“CHRYSALIS”

 

So I was watching an indie film yesterday by director Dolly Wells about the life of a recluse famous writer as observed (third person) outside her "chrysalis" by an unexpected guest living with her in Brooklyn, NY.  The guest was not quite a stranger - in fact in the story her most recent published novel Good Posture, which also happens to be the title of the film, she had actually written about her when she was just a toddler held affectionately by her mom (her good friend),  and that maternal bond quite stayed within the writer's eye as some high epitome of beautiful love. This child, however, grew up to be a bad cook (she was staying with the famous writer for free in exchange of house chores; her widower dad was in Paris with a new woman and she was temporarily between homes) yet she was clever and artistic and she didn't mind her being around (remember that their relationship through affinity, or otherwise literarily, goes a long way). Her job was to take food up to her room and knock on the door and announce she was leaving the lunch outside on the floor (her first attempt at cooking turned out to be a rubbery pasta and salad greens with a mayo dressing and it was "grisly," although the young teenager would improve de rigueur later in the film). One of the most memorable lines in the film is this: A writer needs solitude as quiet as a womb chamber; art's development is from feeding the pupa into butterfly. 

...

At the farmers market this morning Nida said of the permissions set aside and bagged, "Hey, hey, those are for you!" They're grown in Kula upcountry, and I was a bit surprised about them being around this early in the season (back on the East Coast, or West, they come out December or January; in S. Korea midwinter long), but I was happy to take them - when ripe, which is just about, seeing those blushed orange skin soft to touch, peeling the permission with a pairing knife is like unveiling a miniature sculpture with its sweet juice intact inside for your bite to catch. Persimmons also remind me of a favorite auntie in So. California with a lovely so very So. California backyard garden (meaning so very Mediterranean in visual effect - bluer than blue sky backdrop through topiary trees, fruits and herb beds, marble white tiles). I can see her pruning and harvesting wearing a straw hat with a large brown bow on the back. It is an intimate picture of tending and giving. She loves sweet potato shoots growing in her side bed under her calamansi shrub. She picks the tender shoots and washes them in rose petals water and steams them over the cooking rice when it's almost done. In a bowl she adds tomatoes and persimmons and that's lunch with ginger tea. I am dedicating this beautiful tableau of a beautiful lady who knows her food well and more than that becasue she is beloved. In writing, if writing matters as bountiful divining words for life, then let it be food for this chrysalis - and may poetry come. 

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CHALLAH BOY

(Making challah in my NYC kitchen, ca. 2017.)

The pastry chef-owner of Breads Bakery at Union Square Park in Manhattan gave me a starter yeast dough (twisted by hand a small portion from his master batch) and said deliberately: use those for your future bread baking. One of the best results of that "inheritance" was this heavy and densely festive, aromatic dried fruits and nuts challah bread (it was after Thanksgiving that year that I had started making bread from scratch and anteing up my game for the holidays coming and thinking of gifting to friends and family something homemade and something perfect for the season). Challah is not presumptively a "New York" staple. But the tradition it brings is deeper, honorific and permanent for the New Yorker set. My food love for challah on the same note is not perfunctory, and I celebrate challah because it is beautiful straight out of the home hearth, or make a morning à la mode by serving challah french toast with huckleberries, maple syrup and a dusting of caster sugar lavender. Autumn in New York is a classic blues song slightly jazzed up to melancholic temper. Central Park is a dreamy scenery I imagine now with falling leaves on lover’s lane dotted with lamplights in dusk singing this tune. Madison Square Park is pretty, too, on autumn nights having a tall candle in the vicinity called The Empire State Building. Union Square is a maze-decorations of food booths favoring Austrian waffles and winter jams. And coffee never tasted more exquisite because you are wearing a roundup scarf walking back to your apartment from this park carrying a long bread. The air smelled of apricots, acorn and allure. When I made challah that autumn morning in New York I was in the mood for love— a kind of matinée idol swagger in the kitchen both semi-existing in New York and in a manga comic book series but far occidental with sonic intentions to feed the day! I remember stuffing the braids of my challah before baking in the oven ricotta cheese and coco nibs and more salted butter and a final rubbing down of good luscious olive oil on its bumpy body. The other night (fast forward to today in Maui) a foodie acquaintance, having spent time with him at his house, mentioned the Book of Salt, a fiction novel set in Paris about the hired home chef of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, had they had one that could be imagined by a food writer living up to the expectations (and palate!) of a socialite-literati-bon vivant-genius poet and fine art attaché like Ms. Stein who, assuming, ate well by virtue— and our conversation kept going and more interesting over rosé wine until way past sun down, cashews and sliced apples on our plates.     

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BEST CURRY YOU WILL MAKE

Ingredients: 

Uncooked french lentils and black beans 1/4 cup each, 1 med. yam root (with skin), cherry tomatoes 1/2 cup, young ginger root 3 nodes peeled and minced, garlic 3 small cloves peeled, shishito peppers 1 cup pitted, 3 small waxy potatoes, 2 lg. orange carrots with skin and quartered, turmeric powder 1 tsp., and 1 nail of clove. 

Garnish: cilantro herb cut like small flowers.

Side condiments: pickled pear onions and toasted shallot flakes.

How to:    

Combine all ingredients in a tall pot with 4 cups of homemade vegetable stock and bring to vigorous boil covered. Then reduce to med.low heat after that boiling point and simmer for about 45 mins. until all is tender (occasionally stir pot to collaborate the mix of flavors from the curry ingredients and halfway through cooking sprinkling a tad of salt and pepper). Remove from heat when done and let cool to room temperature (to expedite this process put bottom of pot on ice pack). When ready carefully transfer this chunks-liquid pre-curry sauce to food processor/blender and whip:whirr to a thick smooth puree consistency is achieved, licking to taste from your finger. Chill in fridge until time to eat. Make sure you use a silver gravy boat to pour over curry sauce to your steaming rice waiting on your Japanese artisanal painted plate.

Foodnote:  

So this is "the" sauce or the "mole" of the curry you will make. Smother as you like. My comfort is over white rice with the recommended side condiments (see above) - an homage to my favorite curry house in New York City. The "heat" is already in the curry so no need of chili kickers. The substance of this curry is deeply stocked in its ingredients melding all their flavors to a natural cream fluidity and their mouthful goodness is senses elevating, think it as the house food of an izakaya in a suburb of Tokyo, and you are experiencing a quintessential asiatic sitting while dining on the floor with friends. This vegan dish is the base food for that ethos of nutrition. But use this base to your appetite's satisfaction - curry could be universal with culinary keenness. How about add taro tempura over your rice? You name it. Just don't forget the recommended condiments and the cilantro flower on top. Take a picture souvenir of your food milieu. And send it to me. 

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SURFING

 

SURFING

Salad days.

These are his fins.

Hokusai big wave athelete.

His roommate reading Ezra Pound.

Two souls.

Off the plate.

Green macadamia and

Advanced Christmas lights on rocks.

They understand their 

difference is a reflection  

to cross. 

The same thing to ride.

The same thing to write.

Arugula commons, strawberry halves.

What is he thinking?

What is he thinking?

Not to be

a question 

to be consilience. 

Forking for the sherry vinegar

lifted  

the greens.

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A REFLECTION OF THE TIMES

 

I've been writing this food blog more than ten years now beginning in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I was fresh off grad school at that time and was hungry both viscerally and culinarily after several years abroad for a teaching scholarship (S. Korea and the Philippines), and I was ready to come home to the U.S. and cook my heart out in my kitchen and knew just outside my door I had access to a vibrant community of victuals purveyors, menu tastemakers and pop-up hipster chefs.  Welcome to the Big Apple. Ezra Pound wrote that the essence of a poet is that he builds us his world. And New York City had all the tools, if I may add. If the decade had produced anything for me - intersecting food with poetry - and significantly if the world I had traveled through creating my writings was sphere, then like the angel in Dante's Divine Comedy I have every segmented slice colored the wheel with flavor and beauty, and poignancy. Reading is infused in my writing. I can not achieve in this world without books. Also the memories from gathering and observing my food for gathering to share. The health of my heart I give to cooking; and by that I mean the holistic approach to this world I'm building - poetry on top of poetry, like layers of mille-feuille. But it isn't just all sweet and cream denotatives. I really wanted to reflect also on the struggles of isolation and dreams deferred in these uncertain times. I do not know, for example, the future of the Carlton, Ore. farm (photo inset), if the basis of its sustainability is separate lives. And growing older is also a case of slowing down. But I heal with the food I eat on Maui. Moringa pods ginger soup with a splash of cashew milk I share with my surfer roommate sucking out the marrow of life (to invoke Thoreau). Once a coworker had told me I will live forever eating moringa leaves. I told her the realistic measure of my life is in terms of the world of writing I will leave behind. A childhood friend on mainland has been my remote nurse lately, making sure I took care of myself in these uncertain times. I have to harness everything in my creative power to complete that world. In this blog I am not reflecting on mortality. At Iao wilderness when I hike the fallen mangoes have a taste-quality of their own. When I press the pink pulp-seeds of the guava on my tongue and wash it down with spring water from the waterfalls grotto, this life I live now out of New York and into the wild of Maui is like a brethren to my consciousness nature fills.  I learned today a Brazilian-Portuguese word saudade (pronounced SAO-dodge), and it means a celebratory missing of someone who's no longer around, not a feeling-word to be down about, but more to positively and passionately affirm your mark in them. Saudade! A toast to the past and the now, to the good times and bad, to the heart you have worn on our sleeve that had always got your back, and "to sail through, to seek beyond the sunset, and never yield.." (Lord Alfred Tennyson) for the world you had promised us to see.   

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