THE ORIGIN OF TARO AND CHAYOTE

La salade niçoise aioli would be the perfect white dip for this cold cuts platter par excellence— and imagine the addition of hard-cooked eggs dusted with dried marjoram and paprika sofrito coming on the plate, and sticks of wild fennel fronds from the Salento region of Italy, if you could find them. This is the dawning of the "Age of Aquarius” summer, and these indigenous foods (of the tuber and gourd genus) bloomed on my table like the moon and stars. So peace be with you, and toast! (raising a sweet wine grappa shot or a strong port, the best drinks to cheers)... Maui’s great pacific sunset was lighting a color evoked in a professional studio. It was a photograph to remember: this beautiful dining night… The orchid caught in Haiku will be called The Bird... A highland tribe in North Luzon celebrates rice harvest by chanting an epic poem about the legends of their people. Red tea plants mark the boundaries of the rice terraces submerged in mountain water— this floating garden stairway to the sky. In the legend the chiefs of the village shape-shift and turn their tribal wars by cockfighting; they strike with talons at the head by confusing its opponent with fiery plumage. (My hanging orchid is this bird in disguise inside my room.) By this tribe, heirloom rice is turned into wine, a miraculous mellifluous scent of cognac, after fermentation in a weaved basket lined with banana leaves. The aboriginals were guided by the biodiversity of the forest and therefore taro was cultivated. Liana vines adopted by primary trees, like filigree bijou on their arm, guided the sweet growing of chayotes, mimicking ornaments like bees and dragonflies over cascade meadows... Ms. Gray is writing this blog, again, so I could live like her thirty years ago in the Salento wilderness, and to boot, compose recipes from a “life source” quantum, drawing a classical epicurean thought, before they become a splendor on the table... I broiled the purplish taros seasoned in lemon juice, olive oil, rock salt and pepper, and a priori hand-mixed them with a sprig of cut rosemary. I had young dandelion leaves for this chunky salad. And more of the chayote squash was a medley into a tomato consommé soup, spliced with broccoli broth. Eating, it dawned on me where this food all began.                

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The Green💚Kitchen

Jacky T. gave the luscious avocado on my toast, picked from her ex’s yard. (Hayden mangoes are abundant there, too, so she cans them, and would hand me some). I don’t have much of a garden. The potted plants on the porch are my housemate’s,— but when the tomatoes are big and ripe and the herbs harvestable, he’s willing to share, provided I cook green. I do cook green. My kitchen es muy verde. Napa Valley extra virgin olive oil green. Lime juice green over hoisin sauce smacked on chives and leeks and broiled shishitos and okras vermicelli. Basil leaf green on tomatoes and green and white cucumbers on a pumpernickel bread sandwich with afternoon iced tea— not green, but black, because black tea steeping is golden. Biodiversity green of happy house plants surrounding my kitchen elevate my home cooking to a star. Use the chayote green for soups and/or salad and leave the papaya fruits to yellow. Bake the green mussels in garlic and bread crumbs and wined artichoke vinegar, sea salt and pepper flakes. My hapa rice is not with brown but with green lentils that cook perfectly together, firm, but with a robust tender bite. And in the Japanese curry bowl  with potatoes and crispy shallots and pickled pearl onions, that’s the way to go green comfort food. I love my mother-in-law, Milagros. She has a prolific green thumb (her backyard in L.A. is a micro-orchard of persimmons, other tree plants, and the very tart, very sour green Philippine calamansi bush). When I texted her the picture of my green avocado toast, she wrote back: delicious, wow. I had learned from her to eat while standing in the kitchen, to steam up all my green vegetables cut to fit while the rice is cooking in the cooker, and the one-pot meal is a sauce away (usually something pungent and fermented) when the rice is cooked, and spoon away your meal with your hands to your mouth, just like the locals do in the homeland, and this method exercise will go top down not sideways in you, and your body is the better for it.  Most for-cooking super food green plants, flora and forest vegetations, are vertically oriented and slender and tall. Coconut trees,  banana trees, gingko and pine (for the nuts). Pesto is green. My best gal friend since high school’s favorite emoji is a green heart. The jade plant is green. And it is for luck, and long life.

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Splendid Tableau

Lynn Rosetto Kasper talks food she cooks well (this post’s title is borrowed from her show). In Portland, Ore., where I used to live (pre-NYC), the restaurant ethos was so inspired from moments like her. I think I owe it to Ms. Kasper, as well as Ms. Gray, mentioned earlier in the blog, and if I haven’t already, here’s an homage too to Nigela Lawson and of course the sweet Rachel Khoo, all my goddesses of the home kitchen, and I want to thank them for why I cook the way I do— and write the way they cook. Living on Maui now is a splendid privilege because, to my mind, there’s something “living in its geographic poetry” that is beyond the tropical paradise rep it has. The French Laundry is a “living” restaurant, according to its famous American Chef. Maui is a living proof of a pristine island biosphere within a humanism ecology protecting the land as it has always been. The freshwater langoustines are caught by hand at daybreak in the river refuge, in the clearest water. The coconut pulps in local ice creams are a reminder of the tableau scenery of their tress all around the land. The surfing waves are constantly carved by hand and ancient turtles. The everlasting plumerias and chicken flocks with no natural predators— this island has no venom; and the constant breeze is blowing, here and there, the soul of the sacred mountains. The goddesses have possessed my cooking and my nourishment is spiritual in flavor and the designer of my plate is the fruit and flowers themselves. Poetry can’t always be written, when nature can suffice. “The grass flowers come up in the ravines a little of the day leans toward with no boredom in life no trace of absence,” (Jean Follain, translated from French).   

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"ON FOOT"

Travel feeds the soul. Patience Gray, the legendary food writer, followed nature's call to the wild, foreign to her, and built her life around subsistence plants and vines, and peasant agriculture. Her walks to the sea are existential... (While hiking through the refuge this morning, a brilliant friend said that blue light has minerals chromo-active and can be embodied for well-being. And happiness.) The late Anthony Bourdain was this cook's poet-chef, a big fan I am, a follower if only he'd known I carried his passion and taste buds and pen and mind across some of the worlds he's been, feeling I'm him, navigating diverse cultures eating/feasting cuisines and delicacies that go straight to my heart. After visiting a temple in Xiamen, a random local family showed me around their beautiful port city on scooter, and later after a lunch of spicy seafood noodle soup and cold beer, took me to a busy park with their young kids and on tandem bikes, all of us, pedaled through vendors selling sweets and wind flowers in hand and having a great time. One time waiting for my bus in Singapore (to cross over the near border to Malaysia), at the terminal's lunch counter were curry rice bowls with vegetable "parts unknown," fried and smothered, pickled, topped with hard-cooked salted egg, the tastiest dish I'd had all summer long, draining sweat in the heat but feeling all cool! Like Tony. On foot I found a tiny red house restaurant on a sweeping landscape in Eidfjord, Norway offering potato/sorrels/dill/salmon soup with strong bread and brown cheese and had the most peaceful, pristine time under a winter sun. When I wrote a postcard from La Antigua, I printed a fruit photo from my phone and used it as visual to send to my first cousin in Paris. We are kindred in poetry. Whenever, and so frequently when I was still living in New York, I would visit her in France, and at our favorite café in the 11th Arr., we would talk for hours on end, deep talk, art talk, her Walden Pond dream I love the most - and I haven't even touched the salad. Sometimes it's not always food that fills us. There's something greater and cosmic about kinship, about blood friendship, about the bond of love. It definitely feeds the soul.        

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