A TIME TO GRILL

 

    When Ms. Cole, my indefatigable landlord, knocked on my door bearing vegetables too heavy for her, "Come down here Mr. and look what I have - pineapple, eggplants, the avocados maybe overripe, hurry, and plenty more in the bag; and by the way: Happy Summer!" Kale, ginger roots, local apples and red-yellow haden mangoes, Maui onions... what to do? In my head, grilling was key repertoire to cooking (the glistening and stout eggplants were begging them), and then a pop-up soup came to me to pair with the plants, and I would call it: kale-avocado-onion chowder (I have extra cooked pumpkin in the fridge; I think they would mash up nicely and cream up this soup with sweet-nutty flavor tones). I immediately went to my kitchen and sliced up the fruits (to make a cold salad of pineapple, apples and mango), setting aside a few chunks of the pineapple to make ginger-mint iced tea for my preferred drink, but first I had to boil them down to concentrate, then cool - the pineapple will be the component perfect sweetener, just precisely good it will be chilled in the freezer and then taken out when the day got hot. I got to work.

    My excitement in systematically preparing all this food is partly intentional/natural. You see, I am trained to think mise en place and execute like a chef, having cooked at two high-end restaurants in New York for years. How I'm able to put together a "on-your-toes" menu has been developed on the "line of fire." The other part is, and this is more personal, is my genuine adoration for home cooking and cooking a spectacular home food, for there is love to feed. But this morning I was putting together a 3-course meal for a solo diner - and that's this cook/writer himself, an island-fancy treat for myself this holiday weekend and celebrate the beginning of summer. Although I miss my Brooklyn days of intimate home-cooking when friends are over, or when me and ex-partner were hosting an extravagance Thanksgiving party at our place (we lived in an artist enclave/industrial section of Williamsburg and the commercial buildings turned residential were loft-style "gallery boxes spaces," wall-to-wall windows, hard wood and brick interior, exposed-pipes ceilings, a good 20-feet measure high, around our place was lit bright, wide and open like a ballet studio). In short, it was a perfect gathering house. And I was the "indefatigable" cook.  

    Last Mother's Day, I paid a surprise visit to my mother-in-law because she's still very much like a Mom to me no matter what, and I've missed her dearly (it's been a couple of years since I've last seen her). I was bearing a gift - an exquisitely wrapped present from a boutique craft store here in Wailuku, and inside is a lovely white-floral bouquet-brooch hair clip, and a small hand-written card by me saying: Happy Mother's Day... from a friend. Charles Dickens, in one of my favorite novels by him, Nicholas Nickleby, wrote: "The pain of separating is nothing compared to the joy of meeting again." Abundantly, I was more than overjoyed to see her, to hug her, and spend time. And when it was time to go, we both knew in our hearts that, again, no matter what happened between me and my partner ... we will always be friends.      

       

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PICKINGS

“I never saw the moor, I never saw the sea; yet know I what the heather looks and what a wave must be...” —Emily Dickinson 

 

     I started as one of the prep-cooks at a high-end restaurant in NYC years ago and I remember the chef, passing at our station like a 3-star general, saying: "Heads down, folks, pick, pick pick; but lightly." He was referring to the fragility of the nature of herbs and culinary edible flowers we were processing for the salad entrees, preemptively alluding to their summertime vividness as key to the presentation and sensorial experience of our dining patrons. Our hands were primarily the "tactile instruments" into the careful handling of tendrils, filigree leaf shoots and gem-like florets as if they were preserved butterflies on pins ready for mounting on a golden frame. (By the way, I was the only guy on the team, the lead was a Colombian woman who had worked there forever, and the other was from Milwaukee fresh out of cooking school; delicate hands mattered.) We stood together for hours picking, picking, picking, yet we had learned so much from each other and the marvelous plants we were caring for. That was the flashback in my mind while I was eating my breakfast this morning, at the same time thinking of what to write (see photo; it conjured all these memories; I made a simple floral consommé with young Asian greens from Hana farms, some leaves were variegated and purple, thus the bleeding out of a pinkish broth in the soup creating the classic color of heather flowers; thus the poem inspired).   

     In my bowl is the cosmos, too. The cosmos is also one of my favorite flowers in the world of wild meadows. This time of year through the countryside of Unju (persimmon country) in S. Korea, the cosmos hedges line the rice paddy dikes winding along the road, and the hills on the distance are so fresh. The country is seventy percent mountain ranges rolling around the peninsula, and ancient villages are tucked and protected in the valleys hardly have any view or knowledge of the Chinese sea, legend says it - "yet know what the cosmos looks and what a wave must be" - given the landscape they undulate through on grassland as beautiful they swell as the sea. The pink soup currently on my table comes a long way from home, and I'm happy it made it back. But beautiful memories last forever. My hands are as they were. I eventually rose through the ranks at the restaurant, actually cooking not just picking, yet those humble beginnings at a professional kitchen focused on aesthetic workmanship to food art truly were like stories that opened up books I would cherish for the rest of my life.           

     

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PLUMERIA SALAD

 

     I am currently reading Richard Prum’s “Evolution of Beauty’ in the animal kingdom, most notably in birds, and the direction of the book is to understand the adaptive utility of apparent visual choice in natural selection. Least to say, it is an interesting “window” into the preparation of my Sunday meal, putting together food and pulling from ornamentals around my kitchen what would be pretty on the plate (and not just beauty to see, but also pleasurable in its intention). Naturally my salad looks beautiful because of the presence of the frangipani yellow-white flowers (it is the other name for plumeria) in its midst, even though they're not edible— but the longan fruit (like lychee), the papaya, the butter lettuce and the green olives are, for picture’s sake. The thesis in Prum’s book (which, by the way, is a retake on Darwin’s hypothesis on aesthetic evolution) frames a scientific understanding that the animal display of health, vitality and gorgeous colors are necessary selections in the promulgation and endurance of biological species, especially in the avian race, and he argues though beauty is not necessary to survive to be the fittest, it is an exception to rule (think of the utility of a peacock’s multifaceted tail with its stained-glass feathers that according to Prum, is it not futile, that beauty, other than for pageantry?)

     Yet it stood the test of time. 

     There was something unfinished on the plate when I readied myself to eat, and I wasn’t just going to consume away. The plumeria bouquet had been in the vase for a week and some of the flowers where browning and were ready to be replaced, save one or two that still looked bright and fresh. I took those and found a place for them in concert with my fruits and vegetables; I wasn’t going to throw away beautiful until their time. I poured homemade red beets dressing on my salad and therefore the make up is complete. I actually don’t just eat. For all intent and purpose, I eat what I write because the source is there: inside me is beauty I could write. Why are flowers abundantly beautiful when there’s no physical competition in their respective biogeography to control them, yet they blossom from earth-ground and trees unmitigated and profuse to show off? Why are the winged creatures the exception in the animal kingdom to achieve spectacular image as they are, and not only flying but angel-like polychromatic and brilliant and singing? What is the relation (or interconnection, as my former classmate in environmental science would argue) to all these extraordinary miracles of evolution have with human food, and delight us and give us vitality evermore?   

Birds appear to be the most aesthetic among animals, excepting of course men, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have... and they charm by vocal and instrumental music of the varied kinds.     - Charles Darwin  

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HOT SPRINGS

 

     

    Mid-May in Maui, all-around energy soup of patani beans, baby sweet potato and sunflower greens. (The auntie at the Filipino store this morning said the beans and the sweet potato were perfect together for stock— and that’s just what I did, adding the softer vegetables later, steaming on the surface.) Into sunflowers lately; must be a natural food trend. My German-import strong bread is made of it. Trader Joes created its own sunflower butter with dark chocolate cup bites. After my forest run and freezing swim in the waterfalls pool, home was time for hot springs. Internal. Vegetables here are as wild as they grow without seasons because of the perennial growing climate for them. And that’s the beauty of eating on the island: you are assured of the locality of your food that will nourish you now. In my spices cupboard are kosher rock salt, in-a-grinder-bottle black peppercorns, and good olive oil from Napa Valley. My style is to let the vegetables flavor themselves, and the minimal spices I add maximizes the effect of their deliciousness like a sweet quick kiss to the broth. With both hands I lift the bowl from either side to my lips, and in a contra-osmosis experience sipping the hot soup is slowly imbibing in me. I cook the greens whole, I never break or cut even the ends or tips, yes, I wash and lightly scrub tuber roots with running cold water, but otherwise all go in the pot with the universe that made them. The Beitou hot springs in Taiwan is one of my favorite natural ecosystem destinations in the world. I imagine being there again every time I make a “hot springs” food home, when it starts pooling inside my heart.

     I missed a Sunday blog (last Mother’s Day). This is its substitute, until I return to the “clock” this weekend. I was away, and the trip was almost, no, is definitely dreamlike, as if meeting the love of your life for the first time again. Seeing would-be best friends that would endure more than a generation in your life like for the first time again, and they glow ageless in your eyes. Even if the cemetery that you visited, though a reminder of death, because your constitution as an individual held you up, you had felt endeared in the absence of family and your mother was there, for you are eternal to her the first time she held you in her arms. You walked in the City of Roses as if the first time it would be your home twenty years ago. Spring was in full bloom. Dogwoods captured your senses like for the first time again, as the purple blue micro-flowers of the rosemary bush. Community-focused restaurants spilled their vibrance on the sidewalks of leafy neighborhoods, and that golden-age you would have indeed belonged to all those years ago was back. I wrote a poem at the Cafe Nell that night I returned to my dream. 

     

    Because it was real.        

        

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GERANIUMS AND BENTO

    It's sweet inside: candied beets and strawberry; and cashew-coconut-dark chocolate crumble cake (the candies have been shaped to a face). It's a gift for my lovely landlord this morning, tied with such care as depicted, and the desserts are arranged on a cutout page from an old Martha Stewart magazine featuring a frosted cupcake. Ms. Cole, her usual generosity, selected the finest vegetables from her friend's farm and set those aside for me in a bag, waiting at my door when I came home last night. I grow the geraniums myself on the veranda porch where I live above her flat, I have a tall plant shelf with all kinds of potted beauties. I baked in the grain-free granola into a honey loaf bread with macadamia milk, and dusted custard sugar on top. I made a  thick syrup from the juice of the beets and berries and toasted poppy seeds in brown sugar, mixed them up, and set to mold/hold them all together in the fridge. It's an easy process of affection for another individual (like a mother-figure) who's been good to you. And the result is a heart away. May is that time!

    I am remembering the height of spring in Portland, Ore., where I used to live, and truly the essence is all around. Yellow daffodils and narcissus paperwhites are like wild grass/uncontrolled weeds in the neighborhood yards. Two-toned pink magnolias in trees burst in parks. I have a cherry and four dogwoods in my house, all in bloom, and in back two apple shrubs and their dainty florets are already out. The tulips and clematises are decorative and gorgeous everywhere, landscaped or wild vining at an old mansion's  façade. Light purple hydrangeas are my favorite next to wedding calla lilies. And so are the butterfly bush. I almost forgot about my Italian plum tree which is a prolific producer, and around it I planted a peony patch. So you can imagine how abundantly floral Portland is in this season. It is reputedly called, after all, the City of Roses. Take the light rail to Goose Hollow on the southwest hill to see for yourself a forest of roses.

    Bento is the art of designing a beautiful food gift, with the intention to joyfully surprise the eye of the beholder, inside and out. It is great for a small thoughtful thing to win the senses big and warm your feelings. I am already thinking about making my next box with fruits and vegetables and presenting it like a diorama, and each block thematic - a room with a view. 

    

  

      

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