Happy Anniversary, Baby

It slipped by without me noticing even, like some old married couple. I had to go back through my Flickr account to check the date on the photos to make sure. But it’s true; it’s been more than a year that I’ve been in Seattle.

Last spring I got in a car packed tight with my most important books, papers, and kitchen equipment and drove north, arriving late in the night at a house that was dark and sparsely furnished. I woke up early the next morning, awed by the greenery outside my window. I found my first favorite café (there have since been many others). I wandered around this wet city that spring had not yet reached and surprised myself by feeling at home.

(The Subaru, the clogs, the fleece all helped—who knew I had been impersonating a Seattleite for years? I thought I was just being a fashion slacker.)

And when spring truly arrived, it came with showers of cherry blossoms, of cheerful daffodils and fields of tulips. I made chirashi-zushi to celebrate the season. Not since I lived in Japan have I experienced such excitement at spring’s arrival. Sure, we have cherry blossoms in San Francisco, but there’s nothing like spring when you live in a place that has a real winter.



There were lilacs too, bringing with them memories of college and dinners eaten on a front porch. It's a slower pace of life up here. I took long walks and thought about getting a dog. I began to really like you, with your laid back weekends and mellow vibe.

But summer is when you really made me think twice, summer is when you began to make me fall for you. I hadn’t realized that I had been missing summer—tucked away as I was in my foggy corner of San Francisco. I opened the French doors to my bedroom and kept them that way for three months—the cool breezes each evening were pleasant to sleep in. There were some days that you pushed me to the edge with temperatures hotter than I like—and there was that week of rain in July that confounded me—but the bike rides along Lake Washington, the swims in the morning, the gardening, the berry picking, the farmers’ markets I can ride my bike to, all this pleased me to no end. You won me over last summer and made me question my devotion to that city by the bay. And as the summer wound down, you made me want not to leave.



And so I came back. It’s not what I had planned originally, but you wooed me back north, to see what winter might be like. It’s all fireworks and infatuation in the beginning, but how well would we get along once summer was over? I wanted to see you at your worst, to make sure of what I might be signing up for.



I can now say that your worst is pretty bad—dark, wet, unfriendly. It wasn’t a good winter, I can admit that now. I can even laugh a little bit at the weeks of gloom, of how friendless I felt, how cranky, how isolated. My life in San Francisco is so full of people and activity that it took me by surprise how lonely I could be, living by myself in this cold city. In the summer I didn’t mind it, but once the days got dark and dreary I needed more people around. You made me question everything. I didn’t realize how much I was struggling until the clouds began to lift. I couldn't write. I took long walks along the lake in the dwindling light. I grew sick of wearing fleece, of being bundled up. All I wanted was a sundress, strappy sandals, and a fruity drink in my hand. I began to understand why so many Seattleites buy homes in Mexico.



Oh sure, there were those few clear winter days when you dazzled me with the sight of snowcapped mountains rising over blue waters but those are cheap thrills, my friend, not the sort of thing you build a relationship on.



When I went back to San Francisco briefly this spring it made me cry. The city, the golden hills, the fact that I have so many friends there I can’t see them all in one visit—friends with whom I have history, who really know me. The farmers’ market was overwhelming with its bounty, the days were warm, the light like liquid gold. I put on sandals and wiggled my toes and was happy. It was all very confusing.



The day I left to come back to Seattle I stopped briefly in the town of Petaluma and the feeling of being pulled in two directions was visceral. Part of me yearns for Sonoma—for rolling hills and a rugged coast and old barns and cows and little white farmhouses and a landscape I have known all my life. It is home.

But as I woke up the next morning, to lush green outside my Seattle window, I felt soothed as well. There were friends here I wanted to see, things here I wanted to eat, and the lilacs were still in bloom. I weeded my garden and puttered about my house and went to see my niecelets who climbed into my lap and snaked their tiny arms around my neck and whispered secrets in my ear and this place was home too, though in a new and different way.



Which is all by way of saying that I think I might be sticking around. I’m not making any guarantees, mind you. I sometimes wonder why I’m going through the effort of starting over from scratch when I have a perfectly lovely life down south filled with people and places I adore. But I just signed up for a year-long kayaking membership and that’s at least a low level of commitment. I’m not turning in my keys to that city by the bay quite yet, but perhaps I might move some furniture up here, find a permanent place for myself, get a dog. It’s been over a year, Seattle, and I think it’s safe to say that we’re going steady.

But you should know that I’m seriously thinking about spending next February in Mexico. It may be the only way our relationship can last.

An Asparagus Story

I never eat asparagus without feeling profoundly grateful.

Asparagus grew in my mother’s garden when I was little, an early harbinger of spring. I’m sure my mother was grateful as well, to see them sticking out of the ground each year. She tells me they were so tender she never bothered to cook them. I don’t actually remember the spears themselves, I mostly remember the delicate ferny forest that was formed when the asparagus went to seed. My strongest asparagus memory took place many years later, miles away from my childhood home.

It was a sunny morning in late May when I left the small eastern Washington town where I had gone to college for the last time. I had graduated just days earlier, walking across the stage in my cap and gown in front of my family and fellow classmates, bobby pins stuck uncomfortably into my head to keep the funny mortarboard from slipping off. There had been parties, speeches, congratulations, and packing up my small apartment. Now I was heading south—home to California—with most of my worldly belongings jammed into the back of the car.

The road out of Walla Walla leads south and west, through rolling farmland and toward the Columbia River. In the three years I had spent there I hadn’t often driven this route. If I left town I usually went north, for skiing or camping in the Blue Mountains and bicycle rides through rolling hills covered in wheat. I didn’t know this low, flat farmland well.

That morning was clear and sunny and I was full of adventure and excitement, both for the roadtrip before me and for my adult, post-college life, stretching out like a magic carpet. The exams were over, the infernal papers, the required classes. Sure I was nervous about what might lie ahead, but that was part of the excitement. On that golden morning, zipping past open countryside with the windows down and the music up loud, I felt like I could be anything.

That is when I saw them, off in the fields to my right as I zoomed by, the farm workers.

They were bent over, their arms stretching to the ground. Every foot or so they reached down with their left hand to grasp a spear coming out of the ground and used a metal tool in their right hand to sever the stalk at the base, They were picking asparagus, carefully, painstakingly, one by one. Each spear was another stretch to the ground, another thrust with the right hand, another aching back. I had never thought much about where asparagus came from, how they were harvested, I never stopped to consider that each spear represented backbreaking labor for someone.



This photo and article about farmworkers ran in the newsletter put out by the Seattle area PCC coop stores this spring. It is exactly the scene I had driven past that May morning, years ago.

And there I was, in my fancy car (not my own, but mine for the driving), with my newly minted degree that represented a tuition outlay far beyond what these farm workers might earn in many years, a lifetime, perhaps. I felt instantly humbled, aware of my own privilege, of the conspicuousness of my own good fortune in this lifetime. Whatever trials I have had in my life, I have been given great gifts.

Perhaps the greatest gift I have been given was my education—this degree that lay newly glittering in the palm of my hand was the culmination of years of educational opportunities that are not afforded everyone. Sure I was thousands of dollars in debt for that degree, but it was money I would be able to pay back over the years with earnings from the better jobs my education would allow me. I have been given great gifts.

I learned all sorts of things in college, but I learned something far more important that day on the road out of town.



I think of that day each spring, when I begin to see asparagus in the market. I don’t know if each spear is still harvested by hand, but it doesn’t matter—plenty of our food is, probably more than you or I would ever guess. The amount of work that goes into the fruits and vegetables we buy for pennies—work from people who are too often paid only pennies for it—is something I try to keep in mind always. How much more careful might we be if we knew each apple, peach, or peapod was picked by hand? Would we be more likely to treat them like the treasure they are? Would we let these fruits and vegetables rot in our refrigerators?

Each spear, picked by hand, with aching back.

I thought of this more recently, when I had the good fortune to spend a weekday afternoon hanging out and eating at Pizzetta 211, one of my favorite little gems of a restaurant in San Francisco. They had an asparagus appetizer on the menu, fat spears bathed in a Meyer lemon vinaigrette and scattered with a dice of salty preserved lemon. It was served with toasted bread spread with buttery Bellwether Crescenza cheese and it was delicious. The food and that afternoon—when lunch stretches to hours and the light filters in through big windows and you are well fed but generally left to you own devices to chat and laugh with your dining companion—is another thing to be grateful for.



But what can we do to make a difference in how our food is grown and harvested, to protect the people whose hard labor keep us fed? The best thing I find is to learn about where your food comes from and who is growing it. Shopping at farmers’ markets, if they are available to you, makes this easier. Buying directly from the producer allows you to ask questions, to learn about their operation and their values.

For years I’ve bought from Swanton Berry Farm, in the Bay Area, and always choose to support them. The berries are delicious—no doubt about it—but I also like knowing that I am supporting the first organic berry farm in California and the first organic farm to unionize. They offer stock ownership to employees, a medical plan, retirement, and vacation and sick leave. They pay their workers hourly rather than for produce picked, so that their workers are not tempted to risk injury for a few extra bucks. For me, that makes it all taste even better.

Another thing you can do is to support farmworker organizations such as the United Farm Workers, you can sign up on their website to receive email updates. At the moment they are fighting for justice for a 17-year-old girl, Maria Jimenez, who died from heat stroke while working in a Stockton (California) area vineyard this spring. The labor contractor she was working for did not provide the protection from the weather (required by law) and when she was taken to the hospital she had an internal body temperature of 108.4. The vineyard she was working in provides grapes for the Charles Shaw Wines (otherwise know as Two Buck Chuck), which is distributed exclusively by Trader Joe’s. UAF is sponsoring an email campaign to ask Trader Joe’s to support humane working conditions. If you’d like, you can participate here. There are other organizations working for farmerworkers rights as well.

You can buy organic. When I was growing up my family participated in the boycott of table grapes, due to the harsh chemicals used to grow them and the fact that the farm workers who pick them were growing sick and their babies were being born with missing limbs due to the pesticide exposure. I was saddened to hear that this sort of thing is still happening—three deformed babies born within weeks of each other to families who worked for the same company and lived in the same camp only yards apart. Buying organic means that your produce is protected from some of the harshest agricultural pesticides, and that the people who pick it are protected as well.



It’s tempting to ignore these issues—I sometimes would like to. No one wants to look at how children are being born deformed because their parents are working to grow tomatoes that will feed other people's children. We like cheap food, but how can we take care of those who grow it for us? It’s one of those many-layered situations where there is no clear or easy solution for how to fix it (the labor contractor that Maria Jimenez worked for has been shut down, but it’s likely they will resurface under another name). I do my best to stay informed, ask questions, make better choices, and be aware that I am benefiting from the hard work of others.

I am sure the farmworkers I saw that morning barely noticed the car going by on the road out of town, but I have never forgotten them. I don’t suspect that I ever will.



ASPARAGUS WITH MEYER LEMON VINAIGRETTE AND PRESERVED LEMON
Adapted from a dish a Pizzetta 211, San Francisco

This makes for a dramatic presentation, especially on a large platter, and would be a lovely dish for a spring dinner or luncheon. Alternately, just make it for yourself or a loved one. My mother was visiting Seattle the day I made this and, well, she practically licked her plate clean. You can serve it on toast or just as a composed salad.

One generous bunch of asparagus, wooden stems removed, lightly steamed.
1 tbs and 1 tsp olive oil
1 tbs and 1 tsp lemon juice (Meyer lemon, preferably)
1 tsp chopped preserved Meyer lemon rind (more as desired)
salt and pepper to taste (careful to taste before you add salt, the preserved lemons are quite salty)

Whisk dressing ingredients until smooth and drizzle on cooked asparagus. Toss carefully with hands or tongs to distribute the dressing evenly.

If desired, serve with toast and soft cheese. Pizetta 211 uses Bellwether Crescenza, I used a soft goat cheese when I made this dish. Both were wonderful.

To Mise or Not to Mise, That is the Question

Mise en place: a French phrase defined…as "everything in place"… It is used in U.S. kitchens to refer to the ingredients, such as cuts of meat, relishes, sauces, par-cooked items, spices, freshly chopped vegetables, and other components that a cook requires for the menu items that they expect to prepare (Wikipedia).

I have a confession to make: I do not mise.

I don’t have anything against the mise—I find it lovely when people chop all their ingredients beforehand and put them in those cute little glass dishes awaiting the moment when they add them to their soup or sauté. When I first started dating the Italian he made dinner for me and had prepped all his ingredients ahead of time. I sat in the kitchen on a barstool with my cocktail as he made our dinner, adding all the pre-measured components, and felt like I was watching a cooking show on TV. I found it charming.

But on my own, by myself, when no one is watching, I am not a mise-er*.

This is probably because I taught myself how to cook, from books, starting when I was about twelve (and long before the birth of the Food Network). When you’re twelve you don’t think about strategy—and you really don’t have that much patience either. Instead I fell into the habit of chopping my onion as the pan I planned to sauté it in was heating on the stove. Once the onion was in the oil and softening I grabbed the carrot or potato and chopped that. It’s less methodical but it’s terribly time efficient—and I work well under pressure, I always have. Occasionally I've gotten in trouble with this method, but not enough to break me of the habit.

[We won’t even go into detail here about how I don’t bother to clean as I go along either. I grew up in a household where the rule was if one sibling (me) cooked, the other one (my brother) had to clean up. Of course this spoiled me for life and I’m still looking for the dish crew I lost when I grew up and moved out.]

This slap-dash method of mine would never work in a restaurant setting. There you need all your ingredients prepped and in place before the orders come in and you have to fire, fire, fire your dishes at speed for hungry diners who are waiting. In a situation like that, mise in place is essential. Even for complex cooking—dinner parties where multiple dishes need to be orchestrated—it’s pretty important. But on a Tuesday night, when I’m making soup for myself and no one else is at home, I don’t bother to mise.

When I bake, which admittedly isn’t often, I don’t pre-measure things either. Not only that, I don’t always bother to combine the dry components into a bowl and add them all at once the way the recipes tell you to. Sometimes I don’t even bother to sift (oooh, rebel). Sometimes I do, but not infrequently I flout convention and add them, unsifted, one by one. In theory I love those tiny little glass bowls that people measure out their sugars and spices into, but in my real life it’s all far more seat-of-the-pants.

(And the truth is I’ve rarely had anything not turn out well—never, in fact).

I was thinking about this the other day as I chopped lemongrass and peeled ginger and separated eggs and measured out sugar and coconut milk in preparation for making Jess Thompson’s Ginger-Scented Tapioca Pudding (yum). Yes, I chopped and peeled and measured before I turned on a burner and started cooking, but that’s only because the tapioca balls have to soak for 30 minutes first and I had nothing better to do. On my own I would have chopped and peeled as the coconut milk was heating. On my own I measure sugar straight from the bag into the pot. On my own I separate eggs directly over the dish the whites are going into (I'm a daredevil that way). I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but the truth is I rarely mise.

But maybe that’s because I still haven't found my in-house dish crew and want to avoid the extra work of washing all those cute little bowls and measuring cups.



Now, I may be inviting the scorn of food bloggerdom to rain down upon me with this confession, but I’m sort of curious how other home cooks deal with it.
What about you? Do you mise?

*All apologies for abusing the French language, I just couldn't resist.

Life, Death, and Quinoa

My downstairs neighbor in San Francisco died this spring.

Now, before you start saying those things that we all say because we really never know what to say when it comes to death, I should tell you that I didn’t really know this neighbor. He moved in last summer, after I had already left for Seattle. I met him exactly once.

But still it was a shock to hear—this life, gone. A massive heart attack in the morning as he got dressed after his shower. He never made it to work that day—or to the date he had planned for that evening.

We go through life assuming we have time—we have to. But the truth is that time will run out and none of us know when that might happen. It’s worth it then, to consider how we are spending our days and years. Are we really living the life that we want, as much as possible within the constraints that we each have?



I know people who make lists of the things they want to do before they die. There are even websites devoted to it. I’ve never done this, but I am always fascinated by other people’s lists. So often they are filled with grand trips: see the pyramids, sit in a café in Paris, go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

I understand these lists, but my list would look very different, there wouldn’t be much travel on it. I've been lucky to live overseas, more than once, but I’ve also come to a point where I don’t think that trips necessarily make up a well lived life. It’s easy to feel a sense of wonder while wandering the streets of Paris; it’s much more of a challenge to appreciate the average Tuesday afternoon—and I’m going to have many more average Tuesdays (all willing) than I will have days in Paris. How do we learn to treasure the everyday?

If I were to make a life list it would be filled with time spent with friends and with family, simple pleasures such as taking my niece to fly her first kite. It would have more dinner parties on it, more time spent smelling flowers, more evenings in front of the fire. It would have a dog on it, and afternoons spent writing letters—real letters on real paper—to friends to tell them how much I adore them. It would have home baked loaves of bread and blackberry pies and lemonade in a pitcher served on a porch on a sunny day. It would have boats and babies and daffodils in the spring. It would even have work—good work that I can be proud of, volunteer work too—and it might have a few naps on it, especially if taken in a hammock in the shade.



In the time I have allotted to me, I want to try to live my every day in a way that feels valuable and worthy and rich with meaning—at least a meaning that makes sense to me—so that when my days come to an end, be it years from now or only months, I will be pleased with how I spent my time.

And I want—as much as possible—not to put off pleasure. This is why, the week after I heard about my neighbor, I bought tickets to see Pink Martini. I’ve wanted to see this Portland-based band for years, but it never quite seemed to work out. When I had the opportunity, I jumped at the chance. We do things like this when we’ve just spent days pondering our own mortality—at least I do.

That night was jazzy and fun, filled with gorgeous vocals and dazzling instrumentals, and at the end of the evening more than a few people danced their way out of the auditorium. And in the way that seeing a good concert makes you even more excited about a band you already like, the next morning had me googling a bit, reading more about this group I’ve been a fan of for eight years.

And that is how I found out about the quinoa.



It’s true, in an article in Edible Portland there was China Forbes, lead singer of Pink Martini, talking about this quinoa dish she and her boyfriend make—in fact, she said it was "the most important thing in our lives." It was quinoa, mixed with sesame oil, ponzu, and chili oil, and eaten with seaweed. I could almost taste the umami flavors and after a few days I began to crave this dish I had never eaten. Even though I was out of town and not really in a position to do much cooking, I bought the ingredients and tried to mix up a batch of China Forbes quinoa.

And then I swooned.

This quinoa is one of the very best thing I have ever made—and I don't say that lightly. It is dark and deep with flavor. I added an avocado for texture and richness and I cut the nori in strips and sprinkled it on top, but the quinoa mixture is mostly as China Forbes explained it. There is something sushi-esque about this dish, but I dare say I like it better than sushi. It is a flavor that is hard to describe—earthy? deep? primally satisfying? It's easy to become addicted to—the first week I made this dish I ate it every day, sometimes twice a day, and I craved it in between. The two people I’ve made it for both asked for the recipe. It's not a pretty dish, but the flavor is deeply savory and satisfying.



And that’s what it’s all about I guess—savoring. When I look the word savor up in the dictionary the first definition is: to enjoy something with unhurried appreciation, to relish.

May we all learn to savor our days and our years…and even our quinoa.

CHINA FORBES QUINOA WITH AVOCADO

Before I give you this recipe I am going to tell you that not all ponzu sauces are created equal (and I know this because I've gone through a bottle and a half in the last three weeks, seriously). The best I find is Eden Ponzu, which is sadly unavailable in Seattle—or at least I have yet to find it. Other commercial brands are less flavorful. Because of this you might want to take the following recipe as a rough guideline, adding the ponzu slowly and tasting as you go along. Stop when you get to the point you like it. For the brand I am using now, 2 1/2 tbs works, if I had Eden Ponzu I might use less. Try and see what works for you.

If you can't find ponzu at all, you can make a facsimile (not as good but okay) by mixing 1 tbs lemon juice, 2 tbs rice vinegar, 5 tbs soy sauce, and 5 tbs dashi soup stock (made from bonito flakes and kelp). To make this dish gluten-free, you would have to make your own ponzu with gluten-free soy sauce (San-J makes a good one).

Half cup uncooked quinoa
I prefer red or black quinoa, if you can find it, but yellow is fine too
Half an avocado, or more as desired
Make sure the avocado is a bit on the firm side or it will mush into the quinoa and not hold its shape
2 tbs + 1/2 tsp ponzu (Japanese soy/citrus sauce) or to taste (see above note about gluten-free)
1 tsp sesame oil
Siracha chili sauce to taste (for me that's about three drops, but I am a spice wimp).
You can also use other brands of Asian chili sauce, or even Tabasco in a pinch, but Siracha is best.
Handful of nori strips
I prefer spicy nori strips from Sound Sea Vegetables (available in health food stores) cut into even thinner strips with a kitchen sissors. You can also find precut strips of flavored nori in Asian food stores. Plain sheets of sushi nori will work as well.

Cook the quinoa in 1 cup water according to package instruction (I bring to a boil then simmer for about 20 minutes until the water is absorbed). Yellow quinoa will get soft, black quinoa stays a bit firm and seedy.

Put the finished quinoa in a bowl and drizzle in the ponzu, sesame oil, and chili sauce as desired. Cut the avocado in chunks and add. Sprinkle with nori strips. Stir, eat, and swoon.

Makes two servings, but you might want to keep the whole thing for yourself

NOTE: this is not an attractive dish, I will admit it. I tried to gussy it up and also turn it into something more polished—an actual salad-like thing. I added tofu and chopped scallions and created a dish that reminded me of something Heidi Swanson might make (though I dare say she would have photographed it better). It was good, but I like the plain quinoa and avocado better. The tofu and scallions just diluted the flavor, but feel free to play around with it if you like—and report back if you come up with anything good.