They call me Slug Savior.

Yesterday morning I woke up and there was a slug on my bathroom floor!  My first reaction was, That is a slug.  My second reaction was, Huh, I guess I'm not that bothered by it.  I mean, slugs are not known for speed.  I had plenty of time to pee and think about the slug situation before I actually had to deal with it.  It was then that I decided I wanted to save it. 

This was new territory for me.  I'll be the first to tell you that I'm a big wuss when it comes to creepy crawlies.  I have genuine arachnophobia.  The very sight of even a fake stuffed Halloween spider sends electric currents down my back.  It's something about the legs that freaks me out.  Ew, just writing about it gives me shivers.  Okay.  Deep breaths.  So whenever the spiders find me--and they always do--my two options are to either drown them in Raid or alert my roommate, who, being the adult person that she is, will calmly handle the situation and take the spider outside to let it live and procreate and GAH GROSS!

Okay, enough with the spiders.  Back to yesterday's slug.  I felt instinctively that since I did not recoil at the sight of it, I was emotionally equipped to handle said slug disposal myself.  I've always had a theory that since leggy insects bothered me, I could handle slithery things like snakes and worms.  This was my chance to prove it. 

My plan of action was to get a piece of paper out of the printer, lay it down on the ground, and wait for the slug to creep its way onto it.  It didn't take as long as you would think.  The slug was actually pretty keen.  Maybe because the piece of paper that I grabbed had a recipe for West African peanut soup on it, I don't know.  Anyway, phase one of slug removal was completed.  Phase two was to transport the slug paper through my bedroom, around my bed, through the hall, through the living room and out the front door.  At first I thought I would wear gloves, but then I realized the thing about slugs is that they will cling to anything for dear life.  Once that became evident, I did not worry about the slug sliding around onto anything, namely me. 

Phase three was to put the slug outside, thereby releasing it into the wild and hopefully saving its life.  This proved slightly more challenging due to the aforementioned slug grip on the paper.  I tried to angle the paper so he would just slither off, but he kind of went into a ball of fear, so I just set the paper down outside the door and figured I'd check back later to see if he was gone.  I then proceeded to accost my roommate in the middle of her getting ready for work with the tale of my heroic slug rescue.  It went something like this:  "Omi, there was a SLUG in my BATHROOM and I saved it!  Me!  I saved it!!!"  Oh, the humility. 

She was suitably impressed and wrinkled her nose at the prospect of the slug in the apartment.  She, Savior of Spiders, is not so much a fan of the leg-lacking creepies.  I told her I put the slug outside.  She opened the door to go to work and saw the paper.  Omi:  "Why is there a recipe outside our door . . . OH.  EW!"

We are a great team, don't you think?

Wild Gratitude

Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In everyone of the splintered London streets,

And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's
With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,
And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.
All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.

This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General
"And all conveyancers of letters" for their warm humanity,
And the gardeners for their private benevolence
And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,
And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.
This morning I understood that he loved to hear—
As I have heard—the soft clink of milk bottles
On the rickety stairs in the early morning,

And how terrible it must have seemed
When even this small pleasure was denied him.
But it wasn't until tonight when I knelt down
And slipped my hand into Zooey's waggling mouth
That I remembered how he'd called Jeoffry "the servant
Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,"
And for the first time understood what it meant.
Because it wasn't until I saw my own cat

Whine and roll over on her fluffy back
That I realized how gratefully he had watched
Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork
Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently
Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening
His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose
Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or
Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,
A rodent, "a creature of great personal valour,"
And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.

And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—
Who can teach us how to praise—purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

-Edward Hirsch

I'm like that guy who wrote a love letter about his typewriter except about food.

Yesterday I gave a pasta-making demonstration to some people I work for.  I was kind of nervous about it because I wanted to show them how to use their hands to mix the dough and not a food processor, which is something I've only done once but I think it tastes better.  Yeah, I probably should have practiced, but I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of gal.  Instead I went with talking about the process of making pasta and putting off actually making it for as long as possible.  I figured maybe they would forget why I was there?  I don't know.  Anyway, it didn't work, and while they were looking at me expectantly I took the first step and measured out the flour.  It's funny how something so simple can calm you down.  Measuring flour I know.  Cracking eggs?  Old hat.  Next came the tricky part of incorporating one into the other.  You make a "well" and sort of pinch the flour into the eggs.  As I was doing that I realized that I needed to be explaining as I went along.  One of the people got out a video camera.  My very own cooking show!

The thing about pasta as I've said before, is that it's not difficult to make really.  It just takes a lot of time and upper body strength.  Maybe I was more anxious about that last part, but as you knead the dough you think, wow I'm really earning this meal!  And the great thing about teaching is that if you show them how to do it once, you can make the students do the rest of the work. 

One of my "students" made an excellent point about the process of learning from a *cough cough* expert in a craft.  It's a shared experience doesn't happen often enough these days.  People teach themselves how to do things all the time using the internet or TV, but when another person takes the time to show you something, then you will always associate them with that process.  What a nice idea.

All in all, we came out with two great batches of fresh pasta, one of which we ate for lunch.  As the Barefoot Contessa would say,"How bad can that be?"

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

-Margaret Atwood

Mi amore

I have an obsession with pasta.  It's not at all something I've recently discovered.  I'm not having a whiny, middle-aged woman-who-takes-a-gap-year Italian food renaissance,  My passion for pasta has always been and always will be, to the point where I first considered writing a blog about spaghetti long before I even entertained the idea of writing about poetry. 

Pasta and I go way back to a time when I was a toddler and it was a pastina.  My mother used to coax me with a mixture of pastina and egg when I refused all other food, and to this day it is still my go-to dish when I'm sick.  The pasta's and my relationship escalated last year when I was no longer satisfied with simply emptying a box of linguine into boiling water.  I wanted to get my hands dirty.  So I bought a $40 pasta-maker at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and, armed with a book of recipes from Mom, I hand-cranked my first batch of noodles.  Well.  What can I say that will convince you to live a life of only homemade spaghetti?  That it is like nothing else in the world?  That angels and Etta James sang? That it really is the easiest thing to do and cooks up in about 2 minutes?  That true pasta in its plainest form actually tastes rich and eggy and not at all like cardboard?  

Now that I have found gastronomic bliss with my pasta maker, I am continuing to build our relationship.  I have discovered two things in the last month, during which I made a Christmas and a New Year's batch: 

1) Using Italian "00" flour really does make a difference and only costs about $3 if you can find it.  It is so finely ground, it is like working with talcum powder.
2) Instead of relying on a food processor to mix the dough, make an old-fashioned well out of the flour, put the eggs and olive oil in the middle and mix it up yourself.  Ten minutes of kneading dough will certainly help you feel less guilty about that big bowl of fettuccine you're about to eat.

And for those of you who are reading this and thinking, when did I sign up for a cooking blog?  I say, come over and I'll show you what all the fuss is about.

Pumpernickel

Monday mornings Grandma rose an hour early to make rye,
onion & challah, but it was pumpernickel she broke her hands for,
pumpernickel that demanded cornmeal, ripe caraway, mashed potatoes
& several Old Testament stories about patience & fortitude & for
which she cursed in five languages if it didn’t pop out fat
as an apple-cheeked peasant bride. But bread, after all,
is only bread & who has time to fuss all day & end up
with a dead heart if it flops? Why bother? I’ll tell you why.
For the moment when the steam curls off the black crust like a strip
of pure sunlight & the hard oily flesh breaks open like a poem
pulling out of its own stubborn complexity a single glistening truth
& who can help but wonder at the mystery of the human heart when you
hold a slice up to the light in all its absurd splendor & I tell you
we must risk everything for the raw recipe of our passion.

-Philip Schultz

Rich man's problem

Somehow I have amassed a collection of aprons.  I say "somehow" because it is not something I ever thought of doing.  It just happened.  A couple of years ago my roommates and some friends of ours decided to do our very own version of Top Chef, except it was more like Iron Chef and The Next Food Network Star all rolled into one.  We called it Next Top Iron Chef.  There were two teams of two and I was the sous chef on my team.  My chef friend and I took it very seriously.  The secret ingredient was egg, and my team won.  During the competition my chef friend had let me borrow one of her aprons so we could look all business.  When it was over she let me keep it.  This is what it looks like:

Simple, straight-forward, practical.  I used this apron consistently when I made dinner, especially after coming home from work so I wouldn't mess up my clothes.  Over the course of the next year, my friend who had given me that apron moved to New York.  I was sad to see her go because she is awesome and I missed her.  On my birthday, she surprised me by sending me a new apron.  What?! I was so excited to have such a wealth of aprons.  This one had a little more pizzazz:

I tended to gravitate more to it for cooking and the other for baking.  I didn't want to get flour all over my new apron.  Then on my birthday this year, a different friend gave me a brand new home-sewn apron that was a little more girly and frilly than the others.  It's so pretty!  I couldn't believe my good luck.  I wear it when cooking for guests:

But now, my dear friend Angela has upped the ante.  She embroidered me an apron that is so darling that frankly I don't know what to do with it.  I'm actually afraid to use it.  It's dainty and reminds me of those old-fashioned pinafores that women used to wear.  I hate the thought of getting grease or chocolate all over it (don't you want to know what I'm cooking).  I even had trouble figuring out the best way to photograph it in order to do it justice.  I'm still not sure I did:

My apartment is from the 1920s, so there's an old ironing board built into the wall in the kitchen.  I thought it would be a nice match for the apron.  Now I just need to figure out the perfect occasion to wear it (the apron, not the ironing board).

Why I Am Not a Painter

-Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

I have a cold, and I'm supposed to feed it.

This is not a cooking blog, but I can't help sharing what I've been up to over the weekend, which includes this fabulous coffee cake:

It's actually the Barefoot Contessa's recipe, but I altered it ever so slightly and I was pretty proud of how it turned out.  Lately I've been so focused on eating vegetables and trying to stay healthy that I haven't been much in the mood for cooking or baking.  I mean, if I bake something, I'm going to feel like I earned the right to eat it.  But in the interest of trying to use up the insane amount of grapes I had leftover from the last CSA pickup, I also decided to make a grape focaccia recipe I've had my eye on.  Grapes and focaccia?  It's actually a Tuscan thing and it is delicious:

 

Never before have I tried to make my own bread, but I reached way down to my Italian old lady roots and kneaded that dough like a genuine nonna.  It felt so good, I seriously considered opening a pizzeria for about 5 seconds.  Eh, I'm over it now.

Monday

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth--
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see--
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think--
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman's heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

-Billy Collins

The horror of health

The vegetables in my refrigerator are causing me anxiety.  It's not that I don't want to eat them.  I do.  It's just that there's so damn many of them, they can't last.  I'm afraid to open the fridge for fear of witnessing the last throes of a tomato.  When it's dinner time I hesitate between the eggplant and the zucchini.  Which one faces a greater danger of expiring?  I pick up the zucchini.  "I'll come back for you, eggplant!  Tomorrow!  Just hold on!" Then later, guilt: "More.  I could have cooked more.  Why didn't I make ratatouille?  I could have used two for it.  And I didn't!"  It's a regular Schindler's list up in my kitchen.

Here's how it all started:  a couple months ago I joined a CSA.  It's great.  Everything is fresh and vibrant.  The colors are rich and coursing with nutrients.  It's all so plentiful:

It's also a lot of veg.  I didn't realize it at the time, but even between the three people in our household, it takes some considerable menu planning to use each and every one of those little life-givers.  First I took the approach of showing respect to nature by trying to feature each vegetable, but I soon came to grips with the fact that I am not creative enough to feature that many scallions.  Then it became a how-many-vegetables-can-I-cram-into-this-stir-fry type of deal.  I mean, we're only getting these boxes of veggies every other week so you'd think it wouldn't be so difficult, but the other thing to take into account is the time and effort that goes into cooking each meal.  My name is not Ina Garten.  I wish it was, I really do.  Where's Jeffrey? 

So now I'm left with the race to save the escarole from the garbage.  I've practically given up meat I'm eating so many fruits and vegetables.  This is what I get for pursuing a healthy lifestyle.  And yet, every night, triage:  The lemons are shriveling! I run for the juicer.  The grapes are two degrees left of raisins.  Pick out the good ones, refresh in cold water, leave the weak behind.  The plums are growing mushrooms!  There's nothing more we can do.  Body bag (trash).

I'm not ready to give up on the CSA yet or my veggies.  The situation is serious.  It calls for constant vigilance.  And a limerick:

The stress that healthy eating gives
cannot be the right way to live.
The veggies are crying,
the fruit's quickly dying.
How I long for some preservatives!