In the Still, Silken Silence of the Morning

Photograph from New York Public Library Collection

“THERE WAS A CHILD WENT FORTH EVERY DAY,

And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or

pity or love or dread, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of

the day . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”

Leaves of Grass, The First (1855) Edition, Walt Witman

In the still, silken silence of the night, I walk the Brooklyn streets of my childhood. In mornings filled with filtered light and bird song, I travel the byways of old dreams and the highways of an even older faith.

Having been born in the mystical world of Brooklyn with its fortunate neighboring to magical Manhattan, I am hugely blessed.  ”The Center of the Universe,” Mayor Lindsey called it. He was including my entire universe of five boroughs, a heart-centered place filled with multi-hued peoples, uncounted languages, ubiquitous churches, restaurants as bland as The Green Tea Room and as chili-pepper vibrant as the La Fonda del Sol.

I remember the parades: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.  Easter was the best back in those days when everyone dressed up and hats were the thing. People watching was as much fun as parade watching. How vivid still is that one woman with two standard poodles. She and both her dogs wore matching yellow-straw hats, each with a garden of cloth flowers in pink and white.

Oh, and the majesty and grandeur of the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk and the amazing day-by-day progress of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge during the years of its construction. There were people who lost their homes for the sake of space to build that bridge. Despite the displacement it caused, I liked the Verrazano. I didn’t love it though, not the way I loved the Brooklyn Bridge. I loved Cannonball Park too and walking along Shore Road and – in Manhattan – Battery Park.  Central Park held more delights than I could count. When I was seven, my elder sister, Theresa Margaret, took me boating on the lake there. I thought it an adventure. She impressed me with her rowing and steering abilities, skills I hadn’t know she possessed. When I got older, I would go into the city (Manhattan) with friends.  We’d rent bikes and bike Central Park’s many paths. The end-of-the-day exhaustion was profound and wonderful. As a young model, I posed under and on some of the grey-stone bridges there.

I can still remember how clearly the church bells in Brooklyn sounded on icy cold days. Mostly we went to the Roman Catholic Church, St. Pat’s, on 95th and 5th in Brooklyn, but sometimes we went to the Eastern Catholic Church, Our Lady of Lebanon. My father was Greek Orthodox, so there were occasional visits to one of those churches as well. The Eastern rites seemed arcane to me, but the beauty of the icons painted on the walls and their ancient history is something that remains with me. I remember visits to Manhattan and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  In my childish innocence, when I wasn’t dreaming of becoming a nun, I dared to dream I’d get married there one day.  I suppose it was a possibility. The church I liked just as much, but for different reasons, was Trinity Church.  I found its connection to early American history fascinating, especially as it sat modestly right there in the middle of the world’s great, modern financial capital.

When I look back, I think there must have been something in the air or the water because pizza, and pasta, and baked stuffed-clams never taste the same anywhere else. So far in my experience, some foods are not available except at home, like zeppoli. How wonderful were the zeppoli, hot, voluptuous bursts of deep fried pizza-dough dusted with powdered sugar. And when I think about it, neither knishes nor hot dogs have ever seemed so tasty or so tempting. Shotzkin’s knishes are a thing of the past even for those in Brooklyn today.

I remember my mother and her intrepid trips into to Manhattan’s theatre and financial districts, and my grandmother who was afraid to go out at all.  I remember my Aunt Yvonne who always said the Lebanese were the Irish of the Middle East, presumably because of the internecine conflict. And I remember the Irish, mostly fair and hardy and sometimes amazingly carrot-topped.  We all wore green on St. Paddy’s Day, Irish or not. I remember my father and his love of ouzo and cigarettes, both of which I found shocking.

There were trips to Staten Island too, often by ferry for five cents each way.  We had a favorite Chinese restaurant on Highland Boulevard.  I had my first shrimp toast there. Up on a hill – just where, I don’t know – there was a Tibetan Monastery, which is where I was first introduced Buddhism and to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  We’d go to the beach on Staten Island in the summer.  In high school, there were beach parties at night, attended with my first love, George.

Memories like so much in life are mixed blessings:  They make us strong and break our hearts with the sweetness of people, places, and traditions gone and irretrievable. But every morning a new day dawns and we take our joy where we find it. It is, as our young today say, “it’s all good!”

Nothing sweeter …

Public domain photograph of a Brooklyn highway sign in honor of Jackie Gleason, famous for his saying, “How sweet it is.”

“I have no use for humility. I am a fellow with an exceptional talent.” Jackie Gleason

From his role as Ralph Kramden on the Honeymooners to  Reginald Van Gleason, III to  The Hustler  and the guest spots he played in his maturity, we loved this gentleman, Jackie Gleason. A Brooklyn boy, he came from a hardscrabble life in Bushwick, and he became one of the great pioneers of early television.

One Summer Night, A Love Story

Painting of Coney Island Beach, Brooklyn, NY c. 1914 by Edward Henry Potthast (1857 – 1927).

When I close my eyes I see your face,
and calmness takes over my body.
What I feel inside scares me to death.

Karen J. Cino, Brooklyn Poet and Writer

♥

One summer night you stood on the beach

Where the sky touched the sand and spoke in midnight blue

While a thousand eyes watched and winked

You were a handsome boy, as straight and serious as a sigh

The other girls giggled, thinking you too stodgy, too old

But I stepped back, looked at your heart and lost my breath

Your winter gave birth to my spring, your darkness my light

And I have never been the same

Come Spring

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.

The Enkindled Spring by D.H. Lawrence, Poetry Foundation

She is older now, not ancient

but getting old

The face that looks back

from the mirror is her mother’s

or her maternal grandmother’s

The plump, little sparrow of a body

she is living in, slow, matronly, aching

Well, certainly it’s not hers

♥

The place where she is warehoused is alien

with balmy weather, more-or-less one season

The street is not unappealing having

trees, birch and magnolia positioned

among aging oak and reliable evergreen

At daybreak, the birds nesting in the trees

make harsh and urgent conversation

pitching their jabber against the never-ending

rumble and whoosh of a nearby freeway

♥

Dressed in her mother’s face looking down at

her mothers hands,  she sits and listens

She is no longer a juicy, green story unfolding, just

dry, brown and brittle, a solitary side-bar to other lives

set in a place with occasional moments of quiet,

which drop like the cool spun-silver of a dark night

after the unrelenting heat of a mid-summer day

♥

The hush, sudden and infrequent,

shocks her mind into musing and memory

She wonders what it would be like to once more

lie awake in bed at night, listening to the quiet

of a place where lacy white flakes sometimes

drift silently to earth like angels’ dust,

powdering the landscape with tranquility

She wonders what it would be like to once again

step out the front door and raise her face to the sky

Feeling the icy crystals gently drop  on her skin

Seeing their shapes reflected in the stars above

Secure, knowing that everyone she loves is alive

And can look skyward at the same tawny moon as she

♥

She wonders what it would be like come spring

to walk down 93rd Street in new Easter shoes

And make her way to Mass past spring flowers

dancing above the last of the snow-pack

To buy a colorful spring-bouquet after church

To make the requisite call to her distant father

To hear her name on his lips just once more

To ask him the questions she never dared ask

To roast lamb scented with garlic and rosemary,

enough for a crowd, and set the table with

Easter lilies and her mother’s best dinnerware

♥

She wonders what it would be like

To live once more in a land with distinct seasons

To dance with her high school sweetheart

and to retrieve all the much-loved, lost souls

To welcome back the snow-bright nights

and crisp, cosseting Regina Pacis’ mornings

To say good-bye to the numbing consistency

of endless balmy days and highway drone

and  strolling strange streets in stony, stoic solitude

seeking new rituals, new traditions, new friends

to replace the irreplaceable, fear rising sour, like gall

Those old-time springs will never come again

That White Watchung Home

Photograph courtesy of publicdomainpictures.or.

“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.

Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.

The blessing is in the seed.”

Muriel Rukeyser

In the beginning there were trips from Brooklyn to New Jersey, fun and frequent. Sometimes we went to Green Lake (swimming) or Parsippany (relatives).  We went often to Paramus to visit my godfather and his family. There were still a few farms then and many unpaved streets. The famous Bergen Mall was merely a modest plaza. We ate fried onion rings for the first time in a small restaurant there with a cream-colored counter and slate gray floor. No matter where we traveled in Jersey it was a good time, but Watchung was best. In those days, the population was a scant 2,000, and my Uncle Charlie’s house sat tranquil on a hill layered with green lawns, tall trees and orchards. It was at his place one soothing summer day that the writing seed planted itself in a my child heart.

♥

I wonder if that old Watchung home still stands

Or has it been demolished by developers

Building rows on rows of barracks-like housing where

Big maples used to rise to line the roadway

♥

Driving up the hill in a rickety second-hand V-8 Woody

A kaleidoscope of colors would greet us

The burnished bronze of our uncle’s skin and the

Brown-black of his doe eyes and curly oriental hair

The azure sky and snowy clouds tumbling down to

Top the perfect juicy purple of ripe Italian plums

And the brisk reds of beefsteak and plum tomatoes

The true-green of the too-long grass feathering the rich

Chocolaty shades of the well mulched earth

♥

That antique home was pristine white with forest green trim

And a busy, welcoming, wrap-around porch

Often with bushels of fruit and vegetables standing

In the company of freshly cut flowers piled and tossed

All waiting . . . for what and for whom?

The airy rooms were waiting too with windows

And doors thrown open to children like me

Breezing in from the big city with our pallid skin and

Eyes burning to see our uncle and some untouched nature

♥

Worn rugs, Persian and Arabian, brushed bare feet

As searching room-to-room for hidden treasures and history

I marveled at the accoutrements of other decades

The kitchen pump, the dumbwaiter, the pull-chain water closet

Each room was a marvel of furnishings, fine wood and hand-turned

Dresser drawers lined with newspapers, yellowed and dissolving with age

Advertising snake-oil cures and corsets and the ephemera of  this

Same place in times mostly forgotten except for stale news

Telling its stories to the silence in chests mostly empty and untouched

The enormous tables in the large, white, high-ceilinged kitchen and

The regal dining room with its chandelier and heavy drapes

Spoke proudly of multi-generational dinners before TV replaced talk

♥

The great, sturdy safe-haven of that white Watchung home

Matched the steady embrace of its woods and orchards

Where a child like me could lie on the hardy ground

Sun blinding bright, browning spindly arms and legs, little body

Soaking in fecund earth, mind yawning, stretching, awakening

Imagination rising in mists of violet-grey shot with silvery

Short stories and golden poems finding their way into

The pages of a black-and-white marbled composition book

Such plum-sweet visions set free by that dear place

I wonder if it still stands in Watchung, if it remembers me

And how I loved it

I still do

Coffee: From Turkey to Vienna, Recipes Include

Photograph of  Café Bräunerhof under GNU Free Documentation License via Wikipedia.

Public Domain Photograph of Cafe Central via Wikipedia.

A click on the photographs will take you to the coffeehouse websites.

. . . a coffeehouse is a place where you feel at home, even though you’re not at home.” poet Kurt Tucholsky

Periodically when I was growing up, my mother would take me to visit my father at his office in the fur district in Manhattan. In those days, you could still open windows in office buildings. There were always a lot of pigeons on his window sill. He left peanuts there for them. And there was always coffee, Turkish coffee, which he made on a hot plate using a traditional Turkish coffee pot. Along with the hot sweet coffee there were stories. These were occasionally about Turkey and the journey he made from there through Europe before coming to America.

He told me that my paternal grandfather died when my father was a child, leaving his relatively young mother with five children.  My father, the youngest and the only boy, was the family’s hope for the future.  The women worked, scrimped, and saved – no doubt he did as well – so that when he was old enough,they could send him to the United States, the land of “golden opportunity.”  Once he arrived here, it would then be his duty to work and send money home. For reasons of which I’m unaware, he didn’t come straight to America. He made his way from Turkey in 1917 to England and finally to the United States (Manhattan) in 1919.

My father spoke little of his adventures, but he did talk of the cafés as one of his two pleasures, the other being “language.” That he occasionally took pleasure in the cafés is not surprising.  They must have seemed comfortingly familiar. Or, perhaps, now traveling in countries both European and Christian, he had access to what may have been denied him back home on the basis of his religion and Greek mother.

My father was born in Constantinople (it had not yet become Istanbul), which is perhaps the birthplace of café culture as we understand it today. Kıraathane were well established in Turkey in my father’s day, the first having been founded in the late 1500s in Constantinople with coffee imported from Yemen. These coffeehouses were an exclusively male domain. The gentleman would gather to talk, to read (perhaps poetry, which is valued in the east), and entertain and engage one another with music and backgammon.

Picture: Turkish Coffeehouse, Ottoman Empire

It is said that the coffeehouses in Vienna started with coffee that was appropriated from the Turkish in 1683 during a battle that was the turning point of the Ottoman-Habsburg wars.  The Viennese cafés were also hubs where people came to talk, write, play games and simply to read the newspaper. Coffeehouse customers were never rushed away and often stayed many hours.

Café Central, clearly one of the most well-know of the Viennese cafés even now, seems to have been more famous for its clientele than its coffee. Today it appears to be as much a tourist stop as anything (this assessment from an inveterate armchair traveler), but in earlier times customers included writers, poets, artists, philosophers and thinkers of every ilk. Among the most well know was the Ukranian, Lev Davidovich Bronstein a.k.a. Leon Trotsky. Though Trotsky, who turned his back on his bourgeoisie background and embraced the proletariat, was a regular, I’m sure my father and his like were not. Ironically though, my father was a true proletarian in what I understand to be the classical Latin sense from which the term is derived: a male child, the only wealth of his family and the only wealth they had to offer their country. There must have been cafés where poor and relatively illiterate people such as he could rest and get their social needs met. Such cafés might welcome a young man dressed in ragged clothes, perhaps carrying a worn carpet bag with a few meager belongings and kese (Turkish money bag) with the modest saving won by hard toil and fiscal restraint.

Picture: Discussing the war in a Paris Café, Illustrated London News circa late 1800s. From Vienna, the café custom is said to have spread throughout Europe.

I have no way of knowing whether Vienna was in fact a stop my father made as he found his way through Europe. I have chosen it as a stop here because it was the place where the European café culture started in the 17th century, and because I like Viennese Coffee – a delicious froth of coffee, chocolate, cream, and whipped cream – and that’s the recipe I choose to share here today.

Further, I think these coffeehouses of the past offer an enriching historic background for a pleasant tradition. Just like the old and venerable Middle Eastern and European coffeehouses, our American cafés are places where we meet friends to talk, mix with strangers, or go sit quietly alone to read or write. Our favorites may periodically offer jazz, poetry readings, or host other events. With the recession, however, more and more of us are buying our beans and brewing our own at home . . . and perhaps missing the conviviality of the café experience. There’s nothing that says we can’t create it at home.  Why not host a “coffeehouse” of sorts, combining the best of that concept in both the restaurant sense and the event sense? Do something like a coffee-potluck: Guests might bring a contribution of coffee, pastry, sugar, or cream . . . and poetry they like or have written themselves and would like to share.  Depending on your interests, perhaps such a potluck would be better combined with social advocacy (à la Amnesty International), a book club, music, chess or whatever . . . Just a thought.

These recipes, as all recipes on this blog and my other, Musing by Moonlight, are gluten-free  or are modified to be so for those with Celiac Disease or wheat-and-gluten sensitivity.

Here are recipes for Viennese Coffee for one and for four.  You will needed to prepare the following before assembling the drinks:

Whipped Cream: Make whipped cream using fresh whipping cream.  Chill a bowl and beaters first and then whip the cream until it forms peaks.

Chocolate Shavings: Make chocolate shavings by holding the chocolate bar on waxed paper, using your non-dominant hand.  With the other hand and a sharp vegetable peeler, firmly “shave” the side of the bar letting the savings fall on the waxed paper.  You will then be able to fold the waxed paper in half, keeping the chocolate centered, and tip it to distribute the savings over the whipped cream.

Coffee: Use whatever coffee and whatever brewing method is your preference.

Gluten-free Viennese Coffee for one

The recipe

• 1 cup of fresh brewed coffee, steaming
• Whipped cream
• 1 square broken in to pieces and some shaving of gluten-free semi-sweet chocolate

Place the chocolate pieces in a cup and pour the hot coffee over, stirring well to melt it. Top with whipped cream. Sprinkle with chocolate shavings.

Gluten-free Viennese Coffee for four

• 1 cup whipping cream, whip half and set aside the other half
• 1 3-oz bar of gluten-free semi-sweet chocolate
• 3 1/2 cups of freshly brewed coffee

Make enough chocolate shavings to sprinkle on four cups.  You don’t need much. It’s mostly for decoration.  Break the rest of the bar into pieces.  Simmer the 1/2 cup of whipping cream that you set aside and, when it’s hot, add the chocolate pieces.  Stir well to melt the chocolate and mix.  Add the coffee, stir and simmer the mixture until little bubbles start to form on the side of the saucepan.  Pour into cups.  Top with whipped cream and chocolate shavings.

Link here for Lebanese and Turkish Coffee preparation

Link here for Italian Coffee, Espresso preparation

Link here for one fresh-brewed cup at a time

Link here for half-caf

Dining With Women For Women

Video posted to YouTube by mamarungu. Illustrates the way in which funds from Dining for Women were used in Kenya.

“Dining for Women is a dinner giving circle. We “dine in” together once a month, each bringing a dish to share, and our “dining out” dollars are sent to international programs empowering women.” website homepage for Dining for Women.

“Dining for Women, [a] grassroots campaign, started by women to involve women in giving to other women, invites women to get together and “dine in”, donating the money they would have otherwise spent at a restaurant toward women living in poverty.

Dining for Women funds programs focused on health, education, and economic self sufficiency.  Dining for Women also emphasizes collective giving as those who participate can make a larger joint donation than individuals working alone.  At Barakat, we realize that women play a significant role in family, education, society, and development, and our goal is to empower women—young and old—to impact the world around them.” Blogging for Barakat, Empowering Women in Poverty.

Yesterday after reading an article about women who feel “humiliated” by having to eat out alone, I remembered the days when women couldn’t eat out alone even in the United States. I remembered that there are still places in the world where women cannot go out, much less eat out, alone. And I remembered that there are many people who do not have enough to eat.  Perhaps if we have trouble dining out alone – or even if we are quite comforable doing so – we might consider starting or joining one of the many giving circles around the country that operate as chapters of Dining for Women (DFW).

The concept is simple. Women get together at a chapter member’s house for a potluck and then donate the money they saved by eating at home to DFW which, according to its website, uses 100% of donated funds for educational, health, micro-enterprise, housing and other worthwhile projects benefiting women living in Africa, Asia and Central America. (As I write this post, it doesn’t look like there’s a chapter in Brooklyn. I hope this post will inspire someone to start one, maybe in Bay Ridge. I live in California now.)

DFW’s report for August 2008 through August 2009 shows that they raised $259,890. This is not megabucks by most funding standards, but just look at what DFW funded:

• educational scholarships for girls in East Africa ($12,660);
• safe housing for exploited children ($13,872);
• micro-enterprise in Kenya ($17,449);
• housing and educational scholarships in Vietnam ($28,022);
• business training in Uganda ($53,143);
• livestock and training in Nicaragua ($16,440);
• obstetric equipment in West Africa ($15,092)
• hunger project in India ($16,562)
• self-sufficiency programs in the Congo ($10,698)
• basic education and vocational training in India ($53,143);
• training in Rwanda ($13,538);
• health services in rural Afghanistan ($15,220).

Keep in mind that these are all places where we don’t need a huge amount of money to do a huge amount of good.

The current DFW project is the Darfur Peace and Development Project. According to the DFW, its gift of $15,000 will go specifically to that project’s Darfur Women’s Center. Imagine what it feels like to have to go outside a camp to collect wood for cooking, risking rape in the process. One inexpensive and immediate solution that has been targeted is buying small, solar-powered stoves for the women.

I am for anything and everything that empowers women. It’s not that I have anything against men.  I don’t. It’s just that it seems that when we help women, we help everyone.

“Empowering women tends to lead to faster economic growth, which in turn tends to undermine extremism and reduce civil conflict. In addition, there’s some evidence that countries that marginalize women tend to be more likely to have the macho values of a boy’s locker room or an armed camp and are more prone to violence. Bringing women into the picture tends to result in more security.” Nicholas Kristof, co-author with Sheryl WuDunn ofHalf the Sky:Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide in an interview with The Seattle Times, Oct. 9, 2009

Or put more simply as I was taught, ”As the women go, so goes the world.” Time to “dine in” with women for women .  .   .

Women, Dining Out Alone

Photograph courtesy of publicdomainpictures.net.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even butterflies and fleas do it. Let’s do it. Let’s dine out alone.” with a nod to Mr. Cole Porter.

Karen Fayeth of Oh Fair New Mexico fame responded on her blog to this article, How Not To Be Humiliated When Dining Out Alone, which is what brought the article and the issue to my attention. Now, Karen, being the good, smart, sensible woman that she is, is not at all humiliated by eating out alone. She does. She enjoys it. I know her well (she’s my world-class daughter-in-law), so I’m not surprised. The woman who wrote the article wrote it well and certainly meant to empower women. There are 1170 comments on the article as I write this post and many pooh-poohed the idea that eating out alone is humiliating.  Hooray! These women rock. Humiliation because you don’t have a date or anyone else to eat with is not a valid concern. Those for whom this is an issue need to get over it. Many of us eat out alone by choice and because it gives us pleasure. Judging by the responses, shyness is clearly and understandably a problem for some. I’d like to think that Brooklyn women have too much sense and healthy chutzpah for this, but unfortunately it’s probably a universal issue.

I am dismayed to know that dining out alone is a subject that requires discussion anymore, much less by a high-distribution American magazine in the twenty-first century.  It would seem that some of us have forgotten – if we ever knew – that others fought for the right for women to go to restaurants alone. There was a time – which I remember – when a woman eating alone in a restaurant was assumed to be a prostitute. The “better” restaurants would refuse to serve a woman alone. Years ago I was twice refused service. That’s true humiliation. Moreover, there are places in the world where women still can’t go out or eat out alone, and some people don’t even get to eat every day. If you want or need to fly solo: Do it. Enjoy it. Hold your head high and give thanks for the people who went before you and fought so that you could have this right. Don’t take it for granted and do take advantage of it.

Horta χόρτα, Greek Greens w/Lemon, GF

Photograph courtesy of Public Domain Pictures.net.

You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces … just good food from fresh ingredients.” Julia Child

Avenue U. It was a great place to shop with mom-and-pop bakeries and green groceries and Italian pork stores. We loved it. Shopping in the a.m. and then home to cook and eat.  I could always find just what I need for anything Italian, French … or Greek.

Greeks believe and believed anciently in the benefit and succulent and savory delight of greens, so much so that they do and did eat them regularly.  Each day, country people go in search of horta (literally “grass”) or wild greens.  These are prepared with olive oil and lemon and generally served at room temperature. In old times, there must have been an instinctive wisdom to that. Today we know that greens are not only luscious but necessary, chock full of nutrients and micronutrients that contribute to good health. Potassium. Magnesium. Calcium. Vitamin C. Vitamin K. Protein. Fiber. And that’s a short list.

Nothing is wasted. I have known both Italians and Greeks who will drink the water that their greens are cooked in, intuitive acknowledgement of the nutrients leached from the greens in the cooking process.  Sometimes pasta is added to the water and this is served hot like soup and topped with a bit of grated cheese, red pepper flakes, and raw olive oil. (I believe in some parts of the United States, the juice left after cooking greens is savored and called “pot liquor”.)

The greens are eaten alone or with bread. They may be topped with stewed lamb shanks, feta cheese, shrimp saganaki (prepared in a small fry pan with seasonings and aromatics), or – my favorite – roasted beets lightly coated with extra-virgin olive oil and dusted with garlic powder. Really, we are only limited by our taste, resources, and imagination. Here is a basic recipe. This dish is naturally wheat-and-gluten free.

You can choose any greens or mix of greens that you enjoy.  You can even include Chinese greens – not traditional but delicious – like baby bok choy and water spinach. I’ve written this recipe for four, but it may be expanded or contracted easily. Just figure a half-pound of fresh greens per person.

HORTA: GREEK-STYLE GREENS WITH LEMON, GLUTEN-FREE

This recipe

Serves four

• 2 lbs. of fresh greens of your choice
• 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil, doesn’t need to be first press
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed or minced
• 1 cup of water with 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
• black pepper, freshly grated
• 1 lemon, quartered

Thoroughly wash the greens. Be sure to remove any sand and to pick out the tough stalks and any damaged leaves. You don’t need to dry them.

Brown the garlic gently in the oil. Be careful not to burn it.  When it begins to change color add the greens to the pot and stir well. Add the water. Stir again and bring to a boil. Continue boiling until the greens are cooked through, usually a scant five minutes. When the greens are done, scoop them out of the water with a slotted spoon. Let the water drain off. Grate some freshly ground black pepper over each dish. Serve with the lemon quarters so that each person can squeeze some fresh lemon juice over the greens and to their taste.

Optional additions include Kalamata olives, capers, minced tomato or sweet pepper.

Savory Bay Ridge Bread Pudding, Gluten-Free

Photograph courtesy of Udi’s Handcrafted Foods.

Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale, Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs, And solid pudding against empty praise.” Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book I

We had a lovely neighbor who once had no one to share Christmas with. Mom invited her to spend the day with us. Mom made a salad and bought a bakery cake for dessert. The neighbor made a bread budding, which was my first ever. It turned out to be solid and savory and very much a comfort food. I actually don’t know how she made hers, but here’s my version. I do remember that she made hers with Chedder.

My preferance is Emmental cheese, which is a much better quality than the American Swiss. Emmental is getting pricey and is not always available. Swiss cheese is certainly an acceptable substitue. Actually, you can probably use any cheese that you favor or a mix of left-over hard cheeses that you have in the fridge. For a lower-fat version, substitute one of the Lifetimecheeses and use eggwhites.

SAVORY BAY RIDGE BREAD PUDDING, WHEAT-AND-GLUTEN FREE

The recipe

Serves four people

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 1/2 cups of milk (dairy, nut or soy, your choice)
• 3 large omega-3 eggs, beaten
• 1 1/2 cups Pecorino Romano, freshly grated
• Sea salt
• Coarse black pepper, freshly grated
• 1/4 cup fresh parsley, finely minced
• 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary, finely minced
• 7 slices of Udi’s Gluten-free Multi-grain Bread, toasted and quartered
• 2 cups of Emmental Cheese, shredded
• 3 cups of water

Grease an 8 inch baking dish with the olive oil.

In a bowl, mix the milk, eggs, half the Pecorino Romano cheese, the fresh herbs, and salt and pepper to taste.

Layer half the toast in the bottom of the baking dish. This is free form. It’s okay to overlap. Top the toast with about two-thirds of the cheese. Eyeball it. Precision isn’t necessary. Arrange the remaining toast. With a fork, press gently on the toast to help ensure that it absorbs the liquid. Mix what’s left of the Pecornio Romano and Emmental and top the pudding with the mixture.

Boil the water and pre-heat the oven to 425°.

Let the dish stand for twenty minutes. Set the baking pan in a larger pan. Pour enough boiling water in the larger pan to come half-way up the side of the baking pan. (This is like using a bain-marie - or water bath – for making cheesecake.) Bake for about thirty minutes to cook through, set the pudding, and brown the top. If the top starts to brown before the pudding is set, just carefully and loosely cover the pan with aluminum foil.