Follows The Sun

It is winter, and the thing is we’re all acrimonious.
There was a cop car in front of my house today.
My landlady was arguing with the landlord next door
about who put what snow where.

It builds up and closes us around.
The city carves out channels for itself between steep white cliffs
and every street corner has its own filthy mountain
slowly icing over in the cycle of freeze-thaw-freeze
and you start to feel a little claustrophobic
and wake choking from the dream of snow, clogging your mouth and sliding,
frigid
down into your lungs.

Can you drown in snow?
Or maybe in the sordid greyish slush waters that are every sunny January day’s unwelcome gifts?

The first snow of every winter retains its magic,
and then once or twice again, when the flakes are so fat and you can just forget about tomorrow’s errands and your car
and your total lack of waterproof footwear,
and just turn your face up and watch it come.

It is best to do this right under a street lamp.

It is best of all to do this with somebody who will laugh with you, or
when inclined to solitude,

do it all alone, and be assured of your beauty, standing there.
If I had a camera with me
walking home, and I saw you from down the block, standing there
with your mouth open and your eyes closed, enjoying
everything,
I would take your picture.

You, there, in the falling snow.

You are so beautiful.

Forget about the acrimony. The days are getting longer.
Think about the snow as a gift,
if you moved back and forth to Australia at the wrong times of the year, you might go 20 months without seeing any snow at all!

You would miss it.

You will miss it. In August. When it is too hot to breath and you can’t fuck because
you would stick to your lover.
You lie gasping on the couch and look at them naked
and nothing has ever been so unappealing.

You’ll miss the snow then, and the wonder of the cool flakes
falling onto your cheeks and into your waiting mouth.

You’ll miss being able to touch people.

The snow is as much a blessing as a curse.
Forget the acrimony.

Winter is at most another two, two and a half months.
May will be here soon enough, and then the heat.

Meditate on variation, live in the moment,
get your shovel.

It is snow season. Let it be.

I am not by and large a fan of roasted red peppers (also known as pimientos). They’re a little on the sweet side for a vegetable, it seems to me, and they’re slimy – that’s the real problem. Generally one encounters them either stuffed into a green olive or laid out in large, incisor-defying slices in your Italian sandwich. I have often found myself wondering about the most polite way of removing the two inches of roasted red pepper hanging from my between my teeth while I attempt to chew a bite of my lunch.

I know that I’m not alone in my red-pepper misgivings, but I am here to say: There is hope! The textural problems can be done away with completely and the red pepper transformed into a savory, elegant sauce, if only one has the tools for the job.

The tool in question is something to do your chopping and grinding; this is one sauce where a knife just won’t suffice. If you’ve got a food processor, this is it’s moment. If you’ve got a blender, it will serve. In fact, you can even pull this off with an immersion blender (every soup-cook’s best friend), if that’s all you’ve got. For that, however, a little extra knife work will be needed.

Romesco Sauce

Equipment:

• Food processor, blender or immersion blender-and-deep-bowl
• Sharp knife
• Measuring cups and spoons
• Grater (if you’re grating the cheese by hand)

Ingredients:

• Big pinch (3/4 t) kosher salt
• Small pinch (1/4 t) freshly ground black pepper (a few good grinds)
• 1/2 cup roasted almonds, chopped (non-roasted are fine, too, but not salted)
• 1 fat clove garlic, peeled
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan (or Pecorino, or what-have-you)
• 12 oz jar of roasted red peppers, drained
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 2 t sherry vinegar (red wine if you don’t have it)

Combine everything in the bowl of your food processor and pulse or process until chunky-smooth. Chunky smooth is not an oxymoron; it is the correct description of this sauce. I have kept the grated cheese to the side and served the sauce to happy vegan dinner guests.

I first had it served over grilled skirt steak with Yukon gold potatoes and watercress salad. Right now I like it best served over whole wheat pasta tossed with baby spinach while the pasta is still very hot, so that the spinach has a chance to wilt just a little bit from the heat. I am sure that you can think of lots of other uses for it, and you should, because it is very healthy. Red peppers are full of Vitamins A and C, and there’s protein and healthy fats from the nuts and cheeses. The sauce is savory and satisfying, and ready in about as long as it took you to read this about it.

Go forth, and eat roasted red peppers. They are delicious.

Winter sunshine has no right to be so similar
From one coast to another

Winter sunshine should not have the same thin,
sort of
misty sort of
quality to it, in the here and the there

It’s ridiculous
Almost as ridiculous as losing track of your limbs
Pedal, pedal, sticks and fingers
Timbre and rhythm and conversation
Where words have no part

Almost as ridiculous
As missing people you don’t even actually know
As the tricks the brain plays on the body
the body plays on the brain
Almost as ridiculous as the rustlings in the mornings
When you can’t really tell when the night ended
And the morning began

And precisely as ridiculous as the notion that the human voice
is really just another instrument
to be played like all the rest
What’s the point of trying to say things in words?

What’s the point?

It’s ridiculous.

Like hedgehogs.

Like cameras.

Like coming home to count up all the things
that make the place you just walked into
the place that you call home.

In Ann Arbor I think about food and poke into corners, physical and virtual. I poked into my photo library with a head full of A. J. Leibling’s “Between Meals,” and now I share food pictures.

To judge if a recipe is really excellently written, check to see if it meets all of the following criteria:

1. Includes how many people it serves, clearly mentioned at the beginning.
2. Includes an estimate for how long it will take, including important things like if something has to marinate overnight or set for four hours that it would be nice to know in advance.
3. Includes an easily accessible list of ingredients, split up if the recipe has multiple parts (like, a dish plus a sauce).
4. Includes a list of equipment, especially if there’s something sort of esoteric, or that the recipe will be impossible to make without the use of. Like a foodmill, or cheesecloth, or a bundt pan.
5. The steps are written in the order in which they are to be performed, as precisely as possible.* If the oven needs to be preheated, then preheating the oven is at least part of the first step.
6. The steps are divided carefully and logically. Each numbered step may have several operations; otherwise you wind up with a 17 step recipe for pasta, and that gets daunting. Things should be chunked together via time and similarity of motion.
7. Includes general cook times and visual descriptors in steps. Flames run hot, flames run cold, people forget to set timers. “Cook for 2 minutes” is not very useful, and “cook until golden” is only a little better. “Cook for about two minutes, until golden brown and fragrant” is better than the sum of its parts.
8. Includes ALL OTHER NECESSARY INFORMATION. Has every ingredient and every piece of equipment listed at the beginning been accounted for? Is it noted whether the flame should be low, medium, or high? If it should be adjusted, and if so, when? Is it noted that the will dish look unexpectedly wet, dry, dark, light, green, or cheesy? Is there a precise time at which one should turn, poke, shake or stir things to keep everything ready? All of that information should be included in the recipe.
9. Pictures are always nice.
10. So is a little character, y’know. Cooking is fun. Recipes can be, too.

If you know how to cook, you won’t need your recipes to have all of these things.  The best cooks I have use recipes books that are just lists of ingredients and quantities, with nary a procedure around. In my own cooking, unless I’m cooking from an author or cook I really trust and admire, I usually find several recipes for a given dish and choose the bits I like best from each of them.

But I always think that maybe, if every recipe you came across had all of these qualities, I wouldn’t do all that. I’d just pick one, get the stuff, trust it, and go.

* Of course, everybody should read the whole recipe before they start cooking, which makes this much less important. But not everybody does rtwrbtsc, and it improves the Universe to be kind to those who go forth into their culinary ventures in a state of bold and confident ignorance.

The rain is dashing at the windows and the wind is picking at the skylight glass and making it moan, and howling around  house. Every once in a while I can feel the whole apartment sway.

And if I don’t pay close attention I can almost believe that if I open the door, I will find the dark and narrow attic staircase, and if I head downstairs Charles Wallace will be eating a sandwich, a double pot of milk warming on the stove for cocoa.

I can almost believe in a black dog named Fortinbras and a beautiful mother with violet eyes.

I was told that clementines
do not bear seeds.

So this most recent box
– Clementines, you know, are typically shipped
– in wooden boxes
– (made of boxwood, I shouldn’t wonder)
has me befuddled.
First I crunched through the seeds,
then I spit them out and lay them,
glistening wet
in the aromatic cradle of the fruit’s discarded skin.

What is the meaning of this?
I asked the Internet.
– Wonder of wonders
– Futurism at its best.
And the Internet told me
that the culprit
was cross-pollination.

There was a lawsuit!
Orchard keepers vs. Beekeepers.
– Keep your insects
– away from our mandarin-orange-subspecies!
Clearly it wasn’t the bees fault;
who can blame a bee for doing what bees do?
– Especially now that they’re disappearing.
– (That would be rude!)
So blame the keepers, and take them to court
Maybe the orchards are now more sacrosanct.
Or maybe the orchard-keepers’ pockets better lined

But I think it must go deeper than that.
If you’re a fruit that has no seeds,
then you’re a fruit that knows there will never be another fruit
just precisely like you.
You’re a fruit that cannot pass along its genes.
– A neuter fruit
– A eunuch fruit
And even the gentle clementine would not want to be that!

I think that clementine seeds are a sign
of the persistence of life.
Bees will get into orchards. This is what bees do.
The will do their little bee dances on your
mandarin-orange-subspecies flowers
and Mr. Orchard-Keeper
– (or Ms)
there is nothing you can do about it.

The clementine wants to evolve
and the bees want to help it.

Who are we to stand in the way of this,
the greatest of natural functions,
just so that we can enjoy
a seed-free fruit?

Here are some things that I think are cute. Don’t you agree? (Do you?)

This caterpillar (ambient ball of fluff).

A pile of baby quails.

Small objects made of felt.

Mr. Carrot Crocodile

The calf that tried to eat me.

Talia Adelina Woo

Cookies that look like owls.

Stuffed animals in love.

The skulls of tiny primates.

“Stories that matter have ends. Anything that matters ends. It’s the end that gives it a meaning. And the joy, for me, of narrative fiction is you get to pick your beginning and you get to pick your end, and that imposes form and shape on the material between those two things. And that gives you a story. ”

-Neil Gaiman

So I’m reading “Gaudy Night” by Dorothy Sayers. It’s a technically one of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries but this one is really much more about his nay-saying paramour Harriet Vane, and about the early days of college education for women (written in the mid 1930’s) and feminism and lunacy.

I love it. I had to rewrite the first sentence of this because it came out as sounding like pre-war English literature.

It’s my mother’s book. My mother writes in her books. Little lines in the margin by passages she thinks are important.  Sometimes notes in the front material of partial quotes with page numbers. And when something is really important, I guess, exclamation points and underscoring.

The setting is Shrewsbury College, an early women’s college at Oxford, always on the edge of social scandal just for existing, but a place of spinsterly learning and devotion to intellect. Ms. Harriet Vane graduated from there some 10 years prior, Lord Peter Wimsey from a male Oxford college some 10 years before that.

Miss Edwards, the science tutor, is speaking to Lord Peter and the assembled dons of the college, as Miss Barton (who’s subject I don’t remember) has just “returned to her contention that her social principles were opposed to violence of every description”:

“Bosh!” said Miss Edwards, “You can’t carry through any principle without doing violence to somebody. Either directly or indirectly. Every time you disturb the balance of nature you let in violence. And if you leave nature alone you get violence in any case. I quite agree that murderers shouldn’t be hanged — it’s wasteful and unkind. But I don’t agree that they should be comfortably fed and housed while decent people go short. Economically speaking, they should be used for laboratory experiments.”

My mother put two exclamation points in bold blue pen next to this passage, but she’s not in favor of human experimentation, that I can tell. The only underlined words are ‘it’s wasteful and unkind.’

This is my mother. This is my upbringing. Capital punishment is wrong, pure and simple – because it’s wasteful and unkind.