Petit Riz

I’m worried I won’t find my mother at the airport in Tokyo. I see her walking her usual stride: tiny quick steps, sometimes when she is in a rush her torso moves faster than her legs. She sits down next to me with excitement. We’re both like schoolgirls, bubbling, we haven’t returned to Japan in ten years. We arrive in Osaka yawning from the long flight. The small plane from Narita was almost empty. Most of the passengers were asleep during the turbulent flight, but I stared down at Mt. Fuji, emerging from the clouds like a blue nipple. The flight attendant told us in her melodious voice that the turbulence would not affect the safety of the aircraft. We eat cucumber pickles and onigiri grilled in shoyu. The rice ball has a hot brown crust. I eat two in five minutes, drink water, and go to sleep. The next day we wake up at five, our stomachs so empty we can hear them echoing as we brush our teeth. We eat a gigantic breakfast of rice, miso soup, pickles, tiny white fish (baby anchovies), gyoza, sticky rice, soft-boiled egg, and seaweed. The streets of Osaka are quiet, clean and smooth, like the surface of a manicured nail. The only sound is the beep of the streetlight when it turns green. At lunchtime we sit at a counter and watch a man pour batter onto cabbage for okonomiyaki. He makes two for us: one with cabbage and pork, the other with green leeks and pork. One is draped with a shoyu lemon sauce. We stab at them with our chopsticks while they sizzle on the hot metal plate.

Koya-san is in the mountains. There are Buddhist temples at every curve of the road. We stay at two different temples, though our favorite is Eko-in. I like its simplicity, and though the food is better at the other temple according to my mother, I know I’ll be returning to Eko-in. There’s a sign above the faucet saying: Only water comes out. It should say, only cold water comes out. The instructions for morning meditation say, “if you have difficulty sitting on the floor during meditation we can provide you with a chair.” I laugh imagining myself sitting in a tall chair while my mother is on her knees with the monks. After meditating at six we are greeted with a shojin ryori feast, the Zen Buddhist cuisine. My mother’s friend tells us that it is difficult for women to travel alone in Japan because hotels are hesitant to rent a room to a single woman. Why? I ask. Because women have a history of hanging themselves with the belt of a yukata robe, she says. She mimes the gesture of strangling and points at the wooden beam above our heads. We continue eating our vegetarian breakfast. We are told that the monks grind sesame for hours to make gomadofu, sesame tofu.

I walk down the winding, wet road and come across colorful wind chimes flapping outside a small café. I’m transported to my Rudolf Steiner years in Australia. Bon on Shya Café is owned by a French-Japanese couple. She is French and he is Japanese, a musician, fluent in Italian, French, and English. Véronique is an artist and has drawn a beautiful children’s book. My mother wants to purchase it but they haven’t found a publisher yet. Véronique’s childhood reminds me of my own. She was born in the US and moved to France when she was nine and then traveled the world. She lived in Greenpoint as an adult, and arrived to Japan with her husband seven years ago. How did you choose Koya-san? I ask. She shrugs and smiles. I ask if living in the mountains is difficult. She says not particularly. Some days are difficult, but living in a city has its own hardships.

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Cooking with Miyuki is like watching a quiet, gentle dance. She embodies a breed of elegance I’ve rarely seen: she wields a knife with the precision of cooking school training and coordinates four dishes with flawless timing, while telling me about her childhood in the outskirts of Tokyo. Her mother was too busy to cook so Miyuki was in charge of the family kitchen at a young age. I like her openness, the way she asks direct questions in French (Do I meditate like my mother? Do I find French men to be different from Americans?). We listen to jazz as the rice cooks and kombu plumps in water. Junka, her toddler son, loves to dance. He prods the speakers and sways to music. Then he pushes a stool to the counter and looks at his mother cook.

Dashi is the base of Japanese cuisine, Miyuki explains. We rarely use water. Dashi to make soup, simmer vegetables, or thin a salad dressing. There are two main ingredients in dashi: kombu (kelp) and bonito flakes, or dried shiitake mushrooms for a vegetarian broth.

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Dark curls of caramelized onions hide beneath a layer of egg. Thin slices of potatoes, softened with oil, coat the skillet. The Spanish tortilla has a delicate, rich flavor from a secret ingredient. I carve the tortilla with a spoon. Cod croquettes distract me for a bite, but I’m faithful to the eggs.

We are seated in the front room. The entrance of Huertas holds a beautiful bar made of wood shipped from an abandoned barnyard in Indiana. By eight pm the space is rowdy with east villagers drinking vermouth on tap. At Huertas, the vermouth is aromatized with spices, bittering roots, teas and citrus peal. Tiny dense orange slices sink to the bottom of the glasses. We prick them with our forks.

The restaurant is cut in half by the long, rectangular open kitchen. As we leave the front bar, we see eggs sitting in temperature-controlled water for the soft-boiled dishes. Jonah Miller, the chef, sprinkles pimentón onto sunny side eggs. The eggs elegantly arch over oven-roasted asparagus, purchased that very morning at the green market. Spring has arrived, so our server tells us. We eye the plates of cheese and cured meats as we glide towards the back room where a quiet oasis awaits us.

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I’ve always loved crumbles because they require minimal measuring and the recipe is so elastic. Stir nuts into the flour and butter, combine different fruits in season, try dried fruit soaked in rum during the winter, or add heat with cinnamon and clove. Grate a sharp cheddar cheese into the crumble. Caramelize pears in butter. You don’t even need eggs. It’s the kind of dish you can easily adapt to suit your taste buds.

This afternoon was warm in DC, and with the sun throwing patches of heat onto the kitchen counter, I felt like peeling apples. I peeled five apples and sliced them thinly and sprinkled them with sugar and lemon. I chopped whatever nuts I could find in the fridge. I added ginger for a kick. I plopped blueberries among the apple slices for color. The result was divine. We ate the crumble unadorned. Amanda claims it is less sweet than “American” crumble, my mother says it is quite sweet, and I think it’s just about right. The fruit shines at the center – it’s cooked into a velvet sauce – and there’s enough shortbread crumble coating the apples to make the dish feel like dessert, not breakfast. Although leftovers with yogurt are very good the next morning.

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I have a warped memory of sitting alone in the dark corner of a classroom eating my carrot salad sandwich. I was embarrassed of its smell and how fat and unruly it was, with shreds of carrots overflowing and orange carrot juice dripping onto my fingers. I envied the refined vegemite and butter on saltine crackers the other children ate. They only had to deal with crumbs, which could be swept away with one quick movement. I needed napkins to wipe my orange lips.

Sandwiches for lunch were rare. My mother layered thin slices of cucumber quick-pickled in salt, hard-boiled eggs chopped and seasoned with olive oil, and the famous carrot salad so heavily speckled with parsley that it turned my smile green. I didn’t appreciate the thick, black-crusted bread that soaked the flavors, or the sweet, bright carrots tossed with a squeeze of lemon and salt, or the slender crunch of the cucumbers my mother lovingly prepared at six in the morning. I was worried about my teeth and being orderly as I ate.

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 The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

I would stare at Justin in class. There were three boys in our Writing Seminar (titled Ecstatic), one was an engineering senior who still needed the requirement to graduate, the other seemed a little lost as to what he was doing in this class, and then there was Justin, with his dark hair and very strong arms, who always asked questions about spirituality and Buddhism.  I had chosen Ecstatic because Nantina recommended the professor, an older man who moved slowly and spoke brilliantly. I was curious about Justin. I don’t remember what we said in our first conversation, though I remember it was awkward and happened right after class. Soon enough we were bonding over Flannery O’Conner, Rumi, and Conrad. I told him about my mother and how she took me to various spiritual retreats when I was young. Justin wanted to hear about Plum Village in the South of France. I told him about spending New Year’s Eve meditating at another retreat. We started exchanging essay drafts over email. His often began with Hey yo, and ended with Peace, Love, Happiness, Unity.

Although it was his first year of college (I was one of two sophomores in the class), I was surprised when Justin told me he lived in the Quad. I imagined him living anywhere but the dorms. I hadn’t spent much time in the Quad, mostly during my first week when we aimlessly wandered through campus looking for parties, before finding ourselves in the pristine Quad with its clean grass. I lived in Hill, an ugly, box-shaped building. The rooms got so hot in the summer we had to keep the doors open at night. Justin showed me his room and pointed at the corner where he meditated. He boiled water and made tea. We sat cross-legged on the floor with our tea and talked about Thich Nhat Hanh, relationships, going home over the winter, the recent loss of a friend, and how to become a millionaire through spiritual ways, without attachments, of course. He joked about his philosophical ranting. He knew I was skeptical when it came to meditation, yoga, and vegetarian cooking. A lifetime with my mother, I explained, makes you weary of brown rice and sitting zazen. But I loved listening to him speak, being in his presence, opening my mind to his ideas, seeing the world through his eyes, learning how fearless he was as he struggled to understand difficult concepts.

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guest post by Sarah Souli

Hi Justin.

Remember when you decided that you were going to learn how to cook? That was the same year you had committed yourself, with the assistance of a carefully detailed Excel spreadsheet, to how much and what types of food you would buy. Mindfulness in the kitchen. You lived with boys who charred squash on the gas stove and measured spices with their palms. They took off their shirts to cook. I came into your room one day, which you had decorated with fallen tree branches, and you showed me the sparse columns.

“I want to simplify my life,” you said. “I really don’t need all of this stuff. Oatmeal, banana and peanut butter, I can live off that easily.”

“That sounds terrible,” I probably responded, because I was always sarcastic and sometimes your commitment to balance and emptiness scared me because I’ve always been overly grounded in this false reality.

One day in the spring, you asked me to teach you how to make a meal. You came over to my apartment, and we had a little date; I remember Collin teasing us about it later. Standing in my cramped gallery kitchen, we talked about life and love and sex and meaning and oneness, and as usual, I only understood half of what you were talking about. You were on another level, my beautiful friend. But I could talk about food.

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guest post by Kristen Franke

For my 25th birthday, my father sends me a styrofoam cooler. It shows up on my doorstep covered in layers of tape and post office stickers—souvenirs from its long travels. Once opened, the cooler releases a fog of dry ice, revealing a simple, one-page pamphlet atop what seems like years worth of cellophane-wrapped treats. My father had sent me every single ingredient needed to prepare a Cassoulet D’Artagnan.

The actual preparation feels very primal: lots of tearing and slicing and pulling of meat. My cutting board looks like a crime scene. Having soaked overnight, the French Tarbais beans are plump and glowing white as I pour them into a broth of pork belly, clove-studded onion, carrot, thyme and garlic. They cook slowly; the aroma in my little Florida house is intoxicating.

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I’ll walk through the door and the small New York apartment erupts with dinner preparations, the entire space is chugging with kitchen energy, my friend stirs a pot and expertly balances several dishes on the counter, elegance and grace and a touch of disorder, carrot peels in the sink, onion skins on the floor, olives marinated in lemon peel on the table, it’s all there, the elements that make being a guest at a dinner party so wonderful and addictive. I might be eating the simplest dish, but all of a sudden it’ll seem like the most complex, exotic, flavorful, and surprising dish I’ve ever tasted. It always tastes better when someone else cooks for you, my mother says. I find this is often true with a home-cooked meal. Is it the energy, the care, the surprise of ingredients we might not naturally use in our own kitchen? I’ve stored countless memories: Rice cooked in a pot lined with potatoes, fiery curry so spicy it has us sweating as we sit cross-legged around a wooden table, beetroot blinis with salmon and pomegranate seeds, purple sweet potato moussaka, tender roasted chicken rubbed with tandoori spices, pork stuffed with sweet chestnuts and goat cheese, thick zucchini fried in peppery olive oil, duck seared on a smoking hot pan, scallops cooked in white wine and garlic, savory dutch babies eaten with hot sauce.

We don’t always see the work that goes into preparing the meal. We arrive with our bottle of wine and settle into our seat, inhaling the scents and licking our chops.

When I’m hosting a dinner I’ll change my mind over and over again. I can never settle on a menu, and I either give myself too much time or not enough time to cook. I tell myself – next time I’ll make a simpler dish. But I’m reluctant to serve my guests every-day food such as fried rice or spaghetti.

At last, I’ve found three good, simple dishes. All three come from my father and Larisara’s kitchen in LA, tested and highly approved by my little brothers.

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We snack on pecans, brownies, and sip sherry by a fake fireplace. We walk through most of the twenty-two squares in Savannah, stumbling upon each green patch with surprise until the trees and their hanging Spanish moss grow familiar. Walking through Savannah is like gliding beneath green curtains, their edges brushing the tops of our heads. It’s difficult to think of Savannah as belonging to this part of the world. There’s a dreamy, ghostly quality to the shaded streets through which light filters erratically.

We are told that this city was built upon its dead. If one were to dig beneath the pavement millions of bones would sprout. The soil is fertile. The air is warmer in Savannah, but it is still cool and humid in early March. We walk up and down Forsyth Park, passing by grand mansions and afternoon runners. My bones are cold from New York. There is a restaurant with floor to ceiling windows where we devour an Andouille and butternut squash soup followed by shrimps and ground beef swimming in thick gravy. Beneath the stew we uncover the creamiest grits. On Friday afternoon, we continue our walk through the squares. I stand by the Savannah River looking at the muddy water and I turn my face to the sun. I could stay there for hours. We taste honey at the Savannah Bee Company, pumping droplets onto cardboard spoons. I am reminded of a man who killed bumblebee in New Zealand. I was young and traveling with my parents. We were in a bus with many tourists and there was a giant bumblebee buzzing around the bus. A man slammed down his shoe, squashing it flat. My mother screamed, How could you! She may as well have yelled murder. We all stared at him.

At night we ride a hearse with lunatic Laura, as she calls herself. She tells us stories of the Savannah ghosts. The hearse crawls slowly through the dark streets and we are cold as there are no windows. I suck in my cheeks and hold my hands tightly on my lap to stay warm. As Laura feeds us spooky stories she tells us about the family that returns every fall to Savannah and rents the entire hearse for pizza and ghost tales. Only a few blocks away from our bed & breakfast, Laura returns home to her apartment’s ghost, Ted, a man who was stabbed six months before she moved there.

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