Poetry Friday -- Recipe

Recipe

The yellowed newspaper clipping
is attached to an index card
with brittle cellophane tape.
"Nov. 1949
Women's Day Kitchen"
is written in faded ink
at the top of the card.

Her canned tomatoes
were from the garden,
mine are from the store.
Her biscuits were made from scratch,
mine are a boxed mix.

She washed up the prep bowls
by hand,
tired after a long day's work.

Some things don't change.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014



I am participating in Month of Poetry (#MoP) again this year. It is coordinated and led by Australian poet and children's author Kat Apel, a "friend in my head" (never met her in person) from the March Madness 2012 poetry tournament. The discipline of writing a poem a day for at least a semi-public audience is good practice for April. It's a healthy reminder that I have to take what I get in the 20-30 minutes of #nerdlution writing I've promised myself on a daily basis. I wrote this poem while dinner was cooking last night.

The actual recipe is in Mom's recipe box. It's a childhood favorite that I cooked for her while I was home at Christmas. I copied the recipe down (not word for word) to bring a little HOME back home.

Hamburger Cobbler
Nov. 1949 Women's Day Kitchen

1 sm onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 lb hamburger
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp marjoram
1/4 lb sliced cheese
1 (cup) can drained diced tomatoes
2 T worcestershire sauce
3 T ketchup

(ingredients for homemade biscuits)
2 1/4 c Bisquick + 2/3 c milk

Sauté onion and garlic, then add hamburger and seasonings and brown. Spread in a 9x9 baking dish. Put sliced cheese on top, then the tomatoes mixed with worcestershire and ketchup. Put blops of Bisquick on top of the tomato mixture. Bake at 450° for 25 minutes.



Donna, at Mainely Write, is cooking up the Poetry Friday roundup this week.

The Tuesday Effect

It's nice to know that some things don't change after decades and decades (and decades) of teaching. It's Tuesday night and I'm channeling my first-year teaching self.

As a beginning teacher in a tough school in the Dallas Independent School District, I would go through the same cycle, week after week: I would spend all weekend polishing up the most perfect lesson plans ever. I imagined what I would say and how the students would react. It was beautiful. Masterful. Thoughtful.

Then Monday came.

Monday came and I got a little bit behind.

Then, by the end of the day Tuesday, I was completely behind, thrown off track, and feeling buried in a mire of papers.

I call it The Tuesday Effect.

And if you think this is the part where I tell you how I've come so far since those first years, and how I'm so on top of things and have it all figured out now...well, you'd be wrong. It's happening again, right on schedule, with technology thrown into the mix.

The only thing I've got figured out now that I didn't know then is that it's okay -- even necessary -- to leave the avalanche of work for tomorrow and get a good night's sleep. Wednesday will come and it will all work out...somehow.

LADY HAHN AND HER SEVEN FRIENDS by Yumi Heo

LADY HAHN AND HER SEVEN FRIENDS
by Yumi Heo
Henry Holt, 2012

Who can resist a book with their name in the title?!

In this Korean folktale, Lady Hahn is a seamstress. Each of her sewing tools claims to be the most important. Lady Hahn overhears them and grows angry, claims to be more important than any of the tools, and throws them into a box. The tools feel mistreated and misunderstood, so they hide from Lady Hahn, who has a miserable time trying to sew without them the next day. In the end, they realize that they all need each other to get the job done.

This Lady Hahn is more likely my mom than me, though. The Lady Hahn who raised and clothed me with hand-sewn blue-ribbon-at-the-county-fair creations made on her little black Singer worked miracles with needle and thread and fabric. She made baby dresses with smocking down the front, recital dresses from purple crepe, baton twirling costumes of velvet with sequins hand-sewn on, a dirndl from a German pattern, and even BARBIE DOLL CLOTHES with buttons so tiny I'm not sure how she didn't go blind sewing them on!