Petit Riz

      

Left: rice with egg, carrots, onions, and parsley. Right: rice with leeks, spring onions (one bunch), shiitake mushrooms, and ginger. 

This rice isn’t fried, my mother says, it’s a revuelto de arroz. A scramble of rice, or better still, rice turned over in the pan. With a wooden spatula, she lifts and turns the short-grain rice in the pan. Clumps of warm rice roll around in caramelized leeks and carrots. In a bowl, she whisks two eggs with salt and swirls them in a pan shimmering with olive oil. She scrambles the eggs with chopsticks. The rice crisps against a medium flame. The pan hisses as my mother sprinkles soy sauce. She adds a final trickle of olive oil and gently folds in the scrambled eggs. Sometimes she makes her revuelto with coconut oil.

We used to call this dish arroz saltado, or fried rice, until we realized it’s nothing like the fried rice we find in restaurants. These rice grains aren’t glossy and slippery with oil. They hold together from the moisture of cooking in water, forming clusters among whatever vegetables we’ve found in our kitchen. The only seasoning we use is salt, soy sauce, and oil, either olive or coconut, depending on our mood. But we are adamant about using fragrant oil rather than the more neutral grapeseed. The final touch: fresh parsley leaves.

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Photo by Daniel Abrams

There were eight of us for three bedrooms in a wooden cabin so intimate we could hear one another whisper before falling asleep.

We drove two and a half hours west, from New York to the Poconos. When we arrived at the residence the sky was cloaked black. At the entrance near the visitor’s center a traffic board flashed red with the announcement: Saturday night karaoke cancelled due to technical difficulties. The community seemed gigantic and ghostly with rows of houses along empty roads, each house equidistant from the other and separated by strips of garden. I was reminded of an abandoned ski resort. We were surrounded by hundreds of unlit houses, but we still felt as though we were in the middle of nowhere.

We arrived at our cabin after driving a long loop along the lake, around which were organized the two hundred and sixty lots. We joked that we were returning home for Thanksgiving, and indeed I experienced an eerie déjà vu of a homecoming I never had in college.

The windows glowed orange as we climbed the steps of our cabin and pushed open the door. Jo danced around the kitchen, deep in her dinner preparations, while Ben placed logs of damp wood near a heating vent. The house smelled of roasting chicken, lemons, capers, and caramelized sweet potatoes. Dan whisked a vinaigrette for the red leaf spinach while Jo cooked Israeli couscous. She sautéed onions in olive oil and added the white pearls to toast until they were golden. She poured stock onto the couscous and I stirred while she prodded the chicken and spooned capers onto its crispy skin.

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Our school in Melbourne organized camping trips every year. We would drive away from the city with two or three parents accompanying our teacher. We stayed for a week or so in a rudimentary camping ground with a communal kitchen. One summer we found ourselves lost, off-trail, in the middle of the Australian bush. The mother of a classmate gave us lemons to suck on, telling us they helped with mountain sickness. I can’t imagine the mountains close to Melbourne being all that treacherous, but our water bottles were only half filled and many of us wore cotton shorts, barely equipped for climbing over large and dusty rock formations. Our thighs were soon scratched by roots and twigs, our clothes streaked with soil, and what had seemed like a joyful adventure began to frighten us. We could tell the adults were worried. They had no phones and our teacher had started to yell “mountain calls” in the hope of attracting another group of hikers. The lemons eased our nervousness. I remember watching the beautiful mother – she was younger than the other parents, she had long black hair and dark red lips – as she held the lemons firmly against a flat stone and cut with her swiss knife.

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I’m delighted and honored to feature Sara Zin‘s beautiful artwork in this post.  
For more paintings, visit her illustrated cookblog: starving artist (and perhaps cook a recipe or two!)

1987, La Vallée, Bretagne. Not many have seen a Japanese woman when my mother arrives to this quiet country road lined with cornfields where my great aunt Germaine kills her geese once a year. My mother speaks French and has cooked her way through Argentina. She knows buckwheat from cold soba noodles that she ate with finely sliced spring onions and shredded seaweed, dipped in sauce. In Japan, she says, pillows are filled with buckwheat hulls the size of pearls to cool one’s head throughout hot, humid summers.

Her first galette with my father is in Saint-Malo – a port on the northern coast of Brittany – at a small restaurant owned by an old woman. My mother doesn’t like the heavy fillings of cheese and egg so she asks for mushrooms in hers and is horrified when she discovers canned mushrooms hidden beneath the buckwheat folds. This must be an afternoon snack, she tells herself. Later we will sit down for a “real” meal. But there is no “dinner” like in Argentina with many courses, and so that night she nurses her cold feet in the bidet of her future in-law’s bathroom, for April is often a cold month in Brittany.

She falls in love with the land and urges my father to renovate a tiny square house once used to store potatoes. The stone walls are as thick as our forearms. My mother and I live in this house during the summers. She names it la casita or la petite maison in French. The ceilings slant so low that we crouch in the bathtub to shower. Down the road we watch Germaine cook galettes in a small, dark kitchen where she keeps her birds in a cage, hanging above her head. There, she chats with the birds as a gas crêpière smokes. She flips soft, spongy galettes onto a large plate. Hers are famous for the handful of grey salt she throws into the batter.

But do you like galettes? I ask my mother, as she tells me these stories.

Oh, of course, I love galettes, but not with canned mushrooms.

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This was our version of a Thanksgiving meal. My mother doesn’t like the tough meat of turkey, she prefers sockeye salmon, and so we thought of the holiday as more of an occasion to spend an afternoon cooking together. What a gift to have a full day in the middle of the week to indulge in the kitchen.

The result was the kind of meal you might cook to impress four ravenous guests. The dessert takes two to three days to prepare, but it can be made ahead of time and left to rest in the fridge overnight. The salmon can be thrown into a hot oven when the guests arrive as it only takes twenty minutes to cook. The tart can be cooked an hour or two in advance; it is delicious served at room temperature, although it can also be easily reheated. The root vegetables, too, can be roasted two to three hours before serving and returned to the oven with the salmon. They’ll finish caramelizing as the salmon bakes.

We began our afternoon in the kitchen by roasting kabocha, potatoes, carrots, and sweet potatoes in a piping hot oven for an hour, until they were soft in the center and caramelized. We had sprinkled them with sel gris, olive oil and fresh rosemary. The revelation was kabocha – cooked in the oven, it has a delicate, sweet flavor that intensifies along its crisped edges. Its inner flesh was velvet along our tongues.

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I’m honored to have a short piece on galettes and cider published in Public Streets this week!

Photos by Geoffroy Bablon (top) and Patrick Lemoine

I sat down to write in order to stop eating the granola I made last night. Granola is addictive, but this one beckons me unless I hide it from sight.

At the end of July I started searching for the recipe. I tried buckwheat, cocoa powder, cacao nibs, olive oil, coconut oil, coconut flakes, chia seeds, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, pistachios, honey, coconut sugar, brown sugar, and maple syrup. I heated and reheated my kitchen mercilessly through a sweltering summer, my arms coated with sweat as I flipped grains and nuts on baking sheets at five-minute intervals. I tended to my granola batches with doubtful affection, never quite believing I’d find the combination I longed for as I scoured the Internet and my cookbooks.

Cooks have often sung unequivocal praise for their granola. They’ll say: At last, I’ve found it, here is the secret ratio of oil to sweetener, here is the recipe you’ll be packing into jars to gift during the holidays! And indeed, there isn’t one, ideal recipe. It’s a matter of individual taste, isn’t it? For instance, I want mine to taste salty as salted butter, to have more nuts than oats, and to be golden, edging on brown.

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guest post by Sarah Sahel

Cooking requires the constant devolution of time. It is a demanding and regular lover. It does not settle for compromises, but gives itself fully to persistence. Ever since I graduated from my masters two years ago and joined the more time-consuming “professional world,” cooking has become a one-time fling, and I am an ungrateful child, defeated by withdrawal. I don’t give enough, and I don’t get back.

Fortunately, August allows for long delayed encounters. It is that time of the year when time pauses with the gentle languor of summer. That time when people sit at a terrace to write postcards and send their love from… to friends and family. I took this opportunity to return home, to Casablanca, Morocco, and the foreign land embraced me with open arms.

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guest post by Jason Ueda

The first time my mom showed me how to make the sauce, she listed out the ingredients in her pleasant lilt of confidence: a cup of soy sauce, a cup of sugar, 1 to 1, turn on the heat, about this much garlic, the same for ginger, and about thiiis much of mirin. She uses a Japanese brand of pureed ginger and garlic that come in tubes, found next to the wasabi and karashi mustard in any Asian foods market. She told me this is the same recipe we use for shish kebab marinade and for her broiled chicken wings that crisp up outside and fall to morsels when taken hot from the oven.

We were making a glaze for chicken breast well after 8 since my mom worked in downtown LA, about an hour away with moderate traffic. To thicken for a gooey consistency, she added a teaspoon or so of cornstarch in a rice bowl and added a few tablespoons of hot water to make a smooth slurry before dropping it into the simmering pot; it plumed in the convection, she stirred and tasted, offered me a slurp, then with a definitive tap of her spoon over the pot lip, said it was about done.

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My mother, who doesn’t like raw onion, scoops the raw slices with her chopsticks and crunches them with gusto. You would never guess that this is onion, she says, but only because it has been washed and soaked in cold water. We are in the middle of volcanic mountains, close to Mount Aso on the faraway Island of Kyushu. Our dinner is a series of complex dishes crowding our dark wooden table, each one stoking my warring affections. I am a befuddled guest, struggling to give each dish my love. I don’t know where to begin and my chopsticks shoot from plate to bowl to plate, whereas my mother, impassable as a monk, carefully lifts the salad bowl into the hollow of her hand and eats onions. They are white as peeled radish and crisp as raw fennel. They taste fresh like the mountain rain that falls beyond the dining room window. Only the subtle after note of spiciness suggests onionness.

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