NAPA CABBAGE IN DASHI AND MUSTARD

   Inspired by avid love for Japanese cuisine and binge-watching of Tokyoite food shows, this consommé was served for lunch today and was a hit. This traditional broth is vegan using whole petite sweet potatoes and Napa cabbage (just the lower half portion around the stem) as stock ingredients, and boiling them down together tightly, the former will render sweetness, the latter succulence. In the show, stuffed cabbage rolls were being prepared filled with shirataki (root noodles) and mushrooms and cooked holubtsi-style, the rolls dunked in clear boiling soup for fifteen minutes and once done, smothered on a plate with rich tomato sauce Ukrainian-style (Chef Saito, of the show, is a fusionist - yoshoku, melding western and eastern influences in his restaurant oeuvre. Enter dijon honey mustard to finish the soup, with sage and red chili pepper leaves. This soup is light but nourishing, and its flavor cosmopolitan. Veselka, in the E. Village of New York, was one of my favorite restaurants in the city. The name in translation means rainbow- no coincidence. 

The main dish I prepared with this soup had a condiment reminiscent of borscht ordered from Veselka (a cold beet soup with cucumbers, scallions and yogurt), yet in my small salad were the citric cukes and some segments of mandarin oranges with their zest (again, east meets west). On the plate is an ensemble of sprouted brown rice perfumed with basil stems, and broiled eggplant and zucchini frittata served with a thick dot of its own drippings, delicious with the palate cleaning dry borscht. One of the last food books Chef James Beard would write was about his "delights and prejudices" in the experience of cooking "as an analysis of good eating against fancy eating." America's culinary authority ultimately wrote about the renaissance of the all-American cuisine with the emphasis on tradition and terroir (of the land provided seasonally), reflected in a memoir based on his bon vivant lifestyle, the world's traditional food his teacher, and the musings from his childhood in Oregon, a frontier landscape bountiful of local fisheries and wild forages, ever to shape his poetry of good food and good eating, from his weathered hands and heart. This food blog has been, in an inspired way, a diary of that sort, travel writing from here to my fond past memories of the world - and above all this love and appetite is, as well, my food for poetry, and for poetry to my food.