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Boiled in the small potuntil they disintegrated. Nowa bubbling whirlpool of purple, tiny strings.Pink roses rise to the surface. A dish for a baby girl shower?I dip—sweet, tart.A ladle in Japanspooning it over brown garlicky meat? Such viscous roses! I dip out the pitswith a slotted spoon.The roses break up,Continue Reading

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It had a mind of its own. I served it to people and it killed them. Let me explain. Long ago, when I was a boy, my father made a special soup to serve people. It was an instant success. He called it “the magical soup” and would never shareContinue Reading

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Now that I’m rich, I buy broccoli rabe by the bunch,no matter what the price. Same for escarole, Swisschard, organic spinach, avocadoes, artichokes. My grandmother pored through the binof discarded vegetables, haggled to get themfree, picked off decomposing leaves, and cooked.Would she celebrate that I still prepare the foods ofContinue Reading

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I need recipes for exotic dishes –things they never dreamed of inmy ancestors’ hometown of Fly, Ohio. What about Lost Sister Soup –some strange mixture of bone broth,spring greens, mushroomsforaged in faraway hills,and salt pure as baby’s blood? I want a meat pie, its fillingthe color of Phoenix feathers,crust theContinue Reading

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What is time, and what is it made of?Butter? Water? Sand?No matter. It doesn’t matter really. What was then is also now, and not just in my brain where timelines like to blend together and make my world confusing, but in actuality, too, if you believe in certain theories.There areContinue Reading

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A toasted English muffin with egg saladwith the crunch of organic celery.Radio— songs from the sixties, balladswith lyrics I learned better than anymemorized theorem for Regents examsin high school. I sing along between bites.Lunch is a rack of ribs from a lamb,artichoke stuffed with seasoned breadcrumbs tightbetween the prickly leaves.Continue Reading

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It has mushrooms. Lynette G. Esposito, MA Rutgers, has been published in Poetry Quarterly, North of Oxford, Twin Decades, Remembered Arts, Reader’s Digest, US1, and others. She was married to Attilio Esposito and lives with eight rescued muses in Southern New Jersey.Continue Reading

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Coming home from playing in the snow,handmade mittens soggy, smellinglike sheep, toes frozen from snowthat slipped inside too loose boots,steamed up windows signaled seriouscooking afoot. And the aroma, vegetalyet grounded in earthy beefiness,my Grandma’s goulash, quite the dish. Onions, carrots, potatoes, tomatoesand braised stew meat, a cheapcut that softened, meltedContinue Reading

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For Marlene, soup was a broth, cataract cloudy, noodles skimming the surface like a net. It was the type she poured from packets bought at Star Market and mixed with dehydrated chicken bits and imitation carrot. Historic mushrooms wrinkled from their time out of ground set against gluey celery. Granular,Continue Reading

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Try to turn up the warmth:the hot cup of tea, the adoring puppy,the morning sun through your writing studio window,the Rumi poems, your healing sauna,your crispy chocolate chip cookies,a recipe from your grandma,and the matzo ball soup fromyour long-gone aunt,the bag of potato chips left unopened,the pink bathrobe you gotContinue Reading