The Incredible Edible... Marigold?

One of the things I like about having this blog is that it has served as a venue for me to show my photography. I have always had a love/hate relationship with it, one that goes way back, to my first camera at the age of 6. Rather than have anyone see what kind of pictures I was taking I chose to use the camera without film. Something I've come to regret very much over the years. The things I could have learned about my style, my way of seeing from my 6 year old point of view would have been worth the cost of at least my first semester of art school. Oh well. My photography is very personal to me, although that's silly to say, who's artwork isn't personal to them, right? What I'm trying to say is, I've always had great difficulty feeling comfortable letting people see "inside" me. My photography has always been something I did because I had a NEED to do it... it was a creative outlet for me that I took in varying degrees of seriousness over the course of my life.

Then one day I decided I had stopped being able to "see"...

and so I put down my camera and except for half-hearted attempts at taking pictures every so often I didn't do any photography outside of vacation shots for almost ten years. I tried replacing photography with drawing. I'm probably the only artist ever to come out of art school with no skill, learned OR improved at drawing. (Interesting side note: I am hopelessly left-handed except for two things that I can do with my right hand... crochet and use a mouse to draw!) Painting was easier, but it certainly didn't mean I was talented at it. I did find an outlet for my creative urges through pottery, and I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed doing more sculptural types of pottery. Taking the clay and forming it with my hands, feeling it, shaping it, molding it, and controlling it... perhaps that's why I'm drawn to baking, in many ways the two are quite similar. I was happy doing pottery and happily enrolled in a program that allowed me to be creative and more importantly encouraged me to be creative. Then they received a large grant, which meant desperately needed renovations to the school would FINALLY get done, but it also meant closing the school for quite some time during the process. Then September 11th happened and the school, which was not far from the World Trade Center did not open again for a long time. When it did finally open, my schedule had changed enough that taking classes there was no longer feasible.

I needed to release my creative energy somehow, and so I picked up my camera once again. It has been a little over a year since, and I feel like I've begun to "see again" in a new and very exciting way. The camera comes with me almost everywhere now. I'm learning how to trust my talent AND how to feel comfortable talking about my work, which is something I've also had a hard time doing.

So what does this have to do with marigolds? Well, maybe nothing but, they seem to be haunting me lately. I was recently going through a pile of old negatives and came across the above photo. Hmmm, this is nice, I'll scan it and save it, decide what to do with it another time. Two days later I found myself on the bus, held hostage with the rest of the passengers into listening to a VERY loud phone conversation in which the girl on MY end was horrified that the person on the other end had received a marigold plant from the person she kept referring to as "he's such a jerk". "He gave you a what? a marigold plant? he's such a jerk like what are you going to do with that? he's such a jerk" A week later we rented a wonderful movie called Monsoon Wedding. In the movie one of the main characters eats marigolds-seemingly non-stop and I remember thinking while watching the movie "I think I knew they were edible, I must find out more." I promptly forgot about researching it, until last night when I came across this picture once again. This time I remembered to look into it and found that marigolds ARE edible my friends, and if I had a plant in my apt. right now, I'd snap off a bud, have a taste and write about it here. Since I don't- I'll send you here and here and you can learn more, then go here for a recipe. I'm intrigued by the possibilities...I could make salads and sauces or I could do another pasta dish, this time using white wine, butter, shrimp and marigolds. At the very least it would look awfully pretty. No?

Written by Deb on February 25, 2003 12:02 AM