War Zone Easter Prayer, Alan Ginsberg and the Rabbit Hole, Drinks with Yeats

Saturday News Scraps Newsletter, V1/E7

Table of Contents

• An Easter Prayer

• My Okonomiyaki

• The Week’s Favorite Newsletter Reads

• One Brain’s Rabbit Hole Chronicle

• The Parting Glass

An Easter Prayer

The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Easter tomorrow. It’s safe to say Ukrainians will not be able to cook their holiday’s traditional meal. For now, let’s hope and, if so inclined, pray that come next year’s spring, family and friends will gather together in their own peaceful country. Please consider helping the World Central Kitchen to provide food for those who have remained in their homes and the soldiers fighting for their country.

My Okonomiyaki

Tuesday’s story about wandering around inside a nearby Asian supermarket ended with me gathering the ingredients for Okonomiyaki. A noted street food, Okonomiyaki is a cabbage pancake. So far vegans are loving it until the traditional pork belly is fried into it. I followed the recipe on justonecookbook.com and, if I have to say so myself, it made a very nice Friday dinner.

The Week’s Favorite Newsletter Reads

On Fogo Baixo: “Every Dinner Is a Political Situation,” by journalist Flávia Schiochet. This is a particularly inciteful look into the tyranny of table manners.

On The Action Cookbook Newsletter: “The Most Memorable Meals We Ever Had,” by the very funny and weird writer Scott Hines. The comment sections are always a bonus joy.

One Brain's Rabbit Hole Chronicle
And a fine landing on Alan Ginsberg 

A typical 7 p.m. situation: Brain sputters and fails to consider the need to cook dinner. Panic takes hold: Is there wine?? Is a frantic run to the wine store necessary?? How that leads to guilt over not reading a lot of poetry during Poetry Month is a mystery. The remedy is to pull up a new tab to dutifully find a host of poems for the closing of the workday. Despite immediate options popping up, the brain begins to harken fondly back to the years when searching for information was a delightful crapshoot through actual tactile means. Specifically the days when a homework assignment sent a bored pre-teen to the house’s copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia, a 16-inch-tall, nine-inch-thick volume crammed with fascinating useless knowledge, the pages tissue thin, typeface barely 8pt: Abercrombie, Patrick, Sir, architect, 1879-1957 (instrumental in helping to rebuild bombed British cities after WWII); Hatshepsut, (Egyptian queen—1479-1457 BC—and first great woman in recorded history); Smut (an order of parasitic fungi).

Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, the computer’s algorithm for poetry results in the expected. However, as expected with a cracked and exhausted brain, a cascade of somewhat related subjects commences. This is how a reader discovers that the Greek muse of poetry, Erato, was really only helpful for producing erotic verses; John Keats was a licensed apothecary; and the Poetry Foundation has a section devoted to poems about food, including a whole category covering eating with ghosts. Allen Ginsburg meets his ghost in A Supermarket in California. The very first stanza sets the chase:

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
         In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
         What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

[Listen to the rest of the poem recited here]

And this is where the searches end. After all, it’s 8:30 and still there is no dinner cooking. Gratefully, though, there is wine.

The Parting Glass

A Drinking Song
by William Butler Yeats

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

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And now, a spectacularly scary and exciting announcement!

The first anniversary of America Eats! is coming up on May 18. Since it began, a full 103 stories ago, AE has more than doubled it’s readership beyond the few who first received the newsletter. I’m so grateful to everyone who has stuck by me and to my new readers for taking a chance that AE would be worth falling into your mailbox each week.

It seems time, then, to make America Eats! a paid-subscription-based newsletter. The cost is minimal—only $5 a month or, through June, the cheaper $35 a year. Your support will go a long way to help finance the 60+ hours it takes to research and write each week’s two stories and to begin developing new offerings for the coming year. That means videos of when I’m on the road, audio interviews, and the creation of special pamphlets and booklets.

So, look out for the grand announcement or, better yet, sign up now. Either way, it’s so wonderful to have you with me!