{"id":23061,"date":"2022-07-12T12:12:43","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T12:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/pegasus\/?p=23061&post_type=story"},"modified":"2022-08-15T13:32:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T13:32:13","slug":"culinary-inspiration","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/pegasus\/culinary-inspiration\/","title":{"rendered":"Culinary Inspiration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dasani<\/h2>\n

By Colleen Dieckmann<\/h3>\n

Creative writing MFA<\/a> student<\/em><\/h4>\n

The Dasani water bottle was glinting in the sun, and I looked
\ndown to see my sunglasses on my passenger seat. The old
\nMazda coughed and I swore again, knowing I had to pay the
\nauto mechanic or wrangle with a car salesman. Damn
\nFlorida sun, always pounding down. I put on the Dollar Tree
\nsunglasses and keep waiting for Tim to arrive from behind
\nthe Taco Bell. Things are always ringing, true, false, come,
\ngo, get together, break up, and the stains on the seats from
\nthe crunch tacos always spilling the sauce and never quite
\ncleaning up. And the scent of stress, fast-food factories and
\nthe half-life of service to the minimum of things, pay, tests,
\npossibilities and piles of bills and dreams and you should
\nhaves. Tim finally saunters out the back door, squints at me
\nthrough the noonday sun. He opens the passenger door,
\npushing the water bottle out of the way, taco juice dripping
\nfrom a take-out bag. \u201cLet\u2019s go,\u201d he says, and I put the car in
\ngear, thinking about other tricks to get out the car seat stain.<\/p>\n

Dieckmann hails from the windy city of Chicago and a small slice of Western Kentucky. She has published poetry and prose in <\/em>The New Madrid and\u00a0<\/em>Memphis State, along with performing readings across the United States. Now living in Orlando, Diekmann is a writing instructor at a local college and MFA creative writing candidate at UCF.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Anosmia<\/h2>\n

By Alex Gurtis \u201917<\/strong><\/h3>\n

English<\/a> alum and creative writing MFA student<\/em><\/h4>\n

nothing prepares you for the loss of smell
\nthe absence of cinnamon rolls
\non Christmas morning,
\nand the missing spice of opening presents
\nwith a smile made of icing
\nwhen you poured the London tea and only
\nthe warmth of steam tickled your nose
\nflavor seems so distant as though each sip
\nwas an attempt to swallow the Atlantic
\nand bring that looming ancient island
\ninto the tiny apartment we were trapped in
\nyou told me how it felt like pine needles lined
\nyour inner nose, dried, pricking
\nthe cast of cartilage, while you were unable to
\nleave to walk the dirt path leading
\nto the springs and singing birds
\nit now explains the kale in my sandwich on Saturday
\nand why the sandwich tasted so bitter, so sad,
\nand why I couldn\u2019t taste the saut\u00e9ed mushrooms
\nand garlic, oh how I can\u2019t wait to once again taste
\nyour saut\u00e9ed mushrooms with garlic between two
\nslices of bread on our porch with our pot of tea<\/p>\n

\n

Household Economics<\/h2>\n

By Chrissy Kolaya<\/h3>\n

Assistant professor of English<\/em><\/h4>\n

i.
\n<\/strong>His mother
\nwas an aficionada<\/p>\n

of rinsed
\nand reused
\nStyrofoam.<\/p>\n

Were you to go hungry at night
\nit wasn\u2019t
\non her watch \u2014<\/p>\n

oatmeal in the meatloaf,
\na hunk of government cheese,
\nsome dough
\nfried over the stove.<\/p>\n

At the picnic
\nyears of abundance later
\nhe finished his cabbage roll,
\nset his paper plate on the table,
\nand,
\nplastic fork in hand,
\nstabbed
\ntiny holes
\nthrough the Chinet \u2014
\na pattern
\nof a flower.<\/p>\n

What are you doing?<\/em>
\nasked his wife,
\nmarried in
\nfrom the good side of town.<\/p>\n

You<\/em>
\nshould do it, too,
\n<\/em>he tells her<\/p>\n

or she\u2019ll wash them all<\/em>
\nand use them tomorrow.<\/em><\/p>\n

ii.
\n<\/strong>That night
\nshe stood watch
\nas he went for the closets,
\nreaching deep into her hiding places
\nlaughing \u2014
\nSweet Lord,<\/em>
\nhow long have you had<\/em>
\nthis?<\/em> \u2014
\nholding out another
\nthen another
\nof her treasures,
\ndaughter-in-law
\nsilently egging him on.<\/p>\n

Each thing they threw into the trash pile
\nshe remembered
\nsaving for good,
\nsaving against want,
\na little something
\nput away
\njust in case.<\/p>\n

As the sun set,
\nhe hauled six trash bags \u2014
\nbrittle wrapping paper,
\ntinfoil smoothed flat,
\nnapkins from the bakery \u2014
\nout to the garage.<\/p>\n

And that night,
\nas everyone slept but her,
\nshe crept out to the garage
\nand saved it all again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kolaya<\/span> is the author of the novel\u00a0<\/em>Charmed Particles\u00a0and two books of poems,\u00a0<\/em>Any Anxious Body and\u00a0<\/em>Other Possible Lives. She\u2019s an assistant professor of English and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at UCF. You can learn more about her work at chrissykolaya.com<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Reading Terminal Market<\/h2>\n

By Tammy Komoff<\/h3>\n

Creative writing MFA student<\/em><\/h4>\n

Allow me to paint a picture \u2014 crowded narrow walkways between dark wooden food stalls. A sizzle and steam as short-order cooks saut\u00e9 vegetables for customers in black puffer jackets. Fishmongers purge their displays, sloshing melted ice <\/span>into sinks. And there, in the middle of the din, bright white and blue, is Olympus Gyro, a Greek lunch counter. It\u2019s like the Isle of Santorini has been dropped into a muddy puddle.<\/p>\n

The ghost of my father shaves lamb from a spit behind the counter. It\u2019s not really him. I know that, but I\u2019ve seen glimpses of him everywhere in the weeks since his death. This specter pulls me forward. I slide onto a leather stool and watch his busy hands make six dishes simultaneously. He spares me a quick smile, magically producing a menu and sliding it my way. My father did this job. Grandfather did too. That\u2019s what Greeks did if they were lucky enough to escape the Turkish Genocide and make it here, open bars and restaurants.<\/p>\n

I order spanakopita, spinach and feta between buttery phyllo dough. It should be crispy. It should crumble and flake down my sweater as I eat, but this has been cold and reheated. It\u2019s mushy, like grandma\u2019s. And suddenly I\u2019m 6 again and sitting on Daddy\u2019s lap eating last night\u2019s leftovers. While he and Grandma, and her sisters, Teta Luba, Teta Pandora, laugh and lie and cheat at poker in a creole blend of English and Greek. The ghosts surround me, and for the length of lunch, I am home again, in a place and with people lost to time. I feel their love.<\/p>\n

But the ghosts dissolve as I finish my meal. In a moment, I do as well, slipping into the dark-coated crowd. Olympus Gyro standing a bright beacon behind me.<\/p>\n

\n

Live Maine Lobsters<\/h2>\n

By David Gibson \u201921MFA<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Creative writing alum<\/em><\/h4>\n

In case you were wondering, I still have the lobsters \u2014 the ones I ordered for a romantic dinner from the back of The New Yorker<\/em>, from back when we were dating. They came wrapped in seaweed and the Portland Press Herald<\/em>, in a heavy brown box that said “Live Maine Lobsters” on the side, a box dented and dandruffed with wax.<\/p>\n

I told you about them in the hospital, the Live Maine Lobsters, which I had meant as a surprise, and I apologized that I wouldn’t be able to steam them up with drawn butter and chewy French bread, and in the spaces between the morphine and the physical therapy and the uncomfortably erotic catheterizations, I told you that they were probably dying on my doorstep even then, tilted into the crusty snow eight thousand feet above the ocean waves.<\/p>\n

I was there for a week, a week of pain waking me, of doctors putting me under. I knew you were there, three days and nights on that shiny green foldout, and then I knew that you weren’t for five days and nights more, but I thank you for driving me home \u2014 a prickly package of bandages and Percocet, four fractured vertebrae and a hematoma that swelled out of my lumbar like a purple-green parody of pregnancy. You said goodbye with a kiss I could not lean in for, and I kicked the cardboard coffin onto the carpet inside.<\/p>\n

In time, though, the Live Maine Lobsters revived, and began clacking over the linoleum beside the dishwasher, and curling up on the carpet under the coffee table, skittering to the shower when they heard the water run. I snipped away their rubber manacles and let them live off the crumbs that fell around my electric-lift recliner, crusts of cold pizza and ham-and-cheese sandwiches and chicken pot pies. At night, their antennae gave cold caresses to feet slick in compression hose and black from where the blood had pooled, until I pushed them away with the crook of my cane.<\/p>\n

They grew until they were the size of corgis. They knocked over lamps, and chewed up area rugs, made soggy nests of magazines behind the cushions of the sofa, so I moved them to the basement, which had always been damp anyway.<\/p>\n

I am married now, and we have three children. Sometimes after dinner when we’re watching TV, they ask me what’s in the basement, and I smile and say, “Daddy things,” and they go back to their iPads. I double-check the knob on my way to the kitchen.<\/p>\n

Some nights, when I know they are asleep, I roll up my pants and take the first two stairs into the basement, and I let the gray-green water lap over my feet. I toss in the mojo-spiced carcasses of rotisserie chickens and frozen packages of country-style ribs, and I watch their great shadows glide to where the bones sink. They are bigger now, massive even, large like sedans left to rust in the bottom of an abandoned quarry.<\/p>\n

Some nights, like tonight, I take off my clothes and hang them on the handrail below the light switch, and I inch myself off the landing. I float with my face to the moldy ceiling, bobbing in the waves that the Live Maine Lobsters carve in their basement abyss. I hear the clacking of their claws, feel their antennae \u2014 hollow as reeds \u2014 on my legs, my feet, my once-broken back.<\/p>\n

The water is deep, and it is dark, and it is so very, very cold.<\/p>\n

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