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| 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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