{"id":958,"date":"2026-04-04T19:06:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T19:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=958"},"modified":"2026-05-02T16:30:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T16:30:03","slug":"marooned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=958","title":{"rendered":"Marooned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
It's two days before 
a sacred holiday
and I think to myself, 
\"Show-stopper!\"

I find a gorgeous recipe; 
plot my day
to prep 
the dessert of a decade.

My husband deploys; 
hunts through three shops
to find raw and<\/strong><\/em> unsalted pistachios.

Finally he comes home 
with 230 grams 
of the good green stuff.
Barely enough for the recipe.

Alas, my recipe dictates
a nine-inch round tart.
And my sole tin
is a 10-inch large heart. 
So now I need to do math. 
Like Matt Damon in The Martian<\/em>.
On a Saturday.

I blow through five Post-Its,
scribbling sums and figures
and scratching many out,
before I realize:
I'm gonna need a bigger bot.<\/em>

I take some photos of 
the recipe ingredients 
from the four sections 
of the hefty cookbook
I need to reference.

I feed a prompt to Chat GPT:
\"Referencing attached photos; 
create a 1.25x scaled recipe.
Credit the original recipe author.\"

Obviously, I can't just trust AI
I need to verify before I proceed.
So I sample a few measurements
and back-of-note confirm them.

Success!
The math is mathing<\/em>.
Now I'm feeling...
pretty freaking smart, NGL.

I get lulled into my print-outs.
(As an Elder Millennial I need to 
Touch Paper to get through a task).
Chad-ing it up, I am flowing along 
with increasing confidence. Nailed It!

Except, no not at all. 
My prompt was a dud.
I had said \"scaled recipe,\" didn't I?
A fatal flaw. My bad.
I'd really needed an ingredient list.<\/em>

Now I realize 
\u2014 with growing woe \u2014
that I'm half-way through
a fully hallucinated recipe.

Directives that, I must add,
a crew of computers,
sans Le Cordon Bleu credentials 
(or taste buds for that matter)
concocted from zeros and ones.
Fail sauce.

GAHHHHH!!!! <\/strong><\/em>
I scream with passion, 
and without whimsy 
or ladylike demeanor,
at full force in my lonely kitchen.

My spouse's shadow 
darkens the threshold
while his earthly form 
wisely hides behind the door.

\"MmmBabe\u2014do you...
Do you...possibly...need help?\"
He ventures.

Gallantly risking his flesh,
he pursues chivalry 
over self-preservation.

I am, 
however,
not speaking English 
at this time. 

GREWAHSGHHH!!!!<\/em>
I sputter,
with full emphasis
and negatory clarity.

I am, 
as it stands,
not accepting questions 
at this time.

He recedes backwards
without further prompting.
I hear him fleeing to the safety 
of his home office.

I return to the travesty at hand.
I can recover. 
I resurrect the robot voice
of my 2000s GPS device:
\"Re-cal-cu-lati-ng! 
Re-cal-cu-lat-ing!\"<\/em>

I manage to salvage 
my shortbread dough.
I roll it into a tight ball,
wrap it in cling and send it
to the blast chiller (fridge).

Time to tackle the pistachio paste.
I weigh the green nuts and 
recall, oh no<\/em>! 
I need one point two five times
what he had carefully procured!

I turn to the pantry,
where I find roasted, salted, 
still-in-shell pistach-a-lashes. 
Great.

I put an empty ramekin 
on my scale.
I tare it.

Then I shell nuts
one at a time, 
into the bowl on the scale.

I discard shells, 
gently removing, as able, 
loose papery husks.

This feels pleasant 
for about four minutes.

I even have time for a 
quick daydream about 
becoming a TradWife.

Maybe I, too, could 
make chocolate 
from raw cacao pods.
Or manufacture 
my own Froot Loops.

By minute 4:01, however,
I am already
tiring of shelling. 

And little do I know
how many more minutes,
hours, actually, 
are in front of me, 
to remove every single
ripped piece of pistachio skin 
from a hefty mound of nuts.

I am already doomed.
Marooned, in fact. 
Stuck on the Isle of
Reckless Ambition.

Next time I look up
at the microwave clock
it is blinking 7:49 p.m.

I've spent the day 
deep in minutiae
lost in the land 
of the macro lens of my eyes
a mere four-inch focal length
from tiny green things.

By the time I finished 
prepping the bowl
I felt I could hear colors. 

Tipping the denuded nuts
that took so long to uncover
into the Cuisinart Processor
felt like a felony.

But I trusted the process
I made a fifteen-minute paste
and it tasted glorious; 
my family said it was the best. 

And that paste became 
pistachio pastry cream.
And that cream became 
the base of the tart.
And the tart had to chill
o v e r n i g h t.
(At least this was inactive time).

I blink, and now my guests are here. 
It's Sunday, and I'm whirling
and dashing about the kitchen.
I retrieve scalloped potatoes 
from oven racks.

I whiz homemade breadcrumbs.
I precision-split broccoli florets.
I start in on a garlic butter glaze
when I realize:
I must foist off the sauce 
to my other half.

I can't avoid it any longer.
I must return to 
the Tart of All Time.
(TOAT).

And I carefully sculpt 
ripe strawberry halves
into heart-shaped nubbins
and line them down the middle,
of the chilled verdant tart.

Throughout this 
three-day-long
unintended check-in
to a Silent Retreat, I realize:

I succumbed 
to the circumstances.
I let the waves of frustration
become gentle laps.

I embraced the challenges.
I leaned into the hurdles.
I endeavored and persevered.
And I triumphed. Truly. I made it!

They say it's about the 
journey, not the destination.
And perhaps so.
All the same, let's hope 
that tomorrow, we all get 
to fully enjoy this precision-crafted
tart of consequence and humility.

All that said, my loves:
Next time, I'll solicit help 
in the kitchen trenches.
Because as I now know:
those pistachios aren't 
going to de-paper themselves.
<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Poem, \u201cMarooned,\u201d written Saturday, April 04, 2026, a reflection on surrendering to life’s circumstances and making peace with overly ambitious culinary plans. Poem 094 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo: “Denuded raw pistachios: four hours of labor in a bowl.” Photo: Diana Ludwick (c) 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,262,200,4,2,263,551],"tags":[485,481,494,499,479,490,491,500,220,487,497,492,498,489,317,477,44,493,488,475,484,496,486,483,12,480,478,482,476,495],"class_list":["post-958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-poetry-challenge","category-dry-humor","category-humor","category-long-form-musings","category-poems","category-snarky","category-unserious","tag-chat-gpt","tag-easter","tag-elder-millennial","tag-fail","tag-gbbo","tag-giving-in","tag-giving-over-to","tag-hallucinate","tag-homage","tag-human-v-machine","tag-ingredients","tag-jaws","tag-le-cordon-bleu","tag-marooned","tag-math","tag-matt-damon","tag-meditation","tag-ngl","tag-patience","tag-pistachios","tag-post-its","tag-printers","tag-prompt-engineering","tag-puns","tag-recipe","tag-sacred","tag-show-stopper","tag-tart","tag-the-martian","tag-touch-paper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=958"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1463,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions\/1463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}