Surprise, Surprise
Surprise, surprise
Couldn't find it in your eyes
But I'm sure it's written all over my face.
-- Norah Jones, "Sunrise"
Well, whaddyaknow, I'm actually back the next day. Every time Sweet Junie
leaves I root around in the icebox for comfort food. Well, not exactly an
icebox, I suppose, but that's what my mom called the fridge until at
least 1975. I had made some Onion Soup with Saffron and Sherry for us this
week and there was a couple of cupfuls left in the big Calphalon pot on the
bottom shelf. I added black beans, frozen collard greens, one cut-up
chorizo, some cumin, and a pint of low-fat chicken stock and my guess is that
will be my dinner when everything blends nicely together. It got me to
thinking that I hadn't made Black Bean Cassoulet in a while, which is one of my
favorite recipes. Which got me to thinking that I don't even have the
recipe in Whimsy's Cookbook. Hmm. How did that happen? Anyway,
cassoulet is one of those wondrous recipes from the south of France that
tourists have once and then go home and pine over for years. It's
traditionally a slow-cooked bean casserole with tomato paste and some kind of
meat (mutton, duck, pork sausage, goose) and in France the beans are haricot
blanc, for which you can quite easily substitute Great Northern white beans
or whatever kind of beans you like, but I like black beans myself. I have
to dig it up out of my old posts on other sites or emails because I don't have
what you would call a thoroughly organized recipe file, more like a bookshelf of
cookbooks with sticky notes in them and the odd page of scribblings stuck among
them. The recipe I have in mind has lots of garlic and red pepper and
plenty of cumin and is something that could gird your loins against the harshest
winter. I just have to find the sucker.
I promised Steve Schroeder that I would mention the launch of his new poetry
journal, Anti-. I admit to immediately thinking "anti-Christ"?
"antimatter"? but that's my problem. You should run over to his
website and visit for a spell because Tim
Lockridge, Rose Kelleher, Brent Goodman, Tony Robinson, Louise Mathias and D.
Antwan Stewart are there among other and I think the last two are in our
current MMM Volume VIII come to think of it.
This month's poetry is more comment than poetry, BTW. I'll get to that
tomorrow. OK, I really do always say that but my guess is I'll actually be
back tomorrow. Gotta go now, cassoulet calls.