divine and predestinated.

Over the past few weeks I have been slowly savoring Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa in rotation with two or three other books. I can't dedicate myself solely to this one work simply because I do not want it to end. It just so happens that my cousin in Oklahoma is reading the same book at the same time and is convinced that it must be the most beautiful book she's ever read. I do agree.  


Dinesen, the pen name under which the Danish author Karen Blixen worked, stuns me with her ability to capture something almost unnameable into elegant prose - the wild sorcery of a cook. Living on her coffee plantation in Kenya in the early 1900s, Blixen introduces us to Kamante, her faithful African tribesboy servant, and his place in the kitchen. She writes, 


"Now when I find Kamante at hand, as a familiar spirit to cook with, this devotion again took hold of me. There was to me a great perspective in our working together. Nothing, I thought, could be more mysterious than this natural instinct in a Savage for our culinary art. It made me take another view of our civilization; after all it might be in some way divine and predestinated. 
Kamante, in all cooking matters , had a surprising manual adroitness. The great tricks and tours-de-force of the kitchen were child's play to his dark crooked hands; they knew on their own everything about omelettes, vol-au-vents, sauces, and mayonnaises. He had a special gift for making things light, as in the legend the infant Christ forms birds out of clay and tells them to fly. He scorned all complicated tools, as if impatient of too much independence in them, and when I gave him a machine for beating eggs set it aside to rust, and beat whites of egg with a weeding knife that I had had to weed the lawn with, and his whites of egg towered up like light clouds. As a Cook he had a penetrating, inspired eye, and would pick out the fattest chicken out of a whole poultry yard, and he gravely weighed an egg in hand, and knew when it had been laid. 
He had a great memory for recipes. He could not read, and he knew no English so that cookery-books were of no use to him, but he must have held all that he was ever taught stored up in his ungraceful head, according to some systematization of his own, which I should never know. He had named the dishes after some event which had taken place on the day they had been shown to him, and he spoke of the sauce of the lightning that struck the tree, and of the sauce of the grey horse that died. 
He did at times taste the food that he cooked, but then with a distrustful face, like a witch who takes a sip out of her cauldron. He stuck to the maizecobs of his fathers" (p. 38-9).


It was only today that I discovered Blixen also authored Babette's Feast, the iconic French culinary fable that later became a film in the 80s - one of my favorites. 

something old.

            Today, Henry, one of our wine dudes, delighted me with a glass of almost-one-hundred-year-old Portuguese Madeira (she fell but one year short!) at the end of a lovely little lunch on the patio. Raisin, maple, and butterscotch...remarkably not sweet, it made me pucker. X! This is just a quiet toast to all of you, if you're out there - cheers to summertime and LIFE, some things old, some things new. 

the bay, baby.

           

                  I see that Golden Gate and it’s no wonder I feel so at home here. No wonder to me at all. I was thrilled to have a whole handful of dear friends join my sister, Sandra, and I for a springtime romp last week around the Bay (and, I must admit, a much-needed break from wacky and wonderful Los Angeles). “Mixed bag”, said lovingly, is the only way to describe this group: friends and lovers, Midwesterners to Frenchmen to our very own Guy, all complete with some serious quirks and compulsions, distinct humour and taste. However, if there is one thing we all share deeply, authentically, and to the core, it is our love of food and wine. And let me assure you, we sucked the Bay Area bone-dry.

            These four days we spent up North were marked by that true San Francisco weather – grey and damp, romantic and inspiring of (very) early cocktails. I realize how spoiled I have become living in the alternate universe that is Los Angeles, where to “brave” the wet weather is a rare necessity. Back home in the Bay I happily don my duckboots and wool coat to the Ferry Building for Market where I get an initial sense of what the earth’s best offerings are in the top half of my home state: the last of winter’s finest citrus, hearty red Russian kale and tiny, lacy mustard greens. I went home with plenty of treasures…

            Apart from the weather, the other defining theme of this grand excursion was eating with our hands. From gleaming Steam Boat oysters at Zuni Café to impeccable pizzas at Delfina, this action is so informal, so satisfying, so basic. It has got to be one of my very favorite things to do. Hands down…ha!

            After a few days of immense enjoyment our trip culminated with a rather impromptu SummerWinter supper held at the home of our godparents, Glen and Masae Gormezano, where we were given free reign in this kitchen, with David happily at the helm. After collecting plenty of booty from Monterey Fish Market and Berkeley Bowl, we returned to Mill Valley, nestled in a pocket between Mt. Tam, Muir Woods, and the Pacific, and began to prepare. One by one, friends began to turn up (turnip!), offering their hands to help create what resulted to be a truly glorious meal. To see a kitchen filled with those I love and admire shelling fava beans side by side – really, I couldn’t be more content. Moments such as these remind me of the natural law of food and eating that favors togetherness. It is an essential and wonderful tendency to share not just the food itself, but oneself. Time. Attention. When I find myself at the Supper table I know I have arrived because there is no other place I would rather be.

            This time, SummerWinter manifested in a very Northern California sort of a way. I recall slow-roasted whole spring torpedo onions with aioli, live Santa Barbara spot prawns on the grill like candy, Red Hawk triple cream from Pt. Reyes with smoked Monterey Bay sardine on ACME toast.

            Of course, the trip to the airport couldn’t have been more of a harried, mad dash and yet, we still found five spare minutes to grab a boxful of warm croissants almost directly from Tartine’s oven. If this means nothing to you from experience, let me say that it is something like heaven cracking open just a little bit for you to see in. I’m sure my fingers were still buttery when we landed back in L.A.

  

                 

  

granola, we love thee.

       Maybe it’s all the California inside me, maybe it’s my hunter-gatherer tendencies shining through, maybe it’s the association I’ve given it to my father – I can’t rightly say. All I know is that I find my true love in a palm full of granola. I always have.

       Ideally, I seek out the following qualities in this whenever-food: a dry-crispness to the oats, which is absolutely not a mark of boring flatness but slow-roasted freshness. It's the slow-roasting that offers the comforting depth that granola should have. Under-sweetness and more-than-expected sea-saltiness are essential. I’ve found using a combination of molasses, buckwheat honey, and maple syrup together, each very moderately, creates yet another dimension, giving the granola that mysterious appeal that keeps everyone poking like pigeons for more. And it’s a treasure hunt. My treats are deeply toasty pecans, walnuts, pepitas, and thick flakes of coconut. The object, as far as ratios are concerned, is to have just enough treasures so that it’s not too hard to find them but it’s still exciting when you do. The final and most important note – a little butter never hurt anybody. Never forget that.

       As far as fruit is concerned, I like to leave that up to the eater. My granola serves as a blank canvas and welcomes additions of raisins, currants or banana slices – anything at all. Lately, though, I’ve been giving bee pollen and a sprinkling of cacao nibs a whirl.


Toot, toot. All aboard the granola train. 

christmas at grandma's.

             

            I thought so much about my grandmother, Vovó Cleide, on my flight home from Brazil. I’d spent the holidays with her and most of the maternal side of my family in her hometown, Currais Novos, a small mining village in the arid Northeastern region.

            Aunts, uncles, and cousins included, the head-count came up to about twenty of us all together. I must say, too, that we did a spectacular job of choreographing all of our many bodies in her tiny home, and even more so in the kitchen because, of course, that is where everyone always wishes to congregate.

            Late in the evenings we’d all part ways and sleep in various pousadas around town but during the days, which we’d all spend at my grandmother’s (unless otherwise adventuring), some of us would eat our meals standing up or share a chair. Instead, we might just wait our turn, kicked back against the side of house in the shade with an ice cold Skol and a handful of cousins, watching the townspeople go by. The most entertaining person to people-watch with is my grandmother herself. She has a knack for turning small-town gossip into myth or legend.

            As for the coziness of our family reunion, it could not have been more welcome. After all, even back to my early memories I cannot once recall so many of us together in the same room. My mother and half of her siblings moved their lives to California years ago, baby cousins born in Brazil made travel difficult, and my grandmother would never dream of leaving behind her little dog Pituxa, whom she considers her youngest daughter.

            My Vovó Cleide remains very much an enigma to me – a woman truly unique in all of her idiosyncrasies. Staunch, tough, proud, FULL of true love, and with a sense of humour that stands up to the most dry, crass, and crude of any man’s. She beats anyone to the opportunity to make a dirty joke. I have had many, many good laughs in her presence.

            On the days surrounding Christmas, she fed the lot of us until we were stuffed to the brim, with her children’s favorite foods: lamb puxado in cilantro sauce, crispy-skinned chicken with her pimenta macho, and moqueca de peixe e camarão (a seafood stew with coconut milk and palm oil). The staples were fluffy Brazilian rice and Rio-style beans, feijão Carioca, and farofa (toasted manioc flour with peanuts and fresh corn kernels). For dessert, fresh cashew fruit juice and watermelon slices. She’d give us the signal to help ourselves to the midday lunch feast, and once we were all settled with our plates and scattered in conversations around the house – reminiscing, storytelling, joking, teasing – she would observe with a quiet contentment like a proud mother hen.

            Vovó Cleide herself is very ritualistic and particular when it comes to mealtime and likes only to eat out of her deceased uncle’s white tin camping bowl. Her favorite foods include the likes of olho de peixe (fish eye), bola de galo (rooster testicle), and coração e rabo de boi (cow heart and tail). I watched her gobble up each with apparent delight. She is also known to love anything cooked in chicken blood and small prairie dog-like mammals of the region known as preá. My mother swears to this day that Vovó served their pet rabbit for dinner one night.

            What I can’t stop daydreaming about, though, is a much tamer food – feijão verde. Fresh beans, grandma-style. These are green shelling beans, similar in flavor and appearance to black-eyed peas, only too appropriate for summoning good fortune for the new year. It’s a dish that could not be simpler nor more delicious. Cooked slowly in a light broth of onion and tomato, she’s brings it together at the very last minute with a swirl of creme de leite. Hearty but not heavy; fresh and earthy, these beans make you feel a sort of Sampson strength, the kind that could make you live for one hundred years.

color samples.

The Wednesday eve before a Thursday SummerWinter supper – and it will be the final of Two Thousand Ten. The end of the year always seems to bring the busy flurries. In fact, I find myself frightened at my own lack of inspiration in the midst of tying up all the year’s loose ends. One’s mind has been so filled by December, saturated with memory and anticipation alike that, in terms of orchestrating such a supper, it is always ideal to let the gut take over. As aforementioned in a recent post, wisdom of instinct and desire conveniently set in.

             
I equate the dawning of food inspiration with being a very pregnant woman. Our beautiful friend, Emily, who will be attending on Thursday, is pregnant with a capital P. Ripe, if you will. My secret wish is that she goes into labor at the SummerWinter supper – it’s not entirely unlikely either, for I hear that this pivotal moment can only be induced when a woman is free of worry, non-expectant, and at ease.

            
It’s the same when a food dream baby is born. If we carry out this metaphor, David then would have to be the old woman who lived in a shoe, children galore – his ideas fly ceaselessly from his hands and heart. It was only yesterday, actually, that he treated Sandra and I to personal soufflés on the fly, each in our own petite cast-iron cocottes. Of nutty-sweet Parrano gouda and bitter-clean dandelion greens they were. And just because.

It’s remarkable how such inspiration can catch us on a whim. After a sequence of hectic weeks, mine finally settled in as I scampered through market this morning. I mean it – I really scampered. When it’s cold and misty out, and Los Angeles finally takes a break from feigning an endless summer, the produce at early market gleams, dewy and perky in its frigidness. How could one not get excited about all of this food business?

This time, market presented me with the most glorious and unusual breakfast.

* * *

SAMPLE COLOR SAMPLES:

 Spoonful of Hachiya persimmon, flushed apricot-orange. Flaming pumpkin hearts.

Avocados show greens of fresh olives & baby grasses. Peridot.

Flecks of fuschia & violet scintillate in Mrs. Schaner’s 
Red Onion Jelly.

Custard fruit. Guava-green thin & bitter skin. Soft, ivory innards are milky-sweet.

* * *

solo date.

Brillat-Savarin said, “every…sociability can be found assembled around the same table: love, friendship, business, speculation, power, importunity, patronage, ambition, intrigue…” It becomes clear that, particularly in the present season, it is unusual to find oneself dining alone.

This winter I have broken bread (honey flax-seed from the wood-burning oven, to be exact) with those I love best and I have relished in observing how our human clans continue to celebrate each other through the true love of food. It was only this evening, though, that I stumbled upon one of those rare, interstitial moments amidst the holiday powwows with friends and beloveds, acquaintances and strangers, that I found myself alone.

Delightfully so.

There is nothing more hyper-sensorial than eating alone. Just moments past, I sat down to satiate a craving that revealed itself to me without rhyme or reason making their usual appearances. In my experience, when such cravings arise – these nameless, mysterious echoes from within – you’ve no choice but to listen. Tonight it just so happened to be beer and persimmon. To be more specific, that would be a Stone Ruination IPA and a Fuyu persimmon, in it’s raw, unadulterated form. This is not to say that this edible manifestation of my desire is particularly special it its own right. What makes it so is the ability to identify it and the willingness to bring it into fruition – literally. More often than not, when I am alone, my mind and body are quieted to the point that even the most acute of cravings can make themselves heard.

My persimmon was remarkably large compared to its brothers and sisters at the market, but it was not its size that struck me so much as its waxy, California poppy-hued brilliance that so defied the corresponding season’s insistent grey outside.

In the season of absolute togetherness, I am reminded that these instances of solitude present us with an opportunity to reenter into the company we keep with a renewed sensitivity. Edible or otherwise, our essential hungers pang for us to hear.