Category — beautiful things

Forget warm wontons!!

Courtesy of VT at The Sap Also Rises

Oh Hot, soupy, slippery wontons on a clear night after a deep snow.

The perfect portion of pork and scallion and soy wrapped in a soft, just-a-bit-chewy skin, topped with Sambal Oelek and a couple ladels of steamy broth with sliced cabbage.

What could be better?

Saturday night, I had the wonderful fortune to be invited to a wonton-making party down near Dupont Circle. I met up with friend Andy beforehand and we had a hot drink at Big Bear cafe and chatted about agriculture and business and solar power. Then we trudged through the slushy streets with our hands in our pockets and grins on our faces dodging the few silly motorists who dared to break the happy humanity of the evening.

It was a crowd of jolly 20-somethings, convening to drink and devour dumplings and delight in one another’s company. It was a crowd of many former classmates, whose faces I recognized, but who I couldn’t quite place. It made the party seem vaguely comforting and also a little unsettling.

A little after 10, I bundled up and headed outside, my hand on my belly, warm with beer and soup. I met up with Marcie five blocks away on the corner of 18th and Columbia and we trudged to a tall apartment building, where we went up to a party where no one knew anyone, but everyone was talking about love.

The party had cheese and wine and bread and those bright red roasted peppers in oil that have such a strange texture, like raw flesh. So we found a little corner and nibbled on things and talked about things until it was after one and we were sleepy, so we headed back to Marcie’s house.

The next morning, we got up and brought the computer to bed to seek out a breakfast spot. We shared some okay-but-not-great eggs and pancakes, had a mini-adventure at a furniture store nearby and then we each went our separate ways.

I’m looking for inspiration as I write these essays. I got some feedback to “think bigger” in parts of my essays. I’ve always had the most expansive (if not most coherent) thoughts when reading poetry. And Berry is particularly apropo.
One time, I’ll tell you all the story of how my grandparents met Mr. Berry back in Kentucky. But for now, a poem:

“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”

There’s nothing like a celestial event to put things into perspective.The annual leonid (shooting star) shower happened Tuesday night and I organized a little camping adventure.

Tuesday at 7pm, friends Christina and Mark, my mum and I piled into a car laden with sleeping bags, lanterns, blankets, binoculars, firewood and cocoa and headed up the 5 freeway towards the Santa Lucia Mountains. A few minutes prior, friends Steve, Brandon and Katherine left from Palo Alto driving south to meet us.

Mark said the last hour of driving was like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland sans giant cobra. It was a bumpy, narrow dirt road in the stygian night. We passed one campground (the wrong one) but otherwise couldn’t see any signs of the campsite where we were supposed to meet. No cell reception (obviously) and no markers. Google Maps + the GPS = failure.

Eventually, we turned back, planning to camp at the one campsite we had noticed. I turned off the road down the marked path to head towards Navajo campground, but then decided to retrace a little farther on the main road before giving up on the other half of our party. As we came up on an unmarked path, HEADLIGHTS! Hooray!

By that time, it was nearly midnight and cold. We started a fire and unloaded the car and sat around snacking and drinking warm things. Eventually, around 2:30am we headed up a small hill where we unrolled our sleeping bags and gear side by side like individually wrapped sardines and stared up at the sky. Our whoops and hollers at the bright projectiles soon turned into murmurs of appreciation, then some of us dropped off to sleep and it was quiet.

Around 4, we woke up, a few feet down the hill from where we started. The slick sleeping bags had no chance against gravity. We started the fire back up, warmed our numbed toes and soon after, started to pack up to head home.

Me and Christina straining towards the heavens.

Mum, fire-tender extraordinaire.

Christina like an adorable cartoon warming herself in front of the fire.

The crew (I’m taking the picture)

Yes. Looks like the same picture, but wait… who’s that in the middle?

Dawn on the drive home.

I think this is what it means when people talk about “community.” In the past, I’ve studied and even written about community in the educational context: “community based organizations,” “community-school collaboration” etc., but I feel now like I never really understood what it could mean to be in a vibrant, healthy, active community where a weekend in August means non-stop music and free food at the Island Village Barter Fair, Sunday mornings mean brunch and yoga at Sweet Earth Farm or coffee at Credence and Andreas, and there are so many potlucks you’re always afraid you’ll run out of enough quinoa to cover them all.

I guess that’s a lovely small town for you.

And not just a small town, but a town that seems to attract a certain kind of individual who cares about his neighbor more than the average Joe.

I guess some folks come to the island to retire and hide out and lay low, but it seems like most people, especially the young ones, are looking to carve out a niche in a place that’s different from your run-of-the-mill city. A place where you can go see your lamb being slaughtered, where you can work-trade a jar of jam for a haircut, where you know your server in a restaurant and the cashier at the supermarket and the teller at the bank, and so on.

I’ve only been here 6 months, but I already feel the island creeping under my skin. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s not just that. It’s also that there’s this overwhelming sense of connectedness and support and enthusiasm for each other that is like a super contagious mega-virus, the tropical kind that you think you’ve kicked, but that comes back to haunt you 10 years down the road.

I heard a story on NPR today about Flint, Michigan considering a physical downsizing of the city as a means to lowering costs and improving services to a core of city-dwellers. Interestingly, the story offered a community garden as an example of the potential benefits of this sort of plan, the idea being that as residential buildings were consolidated, it would leave more land for parks, gardens, and other shared community spaces.

I know this touches on many different issues: sprawl, infrastructure costs, homeowners’ rights — but I’m most interested in how this sort of change will actually affect interactions between people, everyday.

How do you experience community? In your family, in your neighborhood, through an organization or club?

There’s the finished bread based loosely on the recipe from the back of the Gold’s Bread Flour package. I thought I didn’t take a picture, but I guess my crazy food photo fetish is even more deeply ingrained than I realized.

I love the habits that I’ve accumulated since coming to the farm. I hope they stick.

When you work 8 hours a day producing food, you’d think that the rest of the time you’d want to sit back with a bag of puffy Cheetos and forget about the rest, but what has happened to me is quite the opposite. Spending so much time with my hands in the dirt growing veggies somehow just gives me more momentum to get my hands involved in other food producing jobs. It just feels so good to make yogurt or granola, or my very favorite: bread!

I will never be a professional bread baker. I’ll probably never even win a ribbon at the county fair, but I will get to stick my fingers into soft tacky dough and slap a ball of flour and water and yeast on the counter until it’s stretchy and pliable and ready to bake.

I am not scientific with baking. See, for instance, the maelstrom of my last loaf:

Evidence of my lack of bread-baking discipline:

1) that bowl is NOT big enough for what I’m attempting, but who cares?
2) I was too lazy to go get the scale so I used a cup measure… leveling off with a knife? please…
3) My last loaf was too “blah” so I decided to add a random amount of sourdough starter (1/2 cup) and subtract some related amount of flour/water (1/4 cup of each)
4) Windowpane test, shwindowpane test. When I was tired of kneading, the bread was left to rise
5) When I got invited to a party mid-bread-baking, I simply stuck the rising bread in the fridge covered in plastic wrap and picked up the process when I got home the next day.

In the end, I even forgot to take a picture of the finished product. I ate it too fast. Like in a day and a half. By myself. So even if you can’t see it’s golden-brown deliciousness, let that be testament to its goodness (and hopefully not to my lack of standards).

For me, cooking’s a joy. It’s an experiment, an act of creativity and spontaneity. Once it becomes too prescribed or scientific, it loses part of its charm. When I post recipes here, they’re always things that I’ve tried and measured and recorded, but on most days, my kitchen is a crazy alchemist’s lab full of tastes and smells and happy accidents.

The view from the 6am ferry

Yesterday was a whirlwind day: Went on a farm field trip to check out a farm on another island, biked about 18 miles to and from the ferry landings, and when I finally got back to my watertower, sweaty and exhilarated, it was just in time to hitch a ride with Farmers Peter and Susan to a meeting about drafing new farm intern policy for the state.

After the meeting (sobering, but hopeful!) I piled in the car with the Heritage folks and we headed down to the Alehouse where there’s Thursday night SINGALONG! So we all got beers and threw decency to the wind and belted out the na-na-na-na verse of “Hey Jude” till our throats were hoarse.

And THEN I came home and checked my email and realized that Jaden had posted my recipe for Hainanese Chicken on the Steamy Kitchen blog and it was the perfect topping to finish off a beautiful, beautiful day.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m interning with Jaden over at Steamy Kitchen, learning how to take rockstar food photos and write great recipes, and helping out with research, writing and photos for the ingredients section of her site. My plan is still to go to graduate school and study sustainable food, but it can’t help to have some skillz to spice up those papers and presentations!

So a great big welcome to everyone who’s come over from Steamy Kitchen — I’m so pleased you’ve stumbled upon my humble little blog — it’s lovely to have you.

Oven baked tomatoes: a dash of olive oil and 5-6 hrs at 200 degrees make sweet, crispy tomato chips out of juicy tomato slices, lovely in pasta and as a snack. Halve the tomatoes and cook at 150 for 12 hours for a sweet, chewier version yummy in salads, or in your panzanella.

Once upon a time, I was a kid who hated tomatoes. Tomato sauce was okay, ketchup was great. I even slowly came around to salsa, though for years I survived on dry chips (guac didn’t interest me till well into college). But that wet, slimy slice — that interloper between my hamburger and lettuce and bun, seemed tasteless, useless and generally insulting.

I don’t know when I came around, or the exact details of the conversion, but I’m quite I was spurred by my mother’s coaxing and a few superb Caprese salads.

If you’re lucky, you know the joy of a fresh, vine-ripened tomato. In case you don’t, it looks like this:

and tastes like this:

(actually that was remnants of powdered sugar and french toast, but you get the idea)

It’s become the poster-child of gardening advocates and “eat local” fanatics — it’s one of those things that really does taste better (taste at all? most tomatoes in the supermarket still seem mostly like soggy pink water) when you pick a ripe one direct from the garden.

We sold our first tomatoes back in July — the weekend a gaggle of friends came up to visit from San Francisco, and we took a bunch of the first Stupices for a picnic on the beach with a loaf of bread, some cheese, the last of the garlic scape pesto, leftover spicy scones from breakfast, and a bag of luscious cherries.

The tomatoes were exclaimed over, praised, and gobbled down; we expressed our regret at not bringing more. Then we went about our business hunting cockles in the low tide and headed home to use the rest of our tomato stash in a 4-pan paella masterpiece (only two of four shown below )

Since then, I’ve been continuing to enjoy the tomato harvest: on the grill, in salads, in pasta, and yes, though I never would have believed it had you told me as a child, sometimes bitten whole, like an apple, as a snack before dinner.

But one of my favorite dinners has been a simple panzanella, or simply said: hastily concocted bread and tomato salad.

Panzanella from forgotten ingredients, inspired by tomatoes

• One stale crusty loaf of rosemary hearth bread from the local bakery — at least 10 days old, abandoned on a lower shelf.
• Two beautiful red tomatoes with bright yellow crowns
• A forlorn chunk of sharp cheddar (or some very thin slices of Parmesan or hunks of fresh mozzarella would do)
• some browning sprigs of basil, rescued from the farmer’s market leftovers
  
• olive oil and balsamic vinegar
• a dash of salt

Careful of my fingers, I hacked the piece of bread apart, doused it in oil and threw it on a baking sheet in the oven which I set to heat to 400. In the meantime, I chopped up the tomatoes and cheese, tore up the basil and sprinkled them all with balsamic and salt. By the time the oven reached 375, the bread was browned and sizzling and crispy. I threw everything together and a delicious meal was born.

The next night, I repeated the dish with the remaining bread and added in some sweet dried tomatoes straight from the oven.

There’s something so happy and so sensual about tomatoes in late summer. Thank you Pablo Neruda for putting the words in my mouth.

A couple of years ago, Jaime and I went to Puerto Vallarta to visit his high school friend Naomi and her two incredibly cute and precocious little boys and to bask in the sun and eat delicious food. Rather than stay in town, on Naomi’s recommendation, we headed off by boat to a tiny little cove in a town called Yelapa.

For three endless days, we stayed in a casita at the beautiful Hotel Lagunita and spent our afternoons lazing under the pelapas on the beach, reading beach fiction, and practicing our broken Spanish with the overly aggresive local parrot. One evening, we headed up the hill behind the beach to explore the windy, narrow streets of the town, peering into backyards filled with banana trees and chickens, greeting old friends of Naomi’s, and ending up at dinner at the amazing Pollo Bollo. There we closed the night nursing warming bottles of beer and licking our fingers clean of the tangy sweet sauce that accompanied the succulent tender to the bone BBQ chicken that is their specialty. Another night, we wandered into the Yelapa Yacht Club, where the hopping local expat community jammed the night away to a mix of Tom Petty and world beats.

But some of my favorite memories of Yelapa were the mornings. The casitas at the hotel were open to the air and we woke up to the sound of the surf and the smell of the exposed wooden beams and salty air. We walked out the door down the flower-lined gravel paths out to the beach. Jaime and I were the only guests, and they had set up a lone table under a pelapa where we sat and ordered our breakfast. Strong Mexican coffee, juice, and delicious delicious food.

That was the first time I ever had chilaquiles — Jaime and I hadn’t ever heard of them before, and he ordered them as an experiment. They were served hot, with scrambled eggs and beans with a side of salsa, maybe some avocado, but definitely a stack of warm, fresh corn tortillas. They were so delcious that it didn’t seem at all weird to be putting cooked corn tortillas inside of more corn tortillas.

So when I looked in a corner of my kitchen the other day and saw a bag of stale tortilla chips, it got me thinking of that happy memory and the delicious mornings and how much I’m missing Jaime these days, and I had to try to recreate the moment. I’m the first to admit that food can be oh-so-comforting when you need something to cheer you up.

I’m quite sure they made their chilaquiles in Yelapa with stale tortillas, as is traditional, but this technique seemed to work just as well, and it probably takes even less time since you don’t need to fry the tortillas in oil before starting.

Chilaquiles like that morning in Yelapa
Serves 2-3

4 cups stale tortilla chips
1 tbsp olive oil

salsa
2 dried New Mexico Chiles (or dried California or Ancho Chiles for a more mild flavor)
1/2 cup fresh or canned tomatoes
1/2 medium onion
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup reserved chile soaking water
1/4 cup chicken broth (or substitute another 1/4 cup chile water)
1 jalapeno (optional for spice)

salt, to taste

optional toppings
– fried eggs
– avocado
– nopalitos (http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/nopalitos.htm)
– cotija cheese, queso fresco or feta in a pinch
– cilantro
– sour cream
– leftover chicken

Heat a dry cast iron skillet until hot but not smoking and toast jalapeno and dried chiles until lightly browned on all sides (3-5 min). In a small pot, bring 1.5 cups of water to boiling. Place dried chiles in boiling water and remove from heat. Allow chiles to sit for 10 minutes to reconstitute. Water should turn reddish-brown and chiles should become pliable.

Meanwhile, coarsely chop tomatoes, garlic, onion, and toasted jalapeno. When chiles are done soaking, add chiles, 1/4 cup of the soaking water, chopped vegetables, and chicken broth to blender. The chicken broth gives the dish an especially full flavor, but you can also substitute 1/4 cup extra chile water to make the recipe vegetarian.

Blend ingredients until completely smooth.

Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a cast iron skillet. When hot (you can test to see if it’s ready by throwing on a drop of the salsa and seeing if it sizzles) add in salsa and fry for about 5 minutes, until the color deepens slightly and the consistency turns a little thicker.

Turn down the heat to medium and season sauce with salt. Add in stale tortilla chips and stir well to coat. Cook for at least 5 minutes — the sauce should soak completely through the tortilla chips. They should lose their toughness and turn moist, but not mushy.

Top chilaquiles with your choice of garnishes and serve with warm beans.