What's so incredible? Why is she so awesome? How does she do it?

Apple picking from Leigh Cooper on Vimeo.

Apple picking. The best parts of fall. Having trouble playing the video? Try the YouTube version if you can’t get the high quality Vimeo one above to work.

I live across the street from a fabulous Thai restaurant in Arlington, and I drag most of my mates to it on a regular basis. What I’m trying to say here is that I’m a bit of a Thai snob. I don’t do mediocre Thai. So when I was invited out to T.H.A.I. in Shirlington, I got a little nervous. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Thai food, but I also deplore bad Thai food. I decided to roll the dice of culinary fate and let the chips fall where they may.

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Turns out, I worried over nothing. T.H.A.I. in Shirlington was good Thai. Their lunch specials made my eyes pop out; at least a dozen options of noodle bowls and curry sets priced in the single digits and served with heaping portions of meat or tofu. I got the “Poor Man’s Noodles,” which were a stripped down version of a Pad Thai, consisting of peanuts, bean sprouts, scallions, egg, and fried tofu. The tofu was awesome: crispy on the outside but still spongey and flavourful on the inside. I was pleasantly surprised.

I recognize that I might have a slight addiction to pho. Maybe not addiction, precisely, because while I can go long stretches of time without pho and think nothing of it, I have a pathological inability to turn down an invitation to consume the thing. When people tell me they haven’t had pho, I feel an uncompromising need to introduce them to the dish. Luckily for me, pho is picking up popularity here in the states.

Of course not all of us can make it out to Pho 75 when the craving strikes, so I’ve been sampling some of the faceless pho joints in unsuspecting strip malls over the past few weeks. Pho is a simple dish at its heart — no sides or service required, just a hot bowl and a hungry person — so to stake the merit of these establishments on the service they provide would be to misunderstand pho entirely. The dish gets guillotined by my scorecard and the dish alone.

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Pho Vinh Loi in Falls Church isn’t first on the list of pho places I’d recommend, but it’s accessible enough and the food makes for a nice lunchtime out. The basics are all there, but where the restaurant really shines is the number of pho varieties on the menu (not to mention its all Vietnamese patronage). There’s some unusual pho options here that veer away from the standard beef.

It’s pho, though. So you can expect an unreasonable amount of food for an unrealistically low price served impossibly hot and unimaginably quickly. I think that’s the best part right there, but there are many more reasons to like pho. It’s fresh, it won’t leave you feeling grease-laden, it’s cheap, it’s delicious…what do you think is the best part of pho? What makes it so addictive and appealing?

Washington DC’s Cherry Blossoms are in bloom so I head down to the tidal basin, picnic in hand, to host my own hanami party. It’s of course not on the scale of the sakura in Japan, but it’s a neat little walk all the same.

On my plate: ambiance and miso-glazed sea bass with house-made sweet chili sauce, nishiki rice, and baby bok choy from TenPenh. The complete meal consisted of vegetarian spring rolls with three dipping sauces (including black vinegar and spicy sesame), the sea bass, five-spice chocolate cake a la mode, and a surprisingly delicious mocktail with cranberry and pineapple juice, sprite, and passionfruit puree. All in all a worthwhile venture. Long live Restaurant Week.

I make videos for a living, and I’d like to think I’ve got some skill in the arena. I absolutely love what I do, and this means I also make videos for fun. So I’ve had a bit of a problem on my hands for some time now. If you do any creative work, you may have found yourself in the same pickle, and I don’t envy you one bit.

A passion is a wonderful thing, but making your living by your passions presents some pretty unique obstacles. For example, my head is always brewing one thousand new, wonderful ideas, from the documentary on live action role-play I’m currently babysitting in preproduction to the time-lapse exploration of DC I’d like to complete, but after eight hours of working on somebody else’s film five days a week, coming home to work on my own is often the last thing on my mind. There are errands that need to be run instead and more pressing business to attend to then the several hours it would take to log my own footage or research a better microphone in my price range. Yet, the ideas still come, and it wouldn’t be a passion if I didn’t feel compelled to act on my ideas. It’s the curse of the passionate.

I’ve written in the past about my filmic frustrations, and while I know those words were little more than the fit of a petulant and impatient toddler refusing to eat broccoli, there was some truth behind it. I don’t want to make the kinds of films most people make. But what I didn’t realise was that I actually did. Well, I wanted the same production value. I wanted the decent budgets and the generous timeline and the collaborative process and a little bit of the film festival ego stroking. To put it another way, because I make my living doing video production and postproduction, I know more than the average joe about everything from timecodes and framerates to solid state recorders and mini mols. I know how to frame a shot and I know how to edit for continuity and I know how to mic an actor. So why don’t I do it in my own films?

That’s a complicated question. To make a high-value work, you need a lot of things (e.g., aforementioned budgets, timelines, and collaborative geniuses), and I’ve been wanting the high-value work without putting in the effort. Take my most recent film idea: a video log, or vlog. It’s not a novelty; I’ve been blogging for years and don’t plan on stopping now, I’m already actively involved in social networks, and I’d love nothing more than to jump on the new media bandwagon. I travel a lot, I’m interested in video, and I think I have something to say. Sounds like a perfect fit, right? So why did it take me a whole year to get it together? I didn’t got to the store.

More specifically, I didn’t got to the store because I was sure they’d be out of milk. Did I call to check? No. Did I go to the dairy counter and ask? No. Did I decide I could eat cereal sans milk? No. I just stopped buying groceries in case there wasn’t any milk at the store. It seems absurd when you look at the analogy, but in my brain it seemed perfectly logical to not bother even starting a film if I didn’t think I’d have any of the resources required to “do it right.” I wouldn’t bother to shoot anything because I knew the audio would be subpar, the framing off (it’s hard to shoot yourself without being able to see your shot!), the exposure wacky, the music mixed wrong, the graphics shoddy, the story weak, and any number of self-depricating reasons I could manufacture to put off ever starting. Then I realised how insane it was to stop making movies of any variety because I couldn’t light it well. Hello?! the critical studies side of me shouted to the rest of my mind. What you say is more important than how you say it. True, but instead of saying something, anything, I stopped talking at all to avoid my stutters and mispronunciations, or in filmic terms I stopped making video to avoid the inevitable concessions I would have to make if I wanted to get the project done. This was not just an inconvenience because, as Chris Wanstrath can tell you of creative work, when you kill off your side projects, you’re effectively killing your joy.

My standards were bogus. First of all, this is the Internet we’re talking about. That’s my audience: the people who gave us the Star Wars Kid and Snakes on a Plane. This is the land of Rick Roll’d, All Your Base, and Two Girls, One Cup. People talk into the camera for eleven minutes straight and still get subscribers. Dooce writes about putting her baby in a cardboard box and has one of the most well-known mommy blogs out there. Needing to have the next great indie sleeper hit before I’d put it on YouTube is the definition of bogus. It’s still true that I don’t want to make Must Love Dogs, but I’ve decided to let go of the production quality. Second of all, thinking I’ll ever have the time, means, and will to devote to my side projects is idealistic to the point of insanity. It’s more important that I make movies again than it is that they be the ideal movies in my head, since that state is pretty much unachievable anyway. Comparing what I am about to make to some ungrounded idea in my head is ridiculous. So, I’ve lowered the bar. Make a movie, production value be damned. Let it be out of focus. Let it be shaky and noisy and grainy. Who cares if it’s only roughly edited, or if the music doesn’t fit? My prioritisation was all out of whack. First, make the movie, then worry about how it looks. Move the energy, make more films, and improve that way, not by painstakingly deliberate scrutiny. What my film actually does counts infinitely more than what it could have done, and what it says is what matters, not what I said it would say. Spend more time focusing on what you’ll be doing on camera than what you’re doing with the camera.

Once I stopped cutting myself off, my vlog started to pick up speed. Having actually made a few of them has only reaffirmed how much more meaningful it is to have gotten them done that having them golden beautiful gems of genius that lived only in my head. It’s been a journey, and I’d like to share the first of what I hope will be many. I do “know better” than the shitty camerawork and crappy audio, but that’s not what matters. I did it. That’s what counts. With any luck, I’ll have learned enough about bogus standards, absurd reactions, and the importance of regularly nurturing my creative spirit that I’ll keep on doing it and it will keep on counting. That’s the dream.

Fall has come to Virginia

Growing up we were a two-part meal family. Aside from the occasional one-pot chili bowl, for the most part it would not be presumptuous to expect an appetizer with your entree, and coffee with your dessert. Going out to eat was always a splendid, patient affair complete with aptertifs (my sister and I learned to love the Shirley Temple during this inclusive cocktail hour), pressed white linen serviettes sometimes in fanciful shapes, and conversation to outlast our lengthy restaurant stay. It was over these candlelit tables that I learned to navigate any menu and, following my father’s lead, order the best item, to ask the right questions about a dish’s composition or seasonality, to perfect the art of sustained conversationalism from a ripe young age, and to appreciate slow food at its best, cultivating an adventurous tongue and forgiving intestines out of my family’s persistent and generous food education.

Of course dinner at home was hardly a sordid affair; I have the great fortune of not one but two culinarily-capable parents engrossed in the pastime: my father a resourceful foodie born with New England sensibilities, European taste buds, and a love of leftovers that I aspire to adapt, and my mother a fully-baked mix of southern blooded debutante raised on soul food vegetables and French-ranked gourmand who keeps a counter covered in baked goods at all times, who both have passed on their passions and know-how to their daughters, who in turn dabble in the kitchen with equal fervor, my sister fed by flour and yeast and I fueled by farmers markets. It’s quite a legacy to behold when you look it, and even more intense when you put us all in a room together.

It’s unclear to me whether my respect and adoration for good foods of all calibres — there’s nothing like a properly prepared Grande Mariner souflee, but then again not much beast a felafel kebab when your mouth is dry and your stomach empty and your clock says it’s too late for such antics — came from my family and their food passions or from my own experiences. Certainly the best part of travel for me is the gastronomic adventures I embark upon, be it breakfast sushi in Tokyo, bread in Berlin, or, as my latest adventure saw me, mussels in Brussels, but my convictions surrounding diet are equally impressive, if not altogether formidable. You’ve seen countless pictures of what’s on my plate and in my kitchen and read numerous posts about my obsession with cooking, baking, and eating, so it should come as no surprise to discover that I simply cannot comprehend why anyone skimps on food.

I understand that, when forced to cut corners in your life, food is on the list, and I wholeheartedly agree with keeping your grocery bill reasonable given your particular means, but for the life of me, I don’t understand why food is so often the first to go and not the last. Even when I was a broke university student in an expensive city I’d spend my last penny at the supermarket. I’d shop smartly, and generically, but people would look at my not pre-sliced cheese and bakery bread and basket of greens and cluck their tongues, like it was a luxury only I could afford, never mind that produce is the cheapest thing you can get at a supermarket and that my cheese cost the same as a box of instant macaroni or hamburger helper and would last me thrice as long. No, eating right and cooing well is only for the lucky. Please. As if.

You are what you eat, but you’re so much more. Food is your fuel, it becomes your skin and hair and sweat, it can turn a place into a home, it can show gratitude or devotion, it can cease a runny nose or comfort a lonely soul, it can make and recall memories stronger than anything else. A slice of my mum’s apple pie and I feel twelve again, the smell of my dad’s crab casserole and I know I’m home, the crunch of a taco and I instantly remember the faces and taco orders of all my friends back in Texas, the aroma of cornbread grounds me like a good night sleep. Take in these sights and smells and tastes. Relish them. Long for them. Learn to recreate them, or if you cannot, learn to seek them out. Sample everything. Because food is so much more than just food.

Admittedly, I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten how wonderful a slow meal in good company is. I’d forgotten how to take my time and savour every bite. I’d forgotten how food used to inspire me, not sit silently like a task on my to-do list. I’d forgotten about the relationship between food and community, the kind of honesty you just can’t find in a McDonald’s or California Pizza Kitchen. It’s a beautiful thing and I never thought I’d lose track of it. Remembering all this has overshadowed so much of my attention lately, and for good reasons, since finding my path back to the kitchen has been so much more glorious than I remember the place being. And it was Brussels that brought me back.

My whole childhood I’ve been informed in an unshakable deadpan by multiple relatives that Belgium has hands down the best food in the world. It’s easy to see why this opinion was law in my family. Couple regional specialties with French dining values, Dutch home cooking, and a wide mix of European influences and you get a gem of a culinary culture and one hell of a food scene. But it’s not just the impeccable Belgian blanche brews or the ethereal quality of the chocolateries, the incredible quality of the humble waffle stand or the mastery understated in a plate of frites with mayonnaise fritesausse, it’s the fact that there are so many unique Belgian specialties. It says to me, we don’t just do on thing well, we do everything well. Everything with passion, with an eye to detail, with a standard of quality, whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner, dessert, drink or snack. It says, quite loudly, quite repeatedly, that we value food. From the taste of the food in Brussels, it’s pretty hard to argue any differently. With each coffee I sipped, each chocolate I nibbled, each plate of something new and exciting I sampled, I remembered that I used to value food this way too.

I have been quite busy the last four months, adjusting to life in DC and getting myself set up here across the country on an entirely opposite coast, and as a result I have taken most of my meals without much thought, quietly even, in my very own kitchen. Since my return from Belgium, I have attended three sumptuous meals with a fresh mouth: a sushi feast at Momo in Old Town (by far the best sushi in Virginia), a simple but scrumptious Italian affair at Pizzaiolo in Del Rey (unbelievable wood fired pizzas), and some classic tapas at La Tasca in Penn Quarter (you can never go wrong with manchego and honey). I must say, though the costs were undoubtedly a splurge for me, especially given the frequency, the quality was superb and the experience, previously forgotten, was worth far more to me than just the cost of a meal. Eating out is certainly a luxury, but rarely is it about the food itself or even about the costs of eating it, it’s about a quality of life. The food is always tastier when you’re free the burdens of preparing and cleaning, and there are more than enough eateries in DC with the high quality food to boot. DC has the coffee shops and the produce and the posh bars in spades, but it’s my responsibility to live out the quality of life I hold dear. I consider myself well versed in the art of healthy cooking and of course gourmet tastes; I realise I am one of the few, especially considering my still green age, who appreciates not just the food, but the context, community, and the culture behind it. The road back to the dining room is no longer second nature to me, but it’s lined with delicious restaurants, seasonal fare, and an exciting new slice of local culture to delve into, and I’m just following my nose, excited about heading home.