Rules and Radishes, Rules and Radishes

 According to my high school Russian history teacher, movie extras in crowd scenes are instructed to mutter "rhubarbs and radishes, rhubarbs and radishes" as they move about,  to simulate crowd noise. I've retained this tidbit through all the years since high school, yet remember nothing of the actual subject of the class. It's not that Russian history is unimportant--it's very important--but, with apologies to William Carlos Williams, so much depends on a red radish. Or a green radish. Or a white or a pink or  a black radish. Radishes matter. So do ideas about how or what to simulate, and what rules to follow to either stand out in a crowd, or blend into one. 

Radishes matter if you follow rules. I am not particularly governed by rules, myself. I follow them when I understand their importance, and have less patience for them, otherwise. For this reason, I'm not usually inclined to follow recipes exactly. Instead, I take great pleasure in going to the farmers' market, buying the best-looking produce, and then figuring out how to adapt whatever recipe I feel like cooking to whatever foods I felt like buying. Except with radishes.

part of the radish selection at Reliable Market in Somerville, MA

Radishes drove me to sign up for deliveries from  Boston Organics last fall.  I wanted a particular type, the watermelon radish. Watermelon radishes are unlike any other radish in my experience. Besides an inimitable hot-pink interior, they have a unique flavor. There's just no substituting for them. They happen to be nearly impossible to find around here after the farmers' markets close in the fall. When I saw that Boston Organics had them in weekly deliveries, post-farmers'-market-season, I signed up immediately.

I stopped the deliveries last week, despite excellent experiences as a customer. I believe it all stopped, just as it started, with radishes.  Boston Organics works a little like a CSA; they deliver their choice of fruits and vegetables each week (although customers do have some choice in what they receive). I was happy to adapt recipes to use whatever vegetables came to me, except for (you guessed it) radish recipes. Even though each week's delivery provided more than a week's worth of produce, I kept buying additional radishes. This time, I wanted Korean radishes--as inimitable, in their own way, as watermelon radishes. I cook a lot of Korean food; I need the right kind of radish. I'm now free to buy them without creating even more of an excess of vegetables here.

Why radishes stand out in a crowd of adaptable, simulate-able vegetables, I don't know, but I realized that they do because of yet another of them. I don't think this one has a specific name in English. It's the 'mooli' in the mooli paratha I hope to learn how to make. I've been making parathe for a while, but, due to my non-rule-governed nature and my habits of adapting recipes, I think it's fair to say that the ones I make are simulations. Now I'm going to learn to make the "real" ones, provided I can find the right kind of radish.

parathe I made with turnip for filling instead of radish

We'll see what happens with "real" mooli paratha. I hope mine will eventually stand out by not standing out--that is, they'll be the way this food is supposed to be.

On standing out in a crowd, and also, not, there's Fritz Kreisler, the outstanding violinist so adept at simulation that his Violin Concerto in C Major (in the Style of Vivaldi) was taken for a "real" piece composed by Vivaldi, as I understand, in part because Kreisler knew which rules of Baroque-era composition to follow.

On being rule-governed,  there's something a friend said, after having spent time on the dance floor at a wedding we attended recently: "Dancing with [another wedding guest] was fun, but I can't really lead or follow. It's the kind of person I am." I could say only, "Yes"; that's the story of my life in dancing, too. But then, not being rule-governed is, itself, a rule to live by--and anyway, as radishes are my witness, we are all governed by some rule or another. That universality, plus the individual rules we follow, make us both stand out and blend in.

more radishes at Reliable Market

Beeting a Dead Horse, Turning 40, and Other Inexplicable Things

Over the past week, readers of this blog have made many excellent beet puns. Out of some sort of misplaced intellectual pride, I wanted to make one, myself, but realized that the good ones had already been taken, and further efforts would be misplaced: beeting a dead horse.

Never mind. I can, theoretically, do whatever I want now because I turned forty today. My friend Sue Spilecki, poet and essayist, once started an essay with the sentence, "Forty is a dangerous age." I can't remember exactly how she phrased the next sentence, something about how, having reached that age, one is finally free to "tell the world to fuck off."

In fact, I don't think I've ever had much trouble telling the world to fuck off, but I've realized lately that sometimes it's better to take a nap than to try to force myself to go to the gym. I believe that's comparably liberating, for someone who occasionally pushes herself too hard. There's a time not to push oneself, a time not to try to do or to understand things.

Because turning forty seems to require some kind of taking stock of life, I thought I'd write about beets and how they can be used in soup stock. (I still haven't given up the beet puns. And anyway, someone asked my opinion on making vegetable stock.) In thinking about it, I realized the process of making stock is like taking stock, like learning a language, like quite a few other things I've been doing lately. One takes pieces--of vegetables, if making stock, but also of a strange language, of memories and information--and does one's best to put them together. At first, they bump up against each other because they're next to each other, but they don't connect or relate to each other. After a while--sometimes a long while--something happens to them. They meld together and form a cohesive whole that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

That's the plan, anyway. I know how to make good soup stock, but pieces will be pieces. Sometimes they don't come together into anything cohesive or coherent. Today in the ceramics studio, I struggled to form little pieces of clay into a bowl. Usually, I can do this. Today I was very distracted. I had just learned about the bombings at the Boston Marathon, maybe an hour and a mile away from me. As I thought about the beginning the day, which had been filled with astonishing connections and love in the form of birthday wishes, and then the afternoon of human atrocities, the pieces would not come together.

I didn't make stock. And I don't know what to say about this strange, very happy, very sad day. What I'll say is this, by Julien Jacob. The words of this song don't exist in any language; Jacob makes them up based on his emotions. They are, in some ways, senseless, but they come together to make more sense--a greater whole than parts--than many things.

A Fifth of The Way There

I missed the disco era. When I think of things I've missed in my life, I must say I don't feel too bad about this one. Possibly, I don't know any better. Possibly, it's never too late for disco.  Really. Disco seems to have taken on Cool Vintage status, just the timeless classic to mix into a new song (by Phoenix, for example--not new, but newer than the disco era). Of course, the disco era saw some mixing in of timeless classics, too.

Right. Where were we? ("A Fifth of Beethoven" always makes me think, "Oh, Toto, we're really, really not in Kansas anymore, are we?") I'm not sure whether I should apologize for putting you through that musical experience--a particularly awkward one after "Take Five." Bear with me.

Last week, several readers asked me for more under-five-minute recipes. I thought about doling out five more, but realized the key to these is in the building blocks. You need to find yourself a few "timeless" foods--relatively shelf-stable things that take little to no time to prepare. Once you have these, you can mix them into each other, or with other, ready-made foods and seasonings (like hummus, or gochujang).

One of mine: beets. If you have a beet and a small piece of fresh ginger, you can either cut the beet into matchsticks or grate it coarsely. Put it in a bowl with a little minced or grated ginger and microwave for 1-3 minutes. It should be crisp-tender, not fully cooked. If you want to, you can add any of the following: soy sauce, rice vinegar, dark sesame oil, hot sesame oil, salt. This is good with kimchee and rice. (How do you make rice in under five minutes? Cook multiple servings of it on a not-so-busy day. Divide it into individual servings and freeze. Reheat as needed. Or buy fully-cooked, ready-in-ninety-microwaved-seconds rice.)

This works just as well with carrots, turnips or rutabegas if you don't have beets (or don't care for them). You can omit the ginger and flavor it any way you'd like--with grated Parmesan cheese; with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper; with walnuts, raisins and goat cheese; with za'atar. You can go anywhere in flavoring this dish. At least I think so.

Personally, I feel that beets can take me farther than disco can, but that's just the kind of person I am. I'm also the kind of person who wonders, possibly too often, about what takes us where. I wonder about that on different levels, and find comfort in all the cliches about the journey being the destination. We might not know where we are, but we're getting there.