Christmas Note

Dear Friends:

As every holiday season approaches, we'd send out message to remind all of you what we have to offer in terms of holiday menus and party menus in case you would like to host people at work or family alike. It seems this year the feelings of the holiday season is slightly different. With the economic downturn and whatever is going on the in the world, we are celebrating this holiday with much more reverence and reserve. It does feel that the world is slightly less consistent and that we are confronting a different reality.

This is our very first year in Beijing and we have organized a variety of different mix of party, Christmas and New Years menus for our customers. Please let us know if and when you have your party needs and we'd be very happy to work out the particulars of what it is you need. We look forward to seeing all of you at Tribute North.

Happy holidays!

Frank Sun
Tribute North

Go Ask Alice

Someone sent me this e-mail and I would like to share it with all of you because the questions asked are significant, I think.



Go Ask Alice


Are Alice Waters' gastronomic principles -- shop locally, eat organically -- too hard to live by? A frank talk with the renowned guru of fresh food.

By Farhad Manjoo



Oct. 26, 2007


I had been prepared to skewer Alice Waters. Though I have eaten some of the best food I've ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she's become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us -- of me! -- and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

Alice Waters is not content for you to simply eat organic produce. No, no. It's got to be organic and local and seasonal, and really, for it to be any good at all, you have to get it from the farmer who pulled it out of the earth. And ideally that farmer would be a friend of yours. You and he would discuss the soil and seasons and his search for heirloom varieties, and he would give you tips for your own garden, where, of course, you'd spend many of your weekends.

Alice Waters doesn't want you to use store-bought stock, or mayonnaise from a jar, anything frozen (even peas!), or salad that comes in a bag. She would rather you stay away from nearly every kitchen appliance, including a blender -- a food mill or a Japanese mortar and pestle called a suribachi is wholly preferable.

Consider the eggs Alice Waters wants you to buy, the eggs she serves at Chez Panisse: eggs from chickens raised on a pasture, chickens who enjoy, among other humane conditions, freedom from having their beaks trimmed by their handlers. This is a practice performed at nearly every egg farm in the country, including the ones that sell the $4-a-dozen eggs you buy at so-called responsible stores like Whole Foods. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is extremely difficult to find Waters-approved eggs -- for long periods of the year, production is so low that farms impose rationing and stop supplying most stores; you have to wake up very early even to find them at the farmers' market. "People don't have enough time for this!" I would tell Alice Waters. We don't have enough money, either. It's just too much.

And then I opened her new book, "The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution," and I fell into Alice Waters' world. Waters is known for the rhapsodic manner in which she talks about food, but her writing is every bit as engaging. "Poached eggs perched on a buttered toasted slice of tender bread is the perfect breakfast," she writes, and at that moment you'd move mountains to get those eggs to make such a breakfast.

More remarkable, though, is that she makes it seem, if not easy, at least not daunting. The book begins with a set of principles by which to live -- among them to eat locally and sustainably, eat seasonally, eat together with friends and family, and most important, to remember that "food should never be taken for granted." In the rest of it, Waters outlines straightforward ways that most of us can reach those goals. The most basic thing is this: Go to the farmers' market. Go often, go early, spend a long time there.

I spent several weeks cooking by the book, preparing Waters' recipes with the sort of ingredients she favors. I won't say it was easy -- especially when I couldn't get out of work to get to the market. It wasn't cheap, either, but it wasn't expensive. Every meal I made cost more than $10, but none cost more than $20.

Many times, I cheated in small ways. I bought a suribachi, but I also used the blender. In a risotto, I added frozen peas. In a polenta torta, I used conventional imported Parmigiano-Reggiano ($14 a pound) rather than organic ($24 a pound). I used organic canned tomatoes instead of fresh tomatoes in a pasta sauce, but Waters says that's OK to do out of tomato season.

The food was wonderful. If Waters' methods can be fussy, if her objectives can sometimes seem unattainably pure, the end result is inarguably fantastic. A Caesar salad I made from romaine I bought during an epiphanic morning at the farmers' market was as delicious as any salad I remember having at Chez Panisse. More amazing was that it came together in about 20 minutes, dressing and all. Linguine with clams in a tomato sauce spiked with fennel took three pots and an hour, but was so well worth it that I made it again the next day.

Earlier this week, I visited Waters at her office, which is set in a charming, woodsy annex building off Chez Panisse. She's in the middle of a long book tour, and had come into town briefly. She looked harried. The office buzzed with young assistants getting her set up to fly off to her next reading locations. I found her, as expected, unyielding -- this is a woman who believes food should be the No. 1 issue of the presidential campaign.

And yet, after buying and cooking and eating the sort of food she hails, you really can't help feeling that maybe it wouldn't be so hard to change your whole life around -- or at least to try. (You can listen to the interview here.)

You definitely have a goal for this book beyond recipes and technique. What is your objective?

I want people to focus on where the ingredients come from. That's really what's important to me. It's not so much what they're cooking, it's with what ingredients they're cooking. It can be a hot dog -- but where's that hot dog from? What kind of ranches are producing the meat? Are the animals being fed hormones and antibiotics out there on the range? Are they in feedlots? Are they enjoying the natural resources of the region? You know, what's in the hot dog? What's in the bun? What's in the mustard? What's in the ketchup?

That's what I'm interested in. Because every decision we make about the food that we eat has consequences. And they aren't just about people's personal health. There are consequences in terms of the healthcare system for all of us if people eat food that makes them sick. And there are environmental consequences. But I think the thing that people don't understand is that there are cultural consequences.

When we're eating fast food, we're not just eating the food, we're eating a set of values that comes with the food. And it's telling us that food should be cheap. It's telling us that food should be the same no matter where we are on the planet. It's telling us that advertising confers value. That it's OK to eat 24 hours a day. That there are unlimited resources. It's telling us that the work of the people who grow or raise the food is unimportant -- in fact we don't even need to know. And all of those values are informing what's happening in the world around us. We're ending up with malls instead of beautiful places to live in.

I've been cooking from this book for about a month now.

You have? Tell me, did the recipes work?

Yeah, they were wonderful. But as you say, it's less about the recipes than your ideas of where to get the food. And I've been following those ideas too. I went to the farmers' market several times.

You know this would be any old book of recipes if it weren't for the philosophy of food at the beginning. If you're just going into the store and buying those ingredients, if you're really a good cook you could probably make something. But what is beautiful is that this changes your life. It brings you into the whole community of people and hopefully brings you back to the dinner table.

I agree. But, some things I've noticed. First of all, it's not easy to do this. I'm a writer so I have a lot of free time. I can take Tuesday afternoon off and go to the farmers' market. So it was relatively easy for me to do it compared to someone who has to punch a clock. What do those people do?

I think there are lots of ways, actually. I think you have to decide you're going to work at this a little bit. To begin with, you set aside a day that you might want to eat with your family. It doesn't have to be a dinner or a complicated thing -- it could be an afternoon tea. It could be a Saturday lunch. It could be a breakfast. But hopefully you will decide the following week you can do it twice a week. That's the beginning.

I think you have to plan ahead. When I go to the market on a Saturday and I'm buying for family and friends I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat on the weekend but also about what I'm going to make for the following week. You know those tomatoes, I'm not getting them dead ripe unless I'm eating them for lunch -- I might get them a little firm so that by Wednesday I can have them in a salad. I've always got something in the pantry -- I talk a lot about what you can cook when you just have a closet full of pasta and grains.

So how often would you go to the farmers' market in a week?

Twice. I mean, if I could I'd go every day, but I go on Saturday when I can buy a lot of things, and on Tuesday. And then I'll go get other things in the regular market as a sort of backup.

You recognize, though, that it takes more time to do it this way than going to the store.

I do absolutely recognize it takes more time. But this is all part of fast food values. Let's do it quickly. Let's get it over with. Let's let the machines do it for us, because kitchen work is drudgery and so is garden work. Let somebody else do that.

Get out of that mind-set and tell yourself cooking is a meditation. I like to do it. It's relaxing for me to come home -- it truly is! -- and wash the salad. I love to see the salad in the sink. To spin the salad. I like to dry it. I like to pound to make a vinaigrette with my mortar and pestle. I enjoy grinding coffee and putting it in the filter and warming up the milk. It's part of a ritual that gives my life meaning and beauty.

I feel particularly like this on my book tour, that this is a crazy kind of life. It's over before you know it. And so you have to find ways of slowing it down. And this is an everyday delightful way to slow it down. Take time. Take a moment. The most important value of this book aside from nourishment is that there's pleasure in the doing. It's pleasure in work. It's something that we don't understand in this country. Work is over there and pleasure's over here, and we work our whole lives so that we can go on a cruise ship. It's just insanity, and some people don't even make it to the cruise ship.

So we have to figure out about everyday pleasure. It's trying to bring people back to their senses. Put the smells in the house. Make the chicken stock so it makes people hungry. Burn the rosemary, make the farro, make the bread. These are all aromatic ways to bring people back to the table.

In addition to time, it's costlier to do it this way. One of the reasons that people eat fast food is because that's all they can afford.

For some people that is true. But I would say that you have to decide -- it's not going to be cheap but it can be affordable. And that's where this book comes in. When polenta costs $6 for a hundred portions, I'm pretty certain that I can make something tasty for less money than a fast food dinner for my family.

So you're saying it's more but it's not prohibitive?

That's right. You just decide, OK, well, maybe I won't rent that DVD.

I was struck often in making the recipes by how simple they were. So the buying of the food was more time-consuming than the cooking -- That's right. When you spend time buying tasty things you hardly have to cook them. You just slice a little piece of fig and some fresh cheese, and, voilà!

We have to demystify this whole idea -- many restaurants are complicated for the sake of complication. And I think that leads people to believe that they can't cook it. I'm trying to empower people in the kitchen. It isn't anything but slicing a tomato. You can do this. You can do this.

What do you make of the mass-market, luxury organic food movement -- people getting their organic food from places like Whole Foods?

They're trying to use fast-food values to eat organic food. They're trying still to do it in a minute, and they're not thinking about what it really means. Going to the farmers' market, being present, talking to the farmers, reporting back on how the produce was, encouraging them so they stay in business.

I've heard you describe yourself as an optimist about this stuff but from the way you're discussing it, it doesn't seem that you're very optimistic.

I've been a little pessimistic today. But I am an optimist because I see the potential of feeding children in the public schools. And with good food comes the values that could change the world.

I'm focused on the next generation, because I think it's very hard to break the habit of adults who've got salt and sugar addictions and just ways of being in this world. It's very hard even for the most enlightened people at famous universities that are very wealthy to spend the money that it takes to feed the students something delicious.

We've been working in Berkeley with the Edible Schoolyard for 10 years, and we have a sister program in New Orleans. It's the idea of teaching gastronomy -- "eco-gastronomy" if you will, edible education. It's changing the pedagogy of public education with an interactive school lunch program.

Way back when, the president of the United States said, We want our children to be physically fit, and he put physical education into the core curriculum of the school system. We built gymnasiums, we hired teachers, we got equipment, and every child had to take it. And they got credit for taking it. And now we want them to take eco-gastronomy and get credit for eating it.

Because when they grow it and they cook it, they all eat it -- that's the lesson of the Edible Schoolyard. They want to do it because it's a kind of pride in the process. They have been involved in it since the seed when it was in the ground. They love to give it to their friends. It gives them a kind of pleasure. The big discussion about kids and food usually focuses on obesity and health. That's not something you focus on directly.

I've never focused on that directly. I think health is the outcome of finding a balance and some satisfaction at the table.

You think that if people eat this way, good health will be a natural outcome.

This isn't a new philosophy. This isn't mine -- it's been around since the beginning of time. Eat what's locally available. Eat with your family and friends. Buy from a nearby market. Eat what's exactly in season. These are all understood by people around the world.

You've been traveling around the country recently. I'm sure one of the things people who are not in our West Coast climate wonder about is -- everybody asks that question. I was waiting for you to ask it. "It's all fine and good in California, but how are we going to do this and other places?" Well, I've visited Yale University, which is a pretty difficult climate. They have 300 varieties of fruits and vegetables in their garden including artichokes, radicchio lettuces and a whole lot of things that don't grow in California. They have to use greenhouses, and that's very important. Everybody on this planet is going to have to do greenhousing because of global warming.

We serve root vegetables here at Chez Panisse in the wintertime. We only have fresh tomatoes here for four months. That's it. It's not nine months or 12 months. Likewise with eggplants and peppers and corn on the cob. These aren't things that grow here. We can have salad outside all winter long, but it's a different kind of salad. Escarole. My mint dies out, my lemon verbena's gone. I have rosemary and thyme but it's different tasting in the winter than the summer.

What do they do in the winter in the Midwest?

You have to think of a different kind of menu. You eat dried fruit and nuts. You make pasta sauces out of canned tomatoes. And you're eating different kinds of grains -- farro with root vegetables. All the root vegetables are there, and now because of all the heirloom varieties you can have a beautiful winter palette just the way the summer palette is beautiful.

There are turnips of every color and shape! Carrots that are white and red and orange and pink! You have different preparations of long-cooking meat. Beautiful eggs and cheese. There are wonderful things to eat in the winter. Cabbages! Cauliflower! We just have to learn to cook these things -- there are cuisines like Italian and Indian that cook these vegetables in such extraordinary ways. We just continue to boil up Brussels sprouts and wonder why we aren't happy.

You told the New York Times that you're disappointed with the presidential candidates.

I am disappointed because nobody is talking about food and agriculture. They're talking about the diets of children, but they're talking about Band-Aids. We're not seeing a vision.

What would you like one of them to say?

I'd like one of them to say -- this is what Richardson just said -- "In my first hundred days I'm going to make public education a No. 1 priority. I'm going to rebuild schools." I know that a lot of them feel strongly about local food and helping farmers but I'm really looking for a big vision that helps us to dramatically change things.

Someone should at least put it out as an issue that's important.

As the issue. The No. 1 issue. Not one of 10. This is No. 1. It's what we all have in common, what we all do every day, and it has consequences that affect everybody's lives. It's not like this is the same thing as crime in the streets -- no, this is more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security -- this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.

It seems rather unlikely that any one of them would put this out as a major issue.

I know. But that's because we have been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that food is not important.

One more thing. I saw that you have an iPhone. That seems like a departure.

I am an extremely non-tech person, and they have an e-mail on that iPhone that I can actually do. And so I use it for that purpose. And I also use it to take pictures of food and places and ideas. And I use it as a phone. And I wish I could just throw it out the window, but when I'm on book tours it's a little hard to throw it out the window. But I intend to at some point.

I was surprised considering you say that the only appliance that you use in the kitchen is a toaster.

I don't have any justification other than ... I mean I hate it. I really find it annoying. And I find myself feeling like it's necessary. Answering the phone, answering messages that people have left you. Worrying that they aren't calling when they leave a message. Why didn't they call? Or when you have 20 messages and you can't answer all. The whole trip of it is kind of insane. The worst part of all is that people are sitting on their laps playing with their cellphones when they're eating dinner at a table or listening to you at a lecture. Nobody's paying attention to anybody fully. You can see this happening all over.

I sometimes get the sense that you're kind of advocating for returning to a time long ago.

No, I'm not, not really. Because a time long ago, they were very much locked into a hard life, a narrow life in terms what was being eaten. I think we now have a way of sharing a lot of information that makes the growing of food and the cooking of food and the preparing of food much more diverse and healthy and tasty. So I'm not ready to go back to the diet of gruel.

I was just thinking about something Brillat-Savarin said. "The destiny of nations depends on how we feed ourselves."

That's a really important thing. I want whoever's running for president to say that. The destiny of our nation depends on how we nourish ourselves

Spinning the Goose

My paternal grand parents loved to eat “Peking” duck, so I was told. As late as 1958 in Beijing my cousins would tell the story of the two of them packing off to a duck restaurant somewhere in Beijing on a pedicab and come home with leftovers for another day. My grandmother apparently loved that “Peking” duck and she, according to everyone who knows the “Suns”, was a legendary cook. My grandmother’s cooking shall be the topic of another story some other time, I promise. But all of us have lived the lore of her cooking, and eating, as far as I can remember. The topic of this discussion is about birds that could swim and (for the most part) fly and are very good to eat. Through some odd and fortunate coincidences, I have managed to discover some cross-cultural similarities in the way these birds are cooked, in places one would never imagine anything being the same.

When I was a youngster in Taiwan my maternal grandfather also loved to eat the “Peking” duck except he seldom took his wife with him. Usually, he went with his friends and me, the lonely grandchild, in tow. Even today, I remember what an event it was whenever we had the “Peking” duck. What I loved about the ducks then was the fact they were not fat and you actually tasted the duck meat without having to chew on the fat; sort of speak. Let me try my best to describe that “Peking” duck dinners of my yester years.

Each time when you eat the roasted “Peking” duck, I always remembered the sense of anticipation before you actually get to the duck restaurant. First, you have to decide whether you should have a two, three or four course duck dinners. The two-courses duck dinner normally comes with the sliced duck skin and then have the meat cooked in a different way; or, have the sliced skin with the meat still attached and then have this “duck carcass-bean curd-cabbage-vermicelli” soup. I always remembered the “Peking” duck skin of those years to be thinner and crispier (perhaps in those days the ducks were fed with less chemicals and were leaner because of it). Place on a steaming pancake with some dark soybean paste and thinly slice white scallion is barely on this side of being heavenly. The texture of the hot steamed pancake, with the slightly sweet bean paste and the pungent scallion on top of the just sliced duck skin was, and still is, an unforgettable experience.

The sliced duck skin, then, was never eaten with cucumbers as it is everywhere served today. And that soup of duck carcass, bean curd, white cabbage and vermicelli is something you very much look forward to after such a greasy meal and it’s real comfort food to be had.

The three-course duck dinner is to have both the skin (with the steam pancakes) and the soup, but the duck meat is shredded and stir-fried with bean sprouts and shredded scallion in a light soy sauce. But the crowning event in eating this “Peking” duck is the four-course duck dinner. I don’t know if anyone remembers this “Sulfur Egg” dish that comes with the roast duck dinner from years past. It was truly amazing. The texture of this egg dish actually resembled sulfur when presented and is cooked with the yolks of duck eggs and the dripped fat from the roast duck. For anyone with any hint of heart trouble or cholesterol difficulties, the thought of eating this dish may prompt you to visit a cardiologist directly. And if you have seen sulfur in its pure state, this dish looks exactly like that. I have never liked eating fat but this “sulfur” dish was very amazing. It wasn’t so much the flavors that would linger in my memory, it was the total presentation of the dish and that association with “sulfur” made it totally unforgettable.

After I left that island called Formosa in the early 60’s, I packed my belongings and the memory of foods of my youth and went to live with an aunt in San Francisco. And for many more years after that it was not very often I had the chance to eat “Peking” duck and especially, never again that “sulfur egg” dish came with that four-course “Peking” duck dinner. It was in the spring of 1978, I packed up my belongs again and went up the coast of James Bay, as a budding anthropologist, to live among the Eastern Cree in a place called Paint Hills (now re-named Weminji), in the Province of Quebec. It was the time during the construction of the James Bay Hydro Electric Project when much of the traditional trap-lines the Cree depended on for existence were being flooded. I went to live with the Cree in order to study their traditional culture and collected personal history and stories from elder Cree’s. The stories I collected are now archived in the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa.

During the eleven months spent in total among the Cree, about half the time I stayed with them in hunting camps and on trap-lines where the entire family moves along their family territory following games and the seasons. Where they lived while not in the village of Paint Hills was the traditional “tipi”. To this day this “tipi” thing is an indescribable positive experience for me. If anyone ever has the opportunity to do so should really try it and try it in an authentic manner, no lights, no floorboards and no TV. The construction of the “tipi” can be simply described as a sacred exercise and it is always conducted with reverence and respect to earth and it’s spirits. It is circumspect of the location, direction, accessibility, convenience, visibility and size. To choose the center poles and the laying of all subsequent poles (never with odd number of poles) is the first step. The second step, before the canvass covering goes onto the poles is the construction of the hearth. This hearth is always situated in the center of the tipi. Usually wrapped with sheets of tin, the hearth is laid in a circular manner in the center of the tipi, with wooden steaks pounded into the ground on the outside to keep its circular shape. The inside of the tin is then filled with sand and then later the wood for cooking and heating is placed on top. After the tent covering is placed and the opening adjusted on the top flap, the floor of the tipi is laid with a layer of sand and then covered with a weave of spruce bows. I don’t think I would ever forget the feeling and the smell of first entering into a tipi with that fresh layer of spruce carpet. No matter how cold it is outside, walking into a tipi with a blazing fire in the middle and a soft carpet of new spruce bows is an unforgettable experience; the tipi is so very much the home one would embrace and love, and respect.

Cooking in the tipi is something truly amazing. It is done with such efficiency and ease, one could do it just as easily as turning on a gas stove. From smoking fish and game, to drying clothes, to frying meats, to boiling food and cooking bannock (an Indian version of the Scottish flatbread,) is all done by the very same fire from this hearth. Cooking bannock is particularly worth mentioning because the dough of this thin bread/scone mixture of flour, baking powder, salt, water and lard; wrapped on a stick and the stick is shoved into the ground on an angle toward the fire from the hearth. The stick is then turned when one side of bannock is cooked and the other uncooked side is turn toward the fire. When every side is golden in color and hot, the bannock is done. If you ever get a chance to do this, a freshly made bannock just pulled off the stick is indeed delicious. It is crunchy on the outside and hot and moist on the inside. To me it is definitely in the “good-food” category (except for the lard of course). What is most relevant to this story, however, is the stick with which the bannocks are wrapped and cooked. Here is where the “spinning of the goose” gets started.

Since the very first introduction of the rifle and the shotgun due to the fur trade, the lives of the Cree were forever changed. Being directly under the flight path of many migratory birds such as the Canadian geese and Mallard ducks, the Cree was able to hunt these birds as a major source of protein in the spring and fall. Bows and arrows could get them a few birds prior to the introduction of the guns, but the guns could ensure the Indians of getting migratory birds in quantities as food source. More than once I had heard from hunters about their prowess in hunting geese and the number of geese they brought home seem to increases each time the story was told. Nevertheless, those were interesting stories to hear to an outsider but what interested me was the way the goose is prepared and cooked. Now the tent poles mentioned before also comes into play because by tying the tipi poles with horizontal pieces of wood, a cooking platform is created and the goose is cooked by hanging from these racks above, with the wood fire directly below. The “Peking” duck is prepared and cooked in a very similar fashion.

Similar to “Peking” duck, the Indian (as I have just been told by my daughter Ashley, it is no longer appropriate to refer to Cree as Indians, they are today referred to as “aboriginal people of Canada”,) a goose is trussed both at the neck and at their knees. It is then a line with hooks on either ends is attached to the goose on one end and onto the poles from the cooking platform on the other. The leg truss is hooked first (because the chest meat is thicker to cook) and then the neck when the breast is cooked through. And because the fire is underneath and to one side of the cooking goose, the goose needs to be spun constantly to get an even cooking on all sides (just like the bannock). Here is where the “bannock” stick comes in. An older child is normally employed for this chore where he or she has to sit by the fire and constantly spin the goose during the cooking process. And when the top-end of the goose is cooked, the goose is turned up-side down and hooked onto the neck truss. The duck will continue to be cooked over the fire and spun to until the entire goose is cooked. A cast iron pan is place directly underneath the goose on the edge of the fire in order to catch the goose fat dripping from above. Looking back, I should have told the Cree about that “sulfur” dish I remembered from my “Peking” duck days. But then again, the Cree would not be able to get eggs in the bush.

To me, geese cooked over the hearth in a tipi were just as memorable as the “Peking” ducks I had as a child. The skin is just as crispy and the meat is very tasty, although different but traditionally over-cooked in our “neuvelle” standards. I wouldn’t describe the meat exactly as tender overall because the geese are migratory birds and they exercise constantly when they fly but the flavor of their meat is extraordinary in taste. The best part for me is that the meat is not dripping with fat, as often is the case with “Peking” duck nowadays. So it seemed I managed to find an almost duck half way around the world in a place that I would never imagine having to cook their goose in a similar fashion to the Chinese. The Cree have often said they prefer the spring goose much more because the spring goose is grain fed during the winter prior to their flight north. The fall goose, they claim, is fed on berries up north and the meat is tainted with the taste of tannin from the berry skins. Whoever said that connoisseurs are products of a so-called “civilized” society. But then again, has anyone ever seen a can of Spam after it is pan-fried, or a sandwich made with days-old bannock & fried Spam?

As wonderful as my memories of the spun goose, other food groups during my life with the Cree may not have been equally memorable. Try to imagine eating extremely dried smoke white fish dipped in cold lard with many days-old bannock on the trap-line or having roasted beaver meat, spun in the same manner as the goose over the hearth. So I was told that each ounce of beaver meat has about three to four hundred calories. Beaver meat I’d say is to be avoided at all times. It could never be in the good-food category. Never mind eating the muskrats, it’s definitely in the bad-food category.

One of the most unforgettable episodes regarding food during my year on the coast of James Bay was one night a DC-3 landed in the village from Val D’or fully loaded with palettes of soft drinks and about a hundred buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was one of the most celebrated feast in the village I could remember during my stay in Paint Hills. All the dogs went crazy over the leftover bones. So.

What did we just say about tradition and modernity?

Why Simple Food?

Very often I get asked the question “what is your favorite food?” At the beginning years of Tribute I often ask myself that same question, thinking I really needed a better answer than what really was in my heart. I could say Italian or I could say Chinese; for both I appreciate the “straight forwardness” of the cuisine and how direct it is those foods are connected to life itself – the landscape, the sky and the seasons. The food becomes that imagination in the description of a life that encompasses a totality in a cultural process. It, the food, is the re-creation of a life one chooses to engage and embrace. The food becomes the gathering place of what is in one’s being and all those people and places connected to it. In a sense it is the memory of food that encapsulates one’s place in this world in a most tactile engagement on a daily basis. So “what is my favorite food?”

One of the most vivid memories I have of food had to do with how “hard” life was in Taiwan in the 1950’s. Not long after the Chinese revolution of 1949 the KMT had barely got to this place they called Formosa, in a new place with new politics and a rag tag of disbanded people they had brought to the island from the mainland. Most of them were in the army and now essentially homeless and looking in various ways to make a living. Cars were absolute luxury items at that time and the only way to get around, if you did not take the bus, is by hiring pedicabs – those three wheel bicycles with a cab made for two in the back. If you had to ride a pedicab as transportation (and not as a tourist novelty) it can be a very intimate experience. In the 1950’s Taiwan, the streets were narrow and one literally touches the life on either sides of the pedicab as you ride. It’s hard to forget the smell of the foods and the venders on the side of the street and how they carried their goods with bamboo poles and on bicycles. It is that urban mosaic I miss in cities now and it seems the wide avenues and pristine sidewalks had taken so much life away you have to look for it. But the thing about the pedicab that stuck in my mind was how lean and fit those drivers were from peddling all day long. As distances were short than in today’s standard, the travel time was always longer than you would imagine.

So one night at the top of the street where I lived, I went into a small food stall to get the pedicab driver who was having his dinner. Since he was the only empty pedicap around and I did know him, I sat down next to him and watched him eat his dinner. That meal was etched in my mind forever. As much as I am fortunate enough to have eaten many good meals in my life, what that driver ate I never forgot. As dismal that meal would be in today’s standards, I would consider it to be a very healthy diet and probably had influenced my thinking on food my entire adult life.

What that driver had was basically a broth – a large bowl of soup with some green vegetables in it and a few slices of meat. It had a few drops of sesame oil floating on top of that soup and that was it. Placed on the side of the soup was a small bowl of coarse salt, which in those years was a poor man’s spice. A few stalls of raw scallion was washed and placed on a plate with a large bowl of coarse rice that you could see where the rice was attached to the husk. That driver ate the rice with the soup and dipped the scallion in the salt and ate it as a vegetable. Then I thought about the food I normally had at home and I remembered the variety of meats and vegetables, and I thought about the difference.

In many ways I envied the simplicity of that driver’s diet and how direct his food was connected to his daily needs. So “what is my favorite food?”

“Simple foods.” I would always answer this question now.

Since the onset of “modernism” in art and architecture at the beginning of the 20th century we have too often heard that mantra of “Less Is More”. Whether one accepts that in the fields of art and architecture, it actually makes a lot of sense in cooking. My favorite meals are plain boiled foods with a dipping sauce. I love that simplicity translated through the many layers of flavors with a very monochromatic presentation. Thinking again about that pedicab driver, I do take pleasure of boiled foods. Add some vegetables to the broth such as winter melon and turnip and finishing with some chopped scallion on top of the broth is a comforting thought. A dipping sauce of soy and sesame oil and some chili sauce when the mood strikes and a bowl of plain rice is what I would consider to be a satisfying meal. Add some pepper and season with some course sea salt to taste is all you would need.

Recently I saw a TV cooking program on the perfect meat dish and the winner was a “Bolito Misto” (boiled mixed meats). Bolito Misto has always been one of my favorite dishes of all time. I was so glad that it had received recognition as the best meat dish. The end product was dish of very tender meats and beautifully poached vegetables with a very fresh salsa verde as sauce. This salsa verde consisted of fresh herbs, anchovy, lemon zest, capers, garlic, freshly ground black pepper, lemon juice & extra-virgin olive oil. If you just looked at the finished dish, the meats are pale but glistening, the vegetables firm and vibrant and the sauce a brilliant green and appetizing. A great meal doesn’t get any better than this. It is not fancy but to the point and very satisfying. “Bolito Misto” does bring me back to the pedicab driver in Taipei, some 50 years in passing until I realized the origin of my passion in food.


A SIMPLE DIPPING SAUCE

2 parts soy*
1 part oyster sauce
1 part sesame seed oil
½ part of white vinegar
½ part of maple syrup
Chili paste** (optional & personal taste)
Thinly slice scallion, white parts only (optional)
Small amount of cilantro, chopped (optional)

The amount for the “parts” could a teaspoon, tablespoon or Chinese soupspoon, as long as the measurement is the same for all the ingredients.

* The best soy to use is something to similar intensity of Kikkoman. The light soy or the dark soy would not balance the other flavors in the sauce

** The best chili paste for this is from the wonton shop on 98 Wellington Street, ground floor. Price is HK$20 per bottle.