Back from New York and a Partial Inventory of Food

After enduring a canceled flight, an entire JFK airport ground stop, and our longest flight delay ever (seven hours in an airport terminal), we are home and I don’t know how Oscar managed to get himself to work. Last I checked, we got home at six o’clock this morning.

Not here to dwell though.

We flew into NY on Friday morning, checked our bags at our posh little place on W56th and 7th Ave. (down the block from Carnegie Hall; we can thank my parents for the hook up here), and headed to the Brooklyn Museum for the © MURAKAMI exhibit. There’s Oscar saying hello to a gargantuan Tongari-Kun, aka Mr. Pointy:

So this exhibit is dense and totally crazy, and it was helpful to have first walked through the Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900 exhibit so we could get some perspective on Murakami’s influences and concerns with composition and theme, which we see in the Superflat of his pop art, and because Hokusai is not a part of the School of Utagawa, think instead of Hiroshige’s waves resonating in Murakami’s fields of flowers with faces, his spirals of flowering vines, his Milk (pink canvas accompanying Hiropon), Cream (blue canvas accompanying My Lonesome Cowboy). Think of their compositions and studies of perspective when thinking of Superflat, and also think of their explicit erotic art. Ultimately what it appears Murakami aims to do, while drawing upon those classical influences, is to not merely blur but eradicate the line between high art, pop art, pornographic art, and also commercial art to the point of hardcore commercialism.

Southeast Asian, Take 4

Whew! And I believe, my friends, that we have a speech!

I am now exchanging emails with a professor from the Southeast Asian Studies Department, and musicians from Oakland based Balinese Gamelan Sekar Jaya. As part of my speech will include a reading from Diwata, the gamelan ensemble musicians will be accompanying me on this, totally improvised. As one of the musicians tells me, this particular section or instruments within the ensemble traditionally play accompaniment to a singer who sings poetry in a way that I think fits Diwata, rolling loose storytelling.

This is going to be so exciting!

I’ve done improvised performance with Joachim Luis accompanying me on kulintang. This can be lively. An ensemble of similar instruments is going to be even livelier.

At any rate, in an effort to procrastinate on my speech writing, and work off some nervous energy, I took the veggies from this weekend’s trip to the Jack London Square farmers market, and some organic tofu, and I made vegetarian lumpia. Ingredients: sugar peas, baby carrots, white onion, green onion, garlic, and tofu sautéed in soy sauce and a little oyster sauce, freshly ground black pepper, and sesame oil. After letting this cool, I wrapped these up into some fat lumpias, and shallow fried them for a couple of minutes on both sides (fried to the color of my forearm).

To accompany: garlic fried rice made with leftover chicken adobo in coconut milk, and a salad made with organic mixed greens also from farmers market, tomatoes, and a peanut vinaigrette.

(Robert Karimi: “Remember folks, just because you eat lumpia, doesn’t automatically make you Filipino!”)

I should also say I was inspired by Robert Karimi’s and John Castro’s lumpia campesina (fried to the color of Castro’s forearm) at The Cooking Show Con Karimi y Castro. Because the revolution begins in the kitchen. Word.

Somewhat Filipino Food Post: Variation on Sinigang

Somewhat like sinigang. Something like sinigang.

It’s funny because for so many other Filipino dishes, my mother is a traditionalist when it comes to my cooking of it, but when it comes to sinigang, it’s so anything goes. I typically use lemons, tomatoes, and eggplant to make a sour broth. My sister uses umeboshi plums, and she steams the fish in the sour broth.

This recent “experiment” was a good use of leftover rice, and leftover sauce from Shan Dong Restaurant’s Shan Dong Prawns (they serve the sauce in a separate container when you order to go). This was also great sick food for my recent flu-ish state.

Assembled in a good size, glazed Japanese soup bowl (layers from the bottom up):

(First layer) Brown rice with black barley and daikon radish seeds cooked in a little organic butter and chicken stock. Really interesting nutty, popping texture on this.

(Second layer) Wild Atlantic salmon fillet (really rich, dark pink), seasoned with lemon juice, kosher salt, and cracked pepper, then coated with a sweet soy garlic glaze and broiled. Topped with sesame seeds. Really melty texture on this.

(Third layer) Ladled over first and second layers: Sinigang (lemons, tomatoes) broth with miso, and containing two handfuls of pea sprouts, two chopped tomatoes, grated ginger, scallions, and garlic sautéed in sesame and peanut oil.

On presentation alone, it was one of those hell yeah I’d pay good money for this entrée at a place better than your average trendy Potrero Hill or Castro Asian Fusion place. I only wish I’d taken pictures.

Belated Filipino Food Post: Lumpiang Shanghai Post Ending with a Mel Vera Cruz Image

It had been literally forever since I have made lumpia, and I mean literally because I have never singlehandedly made lumpia. “Making” lumpia means preparing all the ingredients, combining all the ingredients into a mixture, separating the wrappers/skins (they all come stuck together in a package if you are like most of us and buy the Menlo brand of wrappers in the red square plastic package rather than make them yourself), and then wrapping each and every single lumpia.

I have participated in the assembly line that was comprised of me, my older sister, my mom, and my Mama, who would assign each of us a specific task: chopping the water chestnuts and scallions, peeling and grating the carrots, cutting the square wrappers into two isosceles right triangles and then separating them. When I got older, I would actually be allowed to do the actual wrapping; it was like graduating.

Filipino food post: perfect arroz caldo

I suspected that arroz caldo would have Chinese origins, and that it would have been some form of congee. Turns out I was right, as per Doreen Fernandez once again. She discusses 19th century Chinese restaurants giving Spanish names to their dishes, purely for marketing purposes to Philippine clientele.

(I wonder which came first: congee or lugaw?)

Fernandez has written on how Chinese cuisine has been indigenized over time (that is, we come to believe it has always been “ours”), in a way that Spanish cuisine generally has not. This definitely has something to do with the relative abundance of necessary ingredients, as well as relative ease in preparation, unlike Spanish cuisine’s more expensive and relative unavailiability of ingredients, much of which would have been imported, as well as the more complex processes of preparation. These factors contribute to Spanish dishes becoming the “special occasion” associated dishes.

Thy Tran: Foodies

Yesterday evening was Inside Story Time: Foodies, for “gourmets reading in a dive bar.” This all took place in the back room of Delirium (which is, indeed, dive-y) close to 16th and Valencia. We’d come out to see Thy Tran, who has co-authored the Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Companion. She’s currently working on a “collection of essays on how food changes in families across place and time,” and has received a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant to do so.

I have seen Thy read once before, for Litquake’s Litcrawl a few months ago, and at the time, she read a section of these essays on eggs. Yesterday evening, she read a couple of essays on eggs, and then an essay on frogs. I tend to wonder if, as supermarket dependent Americans in cities and suburbs, we decide it’s somebody else’s responsibility to think about the meticulous details of the life cycles of the creatures that are our food sources, the meticulous details of their being born and thriving, their relationship with the world.

Current reading: Philippine food traditions and foodways

I’ve read through Doreen Fernandez’s Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture slowly, and finally finished reading it the other night. Now I have started on Amy Besa’s and Romy Dorotan’s Memories of Philippine Kitchens, which I’d previously thought was solely a cookbook, which it isn’t. Like Tikim, which Besa and Dorotan reference, Philippine cuisine is presented in regional, geographical, historical, and colonial contexts. Nothing new or remarkable here, except to say that I appreciate much Fernandez’s clear and explicit articulations of colonial and neocolonial influences on our foodways, and that Fernandez even uses these terms at all, particularly the latter: “neocolonial.”

One thing that really interests me about Fernandez is that she also discusses gender roles and expectations, and she just comes right out and says that the Filipino men who find joy in creating Philippine (and other) cuisines are able to feel and experience this joy precisely because they are not expected to cook, to know how to cook, to know their way around the kitchen. When they do, they are praised for their liberalism, their not being “above” the woman’s work, and so, they are given the space in which to approach cooking as a pastime, hobby, or novelty. They can enter the kitchen when they choose to, and practice culinary arts at their leisure. In other words, because they are not socially circumscribed by the role, the mundaneness, the unglamorous and the thankless everyday work, they actually have the space to enjoy it.

Poetry and Lit thoughts elsewhere in e-world

Elsewhere #1, in which Ninotchka Rosca discusses revolution and the process of making the perfect flan, and I get to think aloud about women’s work, Filipino gender and food traditions, and literary food anthologies. Comment excerpts:

BJR: … I struggle as a Pinay with what is women’s work, and whether we are degraded by it, whether we should chuck it aside for “bigger” and more “ambitious” things like being academics, authors, etc. But I have found that in taking on my mother’s and grandmother’s food traditions for big family gatherings, I actually feel pretty empowered, and think about ways in which to elevate “women’s work.” It all still confuses me.

Anyway, congratulations on a perfect flan. My mother taught me how to make a flan a couple of years ago, and I’ve since amended her recipe by making mine into Mexican chocolate flan.

NR: Happy new year as well. I envy you your tradition. My mother couldn’t cook and all I remember of my grandmother was that she told me once that the best way to off a husband was to grind some glass in a mortar and pestle and mix it with his flan. … I will try mixing chocolate with the flan mix. Have you tried lining the caramel with blueberries?

BJR: … I know there are collections of Filipino food fiction … I think though, a straight up literary food essay and recipe anthology would be very cool.

Elsewhere #2, in which François Luong detests poetry tourism, and Johannes Göransson and I jump in. I am thinking about whether we really do “limit” ourselves as poets by “ignoring” a certain part of the poetic spectrum, in this case, traditionally rendered Western forms in contemporary contexts. Actually, I am more apt to think that re-rendering Western poetic forms can be empowering, and that rejecting use of traditional Western poetic forms can be considered a political act or choice, and therefore, empowering as well.

I think that using the term, “ignoring,” to describe “not using,” is loaded if not simply inaccurate, especially when proactively opening up the discussion linking traditional Western poetic form to Euro-centrism. To me, that the discussion is occurring is evidence that traditional Western poetic form is not being ignored at all, but rather, directly challenged. As it should be.

Elsewhere #3, in which Oscar Bermeo and I get share poetry co-feature space. This is going to totally HELLA RAWK, in case there were any doubt.