HOT SPRINGS

 

     

    Mid-May in Maui, all-around energy soup of patani beans, baby sweet potato and sunflower greens. (The auntie at the Filipino store this morning said the beans and the sweet potato were perfect together for stock— and that’s just what I did, adding the softer vegetables later, steaming on the surface.) Into sunflowers lately; must be a natural food trend. My German-import strong bread is made of it. Trader Joes created its own sunflower butter with dark chocolate cup bites. After my forest run and freezing swim in the waterfalls pool, home was time for hot springs. Internal. Vegetables here are as wild as they grow without seasons because of the perennial growing climate for them. And that’s the beauty of eating on the island: you are assured of the locality of your food that will nourish you now. In my spices cupboard are kosher rock salt, in-a-grinder-bottle black peppercorns, and good olive oil from Napa Valley. My style is to let the vegetables flavor themselves, and the minimal spices I add maximizes the effect of their deliciousness like a sweet quick kiss to the broth. With both hands I lift the bowl from either side to my lips, and in a contra-osmosis experience sipping the hot soup is slowly imbibing in me. I cook the greens whole, I never break or cut even the ends or tips, yes, I wash and lightly scrub tuber roots with running cold water, but otherwise all go in the pot with the universe that made them. The Beitou hot springs in Taiwan is one of my favorite natural ecosystem destinations in the world. I imagine being there again every time I make a “hot springs” food home, when it starts pooling inside my heart.

     I missed a Sunday blog (last Mother’s Day). This is its substitute, until I return to the “clock” this weekend. I was away, and the trip was almost, no, is definitely dreamlike, as if meeting the love of your life for the first time again. Seeing would-be best friends that would endure more than a generation in your life like for the first time again, and they glow ageless in your eyes. Even if the cemetery that you visited, though a reminder of death, because your constitution as an individual held you up, you had felt endeared in the absence of family and your mother was there, for you are eternal to her the first time she held you in her arms. You walked in the City of Roses as if the first time it would be your home twenty years ago. Spring was in full bloom. Dogwoods captured your senses like for the first time again, as the purple blue micro-flowers of the rosemary bush. Community-focused restaurants spilled their vibrance on the sidewalks of leafy neighborhoods, and that golden-age you would have indeed belonged to all those years ago was back. I wrote a poem at the Cafe Nell that night I returned to my dream. 

     

    Because it was real.        

        

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GERANIUMS AND BENTO

    It's sweet inside: candied beets and strawberry; and cashew-coconut-dark chocolate crumble cake (the candies have been shaped to a face). It's a gift for my lovely landlord this morning, tied with such care as depicted, and the desserts are arranged on a cutout page from an old Martha Stewart magazine featuring a frosted cupcake. Ms. Cole, her usual generosity, selected the finest vegetables from her friend's farm and set those aside for me in a bag, waiting at my door when I came home last night. I grow the geraniums myself on the veranda porch where I live above her flat, I have a tall plant shelf with all kinds of potted beauties. I baked in the grain-free granola into a honey loaf bread with macadamia milk, and dusted custard sugar on top. I made a  thick syrup from the juice of the beets and berries and toasted poppy seeds in brown sugar, mixed them up, and set to mold/hold them all together in the fridge. It's an easy process of affection for another individual (like a mother-figure) who's been good to you. And the result is a heart away. May is that time!

    I am remembering the height of spring in Portland, Ore., where I used to live, and truly the essence is all around. Yellow daffodils and narcissus paperwhites are like wild grass/uncontrolled weeds in the neighborhood yards. Two-toned pink magnolias in trees burst in parks. I have a cherry and four dogwoods in my house, all in bloom, and in back two apple shrubs and their dainty florets are already out. The tulips and clematises are decorative and gorgeous everywhere, landscaped or wild vining at an old mansion's  façade. Light purple hydrangeas are my favorite next to wedding calla lilies. And so are the butterfly bush. I almost forgot about my Italian plum tree which is a prolific producer, and around it I planted a peony patch. So you can imagine how abundantly floral Portland is in this season. It is reputedly called, after all, the City of Roses. Take the light rail to Goose Hollow on the southwest hill to see for yourself a forest of roses.

    Bento is the art of designing a beautiful food gift, with the intention to joyfully surprise the eye of the beholder, inside and out. It is great for a small thoughtful thing to win the senses big and warm your feelings. I am already thinking about making my next box with fruits and vegetables and presenting it like a diorama, and each block thematic - a room with a view. 

    

  

      

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MOUNT LEAVES

 

"What to Cook this Week?" The spring mix and arugula bags have been washed and mounted on cloth and paper to air dry; the calamansi fruits have been juiced in a mason jar; the Mana Foods wheat baguette cut up sandwich-ready and stored in the ice box (reheating in the toaster frozen bread comes out again fresh and awesome, a practice of extending a product's shelf life I've done since my New York days); and the Bulgarian feta is there, too. What to Cook... is a Times column religiously sent to my inbox, and just like its writer I run the gamut of what I have in the kitchen to concoct for my appetite, combined with the knowledge of recommended recipes, notwithstanding the ken of the cook. I don't waste anything I have or was given me. In home food preparation, I think that's the creative cook's challenge to incorporate into a good meal everything that's there for the humbling privilege to eat well.  

I love the discounted prepared food at Mana beginning 6pm found at the hot and cold bars, two buffet stations across from each other. It's practical for solo living to readily eat and mix/match food on the plate with minimal or no heating necessary, especially conducive to your geographic climate, and since Maui is a tropical island with a year-round gorgeous weather, a bought cold asparagus potato salad would be lovely with room-temp creamed polenta greening them up with my salad mix, with a dash of balsamic vinegar. Local fruits are terrific here and sliding on the side of my Mt. Leaves is a papaya boat carrying Kula strawberries. I have two monstrous avocados the size you can't get your fist around, and tomorrow night when they will be perfectly ripe, not too soft all flesh smooth and intact all around, I'm thinking wheat toast with it and a heaping side of feta-greens salad dressed in calamansi vinaigrette (I have a very grassy olive oil, a California reserve, to dot the plate).

Did I say what to cook, or what to eat? Incontrovertible. The extra potato salad in the fridge I will stuff into a baguette with a "relish" of mount leaves. (Back in NYC at this Japanese supermarket near the Schwarzman Library on 42nd and 5th, this sandwich was my comfort food snack, or sometimes breakfast.) One of my finest discoveries on the island is the local-grown, fully adapted to the upcountry ecosystem here, producing delicious, balanced grapefruits. With my potato sandwich and grapefruit as dessert, what a match made in heaven. 

   

 

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FOREST UNSEEN

Stay by the hearth, little cricket. You prefer me invisible, no more than a crisp salute far away from your silks and firewood and woolens.   — Rita Dove 

     Kahakapao Trail in upcountry is a nice hike, a 6-mile necklace loop inside a gorgeous forest of rainbow eucalyptus trees and fern glade. Red tin-arrows are tacked along way directing you through the woods; occasional mountain bikers will surprise you friendly asking a pass, and leashed dogs with their owners.  Otherwise, the forest is undisturbed, and you and a couple of your friends are there alone taking it all in. Professor and author David George Haskell wrote "The Forest Unseen," which is borrowed as the title of this blog. The book is about a scientific close observation of the forest but with "occasional" data from poetry when preemptively the beauty of nature can't anymore be expressed (or understood) in words. It must be a type of warbler, a petite yellow and white bird, joining us on our rest stop drinking hot tea from a thermos when a light rain came down over the bog. She must probably be looking for food, or didn't mind us at all being around to stretch out.  

     This mushroom, like flatbread, epiphyte (adhering symbiotic) to the hardwood, see photo, isn't chanterelles (I realized that only after coming home researching what they were). What I had thought they were actually grew on the forest floor and shoot out of the biomass with caps (not flat embodiments) and are singular growths (but their color, bright brown-orange, is almost the same). Across from this spot, about ten yards away, was a man digging wet dirt with some kind of a purposeful design, we didn't know for sure what, and didn't ask. I imagined the lifecycle of this unknown mushroom dependent to its host in terms of nutrition and what it feeds off, and in return what benefit to the tree. It appears its tenderness duly comes from the sweet sap of the mother tree, and its flower-like lateral projection. A maple stand comes to mind. The bounteous, permaculture-focused farmers market of Portland, Ore. comes to mind. Everything green of the Pacific Northwest. The sublime Olympic National Park, the quietest alpine wilderness in the world.

    I had a hearty soup after our hike - vegetables immersed in light coconut milk infused of ginger, kaffir leaves and lime from a food truck/fruit stand in Makawao town. I live on the westside valley of the island and don't come upcountry very much, and this visit brought back mainland reminisces (comparably because of its cooler climate and the unseen wondrousness of a mature rainforest). I remember a line from Haskell's book that goes like this: My shadow lies in the moonlight, around a circle of leaves. And I wonder now... was this poetry revealed.

         

  

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FOOD RUN

On Maui provisions are overwhelming, you are given your neighbor's vegetables, year-round fruits come from coworkers' yard bursting at the seams in the bag in the office (take them, take them, take them), you get your basics at the health food store, and all comes out too plenty and you don't know what to do. And there's more produce regularly, the growing season is everyday, sharing is a given (no pun intended), and there never seem to be an end to avocados and limes in all shapes and forms. My lovely landlord calling out to my second floor window, wearing light-toned sunglasses and a Tahitian jasmine tucked behind her ear, Pick your veggies first before my friends come. The sweet potato roots are big and chunky, still caked with soil; I took a ripe pineapple and she said, Break off the leafy top and dump it in the compost down here; don't forget the cucumbers, I know they're your favorite, and get more radish. 

I ate PB&J today on milk-honey artisanal loaf, toasted it a bit, and called it lunch. I packed all the "begotten" made on the island abundance in two fabric-tote reusable bags, plus purple carrots, still green bananas, and the rest, and will spread them on the office kitchen table on Monday morning. It's my turn to give - having constantly been receiving much. Wild mangoes fall from trees in the Iao forest rain or shine on the road. Edible forages are textbook perfect quality. Even the spring water from a natural cave spout is a common blessing. (Imagine being given as Christmas gift a real, naturally harvested "Evian" in a green glass bottle? I was guided on trail to this heavenly source, and it's not far from my small town on the foothills of the mountain.) What more can I ask? 

I love making creative random food gifts with anniversary cards/thank you notes. Once a coworker gave me a ride to a store and actually waited for me outside (when I could've taken a bus back home, which was my plan) but the aloha spirit here is just as abundant as malasadas (sugared donuts) and plate lunches. What I love most here apart from the overflowing everything, is the sense of humor of the locals. There's always a comic angle to their expressions and mannerisms, nothing seems to be taken seriously here, when come one, what have we to complain? I picked up that light-heartedness (what an unloading of my NewYorker/artist elegant rigidity) having lived on Maui two years to date, and so for the coworker giving me a roundtrip ride, the least I could do was think of something hilarious but sincere as thank you, just like what the locals do. I attached a peanut (one boiled shell-on peanut) on a homemade card and wrote: "Compared to your benevolence this gift is "peanuts." She texted me after receiving it with this acronym: LMAO! I didn't know what that meant, but then she told me - and both of us were LOL - and, after all, it was a "good run." 

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