Hey! Play With Your Food!

I had a revelation.  It should have been obvious (but obvious things don't feel very revelatory, do they...). I was on yet another airplane, for yet another one of those short, overnight hops to a city 1-3 hours away, destined for a hotel room with nothing to make it memorable except for knowing when I woke up the next morning, I could confidently say to myself in the mirror "Today, I am going home!"

On that airplane, I finished reading a book which my Shauna had bought, written by her favorite food blogger - the Gluten Free Girl, a.k.a. Shauna James Ahern.  It is an autobiography of a girl who had grown up like the majority of us end-of-the-boomer cycle babies, when pantries in North America were filled primarily with packages of prepared food made by corporations whose commercials on TV confidently assured us of their superiority in producing things that could be guaranteed to be the same every single time you bought a new package, regardless of where in our great continent it was purchased.  This made grocery shopping so routine as to become a point of resignation for our mothers, and quiet glee for our fathers who did not have to do it.  The problem is, that food was, to put it kindly, processed, flattened, homogenized, milled, stripped, sugared, plasticized and pasteurized within an inch of its nutritional life - and so it was that we began our continental odyssey towards obesity, craving variety and without even knowing it, trying to satiate those natural cravings with processed cheese food, white bread, and sugar bomb cereals...

This girl had a problem.  In the midst of malnourishing herself to death, she had the added, undiagnosed complication of having celiac disease.  It was not until she was literally hit by a car that the disease really manifested itself, making her desperately ill as she tried to survive on crackers and soft white bread - the very poisons that she needed to be avoiding.  Without stealing the rest of her thunder - this is where I got my revelation:  Once she was finally diagnosed, she came to the life-changing realization that because gluten was now dangerous to her, she was actually completely, totally free for the first time in her life to taste things that she never, ever would have considered even smelling, let alone putting in her mouth.  And with that kind of ridiculous abandon, she began not only eating a vast new palate of cheese, vegetables, meat, fish, fruit, and every possible way to eat them without a trace of gluten, but actually becoming absolutely driven to preparing them with her own hands, passionately exploring the new, the possible, the exotic, the full spectrum of what God intended his children to find, quench their hunger, and add to the exquisite pleasure of being alive.

This story was absolutely absorbing to me.  I am not hampered by gluten, so by rights my field of experimentation can be even broader than hers.  Yet I also realized that all too often, I don't reach outside my comfort zone, falling back on standbys that are actually bad for me, which don't really satisfy the flavor craver living in me, and making me take more in the vain hope that full equals satisfied.

I read on.  Ms. Ahern has the effortless knack of bringing you into the very moment of her discovery - tasting, smelling and feeling what she is feeling as she laser-focuses on the bulb of fennel, the fillet of wild Alaska salmon, or her very first bite of dark chocolate.  She goes one step further - with effortless grace giving you the exact recipe she used in that epiphany.

One of those recipes became my source of inspiration.  She addresses the humble roasted chicken.  Who among us has failed to thrust this common bird into an oven, for with naught but seasoning salt, a bit of pepper, and an hour or so of time, even the least motivated of us can receive absolution from those who hunger around us - roasted chicken does, at the very least, lend the credible illusion of culinary competence, doesn't it?  But face it - roasted chicken in its humility slips very easily into the same category as waffles - when you can't think of anything else, sigh in frustration and roast a chicken.  You can't go wrong.

Well, if you really can't go wrong with a roasted chicken - - - what would happen if you decided to jazz it up?  I mean, really trust in that rock-solid assurance that you cannot ruin a roasted chicken.  What would happen if you let yourself (mothers of the world, plug your ears!) - play with your food?

Shauna James Ahern played with her chicken.  Because she had become an omnivore, a seeker of things that taste good, she knew that dunking fresh rosemary into boiling water makes it taste eleven times more intense and flavorful when added to whatever you add it to.  She also knew that boiling a whole lemon just before shoving it into the cavity of the chicken gives a sublime, singing, lemony note to the meat as it roasts.  So her recipe, recommended with the same "go for it" urging your best friend feels free to use on you, calls for a whole lemon, fresh rosemary, the zest of two more lemons, and ten cloves of garlic.  Put the whole lemon in place, then take the rest of the ingredients and grind them into a smooth, headily fragrant paste, which you then massage into the chicken for roasting.  (I can smell it just thinking about it, thought I, and resolved to swing by Safeway on the way home from a meeting, to get those things that I did not have in my pantry, because I had a chicken to roast, by golly, and this one was going to make an entrance.)

I succumbed, as usual (much to the derisive delight of my children) to buying a bunch of extra things.  I love grocery shopping.  Among other things, some smoked paprika wound up in my basket.  Never tried that before - but Ms. Ahern said I wouldn't believe what it does when you use it...

I have a granddaughter now - a very small one, who gets her meals from her mommy.  Literally.  Whatever mommy eats, granddaughter gets a few hours later - or at least the essence of it distilled in mommy's milk.  She already knows that tomatoes, citrus, garlic, and broccoli are not yet her favorite foods, and she reminds us late at night that while she'll eat them, her tummy doesn't have to like them yet.

Oh-oh.  Panic?  I can't play with my chicken using Shauna James Ahern's playbook!  Ten cloves of garlic cannot be artfully slipped past my granddaughter.

That's when it hit me.  I don't need someone else's playbook to play with my food.  I grabbed the rosemary, plunged it in the pot a-boiling on the stove, and stripped off the leaves.  It was like walking through a British Columbia rainforest - incredibly fresh, incredibly piney.  In my other hand, I popped the top off the jar of smoked paprika.  A brief twinge of doubt - the kind of doubt you get when you wonder whether ketchup and plum jam go together - but then I jammed that bottle, and that fistful of rosemary right into my mustache and smelled for all I was worth.

I nearly cried.  That smell took me instantly to a campfire with the friends from my youth, in Banff National Park, cooking meat outside on the grill, with twilight and drizzle intensifying the rich enveloping scent of the pine forest around us, and the smoke under the steaks lazily, tantalizingly snaking up past our faces...

I had to put this on my chicken.  I did not need anyone's permission, nor did I want to Google it.  These smells belonged to each other today.  Now, I got to play.  I have never owned Kosher Salt.  But I got some today.  It went on that chicken right after the rich, rust-brown smoky paprika, in gleaming white chunks carelessly covering this nook, that cranny, that gleaming curve of drumstick...then some pepper.  The rosemary went on, in little bunches, here and there.  Man, that green looks good against that deep, deep red...  Then - why not ring the whole thing with those big fat white mushrooms....and put on some of that olive oil that actually smells like freshly mown hay, the kind that you mix with balsamic vinegar to dip your bread in.  Hey - why not put some of that balsamic vinegar on too?  And then some kosher salt - imagine the tiny crunchy explosion matched with the silky smoothness of a mushroom slaked in fragrant olive and balsam.....

I put the whole thing in a 350 oven, for an hour and a half.  That was the most enjoyable hour and a half of this busy day - waiting to see what smell would emanate next from the oven as each piece in this new puzzle took its rightful place in the alchemy of a meal coming together.

I made a salad, slowly.  I put sweet pea shoots in it - not just cucumbers and tomatoes.  Pea shoots.  Like bean sprouts, but without the taste of dirt, and like alfalfa, but without the peppery attitude.

We ate the chicken with mashed potatoes.  Nobody said anything - they chewed with their eyes closed.  That is the greatest gift you can give a cook who loves you - closing your eyes when you chew.  I'm glad I played with my food today.  And tomorrow, I will see what else other people who love making food and eating food play with, because inspiration does not need to come from Morocco or Sri Lanka every day.  It can come from smelling smoked paprika at the same time as rosemary.  Just play with your food, and see what happens.

(By the way - Shauna James Ahern's book is called "Gluten Free Girl".  Her blog is located at www.glutenfreegirl.com.  She has also written cookbooks - as her passion is helping those with celiac disease see that life is not over.  Far from it - it can be the start of something really big.  And that brings up the last point in my inspiration.  I don't have to be celiac to love this food.)

Demilitarized Korean Food

Asian cuisine - a misnomer in itself, since Asia is so vast and diverse - has held a special fascination for my tastebuds because I lived in essentially blissful ignorance of anything related to Asia right up through eleventh grade at boarding school in Nigeria, where to be honest, we rarely had any interaction with anyone from that continent.

Discovering Japan, then China, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, and so on came well after high school - starting with my chosen major of Japanese in University, and my introduction to what remains my bedrock favorite cuisine, and on through a job which let me work with, and visit, and immerse myself in at least part of the culture of Japan, Korea and China, and of course, the food for which they are justifiably famous.

So, I started late diving into all the intensity and distillation of thousands of years of evolutionary cooking, and if there's one thing I am discovering, it's that I probably will not live long enough to taste everything there is on offer in even one of these cultures, let alone all of them.  But man, it's beyond fun to try, and even more so to find something every now and then which is so impossibly good that it becomes one of those cravings that you really need to have on a pretty regular basis.

Of all of them, the one I know least, and yet the one that packs the biggest culinary punch in the mouth (in the most indulgent and satisfying way) for me has got to be Korean.  Oh yes, if adventurous, we in the West will occasionally grace our hot dog with sauerkraut, for example.  In Korea, sauerkraut is mere baby food compared to the punishment endured by their cabbage.  Kimchi, the national dish - innocuously translated as 'pickled cabbage' -is a riotous symphony of fermentation coupled with tongue-searing pepper and supersaturations of garlic guaranteed to trail in your wake for four days after eating.  Kimchi is frank, in-your-face, unapologetically direct food.  So is Bulgogi, and other variants of marinated and barbecued meat - soaked for hours in spiky-sweet, vinegar and garlicky goodness, then seared on a blast-furnace griddle in the middle of your table - the very essence of what meat and fire together should produce.  Putting the two together seems impossibly egregious - but match them on a bed of plain white rice, or cold glass noodles (jap chae), and the blend becomes obvious and right - a match which is made in heaven, a result of centuries of experimenting to make it perfect.  Not unlike the perfect giant sushi hand roll, or pad thai, or Szechuan chicken.

It's always deeply satisfying to watch food which you used to have to drive miles to eat, suddenly show up then in places like the food court at the mall.  Look around you next time - next to the A&W, Arby's, Mrs. Vanelli's Pizza and Taco Time - there's a Manchu Wok, a Teriyaki Experience, a Thai Express, or a Pho Noodle House....

The problem is, most of them tend to dumb down the exotic factor which made them so attractive in the first place - maybe because the 'real' flavors are still too exotic to sell.  But at least you can get sriracha hot sauce at just about all of them, in a bottle next to the hoisin.  Not bad - we're getting there.

So, when a new guy shows up in town, hope stirs again that maybe we've made enough progress to get the real thing this time.  Sadly, last night proved again that there's a long way to go.

How could you go wrong with a place that brazenly calls itself Kim Chi at the Market Mall food court in Calgary?  Better order the special - looks like a sizeable pile of beef and chicken piled on rice and sauteed veggies.  Haven't had my Korean quota for the month, but this is a good night to do that, being that my wife had Thai soup, so the garlic will happily cancel each other out.  (It is nice to be considerate and eat garlic when your spouse does.  Trust me.)

I ordered the special, and then cavalierly added a small order of dumplings.  Whether Korean, Japanese or Chinese - all know the essence of a sublime dumpling - pork, garlic and greens nestled in a soft wrapper, crisped on the bottom, juicy throughout, begging for a quick marriage with vinegary-sweet soy dipping sauce....(eyes closed, imagining the first bite, while the chef wokked away at my entree, and gently laid the parboiled meat on the grill to finish it....

Wait.   He's speaking Chinese.  Not that there's anything wrong with a Chinese guy cooking my Korean food, but you know, I was hoping for really authentic.  I know Italians who would laugh at my attempts to make pizza like their nonna does, too.

No matter - it looks pretty good.  The chicken is fiery red - should be a warning of spicy times ahead, okay, okay....the spare ribs are charred in all the right places, okay - that's a lot of rice, but all the more to soak up the garlicky meaty runoff - and the vegetables look al dentishly fresh...

I turn to walk away - "Sir!  Sir!  Don'r forget your dumplings!"  Ah yes, of course, thank you very much.

First bite.  The dumpling.  Remember the porky garlic, the crispy underside?  Think again.  This one tasted exactly like an old sponge, lovingly soaked in old cooking oil.  The dipping sauce?  Aqua Velva aftershave, thanks.

Second bite.  The chicken.  Have you ever eaten chicken that's just barely done?  That uncomfortably cool slithery taste that says "Hey, buddy - put me back in the pan for a few minutes, wouldja?  What are you trying to do, get someone killed?"  I swallowed, hard.   The red color?  Mealy, forgettable - like those gumballs from the machines outside Zellers, where the flavor almost gets there, then disappears into shapeless, taste-free disappointment.  And those lovely black hash marks from the grill?  Like a briquette on the palate.

Third bite.  The spare ribs.  Look - fat is crucial to eating well - it carries taste, it marries with salt, it's no accident that properly used, it deserves its place at the pinnacle of the food pyramid, if only for short bursts of pleasurable reign.  The fat in this meat, though, was trying to avoid my teeth, adroitly slipping out of the way as I, increasingly concerned, tried to find some edible flesh in there between the bones. 

Maybe the rice, then.  It did look brown, and invitingly teriyakish.  But there the resemblance ended.  This was nothing more than the pooling of mediocrity - which I suppose may have been designed to simply not overshadow the bean sprouts and carrots, both of which left no doubt that they had been grown in the dirt.

I am not normally squeamish.  But the spectre of Salmonella, coupled with the odd slithery quality of the flesh made me start to really worry about the prospect of seeing my whole meal once more in its entirety, this time tinged with violence and wreathed in porcelain....

I survived the night.  But I will not be returning to that place.  Even though its name promises a Korean experience you'd normally want to impress your friends with.  Forewarned, dear reader.  If you want real Korean fast food in Calgary, you're way, way better off at Koryo in either North Hill or Northland Village malls.  Those guys make food you remember.