An Unconscious Bounty

I've been digging around on YouTube lots lately, and devouring the short talks of David Wolfe, a raw foods expert and author. His enthusiasm is infectious. His language is Dude. He is great! I’ve flipped through his book Amazing Grace and it is deeply, joyfully inspiring.

"Why are people sick, eating the food they’re eating? The soil’s not loved, the animals aren’t loved, the way its shipped isn’t loving, the way its stored isn’t loving, the way its prepared isn’t loving, the way its eaten isn’t loving. No wonder. And we’re still surviving. Barely. People aren’t living longer, but they’re dying longer."

He is so right about the love. He's saying what I am thinking.

And then, I hear the fear implanted in this way of thinking, along with the superiority of it (“We raw foodists are among the top 1%,” he told a self-congratulatory group during a juicing workshop) and...I wish it didn't have to go there. Saying over and over: “We’re dying from this. It’s a tragedy. Milk has pus in it. It’s astounding anyone can survive how we eat. It’s killing us.”

This rhetoric is not about the love. It is spreading the fear. People are eating fear. And other people are thinking they are superior for eating the healthiest food ever, but they are soaking in fear and separation-thinking, too.

Sure, I’m conflicted.

I've been on a backslide lately. I've been attracted again to lowly sugar-based crud for the first time in ages. Only lard-filled, chocolate-flavored pseudo cakes would do, eaten compulsively. Ho-Hos. Hostess cupcakes covered with the icing you can lift off like one unbroken carpet of frosting, the white squiggles clearly drawn on by a machine.

Time for a visit to the dig site for a bit of nutritional/emotional archeology. Upon excavation, I have found a pattern.

It was the mid 70’s and I was a little kid. My parents were on a “health kick.” They were collecting ‘Back to the Land’ books. They were also into our heritage, so the Norwegian portions of us were forced to swallow a tablespoon of cod liver oil every evening. We had health foods in the house, but no real will to prepare them.

Raw foods had only been barely invented by a bunch of crazies in some California commune. Juicing was done by recluses who used to be insurance agents in places like Big Sur to prepare the body for the rigors of interplanetary travel. There was no soy, little understanding of organic produce, Goji berries were still hiding out in the Himalayas, and every health food store was simply lined with plastic bottles of vitamins. With fruit leather planted next to the cash register.

My personal idea of health food would have been granola-ice cream bars with about 890 calories a piece. Which were considered healthy because they used brown sugar instead of white sugar to make them. But we didn’t buy those.

I packed my own lunch for school. It was usually a piece of fruit and some warmed-up Campbell’s soup in a thermos. Eating this was like eating a moderately portioned serving of self-hatred and low self-worth every day. All the other kids could just smell the neglected freak in me.

Other kids had cute metal lunch boxes with a white bread samwich, little crunchy bag of potato chips, an apple or banana, a thermos of orange juice, and a plastic wrapped Hostess cupcake. Their jewel-like perfection looked delicious to me. So that’s how it tasted, when your mom was there to pack your lunch every morning. So that’s what it was like when she even considerately put a cute paper napkin along with. The dream childhood. A very Brady Christmas.

Now. To a nutritional "extremist," the typical packed American kid’s lunch sounds like it should be included in a study of Unconscious Societal Infanticide. That kind of lunch and living has led to my fellow students now struggling with hanging white bread guts and cola-poked teeth, diverticulosis, ovarian cysts, early heart attacks. Did my parents do me a favor, not buying that?

My family had an OCD approach to weekends. We struggled through the week with the health food plans, but on the weekend we could taste the freedom. We shared popcorn or chips with Friday night TV. We ate a box of Keebler cookies or a Sara Lee Bavarian Cream pie after weekend dinners. Because we couldn’t have anything sweet during the week, we tore into these, a bunch of slavering wolves. Even so, the food was carefully controlled so that we didn’t get more than we needed. And there wasn’t enough to go around. Everyone got a medium-sized piece, my mom asked for ‘just a sliver,’ and my always-athletically slim dad sneakily and thoroughly gobbled down the rest when our backs were turned.

If food is really love, according to MFK Fisher, there was not a surfeit of love in the house. My folks were in survival mode -- survival in the suburbs. They were both strangely dissatisfied, trying to make things better and more healthy and more family, but unaware that what was missing was more heart, more love, more presence.

Those sweets to me represented power and freedom. The freedom of the weekend, to let the straitjacket of rules and high intentions drop. The power to eat whatever satisfies you. And what satisfied me, or rather what glimmered at me, was cheap chocolate snack foods, the more shallowly made and brightly packaged and conspicuously useless, the better. They represented rightness to me. No controversy, no dissatisfaction. The right kind of kid, the right kind of family, with harmony and plenty for all.

They say kids copy the eating habits of the dominant parent. I soaked up the effect of my dad’s power over the food. He always got more treats to eat than anyone else, and he always ate them alone. I do the same thing to this day, when my Hyde is laughing in my Jekyll’s face.

In some ways, it wouldn’t have mattered if I my mom had packed me a healthy lunch rather than a twinkified lunch. It was the care and nurturing I was after. I wanted to know her, by feeling her care of me. I know she was doing her best, and in the 70's, she was in the minority as a working mother, yet still alone responsible for feeding everyone even though she worked as hard as my dad did.

But I craved the experience of not having to constantly comfort myself; rather the safety of knowing someone cared about what I ate, and that I ate at all, and that I didn’t go hungry. The act of packing food for a child with love is an important one.

It’s packing a juicer with the love that is a major element of the success of the David Wolfes (and I only know him from Youtube) of the world. But the superiority act leaves a burnt taste in my mouth. Tell me more about the love and the nurturing, Dude. That’s what we’re really after.

Wild Rice Creation Story

I found a lovely film about the sacred food of the Anishinabe in Minnesota: the wild, long grain rice.



It's interesting the language that the seed companies have already implanted into our society: that they would be creating "genetically superior" rice. It astounds me that anyone, thinking about it deeply, could ever imagine that something artificially altered could be genetically 'superior' to something that has lived on earth and responded to natural conditions, altering itself and adapting, for millenia. How could that be? The Anishinabe narrator tells the story using the language that we have all begun to absorb: a concept of 'genetic superiority' that was supposed to have died with Hitler.

It was just something that stuck out and shouted at me when I watched the film. I don't want to learn the Monsantan language, thank you, because it plants in my consciousness unhealthy and altered words that have nothing to do with the real thing.

Course Description

Here is my website description for my class on Enchanted Cooking & Soul Nutrition. I am continuing to look for venues and gather courage to teach it. It is going to be great.

Once upon a time people sang to the seeds during planting and loved the roots free as the earth released them during harvest. Learn skills of intense and gentle focus in order to enhance every aspect of your life, beginning with self-nourishment. Undertaking shamanic journeys to the land spirits of our food, we will re-enchant the raw materials with their ancestral dreams as we cook and bake together. As we explore soul nutrition and the role of sacred food, we will practice the skills of singing the seeds and animative breathing as well as the art of composing the palate/palette of a meal...whose ingredients become a metaphor for the wholly-lived, delicious life.

What Comfort Food Really Means

Last week I had to choose between forging on into new and Persian delights of dishes, experimenting with rhubarb as a savory vegetable to be mixed with beef and cooked slowly (Oh, I was confident. Maybe just a little too confident)...or return to rhubarb as a dessert, head held high in forced pride, like a cat who trips awkwardly and tries to pretend she meant to do that by quickly licking her ankle. It is however comforting to know that you can always go home again, because the new recipe was a disaster. DIS. AS. TER.

Well, not entirely.

He said: "I like it. It's something different."

He ate a whole bowl of it, and then another. (It was filled with beef, after all, and he is a Prince.) The rest of us couldn't be brought to finishing ours, nor indeed proceeding beyond bite one. The dish in question was ground beef and onion and rhubarb, over rice. Persian. Iranian. 1001 Nights. Exotic. New to me. It had also needed a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, which sent it jolting over the sourness richter scale. During its preparation, I began to panic. I thought, if I add some chilis and then something sweet, I can make it hot and sour and spicy, and save this trainwreck.

But it just tasted like beef in a lemonade flavor base with rhubarb in it, over rice. And kinda spicy.

The sort of thing a crazy and heartbroken and clueless person bakes for their child to take to the Appreciate Other Cultures potluck, and the poor kid is forced to secretly scrape the pyrex dish out near the staff parking lot in the dark before the buffet even starts and never, ever tell and keep the secret with them forever, beginning with when she asks how they liked it, afterwards.

(Post Persian Beef and Rhubarb experiment. Demoralized and hungry, I would need about two weeks to recover. Still searching for a dish of savory rhubarb. Less avidly, though.)

So I returned to the familiar territory of my youth: the familiar muffin territory, where everybody knows your name. Muffins are cupcakes with chunks added, by the way. Muffins are to stew what cupcakes are to soup. Muffins? Meh. Seen it all, muffin-wise. The big, the mega, the jumbo, the mini (so dry, barely edible) and everything in-between. There are particular organic-Hippie-based, small-mountain-town cafes in Colorado (where all the pierced waitresses have been to Burning Man at least once) that specialize only in muffins, believe me. Raspberry muffins whose floppy innards look like a crime scene. Lemon muffins always but always teamed with poppyseeds. Chocolate chocolate muffins: Hey!! Bleh. What's so special about the muffin?

These rhubarb muffins are different, because here, the tangy zestiness of the rhubarb finds its perfect mate in the sweet and rich lemon vanilla batter. Opposites come together and their dance simply works. It's as if the plainest Jane and Joe at the Arthur Murray Beginner's Course Graduation Night turned out to be able to rock Argentinian Tango like nobody's business. Who knew?

325 degree oven, or 180 in Europe. Use regular size (not jumbo) muffin liners in a muffin pan.

1/2 pound butter (2 US sticks, or 1 Euro block minus 2 Tablespoons)
2 cups granulated sugar
4 large eggs, at room temp.
2 T lemon zest (just cut very fine sheets of lemon zest away from the rind, taking care to leave all white pith behind, then very finely mince. Please don't buy a special tool for this.)
2 T fresh lemon juice
3 cups chopped fresh rhubarb
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 cup whole milk

Mix the flour, soda and salt together and set aside. Cream together butter and sugar, then add lemon bits. Mix eggs in one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in half the milk, then mix in the dry flour mixture. End by mixing in the rest of the milk, and then stir in the rhubarb.
Fill muffin liners scantily to the top. (If you like your baked goods really sweet, sprinkle more sugar over the top of the muffins, otherwise they have a pleasantly middle-European subtle sweetness. ) Bake 20ish minutes or so. The muffins should be quite done on the top, very golden brown, and/or check for doneness with a toothpick or skewer.

Also: Stuart took these to his Class Breakfast, and they all disappeared without a trace. I know that they were greedily eaten, because...they are rhubarb muffins and not messed-up Persian Beef with Rhubarb in a lemonade chili sauce.

stalky, earthy, green & tangy

Rhubarb smells like North Dakota in the summertime.

When I was little, it was regularly served in all manner of desserts. I never imagined it in a soup. I never saw it in a curry. I never heard of it included in a ceviche. (I just made that last one up--but there could be something to it.) Rhubarb is vigorously and masculinely vegetal, but it was treated as a fruit. One could liken its disregard for traditional classification to that of the tomato, which is a fruit, but accepted as a vegetable. Like gender ‘norms,’ exceptions to the rules actually make the rules seem sorta silly.

Rhubarb is a prehistoric throw back. We are consistently puzzled by its capacity to endure, its apparent extreme limitation as a food. Like an alligator made huge by eating Florida housecats, it lurks and flourishes and frightens small children in gardens which may have been neglected for decades. Even when everything else has been plowed under and covered with plant carpet, we feel guilty ripping out such a bold and persistent repeat-offender.

Our septuagenarian neighbor June in North Denver vigilantly made her yard as care free as possible, even destroying healthy trees because the leaves were a bother to clean up. There was but one survivor from her parents’ original war-time Victory garden: the rhubarb, as big as a chandelier, its potential edibility in great doubt considering its size. So she surrounded her lone, gigantic rhubarb with inlaid stones set in regulation turf. She didn’t eat the thing, but she isolated it so it wouldn’t escape or do harm to itself or others. The effect was taxidermal. She might as well have mounted it on a plinth.

(Ringing the doorbell and running away, June left enormous stalks for us on our back porch every now and again, which could have been used by the Red Cross to splint broken arms during a national emergency. That is how I learned to tame the beast in a crumble.)

And indeed, rhubarb can be preserved, in a way. Let’s say you have a bunch a stalks...chop them up and freeze them. (They will go limp and sodden, so any additional liquid in a recipe will have to be reduced.) Like Frankenstein abandoned at the North pole, they won’t go anywhere until you feel like cooking them. I’m pretty sure.

In American desserts rhubarb is usually smothered muffin batter or buried in a crumble or teamed with strawberries and tarmacked with pie crust, to disguise its greyish (when overcooked), celery-like character. It sure ain’t purty, but it tastes good.

My Granny once insisted that I take home one of her recipe books from a small town in North Dakota, put out by a local ladies’ auxiliary club of homemakers. It had been hand typed on a typewriter, and then mimeographed, and was titled: Ravishing Rhubarb Recipes. Perhaps some 120 pages of rhubarb and only rhubarb. Many recipes called for oleo, or for Betty Crocker vanilla cake mix, and at least half of them were for crumbles. All were included, because it would hurt someone’s feelings to be left out.

The book was personally autographed by a local octogenarian Rhubarb Queen who visited my Grandfather every weekend at his strawberry, iris rhizome, and gladiolus stall at the farmers’ market. This gal had been the driving force behind the recipe collection. He emphatically did not want this recipe book to leave with me, but Granny insisted. I think there may be more to the story, but I leave it to you to ponder. Ravishing rhubarb can emit a powerful pull.

I have always heard that uncooked rhubarb is toxic, or at least leads to stomach ache. But here in Germany, country kids ate it raw, dipped in sugar. Even so, here rhubarb is usually cooked with sugar, set atop a crust, and covered over, logically, with a meringue.
Meringue. Pavlova. Bizet. A Bizet is what it is called, here, and pairing it with rhubarb seems like a stroke of natural genius, to me. How better to set off the tangy sourness of the fruit, than to surround it with clouds of airy, dissipated sugar? (Recipes yet to come.)
Rhubarb

Nourish is the Word

To begin at the beginning. Enchanted cooking must begin by deeply feeling the first experiences we have of being nourished on earth. In our mothers’ wombs, the nourishment comes into us directly, we don’t have to seek it or cry for it. But after we are born, we begin to acquire experiences of nourishment, which are either holistic and loving, or can be fraught with the static passed on by those who feed us.

Being fed our mothers’ milk is the first experience of intense worldly intimacy we experience. As Stephanie Demetrakopoulos writes in The Nursing Mother and Feminine Metaphysics,
“The flowing of the milk is a holistic bodily metaphor for maternal caritas, an open, nurturing world love.”

She writes of the holy union that suffuses baby and mother during the act of nourishment.

“There is nothing like the monumental status of the filled, often dozing baby and the relief of the previously taut breast; being and becoming merge in a concrete way. As the mother lets go of her own ego, identifying instead with the baby’s satisfaction, she may feel a sense of total unity with the child that is not unlike the more mystical moments of pregnancy. The gradual relaxation of the infant and the mother is a form of mysterium conjunctio, both psychic and physical unification.”

This is the ideal. I breastfed my three children, and while each child was a wholly individual drinker, I experienced a tranquillity and timelessness during breastfeeding that was deeply meditative and nourishing to both of us.

But sometimes, things go wrong: especially when the child begins to eat table food. Our caregivers don’t intend to traumatize us during feeding, but in the hurry of daily life, and with unconscious patterns dominating their behaviors, it is exactly what can happen.

I was once called to bless a woman with a spoonful of ritual food during a ceremony. I was to gently feed the sacred food into her mouth, and she was meant to accept it. But as I advanced, I could feel her fear of being dominated, a fear that I would feed her unkindly, a shame that people around us would see her being fed. I knew at once that she had rarely, if ever, been fed with love. I mean, whoever fed her did not consciously feed her lovingly, with tenderness, with the intention of nourishing this beautiful soul. I could see this grown woman as a small child, doubtful and afraid of feeling violated while being fed. It is a violation to feed a baby, a child, without tenderness, without sensitivity, without presence.

A man I know used to gobble his food terribly. If you sat behind him in a movie theatre, as he ate his popcorn, you would immediately be struck (sometimes literally) by shrapnel fragments of popcorn madly spinning into a three foot radius of space as he gobbled uncontrollably. At some point he underwent a hypnosis to cure this and found himself sitting as a baby in a high chair, being fed by his mother. One spoonful after the other was jammed into his mouth, and he could barely taste the food, much less take it in and swallow it in a comfortable succession—instead he gasped and choked, gulping for air, and learned to eat as quickly as possible, to get it over with. He could eat nearly an entire meal without breathing.

Uncovering and healing our own “food issues” is the first step to learning how to relate to food as love, and is necessary in enchanting our cooking. Nourishing and being nourished is incomparably intimate, and the emotions that come up in us while either being fed by others or by becoming aware of how we actually feed ourselves will always reveal what composes our inhibitions to intimacy.

As MFK Fisher wrote, “When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it...and it is all one.”

Bishop's Weed

On the garden plot we found masses of bishop's weed, or ground elder, or gout weed growing. It is three-leafed, and said to be cookable like spinach, or fresh salad. I had a bite: it has a lovely fresh taste, very subtle, and the leaves are tender, when taken from a new plant. It is apparently hard to dig up--the roots are all interconnected down under. But who would want to? I'm going to eat as much of it as I can. It is legendary for curing gout...which I've never had...but is so central to the sufferings of Austenian parental figures.

Cracked Hearth

Well. Since moving in the cooktop has, by degrees, given up the ghost. I wonder what this means with regard to the health of my hearth.

What happened was: the glass cooktop is a unit bought by IKEA six years ago, and during the move it got cracked. I covered one heating element with a plate and continued to cook. One by one, the elements all stopped working, like lights slowly going off on a stage. Last week the final smallest, most furiously hottest one (I burned two chocolate puddings on it even while being very careful) gave it up.

The oven still worked, so I was making lots of roasts and potatoes and salads. That works, too. For a while. The loss of cooktop was the perfect opportunity to get back into Raw Food...an opportunity that I let slip by.

Tomorrow Carsten will come and put in the new cooktop and we will again have heat. Thank the gods! The hearth will be back on fire. I feel a sort of ancestral guilt for letting the fire go out in my house. I would have quite happily trudged hours to the peat fields if that is what it would have taken, but instead it took a weekend jaunt to IKEAland and a wait for the technician. But soon all will be in order again.

Fire Eating

When I was about five years old, my dad read to me from D’Aulaires Greek Myths every night. My favorite story of all was of Icarus, who tried to escape captivity by flying with wings he had made using collected feathers and bees’wax. I was enchanted by the picture of Aphrodite rising from the ocean. In the picture of the gods and goddesses sitting around Mt. Olympus, my favorite goddess of all was Hestia, the hearth tender. While all the rest sat, doing nothing but looking good, she at least could keep the flames alive, sitting directly in the middle. She at least had something to do — something important. I believe keeping the hearth healthy is one of the most important things.

Cooking and baking is the way that we get fire into ourselves, from the outside in. One could be a raw foods enthusiast, and while I am very curious about raw foods, I realize that I need fiery foods, spicy foods, food that confers warmth, heats me up, lets me sweat. I must eat fire. The book: The Magic of Fire: Hearth Cooking: One Hundred Recipes for the Fireplace or Campfire by William Rubel intrigues me. (I haven’t read it, but plan to.)

I have begun to give some thought as to how to practically describe cooking the enchanted way. It is difficult to do this in a purely mental forum, the internet, when the work itself is numinous, poetic. It is just as difficult to find things out about Hestia: what she did, why she was important. Instead, she is a constant presence, but little is KNOWN about her. It may be that cooking the enchanted way cannot be KNOWN, but rather FELT best. Nevertheless, I will find a way.

(Michelle-Lee Phelan's Hestia image for some reason reminds me more of Bridget. Beautiful, though.)

But first, I recommend a book that inspired me greatly, and which deals with enchanted cooking, and the sacrality of food: Anne Scott’s Serving Fire: Food for Thought, Body & Soul. It is a must-have, a seminal work dealing with the importance of keeping the hearth. Read it.

Wild Garlic not meant for Bears

In early spring the wild garlic comes up and people go nuts for it, here. In Germany it’s called Bärlauch (Allium ursinum) and is also known as bear garlic, ramsons and wood garlic. A woman at the market told me she eats as much of it she can, fresh, and must no longer take heart medicine. It grows in shade here and is already coming up, mid March. It has a slight garlic flavor, and many people who can’t handle bulb garlic can handle wild garlic. I have heard that folks make pestos out of it, blending it with olive oil, salt and pepper. Cut just the leaves off, but leave the bulbs intact so it will continue to leaf out.

I made a lovely soup yesterday out of it: Carrot and wild garlic soup with buttermilk. I really must get up and running with pictures of what I make, but until new batteries find their way into my camera...

Here’s what I did:

Saute 2 onions in 3-4 T chili oil and vegetable oil, with chili oil taking no more than 2T of that mixture. Add 1 t powdered coriander, ½ T salt, and ½ T black onion seeds (these are optional, but they add another layer to the hotness), still stirring and sauteing.

Add a whole bag of carrots (2 lbs), chopped into cubes, let them sweat a while, and before the pot gets dry, add 1/3 bottle of dry white wine. Fill the rest of the (ca. 4.5 Liter capacity) stockpot with water and add 1-2 T good quality vegetable stock concentrate.

Peel and chop 3 potatoes, and sprinkle with 1/3 cup gram flour (ground chickpea flour) over the top and work in to the damp potatoes with your hands. Put into the soup. If you don’t have gram flour, use wheat flour—but gram flour dissolves like magic, leaving no trace except a smooth gravy, and of course there’s no gluten or clumps.

Then take about 3 to 4 cups of fresh, washed wild garlic and chop, and put into the soup.

Let rise to simmering, and after 20 minutes, taste and season (salt if needed). Then pour in about ½ liter of very fine buttermilk. Be careful, I’ve only done this with European buttermilk which is mixed fine, and doesn’t have any chunks in it, and has a mild flavor. I would have to try this with American buttermilk—I would use perhaps half as much and be prepared to see clumps. Simmer another 30 minutes or so and serve. The chili oil gives it an undercurrent of bite to go along with the mildly tangy/hot wild garlic, but the sweet carrots mellow that out.

Wild garlic doesn’t leave the heavy trace in your breath the way bulb garlic does, but even so, the best thing to take away garlic breath is: milk and chocolate. Really!

The Fat vs. Thin Post

I always had a fairly tepid relationship with food. I was a chubby baby, moved off the breast to drink synthetic milk because the doctors were worried that I was so bouncy. I put on a bit extra starting from the age of seven. I look at pictures now and see that I was not a fat kid, but in the 70’s when other kids were stringy, I was padded. I always felt BIG. My two adorable sisters were 4 and 5 years younger than me, and my largeness in comparison was a source of distress for my parents. I was told often that I “didn’t NEED” to eat that. It seemed like there was quite a lot that I “didn’t need” but none of it could be determined by me. And yes, everything on the plate had to end up in me at every meal. I did not taste two thirds of it, but it had to be put somewhere.

It’s interesting. Michael, my dear lovefriend, is a dog whisperer. He is an expert on dogs, he knows dogmind. He says when a dog isn’t allowed to eat, or play with, or try, or smell something, that repressed desire will always seek release at some point: often crazily, irrepressibly, fanatically. The problem is, for dogs that are not allowed to play with other dogs, or snuffle to their own contentment, or walk a long, long way—they tend to overdo it when they finally get the freedom to experience life, so they must be lovingly guided and allowed to experience what they want, without being dominated.

Every starved beast goes through a period of gluttony, in reaction to repression. A dog has to experience the fulfilment of its hungers and desires, in order to recognize its boundaries. The key is to not develop the gluttony itself into a way of life, but to cultivate understanding of one’s own rhythms and tastes and hungers. There is wisdom there for anyone who does anything to excess, and it has helped me seeing it through the eyes of a dog whisperer. Doctors Munter and Hirschman begin with the knowledge that diets cause compulsive eating, and that food is the solution to cure it. Their work at Overcoming Overeating is a revelation.

I used food as a comfort, and a nervous release, but I didn’t LOVE food. That heavy people LOVE food more than everyone else is a myth. We use food to distract ourselves, we use it to sensually overload other feelings. It is purely utilitarian. You might sit alongside a heavy person during a meal and realize they are barely tasting what they are eating. The chewing, the swallowing, is often a nervous action, it’s exercise. I know this because I've been heavier most of my adult life. Heavy folks aren’t ‘more’enslaved by their tastebuds than anyone else. In fact, they are generally less so.

Pop culture stereotypes of fat people are so irritating, so unimaginative. We don’t think about food all the time, we don’t stuff our faces gleefully in front of other people, we would usually never go on and on about food in front of thin people. Fat people do most of their eating alone. Wendy McClure’s blog talks about pop culture stereotypes of the fat to very great effect, and she’s written the book about it, too.

I don’t experience my body as being “fat,” and it usually surprises me when others react to me as if I am, glancing at my plate to see how much is on it. I used to be a great deal bigger. When I moved to Europe, I lost about 60 pounds over the course of three years, without necessarily trying. I just changed my lifestyle. Maybe I’ll tell you about it, sometime.

I was a stay-at-home-mom for most of my marriage. I have cooked or prepared something for my family to eat every day for the last nineteen years. This is not something that I have cultivated or enjoyed in myself, not a skill that I would have put on a resume. It was just part of my contract. But along the way, I think I got good at it.

Two things happened. One, led by some mysterious force that I didn’t know I had access to, I made enchanted cookies for a group of friends, food shamanically filled with LOVE, intentionally created with a specific energetic signature. I shared the recipe and the response was: When’s the book coming out? I had been making enchanted food for holidays for years, but I hadn’t noticed how rare it is.

Most people cannot handle the fullness of truly enchanted food: the intimacy of it, the richness of it, the soulfulness of it. For every fat person who uses food to numb out, there are ten thin people who refuse to participate in true nourishment. You can identify a person with food issues: they hate certain foods, they don’t eat many things, they fetishize gourmet food in order to make it abstract, they turn restaurant-going into ego drama, they build elaborate allergy histories, they cultivate intricate vegan/no wheat/no sugar diets to distance themselves from sharing and soulful nourishment even more.

Folks who are extremely picky about what will enter them likewise turn fullness and beauty and love and surprise and delight away at the door. Food is intimacy: the ability to truly TASTE the sun on the wheat and the rain in the apple can make you cry if will feel it. It is the first way that the spirits of the land entered us: through our mouths we take them in.

And then I met Michael, a man who has not been married, who has made his own sparse meals for decades. His enjoyment of the food I cook opened my eyes. Remember, he is part dog. He actually growls with pleasure when food pleases him; his eyes sparkle. His appreciation made my own children value it, as well, and it got me interested in cooking really good food. Food filled with love, with nutrition for the soul.

So with this I’m doing what I normally would never have done: talking about food. I wouldn’t have talked about food when I was of fatmind, because it would have drawn attention to my body, and I would have worried that thin people thought I was obsessed with food, which is what “they” tend to believe about fat people. I was never obsessed with food. I ignored food and I used it to temporarily put all the attention in my mouth so that everything else was numbed. But now I am finally tasting. I am repairing an impulse that was numbed a long time ago. I am repairing it, scrumptiously.

Cilantro is Delicious. Period.

Apparently, not everyone loves the cilantro like me. Gourmet Sleuth says, “An interesting note is that people of European descent frequently are reviled by the smell of cilantro.” Reviled!!! And, there is actually a UK joke website built of members who “hate” it. All I can say is, if you find cilantro revolting, you haven’t eaten it right.

I made something delicious by over-using cilantro, and I will share this with you. It was a delicious dish, which can be made in the vegetarian way. (I am not describing an enchanted recipe, here, just a good one to eat.) Here’s what you need.

3 to 4 single frozen lime leaves, cut into chiffonade and minced (interesting note: “A kaffir lime leaf looks as if two glossy, dark green leaves were joined together end to end, forming a figure-eight pattern.” From the Cook’s Thesaurus.)

2-3 Tablespoons Lime flavored oil or sesame oil and regular vegetable oil
2 very small very hot piri piri style dried red chilis, minced (do not use more)
3 chicken breasts, salted with rough sea salt
½ cup or so of flour
2 carrots, diced small
2 tomatoes, diced medium
2 handfuls fresh cilantro or koriander, chopped, including stems (one bunch goes into sauce, one bunch goes into noodles)
¾ cup cream or coconut milk
400g rough egg noodles (not the wide kind, rather the lumpy stroganoff kind)
½ T dried dill
1 Tablespoon butter

Saute about 3 or 4 large lime leaves (minced) and 2 very small very hot red chilis (minced) in a small amount of oil (I used lime oil and raps oil together, couple Tablespoons) and then add 3 chicken breasts which have been salted and dredged with flour. Add two carrots, sliced lengthwise and chopped finely into cubes. Add two chopped tomatoes—blanching isn’t necessary. The tomatoes should provide some more liquid in the pan, but watch it: as the pan becomes dry, add small amounts of (1/4 to ½ cup) water. Add a good handful of fresh cilantro, chopped well. Add more water, and cover the pan to steam the meat. Next, gently and slowly add ¾ cup of cream and use it to loosen the fond of the bottom of the pan, swishing all into the sauce. Simmer up and then move everything to a baking pan and into the oven for about 15 minutes. This gives time for the chicken to be cooked through. This goes into the oven just about the time the noodles are ready to go into boiling water.

Boiling the water for rough egg noodles, and add a Tablespoon of dried dill and another large handful of chopped fresh cilantro to the salted water. Boil until they are done al dente, drain them, adding about a T of butter and keeping them covered. Serve a chicken breast with some sauce over the noodles.

If I were giving up the meat in this recipe, I would instead add one or two yellow or red or orange bell peppers, and a teaspoon or so of herb-based concentrated flavor base. (These are often criticised, but they not wrong to use if they are of high enough quality, and used in such sparing amounts that they cannot really be detected—yet with vegetarian food they give it a much enhanced flavor.) Oh...also, dredge the peppers lightly in flour before they are added. This is to build a fond and thicken the sauce as it develops. Of course, the cream can be substituted by coconut milk, and the noodles can be substituted by rice, for a more traditional combination.

This is very rich and aromatic, with a slight bite. Because its full of cream, you don’t need to eat a lot of it, but you might just want to.

Koriander is the new Cilantro

Whoa. A big plastic box of "koriander" at the fruit and vegetable market. I haven’t been there for a long time—I stopped going when every time I had to pay, it was 3 or 4 more Euros than I counted on. I couldn’t say anymore whether or not the feeling of superiority and comfort that comes from shopping at the local market was worth this unpleasant surprise.

I mean, in The States you can go into a market that is designed to be a merchandising dream—like, any Wild Oats—and you know you are paying premium for being one of the chosen few...just check out the prices of the oils and vinegars if you don’t believe me. Playing at being a gourmet in America is a Pricey Passport to Prestige. Like everything, you pay up for the development of an identity.

Here, I can normally play at being a gourmet for a lot less. It becomes a matter of aligning with what I want, rather than how I want to think of myself. Then I simply find what I want. It's a lot easier just to go ahead and do it, rather than make a great show of doing it. However, so much in America boils down to identity. We are a nation of teenagers.

People generally rag on teenagers, roll their eyes, throw up their hands. But teenagers are great: they are wild, they are fun, they upset the cart. (I know this, I have two of them.) No social movement that really reversed the status quo was ever, to date, initiated by elders. It’s always been the youth. And when they are not too busy jogging in time with consumerism, over-experimenting with spiritually hollowed-out scenes, or plugged in to computer games like those blind fish in subterranean caves, the job of their age is to Change the World. The main desire of teenagers is to create identity, separation from the past, from tradition. No Obama was ever voted into office without this necessary impulse.

What is so great about teenagers is that they take great risks to learn the secrets of being an adult. They have unbelievably spontaneous, free-wheeling senses of humor, they can be radically inventive with style, they are hungry for novelty, they can take learning and philosophy and religion very seriously, they can be ravenous consumers, they can be shockingly conformist. They can be thoroughly and bottomlessly self-absorbed.

The males are often desperate to learn the secrets of power, and young teenage males in our day no longer spar with each other physically for this knowledge, but rather spar on sports fields or in front of computers. There’s a high level of testosterone, in other words—the world knows this in the reputation America has for violence, and as with teenagers, what outsiders SEE about them is the violence, the upset, the storm. They don’t see that in unseen ways, this inherent chaos is what gives birth to new forms of thinking, to new ideas, to a refreshing lack of reliance on experts to give permission.

It’s the energy that founded America, and everything, EVERY THING and EVERY ONE is formed at the cellular and intentional level with the energy that abounded in the creator or the parents at the time of conception. I mean this quite literally. We all know that modern America bubbled up from the cauldron of rebellion, but what isn't seen is that this character trait still rules American consciousness. Every American is to some degree consumed with becoming something, in transformation, in movement from one thing to another, from childhood to adulthood, from mediocrity to excellence, from good-enough to better-than.

And the great thing is, when a person hits mid-life, she gets another chance to develop herself. Oh—you might put it off by ignoring the whole biological timetable and having kids 'late' or not at all. But the break-free exactly mirrors the first time around, and can seem ridiculous to those watching cautiously from the sidelines. If the break-free was incomplete the first time around, you can bet it's gonna be a whole lot messier on the second run. Either one uses these precious moments of freedom to have adventures and expand her wisdom, or she retreats into safety and begins the long, slow decline to death. And it can take things a long time to die.

I am hoping to successfully navigate these choppy mid-life waters. Sometimes I get seasick, sometimes I want to head back to port, and sometimes the ride is thrilling and makes me come alive to myself. It is a second teenagerhood. Not talking about it does not mean it will go away. In fact, pretending its not happening keeps me domesticated.

So. There is a gourmet in me, another side to my identity, that has lately become developed, in the absence of America. I was overwhelmed by the Williams Sonomas and the Wild Oats and the Sur La Tables, and the $4000 dollar trips to make pasta in Tuscany and the $800 pendulous, somewhat obscene faucets and the $12.95 teensy metal canisters of black onion seed from Dean and Deluca. It’s just too much. It’s like begging mom and dad for pink converse tennis shoes at Christmas only to discover that Ed Hardy t-shirts are the thing you can’t live without, and there’s no way anyone is going to spend $80 on a t-shirt, young lady. (Though my folks never called me Young Lady, I've heard it said.) The disappointment to discover you’ve missed the mark, again. That it’s always out of reach.

Of course the point of good cooking is not in the collection of the items that prove you are good at it. It never has been, and that has always been the game of wanna-bes. But I must admit, I was raised in the suburban wanna-be culture. I have been conditioned to some extent to go for form rather than substance. I am learning everything anew. And now I find, I can experiment in Europe without that getting in the way.

Okay. The koriander is really cilantro. I used to buy entire modest bushes of cilantro at Cub Foods for less than two dollars. This koriander—there’s a mass of it—comes from Egypt. It costs 4.95 Euros. Eeek. Must have it. Must have it because I could bathe in cilantro, I could tuck it behind my ears every day, I would weave into my hair like Frida Kahlo, I would spark a cilantro revolution in middle Europe, if I could. How about rouladen with a cilantro-pesto filling? Favorite. Herb. Of all time.

Open the box. Nothing. Oh-oh. Very, very subtle, no whang of perfume, no waft of spicy musk. Almost: unsweet tarragony, smothered under a pillow. Baby powder version of an herb that I think of as central American. This would not do.

Commence to chopping for a chicken soup. Oh, yeah. Oh My. That’s what I’m talking about. That hard-to-describe tanginess, almost like a lemon grass, seriously: if plants could make patchouli to eat, we’d be forced to call it cilantro. Wafts of the fresh, oily greens, crunch, crunch. Stems and all.

Complicated. At first, cilantro is like a person with an exotic background who you’re in love with, but who barely speaks your language. You find him irresistible, but you can’t exactly communicate. It takes a while to build a relationship.

My favorite way to eat it was on 32nd Avenue at a place called Cafe Jalisco. The place had four different kinds of salsa and a fat man in a sombrero painted on the window. There were some tourist sombreros on the walls with thin black and red velour and gold lame fringe, and metal framed posters of fast cars, that decorating staple of new immigrants. Jalisco served heated, homemade corn tortillas with stewed beef, tomatoes, rice flavored with lime, guacamole and some greens, including fresh cilantro. Wonderful. Real.

Of course the other way is in every good Thai or Vietnamese restaurant I’ve ever known. In the Thai: with deep fried, soft shell crabs, upturned like steaming beige spiders on the plate, dipped into a thin, sweet chili sauce and crunched away with fresh cilantro and sprouts and carrots. Or Vietnamese, in a see-though noodle wrap with anise-spiced beef and thinly julienned crisp vegetables. Gorgeous. Can’t imagine either one without the cilantro.

I think of cilantro as a Mexican spice, and was startled to learn that the dried version of the koriander seed is what gives spice to Scandinavian baking. The seed and the herb are very, very different. The powdered seed is also used in curries and thorans in Indian food. The herb is best known to me freshly cut, mixed with tomato, onion, lime juice, and chilis. In ceviche or in salsas. The fresh herb has an Asian feel to it, again, like lemon grass or lime leaves—it seems to simultaneously cool down and heat up. Like lavender, it could go into soaps. But the dried version of the herb takes it way, way down, and it becomes a pale version of something like marjoram, with a mild heating quality, just the way dried mint becomes warming, the opposite of the coolness of fresh mint. If anyone knows how to make dried cilantro sing, please tell me. If they can make skeletons dance in Oaxaca, there must be a way.

I think of cilantro in a setting of sunburned abuelas picking over cactus fruits at Safeway, the smell of roasted chilis in September in north Denver, neon pink pastries from the Tolucca Market, huaraches on the beach and coyotes tiptoeing across the highway. Now that she is called koriander and comes from Egypt, I will have to double-dig the poetic seedbed. I will imagine ibis at the Nile’s edge, the sedge and the bee, white linen in a cool breeze, musty carpets hanging on walls, music to shake the hips to. It’s got me thinking about pairing koriander with falafel and a mint and honey dipping sauce...