A tableau vivant; often shortened to tableau; pl. tableaux vivants; French for 'living picture') is a static scene containing one or more actors or models.  They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and may be theatrically illuminated.  It thus combines aspects of theatre and the visual arts.  They were a popular medieval form that revived considerably from the 19th century, probably as they were very suitable for recording by photography.  The participants were now mostly amateurs, participating in a quick and easy form of amateur dramatics that could be brought together in an evening, and required little skill in acting or speaking.  They were also popular for various sorts of community events and parades.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableau_vivant  Thank you, reader.   

Ruth Reichl (born 1948) is an American chef, food writer and editor.  In addition to two decades as a food critic, mainly spent at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, Reichl has also written cookbooks, memoirs and a novel, and has been co-producer of PBS's Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie, culinary editor for the Modern Library, host of PBS's Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine.  She has won six James Beard Foundation Awards.  Reichl's memoirs are Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998), Comfort Me with Apples:  More Adventures at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires:  The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, Not Becoming My Mother, and Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019).  In 2009, she published Gourmet Today, a 1,008 page cookbook containing over 1,000 recipes.  She published her first novel, Delicious in 2014, and, in 2015, published My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life, a memoir of recipes prepared in the year following the shuttering of Gourmet.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Reichl    

My mother “folds me into an embrace.  Heart origami.  That’s what she used to call it when we were small, and she’d open her arms and wait for us to run inside.”  Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult (pee-coh) 

The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations, one of the first accounts of how nations build wealth, was first published March 9, 250 years ago in 1776.  Wikipedia    

France brought all manner of new and exotic items to Vietnam during its colonization of the region, from beer to bread, carrots to coffee, but didn’t hand them over willingly.  The story of how the modern banh mi came together, the sort of banh mi you can pick up today at a farmers’ market in London, or from a food truck in Los Angeles, recounts 160 years of Vietnam’s history in one single, fiery package.  Recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011, and the American Heritage Dictionary in 2014, the term ‘banh mi’ has officially entered the lexicon of the English-speaking world.  But in Vietnam, it refers only to ‘bread’, or ‘wheat cake’, when translated literally.  The pork, paté, and pickles combination now familiar to the West is known as a bánh mì thịt ngoui, ‘bread, meat and cold cuts’, often referred to as the bánh mì đặc biệt, ‘the special’, the one with everything.  This is what every meat-eating traveler comes to Vietnam craving.  Như Lan may be an institution in Saigon, but the banh mi’s tale neither starts nor ends here.  Its journey to international fame began 250 yards down the street, on the banks of the Saigon River in 1859, when the first French gunships and troops arrived to storm the city and begin the 30-year conquest of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, eventually forming the federation of Indochina in 1887.  From here it would take another 70 years, two world wars, a long and bloody war with the French, the civil war that followed, and a young family fleeing the communist takeover in Hanoi to create the sandwich we know today.  https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2016/the-sandwich-that-ate-the-world/   

March 9, 2026