Recently Donna brought home yet another of her well-chosen love gifts for me, a newsprint booklet from 1982 titled 300 Sensational Salads. I shall now share some of these sensations with you, to brighten your day & make you glad you live, cook & eat in the present:

CHOP SUEY SALAD
1 can (13½ or 14½ oz.) chicken broth
1 cup converted rice
1½ tsp. salt
½ cup vegetable oil
2 T. soy sauce
2 T. toasted sesame seeds (optional)
2 cups diced cooked chicken, turkey, or pork
1 can (14 oz.) chop suey vegetables, drained
1 jar (4½ oz.) sliced mushrooms, drained
4 green onions with tops, sliced
1 jar (2 oz.) diced pimiento, drained

Add enough water to broth to make 2½ cups liquid. Bring to a boil. Stir in the rice & 1 tsp. of the salt. Cover & simmer 20 minutes. Remove from heat. Let stand covered until all liquid is absorbed, about 5 minutes. Transfer rice to large bowl. Combine oil, soy sauce, remaining salt & sesame seeds, if desired, mixing well. Stir into rice. Cover & refrigerate 1 hour. Stir in remaining ingredients [including those yummy canned chop suey vegetables, mmm]. Cover & chill at least 3 hours. Make 6 main dish servings.

Also included among the 300 Sensational Salads are “Hot Chinese Potato Salad” & “Chow Mein Salad” but honestly, neither of those is quite as special as this one, which you’ll surely want to bust out next time you host dinner guests:

HOT RAVIOLI SALAD
8 strips bacon, cut-up
1 cup chopped onion
2 cans (15 oz. each) cheese ravioli
¼ cup sugar
¼ vinegar
Pepper to taste

In skillet cook bacon until crisp; drain fat reserving 1 tablespoon. Return 1 tablespoon fat to skillet; add onion & saute about 2 minutes. Add ravioli, sugar, vinegar & pepper; cover & simmer until ravioli is heated through. Serve on lettuce. Yield: 4 cups.

Gawd almighty, is that not the most vile thing you ever heard of?! But leaving the issue of pure nastiness aside, what on earth qualifies this to be called a salad? The fact that you plop it on top of lettuce? The presence of vinegar? What?!

Love:

Michael’s blackberry honey on Alvarado sprouted whole wheat. Every once in a great while, & I mean like every several years, a perfect jar of honey & a certain mood of mine align to give me a whole loaf’s worth of incredibly satisfying bread & honey. The honey varies but the bread is always Alvarado. This time the honey is dark brown, partly crystallized between liquid & solid, & yes, it does taste like blackberries. I don’t see Michael anywhere on the web—figures, for a guy with hand-written labels. You can get his honey at the Berkeley Bowl, & his last name is Huber, which may or may not mean that he is a direct descendant of François Huber, the father of beekeeping. That would be too neat. I mean that both ways.

Dave Rawlings Machine “Bells of Harlem”, off the new album. Steady rotation. “Ruby” is pretty damn awesome too.

Toe-up socks! How can you not knit in this weather?!

Love:

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings at the Fillmore: More than worth the backache from standing all night long. That hallowed room is really not for creaky old bodies, but 10 feet from the stage with the flawless crystal sound, Gil & Dave working their magic, breathing & creating as one organism, it’s so good, it feels like love.

Warren pears: Almost not of this world—but they are of this world, they come from the ground, they grow on trees & aren’t we lucky beyond belief? It seems like insanity to eat any other fruit right now. (I am insane, though, & cannot refuse the last of the melons & stone fruits.)

Gourmet magazine: A different kind of love, more material & mundane perhaps, but no less real. I grew up ogling those centerfolds every month, year after yummy year. I refuse to say RIP! Will someone come in & rescue it somehow? Am I in denial?

I went on a getaway with my pal the Triathlete to Door County, Wisconsin, where her mother-in-law has an old house. Behind the house is the sweetest meadow you ever did see.

Their neighbor mows these perfect walking paths through the meadow & a nearby grove of trees… I don’t know if he is some kind of landscaping design genius or what, but the paths are completely satisfying in every way: where they go, how they branch off from one another, how they are curved or straight in different places. Some of the coarser cut-off grasses make a truly excellent, quiet crunching sound under your shoes when you walk on them. I took the wildflower book out there one morning & identified at least three different asters.

When we weren’t hanging out in the meadow, the Triathlete was giving me a grand tour of awesome swimming spots. I swam in a warm little lake, & in wavy, windy Lake Michigan proper, & that tiny little shape is me swimming in Ellison Bay:

Plus I made a cherry pie, because Door County is famous for its pie-perfect sour cherries. We got the last of the season’s cherries. I’m pretty dang proud, because I’ve always relied on a food processor to make my piecrusts, but this one was all by hand & it actually turned out just fine. Didn’t know I had it in me! We bought local cherry honey to sweeten this pie. (Don’t mind all the cherry goo, we had only enough butter to make a top crust, no bottom.) It was delicious!

I’m kinda cheating. This is from Wyoming, 2004.

Did I mention I got me one of those Census jobs? It’s kicking my ass! I’ve been enjoying my walking tour of North Oakland mezuzahs, dogs, & rosebushes, but still, I’m tired! So please forgive my laziness if I just link to Dan’s post about my Chicago gig instead of telling you all about it myself. Click on it if you wanna come to my slide lecture this Thursday night in Chicago. Otherwise, feel free to ignore, & just imagine me trudging from door to door in various parts of Alameda County, trying to build up Census stamina.

The legendary Richard Aoki has passed into history. When I was an Ethnic Studies major at Cal, this picture was indelibly stamped into all of our impressionable young minds. Three bad-ass dudes (of course they were all dudes—it was the 60s) leading the struggle for the very education that we were now receiving, twenty years later!

By the time I fractured my pelvis & was wheeled off to aquatherapy, another 18 years later, the image was still easily called to my mind, but the bad-ass brothers’ names, not so much. Okay, not at all. At aquatherapy other things seemed much more pressing: getting in & out of clothes & swimsuit, hobbling from wheelchair to the funny little elevator chair that lowered me into the heavily chlorinated high school pool. Strapping the weights around my waist & grabbing a noodle? kickboard? (I can’t believe I’m not remembering what I held in my hands for stability!) to walk slowly across the pool & back again, backwards, sideways, frontways until that subtle moment when my body, fussier than Goldilocks, had had Just The Right Amount of exercise.

This is not a digression. You will see. Many other friendly aquatherapy regulars filled the shallow end of the pool: oldsters with the typical variety of oldster ailments, other (relative) youngsters like me who had been in accidents ranging from merely painful to truly terrible, like the man who had been shot up with 17 bullets & required an entourage of physical therapists to escort him slowly, agonizingly from one side of the pool to the other. Since this is an Ethnic Studies themed post, I am even more compelled than usual to point out he was a young African American man & statistically so much more likely to be suffering from bullet wounds than, say, me, the middle-aged, middle-class Chinese American woman who was bucked off a horse.

Anyway. While walking slowly across the pool one tended to fall into conversation with other aquatherapees (not a real word!) who were walking at similar speed & depth, so I started chatting with an older Asian American man who was recovering from a stroke. I don’t remember exactly what conversation bits soon led to me exclaiming with no small measure of excitement, “Wait! You mean that picture of the three bad-ass dudes, you’re the Asian one?!” Indeed, none other than the one & only Richard Aoki, Third World Liberation Front strike leader & Black Panther Field Marshal, was my pool-walking buddy! Awestruck, I gushed, “I owe my education to you!” (I think he appreciated hearing that.)

Water therapy got a lot more interesting. Along with re-learning how to walk, I picked up juicy nuggets of Panther lore, asked him Everything I Ever Wanted to Know About Firearms But Had Nobody to Ask, & played the Do-You-Know game, Ethnic Studies Edition—of course he knew everybody, & was even related to an artist I knew from a completely different department of my life.

He told me of his early heartbreak when his fiancee forced him to choose between the Panthers & her. I was surprised & touched by the bitterness he still expressed about that long-ago disappointment; it seemed to have turned him off to women permanently. While ranting about it, he even quoted Shakespeare: “Frailty, thy name is woman!”

“Hey,” I protested, “you can’t say that to me!” But he ignored my objection & went on & on about how women can never be as revolutionary as men. I held my tongue & thought, “well, not if you have a narrow definition of revolution that involves so many guns all the time…” but I didn’t really mind hearing him spout off about it; I knew it was much too late for anyone, least of all me, to change his mind, so I continued avidly listening to everything he said, history coming alive for me right there in the tepid pool.

Our conversations were casual & chatty but somehow also intense. It seemed to me that his very aura had a Black Panther flavor: that unique blend of militance & community orientation. We discussed the pros & cons of available options for elder care within the Japanese American community. We talked about Carlos Bulosan & Frank Chin. I noticed various aging Black Panthers shepherding him back & forth to aquatherapy, just as my friends & family took turns bringing me. Eventually I graduated to driving myself to aquatherapy, & then finally to swimming again back at my regular pool, where I walked the shallow lanes with a lot less pain, no weights, no noodle, & also no Richard.

I’m grateful for Richard’s open friendliness at a hard time in my life, & for his dedication & leadership throughout his life, sexist blind spots & all. I feel very lucky that fate threw me in the pool with him for those moments, & I’ll always remember that should I ever feel the need to acquire a gun, I would be best suited for a shotgun. Thank you, Richard. May you rest in revolutionary peace.

Arugula, sliced endive, mandolined Ambrosia apples (just because that’s what kind I happened to have), walnuts, Iberico (break off little nubs with your fingers). If you let this salad sit about 15-20 minutes after you dress it, the apples become rather deliciously pliable. Or just eat it slowly to experience the full range of appleness, from the first crisp bites to the last relaxed mouthful.

Truth be told, I can’t remember what dressing I used (educated guess: usual suspect red wine mustard vinaigrette), because I made this salad back in that Other Time, in the Bad Old Days, before we had a president who could not only form a complete sentence, but have it actually mean something, & furthermore, do sensible shit like shut down Gitmo. Seriously, I had gotten so pathetically downtrodden, so totally used to everything being done wrong all the time that I assumed all this “shut down Gitmo the first day” business was just some fantasy we had, one of those wistful lefty sighs that blows away with the least breeze of reality. Now? Let’s just say I’m feeling Obamalicious! Although tired. Exhausted, actually. My po little brain is working overtime to carve out new neural pathways to accommodate the fact that, apparently, I’m kinda in love with the whole First Family. Never thought I’d hear myself say such a thing in all my born days. I’m so confused, I’ve been taking way more naps than usual.

Not confused, however, about Aretha’s hat!!! (The people who don’t like it, now they’re confused.)

Why I Love the Web Dept: Apparently I’m not the only person who abhors evil Christmas sweaters. Actually, in my vision of hell, everyone is wearing them. Plus it’s always cold & the TV is always on & the only lights are those old flickering flourescents, & there’s rats & mice everywhere. Oh & there’s never any food.

Aren’t you glad you’re not there? More food soon, I promise.

Reasons why I don’t really mind spending Turkey Day as a guest of non-foodies:

1. No overeating.
2. No exhaustion from crazy cooking marathon, or the least dot of pressure to show up with the perfect side dish.
3. More appreciation for the fact that I eat like a fucking empress the other 364 days of the year.
4. Mashed potatoes are always good!
5. Budget-friendly! No extravagant ingredients, not even wine.
6. More time to build gingerbread houses with silly tots who end up eating half of the candy… I guess I’m not much of a disciplinarian, heh.

For some reason I was still really tired the next day, & after a hot bath crashed out for a FOUR HOUR NAP, the likes of which I haven’t seen since, I dunno, my college days? (Those big naps when you have the flu—or a doped-up broken pelvis—don’t count the same way.) It was kinda stunning really. Who knows how much longer I might have slept if my dear spousette hadn’t woken me up to drink some water. After that I was afraid I might be up all night, but no, I nailed it with another 7 hours! How decadent is that? I felt transformed! My skin even looked better. Now if only I could figure out how to make that happen on a regular basis, like maybe quarterly would be good.

Other leisurely 4-day-weekend activities included cleaning out the fridge, going out for brunch (blueberry pancakes!), loafing around the kitchen with the Sunday paper, swimming, & an overdue hair trim, how satisfying!

The only misstep I made was trying to watch Manufactured Landscapes, which follows photographer Edward Burtynsky as he documents some of the environmental horrors of China. I was awestruck by the opening pan, which tracks continuously, inexorably, through a ginormous factory for over 8 minutes. Unfortunately I only lasted another 7 minutes after that, not because there was anything wrong with the documentary, but because watching the factory workers doing their insanely repetitive jobs actually made my hands hurt! Truly these folks have jobs from hell. I totally get why you would want to run far away from that & fry eggrolls in Wyoming instead. Someday when I have a little more fortitude—or more emotional distance from my Bad Hand Ordeal—I’ll have to watch the rest of this thing.

I’ve been busy lately! Coupla weekends ago I had a quintessentially East Bay foodie day with The Witch. First we went to a chicken workshop (yes we have urban chicken fantasies!) at EcoHouse, where I got no good photos of the chickens, but this friendly duck came to investigate my camera:

After that, we dropped by the People’s Grocery garden party, where we ate an embarrassment of padrón peppers & admired this lovely kiwi vine:

Then I felt kinda crappy for a week & didn’t do anything interesting. I think maybe I successfully fought off a full-blown cold.

Once recovered, I had to come up with a goodbye card for the incomparable Steve Woodall, who is leaving (wah!) to run the Columbia Center for Book & Paper Arts after nurturing our own San Francisco Center for the Book from its very beginning. I have always been in awe of Steve’s big, big heart. He is one of the kindest people you could ever hope to meet, & somehow manages to keep tons of stuff running smoothly with the most easygoing manner… I just don’t know how a person becomes like that. If I’m lucky maybe I’ll get to be a little more like him in my next life.

Anyway, you can imagine the pressure was on since I knew that about a hundred killer book artists were all making cards for Steve too. None of this running out to buy a card & scrawling something in it with a ballpoint pen for this crowd, no way. Not when John DeMerritt is making one of his famous boxes to put all the cards in. I was so distracted by the card situation that I forgot all about bringing food to the party until like half an hour before I had to leave. Doh! The fridge looked pretty bare & I thought I’d have to run out & buy something on the way, but you know, that’s not how I like to do things if I can help it. I spent too many years of my life as the person who brought chips & salsa to potlucks. (Although for the record, let me say at least it was always Casa Sanchez. I did have standards.)

Here is Mother of Invention Salad. We have fuyu persimmons on the tree right now, so I grabbed two of those, plus an apple & half a head of some speckly chicory (sorry I can’t remember the name of it—you could use radicchio or anything similar). Mandolined the fruit, squeezed some lemon juice over it. Sliced the chicory; the tops of the leaves were too soft to do on the mandoline, so I did that with a knife & then hit the mandoline when I got closer to the stem end. Tossed it all with red wine mustard vinaigrette (thanks again, Orangette!) & then thought it needed some green, so I ran out into the garden & pinched off some pineapple sage for garnish. Done!

Of course, when I got to the party it turned out everybody else had brought chips & salsa, bread & cheese, & wine. Occupational hazard of the book arts: no way in hell do you have time for anything else. Now I remember why I always used to do the Casa Sanchez thing… & why I don’t edition books anymore!

Next night, it was the reception for Road Trip at San Jose Museum of Art. I hadn’t seen the show yet so was quite eager to find out how it looked. I have to say I’m pleased as punch to be in this show. Curator Kristen Evangelista did a fabulous job; how often do you go to a big group show like that & really enjoy most of the stuff in it?!

It was a fun opening too. Five Dollar Suit was playing bluegrass, & the food was thematic, reaching its conceptual peak with these teeny tiny chicken fried steaks, sandwiched in biscuits with gravy, here modeled by the talented, hardworking hands of Noah Lang & Donna Ozawa.

Look what you get if you do a search for “Chinese” in the New York Public Library’s Buttolph collection of menus!

Just the tip o’ the iceberg.

& more fruit than I know what to do with, too…

I’ve been so distracted—by various foods, effin Republicans, & little sewing projects—that I almost forgot to mention the Road Trip show at San Jose Museum of Art, on view now through 25 January 09. I’m tickled & humbled to have my Chinese restaurants included alongside some really great artists’ work. If you’re a museum member, maybe I’ll see you at the reception later in October.

One of these things is not like the others, but sometimes I just gotta brag about my fabulous bro—how I love this little skirt!

Now back to our regular programming.

Blackberry nectarine plum pie, made with wild blackberries from the Eel River…

...& piecrust cookies, because I always have leftover pie dough (but of course, never enough to make a whole nother pie).

Spotted in Willits en route to the river:

On eating in other folks’ cultures:

I feel a bit of guilt, now that the matzo shortage appears so grim. Even though I bought my 2 boxes before I heard about the situation, well, a shiksa like me can eat leavened or unleavened bread whenever, so probably my matzo shoulda gone to some Jew who at this moment is experiencing major angst over the lack thereof. But it’s too late for that.

We can only hope that emergency matzo gets flown in here before matzo riots break out!

Meanwhile, here is some leavened goodness I enjoyed over the weekend at the Cal powwow.

How to eat an Indian taco: the problem is that you have many many unsecured food bits mounded up on an unstable base (aka thin paper plate balanced on your knees). You are eating in a confined space (very little elbow room) with barely adequate plastic utensils, & you don’t want to be the uncouth non-Indian dropping aforementioned food bits—or worse, flinging the entire thing—upon your Indian (or non-Indian) seatmates. Plus, the distraction of adorable teeny tiny 4-year-old jingle dress dancers.

The temptation is to slice it like a pizza & pick up the wedges with your hand. Do not try this. The motion caused by sawing away with that little plastic knife will cause an avalanche of food bits to tumble off the edges of the plate & onto your lap, the floor, & all surrounding Indians & non-Indians. Also, fry bread is very elastic; when you inevitably lose patience with the pathetic progress of the knife you will try tearing the bread, which could easily result in the flinging action I mentioned earlier.

So. Here is the method I have developed. Pry your eyes away from the cute mighty mites long enough to take your wee fork & eat some of the bits off the top. Eat the hill shape down into a flatter, more spread out & stable arrangement of the bits, preferably so that the puffy edges of the fry bread function to hold things in the relatively sunken middle.

(Note that even with all your best efforts, those stray food bits dangling precariously over the edge will fall to their doom. It’s not about perfection here; it’s about minimizing the damage.)

Now you can try the knife, but be patient & saw all the way through to the bottom. No tugging! For controlled tearing, start with the edge & tear inward toward the middle, rolling the edge in so that the bits get trapped between layers of fry bread. This gets easier as the bread soaks up some liquid from the tomatoes & beans.

I know, nobody likes soggy fry bread, but guess what? You don’t have to eat that part. By the time you’ve eaten all the yummy crispy edges & everything on top, you’ll be too full for that soggy middle anyway. Relax with your comfortably full stomach, watch the dancers, & soak up the drums. Ho!

I’ve never been too much of an Anglophile (unless you count my persnickety devotion to the finer points of the English language). A trip to the UK has, so far, stayed pretty far down on my list of burning travel desires (although it does have a slot there). When weeping with embarrassment about being an American (an increasingly frequent occurrence, & I don’t mean just for me), I’m generally not comparing myself to the British, at least not specifically.

Until now.

Is it not enough that the Dollar has become economically pathetic relative to the Pound? Now the gods & goddesses of design have decided it’s necessary to make the contrast as blatant as possible in three-dimensional, inescapable, everyday-in-your-pocket, visual terms? & I even like purple. Waaaah! Willya pass me a hanky, please? Then, after a good cry, umm, gonna check the airfares.

(If you haven’t already noticed, Ask H&FJ is my new favorite blog. I will try to restrain myself from linking to everydangthing Jonathan Hoefler says. I will not stalk him, any more than I stalked Chockylit the Cupcake Queen at the height of my cupcake obsession—which is to say, not at all. I promise. I do have a life, & all my marbles too. Really I do.)

Hey, look what I found! House numbers meet the Evil Chinky Font! Or, perhaps more accurately, house numbers sprang from an ECF. Truly I never would have figured this out on my own, because as the designers point out, the house numbers have “gradually softened” to the point that they don’t seem to resemble any ECF at all, but inhabit their own house number world. My pal the Triathlete has been obsessed with house numbers lately, so I’ve been looking at them more, & wondering where the hell they came from, because they are so typographically odd. Mystery solved, & who ever woulda guessed the answer would strike so close to home?

I can’t help but draw a parallel between the house numbers &—wait for it—“American Chinese” food (aw, you saw that one coming). They both started out as weird misinterpretations of something Chinese, then evolved into their whole own reality, becoming ubiquitous & integral staples of American culture. Arguably the house numbers travelled much farther than the food; the numbers started as racist caricatures (not designed by Chinese typographers, we can safely assume) & are now no longer recognizably Asian in any way at all, racist or otherwise, whereas the food started through gradual adaptations by Chinese cooks themselves trying to figure out what white people wanted to eat, & can still be described the same way.

I love smart type designers. I love them even more when they explain things so clearly.

In cold news, today my throat was still sore enough that an apple was too hard & lumpy to swallow comfortably, but I did have enough energy to make applesauce, which felt quite soothing, both to make & to eat.

Nostalgic Americana fetish of the day: packaged, ready-to-bake pull-apart dinner rolls. Seems like these don’t get nearly as much play in the retro-kitsch imagination as Pillsbury tube biscuits, which, of course, have that inspired, nay, genius packaging going for them. Plus, the tubes & their satisfying twist/burst/pop persist unto the present day, whereas the pull-aparts have fallen by the supermarket wayside. Or have they? If you know, do tell! (Thanks to Miss Peace Broccoli for jogging these memories; she was telling me about pull-apart rolls she likes from Andronico’s.)