I have a cold, and I'm supposed to feed it.

This is not a cooking blog, but I can't help sharing what I've been up to over the weekend, which includes this fabulous coffee cake:

It's actually the Barefoot Contessa's recipe, but I altered it ever so slightly and I was pretty proud of how it turned out.  Lately I've been so focused on eating vegetables and trying to stay healthy that I haven't been much in the mood for cooking or baking.  I mean, if I bake something, I'm going to feel like I earned the right to eat it.  But in the interest of trying to use up the insane amount of grapes I had leftover from the last CSA pickup, I also decided to make a grape focaccia recipe I've had my eye on.  Grapes and focaccia?  It's actually a Tuscan thing and it is delicious:

 

Never before have I tried to make my own bread, but I reached way down to my Italian old lady roots and kneaded that dough like a genuine nonna.  It felt so good, I seriously considered opening a pizzeria for about 5 seconds.  Eh, I'm over it now.

Monday

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth--
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see--
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think--
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman's heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

-Billy Collins

Of food and dreams

There is a cupcake in the refrigerator.
I am trying to ignore it.
A single cupcake,
a leftover party favor.
It doesn't belong to me,
but I am the only one here.
Devilish little cake,
it whispers promises and compliments.
It has denounced its owner
and pledged eternal love to me.
I didn't earn you, cupcake.
I have not accomplished anything today.
I sit here, cold, watching the rain,
the sky the color of uncaring.
Two pairs of socks dress my feet,
I am cocooned in a fleece blanket,
I know all the news of the world.
This has been my day,
decidedly not dessert-worthy.
I put you out of my mind.

Back to work, 
testing the wall.
I push one brick, I knock against another.
I keep prodding like a toddler
to find one that isn't fully committed.
One brick that wobbles,
I'll kick and claw.
I'll bleed on it
until, like a decayed tooth,
it just falls out.
Then I find myself on the other side.
A sunshine world.
The people see me and wonder,
where have you been?
I don't tell them of the time I wasted
chasing other people's cupcakes.

This post makes my skin crawl.

I hate the word "moist."  I hate the way the mouth forms when it's spoken.  It reminds me of those skeevy men who lean out of their trucks, honk and blow kisses as they drive past and make me want to yell, "I'm walking here!"  "Moist" is blood and stickiness.  It is also cottonmouth.  Someone who moistens his lips is unsure of himself and therefore unattractive.  He probably has chapped lips.

These are all irrational things, like when I think of the word "Amsterdam" I think of the color orange.  But there are two instances when I can deal with "moist."  One is in the description of a cake, because I love cake more than I hate "moist."  The other is in poetry, because as much as I loathe the word, it evokes a strong reaction in me.  That is what I want out of poems, and that is the most I can handle with "moist."  This poem by Sharon Olds is the perfect example:

35/10

Brushing out our daughter’s brown
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a moist
precise flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.