Resilient Pieholes

Add water from the tap — one cup — Who knows what recipes You’ve found, Chilling the water or heating it up. Wen shui is fine, just right. Add it to the flour, stir to make dough. You’ll need more strength than that to knead a dumpling pi that holds up to steam and soup …

We are baking a cake and nothing is wrong I do not have a pit in my stomach Lina comes in licks chocolate icing off the side of your hand I am unfazed in fact, the evening is still entirely ours you’re wearing your dead mother’s checkered apron, and we talk until our words drift …

by drea brown   1. on the eve of this new year, in the middle of a pandemic that brings daily surprise and death, i am safe. the only human in my house that needs to be fed, though the stout black cat nibbling my heels would say otherwise. tomorrow there will be plenty of …

by Gail Dottin   I only wanted one present from her for my birthday that year: teach me how to make them.  *** My parents coordinating picnic caravans with my fertile family and troops of replicating cousins, at least three weekends of each summer month. Club El Pacifico, the alumni association of Dad’s high school …

by Gail Dottin   2 lbs salted dried codfish (You can also use the pollock wanna-be-codfish which is cheaper) 6 eggs beaten  3 chopped scallions  1 small/med onion diced  1/2 cup o’ flour 1 tsp o’ baking powder 1 tsp o’ pepper sauce to taste 1/2 cup o’ veg/canola oil  * For the dried cod and pepper sauce, check …

When a pressure cooker whistles, it is urgent. Like an orgasm. I’m ready! Now! Shut me off before I overcook! It also thinks it can sing.

From March to June, I had erected in our dining room a remote learning station, helping three kids—a teenager and two preteens—figure out how to follow instructions, upload completed assignments on Google Classroom, and attend Zoom sessions. I too was teaching three courses online. It was a chaos that I managed, confident—as so many of us were—that it would soon be over.

by Kay Ulanday Barrett   Hello, I’m feeling hopeless. I can’t write poems. Instead, I’m trying to cook food that feels safe and reminds me of home. I’m Filipinx and my lola/grandma used to make charred eggplant omelets! Almost every weekend morning before Saturday cartoons as I was still in my baggy pajamas, my lola …

I can see the first iterations of the nameless chicken-breast-and-spinach dish being assembled in the attic kitchen of my grad school apartment, with its slightly sloping floors, its odd, leftover-wood cabinets (and countertops) thickly varnished so they shone.

I grew up with a full stomach, grew up with access to books, and grew up with parents that encouraged a life in the arts. These privileges, especially the last one, are not often granted to people of color. So I was grateful to have parents that passed down the rationale that since slaves could be killed for being literate, the written word must hold value, there must be great wealth with every turn of a page.