I love recipes and have boxes of clippings and dozens of cookbooks sitting around the house. Lately, though, I’ve been making things up as I go along, depending on what I have on hand. Sort of like writing a poem. So, why not continue my “Last Things” Culinary Challenge as a poem, since I began it as one? I received a luscious comment/response from Vicki Lane and a poem from doris davenport. I promised to tell what I made from the left-over--or left-behind--ingredients, so here goes, in poetic format. The Making-Do- Kitchen Poetess speaks.
Kitchen Creations
On the first day, she plugged in
her ornery microwave and nuked for 10 minutes the last
of her butternut, along with two mundane potatoes.
She boiled the last apples she’d found in the freezer,
and scooping out butternut flesh, dumped it into the Cuisinart.
Added some half and half (fat-free, of course) and the time-
chastened peaches she’d left out too long in the fridge.
O, if only the stuff of a poem were as easy to process
as pushing a button! The whir of it! The achieve of the thing!
(with apologies to Gerard Manley Hopkins)
She poured all that glorious puree into a bowl
that her grandmother once used. She ladled out
two cups into which she poured just enough
chicken broth, a teaspoon of curry, and Eros paprika.
She stirred and she tasted. No, not hot enough for her husband.
More Eros! More curry! She brought the soup almost to boiling.
She filled two white bowls, dolloped sour cream atop,
and, with smug satisfaction, admired the cilantro
that grew in her Aerogrow. Snipped off a few leaves.
And voila! the soup was now ready to be served....but
wait, she’d forgotten the apples. Oh well, there was always,
as Miss Scarlett told us, TOMORROW.
So she uncorked the Malbec
and called to the man on the sofa, intent on a basketball game,
"Lunch is ready." Some wedges of pita bread drizzled
with olive oil. Slices of juicy papaya with mint leaves
strewn over. She sighed and stepped back.
On the first day, she saw what she’d made and declared it gemutlich.
Then she promised herself a long afternoon nap, after which
she would likely suggest that for supper they order Chinese
from the Red Dragon, or pizza from Papa’s. Pretty please?
(a box of recipe clippings waiting for years to be organized)
Tomorrow, DAY 2 of the Creation.
6 comments:
Sounds delicious -- And I adore "the achieve of the thing!" - being a GMH fan of long-standing.
All those unfiled recipes -- I find that if I wait long enough, the recipes no longer sound that good -- Last year I tossed a whole wad of clippings from the early 60s, many of which involved Jello.
Oh! My Good Man ROger (husband!) has so many recipes - he's attempting to organize them and there has to be thousands...and the recipe books and...oh!
I have a few of my own that are special: recipes and books.
I want to find this one book I had that was recipes from the 60's (Vicki Lane's comment reminded me) where it had "grosseries" like fried balogne with a glob of mayo in it, "pigs in a blanket" using biscuit mix, etc -- and all these things were touted as "Party Foods" teehee
love this. Food...it is a universal language isn't it (who said that?)
Grosseries, oh my! I would never tell my husband about the fried balogna and mayo. Mayo sends him into apoplexy. Slightly short of retching. When Roger finds a way to organize his recipes, let me know!
Vicki, the passage of time does have its rewards. But when I go home I still find a lot of jello salads at family gatherings and elsewhere. What would we do without it and mayo in the deep South?
I have recipes from my mother and Barry's mother - slips of paper in their own hand and I can't make myself toss them. Anything in my mother's hand is just too special.
Glenda, I never toss hand-written recipes. I have some from my late mother-in-law that are worth their weight in gold. Did your mother have Mrs. Dull's cookbook? That's what my mother used so long ago. And I suppose my grandmother had a copy, too.
I don't remember Mrs. Dull's cookbook, but Mother had an old box with recipes she copied from the Albany Herald newspaper.
Most have been lost but I still have a few. And some from my mother-in-law's kitchen.
I had a cookbook published in 1947 with names of prominent ladies whose children attended school with me. I gave the cookbook away and now wish I'd kept it. The ads alone were a history of the town.
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