The Best Damned Lemon Bars In The West!

Before you poo poo the tawny color of my lemon bars, hold your horses. These are the best lemon bars you will ever eat. And they're all organic, and really good for you. Lots of vitamin C in there. So here's the dealeo. I always want to love lemon bars, but they always fall short. They're never tart enough for me, and the crust is lackluster. So I took a stellar recipe from dessert guru Alice Medrich, and honed it so that I could always have the lemon bar of my dreams, one that is super tart and caramely. The reason my lemon bars are so dark, the crust and the filling, is because I make a buerre noisette for the crust (instead of just melting the butter, you go further and actually brown the butter). And if anyone snubs your tawny little bars, it's just more lemon bar heaven for you!

Here are the specs:

Preheat the ov to 350, and position the oven rack in the lower third of it.  Fit an 8" round baking pan with removeable bottom, and line it with parchment paper.  Butter the sides of the pan.

FOR THE CRUST:

8 TB butter (1 stick, melted to buerre noisette (that just means to keep melting till it turns a golden brown. Keep your eye on it so the milk solids don't burn)

1/4 cup organic sugar

3/4 tsp pure vanilla extract

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup all purpose flour

FOR THE FABULOUS LEMON FILLING:

1 cup organic sugar

3 TB all purpose flour

3 large eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest

1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

1/2 cup strained fresh squeezed lemon juice (I think I used 4 smallish lemons, and I used the zest from all of them too)

MAKE THE CRUST:

In a medium bowl, combine your buerre noisette with your whirred sugar, vanilla and salt. Add the flour and mix until just incorporated. DON'T overwork, and don't be tempted to add more flour to the mixture. It will look very damp. Press this damp ball over the bottom of the foil lined pan. I went up the sides with the dough just a hair so it would encase some of the filling at the edge. Why not, ya know? Bake this baby for 25 minutes or so, until its golden brown all the way through the center. mmmm! (I thought this would be delicious eaten on its own.)

WHILE THE CRUST IS BAKING, MAKE THE FILLING:

Stir together your eggs and vanilla with the sugar until incorporated. Add the lemon zest and juice, stir. Stir in the flour. You can use a whisk to make sure all the lumps are out, but don't let the mixture get frothy or your lemon bars will have a frothy scum on the top.

When the crust is ready, turn the ov down to 300 degrees, pour the filling into the hot shell, and bake for 20 - 25 minutes or until the filling does not jiggle in the center when the pan is tapped. Set on a cooling rack and cool completely in the pan before cutting.

To cut, run a knife around the circumference of the pan, then pop out the bottom.  Cut into wedges and devour.

PS, I put mine in the fridge after 20 minutes of cooling. I couldn't wait any longer, and wanted to speed up the process. Came out just fine!

Mangia bene, vivi felice!

Braised Beef Short Ribs

There is a difference between a cook and a chef. No, it's not pedigree or formal education. The difference between a cook and a chef is attention to detail. A cook prepares food to feed  himself in effort to get that blasted necessity out of the way. He happily eats frozen pizza and tosses his prepackaged salad greens with bottled dressing. A chef, on the other hand, makes the rounds to several markets to get exactly what she needs to prepare a meal from raw ingredients. Nothing packaged (OK, tomato paste aside), nothing harried. Nothing sub-par. If one market has the best black kale, she will stop for that one ingredient, then move on to the specialty cheese shop for a perfectly ripened epoisses and so on, until the components of her meal have been carefully pulled together from the most reliable resources. A chef does not follow trends or dive into the buzz. 


Bear with me, you impatient American. You are going to have to read through this blog before starting your meal. Attention to detail and getting yourself prepared before you start to add fire to food is of the utmost important if you want to be distinguished from the cooks.


Today I'm going to teach you how to make a simple braise. Beef short ribs. I went to the meat market today and saw plump, lovely, blood-red ribs. I had no idea what I was going to buy before I set out on my way, and that, again, is the difference between a cook and a chef. A cook has a shopping list. A chef is an clean slate. She goes to the famer's market or the meat market and decides Johnny on the spot what she will make for dinner that evening, and her decision is dictated by what's freshest.  A chef lives in the moment. A cook stocks his larder with processed crap that will endure in the freezer into the future. You don't want to be confused with the cook.


Let's get our 'place' (pronounced 'plahs') together, shall we?


Just what is this 'place?' Mise en place is the French term for 'putting in place', or more commonly, but not grammatically correct, 'everything in its place.' It means to gather your ingredients together, and get them prepped before cooking. As you can see, the theme of preparation continues. Preparation is an essential part of cooking well. By the time you get to the stove, everything that you need to prepare your meal should be chopped, organized and at the ready if you want it to turn out the way it's supposed to be. If you are busy chopping and prepping AS you are cooking, your focus will be diverted and you will burn things and generally be out of touch with what's going on in the pot.


First things first. Get your butt to the market. And think seasonally while you're there. The good thing  choosing a farmer's market over the grocery store is that everything presented is seasonal, and most often organic. Today I started with meat. I got my beef shortribs from a great butcher here in L.A., and that dictated, along with my kitchen arsenal, what I would make. I, regrettably, did not bring all the stuff that I own to L.A. from the Bay Area, alas, I brought my most important bits (though I am still wringing my own neck for not bringing my Kitchenaid mixer. Ugh!) Here is what I find that I cannot live without:


My glorious mortar and pestle (p.s., as I'm writing this, the smell of my shortribs is growing more and more fragrant).

I rarely use a blender or a food processor. My muscle and this granite baby IS my food processor. I make everything from pesto to vinaigrette in it. It is the one kitchen implement I would take with me, if stranded on a deserted island.

Next, my cast iron. Stop bellyaching about the weight. Aluminum cookware is for shite, unless it's anodized. And don't even think about cooking with that non-stick stuff. It's not healthy and it does not conduct heat the way you need it to if you are a serious chef and not a mere cook (if you are a cook, go for it. The aluminum crap aisle at Ralph's has an entire selection of cookware just waiting for you).  Cast iron, steel and copper is the way to go. Anodized aluminum is fine. And yes, you can cook tomato in cast, you just have to be quick about it, and never let it sit in the iron or it'll turn black. Long cooked things do not bode well in naked cast iron, even non-acid things. In this case, you might pick a pot that has been cloaked in enamel. Le Creuset, for instance. Great choice. Later on, I will teach you how to make an omelet in an anodized or steel pan, without non-stick. Yeah. You're a bad ass. You can do it.

Moving along.

First, I want you to take all those lovely veggies you got from the farmer's market, and here's what you found: carrots (3 large), celery - just the lovely yellowee hearts as pictured, the heart yields the most atomic flavor), onion (one medium), 3 cloves of garlic (FRESH. If it's not fresh, it's useless. Buy your garlic often and in small quantity), one medium leek. You will also need copious amounts of red wine (I'm using a cab. Just make sure it's wine that you would actually drink, not cheap swill), dried porcini (a good handful), a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, a bit of canned organic whole Italian plum tomatoes, and some marjoram. I also got four pounds of short ribs. This meal, along with a salad, is enough for four peeps.

Alrighty. First, reconstitute your mushrooms. Don't ask me how much water. You're a chef, not a cook. Use your gut. A cup of water? Two? Put 'em in a pot with water, boil. Turn off heat. Set aside.

Next, RINSE EVERYTHING. Nothing will kill a meal faster than grit. If someone gets a bit of grit, your credibility is ruined. Trust me. Take special precaution when rinsing the leek and the herbs. For the leek, clean it up like this: chop off the dark green tops just where it starts turning chartreuse. Then take your knife and shave off any dark green bits that might linger until you wind up with a nice pale green stalk. Slice it in half length-wise, then thinly slice it up in demi-luna (half moons). Place this pile in a bowl of cold water, swish it around with your hand to loosen the grit, and let it sit while you chop the other veggies. Then strain it through a fine-meshed sieve and rinse again in the sieve. Dice your carrot, onion and celery. Dice your garlic. Yes, dice. Don't whack it and smash the clove then haphazardly brutalize it with your knife like so many people do. This releases all the juices from the garlic and it can overpower your dish. Remember, you are a chef, you are in control if your product. Just how do you dice that tiny clove? Like you would anything else. Peel it, keeping it in tact, and slice it crosswise, then lengthwise, then crosswise. This is the perfect time for you to be practicing your knife skills. That pile in front of you should be uniform in size so that it cooks uniformly. If you add a sundry of sizes to the pot, they won't cook evenly and you'll end up with large chunks of onion and dissolved pieces of carrot.

A word about the herb. After you've rinsed it, pat it dry with a paper towel. If you chop it wet, you'll end up with a pile of mush. Pull the leaves off of the stalks, give it a good, rough chop. Done.

    mirapoix: garlic, onion, leek, marjoram, celery hearts, carrot

Next, take your short ribs, rinse and PAT DRY (*I had the butcher cut four nice ribs in half). By patting them dry they will brown nicely in the pot. If you don't pat them dry, the water will cause them to steam. And where's the flavor in steamed ribs? Next, liberally salt and pepper them and dredge them LIGHTLY in flour. The flour will add body to your braise.

OK, can I just go off on a tangent here? Before we start adding heat to our product? First, we cook with all our senses. Not just smell. We see, we smell, we HEAR. Cooking is a sensual pleasure, which is why I'm convinced that so many Americans don't cook. Still. Even after the food revolution. There should be NO reason why Trader Joe's has such a large audience. The sad truth is that we are not a sensual people. The French are sensual. The Italians and the Spanish are sensual. Take a train from France to Italy to Spain and you'll practically be having a love affair with yourself by the time you get to Barcelona. This is your chance to be sexy. By the time you are ready to brown this meat, you should be fairly liquored up on the bottle of wine you've just opened to make this dinner for you and some hottie you're trying to impress.

Next, take your ribs and Brown all sides. Here's how: Pop those ribs into a cast iron pot (enamel coated), where you've heated olive oil to lightly smoking. Extra Virgin. Anything other than extra virgin is shite. Brown 'em. All FOUR sides. Don't be a lazy ass and just do one or two. The browning is what adds flavor to your finished braise. And don't crowd them on top of one another. They should fit in one layer. You may have to brown these in two batches if your pot is not large enough to hold one layer. And I cannot stress this enough, chef, CONTROL THE HEAT. Start it on high, but lower the heat to medium high as you cook. Don't let the ribs burn, and for god's sake, don't fiddle with them. Don't keep flipping them about or they will never brown! Let them brown, flip. Let them brown, flip. You get the idea. And LISTEN. If it's sizzling and smoking, you've gone too far. Pull back on the heat. You have to learn to cook with your senses, your sense of hearing and sight should tell you to straddle that heat so that it's not too high, but not too low. If it's too high, the flour will burn. If it's too low, you will sweat the meat rather than brown it. If you sweat the meat, you will end up with an unappealing, gray braise, and trust me, no one who has ever served a gray braise has ever gotten laid. So, think, SEXY, browned. SEXY sizzle. SEXY control the flame.

By now, with your mirepoix all chopped up, the wine flowing, your amour-to-be enamored of you, you should be strutting your stuff, so work it!

When you're done browning. Pull the ribs out of the pot, set them aside on a plate. Pour the old oil out of the pot, return the pot to the heat, kick it up to HIGH heat and add some wine. Don't ask me how much. A cup? More?  You are now DEGLAZING. What is deglazing? Well, After you've browned something, as you've so sexily done with your ribs, you take a liquid like stock or, in this case, wine and you add it to the pot with all those brown bits stuck to the bottom, and the bubbling action along with your constant scraping incorporates all those lovely, brown, FLAVOR-PACKED bits into what will be your sauce. So scrape scrape scrape as the wine starts to bubble. and keep scraping until all the bits are incorporated, and the wine reduces to a nice, ALMOST syrup viscosity.

While you are doing this, spoon your lovely mushrooms out of their reconstitutional water, give them a good squeeze and set aside. Pour this water through a sieve lined with cheesecloth to filter out the grit into a bowl. And YES you can do two things at once. You're a chef, not a cook. Keep an eye on your deglazing, stirring and deglazing while you're dealing with your mushrooms. Chop your mushrooms up. Don't get crazy. Just whack the pile of shrooms a few times with your knife.

Check on your deglazing. When you've gotten to the ALMOST syrupy viscosity, I want you to throw in all your lovely veggies, along with your mushrooms, a good dose of extra virgin olive oil, and SALT. I cannot stress how important it is to SALT ALL YOUR LAYERS.

Another tangent: salting your layers is imperative. You've salted your meat, now you are salting your poix. If you don't salt as you go, your braise will be bland. You can't just salt the dish at the end and think that it'll suffice. It won't. SALT EVERY LAYER SO THAT EVERYTHING IS SALTED EVENLY AND THROUGHOUT. You should never have to offer salt during a meal, because you've taken the time to make sure that you've salted throughout. When you salt throughout, you have coaxed the flavor from every ingredient within a dish, every step of the way. SALT THROUGHOUT. And if anyone asks for salt during a meal, kick them the hell out of your house. You don't need that person in your life, because he has neither taste nor culture.

Onward.

I want you to sweat these veggies. Don't brown them. Don't burn them. Sweat them till they're good and al dente. You thought that term was reserved for pasta? Wrong. Al dente translates as 'to the tooth', which is what you want your veggies to be, cooked, but with a give in the bite. The salt will aid in the sweating. What does it mean to sweat? It means to soften the veggies without adding color. You sweat on low heat, and it coaxes the moisture out of them, nice and easy. You will, indeed, actually see beads of 'sweat' exuding from your poix. AND LISTEN. When you add the veggies, you can hear them HISS. When they start to SIZZLE CRISPLY, turn the heat down, and keep turning the heat down in degrees so that they always, only, ever, merely hiss. Like a whisper. Sexy, right? This is cooking with the senses folks!

When you've sweated your poix down to al dente, add a good dollop of paste and about a cup of canned Italian tomato. Kick that heat up to HIGH.

    My spoon is pointing to PRODUCT 1, tomato paste.

    My spoon is pointing to PRODUCT 2, canned tomato.

I want you to now CARAMELIZE your tomato product. What I mean by that is, you have to cook that tomato out. It's a raw product now, yes, RAW. This is where you're a chef. You refer to your ingredients as RAW and PRODUCT. What you have now is RAW TOMATO PRODUCT. It's just begging you to turn it into something sexy. I want you to caramelize it. This is where smell comes in. Stick your nose over the pot. Smell that RAW tomato? It smells sour and tomatoey. Well, I want you to cook it out till it smells SWEET. Do NOT leave the stove now. I want you to stir like nobody's business right now. You will see the bottom of the pot start to darken. DON'T BE SCARED. This is called a FOND. A Fond is that brown crust that is forming. Spin the pot (stoves all have a hot spot. Spin the pot to even out the cooking). Scrape up this fond. And by god, don't even think about turning down the heat!

See how the picture above is a caramel brown, and the one below is getting little darker? Do you smell that sweet tomato smell? YES! You've just owned that tomato! It's no longer raw product, it's yours!

NOW POUR IN SOME WINE! FAST!

This will halt the fond. Take your wooden spoon and scrape up the bits on the bottom. Incorporate it all. High heat. Nice. Now add your reserved mushroom 'liquor', which is the nice, dark liquid that your mushrooms were reconstituting in.

Now I want you to pare off some lemon zest. NOT rind. Just the yellow skin. Use a paring knife, and be careful, just trim off about 2 or 3 strips of that yellow zest. No white pith. Add this to the pot.

Now add your ribs, and make sure you pour in that lovely blood that rendered from the meat while it was resting. Nestle that meat right into that lovely base that you just made.

Bring to a boil, and then pop it into the oven.


Braise for 45 minutes at 350, then turn down to 250 for 2 hours. The lower the heat, the more time it takes, the more tender the meat becomes. If you rush it, the meat will never have time to get tender. Don't be a lazy American. You should have started this braise at 3 in the afternoon to be ready by 7:15.


Take the ribs out and check them. Poke them with a fork. They should fall off the bone. They should be that tender. When you are satisfied with their tenderness, pull them out of the oven and let them rest for 10 minutes. Then serve. Two nice big ribs per person, along with salad and wine, maybe some pureed potatoes. This dish is as rich as they come because of all the collagen in that beef, and you are DEFINITELY going to need to pop another bottle of wine to help you get through it. There is nothing better than this!

Mangia bene, vivi felice!

Perfume Of Hours Past

          The Old Man labored up the stairs, resting along the way, for  he was a man of seventy-five and had lifelong found an enduring companionship in table wine and the liquors that rarely left the compass of his native country without some illegal contribution.  He paused to adjust the bristle of his woolen cap, darkened with damp at the band, before surveying the staircase before him, its slant as weary as he and creakier still, its crevices clotted with dust and grime.  His murky eyes set in staunch determination, his chest plump with labored breath, he clutched a paper bag softened with the sweat of his wringing hands.  And a nebulous, gray light filtered down through the ferrous grate of a high window, the wavy pane behind it perverting an assortment of urban fowl, pigeon, raven and the like, as they fluttered by.

         This building, whose grandeur had long ago been slivered into thin pockets, was once a single family dwelling, its past riddled with stories of tragedy and remembered in the dark tales of restless specters roving the corridors in want.  A small child with yellow plaits and the stain of tuberculosis deep in her breath had opened the rubbish chute one sunny afternoon past, and slipped down the gaping hollow.  Its heavy iron door was barred that eve by the grief of her mother who carried the blame in her languishing soul to an early grave.  A white-haired dowager rocked in a chair of heavy oak over the hardwood floor outside the door of a psychic who read tarot cards and the palms of the wretched to cover her lease: she kept an arrangement of fruit and candles, their wax spilling over the desiccate planks, as offerings in neat piles at the old woman’s ghostly feet.  There was something about time in this place.  Dust covered, it wended through fissures in the plaster, behind the peeling walls with old bones bent by the weight of despair.  The Old Man paused to listen to the sound of the wind as it howled up through the rubbish chute just outside his door.  Some said it was the song of the child.  He thought sometimes of prying the warped boards loose to release her fettered spirit into the ether.

~

         The dreary kitchen, its walls stained with a dearth of sunlight and the residue of tobacco, extended its loneliness as The Old Man stood wheezing in its care, the heavy ham of his heart thumping thickly in the hollow of his rib.  He tugged at the timeworn cord, tacky with cooking greases and tar, to employ a sallow light from a solitary bulb that dangled from a nipple set center the ceiling:  he had never found use for a shade.  His carbon-pigmented fingers, fat as blood-sausages, looked as though they could positively burst.

         A man of cartoonish bearing, Alois wore his Frenchness like fine cloth wholly on the verge of pomp.  His speech retained its floral inflection, laden with z’s and breathy r’s, a proliferation of nasaly sounds, despite three decades in the United States.  I do not understand zee bozzer, what is zee hairry?  He might say with a shrug and a raised brow to underscore some irrelevance.  His florid nose, vericosal and round as a mushroom cap,  gleamed bright as an enthusiastic African violet thriving on an Eastern exposed window ledge.  His straw colored teeth, abbreviated in number as much as they were in usefulness, were crackled and stained in the crevices with discount chaw and hard living, the same rough shape of an old workhorse’s and at least as hardwearing.  He smiled easily and vigorously despite them.

         The Old Man shuffled to the sink and took up a short glass with a bulbous end set to dry on the eroded surface of the porcelain drain board.   The tic-tic of the lazy faucet plucked at the quietude alongside the muffled voices of an evening program on the opposite side of the thin wall.  This wall, with its curdled insulation betwixt, partitioned the lives of the lonely, packaged remorse and dreams lain to rest into neat little squares.  Nevertheless, an ancient bottle of absinthe sat beside a small chipped dish mounded with sugar cubes and a slotted spoon of ornate argent, its battered grandeur speaking of its usefulness.  The Old Man placed the glass atop the table that had long lost its luster, and his paper package beside.

         It was his only liaison now, and Alois drank to remember, perhaps to forget, because all that remained was a clouded muddle of fond recollection fortified with regret.  Paris had become a faded photograph, its edges curling in on itself and obscuring the selvedge of his memory.  Only snippets of antediluvian images remained, the echo of a girlfriend’s laughter and the sweetness of her hair like red field poppies swaying in the silver mist of a fine spring day, a table littered with bits of crumb and leftover conversation.  Even this smudged with the film of endurance.

         The Old Man pulled a dimpled bottle from the ice box, frosty with water and scarcely half full, then dumped his potato body into a simple wooden chair, both releasing a deep and satisfying sigh.  He plucked the brittle cork from the bottle’s head and poured a measure into his awaiting glass, filling only the bulbous cavity, of course; next he lay the spoon o’er the rim and gingerly placed one stone of sugar atop its filigree.  The water trickled past the sweet and transmuted the chartreuse below into a milky haze with nothing less than the magic of alchemy.

         He took a modest sip and closed his eyes as though he kissed a bygone lover. The poppy lover with the windswept hair.  She wore stout heels, he remembered, and silk nylons the color of a new fawn.  Her skin was the unblemished cream of the Poitou-Cherentes, her lips the red of a Moulin Rouge eve plunged deep in the abyss of inebriety.  Her beauty made no apology, handsome and untamed, and she accepted no aid of compliment.  She smoked cigarettes while she danced, and drew her skirts up too high like the flamenco dancers of Andalusia born with gypsy blood coursing through their veins and gold hoops dangling from their earlobes.

         The sound of music and the hollow cluck of soldier’s heels swamped the freshly liberated streets, he remembered.  Paris had not crumbled, and the wine tasted sweeter for lives narrowly spared, yes.  And he loved her, he professed, on this clear August night in a smoky, subterraneous room where the moon’s silver light streamed in celestial threads through the egress window; the feet of passersby hurried over his freshly birthed ardor drifting quickly in stale plumes up toward the flickering stars before dissipating into the cauldron of the night skies.  She tossed her head in laughter, he remembered well.  She wasn’t unkind, you see.  She was a siren banished from the ocean’s depth, and all those who crossed her path would feel the burning fury that swelled in view of her misfortunes.

~

         The room was diminutive and dark.  Oppressive curtains punched back the ashen light soaked with rainwater and endless autumn, hung like lead sheets sodden with the buildup of unspoken stories.  In the center of one wall was a fireplace, its peeling mantle heaped with small objects in varying degrees of disassembly.  A gloomy cot, no more than a skeletal frame of cold metal, boasted a thin mattress whose center wilted miserably in the shape of The Old Man.  A clabbered pillow lay at its head, and a thinnish wool blanket was scrambled nethermost in a scratchy mass.  As a sleeping surface, it would scarcely do.

         Stacks of books gathered beside the legs of the cot in orderly spires, towered round the perimeter of the room to waist height.  Some advanced beyond a head where they had been set stable with heavy objects, pressed between the flank of a shelf plump with findings and a fissured wall; a stalk of heavy timber awaiting revival wedged them near to ceiling height, a column of sentiments unread.  Their yellowing pages perfumed the room with the must of passing thoughts interleaved with dusty layers of time.  Tick went the minutes, the seconds clacked on, the cacophony of lives crashing and overlapping and shaping the daylight and the blackest hours.  There was no relent, no assuage for the forlorn, no relief to savor the small joys.

         A long table stretched the length of an entire wall, mountainous with projects whose mechanical intestines were spilt over its surface.  Alois was not so much a scavenger but a collector of the abused and neglected.  He held no interest in anything functioning, but indeed gave second life to those things valueless whose beauty and purpose he expertly spotted when others had long cast them aside.  His simple mantra was timeworn but durable nonetheless:  Even a life most destitute is worthy of rescue.  This taught by a grandfather who reared him within the russet colored walls of a barn housing one mare, a small flock of sheep whose menace outweighed their donation of coarse, sooty wool, and a variety of herding dogs that came and went, two under the feet of the mare. 

This day he was set to tinker with a clock whose pair of bells sat tarnished at its top, the numbers of its face faded to a ghostly reflection of what they once told.  The only hamper of time is the callow of humanity drawing its claws of pride across the stretches of her underbelly as she labors on, yet ignorance can scar only itself in its strife, for time she has no rival, no feast of ego could shackle her intent.

Alois found the old clock wedged beneath a worn footboard of a staircase in dire need of replacing, for the mice were beginning to ascend to numbers within it so that the full flight resembled a tenement housing structure for vermin when the last planks of decayed wood were removed.  It wasn’t long after the oxidized nails, all but crumbling as they were yanked from their desiccated holes, were swept into piles of fiery dust that the mice found alternative damp pockets to hide within.

He pulled the timepiece forth from the paper sack and set it before himself, its sideward slump foretelling of a battered history.  Everything could be understood by its past, The Old Man knew, and to be judgeless of it was the only possible means to begin the restoration of its virtue, no matter how thought to be lost.

The Old Man twisted the key at the clock’s back, the coils tightened beneath his grip, the gears readied themselves for a good go.  Quite remarkably, as San Francisco painted her canvas with gunmetal and soot, as the death bird sought cover beneath the umbrella of the eucalyptus, as feral cats darted slick and thin into dark porch hollows and the thin crevices between kissing ladies fancied in their finest gold, the clock ticked with a crispness that belied its dreadful past, spoke out in defense of its usefulness despite.