Poetic License of the Kitchen

My friend Becky told me this week about a cookbook called The Book-Lover's Cookbook. I searched through the table of contents, and at first I was discouraged. I had the typical writer's reaction of, "damn! they thought of my idea first!". (Which I guess makes it their idea--whatever.)
But then I thought about this again. As far as I can tell, one of the strengths of the cookbook is that it makes cooking accessible. In the main dish section, there's an entry for beginner's sweet and sour chicken (which refers to Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Tree). Sections are outlined according to course. The book offers variety and functionality; in short, it looks pretty cool.
Essentially, I had to revise what my plan was, narrow and focus and define my terms. And last night I hit on it. One of my roommates, Andrea, and I were discussing costume ideas for a literary Halloween party. She thought of being Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce's Ulysses. I suggested she could hand out bars of soap, and she countered that she could carry a cheese sandwich in her back pocket. She then added that I should make cheese sandwiches for this blog.
But I don't just want to make a cheese sandwich. I want to make a croque monsieur, which is really a gateway drug into the croque madame.
The croque monsieur is a French grilled ham and cheese sandwich. The croque madame is basically the same thing, except you serve the sanwich open-faced and top with a fried egg.
I've not read Ulysses, but to my knowledge, Dedalus does not put a croque monsieur in his back pocket. But that doesn't matter. When I read books, the ideas I take in are places to jump from. They're starting points, not the final say. And this blog, I think, works the same. I'll recreate the foods I read about in books, yes; but that's not to say I'll make it exactly how it happened in the book. Consider it the poetic license of the kitchen.
For today, however, I have a bag of Virginia apples that came in my CSA batch this week, and since it's raining, and I'm battling a pre-Literary Festival sore throat that I refuse to let ruin my week, I'm thinking it's a cinnamon apples kind of morning. Hot and spicy, with sunflower honey bread, and some fried eggs and home fries.

So the way this blog works is that I talk a lot about writing and cooking (and subsequently eating) and how they mash up in my life.
But that's a little skeletal.
My big plan is to recreate dishes I read about in books. I find that some of the best food writing I have come across is incidental, buried in a non-(culinary)-genre works of fiction--like the ham biscuit in Jack London's "To Build a Fire;" the meager meals cooked in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; the salted pork in Little House on the Prairie. The delicious dinner at the men's college that Virginia Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own. (Hell, for that matter, the not-as-great dinner from the women's college too.)
The problem is that these dishes are mentioned with such art and imagination, but the reader is left only to imagine them. So through misadventures, mistakes, and a little creativity, I'm going to recreate those meals and dishes I read about in books.
I don't flatter myself that I'll have people flock to my blog, but since I am sharing the link with my friends, maybe you'll help me out. If you find a great dish described in a book somewhere, let me know about it. My first big project will start in October, when I'll be reading The Cider House Rules and going apple-picking: something I consider a very "Virginia" thing to do, and something I've never done before. Beyond that, I have no plan except to read and cook. (My life is so hard.)
:)

Whisking and Wording

A cook typically uses a whisk to blend ingredients smooth, working out lumps. Alternatively, a whisk is also used to incorporate air into ingredients, such as eggs or cream.
A writer uses words in much the same way: to smooth out ideas into a tangible form, working out the dizzying mess of thoughts and images. Alternatively, words are also infused with life, air, inspiration, etc.
Essentially, both cooking and writing involve the process of making something out of nothing using a few tools and raw materials. That's what this blog is about.
When I was in high school, I wanted to be a pastry chef. I thought nothing would make me happier than to stand in a kitchen all day and play with chocolate. (Side note: that actually still makes me pretty happy.) But after doing a trial run for a culinary school scholarship competition--wherein I attempted strawberry cream-cheese stuffed crepes, paying attention to mise en place as well as actually cooking the blasted things, in under three hours--I discovered I don't cook well under pressure. More importantly, I didn't like cooking under pressure. That was the first step in ending my culinary career.
I became a writer instead. I felt much more adept at sitting in my room, computer in my lap, making up stories, writing literary analyses, reading books and staring out windows. I got my MFA in fiction from Old Dominion University, the best possible place I could have spent three years learning how to write stories.
I graduated in May, and when I'm not toiling away at a law firm during the day or writing stories or book reviews at night, I cook. I live with two writers, and it isn't uncommon for them to emerge from their bedrooms, eyes bleary with ideas and coded dreams, to find me in the midst of baking brownies, or chopping vegetables, or even just making sweet tea.
I used to joke during graduate school that I cooked the most when I was up against a story deadline. Those were the times when I needed to make pasta, banana bread, cookies, chicken soup. But I found that writing was part of my process; food was part of my process. In the kitchen, my hands are mechanical, my actions memorized, my mind free. I can breathe, and ideas can grow. For me, writing and cooking are linked. I am determined, it seems, to spend my life making something out of nothing.