oh for christsake

im going to admit something: im a compete failure in the kitchen.
i love food
i love cooking it serving it learning about it comparing it savoring it playing with it sharing it
and yet
every damn time i go in the kitchen with the best of intensions, SOMETHING goes wrong
sometimes that leads to greatness, glory, the stuff of legends
but just as often it leads to chaos mayhem and inedible food that gets thrown out still encrusted to the container in which it met its doom
case in point:
tonight i spent two hours making double butter triple almond extract fortune cookies stuffed with a stubbs postcard cut into strips on which id hand written a favorite poem by jack gilbert.
the cookies were 200% improved from my first fortune cookie venture.
they were wafer thin, buttery, crispy as crackers and beautifully browned.
i folded in the fortunes, found a beautiful tin, layered them into the tin and was just lifting it up to put it gingerly in my room to bring to my godmothers for thanksgiving tomorrow when the evil sprite that seems to follow me everywhere threw down the banana peel.
i slipped, grabbed, thrashed, flailed and finally hurled the tin across the room smashing every single cookie to smithereens.
steph, roommate, saw and gaped, trying not to laugh but there was really nothing left to do except howl with laughter and hten sit down and eat the whole entire batch. i mean really.
anyway in their honor im passing on the winning recipe and the poem that was held in that sweet far too fragile shell

Ingredients
2 egg whites, room temperature
6 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour, sifted
1/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
Directions
Whip the egg whites until stiff and chill. In a mixer, cream the butter, then add the sugar and continue mixing. Add the flour and blend in, then add the vanilla and blend again. Add the chilled egg whites and mix on low until well incorporated and the batter is smooth. With a small offset spatula, spread batter in a circle about 3 per cookie sheet. Bake in a preheated 330-degree oven until light golden brown, 7 to 8 minutes. Quickly remove the pan from the oven and one at time place a fortune across the center with a bit hanging out. Fold cookie circle in thirds over fortune with flaps only slightly overlapping each other. Turn over and bring opposing sides together and pinch.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

--Jack GIlbert