24.7.08

A couple weeks ago I scrawled on kitchen scrap paper this little list of things to make & eat! It floated along the kitchen currents from chair to floor to counter, & every once in a while I’d catch it & check things off. I’m happy to say I’ve done everything on the list. Some of em I did more than once! This kind of to-do list is great for summertime food, & also this approach to it: first dream some simple dreams… & then just kinda let them happen. July is not the time to get all uptight & structured about getting things done.

corn with cilantro & lime: on or off the cob, yellow or white, with olive oil or butter… I buy my corn from Avalos whenever possible, or Catalan. (Not to get all essentialist, but there’s something so satisfying about the fact that Chicano-owned farms are growing the best organic corn. I feel downright smug on their behalf.)

stonefruit clafoutis: I already showed you a photo of this one. No specific recipe. You break some eggs, whisk in some milk & flour, a bit of agave syrup.

BLT: need I say more?

melon & prosciutto: a classic, of course, but I tend to forget about it for years at a time, probably because I was vegetarian for so long.

white peach ice cream: this was originally gonna be lychee ice cream, but then Cooking Show & I were walking by Mr. PVC’s garden eden & spied his little peach tree heavy with fruit; the irrigation guy who was there said he’d been instructed to “eat as many peaches as possible” & invited us to help. Well twist my arm! I loaded up the hood of my sweatshirt, topped it off with a few apricots, & then had to do something with them pretty much right away because they were that ripe.

blackberry pie: this has become somewhat of a birthday week ritual for me. All seems right with the world when you’re making a blackberry pie.

pesto: the first of many batches!

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23.7.08

Here are the Japan food photos I promised!

It was ume season & we saw this little ume giveaway on the street. Note the perfectly knotted plastic bags so thoughtfully provided:

It was also hydrangea season. Cherry blossoms get all the press, but I thought the hydrangea enthusiasm was pretty dang intense too:

More pretty sweets:

King of Nosh took us to a cute French-Italian place that was tucked away on a quiet lane in Shibuya. When it was time for dessert they brought us this adorable little corkboard:

He also showed me a very good okonomiyaki time in Shimokitazawa. I don’t understand why okonomiyaki isn’t everywhere, all over the world, especially in breakfast places in the USA. Pancakes, homefries, eggs, okonomiyaki… why not?

Four variations on the matcha donut theme:

They like their bread tall:

I always thought I didn’t like eggplant, but apparently when you slather it with miso & grill (broil?) it to perfection, I fuckin love it.

I also fuckin love ice cream, but that’s not exactly news. Gelato from the very-mobbed Pariya in the Foodshow basement of Tokyu Dept. Store, also in Shibuya: lychee, plum, jasmine chocolate cake(!), & coconut banana maple. Then we went back & had green tea tiramisu, apricot, & cherry.

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10.7.08

Heather Johnson is up to another one of her excellent projects. You can participate if you’ve ever been to New York City. Actually, at this point, I’d be pretty interested in meeting someone who has never been there.

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8.7.08

Japan photos must wait, because we are awash—no, drowning—in fruit. All manner of stone fruit, strawberries, melons, lychees… & now the backyard contributes blackberries! I grew up picking blackberries every summer & have accumulated quite the Blackberry Knowledge, which I shall now share with you. Yes, there are actually some tricks.

Respect the thorns, & know yourself. You have to get into a careful & graceful state of mind to pick blackberries. No sudden moves, no jerking around, no careless shoving branches aside in order to reach your berries. If you would rather not be patient & slow & exacting, then by all means wear thick, tough clothes (like heavy denim) that cover as much skin as possible, & boots on your feet. On the other hand, it’s possible to pick blackberries in nothing more than a flimsy sundress & flipflops, as I did today. It has to do with personality, mood, & experience. In any case, however, you should not wear gloves; more about that in a minute.

Get down low & look up to spot the berries. Try it; you’ll be amazed at how many berries are hiding underneath all those leaves!

Most common blackberry-picking mistake: picking them too soon. A sure way to end up with a lot of mouth-puckering, super-sour berries! No! Arg! Second most common mistake: picking old berries. Here are the clues:

You want berries that are 100% black, no red anywhere, not even dark reddish purple.

Look at the texture of the berry. Perfectly ripe blackberries almost literally glow; they are glossy & shiny, & each individual globule of the berry is fat & round because they are all full of juicy goodness. Past their peak, those same berries will be dull, flat black, &/or the little globules will start to shrivel & wrinkle. (Often at that point they will have invisible but horrible-tasting mold, too.) The color & shine of ripe blackberries is what calls me from all the way across the yard & inside the kitchen: “come pick us right now!”

Helpful illustration: the red part circled on the left indicates a berry picked too soon. The shriveling part on the right indicates a berry past its prime.

Now here is the most important part, & why you can’t wear gloves to pick blackberries: you need the sensitivity of your fingertips to feel the amount of resistance when you try to pull the berry from the stem. It should just about fall into your hand at a touch. I usually nudge the berry to one side to see if it will come off, rather than pulling straight away from the stem. If you have to put any effort into pulling—& I do mean any—then the berry is not ripe enough. Think of picking a small object up off a table, not detaching two attached objects; a blackberry should feel like you’re just moving it from where it sits on the stem.

Also, a ripe berry is not hard; with practice you can tell by touch whether it is the right degree of tenderness. With this delicate touch you will also avoid bruising the berries—useful if you’re doing anything with them besides popping them directly in your mouth.

All this fine-tuned awareness, dancing between thorns with your fingers, & the willingness to let go of each berry if it won’t yield immediately to your touch, is what makes blackberry picking a very meditative experience. There are other methods, but I find this the most satisfying.

Here is what you want your bowl of blackberries to look like: midnight with stars. Every little nodule should be plump & glossy, each berry tender, the whole bowl fragrant with blackberry perfume—the essence of summer.

(In case you’re curious, that’s a stone fruit clafoutis in the picture at the top. No blackberries in it.)

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2.7.08

Japan is a country of many graces: grace in manners, grace in design, grace in seasonality, to name just a few. So could it perhaps be a form of rebellion that the young women of Tokyo (well, not all, but a critical mass of them) render themselves so completely graceless by choosing the most ill-fitting footwear possible? Never have I seen so many women stumbling, shambling, hobbling, shuffling, limping & clomping in deliberately-oversized, too-high, beyond-uncomfortable shoes. They simply cannot walk. They are clearly in pain. To my outsider’s eye, they look utterly ridiculous. Obviously there is some cultural value operating there that is beyond my ability to grasp.

Back home now, on my habitual walk to neighborhood post office & bank, I felt a great sense of relief at seeing women of all ages, sizes & shapes walking gracefully, comfortably, in a huge variety of shoes—including some that would render me personally quite ungraceful, but the women wearing them had learned to walk in them gracefully, or at least effectively. As an American woman, I always understood “learning to walk in high heels” as a prerequisite for wearing same. (Which explains why I never wear them.) I remember a friend describing a pair of stilettos as “shoes you only wear from the limo to the bed” (not something I would ever put on my feet!) but she must have made sure she could walk at least that far in them without looking like she was going to fall on her face any second.

Not so in Tokyo. My cousin Travelin’ Fool goes to Japan quite a lot, so I turned to him for an explanation of these self-imposed gait problems. He said that it actually is considered sexy there. We began to speculate why: the Helpless Female taken to an absurd extreme? You look more like a little girl if your shoes are a whole size too big? Ew. Maybe it’s enough for me to feel grateful that I live in Berkeley, the Comfortable Shoe Capital of the nation, if not the entire world.

Here we are in comfy Berkeley shoes, admiring the cute chicken-motif floor tile at a yummy chicken restaurant (chicken cartilage on a stick! deep fried chicken skin! zow!) with our personal curator of Tokyo eats, the King of Nosh.

Now isn’t it just like me to come back from the most fabulous trip & start off by ranting & complaining about something? I once heard of a Norwegian motto that translated “Away good, home best.” That’s definitely me, & that’s what you’re hearing now, but never fear, the next post will be a rave.

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