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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