A friend recently shared a picture with me from a visit they made to The Alhambra in Granada, Spain, a few years ago.
After playing with it for a few hours, I fell in love with this deceptively-simple rosette.
In August, thanks to an invitation my pal, Nirja, I started learning Islamic Geometry. We’ve been taking free classes on Wednesday mornings with the Prince Foundation School of Traditional Arts and supplementing our bi-weekly classes with all the youtube lessons we can find.
I’ve spent the past week figuring out how to translate my ruler-and-compass drawings to a digital format so that I can keep track of all the designs I’ve learned. Up first: this six-fold hammerhead pattern that I learned during my first class back in August.
It shows up in Syria and again – a few years later – in Spain.
Lunchtime: unequivocally the best part of the day. But could it be better? Yes sir, it can. You don’t have to spend gobs of money going out, but you also shouldn’t be packing the same peanut butter sandwich year in and year out; there is a middle way. The path to becoming a lunch box buddha isn’t so hard. All you need is a good balance of inspiration and improvisation.
Spanish food and I don’t really get along. To illustrate my point, I took a picture of the fruits and vegetables section of my grocery last time I went shopping.
One of these things is not like the other
Spanish people are obsessed with pigs. There’s just no getting around it. Galicians in particular also seem to have a borderline-abnormal fixation on plastic bags. Because I am Captain Planet (and also just because I hate when I have a lot of groceries and my bag breaks on the walk home), I always bring my own bags. Unfortunately, the ladies who weigh your produce at the frutería don’t like it if you try to put your onions in your own bag because it’s “unhygienic” (this coming from a people who think it’s totally 100% no big deal to put a severed pig’s head in a pile of lettuce).
So anyway, lunch! This week I invited my German friend Julia over to make lunch with me because it’s Carnaval so all our friends were glamming it up in the Canary Islands and also because I like her a whole lot. Cooking lunch for the week is a whole lot easier when you have someone cooking with you. Not only does it mean half as much chopping, for this particular menu it means you get done faster because one person can roll the pita/falafel while the other cooks them.
Mamoot 