ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

I don’t eat much ice cream but… every so often I get a yen. A yearning. A downright craving. Believing prefab chocolate sauce is not only a dangerously stupid substance to keep in the house, it also doesn’t taste very good, now that my palate has been trained to high quality chocolate bars. So the obvious solution is to melt down a high quality chocolate bar – or as much/little of it as you need. Melt it on low heat with a dab of butter and thin with cream or milk and dribble in a bit of quality hooch like armagnac or calvados. Cool it a few minutes – while you toast some almond slivers in a frying pan – and then lavish it over the ice cream, add some whipped cream and the almonds and hey presto, we’re good till the next time.

Wednesday’s launch of Cartography was grand but I’ll save the word on that till Brian my ace photographer is able to share some of the snaps he took. Suffice to say I am snacking on leftovers, including some of that there smoked oyster pate which I made in happy memory of my first attempt back in February at the writers colony in Saskatchewan. I recommend it paired with Hardbite Jalapeno chips…

A couple of submission opportunities have crossed my inbox lately.

The “Words for Wilderness” prose and poetry contest, sponsored by the Washington Wilderness Coalition (WWC), seeks work that comes from the heart of the wilderness and the writer. It can include both personal work that revels in the experience of nature as well as writing that explores political aspects of civilization’s relationship with wilderness. Winners will read their work at an event in late June. Deadline May 17, 2006

Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. is seeking articles by women for a couple of new collections of essays about travel. Greece: A Love Story (deadline June 1st) needs essays on the Greece that lies behind postcards; and Go Your Own Way (Deadline: May 15, 2006) is seeking original, personal stories by women on the experience of traveling alone in all corners of the globe.

When did linseed become flax? I often get startled looks when I call those little beggars in the Red River Cereal linseed, but I sure wouldn’t dare call the oil version by that name, because we know linseed oil as a furniture polish, traditional oil for cricket bats, and paint solvent, not as the trendy and expensive wonder-supplement we call flax seed oil.

The source of all this is a plant whose full and proper name is Linum usitatissimum, as we might have guessed by the names of other of its products, linoleum and linen for example. It is also grown as an ornamental plant in gardens, its sky blue flowers opening only in the morning. Other uses include dye, paper, medicines, poultices, fishing nets and soap, as well as a handy plug for drains (wrap it up first though eh?). If you’re not keen on sardines or cold water/oily fish, ground flax seed or flax seed oil are particularly good sources of Omega-3. It’s not something I’ve seen used as a central ingredient in cooking – its flavour is pretty nondescript – but you can add it for nutritional and/or decorative reasons to a number of baked goods, soups, grains etc.

I was leafing through my new copy of PN Review which includes a review of the University of Chicago’s recent exhibition The Making of Modern Poetry. The show’s over now, and on the wrong side of this continent, but I liked the reported response by John Ashbery to an acceptance by a literary magazine of his poem Europe, exclaining it was “the best news since the Treaty of Utrecht“.

In my wanderings on the U of Chicago site looking for information on the exhibition, I encountered Poem Present, where you can, if you have QuickTime or an MP3 player, hear and view past readings, including a reading and lecture by Robert Creeley who visited the university the year before he died. What a wonderful world.

I recently attended a series of lectures from the Arthritis Society designed for people destined for but not already committed to a meaningful relationship with osteoarthritis. The last talk was on diet and nutrition, and someone asked about the “Arthritis Diet” books and articles you see everywhere. The nurse giving the lecture said that these are based on studies of rheumatoid arthritis, which is tied to the immune system, not the more common osteoarthritis which has more to do with wear and tear. She conceded that we do all have sensitivities, so it may be that some foods are better/worse than others for our individual situations, but that there is no one diet that will help people with OA. That having been said, calcium, and vitamin D3 and Omega-3 fish oils which help us absorb it, are particularly important to arthritis sufferers for maintaining bones and connective tissues.

Sugar is a major irritant for a lot of arthritis sufferers, which interestingly has to do with insulin levels. As the instructor told it, if you eat sweets or drink alcohol at night before bed, you end up with higher insulin levels after the insulin has done its work processing all that sugar; like a bored teenager looking for something to do, the insulin crosses the blood/brain barrier and interferes with the release of serotonin, which means you don’t sleep properly, which means your body – inflamed joints and all – do not rest either, and you all feel the worse for it in the morning.

But further readings on the subject suggest to me that doesn’t appear to be what really happens. It’s not insulin but tryptophan that is (we hope) crossing the blood-brain barrier, as it’s needed to produce serotonin. Eating sweets and refined (white) sugars and starches are said to be bad because although they cause serotonin levels to rise, they only raise the serotonin levels for 1-2 hours, which I guess is one reason you might fall heavily asleep after drinking alcohol, and then wake up a couple of hours later. Whole grain starch (whole wheat, brown rice, oatmeal):

Triggers a slow, sustained release of insulin that lowers blood levels of most large amino acids except tryptophan, which remains in the blood and can enter the brain. As a result, serotonin levels rise gradually, and blood-sugar levels remain stable, without the rise and fall experienced with sugar or refined grains.

So… you should eat a nice bowl of – sugarless – oatmeal before bed? Or even better, write yourself a soothing little sonnet.

To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.
Or wait the Amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still hoards
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

–John Keats

I came across another sleep – or rather not sleep – poem which features dogs and which I could have written myself at 3 am last Friday, when old Prince next door was feeling sad. Though it turns out I didn’t need to since Emiliano de Lucas got there first.

I had some salmon chowder for supper last night, along with baking powder biscuits made with whipping cream instead of butter.

Having a little trouble posting just now, having failed in my attempt to slice the top of my left index finger off the other day. Ok ok I was making DOG FOOD. And strangely enough I was reflecting on the dangers of using a not quite sharp enough knife when knife responded by biting me, which it has to be said the dog has never done. Anyway my keyboard is a little tricky to navigate with a large bandage on my fingertip. Not sure why it’s affecting the typing coordination in my other hand. Sympathy of twins I suppose.

I got fed up after this and went into the garden (fingertip well protected) and as I was hauling dead clematis off an old trellis, danged if the trellis didn’t savage my arm with an old nail. Lucky for me I had a tetanus shot last summer after an ill-fated decision to attain fitness through cycling, and a misguided attempt to enter my new regime well prepared by spending lots of money getting brand-new bike tires, which I discovered do not respond to turns in quite the same way as the old ones. Perhaps I should stay indoors for a while and use only rounded implements in the kitchen till my wounds heal.

I have been reading a book by Andrew Motion on the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, Philip Larkin. It was published in 1982 by Faber on their special self-destruct paper, so it has quite an authentically antique look even now, and I hope it will not crumble before I reach the end. More a critical than a biographical study, Motion’s book is appealingly slender, at only 92 pages (including a dozen page of bibliography, notes and index). Pithy though, and will bring you right up to speed on your symbolist, modernist and Movement poets, and their passionate aims for poetry, as well of course as a detailed review of Larkin’s evolution. But for the naughty bits you’ll have to try Motion’s 1993 biography or read his Selected Letters. A further biography, by Richard Bradford, was published in 2005.