"Last Bite" by Kyle Potvin + Dark Chocolate Bark

Seasons have a way of getting under our skin.

For T.S. Eliot, it's the "cruellest month." For Robert Frost, "mud season." For Edna St. Vincent Millay, this month "comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers."

The dirt, the flowers, the heat, the ice. Any distinctions that befall the month we're enduring swirl in our consciousness like wind slapping the windows, begging to be let in. Over the years, seasons signify milestones and inspire us to burrow, clean, buy notebooks, travel, and cook the food that grows best in February or May or October, and I find there's something both comforting and unnerving about the consistency of these cravings year after year.

"Black Radish" by Lisa Coffman + Linguini with Radishes and Black Pepper

"They are so other
from what we say they are
they might as well be hidden."

Three lines from today's poem precisely describe the plight of the radish. The poor, invisible radish. Some are lucky, pulled from the stem, dipped in salted butter, and eaten while sitting under the shade of a willow tree, preferably by a river. These are the most adored of all radishes. But most are forced raw into our salads as something of an afterthought, greens hastily discarded to the garbage bin before they have a chance to scream, wait, I'm useful!

So it goes.

Pablo Neruda, Blood Oranges, and Sour Cream Donuts

Pablo Neruda knows a little something about love. Entire volumes of his poetry are dedicated to the subject, and I have to ask, does it get any better than this?

“But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.”
― Pablo Neruda

In ancient Greece, odes were accompanied by music and dance, but the romantics utilized the form in a way its most recognizable today, as a tool to meditate on a singular event, person, or object. Odes are not explicitely love poems, but they do require the careful reflection and observation of one thing at a time. Especially the odes about food, I would say Neruda is utterly enamored with the ingredient he's writing about.

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, he declared that "We [writers from the vast expanse of America] are called upon to fill with words the confines of a mute continent, and we become drunk with the task of telling and naming." Neruda's odes accomplished this task of 'telling and naming' with great beauty and grace on the page. Just bite into these lines from "Ode to an Orange."