Bob Marley's kind of mint

Earth Day in New York was, like, really cool back in the 70’s, Elizabeth Kolbert wistfully tells us in this week’s New Yorker. Cool enough for politicians to be riding their bikes, dead fish to be flung across the streets, soil to be shared among strangers, and the Nixon Administration to take notice and actually do something in response: create the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act. The 2009 equivalent to today’s environmental buzz across the land? The Obamas tune in, and appropriately plant some kale in response.

Of course, I love kale and the publicity of this year’s White House vegetable garden is nothing to sneer at. But the truth is, Kolbert’s right. I mean, how did I celebrate Earth Day this year? I bought herbs. Not even Herbs, like the kind a really cool 20-something would have gotten happy with back on Earth Day ’70 but culinary herbs, for garnish.

After weeks of dithering and spending the last of my singles at the farmer’s market on a sixth basket of Camarosa strawberries for the week, I saved my dollars for the herb man peddling plastic pots. Choosing only three was excruciating, as I had to put back the oregano, the chives, the rosemary, and the baby chili pepper plant (not an herb, but zany nonetheless). I finally exchanged the lemon thyme for silver culinary thyme, which promises to be more potent. And I put the chocolate mint back—not nearly versatile enough, as tempting as adding chocolate flavor to everything savory is—in favor of the Bob Marley mint. The latter originated in Jamaica and was grown by Marley himself on his stoop for his morning herbal infusion, of sorts. Obviously, I’m a sucker for a plant with a story. And I finally chose the purple basil over your everyday trattoria basil, which just seemed so trite at the time (though of course I’ll still be buying bunches of the stuff when my little purple plant is only giving me a pretty little leaf every now and then). Like my friends Abigail and Emma, who have managed to create an entire vegetable garden--radishes included--from these pots on their stoop the size of a Manhattan fire escape, I’m going back, for tarragon and more.


I’ve also begun a new sourdough starter with Earth Day still on my mind and with enough emotional distance from my last failed attempt to be really optimistic about this one’s ability to leaven my dough. I remember hearing once that really old barns make for the best wineries because there are so many generations of wild yeasts hiding out in the woodwork that the wine rarely needs to be inoculated with foreign strains. My 1922 wood-beamed apartment might have the same effect. In fact, the wild yeasts already seem to be churning out a bubbling mess in their jar—so much so that I’ve resigned myself to feeding those damn yeasts once, even twice a day (more coffee for me, a fistful of flour for them). I’d also like to think that my antique brass front door handle, which is stamped with “J.G. Wilson Co., 3 West 29th St, New York, Jan. 20 1890” transported some of those almighty wild yeasts here from back east. Hopefully, from New York’s cooler days.

These are all quiet activisms, though I’m sure many who still practice the throw-a-fish-at-Congress kind of activism would beg to differ. Those who load up on local strawberries, who garden, who bike to work probably don’t think of these acts as a kind of activism at all, except on Earth Day when we’re given a nice excuse to pick up some starters of oregano, chives and rosemary. These little acts have become freed, in some sense, from their attachment to the radicalism of the past. Of course, they don’t speak nearly as loudly as pro-environment uprisings en masse. But they somehow seem more 'sustainable' in the most rudimentary sense of the word, which is, of course, what the environmental connotation of sustainable is founded upon: to keep up or to keep going, as an action or process; to supply with nourishment; to keep in existence. Radical Earth Day acts could never promise to do so much.

So maybe what Kolbert is tapping into is not environmental complacency per se, but a moment of contentment. We got our president. Alice got her garden. I’ve got Marley's mint to muddle for mojitos all summer long. Perhaps we have lost our edge when it comes to Earth Day. But so many of us have taken to dwelling closer to the earth in tiny yet not insignificant ways. I’m not sure what else to say to that, aside from that however we express it, the earth still matters. On Earth Day and everyday.

And on that pun-intended note, I will be starting a new column next month called “Earth Matters.” Not on my own website, but elsewhere—stay posted. Happy Earth Day.

a smidge of a recipe

Out of eggs, three days until the farmer’s market egg stand, and an un-satiable 10pm desire to bake a cake. Not so much a desire to eat cake, mind you, but to beat sugar and butter together and smooth batter with a spatula. But of course, once the cake is sitting there all elegantly cracked on top and cooling, the nub end of the loaf (this is a cake-bread) becomes a mandatory taste-test.

I rarely gravitate towards recipes calling for bananas, I think because I am too diligent about eating them while still tinged with green in an everyday-snack sort of way. Banana creations are always calling for those mushy, over-ripe things; banana bread has hence never been in my repertoire. Sweet potatoes, however, hover around my counter far longer than bananas. A crop native to the tropics, these things stick awkwardly out of the fruit bowl looking well-positioned for long storage but deceivingly so: they start to turn brown long before I usually get inspired to render them edible.

Coconut, liberally. I keep a medium-sized jar of shredded unsweetened coconut on my counter, between the big jar for sugar and the little one for salt. The coconut jar has its own steel spoon.

The last potent nutmeg kernel. I bought it at a spice farm in Zanzibar last August; this farm will remain indulgently in my mind as a big-person’s Candy Land. Now that I'm out, I’m just pretending that nutmeg has gone out of season, like persimmons, rather than admit I will have to travel 8000 miles to return to the spice farm where I bought it to find more. Nutmeg, though we rarely realize it, is the pit of an un-appealingly yellow fruit. Embracing the pit is a lacy pink membrane that is referred to on the spice rack as mace; I wish I had thought to ask the spice farmers what they do with the flesh of the fruit. I grated my entire last darn brainy-looking mass into the batter, and immediately wished there were spice farms in Los Angeles.


Sometimes I find the circumstances that produce our foods so much more interesting than the recipes. How I ended up creating a recipe for an eggless cake-bread borne of the tropics, yet so temperate climate end-of-winter feeling, is purely based on circumstance.

But I’ve also included a formal recipe here, though with a smidge of hesitation. I can’t help but feel that there are so many recipes circulating out there in this virtual space and that mine isn’t necessarily better than all the rest. And I will probably be setting out into uncharted baking territory by the time I’m posting this up. I transcribe it now, however, justified as a kind of archival practice and perhaps the first of a few recipe jottings on this site. Haven’t we all had that serendipitous kitchen creation, only to be befuddled a year later over what exactly went into that spicy thai soup that made it so much zestier than the next? Or which recipe for fresh ginger cake did we follow, the one with molasses or the one with none? Index card recipes are so the grandmother I never had. I suppose I’m suggesting that sometimes our taste-memory isn’t quite sufficient enough, that cookbooks don't always provide us with the most personal instructions, and that perhaps I might capture these recipes—let’s refer to them as happenings, rather than objects—in case, just in case, we should desire an encore. I also intend these jottings as inspiration for your own happenstance recipes. Thank you as well to Steph, who graciously accepted half of the loaf this morning, and allowed me to make more room on my cooling rack.

Out-of-Eggs Sweet Potato-Coconut Bread

Inspired by a banana bread recipe from Orangette

Preheat oven to 350˚. Butter a standard-size loaf pan.

1 stick of butter, softened
¾ cup brown sugar [I don’t keep brown sugar around but instead mash a bit molasses into white sugar—it’s so much moister than brown sugar from a bag, but I’m fussy]
1 ½ cups sweet potato puree from about 2 roasted whole sweet potatoes/yams
2 cups flour [any all-purpose or pastry flour will do]
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 tsp salt
¼ tsp distilled white vinegar
½ tsp vanilla or almond extract, optional
½ cup unsweetened shredded coconut
sugar for sprinkling

Mash the roasted, skinless sweet potato until its nearly free of lumps (a food processor does this job well), and measure out 1 ½ cup.

Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in vinegar and extract.

In separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg.

Alternate additions of puree and flour mixture, beginning with puree, to butter mixture approximately ½ cup at a time. Mix until all of the flour is just combined; do not over-mix.

Spread batter (it’s thick) in loaf pan, smoothing out the top with a spatula. Sprinkle liberally with sugar—I like to keep a jar of vanilla bean-infused white sugar for opportunities like these, but any sugar will give the loaf a nice crust.

Bake 60 minutes, or until toothpick (or wooden chopstick in my case) inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from pan and cool on rack. Eat nub end while still warm, but cake is best a few hours after it's baked.

if the mad hatter drank coffee

Stumptown Coffee Roasters is known as a purveyor of some of the best coffee in the world and yet when I arrived at their roastery in Seattle last week they didn’t offer me coffee. They poured me kishr. Or qishr, depending on how you take your spelling of this byzantine beverage. It was amber and translucent, easily mistaken for an oolong tea, and tasted and smelled strangely reminiscent of an herbaceous and prune-y tisane though I couldn’t identify exactly what kind. And oh yes, it tasted a bit like coffee.


Only because I traveled with Aleco, Stumptown’s coffee buyer, in the hinterlands of Rwanda this summer and made it home alive did I trust accepting a cup from him before knowing what it was. Call it kishr, call it coffee-tea if you, like me, don’t really know how to pronounce much in Arabic: it’s the dried coffee husk steeped in water. Originating in Yemen circa 1100, I imagine it traveled the world on spice trading routes before falling out of fashion with a newly café-ed Western Europe for its deceitful simplicity. Kishr isn't hefty like coffee, and certainly wouldn’t stand up to milk. And it has a faint citrusy flavor that might be cooling on a thick Yemeni summer day and little out of place in a Viennese coffee shop. I joined the group of men wearing skinny pants in deeply inhaling kishr steam from little cups; huddled down the stairs from Stumptown’s main shop and plotting kishr’s comeback in hushed voices, I felt for a moment that I was on coffee's avant-garde.

What is old is new again… though exotica from the colonies always ran the risk of becoming bourgeois, didn’t it.

I had come to Stumptown to sample some El Salvadorian coffees and hear the grower of that coffee speak, but kishr stole the show. Our dried coffee husks were indeed from one of the coffee farms in Western El Salvador owned by Aida Batlle, a wonderful woman whom I wrote about in a post on the Civil Eats website today. With an experimental spirit, she left coffee cherries to dry on the trees before being harvested and then dried them again on clay patios for four days. Some of her nimble-fingered workers picked the husk off of the coffee bean. It’s the coffee equivalent of a late-harvest Riesling or Muscato and she bagged only 250 pounds of it this year. Pittance. If the Seattle underground doesn’t drink it all first, I think you can order it directly from Stumptown for $6 or $7 per pound, a downright 19th century price.


The best description I’ve found of kishr, as if dredged up from a sunken Indian Ocean trading ship, is from this article in The New York Times dated May 13, 1877. Right, 1877, and you can read it right here on the internet. They recommend adding “a few bruized cardamoms or a little dry cinnamon or ginger” and simmering for half an hour to yield a “most agreeable beverage.” Most agreeable, and also most caffeinated. The fruit of the coffee cherry (the coffee bean itself, as you probably know, is the seed of the fruit) retains more caffeine than the bean does; shocking that energy drink companies aren’t engineering coffee husk extractions (are they?). Coffee is brewed on the island of Zanzibar with nutmeg, clove and cardamom and I’ve been meaning to make a version of this concoction with kishr. There will have to be a kishr ceremony of course, like the Ethiopian coffee ceremony or a Japanese tea ritual; I’m open to suggestions of what this will entail. My most Mad Hatter of friends will be invited to the kishr ceremony and also a smattering of pirates, but only the ones who thieve fresh cinnamon in lieu of grenade launchers. I know, pirates are wrecking serious havoc these days and it's not funny business. But, by no small coincidence, they do their craftiest work just off the shores of Yemen.

edible art

'Life is one continuous mistake,’ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, used to remind his students. When he shopped he sought out the rattiest vegetables at market, all the discarded and maimed culls, and his meditation grew strong, nourished by the continuous mistakes of human life. --Wendy Johnson, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate

Buried in The New York Times last week was a write-up about a victory for vegetables. Two weeks ago the European Union pitched “overly curved, extra knobby, or oddly shaped produce” into the grocery store’s waste bin; now they let them stand proud in the grocery store next to all their perfect relatives. It’s a real high-five for the previously “discarded and maimed culls,” the twisted and misshapen vegetables and also a few fruits. Irregular tomatoes, apples and peaches are still banned, unfortunately, while carrots, peas (have you ever had a run-in with a deformed pea?) and a few dozen others are no longer. It must be a case of political discrimination. Where I think the real achievement lies though is in the acceptance of misshapen root vegetables, always the most macabre of the produce section. Any edible pulled from the earth wears scars of its life underground and if Edward Gorey had written a Thanksgiving tale, it would have been a tale of these misshapen root vegetables.


But farmer’s markets have never been discriminatory against ugly produce in the way that grocery chains have (sites of industrial agriculture that they are) and yet I realized that I always search out the most aesthetically perfect fruits and vegetables, however subconscious this practice may be. Inspired, I made a game out of looking for the most imperfect produce as I toured the Ballard farmer’s market in Seattle with my friend Michelle last Sunday. A truly good friend rarely questions one’s ill-justified pursuits and so Michelle didn’t press me on why I was attracted to the farmer’s market’s least-wanted. We found piles and bins: she pointed out twisted carrots and stood patiently while I took some photos of strangely curved beets, soft-edged cabbages and irregularly shaped Asian pears, three-pronged carrots and purple potatoes with pink splotches. Misshapen edibles were all over the Ballard market but rarely were they broken. No, these were not mistakes wrought by a human hand but by ecology itself: the beet that grows its sweet root down and hits a rock perhaps, or the apple that didn’t quite get enough sun on one of its halves and so shows its mis-proportioned growth. I don’t really know the why of the knobs and lumps and funny colors, but finding them all in plain view made me think about the why of caring what fruits and vegetables look like. So long as a fresh food isn’t showing signs of rot and thus danger, does visuality matter if we ultimately perceive quality through its flavor? Is the visual any reliable indication of the taste?


We’ve long privileged vision and hearing over the other senses, with taste often falling to the bottom of the philosopher’s hierarchy. It was considered to be a bodily and therefore primitive sense by Aristotle, who favored the cognitive senses, seeing and hearing, that allowed for objective rationality and thus the production of knowledge. Taste, as a gustatory pursuit, was too subjective to contribute to that. So what does the European Union’s turn away from using vision to judge produce quality suggest? Ironically, one would think that those cultures with deeply rooted peasant cuisines, the French and Italian being chief among them, would have always privileged the flavor of a vegetable or the succulence of a fruit over the item’s physical appearance. After all, those who grow what they put on their own dinner table could hardly dismiss a deformed peach or stunted carrot as a parent wouldn’t cast away an ugly baby. Unless, of course, the compost pile needed beefing up.


I didn’t allow myself the luxury of searching out imperfect produce at the Santa Monica farmer’s market this morning, though it did occur to me that there seems to be less of it in Los Angeles than in Seattle. It was back to the usual market business instead, sizing up the availability of apples (the ladies with the Gold Rush variety were there!) and economizing on lettuce, four small red leaf heads for three dollars. My splurge, as I was retreating from the market’s dead-end where the row of stalls threatens to lead you into the Pacific, was on persimmons. A strange and whimsical fruit, if only because my tour guests told me so when I chatted them up around the vineyard and garden in Napa when I worked there: how can a tree lose its leaves and leave the fruit hanging, they would ask as I led them past Frog’s Leap winery’s two Fuyu persimmon trees. Or more commonly, what is that orange thing, they’d exclaim, can we eat it? And inevitably a tall man would reach up and pluck one for his wife, who never had the audacity to bite into a strange fruit in front of the crowd. The Fuyu variety, squat like a pumpkin-colored tomato, remains hard even as its insides become sticky with sugars so I’d tell her it was safe for transport inside her purse.

The practicality of these Fuyus means I usually prefer them to their cousin, the Hachiya, which are only sweet when they’re soft enough to scoop with a spoon. Until then, they remain stoically firm, a powerhouse of bitterness that rivals that of the uncured olive (which occasionally a winery tour guest would grab from the tree, chew, appear to be poisoned, and promptly gulp down his, and his wife’s, glass of red). But feeling whimsical myself today, I dropped $4 for three Hachiyas, curious how different they’d actually taste from the Fuyus. They were like little tapered bowling balls and the man who took my dollars told me that they’d take six or eight weeks to ripen. I almost asked for my money back.

“Think of them as edible art,” said the persimmon peddler. “Put them in a bowl to look at, check them a few times a week or so and then one day you’ll be surprised-- they’ll be ready to eat.” So it is that I have a display of pretty persimmons sitting dormant on my table, perfect to the eye... but not to the palate.

when life hands you mulberries

I was caught sticky-handed the other morning, a Santa Monica farmer’s market morning. By 9 o’clock the vegetables were sweating and only the vendors stood cool, shaded by their tents and offering samples of pistachios and peaches even though the regulars passing by have had pistachio samples by the dozen and everyone, absolutely everyone, takes more than one piece of peach. It’s nearly Halloween but you’d never know it from the copious heirloom tomatoes still littering the market stalls and the car thermometer reading a defiant 92°.

The Weiser family farm’s stall is the reliable king of root vegetables at the market, with heaps of potatoes and rainbow-colored carrots standing as a testament to Thanksgiving all year long. But that morning the Weisers, too, were peddling summer. Farmer-in-chief Alex called me over from behind the potato table just as I was eying a “Last Chance yellow peaches” sign across the way. “Hey, I’ve got your mulberries! They’re melting!” he shouted. From a jumble of empty boxes he produced a tin tray of mostly frozen oblong maroon berries, like an obvious cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. Back in the spring I mentioned to Alex that I’d never tasted a mulberry and sometime in late June, while I was snapping photos of monkeys in Rwanda, he stashed a bunch in the freezer for me. There must have been ten cups in the tray (I later learn he sold these berries for $25 a pound) and we both let a few dissolve into flavors that are tart, wine-y and woody as he tells me that these Persian mulberries are actually not cousins of the raspberry or blackberry clan. Mulberries grow on trees, famous throughout the Middle East and similarly warm climes for providing shade along the streets. “Wouldn’t it be great if LA had mulberry trees for shade!” he exclaimed. As the deep purple juice stains my fingers and also my tote bag, I try to imagine Angelenos lounging on the sidewalks of Santa Monica, trying to catch falling mulberries in their mouths. Or, more likely, ridding them with their front windshield wipers.

Back at home, I’m lost and confused. My trusted Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook lists only two mulberry recipes, both requiring an ice cream maker, and an epicurious.com search turns up nothing at all. I stare down the tray and wonder if I should eat them all plain, or over yogurt perhaps. Or bake a pie? Or stick them back in the freezer and avoid the whole leaking mess? Nope, into the pot with sugar they went. When confronted with a precious summer fruit and the dwindling autumnal heat there’s only one thing to do: make preserves.


Alex apologized for pushing the flat of mulberries on me the next time I saw him, or rather for the hours I spent mid-week stirring the mulberry pot with a spoon. “I know,” I shook my head, “you think it’d be no time at all, but it always ends up taking the whole day!” I could hardly fault him though--this wasn’t my first preservation project of the past few weeks, nor was it the last. Plum-vanilla bean jam, pickled watermelon rind, roasted red peppers, quince butter… I jarred it all.

It’s been like trying to step simultaneously on a dozen helium balloons, getting all this produce into Bell glass containers while keeping up with graduate school work. Just yesterday I bought eight of the “Last Chance” peaches and with a smudge of guilt spent a good part of my Sunday afternoon cooking them down to mush and sequestering the peach preserves into sterilized half-pints. I have a rather large stash of summer preserved in my kitchen now, as if to say that Southern California won’t yield fruit for the next eight months (never mind that here in LA we’re just weeks away from the first local citrus harvest). But I’ll be relieved if summer has finally set on the farmer’s markets: I have papers to write and besides, I’ve run out of jars.


Wendell Berry once wrote that “The only thing we have to preserve nature with is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity.” Though I can’t say for sure, I like to think he was responding to Thoreau’s earlier declaration: “In wildness is the preservation of the World.” Regardless of whether they were actually in dialogue, wildness has rarely since been captured as wisely in words.

So in domesticity, shall we say, is the preservation of fruit.