Here
we are having our first snow of the season. As big white flakes
quiet the world, we plan a dinner roasted on a sheet pan. Doing oven
time turns vegetables into their most flavorful offerings.
Everything cooks on one pan so cleanup is much easier. We dedicate
this to LGBT hero poet Frank O'Hara. There is a quick story about him
to help with dinner conversations.
Roasted
sweet potatoes full of natural flavors and not candied, fresh
broccoli with their inherent sugars brought forward and great white
meat chicken, wow. For holiday flavors and colors we sprinkle with
red onion, pecans, and dried cranberries.
Ingredients:
2
medium sweet potatoes peeled & diced into ¾-inch cubes (3 cups)
4
Tbsp olive oil, divided
1½
lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts, diced into 1¼ inch pieces
4
cups small broccoli florets
½
cup of a medium red onion, diced into chunks
3
cloves garlic, minced
¾
tsp of each: thyme, sage, parsley and rosemary
1/8
tsp nutmeg
Salt
and freshly ground black pepper
½
cup pecans, whole or roughly chopped
1/3
cup dried cranberries
Instructions
Preheat
oven to 400
degrees.
Line a rimed baking sheet and spray.
Do
your cutting:
Peel
and cube the sweet potato,
cut
the florets of broccoli and let soak in a bath of water with a bit of
vinegar to clean.
Chop
the onion, Mince the garlic.
Cut
up the chicken breasts into 1 ½ inch chunks. Toss with 2 Tbs of
baking soda. (this will help the browning)
In
a small bowl mix together the spices, seasonings, and salt &
pepper.
Place
sweet potatoes in a mound on the baking sheet, pour 1 Tbsp olive oil
over top and toss to evenly coat. Spread into an even layer and
roast in preheated oven for 15
minutes
(meanwhile chop and prep remaining ingredients).
Remove
sweet potatoes from oven, add chicken pieces, broccoli florets, and
red onion around sweet potatoes (just placing everything randomly).
Sprinkle
with garlic and drizzle everything with remaining 3 Tbsp olive oil
(focusing mostly on the broccoli so it doesn't dry) and toss with a
spatula to evenly coat.
Sprinkle
evenly with the seasonings. Toss again to evenly coat with
seasonings and spread out evenly (try not to overlap chicken pieces).
Return
to oven and roast about 16
- 20 minutes longer,
stirring once halfway through, until chicken registers 165
degrees in center.
Toss
in pecans and cranberries. Stir and serve together.
You
might want to warm some crusty bread with this. What a wonderful
holiday decorated meal to serve Master.
socialslave
To
satisfy and restore.
To
nourish, support and maintain.
To
gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to
nurture, assist, and sustain
…..I
cook!
Please
buy slave's cookbook:
The
Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM
via @amazon
=============================
1926–1966
Frank
O'Hara is now considered to be one of the foremost figures of
mid-century American poetry, recognized for his personal tone and
autobiographical subject matter.
He
founded a movement called Personism. He said, “It does not have to
do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague
idea, to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself),
thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving
vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings toward the poem while
preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person”.
O'Hara
is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal
group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from
jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and
contemporary avant-garde art movements.
Frank
O'Hara, the son of Russell O'Hara and Katherine, was born in 1926,
six months after his parents married. He grew up in Grafton,
Massachusetts.
O’Hara
went on to study piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He
spent four years there before joining the military and serving in the
South Pacific and Japan. He was stationed as a sonar man on a
destroyer, the USS Nicholas during WWII.
After
the end of the war he attended Harvard College and graduated with a
degree in music. He worked on compositions and was deeply influenced
by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art.
O'Hara
remained a fine piano player all his life and would often shock new
partners by suddenly playing swathes of Rachmaninoff when visiting
them. He was a deeply artistic person, finding passion in composition
and visual arts. It was also during this time period that he began to
write poetry.
Despite
his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950
with a degree in English. He then attended graduate school at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received his MA in 1951. That
autumn O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe
LeSueur, who was his roommate and sometime lover for the next 11
years. It was during this time that he began teaching at The New
School. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of
Modern Art and continued to write seriously. That year he
published his first collection, A
City Winter and Other Poems.
O'Hara
was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Artnews, and
in 1960 was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions
for the Museum of Modern Art.
Known
throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth,
O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life,
many from the New York art and poetry worlds.
His
initial time in the Navy, during his basic training at Sampson Naval
Training Center in upstate New York, along with earlier years spent
at St. John's High School began to shape a distinguished style of
solitary observation that would later inform his poems. Immersed in
regimented daily routine, first Catholic school then the Navy, he was
able to separate himself from the situation and make witty and often
singular studies. Sometimes these were cataloged for use in later
writing, or, perhaps more often, put into letters. This skill of
scrutinizing and recording during the bustle and churn of daily life
would, later, be one of the important aspects that shaped O'Hara as
an urban poet writing off the cuff.
O’Hara
met longtime partner Vincent Warren in the summer of 1959. Warren, a
Canadian ballet dancer, was the inspiration for several of O’Hara’s
poems.
His
second collection, Oranges:
12 Pastorals, was
published in 1953, followed by Meditations
in an Emergency in
1957. His final collection, Love
Poems, was
released in 1965.
O'Hara's
poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as
sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark
Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes
genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing
"material and associations alien to academic verse" such as
"the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the
daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music,
telephone calls from friends". O'Hara's writing sought to
capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry
should be "between two persons instead of two pages."
O'Hara's
most original volumes of verse, Meditations in an Emergency (1956)
and Lunch Poems (1964), are impromptu lyrics, a jumble of witty talk,
journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery.
O'Hara
continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life,
curating exhibitions and writing introductions and catalogs for
exhibits and tours.
In
1959, he wrote "I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that
stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the
street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout,
'Give it up!
"As
for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense:
if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight
enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing
metaphysical about it."
In
the early morning hours of July 24, 1966 a beach taxi he had been
riding in on the Fire Island beach broke down in the dark. Walking
home, O'Hara was struck by another jeep riding by. He died the next
day of a ruptured liver. Attempts to bring negligent homicide charges
were unsuccessful. O'Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long
Island. The painter Larry Rivers, a longtime friend and lover,
delivered one of the eulogies.
After
his death, the posthumously published collection, The
Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara won
the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.
The
46 year old gay man, Frank O'Hara, made an indelible mark on American
literature. He deserves to be remembered both for his intellect and
his joyous love of life!
===========================
