The (Almond) Joy of (Home) Cooking

When from the distant past nothing remains, after the beings have died, after the things are destroyed and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, yet more vital, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of everything else; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense architecture of memory.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Time Forgotten

A Google search of food and memory brings up an easy two dozen articles about foods that allegedly help prevent memory loss. Eat more walnuts! Eat more salmon! I’m more interested in the food that conjures up a world of memory on its own.

Bring your finger to the bridge of your nose. Right there on the other side of the nasal bone is your amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain conveniently close to your center of smell. This part of the brain houses memory. It also plays a role in the way we process emotion. That’s why food is such a trigger for powerful feelings and recollections from the past.

With his trusty amygdala, Proust spent the last three years of his life within the confines of his cork-lined bedroom evoking a world of sensory riches, an expansive past, all sparked, at least on the page, by a tea-soaked madeleine.

You, too, store a whole ocean of memory in that little nut-shaped part of your brain. It’s why a Colombian friend, inspecting my vegetable garden, stopped cold at the sight of my monster collard greens and started to tear. “My mami used to make these for breakfast, scrambled with eggs.” It’s peasant food, she shrugged, but. . . But it came with warm rush of memories -- of the rural community where she grew up, of the sun-baked heat, the bright mineral smell of the soil, the clothes strung on the line. We’re talking more than breakfast. I clipped her two dozen leaves, each as big as an elephant ear, so she can make collards and eggs and give her children a taste of her own past.

I think Proust was lucky. Likewise my Colombian friend. The foods that so trigger memory or longing may not be as elegant as a teacake or as pure and earnest as greens and eggs. A Bavarian baker turns rhapsodic over the cheap mustard buns he’d get at festivals. Imagine a hot dog or sausage roll split, slathered with mustard and pickles -- everything but the sausage, which he couldn’t afford. Mustard buns, he says, were crunchy and divine eaten at once, greasy and leaden if you waited too long. For his Alabama wife, a professional chef, home is her mother’s salmon croquettes, “canned salmon and bechamel, pretty nasty, actually.” An English friend who lives in Paris, the culinary mecca of the world, occasionally yearns for that Brit standard, beans on toast. Preferably not even heated (he has other issues). For another friend, home is the midwest and the taste of Sara Lee chocolate cake, that thick brown block which her family served -- sometimes frozen -- at every birthday when she was growing up. She knows more sophisticated chocolate desserts, she knows processed food isn’t good for you. It’s still her favorite for food for celebration, because it evokes a lifetime of happy memories.

We don’t get to choose the foods of home. I wish mine was a fiery Bengali curry, a healthful, soulful collard and egg scramble or a sweet, buttery teacake. It is, instead, egg salad. Specifically, egg salad with olives on challah, made by my maternal grandmother. It is something I haven’t eaten in years, and being vegan, could never eat again (and don’t tell me about tofu “egg” salad. I love tofu but do not eat “food” in quotation marks).

I still recall with a fullness at the back my throat and an immense sense of longing the creaminess of the eggs. My grandmother knew just how much to mash them, just how much mayonnaise to add. I remember their gentle pale yellow, the little sparks of salt from the sliced green olives, the tender bread cut into four neat triangles. She somehow intuited my passionate though unarticulated preference for sandwiches cut into triangles, rather than squares. In the same way, she always knew the right temperature to serve it -- cool, not shockingly cold.

And remembering that, I remember everything -- her smell, sweet and rosy from Jergen’s lotion, her bathing me with a hard bar of Ivory soap in her white enamel kitchen sink, the shag carpet in the living room, which seemed, at least to my little girl eyes, to spring up as tall and wild as kudzu.

I do not long to eat egg salad again. What I long for is that absolutely crystalline time and place and sense of being loved.

We are all looking for return, for that place we thought of as home. Sometimes we spend our lives searching for it. Sometimes, we can find it in the memory of a simple sandwich. Food is sustenance, but it is also what connects us to each other, to the planet and to what Proust called “the imminent joy of going home.”

Almond Rice

No egg salad recipe here, I decided instead, to go for the amygdala/almond metaphor and provide an almond recipe. But what? I’ve already done almond cookies. And I thought it was interesting that other than Proust and my Sara Lee-loving friend, the other seminal foods of the past are savory, not sweet.

Left to my own devices, I would do a spicy Romesco, that fabulous sauce of ground almonds and roasted red peppers, or an elaborate biryani, but for the dish to work, it must be child-appropriate and simple. Yet not boring for adults, either. Huh.

The biryani got me on the right track. I remembered the rice with toasted slivered almonds we ate one evening in the desert in Morocco, miles from civilization. One lone cinnamon stick seemed to perfume the utterly comforting dish. Even my slightly tarted up version seems something a child would willingly eat and perhaps years later be a small part of “the immense architecture of memory.”

Being me, I suggest of course, you make it with brown rice. It’s not only healthier, it plays up the nuttiness nicely.

1 cup brown rice

3 cups vegetable broth or water, divided use

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, sliced

1 pinch saffron

1 cinnamon stick

1 teaspoon allspice

1/2 cup red lentils

3 Medjool dates, chopped

1/2 cup slivered almonds

Bring 2 cups vegetable broth or water to boil in a medium-sized saucepan. Add brown rice. Cover and reduce heat to low. Cook for 30 minutes, or just until the rice absorbs the liquid and leans towards tenderness. It will continue cooking later. Set rice aside and let cool. May be prepared a day ahead, covered and refrigerated overnight.

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add sliced onion, stir until coated in oil. Cover and reduce heat to low, letting onion cook for about 20 minutes. The onion will still be pale and will have thrown off quite a lot of liquid. This is good. Add pinch of saffron and raise heat to medium.

Add red lentils to the onions. Stir to combine then add remaining 1 cup of water or broth. Cover again and cook. Red lentils are speedy and should be rosy and tender after 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, toast almonds at 375 for about 8 to 10 minutes, until golden and fragrant.

Add the cinnamon stick to the lentils. Stir in allspice, rice and chopped dates. Season with sea salt to taste.

Heat through at medium heat. Stir in toasted almonds just before serving.

Serves 4 to 6.

Market Economy

What brings together the mayor of Miami, Miami’s greatest chef, Homestead farmers, Haitian refugees, tatted hipsters, Overtown residents and guys in suits? Jewel-like heirloom tomatoes. And fresh, locally grown collards, carrots, eggplants, green beans, loquats and more. It all happens at Roots in the City, Miami’s newest farmers market and magical convergence of cultures.

Well, you know how skeptical I am about magic. I’d like to have faith in the universe’s benevolence and all that, but usually I find we’ve got to help it along. Roots in the City has had some serious magical muscle behind it, including Daniella Levine and the folks at Miami-Dade’s Human Services Coaltion, our community shared agriculture maven Margie Pikarsky, Michael’s Genuine chef Michael Schwartz, whom I have long worshipped and Michel Nischan, new to my pantheon but ensconed there evermore. Chef and author of Sustainably Delicious, Michel is also founder of Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit working to make fresh food accesible to everyone. Wholesome Wave has sponsored over a hundred farmers markets in 12 states, the latest being right here.

Roots in the City not only brings fresh produce to an underserved part of Miami, it offers double value on food stamps. A dollar’s worth of food stamps gets you two dollars’ worth of veggies, and lifetime Overtown resident Sarah Wallace was going for it. In the past, getting fresh produce had been too much struggle -- too much money and too much travel, because Overtown, like many of America’s food deserts, has convenience stores and liquor stores, but nowhere selling anything fresh.

When Roots in the City opened, Sarah didn’t have to take a bus or three across town, just leave her apartment and cross the street. She was the first person at the market when it opened, buying up bags of vegetables, hugging Michel, sampling some of Michael Schwartz’s braised collards and politely listening as the mayor gave her an earful about how important Roots in the City is. Like she doesn’t know. Still, she posed next to him for a photo op, her arms full of fresh collard greens, carrots and tomatoes.

This is the Miami I’ve always hoped for, one in which we all come together, whoever we are. Because we all gotta eat. And we all deserve to eat well. So it's in everyone's best interest to make the magic happen.

Roots in the City Farmers Market Scramble

Feel free to switch out the veggies for whatever’s fresh at your local farmers market. Lacto-ovo lovers may likewise swap eggs for tofu and cheese for nutritional yeast, but honeys, tofu, unlike eggs, adds little fat and no cholesterol, and nutritional yeast tastes cheesily fabulous without the fat and gives you a hit of mighty vitamin B-12, besides. Open yourself up to possibility. I’m just saying.

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small onion or 3 scallions, chopped

1 jalapeno, chopped

1 red pepper, chopped

1 small zucchini or yellow squash, chopped

OR 1 cup greens, fresh spinach, chopped or blanched collards, sliced into ribbons

1 teaspoon cumin powder

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 tablespoon nutritional yeast

1 tomato, chopped

12 ounces firm tofu, drained and squeezed to get rid of extra water

1 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped fine

sea salt and fresh pepper to taste

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add chopped onion, jalapeno, red pepper and zucchini, if using. Continue to saute, stirring, until vegetables soften, about 7 to 10 minutes.

Stir in cumin, turmeric, nutritional yeast, chopped tomato and optional chopped greens. Stir together until fragrant and golden, about 3 minutes.

Crumble tofu into skillet. You may mash with a wooden spoon or have a wonderfully tactile experience smooshing it with your fingers. Scramble together in merry fashion, breaking up any odd tofu clumps. Cook until combined and heated through, another minute or 2. Add chopped cilantro, season with sea salt and pepper to taste and tip onto two plates.

Serves 2 generously, 3 people if you’re adding rice and beans or cornbread or something additional. Recipes doubles, even triples but is best eaten hot, fresh and at once.

Here's Looking At You, Kid

Call me a bit of a rebel, I’m not a big on holiday traditions. For obvious reasons, I’m fine with a turkeyless Thanksgiving. I’m likewise fine with a treeless Christmas, a menorahless Chanukah. I do like New Year’s though, with champagne on New Year’s Eve and hopping john New Year’s Day. There is nothing glamorous about a plate of hopping john -- it's rice, black-eyed peas and collards. It’s cheapish to make and plainish to eat, but I love it for being rich in fiber, folklore and mystique. What other dish promises good luck, fortune and romance?

Some say black-eyed peas look like coins and collards or other greens represent paper money, therefore you’ll make as much money as the hopping john you eat.

Black-eyed peas also fit an old superstition that if a dark-eyed man is your first visitor on New Year’s Day, love and good luck will be yours.

Who knows where such stories started? One version has hopping john originating with the slaves who brought black-eyed peas and rice from west Africa. Some say the dish got its name from a child dancing around the stove, eager for supper. What started as a slave dish, livened with a lttle pepper and pork made its way into plantation kitchens.

It could be hopping john got its start even earlier, from our Celtic forebears who lighted fires on New Year’s Eve and danced around them all night. The Anglo-Saxon word hoppan means religious dance.

In either case, dancing seems as much a part of hopping john as black-eyed peas. I'm a great believer in dancing and a big fan of good luck, great fortune and hot romance. Do I believe a plate of rice and beans will make that happen? Not so much, but just enough -- that's why I’ll start the year the way I have for the past decade, with a pot of hopping john ready for New Year’s Day. Call it the victory of hop over experience (sorry).

Hopping John

Traditionally, hopping john is made with everything going into one pot. Traditionally, it is also made with pork. I -- surprise -- have broken with tradition and make this in two pots and sans pig.

Make it New Year’s Eve or even the day before. Flavor improves over time and hopping john reheats like a dream. You’ll have a nourishing, cheap meal ready to go on a day when some of us are too tired and bleary-eyed to cook. And there’s a bonus -- the sturdy rice and beans dish sops up any hangover.

Happy New Year.

1 cup black eyed peas

3 cups of water

6 cloves garlic

1 dried hot pepper

1 bay leaf

2 cups vegetable broth

1 cup brown rice

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

1 jalapeno, chopped

3 ribs celery, chopped

1 big bunch collard greens, sliced into thin ribbons

juice of 1 lemon

sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

In a large pot, bring 3 cups of water to boil over high heat. Add black-eyed peas, 2 cloves of garlic (whole), pepper and bay leaf. Skim off any beans that float. They’re duds.

Reduce heat to low. Simmer beans uncovered for an hour and a half until beans are tender, not mushy.

Add brown rice and the vegetable broth. Cover and simmer over low heat for 20 minutes. Don’t lift that lid. Turn off the heat, leave pot on the burner and let hopping john sit.

Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion, jalapeno, celery and the remaining 4 garlic cloves, chopped. Saute for about 5 minutes, stirring, until the vegetables soften.

Reduce heat to medium. Add greens by the handful, and cook until wilted, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.

Fluff rice and beans, fold in collard mixture. Squeeze in lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Splash with hot sauce.

Serves 6.

The Eating of the Green

To celebrate today, I wanted to create a new recipe that's beyond green. Sure, you're wearing green because it's St. Patrick's Day and that's what one does.  That's lovely, but even better is the green you wear inside.  I'm talking about the eating of the green -- green as in environmentally aware and green as in vegetable and green as in saving green.  This is what I wanted for you, friends, because that's the kind of girl I am.

The other kind of girl I am is cheap.  I have a horror of waste.  This is why I utilize as much as I can in the kitchen, recycling, composting, making soup stock from veggie bits like too-tough stems from the collard greens in my Obama victory garden (see above in all their green splendor).  While my broth puts to work the rich green flavor and nutrients from those woody stems, the waste-hating part of me wishes I could make a sweater from the stem bits or power my computer or at least make a meal of it.

Then I discovered this traditional Turkish recipe.  The Turks, like the Irish, are a fun and frugal people, disinclined to waste.  They make a version of hummus with the familiar trio of tahini, garlic and lemon, but replace chickpeas with Swiss chard stems.  The stems, fibrous to say the least, are simmered until they just give up, then pureed.  The traditional method probably involves using mortar and pestle to smash the greens to the sound of strumming baglamas (Turkey's most popular stringed musical instrument).  I used a food processor and blasted "Turkish Song of the Damned" by the Pogues (they're Irish, a St. Patrick's Day plus ).

I blitzed away, thrilled with the prospect of a nutritionally rich dish that employs every bit of veggie goodness.  However, here's what the recipe did not mention -- hair.  Not real hair, but the little fibrous bits of stem even Cuisinarting can't cure. There's probably some sort of stem cell pun a clever person could make right here.  Go ahead and insert it.  

Okay, okay, there's a razor thin line between frugality and kookiness and perhaps I crossed it. I may go back to the drawing board on this stemmy hummus business because I love green as much as I hate waste.  However, as it stands, the traditional recipe, even with technology and the Pogues on my side, is not a keeper.  

On my best days, I believe understanding the vital connection between what we eat and where it comes from can change the world.  Other days, I think I'm nuts.  I do not have the new green recipe I'd hoped for.  I have an old one adapted from our friends the Italians, because it's green, it's tried and true and who doesn't love bruschetta?  

Irish, Turkish, Italian --  is this post global or what?  It is also green, because greens are our one-stop shopping source of nutrition -- they're rich in iron, potassium, fiber and vitamins A, C and K. They're detox at its most natural and adorably edible.  

Wishing one and all a joyous and green St. Patrick's Day.  To get the full Pogues experience, here they are doing "Turkish Song of the Damned" live albeit many years ago, when Shane McGowan had more hair and teeth and hadn't been kicked out of the boozing band for drinking too much -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v_2K1Z6Qd87y4.

Tuscan Kale Bruschetta

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 bunch kale (roughly 8 ounces)

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

juice of 1 lemon

6 slices thick whole grain bread

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup grated Parmesan

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

optional but very nice:

2 teaspoons butter

1 egg

Rinse greens and pat dry.  Slice the tender leaves from the tough, woody stems.  Save stems for the amazing stem recipe I will soon perfect.  In the meantime, chop leaves into bite-sized strips.

In a large pot with high sides, heat 3 tablespoons of oil over medium-high heat or until oil shimmers.  Add minced garlic and saute for 3 to 4 minutes, or until golden and fragrant.  Throw in the chopped kale.   Stir for a minute or two until kale starts to wild.  Cover and reduce heat to low and cook until tender, about 10 minutes.  Squeeze in the juice of one lemon.  Add sea salt and pepper to taste.

Heat oven to 375.  Brush bread with remaining tablespoon of olive oil and bake for 7 minutes, until toasty and just slightly crisp.  

Here's where the egg option comes in.  In a small omelet pan, melt butter over medium-high heat.  Crack in the egg and fry for 2 to 3 minutes.  Do not flip.   

Remove toasts from oven and place on platter.  Mound kale atop toast slices and slide optional fried egg atop all. Top with grated cheese and an additional sprinkling of salt and pepper. The idea is to cut into the egg and let the golden gooey yolk run over everything.  It is great for the spirits and senses.  This is no dainty canape, it's a gutsy knife and fork affair.  Dig in.  Have fun. Buon appetito, slainte, and whatever it is the Turks say.