Where is this Quoz you speak of?

William Least Heat-Moon, whose 1983 travel odyssey "Blue Highways" holds a special place on the bookshelf in my heart, spoke at last weekend's Texas Book Festival. I was there to write about the cookbook authors and food writers who were speaking, but I sneaked into Heat-Moon's Sunday morning session and was, as expected, inspired and rejuvenated.

He talked a lot about writing his newest book, "Roads to Quoz." Quoz, he said, is the fecundity, or richness, of the unexpected, which in itself creates more fecundity in your life. What Quoz is exactly in *this* book? Well, I want that for your own discovery, he said. Travel does not merely change us, he said, but it transforms, expands and connects us.

He laments that today generation (who me?) has a lack of connection with anything beyond themselves. "We are so far from first things," he said.


The letter Q is a thing for him. In the book, he refers to his wife as "Q," and in the lecture on Sunday, he talked on a word I hadn't heard: querencia, a special place where a human has a special connection, where when they return, they are a different person. Querencia comes from the Spanish for "to love" (ie, quieres taco bell. mi querido.) and has meant in Texas culture the place where a Longhorn steer was born. One of the reasons I feel connected to Heat-Moon is because we share una querencia. He lives near Columbia, Mo., where I went to school and he, too, spent his youth in the Ozarks.

He lives in his querencia; I don't, but the wisdom he gains by relishing in the old growth and surrounding himself with slow-changing sameness I found inexplicably touching and reassuring. That there will always be my querencia and there will always be the road.

Eat, Memory, Garlic

Eat, Memory: The Sixth Sense

By GARY SHTEYNGART
Published: October 9, 2005

Growing up I dreamed of garlic the way some dream of bright city lights. I had smelled the forbidden vegetable (spice? herb?) during brief trips to Manhattan, roasted garlic coating the poorer sections of town, clinging to the peeling fire escapes, pouring down the tenement stoops to sucker-punch me in the nose, my 10-year-old mind reeling with flavor and summertime heat and the still inchoate idea that sex could somehow be linked with the digestive process (cf. "Seinfeld").

Read the rest here...

(I can see it now, a not-too-bald George (Jason Alexander) crawling out from under the ravenous bedsheet activities to get a bite of a sandwich he's hidden in the bedside stand.)

I read this food column in "Eat, Memory," a compilation of essays published in the New York Times Magazine under the editing of Amanda Hesser, the longtime Times food editor who is coming to the Texas Book Festival early next month.

The writing in this book is taking me back to Jacqui Banaszynski's class -- the last time I can remember my writing being so closely scrutinized -- where we had to sum up our stories and the stories we analyzed in one single solitary word.

In the exercises in her class, we had to get past that we were writing about dessert, for example, to realize our words more precisely represented tradition, comfort or adventure.

In this article, it's lust or maybe passion. But is this article by Tom Perrotta about finickiness or outright control? Is lying to your diners to preserve your perceived originality more about ego or pride?

Of course, we won't all agree, because the meaning we find says more about ourselves than the author's intention, but it's a fun game to play, especially when we're talking about food.

Thought reduction

I found tweetstats.com via Twitter today. It gives you an idea of when, what and to whom you most frequently tweet. They do that cloud thing, which is basically a pie chart of words.

I've seen these before, but it's interesting when you look at them and realize they are, in cooking terms, a reduction of one's thoughts. At the least, it gives you a taste of what's been on my mind (or at least my Tweeting fingertips) in the past few months.

Ruby + Mangos = One Happy Julian

Julian's such a freakin' delight to have around. He's a happy child, whose few tantrums don't seem to affect the true nature of who he is. He figured out how to say "Ruby" and "mango" today. Ian's got him saying something that could be discerned as "yellow," and I swear the kid told me my necklace was "pretty." In baby talk, of course. Anyway, here's a few of his new words, plus the crazy happy spinning dance we should all do when sometime elevates our spirits.