Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The Thing About Rice & Beans

Who doesn't love a love story?
Who doesn't go a little weak in the knee, stolen breath dissipating?
It is not always Montagues and Capulets; it isn't always star crossed.
Who doesn't love rice&beans?
I love the sound that bubbling pot of rice makes. I love the staccato hilarity and furious cartoon bursts of stream. I am comforted by the security in the the ratio in rice preparation. 2:1 Water to Rice.

Beans are the Hardy to Rice's Laurel. Rice is Hepburn to Beans' Tracy.
Who doesn't love a love story?

It was beans that Jack got for that sorry old cow, remember. When the counters count, it's beans. It was hummus they were eating on the beaches of Troy, in Helen's pink shadow. It was beans that were preserved in the pyramids, packed along in the sarcophagus.

A pot of beans murmurs, hems, haws.

Each spice is added with intention, with purpose. Each turn of the pepper grinder is its own incantation. Each slice of garlic peeled away thin as paper, crisp but wet with oil. Each onion cries for more than Argentina. The salt rains down; it falls from my fingers with my hands held at shoulder level.

Salt is older than anything, remember, and remembers more than elephants. It may have been the pomegranate that sweet persephone took to the underworld, it may have even been the seeds swallowed that predicated the sharp months of Autumn, the thin month of Winter. But it is salt that she carried with her when she walked out of Vesuvius into the sweet and lush Neapolitan Spring. It was salt that Gandhi harvested from the Ocean in his most poetic fuck you to the British Empire. Each of us who has kissed away a tear knows that nothing tastes so much like love as salt.

Cumin is lonesome as a Kentucky blue moon. Thick as an Oklahoma Dustbowl.
Cayenne shows her knees, and still has the ability to blush. Paprika has a polish accent.

Each spice alone is crazed, lost. But in context, stirred in the pot, they do that thing that doo wop street kids do. The joy in harmony is inarguable.

These two pots cook next to each other, on the back line of the stove top, like metropolitans on opposite side of a subway car. Each is contained in its own universe; still, two universes can not help but stare at each other.

When they finally do meet, when they finally combine of the plate, the exploding stream is something from old Hollywood. The kitchen tile warms against the wet heat. The body warms exactly the same way with the first spoonful. You are all at once strong, while you're weak in the knee. That is the thing about rice and beans, it tastes like hope.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

The Mango Has Loose Morals

Let’s face it: the mango has loose morals. This is not a judgment, not an assessment. The mango does not play by anyone’s rules but its own. A mango would pull you away from a careening city bus, quick like lightening. Don’t underestimate the mango. Don’t make that mistake. Its cool green skin shiny like the lower east side, its round bottom would incite Paul Rubens to riot. The flesh, sweet and sticky orange and yellow, underneath the skin crisps against the air when the knife first cuts. It prickles with goose pimples – like it’s shy, like it’s coy. It’s an act; it is theatre. It is burlesque. It is a little known fact that Bob Fosse was reincarnated as a mango. It is a sad fumbling dance I do when butchering the mango, hacking away like a novice, fearful of the stone. Like unhooking a bra, wary of moles, fearful of reproach. Each inch, each millimeter, revealing sweeter and more succulent flesh. Each mistake more dramatic, more unforgiveable. The mango is so alive, so vibrant, I can not help but fear I am hurting it when I open it like a secret, like a memory. The blade slices easily through the skin, into the flesh, almost gluttonous to taste more, reach further.
The pieces lay supine on the cutting board, slow arcing abdomens without navels, like Adam or Eve. The air in the kitchen reacts suddenly. The atmosphere changes. The light is still the thin hard light of a summer zombified by drought but it is flecked with wet spots of mango perfume, hanging in the air willfully ignorant of gravity. That’s mango for you – hilarious. The kitchen becomes sweeter – the air is somehow more lush. Time moves strangely when the body is caught in the embrace of the unseen, the sensed. It is not unlike the moment of being kissed for the first or last time. Mango can be a bit dramatic from time to time. The grill outside is a kind of white hot that the Velvet Underground might appreciate. It is that kind of steady fury. I have a way with fire. When the mango first hits the grill the sound is uncomfortable. Not as bad a nails on a chalkboard; nothing is really even on that level. It is the sound of singed flesh – of cauterizing. Yet it sounds like a slow moan, a lingering sigh. The black stripes across the orange become whimsical as autumn, as Halloween. The mango is turned just this way or that, left with the cover closed, the smoke thick and blue as B.Holiday, and the black lines are cross hatched. The stripes have become fishnets. The mango has loose morals.
The roasted mango is of course too hot to touch, and must be touched immediately. The slices are flecked with ash, the skin pockmarked and scarred. And they fit perfectly into a gently open mouth. It is impossible to be anywhere else in the world, when eating that mango. I mean, for that moment, there is no fantasy, no prediction. No reference books or tarot cards. No sad or sweet stories of time past. No rebuilding that past like the Old South. It is impossible not to smile when eating the mango; it’s incorrigible. It sounds like gypsy jazz; it is predictable in that kind of way. But it feels good to tap your foot, to shake your ass, to lick your lips. The mango, a taxi dancer, is there willing to have its dance card filled. For that moment you will taste what it was to be that mango, to be alive, and vital. There is no remorse. There is no arrogance of hindsight. There is only the feeling of the mango’s heat mixing with your own. There is the sweet exhalation, sweet relief.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The Grocer's Daughter's Biscuits

The grocer’s daughter was tall. Her hipbones met the cutting board countertops in her Yonkers kitchen. It looked out on the abandoned lot between hers and other tenements built by WPA. The coldness of her kitchen, the bite of the linoleum floor, made her shuffle from foot to foot, softy tap dancing away sands of sleep.
February can be a hard time, an unforgiving month. Even the sun becomes prodigal. The grocer’s daughter’s heard the north wind whip through her neighborhood’s scraggly trees and thin alleyways. She bent at her over’s portal and lit it with a set of bar matches, creased and crumpled.
Run the oven at 425°. Run the oven hot and fast first thing in the morning.
Her oven was slow to warm; wary as the sun caught behind thick stew of low, sea grey clouds. The grocer’s daughter sprinkled flour on her countertops absentmindedly, distracted. The warmth of sleep was leaving her body, the chill of East Coast morning was beginning to draw sharply across her skin. She kneed the oven lovingly, with pinball body English, and the oven deliciously exhaled warmth and hope.
That is the nature of biscuits.
The grocer’s daughter drew concentric circles in the loose flour. She stopped suddenly, rubbing the back of her elbows. Caressing, really. She cut the butter down, halving piece after piece, her knife raking acceptably small cubes to the side.
The grocer’s daughter believed in self/sifting. She ran the butter and flour through her hands, rolling the butter between her thumb and forefinger. The cold butter leached the warmth in her pink palms. She paused to linger over a pinch of sugar. She stopped to make a wish on the baking powder. She stopped again to banish shame and regret with a healthy pinch of salt. She reflexively stopped, and licked her thumb.
The salt tasted like Savannah, like the coast of Georgia, were the ocean and the land fall in love, day in and day out. Her oven began to warm the low hanging air in her Yankee kitchen. The mixture in her bowl began to look like the cornmeal. The sun broke though the clouds, through her thick northern paned windows, into her kitchen, warming her ankles and calves.
She slowly poured the milk into a well she had dug into the center of her grandmother’s porcelain bowl.
They got it all wrong, she decided as she turned the short, flat wooden spoon around and around, gentle as a canoe paddle, steady as a gondolier.
The got it all wrong when they said breath, and when they said dust.
They got it wrong when they told that story about that man with that beard who blew into that other man’s nose.
Before ribs. Before floods. Before February. Before Winter.
It was milk that got poured on earth and that’s what sprung life. It was milk, round and cold and velvety, that fell on Adam’s dust and brought forth life, or at least biscuits.
The grocer’s daughter transferred the wet, sticky dough to the counter. It pulled back affectionately when she pulled her hand away.
She had been scolded and chided for using a roller; but she knew that she would over work the dough by hand. She would worry it to ruin. She used a wooden roller to press the dough, stretching her back, feeling the roller's phantom. She was no longer in Savannah, and would make biscuits as she pleased.
She used a coffee cup to cut the biscuits out, ignoring more precautions and soothsayers. The grocer's daughter, even this early in the morning, knew her own mind.
She baked the biscuits in her ancient but fast oven, in the cast iron skillet she had bought in Chinatown, and held clung at her side on the long train ride back uptown, upstate, home to Yonkers.
Twelve minutes is long enough to remember to stand up straight. It is long enough to learn how to count to 20 in almost any language. Twelve minutes is long enough to remember what it was like to be in love, and to remember that the heart heals. Twelve minutes is long enough for biscuits to bake.

INGREDIENTS:
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 TBS Baking Powder
8 TBS Butter
3/4 CUP Whole Milk

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Beet&B.Sprout Salad

The beet is a Trotskyite, a wool skirt wearing Sarah Lawerence girl with a babuska’s headscarf. Under its peasant soil, its muddy topcoat, the red flesh vibrates, singing socialist love songs. The beet is sentimental, cresting manic on waves of sugar highs. You will find yourself nostalgic as you wash away some one else’s soil, some one else’s pied a terre. It is impossible not to wonder where the beet came from, when washing away its history, when stripping away its regionality. It is equally impossible not to consider your own history, your own regionality, and the odd bits of dirt and soil clinging on for dear life. The beet, as both Sonny&Cher knew, goes on.

The Brussel Sprout has an attitude; like the Lollipop Guild. I imagine them speaking in unison with Brooklyn accents and Borscht-belt high kicks. They’ll scatter across your counters, roll beneath your refrigerator. Don’t get mad; they’re just having a good time. They’re a hoot, Brussel Sprouts.

Each is strong individually and doubly bright when complimented with the other. Imagine Marlene Dietrich & Groucho Marx. Or Beatty & Keaton.

This salad is romantic in a kind and sweet, 70s epic “Reds” kind of way. It is strewn together from side dishes from previous meals and made into a salad that can be picked at for days to come. It pretends to be pragmatic, but really it is about how good it tastes … right now.

That’s the thing about roasted beets and brussel sprouts, they don’t look back. Sure, you may get weepy while skinning the beets; but the act of eating is totally encompassing. The flavors careen across your palate, excited as love can be, giddy and speedy. The tartness of the balsamic vinegar is accented by the smoke in the roasted vegetables. Reminiscence is left in the preparation, where it belongs.

INGREDIENTS:
• Left Over Roasted Beets - 3-4, diced.
• Left Over Roasted Brussel Sprouts - 1-2 handfuls, halved
• Balsamic Vinegar – ¼ cup
• EVOO – 2 TBS
• Salt – 1 TBS
• Fresh Ground Black Pepper
• Fresh Dill, chopped, about that much

INSTRUCTIONS:
I love second chance food. I love how optimistic it is. I love that second incarnations are natural in the world of food. Though the act of roasting beets is wholly fulfilling, though the smell of a fresh roasted beet has the kind of juju behind it like to call out like Cassandra; on the second day, having cooled into a satin skinned, lush body, the next-day beet dices easily and will make you feel like a badass with your knife skills, which is always nice.

Halve the brussel sprouts. The top leaves will strip away slow and deliberate as Salome.

Toss the diced beats with the halved brussel sprouts. Use the shiny metal bowl that is really slidy. I find that listening to Louis Prima is a good idea in situations like this.

The beets will begin to stain the exposed white halves of the sprouts to a blushing, Hester Prynne red. The beats themselves will begin to look like the guilty and sexy side of a bruise.

Add the vinegar and respect it for the potion that it is. Don’t tell me vinegar isn’t magic. Vinegar, itself, is a second chance. Add the oil, knowing it to be olive tears.

The salt and the pepper, each, should be added with as much panache as possible. When or where else, really, do you get the chance?

Dill always seems like a grandmotherly cheat, some Eastern European wool over eyes kind of thing. I was always suspicious of what was being shrouded behind this cold war seasoning. But when I started eating fresh dill all of my paranoia was washed away on the immediacy of flavor that comes from fresh dill. Fresh dill reminds me of the sweet parts of Watership Down.

In the end the ingredients will blend through strata of sweet and savory leaving a joyful gang of flavor.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Chicken Noodle Soup

The sickness had come upon me quick and all encompassing, much like the ice storm that preceded it. I was taken to the mat fast, disoriented with a full body ache, and surrendered quickly to vivid fever dreams.

Like all fever dreams this one was scary and disconcerting, with sharp dips and swells of volume and texture. Circus mirror perspectives. Gypsy Jazz Violin players, long legged & sharp hipped. The air had that ozoney taste of vertigo.

In this fever dream, at this State of Anxiety Fair, there was a beautiful woman dealing out fortunes from a pack of European cross-hatch-backed playing cards. She was shimmering, given the light, the weave of silver and gold in the thin gauze of the scarves around her head, her waist. The jewelry on her fingers and bracelets running the length of her thin arms caught the light from the soft white electric bulbs lining the trellis above.

The hand lay before her, unfolded. She looked at me with a kind despair, exhaling for me. She reached out with her pale fingers and held my face in her palms.

“Oh,Honey,” she said, “You gotta stop looking for the past in the future.”

I woke in a start, cold and hot. It was close to the part of dawn that suburban doves pay attention to. A snow had fallen and was still fine and untouched. It was in this perfect still moment that I decided to make Chicken Noodle Soup.

The Lesson of Chicken Noodle Soup is the key: Everything you need to fix you is right there in front of you. It is the alchemy of leftovers that gives chicken noodle soup its mojo. More to the point, even in a fevered haze is it possible to take the odd bits of your life, things forgotten but not discarded, and make use of them. The act of making use of them is the act of healing, it is the act of getting better. Each ingredient heals an individual wound. Each ingredient warms a cold corner of the soul. That is why soup tastes like that.

RECIPE
Ingredients:
• Chicken Stock– 4 Cups
• Shallot (chopped)- 1
• Carrots (sliced)– 4-6
• Mushrooms (sliced)- 1 cups
• Celery (chopped) – 2 stalks
• Potato (cubed) - 2-3 small
• Black Pepper (freshly ground) – 10 turns
• Salt – 2 TBS
• Thyme – 1 TBS
• Oreganp – 1 TBS
• Cream of Tartar – 1 Tsp
• 2 left over,baked chicken breasts (cubed)
• 2 handfuls wide egg noodles



Like every other recipe it begins with washing your hands. This is an especially loving gesture at the tail end of a cold, fever still lingering in the dried corners of your eye. Before a piece of food is touched, before the pots come out from the cupboards or the spoons are flexed or waved like wands, hot water pours from the faucet. Its steam betrays the coldness of the floor, the chill of the room. The stream will also make you breathe deeper as you scrub to the forearm.

Each of these vegetables are the loose bits rummaging around. The carrots that didn’t make it into the feta salad. The Shallot that missed the date with the parsnips. There are always more potatoes.

Chop the shallot first. Its tears are sweeter than its even its sister Vidalia. The smell will hang in the wet air, sweet and sharp as the back of a debutante’s knee.

Each peel of the carrots reveals a brightness of orange, crisp as Tibet. For years I would slice carrots for speed, for flash of the steel and for careening percussion of my knife against the beaten cutting board. Still slow from the sickness, at ease and lingering sleep and kitchen steam, I sliced each carrot evenly and slowly. Each oval fell in even thickness, tumbled over like a herd of coin. It was soup, after all, and there is no rush. It was morning, after all, and there was no need for cacophony.

Slice the mushrooms more slowly than the carrots. As you breathe with each slice the dense smell of the earth hidden in the mushrooms will be released from its flesh.

Celery is hilarious. Just listen to it when you slice it. I mean, come on. Hilarious. Celery isn’t too proud to laugh at itself. The smell of celery is cashmere sweaters and bloody marys.

Cube the potatoes after having peeled them. As the skin comes away from the potato, moisture beads its ivory flesh.

The very root of optimism lies within chicken stock. It is in the corner of everyone’s cupboard. I love that hope spring, ultimately, from the marrow in the bone.

Get the Big Pot.

Bring the Stock to slow boil on a medium high heat. Don’t rush the boil. Don’t rush anything. You are still sick after all, and time moves wonkily for the fluish. You may find yourself leaning into the pot, over the pot, splay legged with your hands propped on either side of the stove as you being to find yourself breathing, slowly, ingesting the vapor. You are on your way to feeling better.

Add: shallots,carrots,mushrooms,celery,&potatoes.

Each of these, remember, is from some other meal. Each was the discarded object of another’s affection. Chicken soup is that kind of catch all home for those memories still rattling around the present. Resolution, after all, is salty.

When you add the spices do it with pronouncement. Do not let the oregano fall into the pot as if it slipped over the side of a gunwale. Toss is like it is pixie dust, magic powder, voodoo juju. Imagine Tom Waits is your witch doctor. It is that kind of soup.

With the addition of each spice let some piece of your past go; that is how you make room for the future. It is easy to do when you are weak from a cold, hazy from bad sleep, twitchy from fever dreams, high on chicken stock.

Do the same when you dice the chicken breast as add it to the pot. Do no linger on the memory, turning it over and over like some weird fetish. Simply surrender it to soup.

Reduce to low simmer and cover with a crooked lid, allowing the stream to escape into you kitchen’s stratosphere.

Let it sit on the back of your stove and let it cook for an hour. A nice hot shower and a lovely cup of tea fit nicely into this fortuitous space of time.

Add the noodles a half an hour before you intend to eat.

Eat it slowly and breath evenly.