A Literary Feast

The Farmer General > Articles by: Rachel Hoogstraten

Posts by Rachel Hoogstraten

Vacation

Posted on June 10th, 2016

  I asked the owner of the rental house ten questions in my first email, and six  of them were about the kitchen. I had been scrolling through property listings on AirBnB for many hours and, despite panoramic views, hot tubs, cable TVs, and ‘charming touches,’ no house had seemed suitable until this one. “Lakefront,” it said and, “rustic Maine character.” My fingers hovered over the ‘next’ button. “Great room with stone fireplace. Huge screened porch.” I paused, then scrolled further into the description. “Kitchen can handle large meal prep. Sleeps 23.” Hallelujah. It’s hard to plan a vacation with twenty of your closest friends, but Tuesday Night Potluck is doing it again. We’ve added several members, two babies, and one dog since the…

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Nothing at all Whole or Shut

Posted on May 14th, 2014

I touch the boy on the arm. They say you aren’t supposed to touch the students but I’ve found that there are some, pulled left and right and up and down by a herd of A’s and D’s and those most pernicious of H’s, that need the physical contact to separate my voice from everything else.   “I want you to try the ones I’ve circled again,” I say. His whole body shows his shift in attention from me to the vocabulary list on the desk; his neck snaps forward, his feet jump and then brace on the dirty linoleum, his fingers – all ten of them – spasm and the point of his pencil smashes onto the page, crumbling into a soft pile…

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Potluck

Posted on June 24th, 2013

I am very good at eating, and I don’t mean this in the joking sense of, “I eat a lot.” I neither want nor need to excuse my constant snacking, second helpings, or late night desserts. When I say that I am very good at eating I mean it in the traditional sense. Food – cooking and eating – is a part of my life that I devote time, skill, and artistry to; and I don’t go it alone. I have a pack of epicurious friends, a scullery support group, a guild of craft eaters: Tuesday Night Potluck. It began, as so many things do, with discontent. We were all busy, feeling isolated, and were looking for a way to be together more. “Let’s…

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The Tenacity of the Pea Plant

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Thin vines stretch across the honeycomb of air climbing the chicken wire of the garden fence with sticky new fingers in a spiderweb of green. In one gap, where – finding nothing to hold on to – the plant clearly doubted, it encountered only another of its own arms and the two wound round each other and spiraled momentarily toward the sky before pushing away, leaving a perfect coil in the middle of nothing. Despite this near miss, this almost fall, the vine keeps reaching out from its most recent anchor, groping blindly in the mystery of time and space, trusting that eventually it will reach something, if only itself.   I admire the pea plant. It must take so much hope to wake…

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I Want To Tell You Why I Sometimes Cry In The Produce Aisle

Posted on April 18th, 2013

My friend has a habit of falling in love with fruit; mostly the tropical ones with thin skin that are heavy and soft and inherently warm he claims that they fit in his palm resting between the thumb and pinky along his life line like the curve of a woman’s hip or a heart naked, scared outside of its chest.   He cradles them like eggs loving them giving them back the gentle roundness of their birth in the humid places of the earth that also make spines and venoms and biting things, and he eats them with a gratitude that is humbling to see.   Except for this one cherimoya in which I think he recognized too much of himself so carried around…

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The Night Market

Posted on March 18th, 2013

With dusk comes the feeling that this place is magic. A silent hum builds in the concrete walkways and swaths of lawn, vibrating up the legs of unsuspecting tourists. A man shows up with a folding table, then another with a large wheeled cooler; it’s beginning. Spotting the park intermittently at first, then in regular city blocks (which the narrow and winding streets of Old Stone Town are not), food vendors set up for the Night Market. People of every shade gather at the edges, gravitating towards the square as the sun sinks lower over the ocean, the small dhows anchored in the bay made sharply dark against the shimmering heat of the Indian Ocean. The light pulls back from the heavy stone walls…

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Mi Amore

Posted on February 14th, 2013

I had big soup plans. Feeling very grown up at 19, in my own apartment in the city with a brand new crock pot, I was going to make my mom’s vegetable soup. This was the kind of dish that carried a family legacy. My mom would make it every Monday throughout the long New England winters I grew up in. It would slow cook all day, simmering until the house was a humid bouillon sauna that each family member arrived home to, stomping the snow off our boots and unwrapping scarves to breathe in the moist, salty air. If you weren’t hungry yet – which after school, yearbook, flute lessons, and (in my dad’s case) construction work that was often unheated or simply…

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On Eating, 2013

Posted on January 21st, 2013

Drink more water. Make stronger effort to take out the compost before third overflow bowl is necessary. Find tote bag large enough to smuggle the really big bag of Little Lad’s Herbal Corn into movie theater. Redeem self after “seared” tuna incident. Achieve automation with popovers. Like, going into oven while coffee brews automation. Memorize Food Network daytime schedule in order to plan strategic hanging out with grandma time. Aim for Paula Deen; avoid Rachel Ray. Continue to liberate phyto-brothers and sisters from the tyranny of corporate quality standards. Experiment with nettles. Buy second suction-cup soap dish shelf to put wine glass on in the shower. Also use it for coffee mug. Arrive home to aproned boyfriend just putting dinner on the table. Don’t…

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With Nary A Banana

Posted on November 24th, 2012

I felt bad for my professor; he had a tough audience. No one, no matter how nerdy, should have to face sixty undergrads who haven’t done the reading before 10 a.m. Granted, he wasn’t doing himself any favors with his checked bowties, obscure literary allusions, and hours of monotone lectures. It would’ve taken a student with an unnatural interest in eighteenth century literary conventions and a superhuman ability to stay awake to be an active participant in this class, a student who would forgo several shorter essays in favor of a culminating 30 page research paper on the economic subtext in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa , a student like me – the only graduate student in ENG348: Rise of the English Novel. I got an…

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Everything’s Conventional

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Last night’s crowd at the reunion show of Vegan Options was small but fierce. Raging early into the evening, Jeff, Brian, and I drank seven dollar beers, debated whether unicorns would eat mayo or aioli, and screamed our protest of corporate takeover and profit off human suffering. We wrapped it up around ten-thirty; we had to work in the morning, after all, and that black eye-liner is a bitch to get off. Vegan Options, active during the winter of aught nine, was born in the cubby between registers five and six at an organic grocery store somewhere in the continental United States. As cashiers, Jeff, Brian, and I bonded over our shared struggle with working for a huge, corporate box store – especially one…

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