As a human perhaps the toughest task I face is what the heck to feed me, and the spouse and child, each day for dinner. Breakfast everyone is on their own. Daughter, who has a light appetite, has a protein shake. Spouse, who has a sweet tooth, has some sort of flaky thing and coffee. I have several coffeeeeeees, and, well, I never know. Could be beans on toast. Coudl be leftover takeout. Could be tomatoes and olives in a bowl. Could be yogurt. Might be soup. Seldom is eggs.
Lunch… do people eat lunch? I don’t always. The meals seem to run into each other, and usually lunch is the loser for me, because there is not time to have breakfast, do all the morning things, then do the work things, and fit in lunch too, before it’s time for dinner. But I love lunch. I love lentils and tuna, salads of any kind, rice and tofu, possibly more yogurt. Daughter eats the same meal every day, packed in a lunch bag, Annie’s Organic Star Pasta. We put it in a thermos, and, for about four years now, she eats it…. every. single. day. Dedication. Spouse eats, most likely, more sweet and flaky things. But me, I am most apt to have more coffee, and maybe chomp on some lettuce as I am adding some to the guinea pig cage.
Dinner. Dinner ie exasperating. You know it is! There are, if your life is anything like mine, too many people (and we are only three) who like too disparate things, and have crazy schedules, and it can be downright tough to get everything ready on time for everyone’s schedule, but the toughest of all is thinking WHAT?? what to feed everyone.
Enter poetry, short memoir, short short stories, and art, to save the day, as usual!
As you may know, if you have read this blog before. I started a lit mag, Instant Noodles (gee, named after food. Obsessed? Maybe…..), and now Old Scratch Press is running it. Up until this year I was the only one choosing the pieces, and, often I was moved to choose pieces about food. And I have to say, on a side note, getting to read so many wonderful entries has been nothing but a pleasure. I love Instant Noodles, and I have really enjoyed all the pieces, and all the art too. But, yes, it may be possible to make the assumption that I am slightly food… centric? Motivated? Obsessed? And I have often been charmed by pieces that relate to food in some way, even if it is only in my mind.
And so, in this post, I want to direct you to take a look at a few of them.
The first is the memory piece by John Johnson, “Moss Soup and Manicotti,” where he remembers his grandmother’s cooking, “For love in this family was measured by the number of courses served and the temperature in the kitchen….”
“If Only,” by Bethany A. Beeler, is a wonderful painting that looks, to me, like my dearest love, a steaming mug of coffee:
My second favorite edible may be butter… True!
“…the wood cylinder moans,
the paddles slow,
the moon is full,
the butter comes.”
Writes Cynthia Gallaher in her poem “Butter Eaters.”
I have long loved, “This Is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams, the famous short piece about plums. I also love “Stolen Plums,” by Benjiman B. White:
“…In a lonely field
Full of future and autumn
And a windblown harvest
Forced by growth
To thump against gravity
And hunger….”
And, finally, if you cannot wait a second longer to eat, you can meet me and Willie Schatz in “Molly’s Magic Kitchen,”
“Shit! I forgot to buy the fucking fresh tomatoes. But we have sun-dried. I’ll work around it.”
Of course she will, as she did two days prior when she forgot the dough needed 24 hours to rise and recovered by scrubbing the pizza for pasta primavera or five days earlier when she left her cherished butter lettuce at the grocery and could atone for the evil deed only with a luscious chopped salad or two weeks ago when she entered her realm crowing about the terrific tuna casserole we were going to enjoy only to realize she had bought sardines and would have to settle for a salad Niçoise (that of course was not chopped liver).
So, for dinner tonight, I fell back on a childhood meal that both my mother and my father used to make from time-to-time when magic and inspiration failed them: leftover meat in gravy ladled over extra cripsy toast. I like to eat mine with hot cherry peppers, and each bite will have, if I’m lucky, meat, bread, gravy, a smidgeon of some sort of potato (I made scalloped), a little scrap of veg., and a small bit of hot cherry pepper, to cut through all that thick buttery gravy and make the moutful pop.
It’s pouring down cold buckets of icy rain where I am.
Wherever you are, may you be full of something nice and warm.
What’s for dinner at your place?
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