NATO-RAL SAIMIN

Nato (pronounced nah-to) is ultra fermented soybeans essential delicacy in Japan and slimy odorous (as sharp miso) but mega good for you, protein-rich in molecular amino acids and beta carotin. I had a discussion with a vegan/nature worshiper/surfer originally from N. Carolina deep in the oasis forest of Iao where we swim, and after meditating on the granite cascades of the spring hungered for the bodily and mindful benefits of this food. Our chosen nutrition lifestyle is like mortal abstinence: we are both in a spiritual journey, his more nomadic geopolitical (freedom from capitalistic attachments living freely day by day elevating his "home" to a universal vibration); mine, on the other hand, is more religious (in the sense a personal search guided by the philosophy of Buddhism and poetics, achieving intellectual and creative evolution). And yes, we both believe these pure sources from plants and traditional techniques as food can pave the way. 

In Hawaii, saimin is staple yet I craved a version of my own using nato, whole red peppers, brussel sprouts and curly parsley absorbed in ginger-coconut broth, I am not making a noodle soup but a creamy rich luxurious dish toothsome with a mucilaginous spicy/smoky/miso-ey/earthy kick. When I eat something this good my brain cells excite and smile, and my internal writing soldiers ready for battle, so to speak. I burn my mind reading (and composing poems) always, a "candle burning at both ends" (evoking Edna St. Vincent-Millay), as my imaginative fuel is astral and so I need all the help from nature's foliage primary takers of solar energy. Another corollary health topic we discussed at the oasis was fasting. "As you start growing, new dimensions open in your being," so let the Tao lead the way. This ancient Chinese teaching builds on in you the superstructure of your destiny, therefore a cleansing is necessary for the operative soul. The image of the universe below (with a poem caption) represents this "fruition" I'm talking about using only thoughts or words or meditational power. Please read it.                   

Concerning the universe/the city of God,/we know very little./It was cooked for a long time/over a flame. -- Eugenio Montale, The Paris Review 
(Art by M.T. resin over painting)

The meager monarch butterfly traverses a longitudinal migration riding electromagnetic

wind for a few thousand miles. The Buddha is a lotus flower floating only on pond. There is a poem I pray whenever I'm in Iao that fills me as I'm there intentionally without food despite my cold spring swim upstream and rock climb to the grotto oasis to meditate, and I found that prayer at a trail marker adjacent to opening of the cascade pool. "Grant me the knowledge from above/concerning the hidden wisdom of songs./Grant, grant/us these things." 

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PALPITATING PLANTATION

Pencil sketch, inside Morgan Museum, NYC, ca. 2017

 Good morning. Sometimes in winter when my nerves are tight and the walls appear to be closing in, I load myself into my vehicle with the dog and get down to the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, quick as I can. The emptiness of Jacob Riis Park at this time of year, the open vista of sand and sea, with buffleheads diving in the rips and gulls soaring above the clam shells in the surf, combine to offer respite from whatever it is that’s grabbed me in its mitts. It restores my sense of wonder, of possibility.                                  — Sam Sifton, What to Cook this Week, New York Times

Aloha. Sometimes through endless summer where nothing changes in a planetary way on island, when even a short fall of rain doesn’t inconvenience the prolific life of seabirds, or even when I am hand washing laundry in the side yard with fresh pink plumerias, the occasion of the squall deluge precipitated by the mountain’s spat is negligible here, for when the trade breeze is constant the sun is assured hot and dry at once. Quick-pickling cucumbers sliced zebra striped on the outside, I made my lunch without a fuzz for the toast— with a side refreshment of ube roots macadamia milk horchata in a drinking bowl. Life on the island the renewal is an environmental apropos, the swinging of moods an illogic relevance. So I eat to my heart’s content, abundantly I gather, and my inspired appetite never have to be pleased. Even reading is faster here because of all the light. Yet not unlike Mr. Sifton, seasonality is material to preempt the production of creative writing on food. We cook to write (i.e. what we cook is at the tip of the iceberg), and saying least, to let our whole state flow. New York is (like) a stepping stone to Maui. The economy of a tropical clime appropriates tables for de rigueur salads and iced drinks with micro-umbrellas, and your home is your beach hut, if salty sultriness is on your menu. But I tend to a more palatable plantation cuisine menu with foraging wild. Slow-roasting raw cashews under mesquite wood chips. Over a golden sweet potato-thickened eggplant soup, day-old bread-slightly-burnt croutons. Steeping pigeonwings blooms and chervil to make blue tea. And a ginger bake stockpot with haricot beans. I have a peasant’s quiet love for earth-grown cultivars and fruit vines; and as humble I partake. Aldo Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac about land ethics and careful stewardship of our mother planet. Pablo Neruda described earth a palpitating plantation. A young boy barely four almost died drinking from an untreated water he didn’t know laced with petrol near the farm’s hand pump. His limps inflamed and turned veiny and pale, his baby eyes twitched, his baby body flailed on his mother's arms crying. At the rural clinic an instrumented hose plunged in the baby’s throat and washed him inside out, while enduring gagging and crying with no sound. The mother couldn’t bear the pain as she looked, but held her son with all her love. A miracle baby, the doctor and nurse said afterwards when he lived. All night I read Robert Hass’ Time and Materials book of collected poems. In it he wrote of Basho advising against sensational materials if the horrors of the world is the truth of the world. But it wasn’t nature that hurt me when I was four. It was horror. I don’t remember that fatal day (only I was told what had happened years later). I was born in nature, how could I blame it? I was born like a fawn born in the woods by a protecting mother doe, as Hass would put it. “The mind hungering after likenesses. "Tender sky curves the swallows trace in air.” A father now not unlike Mr. Hass of the poems born after me, no longer a child I grew up writing. I can only learn from poetry as guide what a story can reveal. Take the darkness out, and eat again.                       

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MEET THE FARMER

 

Lotus roots, squash flowers and lemon grass curry (no rice soup). That’s my recipe for today’s blog, but before I write about food I have to digress to an old story of a gander. Years ago when I first moved to the island I was living in Haiku town and would hitchhike on Hana Rd. to get home. One time a truck pulled up and asked where I was going and I said where but the man thought his destination would fall short by 8 miles yet if I were interested in helping him capture a wild duck at a bird sanctuary up the road then he would take me all the way. I jumped at the opportunity. Getting there immediately after passing the electric gate was a sense of magic in the forested air. We were greeted by an elder wearing a monk’s robe and belt and expressed namaste with his hands and said cordially, please follow me to the garden. It could’ve been St. Francis that stirred the park walking through the conservatory. Reaching the bluff with a view of the coast nestled, when downhill at once rising from the precipice we were surprised by a burst of aviary doves rising like peacock tails flying to the summit of the woods, and our host held up his arms to the sky and bowed. Wow! What just happened? Did I unbeknownst get a ride to “heaven”?  The hitch driver only wanted his duck for forty dollars as advertised under animal adoption on the local paper instead got to see this miracle and looked dumbfounded awe. The scene was beatific or operatic in scale (a Madama Butterfly production at the Met no less)— we were mesmerized upon this lighting strike! Just around the bend is a pond and you’ll find it there, much good luck gentlemen, hearing the monk as we returned to reality. I played rugby in college I got this, (wild goose chase) boasted my companion. The rest of the “tale" was both hilarious and a success and I will leave the story to your imagination... but know I was game (that was the bargain for the ride), and I needed badly to get home safe for it was already getting dark. 

To this day we remained friends. In fact, he’s been a neighbor in Wailuku running a small permaculture/biodynamic farm raising heirloom culinary plants in his backyard. And no surprise the white gander is still there (laying eggs for his omelette). I was a farm hand briefly for one summer responsible for digging and establishing the sweet potato field, and renewing the compost mound with a pitchfork. The farmer would play opera on the vinyl while we were working and he said this type of music was good for them (for the vital purity of his homegrown crops). Weekly he sets up by the coffee shop on Market St. a vegetable, herbs, fruits and cut flowers stand— all these assembled in place on a wood wagon pulled behind with a painted sign of the name of his farm by a vintage country bike. He’s cool, rugged artsy and very friendly. Today he made me a special tea bag concocting an herb here a root there a flower in a mason jar from his set up and told me was good for the brain and heart function and relaxation. He had, as well, all the ingredients for my curry — the idea was an impromptu decision seeing how lush and beautiful they were splayed with such care (the squash flowers were like autumn lilies, the lemon grass vibrant aromatic, the lotus root like an unusual gift from heaven). I promised a coworker I would one day cook her curry and bring it to the office, as we always eat lunch together. I will keep my word.             

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A DECADE NOW

 

MEXICAN SQUASH, LENTILS, RADDISH SPROUTS AND BERRIES SALAD

I cooked the golden lentils and choyote together in a lidded earthenware cooker with slivers of ginger and some liquids of water peppermint extract and Nigerian herbs I bought in Brooklyn. The rest of the ensemble will be cold and fresh washed (and air dried; snip off the root tendrils of the sprouts) to mix in later with a simple champagne dressing. Toast bread with it as you like, and for the non-vegan make a charcuterie board of Bulgarian feta cheese to build extra flavor on your buttered toast, but I like mine as is. Writing a home recipe is metaphorically following your appetite for all the combinations of taste that will work for you, as savory as can be; food-writing is like it’s soul elevated before the plate. A “story” can’t work if it doesn’t taste good. 

This blog was created in the summer of 2011 and ever since I had written here what came out of eating I cooked home. This could be an opportunity to reminisce some highlights I remember by heart as favorites “cook review.”  Immediately I think of Argentina— the pastoral wine country in Mendoza, the smoky parrillas (barbecue techniques) and oozing baked empanadas in Buenos Aires. I had studied with chef Manuel in his studio in Palermo, but he admitted his wife was the better cook. Dulce de Leche. The phenomenal locro soup/stew of corn cobs, carrots and saffroned tomatoes served with rice. I went to Tigre Delta to capture in sketches of painting the rustic villages built along the tributaries where rare lilies of reeds abound and navigable only by canoes. I retuned to New York full of recipes bound in a black folder, and top page was how to make a chimichurri.   

Some readers have followed me through this decade-long food journey and it won't be a surprise to them that I left my heart in Paris. I had a routine from the airport directly after depositing my luggage at the hotel to walk over to my favorite boulangerie in the 11th arr. and get my quiche and baguette and while eating walking stop by a flower vender on the street and get a bouquet for my cousin waiting at the steps of Jardin du Plantes by the Siene and when there we would kiss both cheeks and she'd say welcome home honey. Food is beside the point in Paris. I go there to eat well for poetry's sake. It's a hungry companion only satiated spiritually by a kindred artist. And there's only one who is that. I fall in love with the world and one travel memory I had accidentally fell too in love against reality that me and my cousin recoursed to bury that memento in the waters of Île de la Cité, crying with held hands. Weeks later in my apartment in Manhattan I received a postcard from her of that same spot (the card was a caricature watercolour but the metaphor was there) of that romantic island on the Seine with these guiding words, quoted from Aldous Huxley: ... even if your feeling deeply, go lightly, my child, go lightly.   

 

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