Sunday Kind Of Love

Love Sonnet XII- Pablo Neruda

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon

thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light

what obscure brilliance opens between your columns? 

What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Oh, loving is a journey with water and with stars,

with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour;

loving is a clash of lightning bolts

and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,

your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,

and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood

until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,

until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.

Cherry Frangipane Tart

75 grams granulated white sugar

4 tablespoons unsalted butter softened

1 large egg

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

45 grams almond meal 

1 tablespoon all purpose flour

1 sheet puff pastry, room temperature, (store bought or make your own)

Approx 22 cherries ( enough to cover the tart, add more or less to taste), split and pitted

slivered almonds to taste, and powdered sugar


Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

In a mixing bowl cream together the butter and sugar until the mixture is fluffy. Add the vanilla and the egg, and whisk to combine, then whisk in the almond meal and flour.

On a lightly floured surface, gently roll out the sheet of puff pastry so it's nice and even. Place puff pastry on a parchment lined baking sheet and then prick the pastry all over with a fork to vent steam and prevent irregular puffing.

Spoon the almond mixture onto the sheet of puff pastry, being sure to leave a 1/2 inch lip around the entire tart to form a crust. Top with cherry halves and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Next, remove the tart from the oven and top with the sliced almonds, return the tart to the oven and bake 10 more minutes and until golden brown*.

Serve warm or cooled, topped with a light dusting of powdered sugar ( or ice cream!).


*= know your oven! If it runs hot and you think it will burn the sliced almonds hold off until the last 5-7 minutes of cooking, so that the nuts on top only become toasted not, you know, toast.

New Blog Feature - Sunday Kind Of Love

I've been thinking a lot about inspiration lately. Part of the trouble with keeping up a blog for any length of time is keeping up your inspiration, and in these days with so many people with so many clever ideas it's easy to feel intimidated and crippled and like anything I do would seem in someway  like a rip off of... everyone. So what I like to do every now and then is take a step back from the millions of voices an opinions on one subject, and turn my attention to different forms of art to recharge my creative mojo.

A few months back I read an article on the benefits of memorizing and reciting poetry, and it reminded me of how as a result of a kind of old fashioned parenting, I had been encouraged to memorize poems as a child.
And even though it sounds like a tedious chore in a way, there was just something about memorizing  and reciting poems that just felt good, like the chanting and the repetition not only caused the actual emotion of the poem to take root in my heart, but like a paint brush had changed the colors of my mind from shades of grey to wild lime greens, pastels, and disco silvers that made me feel alive.

Inspiration comes when the brain lets go of the task at hand and focuses on something else entirely, and one of the best ways to release your brain is to focus on something emotional. For me memorizing and reciting poetry is a magnificent way to escape from the logical, analytical, rational mind space to the emotional, free-thinking creative mind.

I've decided to harness the creative energy this pastime provides, and I've created a new blog feature to appear every other Sunday, called Sunday Kind Of Love where I'll combine the poem that I'm memorizing with a dish or recipe it inspired. It won't always be an incredibly literal interpretation, I anticipate that most of the time it might seem a little abstract, but my aim is to convey to the emotion of the poem with a dish that I feel represents the same.

I'm starting this project out with my all time favorite poem, Pablo Neruda's Love Sonnet XII,  a poem that I've loved for years ( it's the reason the blog is named The Full Woman), though I've never taken the time before to memorize it.

I'm really excited to share this project with you and sort of mix things up on the blog a little.

See you Sunday.

-m