My wife and I are beanophiles, pure and simple. And could there be a food more pure and simple?
Time was, I bought navy beans at Kroger, plastic sacks of old dry beans grown who knows where and who knows how long ago. I soaked them, and they woke up from their long sleep, and we made beautiful music together (that is probably not the expression I should use). They were very okay.
Continue reading “Let There Be Beans”
“I don’t like the word cheese,” my wife says.
We’re driving home from the grocery store, where we have just bought a couple mozzarella balls to slice and lay over tomato slices at lunch today.
I am surprised and delighted. Forty-two years of marriage and I never knew this about her. I tell her cheese seems like a perfectly good word.
She shudders just a little.
One syllable, it must have Anglo-Saxon roots, I think, also considering the ch in the word. “Cheese,” I say out loud, testing it. In Italy, I’ve heard groups of people lined up to have a picture taken together, everyone saying “cheese,” in English. I remind her of this. “Cheese has caught on in Italy,” I say. Continue reading “Pienza, Pinconning, Santa Monica”
Happy to be reading at Hannan House, 4750 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan on September 16, 2018, 2-4 p.m. Music, open mic first. Then the reading.
They say, “He’s funny, warm, and peevish.” Yup, that’s me.
At dinner last night I had a piece of Lake Superior trout with oxtail on top of it. Five green beans and a fried polenta ball with roasted corn inside. Nifty.
To my knowledge I’ve only had oxtail once, in Rome, when my daughter was having a semester abroad in college. She and I ate lunch one day in Trastevere. A chef buddy back home named Franco had spoken appreciatively of Trastevere. Ballanno, cantanno. Non lavora nessuno. They sing, they dance. Nobody works. Continue reading “Oxtail, Head-air, and a Swim”
