Poetry Friday: A Vacation Memoir

Happy Poetry Friday everyone!!!! Its been ages since I wrote a poem. My poety self disappeared for a bit there under knee x-rays and layers of homeschool curricula. Am back and am not to be beaten down. Feeling very inspired by all the determined women who made office during the recent election. If they can all manage to accomplish political careers and break glass ceilings then I will battle to squeak out a poem on Fridays. Huzzah!

This week I am thinking of our recent trip to Hawaii. We spent some time visiting A's brother Miq and his wife, the inimitable  Penny (visiting family is a good excuse for trips to exotic locales!) and then we also took half the vacation to island hop about on our own and explore. We came to Hawaii for our honeymoon ten years ago so we were returning after a decade to not only enjoy the tropical breeze but also to remember where we started and celebrate having made it this far, back in a kind of grand circle. It was kind of a family vacation/second honeymoon/relative visiting trip...just a little of everything in there.

It was fun to go back as a painter. I feel like it changes the way I see so much of life...I notice amazing colors, the way light glows along an edge, and the soft quality of the air in a vista. One of things that really has stayed in my mind was the fruit. Its a beautifully agricultural and lush place so there's no shortage of ripe, juicy, glistening fruits everywhere. The fruits we have here are equally lovely really, there's just something very fresh about things you don't have where you live. This is what I am remembering now as the weather crisps and blusters outside our house and December looms large.

A Ripe Visit 

Staying in their teak, jungle bungalow
Was beautiful, like the breakfast papaya:
Glistening crescents of spoon-soft gold;
Florals melting into the walls of your mouth. 
They smiled easily and shared their croquet set,
The balls rolling into a dip under the banana tree.
Life there was warm and soft, rippling onward.
We stripped magenta ramubutans slowly and read
Languid stories to the children about dragon gold.
I got up one morning with the roosters and
Watched dawn rise over corrugated metal to the
Nutty snap of a longan skin between my teeth.
We made outings like good vacationers do 
To Chinatown for highlighter pink dragonfruit
To a local farm stand for starfruit with a song
Like a raspberry catching the crest of a sunset.
And to the pineapple plantation where the fruit
Rises like trophies out of a vast plain of thorns.
We picked guavas in a baking crater and ate them
Dripping juice on the gearshift in the front seat.
We found one wild lilikoi, plump and dangling from
Vines tangled with lipstick, wild fuchsia blooms.
That night when we sawed it open at the table
And passed around sips of the jellied seeds
They told us about a friend's newborn daughter
Improbably named after the passionate little fruit.
On the last morning of our visit, hustling for the plane
We ate breakfast together standing in the kitchen
Scooping up avocado flesh with spoons
And then hurling dripping mango into our mouths.
Desperate to eat up paradise before our flight.
We drove out of their bouncing lane and
Saw them framed by an enormous santol tree
Wrapping his arms around them in the sun.

Our host today for Poetry Friday is Amy over at The Poem Farm. Please drop by and savor some of the other contributions if you find yourself sitting with a mug of tea on Saturday morning in a quiet hour. A little poetry does a body good.

Have a beautiful weekend!

Sundried Tomatoes, Sans-Sun

It's tomato season...we're rolling in them. I am to the stage where I have started packing a small container of tomatoes to take with us when we leave...just in case any of our friends want tomatoes. (Yay friends!) Almost time for making tomato sauce. I'd be all over it this week except we're wildly busy with Vacation Bible School at church every single day so, all other major accomplishments (hello Laundry!) are out for a while. Next week will be sauce week, and our counter will be splashed with tomato seeds, and we'll have tomato skins dropped all over the kitchen floor and the house will smell like tangy, sweet sauce for days on end, long after the jars are sealed and rinsed and making their way to the pantry shelves.

 But, I just couldn't wait to do something with tomatoes...they beg to be used, and loved and enjoyed. So, I decided to try making my own "sundried" tomatoes. It's been raining this week and the heat is finally down a bit so I decided to skip doing it outdoors (maybe another year) and just do it simply, in my oven.

Now, this week is insanity at our house so low key was really important if I was going to be working on anything at all. Is tomato sauce intimidating but you'd like to dip your toe in the water of food preservation and old fashioned home-making skills? Dry a few tomatoes. They're dead easy and so luscious good.

 I took some really beautiful plum tomatoes (from the Farmer's Market, not our garden) and sliced them in half. I laid them on a cake rack, to give them good air circulation, set it in a cookie sheet....and popped the whole shooting match into my oven on the lowest setting which on my oven is 150 degrees Farenheit.

They slowly, slowly wrinkle and darken and after a day or so, depending on the humidity, the moisture content of the tomatoes, the heat level of your lowest oven setting...etc. they'll be done! I rotated the cookie sheet around in a circle sometimes to make sure they dried evenly, and towards the end I checked more frequently so that I could start picking finished tomatoes off the sheet as they started to stagger towards done. I turned my oven off at night just because that's a long time of unsupervised cooking and I worried they'd finish somewhere around 3AM and then keep toasting away till I woke up and found them sadly dark and hard. When they're finished they're this sumptuous lipstick red, beautiful, just teetering on the edge of burgundy. And the flavor has intensified to a wonderfully  deep, zippy sweet...almost like fruit leather.

You know they're done when they feel like nice flexible, leathery dried fruit....nothing gushy left to them. I am keeping these in a ziploc bag in the fridge at the moment but next week...when all that tomato canning happens, I'm planning to take them up to the next level and try making this amazing looking tomato confit with them....slobber slobber slobber! I forgot to pick up a couple of heads of garlic at the Farmer's Market today but otherwise I have all of the ingredients ready and waiting...it's just a matter of time.

Windfall on the Corner

I am a very lucky girl. The totally mouthwatering restaurant on the corner that served wonderful hummus and pita and other delicious Middle Eastern whatnots has folded and shut it's doors for good. You might think this would put me into permanent mourning. (It did at first) Goodbye sweet lamb patties and other delights!

But then it re-opened as...... an authentic Mexican taco joint! (With delivery, no less!)

I'll be quite alright. 

Bruchetta To Die For

So, you all know I'm a massive fan of Julie and Julia. And in the movie there's this haunting scene. Its the part of the movie where becoming a food blogger suddenly is clearly Julie Powell's destiny, a beautiful scene with cozy evening light in their apartment. The couple, is having one of those, its-too-hot-to-cook summer night dinners. You can feel the lazy evening vibe, the kind of evening when you have long conversations, and stay up too late because its too hot to sleep. And Julie makes bruschetta for dinner. Nothing else....just amazing bruschetta. And you can practically taste the food because the food styling is that good. The olive oil and tomato juices are dripping off the hands of the actors, you can hear the toast crisp when they bite into it and the bright gleam of that basil against the diced 'maters! Mmmmmm....so good. This is the scene all the viewers come away fantasizing over. It won't leave the mind.

Yeah. So, I saw the movie...what, weeks ago now and then in Michigan I watched it again with my fabulous brothers-in-law and A. And just in case I was not already infatuated with the mental longing for that bruschetta, I got another good dose of it with the second viewing. *slobber slobber*

This weekend, as part of a beach trip, we made a pilgrimage further up the coast to one of our favorite small markets and picked up a lot of fresh produce. Among the bounty were a couple of fresh tomatoes, a baguette (that turned out to be slightly dry which is great for bruschetta) and a bouquet of basil. It was destiny. I made bruschetta for dinner. And folks, it was heart-stopping. It is being added to my list of "signature dishes" (a whole delicious post in and of itself) and will doubtless be repeated several times again now that true tomato season has extended a pinky toe.

So good. Try it and have your own moment of bruschetta genius! 

 

The ingredients to bruschetta are pretty simple:

• rounds of baguette
• really ripe red tomatoes (preferably super local!)
• a good wad of fresh basil
• a nice fruity olive oil
• sea salt
• balsamic vinegar
• sunshine (really!)
• and for this recipe....butter (I know, I know....call the authenticity police...its not authentic but, its super, super good!)

First, I cut up two large red tomatoes in about 1/2 inch dice. I used really juicy ripe, local tomatoes and I think that's pretty key. All of those went into a metal mixing bowl. Then I rough chopped basil leaves and threw them in the bowl and stirred until it looked pretty to me. I know that's vague but, honestly I think the amount of basil added could really vary according to taste. I think basil is lovely so I added quite a bit...maybe 12 leaves or so. After the basil was in, I added about a half a teaspoon full of salt to the mixture, about the same amount of balsamic vinegar and then a nice dollop of olive oil....say, two tablespoons or so. I also minced one clove of garlic finely and added it in. Then everything got a good stir and the whole mixture was placed in a location with intense sunshine. This may sound silly but, slightly warming the tomatoes makes them taste sweeter and more fruity, and warming the basil releases more of its flavorful oil, warming the salt helps it to melt into the mixture more thoroughly and warming the olive oil highlights its flavors too. If you're making the dish at night or don't have any sun the day you're making it, try putting it in a very slightly warmed oven that has since been turned off or if you have a gas oven....just putting it in over the pilot light. I'd also try a heating pad on a medium setting under the bowl.

So, while that mixture macerates and the flavors develop....slice rounds of baguette off that are about 1/4-1/2 an inch thick. I cut 12 rounds to use with 2 large tomatoes. Next I ran a stick of butter over my cast iron griddle, just enough to moisten the whole pan...and then I took the stick of butter and scraped it over one side of all the rounds of bread....just enough butter on each piece to see...not really "spread" with it like for toast. Then I heated the skillet at medium heat until the butter was sizzling and at that point added the bread rounds, butter side down. Its important to heat the pan before adding the bread as this will help the bread to stay soft in the center and just brown and crisp on the outside. I only cooked the bread on one side of each round.

While the bread sizzled I took one garlic clove, peeled it and cut it in half, crosswise, not lengthwise. After the bread was starting to go golden in spots, I removed it to the serving platter and then rubbed each round with the garlic clove all over every inch of the buttered side. I lightly sprinkled the bread rounds with salt and sprinkled them lightly with olive oil and then brought the topping mixture out of the sunshine and over to the serving platter. Each round got a generous spoonful of the tomato mixture and I kept going around again until I ran out. I strained the juices from the bowl off with my spoon and only put drained tomatoes on the toast rounds. Everything ends up plenty juicy if you use good ripe tomatoes and if you pour on all the juices from the bowl you'll end up with soup and you'll lose the nice crisp texture of your golden baguette rounds. Then I sprinkled the whole thing with another dusting of salt and served. You must eat it immediately! This sort of thing does not wait. You lose the warm glow of the tomatoes and the toast will be soggy if you hold off.

And really, that's it...its amazing. Totally amazing. The key is the sunshine, the local tomatoes, the salt, and that pan sizzled golding of the toast. I'm not Italian so, you can fault me on authenticity but, really folks...try it...its divine summer food.