A Blithe PALATE

The taste of tamarind.

The last time I ate tamarind was 1975. 

"White Christmas" began playing on the radios.  It was the signal that the evacuation of America personnel had begun.  Once Robert's family realized that the fall of their country was imminent, they and thousands of others rushed towards the American Embassy.  Marines fought to keep the gates closed against the panicked tide of people desperate for the freedom their side of the gate represented.  Hands and arms reached towards them, imploring; native voices pleaded with them to open the gates.

Robert was 11 years old.  He was at the gate with his mother, his father and his two sisters.  The scene was one of madness, of chaos.  The Marines were allowing only certain people in, those with the right credentials, those who had worked for the Americans, those whose lives were at risk if they stayed behind.  When the gates opened to permit an embassy worker and her family through, Robert's mother took her chance:  she knew the woman walking through the embassy gates.  Impelled by the weight of the crowd, the gates bent momentarily inward and Robert's mother laid her hands on his shoulders and pushed her son through the gates.  She screamed to the woman on the other side, begging her to take Robert.

It was the last time Robert felt his mother's hands for fifteen years.  When next they saw one another....they were strangers.

As children he and I played together but when I met him years later, when we were in our late twenties and early thirties respectively, I found nothing in him that resembled my childhood playmate.  Of course, there were allowances for maturity; he was a man and had put away his childish toys.  But my mother and I spoke about it --

"He's cold," I said to her, a little dismissively after he and I spent an afternoon roaming through the National Gallery.  I warm to everyone.  But nothing in his manner had invited familiarity.  On a sunny June day, his coolness had washed over our excursion like an Arctic wind.

"His mother says he's very aloof," said Mom.  Then gently:  "But he wasn't raised by her.  He lived with other people.  People who weren't his family."  A little pensively:  "I don't think they treated him well."

There's a memory I have, of being at one of the refugee camps in Guam and accompanying Mom and Dad when they found Robert with the Embassy family who had taken charge of him.  Being but five I had no concept of the enormity of his situation; I could not comprehend that Robert was essentially orphaned and dependent on the kindness of strangers.  We were everywhere surrounded by shell-shocked refugees and survivors of a country no longer extant.  My mother embraced him and asked him questions.  He reassured her that he was all right.  That family moved to Seattle while we settled on the east coast so we did not see him.

"Why didn't we take Robert with us?" I asked my mother.

Because she had the five of us, ranging in age from 5 to 2 months old.  Because she and my father had no idea what would happen next.  Like the thousands of their fellow refugees, they were without home, without country and without a plan.

I wonder if I could have made the same decision Robert's mother made:  to offer her son a free life, but one devoid of his family's love.  My father once said to Uncle Mark:  "It's worth it Mark, it's worth it to try for freedom."  But I think too about what my life has been, embraced by the comfort of a large family; encircled in my mother's arms; and when I am ninety, I will still remember how my father's hands felt on my shoulders as he leaned down to kiss my head.

I bought some tamarind at a farmer's market.  And this is what I remembered when I tasted it:  there were tamarind trees outside the complex where my family lived.  When we were children, Robert's parents would come to visit my parents and he and I would  pick tamarind pods off the street and split them open, eating the sweet, acidic fruit.  How bittersweet that taste now, how profound with loss.

In my son's room, I hold my sleeping boy close to me and make him all sorts of promises...It's hard not to cry.

The Torchon of Foie Gras

Foie gras:  moulard liver.  A lobe barely edible.  Gentlemen, we can rebuild it.  We have the technology. We have the capability to make the household's first torchon of foie gras.  This lobe will be that torchon.  Better than it was before.  Better, stronger, faster....or rather, better and certainly yummier.

What sort of dumbass buys foie gras, sticks it in the freezer and forgets about it for a year?

(Raising hand).

Last week, I was clearing out my freezer to make room for one of my Christmas gifts, a Kitchen Aid ice cream maker attachment (more on that later), and pulled out a bag of Grade B foie gras, still sealed in vacuum pack.  What sort of brain wattage have I lost during my pregnancy and motherhood that I didn't even remember I had a lobe of foie gras?  And for God's sake, how long had it languished in the Narnian hinterland of my freezer?

I brought the bag in to show Hubby.  "Is it still edible?" he inquired.  Good man.  Thinking with his stomach.

Apparently vacuum sealed foie gras can survive freezing, but not for more than a year, and even then, the foie loses cellular composition, resulting in a less refined, less creamy texture.  At least that's what several websites I consulted reported. 

But you can't throw away foie -- apart from the wastefulness, it's also a Dack problem.  (This is a situation in which there is no good way to dispose of what you have at hand, coined by a former friend, who in his case was trying to figure out how best to dispose of his deceased friend's cremated ashes, which were stuck to his hand after he spread them in a field where the two of them had grown up.  "What do you do with your best friend's remains on your hands?  Wipe them  on your jeans?  Wash it off with soap and water?"  A conundrum.  I digress.)

So...for years now, I've wanted to make a torchon of foie gras but I've lacked the fortitude to do so.  I generally fall back on the slice and sear method of serving foie gras.  But I was inspired by Carol, who writes the brilliant French Laundry at Home blog and thought, okay, why not try it?  What's the worst that can happen? Apart from rendering an entire lobe of foie gras into a useless bowl of fat?  Besides that, what could happen?  I mean, it's already been in the freezer for crying out loud.

Keller's recipe in the French Laundry cookbook, like the man and his cooking, is deceptively simple.  It looks so effortless, so elegant on the page.  Then you read the recipe and you realize this is a four day process and some steps aren't too clearly articulated.  Or maybe they are and I'm just an idiot.  Day 1, the foie is rinsed, patted dry, then soaked in milk for 24 hours to draw out any blood. 

Day 2 is deveining.  One word:  eeeew.  EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW.  But devein I did, removing every damn blood vessel I could find.  The lobe was completely demolished as I went about this exercise, and I chose to blindly believe Keller, who assures readers that the foie is like Play-Doh -- it can be reassembled.  After deveining, the foie massacre on the kitchen counter was marinated in a salt/sugar/pepper and pink salt mixture, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap, and left overnight in the fridge. 

Day 3, reassembly.  Yeah, Keller's being truthful:  you can reshape this sucker.   Using parchment paper, I  wound the marinated foie into a thick roll, then wrapped it in cheesecloth and prepped it for poaching.  Now, Keller's recipe called for chicken stock (or water).  I didn't have any chicken stock available, but I did have turkey stock, leftover from a turkey pot pie the week before (at one point, I was struck by the thought that if I did have chicken stock, I could mix it with the turkey stock, and by poaching the foie gras in the mixture, I'd have a turducken in spirit if not in letter...).  Hubby happened to be passing by as I was getting ready to poach and I told him to give me a ninety minute SECOND (ed. note:  SECONDS!  NOT MINUTES!  SECONDS! [thanks Gigi]) countdown.  Now, I have to admit:  I thought ninety minutes seconds wasn't going to be enough time to actually cook anything.  But as the foie roll lay in the simmering pot, and fat began to bubble to the surface, I had a moment's panic that the lobe was about to render completely into fat in the turkey stock and was on the verge of pulling it out when Hubby admonished me to believe in Keller.  Okay, so we stuck it out for a full minute and half, then I plunged it into an ice bath.  Amazingly, though the foie lost a bit of volume, it was still relatively intact.  Next step, roll in kitchen towel, reshaping, remolding, re-rolling and tightening, then stringing it up in the fridge overnight.  I can't begin to describe how I had to reshape atomic molecules in my impossibly packed fridge to make room so that the foie could be strung up.

Day 4: eating!  Unrolled, the foie was gray from oxidation, but we cut thick slices and used a round cutter to get at the lush pinkish interior (I saved the scraps to make a foie gras ravioli.  Keller's recipe calls for pickled cherries but I'm not fond of them so I made pickled strawberries instead.  I also made the brioche ("Hubby!  Hubby!  I made brioche!  Look how beautiful it looks!"  HUBBY:  "Great.  Congratulations.  You made something people have been making for a thousand years.").

I imagine that side by side with fresh foie there might be noticeable flavor differential but considering we haven't eaten foie in quite a while, it was absolutely delicious. 

It's not likely I'll be making this again any time soon, but at least I now know that I can make a torchon.  Hopefully next time it won't be a year after I've frozen a lobe of foie gras.  Oy.

If the world ends, we should eat well.

I'm cleaning out my email box and came across this email I wrote to my sister a few years ago:

Last night I had a dream about the world ending in a tsunami.  There weren't enough boats and ships to save people.  I declined to get into a boat, refusing to leave Emil.

The scene then shifted a pseudo New York/San Francisco world that frequently inhabits my dreams -- every time I dream about it, more streets and elements are added so it's being built slowly; maybe when I'm 99 the full city will have been built -- and in this city, I met you for dinner on Thomas Keller's boat because you said that if the world were to end, we should eat well.

So if the world ends, I suppose I should be comforted in knowing that Thomas Keller will still be cooking.

Breakfast with Puggle: English Muffins

Puggle is a human alarm clock.  One who rarely changes his wake up times.  For a while, we were enjoying sleep to 8:00 am.  Then one day he decided to start observing Puggle Daylight Savings Time and began waking at 7:00 am.  A few weeks after that, he shifted Puggle Standard Time again and wake up call became 6:00 am.

Imagine waking every morning with no snooze button.  But, it's hard to be grumpy when your wake up call is a smile and a happy stream of gurgling and cooing chatter.  He's a morning person, my Puggle.  Alas.

After getting dressed, Pug cruises around the kitchen in his walker while I prepare breakfast, which of late has been yogurt, and waffles, or more regularly, English muffins.

I'm deeply fond of English muffins -- so much so that after Pug was born, I was eating about 6 a day (they and Thin Mints comprised breakfast and lunch most days).  My poison of choice -- Thomas' English muffins, but only because I'd eaten them since childhood.  It wasn't until I sent Hubby out to the store one day that I discovered other, BETTER muffins.  And soon after that, I thought, surely someone has a recipe?  And of course some one did -- one of my dearest and favorite bloggers -- the wonderful Barbara at Winos and Foodies.

Her recipe is as easy as making the dough the night before and waking up to deflating, cutting and shaping the dough, then popping them in on a griddle.  Twenty minutes later, you have perfect English muffins --complete with nooks and crannies!  -- ready to be slathered with butter.  They can also be lightly toasted. 

Puggle likes his English muffins plain and warm -- no butter.  We sit at the dining room table and he waits patiently as I tear little pieces for him -- or I'll hold out a bit and he'll do his T-Rex impression:  he sinks in with his brand spanking new teeth (four on top, four on bottom) and yanks his head to one side, neatly tearing the bread.  Seriously, who knew that having a child was such a comedy show?

It being winter, it's still somewhat pinkish when we start our breakfast, but as we progress, the sun comes up and we watch the day brighten together and he swings his little feet against his chair as he eats and gabs at me, sounding out noises that will soon be words. 

I have so many mornings left in my life to sleep late; but how many of these mornings will I have to share breakfast with Puggle?  Happiness doesn't know how to be tired.