Wringing Wet

Our new washing machine overloaded and dumped water all over the utility room floor. This necessitated a major bail and mop. Then our antique dishwasher decided to call it a day and did the same thing, so within a couple of days, there I was again, cursing and mopping up buckets of water.

I’d just stopped feeling like the sorcerer’s apprentice when my husband and I attended an outdoor party at which the heavens opened up. They opened wide, with torrential, driving rain that turned the place to mud and drenched everyone to the skin because the squall gusts caused the party tent to buckle and blow away.

Clearly, God/Life/the universe was throwing an awful lot of water at me. The question is, why?

A friend, altered by drink, theorized that while we think we’re big and important, we’re really just water bearers. We exist to do water’s bidding. We spend our days taking it in, moving it to other places, releasing it. Water, not man, is Earth’s real intelligent life source. It would explain a lot about our current political system.

My feeling, though, is that this water was a personal message. Prior to the deluge, I had not been feeling in the flow. In fact, I felt like a dried legume rattling around in a jar, not like an inspired let alone inspiring creator. I kept getting myself into a tight little knot, writing and rewriting the same paragraph without making it any better. I was not doing myself much good, either.

I do not know why these dry spells happen but I hate when they do. I feel so fallow and purposeless and not how I perceive myself at all. I beat myself up in frustration -- not that it helps.

I am not especially comfortable talking about faith, since I have so little of it, and yet I’m fascinated by those who believe. Faith is intrinic to who they are and trying to get them to parse or discuss it is like trying to get someone to imagine being without a limb -- academic and arcane.

It must be nice. I come at faith like the Little Match Girl, ever on the outside, nose pressed to the glass. Instead of faith, I have perseverence. It’s not nearly as fun. I’d rather have faith, but maybe doggedness is just as good. It’s all part of what Chang-rae Lee calls “that pumping, thriving nature of life,” which, like water, keeps seeping in.

While working on his powerful new novel The Surrendered, Lee said, “I felt completely lost. There were many points in which I felt overwhelmed and overmatched. I learned I have a reserve of faith i didn’t know I had. I’m not a religious person, a going-to-church- type person, but I must say I drew upon some kind of idea, a sense I can do this, if I keep trying and quell these thoughts of desperation, if I can keep going, maybe it’ll work out. I was surprised by how I endured those moments.”

It was all I could do to muzzle the desire to say, “Oh, honey, you, too?” But I was interviewing him, so instead we talked about literature. And silicon boobs, golf, food and wine. But that’s another story.

These past few days, I’ve felt like something has budged, shifted, given way. I’ve been singing as I set about my work, a sign the gloom is lifting. It is one of the great unsung pleasures -- the release when a headache or heartache vanish, when a fever or funk break. It is the rediscovery of the simplest sensory delights like the delicious feeling of sun on your skin or sipping silky broth or really seeing the person you live with. It is being here now, being grateful for where you are without overthinking or trying to hold it too tightly (this part’s the killer for me).

I am -- at the moment, anyway -- more focused, more engaged, more grateful, more tolerant. I’ve been feeling a generosity of spirit, not faith but -- oh, let’s say it -- love -- bubbling up in me like a spring.

It’s raining now. And I’m enjoying it. And accepting it. And opening myself up to it and all that. But I’ve mopped up enough, wasted enough water, paid off enough repairmen, no more appliances need malfunction. It’s okay, universe -- I get it already.

Acquacotta

It sounds fancy and Italian, it means a soup of vegetables cooked in water. Left to my own devices, I’d add white beans or quinoa or enhance it with wine or vegetable broth. I am, however, honoring it for what it is. Acquacotta is peasanty, unpretentious and comforting, greater than the sum of its parts. It’s sort of like stone soup without the rocks -- a nice illustration of faith and a cheap and green meal, too.

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 habanero or 1 jalapeno, chopped

4 carrots, chopped

3 ribs celery, chopped

8 ounces mushrooms, sliced

8 ounces green beans, chopped into bite-sized pieces

1 bunch chard or other greens, chopped

1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes

5 cups water

1 bay leaf

1 big bunch of basil, chopped

1 small handful fresh thyme leaves

sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

For serving:

6 slices whole-grain bread, toasted

extra olive oil for drizzling

Options for lacto-ovo-types:

poached eggs

grated Parmesan

Heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Add minced garlic, chopped onions, carrots, celery and habanero or jalapeno. Saute stirring occaionally until vegetables soften and turn fragrant, about 5 minutes.

Add chopped greens, mushrooms, green beans and diced tomatoes. Continue cooking another 5 minutes.

Stir in water, bay, basil and thyme and cover pot. Reduce heat to medium-low and let the soup simmer for half an hour.

To serve: Place one slice of toasted bread at the bottom of each bowl. Ladle soup over toast, add an extra drizzle of olive oil for gilding and enjoy.

Egg and cheese eaters can add one poached egg per bowl and a generous grating of Parmesan.

Serves 6.

Mardi Gras Memory

One summer many years ago, my father had some work around New Orleans and not much money, so he brought my mother and me along and turned it into a holiday. We stayed in what must have been the French Quarter, in a smallish room with wood-slatted shuttered windows opening out onto a narrow balcony.

The street smelled of dust and August heat -- a heat that stunned, turning me alternately soporific and whiny. We walked to a bakery where my father took me and said I could have anything I wanted. Heat-wilted, all I wanted was a lemonade.

We went to Brennan’s -- my parents’ big splurge. My mother fell in love with oysters rockefeller. I fell asleep at the table. I was six and the concept of fine dining was lost on me. We came back to find a maid had come for turndown service, leaving chocolates on the pillows, which were squishily soft by the time I ate them.

The next day, my parents decided to ditch me. In what seemed the worst kind of betrayal, they casually announced they were going out that evening. They took off for a good time, leaving me in the care of a woman I’m sure had an enormous heart. She had an enormous everything, spilling out of the armchair, filling the room, sending me to retreat to my rollaway cot by the window. She had thick glasses with greasy fingerprint smudges on the lenses and a plastic Barbie-colored hearing aid. I’d never seen one before and it frightened me. The two of us smiled at each other or bared our teeth the way our sparring Paleolithic forebears were said to do, to show we were evenly matched and needn’t try to dominate each other. We attempted neither play nor conversation.

I went to sleep before my bedtime, wishing this woman away. By morning, my wish had come to pass -- she was gone and my parents were back from Bourbon Street. What’s there, I asked.

My mother, who’d patiently explained sex to me the year before, now smiled showing all her teeth, the way she did when she wanted to convince me of something, the same way the babysitter and I’d smiled at each other. Men like to watch naked ladies dance, she said. My mother had never lied before but I couldn’t see the truth or wisdom in this. Until later that night.

We walked by a bar and honest to God, there was music blaring and up on a stage, a hoochie mama wearing an inch or two of something green and sparkly, danced, pranced, strutted. Her boobs bounced.

I don’t think my parents rushed me past the door -- they were progressive and cool and all that. But I was only six. I was too embarrassed to stare -- blushingly embarrassed for the girl, mortified for myself. New Orleans seemed a place of betrayal and depravity and I was finished with it.

Fast-forward a few decades and my husband, a Tulane alum, took me back to New Orleans for homecoming. It was May, it was muddy -- the city a sea of mud. I promptly ruined a new pair of shoes I’d gotten just to beguile my husband’s fraternity brothers whom I’d never met and withstand the scrutiny of their wives.

The shoes didn’t matter. My husband’s old college friends took me in, as did their wives, as New Orleans naturally does. They would have done regardless of footwear. They could have thrown me a parade and I wouldn’t have felt more welcome than I did by this. Yes, New Orleans is all about laissez les bon temps rouller, letting the good times roll, but it’s also about laissez faire, letting things be. New Orleans happily take you as you are, however that is (see April 27 ’09 post).

The things most people love about the city -- the bars, beignets, Bourbon Street -- they’re all there, but it is to me other delights -- the lacy wrought iron balconies on the Victorian homes and the strangers who toast me from them, the mule-drawn caleches. Mules endure New Orleans' heat and humidity better than horses and don’t object to me petting and cooing over them, either.

I am amazed by the Jazz and Heritage Festival, accommodating 40,000 people with five stages spread out on a race track. Somehow, there is room for everyone, the sound from the Elvis Costello stage doesn’t carry over into the Gospel Tent, and for every band you’ve come to hear, there’s another one you stumble upon and fall in love with. You can't get fast food burgers in the food court, but there's oyster po' boys, crowder peas and okra and dirty rice, with bottles of Tabasco at every kiosk.

We go back at least once a year now and I ruin a pair of heels every time. Sometimes the mud does it, sometimes it’s from walking the French Quarter’s cobblestone streets. The sensible thing would be to wear sensible shoes, but New Orleans is tolerant of your pleasures. If you want to wreck your shoes, go ahead. It indulges everything, including your own brand of madness.

As a child, I was a harsh judge of New Orleans. New Orleans never judged me. I, so intolerant of my own weird quirks, am utterly disarmed by this place that says, hey, you’re fine, we love you like you are. This wisdom comes from age and is not a lesson I could fathom as a little girl.

New Orleans has had to learn its own hard lesson. After the wreckage by Hurricane Katrina, it set about doing what it did not want to do -- resurrecting itself, but settling into the task with a grim determination. It is still recovering, but Mardi Gras beads keep the city shiny. So does hope. The Saints' Superbowl victory wasn’t just about football, it was about the joy of winning by being who you are. Happy Mardi Gras.

Down and Dirty Rice

Traditionally what makes dirty rice dirty is the addition of fowl gizzards. Um, no thanks. Chopped eggplant, a Louisiana crop, takes the place of organ meat in this super-satisfying veggie version Not spicy in itself, but you can make it that way. That’s what Tabasco is for.

1-1/2 cup rice (white or brown)

5 cups water or vegetable broth, divided use

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon olive oil

6 cloves garlic, chopped

1 large onion, chopped

1 medium eggplant, chopped

2 ribs celery, chopped

1 green pepper, chopped

1 tomato, chopped (or 1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes)

2 teaspoons paprika

1 handful fresh thyme leaves (or 1 teaspoon dried)

sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

juice of 1 lemon

1 bunch fresh parsley, chopped

optional -- 1 cup edamame

Pour 3 cups of water or broth into a large pot. Place over high heat and bring liquid to boil. Add rice and bay leaf and give a quick stir. Cover and reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes (brown rice may need an additional 10 minutes) or until rice is tender and all liquid is absorbed. Remove bay leaf and set aside.

May be done a day or two ahead and stored well-covered in refrigerator. Bring to room temperature before proceeding.

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add chopped garlic, onion and eggplant. Saute, stirring for 5 minutes, or until vegetables soften. Add chopped celery, green pepper, tomato, paprika and thyme. Continue cooking another 5 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in rice and remaining 2 cups of water or broth.

Reduce heat to medium and cook another 10 minutes until mixture is moist but all liquid is absorbed.

Stir in salt, pepper, lemon juice and chopped parsley, and for a pop of protein and bright green color, fold in optional edamame.

Serves 6 to 8. Keeps several days in the fridge, flavor improves over time.

Soupe Joumou: Sunshine in the Midst of Darkness

art courtesy of Philip Brooker

When a man pours you his soup, he pours you his soul, even when it’s soup cooked up on a hot plate. Maybe especially then. My friend Marcel celebrated New Year’s Day by making soupe joumou, the beloved soup with which Haitians start the new year. For Marcel, it was not enough to make soup -- he had to feed everyone he knew.

When I arrived, his tiny apartment was flooded with afternoon light and was so jammed, I couldn’t see the host for all the guests clustered around, cradling soup bowls, talking, eating, laughing.

Finally, I found Marcel his makeshift kitchen, holding court and presiding over the soup pot.

I gave him a kiss and picked up a bowl.

“It has meat,” he warned, remembering I’m a meat-free kind of girl.

“I’ll eat around it.”

We looked at each other. He beamed and ladled it up from a battered aluminum pot, rich and golden, like liquid sunshine.

Soupe joumou is the triumph of spirit over tyranny, heart over privation and a damn fine way to warm body and soul. This is a soup tapping into the collective unconscious of a people, evoking stronger feelings than Proust’s madeleine. I wasn’t going to let some bits of beef get in the way of that.

We all love to ring in the new year with its promise of new beginnings, but in Haiti, it’s especially cause for joy. New Year’s Day is Independence Day, the celebration of that New Year’s Day in 1804, when Haitians ended over a century of bloody rule by the French and were no longer colonial slaves but a free people in their own homeland.

Haitians celebrated by eating what had been forbidden them -- meat, cabbage and squash, the latter two grown on their own island. Haitian slaves had cooked these foods for their French masters, while they themselves had survived solely on rations of salt cod and lemonade.

Like hopping john, the new year’s dish invented by slaves in the south, soupe joumou is a dish that sustains and is sustainable. It’s made from what is local and available. The Haitians adapted the soup from their French masters, heating it up with habaneros and ginger and making their own. Like hopping john, some eat it on New Year’s Day for good luck. Others, like Marcel, eat and serve it knowing -- and honoring -- its history. And as with all things Haitian, there is some myth. The soup is said to honor Papa Loko, the Vodou god of the ancient African spirit. Yellow is the color that honors him. In any case, soupe joumou is belly-filling and soul-lifting all at once.

Since Haiti’s earthquake, Marcel, our gracious host of just a few weeks ago, looks crumpled, hollowed out. Most of us in Miami do. Haiti is but 700 miles away. Or it is literally next door. Haitians make up a rich part of our community and though we may not personally have lost family, as Marcel has, we all have Haitian friends, Haitian ties. People burst into tears on the street. Coworkers who once barely got past, ”Hi, how’s it going?” now embrace. There has been an outpouring of relief effort here, along with an outpouring of grief. Those efforts will be all the more important in the coming weeks and months, when the rest of the world might be inclined to forget or suffer compassion fatigue. As if caring could ever tire you.

Soupe joumou epitomizes for me Marcel and all the people of Haiti, who take what little they have, make it delicious and offer it to you with all their heart. It’s time for us, who have so much, to do the same.

At this time of crisis, as President Obama said, "We are reminded of our common humanity." Please donate to Partners in Health (www.pih.org),

the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders or whatever relief

organization moves you.

Vegan Soupe Joumou

I have taken the meat out of Marcel’s soupe joumou but not, I hope, the heart. Great by itself or ladled over cooked brown rice.

1 tablespoon coconut oil

1 onion, chopped

1/4 cup garlic, chopped (yeah, a 1/4 cup. Got a problem?)

1/4 cup ginger, chopped

1 jalapeno (or 1/4 habanero),chopped

1 large winter squash, diced

2 carrots, chopped

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

1-1/2 teaspoons allspice

4 cups vegetable broth

1 bunch collards or callalloo, chopped into bite-sized bits, or about 3 cups shredded cabbage

juice of 1 lime

1 bay leaf

Heat oil in a soup pot over medium-high heat. Add chopped onion, garlic and ginger and jalapeno. Saute, stirring occasionally, until vegetables soften, about 8 minutes.

Add allspice, chopped squash and chopped carrots. Add greens a handful at a time. Stir until greens just wilt, about 3 minutes.

Add broth and bring heat to high. When broth comes to a boil, add thyme leaves and bay leaf.

Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for half an hour, or until vegetables are tender.

Squeeze in lime juice and season with sea salt and pepper.

Serves 4.

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.

Spin the Bottle

I have for some time been searching for a line by one of the French decadent poets. Baudelaire? Rimbaud? Verlaine? One of them guys. The gist of the citation is, be drunk. On wine. On life. On love. On poetry. But be drunk.

I’ve interpreted “drunk” in this context to mean loose, uninhibited, delighted by, infatuated with. I do not interpret it as yoimashita, Japanese slang for drinking to the point of paralysis. This is how the Japanese drink -- single-mindedly, with a real purpose. . . and the purpose is oblivion. You’ve got to see it in action to appreciate it.

My husband and were at our favorite Tokyo sushi bar and the woman beside us was so red-faced and unstable (which, as I say, is the point), she knocked a whole flask of sake onto my husband. Sober, she would have been proper and Japanese and mortified. Yoimashita, she just laughed.

I’m not a yoimashita drunk, but a cheap and happy drunk. A glass of wine and I’m cheery, then sleepy, then out.

Of course there was the first time I drank sake.

I was college freshman in the company of a friend and a guy on who I had a brain-bending crush. We sat in at a banquette which seemed to me rather grand. They were seniors, madly sophisticated. To wit -- they were eating sushi and drinking sake. I, who had no money and no interest in fish, was drunk and dazzled just being off campus and in their company. I just cheered them on and drank tea. I really like tea. But at some point, they insisted I try sake.

The crush proferred his cup. This seemed far more erotically charged than it needed to. I brought my lips to where his lips had been and took a sip. The sake was warm and viscous and tasted like cotton. Then came the afterburn. I spluttered.

“You don’t sip it,” the friend said. “You knock it back.” He demonstrated.

I tried, but the fumes alone made my eyes tear. This made me appear girlie, and not adorably so.

“It’s just wine,” the crush said.

I tried to man up. I could drink wine.

A waitress was summoned, another little cup produced.

Strictly speaking, sake is not wine. It is not fermented in the same way and has an alcohol content that starts where wine’s ends. I didn’t know that at the time but I enjoyed the toasty sensation it produced when I drank it.

They ordered more sake. I did my best to keep up with them and became fascinated by the banquette’s dark, scratchy upholstery. I caressed it. At one point, I began singing. This signalled to crush and friend I was plastered.

“I’m fine,” I slurred. My teeth were soft. This seemed like it might be a problem, but not now, sometime in the distant future. I was floaty and happy and launched into "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down."

This turned out to be oddly prescient. Though friend and crush fed me to soak up the booze, crush ultimately had to carry me out to the car, flinging me over his shoulder like a sack of spuds.

I did not get disgustingly ill or even hung over. I was young, my body could probably metabolize sheet metal. The crush did not take advantage of me -- I’d remember that part. What I don’t remember is the source of the being drunk quote. Makes me wonder if I might have been yoimashita when I saw -- or imagined -- it.

Whether it was Baudelaire who said it or an inebriated me, being lightly, giddly drunk on is a philosophy I embrace, even though being drunk on life doesn’t always work for me as it should. I worry about the war in Afghanistan, the fizzle of talks in Copenhagen and assorted traumas closer to home. Being drunk, loose, giddy, in love, is something to shoot for, though. Or drink to. Cheers.

Sake-Spashed Millet with Miso and

Gingered Greens and Tofu

Sake-Splashed Millet

1 tablespoon sesame oil

2 tablespoons garlic, chopped

1 cup millet

3 cups vegetable broth, more if necessary

1/2 cauliflower, chopped

1/4 cup miso

1/3 cup sake

Heat sesame oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add chopped garlic and saute for 3 minutes, or until fragrant. Add millet and stir until the millet toasts. Add cauliflower and broth, reduce heat to low and cover. Simmer for 30 minutes, checking progress periodically, Should mixture dry out, add a splash more broth. After half an hour, all the liquid should be absorbed and the millet should have a porridgelike consistency.

Using an immersion blender, food processor or the back of a spoon, puree millet and cauliflower. It should smoothe out and fluff up a bit. Stir in miso and sake and serve.

Serves 4.

Gingered Greens and Tofu

2 tablespoon sesame oil

2 tablespoon garlic, chopped

4 tablespoon ginger, chopped

6 turnips, sliced

1 head of cabbage, shredded or a big bunch of greens, chopped into bits

1 cup vegetable broth

1 pound tofu, diced

4 tablespoons soy sauce

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add chopped garlic and ginger and saute until golden and fragrant, about 5 minutes. Add sliced turnips and coat with oil, stirring for another 3 minutes. Work in greens and stir until just starting to wilt.

Reduce heat to medium, add vegetable broth, tofu and soy sauce. Continue cooking until heated through and greens are tender, about 8 minutes.

Serves 4.

Unintended Consequences

I almost failed high school chemistry because I had a sixth period class, the last of the day, and our instructor was an alcoholic. In her sozzled mind, she’d already taught us the same lesson five times that day and she was crazed and furious because we hadn’t nailed it yet. Also there was the time she allegedly saw a guy spill acid and ripped his pants off “so he wouldn’t burn himself.” Uh-huh.

There was some sort of administrative intervention and another instructor took over, but it was too late for me. As intrigued as I was by chemistry and all its nifty accoutrements and accessories, I was never going to be of a scientific bent. I could neither draw nor fathom the pretty little molecular sequences. Trying -- and failing -- to memorize the period chart made me anxious. But the real problem was I believed in literature, in stories, more than I ever believed in science.

Things are never as simple and elegant as they seem in science. They can’t be reduced to formula. Or if they can be, there are always what Robert Merton (a sociologist, not a scientist) called “unintended consequences,” fallout you hadn’t expected. Side effects. And they’re usually not fun.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark,” Aylmer, “a man of science,” is obsessed with his wife Georgiana, lovely in all ways, save a small hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek. It is the flaw which obsesses Aylmer. He gets so he can’t stand to be with her, because the defect is all he sees. Aylmer develops a serum to remove the birthmark. It works, and Georgiana is left unmarked, physically perfect. And dead. Death is a fairly serious side effect. No coming back from that one, at least not yet. “With so high and pure a feeling,” Aylmer “rejected the best the earth could offer.”

We may not be perfect, Hawthorne was saying, but we’re all we’ve got and we should embrace ourselves -- and each other. Two hundred and fifty years later, Richard Powers, author of neuro-novels like The Echo Maker and Generosity, says pretty much the same thing. A physicist turned novelist, he knows his science and reminds us a blistering crush is no more than a “surges of dopamine. . . spikes of endorphins. . . waves of oxytocin.” We’re just big bags of hormones and brain chemicals. You can tweak the drugs, of course, with other drugs. Or with genetic tinkering. But would you?

Powers did. He’s one of nine people to have his genome mapped (it was a GQ assignment, they paid the hefty tab). Knowledge, though, isn’t always power. In his GQ article, Powers says sure he knows things about himself he never did before. What he came away with, though, is not an undying belief in science, but a rather touching fondness for human imperfection. I find this very cheering, especially lately, when evidence of my imperfection is everywhere.

I’ve had the text for this post, or at least the core of it, for the better part of a week, but was waylaid by deadlines, Thanksgiving and a boring headcold. Besides, I couldn’t think of a recipe to do it justice or what sort of image to do -- some mad scientist thing? A crazed periodic chart? I made myself far nuttier over this than necessary (quel surprise) and in so doing, tried your patience, please forgive. Fate intervened by way of dinner.

Serendipitously, I had a cauliflower in the fridge, and taking it out this evening for the pasta recipe below, was struck by just how brainlike it looks, I had been writing about brain chemistry. Eureka. This is what I always forget -- sometimes unintended consequences can be positive.

I steamed the hell out of the cauliflower, as I do for this recipe. But what was unusual about today’s preparation is that I left the pot on the burner while I was working, thinking to check its progress, oh, any minute now. This I failed to do until I smelled something burning. Had I had a little more presence of mind, I’d have photographed the very impressive blackened pot. In the heat of the moment, as it were, I was more interested in damage control.

When the smoke cleared, I discovered the cauliflower, which had been sitting in the steamer basket within, was not only fall-apart tender, it also bears a sensual, smoky tang. While delicious, I do not suggest trying to replicate this. Unless you have All-Clad and an intrepid nature (dang, they make All-Clad solid -- the pot cleaned up just fine).

Genetic mapping, Powers says, is only a recipe at this point. We don’t know if the recipe produces “a cracker or a cake.” Meanwhile, we should enjoy who we are now. Our flaws make us beautiful. Or at least they make us interesting.

Unintended Consequences Cauliflower Pasta

1 cauliflower

4 teaspoons olive oil*

5 cloves garlic, chopped

1 generous pinch saffron

1 generous pinch red pepper flakes

1/2 cup white wine

8 ounces whole wheat penne

handful fresh chopped parsley

sea salt to taste

Steam cauliflower for 20 minutes or until it’s snowy and falling apart, but not until you burn the pot. No, really, you don’t want to do this.

Heat olive oil in a large pot. Add chopped garlic, saffron and red pepper flakes. Stir for about 4 minutes, until garlic is golden and fragrant. Add steamed cauliflower and mash the whole business. Add the wine and stir to combine, creating a thick sauce. Season with sea salt.

You can puree it into silkiness with an immersion blender or with a food processor, but to me, a rustic imperfection is part of its charm. Either way, it’s delicious.

Make pasta according to package directions. Toss with cauliflower sauce and cook over medium heat until heated through. Top with chopped parsley.

*Note to nonvegans, you can also use brown butter instead of olive oil, which makes things quite luscious indeed. Top with fresh grated Parmesan.

Serves 4.