MY VINE YARD

“Like a lounge lizard who reads Flaubert” cooking otherwise keeps me healthy and on my feet for the time it takes. Picking out vine leaves from a clump of fresh harvest bitter melon greens from the side garden that many to make little when braised, is a matter of kitchen devotion and survival. Frankly I can’t eat anything else at this point in my life except greens - and fruits and legumes are included in that designation since they start out green from the soil. Yes on a Sunday when I could otherwise read all day, food for my constitution’s requirement is a tall order that just had to be done - lest faint out or meet demise. Oscar Wilde said to the brazen everything is brass, but to the vegan, yours truly, everything is vegetables. But I couldn’t love anything more. I will always have an affair with the sofrito of carrots and tomatoes and diced stalks of Chinese cabbage to sweeten my bitter vines and juice out their chlorophyll iron to sauce and vitamin me. It takes a ton of eating greens to strengthen my body (think a panda in the bamboo forest nothing else on his agenda but ruminating those greens in its mouth, as cows do too and nothing else for them save grass and meadow) to live. My yard is my forest and meadow and I am their gentle “pollinator.” Pea vines grow there with the green beans, and mustard greens are friendly neighbors to the rainbow chards, dino kales are germinating, and the society of herbs planted are playmates to them greens and edible violets and shallot blues in the small scale garden ecosystem. I mostly rely on my farmer friends in the neck of my woods for “bulk” produce purchases to supplement my own meager harvest home, and combining these “bio-carbonless-sources” feel good to be part of a food-growing community which is essential to the future of life - all Life - including our green and blue planet to be more green. Rice, pasta, bread I eat no longer “evolved” to this point reckoning my true physiological nature as herbivore; I can’t break them down no matter how hard I try. I don’t mind my incarnate self now as from a bear or a bovine - they are gentle animals, you see, and cute with a bell. Greens are music down my throat and I’m clinging these words. 

Read more »

AGING HOUSE VINAIGRETTE

 

I was typing a poem entitled Typing V on my manual Smith-Corona when this recipe announced itself in my head, not necessarily disrupting creative flow, but perhaps extenuating it (the first verse in the poem had foraged Chinese violets pictured on the ground, and they were edible). Vinaigrette should be a staple condiment/sauce enhancer in your home ready to use, especially to dress your salad lunch or dinner, and it ages well blended in at once while fresh; though oil and vinegar separate and ferment alone, they will osmose your live herbs bottle-wide, like oak to bloom in wine (in my house vinaigrette I used flowers of shallots, marigolds I grow and wild micro-tomatoes from the nearby sea wetlands bog). Perhaps Patience Gray, one of my beloved literary food writer heroes, whispered this recipe in my head because the poem I was writing was unwittingly about her, too, with Gary Snyder, a modern day Basho, in New Mexico. For sweetness, lacking sugar in my cupboard, I used the tea granule powders of cinnamon, cardamom, clove and chicory root from the bag branded Yogi, a soothing caramel bedtime herbal supplement. It should work. And for a lineage of heat, red pepper flakes and their seeds in the bottle. In Buenos Aires years ago when I had studied with Chef Manuel Posse, my classmates from Germany, France and Japan organized a parilla (barbecue camp) and I was in charge of, you guessed it, the salad to go well with all the butchered meat to grill, and while I was at it made also vegetables of halved onions and green zucchini skewers. The dressing I did used local wine vinegar from Mendoza, the oil a mix of grape seed and olive, copiously together, and key to elevate the emulsion glacé is sugar and salt in perfect balance, but in harmonious zest to the blood sausages drip in gif sage and short ribs rubbed down smoky of Spanish paprika and garlic chimichurri. Rolf was delighted with my dressing and said it reminded him of his grandmother’s recipe in Köln. I was watching an old Martha Stewart cooking episode last night, an event she hosted at her sprawling and elegant estate ranch in Bedford, MA (the grounds were so beautiful from a bird’s eye like the castle at Versailles) celebrating a silver anniversary of her Living magazine with her editorial and creative team and their spouses as guests, and she did all the cooking for her staff - the boss giving back to her loyal employees, through an All-American aristocratic banquet feast to the eyes. The long table outside her largest greenhouse was draped in taupe linen cloth and decorated with bouquets of mixed herbs and succulents, very Martha design, keen to detailed beauty, across the line. Her salad was princessly simple and aesthete: in fresh-cut radicchio leaf made into bowls, she put her chopped corn salad tomato verde greens dressed only in oil, rice vinegar and sugar. And the rest is history. 

Read more »

FOOD TALK

 “The key to enjoying cooking is embracing simplicity. Simplicity in cooking is ease and grace.”

                                                                     (Mark Bittman)

Q: How did you learn to cook?

A: It's acquired, first and foremost. Even if I had worked in professional kitchens in NYC and had studied with a few great chefs, local and international, training doesn't necessarily demonstrate the fitness and quality of cooking, it's more personal than that. I see cooking as you want to be in the kitchen to work hard, as did your mother or your grandfather had been to raise you with unforgettable foods. 

Q: Can you give an example of a formative dish that shaped your enduring sensibilities? 

A: Sure. But it's the archetypal memories of the entire process I remember more than just eating, your family molded in that responsibility and enjoyment you saw from a young age routinely tagging along to the marketplace and observing what they buy, how they pick it and engage with the producers, and how those ingredients come together beautifully and tasty on the table at the end of the day. Is that what passion is? I think so. And that's what I acquired "in my blood." Mom's curry stew fortunately had been replicated by my only elder sibling and I'm glad it wasn't me but her, because it could never be the same without a maternal touch that elevates its alchemy on the spoon to love. However, once on my birthday I tried making mom's blend of rice and egg noodles dish with snow peas, carrots and cabbage, and sis almost cried. 

Q: What are indispensable tools for you in your home kitchen?

A: Other than a chef's knife and a wooden cutting board, I have an extra large, deep silver salad bowl to wash my vegetables in and dual purpose as the bowl where I mix my vinaigrette dressing on the bottom and toss those greens to soak, then serve. Rachel Khoo is a favorite chef and author I had followed years back, and she had lived in such a tiny apartment in Paris and had used her salad bowl for everything - baking, marinating, you name it, and can't live without it.

Q: What did you cook for lunch today?

A: A simple split mung bean soup with tomatoes and radish as binding elements. I will tell you a secret. The tomatoes and radish were my salad yesterday, and I had leftovers. I used them as flavoring ingredients (the salad was dressed overnight and fully soaked) and therefore as the mung was tendering in the pan and the salad was macerating evenly, I only needed salt, pepper and a little olive to achieve the desired taste. It was that easy, but full of intention to make grace.      

Read more »

“WILD THINGS”

In one of those Instagram quotes I read in passing I loved what it said: “May we all continue to be blessed by the incredible biodiversity of wild things.” The post was from a forest forager on the island, and it featured tropical plum recipes made into syrup for tart glaze and other preserves and this workshop wedding cake-like centerpiece stunning in purple inlay frostings design of jelly ivies. I love creativity in food extending its capacity to awe, as creativity in color is food’s intrinsic quality. Foraging is an eye-skill in the challenging woods, and when they make it to your kitchen the wildness never dies in the hunter. Nature the greatest caretaker of wild food - that is biodiversity’s gifts of earth divine, a produce market stand without a price. This is sweet beans plum soup in the picture - an extraordinary take of the taste of wild still tasting “the olives in the oil, or the grape in the wine, or the dark chocolate in the cocoa pod.” This is the biodiversity of flavor composed here by the cook to capture the essential stew of purple in the plum. I owe to artists my lunch, to the yeasts of sourdough, to the meadows in clarified butter toast for its melt. I am on friendly terms with this post’s forager, I see her on the valley road at times and she smiles. Yet formal between us is our shared love for wild things cooked. Common also between us is a comrade I now remember whose wildness is a true form in his soul. The three of us would converge in her garden behind her home overlooking Iao stream after a swim in the forest pools still wet in shorts under the sun and talk about the benefits of wild food and hunting-gathering. Comrade believes in his heart to be direct descendant of the epoch when the first upright men roamed the wild earth for food sustenance and fire and place, without which the development of our complex minds today would’ve have evolved if not for the relationship begotten from pre-historical nature we learned from before our own. I miss him. I miss his brilliant mind. When I see the forager lady, on occasions I do, I see my old comrade in affectionate figures of memory, a genuine Montaño.

Read more »

A DINNER CANDLE

 

Dear Universe:

Bless these gifts from your bounty these lilacs of yams and anthuriums of tomato cherries.

Bless this your bread, we share as companion friends.

The pumpkin you sheltered under wondrous leaves on cold stars, thank you.

Your ocean crystals made salt, your mystic swamps grew shrubs of elderberry peppers, thank you.

And for the clay of your earth that formed this white plate. 

Thank you for our home, our work, our plants, our music, the river stones shaped like whale art on the mantle, it is for luck.

At this table in situ accept our gratitude. 

Bonne année, Universe.

Your provisions, this constancy, in our minds receiving food granted, just like that; yet it is not without humility we make time and remember and include you in our lives before you feed us.  

You are in our midst. 

Forever.

A dinner candle. 

"They flicker and flit through branches and reeds like sunlight on a windy day. [This] perfect world." (Annie Proulx) 

Read more »