recover a modicum of sanity, reminding me of my great good fortune: that I have had the privilege of leading an extraordinarily interesting life.  What flashed before my eyes were photos of life-long friends, cute dogs, babies I have known and held in my arms, Christmases past, and many many trips to splendid places.  And best of all, NASA pictures of the cosmos - like the one at the top, which remind me that I am just a speck on a tiny planet, in an ordinary solar system, in an average galaxy, in a vast universe.  

 

So, mostly to cheer myself up, here is a selection from my gargantuan photo collection, with bits of commentary, in pretty much chronological order. 

Is there anything cuter than a baby elephant?

Egypt

Iceland

   

The Okavango Delta

I first went to Cambridge, England in 1977.

What I remembered best from that visit 

was how very beautiful was the ceiling of 

Kings College Chapel.  When I went back last year,

I found it was more beautiful than I remembered! 

Painting by Jane Peterson, here to represent

the hundreds, thousands of great works that

I have had the privilege of viewing.

I have been staring at this view  for twenty-five

 years.  It never fails to thrill me!

These two photos represent all the beauty of

Japan, and the day I spent in Koyasan

with Susan Spann, one of the most

wondrous days of my life.

These peonies to represent all the flowers

that bring me joy.

These two are of Siracusa in Sicily,

my gorgeous ancestral city.

Lake Manyara, Tanzania

My favorite of the many gorgeous birds of Africa

Ravenna, Italian birds in mosaic

Table set for Christmas Eve,

a ghost of Christmas past

The coast of California.  I didn't know how deeply

I would fall in love with it.

In closing, symbols of the future: Two places where I have the enormous privilege and pleasure of contributing now to efforts that will glow and blossom into the future - my idea of immortality.

The view from a ridge overlooking the majestic 

Hudson.  In the next few years, a beautiful open-air

theater will be built here.  Young people will be making

theater in it for generations to come.

Some of the girls of the Sidai Resource Centre, who

are escaping their traditional fate as chattel, who

will learn and grow into women who will change 

their world to insure freedom for all the girls to come.

A souvenir of an exhibition about Woody Guthrie.

Woody's sentiments are exactly the same as mine.