Bodegón

 Although still life painting was practiced in other European countries, only in Spain did it transcend its traditional status and rise to the same heights as other genres. Bodegón is the Spanish term for still life (from bodega, a storeroom or tavern). Taken more generally, bodegón refers to the representation of common objects of daily life, frequently including food. The still life image may contain piles of fruit, silvery fish lying on a plate, game birds hanging on a wall, or arrangements of flowers. Still lifes may also contain shiny pewter vessels, transparent glasses, woven rugs, books, jars, pipes, a writer’s inkwell, or the painter’s brush and palette. There are works that display the ingredients for an upcoming meal. All manner of inanimate objects are suitable subjects for still lifes, for the painter’s skill suddenly makes us aware of the artistic properties of ordinary things.    - Guggenheim Museum

It is easy to imagine an edible commodity as a talking point in cookery but challenging to convey with a visual art intent as a message in prose. But poetry can be tweaked (or tricked), and this is what I have learned in writing all these years using my kitchen as canvass. I don't know if I would admit to "overcooking" my blog to say more than what I'm eating verbatim (a recipe is a recipe is a recipe), but I suppose it's the same principle manifest for turning the ordinary to extraordinary on the brush of Diego Velasquez, the famous 17th century Spanish still lifer, who I'm evoking here as teacher chef. The food become symbols. I would argue that photography is like a cousin to poetry: hoping her craft would elevate my message. A cook is a laborer of composition using heat and ingredients, and the magic is in the saying and taste served between the lines. The first bodegón painting I saw at the Prado in Madrid was an afterthought - it impressed me the last minute - yet a eureka happened that evening and I hadn't seen my daily food since (more than fifteen years ago) any other way. Part of it was love. It was my ex who actually pulled me out of the abstracts by Miro to check out the sardines, olives and bread at the adjacent gallery over of still lifes. And I was hooked - because I saw an image vicarious to the eyes of love. So, yes, this picture I took this morning of green bananas and French press is worth a thousand words. Memories aren't perishable as are victuals after posing on the table and taken away and make me a better cook. Today I'm showing you the roots of my "food-flowers" cutout and framed with hunger to satisfy in the end. But I cannot write with food alone. Corollary is food is not the true reason I eat but it is so I write. And that's why I made coconut herb soup perfumed with blistered tomatoes and listened to old songs of the Carpenters to feed my heart. "'Tis now many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than myself, and that I had only pried into and studied myself: or, if I study any other thing, 'tis to apply it to or rather in myself... There is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great utility, as that..." (Montaigne).   

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SEA ASPARAGUS PLUM VINEGAR BRINE

 

“Brine is a solution of salt and water. Use 1 part coarse salt to 9 parts water. For best results use soft water. Avoid the use of iodized salts in pickles. Barrel or coarse is preferable to table salt. When following recipes use a 5 per cent vinegar, a white one if the pickles are light in color or a cider vinegar if they are not. Use glass, pottery or enamel vessels for soaking pickles. Store them in well-sealed crocks or in jars with glass tops.”                      — Irma S. Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking, 1943

I have mixed the following spices and vegetables in these pickling jars: ginger (peeled lengthwise), cucumbers (seeded cut in quarter moons), sprouted lentils (precooked), and the star ingredient sea asparagus— and this is my salt. Simply follow the recipe and bottling as above. Refrigerate for a couple days turning the jars upside down before you sleep at night, and flip again in the morning. Should be perfectly and evenly coated after the pickling timeframe. Give the extra jar to surprise a good friend, or coworker. Such a complement to grilled sandwiches on the side plate.

Yesterday at the rummage sale on the corner of my street I found the classic Joy of Cooking kitchen bible, clothbound, for .25 cents (among other vintages I bought, like a Judy Garland vinyl record, and the rare Wind, Sun and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry). In the forward of Joy the authors wrote wonderfully quite on point that “no one will read a cookbook unless there’s a story to tell.” Every chapter of this book begins with a playful preamble opening up each category of food-making with a creative narrative. In the pickles section, for example, the literary character Peter Piper conjured a poetic alliteration to interest the readers on the subject of brining. Throughout are precious vignettes peppering the pages with their joy of writing. My food blogging influences are varied, but to me the best culinary writers wear many hats and thinking methodologies while keeping faith in cooking well, from preparation to presentation, at home. I think the hard effort put into cooking a meal for the family or for an evening with select guests or to celebrate with a gathering is ameliorated by a journey recipe through a thoughtful prose. There is a semantic flavor to food writing that definitely can inspire, wet the appetite and swoon your feelings. So I “cook” it that way.

I finally have to say something about the plum. When at Mana Foods I have always spotted my curiosity at this vinegar option next to the red, white, raspberry, champagne, balsamic ones which I otherwise get. But yesterday I did get it at last and now putting it to the test in my pickles, and because it’s got a rose hue I think in its liquor will render the ginger experience in my brine with depth of citric sweet. I haven’t brined, for that matter, pickled ginger before with sea asparagus, let alone with cucumbers and lentil sprouts. It’s an interesting ensemble — try it and take my word. 

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NEW SEASONS

 

     There's a natural health food and local produce purveyor that pre-dates Whole Foods Market and still exists in the Portland, Ore. to date who got its start around the time artisanal buying ethos-counterculture agribusiness-save the planet Trader Joe's was established in the early 70s, and the name of that cool store is New Seasons. My permaculture farmer/neighbor/weekly supplier of my greens and herbs, and handcrafted edible flowers tea, reminded me of my days in Portland when he'd mention this morning at his set up on Market St. that the season for avocados on the island is over - there was one left on display and that was it, and I bought it; however, he pointed to the gorgeous oyster mushrooms he just harvested on the side trunk of his avocado tree sprouting prodigiously now, and for compensatory alleviation of my disappointment I took a handful of those, too (he said to sautée them with collards, dandelions, basil sprigs - I got those from him as well - and red wine vinegar for maximum effect, which I will do tonight for dinner). The cool thing about that store I am reminiscing in this blog was, like Sahadi's in Brooklyn, NY (another awesome marketplace concentrating on Mediterranean ingredients and spices), that it was a "feeder" of international cuisine-making in the comforts of your home by providing you with a behest of available edible traditions to achieve their taste and flavor originality. My runs at New Seasons were short, few blocks journeys from SE Hawthorne to SE Division Streets on my black Honda Element SUV (back when I was still driving) for the finest Sicilian olives, mortadella delis and Spanish charcuterie cheese I could find for my party. Not to mention the rustic baguettes I stick in my reusable bag after shopping and carry home like a musical instrument - and I, a tired street minstrel, was ready to retire for the night and eat my hard-earned bread.          

     Hetty Mckinnon is a New York City chef and recipe-contributor (as Gabrielle Hamilton, who I also follow) to the cooking section of The Times, and she had an interesting salad dish embedded in Sam Sifton's column of suggestions of what to cook this week (Hetty's was for a Wednesday night, I believe, and it sounded great): roasted cabbage and chickpeas Ceasar, forgoing the customary lettuce and croutons for the formers, respectively; she also wants you to make your own dressing of mayo with capers and lime juice. Lately my landlady's Saturday bag of veggies for me contains heads of cabbages I share with her pet turtles (no kidding; her adopted tortoises like them and she gets a bunch at the market and makes a point to share with me; I really do not mind at all - with the variety of recipes I could do with cabbages, case in point McKinnon's). There's always going to be "new seasons" for cooking when one is connected with cooks and writers you share the same passions with in the kitchen and on the writing board. You see, I have to make the best recipe for the last avocado standing on my table, to give it its proper send off like no other to the palate. Readers, if you have anything to recommended, please do not hesitate to post a comment. I'm all ears.    

 

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BAHAY KUBO

 

     There’s an old Filipino folksong that occurred to me all of a sudden in the kitchen while I was washing vegetables in lemon water of soil detritus and other handling impurities before air-drying them in the sun and then storing in the fridge if I’m not cooking right away— and it goes like this: “Bahay kubo hakit munti/ang halaman doon ay sari-sari:/Singkamas at talong/sigarillas at mani/sitaw, bataw, patani…” And then I remembered my grandfather like a watershed moment appearing in the song singing with plantation farmer folks, he was at center looking so much younger, and behind them was it looked like a construction of what would be our family’s ancestral home in the country; the scene was a marvelous serenade, the nostalgia sweet, and realizing the plethora of all the vegetables I was washing and alternately spreading them on a drying mat, psychosomatically and very gently a lineage in my life came full circling in not only in acknowledging the simple beauty of my rural heritage, but also and most touching for me was inheriting my grandfather’s cultural love for peasant food-growing and gardening edible plants. I have written about my grandfather before in this blog, and his remembrance resurfacing in my kitchen time and again as today is inevitable to my cooking. He was, just as my late mother, the pillar of inspiration when it came to my love for vegetables— because I grew up eating and was nourished by them what he grew by hand at our farm. I think my grandfather was a romantic in the sense that folksongs and folk literature transcended in the beauty that he identified with in his homeland and took pride in it, and leading by example inspired his descendants, especially yours truly. I will translate the folksong now hopefully capturing its essential poetry: a humble hut in the countryside/yet its garden teems abundantly/all sorts of vegetables and beans:/jicama, eggplant/peanut, wing and lima beans… I bought a lot of vegetables this morning at the small Filipino grocery in Wailuku (my go-to where the staff and I greet each other by first names) because they looked so fresh and marvelous, the colors so vivid through the tomatoes and halved kombucha squash revealing their seeds, and the medallion-like green papaya and red-bulbed scallions were begging citrus salad. I must have felt my lolo’s (the native word for grandfather) excitement too, subconsciously, because he was a passionate home cook, as I am, and in turn after harvesting all the vegetables on the farm he'd awe us gathered around the table when it came to lunch (I’m preparing mine too, inveterately), and I think we felt each other across time and space. The delicious-factor (a l a chef) I believe I picked up culinarily from the food presented for us, I think as young and naive I was in the workings involved in the kitchen back then, I had sensed there was something intrinsically special about how they smelled and looked, intentionally, and my lolo’s genes in me were wiring up. Anthony Bourdain said that the nothing could match home food cooked with love and deep understanding of your bayang magiliw cuisine’s finest alchemy (from my sweet country). So... what to do with all these halamans before me? Easy. I am my grandfather now and will cook and serve my brood and farm helpers and together we gather at the communal table laid out with banana fronds and have a feast from my labor of love. I’ll start grilling the tomatoes and okras brushing them with calamansi juice to smoke out the lemon flavor. Cook green papaya ginger soup, yes. Sautéed wing beans with sweet potatoes. Lima beans squash-mash with rice and mushrooms (my favorite spoonable). And pickled long beans with chili pepper water. Come folks food is ready! Or better, for old time's sake: “Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world. For my purpose holds to [cook] beyond the sunset. And 'tho we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are we are— one equal [man] of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (Lord Alfred Tennyson).          

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