chez pim

A heartful new year wish to you and yours

Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A flask of wine, a book of verse --and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness--
And wilderness is paradise enow.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

May your new year be filled with joy and love,
and may you share the paradise with your dearest ones.

all the best,
Pim

Help needed please: local agencies in Sri Lanka and Burma

Spririt Rock in Marin is coordinating help to local agencies in Sri Lanka and Burma.

I understand that some of you who want to send help to local agencies in the affected areas may find it rather dubious to be sending money and other resources to organizations that are virtually unknown to you. Today, I received an email from Spirit Rock about two local foundations, one in Burma, and the other in Sri Lanka.

I don't know about these organizations personally, but I have known Spirit Rock, a Vipassana meditation center in Marin, for many years now. I have total confidence in their legitimacy and judgement, and so I am more than willing to pass on their request for assistance. If the good folks at Spirit Rock are willing to vouch for these two organizations, I am more than certain they are trustworthy.

Please send help if you could.
----------------------------------

December 29, 2004

Dear Pim,

As you may know, Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka are among the hardest hit by the recent earthquake and tsunami that has cost tens of thousands of lives (perhaps 100,000 by the time you read this), devastated countless villages and towns, and left literally millions of people homeless.

The wisdom and skill that has been given to us in the form of the practice of Vipassana meditation was born in Asia. The Buddha experienced enlightenment in India. The wisdom he taught others has flowered into the Theravadan Buddhist tradition and is quite alive today in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka.

Many of us have been to places that have now been washed out to sea. In Thailand, one report I heard said that the tsunami had reached up to three kilometers onto land. Burmese villages (from which no news is allowed out by the ruling military junta) are very close to Phuket Thailand, which has been devastated. I think we can assume these areas of Burma are even harder hit because of the almost total lack of infrastructure and government aid.

Tsunami help, Forensic experts needed

Please help me spread the words.

Forensic experts in race against time, call for help.

Dr.Pornthip Rojanasuand and a team of Forensic experts from the Central Forensic Institute in Bangkok are racing against time in collecting DNA/hair samples of unidentified bodies before burial or cremation. She has vowed to not let a single body be cremated or buried without proper DNA collection for further identification.

The sheer number of bodies in various states of decay have made their task all but impossible. The team has issued calls for help to forensic specialists from outside the country. So far, a team of specialists from the United Kingdom has answered the call for help.

Please let me know if you are a forensic specialist and would like to offer help.
edited 1/12/05: Thank you so much for the overwhelming response to this plea for help. The Thai government has just decided to forward the rest of the forensic identification work to the Interpol, please contact them if you would like to volunteer your expertise. Thank you again for all the offers to help. I am forever grateful.

Tsunami Help blog

I will not be updating Chez Pim for the next few days, as I have been volunteering my time and efforts on the Tsunami Help blog and Tsunami Help Wiki. There is not much time for my usual frivolity at the moment.

Please pass on the links to these two very helpful sites to anyone who may need help find information about relatives or loved ones. The blog was set up by some very dedicated volunteers from all over the world, some of whom are local to the affected areas. We provide news update, links to donation sites, coordinate volunteering opportunities, and answer help inquiries. The site is updated round the clock, with volunteers monitoring new developments and answering help inquiries.

See you back here when things calm down a bit.

Tsunami relief

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who emailed to inquire about me and my family in Thailand. Thank you so much for your concerns. I am not in Thailand at the moment, I had a last minute change of plan and cancelled my trip, so I am safe and sound at home in San Francisco. My family is fine as well, they are on holiday in a different part of the country, fortunately.

Sadly, many other people are not so fortunate. The scale of devastation caused by the tsunami is almost incomprehensible. There are at least 12,000 deaths, and many more are injured or still missing. A frequently updated list of casualties in Phuket and nearby area could be found here.

The Thai government has set up emergency numbers for anyone looking for missing relatives, the phone numbers are +66 76 214492 or +66 1 643 2755. These are supposed to be English language hotlines, but if you had trouble communicating with them in English, please leave a comment for me here in this post (or email me) with your phone number, I will be more than happy to make the call for you. Please don't hesitate, I am more than happy to help.

For those of you looking for a way to help, a fantastic blog has been set up to coordinate help and information in all the affected areas, you could find the blog here: Tsunami Help Blog.

You could also send help to organizations in Thailand, more information on that could be found here.

My favorite organization, Doctors without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières(MSF), has already dispatched medical teams to help in all the affected areas. Chez Pim has a long standing campaign to raise money to support MSF, and you could add your donation to that campaign by clicking on the Spare Us a Grain of Rice banner to the left. That link was set up specifically for micro-donations, so even if you could only spare a few dollors, please do not hesitate to do it anyway. Every dollar or euro counts in times like this.

If you'd like to contact your embassy to report your friends or relatives who are still unaccounted for, the telephone numbers for embassies in Bangkok are as follow:

Paris pas cher: Chez Pim's cheap eats guide to Paris

I’ve been getting quite a few emails asking for recommendations for inexpensive Paris bistros. I do have a long list of them, but I simply haven’t had the time to write about them all on Chez Pim.

I pride myself in my ability to appreciate good food at any price. I’ve been very lucky to have many opportunities to eat at the fanciest of tables, but even I <roll eyes> cannot eat like that everyday, so here’s a list of the other places that I love and would like to share with you. Trust me, eating well doesn’t always mean eating extravagantly, especially not in a food heaven like Paris.

I hope you find this useful, please consider this a humble holiday gift to you from Chez Pim. Thank you so much for spending your precious time with me here, and for the many words of encouragement in your comments and via email. You’ve helped made this a fabulous year, and I so look forward to the next year –I have so many surprises in store, stay tuned.

Paris pas cher: Chez Pim’s cheap eats guide to Paris

Homesick curry: Panang Nuea

Chatting with my friend Max on IM tonight got me a little homesick. He is in Thailand at the moment, having a fun time wandering around Bangkok. Reading what he said about Thailand was almost as good as being there, almost. Kings of Convenience, the Norwegian acoustic duo, playing “Homesick” in the background was not helping the matter…

Everyday there's a boy in the mirror, asking me what are you doing here....homesick, but I no longer know, where home is...

I suddenly remembered a pot of Panang Nuea that I made last week. There's a portion in the freezer still. Curries freeze very well, as long as the liquid level is high enough to cover up all the meat, so I often have a portion or two on hand. Panang Nuea, a type of red curry with beef, was one of my grandfather's favorite dishes. It is one of only a handful of Thai curries that are supposed to be slightly sweet. Well, you probably didn't know that, since most Thai curries outside of Thailand are mostly too sweet. At my grandfather’s house, where I grew up, we often had it for lunch.

I have vivid memories of those lazy days sitting at table with my beloved grandfather on the wide, covered patio that ran the length of the house. It was a breezy space under the shadow of two giant mango trees, so it remained cool even on the hottest days of summer. Grandfather, khunta as I called him in Thai, took most of his lunches there.

2004 Food Blog Awards: Finalists

Woohoo! Chez Pim is finalist in four categories of 2004 Food Blog Awards:

Best Food Blog: Restaurant Reviews
Best Food Blog: Writing
Best Overall Food Blog (!)
and
Best Post, for not one but two posts! (So I am my very own Ralph Nader, lol)
A Meal Fit for A Prophet
A Perfect Paris Afternoon and the Tale of Two Ispahans

It's an honor to be nominated....oh heck, who am I kidding? of course I want to win . :P Drop by Kate's place over at the Accidental Hedonists and put a vote in for Chez Pim (you could also just click on each category above and go directly to the ballot for each section), should you be so inclined...

..ahem, if you are going to vote for Chez Pim in the Best Post category, let's all vote for the Prophet one, please? I like that one way better.

Well, but seriously, it is a huge honor to be nominated, especially in the company of such a distinguished field of finalists. Thank you so very much everyone.

xx
Pim

dinner in a can, yes, really

I didn't feel like cooking or doing anything elaborate today, nor did I have enough energy to go out. So, tonight's meal had me looking in the cupboard to see what ready-made things in there looked good enough to eat. I found a stack of goodies I bought the last time I was in France, a few rillettes de canard (a sort of country paté made of duck meat), some foie gras, and some boudin noir (blood sausage), bought from Alain Ducasse's little food shop Bé in the 8th. They are all made by the famous Auberge Iparla in the Basque country in the Southwest of France.

I decided on a can of the duck rillette, tasty and dripping in yummy pork fat, cut up a couple slices of whole grain bread from Della Fattoria, added to those a couple spoonful of robust mustard and a handful of cornichons. Poured myself a glass of 02 Ann Gros Bourgogne Rouge -just because I am by myself doesn't mean I should drink crap wine- and that was a lovely dinner for one.

I am going to bed happy.

Chocolate & Zucchini Struck Again!

The headline over on C&Z this morning reads:

The Jam Smuggler Strikes Again!

Apparently, someone has been trafficking her favorite June Taylor jams from San Francisco to her friends in Paris, and then back the other direction, this time with her french favorite Christine Ferber confitures back home for herself and a few dear friends.

Well, that someone is now -reportedly- a teeny bit worried that la douane on both directions are going to be waiting for her next time... Luckily her career of smuggling things a tad more innocuous than jams is pretty much over. Thanks to Sue and Peggy whose Cowgirl Creamery has her cravings for Neals Yard's and Jean d'Alos cheeses entirely covered.

Hmm, actually, were a leg of Jamon Iberico just a wee bit smaller...as it is a 7-kilo stinking leg of ham might be a little difficult to hide under the coat.