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when A & D come to dinner? Last time: minestrone and vegetable tart–roast asparagus and carrots on feta creamed with a clove of garlic on crisp baked pastry. Dessert? Those thin and crunchy gingersnaps with oats and buckwheat? What else? Cold outside in mid-March, so not ice cream. Not rice pudding cake. Also not dried figs cooked in sherry. A year ago it was D who cracked the blown glass bowl, although it could have been any of us. Figs and bowl thrown into the trash. Don’t use a silver spoon to cut figs in a blown glass bowl. But this dinner: maybe chard, pine nut, and white bean filo strudel (chard stems add crunch, miso adds umami) with red pepper coulis followed by those small Japanese cheesecakes that never fail and I’ll have leftovers for breakfast. Or with the same amount of work and more luxury: coconut (organic, no guar gum) crème caramels with star anise, cardamon, grains of paradise. Inverted on a plate, a tenuousness I aspire to. Soft wobble with spice. Nothing is so satisfying as the imagination’s rendering of it, said Proust. Well, he didn’t say that exactly, but he lived it, over and over. Like me now. Like you, reading.
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This poem appeared in the September 2025 print edition of the magazine.
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