THE CLUB

This classic sandwich is a remake fresh with ripe avocado chunks, pitted green olive halves, and torn basil leaves. And for seasoning: ground black pepper, lime juice and olive oil to taste, very simple, and no salt was added since the briny flavor from the Italian castelvetranos will do justice to the spread. It was a marvelous filling on lightly toasted Japanese milk bread, cut diner-style (as photo shows), and instead of side fries on the plate, this cook substituted roasted peanuts to offer a health-intentioned option. I had never thought of olives to combine with avocado before— so this surprise “guacamole” was a revelation, and I loved its toothsome savor. Try it! (You don’t have to triple the bread, two would suffice. Slicing to club triangles, the sandwich will make up for the presentation de rigueur, just nicely arrange the pieces as a lump sum of all their sides face up, and angled. This is, without exaggeration, "a midsummer night’s" ambrosia, and you will delight in its delicious spell (like in the play). Imagination subjectively helps. The roasted peanuts with chili flakes came through as a great combo for the club. In the play think of acorn pine nuts, forest fruits and pan de sal banquets for pucks. Don't forget the tea-wine to enrich the (your) spirit, and to chase out your dreams.
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On the 13th of October, 2007, something very special happened inside a church in Jeonju, S. Korea: a poetry club was born. Next month exactly on this day this year, THE CLUB will be celebrating its 13th anniversary. The beauty of this coincidence is in the semantics that, for this fraternity, poetry lives on to the calendar. Imagine by reminisce an old church welcoming a group of young romantics who were given a private mantle, a study, to search through words beyond the confines of faith— to be pilgrims for “active knowledge” and to “sail beyond the sunset”; the hunger of their souls was their wild grace. Poetry is hard to break. The bond is predetermined. And the poets of this class knew their fate. The master fed them for life.        

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GUAVA WELL

Rural life is urbanism with a view. — Lierre Keith

Back in the day when Portland, Ore. was home,  though it was unfortunate that his column was also retired at around the same time I had moved to New York City, but for many years living in the alpine-cool northwest, I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s short column about The Rural Life religiously, and his rustic writings had always fed my soul. He had loved describing the farm from the sentient view of his animals, particularly his horses, and how they could, not only communicate seasonality through idiosyncratic behaviors, but also with the work he had to do to transition his land accordingly, capturing the poetry of that change before the memory was over. Paper in hand while reading and looking out into my small garden, Verlyn could animate my surroundings and made me appreciate life more as directly and morally interdependent with the natural world. I read Rural before I cook, and when I cook (and afterwards gather with my loved ones to eat) I knew that my hand’s imagination had expanded in my mind, and with a "farmer’s" work there was a sacrifice made for beauty.  The winters in Portland when the butterfly bush was dead and the peony buds come out from the same ground; or in late autumn when the Italian plums teem in the tree in my front yard (I preserved them as compote jam with sage for gifts to friends and neighbors alike); and in the summers when the Sauvie Island strawberries couldn’t be better than any of the rest— my “rural life” was lived in my heart. I planted the climbing hydrangea on the chimney wall. I collected firewoods. I never picked the weeds in the grass because I knew in the spring their flowers would turn to cotton helixes and then taken elsewhere by the wind to seed. The four dogwood trees outside my house also bloomed at the coming of spring. (There were four stigmata marks around each petal of the dogwood flower, and at the center was a crown of yellow like a button of cloves.) I think it is literature’s job to make reminiscing like this worthwhile. Mr. Klinkenborg’s farm was in Vermont, if I remember correctly, but his literature, in his words, was his “ground of being” (borrowing the expression from the existential philosopher Paul Tillich). In Maui where I am now, I listen to the roosters at four in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. And the moonshine here is like no other— either the porch has its illumined spirit ad hoc, or an elevator shaft of light was there reaching down from the firmament of night. The equestrian ranches upcountry remind me of the rural life, though absent the bales of hay, yet I wonder how the writer I had always admired has been. Last night I was watching a documentary film about a Japanese small-circulation newspaper going out of business after serving the backroads community for ninety four years. The editor was asked what he was going to do now that his lifelong’s work is over. He mused: “I will look forward to the future— because the ending of writing’s past can finally begin…”  It’s guava season here and this fruit has seeded pulps in its pit to make juice from and I extract this nectar like tea. I may have urban techniques as a restaurant-trained cook cooking at home, but I owe to poetry to always make food well. 

“I live my life in widening circles/that reach out across the world/I may not survive this last one/but I give myself to it.”              (Rainer Maria Rilke)       

A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals. It's a poor substitute for memory, and memory is what I would like to nourish. But if I do give in, this is what I have in mind. I want to count the crows in the field every afternoon. I want to record the temperatures, high and low, every day and measure the rain and snow. If a flock of turkeys walks into the barnyard, I want to mention the fact. If one of the horses throws a shoe, I want to say so, in writing, before I call the farrier; and I'd like to be able to tell from my journal just how many bales of hay I have squirreled away in the barn. It's no longer the writer in me that wants to keep a journal. It's the farmer — or rather the son and nephew and grandson of farmers. — VK

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Avocados Fall: An Ode

Avocados Fall: An Ode

The opposite side of the forest trail was where they were, scattered like billiard balls on the topsoil, mostly intact and untouched by animals. The perfect ones without splinters on the skin were under the ferns, nested and shaded in the mulch-hummus. After the rain the floral biome of the forest releases its perfume to activate the ripening process of fruits and the wild pollination of their successors (this is an environmental science fact). The sweet chemicals that hasten fruition and color is a necessary perfume-effect after the deliverance of water; it is an absorption that blooms for the food cycle process, and for the lucky hiker, an invisible emanation that taps the nose. There were other stone fruits and edibles at feast— strawberry guavas, ginger honey suckles, and river berries. The bounty of the rainforest grows on you. But this is the story of the fall. Why were they in pristine condition? And why were they untouched? Where were the birds, the hares? Why would a fall from so high be saved? True, the moisture in the forest is a spider’s catchment. But… a magical thinking. From the slope of the wind, like a kid sliding on? Anti-gravity drop when no one sees, in this dimension the fall is not a measure from a height placement but a flat synchronicity? They did not break at all, these green, shiny eggs on the mosses of hollow ground.

🥑

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UZBEK FOOD

Roomie knocked on my surfboard door, early, and announced if I could cook Uzbek food. I said, text me the recipe. It was a curious dish: using lentils, root vegetables and herbs (specifically cilantro and basil), and with a touch of cabbage to cream the stew. I think I will turn out delicious. I imagined pairing it with brown rice cooked in orange water, and another side of toasted wheat baguette with chunks of cashew butter melting on top. Here’s what you need, as preparation for two: 

• two small Maui onions rough uneven sliced; 
• one large yellow bell pepper, rough uneven sliced;
• peeled and cubed large purple yam and ditto for the Idaho potato; 
• half a cup of green lentils; 
• six ripe plum variety tomatoes, quartered, spare one for later;  
• one medium peeled, pitted and quartered nectarine (broiled separately with extra tomatoes and green chili peppers with stems and leaves; also add a sprig of rosemary, toss all with oil and salt and pepper, broil until charred; this combination roast will be nuanced and add depth to the soup);
• white half-head of cabbage rough uneven chopped, and parboiled in water with salt and pepper (later to use stock to liquefy/adjust stew for correct viscosity);
• from your herb garden cut and arrange a bouquet garni of cilantro, violet basil and chives (these are the *keystone ingredients to your dish), half of whole garni to use for the pot infusion, and the other rough chopped to sprinkle and toss in your orange water brown rice. 

In  a tall pot under high heat, add a luxurious amount of olive oil and drop with it the onion, bell peppers, root vegs, and lentils. Cover for five minutes. Unlid and release vigorous steam and stir the pot well and turn to medium low. Add tomatoes. Salt and pepper, squirts of juice of lime, half a cup of water. Cover and let alone for 12 minutes. Time to broil the rest of the ingredients mentioned, until charred; rotate tray to balance blistering, then wait till it smokes sweetness, twenty minutes of so. In a separate medium sauce pan with handle, boil the cabbage as prescribed. Now returning to the food pot, check tenderness of the lentils and then mash the tomatoes to release their juice and pulp. Stir and keep mashing the tomatoes and bell peppers on the side of the pot, check liquid juice, add the cabbage water for sufficiency (hold the cabbage for later). Prepare your two sets of herbs and leave on your wood chopping board. Rice is a staple in my household and I have extra from last night (I always cook my rice in citrus or herb water, whichever infusion I have). 

Now it’s time to put them all together. Add the broiled vegetables in the melting cauldron including all the oil drippings from the tray. Add the cabbage. Add the keystone bouquet. Stir with a long wooden spoon until incorporated and increase heat to high, stirring constantly to vibe-boil one last time. Season to taste (by now the flavor profile of the stew should unleash a ratatouille of flavors on the mild spicy side due to the chili peppers left intact.  The dish should be thick but soupy, and fragrant like a Mediterranean tagine. Remove from heat and relax the food. Herb your rice. Set the table. Serve in square plates with rice and stew and bread a beautiful pattern. Call your housemate. Ask, got the drinks? 

(Food note: a keystone species, in ecological parlance, is an essential actor in the ecosystem cycle. Its job is to distribute nutrients and minerals because of its passage- and the nature within its reach relies on this mineralization. An example is the trout salmon. From the sea returns to the river, taking with it the sustenance of the marine world and other robust bio-energies.) 

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THE COOK

Photo by S.P., Lahaina, Maui

For Anne

The cook started the day by smelling the plumeria flower (pink-white) from the landlord’s tree, picked one, and relaxingly breathing it in. The dream last night was inspiringly simulacra: the mind creates an exposure, like film, and the last image before closing the eyes is developed and forever becomes a memory (the moon in the window was the picture, and the words had for its sake a vivid function). Another vision came from a poem he read after cooking (recipes will follow), and it was about a day coming to an end, “the water is mostly still,” and the moisture in the air is versed to become light that are then made into stars. After swimming, the cook rests on the flat rock beside the rapids when the clear pool current runs with bubbles and when the riparian forest sheds some leaves down. The most beautiful sunset happened in Lahaina. Indigo blazing the senses, and the tall coconut tree satisfying the curved dusk on Front Street.  Mana’o radio plays on his drive back. Where is he? Where is his mind? Where is the food that loves his hands? Boiling flat beans and snow peas in salted water. Reducing the marinara spiced with charred chiles rellenos and their edible leaves. In between these tasks, reading the last pages of Dear Leader by Jin-Sung Jang and crying when the defector poet laureate from N. Korea calls his true homeland his Freedom. But his freedom is dedicated to his dead friend, a classical musician, so tender he was and this new freedom in the South will never be as sweet without him. The brown rice is cooked with raw peanuts and laced with a sprig of rosemary. Metal spoon, metal chopsticks, metal bowl (beveled texture by an artisan)— this dish of serene rice and legumes simply salted with lemon, in this bowl, in his adopted city of Seoul is where his memory is.  The past transcends, he will eat this food and be grateful, for the nostalgia can never be reclaimed. The breeze goes as near his hair as if butterflies. If he were a sane man, how else can passion live? How of poetry can survive? The cook is indigenous to it, and his naked torso is smooth. His movement is precise as his line of ingredients, but the alchemy comes from the plants that dye the braise. Dean Moriarty was the muse of Sal Paradise. In the book he wrote about his wild world that will be his greatest voice. When he turned the bend, he knew the sunrise would be full blast mode, full molten orange, its relativity directly tender as can be. How of love can break it? Of living without a staggering spirit? How could in goodness fail in word? The cook is in the kitchen, but the poet is the salt that binds all these fruits. And the chrysanthemum in his room is like light, like freedom tied to duty. He sets the table, the food, and in his chair like praying, conjures the universe in his mind and thanks her for producing the miraculous sacrifice of this beautiful meal. Mr. Jang wrote a poem about hunger. In it he said, when life was good there was corn, and when it turned worse, he could only remember the days when there was companionship. When he cooked for love. 

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