This is a tea commercial and the slogan is "taste the secret."

Generally I poo-poo herbal tea.  When I do drink herbal teas, it is ginger or chamomile.  I think this is because I don't have for it one of those yet-unnamed "way in which food compels," which I'm tempted at the moment to call exoticization.  But I'll let the terminology simmer for now.  Instead I'll illustrate the appreciation I don't have for herbal tea with a scenario.

You're in Starbucks.  There are too many things there, but to simplify the situation you could get coffee or you could get tea.  Coffee seems the safe option, as they are in the business of coffee, after all.  If you get tea it will probably come in a bag and be brought stewing in lukewarm water.  But you're not after fine or well-brewed tea.  You're not here to be picky and get what you expect.  You get some herbal infusion full of arcane-sounding fruits, herbs, and spices and named after some far-flung locale.  It's not that you care particularly what's in it or what it's called--these are all just allusions to what you want.  You put your nose to the steam swirling from the cup and feel like you're privvy to a secret.  The aroma taps you into the ephemera of some other life lost to nearly everyone else.  They're all drinking coffee.

That whole scenario is a lie.  It's the addressed who leads "some other life lost to nearly everyone else," which, through an imagined appreciation of tea, I wish to access in the same manner.

Inadvisable Meal II: Beets & Sausage

Red beets are not just colorful; they have an excess of color.  They stain everything around them bright red and still their color remains incorruptably deep.  They taste like they look.  They're too much.  It is as if cane sugar is a weak imitation, and red beet is the true flavor of sweet.  We learn from the beet that sweet is in fact not entirely pleasant; it turns the mouth in on itself and pounds the tongue with sticky rocks.

In short, beets should be tempered with other things.  Do not eat a pile of beets with beet sauce.  A pile of beets with sausage covered in beet sauce is not much of an improvement.

In elementary school I knew this Jehovah's Witness who loved beets.  In the cafeteria he would sit down with a huge helping of ruffle-cut beets on his tray, lustily spearing them with his fork and turning his bulging lips red by slurping them into his clumsy mouth.  "Oh, I love beets," he would say.  We would all grimace in disgust.  Some would try to make fun of him, but he would just laugh and flash back an evil, self-contented smile between chomps.  Somehow I always liked him.  No harm could touch him.  He had become a beet, staining everything and impossible to stain.  The dye of beets is the only true substance.  A beet may be eaten, but its color persists and travels through you, eventually ending up in the ocean.  How the oceans are not a deep magenta is beyond me.

I had planned to write this in the morning, but tonight beets have kept me up writing about beets.  The beet has disrupted my plans and it smirks.  Pastry may be sorcery, but the beet is something much older, purer, and more insidious.  Root vegetables are coming into vogue like never before.  It is the age of roots, and the beet is rising.

I am sick of beets.  Perhaps I should make a beet cake, or a beet pie.

3 medium beets: 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 white & pink
1/4 of a lemon
4 peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 teaspoons flour

Peel beets and chop into bite-sized pieces ~1cm thick.  In a large saucepan bring 2 cups of water to boil, and add beets  Squeeze juice from lemon quarter and drop the whole thing in the pan.  Add peppercorns and salt.  Lower heat to medium-high and cover.  Boil for about 50 minutes, adding more water if necessary and stirring beets every fifteen minutes or so.  When beets are soft, remove them with a slotted spoon to a large bowl.  Lower heat to medium-low.  Add olive oil to liquid.  Sprinkle flour gradually while whisking liquid.  Remove from heat.  Pour sauce over meat accompaniment.

Rockfish Salad

Shit, I didn't take a photo and I've
run out of fish.  Oh well, isn't this
rockfish adorable?  The photo was
taken by Joyce Feuerbacher Altgelt,
apparently.

I usually eat this quickly because I want it to go away. The salad without the fish would be appealing, but here it serves mostly to mask the flavor of the slimy, five-day-old fish. Seriously, in the fridge the cooked fish gained a layer of transparent slime at the bottom. Okay, fine, it's not that it tastes or smells particularly bad, but the idea of it makes me feel it will taste bad enough to make me vomit at any moment. Eating it is an exercise in repressing a nausea of potential. It only came about because of one of my dad's Costco misadventures, in which he bought far too much salad greens and rockfish.

Without further ado, here is a recipe for an undesirable salad that came about in peculiar circumstances.

2-3 large handfulls salad greens
~1/2 cup cooked rockfish
8 kalamata olives
1/2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon honey

In a large bowl place salad greens.  Tear olives in half into salad.  Tear bite-sized pieces of rockfish into salad.  Drizzle balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and honey over salad.  Sprinkle salt and pepper over salad.  Write one more sentence that ends in "salad," just in case your readers missed that everything was going into the salad.

Corn Dodgers & Lembas

"True Grit" (1969) has corn dodgers.  The Lord of The Rings has lembas.

I could pretend to subtly treat these foods with their very different functions in their respective narratives, but the truth is I'm wrapping them both, and all of their cousins that I'm too lazy to research, into a doughy mass of sloppy exemplarity called "traveller's food."  Traveller's food is at the heart of one of high fantasy's fantasies: the long journey on foot.  (Westerns share this, but by far more often on horse.)  An adventurer, Bilbo might reminisce, does not travel bogged down with food.  No, he pops out the door with a knapsack and a cloak and is on his way.  In his knapsack he has a few bits of traveller's food--some bread and cheese perhaps (or some corn dodgers).  Traveller's food is rations but romanticized--hard tack but less disgusting while just as imperishable.  Despite its portability it is highly sustaining.

Traveller's food is one of the more extreme ways that food can compel that I have been trying to communicate.  Can one ever really make traveller's food?  No, but if you're me as a teenager, its impossibility can be easily forgotten. There was a time when I labored under the illusion that I could walk for days in the mountains with nothing but the biscuits I had baked before embarking.  The fact that I always came back before the next day was due to a personal failing and was not a reason for disillusionment.  Moreover it wasn't precisely that I went home; I simply stopped being the adventurer.  I paused the game.  No, the conflicting logics of "it was a personal failing" and "I paused the game" are not problematic.  They exemplify the necessary discontinuity of living in two.  In this manner I adventured for weeks in the wooded mountains while only doing so for an hour every day or two.  On the one hand adventuring army of one, on the other, at home on my computer.  (Not a strange combination at all, actually.)  The biscuits, obviously, did what they were supposed to.

Pastry's Conspiracy

In The Last Unicorn nothing is quite what it seems. Great monsters are puffed up from the aspirations of common animals with a bit of magical trickery, and a unicorn goes about unrecognized as anything more than a white mare. The book’s tangle of seeming and being is much like what one encounters when one tries to unravel tasting and eating.

Food may be elevated to the snobby heights of having a “palette” because at some level it is a bare necessity. As animals, to live is to eat. There’s no getting around that. But we may sculpt food and manipulate it into dreams that could otherwise not be dreamt. Eggs may, for instance, be separated and whipped into sugary clouds. This is pastry.

The whole object of pastry, it seems to me, is to create something unreal. With pastry we may believe briefly that hunger and nourishment do not exist, and that beauty and taste are everything. Defined this way pastry comes to include not all desserts, but things such as ice cream, candy, and, liminally, some forms of haute cuisine, decorative bento boxes, and even molded gelatine. It is a strain of magic in cookery. In a purely imagined history it began as delights for jaded court royalty and eventually expanding to industrially produced Hostess cakes.  The empire of pastry has wriggled its way into the fabric of many lives and has necessitated enormous quantities of sugar plantations. Unlike the Illuminati, there is no one to cackle at bringing abstractions into the world. There is no pastry sorcerer* triumphantly grinning and wringing his hands. Pastry is its own sorcerer, its own cabal and its own cult leader, and it has no more control over its destiny than those that do its bidding.

The meringue is a meagre beast, yet as beautiful and powerful as it is full of air.

* Although there are pastamancers and saucerors.

Bakewell Tart

Ever since I ran across this video & recipe I've developed an instant righteousness about Bakewell Tart.  Nobody has ever heard of it around here.  The injustice!  I keep having to explain what it is.  My explanations being what they are (stunted, reluctant, and full of 'err's), I settled upon this one: it's basically butter, almonds, and sugar in a pie crust with a bit of raspberry jam.  This seems to simultaneously please and put people on edge.  Unless of course they have an faddish, ironic adoration of fat, in which case they pronounce the absurdly rich tart "awesome."  Why did I sweeten to this tart so quickly?  Because it's British, of course.  And how!  The infinitesimal amount of fruit present is in the form of jam and buried beneath a vast stratum of stiff, buttery whiteness.

My version is flecked with brown because I couldn't find the recommended blanched almonds.  Instead I just put some raw almonds in the food processor.  I have to say if you consider the crust a given, this is one the easiest tarts ever.  Mix ground almonds, butter, sugar, and eggs together.  Spread the crust with raspberry jam.  Spread the almond mixture evenly on top of that, and bake it well.  I'm waiting for the rotten fruit to hit me for that one.

Adapted from Elaine Lemm and Smitten Kitchen

1 baked tart shell or pie crust

1 1/2 sticks butter

3/4 cup white sugar

2 large eggs and one yolk

1/2 cups almonds

zest of one lemon

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

2 tablespoons raspberry jam

Preheat oven to 350 F.  Warm butter until soft but not liquid.  In a large mixing bowl cream butter and sugar together.  Whisk in eggs, yolk, lemon zest, and almond extract.  In a food processor grind almonds thoroughly but not into a paste (i.e. don't turn it into almond butter).  Mix ground almonds into the butter/egg/sugar mixture.  Spread raspberry jam on the bottom of the tart shell or pie crust.  Spread filling evenly on top of raspberry jam.  Bake for 50 minutes.

Ginger Tea

This is very much not the ginger tea at Koshy's, which is steeped.  Maybe it would have been more appropriate to call this "ginger chai," but then some might have gotten the impression that it's like a Starbucks Chai Latte, but with more ginger.  A more accurate name such as "boiled ginger tea" just sounds nasty to me despite the fact that I boil my tea to death just about every morning these days.

2 small slices fresh ginger

2 teaspoons Assam CTC

1 cup water

1/2 cup milk

3 teaspoons sugar or 2 1/2 teaspoons honey

Combine water, milk, and fresh ginger in a small saucepan and bring to a boil on high heat.  When milky water boils it will foam.  At this point quickly add tea and remove from heat to prevent it from boiling over.  After 40 seconds put saucepan back on heat and boil once more.  Immediately strain into a mug.  Remove ginger from strainer, rinse off, and plop into mug.  Stir in sugar.  Drink immediately.