Yesterday was a lovely January Sunday graced with enough time for the laborious yet rewarding feast of bouillabaisse. It was the first time I measured ingredients purely by intuition, and worse, I have no idea of the contents of the 10 pounds of heads and bones baselining the broth from the crazy Russian fish slingers at the back of the (West Side) Market.

What I like about the intuitive approach is two things: there is more wisdom in self-trust than recipe-compliance, and the magical ingredient is the fact that this exact recipe will never be repeated again.

You’d think that the stage would be stolen by the likes of lobster tails, mussels and scallops. But no, every time, it’s the fennel, saffron and garlic and chili pepper infused rouille.

I’ve long been a fan of design firm IDEO’s David Kelley who had a hand in the look and feel of the iPod. According to David: “Good design is not about the perfect thing anymore but about helping a lot of different people build their own personal identities.”

Indeed.

This week I made several freezer containers of organic tomato sauce. They’re a base for variations designed to bring out the best in host pastas and complementary guest ingredients. The house awash in memories of my grandmother’s house in the fall, 18 quarts of chopped tomatoes simmer down for several hours to a decent consistency 6 quarts worth.

This is slow food at its best.

According to New York Theater Workshop Director, James Nichola, “an artist who chooses to use nudity is trying to communicate something.” This is in the context of Broadway shows now tipping the balance from female to now predominantly male nudity. According to Mr. Nichola, “I think the male penis is more theatrical.”

To that I say, he’s never seen Bill Murray’s face in any of Jim Jarmusch’s indie films. Really …

That committment - to the open source projects, and the work they’ll put into those projects, as well as to the future of Open Source, is the single and most important thing to walk away from Tiger with. Apple isn’t just betting it’s future on Open Source, it’s beating Microsoft to market with it.

This from a review of Apple’s new Tiger operating system, powering the iBook that brings jack/zen to daily life. It’s just nice to know that investment in an Apple product is one more endorsement of the institutionally-disruptive Open Source community and its message that was certainly a mantra of my adolescence: grow your own, baby. Read: Let no one or entity define your reality. Very zen, indeed.

The Cleveland blog community converged this week and took a poll of people’s favorite blogs. Mine include recent links to blogs in the NY Times, links from Brewed Fresh Daily, and browsing pics from Flickr.com.

It was interesting to see that the blogs that bloggers read are quite diverse and certainly content-rich. In the not too distant future, people will be talking about blogs the way wine is talked about, comparing nuances of taste and textures. My hope is to keep jack/zen in the two-buck Chuck genre of blogs - inexpensive yet satisfying : )

In today’s NY Times, Rob Walker writes, The Moleskine just looks like a thing that holds interesting, and possibly important, jottings and sketches. Even if you’re carrying it to another boring staff meeting to take notes about sales projections, the notebook makes for a fantastic emblem of creative possibility.

It’s the celebrated nicely designed notebook of the likes of Hemingway and Picasso. I’ve been a fan for a couple of years now and would use nothing else. It’s a fashion statement as much as a garden for the muses - a reminder of the magic of the sensual in a digital world.

For fun, visit Armand Frasco’s blog on all things Moleskine - Moleskinerie.

It’s interesting that so many cultures have their own version of bread - bread loaves, pita, matso, crepes, tortilla chips, rice crackers, pastries. Grain is at the heart of food. In each case, the form provides a perfect context for the content of what it holds and conveys.

JackZen is now being published from a brand spankin’ new iBook. It’s a world of difference from the countless PC products and MS environments I’ve had since my first computer ever in the ’80’s - yes, an Apple 2C 80/86. My key chain has more memory than the 2C with its tiny little green screen and very pre-mouse arrow navigation.

The whole package is inspired and elegant in every sense of the word. Like its European design cousins, the iBook reminds us of why beauty in any genre needs to be an aesthetic imperative in whatever we choose for our world.

The NY Times this weekend reports hard times for folks whose gaydar was always a reliable detector of gay from straight. A friend jokes that the whole dilemma started with the metrosexuals who’ve introduced enough self-care to blur lines that used to be reliable indicators of “which team you play for.”

I like the trend - the inability to accurately judge people by the shape of their social personas. Now we need to have the kinds of conversations human beings need to have to honor the uniqueness of those with whom we share the same planet.