So it's National Poetry Month and what we think is sweeter than sweets is the poem, (best read in the presence of dessert: after all, good poetry reminds us that every sweetness is fleeting and divine).
Over at Writer's Digest, on a blog called Poetic Asides, Robert Lee Brewer is posting daily prompts for the entire month of April. Sometimes we'll use those as rough guides for our own daily April posts.
In honor of the lyrical palate:
April 1 (Today's communication prompt will be the letter that every recipe is from cook to cook, and because he was more talented than he was sometimes wise, for April Fool's Day, we'll honor Mr. Pound.)
Rebecca Louden's Ezra Pound Cake recipe
(Courtesy of Forklift, Ohio)
April 2 (Today's poem-a-day prompt is for a visitor poem. Therefore, we'll borrow a visiting recipe and a visiting writer.)
Anonymous
Ingredients for 10,000
Chocolate Chip Cookies
As found posted in the bakery of the
retired Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. Yorktown
(Charleston, SC)
112 Lbs of Chocolate Chips
165 Lbs of Flour
500 Eggs
100 Lbs of Granulated Sugar
87 Lbs of Shortening
75 Lbs of Brown Sugar
12 Lbs of Butter
3 Lbs of Salt
3 Cups of Vanilla Extract
1 Quart of Water
1 1/2 Lbs of Baking Soda
and if you're inspired to souffle yourself.
April 3 (Today's prompt is for an apology and in apology for those missing plums, we offer a Rustic Plum Tart recipe.)
This is Just to Say
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
William Carlos Williams
April 4 (100% Poetry)
Alimentum: a whole journal devoted to food and poetry: Let them eat their words!
Avgolemono Begin with the father: a Greek immigrant-gone-busboy-gone-dishwasher-gone-cook-gone-restauranteur. Add the daughter, watching closely the broth made from the whole chicken boiled, the top skimmed, (the nothing-squandered so that even now she shames a little at the desert-stripped clean pile of bones, her friends' drumsticks ruffled with leftover meat, the cartilage-knucklebones ungnawed. Yet, she picks them bare--a kind of legacy.) Set the chicken aside, cut a section off for the tufts of meat to be added later. Add rice, and cook until the required spooned-tastes don't stick to the teeth of the young girl who will learn measurements and textures by mouth and hand. The eggs and lemon most of all--a learned thing-- how quickly to add the simmering broth without leaving tricots of white. Add patience in perfect proportion to what it takes not to cook the eggs a bit. Factor the father's fluency is passed to the girl as she adds carefully small spoons of hot broth and then mixes it into the lemon. One day he calls her, the father, and asks why lately the eggs gather like little continents reminding him more of egg drop and she reminds him what he taught her: to work with care, count out the minutes in teaspoons, to allow the lemon mixture to learn slowly how to mingle with the scalding broth without losing its constitution.