Every year for Valentine’s Day Maritime author A.F. Stewart hosts a BLOODY VALENTINE event gathering an assortment of slightly twisted authors who post their fiction and/or poetry all in the name of celebrating love.
This year’s theme is BAD LOVE.
I am taking part in this event and will be posting a piece of short fiction.
I have marinated the meat in the best red wine I could afford, five days now, with garlic onion and bay leaf and a little stick of cinnamon, lots of cracked black pepper, and lots of aching tears.
On the fifth day I rubbed it with olive oil and browned it well in a hot pan. I kissed it for luck.
Crane was right, it tasted bitter.
I carried the meat ceremoniously to a black metal roasting pan that I had beaten with a hammer into the rough shape of a coffin. I browned a sliced onion in the pan, added more tears, and a little butter for flavor.
Then I deglazed the fry pan with a bit of the marinade, stirring and scraping the caked-on bits from the pan, swilling it into the juice for more flavor.
I poured the contents into the coffin-roaster, covering the meat just a little over half way. I stuck the coffin-roaster into a slow oven, set to three hundred degrees. Nice and slow, everything took time, let the hurting leak on out.
I added the insecticide last.
I served the meal in a valentine shaped bowl, bought especially for the occasion. I set her body in her chair across the table from me. The freezer kept her when I could not. Her chest hung open like a secret treasure box. She had a smile on her face. I’d placed it there, a finishing touch before placing her in the freezer.
Finishing nails.
Then I spooned it up. Bitter, it tasted bitter, but no worse than finding your wife in bed with your best friend.
Heart meat is hard, unless you cook it properly.
I ate it up, every last drop.
I bit my lip until the gag reflex stopped working, and then I waited to die.
If I had timed it right, they would find us together before she thawed. A frozen tableau, two hearts, one broken in my chest and one well braised in my belly.
“Did you ever eat Colcannon, made from lovely pickled cream?
With the greens and scallions mingled like a picture in a dream.
Did you ever make a hole on top to hold the melting flake
Of the creamy, flavored butter that your mother used to make?”
(traditional Irish folksong)
There is going to be an awful lot written about Halloween in the next couple of weeks – but I want to tell you folks about a night that rural Nova Scotia folk sometimes refer to as – Cabbage Night.
In years ago Cabbage Night was a time for running with the shadows and whooping and yelling and building great bonfires and whispering in the darkness.
And giggling.
Cabbage Night was a night for giggling.
Every year, on the night before Halloween, children on the French Shore of Nova Scotia would stage great raids upon local cabbage fields. Here they would uproot the nastiest and foulest cabbage they could find. They would search through the bracken and ruttle of turned over dirt – hunting for the most frost-bitten and rotten cabbage they could uncover.
I’m not saying it smelled sweet, you understand.
These cabbages would be flung at the doors and walls of local cottages and houses. They would land with heavy satisfying slaps and splatters against the brick and siding of local residents.
And woe to those who were careless enough to open their door to a knick-knacking pack of children – for they would find themselves the unhappy recipient of a deftly rolled rotting cabbage head that would bowl forward just long enough to reach the clean spot in the center of the kitchen floor where it would break down into a nasty fragrant decaying mulch.
Also useful were the long, gnarled stumps left over from where the farmers had cut away the good cabbages. These too could be used as wonderfully groaty projectiles but it was far better to use them as cudgels. Great cabbage stump battles would be waged on the shoreline as two or three or thirty hardy – or perhaps foolhardy – young warriors would wage battle with the cruciferae cudgels.
This is what I love to do with my writing.
I root through old fields and midden heaps and graveyards and landfills of history. I rummage about and find something good and groaty and then I pull it out. An old ghost story, a legend, or just the bare hint of a tale.
Sometimes I unearth entire carcasses, other times it is nothing more than the shadow of a bone.
Whatever it is, I work with it and try to give it life. I add meat and build it up – one piece at a time. We writers must often play Frankenstein and stitch up our cadavers from the bits and pieces we discover along the way. We stitch each chunk of rotting cabbage together with love and care and precision – until we have modeled ourselves a fine fat Cabbage King.
And then we give it life. We let fly our thunderbolts of creativity and give those old bones and rotten meat life – of a sort.
Each of my numerous ghost story collections (Haunted Harbours, Wicked Woods, Halifax Haunts, Maritime Monsters and The Lunenburg Werewolf) are nothing more than a mass of stories based upon the bits of fact, fiction and folklore that I have stitched together. I am a great recycler, taking old yarns and giving them brand new life. I soup them up and update them. I pimp them out.
In the end that is what we writers do. We take our dreams and our memories and we stitch them together with our imagination and a well-placed lightning bolt of creativity and we give our stories life!
Let me leave you with a wee bit of a recipe.
It is considered customary to make yourself a pot of Colcannon on cabbage night. It is a simple and hearty dish made by mashing boiled cabbage with turnips and potatoes. Butter and salt as liberally as you like.
On Halloween a ring and a thimble were often added to the mixture. If your bowlful contained the ring it would signify and upcoming marriage in your future – if you were unlucky enough to find the thimble in your bowl of Colcannon it meant you’d be doomed to a single life.
Here’s the recipe.
I used 4-6 potatoes and one good-sized turnip. About 2-3 pounds. Peel them and chunk them and put them in a pot with enough cold water to cover them by at least an inch or so. Scatter a bit of salt over the spuds and neep. Boil until you can smoosh the potatoes with a blunt fork – maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Drain in a colander.
Chop a fair-sized cabbage while you’re waiting for the spuds to boil. Whistle if you must, but do not attempt to dance. It is bad luck to try and jig while you’re chopping cabbage – especially if you’re using a knife.
Put the pot back on the stove and set over medium-high heat. Melt a good wad of butter, about 5-6 tablespoons, into the pot and add the chopped cabbage. Stir it up some until it begins to wilt. While you’re waiting chop some onions. Try and look like you know what you’re doing – even if someone isn’t watching. Practice pays off. Stir in the chopped onions. This whole part of the process shouldn’t take too long. About two minutes for the cabbage and one minute for the onions.
Keep stirring and whistling. It is a fine aerobic workout.
Pour in a cup of milk. Traditionalists will use cream, but cream gives me heartburn. Reduce the heat to medium. Don’t burn the milk. Dump the spuds and turnip into the mot and mash them up, getting the cabbage and onion all smooshed together. It ought to look like somebody had dropped a Martian into a bowl of curdled puss and hit frappe.
Salt and butter and pepper to your liking. Serve it with meat – bacon or sausages or pork goes great. Fish is fine too, but it’s awfully healthy for wasting on such a wonderful cholesterol-riddle mess as good Colcannon.
Some people will tell you that you can use kale or chard or even mustard or dandelion greens in place of the cabbage. Others will talk of using parsnips instead of turnip.
People say a lot of things, don’t they.
Whatever you make it out off, have something cold to drink it with. I favor a thick knife-and-fork ale – say a Guinness or something local from a micro-brewery. Stock up on your incense while you’re at it. Colcannon can be mighty fumish, afterwards.
Just remember that there is no real recipe for anything – beyond boil it, fry it, bake it or barbecue. Cooking, like any form of creativity has no real rules to it. The main thing is to have fun.
I like to make my own version of Colcannon with purple potatoes and red cabbage and fat turnips and a gi-normous red onion. The resulting purple mulch is both tasty and filling – and I call it Nightcrawler Stew – after the teleporting blue-furred X-Man. A bowl or two of this will keep you warm and giggling the whole winter long.
“Yes you did, so you did, so did he and so did I.
And the more I think about it sure the nearer I’m to cry.
Oh, wasn’t it the happy days when troubles we had not,
And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot.”
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
If you enjoyed this article you might want to pick up one of my e-books. I’ve got a lot to choose from but REALLY for this time of year there would only be one single e-book that I would TRULY recommend.
This is the KINDLE version. Give it a sniff and see if it smells any different than the KOBO edition.
A couple of weeks ago somebody referred to me online as a “snow shoveling god”.
Let me make this perfectly clear. I am NO snow shoveling god. Rather, I am a fifty-five year old gent with a work ethic that runs bone-deep.
However, you CAN call me a kitchen god if you want to.
Why?
Why not?
I don’t cook fancy. I don’t cook pretty.
I just cook.
Cooking is about as easy as cold beer going down on a hot summer day.
Basically there are maybe three or four different ways you can cook something. You can fry it. You can boil it. You can bake it.
No matter what sort of gourmet restaurant you step into – no matter HOW blue the plate may be and no matter what price tag is dangling off of those vittles odds are that they were fried, boiled or baked.
It just isn’t as hard as some folks like to pretend.
I came home tonight and Belinda had a wonderful fry pan full of supper hash. There were leftover potatoes and leftover sausages and an onion and some carrots.
A side of ketchup and a bottle of beer and I was a happy camper.
“Okay,” she asked me. “What do you figure we ought to have tomorrow night?”
“Leave that me,” I said. “I have a plan.”
I looked in the fridge. We had another leftover sausage – one of those big fat smokey sausages with chunks of cheddar thrown in to the meat so that you can tell yourself that this stuff is healthy on account of cheese is made of milk and EVERYONE knows that milk is healthy – isn’t it?
I’m not talking fancy, you understand.
I looked through the pasta cupboard and found a box of rainbow rottini.
You know that stuff that is red and green and white? They make it with spinach powder and tomato powder added to the pasta so that you can ONCE AGAIN pretend that it’s healthy – on account of it’s got vegetables in it.
I found a half a yellow pepper and I pulled a big fat red onion out of the onion bucket. I boiled some water and threw the pasta in to boil. Then I threw a fry pan the size of Cincinatti onto the burner and chopped up the onion and pepper and sausage while the fry pan got hot.
It is important to remember that some of the sausage was NOT sliced evenly – so I had that throw those uneven chunks into my mouth and chew manfully. Then I moaned a little, like I had fallen into a waterbed full of stupefied cheerleaders.
A man has got to do what a man has got to do.
Then I spilled a little olive oil into the hot fry pan and threw the onion and pepper and sausage into the oil. Stirred like an occasional lunatic while keeping half an eye on the pasta, making sure that it did not boil over.
Occasionally I applied my lips to a happily opened bottle of beer.
When the pasta was ready I dumped it into a colander and then dumped the pasta back into the pot. I tipped the nicely sauted peppers and onions and sausage into the pasta.
For those of you who don’t know – saute is a five dollar word for “fried”.
Then I dumped in a package of Velveeta cooking cheese – garlic and herb flavor. I could have just as easily have added some butter and garlic powder – or shredded some cheese and added a little milk and stirred – but the Velveeta was in the fridge – which made it handy.
The whole thing took about as time and brain power as it took to write this blog entry.
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 