…gathering ingredients together to make a dish is like assembling images, lines, phrases in order to make an essay or a poem. Signals, emblems. On a May afternoon, I cut a huge basin of kale, buckhorn plantain, a leafy perennial chicory I planted years ago for its spring leaves and later for its blue flowers the colour of the sky. I cut dandelion greens, spinach, rapini going to flower, a few leaves of blood-red sorrel. I cut a sheaf of chives, a bouquet of parsley, long strands of the mint that came from John’s English grandmother in his mother’s summer suitcase, dill as green as the spiny wood ferns on shady trails. A tub of feta cheese, 4 brown eggs, filo pastry as delicate as a child’s skin, and greeny-gold olive oil. An lyric essay, leaving the confines of its syllabic lines, the rhetorical device of repetition emphasizing the soil, sunlight, a quick rinse in cool water with a dash of salt to deter snails, a essay in bitter green. Hortopita, from χορτα, horta, a term meaning weeds, and πιτα, pita, meaning pastry*.
*Endnote: puffed and lovely, ready to eat.
...Theresa Kishkan 