Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
-Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving

Confetti Meat Loaf

This dish is colorful crumbly and relaxed. It looks like Thanksgiving stuffing and tastes equally good. First preheat oven to 350 degrees f. Saute in olive oil in large cast iron skillet one orange-sized onion, 4-6 carrots, 3-4 ribs of celery, two red bell peppers, two green bell peppers, when onions are translucent turn off heat and add about four dashes of Worcestershire sauce, 1/4 to 1/2 cup ketchup, 3-4 cups rolled oats, sprinkles of yellow cornmeal, and dash of leftover wine. Then gently mix in a pound of ground beef and half pound pork, a sprinkle of cayenne, a sprinkle of nutmeg, black pepper and salt. Gently pat the whole mess slightly (in the skillet) and bake for fifty minutes to an hour. You can also use a blend of leftover grains or whole grain porridge (wheat, millet, rice, barley, rye, etc.) in place of the rolled oats and cornmeal. Have fun!

Reincarnation

My step-father drank coffee from a gigantic shiny percolator. The pot would sit between us at the breakfast table, and I would stare into its stainless-steel fun-house mirror. I loved the distortions of my reflected face and fingers, the breakfast dishes and tableware. My fingers were elongated when vertical and stubby when horizontal. It was never-ending fun.

One day I visited my biological father and his new wife and their two newly adopted children in Hartsdale NY. He and I were sitting in the sun in the backyard of his new house. For some reason he was trying to explain reincarnation to me. I was seven. My first thought was that after I die I wanted to come back as a coffee pot, identical to the one my step-father drank from every morning.

Loving Leftovers

I love leftovers more than the original Thanksgiving meal. The past few days I have enjoyed leftover mashed potatoes for breakfast with my toasted molasses sourdough oat, cornmeal whole wheat bread spiked with cashews and raisins.

For lunch we've been eating slices of leftover turkey on toasted whole wheat sourdough bread topped with horseradish, mayo, and Bob's home made cranberry chutney.

I'm fantasizing about making a Frank Lloyd Wright gingerbread house!

Frances Moore Lappé

I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.
-Frances Moore Lappé

My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want.
-Frances Moore Lappé

The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.
-Frances Moore Lappé

Hope is not what we find in evidence. It is what we become in action.
-Frances Moore Lappé

Recent science shows that when we observe an action it affects our brains, via "mirror neurons," as if we ourselves were acting. It literally changes us. So, in a basic sense, seeing courage in action can actually makes us braver . . . one person's courage has such unpredictable power.
-Frances Moore Lappé

Loretta LaRoche

This Thanksgiving celebrate the now of chow! Lets take ourselves a little less seriously and lighten up!

-Loretta LaRoche

Woonsocket Dynamite Recipe

Woonsocket's Winning Dynamite Recipe 2008

By Lynne Leroux and Michelle Marcotte

Brown: 5 lbs. of Hamburger (70/30); drain fat

Add: 12 cups of diced green peppers
12 cups diced onions

Cook: 15 minutes

Add: 1/8 cup oregano
1/8 cup basil
1/8 cup Italian seasoning
¼ cup granulated garlic powder
1½ tablespoons of salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
¾ tablespoon crushed red pepper
1½ tablespoon of hot sauce
2½ cups tomato sauce
2½ cups tomato paste
2½ cups crushed and concentrate tomatoes
½ cup of sugar

Simmer until peppers are tender
(Do not cover)

I found this recipe for Woonsocket's most famous food and used it as a guide for making a smaller quantity. I added celery because I had some on hand, and skipped the sugar and added leftover red wine in it's place. I also added more red chili flakes. You can't go wrong with this universal soul food. Make a pot of pinto beans to add mid week and turn the leftovers into a chili. Enjoy and consider sharing with your neighbors. World peace happens one meal, one song and one story at a time.

Coffee

I've discovered I LOVE generic coffee! Stop and Shop breakfast blend for 2.99 a can, the Tetley Tea equivalent of coffee. Sadly, I can't enjoy tea anymore. For some reason (histamine allergies?) it tumbles my tummy. But I am lovin' simple coffee - no sugar and skim milk so you can taste the coffee. I told Bill it's the kind they make at McDonald's, Burger King, all gas stations, and all the Cub Scout & PTA & AA meetings. What some people call bad boring coffee I love!!! To me it tastes like hot cocoa but better because it's not sugary.

Coffee

Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and as sweet as love.
-Turkish Proverb

Gerardo's Espresso

Our pal Gerardo showed us how he lovingly makes espresso every day using Israeli Turkish coffee he found at Job Lot. Now I am making one tiny cup of it each day too. I mix the hot coffee with a cup of hot milk in a big white ceramic mug. To me, it tastes like hot cocoa.

Apple Butter

When I was sixteen I had this fantasy of making apple butter for Bob Dylan. I loved his music and imagined making him this gift. Last night I fell asleep with a vat of apples simmering on the stove top. When I got up I added cloves, ginger, sugar and a bit of apple cider. Then a few hours later when all the liquid was gone, I strained the reduced apple mush through the ricer. I filled four small jars with apple butter!

Farm Life

There’s nothing better than raising your family on a farm. The kids develop a love of the land; they all have responsibilities; and they learn first hand about life and death with the animals. It prepares them for things to come.
-Ed LaPrise, Rhode Island

Gingerbread Hermit Brownies

Preheat oven to 350 F. Mix all of the dry ingredients ingredients together in a big bowl. Mix the wet ingredients together and then combine them. You can test the batter by tasting it before baking. I decided to bake these gingerbread hermits like brownies - I spread the batter into one greased 9 by 12 inch Pyrex baking dish. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a test skewer comes out clean. Let cool. They taste even better the next day.

1/2 cup shortening or oil
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark molasses (not blackstrap)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup warm coffee
1 egg
3 cups whole wheat or white flour (add more if needed)
1 and 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt (less salt if using white flour)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground cloves (optional)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
1 tablespoon of cocoa (optional)
1 cup raisins (add more if desired)

Soup Season

This time of year I love to get out my vat-sized stainless-steel soup pot. Last week I combined two bunches of chopped kale, four chopped sweet potatoes, chopped stalks of celery, a few gigantic chopped onions, chopped cloves of fresh garlic, and a pound of precooked beans. It all went into the pot along with water, extra virgin olive oil, salt, my neighbor Armand's dried oregano, freshly ground pepper, and cumin. I simmered the chopped vegetables for a few hours. We lived on this fabulous soup all week, accompanying it with cooked brown rice on some nights, and serving it with corn muffins or sourdough wholegrain bread on other nights!

Sold!

Last night my painting "Eggs" sold at the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative Ten by Ten show.

You can view this painting here.

Corn Muffins

I've been on a corn muffin bender baking these muffins every morning to warm the kitchen. They are fast, wholesome and delicious and a great lunch box food. I have a love of baking in cast iron pans but any muffin tins will do.

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 or 400 degrees. Mix up all ingredients into a batter in a big bowl and pour into greased muffin tins. Fill the muffin cups half way to allow room for expansion.

2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/4 cup corn oil
1 cup yellow corn meal
1 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoons baking powder

Bake muffins for 15 to 20 minutes at 350 or 400 degrees.

Broached Chicken

Where I live there are a few restaurants famous for something called broasted chicken, which as far as I can tell is a word invented to mean boiled and roasted (till-it-falls-off-the-bone) chicken. It's also called family style chicken. Wright's Farm and a place that used to exist called Ma Glockner's were the two most popular places to sample this down-home delicacy. River Falls has been recently advertising on billboards around the city that they now serve Ma Glockner's berched chicken, which is chicken boiled then seared with a heavy weight on it (heavy like a building, says my friend). This morning I was talking to Bill and I confused the chicken names in the exact way that my Grandma Sophie always scrambled words. I asked Bill, "What exactly is broached chicken?" When I realized what I had said I laughed, and decided to define it myself. Broached chicken is chicken that the chef has sampled before it's served. Or maybe it's the chicken left over that a mother eats off of her children's plates.

Absolutely Right

A downstate Illinois boy loves the Steak ’n Shake as a Puerto Rican loves rice and beans, an Egyptian loves falafel, a Brit loves banger and mash, an Indian loves tikki ki chaat, a Swede loves herring, a Finn loves reindeer jerky, and a Canadian loves bran muffins. These matters do not involve taste. They involve a deep-seated conviction that a food is absolutely right, and always has been, and always will be.
-Roger Ebert

Tamara

Tamara the gypsy,
My birth father's grandmother,
is dark and round and looks Russian Indian Eastern European Eskimo
in the photo.
She must be the one I have been longing to meet.
She has been speaking to me for years through cabbages and onions
in the root cellar.
I always make her homemade yogurt and rustic loaves of sourdough.
I chop her beets for soup, bloodying the board magenta
while dreaming of sauerkraut, sausage, and mustard.

Morning Coffee

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz

by William Notter

She had a truck, red hair,
and freckled knees and took me all the way
to Memphis after work for barbecue.
We moaned and grunted over plates of ribs
and sweet iced tea, even in a room of strangers,
gnawing the hickory char, the slow
smoked meat peeling off the bones,
and finally the bones. We slurped
grease and dry-rub spice from our fingers,
then finished with blackberry cobbler
that stained her lips and tongue.

All the trees were throwing fireworks
of blossom, the air was thick
with pollen and the brand-new smell of leaves.
We drove back roads in the watermelon dusk,
then tangled around each other, delirious
as honeybees working wisteria.
I could blame it all on cinnamon hair,
or the sap rising, the overflow of spring,
but it was those ribs that started everything.

-William Notter, Holding Everything Down

Apples!

We were out of apples and I wanted one. I remembered the big apple tree across the street from the library, on the grounds of the former Marquette Credit Union Building. I had to pick up my library books anyway. So I went with Lily to the apple tree. All of the apples had been scooped off the ground and the good ones were out of my reach. I picked up a stick and tried to knock one down. Then I saw the maintenance man unloading bags of wood chips in the building next door. I could see into the garage. There were barrels full of rakes and shovels. I asked him if I could borrow a rake to reach an apple on the tree. He handed me a real iron rake, not the flimsy leaf-raking kind, and I was able to reach three gigantic juicy red apples, and a few little ones for Lily. I returned the rake, thanked the man, and nibbled my way home. Lily and I were in heaven! I love living in a city where the apples grow on trees!

Cake

by Mark Strand

A man leaves for the next town to pick up a cake.
On the way, he gets lost in a dense woods
and the cake is never picked up. Years later,
The man appears on a beach, staring at the sea.
"I'm standing on this beach," he thinks, "And I am lost
in thought." He does not move. The heaving sea
turns black, its waves curl and crash. "Soon
I will leave," he continues. "Soon I will go
to a nearby town to pick up a cake. I will walk
in a brown and endless woods, and far away
the heaving sea will turn to black, and the waves -
I can see them now - will curl and crash."

-Mark Strand

Implications for Modern Life

by Matthea Harvey

The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is you pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.

-Matthea Harvey, Modern Life

Café Paradiso

by Charles Simic

My chicken soup thickened with pounded young almonds
My blend of winter greens.
Dearest tagliatelle with mushrooms, fennel, anchovies,
Tomatoes and vermouth sauce.
Beloved monkfish braised with onions, capers
And green olives.
Give me your tongue tasting of white beans and garlic,
Sexy little assortment of formaggi and frutta!
I want to drown with you in red wine like a pear,
Then sleep in a macédoine of wild berries with cream.

-Charles Simic, Walking the Black Cat