What kind of donut... are you?

Carrot Cake Donuts

Recently, my professor decided to play a game with us. She read a list of desserts aloud and asked each of us which we would pick if the list was a menu we were offered at a restaurant. The idea was that a dessert we enjoy may say something about our psyche.  I picked chocolate vanilla cream cake, which apparently means I am ambiguous and undecided, but I usually maintain friendships in a long term capacity. Others picked such things as double chocolate brownies which meant that they were sexy and adventurous but moreover indulgent. At first I thought the whole exercise was silly, except that I felt like I had been made. I am indeed ambiguous. I choose vanilla cream with chocolate because I want both worlds. I don't want to choose between fresh/creamy or rich/chocolaty. I want it all. To that same extent, I can't let go of either one the same way I can't seem to let go of an old friend. It made me wonder about the whole ambiguity of expression through food. Surely we cook as a means of expression but the medium is not one so straight forward. Obviously, choosing chocolate vanilla cream cake doesn't mean you can't let go of the past. It got me thinking, What kind of donut... are you?

Banana chocolate chip fritters

Mom got to be thirty-eight when I was twenty-five. She would never have more than four candles on her birthday cake. So she was only thirty-eight when she died. I’m going to do the same thing. I’m staying thirty-eight myself, maybe forty tops. She never cared what the calendars said, and neither do I. Sometimes I feel twenty and sometimes I feel two hundred, and when you do, no arithmetic can pep you up or slow you down.

- Billie Holliday

Ice cider donuts

“Pain, ice, Mona—everything.  And then ‘Papa’ said, ’Now I will destroy the whole world.’ ”

“What did he mean by that?”

“It’s what Bokononists always say when they are about to commit suicide.:”

- Kurt Vonnegut

Corn bread donuts

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

- Faulkner

Raspberry jelly stuffed donuts

If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange

And be all to me? Shall I never miss

Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss

That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,

When I look up, to drop on a new range

Of walls and floors ... another home than this?

Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is

Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change?

That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,

To conquer grief, tries more ... as all things prove;

For grief indeed is love and grief beside.

Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.

Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,

And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Lemon curd poppy seed donuts

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.  

-Henry James

Egg nog custard donut

Courtesy of Katherine Romanow

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

-Federico Fellini

Beet cinnamon vanilla rose donut

'One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write: the end in all three is a noble culture. - Learning to see - habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects. This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one's control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language 'strong will-power': the essence of it is precisely not to 'will', the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus - one  has to react, one obeys every impulse. In many instances, such a compulsion is already morbidity, decline, a symptom of exhaustion - almost everything which unphilosophical crudity designates by the name 'vice' is merely this physiological incapacity not to react - a practical application of having learned to see: one will have become slow, mistrustful, resistant as a learner in general. In an attitude of hostile calm one will allow the strange, the novel of every kind to approach one first - one will draw one's hand back from it.'

 - Nietzsche

Poutine aux beignes

Courtesy of Boris Volfson

Là, là, j'travaille comme une enragée, jusqu'à midi. J'lave. Les robes, les jupes, les bas, les pantalons, les canneçons, les brassières, tout y passe ! Pis frotte, pis tord, pis refrotte, pis rince... C't'écoeurant, j'ai les mains rouges, j't'écoeurée. J'sacre. À midi, les enfants reviennent. Ça mange comme des cochons, ça revire la maison à l'envers, pis ça repart ! L'après-midi, j'étends. Ça, c'est mortel ! J'hais ça comme une bonne ! Après, j'prépare le souper. Le monde reviennent, y'ont l'air bête, on se chicane ! Pis le soir, on regarde la télévision ! Mardi !

-Michel Tremblay

À l'ancienne

Courtesy of Grant Rummel

En me voyant si peu redoutable aux enfants,
Et si rêveur devant les marmots triomphants,
Les hommes sérieux froncent leurs sourcils mornes.
Un grand-père échappé passant toutes les bornes,
C'est moi. Triste, infini dans la paternité,
Je ne suis rien qu'un bon vieux sourire entêté.
Ces chers petits! Je suis grand-père sans mesure;
Je suis l'ancêtre aimant ces nains que l'aube azure,
Et regardant parfois la lune avec ennui,
Et la voulant pour eux, et même un peu pour lui;

-Victor Hugo

Croissant-nut

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

- T. S. Eliot