A Prayer for Stroganoff

There is a prayer in the way salt gets thrown
Into the Big Boiling Pot, sitting like Capone
In the corner of your stovetop
Water crests and foams, stream clings on my face

Dear God, please make something of these things
Left in the side drawers, these bits discarded forgotten
These leftovers from other recipes, from other Master Plans
Remnants, ink smudges, stroganoff

It is a last ditch effort, stroganoff.
That bit of beef that was insignificant, less than prime.
Wide egg noodles, thick hipped and lush
It’s sexy and it knows it, stroganoff.

There is comfort in the pepper grinder,
In its weight, in its imbalance. The sound
Is the same as shells crunching beneath my feet
Bare on volcanic sands, Mt. Etna at my back.

The cream and stock were meant to be together.
The cream’s decadence lingering in the roux
Brown, comfortable, dependable, brown
Flecks of yellow mustard sparkle, recessed like stars

And each time stroganoff is charming, soothing
Each ingredient proud but not dickish about it.
Like gypsy violin, or a proper kiss
Stroganoff

The Holy Order of the Immaculate Muffin

I've been trying.

Since I was a kid, since before I came to fall in and out of grace, measured in 1/2 cups. I've been trying.

I came to it as a stranger; a pilgrim, as my friend Henry would say.
Though I'd never seen it myself, held it in my hand, I'd heard people talk about it. Talk about it in that way that sets folks eyelids fluttering, knees wobbling.
Like snake charmers and revivalists. Like yogis and swamis and the like.
I was looking to be charmed. Needing to be revived.
And so I made cornbread.

Rather, I tried.
God, how I tried.

At first I came at it with arrogance, with ego, with force of will - all the things that will fuck up a perfectly good cornbread.

I had thought it was simple bread and I was a complicated man. Boy, did I have that backwards.

Irony is never a good starting place.

Through my 20s I made thick, lifeless bricks of cornbread that hillbillies could use to build pyramids. I ran my ovens too hot. Inevitably I would rush the bake. Inevitably I would run my forearm into the rack; young men are measured in scars. Time after time, scar after scar, I learned nothing but only became more disappointed with each sandpapery paperweight or bludgeon masquerading as cornbread.

Boy, I was mad. Everyone had lied to me about cornbread. I was mocked in the aisles of the supermarket buy boxed mixes. I dug my heels in and continued to bow down, genuflect and lower myself to the bottom shelf, because that's where they keep the cornmeal.

Through my thirties I ruined batch after batch by adding whatever struck my fancy. My cookbooks, my armory of spells and folklore, sat uncracked, untouched, unloved - stacked above the cupboards, dogpiled. I cheated on the recipe like a touring rock musician. I played the part of plantation dandy in our sprawling Brooklyn apartment in the rural lowlands of Prospect Heights. Not surprisingly my cornbreads were often mush. Half baked and muddled. I would always check the oven too much. The oven that ran slow. The oven that was held together w/ bailing wire and twine. So it goes in your 30s, in Brooklyn. Each disappointment chipped away at me. Each soupy mess made me question my skill as a cook, my depth. Cooking is a magical thing. I came to doubt.

I doubted myself. I doubted the original, mythical cornbread that everyone had talked about. I doubted this non-existing thing that was the bar for every actual cornbread that fell short of the mark, shy of the finish. This weekly exercise in failure had brought me nothing but shame. Even the feral cats in the abandoned lot would not eat it. I walked by the cornmeal the way anonymous and guilt ridden lovers do in the long walk between trains at 14th Street.

And then I stopped. I turned my back on it. I laid into biscuits. I started working w/ high gluten flour and making bagels. I started making long batons of french bread, stubby rounds of Italian. I used no longer used my cast iron skillet, so heavy and powerful, for baking. I abandoned cornbread and viewed it as some old, brown god that the natives had placed on a pedestal. I regarded it as quaint phase of evolution.

Yeast was good for me. I understood it. It understood me. I came back to recipes and scales. I came back to quiet process, to peaceful patience. Over time my breads became better and better. I found a way to whisper to the dough, to be patient with the sponge, to let the oven be. In this way I was charmed by the tenacity of yeast that is thick in the air - unseen but prevalent. Every week I stood in my kitchen and had my own tent revival, shouting sermons and stomping my bare feet on my kitchen floor. Still, I was incomplete. The cornbread haunted me.

Last week I swung at it again.

This last weekend I made cornbread muffins for my Mom as a side for a crab cake dinner. I figured if I tried in her kitchen, the kitchen of my youth, I would have some extra luck. I was wrong. I followed the recipe closely. I was disciplined w/ the use of a timer. Still, the cornbread muffins I made were dense and coarse. They stuck to the pan, embarrassed to be debuted. My mom was kind, and the meal was good. But the cornbread muffins were awful. I was defeated.

Three days later I tried again. This time w/ grilled portobellos and a roasted pepper slaw. I let them go to long, didn't compensate on the cook time for it being muffins as opposed to full bread, and again I was presented with a small gang of cornbread cobblestones perfect for any preindustrial alley.

And then there was last night.

Last night I was pretty dragged out from a long day at work, and a long bike ride home. I couldn't think of food, much less prepare it. My wife made a really, really nice salad. We didn't have any croutons or nuts on hand so I took one of the left over muffins, that I had left in a bowl on the kitchen table as if to remind me of my failure, and crumbled it into the salad.

It was amazing. A-Maze-Ing.

In that moment it became clear to me that the thing I had been doing wrong (wrong from the start, as old E.Pound would say) was thinking the cornbread was one thing, and then blaming it for being something else. The previous failure didn't matter at that moment I was eating that salad. The failures of my youth, the failures in my Brooklyn kitchen. The failure of that dark time when I decided I would no longer try. It was clear to me that the magic lay in understanding the thing, and not forcing it. The magic was in the thing itself, as well as w/in myself, and would come to fruition when I gave it enough space to simply be what it is.

There is beauty in that which is terrible. There is hope in every failure. There are surprises only for those who are open to it. The question always is the intention. Am I cooking to impress? Am I cooking to quiet that voice that won't talk with its mouth full? Am I cooking to flex my will and strut? No. I am cooking to eat better, to be more fulfilled, more complete.

To be fed. In more ways than one.

Amen.

The Potato Story

My mother came from the foot hills of the Appalachians, in the corner of Virginia’s New River Valley, shrouded in mountain fog, in arcane smoke full of specters and ghosts. Depression Era Virginia of my mother’s youth was just another plague or pestilence for the people of the territory. Sure, they’d been American born for two generations, a clear 60 years; but these pasty, freckled, Irish Scots had only traded fen for holler, bagpipes for fiddles, proud songs of revolt for murder ballads. They carried charms to ward of fairies and other pissed off mountain spirits. They carried scars from the Civil War. They lost an entire generation at Gettysburg, 400 miles away. Generations passed and the fables of terror were recounted in those flimsy houses built during each city’s little boom, when the Company came to town, and then became the town. The ghost story each mother told her child, the boogie man always, was the famine of 1843.

Not when what little they had was laid asunder by the Union marching home, savage w/ reckless energy. Not when raw Hell had unleashed @ King’s Mountain, when Ferguson took a bullet in the head and every man in the shadow of the Blue Ridge claimed responsibility for that aim being so true. Not when they Tutulo and Powhattan tribes agreed that these white people had no right to their sacred ground and took their revenge, not discriminating between women and children. No, it was always the famine of 1843.

It was in Ireland. The blight had taken the crops. When the crops failed the landlords came and each family was put out, one by one, until the Crown took all the ruined land. Pushed out of Ireland they came to the Virginia colonies, carrying w/ them the potato that failed them.

My mother’s grandmother, Mom Weaver, would always pause at this part of the story and point out that her family (which is to say her father’s side of the family) came from Scotland, and had not been put out. They were not vagabonds, her kit and kin.

They had come to the mountains to pull coal from the ground, each day losing a little more light. They had gone into the mines and carried out the coal for the electricity they could not afford. They had seen their savings disappear as the banks crumbled in 29. Still Mom Weaver only talked about the famine, as if it were a catch-all.

Each potato, she would say, was a kind of miracle.
“So much, you see, can go wrong”.
Mom Weaver would turn a potato over and over in her hand, scanning it like a crystal ball as she unwove her story:

“When they come to move you out, with their dogs and their guns and their writs on paper,” her hard Scottish consonants slammed like waves against a breach wall, “it’s the same as when the cold won’t break, the river don’t flow, and the crop dies before the strawberry moon. “

“But a potato, a single potato, can stretch today into tomorrow, and remind you what can come from this cold, hard ground.”

“It ain’t proud but humble. Not fancy but homely. The potato comes to us covered in dirt and sod. You can’t get at it and not take the earth home w/ you under your nails, back beneath your ears, deep in the crease of your skin. So what. Dirty hands can be trusted. Ain’t never met a banker w/ dirty hands. Can’t trust one of them.”

“Ain’t complicated. Not like an onion. Spend all day peeling an onion. Just crying and crying. Never getting to anything, each layer thinner than the first, until its nothing but tears and thin sheaf of onion you can see through. Not the potato. No sir.”

“You peel a potato one-two-three. No surprises. What you see is what you get.”

It was at this woman’s elbow that my mother learned to skin a potato, to hold the paring knife confidently, hidden strong in the crease of your palm. She would stand at the table in the kitchen on the South East corner of the house, the side closest to the willow tree, and she would peel potatoes as her grandmother had her separate the peels for later use in moonshine or sourdough starters. She would listen, trapped in the river valley, in that thin walled house, as Mom Weaver would retell the stories of warning, the horrifying recounting of the past.

My mother didn’t tell me about the famine of 49 when she taught me how to skin a potato, to prepare it, to hold the skins to the side (for luck, she said). She would only tell me that you can always count on a potato. It’s humble. It’s pragmatic. My mother smiles a certain way when she says “pragmatic”.

The potato is better than that.

It is better than Mom Weaver’s scarecrow ghost stories. It is better than my mother’s pragmatism.

It is the beginning of everything, a still point. It can become almost anything, swayed by your mood, by your impulse. Its texture is open for discussion. Its meat is a chameleon.

It is the best dinner date you will ever have. The most sublime accompaniment.

It is immediately gratifying in its ability to become. It is ever patient in its process of becoming.

I will hold a potato in my hand and consider its weight, consider its journey, trying to rub the bits of dirt off. I am struck by the great potential of the potato and realize that famine, back there in 49, that was a famine of Hope.

Green Apple Sponge

She was crazy as a mouse, the Brazilian girl who first taught me her sourdough recipe. It was her mother’s recipe, of course. The crazy Brazilian girl worked with me at the honkytonk bar. It was after hours when she told me her mother’s process.

“Baby,” she began, “you gotta love it like nothing else, like everything, and you gotta be patient.”

She held the granny smith apple in her tiny, carnie hands, cupping it like a crystal ball. The apple had been left by the day bartender, who had neglected it for breakfast, and neglected it again after the lunch push, before happy hour. Green Grocers in the city thrive on the optimism of the service industry.

“Baby,” she continued, “you peel the apple with a knife. You know? Like this. You hold the apple like your lover, you know? Like you hold a knife.”

The crazy Brazilian bartender went on to reveal more and more of the apple’s flesh. She peeled away the skin like six and seven veils, each curling deliciously.

GRANNY SMITH SOURDOUGH SPONGE
Skin of 1 Granny Smith Apple
1 CUP H/G FLOUR
1 CUP warm water
½ TSP ACTIVE DRY YEAST


DIRECTION:
Slowly add the water to the flour/yeast/apple peel and mix with a wooden spoon. The warmth of the water should make the apple’s skin to blush, and the smell should be very nice.

The mixture will look weird and lumpy. Somewhere in between kindergarten paste and Dickens porridge. Don’t judge. Just gently stir the batter. It isn’t the worst idea to cradle the bowl in the crook of one arm while mixing the batter with the other. It’s also not a bad idea to hum – BEATLE’S SONGS are always good. MIX the batter for the length of a BEATLE’S song.

Cover the bowl with a damp kitchen towel and allow the sponge to rest on the counter top for the better part of an afternoon. DO NOT ABANDON the sponge. Check in with it from time to time throughout the day. After the first hour the sponge will begin to slowly bubble, gentle but lewd, like a burlesque dancer. Stir it with the spoon three times and replace the damp towel.

After four or five hours cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave the bowl in a warm dry place. The top of the refrigerator is good. I like to leave it on top of the piano, next to the bourbon; but I’m funny like that.

A week. That’s how long it’s going to take. A week.


Check in on it in the morning, before you are fully awake, and smell how the apple is breaking down, how the yeast is alive and loving the apple. Replace the plastic wrap covering after you are done cooing sweet nothings at it. Later in the evening, when you get home, check in on the sponge. Ask about its day and tell it about yours. Leave out the bits about road rage and a two party political system. The sponge is a baby, and doesn’t need to be scarred this soon in its existence. Besides, when you lift the covering off, and smell the sweet love coming off the sponge, who gives a fuck about the two party political system or the road. Stir ONCE at the end of the day, making one small wish each day.

After a day or two, liquid will start pooling on the top while the sponge will become thicker and denser. Yeah, denser. After a week’s time transfer the sponge into a sterile container and refrigerate until later use.

When you do decide to use the sponge, take it out of the refrigerator a day before intended use. The sponge should come to room temperature before divided and used for a dough. Like anything waking up, be gentle with the sponge. Sing to it gently, hold it lovingly, and know that it is delicious because you loved it.

Haiku Salad

The lime has no tears
No regret, the citric orb
poch-marked small green moon

Sweet Watership Down
Nervous Fiver, Rabbit Run
Beloved Chlorophlll

Blistered Skin, Sweet Flesh
Red Pepper, Charred&Sexy
most precious fetish

Parm reg falls like snow
Italian Market Women
Bless children w/ it

Blue Hickory Smoke
Blue like Lady Day, Roasted
Chicken with a drawl

Strawberries can't lie
Read Tess of the D'Urberviles
So sweet and tawdry

Olive Oil on flesh
Someone else's memory
Before Troy burned down

This is my striptease
burlesque roughage, good for this
and better for that

The Thing About Rice & Beans

Who doesn't love a love story?
Who doesn't go a little weak in the knee, stolen breath dissipating?
It is not always Montagues and Capulets; it isn't always star crossed.
Who doesn't love rice&beans?

I love the sound that bubbling pot of rice makes. I love the staccato hilarity and furious cartoon bursts of stream. I am comforted by the security in the the ratio in rice preparation. 2:1 Water to Rice.

Beans are the Hardy to Rice's Laurel. Rice is Hepburn to Beans' Tracy.
Who doesn't love a love story?

It was beans that Jack got for that sorry old cow, remember. When the counters count, it's beans. It was hummus they were eating on the beaches of Troy, in Helen's pink shadow. It was beans that were preserved in the pyramids, packed along in the sarcophagus.

A pot of beans murmurs, hems, haws.

Each spice is added with intention, with purpose. Each turn of the pepper grinder is its own incantation. Each slice of garlic peeled away thin as paper, crisp but wet with oil. Each onion cries for more than Argentina. The salt rains down; it falls from my fingers with my hands held at shoulder level.

Salt is older than anything, remember, and remembers more than elephants. It may have been the pomegranate that sweet persephone took to the underworld, it may have even been the seeds swallowed that predicated the sharp months of Autumn, the thin month of Winter. But it is salt that she carried with her when she walked out of Vesuvius into the sweet and lush Neapolitan Spring. It was salt that Gandhi harvested from the Ocean in his most poetic fuck you to the British Empire. Each of us who has kissed away a tear knows that nothing tastes so much like love as salt.

Cumin is lonesome as a Kentucky blue moon. Thick as an Oklahoma Dustbowl.
Cayenne shows her knees, and still has the ability to blush. Paprika has a polish accent.

Each spice alone is crazed, lost. But in context, stirred in the pot, they do that thing that doo wop street kids do. The joy in harmony is inarguable.

These two pots cook next to each other, on the back line of the stove top, like metropolitans on opposite side of a subway car. Each is contained in its own universe; still, two universes can not help but stare at each other.

When they finally do meet, when they finally combine of the plate, the exploding stream is something from old Hollywood. The kitchen tile warms against the wet heat. The body warms exactly the same way with the first spoonful. You are all at once strong, while you're weak in the knee. That is the thing about rice and beans, it tastes like hope.

The Mango Has Loose Morals

Let’s face it: the mango has loose morals. This is not a judgment, not an assessment. The mango does not play by anyone’s rules but its own. A mango would pull you away from a careening city bus, quick like lightening. Don’t underestimate the mango. Don’t make that mistake. Its cool green skin shiny like the lower east side, its round bottom would incite Paul Rubens to riot. The flesh, sweet and sticky orange and yellow, underneath the skin crisps against the air when the knife first cuts. It prickles with goose pimples – like it’s shy, like it’s coy. It’s an act; it is theatre. It is burlesque. It is a little known fact that Bob Fosse was reincarnated as a mango. It is a sad fumbling dance I do when butchering the mango, hacking away like a novice, fearful of the stone. Like unhooking a bra, wary of moles, fearful of reproach. Each inch, each millimeter, revealing sweeter and more succulent flesh. Each mistake more dramatic, more unforgiveable. The mango is so alive, so vibrant, I can not help but fear I am hurting it when I open it like a secret, like a memory. The blade slices easily through the skin, into the flesh, almost gluttonous to taste more, reach further.

The pieces lay supine on the cutting board, slow arcing abdomens without navels, like Adam or Eve. The air in the kitchen reacts suddenly. The atmosphere changes. The light is still the thin hard light of a summer zombified by drought but it is flecked with wet spots of mango perfume, hanging in the air willfully ignorant of gravity. That’s mango for you – hilarious. The kitchen becomes sweeter – the air is somehow more lush. Time moves strangely when the body is caught in the embrace of the unseen, the sensed. It is not unlike the moment of being kissed for the first or last time. Mango can be a bit dramatic from time to time. The grill outside is a kind of white hot that the Velvet Underground might appreciate. It is that kind of steady fury. I have a way with fire. When the mango first hits the grill the sound is uncomfortable. Not as bad a nails on a chalkboard; nothing is really even on that level. It is the sound of singed flesh – of cauterizing. Yet it sounds like a slow moan, a lingering sigh. The black stripes across the orange become whimsical as autumn, as Halloween. The mango is turned just this way or that, left with the cover closed, the smoke thick and blue as B.Holiday, and the black lines are cross hatched. The stripes have become fishnets. The mango has loose morals.

The roasted mango is of course too hot to touch, and must be touched immediately. The slices are flecked with ash, the skin pockmarked and scarred. And they fit perfectly into a gently open mouth. It is impossible to be anywhere else in the world, when eating that mango. I mean, for that moment, there is no fantasy, no prediction. No reference books or tarot cards. No sad or sweet stories of time past. No rebuilding that past like the Old South. It is impossible not to smile when eating the mango; it’s incorrigible. It sounds like gypsy jazz; it is predictable in that kind of way. But it feels good to tap your foot, to shake your ass, to lick your lips. The mango, a taxi dancer, is there willing to have its dance card filled. For that moment you will taste what it was to be that mango, to be alive, and vital. There is no remorse. There is no arrogance of hindsight. There is only the feeling of the mango’s heat mixing with your own. There is the sweet exhalation, sweet relief.