One of my very favorite foods in the whole wide world is green. The food I hate most is, too. So when I learned that those two foods had recently been combined into a recipe called “peacamole,” my interest was piqued. To say the least.
Peacamole takes a traditional recipe for guacamole—typically consisting of avocados (my favorite green food), onions, garlic and a variety of other seasonings—and adds green peas. Which happens to be the green food I loathe. When the recipe appeared in the New York Times a couple of months ago, public reaction was swift. And very entertaining.
Not long after peacamole became a household word, I stepped outside my comfort zone and attended a writing workshop unlike any I’d been to before. It was an all-day poetry class, taught at the Learning Events Center in beautiful Madisonville, Tennessee, by my friend and poet extraordinaire Connie Green. One of our assignments was to write a haiku, which–I’ll remind you just in case it’s been a while since you took high school English—is a traditional, non-rhyming form of Japanese poetry. Each stanza consists of three lines. The first and last lines contain five syllables, while the middle line contains seven. The subject? A food you feel strongly about. Here’s my poem:
Green peas on my plate
Those tiny little peas with
The funny French name.
Green peas on my plate
Why does Mother hate me so?
Why won’t SHE partake?
Green peas on my plate
Shove them under the meat loaf
Slip them to the dog.
Green peas on my plate
Spit them into a napkin
Flush them down the john.
Green peas on my plate
Hold my nose, swallow them down
Then a slug of milk.
Green peas on their plate?
My own kids were not tortured
I served corn instead.
So there you have it. Now I can say that, on my writing journey, I’ve accomplished two new things. I produced a recipe column, with deepest apologies to fellow H-C columnist Drucilla Ray who really does know how to cook, and I published a poem. Oh happy day!
(August 23, 2015)