I spent Labor Day weekend in the kitchen. I went home to see the husband—as well as the peaches, tomatoes, grapes, eggplants, peppers, arugula, chard and basil. A quick trip, in all respects. I caught a bus, I boarded a plane (cool thing about Colorado: the RTD, which, with my faculty pass, allowed me a roundtrip ticket between campus and DIA for just $5).
I had so many plans for the abundance that resulted from a few heavy rains in my absence these past few weeks. And I accomplished just a fraction of what I had envisioned.
But still, I made progress. That basil above? And the deep purple variety below? Both went into a massive batch of squash-basil soup, which went straight to the freezer until one winter night, when one or the other or both of us decide to open that tub for a taste of summer.
I made gazpacho, too, with the sweetest little medley of tomatoes in so many shades of red, orange, yellow and purple.
The eggplants had a roasting and a smashing into baba ganoush with plenty of tahini, garlic and lemon.
And the peaches…. We’re working our way through baskets of wonderfully luscious fruits (best after sitting on the counter for a day). But Saturday evening, I took a batch of peach salsa to a little gathering down the road. A simple salsa with a sweet-tangy twist:
Peach Salsa
Seven or eight medium-sized peaches, diced
Chopped white onion and shallot
A little minced ginger
A smidgen each of ground cinnamon and cloves
Several pinches of hot New Mexican chile powder
A little salt
A big squeeze of lime
Mix, let sit a few hours, then eat with chips. And that’s it! All you need is a peach tree to get it started….
Jerry left me in Boulder with a tiny kitchen and dishes for one. He shopped at a local culinary fun house (which I’ve yet to explore) and found a pretty set of new chopsticks, Japanese style, with bright red tops and little yellow squiggle designs. But only one pair.
Only one set of chopsticks, on purpose. Though we’ll both be traveling to and fro in the next 8 months, I am, for all practical purposes, on this particular journey alone. I’m only one week into it, and I’m discovering my comforts and annoyances. Things I’m happy to have, others I miss. I’ve been taking mental notes from a largely ecological perspective. In no particular order, these are
THINGS I LOVE:
- This open-minded, educated, forward-thinking community. Its brain jibes with mine.
- Trails. Everywhere—for feet and wheels. All I do to find the view below is head half a block downhill, turn left past the nature center, and there it is: covered in myriad paths up and into and around the Flatirons. Heading there right now with my coffee….
- Drivers, who more or less are courteous to the cyclists and pedestrians who—almost—dominate Boulder’s roads.
- Fitness. I thought I was in reasonable shape (and I know I am). Yet I sputter in the wake of so many pro and nearly-so runners, bikers, hikers and all-around athletes who scale these mountains with barely a breath. But I’ll get closer—I’m walking or cycling everywhere these days.
- The Boulder Farmers’ Market, a beautiful sprawling tapestry of fresh foods and colors, accessible by bike (it’s right on the Boulder Creek Path, another new commuter’s love).
- The Chautauqua Dining Hall, a first-class restaurant one block out my door. Huge wrap-around porch, the perfect place for a glass of wine and sunset. (Plus, residents get 10 percent off!)
- So many restaurants and pubs with live music and general liveliness all around. Welcome back to college!
- And last but definitely not least, the Scripps program, one of the greatest contributions imaginable to journalism and the environment today.
The Flatirons, from Chautauqua
THINGS I MISS:
- My husband, of course. Family and friends. Remember the song, “Make new friends, but keep the old….”
- My big, open kitchen with room to maneuver and the appropriate dish or utensil for every idea in my cook’s mind.
- New Mexico food, wine and beer prices. Period.
- The ability to buy all of the above at one store.
- Perea Farms, El Mezquite, Valencia Fresh Fruteria, my neighborhood farmers’ market, fresh tortillas made daily, honey and eggs for sale around the corner, the scent of roasting chiles in the air everywhere this time of year. I know the local food scene has a lot to offer Boulder, and I have much to explore. But I do miss the down-to-earth nitty-gritty feel of food plucked straight from the dirt—a benefit of living so close to so many farms.
- My garden. Right now, right this very minute, I am missing loads of grapes, peaches, tomatoes, eggplants, chiles, chard, collards and arugula.
- My herbs. It’s a jungle out there among the dozen basil plants, oregano, onions, chives, parsley, sage, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, rosemary and mint. I’ve bought a few little plants for my Boulder porch (below), but I no longer have the option of chopping down a bundle of onions or a heap of basil and mint for a proper batch of laap.
- Dark and quiet. Previous residents have raved about Chautauqua’s peaceful nature. But I’m spoiled, already having the experience of living and staying in some of the world’s most serene locations. I’m liking my cozy cottage quite well, but this park is a tourist destination and a favorite of anyone in hiking boots. I get foot traffic through my little yard all the time. At home in New Mexico, I almost never need to close the drapes. Here, I feel just a bit as though I’m living in a glass house.
- Patio dining. Cooler nights spell perfect times for BBQs. Miss that.
Small herb garden in the making
AND A FEW RANDOM ECOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS:
- My graduate-level environmental studies class watched a video clip of Rachel Carson this week. The last time I’d seen similar footage was in Burma for an Earth Day celebration last year. Here, 20 percent of the class had never heard of Rachel Carson.
- Laundry. I’m actually less efficient living alone because I brought few clothes. I’m having to wash smaller loads more often. The machines here are not ENERGY STAR, and I can’t adjust for load size. Plus, I have no laundry line, which means I’m using the dryers.
- Garbage. I’m tossing more, more often because Chautauqua does not yet have composting facilities (we’re told they’re coming soon!). At home, we are able to compost or recycle almost all our waste. Some weeks, we have but one little bag in the trash can. Since I’m also tossing food scraps here, I’m having to take out the garbage more frequently because of the smell.
- Attitude. Despite the notes above, it’s a given in Boulder—people consider the environment in their daily actions. Bags aren’t immediately given in stores. Shops everywhere sell organic, biodegradable, compostable items. (Just bought a biodegradable plastic file folder.) Living green is the community norm.
- Cooking for one. Either I must change my habits, or I’ll have to start giving daily dinner parties. After so many years of cooking for at least myself and a hungry husband, it’s hard now to think and shop in terms of one. I can’t believe how long a single dish lasts—through the next breakfast, lunch, dinner and beyond. Must. Think. Small.
Three summers ago, we bought a little house near the Rio Grande. You might recall the dump that it was. It’s still a work in progress (and I’m beginning to think we will never reach completion). But every now and then, I glimpse a few photos of years past and I see that we have indeed progressed—all new kitchen, new floors, new windows and trim.
But the most remarkable changes have taken place outside, in a fertile yard with peaches clinging to young branches, a pomegranate tree that’s nearly doubled in size, five productive varieties of grapes (one so laden with fruit, its bunches touch the ground—we can’t keep them up!), a shaded table for our outdoor dining, and two comfy hammocks strategically placed for alternate daytime/nighttime use.
And the herbs.
Three summers ago, I planted a small herb garden on the north side. I started with a little oregano, parsley, basil, thyme, and a single Egyptian Walking Onion. I knew nothing about this plant, Allium proliferum, except what the store tag told me: this onion would “walk” itself around my garden as it grew. I planted it, gave it some compost and water, and let it go.
Well, dear readers, this is what we have today: an enormous shrub of onions, expanding in every direction. Jerry thinks they’re aliens.
I love the way they form small bulblets atop a hearty stalk. New little onions sprout from the mother below. We sometimes get three generations of onions, all reaching toward the sky, until finally the stalk tumbles beneath so much weight. They’re “walking” now into the neighboring mint, oregano, chives, thyme and Texas tarragon. But it’s not a problem. If the onions walk where I don’t want them, I just pick them up and aim them elsewhere. Most fallen stalks “plant” their new onions atop the soil. It takes months, even years, for the newer onions to dig themselves in.
Both bulbs and stalks are edible, though the youngest growths have the sweetest flavor. The biggest stalks are hollow inside, big as bamboo, with a potency that renders them unpalatable.
But these little beauties are delicate enough to slice and eat raw, or cook as one would with shallots.
These right here are my favorites. Such tender baby green stalks, slowly walking the garden as they await my plucking and chopping and mixing with fresh greens, tomatoes, a bit of crushed young garlic, a touch of mustard, olive oil, paprika, s&p and—when I’m lucky—wild Alaskan salmon.
That is indeed a pretty white glass of milk surrounded by the lovely green leaves of cannabis sativa. Marijuana milk. Pot juice. Call it what you will, but it won’t make you high. Though hemp milk is made from the pulverized seeds of the same family of plants that addle the brain and alter consciousness, the seeds have no psychoactive power. The milk could, however, make you very healthy (it has the grassy, pasty taste of something that must be horribly good for you). Studies confirm the drink is a reliable source of protein, fatty acids, calcium and various vitamins. Plus, people don’t seem to be allergic to hemp milk in the way that many are to cow, soy or nut milk. It’s actually illegal to grow hemp (and thus the seeds) in the United States, but it’s legal to buy the milk. (Most American sellers import the seeds from Canada.)
This particular glass, however, I sipped in the cool shade of an open-air dining room in northern Vietnam. Remember Shu? She’s started Sapa’s first Hmong-owned homestay and restaurant in Lao Chai village near Sapa. Her little place is ringed by tall, bushy cannabis swaying in the breeze. Its wispy clumps of leaves almost reminded me of the desert willow growing in our New Mexico yard. Shu brought out a glass of the milk, which was earthy and herbal and contained little brown flecks of seed. She said the plant has long served as an important part of the Hmong diet, particularly because of the nutritious oil that emerges when the seeds are heated. “If you cook, you see a lot of oil coming,” Shu said. “In the past, people were very poor, and people used to cook like this for tofu.”
I got a yen for wild betel in Vieng Xay, in a laid-back local market that sold an assortment of lunch pickings—sticky rice, sour bamboo, tangy dollops of jaeow, spicy little meatballs and grilled buffalo (above, middle, left of the balls) that had been mixed with onions and spices, wrapped in betel leaves and grilled over flames. Something happens when wild betel is cooked. It pops with fragrance, in an earthy, minty, almost flowery bouquet. It’s stunningly delicious, and I know of no other leaf that compares. (Plus, it fights atherosclerosis—at least in rabbits.)
In Vietnamese, that leaf is known as la lot. And by the time we were deep inside Vietnam a week later, we’d eaten our way through myriad mixtures of meat cooked in wild betel (usually grilled but sometimes fried). In Sapa, our Hmong friend stuffed a batch of betel leaves with ground pork and spring onion, nothing more, and plopped them into a splattering wok of hot oil. They fried to a beautiful brownish crisp—and tasted heavenly.
We’re back home in New Mexico now, but we’re blessed with a great Asian market. I found betel (it’s sold on the stem; if packaged neatly on a tray with stems removed, it’s probably the chewing betel —not what you want for this dish). Using Andrea Nguyen’s recipe as a guide, and recalling the flavors we’d had in Vieng Xay, this is the recipe that emerged:
Ingredients:
1 lb ground beef
1 package wild betel (about 25 leaves)
1 stalk lemongrass
several cloves green garlic
salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon curry powder (I used Penzeys Maharajah)
Method:
1. Soak several bamboo skewers in water.
2. Mince one stalk lemongrass (tender insides only) and a few cloves of fresh green garlic (or ordinary garlic, small fragrant cloves preferred for a sweeter, less biting flavor)
3. Mix ground beef (I used lean grass-fed, which tended toward the dry side; I might add a bit of minced pork next time) with lemongrass, garlic, salt and black pepper to taste, a few squirts of fish sauce and 1 tablespoon Penzeys Maharajah curry powder. (My brother and sister-in-law had given us a whole box of Penzeys curries just before we left the country. We’d hardly had a chance to use them; this was a perfect excuse). Let sit at least one hour.
4. Clean the leaves and flatten, placing shiny side down on the counter and stem pointing toward you. Fill each leaf with a small, long strip of meat mixture. Roll the leaf lengthwise around the meat and skewer. The skewer will hold the leaves in place. It’s OK to leave a little extra space around the ends of the meat, but don’t overfill the leaves.
5. Drizzle the skewers with oil and grill over medium heat with vents open until leaves are slightly charred (but don’t burn). Serve with your favorite spicy sauce. I made a Lao-style jaeow with smoked morita chiles pounded with garlic, galangal and fish sauce.
It was an easy, extraordinarily delicious success—thanks to those ambrosial leaves. Some recipes call for grape leaves as substitutes, but I’m with Andrea on this: grape leaves offer none of the fragrance. HOWEVER, I’ve been thinking of using grape leaves (since we have ginormous quantities growing in the backyard) in a different sort of way—stuffed with ground lamb, perhaps, and Mediterranean spices? Dolmas with just the meat and spice, minus the rice? Drizzled with lemon and olive oil, served with hummus and olives? Just a thought….
Several girls mix individual bowls of noodle soup at the Sam Neua morning market in Laos.
Greetings from the American Southwest. Jerry and I are home to a house that looks much the same. The herb garden grows again, the pomegranates bloom. And we fight the remnants of jet lag while leaping back into stateside life. I’ve had sporadic postings here lately, but that will change next week. Stay tuned for new reports and lots of stories from the weeks and months behind us. Meanwhile, you can also follow the Rambling Spoon Facebook page, where I often write between blog posts with links to food news and interesting tidbits.
Though the body has made it to New Mexico, the brain remains in Laos. Amid five months’ worth of dusting, vacuuming and laundering, I’m spending my hours typing and organizing hordes of notes. I’m remembering a steamy Sunday morning, just a few weeks ago (I cannot believe it was this month… feels like ages ago), when Jerry and I strolled through the Sam Neua morning market, which sprawls along the riverbank. We sat on a long wooden bench at a wide table covered in trays of herbs. A friendly woman stood beside her bubbling pots, ready to dole out servings of buffalo foe (or fer). Hers was one of the best bowls of noodle soup I’d had in weeks—rich meaty broth infused with galangal and thin tender strips of buffalo meat, very lightly cooked over parboiled wild water grasses; topped with a variety of fresh wild mints and additional raw wild water grasses, lime and the usual chile. This is what I love about Lao foe: most every bowl in every little village or town tastes different. It is one cook’s creation and none other.
As we ate, we watched seven little girls marching toward us. They aimed straight for our table, crowding around us, sitting patiently for their own bowls. They were, you might say, granddaughters of the revolution.
When their soups arrived, I watched as each little girl painstakingly constructed what was obviously her personal ideal—just enough chile, herbs, salt, fish sauce, shrimp paste and locally made Lao tomato-chile ketchup to make a uniquely individual breakfast. Each girl also brought a personal baggie of sticky rice to be dipped into the soup.
Slurp, slurp, smack, smack—they ate to contentment. But the girls’ bright red bowls contained so much chile, their little lips burned at the edges. They didn’t seem to mind. The vendor offered each of us a cup of drinking water served in a recycled glass shrimp-paste container, with label still intact. They were, I realized, the exact size and dimension of Vietnamese coffee cups.
Now that I’m back in the States, I’m struck by the freedom those little girls enjoyed. Seven kids, roughly between the ages of 9 and 12, out on their own for a Sunday morning breakfast and shopping spree. All across Sam Neua—all across Laos, really—we encountered little kids, some as young as 4 or 5, wandering and playing away from parental eyes. Kids walk to school alone. Kids hike through the forest alone. I’m not saying this always works. But coming from the perspective of a fear-riddled country in which parents drive their kids to the bus stop two blocks away—this sort of Lao-style freedom is refreshing. There is little cause for worry. Laos is not a place of rampant kidnappings. But it is a country in which parents help parents and neighbors help neighbors. In Laos, the village rears a child. If a mother isn’t watching her kid, chances are every other mother on the block is.
Anyway, it was a great bowl of soup. And even more pleasant to see young girls enjoying the food on their own terms.
A while back, I posted my account of eating for nine days in the northern Lao village of Sophoon. That was an example of what comes to the dinner table when the hosts know they have guests to feed. A few days ago, we trekked to the Hmong village of Ban Pakeo, several hours on foot from another Hmong village outside of Phonsavanh. We went there for a variety of reasons (old jars, for one), and you’ll have the opportunity to read much more about this in the future. But first, let’s consider dinner.
Ban Pakeo has no electricity (though that might change if villagers agree on allowing solar panels into their community). When we visited five years ago, villagers had to walk up and down steep hills to retrieve small buckets of water (that’s changed, thanks to a couple of water taps installed by Engineers Without Borders and a man named Don May at Fort Lewis College). Ban Pakeo has a cell phone, but it takes an afternoon hike to charge the phone in the nearest roadside village. Bottom line: no one knew we were coming for dinner. We had no way of notifying them. When we arrived around 5 p.m., all but a handful of kids and a few adults were still working in the fields. This is so all across Laos–the rains have started and it’s planting time.
So the villagers offered a live chicken, and our guide found a few young women to cook (presumably they killed and prepared the chicken–we never saw it again until it appeared as pictured above). They had no vegetables, but they did have steamed rice (the Hmong traditionally eat mountain rice grown in slash-and-burn fields; and some of the families here also grow wetland sticky rice). When dinner arrived on the table, around 8 p.m., it was soup, rice, and two leftover jaeows we had bought before the trek began. We finished it off with fresh mango, also purchased in town before we started hiking.
The broth was delicious–very salty (much needed after hours of sweating) and infused with a forest herb that tasted to me like the fragrant essence of Christmas trees–piney, green, minty. We were told this was a local herb eaten to restore strength and cure illness.
But where did half the chicken go? We got the head, the feet, the neck, some of the innards. But the breast? The meat? Nowhere to be seen.
Breakfast the next morning was sticky rice, more leftover jaeow, and more leftover soup. This, we know, is what most villagers eat on a daily basis–or some variation thereof. They eat what they have, they have very little, but they survive on what the land around them offers.
Happy Easter, everyone. I know it’s technically spring, and many of you are just waking to the season’s first blossoms, the mercury’s first climb toward warmer temps. But here in Vientiane, it’s summer through and through. It’s an Easter skillet—and we’re frying in the middle of it. By 9 a.m. the sun’s too strong to face. A walk around the block makes the body a salt lick. The only reasonable action: drink another lime juice (as I am right now at Joma). Call it nam manao, nuoc chanh da or tuk kro’chma—it’s Southeast Asia’s answer to lemonade, made with little limes. I’ve been loving the stuff ever since my long-ago semester in Hanoi. I remember that first broiling afternoon, and my introduction to Co Phuong, who ran the drink shop on the ground floor of the Ministry of Education Hotel (my four-month home away from home). She served me that first sugary glass of fresh lime over ice, and thereby taught me the key to battling intense tropical heat.
Lately, I’m finding more and more Asian menus offering lime juice (or lime freezies) blended with mint—so much mint, the drink comes speckled with garden green dots and a big, fresh sprig at the top. Brilliant. It’s so simple, such an obvious thing—yet I’m not sure I’ve ever served this to friends back home on a hot summer day. Rest assured, you will find this drink at the Redcoates hacienda, come June!
Even if your Easter is battered with wicked spring winds (or, heaven forbid, snow), tuck this one away for a sunnier day. When the flowers bloom, the birds sing and you prepare for summer’s first barbecue, remember to quench your guests’ thirst with this:
*fresh squeezed lime
*crushed ice
*sugar to taste
*a bunch of mint
Simply blend and enjoy—and embellish, if you like. A little gin? Vodka? Perhaps rum? Or SAKE!
Dinner in Udomxai: spicy tam maak hung (Lao papaya salad) with padek, and Lao khao soi (noodle soup with pork-tomato-chile sauce and lots of fresh herbs)
It took four days to travel overland from Chiang Mai to Sophoon, in the northern Lao province of Phongsali, where we camped in the village dispensary with Jim Harris and his team. Eight days in the field, then another four (again) to reach the big city of Luang Prabang. A long haul, indeed. We’re tired, but thrilled to have made such progress in our research. (This just in: Jerry’s photos from this project received an Honorable Mention in the Santa Fe Center 2010 Project Competition. Jerry also has been selected to participate in this summer’s Review Santa Fe.)
In the 35 years since the end of war, Jim and the PCL team are the first to clear ordnance from Phongsali–bomblets in rice fields, mortars among cassava trees, even a 750-pounder that a villager found on the hillside where she plans to plant rice. In Sophoon, like elsewhere in Laos, village blacksmiths make their knives and hoes from bomb fragments found in the ground. Villagers said they’re often afraid to work in the fields or collect vegetables in the nearby forests. But what choice do they have? Until Jim arrived last year, with promises to return and destroy ordnance in a safe manner, Sophoon residents had no reason to believe they’d ever be free of bombs. They still aren’t. The job is far too large for one team to complete.
Don’t worry, I’ll have many stories to come. But I’m still dealing with painfully slow Internet connections amid continued travels.
For now, imagine the lovely Lao mother who served us a simple but delicious meal (above) in Udomxai. We recognized the flavors of Laos as soon as we crossed the border at Huay Xai. That night, we ate chicken laap infused with dill, thick sticky rice, a spicy jaew maak len (tomato chile sauce) and a deliciously herbal or lam stew with eggplant–everything distinctly Lao. Still, this country too often gets squeezed between its neighbors, its language and cuisine lost in their similarity to those of neighboring Thailand. Not surprisingly, some Laotians tire of visitors speaking to them in Thai or asking for foods using their Thai names. Laotians tend to be mild-mannered people, but sometimes, enough is enough:
Restaurant menu in Huay Xai, on the Lao side of the border with Thailand
Doesn’t it look inviting? It’s after noon on a Saturday. You can go ahead and have one, if you’d like. My mother, the martini traditionalist, would say this is adulterated. But it tastes as gorgeous as it looks. This is Jerry’s creation: start with gin and dry vermouth, at a ratio of 3 to 1/2. Gather one clove of pickled garlic, one black olive and one sprig of fresh dill. Shake the gin and vermouth with some ice cubes, then pour over garlic and olive. Add dill and drink. As the mixologist says, “The dill fluffs your nose and gives a lovely scent as you imbibe.”
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Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
My books:
