"When all else fails, boil it."

I hit up the local market -- okay, so it was a Food Lion, but I did buy a mess of sweet potatoes, onions, and rutabagas earlier that morning -- last Saturday, and while there bought a jicama.

I took it to the counter, where the clerk, a young woman in her early 20s, looked a little flummoxed.

"Is this a mushroom?"

"No ma'am...I think it's a 'hee-com-ah.' (I like to call people younger than me "sir" or "ma'am," turn the tables a little bit.)

"A who?"

"Hee-com-ah," I said. She consulted her rotary wheel of produce codes.

"What is it, though?"

"It's kind of like a potato," I said. "It might be under 'gee-com-ah.'"

"What...how do you cook it?"

"I'm not quite sure, I said," explaining that I was planning to go home and look online, maybe roast it or make a nice slaw.

She looked at me like I was crazy. She then called her friend over.

"Look at this...jicama. You ever heard of that?"

"Looks like a turnip," the woman said. "How do you cook it?"

"I'm not all that sure," I said. "I just saw it and thought I'd try it out." She too looked at me like I was crazy...what kind of person, she must have thought, buys food just to experiment with it? When they don't even know what it is, really?

"I didn't even know we had them," the first woman said.

"Well, *someone* must eat them," I said.

"Spanish people," the woman said plainly. "Well, anyway, good luck with that."

"Thanks," I said, walking away, feeling like a cultural pelt collector.

"I say you just boil it," the second woman called out to me. "When all else fails, boil it."

Henderson the Brain King

This is old news, but I love this quote from Fergus Henderson:

“You want to discipline the parsley with three or four chops, not whip it into submission.”

Something about "disciplining" an herb, showing it who's boss, appeals to me. We must tame all our food in one way or another, after all -- even the herbivores among us.

Fergus, of course, is British chef who's become a minor foodie superstar due to his use of all sorts of offal.

I'd argue that it's been done in the American South (and, moreover, France) for eons, but then again, Fergus does have (perhaps) (actually) one of the coolest accents I've heard in ages (yes?) (splendid.)

Spaghetti and Loneliness

One of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami,has finally gone on record -- to the Harvard Book Review -- about what I think is one of my favorite short stories in quite some time. As you might imagine, most of the world thinks it "plotless."


(To which I say: does your life have a plot? Or even a given day, really?)

Anyway, enjoy. (Hopefully)

PS: The story is here:

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/people/efros/personal/murakami.txt


JB: I'd like to talk about your story from the New Yorker, "The Year of Spaghetti," and the different things that spaghetti means in your work.

HM: I wrote that story more than twenty years ago, when I was much younger. I was in my early thirties at the time. That is one of my favorite stories. I remember how it was when I wrote it. I like spaghetti myself, very much. And I lived in Italy for a couple of years, so I ate spaghetti every day, as a meal. I just wanted to write some story about spaghetti, about making spaghetti every day. It's just an idea. And when I remember cooking spaghetti I remember other things, what happened as I was cooking spaghetti. It's strange, but many things can happen when you are cooking spaghetti. I don't know why.

JB: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle also begins with someone cooking spaghetti.

HM: Yes, that's right. The same thing. I cook myself, and I cook spaghetti very often. And it takes time to boil the water, so many things happen.

JB: It's funny that both of them are about cooking spaghetti and being interrupted.

HM: While you are cooking spaghetti, you think about many things. So many things happen in your mind while you are cooking spaghetti. And you are getting kind of philosophical while you are cooking spaghetti.

JB: In the story, spaghetti is also related to loneliness, and it's a similar scene in Wind-Up.

HM: Before I was married, I cooked spaghetti just for myself. It's a very lonely task, to cook spaghetti for yourself. So I think its kind of natural that you think about loneliness when you cook spaghetti for yourself. You know, when you're making a sandwich for yourself you don't think about loneliness so much. But when you cook spaghetti, it's different.

JB: Because of that waiting...

HM: That's right. And eating a sandwich by yourself is not so lonely, but eating spaghetti by yourself is different. You have to be conscious about your loneliness when you cook and when you eat spaghetti alone. It's a fact.

Spice spam

Got this in my e-mailbox this morn:

Cooks, epicureans and foodies can now manage their spice cabinets via the Internet like many consumers who have turned to the Web to balance their checking accounts, check their stocks and control their music libraries.

It seems the good folks at Spice Islands recently decided to launch an online program, Register Your Spice, "to empower cooks to get the most mileage out of their spices while the goods are still good."

The new site, located at www.spiceislands.com, is a proactive portal that makes sure that cooks know the freshness levels of their spices at all times and also sends cooks recipes to utilize their spice purchases in new, interested ways.

The (spice) rub is that, when replacement time approaches, the site distributes an e-mail reminder to "encourage cooks to use the spice or replace items for the utmost freshness."

Their dried spices, of course. Couldn't you just...I dunno....taste them?

Queens of the Poached Egg

In the new Rolling Stone -- new to me at least -- Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Josh Homme (pronounced like "hominy" without the "in"), has this to say:

"I'm optimistic, except for this blog thing. We should charge people to be on the Internet. People don't care what you had for breakfast. If you think they do, think again."

Lunch, perchance?