Category Archives: food

sure smells like New Mexico

food, the day lee

awesomeness like this on the side of an 18-wheeler just screams “New Mexico!” and when it’s Hatch chile season you’re going to smell it before you see it.

The “chile drop” was at the La Puente High School parking lot, with burlap bags everywhere, burritos for sale, and a whole host of confusing canopies separating the people into variations of walk-up, pre-pay, fresh, or roasted categories. god forbid if you wanted to mix and match between the categories.

i was in the pre-paid roasted section, which i assume was the most orderly, as everyone in line was only mildly frantic, confused, or salivating. mostly the conversation sounded like kids talking to overseas grandparents: “what time do you have?” but several people who had been standing in the sun too long offered up their opinion on how to fix the ordering system. in New Mexico you can smell the roasting from the side of the road and just pull over and pick up a bag, but here they assign everyone a check-in time, and then plead with you not to be late, but if you are late, they squeeze you in, making the people who actually do show up on time wait. as an owner of two dogs this is the most egregious example of “rewarding bad behavior,” but i didn’t mind because the chile lady said “there was a slight back up because everyone wanted Chavez,” and i got curious as to whether Chavez was a type of chile or a person.

turns out Chavez is a roaster, and he’s got the art down. some of those guys throw the chiles into the drum and put it on automatic. but not Chavez. Chavez roasts by hand, checking that the chiles are blistered just enough so peeling the skin later isn’t a pain in the ass, but not too roasted so the skin is carbonized to the meat. someone in line before me said “What’s the big deal, what difference does it make who roasts?” and the chile lady gave her a look of “if you have to ask, then it doesn’t matter.”
when it was my turn, the lady asked me whether i wanted to request a roaster. i said yes, and she said which one. turns out there’s more than one master craftsman roaster, but that was the only name i knew so that’s who handled our chiles.

the bagged goods.

the taste test.

the apres roast.

on the freeway coming home we passed a pick-up truck with two bushels of roasteds in the back. when we passed i gave him the sign of the coyote but the driver was too fixated on whether he was going to have enchiladas or burgers for lunch to respond.

A is for apple, or why i love saying hongo hongo hongo

food, self-portraits, the day lee

on a hot afternoon after visiting the lovely city of Sintra, Portugal, after discovering a delicious drink called Amarguinha (almond liquor served with lots of fresh squeezed lemon and ice), after discovering that the dessert the Portuguese call “Byronian” was—in one word—a cracker, some pals and i took a long, winding bus ride to the Western-most point of Continental Europe.
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to pass the time we had some fun with languages, since between the four of us we had English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian covered. we were all a little brain dead, so mostly it consisted of trying to pronounce the Chinese and the Russian words, and noticing similarities between the Latin languages. and then someone suggested “mushroom.” now what a silly word. there’s some debate as to the origin of the word mushroom, most likely from the French word mousseron (to mean moss), but some argue it goes back to the Greek work for mucus (mykes, from where we get “mycology”). (on a side note, back in those days, a candle snuff was called a “snot”). in any case, there we were, with “Mushroom,” “Grib,” “Mógu,” “Cogumelo,” “Champignon,” and “Funghi.” the only one missing was the Spanish. no matter how we stared and blinked at each other, no one could remember. we tried ordering a pizza in Spanish, we tried imagining a can of mushrooms in Costa Rica (sadly, the label said “Champignons”) we tried thinking of all the Mexican dishes that had mushrooms featured (er… none), we tried hating mushrooms, and collectively not caring what the freaking word for mushroom was in Spanish, but still it eluded us, for hours. damn hongos.

to keep from going crazy we went back to things we knew, like the English alphabet, and played a game of “what so-and-so has up his bum tonight.” it’s a daunting task for a non-native speaker trying to remember unfamiliar words, such as Kleptomaniac’s birth control, or Suzanne Somers, and so this is very impressive.
[qt:/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Uphisbum.m4v 480 400]
and this, is in honor of “a laundry.”

traveling pastries

food, the day lee, writings

while the garden and backyard was being dismantled i went to Lisbon for two weeks to attend the Disquiet: Dzanc Books Literary Program and solve the mystery regarding certain Asian pastries and why they don’t seem very Asian once you stop cooing over how delicious they are and think about them in relation to their fellow brethren (like fried milk, red bean paste, sesame rice dumplings, etc).

i thought i was onto something when i found out the wine my parents used to serve (before i had a say on the matter) on fancy occasions (Lancers and Mateus) were both from Portugal. hm… i thought, was it something that filtered into their consciousness via Portuguese influence over Macao and Hong Kong? i asked my father, and he said “I know Mateus is made in Portugal, it is the info I got from recommendation from some magazine long ago. Lancers was introduced by some friend.” not that he answered the question, but that’s Dad for you.

so, the great pastry tale starts in Portugal in the Age of Discovery: in 1498 Vasco De Gama found the route from Portugal around Africa to India, allowing the Portuguese to dominate the spice trade, colonize Macau and various other spots along the way, and bring pastries to China. thank you!

i have always wondered why the egg tart served in Chinese dim sum was such an anomaly. it’s baked, for one thing, it’s a custard, which is weird for the Chinese, and it’s a tart, even weirder. now that i have gone to Belem (the old home of Pastel de Nata) i’d have to say the Chinese should have followed the recipe better. more creamy, less egg-y, and with the dusting of powdered sugar and cinnamon the thing goes “poof” when you bite into it.
visiting the old home of a special food is a great thing. in Belem when you order the custard tarts they ask “how many.” maybe the little guys operate on the buddy system, or maybe this was influenced by the Chinese. In Nanxiang, China, when we ordered soup dumplings they asked how many steamer baskets. makes you want to learn the numbers of foreign languages real fast.

one morning i dropped by my favorite cafe and ordered a coffee (by the way, their espressos are ok, not great, but ok) and the largest pastry i could see. i took one bite and almost peed my pants. whatever it was called in Portuguese i don’t remember, but what i was eating was the famous Hong Kong pastry called the Gai Mai Bao, or the Chicken Tail Bun. Buttery and coconutty and open faced, it’s always been my mom’s favorite, even though what she knows is an eclair-shaped pastry with the buttery goods stuffed inside. Same difference really.

finally i went to Castella do Paulo, a Japanese/Portuguese bakery where i found out that a famous dessert called Pão-de-Ló was taken to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the 1500’s, and the Japanese in classic form morphed the recipe, perfected it and renamed it Castella cake. And how. here’s a video of their “and how.” (They’ve got this thing about beating it by hand in gorgeous copper pots. Please play the sound full volume.)

also in Belem is the port from where all the Discoverers set sail. pretty amazing to think Vasco De Gama looked at this same view as he took off. minus the bridge, of course, which, incidentally, was built by the same people who designed San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. I know I know, looks like the other one…

nowadays Lisbon is so lovely and beautiful i can’t believe anyone would want to leave. the drinks all come Pantone coordinated and all the plants look like Los Angeles. and that bridge? really…

growing meat

food, the day lee, things i worry about

the May 23, 2011 issue of The New Yorker has an article by Michael Specter on growing meat in a test tube or petri dish. i’ve always wanted a meat tree in the garden, so now that we’re putting in new containers and ordering shitloads of dirt i thought it would be a great time to try.

first we pulled up all the fava beans still lingering in the yard.

then we staked out the area for the new containers, set them into the ground, sprinkled heavily with water… and the next morning…

VOILA!

turns out you don’t need compost, or dirt or anything. just a nice steady morning light. chicken cacciatore anyone?

on a different note, Specter’s article talks about Willem van Eelen, who “was born in 1923 in the Dutch East Indies, yet his youth of freedom ended abruptly on May 10, 1940—the day the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Van Eelen enlisted and served in Indonesia, but he was eventually captured and spent most of the war as a prisoner, dragged from one P.O.W. camp to another. After the war, he studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam, but he struggled with the intertwined memories of starvation and animal abuse in the camps.”
for some reason (combined with the fact that the Rapture came and went with hardly a tremor of any kind in this earthquake-prone city) this reminded me of my sister-in-law’s parents, who started out as missionaries in Indonesia. they soon realized that the locals didn’t need religion, they needed irrigation. so off they went back to Europe to receive a degree in agriculture, and afterwards returned to Indonesia to help on that front.

B is for NY

food, the day lee, why artists need math

Back decades ago, when the chain stores started invading NY, and every corner seemed to sprout a Starbucks or a Rite Aid, Blockbuster Video, Bon au Pain, or a Gap, a friend of mine so aptly said “LA has won.”

Now that the city boasts even more shops from the global marketplace (on this trip a friend said “the reason they have all the same shops you see all over the world is to make it seem less scary to shop in NY) and even the street vendors have the same stuff unloaded from the MOTHER CRAPU STORE that is China, the truly great remaining bits of NY become that much more precious.

NY is still the place for me where bagels are not only edible but delicious, and only there do they give you so much cream cheese you end up with a small cheesecake on your plate after you’ve finished the bagel.

NY is also the place where Sullivan Street Bakery is no longer on Sullivan Street, (a very Los Angeles thing, actually, where Western Ave is east of West Blvd, and they are both located in the east side of the city) and the bakery that took it’s place on Sullivan Street, (the result of some sort of partner divorce split) Grandaisy, is also no longer in the old location on Sullivan street. But at least you know “B” still stands for Bread.

Inside the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a little door painted green and blue like a bad Monet, and through that you must pass underneath some really old and funky looking HVAC ducts to get to another door that says: CAUTION. do not let this close behind you, it will LOCK.
Once inside you arrive at a concrete bunker/meditation pond with a chair, a bulb and the happiest, fattest (and some very pregnant) goldfish you have ever seen. This is where to go when Armageddon hits New York. The only drawback is all the lower levels of the Met do not get reception of any kind. Just don’t let that door close behind you.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the public-sanctioned part of the Met there was a nice little show of stuff from Emperor Qianlong’s private retirement retreat in the Forbidden City, including some drawings of him practicing western-style rendering of antlers. Hey, not bad for an emperor.

Meanwhile, Qianlong’s contemporaries (r. 1736–95) were busy doing what Chinese painters do best – letting a few detailed brushstrokes act as a metonym of something large and abstract and difficult to draw. What these little waves do is bear the representational weight of the entire ocean on their shoulders. They allow all the other water scenes in the painting to be abstract and spaghetti-like, and the whole scroll, some 12 feet long, remains anchored in representation. (Xu Yang, 1750)

A few other fabulous things – Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar can do everything LA can’t: tiny 6 table space with the smallest kitchen in the world, no gas, no coffee, no tea, and a prix-fixe menu that was as reasonable as the food was exquisite. El Quinto Pino’s way awesome bartender served us a basil-gin-lemon slushy that seemed to come out of a feed tube, along with their exquisite Uni Panini and other tasty goods, and finally dinner at Blue Hill on Easter Sunday, where they sent every table home with a half pack of their farm fresh eggs.

In case the eggs got me into trouble with security at JFK, i put the Peeps my lovely hotel left on my pillow in with the eggs in my bag. seems hard to make someone with no shoes on, whose belt is in the bucket and pants are falling down, who calculated just the right amount of lotion to bring, to toss out raw eggs if they’re accompanied by Peeps.

Finally, it might be obvious that other than the bagel, which was eaten at lunchtime, there are no food shots. no artic char with onion glass, no Pulpo a Feira con Cachelos, no passionfruit marshmallow… this is the curse of an iphone battery that cannot last a single day. where in Los Angeles there is always the car to plug into, in NY a semi-functioning battery will bring nothing but darkness after the sun goes down.

two and four ways of looking

food, the day lee, why artists need math

Errol Morris’ piece on Thomas Kuhn, Saul Kripke, Pythagorus, and incommensurability is a giant brain bender, and it forced me to back the bus up many years. i read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions a long time ago as an undergraduate crashing a seminar led by Todd Gitlin, but i was taught the weird concept of the square root of 2 before i could even drive. it wasn’t anything profound, but i was mesmerized at how a number could go on forever, without repeating itself. forever, back then, was the length of time it took for my friend to make a cassette recording of The Clash’s Sandinista, but i still couldn’t grasp the idea. really? forever?
it was so beautiful too, a right triangle with sides of 1. so small, so simple, yet a little sad. that’s all it gets, the three sides, with the funny symbol over the 2.

i imagined standing at the point in space designated by the number 1.414, and looking over the chasm at the number 1.415, and thinking that “forever” happened in between those numbers. it took me a long time to understand that there are way more irrational numbers than rational ones; it’s just that the rational numbers are the ones you can count. it’s sort of like the Republican’s view on redrawing district lines; they want to consider only the people who can vote.

back then i wondered why the other commonly known irrational numbers π and e seemed more practical, for instance both π and e had special names, whereas the square root of 2 was just the square root of 2. e has something to do with how much your credit card charges you when you don’t pay your bill, and anyone who’s ever tried to bake a charlotte from scratch knows the power of using π to figure out how long to make the ladyfinger piece that will wrap around the entire cake. but poor old dowdy square root of 2? not much, unless you spend a lot of time in a country that still uses legal-sized paper and want to know who in their right mind thinks that 8.5×14″ paper is useful. well, it isn’t. (most of the world uses paper based the aspect ratio of the square root of 2. this means when a piece of paper is folded in half in those countries, the resulting piece of paper has the same aspect ratio as the parent, and it corresponds to the next size down in terms of the paper tray. whereas our aspect ratios are all different for our commonly used papers, and all retarded – just look at 8.5×5.5!).

so, in honor of Morris, language, meaning, and the square root of 2, here’s two ways of looking at the same window:

two ways of looking at a pork tenderloin stuffed with pistachios and yogurt, with a coffee-cumin rub:

and… four ways of looking at the same piece of sandwich bread floating in a stream:

work/play

food, the day lee

the giant hole in the roof’s been cut, so the moonlight can stream in. the insulation is also in place, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference today. i know we’re not buried under ten feet of snow, but it’s been sweater-shirt-fleece-wool hat inside the house kind of weather. in fact its cold and its sunny, but there isn’t enough wind to make the famous “wind chicken.” maybe when the garage is finished we can ask the guys to put up hook in the eave.

as anyone will tell you, construction is hard work, and after handling a compound miter saw all day, there’s nothing like a bottle of chateauneuf du pup to warm your nose.

reflected vs. reflection

food, the day lee, why artists need math,

Light arriving at an opaque surface is like me arriving at a buffet. it’s all about which dish will be rejected and which dish will be ingested, since the color of something is determined by which wavelengths of light are reflected and which wavelengths are absorbed. turn away all wavelengths and you are a big white light, eat everything and you are a massive black pig.

sometimes the question is exactly which colors are not being represented.

of course the quality of the buffet matters, and the last time i was faced with a tray of smoked salmon at a breakfast buffet in Hawaii i took the advice of a friend’s father, who suggested a special way to use the tongs. he told me to open it up and run it parallel along the bottom of the platter so you pick up the entire half of a wild salmon in one stroke. he said “you get some looks, but hey, they’ll bring another one out for the other guests.”
one alternative to this is to make your own gravlax, which is perfect if you are tearing down your deck and have some bricks handy to press the fish with. the great thing about making your own is that you can eat it like a burrito and no will give you “some look.” incidentally, fish scales are not opaque surfaces, they are translucent, which means they transmit light as they scatter it, as opposed to plastic wrap, which also transmits light but absorbs the transmitted light.