Dancing Tikka to Cheek

The Elephant and Butter descended into New York the other night for a dandyish bachelor party involving fancy outfits at a horse race track, feasting on Korean barbecue, and twenty males stripping down to very abbreviated cut-off jean shorts and wearing them around midtown Manhattan. I took leave of the various forms of juvenilia sometime after midnight, and walked up to Grand Central Station, the God-sized main room of which never fails to make me giddy.

The night prior, it was some of my beloved chicken tikka masala that made me giddy. We have some history, the tikka masala and I. A few years ago, I ate it a couple of times a week. When I moved to the east coast, I wrote a letter to my favorite Indian restaurant back in San Francisco reminiscing about the many virtues of their rendition of the dish. (They never replied.) On a trip back to the west coast once, I persuaded the same restaurant to give me a couple of their tikka masala bowls for sentimental reasons. Once, tikka masala gave me very serious food poisoning. More recently, I got my brother-in-law hooked on it, and after he passed away we served it at his funeral reception. 

The other night I sat on the floor with a bowl of take-out tikka masala, and had communion. It was amply spiced, and by the time the bowl had been emptied I felt like my entire head was emanating hot rays of tikka masala presence. Which is how I prefer my head to feel. 

The Pork Ball Oath

On occasion, The Elephant and Butter takes a break from negligibly-useful rambling, and actually deigns to provide instruction on how to cook a particular dish. This is one of those times.  

A few days ago -- the holiday, actually -- I reprised a pork ball recipe I'd devised (as far as I know) a few weeks earlier. Goes like this:

• 1 lb. of trustworthy ground pork
  
• 1 onion, diced
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• fresh ginger, grated
• a whole lot of curry powder
• cayenne 
• chopped cilantro
• salt
• olive oil
• fresh lemon juice

All you have to do is mix the first eight ingredients, create some balls, and douse them with olive oil. Then put them on a grill and drip lemon juice on them as they cook. This is basically a variation of kofta. The planet earth, too, is basically just a variation of kofta.

The Cosmology of Sloppy Joes

And now, the stunning return of cosmic auditory food programming. From time to time, The Elephant and Butter hopes to interview noteworthy figures in the culinary world. It's important to recognize and herald personal knowledge, I think. Recall that Julia Child, in the early history of "The French Chef," cut from her kitchen in Cambridge to Simone Beck's kitchen in rural France to show how Simcha handled a particular type of pastry dough for a spinach turnover (episode: "The Spinach Twins").

And now, we shall cut to a subject-matter expert on the Sloppy Joe. The history of this unpretentious sandwich is not fully known, but the savvy gourmand interviewed provides some possible answers:

The Recline of the Uncle

The Elephant and Butter has been on a special uncle assignment in the Colorado portion of the country. Children have been wrestled to the point of delirium. Vanilla pancakes have been cooked. Favorite colors and animals have been declared. Dadaist songs have been devised and sung con gusto on a barely tune-able toy guitar. Picnics have been staged. A three-year old has been taught the phrase "East Coast media bias." A six-year old has alleged that the uncle's wardrobe is repetitive.

And then, during the glorious time of the nap, the uncle becomes recumbent on a hammock with a bowl of cherries from the farmers' market, and he spits pits every which way while looking up through the flutter of some cottonwood trees.

[Note: That last line originally read "a cottonwood tree," but the six-year old found out I was writing partially about her, and asked me to read the entry aloud. When I got to the last line, she said, "Make it trees, not tree." So I did.]

Butter vs. Butter

I've been thinking about milk fat more than usual these days. What I've been thinking is that I love it. Having read recently that the French make butter with a higher percentage of fat, I decided to buy some the other day. Then, for the sake of comparison, I dropped by Cook Farm in Hadley, MA, and purchased some of their butter, too, which had been produced by the following holsteins:

Notice the come-hither look of cows. Very flirty, those cows.

Inside the farm stand, I asked the girl behind the counter if she knew the percentage of milk fat in her butter, and she regarded me as if I had just said something deeply immaterial. Farm girls know what's what.

A few days later I sat down with my two butters and tasted thin pats of each. The French butter was manifestly salty and sharp. The sharpness might be a product of the pasteurization process, the heat of which can give milk a slightly toasted flavor. Purists complain about this, but I admire the glossal effect. The local, unpasteurized butter, however, was absolutely silky. I felt as though a bra had been gently pushed into my mouth. The verdict, then, is that both butters have much to offer.

Field Notes on Picking Strawberries

Strawberries are announcing themselves in the fields right now, so after work I got down to a white T-shirt and drove out to the farm to begin the gathering. A swine made some percussive noises at me as I walked out to the strawberry patch. Then an ignoble fly started to ram me in the head over and over again, so I jogged the rest of the way through the hollow, thinking: how lucky am I to live in an area where there is a thing called a 'hollow' through which to run, even if the running is the result of aggressive flies. I like using the word hollow because it makes me feel like I'm writing from within a Van Morrison song. My heart was thumping, etc.

Anyway, here are some minor thoughts on how to approach picking 'strewn berries':

1. Look for the thickest clumps of plants. Big dudes hide in the deep, dark.
   
2. Walk past plants dotted with smaller berries. (Actually, they're technically not berries at all, but stamens.) I have noticed that small strawberries hang out near other small strawberries, and big ones near big ones.
3. Follow the bugs. Though strawberries self-pollinate, insects can also cross-pollinate them, which has been shown to produce bigger strawberries.
   
4. Pick with your legs, not your back.
5. To pick, you must put your arm into the unknown. Don't just reach for what you see -- reach for what you can't see. Be aspirational.
6. Should the kneeling and hunching wear you out and tempt you to complain, consider that workers in Watsonville, CA pick strawberries ALL DAY during harvesting times.
7. Don't count on strawberries to ripen after they're picked. They don't work the same way as avocados, bananas, and mangoes.
8. ALWAYS eat the best few you find right there in the field, dust and all. Make a sweet red mess in your mouth.

When Are We Not Cooking?

Just got back from Philadelphia, where The Elephant and Butter speared kabobs, sipped homemade chilled borscht, gasped at a drive-through liquor store, ate raw radishes with butter, got intimately reacquainted with chorizo tacos, drank mosaic-like sangria, listened to some great shambling Balkan music, and consorted with refined/debased poets of concentrated living.

One morning, after an austere omelet and a game of chess, Rebbi Jose and I sat down to plan a guest lecture for a creative writing class at Temple University, and all sorts of tendrils of thought spun out of us. We decided between bites of challah that we wanted to talk about the practice of writing rather than the artifacts produced by that practice. Everyone knows about the artifacts, anyway. And perhaps the object-orientation of the world prevents people from seeing that the real good shit comes out of a process of careful seeing, understanding, and translating -- one that need not always result in words on a page. That led us to ask ourselves when, as writers, we are not writing. The answer seemed to be that we are never not writing.

This got me thinking about cooking. When are we not cooking? So long as we contemplate the manifestations and capacities of food, so long as we never disregard a single taco, or take for granted any bananas, or shut ourselves against the rhythm and rituals of flesh life, we are never not cooking. That's what I'm thinking.

I, Too, Would Want to Go Home

First, there is a drunken fight. Next, a first mate aboard the ship tries to break into the captain's bunk, and as a result is taken away by the constable. There also seems to be a sheriff in the vicinity, by the name of John Stone, who will not leave someone alone. These are the unsavory conditions aboard the Sloop John B, as conveyed by the Beach Boys, just prior to the ultimate offending event:

The poor cook he caught the fits

And threw away all my grits

Then he took and he ate up all of my corn

For days now, I've been listening to the song over and over again. I've learned that Alan Lomax made field recordings of it in 1935 under the title "Histe Up the John B Sail," which led to versions by The Weavers and The Kingston Trio. It's believed that John B was Captain John Bethel, who sailed a sponge boat out of Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. According to legend, he ran a pretty loose ship. I've checked out a book on Caribbean sea shanties, "Deep the Water, Shallow the Shore." I've read that the pace and layering of melody in sea shanties might be a result of the rhythm of the sea itself. I've confirmed that the native Arawak grew corn on the Bahamas. I've learned that cooks on ships in the late 1800s were often in that role because they were unsuitable for hard physical labor, which might explain "the fits."

But why, I keep wondering, would the cook throw away all of the grits, and then eat up all of the corn?

It is plainly obvious from the double-usage of the possessive "my" that neither of these things belonged to the cook. I'm willing to accept that he was uncommonly temperamental, but for some reason I can't accept that he would throw out some of the food, and eat the rest. Shouldn't a sea cook, even one beset by fits, be more judicious with provisions? Even supposing that the sailor-narrator of the song was a tremendously annoying person to be around -- a possibility worth considering to be fair -- I can't understand the throwing away of the grits. Why not simply take them away and put them back in the pot? Or give them to someone else?

The answer is pretty clear: the Sloop John B was indeed the worst ship, and the vehicle for the worst trip, one could be on. It was an unreliable and overly vindictive environment for humans, and a wasteful one for certain iterations of corn.

There is, however, something very encouraging about the song. Notice that the sailor-narrator calls the cook the "poor cook," showing empathy for the man who capriciously threw out his grits and ate up all of his corn. That's a nice attitude to take. I hope that, should someone throw out one of my food items and eat the entirety of another, I can be similarly forgiving.

One Hot Breakfast

Whoa, that is a fierce light on my breakfast -- the unrestrained light of morning. Two days in a row now I've taken my breakfast here whilst sitting down with the newspaper, as opposed to my previous habit of eating in transit. The sitting method is better because it makes me feel like I've invented a brand new realm of time. It's just me, the news in a tactile form, an austere plate, and the generous clarity of early light.

Also, that's not a ritual blood-letting on my bagel -- that's hot sauce. Hot sauce adds grit and challenges the ease of the cream cheese. The bagel is of the "everything" sort. It's best to start the day by being open to the world.

Spying on a Farm

When spying on a farm, one must first consider the best vantage point. Because farms generally consist of land (I'm not talking about farms of the mind here), and because a farm must have a not insubstantial amount of land to be a farm in the first place, it helps to spy from a height. One can see more this way. Luckily, the farm I aim to surveil is bordered by a levee. Both the farm and the levee are located about a quarter of a mile from my home, which is noteworthy because I live in the middle of a town. In fact, that's precisely why I'm spying on this particular farm -- because it seems to have recently, magically embedded itself in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Pretty clever, if you ask me.

Back to the levee. It's a long one, and has some bends and gullies. I've seen some of our town's local drifter population emerging from the gullies with paper sacks of beer in their hands. The levee, obviously, has something to offer for everyone. (In fact, it was on this very levee that I recently began a viewing of 'Go to the Chateau,' a play by Madeline ffitch involving an audience of two, a car ride around town, and much absurdist behavior.) Witness, the levee:

So, prowling along the levee, one eventually notices some buildings through the trees on the right, and some fields. I've been past these fields many times. In fact, some friends used to live a half block away, and I recall strolling past the fields at night during the summer. Thousands upon thousands of fireflies flickered and spun in the air. But now, the field and farm look like so:

At this point, a spy might have some questions. Such as: What's the purpose of building in the foreground? Or the big one in the back? Or the small one on the left? And what are all these fields about, anyhow? I paced back and forth along the levee, trying to divine the answers to these questions, and pretty much got nowhere. That's because spying on a farm is an inherently distancing activity. If a farm spied on me, it wouldn't learn the most important things about me, either. So, I decided to meet the farmer: 

That's Ben Jabirdy, of Town Farm. Turns out, Ben just ended a stint teaching English at a small liberal arts college in the area, which is exactly what I just finished doing. Now, he's farming. His goal is to set up a 100-member C.S.A.  The building in the foreground of the photo above the one above will serve as the distribution spot for the farm shares, the big barn is being made into living quarters for Ben and the rest of the farmers, and the other building, if I remember correctly, is for goats. Goats!

Though The Elephant and Butter is already committed to another C.S.A. for the summer, this neighborhood farm is nothing but a fantastic development. As for spying, despite its inherent flaws I remain a fan of the method. In the future I shall spy not on farms, though, but perhaps on a cappuccino.