The cool thing about winning an award in New Mexico is the almost certain guarantee that the prize will be made of Nambé. Nambé is the pride of New Mexico, an alloy of eight metals developed by a Los Alamos scientist. It can retain temperature for long periods of time, is food safe and can be used on the stove or in the oven. Plus it’s shiny! But the cool part is that the company was started by Pauline Platt Cable, who was the secretary of a foundry that cast bronze and copper cookware. The original owner retired in 1951 and left it to Pauline, who worked with Martin Eden, the scientist, to create Nambé.
Even cooler is a Nambé award for Women in Science, and though I have no memory of how I happened to be awarded one, I am very proud to lug this around:
The word Nambé comes from the Tewa Indians meaning “people of the round earth.” According to the NY Times, girls are leading boys in science exams everywhere on this round earth but in the US.
But not in this little part of California, not when you can send Hello Kitty into space. Congrats Lauren Rojas. I salute you with my Hello-Kitty-inside-a-Kobe-beef-outfit.
Many years ago when we lived in Los Feliz (and rent was $525/month for a 1 bedroom apartment), we held a garage sale and some friends came over with orange juice and vodka to liven up the sales. In fact the sales went so well (sold some nice skirts to the guy next door, and my Doc Martins went to the lady who took all of our clay pots, etc.) that we went back into the apartment many times scouring the place for more things, anything, to sell.
I had a little bit of that feeling this week after getting my sea legs with the Ibushi Gin Donabe Smoker. I trolled the kitchen wondering what else I could possibly put in that little pot belly. Soy sauce! Cod roe! Salt!
If I could only smoke one thing in the whole world however, it would be tea-smoked duck. Hands down.
OK, maybe a hard boiled egg. OK, maybe a slab of pork cheek. Well, it would be in my top three things, alone on my smoking desert island.
Here is the smoking goods: rice, lapsang souchong tea, brown sugar and pieces of cinnamon.
The duck breast is crosshatched, then marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, and Shaoxing rice wine. I ran out of time so it was only marinated for two hours, but I sprinkled it with Sichuan peppercorns before searing the skin and tossing it into the smoker.
Like the communist party that promises a bowl of rice for every person, we promise a shaft of crispy skin on every slice.
This is the famous clay pot of Banpo, a neolithic village dating back to 5000 B.C. If you get tired while carrying it, you just jab the sharp end into the ground and take a break.
This is the famous clay pot of Banpo sitting in our neighbor’s yard. If you get tired of figuring out what to do with the landscaping, you just go archeological.
Call it clay pot, Donabe, tagine or Römertopf, the idea of cooking with clay is universal. Different countries claim to have endless resources of a particular type of clay that they’ve been excavating for centuries, be it Yixing for teapots or Iga for Donabe.
Working with clay is hard, as I learned from my Yixing teapot master, and pottery has one of the slowest timelines in terms of gratification (photography used to be similar, but has since surged into the “immediate,” but pottery is still far behind others, like architecture or child rearing). What you have on the wheel is definitely not what you get when it dries, much less when you pull it out of the kiln, and let’s not even talk about glazes, which to me seems like painting with invisible ink.
As with many things, understanding clay is complicated, and often technical. A lot of people want to treat clay like it’s a non-geological material, and they just want the best pot from the best clay. Sometimes when I tell the people interested in Yixing teapots that terroir, age and technique does matter, as the material at the bottom of the bag can be different than the stuff at the top, clay being a mixture of dead animals, minerals, etc, they soon move on from their casual interest in teapots to other things like siphon coffee makers and raclette grills.
To ring in the new year we bought the Ibushi Gin Donabe Smoker and though the clay probably comes from the best part of the bag, our technique/timing needs work. Even so, our chubby La Bedaine is so cool it’s hard to screw anything up. What’s missing in the photos is the smell of Sakura wood chips being heated. Wow.
On the bottom we put a piece of opah, the middle had salmon and fennel, and the top had tiger shrimp, fennel and leeks. We should’ve cut the opah into smaller pieces, but it was easy enough to smoke it a second time until it was done. The leeks were smokey but still hard so we just sliced and panfried them in butter, no doubt a technique dating back to 5000 B.C.
The holiday season slows everything down, and it’s mostly a good thing, with or without family, the hours seem to crawl.
Time is like bad weather, it only matters when there’s nothing you can do about it.
The rain makes introspection easy, and if you have proper gear, and lashings of coffee and scones waiting for you, then there’s nothing better, after reaching the flood in the road,
than taking your whisky into its natural environment, softening the dram with rain and accentuating the peat with some wet dog on the nose.
Drinking scotch in lush green landscapes reminds me of the scene in the BBC’s production of Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy, where George Smiley takes a bottle to Connie Sachs amid a gigantic rainstorm to “go over some very old ground.”
But beware of too much holiday idleness. You only have a limited amount of time farting around before the chicken claw mafia comes and tells you enough is enough.
“The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.”
In the spirit of Emerson’s essay on gifting I struck a deal with the pups. If I got to order a box of chocolates from Dude, Sweet, I’d get enough insulation material to make them thermo-nuclear crate blankets. But that would have to be a giganto box, I said, and they said, we love the UPS guy, go for it.
I wanted to use two old pillowcases that got accidentally melted in the dryer (fleece vs. heat = craft project) but the thermo material wasn’t wide enough so I cut up the little pockets that held the ice packs to fill up the gap.
“Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit.”
so a clear case of how to “go to mat.” thinking of all that chocolate gives Stevie a real flat head.
Our recent trip up to the bay area was timed perfectly with the Canine Sherman show at SF MOMA.
we got to meet the artist!
What’s a trip up to bay area without a stop at Feve Chocolatiers, featuring the mighty enrober, and the butt plug. Apparently the enrober is wide enough to do a small personal pizza, but it wasn’t perfectly warmed up so we couldn’t give it a try.
Oh yes, twist that knob and all the good brown stuff comes gushing out.
We stopped by the Cowgirl Creamery for some cheese… and Marin Sun Farms for their Crispy Kale fried in pork lard which no picture in the world could do justice…
We sloshed around in tidepools…
and last but not least… bought us some snowy plover protection
In memory of my father’s passing I created a website where friends and colleagues could post photos and remembrances. One letter, from an old Chinese friend of my dad who apparently knew him at a young age (speaking about my dad, he wrote: “A lot of childhood stuff starting to pop into my head: mischief, the way he walks, talks, playing silly in front of girls, his lovely parents and grandma”), contained a rather peculiar sentence which went unnoticed for several months. Not “unnoticed” like I didn’t read it and think it was weird, but rather “un-taken seriously.” At the time I figured the entire letter had been put through Google translation and, like the way most Chinese vegetables get presented as “lettuce,” some nickname or term of endearment which the friend used must have gotten twisted into the word “stepfather.”
Mr. Dai wrote: “Most importantly, he is a wonderful son ( I know for fact, he loves his father (stepfather) dearly until his pass-away).
When my father’s wife threatened to sue my brother and I (not sure over what), and then in a follow-up email forwarded a powerpoint presentation of the concept of a mathematical magic square with the eerie command “Enjoy it,” we decided that sleuthing out the grandfather-as-stepfather rumor was a brilliant way to avoid dealing with crazy people.
Mr. Dai told my brother that he had heard our father’s biological father died as a pilot in the Chinese Air Force, which prompted a search in all the old photos for anyone that was Chinese, wearing aviator glasses, and short. (my *ahem* grandfather was very tall, a “clue,” seeing as how short my father and my brother and I are, when you really take the ridiculousness of all this into account)
We asked some old family friends, who all said they knew nothing, but offered similar stories from their own family, of non-biological parents kept secret for generations, of a father who said to his family “I had a wife and family back in China, and they’re coming over… today.”
Then we asked the husband of my grandfather’s cousin, who had taken good care of my father’s family before they moved to Taiwan in 1949, who said he knew nothing of the matter, and even seemed a little sad that we would doubt the bloodline between his family and ours. Then we debated whether to get DNA tested with the daughter of that cousin, to really settle matters.
Then we asked my mom, who said she didn’t know, but always suspected it (whatever that means). My mom of course sent us on another wild goose chase, recalling an incident around thirteen years ago when my father was shocked to find out he was unable to donate blood to my grandfather due to blood type. My mother couldn’t remember the details but it revolved around something like if you were A type, then both your parents had to be A, and clearly my dad was an A, and his father wasn’t. Of course, this isn’t entirely true, and the Internet sez it’s quite common for children not to be able to donate blood to their parents, and keep in mind my mother—in the same breath—insisted that my brother and I had “Type Q” blood. If you put “Type Q” blood into Google translation you find out it means you carry the trait of being able to slurp oysters with grace, something shared between my brother’s children, myself and MO. The smurf hand I inherited from my mother’s side.
China in the 1930’s was invaded by Japan, then entered WW2, then began its own civil war. There was no shortage of widows, abandoned children and dead fathers. My father had always said there was debate as to the year he was born, one reason being that many Chinese kids were considered to be one year old when they emerged into the world (the 9 months in the womb providing the experience of one year on the outside), and we don’t have any specifics like my grandparent’s marriage certificate or anything, so we have no idea whether my grandfather met my grandmother while she was pregnant, or whether she already had her kid. We don’t even know if she was married to the pilot guy. We even tossed around the idea that maybe my grandmother was a rape victim of the Japanese, in which case I’d be quarter Japanese (am I allowed to buy a Prius now?).
What we do know (and this is where it gets weird) is that my father’s name (a rather unique name) is the exact same name as my grandfather’s first son. Say WHAT?
My grandfather left behind a wife and son in Cixian during the westward retreat of his university due to the Japanese invasion, and this wife and son (both long dead) was kept a secret from my dad for nearly fifty years, until the eve of my grandparents’ first trip home to China after an exile of nearly as many years. My father in turn kept it a secret from me, and he had it pretty buttoned up—like he had shoved the largest cork in the world into his ass not even a Cixain crowbar could bust loose—as nothing came out other than “beware the lying aunt” and “seems like a bad connection” on the MORNING that David and I were to visit my grandfather’s old home, not knowing who we were about to meet, not knowing what the f**k “lying aunt” meant, and as I stood there surrounded by (so called) relatives, half of them screaming on the cellphones to get other relatives to come ASAP, David asking “What are they saying? What are they saying? And which one is the lying aunt?” and I couldn’t understand shit until one wrinkled lady changed her dialect to mandarin, and said very slowly, “Your grandfather is my father.” Chinese being a language with specific words for describing exactly how a person is related to one another, it took another several minutes to get it clear that what she meant to say was that she married my grandfather’s son. Needless to say the next words out of my mouth were “Holy Shit.”
After David and I returned to the states we had to sit my father down and accuse him of sending us into battle without a helmet. He hummed and hawed and gave super uncomfortable eh’s and ah’s as he explained stuff about the “lying aunt” that I promise to get to in the future. The point is, at that moment, sitting there uncomfortable as hell, my father could’ve told me about my grandfather not being his real father, and all that old home myth wasn’t really his real old home. But he didn’t. I don’t think it’s strange that my grandfather was not my real grandfather but I do want to know why it was such a guarded secret. By this time, both my grandparents had passed away, and yet the cork didn’t budge. My dad’s second chance to reveal the secret came when he was about to go into the hospital for his heart surgery, and his third chance was anytime after surviving his surgery and subsequent complications.
So, maybe my grandfather renamed my father in the memory of the son he left behind. Maybe he had to rename my father for obtuse Chinese and/or legal reasons. Maybe he just really really liked that name.
But maybe it wasn’t true? Maybe Mr. Dai had my father confused with another childhood friend? No one else seemed to be able to confirm this so my brother, being semi-masochistic or something, asked my father’s wife whether she knew anything about this. She told him (in between her claims that my father promised her this and that), that she knew about my grandfather from a secret source which she wasn’t revealing, and that my dad didn’t know that she knew. Great. So we called up another old friend of my dad’s whom we think could be the secret source, since he lived close by to my dad, and Holy Blistering Barnacles the guy has not returned our call. Which, with all due respect, seems pretty strange.
Stay tuned.
Even though all this grandfather business is more of a curiosity than anything else, genetics do come in handy in some ways.
But be careful when breeding happy faces to happy faces,
