CHESTNUTS AND POMEGRANATES

 "I've looked at love from both sides now

From give and take, and still somehow

It's love's illusions I recall

I really don't know love at all."

(Joni Mitchell) 

     The technique of roasting chestnuts is incubating in searing heat (scored and covered) and hatching them when fully grilled. It takes time to evenly distribute their cooking, but spending it Christmas early morning is the homemaker's duty as is that sweet tenderness time they come alive for while everyone else is asleep and you're up "building the food fireplace." Using your family-inherited wooden spoon charred in the grain around the edges of the scoop, turn the chestnuts frequently and ventilate them with some sprinkling of orange water, and their perfumed steam will eventually loosen and crack their shells. In the meantime, slice the globes of chilled pomegranates in even halved cross-sections and juice them all into the clearest mason jars you've dishwashed the night before - there's nothing like a home-viticulture of "Burgundy" or "Amarone" carefully filtered through a fine mesh cloth to catch the pulp and encasing comb debris, leaving you a perfect libation so evocatively red in taste alongside your chestnuts roasting. I have since learning to cook traditionalized chestnuts and pomegranates in my "cookbook" repertoire for the holiday season. That's the reason they're available as harvest in winter, for nature's love of us. I have received a few precious shipped-from-mainland gifts from the small circle of intimate relations in my life, I put up a real tree for them filled with lights, I will open the gifts when the chestnuts are ready and have pervaded my cottage with their orchard glade, I will think about those loved ones not with me and fill my heart, and I will glad. I will touch these words I feel for their poems (to mean: their mystery) so I won't be sad. Smoke is coming out of the lid and crackling sound, I anticipated the smell, I turned some more coating and adding a little salt. There's music of course on the radio. In retrospect, I find no difference in cooking and loving - both meet each other through the parallel process in the kitchen and intention you celebrate. When I was a kid I looked at midnight clouds and wondered to myself why I was here, a deep, innocent questioning why, given all the stars and all the black void. I still do. Yet, I had never asked my late mother, who had handed down all these traditions to me, as to why. But I don't think it's not ever too late to know why. Just like hers before back home, I have a kitchen I call my own now. And therefore love is never too late. I'm still here. They're perfectly roasted, they've breeched out of their shells to peel off easy, these beautiful chestnuts are ready to eat fresh off hot, but blow to cool, because Christmas is coming to pass. She's coming to pass.  

      

     

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FOR GIVING

Giving, sharing, donating, volunteering, cooking… — these are all gestures of benevolence for someone. The fictional Sal Paradise (if you remember from my old post titled Soul Food)  came to town and brought with him “gifts” under my Christmas tree. (The material present even if it’s just one, is infused with layers of thoughtfulness only from a “Santa” intimately familiar with who you are, and how food is your comforting element; and to suggest perfectly the ambience for a recipe I could do with his gift in, say, a dreary and cold rainy day like today, to make buttery grilled cheese sandwich on the panini maker gift! with a sweet card writing that I make a nice hot cup of chocolate drink with it for full experience of coziness — goes a long, long way to the cook at heart.) There’s probably a very generous reason why his name is Paradise. 

I will be watching Love Actually and couch out this awful rainy Sunday with hot cocoa pressed between my hands, laptop on. It’s a holiday must-see movie tradition that’s dear to me, it’s very romantic and forgiving, even if on Christmastime “you tell the truth.” One scene that’s a high point in the film is a caroler secretly in disguise addressing his longtime crush, who happens to be his best friend’s wife, by showing placards with notes of his feelings for her finally revealed on this “Holy Night.” He knew it won’t amount to anything but did the impossible “giving” anyway, and gave his full heart to her, revealing his feelings, for nothing in return. He walked away from the house onto the street carrying the boom box still playing the carols under one arm and under the other the big handwritten notes that told all, and to his surprise she followed him on the street running and he turned around — and got a deep kiss of thanks from his secret love. 

Joni Mitchell’s song From Both Sides Now was on the record player when the impeccable Emma Thompson, one of the main English actors in the film, emoted the pain she felt learning of her husband’s extramarital affair at work on Christmas Eve, and worse on their children’s Nativity play at the elementary school they were, as family, to attend, showed her resiliency instead to overcome the betrayal. Wiping her tears away and not showing her family, gathered everyone to the car so they won’t be late for the show, and the kids were excited to evidently, and then she looked at her husband in the eye to mean without words, I know. But not without out love.

Santa knew I love this film, its message of unconditional giving, of sacrifice for truth and for togetherness. Santa knew I would need nourishment by way of feeding my heart all worked up during the unfolding of story in this film of ordinary people experiencing extraordinary acts of giving and forgiving. And he’s always right.

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O PULP THE JAM

     My red kiwi and passion fruit (with multi-berries) homemade jam is now a week old and I think it’s ready to be taken out of the cupboard for a taste test. (I’m thrilled that during the process of “canning” or aging,” inspecting the cabinet for any evidence of oxidation or bubble or mold daily, that nothing like that had happened and the jam looks to me strident from the outside, and the moment of truth now awaits as I open the seal to release the sugar air built in.) I have no reservations. 

The soft-set texture I was intentionally achieving for (as prescribed in the book Salt Sugar Smoke) was achieved, and I had fantasized an experience of like uncorking a bottle of wine and allowing the liquid to bloom her “genie” when popped, admonishing the air, and therefore unleashing the olfactory aroma of a wish come true. You will never forget your first! 

Spreading is next, and a sliced croissant bread is in the wait as well as room temperature butter to go on the bottom as the jam’s bed de riguer, and perfectly toasted - the jam and butter marriage is heavenly to the nose and I am spelled. Unesco recently declared the French croissant (or is it the baguette?) as intangible heritage to humanity, and this is exactly the reason why, for all intents and purposes. High pectin fruits function well in preservation and concentration of flavors, but its begotten form as jam is light and magnifique sweet that is more corporal to the fruit and not the sugar. To blend fruits in compote and how to describe their harmony to the palate is like seeing a basket full of them and that picture of beauty is retrievable in taste transcendence if you let it conjure that feeling. The juicy deliciousness of the kiwi swam in the spark of the passion fruit pulps in due service to raspberries and blueberries joy. 

“Label and date what you make,” advised Diana Henry (author of SSS, which inspired this jam-making). Well, this one I did will not only have a title - but this story, too. 

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A COOK'S LESSONS

"I had been cooking all my life, but only as a way to please grownups; now I discovered that it had other virtues. I yearned for romance and dreamed of candlelight suppers. I started with the recipes I had learned, but I soon branched out. It never occurred to me that a recipe might be too hard. I understood the rhythm of the kitchen and I was very relaxed. And very lucky. If anyone had cared about the outcome things might have been different, but everything I cooked turned out fine. I developed the skin of a cook, I learned to ignore minor burns. And to improvise."       (Ruth Reichl, Tender at the Bone) 

 

 

"Cook Review" is a play on Book Review, the chosen title for my longtime food blog, and I think the onomatopoeic reference is pretty obvious. But what’s not obvious is this: who’s the book? what’s the story? and what’s the lesson to deconstruct through literary (I mean culinary) criticism? Is the author using “quotes” efficiently to shape the theme throughout the “book”? And what about the title of the “cook,” does it convey the coherence of each ingredient to make a whole plate desired? Is reading it worth the taste, after all? Did you eat and enjoy it? Did you learn anything from it? And, finally, did it stir your imagination word to mouth? I have been cooking for writing since moving to New York more than a decade ago, and I’m still slicing and burning food to my standard of perfection where deliciousness and nutrition meet love on the stove and page. In a sense, I am my own “critic” and present my “review” after I had cooked. Again, is it all worth the effort in rehashing it all out? Because every little “poem” I make here is like a new tapas served on this “counter” for you I’ve test-tasted and had been worth traveled for discovering new foods, a cook review at every bite should be a wonderful experience, no? It’s almost the end of the year and the holidays are coming and I am reflecting on some kind of closure that whole breadth of time. O.K., looking back, pointing to the dish I really liked, and that one I could picture, sure, and had indeed enlivened this book. There were times, too, when a chapter was the saddest, more so because of the food you cooked, and you couldn't imagine it was going to be the last time you did. I just buttered raw pecans in a pan with rosemary needle pines and tossed the roasting fragrance like a pro to cook evenly and remembered Christmas in France with friends and your bygone happiest. The Guatemalan vendor at the farmers market yesterday gave me a lesson about what to do with a cactus fruit and said to juice it, and that was distinctly its utility, and not confusing with the plant's leaves when cooked achieve grilled bell peppers quality you could sandwich in a soft-shelled taco. My dependent-on-the-fresh-catch menu at Cayman Islands wintering there from New York was by far the greatest "cook" I ever read, and it taught me these: (1) you have a difficult but a precise job to bring out the best in what you have on the kitchen counter to feed your family; (2) do what you can never do in your high rise little apartment in the city like wok-frying in peanut oil and curry leaves a whole spiny lobster sizzling with garlic and table wine; and, (3) snorkeling at sunset around shallow reefs on white sand and after, walk the long beach to the limestone cliff where you see from a distance Caribbean boobies land to nest for the night while holding your lovers hand feeling like it's eternally held, eternally loved.         

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JAMMING

 

    I will be jamming red-green kiwi and passion fruit together using all their natural pectin and acidity to preserve it, and with only a touch of raw turbinado cane sugar to taste after they've boiled through and set. The final color in the jar looks already devilishly delicious to me - like a quasar liquid dipped in candy glitter. I have a vegan croissant bread slices (new at the store) to serve as toast later when ready to spread my jam, and when the mood is ripe for when a cozy morning comes (these days the weather has cooled down much near the mountain, and with gentle precipitation mists outside the window and hot cocoa on the stove steaming fudge and milk, I know that beautiful time has come). Lately I've switched from brewed coffee to old-fashion hot chocolate to start my day into the work week, extending especially during sleeping-in weekends' arrival when taking it all easy is vital for wellness (this switched was inspired by my rereading of The Picture of Dorian Gray, when his servant-valet delivers hot cocoa poured exquisitely in a fine China cup on a silver platter just when he's getting up from his luxurious bed chambers all fancy robbed and princely in his glorious country estate).

      

     O.K. midlife crisis I'm not admitting. Here's how to jam perfectly as can be done only at home: (1) sterilize or hot bath your jars and dry heat them clean (transfer your compote here directly from the saucepan when done and let cool before sealing); (2) ratio your fruits equally in volume and simmer gently in a large saucepan stirring in lemon juice from a whole fruit and it's recommended by the experts that they all be just ripe - these symphony of fruits - and at peak to touch, for that's when their pectin is high; (3) add the sugar and stir lightly while treating your lips to its emerging flavor and sweetness blend, and when it's reached extraordinary taste that's when you know it's perfect. This recipe and process was derived from my reading a British home cook known for her preserves of all kinds using bumper crops season after season in very fanciful ways. There was a story behind her passion for jamming. Once she traveled to the south of France and had read about a town eccentric for its preserves-making, and by train alighting in Chinon and dispatching herself to the famed inn with its cookery magic of jams stored in old wooden armoires impeccably colorful shelf upon shelf, she was hooked.

  

     Give me a week to can my kiwi-passion fruit jam and age it perfectly for my croissant toast in waiting, and update you with results of success (hopefully) on my next blog. I think, you my followers, can "fruitfully" join me in this jamming journey you can very well do now (use fruits you love, just making sure of their pectin content the higher the better, like apples) and timing it together that us achieving slow food in team spirit will come to pass. “Simone de Beauvoir compared jam making to the capturing of time. I like the idea of stopping a fruit in its tracks so you can eke it out little by little. However, preserving is also about holding onto a season, a particular mood. You can find fall in a jar of pear and chestnut jam, or the fragrance of your Provençal summer vacation in a jar of apricot and lavender. It is one of the most poetic branches of cooking. "  (Diana Henry, Salt, Sugar, Smoke)  

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