A Literary Feast

In Praise of Garnish

Posted on July 20th, 2012

Eat More Kale, cry bumper stickers nationwide. Well, perhaps not nationwide. I can think of pockets of the continent’s interior where kale is all but excluded from the hot food bars that dribble and seethe with whatever chemical agent turns macaroni orange. The kale lobby in these regions is weak at best. Still, the vegetable appears from time to time as a leathery green, reasonably oil-resistant pad on which such delicacies as cocktail shrimp and dip bowls are arranged to draw out fleeting Ooos and Ahhs before they are mercilessly devoured.

Which leaves our friend kale lonely at best, smeared with a few bits of this and that. And you probably wish you hadn’t eaten quite so much of This and That, don’t you, because your gut is protesting that what you just subjected it to is in no way worthy of the title “appetizer.” You long for some refreshing roughage. There it sits, right in front of you—a generous bunch of delicious kale, ripped into plate-sized pieces, cool, hearty, chewy, and possibly even washed.
But you won’t eat it, will you?

Or maybe you will. If so, then you are one of the happy few who have realized that garnishes are not for decoration. Garnishes are to be devoured, raw, whole, unapologetically. Yes, your friends might give you funny looks or even use words like “disgusting.” Etiquette columns might accuse you of acting like a starved raven. In the worst of cases, the chef might come after you with a cleaver. But you know that it is all worth it, because no radish ever tastes so good as when it is bent into something resembling a lily, no orange rind is ever so sweet as when it has been soaking up good whiskey, and no kale is ever so dark and rich as when it has been lightly glazed with duck sauce and peppered with wanton crumbs.

I have been an inveterate garnish-eater since I was old enough to steal from friends’ plates. I see no reason to reform. I do not move in circles that require many sacrifices at the altar of arbitrary propriety, and if I have one friend who all but refuses to eat out with me because of this quirk— well, I have more than one friend.

I try to be tolerant of those who don’t agree with me, but it’s not always easy. I will never try to force anybody into peeling the kale off the bottom of the platter, but sometimes I do feel the need to intervene when the “garnish” is particularly exotic or intriguing. No horned melon or prickly pear should go untasted. A slice of persimmon floating in your drink is an invitation to eat a slice of persimmon. (You don’t say no to the persimmon). And if you “don’t like” maraschino cherries even when they are lovingly prepared by a months-long bath in brandy, then please: consider ordering a cocktail without one.

I have not produced many converts. Taboos run deep, and when people see me gnawing on a slice of raw lemon they often feel compelled not to emulate my behavior. Rarely, though, I will find a curious someone who might want to join me in my frivolities, to frolic in the freedom of shameless garnish-gobbling, if they could only overcome one slight reservation: “Is it really edible?”

And there, my friends, is the (garlic? sage?) rub. There is where I stammer, and look nervously down at the table, and begrudgingly admit the truth: sometimes I have no idea. Kale, fruits, and roots done into flowers are all an easy Yes, but once in a great while a plate contains an object that I cannot readily identify, and that is clearly on the plate for its visual rather than its culinary appeal. At this point I will usually stop trying to talk others into eating it. In an unwise fit of altruism I will pop it into my own mouth so that they might judge by my fate whether the answer was Yes or No. I have never gotten into serious trouble through this practice, though I have chewed up bits of wood (deceptive toothpicks) and plastic (false cabbage) in less upscale establishments. More often I am thrilled to discover some rare sort of ill-looking beet or the titillation of something pickled that never should have been. I don’t remember their names, even if I do ask the waiters and they do know the answer. But I remember how they taste: usually peculiar, often bitter, and seldom really worth eating except as a matter of principle.

So perhaps you don’t want to follow me down this dark road. But if you’re half convinced, perhaps one two anecdotes will tip the scales for you (or, err, garnish the plate? No…).

First. The basement of a crowded bar and grill in Allston, MA. A friend’s birthday shindig. Fourteen noisy humans, indistinguishable burgers, beer and a surprising amount of mead—a waiter’s nightmare. Hungry but obstinately refusing dinner, I spend the evening snatching the kale off of everyone’s plates, sometimes casually but sometimes frantically, desperately, as the waiter is about to take them away. The evening ends. The check comes. As does a surprise for me: a plateful of raw kale straight from the kitchen, on the house. We tip well.

Second. A classy retro bar in Cambridge, MA, half style, half kitsch, inventive cocktails. Third round rolls around. It’s getting late. One of us orders a concoction called the “Orient Express.” With unbearable wit another says to the waiter: “Can we get that with extra murder?” He chuckles politely, a few others groan, and we try to forget the rotten joke. But the waiter does not. He returns carrying not only the cocktail but also three olives on a skewer, onto which he has drawn little faces of violent death, Xs for eyes and tongues lolling out of strangulated frowns. We are thrilled, but he shuffles off before we can ask whether the faces are doodled on with something reasonably food-based or with, say, hideously toxic permanent ink. We all shrug. It’s too good to pass up.

We eat the olives. They are delicious.

Categories: Uncategorized

Stank

Posted on July 20th, 2012

Sure, you can source your ingredients, prep everything, follow your own recipe or someone else’s, recognize when it’s all just so and serve it up to friends and family, but can you eat it? Probably, if you’re an amateur like me. That end product, the meal, is what it’s all about, right? But there is a point where that’s no longer true. For some it happens in a suburban home on Thanksgiving with a 26-pound turkey, a red wine spattered apron and a legion of in-laws close at hand. For others, the transformation occurs in a commercial kitchen on the bad side of someone’s threshold for cursing, bumping elbows and burning oneself in a haze of smoke and other people’s B.O.

I’ve known cooks whose spouses require that they ditch their clothes outside their apartments and shower immediately upon arriving home from work. The job can be just that consuming, so much so that you actually bring part of the restaurant home with you. The smell, or the intolerance of it, is really just a byproduct of the demystification process though. At a certain point, that entrée you just sent out stops being just a beautiful cut of meat kissed with a hot pan and topped with pretty-looking delicious stuff. It becomes instead a symbol of everything that went into it — not just the ingredients, but the experience of cooking it. It represents hours and effort, with the steam from the dishwashing station, the scum under the floor mats, that server’s over-the-top-cologne, and whatever somebody burnt the living shit out of last night all wrapped into one tightly wound package. That’s why some fine dining people subsist on cereal and takeout Chinese, and why your buddy who works at that incredible pizza place won’t touch the stuff. They’ve got a mix of porn industry cameraman syndrome and P.T.S.D., which means they’re perpetually unimpressed and actually kind of appalled by something that to the rest of us embodies all that is right in the world.

Knowing this, I always wondered how farmers did it. Just as life in the kitchen ain’t exactly all pressed chef’s whites and wine tastings, the realities of farming stand in direct opposition to the popular bucolic ideal. In fact, it turns out that food mostly comes from the ground. It is dirty and sometimes covered in poo and feathers. That bacon you had for breakfast? Not too long ago it had hair and a snout and burrowed in stinking heaps with its siblings (ideally). And while the act of coaxing sustenance from the soil inherently involves bring about life, the taint of death is never far away, never mind the potential for failure, and the preponderance of backaches. “In the shit” is not a euphemism on most farms — farmers are often literally ankle-deep in shit and work hours that make a restaurant shift look like a cotillion. But I’ve seen these people take huge swigs of milk after staring at the business end of a heifer with G.I. issues for hours on end.

I had been mulling all of this over for a while when I got the opportunity to work on a mussel farm recently. “I love mussels!” I thought to myself, and signed right up. About a week later, as I was sweating through my t-shirt in the morning sun, I wondered what could make me hate them. Shoveling several hundred pounds of them a couple of times over might be a pretty good start. At the time I was also standing in a borrowed pair of rubber overalls with a tear in the knee, covered head-to-toe in mud and seawater. I looked and smelled not too different from the mussels themselves and felt like I, too, had just been pulled off a rope hanging in the bay. The truth of the experience lay open and exposed like the unlucky inhabitants of a few errant black shells my feet: getting food in this way was hard, dirty work.

Slowly, we migrated the haul — just over 1,000 pounds in all — through harvesting, processing and packaging. At the end of the day, what had emerged from the ocean with unruly strands of beard, covered in barnacles, seaweed and a few itinerant hangers-on, sat on ice, in neat parcels of ebony shells, complete with a little note that explained where they had come from, and when. They were clean, lustrous even, like a bunch of reformed Hell’s Angels headed to a job interview after church.

I, on the other hand, was in shambles. I smelled like fish and rubber and sunscreen and sweat. My hands — rendered almost useless by the departure from my usual routine of keyboard pecking and fussing about — hung limp at my sides. Crusted over with mud and fatigue, I shocked myself by still replying “Yes” when my boss asked me if I wanted to take some mussels home.

Later that night, after causing a bit of a stir while picking up a six-pack on the way home, I emerged from the shower, cracked a beer and stood in front of the open fridge door contemplating my spoils. I had hated parts of the day, but also loved parts of it, too. Now, all of that was wrapped up in a mesh bag, sitting in a metal bowl. The sunrise over the water, the hum of the skiff’s engine, my reflection in the glassy water at dawn, the rhythm of the work and the smells and sensations that came along with it. I had waited for the end of the day, and wondered what would happen at this very moment, when I thought about dinner, and thought about the mussels.

All of the trepidation disappeared as soon as I stuck my nose into the bowl and breathed deep. The flood of briny minerality washed away the bad and begged for butter, onion, garlic and white wine. I was hungry for mussels, and everything was going to be OK.

Categories: Uncategorized

Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down

Posted on July 19th, 2012

1.

hot
august
it’s all arm, cherries
pits spitting
humid, spitting
whole
afternoons
you say
larb
and I say
yes
and the sheets
will barely be
remembered–
who lets
a college kid
house-sit
anyway? It’s
all
pits, hot
mouths lost
phone
numbers.

2.

cold
mid-winter prospect
heights
he says
hey I say
hello, the warm
startle of
breath on
breath, and later
butter, but
squid curry
first our
faces vague
with heat in
an anywhere
restaurant, until
the hallway
bathroom, shared and
I say
oh
so this
is Brooklyn.

Categories: Uncategorized

For the Love of the Dark Virgin (Chocolate)

Posted on June 25th, 2012

I am hiking up northeast Brooklyn streets, pretty brownstone blocks giving way to commercial drabness of Myrtle Avenue, the highway past that, industrial buildings looming on the other side. My face is covered with a film of oily moisture, my jeans are sticking to my legs, my messenger bag pulling on my left shoulder and I swear it’s sweating worse than the right one. I did not dress for an urban hike on an unexpectedly steamy, humid late spring day.

In my head, imagination runs wild. I am about to meet Ryan Cheney, the co-founder of Raaka Virgin Chocolate. Ryan is the sort of entrepreneur we all love to read and talk about: found a passion, wanted to make a difference too, and successfully combined the two. But what would a real chocolate factory look like? Would it be huge, like post-depression factories of the 1940s? Would Ryan be wearing a puffy white chef’s hat and stand there twirling a musketeer-worthy mustache?

Under the elevated expressway, down an industrial block, into an unassuming brown doorway, up a flight of stairs, down a long hallway to an unmarked loft. Ryan opens the door; he is tall and dressed in a black t-shirt, shorts and a baseball cap. This is overwhelmingly… normal.

*

Ryan Cheney fell in love with the raw cacao bean while he was in Thailand. He spent a year learning the ins and outs of making and producing chocolate. Meanwhile, as he gathered information on the countries that export the cacao bean, he knew he wanted to help the farming communities there, to ensure that the farmers made a living wage and had the money to educate their children and feed their families.

He came back to New York and soon teamed up with Nate Hodge, a friend and gastronomist. Together, they set up the basic tools and machinery right in their apartment, working around the clock to manufacture, distribute and promote their product. A year and a half later – they sold their first bar in December of 2010 – Raaka is growing, with three full time and six part time employees, and 2012 total projections of five tons of beans imported from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to be made into seven kinds of chocolate bars. They even do weddings.

*

The space is clean, but shows signs of a busy workday. It is roughly the size of a large living room in a Tribeca apartment. Bags filled with beans take up much of the space, as do large bourbon casks (for the bourbon bars). Four stone and steel grinding machines churn around the clock, crushing the beans (already shelled, using another machine) for three days before the cacao can be cooled to just the right temperature, frozen in rectangular shapes of two sizes, trimmed and hand-wrapped. The scent of chocolate envelopes me, makes it hard to focus.

After Ryan takes me through the importing, manufacturing and wrapping process, he lets me taste the goods. Now, I’ve tried many different kinds of chocolate over the years, with the dark, bitter varieties being my favorite, so while I expected good – even great – chocolate, I did not expect different. But each bar is its own thing. The Chili bar has a slight cherry undertone and a bit of a kick; the Blueberry Lavender bar’s flavors likewise do not overpower the bean, but make themselves known; and the Bourbon Cask Aged bar – not actually made with bourbon, but aged in wooden casks – has that oak-tinged finish to complement bourbon, should you pair the two. (Sea Salt, Vanilla Rooibos, Black Coffee and the almost raw – in the best way – Dark bars round out the selection, which is bound to expand with time.) We then sat down at the stainless steel wrapping station for a chat about the future of Raaka Chocolate and its globally aware, socially conscious operation.

*

The Farmer General: You just came back from a trip to Boston. How many beers did you put away while there?

Ryan Cheney: Not many, considering it was mostly business. We just expanded into the Whole Foods there – 28 locations in the Boston area, to be precise.

FG: Do you feel Whole Foods does right by its small food producers?

RC: Actually, yes. They get behind a lot of small organic growers and manufacturers. And the increased demand from Whole Foods means we’ll be importing more beans from the farmers in Haiti, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic [currently the world’s Number One exporter of cacao beans], so there’s more business all around.

FG: And what is your mission in these developing countries?

RC: We try to do business in a way that allows the farming communities there to thrive. The communities that grow and harvest the beans usually deal with the food producers in the West through two levels of middleman; this eats into their profits. We try to deal with them directly, cut out the middleman. As a result, the farmers get a minimum of $500 above market price per metric ton of cacao beans.

FG: How did you get into chocolate?

RC: I was living in Thailand and visited a cacao farm. I became intrigued with the process of making chocolate, and with the bean itself. Cacao beans are a lot like grapes: so much depends on the soil, the temperature, the levels of precipitation in the region – each variety has its distinct taste. All these factors come into play to determine the taste of wine, and so it is with chocolate too.

FG: Each bar you make retains much of the original flavor of the bean. Your chocolate isn’t too sweet, and it often tastes even darker than it actually is. What’s your secret?

RC: Most chocolate makers roast their beans; that’s where the bean loses a great deal of its flavor. We aim to retain as much of the bean’s original flavor as possible, so we forego the roasting in favor of fermentation. Then we add just enough flavor – blueberry, say, or sea salt – to make it completely original.

FG: When you started Raaka, did you have targets you wanted to hit? Was there a business plan?

RC: Oh, we definitely had a business plan, but we just kind of let the business grow naturally, through a lot of work and cost cutting in our personal lives. We started very small, in my apartment, just Nate [Hodge] and I. When the orders poured in and we hired extra help, we’d sometimes just pay them in cash. Eventually we got enough orders where we needed more space, we had to crank out more batches. We poured our savings into the space and the equipment, borrowed where we could – and now here we are and growing. Each batch takes at least three days to make, and our capacity is approximately four thousand bars a week. We grind around the clock.

FG: So it all happens right here?

RC: Yeah, almost everything’s done in-house. We make the chocolate, trim and wrap the bars… I handle many of the usual aspects of running the business myself, including promotion, web design, displays, and payroll stuff.

FG: What about the wrappers? Each type of bar has its own, beautiful, subtle wrapper pattern.

RC: That’s a friend of ours, Elissa Barbieri. She is an artist and designer who works with patterns. We only use 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

FG: Your locations are constantly expanding – before you got Raaka into Whole Foods, your chocolate was available in coffeehouses and shops all over New York.

RC: We have many distribution channels, including retailers, cafes and farmer’s markets all over the East Coast, plus in PDX and Canada. Then there’s our website, and we also do wedding orders and participate in tasting events.

FG: So can we look forward to spotting your booth at Brooklyn farmer’s markets this summer?

RC: Actually, it’s difficult to keep chocolate from melting in the outdoor summer heat. You have to keep the bars in these pricey sleeves that keep them cool. Our farmer’s market season just ended, but we’ll be back there in the fall.

FG: By that point, can we look forward to new flavors?

RC: [laughs] You’ll just have to wait and see.

Categories: Uncategorized

Onion

Posted on June 25th, 2012

Tonight I cooked an onion. I do this almost every single night, but it’s still worth writing about because I love to do it–the whole process. I love choosing a big, round, firm onion–my onion–from the crate at Publix. The other onions in that crate have other destinies in other skillets, but I don’t envy them because I can’t imagine produce receiving a higher degree of loving attention anywhere else than in my kitchen.

I love turning the front-right burner on to medium heat as I execute my patented “no-look” twisting refrigerator-door opening maneuver. This move is only possible in a cramped condominium kitchen, and only once you are intimately familiar with your surroundings. I don’t recommend it for beginners or away games. As I slide deftly into the wedge of cold light that now emanates from my fridge, I separate my onion from his friends in the Crisper drawer and grab a stick of butter. I spin the door closed and, in a matter of seconds, there’s an onion on my cutting board, eyeing my chef’s knife, and a hunk of butter melting in my skillet.

Ah, my skillet. It holds a place of honor in my kitchen, always sitting on that burner, keeping an eye on things–that way, when I’m cooking, I can just turn on the stove and let it pre-heat. I like things that are made to last, and this eight-pound hunk of cast iron will be here long after the final meal I prepare in it. If you’re a stranger to cast iron the idea of a skillet pre-heating might sound odd, but believe me, it’s key if you want your onions just right.

I mentioned that I treat my onions with loving attention. Well, I try to keep that in mind when . . . the time comes. I skin and chop the onion as quickly and humanely as possible, cutting it in half once, and then cutting each half in quarter-inch strips from top to bottom, and separating them out, allowing each sliver to breathe and move freely. Soon, tiny bubbles of anticipation are bursting on the surface of the butter, and the onions go in.

I move the slivers of onion in a constant, swirling, circular motion as I shift from my left foot to my right and back again, moving to a cooking rhythm in my head. I’m sure to coat all the onions evenly in the butter and heat, so no one is left out. Soon I’m grinding pepper and sea salt into my skillet, and then it’s back to the swirl. I don’t drink much wine, but I always splash some into my onions. This squeezes a lot of steam out of my skillet, so that I usually turn on the fan–which does little except bring back memories of my early cooking days, when I used that fan equally unsuccessfully to dispel smoke that was the token of ruined (or quickly ruining) food, rather than a delicately infused flavor. To me that sound still indicates that something is going wrong in the kitchen–that time and food are being wasted–and my pulse is always quick, and my nerves frayed, until the onions are done and the fan is off.

I am very careful not to overcook my onions. In fact, some might say I undercook them. What you do with your onions is your business, but I only really want to cook them enough to get the flavor of the butter, wine, pepper, and sea salt into them. When I take a bite, I still want to remember that little guy I brought home from the grocery store–young, fresh, full of possibilities. I don’t want to remember cutting him into a million pieces and cooking him to death.

There are rituals to be observed after the meal is eaten as well. I lick my plate, without shame, every night. I will have a hard time telling my children to do otherwise, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. The skillet has cooled down once dinner is over, so I run my finger through the silent remnants of fat, salt, pepper, wine, and onion that have gathered there. I can’t get enough of it. Before I ‘clean’ the skillet, it is mostly clean already from this process.

The cleaning is very important. You can’t clean cast iron with soap, just very hot water and a scrub brush. Officially you can’t use soap because it messes with the cast iron, but really you don’t want to disturb the flavors and essences that get cooked into the skillet every time you use it. Soap would eradicate all traces of the cooking history that you create along with your meal, so when you put your skillet away at night it would be blank, empty, vapid. Scrubbing with scalding-hot water burns the memories of the night’s meal deeper into the skillet, creating an enduring pattern that will be impressed on all other dinners to come.

When I got the skillet (a gift from my brother), its surface was uniformly colored. Now it is a swirling and complicated landscape of browns, blacks, even reds and purples. The overall color is determined by my regular cooking routine, but the most startling features are scars, reminders of meals cooked too long, too hot, or both. In the beginning I was dismayed to see discolorations that wouldn’t come off in steaming water, but now I know that it’s those imperfections that make the skillet mine.

My brothers and I have always been incredibly enthusiastic, even fanatical, about food. And we’re not proud, either. A 3AM trip to Taco Bell can be every bit as exciting as an elegant dinner in Budapest. But we are at our best, our most glorious, when we create our own food, because there is something intoxicating about starting out with essentially the same ingredients that other people have had in their kitchens at many times throughout history, and knowing that you might take them someplace they’ve never been before. People have been preparing food from time immemorial, but there is always the possibility for reinvention and exploration, and what you come up with tonight could be your new favorite dish, or your wife’s. It could become a staple in your life, and the lives of your children, or grand-children. It is no exaggeration to say that when you turn on the burner or open the fridge, you stand on the cusp of immortality. Most of us are just too busy to notice.

Don’t believe me? What about the guy who invented the grilled cheese sandwich? I don’t know his name, but children everywhere owe him a debt of gratitude–and people who microwave ‘pasteurized-processed cheese food’ on white bread will have to answer to him before they go to their reward. I’m sure bread, cheese, and butter were around for a long time before he did his thing, but it took the right moment and the right person to bring them together. We’re talking about a man, a human being with parents and siblings and dreams and fears who was born and had a childhood and grew up and got married and died, and that simple combination of three flavors, that one moment, was the most lasting thing he ever did.

So what if we don’t know his name? If I can make something that is so simple, so elemental, so viscerally and undeniably delicious that people never–never–stop eating it, well, that will be enough for me.

Once you have this drive, this literal and figurative hunger for novelty, it never stops. My brothers and I are at the point now where we will modify each other’s creations in mid-consumption. Recently, I walked past my brother Mike as he was finishing up a provolone, roast beef, liverwurst, ketchup and mustard on white bread sandwich (we were on a lunch break while helping my aunt move). I impulsively placed an Oreo on top of the last bite. He tossed it back, and his eyes widened with excitement as he announced that it tasted like sugary smoke. Before we left that day we had constructed and demolished three more such sandwiches between us. So goes the creative process.

Even when we buy prepared food, we reinvent it–one night we breaded and deep-fried double cheeseburgers from McDonald’s. Since then we have been invited by friends and family to duplicate this monstrosity at birthdays, graduations, Christmas parties–and every time, no matter the event, it is upstaged by us, our peanut oil,
and our need to create. We’re treated like celebrities. The deep-fried double cheeseburgers have evolved into the centerpiece of an event (informally dubbed ‘Fry Night’) that has taken place annually for almost a decade at a 100-person family reunion; it is arguably the high point of the two-week beachfront affair, which is arguably the high point of the year for many of its attendees, myself included.

And you thought a deep-fryer was just a way to hasten your own demise.

My most beautiful and terrible triumph ever is probably my favorite sandwich of all time: the thick-sliced bacon, natural peanut butter, extra sharp white cheddar, and concord grape sandwich on two slices of fried bread. I already knew grilled cheese was awesome, bacon and cheese was a winner, peanut butter and jelly was tasty–peanut butter and grapes was better–and cheese and peanuts were delectable. After some careful analysis I determined that bacon + peanut butter = delicious. I threw it all together, and things haven’t been the same since.

A memorable eating experience lasts forever. It is our surest method for putting one over on Father Time, because not only are we left with our memories, but we can actually recreate some small portion of the event, transport at least our noses, mouths, and hands back to that moment which, to the rest of the world, is forever gone. When you love food, you can use it to freeze, even forget time for just a little while, because the fried bacon, peanut butter, grape, and cheddar sandwich you’re eating today is just like the first one you made back in college, and just like the one you’ll have six years from now at your brother’s house in who-knows-where.

Create food with care and attention, and you’re creating a snapshot of the world that you can always come back to, even in unfamiliar surroundings at uncertain times. For lucky people, the Meal is born and dies three times a day, but in this briefest of life cycles there is a glimpse of eternity. I feel bad for people whose dinners come frozen, whose onions are pre-chopped and dehydrated. Without the effort of creation and the pungent, varied flavors that can only come from freshly prepared food, dinner becomes a strictly biological process, and a dubious one at that.

Devoting a little part of each night to a ritual that requires focus and effort, and yields pleasure and satisfaction, is like digging a foxhole in your head. Every time you relive that experience you are sheltered, for a while, from the onslaught of time and things lost.

Categories: Uncategorized

Arlene Brokaw: Inspired Farming

Posted on June 25th, 2012

More important than striving for perfection is to “keep your cool, be confident in what you do know to solve problems down the road… It sounds like good advice, but I still freak out.”

Arlene Brokaw, head cheesemaker at Olde Oak Farm, has a wisdom acquired only with experience and many mistakes. As we waited in the cheesemaking facility for the starter culture to work its acidifying magic on the milk, Arlene explained to me that during her first few years on the farm, she could not focus on the cheese, on the greater result. She had been too afraid of messing up. This is Arlene’s fourth season up in Maxfield, Maine, 45 minutes north of Bangor, and while she is still learning about how to make great cheese, anyone could be fooled because she exudes ease in her element.

Olde Oak Farm is a small operation hosting approximately sixty goats with twenty-two in milk production this year. When I visited the farm two and a half years ago, they were milking each goat by hand. Today, milking is more efficient with one portable machine able to milk two goats at a time. Each goat’s udder is cleaned, stripped for a visible check of milk quality, and hooked up to the “claw” to suction the milk directly into the portable tank. Then, as the volume of milk pumped decreases to a trickle, the claw is removed and each goat is hand milked to the last drop. This is to ensure all the milk is carefully removed from the udders to limit the risk of mastitis, an infection of the mammary glands.

All the milk from Olde Oak’s goats is sent directly to the cheesemaking facility not 100 feet from the milking parlor. The facility is a small cabin, fitted with plastic milkboard walls and ceiling, sinks, shelves, a walk-in cooler, and of course a cheese vat. Much of the milk is transformed into fresh, lactic goat cheese (also known as ‘chèvre’), sometimes mixed with herbs and spices, and sold in 5-ounce containers at farmer’s markets across Maine. Other times, the milk is made into aged cheeses similar to the ash-coated Saint Maure logs and into small Camemberts. To supplement their herd’s milk, Arlene also transforms purchased cow and sheep milks to make a Boursin-like fresh cheese and aged cheeses comparable to Manchego and Saint Nectaire.

While I appreciated every one of their cheeses I tasted, there was one cheese preparation I found particularly surprising and delectable. This was a specialty I savored – and wished to stuff my face with – because it was flat out delicious. Simply, it was plain fresh goat cheese stuffed in small, round red peppers. The crunchy, slightly spicy, slightly sweet pepper, melded with the creamy, tangy, soothing goat cheese, makes my mouth water even when I’m not hungry. I wondered about them as I was helping prepare the cheeses for market, and Arlene suggested I have a taste. I popped a whole one in my mouth and felt the colorful explosion of contrasting flavors invade my senses. How had I not known about the pepper-cheese combination? Where could I find a regular stash of those bright, adorable red peppers? I brought a 5-ounce container of the pepper-cheese dish home with me and, I can say without hesitation, I regret sharing it with my family.

Arlene Brokaw originally came to Olde Oak Farm to learn how to care for goats, how to make cheese, and how to run a farm. As a former journalist, she wanted to move away from writing about all the cool stuff people do, to actually being the one to do those great things. Arlene’s favorite cheeses to make are not the pepper-cheese morsels of goodness but Tomme and Manchego (and her favorite to eat is Camembert). However, more than any cheese, her heart is tied most closely to the goats. She is extremely attached to every member of the herd and is anxious for the day she must leave the farm to move closer in the direction of running her own business. Olde Oak is successful in bringing delicious hand-made cheeses to its community, but Arlene aspires to save up enough to take a loan out for equipment and lease land to start her own farm.

While I get the sense that the other members of Olde Oak will desperately miss their head cheesemaker and friend, I know that such a deep commitment to a place will be carried with her wherever she goes. And even if she does not continue to make chèvre-filled pepper bites, I know she will keep her cool in the cheeseroom. Thanks to Arlene’s down-to-earth words of advice and humble attitude, I have managed to calm my own apprehensions about cheesemaking and keep going in my business plans. I know that my cheese will not be perfect, especially at the beginning, but as long as I strive to improve and look at the big picture, I can succeed. I only wish for Arlene the kind of inspiration she gave to me the few days I was making cheese with her at Olde Oak Farm.

Categories: Uncategorized

In the Jaws

Posted on June 25th, 2012

“I will pee off the side of this boat if I have to. I’ve done it before.”

 

I thought this even while I thought about the multiple layers of pants and rubber and rain-soaked nylon that I was currently sporting. I’d make it work. I had one mark against me already by being dickless, so, I’d just have to metaphorically sack up and make the micturition happen, one way or another.

 

I was perched on the prow bench seat of a flat-bottomed fishing boat, somewhere off of the coast of Tillamook, OR. When your friend asks you if you want to go fishing with a wild-eyed, Columbia-educated strawberry farmer who tends bar at the sushi joint they both work at, and tells you that you will be the only girl, you do not say no. You say ‘yes’, and you show up.

 

We’d left Portland at three in the morning, in the wet darkness. (In Portland, there are only two kinds of darkness: wet, or about to be wet). I was working as a baker at the time, and you’d think that this would’ve prepared me for the punishing eye-squint of being dragged out of unconsciousness at that hour. It didn’t. The road out to the ocean is winding, narrow, and inexplicably packed with semis, especially during the reptilian confines of pre-dawn. The windshield was greasy. The rain, ever stronger, the closer we got to the ocean. We rode in silence, save for the occasional deep, drawn out ‘fuuuuuuuuuck thiiiiiiiis’, which is what you say when you start to wonder why anyone would choose wrestling with crab pots over that great dream that you’re always having right before the alarm goes off. But. We had chosen to be responsible for sandwiches, and the captain’s beer. If being a woman on a boat is already fraught with difficulty in the luck department, failing to show up with the booze is a guaranteed pair of snake eyes. Again, you just say yes. And you show up.

 

When we finally pulled into the parking lot, somewhere near Garibaldi, it was still dark enough that boats, water, buildings, trucks, and trailers blurred together in a general wash of rain and shadow. We hadn’t eaten. Eric decided to smoke a cigarette in the driving downpour, and make a call to see if we were early or late—there’d been no sign of life at the marina, and we couldn’t tell which side of the fence we’d landed on. I envied his ability to piss against the side of a building, and wished away the coffee I’d consumed. The car door opened in a burst of wind and salt. “They’re here already. Down at the dock. Let’s go.”

 

A vague smear of light had begun in the sky, bringing things into sharper relief as we approached the pier—the white-chased ocean, the scurrying shapes, securing lines, arranging gear. Introductions. And then, for the first of many times that day, “Are you sure you want to do this?”, from the skipper. I’m sure, I said. “Then put these on.” A pair of rubber waders, on over my canvas overalls, under the already-sopping raincoat I’d borrowed from the closet that morning. The waders had footed ends, my feet suddenly encased, condom-like, and difficult to shove back into the non-slip Crocs I’d grabbed in a three a.m. assessment of which of my shoes were a) not slippery and b) waterproof. I felt trussed like a ham. There were more instructions, I was handed down into the pitching flat-bottomed boat, and then, the wooden dock was fading away, and we were making for open water. “Is she having a good time, do you think?” I am not supposed to hear this. Oh, I am having a good time, I think, spray hitting my face sideways. I am  goddamn spectacular.

 

And, it was. The wind was up, and the water was rough—we were heading out towards a part of the bay called The Jaws, riding the choppy swell with all the grace of an ocean tanker performing a ballet—first, the sharp tilt up at the crest of the wave. Then, the tooth-rattling, ass-bruising slap of the boat’s bottom on the back end of the slope. “IT’S LIKE BEING MADE LOVE TO BY R. KELLY” I scream to my friend, my words, and my sleep-deprived hysteria lost on the wind. The sky was growing light. We were at least ten kinds of wet, and it was not even five a.m. We were fishing.

 

Well, first, what we were doing, was placing crab pots. This was a multi-pronged expedition—should our lines fail, we were hoping for Dungeness at the end of the day to make up for it. The heavy cages were tossed overboard around a section of cove, the lines bright then gone in the green water, sinking down out of sight. Goodbye, hope, I thought. See you later.

 

Then, we turned our attention to the true reason we’d all arisen at the god-awful hour of ass-early, and assembled here in this water-logged vessel: salmon fishing. I’d cast about on piddling lakes and ponds. I’d stolen sunfish from the man-made pool on the local wealthy family’s property on an illicit babysitting raid of their fish stock. But I’d never fished on the open ocean. This was readily apparent, as I sat there, dumb-faced, thumb-stupid, listening to the skipper explain the basic principles of what we were doing. The method seemed to be this: get your poles ready. Allow one of the boat bros to bait the hook properly, with a small-bodied silver fish. Fend off the waiting seagulls. Cast your line into the water at the right moment while we drifted back through the channel we’d so recently battled our way to the front of. Don’t tangle it with anyone else’s. Wait. And then, when the tug comes—haul like hell.

 

And so it goes, on the rough sea, in the Jaws—the slow creep up to the mouth of the bay, where the water churns violently, forced through a smaller opening out into the Pacific, the boat slapping the whole way up. The subsequent drift down again, lines trailing, seagulls poaching bait accompanied by our cussing, the ten a.m. shots of Jager that appear from somewhere near the skipper’s feet. His sly, testing grin, measuring my reaction to everything—is the girl enjoying herself? How soon will she ask to go back in?

 

I don’t. I won’t. I don’t care how badly I have to pee.

 

Several hours in, the magical thing happens—I’m given the credit, but, I don’t feel I entirely deserve it, when I land that salmon. It is huge, silver, gasping in the net, and my arms are aching with the weight of it. It is easily the length of one of those aching arms, shoulder to pinky finger, and as sleekly fat as a seal. Forget sunnies. Forget trout. This is a Fish. All silvery pink scales, blood, and salt, and I am so transfixed by its arcing body in the net that at first I don’t hear what the boys are telling me. That it is the wrong kind. The kind we are not allowed to keep. It has to go back.

 

It has been hooked cruelly deep, and blood is running from its mouth, and I know it is a dead thing, and want to weep with the frustration of it, all of these hours in the cold and the soaking rain leading to this—some seagull poaching my first salmon before its body can even sink beneath the waves. Fuck you, I breathe to the first bird that takes a pass. Shoo. Fuck off.

 

But this is the way of it, for all of us, that day—fish after fish. Each one the wrong kind. The Jaws casting each muscled winking body into our waiting nets, and then taking them back, just as readily. The sea giveth. The sea makes you glad you brought sandwiches. The sea taketh away.

 

And there is something in the rhythm of it, that steals over me, in my rain-soaked stupor, this hauling in and letting go, that drives home the beauty of the sport all over again. It’s about the fish, sure—we want them. We want them badly. But, it is also about only having them for a short while, no matter which way it ends–in a pan, or in a net lowered once more to the water. They are here. They are silver. They are so bright. And then, they are gone.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

Mirella’s Kitchen

Posted on June 25th, 2012

My heart was racing a little bit as I tied the apron strings around my waist and prepared to join Mirella in the kitchen at Osteria del Trivio. I couldn’t remember any of the carefully rehearsed Italian “kitchen” phrases I’d been repeating for the past several days and my hands felt all thumbs. Could I do this without making a fool of myself? What did I really know about cooking in a restaurant kitchen anyway? And, in Italy! My confession, spoken to Mirella three nights earlier, that I had dreamed about cooking with her in her kitchen suddenly seemed absurd. But her immediate response, “Si, e possibilie!” gave me the courage to follow through on the hastily arranged plans. I swallowed and walked through the swinging doors to hear her say, “Allora, vuoi fare pizze?”1 and the dream became reality.

Five years earlier, we had walked into the unassuming but charming osteria2 on our first night in Spoleto, Italy. We were greeted warmly by Umberto, ushered to seats at a small table with a view onto the street from opened windows, and he recited the menu to us, slowly, giving us time to decipher his Italian. We ordered wine and, as we waited, I gazed upon the medieval stone wall outside, glistening in the early evening rain, and started to cry. The moment was a culmination of all my fantasies about Italy and travel and the long years of waiting to see them fulfilled. I wanted to sit on ancient stone walls in the sunshine, walk the rounded cobble remains of Roman roads, and contemplate the centuries of history, which I had only taught in the classroom, while drinking strong, red wine. I was finally here! As the evening unfolded, we spoke with Umberto, met his lovely wife, Mirella, and were treated to the culinary delights that ushered out of her kitchen: bruschetta con pomodoro, strangozzi con zucchine, gnocchi con funghi, coniglio brasato, crosanda, biscotti,3 on and on. We ate, drank and conversed with them for three hours. We returned five more times in the two weeks we spent in Spoleto, each time reveling in the simple but delicious food and the warmth and generosity of our hosts. Silver-haired and tongued Umberto, who could converse, cajole and joke in English, German and French and pressed gifts upon us when we departed the city that first time. And, Mirella, petite, dark-haired, with flashing eyes who dismissed compliments with the words, “Non, e semplice,”4 and informed my husband that I was, “stupenda!”5 He (correctly) answered, “Io so,”6 and she patted him approvingly on the head. I began to dream about learning the secrets of Mirella’s kitchen, how to take simple ingredients and turn them into savory moments, memorable flavors that lingered in the mouth and heart.

So, here I was, five years and two more trips later, in Mirella’s kitchen with my hands kneading dough on the wooden counter and worrying about whether I was making the pizze round enough–was I doing it the “right” way? I looked at her as if to ask and she smiled, saying “Non importante, la forma!”7 And, taking the dough I had just shaped into a somewhat circular form, she placed it on the stove’s griddle. Poi!8 The pizze was followed by chopping, mincing, mixing, one after the other, ingredients for ragu, fagioli9, biscotti, carciofi10and, finally, strangozzi con salsicce e zucchine11 for the kitchen’s lunch. I learned some of the secrets of Mirella’s kitchen: soffritto as the base for ragu and fagioli; an abundance of pungent, green, Umbrian olive oil in every dish; simple ingredients and straightforward technique; don’t be fussy; semplice, tutto semplice!12 I discovered that, like me, she uses a knife to peel vegetables (no need for fancy peelers). Use orange oil in the biscotti. A pinch of saffron is added to the zucchini e salsicce for lunch. I lost myself in the familiar rhythms of food preparation and realized, several times, that Mirella had left me alone in her kitchen. All at once, in that moment, I knew that she trusted me and my heart soared.

Umberto came into the kitchen, tapping the watch on his arm and asking the whereabouts of his lunchtime pasta. Mirella rolling her eyes, shooed him out of the kitchen with words to the effect of, “Can’t you see we’re busy here?” and together we completed the sauce for the strangozzi she’d made by hand the day before. We carried the plates of steaming pasta to a table in the main room, filled our glasses with the local Montefalco Rosso wine and then raised them in a toast to the morning’s efforts. As I looked out the window onto the now sun-filled street, I was smiling as I tasted the first forkful of pasta, redolent with the aromas of fennel-studded sausage, that pinch of saffron, and the just-made memories of a shared kitchen. Che meraviglia!13

 

Pasta di Pranzo14(all measurements are approximate here –not a measuring cup in sight!)

1 sweet Italian sausage link

2 small zucchini

Very good olive oil (preferably Umbrian)

8 oz. fresh pasta (fettucine or linguine will work as substitute for strangozzi)

Pinch of saffron

Freshly grated pecorino cheese

 

  1. Heat approximately 3-4 tbs olive oil in large, heavy sauté pan over medium heat.
  2. Quarter zucchini lengthwise and cut into small diced pieces.
  3. Add zucchini to sauté pan, cook for 1-2 minutes.
  4. Remove sausage from casing and mash into pan with the zucchini and brown.
  5. Boil pasta water and add fresh pasta – cooking 2-3 minutes.
  6. Add one ladle of pasta water to pan with zucchini and sausage.
  7. Add saffron to zucchini and sausage mix.
  8. Add drained pasta to the sauté pan and toss ingredients together, adding small amounts of pasta water if necessary to emulsify sauce.
  9. Add 1-2 handfuls of freshly grated pecorino to pasta and toss.
  10. Divide among 4 serving plates, with additional pecorino if desired.
  11. Mangia!

 

 

 

1 Now then, do you want to make pizzas? (more like flatbreads for antipasto toppings)

2 Literally, a tavern.

3 Bruschetta with tomatoes, strangozzi (a type of Umbrian pasta known as “priest stranglers,” literally shoelaces!) with zucchini, gnocchi with mushrooms, braised rabbit, a pastry tart, biscotti.

4 No, it’s simple.

5 Wonderful!

6 I know.

7 No, the shape is not important.

8 Another way of saying, “Now, then!”

9 White beans simmered with soffritto (minced celery, onions and carrots), pancetta and tomatoes.

10 Artichokes

11 Priest stranglers with zucchini and sausage.

12 Simple, it’s all simple!

13 How wonderful!

14 Lunch Pasta

Categories: Uncategorized

The Spectrum

Posted on June 25th, 2012

All gustatory experiences are not equal: they range from bad to okay to banal to good to great to pass-me-a-proverbial-cigarette beatific. We all know bad and okay – most often these are actually the result of a well-intentioned and inexperienced cook trying to do something nice. New spouses, small children, and supportive relatives of a newly declared vegan or gluten-free eater often accidentally create something that has to be choked down with a smile and hopefully a stiff drink. Banal gustatory experiences are myriad in our world of processed food. Cereal and milk always tastes like cereal and milk, frozen pizza always tastes like frozen pizza, and peanut butter and jelly always tastes like elementary school. These are fine things–their actualities always line up with our expectations. We can consume them without much thought at all being devoted to the experience. Even good experiences come a dime-a-dozen for most because people generally consume what they like; therefore most of their chosen gustatory sensations are good. Experiences between great and beatific are few and far between. These experiences are fleeting and have a spectrum of their own ranging from seasonal to elusive and coinciding with this spectrum is a gamut of heartache.

Seasonally fleeting gustatory experiences are the ones that are abundantly available during their time but we cannot have at any other time even if we so desired. Fresh native corn on the cob, Girl Scout cookies, and the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake all fall into this category. Most of us have at least one seasonal favorite that we anticipate and enjoy more than most other food or drink in part due to their limited time only mystique. For me it is watermelon flavored beer, which I know sounds repulsive. I can’t even describe it to you in a way that sounds enticing because it really is like having a watermelon Jolly Rancher and a pale ale simultaneously. But somehow there exists a synergy in this combination that I find inexpressibly satisfying. The marketing gurus at Thomas Hooker Brewery tout it as “Strangely Refreshing” and I am inclined to agree and leave it at that. The first annual taste of any seasonally available item is always the best. It has been deeply anticipated and it is what awakens us to the new season upon us. I had my first Watermelon Ale of the season a few days ago. I purchased a six pack last week but was waiting for just the right time to experience the first taste of the season, a warm Friday evening after a rainy week—and it was perfect. If I could describe it to you accurately I would but let’s leave it as cool, refreshing, and tasted like summer. For the rest of the summer I will continue my affair with Watermelon Ale all the while knowing that as with all good things it will come to an end. Some people try to cheat the season and hide girl scout cookies in the back of the pantry or buy a case of beer right at the end of the season, and while I may nurse my last few Watermelon Ales into mid September that is as far as I can take it. Cheating the season only cheapens the experience which in turn is only cheating yourself. The rightful heartache that comes with the wane of any season and its exclusive foods is not so bad, it reminds us that we still live in a world where things grow and seasons change and we can’t get everything we want at a twenty-four hour supermarket whenever we want it just because we want it. Some things are meant to be savored in their own time.

After seasonal, we have things that only come but once a year. For some it is the majesty of dyed Easter eggs, or a Cookie Puss ice cream cake they have had once a year on their birthday since grade school, or Aunt Sue’s famous baked beans only made for the Fourth of July picnic. For the fifty or so friends and family closest to my husband and me it may be the handmade chocolates I give away between Christmas and New Year’s. Everyone has some culinary delight that comes once during each rotation around the sun that they love (or at least I certainly hope everyone does). I have my grandmother’s Christmas Eve meal which I begin anticipating just after Thanksgiving. It has been the same as far back as I can remember: lasagne with bite-sized homemade meatballs, and a Friendly’s Jubilee Roll –wait, one year we had tortoni but that was a fine substitution. My grandmother is Polish and she married my grandfather who is Italian but will not eat garlic or onions. She was taught how to cook the Italian staples by his family but had the added challenge of having to feed the pickiest Italian man in New England. I give you the background in order to make clear that there is no way anyone will ever recreate my grandmother’s sauce, her meatballs, or her annual lasagne: they are born of circumstances that cannot be imitated or recreated. The lasagne begins with a trip to a local Italian cheese shop for some seriously smooth and fresh whole milk ricotta cheese. Then there is a double or triple batch of sauce which is made with pork sausage, beef meatballs, pork chops, and a Christmas-time special: braciole . Also, sometime during the frying of all these meats she makes bite sized meatballs smaller than a teaspoon and reserves them for the lasagne. I have no idea what noodles she uses or how she cooks them so perfectly or how the whole lasagne consisting of ricotta, noodles, sauce, and mini meatballs stays so well balanced. The noodles don’t soak up all the extra liquid and get bloated and limp leaving the rest of the lasagne dry, they retain their noodle-y structure and have a flavor of their own – I know she uses flat noodles not curly ones and I can only assume this is an integral part of the magic. Nor is it too saucy, or drowned in stringy mozzarella—in fact I don’t think there is any mozzarella at all. You can see that this experience, be it fleeting, has pretty much ruined all other lasagne for me, as I have outlined all the flaws with most lasagnes – including my own humble attempts. While I cannot deny that this lasagne would bring Mario Batali to tears in spite of its simplicity, I also have to believe its mere annual appearance and connection to the people I love most on the planet creates a magic that enhances this experience beyond just the ingredients. The heartache that accompanies annual experiences is that they are always linked to some tradition and usually some person and while no matter how steadfastly we hold onto tradition nothing stays the same forever. We know deep down some day, however faraway, that this moment, this time, this place, this meal is temporary. I don’t know if my grandmother would ever make the lasagne outside of Christmas Eve. I have never asked her. I wouldn’t dare cheat this experience.

Next I must address the Russian Roulette category of fleeting gustatory experiences. I find that this most often applies to fresh produce, especially stone fruits, but can also be experienced at restaurants. You know that your peach, or pear, or disco fries have the potential to be incredible, an experience bordering on extreme greatness but you really have no idea if that greatness will strike today or anytime soon . The peach smelled ripe but isn’t quite there yet, the pear felt soft and juicy but had a severe graininess that you just didn’t do it for you. And the past two times you had disco fries at your favorite pub were vastly different experiences: once it was amazing, an experience not to be outdone, a harmonious balance of potato-gravy-and-cheese, the perfect comfort to your shitty workday, and the time following they were so drowned in cheese you couldn’t even get through half–so really, who knows what will appear today when you order them? I find the mecca of the culinary Roulette wheel to be a perfect avocado. Avocados are almost always good, they add richness and creaminess to anything they grace while still being a humble plant product. Buying super ripe avocados for mashing into guacamole immediately is rarely a challenge, but I find I usually buy a firm avocado and take my chances. Sometimes I leave it out, wait and hope it gets ripe enough to mash on the day I feel like guacamole. Other times I put it in the fridge hoping to stave off its ripening and pull it out a day or two before I want to slice it up for a burger or a sandwich, hoping I have timed it right. Sometimes it’s a bit too soft to be properly sliced and sometimes it’s still a little too firm for maximum enjoyment, but sometimes it is perfect. This happened a few days ago, the same warm Friday evening I had my first Watermelon Ale. The avocado was perfect–not too hard and not too soft, just right to be sliced and put onto my tempeh bacon, lettuce, tomato, poached egg sandwich with mustard and sriracha. It held its shape when sliced but was soft enough to yield peak creaminess to the sandwich experience. This was a perfect avocado, an event that comes along just often enough to remind you that it does exist and is not in fact a mirage or figment of your memory. The joy of striking it rich on the culinary roulette wheel is always tempered by the heartache that gently reminds you that you have no idea or control when it will happen again.

Finally, we must discuss the saddest and most elusive of all gustatory experiences: the lone ranger. These are the experiences that reach the beatific, a meal so incredible that you need a shot and a beer immediately following just to ease yourself off the high. There is no room for heartache during this experience because you are too busy pushing your own limits of gluttony to think this might be the one and only time you eat this meal. The heartache comes later, much later. The trouble with these solitary experiences is that you have no idea they are about to occur because it’s the first time you are going in for this meal and you often have no prior knowledge that it will in fact be your last meal exactly like it. There is no way to prepare for the experience or the subsequent knowledge of its isolation. With all that said let me share with you my most recent lone ranger. My husband isn’t a huge shellfish fan so I rarely, if ever, make it at home. I love baked stuffed shrimp but many places seem to make it as an homage to mediocrity. One day I had a hankering for some baked stuffed shrimp and I found a review of a seafood and jazz place in town. It had apparently been there for quite some time but was just off the main street and I had never noticed it. We decide to go for dinner, and despite it being almost deserted the food was incredible. The baked stuffed shrimp were amazing, dripping with butter, and a very-lemony-real-crab-meat stuffing . The family style side of julienne vegetables was also delicious and doused with butter. I thought to myself “Here is a place I can come when I have a hankering for seafood. I bet everything is good – who am I kidding I am only ever going to order the shrimp.” I was in a state of ecstasy that prevented me from having a conversation with my husband about anything other than how amazing my meal was. We made it home for a night cap and I went to bed fat and happy. A few months went by and my hankering returned, but this time I thought I knew the remedy. We went downtown, parked, and he listened to me blather on about stuffed shrimp on the short walk to the restaurant doors that were closed – permanently. I was devastated. The heartache was severe. It took me weeks to mourn the loss of the possibility of repeating my gluttony. I probably should have spent more time noticing how empty it was the last time we were there but I was taken over by forces I could not control. I can only take solace in knowing that I could not have enjoyed it any more if I had known it was going to be a one time experience. I enjoyed that meal to the fullest extent of my ability and had I known what was to come the ecstasy probably would have been laced with heartache and in fact not ecstasy at all. Although these single experiences bring with them the deepest sorrow in addition to the greatest euphoria we are still the better for them.

All types of ephemeral gustatory experiences provide us with two equally important things: the feelings of joy and familiarity and the knowledge of powerlessness in a world where we believe we have conquered all.

Categories: Uncategorized

The Dregs

Posted on June 25th, 2012

The boy who gave us bananas carried a machete casually slung over his shoulder. He seemed confused when I broke one open and began to eat it, and talked very fast in Swahili to my guide. It seems I had made yet another cultural gaffe. These were cooking bananas, my guide explained; no one in their right mind would eat one raw. The boy, shooting me looks that clearly said he was worried about this tall white girl, nimbly climbed a nearby tree and brought me down a petite, deep golden, and oddly heavy replacement. Its peel was thin and fibrous and the three bites that it afforded me were rich and sweet. The boy took the first banana – a fruit that might be found in any perfectly respectable American grocery store – out of my hand and quietly tossed it into the forest. We thanked him, “asante sana,” and continued our hike around the villages of the Chagga tribe nestled on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, stepping over giant avocados that speckled the path like so many acorns would back home. They had dropped from the forest overhead, overripe and crawling with ants where the peels had burst and the deep green flesh spilled out and turned rusty brown with oxygen and dust.
When we reached our destination, a coffee farm at the end of a high dirt road, the man who met us carried an even larger machete. Later on, he would take us on a terrifying climb along an aqueduct to a waterfall “good for jumping” and then carve a fish out of driftwood with the machete while we swam. For now, however, the man, proprietor of this farm, swung the oversized blade into a tree stump and led us to the coffee trees.
I’d been drinking coffee every day for a decade yet, ironically, I was blindsided by the evolution of this particular cup. Things like bananas, avocados, the huge chunks of papaya we got with our scrambled eggs every morning – these things I was prepared for, delighted by. I knew instinctively that these bright, soft fruits were foreigners back home. They reeked of sunshine and warm rain; they would clearly never make it in the rocks and ice of New England and thus, I could only love them in the way one loves things that may be snatched away at any moment. But coffee – coffee fit, and the startling realization that it too came wrapped in a bright red berry and flourished under leaves as big as my torso, that hurt.
From the damp shade of the coffee grove, our host took us to his backyard where he’d left a pile of small green beans to dry. He showed us the large mortar and pestle that had been passed down in his family for generations, the wood nearly as hard as stone after several hundred years of pounding. He taught us how to alternate the downward motion of tall wooden staffs to shake the husk from the dried beans. In the roasting hut, thatched in the traditional Chagga style with overlapping banana fronds, chickens wandered around us in the smoky dusk as we stirred the beans around a stone bowl over the open fire. Our host pulled the bowl off with a potholder of folded leaves and dumped the roasted beans into a wide, shallow basket. Stepping from the mystery of the hut into the equatorial sun, I was confronted with coffee as I had known it my whole life. The beans shimmered oily in the basket, a shifting puddle of soft browns, deep chocolates, and smooth blacks as dark as our host’s skin. Back at the mortar, I locked eyes with the Canadian woman across from me, our arms echoing each other’s methodical up-down as I imagine our own ancestors’ did, churning butter on the great prairies of another continent.
It was hard to recognize this coffee farmer as well-off. He wore an old button up shirt, ripped shorts, and rubber boots with no socks. Though he had a relatively large house with a wall around his property, the yard was packed dust and dirty dishes lay piled outside the back door. As he led us to a small gazebo he’d built in the garden, he told us how he was trying to increase his tourist draw by making a sitting area for afternoon tea. He pointed proudly to the small pond he’d dug, debris floating amongst the small orange fish, and took the plastic thermos of hot water his wife had brought out on a tray. The coffee we’d roasted and ground sat in an unassuming Tupperware bottom, the smell of it wafting over us in distracting waves. Our host spooned it into a bright yellow plastic strainer and poured hot water over the top, making us individual servings of strong, black coffee in mismatched china teacups. A large amount of the grounds drained through the wide mesh to settle at the bottom of my cup, while the swirl of oil on top attested to the freshness of beans that hadn’t even cooled fully before they’d been leached of their flavor and ended up between my hands.
Two weeks later I would pick fresh nutmeg and accidentally trip over a vanilla bean vine. A week after that I would utter the words, “oh, it’s just another giraffe.” The feeling would be the same: a sense of the abstract becoming suddenly tangible, as if someone had handed me an object and said, “that thing that you’re holding, that’s God,” and it was. A sucker punch to my reality. I’m not saying I found religion on the eastern coast of Africa, but what I did find seems far more intimate. I tried to bring it all back with me; pounds of coffee in bright fabric bags, a sack of turmeric so yellow it looks like treasure, earrings made from the bones of cows unlucky enough to wander across the path of a lion. Maybe it’s the intensity of the light or a change in the magnetic pull of the earth, but none of it is quite the same. Apples and asparagus and the call of geese overhead in October still have a place in my inside heart, but things are awkward with coffee now. We still see each other, we’re still close, but no cup has ever been quite as good.

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