Wrappings and Fillings - The Origami of a Potsticker

Gone are the days of traveling with a passport, a paper map and a change of underwear.  In packing for my two week trip, destination Hong Kong and China mainland. I have triple checked that I have my laptop, camera, chargers, magic jack, Tylenol PM, and an unheard of four pears of shoes.  Clearly traveling light means something different to me now then it did a carefree decade ago.

Despite having to pack and prepare for this journey, I was inspired by Heidi Swansons's post "Golden Pot stickers"  on her blog 101 Cookbooks.  Maybe it because of the Asian influence or maybe it was because she also was preparing for a flight that I was moved to making pot stickers before this trip  (Once again I leave my kitchen a mess at a very inopportune time.)  In this post I will recommend that you try Heidi's recipe that looks practiced, well-tested and tantalizing.  Mine was, in fact, a disaster.  Let me apologize if you came to this site in search of a recipe and instead found me droning in about the current up sweep of my life and how it connects with the joy I find in the craft of making food.  In my defense I tried to write a fabulous recipe for you, one indicative of this new culture that I am traveling to.....a culture that I know little to nothing about.  That was the problem.

I made the filling for these pot stickers the way I would have made a ravioli, a vegetable, tofu ravioli.  I was drawing on my own knowledge about cooking and cuisine and this time I fell short.  The effect was bland and mushy with the faintest hint of what I assumed to be Asian flavors:  ginger, scallions, soy sauce, shitake mushrooms  Like an ethnic stereotype, it was an incomplete, inaccurate representation of what a real Asian food experience could be.  Food without that deeper complexity is just filling your stomach.

Not everything I make is a success, design, food, or writing, but what I have come to know is that the process is what keeps me going just as much as the desired result.  There was a calm that cam over me in folding these wrappers into neat little four-cornered envelopes, trying to get each one more perfect than the last.  A talented artist friend of mine, Jaclyn, told me that when she feels anxious about something she folds origami paper cranes.  There are beautiful bowls full on of them on display in her home.  (Was I anxious?  Could have been the 14 our flight ahead of me.)

Anyway, I will probably be too busy to see many of the tourist sites on this trip but I do hope I come away with a more authentic idea of Chinese cuisine than what comes in the little white cardboard boxes in New York.    Maybe then you will get your recipe.

Finding Eggs and Shelling Beans

I was eight and my brother was four when we were introduced to our grandparents.  It was the first summer of many we spent in the mountainous region of Southern Lazio, Italy where our father is from.  It was a long, stuffy journey for us but the air got progressively cleaner and thinner as we got closer to our destination.  By the last fifteen minutes of the journey, we were riding in a car circling higher and higher up mountains.  Birds were our traveling companions.  My father became more animated as what looked like a birthmark on the mountain grew to be recognized as a cluster of stone residences that was his town.  A far cry from Yonkers.

My father had told me that my grandparents kept chickens, picked fruit off of trees and harvested olives with the help of their neighbors from their own olive groves.  My fourth grade textbook education translated that to 'They live on a farm.'  Rural to the average American eight year old is a ranch style house and rolling acres of land around it, like in a picture book called "Where Does Our Milk Come From?". When we pulled up to the large wooden doors of a stone facade that seemed to be attached to every other stone facade in the town, I thought we could not possibly be in the right place.

"Why are we stopping here?  When do we get to Nonna and Nonno's house?"
My father laughed in a way that was both amused and excited, and exclaimed, "We are here!"

Here we were.  In the midst of a reunion, my brother and I are presented with pride to our grandparents.  There were big exclamations, gesticulations, tears, smiles and checks pinched purple.  My grandmother had a cloud of snow white hair, a fixed demure smile with chin tilted inward, and broad palms that cupped our faces in a basket embrace.  If the barrior of her dialect had not existed, one would still have to lean in close to hear the soft, high pitch bell of her voice.  My grandfather was short and stout with a chest that puffed out like a pigeon.  His shoulders were broad as was his upward, tilted smile.  In contrast, one would never have to lean in to hear him.

Fascinated and timid, I was determined to be on my best behavior.  Yet, I felt idle and mute in this new place were I struggled to understand and be understood.  I shadowed my new grandmother around her home.  I found her at the sink in the mornings. "Cosa vuoi mangiare? L'uova?" What would you like to eat? Eggs?  She asked me to retrieve them.  There were no eggs in the refridgerater.  My father is chuckling in the doorway.  "The eggs are outside in the yard."  Down the marble stairs and out the back door is a small yard with a chicken coup to the right.  I stepped inside to loud squawking and feathers flapping around my feet. I walked gingerly through my egg hunt.  I held up a smooth, brown globe.  Triumphant and beaming I ran back to the kitchen.

In the afternoon, we sat on folding chairs with a bucket of bean pods between us.  She taught me to split the pods with my thumb to reveal the beans inside.  They were glossy white speckled with purple patches like artisan beads. Her rounded hands worked nimbly leaving a pile of empty pods in her apron while my small fingers worked clumsily, barely making a dent in her afternoons work.

Without words but with shared activity I got to know my grandmother, her lifestyle and routine.  The routine that made her matriarch and care taker of all those who entered her home, friends, family and neighbors.  During that first summer away from the familiarities of suburban New York, I never asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or an oreo cookie.

No recipe today.  Just a  photo that triggered a memory to remind me why I cooked today and will cook again tomorrow.

Musings of a Home Cook

Nothing like a six week sinus infection that kills your sense of taste and smell to re-examine your relationship with food.  That's were I have been this winter.  Now the air is clearing, the weather feels milder and I have returned to my blog.

Functioning at about seventy-five percent of my normal gusto has changed my routine.  Or should I say slowed it down.  Normally, when I get home from work, I have 2 to three hours before my husband gets home when I tackle my daily/weekly task list.  Tasks including drawing, art projects, design work, household chores or just answering emails.  Then I start dinner.  Not feeling 100 percent means I have to pair down on some of what I get done after work.  Surprisingly, what I did not change was my cooking routine.  We could have ordered pizza. Albeit, take out every night would be an expensive and less-than-healthy option, I am not entirely sure that those reasons were the ones that motivated me to return to the stove every evening.

If asked in conversation what motivates my interest in food and cooking I would respond by referencing the impact our food industry and our personal food choices have on our health and the environment.  The agriculture, production and distribution of food affect the living and working conditions of many people around the world.  Eating better can mean living better.  And if that isn't enough, I LOVE to eat!  It is one of the greatest sensory pleasures.

I would heavily emphasize that last point.  What I discovered these past weeks was that even with my senses of taste and smell impaired, I was still not willing to forgo my cooking routine.  When I felt I could no longer concentrate at my desk, my inclination was to gravitate toward my cutting board.  I realized that that is the place were my thoughts are released and my hands and senses take over.  Taste and smell excluded, there is comfort in the tactile rhythms.  The comfort of being home is slicing through a cool, crisp vegetable and hearing the sound of the sound of the knife tapping on the cutting board.

Although I must say that I am happy to have my other senses back.  The other night after having dinner at a wonderful restaurant in Williamsburg called Barberry, I spent some time chatting with part owner and chef, Diego, about the subtleties of salt and the joys of making food from scratch.  In that conversation, Diego eloquently expressed what I will paraphrase, "how often we forget a face but the memory of smells and tastes last forever."

Kindred Spirit: Wayne Thiebaud

“Cakes are glorious. They are like toys.”  -Wayne Thiebaud

Cakes, 1963

Pies, Pies, Pies, 1961

I would have liked to have dinner with Wayne Thiebaud.  Maybe desert, come to think of it. I would have liked to talk to him about his art. As an artist I would love to hear about the progression of his work.  I mean, how did the work evolve to include such detailed and luscious paintings of confections?  I have to wonder also, what kind of cook was he? (I was somewhat giddy to learn that he had worked in a café in his youth and enjoyed recreational cooking.) We never covered that in art history class.

I remember looking at these paintings during my school days and thinking “Why cakes?” Not a landscape, figure or portrait. I understood painters mimicked nature in their struggle to understand it. I understood that abstract expressionism was born out of that practice when Jackson Pollack exclaimed, “I am nature.”  But what is the greater meaning in painting desert?  What do we as artists and viewers gain from still life? What do these paintings tell about our natural desires?

That’s what I would ask him (over a glass of Vin Beato and a pastry) “Why did you want to paint cakes?”  I imagine Wayne Thiebaud, the optimist that I read he was, talking about what he loved about cake, about the display window in the café and his mother, Alice’s baking.  Still life is, very simply, the appreciation of a subject’s existence.  At first glance, we label the desert as what we know and recognize the way in which it looks like every other slice of pie we have ever seen.  Then we see in the texture of the paint what we remember as the experience of pie.  Gooey, sweet, fruity, flakey pie. I am glad that there is nothing else in these paintings to distract me from the delicious subject.  The only thing on the canvas to be compared with a slice of pie is another slice of pie. 

Perhaps for Wayne Theibaud and I, painting is a craft that, like cooking, revels in pleasure.  In this case, a fluffy, spongy pleasure slathered in butter cream.  

chai tea cupcakes with honey cream frosting