Super-sized Series

 Delicious Delights

 

 

Wearing Dinner: A Fibonacci Poem by Tina Hacker

 Lettuce

Wraps

are treacherous

.Each green leaf 

in hands adept at folding

swaddle a delivery of ingredients in original blends

so securely, not even a dribble of hoisin escapes onto fingers or clothes. 

                              In my palms, the jade blanket splits open, seeps streams of soy sauce

                                                                    filled with schools of vegetables onto my lap

                                                                                                  Then I remember my vow.

                                                                                                                    Keep it simple.

                                                                                                                         Don't order

                                                                                                                                     this

                                                                                                                                   again.

 First appeared in The Fib Review.

 

My artichoke, my love by Joe Cottonwood

 

Bristly, chubby,

in sandy soil by the green ocean

our love thrives.

 

In droplets of cool fog we wash.

In sunshine deep purple we bloom.

Outsiders fear us as thistles.

 

Wildfire consumes hills nearby.

Our passion smolders.

One touch, a spark.

 

She peels layers from our love,

sucks scraping between teeth.

Prickles protect her

but a sweet core betrays her,

a heart spicy and soft.

 

We steam, with tang 

of garlic and lemon we lick lips, we savor.

A voluptuous coating she butters,

in ecstasy she mutters

Devour me. 

Pudding by Shaun R. Pankoski

I'm using my favorite pot,
the one with the copper bottom.
Sugar, milk, butter, vanilla--
an egg yolk. A pinch of salt.
And food of the gods.
Otherwise it would simply be
custard.

I imagine Quetzacoatl,
peering over my shoulder,
in all his feathered, serpentine glory.
His sweet, chocolate-y breath
in my ear, at once aphrodisiacal
and scrumptious.
As I stir, I am stirred.

I think of wars fought,
a harvest, a funeral, a rite. Cacao
as currency. As opulence. As a comfort.
My wooden spoon, it's handle
shaped like a little twig,
slowly turning molten
liquid to velvet.

First published in Silver Birch Press  

 

 

Making Eggplant Croquettes with The NYT’s Food Page by Robbi Nester

To make this dish, you have to plan ahead.
One day, two eggplants occupied the shelf
in my refrigerator. I baked them, purple
as a nimbus cloud about to split. They fell in
on themselves, all steam and soft white flesh.
Then I left them overnight to cool, bitter
black juice seeping into the bowl. The next
day, I slipped off their blackened jackets,
chopped the yielding shreds, grated in
four cloves of garlic with a microplane,
mixed in some green-gold olive oil
and salt. I wasn’t finished yet!

After another day of waiting, I spread
a sheet of parchment paper in a pan,
poured in the eggplant mixture, wedged
it in the freezer. Next afternoon, I cut it
into greyish squares smelling of sweet
garlic. Finally, it was time to cook!
I arranged three bowls of beaten egg,
flour, and seasoned panko, dredged
the squares of frozen eggplant,
heated the cast iron pan till waves
of heat shimmered like a spirit
over the oil, lowered the croquettes
into their sizzling bath. They hissed
and spit like cornered cats, and crisped
immediately, the insides creamy
on my tongue. Sometimes, cooking
is like a séance, calling forth from plain
ingredients what’s been there all along.

first published in Silver Birch Press  

 

 

 

Rachael Ikins at age five or six with her Grandpa.

Heart-Healthy Tollhouse Cookies for Opa  
At Age Nine by Rachael Ikins                

Preheat oven to 375 degrees
Wash your hands well.

Substitute 1/2 cup canola or other vegetable oil for 1 cup butter
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 Tbsp hot water
Omit 1 tsp salt
Omit 1 tsp baking soda
2 1/4 c. All purpose flour
1 tsp. Vanilla extract
2 cups semi sweet or dark chocolate morsels
No nuts!

Pour flour into mom’s green Pyrex bowl.
Pour oil into a separate smaller red bowl, add brown sugar and white, vanilla.
Stir with Saturday pancake spoon until smooth.
Add eggs, one at a time. Gradually mix in flour using Mom’s wooden mallet.
Add morsels and mix well.

Drop by rounded soup spoonfuls onto ungreased baking sheets.
Bake for 9-11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool completely.

Swapping out oil for butter makes a thinner, crispier cookie. Perfect to dip
in coffee, they hold their shape and satisfying crunch.

Carefully stack cooled cookies in a waxed paper lined, decorated metal tin.
(Tin painted and embellished a week earlier.)
Tape lid to preserve crispness.
Top with bow and a handmade card, created for his birthday and for Christmas.

Note: After he died when I was thirteen, I baked a batch and took them to the cemetery and left them on his grave.

Bread by Judy Kronenfeld

Even the packaged kind—
twisty tie untwisted—
sends up its yeasty plume
to the nose, its celebration
of morning hunger...

and I think of truckers in a diner,
knuckles greasy, gathering up
the creamy yolks with a crust,
before each climbs alone into his cab,

of a student breaking a bagel
in half as she runs to an early
class to present her report, bits of garlic
pungent on her tongue—

all of us eager as a spaniel
under a table for that leftover rewarding
morsel of toast soaked in the perfume
of sausage or bacon—

how we take the new day
into ourselves, and it crosses
the barriers of our cells
and enters our blood,
how it may feed us,
or not.

from Bird Flying through the Banquet    

 

 

Celebrating at Chili’s by Sharon Waller Knutson

On her 43rd birthday,
our daughter-in law
sits sandwiched between
her toddler and teenager,
husband on the side.

Her nursing uniform
in the car in case
the clinic calls,
she dines on shrimp tacos,
black beans and iced tea,

while our son enjoys
a turkey club sandwich
with no avocados
and we savor the salmon
and garlic mashed potatoes.

Our fifteen-year-old grandson
eats a hamburger with tomatoes,
pickles and pineapple
and drinks pink lemonade,
sharing his order of fries

with his two-year-old brother
who sips apple juice, saying,
No, No, No, to buttered noodles
and mandarin oranges
as the waitress flits like a fly.

From Survivors, Saints and Sinners  

 

 

The Showdown by Marilyn L. Taylor

Okay, Zucchini,
with your sleek Sicilian good looks--
I know all about you and the rest
of the Zucca family, how you start out
small, in the corner of some
respectable old giardino (nobody
even notices) and then you spread,
don’t you, till you’ve moved in on
all the little guys, the beans
and the carrots and cukes,
and pretty soon you’re in charge
of the whole damn fattoria, right?
Well, I’ve got news for you, pal,
you’re past your prime.  You’re ripe
to spend the rest of your natural life
in the cooler.  Think I’m kidding?
Listen, either play along or it’s
      Ratatouille!  Ratatouille!
—a year in the jug for you, Zuke.
And your little tomato, too.

First appeared in Your Daily Poem
 

 

BLT by Barbara Crooker

"Enjoy every sandwich."
--Warren Zevon, talking with David Letterman
about his terminal lung cancer shortly before his death

Here’s how to make a great sandwich:
country white bread lightly toasted,
contoured with mayonnaise, leaf
lettuce spilling over the borders,
overlays of tomatoes, train tracks
of bacon leading straight
out of town. No need for road
maps, potato chips, or pickles.
Yes, winter is waiting, just over
the horizon. But right now, I’m
going to sit in the sun and listen
to birdsong. I’m going to eat
every crumb, every plottable
coordinate, now, while I can.

From Some Glad Morning    

 

 

To a Drumstick by Donna Hilbert

O creamy pleasure
atop a sugar cone
crowned in chocolate
studded with nutty buttons
chocolate plug at tip
perfection at lip
O flavor, form, and function
you are one!
Nutty Buddy, Drumstick,
by any name you are king
of ice cream novelties.
Good to the last lick.
Good to the last drip.

From The Congress of Luminous Bodies  

 

 

My Mother Fixing Supper by Judith Waller Carroll

Every night at suppertime, my mother sang.
Clues to what she was cooking were sprinkled like salt.
Cry Me a River she’d croon as she sliced
onions, slid them into bubbling butter,
We’re in the Money if she’d splurged on steak.
Once the food was on the table,
she was all business—napkins on laps
and mind your manners—but while it was cooking
our kitchen was as raucous as a dance hall,
my sister and I twirling past each other
as we laid out knives and forks,
steam rising around my mother’s face
as she drained the potatoes, another song
beginning as she scooped flour from a canister,
whisked it into hot grease, and still singing,
turned it into gravy.

From Ordinary Splendor   

 

 

The Capricious Caper by Betsy Mars

A caper is a bud, an edible flower, a wannabe:
atop some smoked salmon it begs
for a glass of champagne to accompany
or it skips off to play ring around the Flinders rosie,
prances in a patch of puttanesca or on a slab of piccata,
frolics in a bath of vodka—a substitute to garnish a martini.
On Saturday nights, my mother preferred hers dry,
with an olive stuffed with pimiento or Roquefort,
but on Sunday mornings there was nothing finer
than a bagel platter bearing red onions, tomato slices,
silky lox, a schmear of cream cheese, a chutzpah of capers.

Previously published in Silver Birch Press    

When I Was Thinking of Living in Chicago by Marianne Szlyk

I imagined cooking kielbasa
in a tiny kitchen, postcards
covering cupboards
the color of butter mints.

I could have been boiling
sausage in a pot
almost too large for the burner.
I could have been spooning out
sauerkraut from a huge jar
to a gold-rimmed serving dish.

But I imagined myself stir-frying
the discs with onion, mushroom,
even a little frozen broccoli
bought at the market below,

humming and flipping the food
with a wooden spatula,
not the plastic one my mother
had given me.

I would play her radio,
tuned to the college station
that played reggae 23 hours a day,
the music of this third-floor apartment,
the music I had ignored back in college.

Playing polkas or the blues in Chicago
would be too much. I might as well
wear a Cubs cap and curse the night games.
I might as well cheer for the Bulls.

I could not imagine you eating this dinner.
Even here we’d be slurping
ramen noodles, too salty, too spicy,
too slimy with the seaweed
you’d buy at the co-op
halfway across the overfed city,
two or three buses away,
too far for even you
to walk.

I must have been cooking
for someone else.

First appeared in Verse-Virtual  

 

 

Recipe for a Summer Supper by Joan Leotta

After my watering has slaked
their thirst, before searing heat
can shrivel them, sun ripens my
tomatoes. Using seeds saved
carefully from past crops,
these range in color from yellow to deep red-brown,
irregular in size and shape.
My nose and fingers
know when, still warm from
consorting with the sun, these fruits
will fall into my hand to join
a profusion of Genoa basil
in my basket. On the Kitchen counter
knife finds garlic, chops several
cloves, and the tomatoes into submission
I wash the basil, shred its soft fragrant
leaves into the bowl, add salt and olive oil.
Cover.
Warm pasta will
refresh, absorb the flavors, transforming
garden abundance into a
succulent summer supper.

Previously published in Young Raven Literary Review   

 

 

In praise of smelly cheese by Rose Mary Boehm

Starting with the least offensive you work
your way slowly up the intensity scale.
Beginning with a Camembert de Normandie
you move on via a gentle Brie de Meaux to a powerful
bleu, a Roquefort perhaps. When you can barely
talk (because your mouth is full and because you
didn't know how much wine is needed to neutralize
the Reblochon), your eyes, your nose and your
tastebuds which stay alert throughout, lead
the knife in your hand towards the Munster
and the Vieux Boulogne, avoiding
the Pont l’Eveque, Livarot and Banon
because you just can’t eat any more and you haven’t
made it yet to Napoelon’s favorite:
Epoisses de Bourgogne.

Historians have never asked themselves
whether the secret of his military success
may not have been that he was driving
the armies of Europe downwind.

First published by MacQueen’s Quinterly  

 

 

The Eggplant Amblers by Margaret Coombs
By the fifth day of our journey
we knew each other well,
the identities we came with
didn’t fit us anymore.
At night around the fire
we baptized each other
with trail names that pointed forward
and not back.
At morning dew
some of us were cranky
about what others saw in us
but the names held truth
so we were stuck.

The men were captivated
by Ukrainian Beauty
but Nipple Fruit
really made them sweat.
Cannibal Tomato
was my favorite walking partner
but he wore me out
and left me far behind.
New York Improved
was earnest,
and sure of all his facts,
but I think I left him cold
and that’s OK.

Little Sailor and Little Green
only walked together.
They shared a scale too small
for any other stride.
Louisiana Long Green
kept watching out for them
and served and aided each
whenever there was need.
Prosperosa and I
had a fling for a bit
but he seemed too slick for me
and I went on again, free.

Apple Green, Barbarella,
Red Ruffled, and I
kept plodding forward
when we weren’t circling back
and somehow kilometers passed.
We traveled as far
as we wanted to go
and were changed by it,
there is no doubt.

Our names from those days
now are secrets inside
that none of us share
very much.