Seasoning: an act in calories

These are delicious days at my home, though we count the money even for groceries lately. But it's ok. Beans, seaweed, grains, vegetables in season. It's not so expensive to eat well at home. If I ate the meals I cooked at restaurants, it would cost $50. So every time I cook for myself, I imagine I am paying myself $50. Tonight's $50 is for white beans cooked with sage and bread and bitter greens salad.

Bitter and sour, spicy: you might not associate winter hardy veggies with those flavors, but let me remind you. Many of the more common winter leaves are very mild: when kale is strong it has hints of a seaweed flavor, and collars are definitely in a cabbagey family. I've noticed lately that spinach is almost flavorless compared to my favorites. I am hungry these days for the piquant spicy greens that you have to go out of your way for. Cresses. Mustard greens, chopped fine and raw. Red velvet striped chicories, sometimes shockingly bitter. I have a special friendship with a certain farmer's market stand that lets me fill my bags for half price every Saturday at the end of market, and this is what I scoop up. Young onions. Delicate and slightly swoopy fennel roots with fronds, sweet baby turnips, tender stems of broccoli rabe. Today I made a salad of purple baby kales, maroon chicories, minty ancho cress, curly parsley, dressed in lemon juice, ume plum and olive oil. With dumpstered bread, broiled tofu and a pot of grassy green tea: my friends were happy!

I'd like to get poetic also about the spicy radish, plucking up that mellow wintertime lull of sweet mushy winter vegetables like pumpkins, beets and turnips. Once again, I have to sing the praise of the watermelon radish, it's strong flavor and spider vein design of my favorite color pink. This radish impresses everyone!

You know, we are a couple of months into the cold season, and I'm not even sick of pumpkins yet, or hardy greens, or roasted roots. I have no strawberry fantasies, not yet. But I was delighted to see little white buds as fragile as ice foaming on our plum trees in the backyard. Just in time. I am down to my last pint of plum jam.

Pubescent loquats are appearing too, green and modest. This year I really must learn to like them. Loquats are one of the few fruits known to my region that I'm sour on, I think for their vaguely Asian flavor.

January in Oakland, California, this year was dry, warm, sunny. Day after day cloudless carefree sunshine basted us. It began to feel very wrong. Poppies and plum blossoms burst alive too early. Wintertime is a period of huddling, of expressive weather rolling and blasting. Our region felt like an island, unmolested even by the winds or moisture of the big licking ocean that dwarfs us. Michael made a wish on his birthday for rain.

Michael's birthday was on February 4th and I made him a little vanilla maple-syrup blood orange cake that collapsed. We had lunch at La Torta Loca on Fruitvale Avenue. It was unforgettable because the owner of the restaurant, which is a counter with stools on the sidewalk, had a weapons display behind the register that made a lasting impression. He had pepper spray, a giant hook, chains, 4 different bats, 2 different brass knuckles---and mushroom quesadillas reminiscent of the mastery of masa in Mexico, but more greasy, more expensive, less loving. It was grey and windy and there was small-time mafia action that distracted me until I ate so much that I wasn't hungry enough hours later to make the birthday dinner.

Lately, on very special holidays I like to skip dinner and avoid the cooking, and have something like magic mushrooms and cake for birthday dinner, enjoying the brain buffet on the special day. Our pupils were full and dark as we laid in our bed and watched a milky purple moon wink and undress under filmy clouds.

Michael's birthday wish was for rain and a special storm granted his wish a week and a half later. As we made homemade pizzas with friends and drank absinthe on Valentine's Day, a fierce rainstorm belched arctic all over us----a birthday wish granted in delay. The winds rustled the banana trees out our window, interrupting the stream of Vietnamese karaoke blasting out a neighbor's window.

We are finally getting winter rain storms, days of nonstop rain and whipping winds followed by other days of the sun shining on a newly verdant and beautifully vegetably landscape. The dandelions are born suddenly in the yard to nod appreciatively at the rain and sun cycles. Life feels very perplexing lately, with the economy shriveling and values quaking. California is in a drought too. If you check the news, the drought and its impact over these last three years is radically affecting the Central Valley, which is the fertile belt of this coast and maybe the most blessed growing area in the world.

When the rain comes, we rejoice, we are not complaining of inconvenience or scowling at the crybaby face of the curdled cloudy sky. We are so relieved, we are bailed out. The more I witness the world, I have my doubts about humans' abilities to actually deliver each other from trouble or suffering in a comprehensive way, but how pure is the sensation of the diety of nature granting us another green day, the most divine bailout, clean and irreplaceable RAIN.

The proportions of error in civilization become exponentially magnified with every day, the magnitude is indigestible. I find myself avoiding the numbness and alarm by so wholly enjoying what is so miraculously here and still thriving. The first artichoke of spring. The oversized pomelo. The olive oil, only $20 a gallon, because of the trees' proximity. The homemade chocolate and nettle butter shared by Brooke at the dinner party last night. My potted peppermint still managing next to the rotting garage though its companion, the valerian, has died. TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED. Last night, I had a piece of apple pie at my dear friends' dinner party and Michael said, "WHAT NO ICE CREAM?" and I saw the carton passing around the table and I served myself because, "DO I LOVE LIFE?"

You must, for those who are so inexplicably in the horrible vises of civilization's failures, those who are thirsty without clean water. Those who would have to pay a huge portion of their income just for a loaf of bread, because of the cost of wheat, or the instability of their currency. I have so many loaves for free, in dumpsters and food banks.

Shouldn't we fast too?

Maybe our time for that sacrifice will come. But for now, no lemon should rot under the holy stem it grew on. No peaceful land which could give to our communion should ever be squandered. Every bee thanked. Every raindrop praised. Every eater's appetite must match the gratitude toward the farmer.

We aren't experiencing it so much in California, but the snow-bound know: It is the deadest time of the year. Cold, biting and dripping with mortality. I hope if you read this from miserably rainy Portland, or frozen Detroit, you recognize your sacrifice and pay deepest tribute to the infant cheer and brisk winds of early spring. Asparagus is coming, so are difficult artichokes and then, the brilliant strawberry, offering you a back payment of the sweetness you were deprived of for so many months.

ENJOY YOUR FOOD AND HEALTH
ENJOY YOUR RAIN AND SNOW
ENJOY THE FLIRTATION OF THE SUN, BUSY WITH ITS OTHER EARTH WIVES
PLEASE EAT 3 MEALS A DAY OF WHAT GROWS IN THE DIRT
EVEN 4 IF YOU LOVE LIFE SO MUCH
RUN REALLY FAST TO HUG SOMEBODY
COOK THEM DINNER (menu: green lentils cooked in wine, thyme and with pumpkin in the oven with a dutch oven, a tart and bitter green salad, your homemade sauerkraut, bread retrieved from the dumpster, a spread made of tahini and miso and chopped garlic, braised baby turnips, blood oranges, if you are not the cook, you must bring the wine and do the dishes! and if you don't live in a temperate climate, I have no idea how you eat local in the winter! do you pickle, can and freeze everything?)
I LOVE TO EAT IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY
GOOD EVENING