CROQUE MADAME

    The sourdough bread of this tall ham and cheese sandwich, made complicated because it's French, is two-sided: the jalapeño cheddar side, and the plain side. But this is homemade. In a 12-inch frying pan on medium heat I melted a good amount of butter sprinkled with nutmeg and soaked in the bread, turning them over when slightly browned. Shut stove and remove from heat. Meanwhile, set your toaster oven to broil and prep the cured ham by lathering it with olive oil and fresh-cracked black pepper, then folding over once sealing in the rub. Set aside. Harvest the soaked plain-sided bread from the pan, plate it, then add overlapping thick layers of pepper jack cheese and muenster - and stick it in the toaster to melt (roughly four minutes). The jalapeño side will be the spreader of the essential dijon mustard flavor to the whole sandwich, so dollop on a spoonful to it beautifully, while waiting for its other half. Time to cook the egg. Pretty simple and here's my technique to achieve a perfect molten yolk, firm around the contours but the center is emulsified: cover the pan with a clear-glass lid (perhaps from your stock pot) and swirl the oil around cooking the whites evenly, leaving the yolk red for the steam to cook it desirably (on medium-high heat, total time for this style should be under three minutes, making sure the oil is very hot before placing the egg). Now assemble the Croque, melted cheese-side up smothering the ham on the bottom - and crown the Madame with your perfect oeuf frit (fried egg). The height of this sandwich is pretty big; I had purposely sliced the bread thick and "pastramid" the ham to match the fondue viscosity of the muenster jack. More fresh-cracked pepper and olive oil blot as final touch, and you're good to go. Eating might be a challenge so prepare yourself a steak knife and hold down the sandwich with your other hand. A vinegary malt coleslaw would be a great pair for offsetting flavor profiles that overcomes the mouthful of béchamel ham on toasted country bread that's butter-rich and slightly spicy from peppercorns. The salad will spike your food to wonders because the oeuf frit was marquee to it all.             

"Be realistic, demand the impossible." - Joseph Remnant 

(French photographer and social justice activist)

(Bread, by M. Toku)

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CHIVES FLOWERS AND SEAWEED GRAPES

 Once upon a time in childhood, chives flowers and seaweed grapes were family salad meals— and to this day I would never forget their beauty on the plate and their crisp-sweet-brine-citrus taste. Grandpa always had them prepared on Sundays at the rest house in Laguna, among other delicious food and desserts, but these floral vegetables were my all-time favorite. I suppose I was, by nature, an aesthetically and culinarily curious lad, but Pa made cooking and eating really interesting for me. And these informative years began by tagging along with him at the local farmers market and fruit stands along the provincial highway. Basket in hand walking up to his go-to venders, he would ask enthusiastically about what’s fresh and what’s good, exchange recipes with them and how-to, and then gather up his usual staples for salad; they’re already prepared, they knew I was watching with a shy smile behind Pa, they would say hi, and off we go. (Foodnote: chives flowers are a family of green onions/scallions plants but their root-to-stem structure is firmer and the tips have bulb nodes signifying imminent blooming.) However, in my family they’re “eaten in the bud.” Pa prepared it this way:  a chives bunch was cut in equal thirds and steamed piping hot for a few minutes— and then immediately served dim sum-style on small plates topped with oyster sauce. The allium nuance and unctuous salt was what I loved the most about it, with white rice. For balance this was how I was taught to enjoy it best: with a side of chilled seaweed grapes salad with chopped tomatoes and diced green mangoes tossed in coconut vinegar, a little salt and pepper. (Foodnote: seaweed grapes or sea grapes or “green caviar,” latok/lato is the indigenous name, is a very common seaweed/kelp grass in the Philippine Islands where I grew up.) Think of a vineyard growing chardonnay grape cultivars, and on the vine bunches form tiny green berries shaped like tiny Christmas trees— that’s how lato looks. On the appetite level, it’s awesome because the flavor is hidden in the sea berries that would eventually burst in your mouth. Chives flowers with rice and then latok salad is a panoply experience of inherited good eating and how that play in plants combined could fullest deliciousness be achieved.

 

An older photographer friend of mine visiting me in New York a few years back (by the way he is also a gourmand and a food critic), over dinner at my apartment told me that the best way to eat well and fulfillingly was the substance of nostalgia. Pa and the farmers were always happy to see each other every Sunday at their stands. Pa had gathered three generations of his family every Sunday at the rest house and wonderful food was served all day long al fresco. And what I remember most was after lunch, he’d take a strong shot of drip espresso in the kitchen and then head to the lanai for a nap on a bamboo bench… looking always happy, and at peace.   

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THE CLUB

This classic sandwich is a remake fresh with ripe avocado chunks, pitted green olive halves, and torn basil leaves. And for seasoning: ground black pepper, lime juice and olive oil to taste, very simple, and no salt was added since the briny flavor from the Italian castelvetranos will do justice to the spread. It was a marvelous filling on lightly toasted Japanese milk bread, cut diner-style (as photo shows), and instead of side fries on the plate, this cook substituted roasted peanuts to offer a health-intentioned option. I had never thought of olives to combine with avocado before— so this surprise “guacamole” was a revelation, and I loved its toothsome savor. Try it! (You don’t have to triple the bread, two would suffice. Slicing to club triangles, the sandwich will make up for the presentation de rigueur, just nicely arrange the pieces as a lump sum of all their sides face up, and angled. This is, without exaggeration, "a midsummer night’s" ambrosia, and you will delight in its delicious spell (like in the play). Imagination subjectively helps. The roasted peanuts with chili flakes came through as a great combo for the club. In the play think of acorn pine nuts, forest fruits and pan de sal banquets for pucks. Don't forget the tea-wine to enrich the (your) spirit, and to chase out your dreams.
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On the 13th of October, 2007, something very special happened inside a church in Jeonju, S. Korea: a poetry club was born. Next month exactly on this day this year, THE CLUB will be celebrating its 13th anniversary. The beauty of this coincidence is in the semantics that, for this fraternity, poetry lives on to the calendar. Imagine by reminisce an old church welcoming a group of young romantics who were given a private mantle, a study, to search through words beyond the confines of faith— to be pilgrims for “active knowledge” and to “sail beyond the sunset”; the hunger of their souls was their wild grace. Poetry is hard to break. The bond is predetermined. And the poets of this class knew their fate. The master fed them for life.        

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GUAVA WELL

Rural life is urbanism with a view. — Lierre Keith

Back in the day when Portland, Ore. was home,  though it was unfortunate that his column was also retired at around the same time I had moved to New York City, but for many years living in the alpine-cool northwest, I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s short column about The Rural Life religiously, and his rustic writings had always fed my soul. He had loved describing the farm from the sentient view of his animals, particularly his horses, and how they could, not only communicate seasonality through idiosyncratic behaviors, but also with the work he had to do to transition his land accordingly, capturing the poetry of that change before the memory was over. Paper in hand while reading and looking out into my small garden, Verlyn could animate my surroundings and made me appreciate life more as directly and morally interdependent with the natural world. I read Rural before I cook, and when I cook (and afterwards gather with my loved ones to eat) I knew that my hand’s imagination had expanded in my mind, and with a "farmer’s" work there was a sacrifice made for beauty.  The winters in Portland when the butterfly bush was dead and the peony buds come out from the same ground; or in late autumn when the Italian plums teem in the tree in my front yard (I preserved them as compote jam with sage for gifts to friends and neighbors alike); and in the summers when the Sauvie Island strawberries couldn’t be better than any of the rest— my “rural life” was lived in my heart. I planted the climbing hydrangea on the chimney wall. I collected firewoods. I never picked the weeds in the grass because I knew in the spring their flowers would turn to cotton helixes and then taken elsewhere by the wind to seed. The four dogwood trees outside my house also bloomed at the coming of spring. (There were four stigmata marks around each petal of the dogwood flower, and at the center was a crown of yellow like a button of cloves.) I think it is literature’s job to make reminiscing like this worthwhile. Mr. Klinkenborg’s farm was in Vermont, if I remember correctly, but his literature, in his words, was his “ground of being” (borrowing the expression from the existential philosopher Paul Tillich). In Maui where I am now, I listen to the roosters at four in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. And the moonshine here is like no other— either the porch has its illumined spirit ad hoc, or an elevator shaft of light was there reaching down from the firmament of night. The equestrian ranches upcountry remind me of the rural life, though absent the bales of hay, yet I wonder how the writer I had always admired has been. Last night I was watching a documentary film about a Japanese small-circulation newspaper going out of business after serving the backroads community for ninety four years. The editor was asked what he was going to do now that his lifelong’s work is over. He mused: “I will look forward to the future— because the ending of writing’s past can finally begin…”  It’s guava season here and this fruit has seeded pulps in its pit to make juice from and I extract this nectar like tea. I may have urban techniques as a restaurant-trained cook cooking at home, but I owe to poetry to always make food well. 

“I live my life in widening circles/that reach out across the world/I may not survive this last one/but I give myself to it.”              (Rainer Maria Rilke)       

A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals. It's a poor substitute for memory, and memory is what I would like to nourish. But if I do give in, this is what I have in mind. I want to count the crows in the field every afternoon. I want to record the temperatures, high and low, every day and measure the rain and snow. If a flock of turkeys walks into the barnyard, I want to mention the fact. If one of the horses throws a shoe, I want to say so, in writing, before I call the farrier; and I'd like to be able to tell from my journal just how many bales of hay I have squirreled away in the barn. It's no longer the writer in me that wants to keep a journal. It's the farmer — or rather the son and nephew and grandson of farmers. — VK

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