Ring out the Old, Ring in the...Bacteria?

A friend and I have been worrying, lately. I mean really worrying. We're very flexible. We don't care what the topic is; we can feel anxious about anything. Luckily, we can be a reality check for each other. My friend can say, "That's a crazy worry, isn't it? That's not actually going to happen...?" And I can say, "Yes." She does the same for me.

During one such reality check, a few days ago, I found myself saying, "All the evidence I have points to things going well. But I have no definitive proof of that." Even in the midst of my anxiety, I realized how ridiculous those thoughts are. What we think of as "proof" is, in many cases, an interpretation. Not always, of course, but often enough, it's how we see the evidence as much as what it is. My friend suggested we try something: for the next two hours, we'd frame everything--every thought, every anxious worry, every hairball the cats threw up, anything that happened--positively. We  began by believing we could do that, no problem.

It worked. It worked so well, I decided to extend the two-hour trial period and make it a new year's resolution: practice optimism.

I started my practice with yogurt. I've wanted to try making yogurt at home for a long, long time, but occasional bouts of quasi-germaphobia cause me to forgo most home-fermentation projects. Leave milk unrefrigerated? For the express purpose of growing bacteria? What if mine grows the wrong kind of bacteria? What if it grows a special, deadly kind of bacteria, which nobody's warned yogurt-makers about because these bacteria are unique to my house and very new in the world (maybe they've only just begun mutating and multiplying on my counter tops)? And then I feed the deadly-bacteria yogurt to ten friends, and...

The positive outlook here is, of course, why would yogurt grow the wrong kind of bacteria when there is a time-tested procedure to make the right ones grow? Yogurt-making is easy. You scald some milk, let it cool to "just warm" (the technical term for 110-115*F), thoroughly mix in some already-made yogurt, and let the stuff incubate in a warm place for four to twelve hours. People do this every day, all over the world, no problem. Having mostly adopted this outlook, I decided to try making my own yogurt, if for no other reason that as a culinary form of my new year's resolution.

It worked. I admit, I'm still working with the thought that it's not going to kill me, but it's delicious. (I flavored the yogurt with fresh bay leaves.)

Since the word "yogurt" comes from a Turkish verb (meaning "to thicken"), I had to turn to Mozart's Piano Concerto in A Major (Alla Turca). Here is Glenn Gould making the "Turkish March" sound much more march-like than usual.

But Mozart is good for optimism, too. He was profoundly optimistic, if I'm remembering his biography correctly. He--or his music--inspires "Mozart Optimism," the belief, clung to by parents, that listening to Mozart makes children smarter. I'm not a parent, but I did follow a version of this belief when I was in college. I listened to Mozart before each and every exam. Whether this practice made me smarter, I don't know, but it did do something to my mind. It calmed any anxiety I had, and made me feel positive that I'd do well on the exam. It was as much a kind of mental training as studying for the exam was, as much a practice of optimism as making yogurt is.

I have a lot of Mozart phrases in my head. (I took a lot of exams in college.) They're musical mantras I can call to mind when I need to focus, or to calm down. I believe they demonstrate the power of positive thinking, as well as the brilliance of Mozart.

I ate the homemade yogurt with a soup I made by sauteing a generous teaspoon of whole cumin seeds, two fresh bay leaves,  a small onion, diced, and three cloves of garlic, minced, in olive oil over low heat (covered) while I peeled a carrot and two beets, then cut them, and two potatoes, into roughly chickpea-sized dice. I added some sprouted chickpeas to the onion, garlic and spices--I had about a cup of sprouted chickpeas left over from another cooking project--dumped in about four cups of water, turned up the heat to medium and left the soup alone for ten minutes. Then I added the vegetables, a teaspoon of ground coriander, salt, freshly-ground black pepper, and cooked the soup for about another ten minutes. At that point, I added a bunch of flat-leaf parsley, chopped.

This is a very flexible soup recipe that doesn't require any kind of ingredient-measuring. Even when I'm not training my mind to be more positive, I know it will always turn out well. It will for you, too--no problem! You can change the vegetables if there are others you like better, but I think the beets are important. Hot-pink soup does a lot for a positive outlook on gloomy winter days.

Three Bionic Idiots, Your DJs for the Affair*

1.
It's Christmas! We Three Kings, if I...mmm...we can use the royal we, here, for a day, have a special report, inspired by P-funk, as well as by all the brilliant writers of scientific articles, everywhere, who number their thoughts so fastidiously and assume that the numbering works as a logical argument. ("I can tell you put a lot of thought into the organization of your article," I tell those who bring such writing my way, "but I think readers need to know more about the connections between the different thoughts here. How are they working together to make your point?" The poor authors look at me like I'm from another planet, and understandably; although I not from orient are (ah, christmascarolcatspeak), I'm not from Planet Engineer, originally, either.**)

1.1
Educationally, I was raised by Indo-Europeanists. "Three"--of anything, really--takes my brain straight to Dumezil.

1.2

I consider Georges Dumezil to be one of the three bionic idiots of my undergraduate education, the other two being Michel Foucault  and Clifford Geertz. 

1.3

Selected runners-up:

Aristotle

Monier Williams

Aleksandr Kushner (who proves that being a bionic idiot isn't necessarily a bad thing)

2.
When I had a tv, I occasionally used it to watch Emeril Lagassee talk about the "holy trinity" of creole and cajun cooking: onion, celery, green pepper.

2.1
Culinarily, I was raised on a different trinity: onion, carrot, celery (the mirepoix). These three vegetables formed the base of all soup stock, each and every tomato sauce. I ate and cooked with so much of this combination, I grew to resent its salty non-flavor.

2.2
As a result, I now know (and stock ingredients for) many different trinities. I flavor according to my mood, or the nature of the other ingredients I'm using. 

2.3
This is an easy way to add variety to whatever food you're preparing. For example, you could flavor many different foods with any of these combinations:

a little salt, a little sugar, a little (Japanese) soy sauce

Thai/"bird" chili peppers, fish sauce, lime juice
(not Japanese) soy sauce, ginger, cilantro

black mustard seeds, cumin, turmeric

rosemary, garlic, olive oil

garlic, mushrooms, thyme

cumin, coriander, feta cheese

celery, walnuts, dried cranberries

lemongrass, cilantro, ginger
cumin, cilantro, chipotle pepper
white wine, tarragon, lemon juice
serrano peppers, turmeric, lemon juice
cumin, ginger, lemon juice
parsley, garlic, capers

2.3.1
That is only a small selection of the possibilities.

2.3.2
I tried to repeat ingredients, so if, for example you buy a bunch of cilantro, a jar of cumin seeds or a lemon, you have some different things to try.

2.3.3
Please add to this list. What are some combinations of flavoring you use?

3.
They go by "triads" and "trios," more than "trinities," but music, too, has its share of bionic threes that meld together to influence (subtly or not) our experiences: three-note chords, three voices, three instruments, and more.

3.1
Musically, I was raised on Rameau trios, so three voices at a time seems natural to me. I think the idea is better exemplified by music earlier than Rameau's, though. Here is Palestrina's  Jesu, rex admirabilis--maybe not the most spectacular of his compositions, but in a video that's helpful for illustrating polyphony with three voices.

3.2
Emeril talks about how the holy trinity forms a "base" for various dishes. Here is Josh Gabriel's remix of BT's "Every Other Way."  Please just ignore the video (it has little to do with the song) and keep an ear on the three sustained tones and how they relate to the lyrics "hear me out" and "hold me now."

3.3
And then, in the holiday spirit of We Three Kings of Self-reference, here is De La Soul, saying it better than I can.

Happy Holidays to all who inspire--because we all do, in our own way--and to all who are inspired--because we all are, in our own time. And to all a good meal.

*Parliament, Mr Wiggles, from The Motor Booty Affair
**I say this out of tremendous respect for engineers.

Love knows unexpected boundaries

Sometimes we fall in love with something (or someone), for no apparent reason, and want more and more of it (or them) in our lives. So it went, I gather, for Kirsty MacColl and the Latin-American rhythms that spice many of the songs on her album Tropical Brainstorm. What I love about this album is how MacColl's already-spicy personality and humor mix with these new beats. Songs from the albim aren't available on Youtube due to copyright issues, but you can hear part of my favorite, "Treachery," in this drawing tutorial.* Here are the complete lyrics to "Treachery." (The third verse is my absolute favorite.)

I'm stalking a fan
He lives in a high rise block
And here I am
He shouldn't have turned my rock
He's brushing his teeth
He doesn't look bad from this far
I'm hailing a cab
And I'm gonna follow his car
Wherever he goes
I won't be too far behind
Just hanging around
Driving him out of his mind

Treachery made a monster out of me
Treachery made a monster out of me

I'm stalking a fan
He used to write all the time
How lovely I am
He really made me feel fine
But how they forget
He needed a wake-up call
And he will regret
Having been so shallow
He made me believe
That I was some kind of myth
So here I am
How could he treat me like this?

Treachery made a monster out of me

Treachery made a monster out of me
Treachery made a monster out of me

Treachery made a monster out of me

Wherever he goes
I won't be too far behind
Just hanging around
Driving him out of his mind

I'm stalking a fan
He's gone to the record store
To buy a CD
By some other girl not me
He's taking her home
Getting her out of her box
And putting her on
And dancing around in his socks

Treachery made a monster out of me
Treachery made a monster out of me
Treachery made a monster out of me
Treachery made a monster out of me

Getting her out of her box
Treachery
And dancing around in his socks
Treachery
Treachery
And dancing around in his socks
Treachery
Driving him out of his mind

Sometimes we love something so much, we need to adopt it into our own traditions. For me, it was fresh turmeric. I ran into it in Russo's market one day, and have never been the same, since. Fresh turmeric doesn't taste anything like dried, powdered turmeric to me. It's in the ginger family, and something about its flavor does seem gingery. It also has the resin-y, peppery taste of fresh galangal (another member of the ginger family), and a kind of startling freshness all its own. That might not sound delicious, but I say, try it. You, too, might find it life-changingly delicious. In addition, its brilliant, saffron-robe orange makes powdered turmeric look dull. (It will color anything it touches that same brilliant orange, so be careful.)

For a few years, my love of fresh turmeric caused me to cook a lot of Indian food. Then I realized love has, maybe not no boundaries, but certainly different boundaries than that. (Love has plenty of boundaries--see MacColl's words of stalking--but they're often not where we expect them to be.) I started adding fresh turmeric to more and more kinds of food. In such an experiment, I decided to try it with fresh cranberries (another love of mine). I like the combination enough to make this dish regularly, when fresh cranberries are in season.

In this recipe, the combination of turmeric and cranberries turns the lighter-colored ingredients a deep orange-pink. The recipe is much, much less sweet than traditional American cranberry sauce. I put in the bare minimum of sugar because I like the natural tartness of the cranberries. For traditional-cranberry-sauce sweetness, you could double the sugar, to start. It's an effective side dish for milder-flavored things. It's good for breakfast, and also over vanilla ice cream.


Not exactly cranberry sauce:

about a 1-inch cube fresh ginger
about 1/2 inch fresh turmeric
1 cup cranberries
1 slightly unripe pear (I use bosc pears for this recipe, but you can experiment)
1 apple
2 tablespoons sugar
pinch of salt

Grate or mince the ginger and turmeric. A ginger grater works best for this task. Dice the pear and the apple into more-or-less cranberry-sized pieces. Combine everything in a heavy-bottomed pot and cook over medium heat, suitrring frequently, for ten minutes. You want the cranberries to burst and soften, but the apple and pear to retain some of their crispness.

*Thank you to Marc Mancuso, for finding this video

4 minutes, 33 seconds, and counting...or do they count?

This week's blog entry is brought to you by grading. That is to say, I was grading, it took all my brain power, and that's why I didn't write anything here. This week, we're trying a performance of silence, like John Cage's 4'33" (which is just that: 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence). 

And no recipes this week, either. But I did discover something, theoretically a food, in my local grocery store. It was a stressful week, and emotional eating had me looking at grocery-store displays I usually ignore. Packaged in a kodak-yellow cardboard box, the kind of box that usually holds cookies or crackers, and displayed--I guess the intent was "alluringly"--on an (unrefrigerated) end cap, was something that called itself "Ready Bacon." I didn't buy it. I'm a vegetarian, and no amount of stress makes me crave meat. (Scones, yes--I ate a month's worth of scones this week. But bacon, "ready" or not? Never.) Does anyone know what this is? 

While the Ready Bacon was its own kind of performance (or performance art, maybe), I suggest a moment of silence, out of respect, or something, for such creative, instant-meat-style, food-type objects. May they reside in shelf-stable peace. But anyway.

What does it mean to make a performance out of silence, or is that just a manipulative, performance-art  thing? I was reading an article about lying by omission today; certainly this is a performance through silence. There's a kind of silence of expectation: when is this musical performance going to start? (I've been waiting four minutes and thirty...thirty-one...thirty-two seconds and...) When is this lecture going to start? Are we there yet? That, I think, is a performance more by the audience than the performer. I mean, what's everyone in the audience thinking they're going to hear, for four and a half minutes? Aren't these--the expectations--the performance each one of us experiences?*

If that's a performance of our own, internal expectations, there are also performances of silence based on external expectations--expectations we have of other people. You've probably seen some of those performances--pregnant pauses, guilting silences, comfortable silences born out of familiarity (we know we don't need to explain, because others "just know"). Please tell me the ones I'm not thinking of.  

Some of these performances take a lot of practice to pull off. Those who know me know I drink a lot of tea, especially at work. I got into this habit because I teach by the socratic method. It's really hard, when you first try teaching by asking the right questions (as opposed to providing the right answers in a lecture), not to jump into the long, long moments of silence and answer your own questions. I paced myself by drinking tea after I asked a question. After maybe half a cup, if nobody said anything, it was time to rephrase the question. I'm comfortable with that silence, now, but I had to learn.

I try to be mostly comfortable, most of the time, with most kinds of silence, and with what I think is its companion, emptiness. Emptiness is not a bad thing, sometimes. There's sunyata, the emptiness of enlightenment, and blank mind, the emptiness of meditation. There's the emptiness before inspiration, both creative and literal. There's the emptiness of exhaustion after hard physical or mental activity, and an emptiness that comes after the release of strong emotions--both of these, I think, are a relief. 

This has not been an empty week. It's been crammed full of impatience, overly-obsessive counting-down of days, over-analyzing, over-eating, make-work and grumpiness. I'll definitely benefit from four and a half minutes of silence.

Next week, recipes. But one thing I do, as a ceramicist: I always try to make bowls and plates that look good when they're empty.

Photos: Marc Mancuso

Bowls: Amanda

*As I understand 4'33", part of the point, if not the point, of the composition is that neither Cage nor the performers have any influence over what the audience members hear--but the focus is meant to be on ambient noise, not on what's happening inside the audience members' heads. Is that right, musicians and scholars of music?

The Blackbird Whistling, or Just After*

As far as I know, Tiger was the first to record the song "Guilty," in 1971. UB40 recorded their version fifteen years later, on Labour of Love. We could talk about the obvious (or less obvious) musical changes UB40 made (or what they didn't change)--and I hope we will. Which recording do you like better?

We could also talk about communication styles.  I've heard more than one critic say that UB40 spoil the whole song by giving away the punchline, "I'm guilty," halfway through. I heard the UB40 version first, so I don't know what it would be like to have been surprised at the end of the song. I like Tiger's version better. musically, but maybe also because I admire that level of directness in personal communication. There's a lot to be said for just "getting something off your chest" (as he says), so clearly and directly that it can't be misinterpreted.

There's also something to be said for having been saying something all along, consciously or unconsciously, and only clarifying it later. In my experience, this is the more common way we express big and potentially-vulnerable-making things. We repeat our version of "guilty" (or whatever the big thing is) as a back-up vocal in our interactions. Most of us, I think, give ourselves away, most of the time without knowing we're doing so. But I also think that what we have to say still works as a punchline, once we finally get it out more directly, because other people don't know what it is we're trying to tell them. The potential problem here is that it can take a long time to build up to the punchline, and sometimes we just don't get to it.

If you're in an interpersonal or a communication rut, you could think about what you keep saying, or getting off your chest, or not, and how that's going. Which style works better for you?

If you're in a food rut, you could try a culinary equivalent. Some flavors come in suddenly with a kind of taste-bud bang that can't be ignored, while some accumulate gradually. Here is a very simple salad dressing recipe made with these two kinds of flavors. Raw garlic is sudden. You can't misinterpret it. Roasted garlic's milder, buttery taste comes through in a more blended, saying-it-all-along way. You can use this dressing on all sorts of things besides salad. You could try it on any kind of raw, steamed, baked, microwaved or stir-fried vegetable; potatoes; toast; tofu; sandwiches; fish; cranberry sauce.

Let me know which version you like better, and what you put it on. In fact, I challenge you--especially those who've said you're in a food rut--to use this dressing five different ways.

I put mine on a salad of celery, watermelon radish, roasted beets, roasted hazelnuts, lettuce and crumbled feta cheese today.  You?

Salad dressing

1/2 of a large lemon
3/4 cup flavorful olive oil
salt to taste (start with 1/2 teaspoon)
freshly ground pepper to taste
2-4 cloves roasted garlic, mashed
1 small clove raw garlic, minced

Squeeze half a lemon into a glass or stainless steel container. You should have about 1/4C lemon juice. If you have more or less juice, it doesn't matter; you can adjust the oil. You need three times as much oil as lemon juice.

Add salt and pepper, stir briskly or whisk to emulsify, and divide into two containers. To one batch, add the mashed, roasted garlic. Add the minced raw garlic to the other batch.

Keep refrigerated.

Makes about 4 servings of each version.

Roasted garlic

You can roast any amount of garlic; once roasted and scooped out of its skin, it freezes well.

1 or more heads of garlic
olive oil

Leave the garlic heads whole and unpeeled, but, with a sharp knife, cut about 1/2 inch off the top of each head so you expose the tops of the garlic cloves. (Save the cut-off tips of the cloves to cook with another time or use them for the raw garlic version of the salad dressing.)

Put the garlic in an oven-safe dish, on a cookie sheet or on a generous piece of aluminum foil, cut-side up. Drizzle some olive oil over the top of the garlic so the oil gets down into the cloves. Be generous with the oil; you can use it later after it's been infused with roasted-garlic flavor.

Cover tightly with aluminum foil and bake in a 350* oven. I find the garlic usually takes about 45 minutes to cook thoroughly, but investigate after 25 minutes, and keep checking every 10-15 minutes. It's done when the exposed tops of the cloves look slightly golden and the cloves are very soft when poked with a fork.

Let cool, and extract the cloves from the papery skin, either by squeezing gently or by using a fork or a spoon to scoop the cloves out.

Strain any oil remaining in the pan/foil. You can use this garlic-infused oil to flavor anything--it's great on potatoes and broccoli--or you can cook with it.

Keep the garlic-infused oil refrigerated, and use it withing 10 days of making it. Roasted garlic should also be kept refrigerated, or, if you can't use it within a week, frozen.

*Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird." in part:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Where are we, and why are we here?

My first job, the summer in-between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, was as a baker at a small, trying-to-be-French restaurant in coastal Connecticut. I was one of a team of two; the head baker and I produced muffins, scones, sticky buns, croissant and brioche for the restaurant’s weekend brunch, and all sorts of cakes, tarts and puddings for the dessert and catering menus. That a fifteen-year-old with no  professional cooking experience got such a job says more about the restaurant’s odd priorities than about my ability, but I got it, and thrived in it, and came back to it the next summer.

I learned a great deal about the adult world at that job--all sorts of facts and responsibilities my parents never taught me. Prior to working there, the head baker had made a living decorating pornographic cakes. His portfolio, which he kept on the rack above our baking station, offered a wealth of information, some of which I didn't fully understand until years later. The restaurant’s owner spent a good portion of his time devising ways to smuggle marijuana (“If you put it in the kid’s diaper—they never look in the diaper…”) and evading the local health inspectors. He had plenty of reasons to evade the inspectors. It took me several years to be able to eat out in restaurants again, after what went on in that place.

It seemed a completely different world than the one I lived in at home. I liked it much better. For one thing, these adults seemed happier. I lived with my father, a physician who hated his work, and with my mother, a classical musician whose stage fright and perfectionism rendered her completely unable to perform. No one at the restaurant seemed quite as stuck in misery. (And if they did feel stuck, there was always pot.) At home, my mother practiced the harpsichord for hours each day, stopping at every tiny mistake and yelling at herself. In the restaurant kitchen, we listened to a pop radio station most of the time, or, when the head baker took charge of the music, to the local classic rock station. I was thrilled by the lighter tone and harder rhythms of the songs we heard, but a few of them--"Tangled up in Blue," "Can't Find My Way Home"--made the head baker teary-eyed. At those moments, and at times when the restaurant owner's illegal activities got particularly in the way of the food production, the head baker would look at me, shake his head resignedly, and say something I would never, ever have heard at home. "Sometimes, you just gotta say fuck 'em all, Amanda. Fuck 'em all." He'd put his head down and keep working, muttering, in a pleasant and friendly tone, "Fuck 'em all. Fuck 'em all." Always eager to learn, I internalized that lesson, too. It has helped me enormously.

I also learned something about professional baking at that job—enough to hold other restaurant jobs, later. I learned that, fundamentally, professional cooking is about rhythm as much as it’s about food. When I baked a cake at home, I focused on the cake, attending to the creation and transformations of that one thing. In restaurant baking, I focused on pacing and sequencing.  I made many different things at once, and timed my work so that the sugar for the sticky buns caramelized while I unwrapped six two-pound blocks of cream cheese, put them in the mixer bowl to soften, then scooped and squeezed muffin batter out of a bowl with my hand—a handful and a half for each of four dozen muffins per batch. Then back to the caramelizing sugar and the sticky buns while the muffins baked. Then, the cheesecake batter with the softened cream cheese.

That job changed the way I think about food. I began to realize that food, food prep and food enjoyment have all sorts of rhythms. Ingredients vary by season. Some foods cook quickly, others need long, slow cooking, and some change, drastically, depending on whether they're cooked quickly or slowly. 

Rhythm is a starting point. Mine is the type of brain to connect disparate things, and this blog, in part, explores the connections between seemingly distant worlds--how different means of expression may not be all that different. It's a place to talk about things I love: eating  seasonally and locally, growing things to eat on an urban windowsill, cooking interesting and nutritious food even if you cook only for yourself. It allows me to share my delight in cooking for other people. It's a kind of melding of worlds, but, hopefully, more.

Although I didn't see all of it at the time, there was considerable misery in both of those two worlds I knew in high school.  Food has rhythms, sure. But food and music have other, perhaps sneakier relationships. Each on its own, and also together, they can keep us stuck in misery, or help us get past it. This is a blog about making dinner and getting out of ruts. Some of the ruts are actual food ruts--cooking or eating the same thing, week after week. Some ruts are more about rhythm--breaking free of old rhythms, or rediscovering ones that we've forgotten. Hopefully, there will be some good things to eat, and some good music, along the way.

Can't Find My Way Home