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.

The real deal

Last week my friend Mr. Potter commented: 

[A] Scottish Gaelic instructor introduced me to a CD of "The North Shore Gaelic Singers", elderly Canadians of Scottish ancestry who were native speakers of Gaelic, singing Waulking Songs. He said that there's a general feeling among Gaelic Waulking song enthusiasts that they must be sung by old people to sound authentic, which he said is absurd: these songs were formerly sung by people of all ages; it just happens that now Scottish Gaelic has almost died out in maritime Canada.

So I guess if you only ever had experience with behemoth kohlrabis and then you tasted a young one, you might think it wasn't the real deal.

To waulk is to full tweed by hand, bunching and beating it to a rhythm set by a waulking song. When I learned about waulking, in the rather unreal setting of a graduate-school Scottish Gaelic class, I learned a particular pattern of thumping tweed against a table twice, then passing the section I'd worked on to the right, to the student seated next to me. We sang while doing the emperor's-new-clothes version of waulking; we didn't have any tweed to full, but we banged out the rhythm with imaginary cloth in our fists.

Was that an authentic waulking experience? Depends on what counts as real, I'd say, but, based on it, I didn't recognize this song as a waulking song. It has a contemporary base line instead of the sounds of tweed being waulked. After reading the liner notes, though, I could hear how the thump-thump-pass rhythm I learned fits into the song, even into this version. And when I described this version of the song to Mr. Potter a few days ago--I hadn't listened to it in a while and was trying to remember its name--he identified it by the base line. Whether any of that makes it "real," or not, I don't know.*

It's possible--really possible--to back oneself into an intellectual corner over questions of authenticity. In America, "real" brie cheese is imported from France. It's mild, rich, creamy, buttery, and not at all like the brie cheese eaten in France. French brie--I mean brie found in France, not brie found in America that's been imported from France--is medium-brown colored and decidedly stinky. As this slate.com article explains, the difference comes from US government regulations that curtail imported brie's ripening process. You just can't get the real real brie in America. But not to worry: you can get some other kinds of real brie in this country, cheeses with a more authentic (but not really authentic) flavor. Okay, so, if you've only eaten brie in America, which is the real version, the one you experience in real life, or the "real" French one, or the in-between ones?

Sometimes the real thing is the one we knew first. Sometimes, something changes our mind about what's really real, as eating brie in France changed mine. And then, sometimes, something else changes our mind all over again, as reading more about brie in America did mine (again). Sometimes, it's probably a good idea to just enjoy different versions of things as they come along, although I can't help thinking that I enjoy each version more if I understand the history behind--and relationships between--all the versions. What do you think?

Real American Brie

Image: http://blogs.etruth.com/takefivewithhaley/2013/04/12/v-top-five-favorite-cheeses/

*The Scottish Gaelic lyrics are in the comments to this video. (Scroll down.)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

"Old age is not for sissies," said Bette Davis. It certainly isn't. The knees fail, the memory fails. We're not what we used to be. But what was that, exactly? What were we, in the first place, that we've changed from--grown out of or into? It's an endless quest, this trying to find the essence of ourselves. Or of anything, really.

In high school, I liked a band called the Cowboy Junkies. I especially liked a song they sang called Sweet Jane. I didn't know theirs was a cover until years later, when I heard the original Sweet Jane, by Lou Reed. I can't say I liked the original. If we think of covers as the expression of what each artist sees in a song, well, I liked what the Cowboy Junkies saw. I liked the essence they chose to draw out of Lou Reed's piece.

 

I no longer have strong opinions about this particular song and its covers, but covers, generally, fascinate me. They say so much about what we think it's okay to emphasize, to keep or to change. They tell all kinds of stories about what we think is good, what we think is real or authentic.

 

Maybe covers fascinate me because I don't tend to follow recipes too closely. I like to get ideas from other people's cooking, but I modify their recipes based on what I think is the "essence" I'd like to draw out of the recipe or its ingredients. 

 

And so, when I saw Maangchi's recipe for cold salad with spicy mustard sauce, I liked her idea of using Asian pear but decided I had something else that would do the trick: kohlrabi. The flying-saucer look-alike of the cruciferous vegetable family, kohlrabi tastes like a cross between a granny smith apple and a salad turnip. All set, I thought, I've got this recipe covered. (I should have known one cannot make bad puns like that with impunity.)

 

I'm used to buying small kohlrabi--an inch or two in diameter--at the farmers' market. Probably, this salad would work well with such very small, very fresh young things. I had something else at hand this time. Boston Organics brought a behemoth: a bigger-than-a-big-grapefruit-sized kohlrabi that had clearly been grown for winter storage, not fresh eating. This behemoth is not for sissies. Not for salads, either. At older stages in its life, I discovered, the vegetable develops an over-cooked cabbage flavor and a slightly spongy texture. 

 

At first I was disappointed. I fixated on how to bring the behemoth back to some semblance of its youth. (What could I possibly add to the salad to get that thing crispier?) Then I realized I was doing it an injustice. I have little patience with people who can't accept their own aging; why should I inflict that worldview on a kohlrabi? 

 

Here is the other way that old age is not for sissies: aging challenges us not only to accept and make the best of what we have at any given time, but also to accept that what we have--our essence, if you like--at any given time differs from what we may have had at another time. What we did to bring out our best at one point in life may not work at another, because we have a different best. Sounds so obvious, but it isn't that easy to do.

 

Musicians, especially vocalists, meet these challenges with varying degrees of grace. Here are the Cowboy Junkies performing Sweet Jane in 2011. I'd say they're not dealing well with their own aging. The arrangement of this version makes me feel the band's trying to be more like a young Lou Reed, here, than they did when they had the oomph and the edge to pull that off. *

 

Here is a no-longer-young Lou Reed performing Sweet Jane.  This has to be the most un-Lou-Reed-like performance I've ever seen from Lou Reed, possibly because he seems so true to himself. 

 

No-longer-young kohlrabi, I discovered, works well cooked lightly with fresh lotus root and a little sesame oil. Something about that combination brings out the best in each of the vegetables, just as they are.

*not to imply that aging entails loss of oomph and edge, every time