Grilled salmon for dinner leads to salmon cake next day. I found Ina Garten’s version and adjusted the recipe for the ingredients I had (pasilla chilies and black olives) in place of the ingredients I didn’t (sweet peppers, capers). I smiled at the instruction for a quarter teaspoon hot sauce, Tabasco recommended. First, I no longer keep a bottle of Tabasco on hand cuz I love Crystal Hot Pepper Sauce. Second, a quarter teaspoon! Before the 1990s leading-edge recipes listed “dash of Tabasco.” A quarter teaspoon is quite a few dashes. Still I’d add up to a half teaspoon myself. My palate has changed and yours probably has too!
Salmon practice: Sumi-e is a practice with ink and paper. When I make a picture, I get an idea of how to make it again but more simple, meaning fewer brush strokes and more gradations of ink in each stroke. I tell myself what I like about the picture, too. Above, I like the air bubbles. Below I like the second fin from the bottom left and the tail fin works. I captured the salmon’s hooked top lip, too.
Instead of frying individual patties, I spooned the mixture into a buttered 8-inch round dish and baked in a 350 F oven for 45-50 minutes, final internal temperature 145 F. The. Best. Salmon. Cake. Ever.
Could be a salmon. Could be swimming upstream to spawn. Could be.
“One Hundred Twenty-One Days”: a fairy tale,Africa, Paris,Strasbourg. Lists of papers in an archive, lists written in a notebook preserved for a future researcher to find, registries of visitors to academic institutions in France, scene re-created, imagined from a photograph, excerpts from a diary or two. Marriage announcements, birth announcements, death announcements. People, mostly mathematicians and the people in their lives. Men horribly injured, physically or mentally in war; the women who care for them. Clues about what it meant to be Jewish or Catholic in mid-20th Century France and Germany. WWI and WWII.
Michele Audin, a novelist (deemed a “brilliant mathematician” on the book’s cover so it must be true) constructed the novel based on the above random subjects several of which are enough in themselves to be the basis for a novel. I picked up the book on the “Suggested Reading” table at my local library. Further, I learned that the author belongs to Oulipo and I learned, sort of, what that is. Anyway, Michele Audin’s beautifully arranged fragments remind me that fragments can make a spell-binding story. I’m assembling in a story about which I want to know more. Therefore, I’m writing it.
I read hungrily in general but especially now I’m very keen to read not only the books, but about authors’ who are showing-telling-sharing about craft, work, vocation, writing, the environments of their lives. Each time I do, it’s like a mini-moment MFA, a degree I don’t have, but imagine that spending time with noted authors is part of being enrolled in one.
(Credit, Jai Stokes, Poets & Writers)
This week I met Guy Gunaratne and his debut novel: In “Our Mad and Furious City” (New Yorker, 1/14/2019). He’s a British guy with Pakistani roots. I’m intrigued by the article’s description of Gunaratne’s inventive use of the English language(New Yorker, 1/14/2019). I want to read the book for that and for the culture of the world Gunaratne creates, immigrants grabbing for a toehold in a country no longer new to them.
(Credit: Book Shop Santa Cruz)
The latest New Yorker (1/28/2019) has a story about Marlon James who creates amazing worlds filled with pow! and patois about Jamaica where he grew up and still calls home along while he lives in St. Paul, Minnesota (he teaches at Macalester College) and New York City. He tells his students: “Risk it all.” His latest book is “Black Leopard Red Wolf,” the first of a trilogy. He’s this respected literature writer who’s pulling in sci-fic and monsters this time around. Yup, I want to read it.
I’m not hopping a plane to flee this winter’s weird weather (70-degree temperature change in 24 hours, anyone?). However, I’ve already been to France. I’ll be in London soon with Gunaratne and then in James’ fantastical world. It’s not a beach or a stretch of desert near Tucson. It’s enough for me for now.
Fez, Morocco…Christmas Eve. I couldn’t, didn’t take a picture, though my hand itched for the camera. All I have is mental images, translated here:
“And, this,” says Ali, the city guide, “is the caravanserai (CAR-uh-van-sir-I).” He continues, “The farmers stay here when they come to sell in the Medina.” A donkey wreathed in a rope harness stands in one corner. Two women pull veils closer around their faces and watch us warily, four American women, decidedly unveiled. The men stare at our way, expressionless. I look away to the baskets, woven from palm fronds holding onions, garlic bulbs, potatoes and carrots. Nearby, a cluster of chickens tied together at the feet, cluck and mutter, in a feathered pile on blue plastic mesh.
Ali points to a row of blue battered doors on the second floor. “That’s where the farmers sleep.”
Standing here is almost unbearably intimate. We. are. not. welcome. I smell the straw, the donkey dung, and the dust and try to nod or acknowledge a greeting? That we’ve intruded? Ali led us here, but I can’t look away.
Each cobblestone lane in Fez’s Medina, seems more Canterbury Tales than 2015 Christmas Eve. I’m jolted to remember the celebration of Jesus’ birth in an obscure stable in Bethlehem, another Mediterranean city 2000 years ago. This courtyard, this caravanserai, could be that barnyard. Tonight on a farm in South Dakota after Christmas Eve supper, my brother will read aloud the passage from Luke 2:7 in the New Testament: “… and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.” (Holy Bible, NIV). This real life moment in Fez feels like a very, very old story. Time travelers? Them? Us?
