Category Archives: Food

Pieromaniac

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Pieromaniac

At any time of day or night,
I’m always open to a bite
of pastry stuffed with something nice,
in fact, pie is my favorite vice!

I am very very very
fond of all things flavored cherry,
and of all this cherry pleasure,
pie’s the one that I most treasure.

Good for breakfast, good for lunch,
on pumpkin pie, I love to munch.
Coconut or chocolate cream?
They are my fantasy and dream.

Banana, apple—oh, and peach!
Put one of them within my reach,
and I’ll purloin a piece or two.
No pie is safe within my view.

On the window ledge or table,
I’ll grab a piece if I am able.
In a coffee shop or grandma’s kitchen,
pie’s delicious. Pie is bitchin’

At picnics, parties, celebrations,
with coffee or with small libations,
at any occasion or event,
pie is the best accompaniment.

Yet there is one aspect of pie
that I hope never meets my eye.
I don’t like pie in just one place.
Please don’t shove it in my face!

Today, I’m using the weekly challenge: Pie—The scent of pastry baking, the sound of a fork clinking on a plate… This week, make our mouths water with stories about pie.

The Indigestibles

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The Prompt: Mouths Wide Shut—Are you a picky eater? Share some of your favorite food quirks with us (the more exotic, the better!). Omnivores: what’s the one thing you won’t eat?

The Indigestibles

No room for mushrooms, can’t live with liver.
The thought of brains just makes me shiver.
Though I like pizza, my other law
is I don’t eat tomatoes raw!

Drinking milk’s against my wishes.
Fish is simply for the fishes.
I eat no veal or other baby,
and steak for me is simply “maybe.”

So if it’s your plan to invest
in things that I like to ingest,
I won’t make it any harder
for you to come and stock my larder.

All else you want to bring to feed me—
what edibles you wish to cede me:
Injera, curries, Thai, Chinese—
all are sure to tempt and please.

Except for one thing I just thought of
that in the past I’ve had a lot of.
There’s one more mouthful I won’t try.
I have no taste for humble pie!

“One Word Photo Challenge: Mustard”

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“One Word Photo Challenge: Mustard”
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, credit me with six thousand in my six- photo depiction of the word, “Mustard.”  Before his early demise, Sponge Bob was a fifteen foot (or more) high hot air balloon made from Tyvec, constructed in Mexico as one of hundreds launched in a yearly Independencia celebration in Ajijic.  These balloons take months to design and construct, then up to a half hour to launch, as a crowd of a thousand or more mills around on the ground or sits patiently in the stands of the soccer field, waiting for their ascent.  Usually three or four are being launched at any given time throughout the long afternoon and evening.  First a fire is lit in braziers to create the hot air to fill the balloon.  Then a ring in the center of the bottom of the balloon wrapped in kerosene or gasoline is set fire to keep the balloon inflated and the balloon rises above the heads of the crowds, sometimes floating away to nearby towns, at other times meeting within minutes or even seconds with the fate of Sponge Bob Hotpants.  The spectacle of the remains of the burning balloon falling into the crowd or trees or rooftops or highline wires is taken with a fatalism endemic to Mexico.  Small boys rush to stomp out the remains of the fire.  No mothers scold.  No fathers forbid.  The crowd pays more attention to food purchased from local vendors than they do with the possibility of being set on fire.  This is Mexico.  Such things just work out one way or another.  A nearby firetruck was never called upon in the time I witnessed the event.  Sponge Bob, the most mustard of balloons launched and an annual crowd favorite, was soon history and the only mustard to be seen was on the amazing spiral-cut hot dogs-on-a-stick served in one of the food stands that rimmed the road leading into the soccer field.

Green Brownies

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(This poem evolved from notes that I scribbled into the margin
of our Mexican Train score sheet while visiting my friend Gloria.)

Green Brownies

The brownie that she serves me
crumbles when I try to break it into two.
Her sense of humor allows it and so I tease her.
“Gloria, this looks like the kind of food
my grandmother tried to pawn off on us—
weeks old and crusty from the refrigerator.”

“Those chocolate chips were like that when I bought them!”
she insists, even before I question their green tinge.
I think that this is even worse than the alternative,
and say so and we both laugh as she eats her brownie
and I reduce mine to dust. Not a hard task, as it turns out.

She’s had a bad infection for a week or more.
“I’m not contagious,” she insists each time she coughs
a long low rasping rumble that threatens to avalanche.
“Now stop!” she tells the sounds that explode
without permission from her chest.

“Perhaps,” I say, “These brownies are a godsend
and that’s penicillin growing on the chocolate chips.”
Then her deep coughs transform into
gasps of laughter that echo mine.

The young man there to rake the garden
looks up at us and shakes his head
at two old ladies drinking rum and
eating something chocolate,
and it occurs to me that perhaps
what the world sees as senility
is simply evolution
out of adulthood
to a higher
stage.

The Prompt: Locked and Sealed.  Can you keep a secret? Have you ever — intentionally or not — spilled the beans (when you should’ve stayed quiet)?  Yes, I must admit that I regularly mine my life with friends and family for topics for my writing.  As a matter of fact, that’s pretty much all I write.  My friend Gloria, however, has no qualms about my writing about this occasion.  In fact,  she insisted I send it off immediately to a local magazine/newspaper whose editor may or may not find it as funny as she did.  With one exception, I’ve had just one friend object to this practice of writing about friends and family.  She has always refused to read anything I’ve written about her.  “You haven’t spilled any of my dirty little secrets, have you?” she says (no small amount of dread in her voice)  every time I tell her I’ve written about her. No, I never would.  The only dirty little secrets I ever reveal are my own!!!

Note:  So amusing that today’s prompt, “Locked and Sealed” takes its title seriously!!!  Its link does not work. For this reason, I’m posting today’s blog in yesterday’s topic and counting down the hours until they discover this.

“How good are you at keeping secrets? Today’s @postaday prompt is Locked and Sealed: wp.me/p23sd-njA 2 hours ago“—This is a quote from the WordPress site.  And yes, the prompt truly is locked and sealed.  9:08 and still, none of us can post on the site.  At least this time they posted the topic.  I imagine by now there are at least 80 bloggers straining at the prompt, ready to spring into action to post as soon as the link works.  To the starting gate, bloggers!

10:58  133 bloggers standing in line to post…still, no link. Locked and Sealed?  Is it April 1 by any chance?

Crunchy, Soft and Piquant

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The Prompt: Is there an unorthodox food pairing you really enjoy? Share with us the weirdest combo you’re willing to admit that you like — and how you discovered it.

Crunchy, Soft and Piquant

Potato chips, ketchup and cottage cheese! I imagine this pairing came about by accident one day at a school or church picnic on a too-small plate, and some flavor memory insists there were baked beans and a hamburger on the same plate; but somehow the vital ingredients came to be the salty-crunchy chips, the creamy-soft cheese and the piquant perfection of Hunts Ketchup. (For the uninitiated, the process is to dip the chip in the ketchup and then scoop up the cheese.)

I don’t usually keep potato chips in the house anymore because I can’t be trusted with them, and cottage cheese is so expensive in Mexico that I don’t usually buy it; but when I make a trip to Costco in Guadalajara, invariably I’ll come home with one of their huge containers of cottage cheese and somehow, magically, potato chips appear (If you buy it, they will come) and the house echoes with the strains of some culinary Indian Love Call coming from the heart of my fridge, “When I’m calling you u u u u u u.” And so it is that the unlikely trio are reunited once again, probably late at night when even the dogs are fast asleep and no one is looking.

Sayonara Umami

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Sayonara Umami

Every day my word prompt takes time away from me.
I lie in bed and write and write sometimes till two or three.
But today they’ve found another part of me to waste,
for now they’re going to take away one aspect of my taste.
Salt or bitter, sweet or sour, are tastes I must maintain.
Umami is the obvious choice that causes the least pain.
They say monosodium glutamate is what creates its savor.
Seaweed, cured fish, aged cheese and meats are what contain its flavor.
(All foods I hate and so at last, I’ll never have to worry
about detecting those weird tastes in saté or in curry.)
No more lurking fish paste. No more furry tongue.
No more adult flavors found revolting by the young.
So for once, dear “Word Prompt,” I shall to you relate
my thanks for taking from my life something I really hate!

The Prompt: Picky Tongues—You have to choose one flavor that your sense of taste will no longer be able to distinguish. Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami, spicy (not a taste per se, but we’re generous): which one do you choose to lose?

Lick for Lick

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Lick for Lick

Ice cream is my weakness—my favorite sort of sweet.
A flavor that I don’t adore is one I’ve yet to meet.

Mandarin orange or licorice, tequila or dill pickle?
I am not true to any of them, for I fear I’m fickle.

When choosing ice cream flavors, it’s impossible to pick.
I simply am incapable of choosing which to lick.

And so I’d like a flavor that has a bit of each:
chocolate and vanilla and a little touch of peach,

strawberry and mango and lime and toffee crunch—
why choose just one flavor when you can have a bunch?

Throw some tangerine in and some pineapple sorbet.
Licorice and banana? Who am I to say nay?

This flavor would be popular with those who cannot choose
whether they prefer the flavor of pickles, fruit or booze.

Though some of you may scoff at it and laugh in your derision,
the name of my new flavor? I call it “Indecision.”

The Prompt: Flavor # 32—A local ice cream parlor invites you to create a new wacky flavor. It needs to channel the very essence of your personality. What’s in it?

NaPoWriMo Day 27: Lemonade

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Lemonade

The Crystal Lite, like a marriage of Kool-Aid and crystal meth,
catches the light and glows from inside its plastic gallon container,
becoming its own advertisement for this lemonade stand,
its pre-teen proprietor standing in the scant shade
of a stop light pole
behind his fruit crate counter
with its stacks of styrofoam cups.

He has chosen his clientele—
perhaps thirsty from a long wait
in the doctor’s waiting room in the clinic
or the hospital across the street.
To his back, a retirement community with no house
more than 3 blocks from the hospital—
its inhabitants like products on a shelf waiting to be picked.

When they pass the stand,
memories of generations of such stands
perhaps flood their minds,
and thirsty or not, they stop for a cup.

I am the woman with her foot in a cast,
sitting in the passenger seat
of the car pulled over to the curb.
The woman reaching through the window of the car
is my sister, holding out the white cups
with the too-sweet yellow shining through
as though radioactive.

She was my long ago pattern for everything,
including Kool-Aid stands with 5 cent
paper bags of popcorn and ice cube slivers
floating in the Tupperware pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid,
a plate on the top to repel flies
lazy in the July heat, orbiting our sweaty heads
like precognitive sputniks
buzzing in the minds of rocket scientists.

We had not a clue.

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The prompt today was to write a poem based on a picture.

NaPoWriMo Day 26: Pied Beauty II

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Pied Beauty II

Thanks be to Sara Lee for appled things—
For pies, for apple fritters and for thin-rolled strudel crust;
For pastries of the fruit of Eve and sauce it swims within;
Fresh-cooked in ovens, how their sweet juice sings;
The sugar clotted and pierced— place it on plate we must;
And all taste, for how can tackling it be such a sin?

All things made of flour and Crisco and of apples sweet;
(How can they by nutritionists be so sorely cussed
With words professing they won’t make us thin?)
With their tart flavor are sure our lips to meet;
And meet again.

—Judy Dykstra-Brown

Our prompt today was to write a curtal sonnet in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous poem “Pied Beauty”. This form consists of a first stanza of six lines followed by a second stanza of five, closing with a half-line. The rhyme scheme is abcabc defdf. I chose to make it a parody of Pied Beauty as well.

And now, the original:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins