Already February.  The Kripalu website says February can often seem like the longest month.  Perhaps that’s true, with the dark, but I always think it goes very quickly.  It’s one of my favorite months actually; sometimes there’s a false spring. It’s a good month to burrow and be quiet with yourself.  I’m reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf for a class I teach.  I’m struck again by her prose, her elegance.  I discovered a website (woolfonline.com) that offers reproductions of her handwritten drafts, as well as an outline.  I’m so taken that she outlined.  It gives all us writers courage I think.  Reading Woolf makes my own work progress.  The only other writer who has that effect on me is Carole Maso.  The Two Muses.  Alongside Woolf, I’m reading the delicious The Hours by Michael Cunningham.  It’s taken me this long.  I started it when it came out, then just put it away until yesterday.  Of course he makes me think, why didn’t I think of that for a structure?!  Well, I didn’t.

On another note, I finally found out who Lady Gaga is. On You Tube, there’s a video of her singing with Elton John.  The end of their duet is very sweet as they both pay homage to one another, especially she.  When she performed by herself, I kept waiting for Madonna to walk out of the wings and join her.  I know so little about current music. I think I entered a dark hole in the mid-1990’s.

Happy birthday to Subashree!

image from freeimages.uk

A long time ago, I volunteered at Outermost Community Radio, WOMR-FM, in Provincetown.  My friend Kathy Shorr gave me her show, Monday First Light, and I rose at dawn, dragged a bunch of LP’s to the station, and played music from 6am-9am. I was very, very happy. Then, Denya LeVine suggested we do a show called Veggie Bites.  Or was it Veggie Bits?  Denya and I produced, wrote, and directed three minute segments on food.  Among other things, I learned how to splice together tape, a skill that probably has gone the way of, well, vinyl records.

One of our features was on tofu.  It was Denya who taught me to press tofu, to take a cutting board, balance it on the block of tofu, then weigh that down with a five-pound jar of beans.  Every time I press tofu, I think of Denya.

These days, the recipes I see for tofu don’t call for pressing.  Why is that?  Does anyone know?

The best tofu dish I ever had was served when I was a guest of my student John Parbst and his wife out in Long Island.  John made this tofu barbeque that was amazing.

The best tofu dish I’ve made comes straight out of Annie Sommerville’s Fields of Green cookbook, p.273.  She credits it to Tassajara.  It involves ginger, garlic, and soy.  I leave out the dry mustard–never a staple on my cupboard–and I’m sure I must leave out the sake (I haven’t made this in years) but the result, properly marinated, is utterly delicious.

Back in Provincetown, I had three cookbooks: Mosewood; Madhur Jaffrey’s World of the East; and Anna Thomas’ The Vegetarian Epicure, Book Two.  Book One, I’m told had recipes paired with marijuana, but Book Two did not.  Mostly, I used Moosewood.  Every Saturday, we had a potluck, those of us at the Fine Arts Work Center, and mostly, we came up with variations of pasta.  Though I can’t really recall any of those potlucks now, I think they were important to our creative souls and sense of community.  Even today, I wish I had a regular potluck to attend.

I’ve cooked my way through the usual suspects in vegetarian cooking:  Julie Sahni’s exquisite  Classic Indian Vegetarian & Grain Cooking, Laurel’s Kitchen (who did not want to be Laurel,overseeing the beans in her philadendron filled, cat friendly communal kitchen?) and  The Greens Cookbook by Deborah Madison.  Then I discovered The Inspired Vegatarian, with inspired photographs and recipes featuring syllabubs; The Vegetarian Table: France with equally inspired photographs of, oh, fig and arugula salad and vegetable ragout; From an Italian Garden by Judith Barrett; Sicilian Vegetarian Cooking by John Penza; How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigela Lawson( which makes for heavenly bedtime reading and really good recipes); Lord Krishna’s Cuisine by Yamuna Devi, a diciple of Srila Prabhupada; Anna Pump’s scrumptious Country Weekend Entertaining and The Loaves & Fishes Cookbook.  These days, I most often consult Jack Bishop’s Vegetables Every Day.

I still don’t eat enough vegetables or tofu.  Become addicted to vegetables, a massage therapist once suggested.  Words of wisdom to one addicted to sweets.

Another reading suggestion: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral by Barbara Kingsolver.  It has good recipes, too.

Maybe next Tuesday, I’ll pen some thoughts on M.F.K.Fisher, Ruth Reichl, Amanda Hesser, Alice Waters, and other queens of the literary kitchen.

Not until Tuesday, they forecast, and flurries at that.  But the sky outside looks like –ah, it’s changed since I last looked up, and now the blue is showing.  Wanting snow on a Sunday is akin to wanting a holiday on top of a holiday.  For me, snow frees up thinking.  Oh, what could I write with snow falling outside and a plateful of warm brownies by my side.  I read the Times online. Madison Smart Bell wrote a very good essay in the the Times about Haitian literature. I put potatoes to boil, got some curtains up, and went to yoga.  Now I watch the sky again, a moody blue, the color of school uniforms that have long faded.  There is a story called “The Cloud Maker” by a French author whose name I can’t remember–Escarpit?–about a factory that matter-of-factly produces clouds.  Well, somewhere behind this blue rests a sunset.