7 Comments

Cardoons... I can't believe how many recipes for cardoons I collected. Your beautiful picture made me look them up. They are highly esteemed in the Italian American community for the meatless meals on St. Joseph's Day, and the Christmas Eve, often referred to as the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Cardoons -- fry them, bake them, make a gratin, dip them, puree them for soup. Incredible. Edible!

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A friend of mine, Alberta Gerould, gave me some Jerusalem artichokes, which are plants related to sunflowers with edible roots, sometimes called sunchokes. They, too have many culinary uses.

Unfortunately, I don'r have the ability to dig them up, and my husband is totally uninterested. So they are in the garden, unharvested.

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Love the thistle pick and the poetry batch is wonderful. I hope the recipients appreciated them as much as I did!

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The poems are free, but often people tip me. Usually $5. Last week, a woman came by who said she still had the poem I wrote her at Tuba Christmas back in December. I wrote a new one for her friend Alejandra.

I used to make $20-30 in tips, but it's fallen way off lately. People do thank me, often profusely. So that's a big win.

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Great read this week, every stellar word of it. Thank you, Fran. And you are a hero for writing your wonderful stories and off-the-cuff poems.

And I got a kick out of your thistle. We discovered one growing in the far corner of our yarn where we rarely looked closely. It had thorns. Holy merde it had thorns! Like and African acacia tree! Every surface of that demonic herb was covered with the, but my knight in shining armor (he truly needed it) chopped it down and dragged it to the trailer to be dispatched at the dump. It must've been a meter high and at least that in diameter. Truly glad it didn't spread much seed before it met the axe.

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your spontaneous poems are wonderful. must be like stream of consciousness writing for you!

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That is exactly what it is. Spirit moves my pen.

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