by Holly Jahangiri | Jun 24, 2021
Strong threads you weave;
A web of them,
At first, to swaddle and protect –
Softly subtle, safe cocoon,
Where only pleasant dreams reside.
Bright sunlight flickers,
warm, upon the glass, and I
Can’t move. Can’t breathe.
Your sticky net catches everything –
Grows tighter as I struggle,
Wiggling free.
Where once I fed on you,
You feed on me.
Night terror, you,
Your breath tickling my cheek.
Does it still breathe? I hardly dare.
Half-dreaming, I reach out,
Slap you. Slap me.
So long ago, a truce – you
Retreated to the shadows,
Present, still.
Those graying wisps
Hang tattered, torn, defeated.
I learned to deal with nightmares
On my own.
But there! Just now,
Upon the dew-kissed window-pane,
I see you! Sunning yourself.
Smiling at the rounded belly
Beneath my hand, as we –
In our own ways, our own time –
Begin to weave.
Happy New Year. And welcome to #WednesdayVerses. Vinay and Reema are offering a prompt each Wednesday to inspire you to write a poem. If it does, write it as a post on your blog, then come link up with them. If it doesn’t, then browse the links to read what others have written, and share the posts with your poetry-loving friends. The linky is open from Wednesday till the following Tuesday night! Please add your post to the link only if it is a post written for #WednesdayVerses. All are welcome and invited to participate.
The prompt for this week is the picture of a lovely dream-catcher, which finds its origins in Ojibwe legends.
Author’s note: I wanted to learn more about the real history of the Native American dreamcatcher – not just the commercialized motif so popular since the 1990s or so and more likely made in China, now, than by Native American hands. I hope that my own reading and interpretation of the story does it justice. What I saw, in reading the legends, was mothers and sisters and grandmothers standing in as proxies for the protective Spider Woman, Asibikaashi, whose web hangs over children’s cradles and beds and “catches” all the nightmares and only lets good thoughts and dreams come through the center. But children grow up; part of becoming an adult is struggling against the protection and safety of their elders’ “webs” and learning to take care of themselves, so that they can one day take care of others. As a mother, myself, I know that it’s only after we’ve broken free of the “constraints” of what we see as “overprotectiveness” that we’re ready to accept help from the old “spider women” whose webs once chafed and annoyed us.
by Holly Jahangiri | Jun 24, 2021
Honolulu. 1980. As the plane landed, I felt the first symptoms of a cold. Nooooo, not right now, not at the start of a tropical vacation! I had plans to meet up with a local friend for dinner, when all I really wanted to do was curl up in my hotel room and die. He took me to a Chinese restaurant and ordered us a huge bowl of hot and sour soup. I had not, yet, built up the tolerance to spicy peppers that I have, today, and I was convinced he was trying to kill me. Twenty-four hours later, I realized he’d saved my vacation; my cold was cured.
That’s not normal. The normal progression of a cold is a steady, predictable building from scratchy throat and stuffy nose to full blown misery lasting 3-7 days, and in my case, usually climaxing with the double-whammy of bronchitis and a ten-day course of antibiotics. That’s normal. This was about six hours of misery knocked flat on it’s backside by a bowl of hot and sour soup. I felt terrific, the next day.
In hindsight, the soup itself had been quite tasty. Sure, my tastebuds were traumatized and blistered, but the flavor was more complex than my initial “burns the lips off a chicken” reaction. I set out on a quest to find the perfect hot and sour soup on the mainland. I came close, at a little restaurant in Canton, OH. But by then, I was living in Oklahoma. I don’t recall the name of the restaurant, and I think the place closed, years ago. Nothing, since then, has even come close.
My main complaint is that all restaurant hot and sour soup seems to have been “dumbed down for the tourists.” I get it; I go to Thai restaurants and order “4.5” on a spicy scale of 1-5. That’s my coded message to the cook: “I’m serious about loving hot and spicy things, but I’m not native Thai, please don’t kill me.” People talk a good fight, but when push comes to shove, a few drops of Tabasco Sauce pack too much heat for most people. I’ve tried ghost pepper, and I draw the line far, far down the Scoville Scale. Past a certain point, it’s just a contest to see who’s the dumbest masochist on the planet. Raw Serrano heat is my happy place – somewhere high above jalapeño, but well below Carolina Reaper. Restaurant hot and sour is more mild than a third of a jalapeño, with the ribs and seeds removed. But that’s not the biggest problem with it; the biggest problem is the cornstarch. Restaurant hot and sour soup is thick.
I wondered if my memory were failing me, and if the soup I fell in love with, in Honolulu, wasn’t authentic hot and sour soup at all.
One Last Ditch Effort
So it’s been nearly 40 years, and I was about ready to give up the quest. In one last act of desperation, I started searching for things like “hot and sour soup that’s not full of cornstarch” and “hot and sour soup that’s actually HOT” and “ffs can’t anyone make a decent hot and sour” and “is hot and sour actually SUPPOSED to be like this?” at which point I found, “The Food Lab: This is How Hot and Sour Soup Should Taste,” by J. KENJI LÓPEZ-ALT. When I read the following passages, I knew I had to give this a try before giving up for good:
Here’s the fact: Most restaurant hot and sour soup stinks. …
In certain Chinese traditions, hot and sour soup is thickened with blood from either a chicken or a pig. Not only is blood not easy to come by in the US, it’s also not high on most folks’ lists of “things I love to eat,” including mine. Instead, hot and sour soup in the U.S. is more often than not thickened with cornstarch.
Some writers and eaters—probably those that have been scarred by years of eating the steam-table glop—insist on using no thickener at all. I personally like to use just a hair—enough to add some body to the soup and help the solid elements stay suspended, but not so much that it becomes mouth-coatingly slick.
J. KENJI LÓPEZ-ALT gets me.
First, I went to Hong Kong Market. It’s my new favorite grocery store, but it’s not walking distance like my local Kroger’s and I’d never been there before. Armed with a shopping list the length of my arm, full of things I couldn’t properly pronounce and had never heard of, I started wandering the aisles, just to get my bearings. I quickly found the chicken feet.
You can’t be squeamish if you’re going to cook chicken feet. They look a little too much like a cross between lizard and four-fingered, elegant, old-lady human hands. The recipe also calls for “chicken carcass.” Isn’t that just…whole chicken? Apparently not. One thing you can easily find at the Asian market that you won’t likely find in a U.S. grocery chain is random chicken parts, hacked to bits for stock. I was relieved, because I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the instructions:
Hack your chicken carcasses to bits before making stock. Not only will it make you feel like a medieval viking-style badass, but it’ll also make your broth come together much faster. The more finely you chop the bones, the more surface area they have, and the more channels for proteins, minerals, and other goodies to get extracted into the broth.
Not that I don’t relish the idea of being a medieval viking-style badass, whatever that is, but I have been voted “Most Likely to Hack Her Own Hand Off with a Meat Cleaver.” I have sliced and stabbed myself and even needed stitches, that’s how poor my knife skills are. I’m sure my fingers in there would add a certain “richness” to the broth.
I also found a lovely pork tenderloin, lean and on sale. Jinhua ham? Nope. That was the one substitution I ended up resorting to, using the prosciutto, as recommended in the recipe.
In other news, I know, now, where to find duck tongues, pork arseholes, chicken “testides,” and tripe. I really need a recipe for duck tongues; those look interesting. I think chickens’ “testides” are bigger than their brains.
During my search for the ham, I ran into two very cheerful, helpful, and determined staff members who were easily enlisted in my quest. Laura was particularly kind and at least as doggedly determined to succeed in my grocery scavenger hunt as I was. Together, and with help from another customer, we located day lilies next to the black fungus. So many types of black fungus. We found extra firm tofu, hidden amongst the silken, soft, medium, and firm varieties. With fifty different types of sesame oil, we didn’t find toasted sesame oil. When I got home, armed with sesame seeds for toasting, I found out that the sesame oil I already had at home was toasted!
After the gingerbread fiasco, I was ready for a win. I decided to make the broth today, and finish the soup on Saturday. I blanched the chicken carcass and feet, then put them into my slow-cooker, along with the prosciutto, ginger, onion, scallions, and smashed garlic. I threw about two handfuls of dried red chili peppers in there for good measure.
After simmering all those ingredients for hours, the whole house smells heavenly! I’ve strained and put aside the broth, in the refrigerator, for Saturday’s lunch, and will write later this weekend to let you know if the quest has truly been completed, or if I’ve just found a tasty, but very different, soup to enjoy. Either way, I have no doubt it will be delicious.
Soup’s On!
Oh, my sweet Lord, that’s good. I couldn’t wait till Saturday – I swiped two cups’ worth of broth to experiment on before subjecting my husband to the finished hot and sour soup this Saturday. My first attempt is not flaming-surface-of-the-sun hot, like I remember that first bowl being, something that’s bound to bring a sigh of relief to my husband’s lips. It may not cure the common cold, but it would sure bring some comfort to the sick. it’s as close to “the perfect hot and sour soup” as I’ve been able to find in 40 years. I intend to practice this until I can whip up a batch of it in my sleep, it’s that good. What more can I say? My long quest has finally come to an end, I’ve found a new grocery store to love, and all that’s left is to perfect my execution of the recipe.
by Holly Jahangiri | Apr 1, 2021
Absolutes: we deal in
Black and white.
Color – once vibrant – now
Dimmed to dull gray
Effluence – our
Flaws flowing, fulgent –
Garish graffiti on our souls.
Have mercy.
It’s ironic:
Justice, blind, can’t see
Keenly how, by their absence,
Lacunae have tipped the scales –
Making chaos out of order.
Not till the eleventh hour –
Ostensibly, too late –
Practically past all hope,
Questioning the who, what, where, and why of it
Restores her sight, and now
Shows clearly how
Tenacious tendrils of apathy
Unseen, like dandelion roots or
Varicose vines,
Wrap around the wooden heart –
Xylophagus. Rot, in the end, reduced to
Zero.
by Holly Jahangiri | Feb 23, 2021
Let me make it very clear from the start: I appreciate it when friends fact-check what I post. I don’t appreciate long, drawn-out, circular, unproductive “political debates” with people who think politics is a sport, but I do appreciate friends who keep me honest on those rare occasions when I post utter rubbish on Facebook. It happens to us all, sometimes.
Assuming we’re breathing.
A few days ago, I posted a link – a direct link to a primary source of information – Donald Trump, Jr’s own tweet that so comically led people to mock him for calling Governor Abbott a Democrat. Governor Abbott, as any Texan knows, is not a Democrat. He’s not much of a governor, either, but that’s not the issue right now. Here’s the original tweet, in Donald Trump, Jr’s own words (I’m including the image for those who don’t have Twitter, and if you click on it – assuming he hasn’t deleted it – it will take you straight to the original source.)
I live in Texas. I’d love to see Ted Cruz resign; he’s a disgrace. Wanting to “cancel” Ted Cruz shouldn’t even be a partisan matter at this point, and he should be thoroughly investigated for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Three major Texas newspapers have called for Ted Cruz to resign.
Texans died during the winter storm and massive power grid failures in February. Texas Republicans and Democrats were fairly united on one thing: They were not impressed when Cruz fled the disaster area to the warmer climate of Cancun, Mexico. They weren’t impressed when he tried to blame his poor judgment on his 10 and 12 year old daughters, claiming he was “trying to be a good dad” by taking them to Cancun during a school break. They were even less impressed when his wife’s texts, complaining of the bitter cold and inviting friends to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun, at just $309 a night, were “leaked” by a friend. Apparently, no one wanted to be seen traveling with them during the pandemic.
It seems that Ted Cruz didn’t learn anything about damage control from Paul Ryan’s photo op in a soup kitchen, or from Trump’s tossing paper towels at Puerto Ricans after Hurricane because he staged his own.
Anyway… here’s where the “fact checkers” come in: They marked my post “partly false.”
It’s important to understand that the only thing I wrote was a sarcastic, “Who knew Gov. Abbott was a Democrat?” as an intro, with a direct link to Donald Trump, Jr’s own tweet. I certainly did not claim that Governor Abbott was a Democrat. And I only linked to Donald Trump, Jr’s own words. I’ll cop to sarcasm and snark, here, but not to lying:
So, how is this “partly false”? Here’s what they have to say, when you click “See Why”:
Had I written a whole news article claiming that Donald Trump, Jr was an idiot who truly believed that Governor Abbott was a Democrat, as opposed to being an angry weasel who cannot write a proper sentence and shouldn’t be allowed to wield an apostrophe, then I could see their point, too. I certainly wouldn’t argue that Donald Trump, Jr. was an eloquent rhetorician who brilliantly expressed what he was trying to say in his tweet. I also wouldn’t argue, as some have uncharitably done, that he looked high when he posted it. He clearly needs the likes of writer Alexis Tereszcuk to decipher for us mere mortals what he was trying, inadequately, to say.
But apparently, it’s not my annoyance over his laughable ineptitude and misuse of the English language that bothered the “independent fact checkers” Facebook uses. It is mind-bogglingly weird that they seem to be fact-checking Donald Trump, Jr’s own tweet, in his own words, to say that he didn’t mean to say what he clearly said and still hasn’t bothered to delete.
I’m assuming he’s allowed to delete his own tweets? He is a private citizen, right – not a government official using Twitter to conduct official business, as his father and so many other politicians seem to think is appropriate? He could say, like Britney Spears, “Ooops, I did it again!” and write whatever the hell it was he actually meant to write. That is, if he didn’t mean to write what he did write, rather than…
It’s like one of those Escher drawings.
I sent in an appeal, but only as a matter of principle. I told Lead Stories that I truly don’t care if they ever remove the “False Information” overlay – it’s funnier this way, and highlights the inadequacies of social media’s attempts at automated content moderation. I would applaud their efforts, but there is still so much truly dangerous misinformation being spread online about COVID19, so much racist, misogynistic, hate-filled garbage, so many fake and fraudulent accounts, so many bait-and-switch advertisers – just so many other, more important things that Facebook deliberately ignores despite repeated reports, that I wrote, “it calls the credibility and worthiness of your own efforts into question, when there is so much more false information on Facebook, dangerously misleading bunk on Facebook, that I submit reports on, and am told, “This does not violate our Community Standards.”
