A REFLECTION OF THE TIMES

 

I've been writing this food blog more than ten years now beginning in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I was fresh off grad school at that time and was hungry both viscerally and culinarily after several years abroad for a teaching scholarship (S. Korea and the Philippines), and I was ready to come home to the U.S. and cook my heart out in my kitchen and knew just outside my door I had access to a vibrant community of victuals purveyors, menu tastemakers and pop-up hipster chefs.  Welcome to the Big Apple. Ezra Pound wrote that the essence of a poet is that he builds us his world. And New York City had all the tools, if I may add. If the decade had produced anything for me - intersecting food with poetry - and significantly if the world I had traveled through creating my writings was sphere, then like the angel in Dante's Divine Comedy I have every segmented slice colored the wheel with flavor and beauty, and poignancy. Reading is infused in my writing. I can not achieve in this world without books. Also the memories from gathering and observing my food for gathering to share. The health of my heart I give to cooking; and by that I mean the holistic approach to this world I'm building - poetry on top of poetry, like layers of mille-feuille. But it isn't just all sweet and cream denotatives. I really wanted to reflect also on the struggles of isolation and dreams deferred in these uncertain times. I do not know, for example, the future of the Carlton, Ore. farm (photo inset), if the basis of its sustainability is separate lives. And growing older is also a case of slowing down. But I heal with the food I eat on Maui. Moringa pods ginger soup with a splash of cashew milk I share with my surfer roommate sucking out the marrow of life (to invoke Thoreau). Once a coworker had told me I will live forever eating moringa leaves. I told her the realistic measure of my life is in terms of the world of writing I will leave behind. A childhood friend on mainland has been my remote nurse lately, making sure I took care of myself in these uncertain times. I have to harness everything in my creative power to complete that world. In this blog I am not reflecting on mortality. At Iao wilderness when I hike the fallen mangoes have a taste-quality of their own. When I press the pink pulp-seeds of the guava on my tongue and wash it down with spring water from the waterfalls grotto, this life I live now out of New York and into the wild of Maui is like a brethren to my consciousness nature fills.  I learned today a Brazilian-Portuguese word saudade (pronounced SAO-dodge), and it means a celebratory missing of someone who's no longer around, not a feeling-word to be down about, but more to positively and passionately affirm your mark in them. Saudade! A toast to the past and the now, to the good times and bad, to the heart you have worn on our sleeve that had always got your back, and "to sail through, to seek beyond the sunset, and never yield.." (Lord Alfred Tennyson) for the world you had promised us to see.   

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KALE MICROGREENS AND KIWI BERRIES

 

"It was during these long trips that she began writing a great deal again. The landscape, the strange life stimulated her. It was then that she began to love the valley of the Rhone, the landscape that of all landscapes means the most to her. We are still here in Bilignin in the valley of the Rhone."                            - Gertrude Stein 

    The produce guy, a bit in a rush but polite, said eat them as is. Kiwi berries are in season, and they are also those one-of-a-kind ingredient (perhaps to lift the richness of a Spanish rice-tomato-saffron stew), or a ready addition to any salad greens you can mix pleasing it even more. They look exactly like olives, though without the oil sheen and out of the required juice bath; they are olive green in color, ripe and bursty. I love them. Lately I haven't been seasoning any of my food (my nutritionist recommended raw intakes), and just the same I allow my food to interlace themselves independent of dressing binding and simply interact on their own on the palate of the mouth naturally. In the case of my salad today, that's the idea: the diminutive peppery-bitterness of the kale shoots with the semi-tropical sweetness of the berries melded not surprisingly well. Fruits in salads are, to me, culinary tradition's most harmonious pairs. Imagine a Mexican rice smothered in a roja-smoky sauce with kiwi berries and flash-fried corn. I think that's marvelous.

"The transition from summer to fall is one of our favorite times of the year. Yes, it opens the door for the fall harvest and the abundance of goodies that come with it, dreaming about stews and serving up long-simmered braises and soups."                                 - Your friends at The Splendid Table   

    The last time I hosted and cooked for a Thanksgiving party with friends at my Manhattan apartment, ca. fall of 2015, a cornucopia of fruits and nuts (tagine-style) were abundantly slow-roasting in the oven over my main centerpiece dish for twelve hours, and the aromatics in the air had a Mediterranean osmosis in my place. Chestnuts, cashews, dates, apples, green olives, apricots, orange peel, cloves, garlic. The alchemy is evolved. My glamorous guests raved about the tagine for days after; a techy from India, by way of the Microsoft Campus at Redmond, WA, couldn't stop calling me about it for the recipe. I am honestly serious. Well, the likes of gastronomy-trained cooks will tell you this (in response to his request): "Come back to another of my party's next year and I will cook it again for you. It can't be replicated. Its "landscape" won't allow." A Japanese makeup artist friend (for the fashion industry) living in Spanish Harlem at that time, brought that evening a host gift of vintage coupe glassware its fire-blown discoloration proved its antiquity and style. I loved it. She ingratiated: Make me your famous sezerac, darling, and make us all happy.     

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“HERE COMES THE SUN”

 

    Beattles was playing on the drive back from Haiku on Hana Rd., and the melody was so upbeat along a Maui backdrop. I have no recipe in mind today, just food thoughts swirling around my head— but eating isn’t always the intention. Some of the best life memories come after! Bourdain, my idol, was master of the “talk of food” on his late show Parts Unknown, right? He “traveled” through the cultural lens of that country he’s being shown, and the cuisine was beside the point (he’s interest was in people and how it was manifest in routine to live by their food). I remember an episode shot in a working-class barrio (village) in the Philippines (he had featured the country a couple of times before) and knew better where to find the best halo-halo in town, to soothe the body through sweltering heat and a must there. He could have gone to one of the full-blast A.C.’d upscale malls in the capital, Manila, and got this shaved ice with candied fruits, ice cream on top and dunked in evaporated milk at a Jamba Juice-like store, but instead he went to the humble streets of the metro for one. He sat on a dirty bench with flies about and enjoyed scooping the bananas-brown beans-coconut jello coldness looking totally cool and not necessarily out of place (the ordinary folks liked him). Again, it’s not because he was a foreigner and curious; it’s because, just like the Filipinos, he was enjoying the halo-halo as it is, to pass the time. In an almost poetic travelogue scene, the towering chef extraordinaire let that moment spoke for itself. I also couldn’t forget his trip to Hanoi, Vietnam and met the President over spicy brisket pho and local beer. The paparazzi didn’t seem to faze Mr. Bourdain. And never mind the deconstruction of the soup or what seasonings and fresh herbs cum bean sprouts go when or the proper way to hold a chopstick. No. On the other hand, he straight away talked about the future of his young daughter in a 21st century world that’s geopolitically in upheaval, and what could Obama do about it. He was a father first and foremost. Never mind he knew how to eat in S.E. Asia and sweat it well. I don’t know of any other celebrity chef, living or dead, as unique as Bourdain my idol capturing the essence of cosmopolitan food the cerebral way, barring none that was artistic in his nature. Good food wasn’t a commodity for him. If anything, it was a "means to an end" we, in retrospect, all respected. My buddy and I stopped at Baldwin Beach for a sunset swim before going home. On Hana Hwy. beams of the sun flashed over Iao Mountain across the sea, what a fantastic view, and still blasting on the car stereo, it’s all right... The water was warm and side-by-side we both floated in the swell carrying our backs. We ate well that day in Haiku (an omnivore home feast cooked by our hippie friends into sun dance drum-chants and around lava rocks sweat:purification lodges). For the vegans in the group, I prepared a fruit plate of pomelo citrus, papaya and yellow lilikoi in half shells. The spiced chicory lentils porridge was sublime. A circle of interlaced hands around the communal table in prayer before meal, bestowed the blessing of the day. And it was for the celebration of earth elements - creek water splashed steaming the coals of cedar perfume - that we all gathered for under the grand Sun. ... sun, sun, sun, here it comes...      

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GREEN DIP AND MUSHROOMS IN TOMATO CONFIT

Photo by C.G., ca. 2016

     Mana Foods yesterday had an organic yellow corn tortilla chips (large bag) on sale stacked in a wired basket along the cheese aisle, and I grabbed one. But I was disappointed when I got home after I made a “guac” (of avos, lima beans, fresh-cut cilantro and basil, lime juice, salt and pepper, a splash of chili flakes) the chips were stale (it had an expiration Sep. 1st). I had an immediate alternative: raw backyard-grown carrots given to me by coworkers— my reading Dorie Greenspan’s article about making a green dip prompted me to think quick what works well with the guac, not to mention using her title (thanks, Dorie). And it did. My appetite for appetizers is voracious.

     Confit is a technique of poaching food in oil— essentially in its fat solids for maximum unctuousness. Oyster mushrooms when confited (pronounced, con-feed) achieves a tenderness like grilled octopus tentacles matching its bite. The broiled cherry tomatoes caked in the lard overnight heightened the flavor experience. Serving on toasted flat bread the next morning spreading over it the shrooms-tomato confit and splashing sherry vinegar is an informed decadence and very Parisian cafe savour. “Sometime in my early 20s, I went to Paris to strengthen my French and my character. I’m not sure what prompted this — probably something I read — but I woke up one morning and realized that I’d never lived alone.” Dorie is one those New Yorker cooks I follow with a well-traveled palate and a writer’s knack turning food recipes and stories literarily (the quote was from her Eat column in the Times). Even if I have lived on Maui for a couple of years now, I am, at heart, very much a “world cook"— but the ingredients here are incomparable and they inspire me just as they taste phenomenally good. 

     The chapter My Arrival in Paris in Gertrude Stein’s novel, published 1933, had this memorable line: “There are great many things to tell of what was happening then and what had happened before, which led up to then, but now I must describe what I saw when I came.” I have blogged many times previous about my frequent trips to Paris to see my photographer cousin, and dinning exquisitely together is on top of that consciousness.  It is through the lens of poetry I write about my travel food, but it is through her photographs that capture its essence. Reading the Times and Stein, cooking and eating in paradise Maui, circulate in my senses the partnership of our collective arts, with the past and now still conveying our passions.     

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