Scribblings with Green Chalk

Thanks for the blueberry muffin on a lingering bad morning. Not as small a gift as it may appear–in a time when everything goes wrong in a domino fashion.

I found this video with my one good eye. There’s nothing as romantic as folk stories about murder. Please watch it for me while I curl up and fall asleep.

This is by no means a new obsession. It dates back to when I was perhaps three and wanted to live solely on twaróg* and tomatoes. When my mom lifted the ban on sweets, I tasted the divine incarnation of twaróg as a pastry. Now I’m carrying a silly childhood imprint in my–yeah, where? Tastebuds: can’t be, mine are almost defunct, stomach sounds improbable, so we’re left with the fleshy Dickinsonian Brain…

Could be the phases of the moon (if it’s indeed made of cheese) that made me go all werewolf about CHEESECAKE. Somewhere around Kim’s birthday I started dreaming about it: taste and all. It was after we decided the cake needs to be written entirely in upper case letters (like Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE only with more substance to it thanks to cheese)–if German nouns deserve to begin with a capital, CHEESECAKE deserves them all the way through.

Real SERNIK, the dreamed variety, is slightly tart, juicy, has very little sugar. No crazy stuff. Eat your fruit later, unless it’s a few raisins you accidently dropped into the mix. That shall be forgiven.

It took me a long time to hunt down in Heidelberger cafes a KÄSEKUCHEN** that could approach that lusciousness. Finally, today, I risked it in a place where I had once gotten a Mojito that was just straight vodka with a few peppermint leaves floating about, unable to bite through the alcohol. I decided not to lose my faith in the friendly service in spite of that incident (eh, the drink was relatively cheap as HD goes) and with a Milchkaffee and a tinfoil package of mystery KÄSEKUCHEN I made my way down to the Neckar.

Was OK. One-third of it is waiting for me in the fridge. or for S. whom I got hooked on it by my constant fantasizing out loud.

Notes

* twaróg is sort of like Quark but very different

** probably the cutest word in the German language

Addendum

KÄSEKUCHEN in a cup? No!
Doch!

Doro let me have the last piece of her fabulous cherry pie. You are what you eat. I’m cherry pie.

My tastebuds are incapacitated. An eating disorder in my teens and later ulceritis have turned my relationship with food into something of a marriage of convenience. I tend to compliment dishes with “interesting,” as if suddenly drained of adjectives. I am grateful for good food, but I lack culinary imagination. I have fleeting food obsessions but no true love ensues.

I wish I could write seductively about peanut butter. Nothing makes you appreciate good peanut butter more than bad peanut butter. I felt like Rapunzel’s mother, asking a friend to get me real, serious organic peanut butter from the US army grocery store uncanny shopping land. I could not deny my intense real-peanut-butter hunger, even though I could not write an ode to peanut butter nor a lament for the bad peanut butter I had in the past months. As a birthday gift, my friend gave me two big jars of crunchy and creamy. I’d never have guessed it would turn out to be such a marvelous gift. I went for a birthday week with peanut butter toast, peanut butter toast with my mother’s jam, and, of course, apples with peanut butter, and peanut butter without company.

Magically, the sun’s declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. In hope of catching some natural vitamin D, I took a long walk yesterday with a curious pause (thanks to my friend and the passport I forgot to leave at home) in uncanny shopping land where I binged on American women’s magazines, coffee, and a brownie. Caught the last sun rays on the way home and had apples with peanut butter before sleep. The life.

I don’t think I have a temperature anymore, but I still feel weak and my nose is still like a leaking tap. Ergo, I still have a cold. However, this is what I did today: I spent an hour waiting in the wind and rain for a package from my mother. Because my mother had the romantic idea to pass the package through someone traveling to Heidelberg. So I almost froze to death waiting for it at the station and when I finally got it, I saw my tram driving off (it’s Sunday, they go every hundred years). I dragged the package home in the rain… and went to sleep without opening it.

Several hours later I opened it and found — apart from the things I asked for — a neatly tied parcel with… what should I call them?… St. Martin’s croissants(?). Rogale marcińskie, which is the Polish name of this delicacy, is probably the most wonderful thing about the region I come from. It’s St. Martin’s today, which means everyone in Poznań and its environs, is eating rogale…

(Image: mniammniam.pl)

It’s also a delicious beginning of the second year of my emigrant life, which — in spite of the scarcity of rogale — has been good for me so far. And rogale have definitely been worth the epic quest. Ask any poznaniak, they’ll tell you.

PS: It’s also Independence Day in Po(e)land. My chance to wave a flag, if I had one.

She never had Rhine wines, but they are there among the buzzing bees. I saw a bumblebee today, like a last speck of dying summer, just when I was thinking of Emily Dickinson as a good excuse for my wine obsession. I have not tried the local wines yet, I was just staring at a vineyard on the other side of the Neckar. Come slowly, Eden.

I got an email today from someone whose opinions and ideas I always find very interesting. I consult him often about various things, or rather pester with my ideas and unfinished thoughts. This person, who was my teacher for a while, tends to respond to my half-bitten ideas with wounderfully rounded thoughts. We talked about Complete Thoughts once but it was too hot then to, er, complete the thought. Perhaps one day I might get my mental balancing act to reach that level. I feel I have learned a lot from my teacher but this may not be something that I could learn. Maybe my ruminations on milk cartons and teeth are meant to stay frayed?

What if we all had Complete Thoughts? Would we then want to share observations so eagerly? As things are, there are shapely insights and questions with brand new wisdom teeth, just waiting to nibble at completeness. And then Complete Thoughts bite back and there are crumbs everywhere — tasty non sequiturs and aphorisms.

Before I get carried away into the world of tastes, let me just say that I was very surprised to learn that my teacher reads these entries sometimes. I realized I had been writing them with the assumption that absolutely no one reads them (except Denise, who is wonderful and was kind enough to comment on some of my frayed thoughts). I did feel slightly embarrassed because the overall triviality of my postings after reading my teacher’s letter. After all, who cares about my blueberry obsessions and toothache? But, well, if you can see the world in a grain of sand, then think of what may appear in a blueberry that is not a blueberry in the European understanding of the word and for many people does not exist as concept nor fruit at all…

We are back to tastes again and the little things that make up my postings. I am writing this after a day of tastes and shameless gluttony. It all began with a salad called Flower Power, followed by a trip to the Cornell Dairy Bar, a Shakespearean cookbook that Debbie found at Borders, dinner at home (that Shakespeare certainly would have enjoyed), and lemon ice cream with fruit (Shakespeare might have wanted to count the blueberries and write a blueberry poem which I might have enjoyed). And there are crumbs of ideas, of course. And I really do not think I want to do anything about that.

PS: It was New England clam chowder.