MAKING PICALLILI WITH MAGDALENA AND NINA
Today was a fun day at The Castle. I’ve been planning on stripping the tomato vines of all the green fruit that will not ripen before a frost gets them. I’m geared up to make piccalilli. I shopped last week and brought home red bell peppers and an onion. Today was the day. I bought a new CD that I’ve listened to in pieces and parts and it was my intention to play the whole thing through at high volume during the piccalilli process. The CD is Bemba y Chichon. My new friend Magdalena is the artist. There is music and there is poetry reading of the finest kind. I am tuned in to the words and the reading.
I didn’t realize how much fun it was going to be. Magdalena provided the sounds, the vibes to transform my kitchen at The Castle into a backyard kitchen with smells of vegetables and spices and chopping noises. I swung my hips and shoulders to the music as the knife swung and sliced tomatoes, peppers, and onions. My head was in Maine but everything else was south of the border. I was in Puerto Rico, Cuernavaca, Cuba, Guam, lots of places where I’ve been happy and helping prepare food for a fiesta or being productive and so human and of the earth.
The stove top eventually had two kettles. One with the piccalilli and one with water heating for canning to sterilize the pint jars, seals and rings I had just washed. I spent about four hours from start to finish. The yield was seven and a half pints. Magdalena moved me with her poem La Loca. I have written one on the same subject; men calling women ‘crazy’ when the man has run out of angry adjectives and wants to hurt someone badly. I love Magdalena’s reading of La Loca. Her wonderful acting voice and expressions bring it alive and it is easy to re-awaken all the times I have used the adjective on others in the past before I came to be evolved.
Chopping, slicing, combining the fruits and vegetables with the vinegar and sugar and ginger and raisins. I modified the recipe eventually to incorporate cumin and salt. POW! It is delicious! The taste, the music, Magdalena’s voice, and thinking about Nina in my kitchen. We three were moving and swaying and shouting our truth to the gods of food and heat and spices and stirring. Singing with praise to using what is in our ground. Feeling that grounded existence from below the roots. Listening to the huge kettle with the hot water bath ready for the canning jars and lids and rings. What a beautiful day it was.
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Playing Fair and Being Kind 