Category: delicious.

Valentine’s day (photo)!

Published on by taylor mardis katz1 Comment

as it turns out, i love valentine’s day. misha  & i give each other little presents a lot (little things, just poems or a small round rock), but today we give each other a little present on the same day, and i like that. it feels nice to know that loving is emphasized today, even if it’s all hallmark-ized and hollywood-ized–still, people are remembering to act in the name of love today. i believe in that. i love so many people, my mom & dad & sister, & my grandpa with his broken shoulder & the rest of my family, & my friends in the east & some people out west & various chickens & cats around america. loving people is what i like to do. valentine’s day has gotten dumbed down a little–bad chocolates are dumb & so are teddy bears with hearts in their bellies, but a loaf of bread with a heart in it is not dumb it all. in fact, it is very savory & beautiful. & it slices like heaven.

(bread & photography by misha j.)

happy day to everyone i love. happy happy day.

xoxo

Words to live by (Chris Kardambikis).

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written at the summer sideyard & since then stationed on my refrigerator. & now you too can have this friendly reminder on your fridge, these words of wisdom, this clever counsel, to guide you through your future beverage selections, just save the pdf, click on print, and enjoy a future of smart hydration…

Tomato poems! In honor of the last day of summer (Guillermo Saavedra).

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On the Tomato

Brief Vaudevillian Hypotheses Apropos of This Androgynous Fruit

 

1

Behold the hero of the vegetable patch

a modest American marvel

with the face of a Chinese lantern.

2

Sheer light made of water:

a fleeting heart, pumping

muted cries of jubilation.

3

Her fancy dress, her festive

fantasy of red confirms a doubt:

she’s a lady tossed in the salad by mistake.

16

A tomato rots: here lies

a misfortune greater

than the fall of an empire.

39

Voluptuous little flag:

he makes every dry spell

fresh.

41

To sink one’s finger into

its soft flesh: a crime or copulation

as vague as your idea of bliss.

44

A tomato crosses the river

on a moonless night:

becomes a plum.

55

(Mark Twain)

A salad can be an anthem to joy

but the proof

is in the tomato.

60

To bite into a tomato thinking

of nothing: so the peak

of summer will burst in your mouth.

64

Columbus’s was egg

and prophecy: America

is a tomato under sail.

66

A tomato was raised

by two elderly lemons:

now it’s a sweet tangerine.

75

And yet, there is no more

voracious love than that of salt

searching for it on the plate.

97

The taste of tomato

remembered: the damp

face of a barefoot child.

 

 

translated from the Spanish by Cindy Schuster

Poem about onions (William Matthews).

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Onions

How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.

Summer reading list, for serious.

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I just looked at last summer’s book list, which I posted here last June. I didn’t read a single book on that list. This makes me think that perhaps I’m doomed to lose interest in any book that’s on the Summer Reading List. Or perhaps my list was made by just looking around my house at books I’ve been meaning to, but not especially wanting to, read (sometimes there’s a big difference between these two categories). This year’s book list features some books I’ve already read, so hopefully I’m not such a big liar this time around.

***

Le Summer Book List 2011.

The Fountainhead/Ayn Rand (check)

Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara (check) (swoon)

The Art of Recklessness/Dean Young (in middle of)

A Visit from the Good Squad/Jennifer Egan (as of today, check)

The Best of It/Kay Ryan (in middle of)

The Good Earth/Pearl S. Buck

Invisible Cities/Italo Calvino (this was on last year’s list too, but now I actually own it)

Collected John Berryman (all of it, of course)

Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction/ P.H. Matthews

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems/Jane Kenyon

Lighthead/Terrance Hayes

Siddhartha/Hermann Hesse

From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol(/Andy Warhol)

The Maverick Poets: An Anthology/ed. Steve Kowitt

Tremor: Selected Poems/Adam Zagajewski (again)

Truth and Beauty/Ann Patchet (in middle of)

A Trip to the Stars/Nicholas Christopher

Come All You Ghosts/Matthew Zapruder

Bossypants/Tina Fey

 

The photograph below, by Elliot Erwitt, is where I’d prefer to do all of this reading. But my kitchen table will work, too.