September Communion

This month's Communion was a little different than last: a different theme and a mostly different cast. Thanks to Jiwon Park, our sous-chef at Range, the prepping, cooking and serving of dinner was a breeze. At first I was very nervous to have her. Yes, she's my dear friend,but she's also a trained professional. I'm an intuitive cook, but a home-schooled one at that, and even sometimes a very scattered distracted one. Needless to say, I was intimidated. But once she got here and we got to chopping and chatting, it was very comfortable. Jiwon and I talked about our families, hers in South Korea, mine in Venezuela; about our growing up in very different places, and about how, around the same time and the same age, we both moved to San Francisco. Our lives now converged in this kitchen, around my red island work table, with her providing amazing insight into cooking techniques and Korean culture.
Our line-up included Lisa the Peanut, still with Burning Man sand stuck in her hair, and Susita, my dear friend and roommate, who before going to work at her posh Italian restaurant, helped fold napkins and set the dining room table. And Rebekah, The Petaler, who took pity on us and donated an exquisite floral arrangement. So this time, we were ready ahead of schedule, set and ready to go, vestidas y alborotadas.

The theme: Change. How we have coped with it, fought against it, or simply rolled with flow. What was the outcome of change---a success, a defeat, or still the source of bitterness? I wanted to hear what other people called a considerable change and wanted to learn of how they managed it. More specifically, I wanted to learn of those steps we take to entice change: those steps forward, or back, that create a new path to follow.

Our first course was a white bean crostini with basil and shaved parmesan that I played with a few months ago when making a white bean stew. We served it with a simple arugula salad and some plump, meaty olives tossed in lemon juice.

Along came stories of leaps of faith, of when we had no clue of what to do, but jumped anyway. Most stories included a geographical move but in the heart of these tales was how each of us had decided to follow our own path, despite what parents, school, or a lover said. There was as much agency in action than in inaction, too: just as one of us jumped on a plane to Argentina to follow her heart, another refused an private liberal arts education for the massive experience at Cal Berkeley. (Go Bears!)

Second course: a purée of spinach soup with garlic butter, and tales of catalyst events. If I can digress a bit here, this is one of the best soups I've ever made. I've inherited it from my Tía Loly, who runs her own cake business, Aurora, in Caracas.

Sautée onions, garlic, a carrot and a celery stalk until translucent.
Add about 5 cups of water.
Bring to a boil and add cleaned and trimmed spinach until wilted.
Season with salt, pepper and a dash of nutmeg.
Purée in a blender, and unless you're serving immediately, quickly chill over an ice bath. I never knew that trick before, but apparently all food professionals know that. Thanks, Jiwon!

The butter: roast two heads of garlic in a 350 oven for about 45 minutes.
Use room-temperature unsalted butter cut into cubes. Place roasted garlic cloves and butter in a food processor until smooth. Add parsley if desired. Then roll onto saran wrap and make one-inch wide cylinders. Refrigerate until hardened. To serve, just take wrap off, slice, and place onto whatever you're serving!

But back to the confessions, it was curious to see that a lot of us understood the catalyst event to be the same one for which we had had a leap of faith. For me, this sparked a cascade of doubts: What am I doing here? How terribly have I failed at Communion if the first two questions enticed the same answer? Unfortunately, this bone-shaking insecurity lasted a good part of the evening and it kept me from really listening to the rounds of anecdotes shared. I've spoken to each diner since then and they continue to assure me that lessons ran far and wide and that conversation was animated. What a shame I missed it. In a way, that sort of mental and emotional disconnection is what prompted me to come up with Communion in the first place. I'm happy to be reminded of the crucial need to let go and listen and see where the conversation turns.

Our main course: a citrus pork shoulder with a corn and zucchini ragú and pieces of good advice. For a few weeks, I played with the pork shoulder, which Venezuelans call pernil, and deviced a delicious ratio of acid to sweet in the marinade: a cup each of pineapple and orange juices, an onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, bunch of cilantro, about a tablespoon of cumin and a generous pinch of salt.

The handed-down advice made me think of a Venezuelan saying: más sabe el diablo por viejo, que por diablo---meaning age and experience have more to teach than the devil himself. Despite that all the pieces of advice came to each of us in different times and different contexts, I felt that all of them were pertinent to my life at the moment. I don't think I can repeat them any better than the picture below: (And I love Jiwon's Korean handwriting!)

As we indulged in dessert, a fleur de lait ice cream with espresso granitas that I experimented with so much it deserved its own post, we spoke of "best mistakes"---those actions that seemed like a bad idea at the time or those that were a good idea but didn't turn out the way we expected, but somehow all worked out in the end. For me, it was a spring break trip to New York City to interview for a summer internship at a non-profit, when in reality what I really wanted was to be near a man whom I thought at the time was the love of my life. What happened? I didn't get the internship, and the man told me we were speaking different languages. I was the most defeated I'd felt in my life, both at work and at love. On my way back, I was the only one in the plane sobbing inconsolably, but in a moment of glancing out the window, looking at NYC fade away, I thought that not getting what I wanted was exactly what I needed.
In the midst of such bittersweet lessons, good thing there is ice cream!

For our final course we served an Italian sheep's milk Nocino Pecorino and a 3 sister's Serena, a californian cow's milk cheese, with fig preserves and my very own walnut raisin bread. We talked of sliding-door moments, or those where we found ourselves at a fork in the road, where whichever direction leads to a very different outcome. Doesn't that include everyday when we decide to get out of bed?

To close, we asked diners to fill in the blank: I'll be more [___] from now on. I think reminiscing on what we've been through, despite how difficult it was, inspired our answers: appreciative of sorrow, happy, open to all invitations, active/risk-taking/buck-wild, honest (in totality), relaxed/compassionate, loving/honest. I want to be more of all of those from now. The key issue here is not what, but how, we get what we want.

Next Communion is Tuesday October 13th.

thoughts on pernil

Hmmm....pernil....aka pork shoulder, or pork shoulder butt, comes from the top of the pig's forelegs, like in the way of ham, only the latter comes from the animal's hind legs. It is a really affordable cut, with lots of fat marbling that translates into moisture and flavor during cooking. It is also a staple of Venezuelan feasts, and I learn it is as well for Cubans and Puerto Ricans. Despite having very similar approaches and flavors, they are all very different. Puerto Ricans add spicy peppers; Venezuelans, oregano. Cubans add orange juice, Puerto Ricans, a blend of lemon, lime and orange juices, as well as a rub of adobo. I remember eating it with a sauce of garlic, oregano, sugar, some moscatel wine and worcestershire. I figure there is no right or wrong answer here, just as long as there is at least three hours to marinate, at least four more in the oven and the result is fork-tender. Taking cues from a variety of sources, including this month's Bon Appetit issue, Serious Eats (a fantastic food blog) and my memory, I'm attempting to materialize my own vision of pernil.

Rub the pork with a lemon, salt and pepper and let sit in a roasting pan.
Purée in a blender: couple of cloves of garlic, a small onion, a cup of fresh cilantro, a whole jalapeño, a teaspoon of cumin, with a cup each of orange juice and pineapple juice. Season with salt, pepper and a couple of dashes of red wine vinegar.
Pour liquid marinade on pork, cover with saran wrap and refrigerate for at least three hours, or preferably overnight.
Preheat oven to 450. Covered with tin foil, bake for one hour. Bring temperature down to 400, and let the guy hang out in the oven for about 4 hours. Everyone seems to agree that the desired temp of the meat should be around 180. But I don't have a thermometer, so I'm pretty much eye-balling it here.

(Bad cook disclosure: after the initial hour in the oven, this bad cook here laid down to read, aka rest her eyes, or otherwise known as taking a mid-afternoon nap, and thus left the pernil unsupervised. I woke, with an hour left on my timer, and the meat falling off the bone. All in all, the pernil was in the oven for three hours, and it seemed plenty.)

Remove foil and cook uncovered for about 20 more minutes for the meat to brown.
Move the pernil to a serving platter to rest. Transfer the pan juices to a small saucepan, add a dash of white wine and reduce. Strain the solids and reduce the cleared broth by half.

I served this with a succotash-esque side: leeks, shallots, garlic, yellow and green zucchini squash, sweet white corn and a few cherry tomatoes. Alone, the pernil was a little too acidic, too bright. I'd suggest an extra dash of salt and omitting the red wine vinegar in the marinade. But together, pernil and corn ragu, are a pretty amazing match and helped set the tone for the evening to come. Hmmm, pernil!

1st Communion: a night of memories and building intimacy

What a night, what a night! After a lot of last minute work which included rolling out fresh pasta as well as setting the dining room, Jacob, Lisa and I had almost everything ready, except my makeup, by the time our first guest arrived. This first communion was a little different than I'd intended: only one of us was a stranger to the rest. Out of ten invited guests, only three rsvp'd; the rest were foodie friends who'd volunteered as understudies. So, the atmosphere was more of a themed dinner party than the social experiment I had planned. Given the pun of having it be a "first" communion, I decided the overarching theme would be about our childhood. I thought it would be appropriate to explore how the kids we once were informs the adults we are today.

We started off with a purée of eggplant soup, a dollop of basil goat cheese, and a round of everyone's earliest, or most poignant memories. Amazingly, a lot of them included a body of water, but most included a trauma, or a distressed feeling. Feelings of betrayal by parents who'd promised they'd catch us, and didn't. Feelings of desperation when we were in some sort of medical emergency. And then, there were the memories which we couldn't recall, but we'd inherited. It led us to ask: what makes a memory, or rather, a childhood memory? A lot of us remembered an early moment, as early as being three or four, that most of us can't really remember, but have had imprinted on our consciousness by the adults who witnessed the event.

Second course: my broiled chicken with an olives, lemon and bread salad, along with tales of what did we want to be when we grew up. Baseball players, taxi drivers, seamstresses, models, mad scientists, absolutely nothing, or a variety of things depending on the day. What drove our desires was an interesting exploration: can girls be smart, and can they invent a time machine? What are boys supposed to be? Is reaching adulthood even a possibility? The social contexts and the gendered expectations of our desires were a good topic of conversation: what does city dwelling, single parent households, suburbia, queerness, or being an only child do to how we develop desires or long term goals?

Third course: homemade tagliatelle with Jacob's lamb ragú, and stories of our thirteenth birthday. A lot of us didn't remember that specific year, but could remember a few years before or after. My 13th birthday was February 4th, 1992, which in Venezuelan politics is the day our current president, Hugo Chávez, tried a Coup-d'état. A very primal resentment sprung out that day when my birthday party was canceled due to a state's curfew. I think that is the day where I became conscious of a being a political being, or at least living in a grander political context.

Good thing that by the time our fourth course was due, everyone had had plenty of wine. The topic: first crushes and early heartaches with melon and lime sorbet. Funny thing was, the full names of strangers buried away by decades were being shouted out at the dinner table. Detailed descriptions of that tight knot in one's chest when being broken up with, or that guilty feeling when breaking up with someone. Some stories of first sexual experiences came up, like the Norwegian woman in Sri Lanka getting her way with a thirteen-year-old, or the gift-wrapped condom for a seventeenth birthday.

Our cheeseplate was comprised by a Roaring Forties, a tasmanian cow's milk blue cheese that was both dolce and stinky, and a Sottocenere Perla Grigia, a soft piedmontese cow's milk cheese, with my perfected batch of walnut raisin bread and a trio of apricot, fig and pear jams. We discussed our first drunkenness, but you'll have to forgive me, dear readers, since the only detail I remember from that conversation was that I myself was now really drunk, and was contemplating the irony of having to recount my first drunkenness amidst my most recent.
Thanks to my friend e.m.a.e.l, the perfect closing prompt asked diners to fill in the blank: I want more of [...] in my life. Adventure, consistency, fun/honesty/money, simplicity, intimacy. The best one was not written on the menu, but rather scribbled onto the table, hidden away by breadcrumbs, candlewax, and water stains: CONNECTION. I feel like the intimate stories and memories we shared did just that, build and strengthen the connection, intimacy, and honesty among us at the table.
Next Communion is Tuesday, September 8th!

prelude to 1st Communion

Today is our first Communion. I'm pretty excited, but also pretty nervous. I rose at 730 (which NEVER happens) after dreaming that I had forgotten to marinate the meats, despite doing it last night before bed. Soup is stewed, croutons are just out of the oven. A new batch of the walnut-raisin bread is rising, and a last perfected batch of sorbet is in the ice cream maker. I still have to do a goat cheese-basil paste, but will do that almost to dinnertime. I'm still reading on how to candy mint leaves, but think I may be overdoing it [scoff, overachiever.]
Jacob Brownwood, aka booh, is in charge of the main course and of picking two cheeses for dessert. I had a blast with him at WineHouse last Friday, trying to pick wine. California, Italy or Rhone? How much splurging can we do? And where can we find a good, but affordable, bottle of vin santo? Lisa 'the peanut' is our designated server, but I think she'll forget to clear courses once she's in the midst of conversation. And Molly D.W, my coworker at Range, is our confession instigator, or mistress of ceremony.
And Ceremony is exactly what has been on my mind lately: the attitudes and behaviors that ceremony and ritual entice. The performative aspects of ceremony that are acted out on the table. The table then, as a stage or an altar. But where is the line between ceremony and protocol? The decorum of ceremony is not of interest here, but the human component to rites of celebration. Etiquette is a social construction; ritual may be a human necessity.
I'm really excited to see what sort of stories come up. We have five confirmed guests (not all of them strangers) who have been or are currently involved in the food industry. This first Communion is certainly a sort of initiation rite for me, as I think a lot of ideas will get fleshed out and/or flushed out.
Next up will be the results...

going back to bread and back to childhood

I remember when my mother would make bread when I was growing up. She would make these "buns" (and would call them so, in all its Anglo pronunciation) that were perfect for sliders. She mostly made them of whole wheat and with lots of oat bran, but sometimes they would be sweet, glazed with butter and sprinkled with sugar, como un pan dulce.
I remember when she would make a table with the buns, ham, cheese, mayo and other fixings, inviting us to make our own snack. She was one of those mothers who, despite having a really protective streak and watchful eye, never really over-mothered us. We (my siblings and I) would not have anyone to blame but ourselves if our laundry was not done, or if we didn't have a snack at school, since she did teach us how to use the washer and would provide everything we needed to make lunch. But I digress. Back to the buns, I would make myself two or three small sandwiches, filled with jamón, tomato and mustard. When I'd unpack my lunchbox at school I noticed two things:
1- the other kids who ate sandwiches had square white bread.
1.1- the other kids eating white bread would blatantly make fun of my weird looking bun and call my family 'poor' for my mother having to bake us bread.
2- the rest of the kids' lunches were made of masa: arepas o empanadas, staples of venezuelan street-food breakfasts.
I gotta admit I felt self-conscious and conflicted because I wished I was eating either the white bread or the empanada, for either way, I would have escaped the scrutiny of my peers. But I wouldn't have wanted my mother to stop baking because I liked it when she did: my sister and I would help her roll of small pieces of dough onto a tray to let them rise and she'd let us eat the bread right out of the oven. I know now that baking was one of my mother's most intimate ways to show us her love. (Kudos to my mom for not stopping baking despite us telling her that her buns made us social outcasts.) I don't really remember when I finally got over the shame of bringing homemade bread to school, but I'm sure there is more here to unpack that merits a session with a therapist, not on a blog entry. But the two things that are clear for me here are that, one, bread has huge emotional associations for me, and two, kids are cruel.

Despite having been raised by a pretty dexterous cook and baker (my momma,) I've always felt iffy about baking because it's more of an exact science, with less room to maneuver in case of a screw-up. But in the last few months I've been playing with quick-rise breads, no yeast necessary, loads of butter, aromatic and a final consistency that dances between being bread and cake. I've played with zucchini (since i had lots leftover after making the zucchini white bean stew), banana, carrot. I've been overall pretty pleased with the results, although I have taken note of colleagues' comments on the effects of over-kneading and over-baking.

My challenge this week was a sweet, yet savory, nutty bread that we could serve with the cheese course for this week's Communion. I got this recipe off the Bon Appétit Cookbook: Walnut-Raisin bread. Despite using yeast (which made me a little nervous) it was super easy to make, and delicious: it calls for wheat and rye flour, oat bran, cocoa, toasted walnuts, raisins, butter, milk and honey. After a couple of hours for the dough to rise, it took 45 minutes in a 400 degree oven, and voilá! Soon the whole house was permeated with that baking scent, bringing me back the memories of my childhood.
After I cut two slices of the slightly black/brown bread, I took notice of that homemade feel that commercial breads will never attain. It reminded me again of those buns my mom used to make, with their dense consistency and grainy texture. I made myself a ham, tomato and mustard sandwich, like the ones I fixed myself when I was a child, and felt myself getting filled by nostalgia and regret. Nostalgia, for I missed being on the receiving end of such a loving gesture; regret, for ever having felt shame for eating a sandwich that was so good.

sorbetti bonanza!

Thank god for department stores' mid-year sales! Kitchen devices prices are seldom low enough to warrant any sort of splurging. The store was jammed packed with desperate shoppers. Crowds were mad and pushy; salespeople, inpatient. Good thing I knew exactly what I was looking for: in and out in 15 minutes, $45 later.
Meet my 1 1/2 quart ice cream maker. Just like the one my mom has. And if i can make ice cream the way my mom does, I'm in business. I had already purchased The Perfect Scoop, an ice cream recipe book for beginners, and was already fantasizing of all the amazing frozen goodies I would be making.
I gotta confess though, I don't really have a sweet tooth. Pies, tarts, molten cakes, even eclairs can parade in front without me salivating. Ice creams are good, but only on a cone, and even then, only if the cookie is good. But, perhaps this is something I have developed as a result from growing up in hot-ass Venezuela, sorbets (helados de agua) have always had a special place in my heart. Whenever the ice-cream cart would make it to my street, I would (after begging my mom to give me money) run screaming "!heladero! !heladero!," and dig through his dry-ice box on wheels for "manzanitas," popsicles made of tart green apple (and a lot of yellow #5,) or a "bati-bati," a grape-(or tutti-frutti?) like concoction served in a plastic cone with a surprise piece of gum in the bottom that was like my childhood crack.

This time I want to make all those sorbets that make my mouth water; the ones that would actually quench your thirst. What sort of flavors do we crave when it's hot outside? (The tricky part here is that San Franciscan summer is never warm enough.) Lime, for sure. Watermelons and blackberries. Peaches and nectarines, but I do think they'd benefit from a little cream, no? The possibilities are endless as long as there is water and sugar.

Given my inexperience with sorbets, and with my new machinery, I got three amazing orange flesh melons and their scent is intoxicating. My strategy: test, test, test, until the result is the desired one. Yesterday, I followed every instruction on the recipe. I used 1/2 cup of sugar, pinch of salt, no water, and a tablespoon of lemon juice. Purée until smooth, chill for at least two hours, and pour onto frozen bowl of ice cream machine. Within 30 minutes, the texture was smooth and malleable. But, oh, too sweet! It's been in the freezer since then, in an airtight container, but it is unscoopable. Despite having a warm scooper, the sorbet crumbles, and does not fall onto the plate in beautiful smooth round scoops. More like haphazard chunks in a pathetic attempt to make a half-scoop...

Today, I will make a second batch: no sugar, maybe another tablespoon of lemon juice. Maybe my airtight container isn't airtight after all. I'm raiding the internet and every pastry chef I know for suggestions. All I'm saying is that it better work, 'cause my all-time-favorite sorbet flavor is on the menu in 11 days...

tryout recipes: some sucesses, mostly flops

I just made a cannellini bean and green chard stew, with carrots, zucchini and thyme. I've been reading loads of recipes about it, and took what I liked best about each of them. Ross Parsons, food critic at the Los Angeles Times in his book How to Read a French Fry, recommends baking the beans in a dutch oven in teaspoon of salt. He lists garlic, bacon, carrots and Swiss chard. Barbara Fairchild in the Bon Appetit Cookbook mostly lists canned beans, (but does reccomend soaking overnight if you use dried beans) but goes for classic flavors with sage, bacon and plum tomatoes. The Silver Spoon asks for canned beans, eggplant, bell peppers, tomatoes, parsley and basil. My grandma swears by pre-soaking the beans overnight and cooking on very low heat for at least two hours; she would add ham, carrots, chiles, sugar, cilantro.
I decided to loosely follow instructions. I soaked the dried beans for 24 hours; drained, replaced with cold water, brought to a rapid boil, reduced heat, and cooked over medium-low heat for about an hour and 15 minutes.
(In the meantime, I tackled a sanding project that was way overdue. I finally got a hold of a heavy-duty sander and went to town in my backyard. I have officially, and successfully, sanded, primed and finished a janky-looking shelf. The problem here is that my attention was definitely in the sanding, and I have to admit I forgot about the cooking beans on the stove....)
Back in the kitchen, on another pot, I sauteed leeks, shallots, garlic until translucent. In went about 8 chopped Nantes carrots (that had about five more days of fridge life left,) 2 zucchini squash, the chopped stalks from the chard, and 4 thyme springs. Cooked covered for about 10 minutes over medium-low heat. (By then, the beans were overcooked! Falling apart from their shell, the stock was clumpy and starchy from the beans breaking apart.)
Feeling disappointed and a little defeated, I still added the beans along with some of their stock and simmered for about 5 minutes. The result: not the gorgeous stew I had imagined, but something more like baby food. The remaining of the beans went into the freezer for a future use (or earthquake food.) Although pretty flavorful, the stew went right into the blender. Too thick for a soup, but perhaps good enough for a contorni? (I can see this going with some venezuelan-style pork butt---pernil.) Even better, I spread onto toast of a seeded baguette, added some julienned fresh basil, grated some parmesano and sprinkled some coarse salt. Served next to some mizuna drizzled with balsamic, there we had lunch!

The lessons:
Soak beans just overnight. 24 hours is overkill.
Keep an eye on the stove!
Don't overmix the stew ---the ladel bumps against the beans, bruising their shells.
Add the zucchini much, much later.
More salt, maybe lemon zest to serve?