O'Hara's Holiday Meal

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.

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E-47VmFopE&list=PLyn1b86Ad_a6KrXeRMyX2LMSgStSeQUgb&index=146

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

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Frank O'Hara 

                            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!

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