CURRY LEAF CROUTONS AND BLUE-DYE JASMINE

The difference between a flower and a weed is inconsequential. I agreed with this statement sent by my childhood friend the other day, responding to a photo I had sent her of a diminutive bouquet of wild summer blooms neatly set on my dining table. I said, Yes, it's all about the design and intention. The exchange of thoughts inspired me, warmed me, especially for her practical homage to beauty— and thus my Sunday cooking feels like blessed. Melissa Clark, of The Times, also has a fabulous complementary quote: "It's Sunday, which in Italy means taking the time to make the pasta-filled, multi-course, multigenerational family lunch known as il pranzo di domenica. This tradition is appealing on so many levels — the slowness of it, the platters of gorgeous Italian food, the glass of wine in the middle of the day followed by a walk and a nap — and I've been fantasying about making such a feast right here in New York." Yesterday after my hike and swim at Iao, I stopped by a friend's house to score some culinary botanicals teeming prosperously in her garden. Take the blue butterfly peas, please; they will bloom again tomorrow… Make tea, it will bleed indigo and is sweet and mild… You know, the cinnamon basil here is my favorite of all the basil species, and the stamens are seeding, please, please take them and plant them, they will grow fast. I rubbed my fingers between the basil leaf and she was right: fuzzy and thickly fragrant with delicate astringency, fruity taste, perfect, I said, for a margherita pizza with homemade sauce, oil and roasted garlic (Roberta's-style, of Bushwick, Brooklyn). She surprised me with her knowledge about curry leaves. Use them like bay leaf and you must pull once your dish has fully absorbed it… Blanch or fry or dry; they go in versatile ways of rendering flavor. Mahalo (thank you), these are all awesome… Driving home I thought about the day-old baguette in my freezer and invented curry leaf croutons. I have pasta, too. Let’s see, how about: cinnamon basil, butter fettuccine with fresh-picked blue butterfly peas? Then add the spiced croutons. Finally, I decided to make a hybrid lemonade for drinks using the blue-dye jasmine tea, chilled, with a splash of local Meyer lemon juice in a flute glass, preserving the flower in the libation to float. So that’s the ensemble for a beautiful feast for one! I am cooking, concocting and styling my food simultaneously by the most artisanal of conventions through the lens of gratitude and artfulness. I am lucky to be around food and nature lover friends, and givers of love. I present them to you now as a result, and I hope they (the pictures) can speak for themselves (of my thankfulness). I leave you with this "song"; and caio for now: “All that reggae music introduced me to the island kind of life. It helped me see that someday I could slow down and relax and live in a place like Maui. You cross a road, and the ocean is your bathtub. The sky is your roof; the food is fresher than fresh. I want some of Kenny Burrell’s Guitar Forms with Gil Evans arranging and Elvin Jones on drums— I could live with that on a desert island forever.”     — Carlos Santana, The Universal Tone

   

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EDIBLE SUNDAY

    My childhood friend is here visiting, she is juicing local tangerines in the kitchen while I think of brunch. I am prepping some salad edibles for possible inputs and she asks this question: How is cooking such an efficient process but with a goal of inventiveness capturing the imagination while stirring the appetite? A loaded question; the smart one in the family she truly is. Answer:  It’s a practice; my old-time practice. She knows my background in culinary. Her curiosity, I believe, is in estimating the grand and whimsical act of lifestyle food creation to something extraordinary from nothing— nothing, yes, but there is always something for that void to fill when around you are resources of beauty and nature’s gift to eat — whether it is rendered semantically and/or intentionally for the plate and palate. How about I make a creamed risotto with green mangoes and honeysuckle flowers, olive oiled vegan and then broiled brûlée? She takes pictures of my hands, the knife play on slicing, and the immersing of ingredients in a stream of filtered tap and onto the pot or ramekin. Simultaneously I am making a vegetable stock of carrots and onions. When that’s fortified, I can make an easy Thai soup with rice noodles, shiitakes and unsweetened coconut milk to lather (turning it out not spicy but soulful). I am now slicing pineapple from skin and scoring through its eyes, and rinsing and chilling with meyer lemon.  Boiled peanuts, avocado, pomelo for amuse-bouche. The words that make my food are, or could be, the resulting embodiment of the dish copied to taste. I cook with a menu rubric in mind on which they would speak, and their story on the burner tying it all up. We are listening to Dave Matthews Band Live with Tim Reynolds at Red Rocks, and reminiscing our college days. Yesterday at the secret beach in Paia, we were dancing on the white sand and dreaming again against the relentless wind. “I want to take a picture of your fridge this morning and show my kids what you have in there.” A whole papaya. Baby cucumbers marinating in red wine vinegar. Fresh-squeezed tangerines juice by her. Iced coffee-mocha home brew. In the freezer, half a baguette. DMB has a song entitled, Under the Table and Dreaming. Deliberately and succinctly, a musical artist who has influenced an entire generation like me, with restless passions and un-definitive loves, I don’t have to go far to know what to do for food when it’s time to cook. We talked about composting and also blessings to the land recycled.  I mentioned the naturalist Aldo Leopold and ecosystem ethics, and we sit on my couch with our drinks. A red sarong with white turtle prints. And edible flowers in the living room illuminate our time before she leaves on Tuesday. I don’t know if I had answered her question about food. I think the way I eat is summarily the way I think that is nourished by writing and poetry — and is intuitively and internally visual — that if I can cook what I can write, then it will be good. The honeysuckles honeying the green mangoes in the olive risotto and torched with lime on top. The sweet crunch of the acidic-salt of the pickled cucumbers balancing the trade of savors and richness. Then I hear the church bells ring. 

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COLD COMFORT

Avocado "Ice Cream" Sandwich

Pre-chill fruit and generously scoop on a German mestemacher bread (buttered and mustarded), over the alfalfas sprouts and mint leaves. Season ("for toppings") with the "syrup" of red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and olive oil - in that cascading order. This is a very green "sundae" treat "churned" into a savory meal. I had to pretend the chopsticks were vanilla-white chocolate wafer sticks to complete the ensemble. 

Blended Affagato Coffee

Affagato is an Italian gelato dessert swimming in espresso shots (double or triple as you like). I'm keeping up with my "sorbet" theme on this post to formulate pleasure food and libations on hot summer days. In this "float" is auto-drip French Roast coffee frozen overnight in the pictured glass, and luckily the chocolate espresso bean I added last minute rose to the top. This morning it perfectly thawed to accommodate the combined milks of cashew and macadamia - and voila! - my dairy-free iced affagato (thanks to Sam Sifton's recent article about it for inspiration; also, I love Maui Coffee Roasters' blended cafe mocha, and this is my take on it).

I have a couple more simple condiments in the fridge I made this morning that's worth mentioning: pickled cucumbers and seasoned boiled onion and heirloom carrots. These "cold cuts" are easy to prepare and can be stored rendering their freshness for a few days to go with a toast (use cukes), or garnish around rice. 

As languid a weekend can be in warm August as long this month drags outside when mynahs flourish loud in trees and jewelry artists soak in the sun, after my cooking is done I listen to old recordings on my phone — saved conversations from my past world travels (I listened again to a composer friend of mine from Berlin about his creative process and the conversion of music sounds from shapes abstract), laying on the couch relaxed. I'll watch the 1950's classic film, A Roman Holiday, with Gregory Peck and (introducing) Audrey Hepburn next.

   
 

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SUMMER BASKET

I relished the feel/of my hands gripping the wide handle bars/and my body hoisted above the earth./I straddled those wanting to speed, to soar,/over the smooth road between houses where/I might ride to its end and turn into the world. 

- Sharan Strange, The Bicycle Wizard, The Best 100 African-American Poems

Seedless watermelon, purple yam cheesecake, "haiku bentos" (nested rice salad and savory August plums). Sea asparagus and boiled potatoes, dilled and buttered. Long-stem field sunflowers and a bottle of pink Lillet in iced cooler accented for joy. Summer in the Catskills when I rented a cottage by the lake on Mt. Dale with my old dog, Jung. I sent "cable dispatches" to the city to check in at home and report we were O.K., that the "kid" was rabid chasing squirrels in the woods, and wild about his freedom running in a clearing seemingly forever. We napped together beside the birdy creek after he had licks of water first. We had Brooklyn-curated food together, me with my vegetarian canine friend, lounging on a handmade blanket over cool grass. He was two at that time, more than ten years ago. A sweet summer hard to forget.   

The last summer I went fishing in Jeolla-do (S. Korea) with my students, we were all wearing yellow t-shirts and jeans riverside. Some parents came for the picnic, and we all gathered for lunch in the park's terrace, sitting on bamboo floor around low, long tables steaming with hot food in sizzling bowls, sesame noodles with scallions, and moon cakes. I loved mandoos in the basket- those fried on one side and steamed on the other tofu and water chestnut dumplings, and dipped in chili oil soy sauce. This hungry teacher, sure, was eating one for the chopsticks after another, satisfaction down. The mid-July mountain had crystal clear air and soft breeze handed down from Unju's persimmon orchards to us. Food is an affectionate sharing time in the country's culture, and being spoon-fed, literally, is an act of gratitude to receive victuals from the elders who cooked hard. Jong-min's oma (mom) treated me like family, and fed me well. "I'll go back to heaven again./At the end of my outing to this beautiful world,/I'll go back and say, It was beautiful" (by Chon-sang, Pyong). 

I have blueberries and mint leaves in the fridge; roasted cashew nuts and blue corn chips in the cupboard; avocados, tomatoes and alfalfas chilled. Orange blossom sparkling water. And a thick book to bring: "Carlos Santana, The Universal Tone, A Biography." I'm ready to hit the road again, "hear" and now.    

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PB&J

    

Protein, Butter (Lettuce) and Jam (Mustard). Lightly toasted sourdough bread to soak up the lima stew and assert all its rich herbaceous-ness. Working hard means replenishment eating. Reading Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange, makes me hungry. Fast sandwich I'm starving this great! 

Home-brew ginger honeysuckle (natural sweet) tea, iced, chase it down. The lettuce is toothsome fresh. On Spotify Maisie Peters, Favourite Ex. On page 262 of the book the author said: "I only ask that you show moderation in all things, remembering who it is that you are celebrating- without whom there could be no harvest and no rejoicing..."  

The cutlery scooping the artisanal dijon is a sound of gastronomy. Whole Foods bans Nutella. If I could couch surf again (grad-school backpacking) tomorrow on the fly I would fly Singapore Airlines now to Ubud, Bali and call my coffee-roaster friend Wayan when I land at the airport and eat tempeh and cook with him.  

Braising tomatoes is a beautiful witchery with wooden spoon. And legumes in it are like gifts from Aphrodite. My running shoes are size-10 red K-Swiss. And there's a surfboard in my room. There's a reason to be hungry like this when the mountain has treated you good. 

A bruised mango rolled on the hill road. I was hitchhiking in Cameron Highlands and jumped on the pickup truck for the plantation tea (ca. sweltering summer of 2010). I eat to live. There was a poet with an anthropological story about "the savages" he lived with, and harvested rice paddy snails.

Golden Mountain (S.Korea) was the name of the Buddhist temple it called on, akin to the color of these beans I flavored love. I could've been born to dream- at the blooming of a magnolia a thousand years ago. My van overheated passing Kamehameha Hwy today. And I stopped on the road and cooled down. 

 

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