Category Archives: Food

Rhubarb Strawberry Muffins

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IMG_2029On a drive back from Asheville, my food and photography consultant Grace and I were discussing something new to do with muffins, or something new to do with rhubarb, or both–I’m not quite sure which. Either way, it was a lively discussion, and this recipe is the result.

 

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups flour (Whole wheat, white, both, as you wish)
  • ¾ cup of sugar
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • ½ tsp cardamom
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ½ cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup diced rhubarb
  • 1 cup chopped fresh strawberries
  • ½ cup rolled oats
  • ½ cup walnuts
  • 2 cup cooked sweet potato (I like it baked, but I assume canned will do)
  • 3 eggs
  • ½ cup buttermilk or Greek yoghurt
  • ½ cup oil (it might work without this; I liked making it with coconut oil.)
  • 2 tsp. vanilla
  • ½ cup brewer’s yeast (optional)

 

Step 1, Prepare Ye the way: Preheat the oven to 350°, chop the rhubarb and the strawberries, either grease the muffin tins or put in the cupcake liners (I usually spray a little canola oil in the bottom of these to make things come out easier). I get 2 dozen medium sized muffins out of this mix.

Step 2, sifting the dry ingredients: In one bowl crumble up the brown sugar, then sift (mix if you don’t have a sifter) in the flour, white sugar, baking soda, cardamom, and salt. Mix thoroughly.

Step 3, mixing the wet ingredients: In another bowl, mix the oatmeal, rhubarb, strawberries, walnuts, sweet potato, eggs, buttermilk, oil, and vanilla.

Step 4, combining the big mess: Add the dry ingredients to the wet ones and mix well. You want to make sure the individual bits rhubarb & berry are each coated to keep them from getting too clumpy. The consistency should be much firmer than batter, but a little more liquid than cookie dough.IMG_2026

Step 5, baking: Fill two dozen or so muffin tins. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. See how they look. Stick a toothpick in one and see if it comes out battery.

Step 6, sharing: I think that muffins are an ideal sharing food. Sure, they are a great breakfast to hand to a family member as she rushes out the door, late for work, but they are even better to share for a liesurely breakfast with black coffee or strong tea sweetened by conversation. Of course, they work just as well for an afternoon tea. As always, they are a great gift to share at work, or to mail, or otherwise sneak to lovely people.(Note: if your only means of postage is messages in old bottles, they are a bit awkward.)

White Bean and Rosemary Dip

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White Bean DipMy daughter acquired this recipe while staying at and working with the community at Koinonia Farms in Americus Georgia. They are a wonderful group of people, and also grow great pecans.

 

 

Ingredients:

  • ¼ cup olive oil
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
  • 2 cans (15 oz. each) white beans (Great Northern, cannellini, or white kidney beans) or the equivalent of dried cooked and drained.
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 3 sprigs fresh rosemary, rinsed
  • 2 large or 3 small tomatoes, chopped
  • Basalmic vinegar and freshly ground pepper to taste

 

Step 1, in the beginning: All origin stories should begin with olive oil, onions and garlic. Heat the olive oil sauté the onions until semi-translucent, add the garlic and rosemary and sauté until fragrant, being careful not to brown garlic, about 1 minute.

Step 2, the dip thickens: Add white beans and warm and soften them through. Add the salt and balsamic vinegar and mash the mixture to get it somewhat smooth.

Step 3, finishing: Remove from heat, the tomatoes and more balsamic, salt or pepper to taste. Garnish with rosemary sprigs.

Step 4, to the table: Serve to friends, preferably on the terrace IMG_2019or in the garden, with pita chips and a fine chilled white wine. We served it with home made pita vread (forthcoming recipe), my roasted beet salad (also forthcoming), and a green salad.

Why Cook?

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Sing to me, oh Muse!

Sing fireto me of fierce fire tamed,
      and made to humbly do our bidding;
Of strangers drawn unto its warmth,
      to make and eat and become a people.

 

 

Sing to me of sweet earth’s bounty,
      harvested and shaped and changed;
Of food upon the open table,
      to fill the gut and feed the heart.

salt spiceSing to me of precious salt,
      wrested from deep earth and sea;
 Of herbs and roots, of leaves and spice,
      to season the plate and gladden the sense.

 

 

Sing to me of spoiling turned tool,
     and rot to flavour and preserve; 
Of fermentation in riotous rot,
     bringing bread and beer, pickles and cheese.

Sing to me of roasting and baking,
     of stewing and frying.

cherrypistachio 013Sing to me of bread, precious bread,
    combining fire with plant and salt and yeast.

Sing to me, oh Muse!

Sing to me of the cook.

 

Around the Bistro this week, we have been keeping busy. Wode Toad has been hazing/harassing the new guy, Brandon, we’ve been doing some spring cleaning, and Pierce brought in a new book: Cooking, by Michael Pollan. He is probably the most influential food writer of our times, and a champion of real food as opposed to processed food–both from factories and factory farms. It seems strange that it has taken him this long to establish a connection between food and the cooking of food, but in this lively, entertaining, and occasionally overstated book, he examines cooking and learns to cook. This has generated a great deal of discussion in the Bistro’s kitchen, and it occurred to me that, in spite of the fact that we are a bistro and I share weekly recipes and many of my illustrations center around food, I hadn’t actually written about cooking.

It occurred to Wode Toad that my weekly essays have been Wode-Toad-color-miffed.jpgsteadily growing longer, or, as he says about brevity: “Och, I don’t know abou’ the soul of wit, Bear, but with your writings as with briefs, the less I see of them, the better, Aye?”

Observing that I loved to eat (a doctor once pointed out that my sister as an infant displayed tremendous “hand to mouth coordination”–a family trait), my mother convinced me that there was a natural relationship between cooking and eating, and that if I wished to eat well, I should learn to cook well. I agreed, and asked if she’d teach me. She said yes, the first thing you need to learn is how to wash dishes, which she then made me do.

The lesson, however, was not lost on me; I learned to cook because I wanted to eat. After my first kidney transplant, I had to control my diet (and my budget), so I learned to bake my own bread and to cook from scratch and from fresh ingredients. Because my daughter likes good food, she learned to cook, and will probably soon surpass my skills. With a few exceptions, most of my friends cook, and cook very well.Wode-Toad-color-miffed-150x150

ahem.

I cook because I need to eat.
I cook healthy food because I need to eat healthy food.
I cook well because I like to eat well.

I cook because I need to create.
Most of us work jobs that don’t actually produce anything, and where nothing is actually ever finished–it just keeps starting over again. Most of us live in worlds that our outside of our control. In the kitchen, I have control, I am producing something, and, at the end of it, I am actually done. I can look at it, and–Godlike–say: ‘it is good.’

I cook because it keeps me busy.
Due to a variety of circumstances last fall, I spiraled into a deep blue funk, a slough of despond, a dark night of the soul, a dark forest, a depression. To keep me from sitting and staring, I made myself cook every day, even though I had lost my appetite. Because of this, I gave a lot of it away. “Well,” my friend Amy said, “even if you are still depressed, at least you’ll be very popular and depressed.”

I cook because it is handiwork.
I live in a world of words. I sell words at one job, and guide students through words at the other. Everything I do is so verbal. Don’t get me wrong, I am at home in the world of words. But one of the great pleasures of cooking is that it is working with my hands (and smell, and sight and taste, etc.) rather than with words. It is to me what Zen meditation and running are to many others. Because of this, however, it is hard to explain why I love it so: like music, it defies words. It is my own quiet time.

This doesn’t mean that I would not occasionally like help.
In fact, one of my greatest regrets is that I have never really figured out how to cook well with others. I have worked in commercial kitchens, and I love the camaraderie, but I tend to be alone in the kitchen. Even when I do get a chance to cook with somebody–usually my daughter–we tend to bump into each other because we each are used to having the kitchen to ourselves. If you are just starting to cook, or if you are just starting a relationship, my advice would be to learn to cook together.

I cook because it connects me with our food.
I know each piece, because I found it, brought it home, cleaned it, and prepared it. My food belongs to me, and is not just a product; I know it intimately.

But I also cook because I love.
I am not a person who feels comfortable expressing affection–or even emotion, for that matter–but cooking is an acceptable, safe way of telling somebody that I love them.
There is something strangely satisfying in getting up several hours before I need to in order to cook my wife breakfast for her birthday, or to make muffins for the intrepid New York travellers to take to Brooklyn, or to leave bread on somebody’s mailbox, or lean in and hand it to them in the middle of a conversation. I think of the people I am cooking for, and this happiness permeates the experience of cooking.

So, go cook something yourself.
Make yourself something to eat,
then make someone you love something to eat,
then convince that person to cook with you.

And remember to drop by the Philosophy Bistro for recipes and discussion.

Cherry Pistachio Bread

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Cherry Bread with PB“Some look at the world as it is,
and they ask: ‘Why?’
I look at the world as it is,
and I ask: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a dark chocolate and peanut butter sandwich on cherry bread?
I wonder how you make cherry bread?'”

 

Ingredients:

  • 2 1/2 cups warm water
  • 1 cup warm milk
  • 2 Tbsp. Cherry Jam
  • 2 Tbsp. Yeast (maybe 3 envelopes?)
  • 1 Tbsp. Salt
  • 1 cup Dried Cherries
  • 1 cup Shelled Unsalted Chopped Pistachios
  • 8-9 cups, give or take, of whole wheat (3 cups) and bread flour (6+ cups)
  • 1 Egg (you need the white)

Step 1, Wet Stuff: In a large bowl (or the mixer bowl if you plan on letting the bread hook to the heavy lifting); whisk in the Cherry Jam into the warm Milk and the first cup and a half of warm Water. Add the dried Cherries, and set to the side.

Step 2, meanwhile, back at the yeast: in a smaller container, whisk together the remaining cup of warm Water, the Yeast, and just a smidge of the Cherry Jam. Let this sit for a few minutes (listen to a pop-song, gather the flour, begin to shell the pistachios; whatever you fancy), and let it start to bubble.

Step 3, mixing and proofing: Whisk the yeast micherrypistachio 001xture into the milk mixture. Next, add in the first 3 cups of flour a little bit at a time, whisking until it is smooth–I usually move from the coarsest flour to the smoothest, so the wheat flour here. Now leave this in a warm place for 5 minutes and walk away. Fold laundry, try to figure out where you put the bread flour, dance, just leave the yeast alone. If, as I found, you cannot find unshelled unsalted pistachios, this is a good time to shell the unsalted pistachios you found.

Step 4, kneading: Come back, Little Sheba. If it is bigger, and a little poofy, the yeast is doing great. If not, either you have bad yeast or a cold spot. Whisk down this living thing in the bowl, and add 1 Tbsp of Salt. Add in the Bread Flour 1/4 of a cup at a time, and thoroughly mix it in; when the whisk becomes impractical, use a big wooden spoon, when this is too hard, use a mixer with a bread hook or turn it our onto a floured surface. It is important to knead the flour in 1/4 of a cup at a time, and after each bit of flour, hook or knead the bread until it becomes one thing again–not a mixture of flour and dough, but one unit. When the dough is a single round thing holding on to itself and not sticking to other things, behaving about like a deflated volley ball, it is ready. The amount of the flour doesn’t matter–getting it to this proper consistency is what matters. Roll it around on the counter for good measure.cherrypistachio 006

Step 5, let it rise: Grease a smooth bowl 3 times as big as the dough. Roll the dough ball in the oil, and then cover with plastic wrap or a wet towel or something that will let it work without drying out. Let this sit in a warm place–in the oven with a heating pad on a different shelf, on the sunny side of the house, just a safe and warm place–until the dough has doubled in size. Usually, this will be about an hour.

Step 6, making loaves: Turn the dough out onto a clean cherrypistachio 007surface, and punch it down (forcefully knead it), which should reduce it to close to its original size. Separate this into 3 portions ( or 4 or… you figure it out). Flatten each of these, and sprinkle with the first half cup of Pistachios. Fold the dough back into itself, knead it slightly and shape each into loaves; make sure that there are not seams or spots the loaf might separate, maybe pinching loose edges and rolling it about a bit–each should be smooth and coherent–it’s own little self.

Step 7, second rising: Grease some baking sheets and sprinkle with corn meal, or grease 3 bread pans, or 2 bread pans and 2 little pans, or some such combinations. Put each loaf into a pan, slit along the top with a sharp knife (this lets bubbles out) and set these into a warm place until they have grown–usually less that the first rise. About half way through this rise (20? 25 minutes?) pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.

Step 8, prepping and baking: Beat together an Egg White and a little cold water. Paint the tops of the loaves with the egg white mixture, and then sprinkle with the remaining Pistachios. Put the bread in the oven for 30 or 35 minutes, until the top crust is a nice dark brown. Figure out your oven, and see if you need to turn them orcherrypistachio 020 rotate them to get them to cook evenly.

Step 9, cool it, boy: When they are done, get them out, take them off the sheets or out of the pans, and put them on a cooling rack.

Last Step, sharing: You may have noticed I made several loaves. You can, of course, use division and figure out how to make a smaller batch, but I suggest you make more, and then figure out why you needed more. The bread might be so good that one loaf is eaten before it even cools. Break out the Brown Betty; it is perfect with some butter and a cup of tea. Most importantly, if you have extra bread, you will have to give it away.     cherrypistachio 023 Give it to friends for Christmas, a House Warming or just because. As always, give it to a wandering Buddhist monk, a musician or a college student–all of these are good karma. You might give some to somebody you love, or whom you wish to love, or who needs to feel loved. My mom says it is just as easy to pray for somebody while kneading bread as it is just to pray for somebody; I don’t understand prayer, but I know everybody needs to feel loved and everybody loves good bread.

Post-Last Step, left-overs: It makes brilliant toast, of course. It also makes excellent French toast, bien sûr, if you like that sort of thing.

What to do with Eggs

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Frittata!
Frittata 002

This is my standard left-over-veggie-sunday-dinner-in-a-hurry-go-to-dish.
Nice with a little of my french bread and some wine, but hey! what isn’t?

 

Ingredients:

  • Left over vegetables (brocoli is good, Spinach is good, Onions are a must, carrots are good, cabbage isn’t quite as good–whatever you happen to have ready to hand–about a 1/2 cup’s worth for each person eating).
  • 4 eggs (for 2 or 3 people, more for more)
  • Olive Oil
  • Cheese (a hard Italian is best–I am going to regret having said that–like Parmigian or an Asiago, but a Gruyère or something like that will do as well).
  • Herbs, Pepper and Salt to Taste

Step 1, prepping the veggies: Heat up a small iron skillet (or a big one, if you are making lots of this–you do the math), and saute the left-over Veggies with plenty of Olive Oil (or, of course, butter).

Step 2, prepping the eggs: While they are sizzling, take a large bowl and whisk the eggs with a little bit of water–like an omelet; this mixture should about triple in volume. You may add in the herbs, salt & pepper and whisk some more.

Step 3, the combo: Pre-heat the broiler to High. Pour the eggs over the stuff in the skillet, mixing it a bit, but then just stand back and let it cook. When the bottom and middle start to solidify (two minutes or so? not long), put the cheeses on the top.

Step 4, broiling:  Switch the frittata from the top of the stove to under the broiler to cook the top. When the top is browned (it should puff a bit, so don’t overfill), take it out, let it sit for a few minutes and serve with a green salad.

Carrot Salad

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Carrot Salad 2In our family, we love salads. My Dad likes to tell the story about how, after a week in England (a lot of boiled beef), we pulled over at a restaurant in France and all five of us ordered salads. It was what I had for breakfast when I came home for spring break my freshman year in college and what my daughter had for breakfast the first morning home on her most recent spring break. This is one of my Mom’s recipes, and one of my family’s favorites. I had thought it was German, but according to her recipe in the Hopwood Memorial Christian Church Cookbook, it is a Russian Carrot Salad. Like most things I prepare, it is savory rather than sweet.

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb. carrots (about 6 medium sized)
  • 3 Tbsp Cider Vinegar (or another kind)
  • 1 tsp Salt (give or take)
  • ¼ cup freshly chopped Parsley
  • ½ cup chopped Onion
  • 1 dash or grind of Black Pepper
  • 1 Tbsp Olive Oil

Carrot Salad 1

Step 1, great grating: Coarsely grate the carrots. If you want to be fancy (or, I you have way too much time on your hands, like I do, thanks to the 21st century economy) you can also peel them into long strips, using a carrot peeler; this is dramatic.

Step 2, combine: add all this ingredients except for the oil. This is best if the carrots are sweet and full of flavor; if they are dull, you can spruce them up with a pinch of sugar and a little more salt. Taste, and see if it is to your liking. Add Oil last; if you are making them in advance for serving the next day, let the salad pickle a bit and add the oil before serving.

Carrot Salad 3Step 3, serve: I like to serve them as little salad plates with cucumber salad and tomato salad, but you can also serve them in their own bowl. Or take them on a picnic. Or package them in glass jars and send them to loved ones.

Peppermouse Cookies

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Peppermouse CookiesHey, Whovians! I am finally getting around to publishing my Tardis Cookie Recipe!

This was kind of a Christmas cookie experiment that I played with one day when I was bored. I had had a soup in a Szechuan restaurant that included these spices, and I thought it would be an exotic variation on the German Pfeffernüsse. I needed a wacky recipe because I was making Tardis & Dalek cookies for work, and this seemed good.

Ingredients:

  • ½ cup solid shortening
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • ½ cup dark molasses
  • 1/3 cup milk
  • 1 tsp ginger
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 tsp allspice
  • 1/3 tsp cloves
  • 1 tsp anise
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 1 tsp Srirachi sauce
  • Sift in:
  • 4 cups flour (31/2 if not in Tennessee)
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • ¼ tsp salt

Step 1, cream: Soften the shortening, then beat in the sugar. Add in the eggs, molasses and milk.

Step 2, spice it up: Mix in the various spices. Leave some out, if they don’t suit your fancy, or add some more, but I do wonder: if you don’t trust me, why are you reading my recipes?

Step 3, sifting: put the flour in a sifter and add the leavening & salt. Gradually stir this into the various wet ingredients. Mix well—it should be stiff, but sticky.

Step 4, chill overnight (always good advice): wrap in plastic and store in the refrigerator.

Step 5, roll and cut it and mark it with a tardis: Preheat the oven to 375. Roll the stiffened dough out on a floured surface, perhaps half at a time. Cut out in shapes (I prefer mice, but also have done Tardis (dredel cutters work) & Daleks (modified Christmas bells); ironic mustaches seem like a distinct possibility). Transfer onto a baking sheet. Bake at 375 for 12 minutes.

Step 6, cool & frost: Remove from pan while still warm, cool on a Dr Who Spice Cookieswire rack, and if you don’t know this should you really be in a kitchen unsupervised? I frosted these with a simple confectioner’s sugar frosting.

Eggs on the Lawn

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trosly pigs 007This is one of my favorite recipes. In the part of Germany I spent my childhood, this was the dish that was traditionally served on Green Thursday, the Thursday of Holy Week. It was called “Eier auf die Wiese” which means “Eggs on the Lawn.” As you can see, the bed of greens looks like a lawn.

In my mind, because the German word for egg—“Ei”—sounds like the English word “Eye,” and because a cooked egg looks like an eye, I will always think of them as “Eyes on the Lawn.” I also love the combination of cheese and spinach. Another name for this dish is “Eggs Florentine with Mornay Sauce.”

Ingredients:

Sauce:

  • 4 Tbsp Butter
  • 1 Tbsp finely diced Onion
  • 4 tsp Flour
  • 1 dash Salt
  • 1 cup Milk
  • 1 Tbsp grated Gruyère Cheese
  • 1 Tbsp grated Parmesan Cheese
  • Mess of Greens (Spinach is preferable, but you can also use others; traditionally, the German greens for this dish can also include the first wild greens of spring, such as dandelions, Sauer Ampfer and even Stinging Nettles. I started with fresh spinach and added some arugula, and some fresh clover and wild onion tops from the back yard)
  • 4 eggs

 

Step 1, a roux: Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the onion and soften a bit, then whisk in the flour, stirring and letting cook a few minutes until it thickens trosly pigs 003and starts to bubble, but not so long that it browns.

Step 2, dairy it up: Add the milk, and stir over a medium heat until smooth. Put in a bit of salt, and pepper if you like. Add the cheese.

Step 3, prepping the greens: In another pan, sauté the greens in a little bit of Olive Oil or Butter.

Step 4, egging it on: Poach 4 eggs. To do this, you can either poach 4 eggs in a pot of boiling water with a touch of white vinegar, and then set upon the greens, or break the eggs whole into the greens and cover until they have poached.

trosly pigs 005Step 5, prep and serve: garnish to plate and add a bit of the cheese sauce.

This is a simple dish, as is fitting for the holiday. Enjoy it with family or friends, perhaps with a bit of toast and a glass of sweet white wine.

Then go wash a strangers feet. What have you got to lose?

Why we need Poetry and Cheese

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Cheese & Poetry 1

The last time I taught Plato, my students picked up on a passage I had never really paid any attention to before. In the third book of the Republic, Socrates and his listeners are discussing a hypothetical community (a Greek polis, or a republic, or a metaphor for the soul). Socrates is building this hypothesis from the ground up, and trying to keep it simple. Glaucon, with whom he is arguing, objects: “No luxuries?” Socrates responds “I forgot; they’ll have salt and oil and cheese and figs, country herbs and acorns to roast by the fire.” Glaucon objects passionately, arguing that they will need real luxury goods, like imported sauces, fine furniture and concubines.
My students were kind of fascinated by the idea of there being an argument about what members of a community need to spice up their meals. I was fascinated by the idea that this argument came at an earlier point in a book that ends with Socrates exiling the poets because they couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth. Even Socrates, however, recognizes that we can’t just live on wheat and barley cakes; we need salt and olive oil, herbs and figs, and cheese.

There is nutrition, the need to just get something eaten in order to keep going, but there is also food that delights and amazes and makes everything better, food that is an experience in itself, food that makes you just want to stop and be in that moment and find joy in what you have just encountered.
For me, that is often cheese.

Cheese.
It does something that is simply remarkable. It is all produced in a very similar way—cow, goat or some other kind of milk—but it varies from country to country, region to region, and each is remarkable and wonderful in its own way.
The sharpness and character of a Sharp Cheddar, or the similar but different flavor of Red Leicester, the creaminess but surprising oddness of a Roquefort, the mellow smoothness but complex nuttiness of a firm Emmentaler, the rich butter taste of a Gouda or a Havarti, the smooth roundness of fresh Mozzarella as it complements the freshly sliced tomato, the sharp leaves of basil and the rich olive oil.

Each experience is more than just something to eat; it is something remarkable. It is joy condensed into a physical experience.
This experience might be a different food for you, but for me, it is cheese.
This experience is also of a form of beauty.

Beauty.
I am not sure I can define it, but I find it constantly, and it is one of my great joys, one of the things that keeps me going. As I usually do when I can’t quite explain something, let me tell you a story.

A few years ago, a dear sweet man whom I admired and loved passed away. No, this isn’t that kind of a story; Earl had lived a very long, very full life,  was surrounded by a huge loving family, was well thought of by most who knew him, was at peace with his world and his God, and so his passing on was not too tragic. All death is a sadness for those left behind, but he had not left a legacy of ghosts and wounds, but of love and love, and of music, so we celebrated his funeral with mixed sadness and joy.
At the funeral, one of his sons played the violin in tribute to his father, accompanied by his wife. They are both professional musicians, and incredibly talented, but what they produced was remarkable.

They played Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending.

For just one moment, time stood still.
That one moment I sat in awe.
It was too wonderful for words, a sensation too beautiful for thoughts.
The sounds around me were joy in the middle of sadness condensed into a physical experience.

I do not know much about larks. I do not know anything about souls or heaven.
But at that moment, I understood Earl’s soul rising to heaven,
like a lark ascending.

We live in a world of pain, but even more, a world of bleak grayness.
We need beauty.
We crave and we create beauty great and small, huge joys and little ones; we need beauty, we need poetry and we need cheese.

Poetry.
We need to hear of the eternal voyage from Homer:

“Sing to me of the man, Muse,
the man of twists and turns,
driven time and again off course,
once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove –
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sun god blotted out the day of their return. . . .”

We need the call to human adventure and exploration from Whitman:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)”

The disjointed sensuousness of e.e. cummins:

somewhere i have never travelled,
gladly beyond any experience,
your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Echoing Schiller, I would say that this is joy condensed into an experience with words; even the joy of a poem that makes us ache and weep allows us to walk drunk with fire.

A good bit of cheese, the first bite of summer’s home grown tomato, a poem, a piece of music–each time we encounter them, each of them transport us like a first kiss. They are like the first spring sunshine upon whatever makes up the human psyche. They nourish us. Joy nourishes us to allow us to be who we should be. Beauty nourishes us to make us who we should be, and even what we might be. It helps us to find that which goes beyond good; it suggests better.
ending321

Welsh Rarebit

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trosly pigs 024This is a very basic, but wonderful, cheddar cheese sauce which I first encountered in Illinois, where it is the main ingredient in a Horseshoe Sandwich. The sauce itself is fairly simple, but incredible, and can be used in a variety of ways.

(Note: I realize that for many of you, next week will include that important yearly holiday, the celebration of the beginning of the newest Dr. Who season, so I considered posting my Tardis Cookie recipe. However, Cheese is a theme this week. I will, however, post them eventually, I promise.)

trosly pigs 023

By the way, this is what the bottom drawer of my fridge looks like:

 

Ingredients:

  • ½ 12 oz Bottle of Beer
  • 1 lb. grated Sharp Cheddar Cheese (we used half Kerrygold Dubliner & half Cabot’s Seriously Sharp)
  • Pinch (scant 1/8 tsp?) mustard powder
  • Dash Worchester Sauce
  • Dash Onion Powder
  • Dash Paprika
  • ¼ tsp Corn Starch

 

Step 1, heat it up: In a small saucepan, whisk the corn starch into a half a bottle of beer, and then bring the mixture to a boil. Be careful, because it will foam.
I’ve made this with several beers, and it is best if it is something with strong flavor, like a porter, but without the bitter overtones of a stout; experiment and find something you like. Most recently, I used Killian’s Red, but last Sunday, I went down to the Green Man Brewery in Asheville, and they are now bottling their porter, with is very smooth, and which I can recommend.

Step 2, a little spice: Stir in the mustard, the Worchester sauce, the onion powder, and the paprika.

Step 3, the cheese: A handful at a time, add in and dissolve the cheddar cheese. The end result should be thick and bubbly.

Step 4, serve: There are a variety of uses for rarebit.

trosly pigs 025When she was in for spring brake, my amazing daughter & I made it to dip home-made soft pretzels in.

Traditionally, it is served over two pieces of toast which are Hidden Egg & Welch Rarebitthen broiled slightly as a light supper (in place of rabbit). As a variation on this, I cut a hole in a thick piece of bread, put it in a skillet with a little butter, broke an egg in the whole, fried it over easy, and then served it with the rarebit.

trosly pigs 019I also use it as my sauce for home-made macaroni & cheese, since I don’t particularly care for most home-made macaroni & cheese.

As I mentioned, it is an ingredient in a Springfield Illinois style Horseshoe Sandwich. More than anything else, though, the Rarebit Sauce is amazing with French fries.