The wind-down wind-up.

Last night at midnight, all my students' work was due. So today, Saturday, my intentions were to:

• get up,
• grade, then
• meet my daughters for a little pre-wedding shopping.

What I did was:

• got up super early. At 10 a.m. I still don't quite know how that happened, but it was so choice.
• ate breakfast and read through the whole paper, including the sports pages' admiration of Kevin Durant, who was the means by which Oklahoma City prevailed last night against the Jazz, alas.
• got myself to my laptop where I prepared myself to grade by figuring out which student groups were missing what, sending messages, and preparing the rubrics. Then,
• I graded one student project.
• and then I went to the mall, which--surprise!--was a madhouse because--surprise!--Christmas.

Never mind. Two of my three daughters and I had our way, sort of, with Nordstrom and selected other stores. Then we sat down and had a restorative repast in the Nordstrom cafe, which involved the wolfing down of sundry french fries and salads and diet Cokes. The bride herself--Abbey--has not yet arrived in town. Those of us who are in town at the moment had this and that to look for--shoes and dresses and tights for the baby. You know, wedding stuff.

At the end of that, which was lovely, I was exhausted.

'Shopping can be exhausting,' said the historian.

'It can,' I had to agree.

'I find shopping exhausting,' he clarified.

'Listen, if I, whose shopping capabilities are considerable, found the shopping exhausting, it was totally exhausting,' I said, taking off my shoes and lying upon the bed and perhaps also under the covers.

We considered our movie options. Although there are a few we want to see, or sort of want to see, that we haven't seen, none of them moved us to arise and go, and go to the multiplex or the art house.

'Let's get some soup,' I said.

'Okay,' said the historian.

'Pho,' I clarified.

'Okay,' said the historian. Soup makes everyone agreeable.

So we tried a new pho place that had the great cultural advantage of being in our neighborhood. It was vegan pho, and it was quite good. We also had a coconut and pandan leaf waffle for dessert, with sweetened condensed milk to dip it in. Because it was our first time at the restaurant, and it's one of their specialties. It smelled like a sweet, baked thing as it arrived, pale green on the plate. It was lovely. And then, we came home and I put a few more ornaments on the tree, and then we watched A Very Murray Christmas and laughed. 

I predict that over the next few days, as we get closer and closer to the wedding, we'll have more and more to do, but I hope we can treat the more and more as special sweet things that are happening--our daughter's wedding, her happiness, the festivities, the joy, and all the lights and shining things gleaming.

Soup and bread.

Today I spent a lot of time with this guy, and all the people who talk about him:

Francis Bacon A Terrible Beauty from Feenish Productions on Vimeo.

It was a quiet day. I told a friend, with whom I briefly chatted, that I feel like I've been waiting for this--for the quiet, when I could sink into the project of a poem--for such a long time. It was wonderful.

I made my breakfast and read the paper. I set to work. I retrieved a book I have about Bacon and his studio. I read multiple accounts and interpretations of the studio reconstruction, the moving of the studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

I realized I didn't have an idea for the beginning of the poem. That's okay. What's wonderful to me about this process is that sometimes the poem comes to you, overtakes you, the shape of it and most of the words or tropes, and you just channel that overtaking and get it written down. After that, you can revise and revise away. But sometimes, the idea of a poem crystallizes slowly. Layers and layers, arriving in stages. Once, Larry Levis, in a workshop, told another poet that his draft was one of those that you could work away on for awhile, a slow process, like making stock for a soup. You would work on it but it would need time to develop. The way he talked about it, it sounded like pleasure.

I had a day filled with this pleasure.

I also had lunch with my son, where we talked about basketball. When we got home, we took a look at one of the couches in our living room--Bruiser had, in his goings and comings, basically disarranged the entire cushion set up. Also, the cushions looked dingy. We agreed, basically on a dare, to take the coverings off and wash them. They are hanging dry as we speak, much brighter and cleaner. Also, I vacuumed copious amounts of dog hair in the bed of the couch. Wow, is all I can say.

And made carrot soup and corn bread. The carrot soup had onion and garlic, some sweet peppers and a jalapeño, all sweated in olive oil then simmered in stock, then blended. Coriander and cumin as well. The corn bread, I made in a pie tin. It's a recipe I have been making for decades:

1 1/4 c. flour
3/4 c. corn meal
a little sugar
1 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1 egg
1 c. milk
1/4 c. safflower oil

Stir the wet ingredients into the dry with a whisk with a few strokes, till the batter is almost smooth but not quite. Bake at 375 for 25 min. or so, till a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Butter, honey, etc.

I want weeks and weeks with days like this in them.

Soup (episode I don't know which one--I've lost track).

Tonight, for dinner, tortilla soup, vegetarian style. This soup would have occurred last night except for the fact that I had elided, like, four critical ingredients when I was at the store. But that's okay. I scrounged another dinner out of stuff we had/I had recently bought. So I won the kitchen derby on Sunday night, and went on to hit it out of the park on Monday night, tonight: score!

Tortilla Soup.

Take your corn tortillas, about eight of them. Lay them neatly upon one another on the counter or cutting board, if you're tidy like that. Slice them into thin little ribbons, or "matchsticks," as the fancy cooking wizards say. Toss them with olive oil and salt them. Put them on a baking sheet into a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes or so, until they are crispy but not scorched. Remove them from the oven and try not to eat them all, because they are delicious but you will need them later.

At the same time, especially if you are a multi-tasking genius, take about 20 (why 20? I don't know. It's a good number. A lot of good things ring in at 20: 20 years old; 20 dollar bill; 20th century had some good things in it, like rockets, robots, the internet and the Beatles; etc. I'm sure you can think of other instances of the goodness of the number twenty--) cherry tomatoes and slice them in half, toss in a little olive oil and salt, and roast them till they shrivel up a little. This might take 40 minutes, so it's probably a good idea to be roasting the tomatoes and toasting the tortillas at the same time. You don't have to take my advice here, but I think you might as well, because, you know, time is money, time's a-wastin', [insert other homey advice/adages about time here].

[NOTE: The above are accoutrements. They are garnishes that are essential to the character of the soup. There are a couple of other garnishes (see below), also essential, but they don't take any preparation. They take purchasing. Which I did, today, but not yesterday. But: sufficient unto the day itself is the garnishing of the soup! Check it, it's in the Bible.]

Now we're at the actual soup. Luckily, it is easy as pie. Easier, way easier. Pie is difficult. But this soup: easy.

Dice up an onion and mince three garlic cloves. Saute in some olive oil for a couple of minutes. Add one can of crushed or diced tomatoes, along with 1 t. cumin, 2 t. ground coriander, and 1 t. cayenne--yes, cayenne!--pepper. Let this cook for five minutes. Then add one cup of broth--I'm going to recommend, yet again, the vegetarian bouillon cube as an essential pantry item--and blend all of this in your blender. Return this to the pan, add 5 more cups of broth, and simmer for a bit.

To serve:

Put some cherry tomatoes in the bottom of the bowl, along with a few julienned sun-dried tomatoes, and a slice of goat cheese, crumbled. Ladle the soup over. Strew a fantastic amount of the crispy tortilla ribbons on top, and eat it right away.

A salad, either green or fruit, would not go amiss.

This dinner brought to you by Google.

As you well know, we had a snowpocalypse last night, which meant that there was serious doubt about whether the historian and I would make it home from our movie double-header downtown in one piece. The odds were more significantly stacked against us because we were in two separate cars. That's because I spent some artistic time at the Roasting Company. I swore to myself that I would draft the current poem I've been working on, or know the reason why. That's because I had my writing group today, at my house, and that's why the snowpocalypse had especial significance: because what if I couldn't arise at the crack of dawn to go buy special ingredients for things I had never made? because what if my writing group food were just ordinary stuff that I already had? The Horror.

I know that was a lot of becauses, but sometimes there happens to be a long chain of causality, okay? a chain which led me to the inevitable conclusion that I should be sensible for just about the first time in my entire life, and figure out something to make out of the bountiful ingredients already in my well-stocked house.

So, the assessment of possible already-there ingredients included:

• arugula
• pears
• a soft persimmon
• a suspiciously soft blood orange
• broccoli
• potato chips
• a shocking amount of 2 liter bottles of various caffeinated soft drinks
• granola bars
• pasta of all kinds, including those pasta side dishes in a bag
• (in case you can't tell, college-running-post-missionary son and I went to the store on Friday)
• various legumes
• a bunch of cheese
• some smoked salmon
• chocolate

At first, when I thought I might run to the store at the crack of dawn, I was thinking I might make a version of this delicious Thai soup I had at Cafe Trang this week. Alas, no time for lemongrass. So I thought perhaps I would invent some kind of fancy chowder that used smoked salmon? But then I thought, I know: I will Google Orangette to see what she has to say about all of this. And that's how I ran smack into the best idea for a day when your trees are laden with snow and you feel lucky not to have spiraled off the road into a wintry death: red lentil soup.

Did I have red lentils? I did. So I made this soup and commend it to you for your wintry hours.

Then, I took the arugula and some mint I had, washed and tore it up into a bowl, then slivered up a teeny sweet orange pepper I had languishing in the fridge, and two pears for sweetness. A vinaigrette, with sherry vinegar in the vinegar slot and a little garlic and a little mustard to sharpen it up, and that was a good salad. I also put some delicious crackers on a plate with Point Reyes blue cheese and the smoked salmon.

For dessert, I made chocolate cake. While I had Orangette doing my research for me, I used Orangette and chocolate cake as search terms, and came up with this recipe. And of course I made adjustments. For the flour, I used a little bit of organic unbleached white, some white-wheat, and some delicious unbleached cake flour. Instead of canola oil, which I did not have, I melted some butter, and why not? Also, I happened to have some full-fat buttermilk which was thick and gorgeous and made this cake a champion. Finally, I did not have any cream so ganache was not possible. Instead, I had the teeniest amount of vanilla ice cream, so I put a spoonful of that and a spoonful of blackberry jam (mine) next to the little cupcake, unwrapped on a plate. And those three flavors--the dark dark of the chocolate, the milky ice cream, and the purple fruit--were divine.

So after the writing group friends left, singing son gave me a call. "Are the Jazz playing tonight?" he asked. I told him they weren't. "Well, what are you having for dinner?" Soup, I told him. And so he and his little family came over, and my writing group repast did a second stint, and it was just as good the second time.

From the chronicles.

The Soup Chronicles, that is:

And verily, she did arise from her bed of affliction: and lo, there were squashes and onions, peppers and garlic galore on the tops of the counters. And she found it was Wednesday, yea, the Wednesday of pulses, and thus she must soak the remainder of the Yellow Nightfall beans in the water that ran from the tap, yea, the water that ran clear as rain.

And the chopping of the peppers, onions, and garlic was terrible to behold, but greater still was the immensity of the hellfire, aka the sauteing, though the medium was the purest of olive oil, yea, the olive oil which is called "Extra Virgin."

And suddenly, there was with the cook a multitude of the heavenly host, saying: Glory, there is soup!

IN OTHER WORDS, the people, it is again Souptopia at the Megastore, one day after another. Chili, then roasted butternut squash soup, and tonight, carrot soup with red lentils and basil.

And lo, her refrigerator yieldeth all for the good of the soup.

Amen.

Clam chowder: requiem for a dream.

Since today was the last day of running around New England, I determined that today would also be the day I had clam chowder for lunch. Driving from Maine to Provincetown? Surely there would be chowder opportunities aplenty. Alas, when college daughter and I left Maine, we neglected to calculate the effect that a breakfast beverage might have on, oh, say, when or where we might stop to pee.

Skip ahead to Hwy. 6, halfway between Boston and Provincetown. We were navigating by holding a spit-finger to the wind, and the wind was saying, "I don't know where in THE hell we are, and as for a clean public restroom? Beats the hell outta me." Also, one might consider the fact that many locations on the Cape are vacation-y and therefore--oh, and also, it's Sunday--closed for the season.

So, we're in thriving downtown Barnstable, made up, as far as we could tell, by equal parts Episcopal churches, fire stations, gorgeous picturesque houses, and closed antique stores. Our GPS robot was telling us about restaurants that may or may not have been in the area, in any direction from where we were driving. We chose a restaurant with Dolphin in the title. (Have you forgotten that we needed to pee? Don't forget this fact.) And lo! The Dolphin appeared before us, along with the Barnstable Tavern and the Village Cafe.

The Dolphin looked very swanky and also possibly only barely open, and very swanky seemed in excess of our needs, so we turned around and thought, Village Cafe, just a couple of locations back. We hopped out of the car, our bladders doing all the reasoning for us. We stepped into the cafe and lo! it had the smell of two decades' worth of deep-fried food, which my actual brain processed just as the proprietress said, "Sit anywhere you want," and my mouth said, "Mind if we use the restroom first?" and my soul screamed, "NO NO NO NO NO!"

I am an old-fashioned girl, and once you've decided to avail yourself--gratefully!--of an establishment's facilities, it is my view that you must buy something there. They don't just have a restroom so anyone in the world can just casually stop by to pee without also ordering up some fries or a sandwich or something. Or chowder.

And so, dear reader, I ordered the chowder. At the counter. And the waitress said, "Ohhhhh, chowder, right, it's on the menu but I don't think we have it on Sunday."

Deeply disappointing, right? But the cook, behind a fortress made of stainless steel that was probably coated with the grease of the ages, said: "We can heat some up."

"Are you sure?" I said, when a rational person would have said, "Umm, do you have like a bag of pretzels? and a Coke? or, like, maybe a Coke and a bottle of 409 spray and a roll of paper towels?" But no. No, I said, "Great!" And shortly after that, a plastic tub of chowder, labeled "CHOWDER," appeared from the walk-in and disappeared behind the stainless steel. And then, probably three minutes and thirty seconds later, the chowder appeared, in a shallow bowl, over the stainless steel barrier. With some steam wafting, a positive omen, I thought.

But I was wrong.

No, the chowder was lukewarm, or rather, of uneven heat, sort of how a big bowl of soup is when you microwave but do not stir. Moreover, the soup was extra salty, as if salt were the only possible seasoning ever to grace chowder. There it sat, looking like the paragon of chowder, clam-filled and potato-y and even a little creamy. Why was it so nasty? Why?

Here's what I did and did not do: I did not ask for more nuke to be applied to my soup. I did not not eat the soup. No, I sprinkled both packets of oyster crackers on the surface of the soup, and I ate each little cracker, lightly anointed with the soup, telling myself this: "Having made the deal to be polite and eating in a sorry place where even my low(ered) expectations were disappointed, I am not going to change the deal now. No, I will eat the misbegotten chowder and enough of it that I will not have to explain my not finishing it. I like oyster crackers. I like them!" I said this as the chowder cooled and got, yes, nastier.

My daughter asked me if perhaps I wanted to try to redeem my chowder luncheon by finding better chowder for dinner. No, no, I did not. The experience had embittered me. I may or may not eat chowder again, but it will be a cold day in hell before I order it again at a restaurant where the chowder has not been vetted by experts, aka, by me myself at a previous occasion. Even then. The whole concept seems fraught with peril. Milk, clams, potatoes, onions . . . I'm sure there is a long and storied history of how this came to be a beloved American dish, but I'm thinking that the real genius of the soup world is the inventor of the oyster cracker. Now there's a dish no one can screw up.