Making soup again

These days I refuse to sigh for cooked up futures. Potatoes from a friend and a bag of mixed root veg for £1 assure companionship. This bounty grated, cooked with stock and bay leaves, will be ladled out for half-a-dozen bowls dressed up with haricot beans. The appraising birds perch in the top bare branches,

Another Food Poem

You cooking me Two burnished hazelnuts singe flax. Golden Savoiardi shake loose vanilla pods. An oiled aubergine turns roasted cumin seeds. The sorrel and bay sauté with wild mushrooms, freshly picked. A wholesome slice seals the Dijon. — I have written a number of poems that draw on the influences of cooking and kitchen. Today’s

That’s it

  The orange has been wrung of juice. The garlic’s lost its tang. The salad leaves have dropped their wings. The kitchen now has closed.   — I do like a good food-related poem. Sometimes it’s more or less simply about the food: Most versatile Salad with mackerel Or the words: Recipe Kitchen Alchemy On

Most versatile

The morning egg is most nutritious, the lunchtime egg substantial; eggs for dinner are a light, quick fix. Boiled, scrambled, poached or fried, to a life of laying thanks is owed for this. — On the dining-table of our kitchen lives a refillable plastic peppercorn grinder. In absent-minded moments when I’m forking stir fry vegetables

I can tell a half bowl of you about leftover Friday rice

It must be the time of year for food thoughts, because ‘Tightly Sealed‘ from this time last year took fridge leftovers as its starting point.  

Tumbling After – reprise

  This time last year I revisited a poem based on the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme. This version was a shortened version of the ‘Tumbling After‘ I had written the previous December. Both versions veer towards the same scene: Jill watching Jack from afar and awaiting his delivery. Although not true to the nursery rhyme’s narrative,

In an alleyway of thought

In an alleyway of thought A nibbling rat sniffs amongst the kitchen waste, snouts for a morsel to inch through. It’s a voracious, fat-bellied rat carrier of diseased fleas and nibbler of all that should be left to decompose. Such is clinging mind: it won’t let go. — For another poem that develops a metaphor

Ode to a Golden Mango (Pindaric Style)

Pakistan’s Gold  A loose Pindaric* ode to a delicious mango As still-hard flesh, this baton passes blushed apricots, green-skinned Hasses,** to triumph in a grocer’s tier. Event two in a domestic Mount Olympus: here ripens the sweet-juiced summer discus. — My 87-year-old landlady swears by the small, golden-skinned Pakistani mangoes that are imported each summer.