Introducing Literary City Guides!

Today I'm excited to unveil a new feature on Eat This Poem! Literary City Guides will introduce you to the best bookstores, libraries, restaurants, and other spaces that make a city unique. Your tour guides are local writers and bloggers with a passion for their towns, and I'm certain that a quick peek will have you packing your bags before summer ends.

We're kicking things off with three guides. I'm navigating the large expanse of Los Angeles, Stacy Ladenburger has enticing recommendations for San Francisco, and Tim and Shanna Mallon explore the charming streets of Nashville. Click on the photos below to visit these great literary towns!

New cities are already in the works, but please email me if you'd like to be a tour guide for your town!

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visit nashville!

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visit los angeles!

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visit san francisco!

"Looking for Melville Winery" by Nicole Gulotta + Mushroom Quesadillas with Brie and Honey

I've written this blog for a year and a half without so much a word about my own poetry, and there's a good reason for that, a simple reason. I stopped writing it.  

I'll spare some of the minutia, but shortly after my chapbook, Migration, was published in 2009 (it won the annual contest from Flyway: A Journal of Writing and Environment), my writing experienced a tectonic shift from poetry to food. That shift is partially responsible for leading me here today, confirming once and for all that there is a reason for everything. 

When I started Eat This Poem, my soul longed for poetry again. Not the writing of it myself (at least not yet), but the reading and enjoyment of it. The power. I've always believed that when the time was right, when enough poetry made its way through my veins like a daily dose of Vitamin D, I would put pen to paper again. I haven't gotten there yet. Right now it's just fragments, a line or two now and then, or maybe a draft of a poem that needs some attention, but nothing whole. 

Maybe sharing today's poem will help start me down that path again. As an Eat This Poem offering, I have "Looking for Melville Winery," from the aforementioned chapbook. Re-reading this poem five years later is like being thrust back in time. I wrote this after our first visit to Melville in the Santa Ynez Valley, a winery my husband and I are now club members of.  

The first time you make the drive off highway 246 towards Lompoc, you'll think you passed the winery entirely. The road is a long stretch, about 10 miles, and you might doubt your directions, or in our case, make a wrong turn and find yourself in the driveway of a farm, watching horses.  (We were also using a real paper map, not our iPhones.)

We called for directions and eventually arrived. As the poem describes, everything about the place was inviting. The vines were golden, the tasting room Dijon mustard yellow, and when the sun set, it cast a blanket of warmth over trees.

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Looking for Melville Winery

by Nicole Gulotta

The tasting room is honey, Mediterranean
stucco, vines the color of a coriander seed.

Small rocks split under the pressure of our tires
as we roll toward the tasting room. 

I press our map against the dash, watch wind
waft through the drape of a horses
                                                                 tail.

The world of this animal—nothing to do but gallop
into the shade of an oak

this gentle morning. 

Poem first appeared in the chapbook, Migration, published by Iowa State University Press. Reprinted with author's permission. 

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During the first pick-up party for our wine shipment in January 2012, Melville hosted club members in the barrel room, and in addition to serving library wines (poured by Mr. Melville himself), the catering team passed around truffled French fries and quesadillas filled with mushrooms and drizzled with local honey. I never forgot it.

When I pulled my chapbook from the shelf and lingered on this poem, I was surprised to have used the word "honey" to describe the tasting room approximately four years before honey would appear in an appetizer there. When I wrote this poem, Melville's wine club hadn't even been established yet.

It just means the world goes 'round, and hopefully you'll be able to look back and see the course, know it led you in the right direction. This need not last for days. We just need a long pause now and then, to take a deep breath and remember that every choice made built upon another like a ladder, and one day we'll emerge from the hanging and the climbing, the effort of it all, and just stand at the top of the hillside for a brief moment, full of nothing but peace and satisfaction.

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Mushroom Quesadillas with Brie and Honey

Spelt tortillas have become a favorite of ours, but use any tortilla you'd like. Normally, I cook quesadillas on the stove top, but I find that browning the tortillas, then melting the cheese in the oven helps get a nice assembly line going, and everything finishes at the same time.

Makes 4

 Extra virgin olive oil
1 package cremini mushrooms (about 8 ounces) 
1/2 teaspoon rosemary, minced
Salt and pepper
4 tortillas (fajita size)
8 ounces brie, thinly sliced
Warm honey, for drizzling
Parsley, for garnish

Preheat oven to 300 degrees and have a sheet pan ready. 

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil over a medium low flame. While the oil warms, thinly slice the mushrooms and add them to the pan as you go. Stir, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, until tender and golden. Scrape into a bowl.

Heat a bit more olive oil and brown the tortillas on one side only, then place them on the sheet pan. Now you can assemble. On each tortilla, place 4-5 slices of brie on one side, followed by a couple of spoonfuls of mushrooms, then a few more slices of brie. Sprinkle with salt and pepper before folding the other half of the tortilla over the top. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the brie is melted. Before slicing and serving, drizzle the quesadillas with honey and parsley (if using).

Living With Poetry | The Last Bookstore + Grilled Nectarine Panzanella

Living with Poetry is an occasional series where we explore how  poetry infuses our everyday lives. Catch up with past features here. Interested in sharing your own story about how poetry inspires you (in the kitchen or otherwise)? Contact me.

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The second floor of The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles is named "The Labyrinth," and for good reason. It houses 100,000 used books, all on sale for $1. Although a bargain, you actually pay more with your time, because it's easy to lose an hour or two browsing endless rows of books to find the gems you'll walk away with. 

Did I mention that none of the sections are marked? Actually, that's not entirely true, because as you snake through the aisles, you'll sometimes come across a large yellow post-it note with a guide like "Law" or "History," but more often than not, the section you're looking for won't be that easy to locate.  

I was determined to find the poetry.  

At first, there seemed to be no order. Romance novels were stacked next to get rich quick guides. But as I made my way through, there did seem to be a modest effort to cluster books by topic. Eventually, I stumbled on a few rows of cookbooks. There was a pie and pastries cookbook from Martha Stewart, probably one of the first books she published, and plenty of Better Homes and Gardens titles. Smashed between two 90s diet books was a slim, hardback copy of Epicurean Recipes of California Winemakers, a cookbook published in 1969 and I'm certain out of print, compiled by the Wine Advisory Board. I took it home. 

My husband was very generous to help me, and just when I felt like turning around, he pulled down a worn, paperback book of children's poetry. A ha!  Despite the fact that the lingering dust was starting to give me a headache, and my stomach was starting to grumble, I refused to believe that with 100,000 books on the shelf, there was no poetry.  

The poetry section turned out to be three small shelves on the opposite side of the vinyl records. There were some old copies of literary magazines like RATTLE and the Denver Quarterly, and some paperbacks of obscure poets. There was a Rita Dove collection that I almost took home, but it was covered in notes from the previous owner.

After an hour and a half, I walked away with my wine cookbook, and a copy of 2002's Best Food Writing. For $2.18, I'd say that's the best deal in town. 

We left just as I was beginning to feel faint with hunger, and walked two blocks over to Artisan House, an urban restaurant with a rooftop garden, seasonal dishes, and Sunday movie nights. With a philosophy of "Break bread. Share wine. Feed the soul," I knew we'd stumbled onto something good. We had other plans and left before Top Gun started, but we sampled a few memorable dishes during our meal, including the grass fed sliders below, and a salad of nectarines, burrata, hazelnuts, and a thick balsamic sauce. It was heavenly. The kind of flavors that both excite and cleanse your palate, and remind you what summer eating is all about.  Naturally, it didn't take long to bring those flavors home.

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Grilled  Nectarine Panzanella

I recently borrowed the flavors from our Artisan House meal for a summer panzanella. Precise measurements are tricky with salads, especially the kind that benefit from a "clean out the fridge" approach, but I hope my description will steer you in the right direction. The beauty of a festive salad like this is you can improvise a bit. If you have baby kale, use that instead of spinach. No mozzarella? Try goat cheese. Add toasted almonds! You get the idea.

A large handful of spinach
A large handful of microgreens
4 ounces fresh mozzarella, roughly chopped
4 slices prosciutto, torn
2 to 3 nectarines, sliced and grilled
1 small shallot, thinly sliced
4 green onions, grilled, then roughly chopped
3 to 4 basil leaves, torn
1/2 baguette, chopped into 1-inch cubes and toasted
Lots of chives

Dressing
Balsamic vinegar
A drizzle of honey
Salt & Pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil

Place all the salad ingredients into a large bowl and have two wooden spoons nearby. Give the dressing a quick whisk, then pour over the salad and gently toss until everything is evenly coated.