JAMMING

 

    I will be jamming red-green kiwi and passion fruit together using all their natural pectin and acidity to preserve it, and with only a touch of raw turbinado cane sugar to taste after they've boiled through and set. The final color in the jar looks already devilishly delicious to me - like a quasar liquid dipped in candy glitter. I have a vegan croissant bread slices (new at the store) to serve as toast later when ready to spread my jam, and when the mood is ripe for when a cozy morning comes (these days the weather has cooled down much near the mountain, and with gentle precipitation mists outside the window and hot cocoa on the stove steaming fudge and milk, I know that beautiful time has come). Lately I've switched from brewed coffee to old-fashion hot chocolate to start my day into the work week, extending especially during sleeping-in weekends' arrival when taking it all easy is vital for wellness (this switched was inspired by my rereading of The Picture of Dorian Gray, when his servant-valet delivers hot cocoa poured exquisitely in a fine China cup on a silver platter just when he's getting up from his luxurious bed chambers all fancy robbed and princely in his glorious country estate).

      

     O.K. midlife crisis I'm not admitting. Here's how to jam perfectly as can be done only at home: (1) sterilize or hot bath your jars and dry heat them clean (transfer your compote here directly from the saucepan when done and let cool before sealing); (2) ratio your fruits equally in volume and simmer gently in a large saucepan stirring in lemon juice from a whole fruit and it's recommended by the experts that they all be just ripe - these symphony of fruits - and at peak to touch, for that's when their pectin is high; (3) add the sugar and stir lightly while treating your lips to its emerging flavor and sweetness blend, and when it's reached extraordinary taste that's when you know it's perfect. This recipe and process was derived from my reading a British home cook known for her preserves of all kinds using bumper crops season after season in very fanciful ways. There was a story behind her passion for jamming. Once she traveled to the south of France and had read about a town eccentric for its preserves-making, and by train alighting in Chinon and dispatching herself to the famed inn with its cookery magic of jams stored in old wooden armoires impeccably colorful shelf upon shelf, she was hooked.

  

     Give me a week to can my kiwi-passion fruit jam and age it perfectly for my croissant toast in waiting, and update you with results of success (hopefully) on my next blog. I think, you my followers, can "fruitfully" join me in this jamming journey you can very well do now (use fruits you love, just making sure of their pectin content the higher the better, like apples) and timing it together that us achieving slow food in team spirit will come to pass. “Simone de Beauvoir compared jam making to the capturing of time. I like the idea of stopping a fruit in its tracks so you can eke it out little by little. However, preserving is also about holding onto a season, a particular mood. You can find fall in a jar of pear and chestnut jam, or the fragrance of your Provençal summer vacation in a jar of apricot and lavender. It is one of the most poetic branches of cooking. "  (Diana Henry, Salt, Sugar, Smoke)  

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“AWAKENING”

 “There were times when it appeared to [him] that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions.”           (Oscar Wilde) 

The artist Rebecca Louise Law has a current exhibit at HOMA (Honolulu Museum of Art) entitled “Awakening,” it is an installation of beguiling potpourris stringed together from ceiling to floor draped across thee gallery tunnel-fashion, it is a collective rain of all the petrified flowers in the world and to experience this alteration to the consciousness as one passes by is a tactile mirage. There were purple honey clovers and marigolds harp strings-like curtains, rye grass and bougainvilleas, acorns and chestnuts chimes. I was a butterfly transecting Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream bewildered by flying pollens. The hanging vines and epiphytes of roses and hydrangeas and dogwoods pinked the light. Dried fruits they were when they were still blooms. The sky fall irony of the beauty of all these dead flowers and maybe food for celestial stars - I am inside plant life’s souls’ cellular level veins, their gene strands linked by proteins and amino acids of chips of rhinestones. A feast day for rainbows and their friends and who knows whatever other magic. The artist’s message: this is your planet’s recycled meadows of waste you can’t take for granted. It was, to me, a journey to the psychedelic existence of foundational food source - for whence all foods come from flowers. I cannot bare writing of imagination I didn’t come to know or touch when I cook. Dandelion weed-grass, curly parsley, papaya compote, sage, tangerine hand-juiced, raw crystal sugar salad is an homage to what I don’t take granted by making food find ways to its own art. Chamomile-scented ribboned collard greens soup with lemon twist is my elixir that had to be real of supernova. “Awakening” made me dream more for my cooking with their real ghosts. 

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A TOAST

 

"Wine" from a neighbor-grown tree of blood oranges its peak now and sold honor system at his fruit stand in front; and tea-soaked butterfly pea flowers floating in the apéritif from a food-grower friend next block over with delicious edible bouquets on his Sundays market. The celebration: a memorial anniversary. An old friend came to the island to join me at church, it's a yearly coast-to-coast tradition, but this time we were together for the offertory mass and prayer remembrance with white Tahitian gardenias placed at the altar. And before heading out, we started off with a toast: "But thy eternal summer shall not fade,/Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;/Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,/When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st" (Sonnet 18, Shakespeare). With grace-filled voice she's always assured me life goes on and all is well. 

Her stay was only for a couple of days and we didn't waste time and got busy afterwards fixing up my new home. We got two great bookcases at the used store and she said the other was begging to be painted and I agreed, and we chose green as color for it the kind when you cut open an avocado and see its flesh, that color, and bought that paint. I feed my friends well when they visit (most are omnivores but they delight with my plant-based nutrition when around). I had steamed baby collards in a cut-in-half sweet dumpling squash call it greens bowl - can you imagine how I did that? O.K., I will tell you, intrepid cook: the morning of her arrival I was tenderizing garbanzo beans in a slow simmer halfway up the pot and there was room for my raw cross-sectioned squash to join in the cooking face down, the idea is to marry their flavors together in the process of convection, and once the squash was cooked through I scraped the pumpkin purée out seeds and all (in fact I was eating the delectable seeds as I was transferring, nothing short of fabulous), and voila! shell of the squash bowl sculpted, I then stuffed the greens in it and plunked gently back in the simmering pot face down again to cook the collards. When done, turn upside down with two long wooden spoons, take a towel and hold on either side, nest the shell in a real bowl and serve your food with ivory chopsticks.

The night that will be her eve before returning to the mainland we dined at Mala in Lahaina and sat at the bar next to the sea. We talked to catch up as deep as we can about our lives now, and food was accessory turning time slow. We toasted again for the last time - and the good server made that memory permanent now on our separate phones. 

     

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“DOOYMAAJ SALAD”

 

I discovered Niu Life Kitchen a few weeks ago walking downhill on Main Street. It’s a vegan sandwich shop baking on premises spelt focaccia bread (their specialty)and making brilliant fillings of bio-life food like tempeh katsu with moringa pesto, coconut teriyaki glazed with nori sauce, and loaded falafel plate New York-style (the chef in back I hear is from there; the other day when I was at the café on my work lunch break he peeked through the cracked door of his kitchen and said hi.) I ordered a few things for the weekend so I don’t have to cook, I just wanted to focus on relaxing and reading, the weather is so gorgeous on the island this time of year it’s like a postcard but as real and as large as life with volumes of trade winds charming up the azure. So why work. 

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I haven’t read Sifton lately, Clark had filled in he must be on sabbatical break, and this morning his piece in The Times had an interesting recipe I could actually use incorporating my extra bread from Niu stored in my freezer. It’s an Iranian classic salad called Dooymaaj using old lavash (flat) bread to mix with herbs, greens and dried fruits in a buttermilk and lemon dressing. I thought that the spears focaccia I didn’t eat could be toasted and cut in cubes, and instead of herbs I have Maui-grown watercress and heirloom okras from Tamura market, and I say, Why not toss these all up in a large bowl and create my own version of dooymaaj? And I did. (For dressing I used coconut milk and olive oil and very black peppery nuance to absorb in the bread and slather my unusual salad greens with “beyond” spiced buttermilk profile, drizzled with Mexican bar limes and garnished with fresh-picked basil from Rick the Duck’s farm, my plant food purveyor.) Clark loves Euro-acidity in any of her home dishes, Sifton loves Asian savory in his, and in mine I do both - in honor of these culinary teachers of mine.

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My old books had finally arrived from New York from years in storage, I’ve been waiting for them dearly, and now that I’m ready with space for them in my new cottage on the island near Iao Valley, I could at last say: “The pain of separating is nothing compared to the joy of meeting again” (Charles Dickens). I will be busy building my humble “library” abode this holiday season now fast approaching, I won’t be traveling anywhere this Christmas and will just be happily staying home and making it one. Taking it easy, of course, eating my life-food as they bless my life, of course, for writing’s sake. 

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