Stories

In the summer, people tend to fall in around here, sometimes when we least expect it. Spontaneous plans get made in the morning or a minute before because the weather’s nice and Alan’s almost always game for a barbecue (though he has been known to get cranky when the dishes pile up.)

He is constitutionally “allergic” to making salad and the appetizers and the sides (unless we’re talking grilled vegetables and the occasional amazing polenta) generally fall on my shoulders. But, since the side dishes and appetizers often define a meal, give it its flourish so to speak, it could be viewed as a tiny opportunity, to show off.

So here are a couple of my favorites, that involve a minimum of effort, the next time there are hot dogs on or burgers or Alaskan salmon on the grill and you just have to rustle something up to go along with them.

In the fall and winter I really enjoy cooking with beans. I make lentil soup or sometimes black-eyed pea soup for New Year's. I love chili with beans. And I particularly enjoy bean salads, either warm or cold, as side dishes or mixed into green salads for a healthy lunch. Black beans and cannellini beans are some of my favorites to cook with, but I'm always looking for other types of beans that I haven't tried before.

There are many varieties of beans and I've been on a trek to discover them all, especially heirloom ones. I recently discovered French flageolet beans and loved them right away. The unique feature of this bean, besides its pale green color, is that they keep their shape very well after cooking and, if soaked overnight, they cook up quickly—in about 30 minutes. Their firm texture is what makes them perfect for this French-style bean salad.

In this recipe I play with Mediterranean flavors like fennel, garlic, lemon, and olive oil. I use fennel stalks and fronds, which most people would otherwise discard after using the bulb. (I usually use the fennel bulb in a roast chicken recipe and use the stalks for this salad. Then I pair the two dishes to make a meal.) The fennel adds a sweet anise flavor to the salad and the carrots lend additional sweetness. Lemon as well as red-wine vinegar add tartness. Serve this bean salad warm or cold, as an appetizer or side dish to fish, chicken, or meats. You'll enjoy the bright and fresh flavors.

I don’t know another food that seems to inspire stronger emotion—passion, even
—than that most humble of desserts, pie. — Joyce Maynard, "Labor Day"

I’ve been thinking about pie a lot lately. It’s only now, as I’m preparing to leave the college where I’ve taught for the last 15 years, that it occurs to me how many works I’ve taught that have included pie. In the early years of my women’s film class, I used a clip in which Snow White sings about her prince while crafting the perfect pie for the seven little men that she lives with. Pie can be a metaphor for comfort, for domesticity, for nurturing and for accomplishment.

Those very suggestions are what also make pie such a successful weapon in the arsenal of slapstick: to be attacked with a pie, otherwise a symbol of warm inclusiveness, is to be shamed, reduced (just ask the British Prime Minister’s pie thrower his intention).

Vintage tales of hardship and survival:
Grandad crushed when the tractor toppled
On Brier Hill. How Uncle John lost his arm
To the picker. Samuel smothered
In the silo, lungs full of harvest.

Thus reads a stanza of the poem Farming – One of the most dangerous occupations. It is representative of the twenty-six poems in Dead Horses, poems of struggle and suffering, loss and death. These are poems of memories, especially memories of horses:

Now that they are dead or gone, the dream
Is always of a field where horses
Flash past, hooves catching and echoing light,
The grass lush, milkweed or Queen Anne’s lace
Along the fencerows. Then suddenly it’s winter,
Snow is falling, shapes are haloed, the sky is bleak.

And another stanza, from the same poem:

…..You want them now, those horses
Crashing the earth with sound as if light
Had been surpassed by speed, as if the laces
That bind you to your bones gave way to winter’s
Blast…..