Cooking with Vinegar in Spain's Former Colonies

This is tilapia escabeche from Tienda Morelos.

0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false

In countries where refrigeration came late, freshly caught fish is often preserved for future consumption in Spanish-inspired techniques now associated with the Mexican ceviche. A variation is escabeche, lightly cooking the fish then marinating in vinegar and spices, a technique that works better when one lives inland or up in the mountains where fresh fish is not available.

In the Philippines, escabeche is a more elaborate affair. Fish, often cleaned and cooked whole, is fried then cooked in a sweet-sour concoction of vinegar, brown sugar, garlic, onion and maybe a little soy sauce to which are added chunks of sweet bell pepper, tomatoes, maybe slices of pineapple in syrup.

Raw fish preserved in vinegar we called kilawin, a technique used for other food stuff like pork ears, shrimp and prawn. Fish has to be really fresh. I remember tiny sardines that are quickly filleted then marinated in vinegar, finely chopped ginger, scallions and maybe a wee bit of garlic. The translucent flesh turns opaque when it is ready to eat. The finished product is used more like a condiment, in small doses often to accompany really rich viands like fried sole or mackerel steaks.

Posted via email from Duende Joes

Discovering Nectarines and Other Drupes

See the full gallery on Posterous

I've lived in North America for over forty years but I've never had a nectarines until a few days ago. How could I have missed it? What happened was, I think, the fruit appeared toward the end of summer when I'm usually sated with the bonanza of fruits the season brings and I just skip its arrival as a non-event. Or maybe I thought the nectarine was not a true fruit but a cross between two fruit species and elitist that I sometimes can be I decided it was not worth my time to discover this luscious delight.

I blame Trader Joe's for introducing the fruit into my gustatory repertoire. Last week they advertised white nectarines as something to try because it was sweeter than the usual nectarines. True to form I didn't see "nectarines" and though the fruit was "white peach." I didn't discover my mistake until I was ready to serve the fruit to a friend and bragged how this was something new, a white peach. He corrected me: it's nectarine. Nectarine? I salvaged the label from the trash and sure enough it read nectarine, but white nectarine.

Anyway I went ahead, cut and served it. I sunk my teeth into my half of the fruit and juice squirted all over the place, overflowing and dripping out my mouth. I felt momentarily silly until the experience blocked out any other sensation. I was conquered territory. I'm now a fan.

I explored produce in other markets and decided to try the regular nectarines. Those are juicy too but the flesh has a different quality. It's translucent whereas white nectarines have fine sandy, milky flesh. I can see how people think of nectarines as crossed cultivars of plums because regular nectarines have flesh that look and taste like plums.

In fact nectarines are cultivars of peach except that their skin is smooth so that sometimes they're called "shaved peach." Like peaches they're believed to have originated in Central or Eastern Asia although Europeans initially believed peaches came from Persia, hence the name peach from French peche, from Latin malum persicus.

Like regular peaches, white nectarines should combine with banana and the usual fruits I blend with dairy to make my post-workout meal in the morning. I am not as keen about plums or regular nectarines because the consistency of the flesh is different. They would show up like translucent or glass-like fragments, which I suppose, can be attractive too, like tapioca "pearls" in Taiwan iced bubble teas or "nata de coco" in Philippine halo-halo.

Nectarines like peaches don't do well in the tropics. They are summer fruit in temperate countries. Nonetheless our summer harvest of fruits in North America take me back to the tropics and their unique fruit offerings. Wherever we are, we develop our own list of favorite foods, what become our comfort food, food we associate with the good times. White nectarines is joining that list for me.

Posted via email from Duende Joes

A Fitness Formula That Works

I've heard it so many times, I've even preached it myself, but sometimes we don't act until we're in a corner and have to do it. Fitness is a lifestyle and improving health and fitness means modifying my lifestyle. When things are going well, too well, it is easy enough to swell our ego with talk but nothing gives true confidence, faith if you will, than seeing the evidence with our own senses.

Okay, health is an ongoing concern. It is ongoing because our goals change over time and, more to the point (corner), our bodies change. The demands we place on our physical, psychological and spiritual beings change, too, and, hopefully, with time and the experience of well-observed time we may learn a little more about ourselves and the world that impacts our concept and therefore goal for health and fitness.

Quitting regular outside employment two and a half years ago was more difficult than I thought it would be. For years I'd actually been moving towards this change but when I did finally take the plunge (okay, I'm switching metaphors from home interiors to sea) the repercussions were greater than I thought they would be. Now, why did I think I knew about this change before actually implementing it? Didn't I just write that time and the observation of what transpires in time are necessary ingredients to growing and learning?

One of the concomittants of the decision I took was the loss of the very structure that motivated me to make the change in the first place. Constructing a new structure to take the place of the old is in itself a process. It's again not a project we can fully anticipate and work out ahead of time. I guess there is a kind of genius to the whole process. If we can learn without experiencing i.e. living and observing what happens in time what's the point of living? Okay, this is not correct logic.We live because we are living. Introjecting meaning into living is something else and not the raison d'etre for living itself. If learning is not the reason for living, it does give meaning to it. That's just one of the ways we can look at living, of course. For others, living is loving. Or, for others, living is for finding what they call God. For me, living is just living but slathered all over the cake (another metaphor change) are the various icings we concoct to make what is essentially joy itself feel joyful. And that is what I mean by the genius of mindful living.

Back to the title of this piece (more of the preceding in subsequent written-out thinking). This is what seems to have worked for me just in the past two weeks. 

Regular aerobic exercise, at least five times a week, daily being better still, starts the day best in terms of waking up energy for creative activity. Since I'd gained 10 lbs. in the past year, resuming a regular walking regimen felt harder than in the past when I'd slack off and start over again. I should know. I've been working out an exercise program that works for me for some 25 years. (I remember that first day I stepped out of the apartment to go walking for the first time. The body was heavier than the world on Atlas's shoulders! My! It got better over the years and I've been more often on a program than not. Then again I'd not weighed as much in the past as I do now!

My goal two years ago was to bring my weight down to 168 lbs. That would make my BMI accord with recommendations for my age, reduce my sugar to well below the maximum healthy pre-prandial concentration, and tune down my bad cholesterol. (Other than these, my physical health couldn't be better!) Instead, I gained 10 more pounds!

Through trial and error, with lots of help from my physician/friend, Kevin, I've found out that taking a mouthful of raisins, wheat bran and grouts, and raw or dry-roasted almonds with 500 mg L-carnitine gives me the energy boost to take my morning walk to cardiovascular levels again. My capacity still has ways to go but it's now up to where it was last year when I was walking five to eight miles a day on the Monon. That was insane. It was taking too much time—2 or more hours a day—and my feet and legs were taking a punishing they didn't like!

Now I just do 2 to 3 miles a day, occasionally spurt to 5 or 6 miles, and my feet feel fine. I've been doing interval running which counterintuitively seems to be helping my lower back. What really proves the point to me is the slow, steadier weight loss. It's not much but unlike before when my weight fluctuates all over the map (the final metaphor change), now it stays closer to the range. And I can feel my belly again.

Frankly I wanted to lose the weight to have more energy and flexibility again. That belly gets in the way of some of the things I used to enjoy doing, like some yoga asanas. Then again I didn't use to have to deal with deteriorating cartilages but this is why formulas for fitness, for happiness, for joy don't stand still. We change, they change. Without change, how do we know time? And without time, can we know we're alive?

Posted via email from Duende Joes

Easy Summer Fruit Sherbet

As the sun blasts us and the earth in July and August, we can still take comfort in the abundance of fruits and vegetables burgeoning from the fertile earth. What to do with this bonanza while trying to stay cool? Think fruit sherbets!

The old way if you don't have an ice cream maker is to blend the mix, freeze in an ice cube tray, stir every 15 minutes while the mixture solidifies until you have a smooth frozen concoction. My way is easier. Freeze chunks of fruit, process quickly in the blender and voila! Sherbet that satisfies the sweet tooth while keeping your fat and cholesterol intake low.

Here's the recipe for blackbettery peach sherbet: For two huge servings, take 1 C. of frozen banana,1 C. fresh chilled ripe peach, 1/2 C. frozen blackberries, 1/4 C. each orange juice and whole milk, 2 Tb. whey protein powder and a basil or mint sprig for garnish. I use Bally's Performance Whey Protein that is sweetened with Splenda but you can use any good quality whey protein and skip the sweetener or add a little demerara cane sugar or honey. Pulse in the blender and serve!

Posted via email from Duende Joes

The World Is Flat

Unless you’ve been living under a bushel (not letting your light shine as beacons for others and without nearby WiFi) you’ve noticed our world has changed. It’s no longer the world of your parents or even the world you yourself were born into.

It’s the same earth but, at least on the surface of it and on what paleontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard du Chardin and Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky called the noosphere, there’d been great changes especially in how its dominant species, homo sapiens sapiens, lives. 

(The changes do not go deeper usually than a few feet under the surface and earth remains despite our arrogant illusions very much its own self with its own laws that shall outlast even the longest lived senior of our or any other generation. When we act forgetting this, the earth reminds us with unforgettable force that it remains above our human laws and expectations.)

Civilization with its infrastructures has changed from the time of the pyramids at Saqqara and Giza or the so-called Seven Wonders of the ancient world (of which only the Great Pyramid is the lone survivor). One need only look at pictures of the new Shanghai skyline to see how architecturally things have changed.

One of the most exciting changes to me is the globalization of commerce and industry in this digital age. This is the subject New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explores in his 2005 book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. To Christian Europe before Columbus the earth was flat. The Genoese believed that he would find India not by going east but by crossing the great sea going west. He was the first to act on a guess that the earth was round and that going one direction one could get at the same place as someone going in the opposite direction.

Friedman who won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work with the New York Times wrote how he came to realize the earth had changed shape again. He was shooting a documentary on the Indian company, Infosys, exploring how India and Bangalore in particular had become such a major pool for outsourcing service and information for North American and European companies.

Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani, was telling him that in a world of digitized knowledge, countries like India could now compete for global knowledge work. “The playing field,” Nilekani told Friedman, “is being leveled.” The phrase kept playing in Friedman’s mind like a broken melody until the realization hit him: “My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

With the distant places on the planet now connected via satellite and fiber optic cables, communication occurs in seconds via this all-encompassing highway. Someone in Dalian in China (another rapidly emerging outsourcing center) could pick up the phone when I call from Dallas, Texas about my Internet service and the I wouldn’t have to wait that much longer than if the Dalian was sitting at an office across the street. Isn’t this amazing?

There are limits to these arrangements. Dalian gets business from Japan by training hundreds of mostly young Chinese to speak Japanese just as Bangalore service representatives learn to modify their Indian English accents to approach Midwest American sounds but there are limitations that go beyond language.

I experienced this firsthand when I recently called AT&T. The 800 number routed to an extremely pleasant young woman, Danielle, somewhere in India who efficiently answered my questions by consulting her computer screen. She read the pertinent guidelines for setting service and insisted that I was under an annual contract with AT&T. Fortunately I asked to speak to someone else and she switched me to the Disconnect Department

This department was stateside. Tom indeed sounded like Tom. There the customer representative was able to access more customer-specific data and told me that indeed I was not under such a contract. He suggested that in the future I should ask to be connected to his department, which I did when a few days later I made the decision to switch from DSL to cable and discontinued my land phone line. (The landline is going the way of pyramids just as, debunking religious belief, we’re disposing of our dead in less earth space than pyramids or cemeteries.)

What is leveling the field, flattening the world, is not only the speed of telecommunication but the nature of the most rapidly changing commodities and services of our modern world. These are often software-generated products that can be sent in digitized form, packets of information so tiny millions of them travel along innumerable pathways blanketing the earth, physical manifestations of Chardin’s noosphere. Who would have thought in the time of Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs (Reyes Católicos) of post-Muslim Spain that just 1 and 0 (0s are Muslim inventions) could build edifices more powerful than brick or even stainless steel.

As the manufacture of physical products move ineluctably to where labor is cheaper (because the locals are willing to work with passion and dedication for much less money than North Americans or Europeans), industrialized countries are having to re-invent the world. What advantage they still possess today largely consists in technical knowledge and research facilities and superb universities where new knowledge is generated. We’ve become knowledge purveyors, our greatest assets what we dream of in our heads, noosphere.

This state of affairs is rapidly changing, too. Friedman quoted the communist mayor of Dalian teach him about capitalism: “The rule of the market economy,” said Mayor Xia, “is that if somewhere has the richest human resources and the cheapest labor, of course the enterprises and the businesses will naturally go there.” At the time of the book’s research, Dalian had twenty-two universities and colleges with over two hundred thousand students! Xia further emotes: “My personal feeling is that Chinese youngsters are more ambitious than Japanese or American youngsters…”

There is market economics and then there is human economics. The former deals with financial laws, the latter with energy, ambition and spirit. People in poorer countries are forced by circumstance to work harder and improve their living conditions. We in North America or Europe are not so hungry or needy. I think this may in fact be a good thing. Maybe we don’t have to compete as rabidly in the dog-eat-dog world and set the pace instead in truly improving the depth and quality of our lives, focus not only on research knowledge but other forms of knowledge only those who live fairly comfortable lives have the luxury to explore. There is technology information and then what we still could call spiritual knowledge, Chardin’s noosphere.

Members of the our species, homo sapiens sapiens, are said to distinguish themselves from other species in the more elaborate, imaginative thinking of which we are capable. Following Maslov’s trajectory of personal growth, we might climb the pyramid of lessening suffering and increasing joy starting by first providing for our body’s needs. Having those satisfied we move up the hierarchy into satisfying increasingly more subtle needs but instead of stopping with self-actualization we could leap into the empyrean.

“What is quality?” asks Phaedrus in Robert Pirsig’s 1074 classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Mathematical values have changed our world so much, changed our perception of it from being flat to being round and now again to being flat again. Transcending the technological advances of the twentieth century maybe we can go full circle and with those peripatetic thinkers of fifth century BCE Athens concern ourselves with subtler enterprises.

We might, for instance, work harder at improving the lot of humans everywhere, what we call civil rights (because they are recognized by civitas or cities and societies). We can learn to recognize how we oppress ourselves and other people by the beliefs we hold, by plain, ignorant prejudice. After all a flatter earth means ultimately that we live that much closer to our neighbor and who is our neighbor?

According to Jesus of the Christians, our neighbor is whoever needs us, whoever our compassion enables us to connect with that the distance between us really goes nil, zero, and from round or flat earth we grow into one earth, one life blanketed by one all-encompassing thought, our noosphere.

Posted via email from The Pursuit of Duende

On Writing

See the full gallery on Posterous

In the June 20, 2011 issue of Time, David McCullough discusses writing and its importance (10 Questions):

“The loss of people writing—writing a composition, a letter or a report—is not just the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren’t [writing]. And that’s a handicap. People [I research] were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.”

This is why I write and why I don’t feel I’ve done a day justice if I don’t write. Writing helps me document my thoughts, organize and make sense of them i.e. connect them with the overall picture of thoughts I’ve been constructing all my life, and, in the process, stumble into insights and new ways of seeing myself and the world.

Assuredly there are many other people who don’t think of writing on par almost with sleep or eating. They go through life unconcerned with meaning or significance. What’s happening now is all that matters and it is good enough. I am everlastingly concerned about myself, how I should live, why I should live. I’m a masochist, and selfish to boot.

Writing for me surely is both familiar pleasure and questionable good. Writing is one activity I’ve done for so long and done so long because it has repeatedly given pleasure. I say I write to know myself—the “unexamined life” and all that—but its benefit here is dubious. I write because I enjoy writing.

I might even essay that I need to write as some people need to paint or versify or run for political office. It’s my true vocation, not the avocation it was through my adult life till now. I love the slippery rocks that are the words and phrases writers employ to enter into their world of creation. Sometimes they’re just there at the river where you’re crossing it to the other bank but usually you have to go up or downriver searching for just the size or heft of combination of them you need for the hut you’re building by the rushing waters.

Writing is meditation. Both the external and the familiar, doggedly pernicious internal world disappear; I even disappear. There are just the ideas with their precious freight of energy.

When writing my whole responsibility is simply to respect the energy and let it lead me where it may that I can take the ideas to a kind of universal intelligibility. For me this is art: transforming an individual experience, object or idea into its superhuman relative, which communicates that something behind it to anyone who’s looking.

Let those with eyes see… but first I must see it with my own inner eye. Art is really just the energy artists struggle to find within themselves, a primordial, archetypal energy like to that of Yahweh or the artificers of the world’s great myths and religions.

So writing is an activity within the realm of the religious, if by religion we mean our yoking ourselves to something bigger than we are. Writing is a writer’s vehicle to transcendence as painting to a painter, sculpture to a sculptor, mathematizing to a scientist. 

Posted via email from The Pursuit of Duende

Mung Bean Stew with Jackfruit and Spinach, and Malaysian Salt Red Fish

Mung Bean stew is an old favorite from childhood days in the Philippines. I never cooked this when I still lived in the islands. In fact I didn't cook much until I came to the Promised Land. So when I cook Filipino foods today I base the recipe on memory. Nostalgia is a powerful teacher, much less necessity in the old saying about invention. Today's stew, cooked while freezing rain was causing a racket against the window glass, was a last-minute concoction.

Ingredients: mung beans (monggo in Ilonggo), garlic, onion, tomatoes, olive oil, Malaysian salted Red Fish, canned jackfruit chunks, fresh spinach, and salt. I boiled the beans and fish until almost tender. I sautéed garlic, onion and tomato in olive oil, salting as I cooked. I added the beans and jackfruit chunks and simmered until beans were tender. I added spinach, corrected the salt and presto! A wonderful, fragrant soup against which the ice storm outside was no match! Served with brown rice tenderized with dried kelp, it was lunch for a king.

Posted via email from Duende Joes