queer stuff: love, suffering and dancing

i stood in the little cheese etc. shop watching yet another mom wrangle her Sports Utility Stroller through the door, like a camel through the eye of a needle, and public radio repeated…kidnapped, beat, tortured and sodomized. Young men in the Bronx by other young men in the Bronx. Over my eight hours behind the counter through the trickle of customers, that was the refrain of the day. Each hour: kidnapped, beat, tortured and sodomized. They did not say raped; I keep wondering why.

this drawn out headline followed by NY governor candidate Paladino’s speech about “gays brainwashing our children…” corrected with a talk show tour where he clarified that he is no homophobe, he just doesn’t think gays should marry.  There’s a People magazine sprawled on the backseat of the preacher eater’s aunt’s car: cover story, bullying and teen suicide.  Mostly queer kids.

gay men saved my life.

against all the recent news of suffering, I vividly recall:

the fire circle.  after the talent show. drums cradled between knees in a ring in the dark.

standing woodside, pushing my hips off the beat, side to side, minidress sliding up black tights; the ground hard and cold under my thin soled boots, the laces tight. Wide-kneed stomping, he comes around the circle, naked from the waist down, pale cock half flopping, side to side, in a short formal jacket, wild white-faced with peaked sparkling eye make up glittering over his beard, over his big smile. The fire belches up sparks into the black, spraying light on his shiny elbows flapping. I step over the tarp where voyeurs curl up watching; he makes room. Slide into his square clapped out into the air for me, framing my body, we churn something older than us in the air, old like dirt. Snake through the warm pockets, sweating, long sweater sliding off. Turning, stomp hard at each other; asses jiggling. Beyond us, men share flasks of Wild Turkey, smoke out of an apple. Beyond them, a cluster of three slim figures stroke each other. My lover stretches on the blue tarp behind me into the folds of a big bearded man’s toga, glitter falling between them.

years ago, the back dance floor of DJ’s place, after the drag show, falling against the cook from the café where we all seemed to work, freckled, thin in his old jeans and white tee shirt. His arm curving around my hip and waist pulling me close, step to step, hips locked. His lips slid up my neck, “I never met a woman who loves food like you do.” “Talk to me about Garlic,” I hissed and bit his tongue.

i had a horrible eating disorder, lost whole days to it. Queers helped me get over it. All that affection. New scales for sexual desirability. New performances of femininity. All that unapologetic pleasure.

perched on a stool in the burgundy China Doll dress he had picked out for me, I looked up at his perfect cupid’s bow lips as the ice skater lined my eyes. We’d make-out with only lips touching in the parking lot before going into the Red Fox, the after hours gay club with the old high school lab tables. Kissing like the thirsty drinking water, crystalline, simple. He held me when I melted down after taking his boyfriend/my housemate’s ex-lover to the hospital when his mother had a heart attack he blamed himself for. After the little gay mechanic’s dad put his head through a windshield, and the opera singer went back in the closet so his parents would let him stay at home and in touch with his younger brother. After we unlisted our phone number because of the creepy calls. After my girlfriend’s gay sister was dragged to the front of the family church to be exorcised.

perched in the dirt at our campsite, I closed my eyes as the drag queen glued false lashes like pink polka dotted butterfly wings to my lids. Slipped into the circling conversations of foreclosure politics, fabric dying, and perverse non-sequiturs. After the majority of my closest gay men friends sero-converted to HIV-positive, and I remain relieved most live in cities with access to services and community. After the young violinist jumped off the bridge. After all the break-ups, layoffs, depression, and drama. After taking my friend to the emergency room to have a sex toy removed from his ass that, although beginning pleasurably enough, had been up there over 24-hours and another 24-hours at the hospital before surgery.

okay, the last incident was really one of the highlights of my year so far since it all turned out happy hinney. (sorry, bunny, but it was rather exciting…)

there was a Love-In in Times Square on Friday evening in response to the spasm of anti-queer hate crimes. I was in the boug-box, and Loved-In from there. I hope you’ll Love-In from where ever you are.

ida bailey allen like roses, squirrel and pie

after breakfast and replanting squirrel savaged rosemary in our fire escape garden, late morning sun blankets the k pidds napping in the window sill, kitten head on post-it notes, and we people settle behind respective laptops & coffee mugs.

the preacher-eater is reviewing a new book, Radical Homemakers [link forthcoming]. Over the past few weeks, flipping through it in moments between homemaking and working, its refrains resonated: transform families from “units of consumption to units of production;” reroute social programming that drives people into numbing stuff, debt, work cycles; reclaim the value of home-scale cultivation, cooking and caretaking. This morning, its narrative of pre-Industrial pastoral bliss and redemption evoked only my impatience—perhaps aggravated by the release of that film about the worn out but wealthy discovering their souls, handmade pasta and universal interdependence then getting laid— turning me to the much dustier pages of Ida Bailey Allen’s Money-Saving Cook Book (1940).

like a fashionable auntie sitting cozy at your table, Ida Bailey Allen came into tens of thousands of kitchens via radio from 1928 – 35 on her show the National Radio Home-Maker’s Club. Social media frontrunner, the Nation’s Homemaker, Ms. Ida built a virtual community to preach the new science of home economics and old faiths of frugality and day-to-day deliciousness.

her prolific career as domestic guru began in print, generating 22 years of syndicated newspaper columns, more than 50 cookbooks, and uncounted leaflets, booklets and adverts. Radio was magic to Ida Bailey Allen, connecting her to her widest audience and most intimate sense of community. In her forward to 104 Prize Radio Recipes (1926), she writes:

Many of you have done it–and have written me letters of appreciation that make me want to help you more and more. Little groups of you are meeting in central homes to “listen in” while you sew and are having Radio Luncheons afterward. . .The recipes in this Little Book belong especially to the National Radio Home-Maker’s Club because each one was written by a member of this organization.

ida bailey allen

her influence in home practices and the emerging market of home purchases granted her not only a lasting if unattributed legacy but also commercial viability. Auntie Ida was not above shilling product. Imagine an older Ida Bailey Allen arriving at the Mad Men offices, linking arms with Joan or Peggy and declaring aside to her:

I came back to New York with no broadcasting ambitions. Some two or three years later, I was asked to speak again—on a Christmas program; and I remember suggesting that, in the holiday season, children would adore to have their mothers dressed in gay frocks, and I declared that every woman who could, should have a red Christmas dress. The letters poured in from everywhere, and red dresses bloomed like roses.

Ida Bailey Allen’s Modern Cookbook 2500 Recipes (1935)

in store displays claimed the nation’s “perfect hostess” served Coca Cola to grand success at her gatherings and you can too! She contributed recipes that sold Pillsbury Flour and Royal Crown gelatin. I adore her anyway. Imagine her, red dressed, empathizing with struggling dieters:

if you are on a reducing diet (and therefore perpetually hungry), I cannot urge you too strongly to cut out a hundred calories a day of the meat, fish or eggs of which you are probably eating too freely and substitute a cereal.

or gamely offering recipes for squirrel stew, roast woodchuck, hasenpfeffer, muskrat and pheasant with oysters stuffed with wild rice and cream. She resisted writing on expensive/wasteful game meat for her Money-Saving Cook Book (1940) until:

the publisher looked retrospective. ‘It’s not expensive if you shoot it yourself,’ he said.  To which there was nothing further to say.

her books fold together the wisdom of her up-bringing and cutting edges of her era. She recommends, for body and budget, a diet that relies on bean and grain combinations and dairy products de-emphasizing meat; the discovery of vitamins backs up her command to eat more fruits and veggies. She’s enthusiastic about standardized measures: “the National Bureau of Standards of the United States Department of Home Economics has worked out correct specifications…Given accurate measuring equipment and by observing level measurements, many cooking failures can be avoided.” Fans of “Cook’s Illustrated,” please feel free to swoon. There’s comfort in being able to culinarily converse with precision, yet cooking measured off our own selves (a handful of pine nuts) and beloved if haphazard items (a cracked teacup of sugar) retains an unmatched romance smacking of lustfully concocted midnight feasts. I doubt Ms. Ida went in for that.

But she did go in for pie.

fire escape salad

come as you are!

the trouble with writing about salad is that making salad is not really cooking but assembling.  Yet, these are essential ensembles.  Consider this your salad reminder— salads make a fine meal from a cool kitchen.  With global weirding subjecting us at random from this day forth to the heat formally relegated to the official months of summer, the oven’s days are numbered.  Even off the shaded garbage courtyard, this Brooklyn apartment kitchen can get hotter than crêpes suzette come summer.  Maybe the possibilities of salad make hot weather an ideal time for wooers-not-cookers to court; salad can be high on haute and low on technique.  What matters most is the freshness of the goods, and the whole rainbow of plantdom is pretty much a candidate. It goes without saying that salad is really good for you.

this salad thrills because it is composed mostly of bounty off our fire escape, where we’re nurturing a container garden of lettuce and herbs, plus catnip for the miraculous flying cat, the K. Pidds.

the k. pidds

in scavenged tubs, two kinds of lettuce are putting out sails of green and red leaves.  After harvesting greens the size of my hand, the still unfurling centers promise more salad to come.  I hope to add Tom Thumb and Little Gem.  If we add rocket, soon we’ll have mesclun.

authorities claim the key to a gorgeous salad is well-rinsed and gently, thoroughly dried greens.  Simple oil and vinegar dressing clings to dry leaf sides.  In Unplugged Kitchen, Viana la Place not only feels “a keen excitement” when she sits down to eat a dish of beautiful green leaves, she writes: “Harvesting lettuce leaves in the garden right before supper creates a romantic vision, but it also allows us to derive the full benefits from each ruffled, fragrant leaf.”

a heartfelt Italian cook, Viana delivers 25 recipes for lovely salads, including beloved veggies: purslane, artichokes, beets, and old fashioned potato and nasturium salad.  As I nod to her here, she gleefully shares “salade fatigue” by 1960s fashion impresario Simonetta, an Italian in Paris and a Snob in the Kitchen:

many of Simonetta’s salads, including this one, call for the salad to “season” for an hour before serving.  For Simonetta, a salad must be fatigué, “tired,” to be good; it must be “mixed, beaten, and drunk with its dressing.”

current food fashions have veered away from greens besotted with dressing but beaten and drunk have a certain camp appeal.  She recommends whacking towel wrapped greens against the counter to tenderize them, also a satisfying way to call forth the essential oils in herbs going whole leaf into salad.

fire escape salad

our herb garden includes spicy or Greek basil, a diminutive cousin of the towering Italian type classically paired with fresh sliced tomatoes and creamy mozzarella in mid-summer.  Also tiny, forest green peppermint.  Lime basil, with slender, petal-thin leaves.  Sage that has since been menaced by the weather and lost its leaves but seems to be reviving.  Creeping thyme, lots of it, my favorite.

rosemary too, which is now only three branches strong but with care will become a bush and burst forth with fragrant purple blossoms.  Those will go in the salad too.  Rosemary needles, with the resiny toughness of an evergreen (though it’s a member of the mint family), are better cooked, even for salad.  Bringing me off the fire escape and into the pantry for staples that made this salad a meal.

cannellini beans cooked with one healthy branch of our little shrub and a bit of salt and fresh ground pepper.  When boiled tender, drain the beans in a colander and toss with a pour of olive oil, salt, fresh pepper and handfuls of fresh herbs.  While the beans cook, slice a red onion very fine and soak the shreds in ice water for at least 10 minutes to take the bite out.  Marinade in balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper for as long as you like.

in your biggest, best salad bowl, gently combine the beans and onions with your greens, including that succulent lettuce and fresh herbs.  Just lift the onions out of their marinade with a fork.  Despite Simonetta’s preferences, the vinegar soaked onions and oiled beans will carry plenty of dressing into the salad.  Croutons are nice, and grated parmesan.  Serve with crusty white bread toasted and sliced, along with a plate of very fine olive oil with a pool of honey in its center, sprinkle with sea salt and a crank of fresh pepper.  Trust me.

bread pudding

And since I’ve been an absentee blogger (a technical difficulty, my computer has gone lame and I am on bowered time-connected), I’m giving up a bonus recipe this edition. This is for the saucy wench in Chicago, for years of unflagging friendship. Though, you know, Sistergirl, you already have it; it’s in the ’zine.

Essentially, bread pudding is leftover bread buttered and baked in custard. One of those genius little recipes of frugality, a means to ensure remainders do not go to waste but are lovingly transformed into deliciousness.

The ingredients will vary based on what you have on hand, and the amounts will vary according to the size of your baking vessel. Please adjust accordingly and adopt to suit all your whims and fancies.

Basic Bread Pudding Instructions:

in a saucepan, heat about 2 1/2 cups of milk almost to a boil (scald it). Slice open a vanilla bean, drop it in and stir. Lower the flame and cook for about 15 minutes. Leave to cool.

butter both sides of thick slices of a leftover baguette, about half a loaf. Cut or rip into cubes. I think ripping is easier, because the buttered bread just sticks to your cutting board. Arrange the pieces in a casserole dish or baking pan. Whether you select a deep or shallow pan depends on your desired crispy to gooey ratio: deep pans make for more custardy, cakey pudding, and shallow pans allow for more crispy, golden top crust.

beat 3 eggs, or 5 egg yolks for lux pudding, with 1/3 cup of sugar and a dash of salt. Pour the scalded milk into the eggs in a thin stream, beating constantly. Pour over the bread. Let stand for at least half an hour, and it will be really happy if you wrap it up and let it sit in the fridge overnight. I set aside a bit of custard to drizzle over the top just before baking.

set your casserole in a pan that is larger around by about a quarter inch. Pour water in the bottom pan until the level is a quarter inch or so below the op edge of the casserole. This is a water bath. Bake at 350 for about an hour.

for breakfast, serve it with maple syrup, and maybe layer some raisins in. Pecans are good. For dessert, try it with dark chocolate bits and orange zest added, served with whipped cream or rum sauce. Or you can make it with pain au chocolate. No need to butter croissants, of course.  Making jam sandwiches out of the bread, buttering the outside, and breaking that into cubes also makes a mad good pudding.