A Literary Culinary Journal
If you’re happy, you eat. If you’re sad, you eat. You lose a job, you eat. You get a job, you eat. It’s, you know, it’s addiction.–Barbara Cook
Photo courtesy of Theater Mania.
Barbara Cook is a Broadway singer and actress who won a Tony Award for her role in The Music Man in 1957. Today she performs in concert and in cabarets.
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Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.–John Cage
Apart from being a very gifted composer, poet, artist and print maker, John Cage was an amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.
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by here
Chicken tikka masala, New Indian or fusion?
Chicken tikka masala is quite likely one of the most popular Indian dishes the world. The irony of chicken tikka masala, better known as “CTM,” is that what is often enjoyed in restaurants as a traditional Indian dish has very little to do with authentic Indian cuisine. It is closer to “Britain’s true national dish.”
It was former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who proclaimed chicken tikka masala as the new national dish of Great Britain, in an attempt to set an example of British multiculturalism. The chicken tikka masala Mr. Cook was referring to was in actual fact the gravy-based dish invented in Britain.
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What better place to start an Epicurean Adventure than exploring the hub of any city — the food market.
Towns historically formed around the market centre. Farmers brought their produce to town to barter or sell, long before 20th-century industrialisation and long before we turned the fashionable 21st-century urban phrase ‘farmers’ market’. All around the world, food markets are still the bustling heart of local cuisine, and the best place to start your culinary holiday.
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Rebecca Varidel believes in the generosity of food and enjoys home and restaurant cookery that uses fresh local seasonal produce as its base.
Australian born and bred, Rebecca worked as a chef, in restaurants and later, cooked for the rich and famous in award-winning, private catering. Her latest endeavour is contributing editor for the popular food and travel website Inside Cuisine.
The 2011 Foodies Guide to Sydney says, “Rebecca Varidel seems to live a fortunate life. When she’s not quizzing celebrity chefs, she pops up at the best food parties, escapes to fabulous locations, or dissects a major foodie festival. Prize recipes from big name chefs only add to the caché.”
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For the first time I know what it is to eat. I have gained four pounds. I get frantically hungry, and the food I eat gives me a lingering pleasure. I never ate before in this deep carnal way… I want to bite into life and to be torn by it.–Anaïs Nin (1903 – 1977)
The daughter of Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, Anaïs Nin is most known for her diaries but she is also the author of numerous novels, poems and erotic short stories which were published after her death. In 1974 she was elected into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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by Esmaa Self
Backyard hens are an integral part of our sustainability efforts here at Middleground Farm. I feed ‘the girls’ wild greens, table scraps and essential nutrient-rich gruel; in return they give us incredibly healthy eggs. Our free-range flock reduces the property’s bug population and we protect them from chicken predators. It’s a beautiful relationship, and one that blesses us all.
Select fresh, clean, unblemished eggs
Perhaps you’ve heard that happy hens lay eggs. While flock contentment is relatively easy to attain (simply provide food, water, shade, soil to scratch, safe spaces in which to lay eggs, roost and roam), I am here to tell you that there is a poultry discontent beyond human control.
Some hens are better layers than others and will vigorously produce eggs come what may. Others find it too taxing to lay when the mercury rises above 92° F or falls below 32° F. A few breeds lay through the molt and when days are short, but many do not. Nearly every mature hen will lay eggs in abundance during spring, so productive are they then your refrigerator may become overrun by eggs.
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Food is the most primitive form of comfort.—Sheila Graham
Sheila Graham was a notable gossip columnist and author during Hollywood’s “Golden Age” who met and became romantically involved with F. Scott Fitzgerald, an affair which she chronicled in her autobiography, Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman (1958, with Gerold Frank), a bestseller which was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr. Born in Britain, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen and died in Palm Beach, Florida, in November 1988 at the age of 84.
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by Rod Jellema
Green Beans
The bean is a graceful, confiding, engaging vine;
but you never can put beans into poetry. . . .
There is no dignity in the bean.
Charles Dudley Warner
1.
Spring-loaded vines
on tendrils
shinny up skinny
poles and
shoot for the sun.
Their leavings are
heart shapes that
pinch to life
small yellow curves
that plump
like the knuckles
on babies’ hands.
Each nub
lengthens down
to a green
velvet composure
that will curtsy
and sway in the wind.
2.
No need to slit the tight skin
down to its pearls. Just snap
the stem and bite. The coldest
spring water never rinses away
the holy scent of turned earth
slendered into a bean, that trace
it holds of wild green smoke.
Relaxed in steam and slathered
in buttery gold, each one of
these peasants, when summoned
to the royal red silk
banquet hall of your mouth
will loyally serve its fare,
presenting with quiet dignity
small mists of sweetgrass, pineroot,
peat, seawater, ancient stone.
Rod Jellema is Professor Emeritus of English and former Director of Creative Writing at the University of Maryland. His 2005 book, A Slender Grace won the Towson University Prize for Literature. Incarnality: The Collected Poems, which includes his reading of 26 of the poems on a CD, was published in October, 2010. Click here to go to his website.
Photo courtesy of Dreamstime.
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by Jonell Galloway
When I had the idea of covering the entire A to Z of food, including Food Art and Food Poetry, I never dreamed it would be such a success. Our readers love it, and are asking for more.
If you’re a food photographer and would like to exhibit your work in our Food Art section, please send your portfolio to jonell@theramblingepicure.com. And please do spread the word!
Below you can view the exhibitions of our two staff members, Alison Harris and Meeta Khurana Wolff.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
