Like many young-marrieds in the 1970s, Bob and Jill devoured Siddhartha and Vonnegut, appreciated Hendrix, and filled their bodies with revolutionary meals from the spiralbound pages of Moosewood Cookbook and the Diet for a Small Planet. They bought a small, shingled house, set back from the Seattle street, which they papered, painted, and flower-potted with vigor. Both got good jobs and then had a healthy, happy son. On TV, Julia Child stirred an enticing pot of life’s possibilities which captured …
Tag: Cooking
“Cooked Under Pressure” & Other Poems * Joan Mazza
Cooked Under Pressure My mother loved her pressure cooker and gave testimony as if in a commercial: Preserves vitamins, fast cooking! Energy efficient! Sterilizes your food! Even quick-cooking vegetables like spinach, escarole, and broccoli went under the power of pressure, set the valve jiggling as if it might explode at any second. My father arrived as Mother served the meal. He washed his hands and ate in silence, while pressure built in that small dinette. We knew he could blow …
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“WANTING” * Fiction * Mike Lewis-Beck
Hilda has it all. She’s 42, mother of bubbly two-year-old Todd, and a professor of intellectual property law, where she has just made a bundle—her share in an inheritance suit deploying ‘The Eustace Diamond Defense’—which persuaded the judge to allow Mrs. Mandolini to keep the family diamonds her late husband, olive oil magnate Giuseppe Mandolini, had lavished upon her. Besides these personal and professional triumphs, she has just won a weight-lifting trophy at her fitness club, for executing a 190-pound …
“Anosmia” * Fiction * Tara Ison
It’s early days yet (a casual omelet bar meet-up, then a nice though not too-pricey bistro dinner), but she thinks it’s going well, so far. Her friend Jean thought they’d hit it off, that Rose would like this public defender guy Jean met at some wedding and interrogated over the tarragon chicken, on Rose’s behalf, about his relationship status; Jean said he checked all the boxes Rose thinks are important, and so felt fine passing along her number. She and …
“An Imperfect Cook” and Other Poems by Kashiana Singh
An imperfect cook I often look up the recipes saved in a handmade diaryone I had brought along, it was sealed in a quilted bagof things, it was not one of brocade or of autumn richcolors, not like bags sealed with dowry, massive, final this bag was handmade, my dadi’s, not a quintessentialfeast of gold and zardozi of weddings, it was permeableof skin, muslin pores on its surface, colored in mustardof haldi, reminding me of dadi’s golden concoction withginger, honey …
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“Yellow” * Prose Poem * Y. C. Lin
i. My mother knocks it against the counter and splits it cleanly in half. Yellow yolk slides smoothly into porcelain. She whisks the mixture, tilting the bowl. This way more air goes in, she shows me, arm moving swiftly back and forth. Yellow spills into the clear. The fork clacks rhythmically against the bowl while the oil in the pan sizzles on the stove. There is the loud, incessant noise of the ventilation hood, the rising smoke, the hazy heat, …
Anosmia: My Newly Discovered Disability * Nonfiction * Ernest Gilman
“ Par ma foi !” cries Molière’s would-be bourgeois gentleman M. Jourdain: “For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it”! I had my own Molière moment just recently when I learned that there was actually a name—and a scientific name at that—for my inability to smell: “anosmia.” I myself might otherwise have come up with a name like “olfactory deprivation,” or perhaps “smell blindness” (I know this is controversial), but I wanted to imply a …
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“Italian Sunday” * Poetry * Diane Kane
Sunday morning quiet Open cans of tomato Puree, chopped, and paste. Only Contadina will do. Garlic, oregano, palm Full of sugar. Mix, check Flame, place cover askew. Remove ground Hamburg From brown paper wrapper. Room temperature Tan eggs in yellow bowl On Formica table. Time to go to the garden. Snap rubbers over black Shiny shoes. Walk through Dew to where the Green parsley grows. Pinch willowy shoots between Fingernail and thumb. Inhale. Return with bounty Steam drips from …
Alley Cat * Creative Nonfiction * Michele Rappoport
The smell of fresh paint always takes me back to my first apartment in Washington, D.C., a three-room efficiency in a squat brick building that hissed like a radiator after a summer rainstorm. Somehow, I’d convinced my parents that living off campus would be cheaper my junior year. Maybe it was. But it was my yearning for a solo shot, a chance to prove my growing independence from them in a way I didn’t feel was possible living in the …
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“Mycophagy” & Other Poems by Thomas E. Simmons
without frail gestures Her yellow parachute detached it slip-ungripped from a wrist All her olives rolled away the wet hyssop was misplaced Its minty twigs shriveled & the bullocks pointless Her matchstick-style carrots on blackened khokhloma She was three kilos high bouncing hard on a rock Puzzling at 1% and then …