CELEBRATIONS

When they were wild

When they were not yet human

When they could have been anything,

I was on the other side ready with milk to lure

them,

And their father, too, the name like a net in his 

hands.

- Louise Erdrich, Birth

The gift was a real peacock feather hairclip/side hat showcasing its green glittered tail with eyes, a beauty accessory for church service to know the matriarch is in the house in yellow Sunday dress, because her day has come. And the brunch was to be spectacular: sangria champagne to toast; French-inspired food focused on heavy foliage tomato-cilantro stews with side of lentil rice; mountain apple and spinach salad; rye seeded flat bread; rum cake blueberry compote molten at center; toasted pecans, pickled red pearl onions from Peru for aperitifs' hors d'oeuvre; the family finally gathered under the sun. In a cook's life, these moments are what he lives for, commemorating long histories of friendship and good times and feeding them well. Mom would've been proud of these celebrations he serves.

The surrogate nephew took a moving video of the blowing of the candles around the table while the singing burst, and those who couldn't be there called in on phone in sync. He was blessed at the church in the morning by the priest, and didn't expect this. Before the celebrations begun, the flute glasses where frosted in the freezer and the mint leaves were picked. He ironed his white shorts and floral shirt. Brewed plantation-style coffee. He arranged flowers in vases of blue-violet and white. He felt the kitchen's pulse. 

You have guests over and in a blink of an eye visits leave, and with memories of them will next year save you a date. Our names have endured, and our journeys come full circle there in reunion. We clean up together, and then pack a luggage for there is just one more night. Names, our names, have grown of age like siblings. We embrace. We wave. Friends are transformations and fill the void. And will never forget you. 

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WORK FOR FOOD

     If you look close enough at the photo there is an image of a hula girl on cinder block - and I found her while clearing the side yard this morning half buried in the bio-detritus. I was preparing a food garden, at last, this tiny land had been sitting fallow since I moved here, and now absent of overgrown brush looks to me a perfect herb &vegetable bed for a home farmer. I had missed doing yard work for cultivation (last time experiencing that was when I still lived in Portland, Ore., at an old English-cottage style house surrounded with fruit trees). I'm imagining a raised planter box growing allium bulbs that flower for pollinators and Crop Science-developed seeds that propagate diverse micro-ecosystems like sun berries with rainbow radishes and interspersed along them legume vines that fend for themselves with visiting wings. Summer is just around the corner. It has been a wet April and May on the island, yet the nutrient recharge as its steeping the ground is perfect timing for this work. 

     Harvest in the indigenous knowledge sense is undisturbed in nature. Tribal swidden system in the highlands (I learned years ago in grad school) is a case in point: the forest is a watershed and adjoining a rice terraces cultivation is irrigated from its roots downslope; it is a sun sink and also a buffer shade at different times of the day as earth renews from an inert axis and life abound in vegetated streams. Yet earth's performance needs an instrument in the hands of man. According to the shaman I interviewed (with a translator), a human touch designs the agronomical circuitry of the planet and turns it on. And prayer-chanting, the tribe cupping rice wine in their hands, is its fuel. On the Cordillera mountain my research focus was the role of those chants-in-supplicate to traditional agriculture, and what forms they render to consilience (E.O. Wilson, Harvard emeritus professor, coined this word, and it means: the harmony-transcendence of the astronomic with the anthropomorphic). I remember a classmate of mine in the program how she loved Wilson like a mentor having read all his books and having admired his tenacity to undercover deeper phenomenon and beauty from mere empirical science. She was a hardhat-wearer forester with a heart of a poetess. 

     It might not be a coincidence I have found a statue of  "Gaia" embedded in my garden - the mother of earth. May she bless my work on her land, and may I faithfully earn my keep.               

 

 

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OLIVES AND EDIBLE PETALS

 "It was wonderful two years ago: all I had to do was to close my eyes and my head would start buzzing like a bee-hive. I could recapture the taste of kouskouss, the smell  of olive oil which fills the streets of Burgos at noon, the scent of fennel floating through the Tetuan streets, the piping of Greek shepherds; I was touched."   (Jean-Paul Sartre)

Inadvertently in my readings I would come across food literature like the aforementioned quote, and often I find it in novels not about food - somewhat appropriate, if fortuitous, to start a blog. Here’s a secret (“recipe”): writers already have a working framework they hang on to in their heads and tenaciously will shop for details, as I’m a book cook, so there I go. My “starter” is lifted from a diary of free association from an existentialist bard - a bit heavy, yes, but his “bread” is optional. (I was actually thinking of bruschetta in the title but opted not; it’s a figurative decision - some savories you allow to bloom late in the taste.) I wilted a whole head of butter lettuce with the olives and petals, and in the braising added sunflower seeds and alfalfa sprouts. I was craving warm salad for a change, and thought it would be great with toasted pumpernickel German flat bread, then splashing plum vinegar and red pepper flakes over my plate as finishing touch.

"Edible wild greens are available everywhere seasonally for the picking but great care must be used. If you are in earnest about pursuing this economical, healthful hobby, consult an authoritative text or better still a local enthusiast. 

"Here is a charming quick-trick decoration. Just before serving, select some delicately colored, open-petaled flowers, like hollyhocks. Remove the stamen. Cut off all but 3/4 inch of the stem. Arrange the flower on the cake. Place a small candle in the center of each one."     -  (excerpts in the) Joy of Cooking

Sunday isn't only food-writing day it is also a synthesis of sorts becoming of me a hands-on cook who appreciates food's utility for health as essentially for my long, humble practice in the poetic arts. I don't really have much going on in the island, but I know for sure that my proprietress will have a bag of vegetables (and fruits if I'm lucky) waiting for me on the staircase every Sunday, and that's an assignment to fulfill in the kitchen because already love was in them in the giving and I will get busy for love in return. The beauty of her generosity also comes in a paper note attached to the bag telling me about cute stuffs. Gary, the mountain apples came from a yard up the hills! By the way, you've got mail, too (with a smiley emoticon). It's hard not to be grateful in life when relationships are forged like a handmade pendant wrought intricate and delicate and when you open it there's a heartwarming picture of a mother and son-like friendship. The caring is so deep - and food becomes communion.           

Coring those apples and peeling the skin in stripes to keep the tannins in the taste and slicing up identically the cucumbers seeded, and making a quick pickled salad for a side to a stewed eggplant-carrots-baba ghanoush is an assembly production on my line (compartmentally I have a running filtered water sink to wash and prep the vegetables, and on the wood chopping board counter space my produce taking turns on the knife, and finally to the hot pot where it'll all come together as dish du jour). Even if so for a few years now, I'm happy to be alone, I'm alright and healthy, the future is going to be O.K., because I know someone downstairs I share, we share, our food and home, I have a beautiful place to write and abundant provisionally is where we live like in an orchard. Sartre has written about the human condition from the lens of philosophy, however they are idealized in common thread of events one belongs to under the skin. He writes about he in the tactile and in the approximate sense of a standard life day-to-day he enspirits. The French brought artichoke plants and culinary flowers for cultivation in the highlands of Da Lat, Vietnam, and they taught the locals to use these flowers in soups and stews, and in garnishing condiments/amuse bouche. They make food look pretty and tasting another level of satisfaction. My mind reads and travels when I write, and land on my plate. As simple as that, I finish cooking and earnestly eat what I've begotten from all this living.      

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WHEELED WITH THE STARS

 

Postre is dessert in Spanish-Argentinian. Posterity are descendants in the nomenclature intended to pass on to thee. My late mother used to say that prosperity comes in round shape and I should never forget to put them on the dining table in anticipation of a jubilee. Golden coins of milk chocolate were, to the delight of a child, my favorite symbols of receiving those shiny treasures. The nesting pigeon outside the window at work, when I go for a break on the fifth floor to have a look, have two of those egg-symbols underneath her feather-belly and I feel she's feeling grand. Recently I had a layover in L.A.X. for seven hours coming back from a business trip, an old friend lives nearby and came to fetch me bearing gifts of homemade fudge filled with walnuts and cherries, they were so specially wrapped in Korean thimble canisters repurposed to render her creativity, of course to my delight, and presented them on a matrix styrofoam board with red holes like a game of buga-shadara. 

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world, a line from Rilke I have since embodied after finding my voice in poetry, the earth a clock, on the other hand a compass on my heart. In the town of Makawao upcountry is a Japanese-run bakery selling hot cross buns today, and I love those rolls with hot black tea because of the raisins and liqueur candied orange peels in them. There's a dish I would like to make in my head to celebrate posterity, a Mom's recipe (a prosperity food) given to us children to give luck and good fortune in the years ahead when she might be no longer be around for us, it's a dish of meat balls and angel hair noodles and green squash soup, it was so comforting to eat it was delivering her love in winsome ways, in my mind now it is also bequeathing a promise. I have much to be grateful for in life, especially with a few true friends in my circle I have been celebrating with, be it tiny achievements or big, professionally and personally (even artistically), with them around me the world is warm and kind in the deep sense of belonging or giving, and of never to feel alone. It means the world to me to be treated with love as I would in default mode my nature to love begetting it growing up steeped in food of love. I thank them for their courage, evermore. Love to me is nothing short of courage. 

I wheeled with the stars, and my heart broke lose on the wind (Pable Neruda).     

   

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A NIGHT OUT

     

     In Lahaina the art galleries on Front St. are impressive curations on set and the for-tourists food hold their own, one can juxtapose the two activities together and come out with a good time on a Friday night with a friend. There was an original Dali for 4.2 mil., a waxed depiction of the death of Christ on the cross; there was a San Diego-based bronze sculptor populating an elephant with caricatures and trinkets of Hindu gods and symbols, albeit kitschy but the detailed craftsmanship was an amazing feast for the eyes, it’s like seeing a 24-carat mammalian golden universe in frozen fireworks. A sidewalk professional artist was painting the exoskeleton of an angel fish in fire orange and neon indigo while a curious young girl with her parents watching was transfixed and the artist said to her, Go with your guts when you paint. Kimo’s next door is a seafood and steak massive restaurant, two floors with ocean view, my pal and I had a decent salad to share with carrot bread, and a blue Hawaiian kombucha on the rocks .00001 proof, while dissecting the merits of Peter Lik’s photography. One particular piece by the Australian-born artist stayed with me: the Maui rainbow tree renewing its vivid stripes after the rain, a towering 8-ft tall framed-vision of spectral notes soaked in forest dew highlights, with a fifty-two hundred dollars price tag. It was impossible to have captured the big wave in that cross-sectional curl, I asked the curator, logistically it was a life or death decisive moment on the camera, but there it was like a dancing fountain in the most dangerous waver run up condition out at sea, was the artist out of his mind? The cherry pie cobbler was delivered to our table toasted around the edges and clumps and smelling great. Butter, flour and miscellaneous compote make for the perfect burning of the crust in the ramekin as the jelly is oozing, and because of this concentrated fire April on the island begins to spring, the torch on the balustrade was a song to Molokai. We looked good that night, prepared for a little glamour barring none. Gallery-hopping presented its surprises at the eyes of the beholder critically in love with a work— and the discussions that follow revealed the art even more. I found my companion in the showroom speaking with apparently the artist-in-residence and overhearing their conversation about "process" I thought diminished the value of art in its pregnant form if you have to explain it. And true enough the artist didn’t allow encumbrances to creativity having to articulate it a priori. He said, You just go for it. (Sounds familiar.) No one can explain the origin of beauty, its source cannot be embodied, I argued, history judges art because of its timelessness. It could be that to debate art is part of the glamour of a night out when art’s effects compositionally overwhelm us. And that’s what it's supposed to do: to turn you in its direction you haven’t seen before. It is only beginning to tell, but look long. It’s a rare evening to celebrate in this island gigantic concepts ensuing gigantic geniuses that made their works possible — Matisse, Durer, Picasso, Dali and emerging local talents following their footsteps — and realizing the nature of passion as cumulative in our understanding their accomplishments that are larger than life itself. And our food and wine capping the night never tasted so much better.    
 

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