All Content by Michael Kim
All Content by Michael Kim
Culinary Corner
This is what I make for breakfast when I’m not particularly hungry in the morning but know I need to prepare my belly for a stretch of activity before lunchtime. It’s substantial enough to make me feel satiated, but it lightens my senses rather than weighing them. In other words, you’ll feel grounded but also blossoming.
This should be the first thing anyone learns to cook because, with it, you can magically transform any meal into something fit for a royal palate. I make this when the farmers’ market is bursting with red treasures. But supermarket tomatoes are fine, too -- especially if your aim is just to make a very spicy condiment to pep up other foods.
Like anything from a cheap take-out place, food truck or busy street stand, Cauliflower 65 is satisfying, quick and kicky. This is something we like to stand over in the kitchen and eat right off of greasy paper towels.
Actually a breakfast food, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it there. This dish is so sweet and rich that, in the context of a cookbook, I have to call this a dessert. In any other context, though, I’d call it the perfect metaphor for the afterglow of morning dalliance.
The day had started out unpromisingly rainy and foggy, and the soggy ground smelled like roots. I was even thinking that the last few golden leaves still clinging to the maple trees looked like the first bloom of spring forsythia. At five o’clock, an hour before our dinner’s start time, the sun came out. I still had to towel dry the cement floor of my porch, which held so much condensation from the tumbling fog. When my friends pulled up, a herd of a dozen deer elegantly glided across the street and melted into my back garden, among confused periwinkle blossoms.
She is very busy. The goddess of wisdom, Sarasvati sits upon a mythical bird, which looks rather like a wild goose. But it is not. It’s a magic creature that can sip the milk right out of a mixture of milk and water. I suppose it does that only when Sarasvati is not perched on its back, rather like Mother Goose, completely absorbed in singing and playing her veena, while her other two hands are occupied with the Vedas and her prayer beads. So relax. That cup of chai in your hands is safe for now.
Half of a family pack of chicken thighs, a few tablespoons of ghee, and the contents of the spice box -- easy and low-stress addition to the dinner menu.
The moon quartered is an apple slice.
Calm and cinnamon, the autumn fields.
At the behest of the morning star,
deign to rise
doe-like eyes
on your knife’s deft work.
I make potato puffs when I need to feel that everyone loves me. Feeling unloved is one of the principal occupational hazards of being a poet, I have found. It is hard to write poems. So often they are full of pain and the truth that causes pain. A good kind of pain, but pain nonetheless. Writing is like going away someplace far and remote, full of loneliness. Stones and air. The threat of storm and darkness. When I come back to myself, in a warm chair and with my chin in hand, I even feel sometimes that I have become stone. Putting a few potatoes in a pressure cooker dispels that feeling pretty effectively. A soft love helps.
Get in touch with Michael at michael.kim@nyackschools.org