FOODJI

..Recipes, he writes, are like postcards from another time: “The time before this, when you could just take a subway, a taxi, a ferry or a plane without thinking twice, and when you could arrive wherever you were going and walk down a street where the lights were on and the doors were open.” —Pete Wells, NYTimes, May 26, 2020

I go to the East Village to find temple food. Unctuous sesame noodles with steaming scallions. Fried rice seasoned in celery-fish sauce and duck egg wash. The honeycombed slices of white lotus kimchi. Sake-soaked plums in shot glasses. In Miwang-sa, S. Korea, where I had stayed once during the harvest moon festival, the monks only eat and prepare what they grew; everything was vegetables and served on small plates, and the barley tea was blessed by the mountain water. I celebrated a birthday once at a Tibetan restaurant on the corner of 3rd Ave and St. Marks Place and we were all seated on a mandala floor. Outside Kyoto, at one of the sites of Basho’s pilgrimage, was a rural stream strewn with cherry blossoms and leaves. The inn there offered for breakfast a tamago omelet folded in an eggplant confit with a side of tiny watercress salad dressed in persimmon vinegar. A serene food. Ancient in spirit gastronomy. Cultivated in flavors. There were water spiders gliding on the pond. The picture inset is of Taipei, the spiritual sister of New York City. In gratitude, we acknowledge the blessings of the universe before we eat. Food is healing.  Temple food is a house of nourish. In Ubud, Bali, a statue of Ganesha, god of poetry, is enshrined at every traditional compound. Incense always burns, plumerias always burn. In the forest, gathered around the bonfire with the sacred wine baya in our cups, the descendants of the Ifugao connected their ancestral land with human perseverance, if the rice terraces were to survive a living ruin. I have created these sacred mountains on my table of food. Gazing now, I am waiting for the clouds to move and show me heaven’s peak.