Mae West wrote plays and film scripts, while her black urban counterparts, women like Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Ida Cox, wrote some of their own best songs, many of them tart and blue (that's blue as in shameless and raunchy, not mournful) comedies of male-female -- and male-male and female-female -- relations.
High points were the inventive salads: a tower of tart apple slices, blue cheese, walnuts and mache in a sesame-sherry vinaigrette; a toss of arugula, enoki mushrooms, hearts of palm and cherry tomatoes gilded with warm, firm, baby shrimp; and a construction of tomatoes, haricots verts, chopped nicoise olives, ricotta salata and pine nuts all drizzled with white truffle oil.
The "tea bento" features several offerings, including the yuzu sencha (25 Canadian dollars), which includes a lime pistachio cake, chocolate candied yuzu tart and "citrus-blue ginger cured salmon with avocado and kumquat dressing," along with the requisite pot of tea.
Summer is for salads, and some of the Island's more creative ones can be found here, including cubes of roasted beets with baby watercress, asparagus and blood oranges punctuated by goat cheese and a blood orange reduction and an array of tart green apples, Danish blue cheese, walnuts and mâche dressed in black sesame jerez vinaigrette.
(He's written everything from learned articles on Nietzsche to musings on the color blue to deliciously tart condemnations of young novelists' overuse of the present tense).
I could picture them becoming jam-like bonbons in the oven, maybe on a savory tart with caramelized onions and blue cheese.
The field of greens salad ranked high, too, with its mixed greens, a port-poached pear, Maytag blue cheese and tart-dried cherries with caramelized walnuts strewn about.
Ooh I'll get back to you shortly, the silverbeet, blue cheese and leek tart is being served.
The spread includes raw cacao nib and black olive tapenade; a Yorkshire Blue cheese and chocolate tart; and choc-cherry scones.
In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged.
