Zen and the Art of  Blog Maintenance  Kayaking

Well, friends, you might be wondering what happened. Why another six-plus moths between blog entries? 

It's like this:

The first time I kayaked, ever, I started out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I was in a boat sailed by some friends of friends in northern France, who spoke a dialect of French I didn't know too well. The details of their conversation slipped past me, but somehow it came to one person lowering a kayak into the ocean and me getting into it with him. If I'd had time to think through the situation, or a slightly better command of the language I was speaking, I might have declined and stayed in the sailboat. Luckily, I didn't think or understand too much. 

I know this was a profound experience but--or maybe because--I remember very little of it. I don't remember holding a paddle or what I was sitting on or anything that anyone said or didn't say or how I learned to move the boat in any direction at all. I remember color, an immersion in the shifting turquoise and grayer and greener  blues of the water as I looked down into it and out over it. I know I was kayaking because I can sort-of feel the water shifting as I see the shifting colors, but I can't separate out the elements of the experience--me, the paddle, the contact with the water. All of these things blend as the colors blend. If I concentrate, I can sense my tiredness after paddling and paddling, and my awe at the vastness of the water I was moving through. 

That's it.

This happens. I've got a brain that thinks in big-big-big pictures. I don't know what's what--sometimes for years--when my brain gets going; the scope is too big. I can only watch details slide by and hope to later separate some of them out and assemble them into something that makes sense. 

Sometimes this doesn't happen. I had a plan: I was going to tell you more about yogurt. When I tried to write about yogurt, I remembered kayaking. When I tried to say something about the percussion in Nico & Vinz's "Am I Wrong," I lost my thoughts in the colors of the Atlantic.* 

At one point, I stopped trying to write about yogurt and wrote myself a little note: 

We go along trying to make sense out of things, but is that really the best idea? 

I was pretty sure that this note had something to do with yogurt, maybe the combination of yogurt and kayaking, but it wasn't until today that I got a sense of what's going on. Talking with someone about being authentic--being really-really present in our true selves--I came to understand that my brain (maybe I should say my intuition) is onto a different project these days. I'm not quite sure what it's doing, but the project it wants to work on doesn't seem to line up, exactly, with topics of this blog. It wants to write about how people are drawn to each other. And the rest of me needs to follow it--to stay true to it.

I might be able to shift the focus here and keep writing. Or I might direct you to a new project for a while. Keep checking back; I'll let you know. Meanwhile, what can I say, except, to be our really-really present, authentic selves, we have to follow our own heart-mind?

*I should have paid more attention to the lyrics.

 

Not-so-simple Addition

Some readers know from last winter that I like to hybridize Hippeastrum, a flowering bulb I grow as a houseplant. One might ask why I indulge in this hobby; hybridizing is nit-picky, time-consuming and patience-testing. Hippeastrum are fairly easy to hybridize, but, partly because of the ease with which they can be led to mingle with each other, most commercially available plants are complex hybrids. (A hybrid is a cross between one species and another species. A complex hybrid is a cross between one species and a hybrid, or a cross between two hybrids.) In complex hybrids, the expression of recessive traits can really surprise a hybridizer.

Four years ago I made a cross that I felt sure would result in red flowers, some with a doubled petal count. The seedlings are blooming for the first time now: pink and orange, single flowers.  I don't know why this happened. 

That's one of the main reasons I like to raise my own hybrids. I know enough about genetics that I'm usually not too surprised. When I am, though, I learn. A lot. About Hippeastrum, about genetics, about my expectations and about the nature of surprise itself. There's also something to learn, here, about addition, the mathematical task so often billed as "simple" but so rarely actually so. Add one thing to another and you get--often enough--a whole very different from the sum of its parts. That is one of the greatest joys of hybridizing

And cooking. Here, too, I know enough that I'm not usually surprised. But, every once in a while, I add one ingredient to another and get something totally unexpected.

Last week I wanted to put together a type of achaar (pickle) made with mixed vegetables, spices,* oil and lemon juice. There are traditional combinations of vegetables, but sometimes I improvise. (It's the hybridizer in me.) I've been doing this for a while, and I know that some combinations make for a good surprise, some, a less-satisfying culinary experience. This time, I used carrots and red bell pepper to balance the green chili pepper, and cucumber to augment the cauliflower. All went as predicted, on that level of "hybridizing."

I was almost done with the project when I realized I didn't have lemon. I can improvise, but I cannot get my mind around achaar without fresh lemon juice. I had a meyer lemon, a sweeter-than-your-typical-lemon hybrid between your-typical-lemon and some kind of orange. My trepidation--achaar needs sourness--was outweighed by my disinclination to schlep to the store in arctic weather. I added the meyer lemon to my complex-hybrid of a pickle.

I can't really describe what this change did to the taste of the pickle, but whatever happened was good. Very good. Next time, I'm going to use meyer lemon again and see if the same thing happens. It might--or might not. You never can tell, with complex hybrids.

I'll leave you with two things:

(1) A complex-hybrid of a song, which some might call "third-wave ska." Ska originated in Jamaica, its first wave already a complex hybrid of both music genres and cultures. It spread to the UK in its so-called second wave (two-tone), a further hybridization of sounds and cultures. Third wave ska exhibits the genre's most dominant trait, a guitar chop on the upbeat, crossed again with different genres, languages and cultures--sometimes with surprising results.

(2) A thought that this complex-hybrid-surprise business happens everywhere, all the time, and not just with genes, sounds and flavors. Ever notice how our personalities change slightly, depending on who we're interacting with or the setting we're interacting in? Different interactions--different additions of people and places--elicit different aspects of our personality. While we can sometimes predict these changes, sometimes there's a real surprise. You just never know--but, sometimes the surprise is quite wonderful.

Let me know what happens if you add (1) and (2) together as an exercise of "simple" addition.

* dry-roasted and ground brown mustard, cumin, fenugreek, cardamom seeds, plus turmeric, cayenne pepper, ginger, asafoetida and salt. Ask me for the recipe if you're curious.

Cure-all

If I had a dollar for every music critic's lament that, nowadays, to be a pop star you don't actually have to be able to sing, I'd have enough dollars to commission my own voice-processing system. Until that happens, there's Auto-Tune, the voice-processing software that offers hope and trendiness to those born with a mediocre vocal range. Can't sing? Auto-Tune can fix that. Not cool enough to be a star? Auto-Tune's got that covered. Boring lyrics? Auto-Tune can help make those cooler, too. It's a by-now time-tested way to make something out of nothing--even old news,* as the Gregory Brothers demonstrate. They make good on their claim: "everything sounds better Auto-Tuned."

Faced with old news in the kitchen--same old recipe, same uninspired stuff in the fridge--it's easy to turn insipid ingredients into rock stars. Add the culinary Auto-Tune: sesame oil. A few drops of this stuff on plain vegetables work magic. If you start a soup by sauteing garlic in roasted sseame oil, your life might n be forever changed.


It would be nice if we could say everything tastes better Auto-Tuned, but of course that's not true. Just as non-stop Auto-Tuned vocals grow tiresome, all-sesame-oil-flavored food, all the time, begins to lose some of its charm. It's worth thinking about how to make something out of nothing, in cooking, singing, and all sorts of other areas. Also worth thinking about: when not to make something out of nothing. It's a fine line between glam-ing up and over-reacting, sometimes. And we all need a little mediocrity mixed in with our rock-star cool from time to time.


What's your culinary Auto-Tune?

*and scary politics

Striking A Chord Or Four

I'm not sure why I first made pulusu, a tamarind-based curry/stew from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. I think I was looking for something else (culinarily), came across a recipe for egg pulusu, and decided to give it a try. I got lucky: what I tried, on a whim, had an incomparable combination of flavors. To say it struck a chord with me would be an understatement. I became a pulusu convert, determined to learn to cook at least some of its many variations. 

Chance encounters occasionally take off like that. This dish, though, seems to have an effect on many people around here. Every time I've cooked pulusu for people who haven't tried it before, they've fallen for it as strongly and immediately as I did. Of course I don't know what I'm doing; I learned to cook it by vacuuming--sucking up any and all information I could find on it. I was vacuuming in a vacuum, effectively. At the time, I didn't know anyone who could tell me if I was preparing pulusu correctly, or even what the dish is supposed to taste like.

Chef Sanjay Thumma's explanation helped me to understand pulusu as a base to which one adds different ingredients (eggs or okra or taro or fish or eggplant or bottle gourd or potatoes, for example). I still don't know what I'm doing, but I believe it's a bit like Pachelbel's Canon in D.

Do you like this piece? Does it get stuck in your head? Pachelbel's Canon draws a strong response from most listeners. Many fall in love with it, even the first time they hear it, even if they're not accustomed to hearing western classical music. Even if they don't like western classical music. The piece triggers deep emotions. It's the base--in this case, a ground base of eight notes that repeat throughout.

As Rob Paravonian laments, the ground base in Pachelbel's Canon in D causes some to hate the piece, mostly because they grow bored with its simplicity and repetition. But he and The Axis of Awesome point out something else: this is the base for success. Something about the progression of sound speaks to people, not only in Pachelbel's Canon in D, but also in many, many other places. Master these chords and you'll write a hit song, claim the members of Axis of Awesome in another performance.

It's worth noting that the hit songs use four chords, not necessarily the eight-note ground base. That gives me a great deal of hope. I still don't know if I'm making pulusu correctly, and occasionally my quasi-obsession with "real" things* makes me doubt my efforts. But if I take the four-chord-hit-song-from-eight-note-ground-base as an example, I only need to get about 50% of this dish right for it to be fabulous. That should strike a chord with perfectionists everywhere.

Thanks to my friend Pamela for photos of chili peppers and potatoes

 

*note: not a real obsession

 Learning The Real Deal (or Learning: The Real Deal)

Senegalese griot Lamine Toure leads the drum ensemble Rambax at MIT, providing sabar drum and dance enthusiasts the chance to express themselves. It's always a delight to catch one of their concerts.

I'm in awe of the choices Lamine makes with his students and their performances--how he teaches and translates a traditional art form in a different cultural setting. As someone with constant questions about what's real, I used to be jealous of Lamine's sabar students--not because I yearned to play or dance sabar (although I've enjoyed learning a little from Lamine) but because I wanted a mentor to help me with cross-cultural translation. In particular, I wanted someone to mentor me in traditional  Korean cooking, which I've been learning on my own for five or six years. My wish was granted a few months ago; a friend who studied cooking in Korea offered to teach me. Her skill and talent in the kitchen inspire me unendingly.  

My mentor tells me the reasons behind every step of every Korean recipe. Such knowledge helps me follow directions--something I'm not too good at--and also helps me not follow directions. I believe we can bend rules more wisely (and safely) when we know not only what the rules are, but why they're in place. A little knowledge of why helps enormously in translating, following and improvising. The same can be said for sabar; what Lamine has taught me of the tradition helps me appreciate his choices as he brings it from one culture to another. The best mentors--I count mine among them--know that why is crucial to what and how.

Yet when I cook I sometimes take bloody-minded joy in venturing out on my own, anyway, trying to figure stuff out without knowing what's important or why. And so, guided only by online information, I decided to make a vegetarian version of kongbiji jjigae, ground soybean stew. I made vegetarian kimchee; made vegetarian stock; soaked soybeans and pureed them; sauteed garlic, kimchee and shiitake mushrooms for a few minutes before adding some of the stock I'd made. None of this was new to me. I don't own the stone pot this stew is traditionally cooked in, but I've made that cultural translation before, when cooking other Korean stews. The adventure began when I added in the pureed soybeans. They had the consistency of beaten egg whites, and floated over everything else, resembling a cross between a souffle and a volcano as the stew bubbled up through them.

I followed Maangchi's advice and did not stir the soybeans for a minute or two after I'd added them. Even after I stirred them, though, they floated, resisting all my attempts to incorporate them. Until, without warning, everything deflated. Really: the stew lost half its volume. I have yet to learn whether that's supposed to happen. But, good or bad translation--however authentic, or not, my version was--it was one of the most delicious things I've cooked in a long time. By far.

     
What I'd like to know is why one shouldn't stir the stew immediately after adding the pureed soybeans. I will ask my mentor. I did realize the why of something else, though, through the experiment: why I strike out on my own when I have someone to mentor me. I would have known this easily if I'd seen it in a student; sometimes it's harder to see things in ourselves.

Some students can start with no knowledge, receive information from an expert, and absorb that information. Some can't. I am one who has to learn, on my own, before I can be taught. Because, when studying with social anthropologists, I read about the importance of fieldwork and context for "real" learning experiences, I haven't been giving myself credit for the experiences I have on my own. I feel better about them now.

If we are trying to learn something--anything--one of the most important things to learn, first, is how we learn. Then we can be mentored, as suits us.