Storybelly Extra

Two recipes: one for food, one for writing, both for sustenance.

Happy Friday! In Monday’s Digest, I promised an extra post this week with two recipes, one for food, one for writing. Food first.

I don’t know when I started the ritual of making popcorn when I’m writing, but it always makes me happy, for many reasons, the highest of which is, it means I *am* writing, and usually it means the writing is going well. I don’t mess around, either. I use my deepest, heaviest pot, and always make two big bowls. One pot full of popped corn will fill them both.

I always make it from scratch, meaning not from a box, but using corn kernels, a heavy pot, some neutral oil (I use canola), salt, and nutritional yeast. Those are your ingredients.

Microwave popcorn or store-bought popped corn can’t touch this method in taste and freshness and ingredients you can pronounce, and honestly, it takes about the same time as unwrapping the microwave packet, fidgeting it into the microwave, and waiting for it to pop. Invest you in some good yellow corn kernels (my preference, I am not partial to the texture of white, but I’d like to try red kernels sometime), a container of nutritional yeast (I buy it in bulk at YDFM - Your DeKalb Farmers Market — here in ATL, but I also use Bragg’s), some sea salt in a generous shaker, and you’ve probably got the oil on a shelf. Olive oil is too heavy, canola or grapeseed or even coconut oil is just right.

Be generous with the oil — not too much, not a pool, but also more than a coating on the bottom of your heavy pot, or the popcorn will burn at the bottom. This sometimes takes practice to know just how much to use in your particular pan. Toss in a few corn kernels, cover the pot, turn your stove not quite to high (gas or electric — I go just below “Hi” on my ‘lectric, this is key), and wait for those kernels to start popping, then quickly add in as many kernels as will cover heavily the bottom of your pot. I use an over-full 1 cup in my 5qt pot. Mom always used a half-cup, but her Revere Ware pot was a 3 quart.

Mom shook the pot in a vigorous back-and-forth motion across the eye, as the corn popped. Very dramatic! No need to shake, except at the beginning, before popping begins in earnest, to make sure all kernels are coated with the oil. Then you wait, and things happen fast.

I love it when my pot lid begins to push up from the pot because I’ve got the just-right amounts (eyeballed, of course) of oil and kernels and heat going, and I know I’m going to have fluffy popcorn to coat with salt and nooch, and now all I need is some fizzy water or — wait for it — strong coffee laced with a glug of whole milk to go with my popcorn feast and the next chapter (paragraph? page?) banged out on the laptop, while sitting in my writing place (the green chaise that is worn and well-used only for writing the next great American novel, heh-heh).

There are no calories in this popcorn when writing.

where I write… this was taken in 2009 while I was writing Countdown

And now a writing recipe:

In yesterday’s Writer’s Lab post I talked about how I teach writing. One of the “getting ideas” things I listed was making a list. A list is a recipe for ideas, and it can be many other things, from a grocery list (I am famous for them; my notebooks are full of grocery lists), a to-do list (ditto), and lists of birds in the back yard, whatever you want, lists are amazing. lol.

Well, they are. I used to tell my students, “I put the date on front of a notebook when it’s full, put it with the others I have filled, and I can pull one out and tell you what we had for Thanksgiving dinner in, say, 2003.” They were not impressed, but for this writer, knowing that might come in handy. It also comes in handy at the grocery store, even though now I often use the app. Still a list. :>

Here’s an idea/recipe of sorts. Make a list of ancestors, of people you knew when you were young, or those whose stories were told to you, and/or a list of the young people you know now, maybe your own kids or other kin. You’ll write from this list, maybe about the one name or photograph that suggests a story, “the time that.” That’s the way to frame it, “the time that ____” you can write that down, and voila, a focus sentence. When I made such a list, years ago, Miss Eula and Ruby were born, and they eventually populated Love, Ruby Lavender.

Here is the altar in my writing studio. It is the living/dining room (Ruby would call it “the front room”) of my house. I call the studio “my office” most of the time, because my dad always used that term for the bedroom he turned into the space just-for-him, where he lined one wall with shelves and filled it with Time-Life books, encyclopedias and their yearbooks that came in the mail every January, Scientific Americans, Book of the Month Club books, Reader’s Digest condensed books, and old books that held such mystery for me, such as My Search Through the Heavens, a book that felt out of place with the others, but that moved from house to house with us, from office to office, so it must have meant something to my dad.

That’s not a “one clear moment in time” memory, but it could jump-start one clear moment, say, the time that I watched my dad shelve a new book in the bookcase. It was 1964. I was eleven years old, the same age as Franny in Countdown. We lived in Washington, DC, where my dad was a C-130 pilot, stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. Again, the same as Franny. I had been sent by my mother to call my dad to dinner but I stopped at the doorway to his office because I knew something was off — I could feel it.

He looked up, saw me standing there, but didn’t acknowledge me. I knew not to say a word. He closed the book gently, pushed back from his desk, lifted the book with two hands, although why, I didn’t know, as the book was so slim. It was white, too, which made it stand out as unusual. He walked the book over to the shelves and made a space for it between some darker spines. He slipped it in quietly, with ceremony. “Let’s go,” he said, almost tenderly, and we went upstairs to our supper.

I didn’t ask him about the book, but I did slip down to his office later. I gingerly and quietly pulled the book from its protected place and looked at the cover. Four Days, The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy.

I could expand this one clear moment in time to tell you how my dad looked as he shelved that book, or when he said let’s go, what we ate for supper and what the conversation was about, and how it felt to see that cover, and later, to go through those pages of photographs and relive the fresh grief of a nation that had just been through the assassination of a president and its aftermath. We were all still reeling.

I could bring in standing in the freezing cold in November 1963, waiting in line with my brother and mother to pay our respects in the rotunda of the Capitol, where JFK lay in state. Or a dozen other memories… it would be a good vignette or essay, one that I wouldn’t publish, but a memory that stayed with me for decades, and that accompanied me as I wrote Countdown, some 40 years later.

Lists. Recipes for ideas. Also no calories.

Happy listing. Tell me what you discover; I would love to hear. Maybe you’ll take it in another direction, but you’ve got an idea now, I’ll bet, as you list.

Good weekend to you. We sold our washer and dryer. The plum trees are blooming. Stories for another day. See you Monday with the Digest.

xo Debbie