Yup, it’s that time again when I write a poem

It’s been a while since I’ve put up a poem. As usual, it’s pretty rough. I like a lot about it and I think I can make it work.

I’m almost done with my manuscript, but struggling to make a couple of poems tighter. AND I HATE writing cover letters. Oh, help!

Vinegar and Sugar
(the German word for please is bitte)

In my mother’s brain,
the area responsible for taste
has interchanged
with the area responsible
for memory

She does not ask me for “Vinegar sugar soup, bitte”

But when I make lentils
for dinner,
she slyly opens the pantry door
(as if her desire to have a secret makes her invisible),
takes out the bottle of white vinegar,
and pours it into the soup

Mom, it already has vinegar in it

I like a lot, she says

She moves on to sneak the sugar bowl from the cupboard
and dances teaspoon after teaspoon
into her vinegar soup

All my Oma really wanted to eat
when she reached her 90s
was Schokolade

She stashed it in drawers
and behind books,
wrapped it in cloth and kerchiefs
in her little room
where they put her
with her little window
high up on the hill
at the top of the small
German town where she lived
most of her life
and died her only death

Now my mother
wants only sweet and sour
around her

She forgets
that she hates soup
and soup with beans
and that all they had to eat during the war
was soup
and beans
and her father’s rabbits and rooster

So,
sour or sweet,

who am I to stop her, bitte?

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new poem

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a poem.

I’ve been working on a couple of manuscript submissions among a few other things. I suspect once I’m back home and done with my deadline, I’ll write again.

Without further ado….

All You Can Eat

The city’s grime on my hands,
my feet

I hike my leg into the sink
watch the dark water
rinse down the drain

no homeless
no bikes
no traffic
just me
and my feet

I wonder how long
before I am obese

like the man picking a quarter cup of coffee
out of the garbage

all I can eat
every day
I’ll go
and stay
for 2 hours
4 kheers after 3 servings of chicken tikka

I’ve eaten enough
now straight to the source
I’ll fill the bowl
with rice pudding and rose petals
and soak

no more food

time to starve

time

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Poetry Jam II, 2012

This week’s Poetry Jam prompt has to do with spices and cooking, but it was presented in a broad manner and open to many interpretations; I really liked this flexibility. So far, from the submissions and poems I’ve read in response to the prompt, it seems many of us love writing about exotic spices, cooking, our senses of smell, and the concomitant associations of all of those with sex.

Not sure if this is finished, but I really wanted to link to it before too long. In any case, on with the show.

Apres Le Diner

Fingerbowls of powdered red dust
black sesame seeds

Oil sizzles in a cast iron pan
cardomom pops

I smell like curry,
lime,
and honey,
in the late heat of the day,

I taste sharp garlic and hot ginger
on our mingled fingertips

Your puzzle of spices and fruit pods
makes sense

There is a mushroom
that mimics the smell of decay
to attract flies to spread its spores

Using scent to get what we need

*****************************

This week’s Poetry Jam got me thinking about a few other things, not directly as a response to the prompt, but I’ve decided to include them here as a sort of Part Two of this post. Incomplete, perhaps, like my little poem; read on if you like.

Last year, I visited Salem, Massachusetts for the first time. So many little port towns in New England in the 1600s and beyond were made wealthy by the shipping industry. The Triangle Trade was the trade and transport of rum, sugar cane or molasses, and Africans who had been sold into slavery across the Atlantic Ocean and between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and New England. Much wealth also rested on the spice trade. Pepper, cinnamon, chilis, nutmeg, (Connecticut was known as The Nutmeg State), The Spice Islands. It’s a fascinating and complex history which I’ve given short shrift along with ill-supported flicks of information.

It is Black History Month and it behooves us to keep learning more, to dredge up information, to keep asking questions, and to keep seeking the bones that sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the Middle Passage. At least that’s what I think, but maybe that doesn’t jive with the current [Facebook] trend of trying to focus only on the positive. Hmm. I’m torn between seeking a state of peace and higher consciousness and admitting to the consistent, historical truth of being human in other circumstances; but not really. I know where I fall on the continuum.

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Thankful Thursday–miso soup and from the movie Big Night: “Goddamn it! I should kill you!”

I have made miso soup 3 times in the last week.

I am sure it had been 7 or 8 years since I last made miso soup. My miso soup tonight wasn’t very good. Then again, it wasn’t very bad. I have forgotten how to make a more flavorful miso soup. I used to make miso soup more frequently when we lived in Ohio, before kids especially. It was never restaurant-quality or as good as a real Japanese cook (you can take that to mean a person from Japan OR a person trained in Japanese cooking) would make, but it was good enough.

The best miso soup I ever had was from a crazy Japanese-Chinese restaurant in Cuyahoga Falls (Ohio). It’s not always a good sign, a combo Japanese-Chinese restaurant. ESPECIALLY if you are in Paris (France), c’est vrai!

Anyway, I used to love the miso soup at that restaurant (which had very dirty walls with built-up dust and grease, by the way), but I found out I loved it because it was pork-based and then I didn’t trust it so much.

Today, I am grateful for miso soup. Tonight, I made my miso soup with dandelion greens, garlic, toasted sesame oil, carrots and lemon zest, not in that order. Oh, and a good barley miso which came from a local producer, right in here in the Pioneer Valley. YES!

You may recall that I love the movie Big Night. I love the whole movie. The movie is about food, especially Italian food. And it is a little about New York City in the 1950s. And Italian immigrants in New York City in the ’50s.

But really, the movie is about people. It is full of interesting and likeable and well-written characters and that is my favorite kind of movie. The script is outstanding. The cinematography is outstanding. The acting is outstanding.

While all of the acting is very, very good, Ian Holm and Tony Shalhoub are the standouts. I really love them both in this movie. But really don’t I love Tony Shalhoub as Monk, too? And couldn’t a student of theater learn a zillion ways to act well by watching either of them at any time in any role? I think so. Who dares to bet me a million bucks (or less if you prefer) that Ian Holm has studied the Alexander Technique? I know it’s not that much of a stretch since he’s British and likely classically trained. Oh, well, for all of my wealthy, betting readers, it was worth a try.

For your pleasure (as is so often the case, you’ll have to excuse the blurry visuals):

Go see that fucking movie, okay?

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Twinkly Cooks! Garlic Scapes Pesto

I am sure that no one in my family shares my love for Garlic Scapes Pesto.

I started making this stuff for the first time last summer on the suggestion of a friend. Previous to that, I would bring home a handful of scapes from my farm share, and with a puzzled expression, not unlike one you might see on the face of a country rube with a piece of straw dangling from his mouth in an old 1960’s cartoon, I would chop a few into a stir fry or onto a fresh green salad, to no accolades and with no desire to do it ever again.

I found many recipes for Garlic Scapes Pesto on the web last year. I credit this one to dorie greenspan with a couple of tweaks by me.

1 C (appx 10-12) garlic scapes, roughly chopped

1/2 C hand-grated* parmigiano-reggiano

1/3 C extra virgin olive oil

1/3 C toasted, slivered almonds

appx 2 tsp fresh lemon juice (squeeze it baby!); additional lemon zest if you like

1/2 tsp sea salt

freshly ground pepper to taste

Put all ingredients, save the cheese, into a food processor and chop until uniformly blended and to your personal preference for smoothness

After you have transferred every last bit of the pesto from the food processor into a glass (or ceramic) mixing bowl, add the grated parm-reg until well-blended

Put the pesto into an airtight container and refrigerate. Use it whenever you want, even on a midnight kitchen raid while you are watching a dirty French movie. I don’t think it will make you fat, even if you eat a cupful all at once.

I have found that the pesto stays fresh for around 4-5 days after it’s refrigerated. If you want to be like twinkly, you’ll double, triple, or quadruple the recipe (see note below) and you will freeze smallish portions for later use. Like next week and the week after because you will never get enough of this stuff. I dare you to try to have even one batch left when the snow flies. But wouldn’t it be loverly if you could make it last that long?

*after experimenting last summer with this recipe as well as with recipes for traditional basil pesto, I have found that adding the cheese into the food processor has a detrimental effect on both texture and flavor. Also, in typical twinkly fashion, I make huge batches of things so as to maximize my TIME SPENT PREPPING/COOKING to FOOD YIELD ratio. I freeze the garlic scapes pesto sans cheese (and so should you).

HOW DO I EAT IT? Well, I eat it on crackers for lunch, every day until it is gone. I eat it on wheat linguine noodles with nothing else or with cooked chicken added. I am eating it right now atop an Ak-Mak. You should do these things if you know what’s good for you and you should write to me with any new ways to eat it that are delicious.

And look, I’m gonna use the same goddamn photograph I used in yesterday’s post. That’s how little I like to work. I didn’t even reduce it like yesterday. God am I lazy.

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Thankful Thursday

Google images

garlic scapes

garlic scapes pesto (perhaps I will post a recipe tomorrow–?)

food, eating, food, eating food, food in general, dreaming about making delicious recipes, even if I never make any of them, eating delicious food that someone else makes, more food

the arugula I mentioned in a post a while back? I love it mixed in fresh green salads–fresh greens right out of the farm field with the best homemade effin’ dressing in the world (recipe soon–??)

fonts (but maybe not enough to pay $30 a year on wordpress to change them on my blog)

the 3 cases of classic Dentyne that came to my door a few days ago

my kids, home from school

my kids, in camp away from home some of the time

sleeping in oh my god do I love sleeping in

money: having it, having enough of it, having more of it

friends….you already know that I love my friends and that I form intense bonds with people; but also, I really love my kids’ friends (well, except for that one boy who put a sucker in my hair that one time about 10 years ago…wait, that’s a lie, that was my nephew, 20 years ago and I’ll bet one of his own 2 sons have already karmically paid his debt)

the advent of summer (though not the thought of the already-short New England days getting shorter)

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Cape Cod–CHACH

As you may know from Music Monday this week, we are spending a few days on the cold and windy Cape of Cod. Here is my yelp.com review of our favorite restaurant in Provincetown, MA:

Heaven, I’m in Heaven. What? I’m not in Heaven, I’m in Chach? As has been abundantly stated, the most amazing, HEAVENLY, vanilla-infused French toast ever made. I can’t finish it, can’t eat the middle because it gets too soggy and gloopy. But the crusty edges, thick all the way up and down: give me more, ’til I burst!

I love the waitstaff. I think some are leftover from the last restaurant here whose name escapes me.  I love the woman with the fish tattoos. Is she a Pisces? I don’t know, ask her. She also has a great haircut and a sort of typical “does she like me or hate me?” Provincetown vibe. The older gentlemen waiters who are generous with the “sweeties” and “honeys” are an easier read: obviously they love me.

My kids love it, my hubby loves it, my mother (yes, my unpleaseable mother) loves it, our friends love it, our kids’ friends love it. Closed on Wednesdays, so don’t take a 3-hour walk down the beach from your condo and expect a big hunking breakfast on a Wednesday.

If you’ve never vacationed in Ptown yet, you may be surprised at the prices, which are on the high side, esp. considering that this is mostly breakfast. The music can be unpredictably loud or simply too Ptown for me.

Lots of locals, always a good sign. Chach gets thumbs up with a twist (highest rating).

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