EyeSwoon, as its name announces, is a lifestyle blog designed first as a feast for the eyes. But Athena Calderone, the site’s founder and chief roving eye, knows she wouldn’t be doing her job if she engaged only one of the senses—instead, she has to find a balance between them.
In a crowded field, blogs like Calderone’s stand out when sumptuous visuals of the life you want to lead draw you in so completely that you can smell the sherry and chanterelles mingling in the recipe for braised chicken legs. At their most immersive, lifestyle blogs engage even the ears, making their subject matter so present you can hear the crackle of spring snap peas or the fireplace sparking in a Swiss chalet, to cite two of Calderone’s obsessions from the past year. “I’m a hypervisual person, and at my core I just really love to create beauty,” says Calderone, who is also an interior designer. “But I found that the visual alone didn’t encompass all the things I was passionate about.”
Today she juggles EyeSwoon’s coverage of food, fashion, travel, and design; the renovation of a historic townhouse in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, which she and her family hope to occupy next year; and the writing, testing, and styling of recipes for Feast Your Eyes, the working title of her first cookbook,
due from Abrams in fall 2017. However, it took Calderone a while to find her a balance between multiple activities, and her journey wasn’t always a smooth one. Calderone—who shaved her head and tended bar at iconic Manhattan nightclubs in the '90s, before trying acting as an outlet for her myriad creative impulses—had an instinct for dabbling which pre-dated the current acceptance of multi-tasking. “I was almost embarrassed by all those creative ramblings,” she says now. “For so long I thought that I just needed to be one thing, that it was a hindrance instead of something that made me unique.” In the end, the key to her success would be creating a space that could harmoniously combine of all of her creative interests.
That space is EyeSwoon, a visual presentation designed to whet the creative omnivore’s appetite. Even the website’s name works on multiple levels. It’s wordplay, a take on the pronunciation of Calderone’s favorite declaration of enthusiasm: “I swoon.” So it seems fitting that for her latest creative inspiration, Calderone cut herself off from the way beauty usually enters her consciousness—visually—and instead surrendered to the way things sound.
Recently, Calderone was excited to seek out that heightened consciousness—and to unplug from the demands of her blog and cookbook—at a wellness weekend in the Hamptons hosted by Buick to celebrate the launch of their new Envision SUV. The vehicle inspired the events of the weekend, which centered around health, balance, and beauty from the inside out. There Calderone sampled a technique that currently has plenty of mindfulness-seekers swooning: she took a sound bath. It isn’t an exercise in grooming—sound bathing is a form of meditation wherein gongs, vibrations, chanting, and contemplative arias coaxed from vessels known as singing bowls wash over the bather in waves that are by turns soothing, percussive, disorienting, and deeply intimate. The hope is that the experience loofahs away the sensory overload clogging our mental pores.
“I was ready to be taken on the journey, and I found it to be very profound,” says Calderone, whose session was administered by sound bathing specialists Jarrod Byrne Mayer and Melody Balczon, of the Maha Rose Healing Center in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. At one point Calderone experienced a whisper of coolness she associated with a sea breeze; she later learned she’d been brushed with a feather. Meanwhile, a tuning fork pressed to one chakra choreographed a response sensed in another, segmenting Calderone’s being like an orange. “They placed it on my forehead, and immediately I felt something around my heart, and I got emotional,” she recalls. “I really felt this wave going through my body.”
Calderone found the moods and the shifts in tone from softness to intensity to be like the varied rhythms of cooking, in which one set of ingredients can require a light touch while another responds to a decisive chop. And by closing her eyes, Calderone was drawn deeper into the experience, an addition by subtraction that is a recurring theme of the advice she shares on EyeSwoon. Calderone’s instinct when plating, whether on family-style platters or for a single serving, is to leave negative space around the food, guiding the eye around the composition much like the way she was guided by sound.
“We all want to relax more or be more present, more in tune with our bodies,” she says. “Everybody needs a gateway or a portal—I found it very meaningful that sound could be harnessed to give me greater access to myself.”
Of course, another of Calderone’s creative instincts is that visually dynamic food lushly plated will only get you so far. Sound is a very important guest at the table, too. For dinner parties she conducts mood through a playlist that moves from swoony, seductive tones to more rock-oriented energies as the conversation crests.
This attentiveness to the power of sound is a happy by-product of her marriage to sought-after DJ and producer Victor Calderone. It’s tempting to wonder what the man who’s been a go-to remixer for some of the 21st century’s hottest musicians would make of sound bathing; could he quiet his dance-driven instincts to sample the gong beat or rearrange the twinkle of the chimes?
“Oh I called him immediately and described it,” Calderone says with a laugh. “He was like, ‘Yep, I’m in.’”
Fall sounds Calderone relishes include the first bite into a crisp apple or vegetables sizzling as they roast; below is an EyeSwoon recipe for roasted carrots brightened with honey and deepened with sumac or paprika. And stay tuned at the end for one of Calderone’s signature “Swoon Tips,” secrets for achieving the spare, elegant aesthetic of the blog.
Honey Roasted Carrots with Sumac Yogurt • 10 carrots, washed
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• 1-2 tablespoon honey for drizzling
• 2 tablespoons hazelnuts toasted and roughly chopped
• 1/4 cup parsley roughly chopped, plus more for garnish
• 1 clove of garlic, smashed and minced
• 1/3 heaping cup Greek yogurt
• 1/4 teaspoon sumac or smoked paprika
(if you want more heat, add more to taste)
DIRECTIONS
• Preheat the oven to 350°F.
• Remove the tops of the carrots, place them onto a sheet pan, and drizzle with some olive oil. Toss the carrots to coat, and season with salt, pepper and a drizzle of honey.
• Place in the oven for 30 minutes, then flip the carrots over and return to the oven for 10-15 minutes until slightly wrinkled with darkened edges.
• Meanwhile toast the hazelnuts in a small, dry frying pan until they are golden brown: this will only take a few minutes.
• Immediately place in a kitchen towel and rub together to allow the skins to peel away. Roughly chop.
• In a bowl, stir together the parsley, garlic, yogurt, and spice.
• Place the roasted carrots onto a serving dish and layer on the yogurt dressing. To finish, sprinkle the hazelnuts and chopped parsley and a touch more sumac.
SWOON TIP
When plating your carrots be sure to leave some negative space on the outer perimeter of the plate – less is more! Be mindful to create color and textural contrast as well. A sprinkle of vibrant herbs and the crunch of a nut can elevate both the taste and visual appeal of the overall dish.
Written By Kyle Brazzel
Photographed by Jacqueline Harriet
Food Image: Courtesy of EyeSwoon
