Archive | Food Matters

Banana Pancakes and Change

One of the advantages of not being young anymore is knowing that change is not only inevitable but okay. Good times are followed by bad times, which are followed by good times again–especially once you grow out of clinging to leaky rafts. Being a change-hating Crapicorn, I’m still trying to grow out of that tendency. I’m not doing a great job, but I’m trying.

I keep flashing on a breakfast scene of about a decade ago. I was dating a guy from my hometown even though I’d been living in Brooklyn for more than 10 years. He was a big-nosed, big-shouldered, big-dicked musician who’d already fled New York for a sleepy, working-class neighborhood of Boston not far from where we’d grown up. He looked appealingly like a Founding Father and was remarkably steady in bed; he seemed comfortable with his choice to trade creative for cozy. I figured I could try doing the same. Sexy male mommies being my Achilles’ heel, I clamored for his maternal embrace.

Really, he was smart but stuck—-yet another guy held hostage by his fury at his mother.

I was at loose ends, as I am now. I’d just broken up with a woman who was such a liar that I’d come to hate her mouth though I craved what it could do for me, and I thought maybe I could climb into this hometown honey, let’s call him Al, whenever I came back to Massachusetts. I was still trying to figuring out my relationship with my family of origin, so I came home pretty often. Continue Reading →

Whitman at the Grocery

I sing a song of Red Hook Fairway. I sing of all the makings of meat ragu and matzo brie; of fennel; of wild rice and farro; of smoked fish and capers and everything bagels still warm from the oven. I sing of meyer lemons and blood oranges and two kinds of kale and chili lime dried mango and seltzer. O! Seltzer gets its own stanza in my song. So does Mz. Liberty, to whom I sing rain or shine–always while munching an egg sandwich made by someone besides me. Coda! I sing of water rushing all about me; of people I love whom I don’t really know: of fish mongers and handsome butchers and checkout sweeties and produce guys with dastardly senses of humor. I sing of mauve skies and salty spray. I sing of fetching the fuel my body needs to sing. I sing.

Stone Soup at Your Service

I have a powerful urge to start this post by rumbling, “Now is the season of our discontent.” But since I’ve decided this is going to be a great year, all Richard III references are null and void even if 2016 has been off to a rocky start. The good news is I don’t really think a new year begins until your birthday, and mine isn’t for another few weeks. I’m in what astrologers call the “balsamic” phase, which means this slow start is not really a start so much as the wrapping up of last year’s business. Hence the mother of a flu I’ve had: a total detoxing of all of 2015’s bugs.

A few days ago I forewent a fancy-schmancy event to get acupunked–it seemed unwise to traipse around in black-tie finery in subfreezing temperatures while hacking great gobs of phlegm–and was rewarded yesterday by feeling well enough to go on one of my long walks. And lo! what a walk it was. I wandered back to Brooklyn from the Flatiron District, stopping off to greet various friends and neighborhoods and to wolf an enormous burger and fries at Diner. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy