A literary food blog.

"The Vegetables" by James McMichael + Asparagus Risotto

2013-05-19T01:34:00Z

A couple of years ago, someone asked me what my signature dish was, and without hesitation, I replied with risotto. It surprises me now, because when I first started cooking, risotto was one of my least favorite things to make. I thought all the stirring and waiting wasn't worth my time. I lacked patience. I didn't see the beauty in the process. These are lessons I've learned now, but as a young, inexperienced cook, I didn't find value suspended in the grains of rice, but a pan filled with great risk. Risotto, as you may know, benefits from a good amount of loving attention. If you drift away and let the liquid absorb too much, the rice may stick to the bottom of the pan, or even worse, burn.

Once I warmed to the idea of maintaining constant watch on the stove, I still wasn't confident enough to know risotto's nuances. I wasn't certain if the rice was done, if it needed or less stock, or how much cheese to add. But with time, patience, and practice, comes intuition. Today, I just know when the rice is done. Then, I give the pan a triumphant shake, melt the butter and Parmesan, and whip the rice around with a wooden spoon until it flows like a river over smooth rocks. I always smile when I eat it, too.

A guest post on Life & Thyme

2013-05-03T19:28:00Z

In my experience, pizza is almost always a good idea. This week, I'm honored to be guest posting over at the simply stunning website Life & Thyme. I'm sharing my favorite pizza recipe, plus a poem by Wilda Morris that will remind you of your grandmother. Head over if you're hungry.

Reading to your kids, crazy cake, and a giveaway

2013-04-25T14:01:19Z

As a former literature major, Libby Gruner established two rituals when she and her husband had children: family dinner and bedtime reading. Devouring her essay, "Shared Books, Shared Tables" from the recently published book The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage, made me recall memories I hadn't thought of in a long time, like curling up in my reading nook strung with blankets and sheets to read The Boxcar Children or Michael Crichton novels after school.

The essay explores several children's books with food themes, like Alice in Wonderland. "Food is the medium of transformation in Wonderland," she writes, where Alice is "subject to food rules that seem to constantly change." She relates this to the rules used in her own family, like insisting her son Nick "eat at least one bite of the burger he ordered before he had another French fry," a request that forced him to tears.

"Turkey Pot Pie" by Terry Hertzler + A Pot Pie for Spring

2013-04-17T14:00:57Z

"Time mutates memory."

"Time mutates memory." This truth anchors the final stanza and springs from the page like a kicked ball bouncing into the street before you have a chance to catch it. It serves as a reminder of how memory shapes us, comforts us, and in some cases, angers us, especially when two people remember the same experience very differently.

The poem begins by setting the scene for a date night gone sour, including roses, attending a movie, and eating dinner at a restaurant, but a moment during dinner triggered an argument. By the end of the evening, the flowers were placed in the garbage, never retrieved. The memory had "mutated" in the minds of each person involved. He recalls eating turkey pot pie at Marie Callender's, she insists they ate vegetable soup at Chili's. The poet may know the topic of the argument, but doesn't share it with us, emphasizing that the point of all this is not the subject matter, but how we communicate to each other.

On Hunger + Avocado and Cucumber Sandwich

2013-04-08T13:00:39Z

"The fed versus the unfed. What else is there in the history of the world?" -Mary Ruefle

Poet Mary Ruefle said this rather nonchalantly at the end of a reading I attended in February, but it stuck with me. It's a heavy question. Food, after all, is one of the three essentails—the other two being water and shelter—that we need to survive at the most basic level, and the lack of food has dire consequences on the mind and body.

As a well-fed food blogger, my hunger pains are not severe. Sometimes I forget to bring a snack for the afternoon slump at work, or the lack of reservation at a restaurant forces me to wait longer than I would like for a meal. I have the means, the access, and the ability to make healthy choices for myself and my family without a lot of stress involved. Any stomach grumbling I experience are temporary, and nothing to complain about when 50 million Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from.

When you think about hunger, you might envision a malnourished child in the Horn of Africa. Famines cause great peril and are widely publicized in the media, but it's the everyday hungers that are more common, and go largely unnoticed. That's why it's so important to pull back the veil on this issue and take steps to do something about it.

"Last Bite" by Kyle Potvin + Dark Chocolate Bark

2013-04-01T13:00:45Z

Seasons have a way of getting under our skin.

For T.S. Eliot, it's the "cruellest month." For Robert Frost, "mud season." For Edna St. Vincent Millay, this month "comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers."

The dirt, the flowers, the heat, the ice. Any distinctions that befall the month we're enduring swirl in our consciousness like wind slapping the windows, begging to be let in. Over the years, seasons signify milestones and inspire us to burrow, clean, buy notebooks, travel, and cook the food that grows best in February or May or October, and I find there's something both comforting and unnerving about the consistency of these cravings year after year.

"Black Radish" by Lisa Coffman + Linguini with Radishes and Black Pepper

2013-03-20T14:00:49Z

"They are so other
from what we say they are
they might as well be hidden."

Three lines from today's poem precisely describe the plight of the radish. The poor, invisible radish. Some are lucky, pulled from the stem, dipped in salted butter, and eaten while sitting under the shade of a willow tree, preferably by a river. These are the most adored of all radishes. But most are forced raw into our salads as something of an afterthought, greens hastily discarded to the garbage bin before they have a chance to scream, wait, I'm useful!

So it goes.

Pablo Neruda, Blood Oranges, and Sour Cream Donuts

2013-03-04T15:10:16Z

Pablo Neruda knows a little something about love. Entire volumes of his poetry are dedicated to the subject, and I have to ask, does it get any better than this?

“But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.”
― Pablo Neruda

In ancient Greece, odes were accompanied by music and dance, but the romantics utilized the form in a way its most recognizable today, as a tool to meditate on a singular event, person, or object. Odes are not explicitely love poems, but they do require the careful reflection and observation of one thing at a time. Especially the odes about food, I would say Neruda is utterly enamored with the ingredient he's writing about.

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, he declared that "We [writers from the vast expanse of America] are called upon to fill with words the confines of a mute continent, and we become drunk with the task of telling and naming." Neruda's odes accomplished this task of 'telling and naming' with great beauty and grace on the page. Just bite into these lines from "Ode to an Orange."

Guest Post: A Meditation on Leftovers + Pesto Polenta Breakfast Bake

2013-02-28T15:00:16Z

Today's offering is a guest post from kindred spirit and fellow food blogger Annelies Zijderveld. You'll love the way she explores leftovers both in the kitchen and on the page.

Leftovers. When was the last time you heard someone get excited about leftovers? By their very name, they point to past revelry and sumptuous meals like the remnant of the Petrale Sole from Friday night’s dinner or Salade Nicoise from Sunday lunch. How is it then, that a dish you could be jubilant at receiving hot out of the oven or freshly tossed can seem so diminished even the day after? I think, too, of the name given to the bag that holds restaurant leftovers and wonder if a doggie ever really did get to sup on its contents?

Leftovers in poetry play a different role. They are the indispensible bits- a fragment of a phrase jotted down quickly in the notebook you’ve got tucked in your bag or a line that in the final analysis didn’t quite fit into another poem but couldn’t quite be deleted from the computer screen. A poet I worked with and admire talked about the importance of keeping a working document of salvaged lines as a library from which to draw when your well might be running low.

The editing room, the chopping block- what remains after the poem is penned. What makes leftovers revelatory in a poem and on the plate is how they can be reimagined from their original intent. So how do you make a masterpiece from leftovers? This requires a bit of ingenuity or deviance, depending on your perspective. Just as poets read to waken their sensibility to listen to the world around them and see it for what it is and not just for what it might seem, so too, do home cooks contemplate cookbooks, restaurant menus or simply ingredient lists for new ideas of pairings that might work well together. Simply ask a Thanksgiving cook about how they plan to incorporate Thursday’s turkey into Friday meals.

"For the Buyer of Breakfasts in Salem" by Colleen Michaels + Cheddar Scramble

2013-02-12T14:00:35Z

While waiting at a stoplight last year, I witnessed something that stayed with me. A homeless man stood on the divider holding up his cardboard sign asking for food and money and help, and in the minute before my light turned green, I watched from my rear view mirror as a man extended his hand with a few bills. It was one of those gestures that likely went unnoticed to most, but the kindness of this stranger informed the rest of my morning. I couldn't help but smile, shake off my frustrations, and believe that it was going to be a good day. Reading this poem by Colleen Michaels helped me remember the experience, because her poem captures the joy of doing something for others.