Recipoems

Procrastination, we meet again.
(GUACAMOLE/CONCLUSION RECIPE)
 
Walk with the dog to the market.
Head home and do some yoga.
Eventually take out two ripe avocados,
Scoop out the flesh,
Marvel at the perfectly popped seeds.
Roughly chop a tomato.
Extract less than half a lemon’s worth of juice.
Slice and dice a bit of red onion.
Remember to always remove the annoying
slippery outer skin from now on.
Chop two small cloves of garlic, finely.
Chop cilantro leaves and
one red hot chili pepper, sans most of the seeds.
Sprinkle a bit of cumin and a
a few grindings of salt and pepper.
Mix et voilà! Guacamole.
And a recipe for writing your conclusion.
 
February 9, 2020
Singapore

Nonya chicken curry from scratch as a labor of love

First you need to figure out where to get
exotic sounding ingredients like
candlenuts, kaffir lime leaves and galangal.
You must then realize you live in Singapore
and they are all easily obtained from the supermarket—
even in the middle of a global pandemic and
city-wide lockdown because
the body politic still needs its curry!
Rub the chicken down with a few grindings of salt
and the super authentic curry spice mix
that you ordered online from a local artisan
and excitedly checked the mailbox for
every day until it arrived
much later than normal because #coronavirus.
Then you finally get started on what’ll make this special:
the curry paste.
Seriously pound with a mortar and pestle:
a red hot chili pepper sans their seeds;
five shallots—and finally understand what shallots are
and how they’re different from red onions;
a couple of inches of ginger;
half a dozen candlenuts;
a few cloves of garlic;
a few curry leaves;
maybe some belachan or bagoong; and,
a couple of tablespoons of spice.
Figure out how to liberate lemongrass
from its unneeded sheath,
and set a few stalks aside.
Peel and chop some potatoes.
Wash and separate some lime leaves from their stems.
Stir fry the paste with oil so the paste absorbs the oil
and until the oil sort of sweats out of the paste
(but you won’t be really sure when that is).
Add the chicken, lemongrass, lime leaves, and potatoes,
coating them well in the paste.
Add a can of coconut milk,
and a bit more of the spice stirred in for good measure.
Let the whole thing simmer for thirty minutes,
and at the end add a tablespoon of lime juice
and a bit of salt.
Serve with some greens, love and baguettes.
Look at the empty chair next to you,
sigh away the heaviness from your heart,
and hope that next time
he’ll be there to labor with you.

April 16, 2020
Singapore


(Haiku)

Pine nuts, olive oil,
garlic, basil, salt, pepper,
parmesan—pesto!

April 18, 2020
Singapore