2001/onepot

PEASANT DISHES

“Prose poems are the culinary equivalent of peasant dishes.”
Peter Johnson

My favorite. I’m a big believer in one-pot dishes. Don’t like to to spend all day in the kitchen, chopping and fussing. I like kitchari best. An Indian dish of mung beans and rice with spices. Its description powerless to tell what it really is. Topped with cilantro, coconut and lime. A holy food, there’s no other way to put it.

Or red lentil soup, with turnips and carrots. Nothing glamourous about it, but everyone wants the recipe, which, of course, does not exist.

The problem is I don’t have enough easy favorites to fill up the week. So I have to repeat, or strike out into new territory, so that dinner is down a notch from the top, or up the complicated scale.

Gertrude Stein said eating the same food all the time was the way for a writer. I tell myself to make something new each week, but I always seem to forget. It’s okay, I like prose anyway.

3/21/01