I always crave seafood on summer weekends, and this afternoon I sautéed a soft-shell crab in lard to top roasted red potatoes with pesto.
(Flour the crab, tap off excess, fry in two tablespoons of fat on high heat for two minutes a side.)
Tempted to make pesto from whatever green winks at me in the kitchen, sprouted sunflower greens (about a cup) with a few walnuts, an eighth of a cup of parmesan, one clove of garlic, and two tablespoons olive oil became a mild paste stirred into warm potatoes.
And the bits left in the pan sizzled with the browning butter that I poured over the crab, sprinkled with Sel Gris, and picked up, letting the juice run down my arm and onto the potatoes that are best eaten without a fork in the sunshine…
I’m about a month late for the Global Voices Book Challenge, where their wide world network of bloggers posted about “a book from a country whose literature [they had] never read anything of before.”
Since I rarely follow directions anyway, I chose to read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of fictional short stories presumably written in Brooklyn about Bengalis and their experiences mainly living outside of India.
You might choose to read this one on the Kindle, since the cover art with red foil serif lettering and gold jewelry awash in the swirling tide (you learn later the gold jewelry represents a significant bangle bracelet) promises a highbrow romance—until you spot the other gold circle on the cover, labeling the work as “a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year.”
The tension between an author celebrated in English-speaking circles, keenly aware of the American literary appetite and an appointed cultural interpreter of Bengali-American lives ripples throughout, pointing up the universality of alcoholism as a family secret, the well-intentioned phone calls with old news about family friends, while staking a curious feminism in the triad centerpiece series that anchors the whole, culminating in protagonist Hema’s indulgent Eat Pray Love-type affair with luscious Italian pasta and childhood crush Kaushik before her steely resolve carries her onto a plane to India and an arranged marriage that will allow her to continue her professorial work studying Etruscans, the culture that bequeathed a lifestyle the Romans perfected into carpe diem. The narrative uses “I” in these three stories as a device to alienate the reader, suggesting the intrusion omniscient narration always carries, and causing discomfort when the “I” becomes particularly intimate, when the Reader knows she/he is not the lover to whom the confessional narration is addressed.
Instances of aborted delivery of media abound and become the true link between the stories–from the wedding placed at the exclusive private boarding school that tucks public phones nicely away from campus visitors to scanning disaster photo credits to ascertain proof of life to an unmailed postcard taken by a child and planted in a garden freshly dug.
The collection opens with a Hawthorne epigraph;
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
And so it is a trifle heavy-handed in the opening story for a child to be planting a letter–in dirt that’s just been turned–written by one generation but not delivered, handled by the generation he begat, and implanted by the youngest generation just taught Bengali words.
Like Hawthorne’s work, Lahiri’s pieces rely on the everyday nightmarish excesses of the American Gothic, on tales told twice (which is to say: beautifully narrated, deeply felt, and tediously redundant) with fastidious framing that works as a device to take us far from what could be a deeper understanding of a group of people she seems to usher into and through a Custom House (the introductory setting for Hawthorne’s famous Scarlet Letter and another reason for the title) that works as a sieve, leaving dry characters straining against cosmopolitanism while Lahiri’s lilting prose laps over the pages—though, as a caveat, I’m spoiled by Global Voices, a model with local bloggers attending to issues in their national purview that works quite well.
If there’s any golden ring to reach for in this overwhelming stream of content, truly local narratives that stand alone and are placed in context alongside narratives from and about other (sometimes nearby, something distant) localities seems to me a bright, shiny one—
I heard a knock at the door, and opened it to find one of the homeowners handing me four mangoes–two that are ripe, two that need another day or so.
We started talking about the coconuts that he harvests from the street, and that led to a machete and a handmade, welded striking implement cracking open coconuts on the porch, draining the milk, admiring the meat (which you score and then scoop out), and an explanation of how to make coconut milk—blend quite a bit of coconut water, a little coconut meat, a date and a dash of cinnamon for sweetness.
As a storm rages outside, intermittently lighting up the cottage, I am drinking it all up and in, sipping the milk (fresh coconut water tastes infinitely better than the packaged product, as you can imagine) and shaking my head at all the years I let a terrible cake experience with sweetened, shredded kind of coconut hold me back.
I prescribe fresh coconut.
If we can imagine meat—the word itself, without its weighty moral baggage and simply referring to these hairy things that hang from tropical trees—as a delightfully firm, silky white layer hidden inside a shell, perhaps spritzed with a little lime, we may all feel a little better…
When I wake in Miami lately, I look out the big windows of the cottage and see mangoes reddening, preparing for their earthly descent.
Outside, I look up–how many mangoes do you count here? (Hint: there are more than five. Click on the picture to see the bigger version.)
Some of them are in clusters, like this small bundle the homeowners are up on ladders twisting off the branches as I write this.
And it’s also the season for meeting friends for dinner on patios–I had a wonderful time last night with Jean Marc, Jay, and Daniel at Bueno Vista Bistro a little past the Design District (Jay’s a great date, and Jean Marc simply glows with cleansed energy and dinner prep ideas),
oh, and for red cars and accelerated driving (adore the way Jay narrated the story behind reclaiming his car here):
Nearby on the warm Miami night, I met Jess for a moment at Sweat Records where the air conditioning was out, but enthused local musicians and artists were in and around—one comparing my dress to a Stereolab album;
for a certain set, Sweat Records is a community space model unique in Miami that connects through poetry readings, music, ironic shirts, shared pie, and Peeps on the craft table for peeps of all sorts—
Note: that’s Sweat Records owner Lolo smiling at the end of the above video.
I’ve been thinking about orbits this week, in memory of Venetia Phair, who named Pluto at age twelve (she died on Monday).
The L.A. Times article that I found through my friend Laura’s Tumblr reports that she “suggested the name to her grandfather at breakfast in 1930.” One can only assume she believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast that day as well.
Here’s to those gifted with naming and to all of us delineating new directional paths near and in reference to each other—like the Super Furry Animals recall the Beach Boys on Pet Sounds, the pet sounds in the later track from SKWBN in this podcast, all of the included at the “Speed of Sound” that I like best—
It’s been a week, and I’ve missed writing here, so this is a longer post below. I hope that all of you are having wonderful days—
Last Wednesday, my friend Dianna showed me the community garden in South Beach. With retro signs (community gardens are quietly beginning to be called Victory Gardens again across the United States) and a convenient location in the South of Fifth section, the garden boasts a waiting list years long and acts as a quiet hub for energetic locals.
An ideal way to find people who share your concern for thoughtful food,
in a way that Dianna’s Mr. Cecil approves.
Thursday night I flew toward another community garden in Portland, Oregon.
After Friday morning pastries from Boulangerie in the Northwest section (skip the croissants and tend toward the more complicated offerings), I unwrapped a pork belly banh mi off the Bunk Sandwiches board—
with perfectly toasted bread, melting pork belly, the right sort of red sauce, cilantro, and julienned carrots, perhaps the best sandwich of my life.
And so I fell silent for part of the Friday drive with my beautiful sister Kat to the Erath and Ponzi vineyards near to Portland,
where even Erath’s Pinot flight (the Reserve Pinot Gris that is only sold at the winery is lovely) was no match for Kat’s homemade cherry kombucha, and we headed out the next morning for other healthful local food at the Portland Farmers’ Market with Reid and their friend Nathania,
Full of families visiting, eating, laughing, the Pickelopolis stand awed younger market shoppers,
baskets of rhubarb waited to be stewed, roasted, and baked into crumbles and pies, jams,
and Ranoculus and purple flowers carried the day.
Close to purple flowers, bundles of purple asparagus waited,
though we opted for local fried asparagus from Burgerville, the In-n-Out chain of the Pacific Northwest, (pick off the batter and dip the spears in the included aioli,)
and crossing the St. John bridge, we picked lettuces and onions from Kat and Reid’s plot in the community garden (I resisted picking dandelions).
The two explain what they’ve planted:
and we peered closer at the potato plants,
peas on a trellis Reid has devised,
soft lettuces glowing in the sun that hits parts of their plot,
and then Reid appreciated the smell of the freshly-dug onions in the backseat all the way to the Oregon coast, where even toddlers skate,
and the trees stand tall,
covered with moss,
and we waded over to the side where smaller waves washed into the shore,
and held forth with a picnic of crusty market bread, herbed chevre, wine, olives, and strawberries,
before returning to Kat and Reid’s apartment in Portland to simmer those morels in cream, sauté fiddlehead ferns and nettles with their onions, and roast parsnips, delighting in the way foods from this moment in the season play off each other.
Sunday, I visited Kat working at Cacao (where she introduced me to a fabulous new chocolate bar that tastes of blood oranges) and sipped drinking chocolate,
and after she closed the shop, we shared a spicy avocado sandwich with bread that did taste alive along with a bowl of beans, quinoa, and kale at Blossoming Lotus.
As yoga practitioners emerged from class in the adjoining studio, we joined them in breathing deeply as sisters and even closer friends…
Yesterday began in a freezer. Well, really a Bikram yoga studio of 105 degrees, but after that a freezer full of farm eggs and tropical fruit at Bee Heaven Farms in South Florida, where I picked up my order:
Another red custard apple for the road—to eat in a few days, as these become very soft when they ripen (the beautiful inside):
and I looked up at the branch above my car at these fruit-like objects of interest.
Driving quickly, lest tree roots grow over my wheels as they had overtaken fences,
white flowers on parts of the stretch made me pull over,
and then my friend Jess and her friend Maya arrived at the cottage with cupcakes. Influenced by icing, we took Jean Marc’s good advice and headed over to Cinco de MiMo, a celebration of that area of Miami.
Recognizing him by his twirling umbrella, we greeted Gene Kelly,
toasted with Tiki punch to local designers in the Upper Eastside Garden:
Then, we wandered to nearby Divine Trash and found same,
secured a vintage getaway vehicle,
to fill with new treasures,
and Jess kept the flower from the garden tucked behind her ear,
as she contemplated a new furniture project,
and baked goods.
Across the street, we took in Vagabond Market
forgoing Indian cuisine inside
to walk past pink flowers,
pass Elvis on stilts,
and sit outside at the Buena Vista Bistro with identical orders of spinach, declaring our intentions to explore other new areas of south Florida as the thermometer goes ever higher…
