MULTI-HERB ZUCCHINI SOUP

Consider it monk food, for its serene aspect and infused temple spirit. Alfred Tennyson has a verse about a secret garden and I will paraphrase it to conjure a Buddhist vegetable plot: before a seed, comes a blessing— to blossom forever. Curled parsley, lavender basil, thyme and rosemary, the babies of chard and sage just snipped off their essence (from the herb garden on my porch); deep inhale, gratitude, and set in a bowl of rose water. Peeling the squash, cutting to sticks, steaming in olive oil and lime juice and homemade chayote stem tendrils and Kula onions stock. Monks don’t spice up their food; it is a principle of economy and simplicity. But in otherworldly sense, their dishes have a botanical emanation to taste. I’ve learned the elegant humility of this cooking technique at Miwang-sa, S. Korea during the harvest moon festival more than a decade ago, and I still carry with me this temple food tradition. At work, many times they ask me what I put in the salad or soup I brought from home, and I say delightfully, not much to it, but micro-pinches of salt and pepper and whatever citrus fruit I have to juice a tad, that the vegetables and herbs and flowers have their own identity, and from a heartfelt gesture, I share and serve. Once in Phenom Penh, Cambodia, I saw secular pedestrians pay their due respect to a monk standing in a sidewalk eyes closed with an empty bowl cusped with both hands. It was not begging. It was receiving food; and people bowing. At the monastery, caged brown sparrows were sold honor system for fifty cents, similar to dropping a coin in the collection box to light a candle inside a Catholic church. The intention is same. But in Buddhism, releasing the bird is releasing your suffering.               

Nights are cooler now late November in the islands. This soup is just what I needed. The still fragrant leftover mashed sweet potato with churned cashew butter from Thanksgiving, I’m thinking dessert, I reconstituted creamier and lighter to become a spoony fudge with flecks of dried coconut in rich oat milk swirls. I know I am not a monk, but the Abbot at Miwang-sa I think will be proud with this humble sweet. My temple-stay was during Chuseok (name of the three-day festival), and visitors participate in the preparation of songpyeon, rolled rice cakes shaped into marbles of pink, white and blue and gently marked with a metal flower insignia. In that spirit, I know my fudge is pretty, and I offer it up... And I light a candle in my dining kitchen.

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A KIND OF KELP

It was a surprise to discover sea grapes at a local grocer in Wailuku yesterday; the moment was surreal. This kind of sea grass or kelp abundant-growing around the coastline of the Philippine Islands had been an elusive find ever since, so I had written about it previously in this blog from the context of nostalgia (growing up as a kid I had always loved it mixed into salad). And then the jar was in my hand, the sea grapes swimming in salt water like a coral reef aquarium. The attendant cashier had said to rinse them twice in cold water to break down the brine and they're ready to go; best with raw onions and tomatoes. Yes, I do remember (I smiled, and imagining it already in my head). 

In the kitchen rinsing the sea grapes in a cold bath, the otherwise sleepy kelp locked in a bottle for so long immediately begun to plump up double its size and the berries for a moment were like pearls. I saved the juice in the jar for later use (thinking to make salted century eggs, hardboiled, and immersing them in the kelp brine for weeks with additional fresh herbs, akin to a Chinese condiment of pickling plums). The execution of this prized salad has nothing to it, just combine the three ingredients and toss, and in of itself the sea grapes is delicious yet will attract by osmosis the tomatoes and onions to that reward in the mouth. I couldn't wait for the main dish I was also preparing at the same time (the broiled eggplant tamago still cooking in the pan, which should be a perfect pairing) yet had to eat the unbelievable salad I have on my plate, now. In the book Soul of the Chef, (also previously cited in this blog), mastering culinary techniques and kitchen ethos, it was noted, was a craft not unlike the talent of a smith. But he, too, will be hungry - and for the love of eating good food, after visually designing the menu's coherence, it's time to celebrate with swoon.   

 

Enter steaming sprouted brown rice, earthy eggplant tamago and sweet banana ketchup (second photo inset). After a few hours of hiking/swimming at Iao Valley in a storm (yes, a bit dangerous but there's a climate-drawn dance in the forest that's strangely beautiful to behold, and that's why I had stayed longer), and returning home wet and cold but rejuvenated body and spirit, comfort food was a must, and there was the sea grass salad and there was the big breakfast! I had a wonderful traditntal food of the Philippines to partake, and I couldn't ask for a better end of my weekend, this is like a Thanksgiving, with the help from a kelp. 

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BOURDAIN DAYS (one of the bests)

 

Tuileries Garden, Paris. Photo by C.G. (sitting in this chair reading my postcard) 

“[He] marveled at how the fruits and vegetables that grew in a place — the ones that gave it a particular flavor — amplified his experience of having been there. How taste made the vividness of certain landscapes resound, long after he had left them. How the truck-farm ingredients of a place, sold by poor women with cracked hands, could be so rich and expressive.”          — John Birdsall

To La Antigua, Guatemala, circa 2012. At La Guardia airport waiting for my Spirit Airlines flight, with connection in Fort Lauderdale, to Guatemala City, summer in New York was a time for a getaway. I had read about the street tamales and white corn soup in guidebooks, but self-discovery of other culinary gems was what I was after, albeit the romantic understanding of history and culture was beside the point. I got a middle seat on the plane and it was cramped. I read all through the flight, with straight back, and arms folded near my face. Arrived at last, I had to take an hour bus ride to my desired destination, and conveniently, with the porters direction, it was just outside the terminal. It was an old tank, with open sides, and seats across the bus like church pews. Wow. Let the adventure begin. I must’ve conked out exhausted on the trip but when I woke up, the driver announcing our arrival, I was wide-eyed beholding a Spanish colonial town around a dreamy square with a gorgeous mermaid fountain. 

And then there was the vibrant food. Just around the corner from Casa Hotel, my charming B&B accommodation, welcoming you to a front garden with climbing violet hoyas and shady ornamentals, was a vender wearing a traditional handwoven traje, purple, red and white, and selling the steaming famed chile relleno tamales. The novelty of this Central American recipe was its requisite powdered cheese on top of the tamal and a side of fermented red cabbage slaw eaten all at once together. Standing on the sidewalk joyfully chewing, I struck up a conversation with a local and was told to try it with sopa de mais — and that I could find it just up the road behind the old cathedral at an unmarked garage, and that I couldn’t miss it because of a line of folks waiting their turn to buy the soup snaking about. The delight of washing down food with hot soup elegantly simple (the white corn juice thickened with its corn masa and pureed, and nothing more was added but salt and hours of stirring) was a palate sensation that made you think of a country’s bounteous identity. 

La Antigua is a mountainous village surrounded by three stunning peaks of dormant volcanos, and the last destructive earthquake that hit the town a century before left behind church ruins and bell towers that to this date remain scattered around town, yet cleaned up and transformed into an open space installation-museum of what was once the glorious standing of a religious city. But it is a Mayan country in its roots and its indigenous beauty colors the scene everywhere I look. I sent a postcard to my cousin in Paris from La Antigua. It was a photo of delicacies and market fruits I took and developed at a small Kodak print shop near the square, and I wrote about where I was (the impulse of my travels wasn’t a surprise to her) and what I was eating. I could've sent a photo of the mermaid fountain, but it was hard to picture a dream.

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BOURDAIN DAYS (cont.)

 It is only recently since reading a biography of the famed chef and father of the quintessential American cuisine, James Beard, in The Man Who Ate Too Much, that revealed to me he was born and raised in Portland, Ore. It was, however, his English mother, Elizabeth, who had informed his passion for food and, what would be, his defining simplicity yet elegant industry in the kitchen. Portland had been my homebase for a good amount of years (pre-NYC), and the Pacific Northwest, given this culinary legacy, had also been kind of a springboard for some of my most exciting, if not, sentimental world travels in search of the perfect food. It is fair to say that, artistically, I am a cook with a pen in hand. Sometimes I travel for the sole goal of writing, and the amazing food finds I discover purposely become the fuel for my brain. Poetry is always hungry, so to speak, because thinking never stops in the act of eating for the experience of gastronomical notes. And books make me hungry for beautiful letters and postcards to write. Poetry is the cause, and voyages are the effect on the romantic stamp of my letters. Food and words to me, after all these trips, find their home. 

Chef James lived on Salmon St. southeast of the Willamette River, and from downtown Portland you could take the Hawthorne Bridge. My house was in the same leafy neighborhood, literally a few blocks away. His iconic history having roots in Portland didn't surprise me. This great city is, arguably, the best food town in the States, with Michelin-rated restaurants and sustainable farming practices which directly supply the local community with the awesomest raw ingredients, not to mention a world class wine region. The other great American chef, Anthony Bourdain, the transcendent subject in this series of blogposts/homage to his name, definitely had visited Portland on a few occasions and had "food noted" nothing short of inspiring, over-the-top delicious impressions. Then off he went to Port-au-Prince or Madagascar...

I met Karen V. in the Philippines, and our deep friendship there (entwined in poetry and forestry studies) turned out to be the platonic love of my life. We spoke the "same language," that's why we're so close, and that language was the language at the convergence of understanding the art of science - when rigorous methodology, process and materiality hit a synthetic conclusion at face value, but the burning curiosity of a scientist searching for more truths, asking more questions, was satisfied only when the imperical facts exhausted became sublime. On break from teaching at the arts high school, she would visit me on the farm where I had stayed and I would cook for her with pleasure. She had always loved the pea tips and sweet potato leaves salad I made (with onions and garbanzos, dressed in tamarind vinaigrette), and the simple garlic pasta dish I paired with it topped with fried edible flowers. Sometimes I don't know whether she had loved more the chef in the cook, or the poet in the cook. Sometimes her silent gaze was almost enough to know. We have kept in touch, though on and off, through the past decade since. When, again, I travel I never forget to send her a postcard. In Xinbei City, Sindian District, Taiwan, feasting at the night market food stalls and soaking in natural hot springs in Beitou, I couldn't help (my words) long for her.      

                

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BOURDAIN DAYS

Paris, Ile-de-France, November 21, 2016
Photo by: C.G.

The stack of to-read books in the living room are indications of a weekend mood. The previous workweek was a blink of time, but now the agency to rest out long has traction and good reason. Goethe had a pretty striking theory about plants. The poet wrote in the late eighteenth century that botanical vegetations and garden blooms, with the exclusion of hardwood trees, all shared vascular structures and/or systems of growth that determined exactness of physiology by their difference in manifestation: that genetically the stalks were wrapped up petals for their eventual unfolding, that “everything is leaf” about a plant, that the flower was merely the incumbent becoming of a pretty leaf. This outlandishness made me think of  the late Chef Anthony Bourdain and his food travels around the world in search of the perfect plate. In France, the culinary scene there is a seamless manifestation of organic beauty, all is exquisite and coming from the same source of focused tradition of taste and interpretations. (The chef actually had died in Paris. It was, I think, heaven to him.) Of all his shows, the episode in Greece where he cooked for his staff was my favorite (it certainly wasn’t the usual dialogue between foodies and the politicalizations of history); instead he was his homey self in an outdoor kitchen feeding abundantly and deliciously for his peeps. I had never seen him cook on television before, so this broadcast was an illumination of his heart as a cook. The impresario journalist, the master chef, the home cook was distilled into one persona. White wine in hand while grilling the baby octopus with artichoke leaves, its tentacles still twitching life, shouting “plates please with lemons these babies will cook fast,” his intentional timing to eat at the right place at the right time was a commitment to the experience of food to a level of reverential. He was my hero. (Summer of 2013 a friend from New York let us borrow her uncle’s bungalow along the beach access road on Cayman Brac, in the Caribbean, and that 10-day vacation all I did was cook, a l a Bourdain— it helped that the uncle was a fisherman and had a small farm up the cliff near the lighthouse, and every morning he would show us his fresh catch and would always generously say to help ourselves in his vegetable garden.) There was news that he had also died of, I believe, cancer, a few years back. That had deeply saddened me. But my time there and with him, I had sensed he was happiest at sea and had a sense of wholeness around his plants and fruits. The other night I saw an old episode of Chef Toni’s show on CNN, Parts Unknown, when he was laying over in Taipei, Taiwan for 3 days (of course passionately eating everything he could try at the night market, or was recommended at restaurants by the in-the-know locals), and it brought a flood of memories and longing to me since Taiwan was, and still is, my favorite food (doe hua, sweet soybean custard swimming in ginger syrup) and nature (Bai Yen hot springs, an hour hike from town to mountain high where the waterfalls meets the volcanic spring at a confluence pool) and its people (will genuinely treat you like family) destination country in the world.  I had stayed for a month in the fall of 2016 at Xindian, and my host became a brother figure, and I, an extension of his family, his sisters and his kids. In fact I had two brothers there at the time of my stay. The other was an ex-left-the-temple-life-monk and pursue his culinary passion to be a vegan chef. His small restaurant was just down the street from my homestay and it and his companionship became my sanctuary of inclusiveness in spite of my difference of culture (being a writer from the wild City of New York versus a gentle, contemplative man who seemed to me praying while in the act of cooking). His plates of blossoms and greens and purple rice were like altars of beautiful simplicity. Once at the prep table in the kitchen we were picking the leaves of the water spinach and I remember him saying, “I have enjoyed your company and your sharing of your poetic life and love for life, know that you will always have a brother in the same spirit here in Taiwan. Our heart’s journey, I think, are side by side.” I would have taken Bourdain to this sanctuary had I known him personally, had we discovered each other’s like-mindedness and reverence for food at the crossroads of our similar travels worldwide, pulled by the longings of the gastronomical earthbound creatures we are in search of heaven on earth. 

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