Meat

A few hours after grilling some meat, I almost always forget I still smell like smoke and feel a momentary alert: what’s burning in this house? No, wait, that’s my hair and shirt and pants. Standing near a wood-and-charcoal fire for a couple of hours passes along an odor that later morphs into house-on-fire, for a moment.

But it was dry and nearly warm by Sunday noon, and I was inspired to roll out the black ovoid grill – any simpler in design, and it would be a pit in the ground – and load it with charcoals jazzed up with lighter fluid, plus an assortment of large and small sticks, and fast-burning newspaper from bags in the garage. The papers were put there sometime in the fall of 2004. From the looks of them, there seems to have been some kind of election going on at the time that the newspaper people thought was important. A record of historic doings. I burned them anyway.

I cooked beef, pork and chicken. It was shredded pork, the sort you cook at your table at a Korean barbecue restaurant. So to do it up right after grilling, you wrap the cooked meat in a lettuce leaf dabbed with Sasum Deer brand red-pepper paste. Ah, that’s my kind of fusion cuisine: grilled up Occidental style, spiced by the Orient.

Got a postcard last week from Geof Huth, one of the nation’s foremost visual poets and a regular reader (hello, Geof). “Welcome to spring, tho I expect Dees to complain about the lack of vernality in his blog,” he writes (the card is addressed to all the Striblings under this roof).

Been meaning to get around to just that. Sunday’s short warm spell was the exception. On Friday morning, for instance, we woke to a thin coating of snow everywhere. By about 10, it had melted. A few hours later, huge snowflakes started to fall, coating ground and bare trees. It too melted in a few hours. The equinox may have passed, but that’s not springtime. Spring hasn’t had its first cup of coffee yet. It’s still in its bathrobe, thinking about whether to shave first or make some eggs.