Not too long ago, while I was busy tap tap tapping on my keyboard, I picked up the divine scent of raspberries.
They beckoned like shamelessly seductive sirens from a far-off fairyland: “Come, come to us! We’re mingling with flour, sugar, eggs and buttermilk! We can make you happy! O come, and bring your butter knife!”
You can see I had no recourse but to investigate. The aroma of something wonderful baking in the oven is what I live for, and I absolutely love love raspberries! It wasn’t coming from my kitchen, sad to say; the resident bears were all napping. So where? I clicked through to a few of my favorite foodie websites. Dorie Greenspan was busy baking thousands of gourmet CookieBar cookies, and CakeSpy was happily working on her new book, due out this Fall!
Weakened by longing, desperate with curiosity, I briefly closed my eyes and let the rich raspberry rhapsody wash over me. I had to find those vixens! Aha! I should have known. Those ruby red rascals were right here on LiveJournal! My highly trained olfactories led me straight to Jeannine Atkins’s blog. Yes, she had just set out a plate of freshly baked Raspberry Muffins. Oh my, what beauties! Big, bumpy, bursting with berries. Taunting and tempting, even contaigious, since it didn’t end there. Within minutes days maybe a week, those very same muffins appeared on Jo Knowles’s blog.
The title alone conjured up blissful images of a city bursting with creative energy, teeming with artists and bohemian types meeting at sidewalk cafés and salons, everyone in love with life and each other. Add to that dreamy vision Majorie Priceman’s wildly exuberant, free-spirited art, and I was a goner before alighting on the first page.
#19 in the Poetry Potluck Series, celebrating National Poetry Month 2010.
“Tea with Rosebuds in Romantic Cup” by Michael Paul.
(Available as a print here.)
You’re just in time for a cup of tea!
Now, if I said, “Jane Austen,” “poetic forms,” “dead white poets” and garden gnomes, whom would you think of?
Kelly Fineman of course! Like me, you’re probably a fan of Writing and Ruminating, where Kelly displays her literary brilliance on a daily basis. For almost three years, I’ve been reading her amazing blog and I’m not bragging one bit when I say that as a result I’m much smarter ☺. *basks in newfound intelligence*
When it comes to poetry, Kelly knows her stuff. When she features a poem, there’s usually a detailed explication, a bit of backstory, personal notes, even illuminating digression. Yes, Kelly loves to digress . . .
The inimitable Monsieur Dooglas of Chez Florian will be serving you breakfast today. Oo-lah-lah! He has brought freshly brewed café — French roast, naturellement — can you smell that divine aroma emanating from your computer screen? It’s the best part of waking up, non?
C’est fabuleux! But — there’s just one leetle problem. Bien sûr, in all the world, there is no finer French toast host than Monsieur Dooglas, and we love his café and his cozy French country inn.
#8 in the Poetry Potluck Series, celebrating National Poetry Month 2010.
Note Hershey syrup can biscuit cutter. ☺
I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing that warms my heart more than the sight of boys in the kitchen.
Would you just look at these two adorable bakers? Don’t you just want to reach into the picture, give them a big hug and pinch their cheeks? I’ve been in cute overload mode ever since Sara sent me photos of her husband, Mike, and now-college-age son, Wade, making biscuits together.
The recipe comes from a cookbook Sara and Mike received as a wedding gift, called Dining with Pioneers. It seems especially fitting for this “pioneer” family, who has lived in and traveled to many states and countries. Perhaps this family biscuit tradition helped them feel at home no matter where they went. Just recently, Sara mentioned Mike was making biscuits on a Sunday morning. Sigh. Don’t you wish he’d come over to your house?
Cutest rolling pin boy ever.
BISCUITS
The book, a wedding gift
from 1984, wishes us “many hours
of pleasure” and admonishes us
“eggs should be at least three days
old before using in cakes.” It opens,
natural as pie, to Ann’s Angel Biscuits;
the paper gritty with dried flour dust;
the ochre glue of the binding visible
where the spine has cracked flat
to this page. The oven is set to 450.
Yeast — granular, fine as brown seeds — floats
on 2 Tablespoons of warmed tap water;
I think of woman and man and what begins
over and over from seed and water
while rough sugar blends into the slippery
whiteness of self-rising flour; molded
together with Crisco — gussied up lard,
silvery salve stored in lidded tubs;
then buttermilk, if we have some, exotic
in a green carton, beaming with wholesome rectitude.
Roll out immediately; orders the recipe, although
it should say: gently, with a dusting of flour
to cushion you. Nothing about how to shape it,
but we know: with the smooth halo of a juice glass,
or (if you’ve saved it all these years) by the open
cylinder mouth of a burnished Hershey syrup can
rescued, measured sweetness, from a brownie box.
Bake until risen, freckled, and puffed
by sugar and grease and heat to row upon row
of circular, layered towers; a city of biscuits on a tray.
The cookbook is called Dining with Pioneers,
and perhaps we do, we makers of biscuits,
we seekers of pleasure, we homesteading angels.
I love so many of Sara’s poetic ingredients: the exotic buttermilk with “wholesome rectitude,” the “gussied up lard,” the idea of a dusting of flour to cushion the dough, the “city of biscuits on a tray.” Swoon! I MUST have one (or two or three) of these perfectly risen, freckled beauties. Now.
Sara: My husband has made biscuits ever since we were married in 1984. He’s made them with both kids, and for guests. When the kids were little, he would let them form the dough scraps into snails and other animal shapes. He’s made them at the beach and in the mountains, and in at least three countries. He’s even made them on a houseboat on Lake Mead using a grill as an oven. We eat them with jam and/or honey; occasionally with slivers of country ham.
Thank you so much, Sara, Wade, and Mike!
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Sara Lewis Holmes is the critically acclaimed author of the middle grade novels, Letters from Rapunzel (Winner of the Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Contest) and Operation Yes (Booklist Top 10 Arts Books for Youth). She occasionally posts some of her beautifully crafted poems at Read*Write*Believe, and is one of the seven “Poetry Princesses” who’ve graced Poetry Fridays with group projects (A Crown Sonnet, Villanelles, Rondeau Redoublé). We both love Shakespeare, cupcakes, and popcorn, but when it comes to beets, she’s strictly on her own.
Jama's Alphabet Soup 