For Pleasure

Naming. Nicknames especially. A referent, sometimes just a way to remember. A small yellow flower I haven't identified. Weeks later, I might ask Jenny or B, both of whom are nominal experts, but sometimes I like my name better, Yellow Splutterweed, Crested Shitbird, Bitter Bush. In my own head I know exactly what I mean, but to talk about micro-environments with Jenny, we have to use the agreed upon name. I read Dorothy Sayers for pleasure, actually probably 50% of my reading is for pleasure, and almost all of it is pleasurable. Few activities stimulate me more than tracking down a fact. Knowing full well that any given fact is suspect. Grave Goods for instance. Flowers and a broken axe. I've read The Nine Tailors, five or six times, The Riddle Of The Sands, and I could read them again tomorrow. I enjoy plinking with my slingshot and not dancing; I enjoy listening to the blues, in the dark and alone; and I really enjoy eating artichokes with aioli. Always makes me want to make paper, because the fiber is so obvious, like Spartina in that regard. Rot off the organic crap in many changes of water, okra works well for this too, and you're left with a very nice fiber. Cotton might be the benchmark, clean and white. Fifty years before printing, pounding fiber into paper finally occurred in the west, maybe 1400. Papermaking made printing possible, vellum was limited to unborn calves, but paper was infinite. In so far as any fiber was available, pine trees for god's sake, suck out the naval stores, and you're left with fiber. That's why so much of the south is planted in fast growing pines, the Loblolly is hardly a tree, more a bush, actually. Harvested young and replanted because it's such a good crop. No upkeep involved, walk through occasionally and knock off the lower branches with a club. Tight knots are a good thing, a knot that can be released under pressure is even better. The simple clove-hitch. A package of chicken gizzards and hearts in the discount bin for $1.88, so I make dirty rice, to stretch the last of the stir-fry. Louisiana risotto. Minced gizzard and heart are so toothsome. The rice coming out of the deep south right now are the best I've ever had. Pecan rice, jasmine rice, black rice; and since the kale revolution all the greens are better. I like to cook two or three varieties together, with onion and salt pork; the extra liquid, if there is any, I just drink with a dash of hot sauce. Pot-liquor, this was always called, served with a splash of juice from the pickled cayenne peppers. Maybe a last corn bread stick drizzled with molasses. Seldom any dessert other than fried dough, dusted with powdered sugar. Fried fruit pies. Bananas, after United Fruit took over central America. Bananas and avocados are perfect fruit because they ripen after picking. The wild southern plum, I have no idea where it came from, makes (to my taste) the best of all jams, sour and sweet at the same time and explosive in flavor. If there's a piece of left-over cornbread, and someone visits, I'll split it open, butter the halves, and when it's toasted, smear on a blob of plum jam. Some of them merely smile, knowing my ways; others go into cardiac arrest. Nothing should taste that good. I do a great dish, with pounded pork tenderloin rounds, a complex recipe that involves dried fruit and nuts, a de-glazed sauce that is probably one of the great wonders of the world. I never actually saw the hanging towers of Babylon, but if the moon is positioned correctly, I can make a sauce that might well make you forget everything you previously thought you knew. Nordic. Dill. The one rotted shark I almost liked was covered in dill. A small amount, on toast, with onion and mustard, didn't quite taste like rotten shark. Sturgeon roe could lead you to trout roe, or salmon eggs, pressed through a sieve with a little salt. I don't want that, I swear, I'm perfectly happy making fake caviar from perch eggs and hiding in the woodwork.