(Post by Kirsten--blog host, writer, high school English teacher)
I don't know about your family, but mine is eating some meals we've never put on a plate before. It's hard to get all of the ingredients I'd normally shop for right now, and so my kitchen holds a mishmash of what I could find: canned peaches and pears, ricotta cheese, kale that a neighbor gave us, a lot of lemons, white beans, more tuna than I'm excited about eating, frozen fish. We're making what we can of these odds and ends. I whipped up a lemon-ricotta cake the other night that was amazing--something I would never normally have made. We also have become very fond of pasta e fagioli, which sounds fancy, but is just noodles and beans. It's tasty though!
All of this has made me think about my grandparents, who were children during WWII and so learned to make and enjoy simple meals with few ingredients. My grandpa loved toast with a fried egg on top, soaked in (wait for it) warm milk. He also liked chicken liver, and canned deviled ham, and condensed milk. These aren't foods I'd search out myself, but what I realize is that taste--and by that I also mean pleasure, joy, a sense of treating yourself--is all about perspective. Which has led me to think about the way that constraints, or limiting some of the possibilities open to us, often leads us to joyful discoveries we'd never have found if everything was available to us.
This works for dinner and for writing. When we write with constraints in place, we're often surprised by the creative pathways our minds find to work within (and around) those limitations. Here's a beautiful craft essay by Rebecca Hazelton on this topic (as well as some links to poems you might love).
So, in the spirit of seeing where creative constraints lead us, below is today's exercise.
Write (in any form you like) about a meal, but limit yourself in one of the following ways:
1. If you are writing prose, write exactly five sentences, and keep your word count to between 450 and 500 words. Be precise about the word count.
2. If you are writing poetry, organize your poem into exactly five stanzas, and keep your word count to between 45 and 50 words. Be precise about the word count.
* For an extra challenge, include all of the following words: yellow, zinc, starch, sour, clotted.
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