Jammin'

A CommunalTable Sunday afternoon of

 Jam making...

Jam maker and author Elizabeth Field helped guests
make jam using a recipe
from her  recent book Marmalade.*
                                                                 

 Orange and Pomegranate Marmalade boiling                                     

                     



                  
Jammy treats...

On the menu: thumbprint cookies, pb&j, guava paste and cream cheese,
tomato jam with goat cheese and crackers,
Nueske's** applewood ham on biscuits with green pepper jelly.
cheddar and chutney, and Blue Sky Bakery*** mini-muffins with apple butter

hosts Don C. and Catherine A. getting cocktails ready:
Tequila Jams on the Rocks made with blackberry shrub,
 lime and spiced simple syrup... served in jelly jars


Jammin'

members of the Angle Band Jam along with jammers Samuel Levine and Lucio Westmorland.
Artist Emma Tapley used band members as live models for some afternoon figure drawing,

while folks inside the house sketched still lives including
 oranges and pomegranates from the jam!

*Marmalade  http://www.amazon.com/Marmalade-Sweet-Savory-Spreads-Sophisticated/dp/0762443049

** Nueske's http://www.nueskes.com/ Nueske's NE regional rep. Terri Sweetbaum kindly donated ham to CommunalTable and we were excited to share this Wisconsin company's delicious goods!

*** Blue Sky Bakery http://cheapassfood.com/eats/show/311-blue-sky-bakery  Baker's Eric and Jorge brought some muffins with them to add to all the other treats! 

**** and special thanks to Annabel Willis for snapping these pictures! 

the medium's the message

  October pst wherein I report on the meal I made for the poetrysciencetalk: 

poet Gerd Stern with Huey P. Newton

Beat-poet multi-media artist Gerd Stern showed three videos shot in 1973. Gerd has a crateful of tapes made using the early Portapack; a portable video recorder that opened the floodgate to mobile documentation and on the spot video art (legend has it that Gerd went shopping with Nam Jun Paik on Canal St. on the very first day the portapacks went on sale!) At this months’ pst he was celebrating having a few of these tapes digitized (a costly and painstaking process of actually ‘baking’ the sticky oxide layers of old tape so that they can be unraveled and reprocessed. This is being undertaken at ZKM, the Center for Art and Media at Karlsruhe, Germany, in their Laboratory for the Restoration of Antique Video. They’re doing this work in exchange for copies of these historical tapes for their archives.) 

Gerd showed three tapes of conversations with now deceased friends: media theorist Marshal McLuhan, activist and Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton, and anthropologist Edward T. Hall.   Wow! McLuhan was visionary in describing what we now experience living in the World Wide Web, and Newton was vibrantly eloquent, as vital today as then. It's a given our life experience is mediated, what is still a struggle though is by whom and how these experiences are distributed and controlled, and this is what Newton was talking about in the tape Gerd made.

Over the years I’ve had a share of fantasies about making food videos, imagining real time visuals with alluring background banter, but despite increasing demand for food writers to diversify from print (hence blogging, you-tubes, radio) I’ve resisted adding to the plethora of skewed cookie-cutter food-network knock-offs.  Alas, put a camera in my hands and I freeze. This is not because of a Luddite soul, or because watching, as opposed to engaging in real-time live-action can be painfully tedious. It is because videography, like any other creative venture takes skill and practice and the expectation that you can pick up a camera and be good to go seems pure arrogance.

Still, in celebration of Gerd’s presentation I decided a bit of videoed real-time cooking uploaded to you-tube and shared on my iphone would be a welcome ingredient in the evening’s menu. 

buffet offering: iphone you-tube on a plate

Using recipes inspired from Moosewood and channeling memories of meals at Food 

                     I served a vegetarian mushroom barley soup. 

A foraging friend found this amazing chicken mushroom in Prospect Park,
which I carefully washed, picking off dry leaves and blades of grass
the fungi had grown around.  Sauteed in high heat with butter
and a fair dousing of booze, it was added to the soup.

Also whole grain breads with runny cheese (I served Ribiola Bosina, a mixed milk cheese in place of Brie, which was just becoming popular at the time Gerd's videos were made) and a salad of shredded Romaine, kale (probably should've used red cabbage... did anyone eat kale back in the 70's?) and sprouts with tahini dressing, followed by apple crisp with whole grain crumble and vanilla ice cream.

No one really looked at my video…  it was enough the iphone was there... the medium became the message.

Summer Squash with Whipped Brown Butter

In August I headed to Tybee Island, Georgia with my son Sam and his girlfriend Annabel's family. We stayed in a house on the salt-marsh that faced the sunset. Egrets and pelicans flew by. I shared a room with Sam, who tip-toed in from Annabel's room at dawn- a charade in honor of A'bel's father (ha! James are you reading this?) I was a bit on edge as if I were meeting the in-laws (except we're talking high-school sweethearts.)     

The day we flew down I chipped a tooth on a frozen salted caramel and first thing I had to do was find a local dentist and then we planned was to rent bikes and ashamed as I am to admit, I don't know how to ride a bike and so I was stressing, feeling like a high maintenance ninny.

         Wa la! I rented a trike!

Tybee is beautiful with radical tide shifts. At low tide you could walk a mile into the sea. It was shell-less, and there were sink holes and tidal pools, some deep enough to swim. Tiny sea worms burrowed leaving patterns in the sand. I lucked out and found one perfect sand dollar-- a reward for braving the eerie emptiness.  

One day we wandered around Savannah, which is around a half hour from the island and had lunch at Mrs. Wilkes’ Boarding House  http://mrswilkes.com/history.html  Mrs. Wilkes passed away at 95 in 2002, but she ran the place for 55 years. Famous for her fried chicken and biscuits with cane syrup, what I fell in love with was a slow cooked mashed summer squash. Many of her recipes are on-line, but not the squash. I think the key is butter. 

squash is in the foreground- there was also creamed corn, mac-n-cheese,

mashed potatoes, rice, stewed turnips, braised greens, and butter beans, to name a few!

Slow-cooked Summer Squash with Whipped Brown Butter

Trim stem and root ends from half a dozen yellow summer squash then roughly chop and put in a saucepan with a tablespoon of water and a pinch of salt. Cover and cook over a low flame, stirring now and again to prevent scorching, until the squash is mashable tender. Take off the lid and continue cooking to evaporate the squash water and to intensify the flavor. Stir in a spoon or two of whipped brown butter and salt and pepper, mashing as you stir.  

Whipped Brown Butter

Simmer 2 sticks of unsalted butter in a small saucepan over low heat until butter turns the color of weak coffee. It’ll take a long time- 30-40 minutes. Keep an eye on it because it can burn.  What’s happening is the milk solids are caramelizing and imparting a nutty sweetness to the butter. Spoon off any white foam from the surface. Pour into a container and chill till it reaches room temperature.

With a mixer, whip one stick of plain butter, then add the chilled brown butter. Whip until aerated and fluffy.  This can stay covered in the refrigerator for several weeks. Use by the spoonful to flavor vegetables. 

    

     After all the sorting it turned out both sons would be away for the better part of summer and I'd get a trial-run of empty nest. On a spur I perused artist colonies (not only would I like to be a participant but I've harbored a dream that when my children were grown I'd find employment being an artist's retreat chef, nomadically following warm weather!) Alas- I was way past the various application deadlines. Instead, on a lark, I signed-up for a 10 day silent retreat at the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburne, Mass. http://www.dhamma.org/

    Several people I know had done this, including my sister who told a story of smuggling napkins from the dining room and finding a pencil stub on the bottom of her purse to write illicit poems with the shades drawn in her room. (There is no reading, writing, music, talking, exercise allowed; only eight hours a day of meditation broken up with meager meals and pre-recorded dharma talks.) 

    Let me tell you: it was really hard, and fascinating and uncomfortable and tremendously empowering. The silence was easy, silencing the "monkey mind*" was not. First off sitting that long is difficult (this is why the ancients invented yoga- to prepare the body to be able to sit.) By the second day I pleaded for chair dispensation and despite pillows propping every bodily curve by the third day my hemorrhoids were trumpeting "get off your arse, get off your arse!"

    And it was shocking where and with what speed the mind travels despite the most concentrated efforts to still it. Unexpectedly I remembered so many people and moments I was filled with a magnificent and rooting sense of history. I had many creative thoughts and just as many undermining ones. Sitting so long, feeling every breath, moving my focus back and forth from the top of my head to the tip of my toes I  became able to discern patterns of thought and to welcome both good and troubling thoughts and to take neither seriously. For short moments I was able to appreciate rather than judge. For even a few spare fleeting moments I was able to not think at all and only feel. 

     Small stones along the short paths through the property's woods became my illicit poetry. I pocketed dozens squirreling them to my room, then built and collapsed and rebuilt towers marking each day of meditation, and each day of not drinking wine achieved (this being a part of my agenda for going- to clean house so to speak.) 

     Meals were simple, bland, starchy vegetarian fare. Oatmeal and toast for breakfast, then for the other meal: brown rice or quinoa with steamed vegetables (or horrible canned tomatoey mushes with too much cumin in them.) Towards evening there was tea and fruit. So longing was I for the kitchen (my real life) that I'd string out the tea break peeling my orange with one long spiraled cut, and then supreming perfectly pithless segments into a bowl. 

     I thought I might never eat another bowl of brown rice ever again, but just the other day I got a hankering. What makes the dish is miso enhanced tahini and spicy mixed Indian pickle liberally spooned atop. I know this is a mash-up of Middle-Eastern and Asian flavors, but I think it works. 

Tahini Sauce:

Mix 1/2 c. tahini (ground sesame paste) with 1/2 c. water. 

Stir till smooth and blended. (Add a bit more water if its too thick- or a spoon of yogurt or buttermilk)

Add: 1 T freshly squeezed lemon juice 

a dash or two of soy sauce

1 - 2 T miso (fermented soy paste)

Spoon a few spoonfuls of sauce over cooked brown rice, (or other foods: salad, cooked vegetables...) then top with Indian pickle (which I buy from Patel Brothers in Jackson Hts.) At the Vipassana center I also dusted the bowl with toasted ground flax seeds.

Leftover sauce keeps well in the fridge.    

* Monkey-mind is a term used in Buddhist and Daoist writings to refer to the wandering mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_monkey   

       Somehow always before
    getting down to work

         a bout of housecleaning comes first. 

          A sweep-out of ash from round the hearth. 

           If I catch-up might I keep up?

        

I started this blog stoked, inspired after an online food writers blog writing class with Molly O'Neill from www.cooknscribble.com  (totally recommend these classes, also joining this online community!) Meant to add monthly posts with religious fervor, then half dozen poetrysciencetalks came and went unremarked, and another half dozen other things. Next pst is next week, the 12th season opener with the theme of "no-thing." A chance I suppose to just be, so hmmm, what food represents that?
Water?

Since last posting:

Got to teach Food is Art at Parsons School of Design, a survey class for art students encouraging them to view food as expressive culture. Took me a year to write the syllabus and another year to peddle it.  An email query sent off with a prayer to an acquaintance who passed it on to someone else, like casting a line to the sea. Finally there was a nibble, then a churlish wait to see if I could pull in enough students. It was my dream job come true. I was terrified. Waiting for class to start that first day I calmed myself sipping steaming Miso then hauled a shopping cart of pot-n-pans and hot plates and vegetables across Union Sq. and into the classroom. Boom, there I stood, blathering introductions. The students learned and mostly I learned and we had good fun. Highlights included a DIY extravaganza (relating the artisanal "foodie" movement to various avant garde movements past.) We flipped pizza dough, made ginger syrup, gnocchi, sauerkraut, and pictorial sushi rolls. We had a 'food belief systems' PechaKucha (and contextualized these beliefs with their historical and cultural counterparts.) There was a series of guest lectures including Tatfoo Tan, Fabio Parasecoli, Victoria Yee Howe from Kreemart, and Mihir Desai from foodTEXT(at)foodTEXT.org, and each class culminated in a themed student cooked feast.

Myopically visioned as I am my iphone snaps were of the food rather then student's artwork, but there were among their projects some wry videos (one went viral  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCBa2H9J4r0 ) and an engaging series of photos of shockingly repulsive looking monochromatic platters of food.  

During the semester break I took a trip to Michoacan, Mexico to see the winter home of the Monarch butterflies  (a tour run by Jackie Detloff from Conocer in Milwaukee, WI  www.conocer3.com/schedule.shtml)

Quite fantastic hiking a steep path through Oyamel fir. When sunshine bursts through the clouds millions of golden butterflies blot the sky creating a symphony of wind with their flapping wings. An awesome spectacle, but what really caught my eye were the markets, colors and smells in the small towns we visited. 

                     

 A particular highlight was visiting La Pacanda, a small island in Lake Patzcuaro. For centuries the indigenous  Purepecha were fishermen but the lake has become polluted and overrun with algae and they are struggling to adapt. One thing they've done to bring money to their island was to convert an abandoned Spanish garrison into a really comfortable ecolodge with a small restaurant and I had the opportunity to wake up at sunrise and "help" make the days tortillas.

The nixtamalized corn had already been ground at the town mill but we ground the masa finer with a heavy metate (mortar and pestle) then hand shaped the tortillas and cooked them on a wood fueled comal. Mine were thick and misshapen, the sticky dough near impossible to clap into shape. The cooks suffered my zealous enthusiasm with great equanimity!  

Another pleasure: in the town of Zinapecuaro we were hosted by an extended family and I had the honor to be invited into the matriarch, Terre Caballero's cocina for a salsa making lesson.   

Terre's Tomatillo Salsa* (yield: 2+ c.)

1# tomatillos

1/2 medium white onion

1 - 2 seeded jalepenos (how much heat do you want?)

hefty handful cilanto- stems and all

1 t. salt

juice from 1 - 2 limes

husk and core tomatillos. throw everything in a cuisenart or blender. done.  

* this is a raw salsa- resulting in a stunning sharp green pungent delight. It doesn't last more than a few days in a jar in the fridge. You can use any leftovers to cook with. Sautéed chicken or fish are great with it, or use it up by stirring into some guacamole.

poertyscience December

 poetrysciencetalks:a monthly salon where I serve a meal  before an evening's talk and try to make the menu reflect the presentation.

                                Chapter One: planning the meal.

     December’s pst was about the Singularity, an idea that a time is coming when machines will become both self-conscious, and more intelligent than humans. To some, this seems great, a kind of techno-rapture. I fall in another camp, but still, it was great creating a menu to match this talk presented by an Associate Professor in Applied Computer Network Administration who has a strong interest in ecstatic practices and mystical eschatology!

     First food thoughts jumped to a cartoonish Rosie the robot/George Jetson technology. I had fleeting visions of robotic pacojets and centrifuges’ or “Soylant Green” nutrient pills, but thoughts about using fancy machines to make fancy futuristic foods dissipated like so much liquid nitrogen.  After all, cooking is technology, and some theorize our use of this technology early-on is what distinguished humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. The marriage of food and fire is our very essence, so using technology to cook, no matter how futuristic the machines, seems actually, antiquated.

     Second thoughts were helped along by madcap email discussions with my son, the neuroscientist, and my niece who is writing her dissertation about something I don’t quite grasp but it has to do with technology and sustainability. We discussed computers as tools that handle complexity. Computers figure-out complex things we mostly can’t, even if our human minds created the programs to set the figuring in motion. I started thinking about “complex” flavors. Pesto, say, is not complex, even though it's a blend of flavors. Your mouth can pull apart how the elements complement each other. Curries on the other hand, are complex. We can distinguish characteristics (i.e. hot or sweet) but most of us can’t tell exactly what’s in the blend.  

     Computers expand (according to my niece) but also limit (according to my son) how we think because the algorithms organize our access to information. This brought to mind hyperlinks, and how they lead you on a journey, and how flavors too, migrate and change. Tasting flavors also leads you on a journey.

     The menu I settled upon offered platters of “base” foods, which I shaped into 1’s and 0’s to represent computer code. Some of the shapes were formed with cookie cutters (technology) and some occurred naturally.

Delicata squash 0’s and tofu 1’s to represent computer code.
The base foods were plain, flavored only with salt and pepper. There was also a big bowl of Basmati rice.

Surrounding the bases were five different “hyperlink” curries from different parts of the world. There were many overlapping ingredients, yet each was distinctive. Our brains discern these differences in taste, but to pull apart the cultural, historical and geo-political aspects of these curries and how they are or are not related could take a lifetime of figuring… or perhaps an algorithm could do this?

I began searching for recipes online, but push comes to shove, books offered better and more in-depth information. Julie Sahni, Madhur Jaffery, Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, Nancie McDermott, Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, all champions!

  

I did find a Japanese curry recipe here:

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/06/how-to-make-japanese-curry-rice-from-scratch-recipe.html though I doctored the recipe as I was interested in making sauce for the 1’s and 0’s, not stew.

                                                                  

                                                                     An interlude:

                            (It was lovely, so lovely eating a meal of sauce.)

                             Luscious, spicy Thai Green curry with coconut milk, fresh herbs,

                                                           and diced eggplant.

Malaysian pineapple curry thickened and sweetened with fresh pineapple puree.

Pungent North Indian buttermilk curry, with curry leaves and black mustard seeds.

The curry from Martinique used ground yellow mustard

 and had diced ripe mango and sweet potato. 

Japanese curry used Worcestershire, potatoes, carrots, peas and S&B.

Warm and rich, Japanese curry is a mash-up of cultures; Indian spices thickened by European roux.

http://www.sb-worldwide.com/curry/feature.html 

Each guest filled their plates according to interest and preference. Google however, "fills our plates" for us by ordering the information in any given query we might have. I suppose it might be similar to taste preferences- based on our particular history... but what if you're in the mood for something new? How would Google know? 

chapter two: (and then there was dessert.)

Cookies: text files stored on your hard-drive, and also sweet treats. 

I thought sandwich cookies might represent our relationship with technology, 

but perusing the web I came upon this recipe for Fig Newtons:

              http://www.stirthepots.com/2011/11/fig-newtons.html 

 Fig Newton architecture seemed more apt; rich dough enclosing a fruitful center. Also, and this may seem off topic but bear with me, Fig Newtons were my sister’s favorite cookie. It was my sister who introduced me to poetryscience and every month when I  cook for the salon I think about her. She passed away from colon cancer three years ago. When I rolled the dough for the cookies I was filled with longing for her.

       

     Another aspect of the Singularity is that when it comes, humans may be able to merge consciousness with the machine’s “super-consciousness,” freeing us from the frailties of our bodies while preserving our minds. This is not wholly far-fetched, just the other day the New York Times had an article on bioengineering that spoke about the possibility in the not too distant future of storing digital information insides human cells. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/drew-endy-better-computing-for-the-things-we-care-about-most.html  

Maybe such a process could be reversed: instead of our becoming 

cyborgs, machines could become humanized?

     During the presentation the speaker asked us to think about how we’d like this merging of mind and machine? The thought horrifies me, but got me thinking about my sister again. She loved science fiction, and the idea of a Cyborgian Society. As she was dying, she found tremendous comfort thinking her consciousness would merge into some kind of universal energy force. I wondered how I’d feel having access to her now, via computer, and then it hit me like a flash! I do have my sister, now and forever, in the taste of a cookie.

       

tasting a bit of history at The Festival of Ideas...

     Last spring, Communal Table (my food/art business) set up shop for a day of tasting and story telling at the Festival of Ideas For a New City on New York City's lower east side. Communal Table invited people to "taste the neighborhood" and set out bread and dips that typified the cooking of the various people that have lived and thrived for generations in this thronging, historic neighborhood.

     We offered oniony "schmaltz," to represent Eastern Europeans, (albeit a version made with olive oil instead of chicken fat to please Vegan, Vegetarian, Halal and Hipster denizens who abound in the neighborhood today.) Also spicy Chinese chili oil, and a pan-Latino Sofrito which had Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Spaniards debating all day long about the origin of this flavorful combo of peppers, onions and herbs.

     As people dipped and tasted, we asked them to "listen" as the flavors in their mouth told their brain a story about history and culture, and to be aware how each taste told a completely different story. Even if they professed ignorance of history, or knowledge about the city’s waves of immigration, or of Chinese cooking practices; we promised the flavors would tell them stories. It was a simple exercise; tasting and listening, and it seemed to move people. I watched people’s faces as they let the flavors speak, and saw that wonderful “aha!” moment when their taste buds explained a little piece of cultural history.    

     After the tasting, we invited folks to share recipes or list ingredients that described their own stories. These were written on colorful cards that we hung on a clothesline for other passersby to read and comment on. My favorite was from a young girl who explained that her mother’s Korean and her father’s Norwegian- so her diet is split between rice and potatoes. Her parents, she said, are divorced now and her father’s girlfriend is from the Caribbean, so she had no trouble identifying the Sofrito.        

     Throughout the day, people asked for my sofrito recipe, which made me feel proud. Yow! One guy almost cried, telling me he’d recently lost his mother and hadn’t tasted that flavor since she’d died. I’m first generation Eastern European, Jewish, and my people never ate such a delicious, spicy, lively concoction, so I couldn't call a grandmother or an Auntie for a recipe. Instead I researched cookbooks and the web, and made a mash-up version that included tomato, which is not traditional for Puerto Ricans, but is common in the Dominican Republic. I blended the raw ingredients into a fairly smooth puree, which I sautéed in oil that was colored and flavored with achiote seeds. Usually, Sofrito is used as a seasoning, dolled-out by spoonfuls to flavor beans or stew, but for the Festival of Ideas I made it strong and extra soupy, all the better for dipping.

Cross Cultural Sofrito for The Festival of Ideas

1 large Spanish onion
1 green & 2 red peppers (most recipes call for more green than red but I don’t like green peppers) plus 2 jalapeños (all the peppers seeded!)
2-3 plum tomatoes,
4-5-6+ cloves of garlic,
1/2 c. pimento stuffed Manzanilla olives,
1 tablespoon capers,
A big handful of fresh cilantro,
a couple of sprigs of parsley (stems and all)
salt and pepper.
Blend first 5 ingredients in a food processor, then coarsely chop and add: olives, capers and herbs.
Sauté in ½ c. annatto oil* for 10 – 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add a splash of red wine vinegar, olive oil, and some water to thin to a good “dip” consistency.

*to make annato oil: warm a teaspoon of achiote seeds in 1/2 c. olive oil until the oil turns golden orange. Discard the seeds, but save the oil.