Brekky of Champions

I lived in Sydney for a year during college, and when I arrived there, I was a sleeping fool. I never took a class before 11am, slept my Sundays away, and never, ever ate breakfast.

But in Australia, something happened. For one, I stopped taking architecture courses and stopped pulling all-nighters. Aside from unthinkable cloud formations and Centennial Park at daybreak, I also credit my job – as a waitress at Sloane's on Oxford in the artsy, wrought-iron-accented suburb of Paddington – with turning me into a morning person. I had to show up at 6 to squeeze a few buckets of orange juice and serve date-pecan scones to our earliest customers, and I'm pretty sure it was their Bircher meusli that helped me realize life could be dreamy before noon.

Meusli, I quickly learned, is the Australian (or European) term for granola. Usually, it's plain untoasted oats, nuts, and dried fruit, and sometimes they mix it with yogurt. This version is fair enough, but requires an unbecoming amount of teeth-gnashing to digest.

Bircher's ingenious component is an overnight soak of the oats, nuts, & raisins (charmingly referred to as "sultanas" by Aussies, who deftly cutesify just about everything) in apple juice. I swear I'm as unenthusiastic as the average eater about dried out SunMaids, and I promise that the rehydration process eliminates raisins' resemblance to rat turds. They'll become bright fruity jewels by morning.

So. For the batch in the photo, I had rolled oats on hand that I combined with trail mix containing raisins, dried cranberries, almonds and pepitas. (Other possibilities are dried coconut flakes, pecans, and chopped dried apples or pears.) Recipes say the ratio is 1/2 a cup of juice to every cup of oats, but I just layer the dry ingredients in a wide, flat container and pour until the nuts and grains can slosh around a little – not quite as drenched as cereal in milk. Grate some cinnamon, nutmeg, and/or fresh ginger into the mix. Cover and ignore while you snooze.

Early the next day, leap from your bed and run to the fridge where the meusli awaits, newly infused with tangy apple sweetness. Stir in an almost equal amount of yogurt. I went with Redwood Hill Farms plain, but Greek style or fruit-flavored varieties can be equally smashing. (After a spare, leafy lunch at the Tate Modern's overpriced cafe in London a few years back, I happened upon currant-yogurt Bircher in a tiny take-away shop, and would've danced for joy if I hadn't been busy scowling at the exchange rate.)

Finally, chop up and add whatever fresh fruit is rolling around in your fruit bowl. In my case, I refer to the fruit region of my countertop, which was harboring this Black Arkansas apple. I bought it at the Ferry Building because I find it beautiful in a slightly sinister way, like the flocks of bats (aka flying foxes) that take wing on spring and summer evenings in Sydney.

Fresh, creamy, crunchy and fruity, there's simply not a better bowl of breakfast on this continent.

The Passion of the Beet

The world of beets is shadowed and labyrinthine, rooted in the secret, craggy corners of earthy hearts. Does eating them help channel the inky passions that course through our animal bodies and release them into the light of day? Or do they merely worm their way into our souls to stain our guilty consciences even further with their knowing tint?

Here is a beet salad with hazelnuts that I made for my sister while visiting her in Los Angeles in August. I used the beet recipe from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook I wrote about in an earlier post, in which I ended up with Lady Macbeth fingers.

It is hard not to feel unsettled when handling wine-dark beets. It seems I am not alone in this sentiment. Below, I share with you the opening chapter of Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume. It will irrevocably change the way you think about beets. It may also cause you to reconsider radishes, tomatoes, turnips, cherries, and carrots. Bon appetit:

TODAY'S SPECIAL

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukranian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."

That is a risk we have to take.

Pictured here: Vegetables worthy of Snow White's blood-red lips—(l-r) chioggia beets, Arkansas black apple, red onion, radishes, early girl tomatoes.

The fairest of them all

I can't remember exactly how it went, but the idea for this blog grew from a conversation Kat and I had while hiking, when I named Romanesco (pictured at left, in pointed glory) my favorite weird vegetable. I also claimed I'll someday tattoo its image upon myself while singing the praises of this green, fractal wonder. (FYI: That is the New York Times lying on my kitchen table, and yes, I consider this vegetable elite.)

Its verdant, whirling form inspired love at first sight, so I took it home (from the Oak Hill Farm stand at the Sonoma farmers' market) and treated it rather unadventurously – like broccoli's edgy cousin. Steamed and salted, the flavor lies somewhere between cauliflower (earthy/nutty) and said queen of green crucifers (bitter and sweet, vegetal). But when I saw, then tasted, roasted Romanesco florets sprinkled around scallops at Quince, my adoration grew like Totoro's tree.

My preferred preparation method is a hybrid pan-roast and steam: throw it in the skillet with olive oil, garlic, plenty of salt, then add your liquid of choice (water, stock, PBR) and cook it off to mellow the crunch. (Also helpful is this straightforward yet poetic description from the Food Lover's Companion.)

I'll frequently turn the resulting slightly browned bits into a puree, sometimes with the addition of tahini. Pictured here is purple cauliflower given the same treatment: pureed, then spread on cheese toast. I once brought this snack on an airplane, and when my seatmate blurted, "What are you eating?" I was more than happy to reach across the aisle and spread my love of weirdness.

Mission Street Food update

I'm not sure, but I think that people aren't supposed to update blogs on Friday nights, thus creating the illusion that they are out having a better time than you are. However, I am pretty beet (!) from being out on the streets all last week, from Halloween Critical Mass, to election night spontaneous street dancing, to finally getting a taste of the S.F. foodie phenomenon Mission Street Food last night (I missed the vigil and march to protest the depressingly misguided passage of Prop. 8's ban on gay marriage, but many of my friends were out there).

In a tragic missed connection, I never did get to meet that elusive King Trumpet sandwich, since the operation has tweaked its menu and moved on up from a taco truck to a Chinese restaurant on Mission St. between 18th and 19th streets, hence taking it from Mission Street Food to Mission Street Food. I did get to sample the dreamy ginger and coconut ice cream, followed by the highly tasty meat-smoked fried rice with duck (yes not so vegetable, though the smoke part could be deemed weird). The restaurant was packed and had a kind of speakeasy vibe—the lights were mostly out except for some red-and-blue Christmas twinklers and the fluorescent glow of the back room, casting film noir shadows on the forms hunched over bowls of indeterminate edibles. By around 9:30pm, the food was running out, so I had to grab whatever happened to go by on a tray, dim-sum style.

The foodies were out in full effect thanks to the frenzy whipped up by local blogs like Eater SF, SFist, and Burrito Justice, which have already posted extensive photos and updates on last night's meal. The service was friendly and volunteered by chef Anthony Myint's loved ones, and I left a hefty 75-cent tip for my harried waiter, who found me a spot at a table with his friends (thanks!). I also met a nice Italian food enthusiast named Arrigo who has promised to give Weird Vegetables the inside scoop on his upcoming vegetable fermentation extravaganza based on a workshop he went to in Berkeley. Check the updates on Anthony's blog Mission Street Food for more information on location, menus, and possible guest chef appearances. Still every Thursday until further notice...

This is what it looks like...

...when vegetables cry.

Arugula or Iceberg Lettuce?

I voted arugula. This poster comes from a very scary righty blog that I don't have the heart to link to here, but Weird Vegetables wants to take back the arugula and detach it from this taint of xenophobia that demonizes strange, foreign-sounding words and exotic-seeming vegetables. Why should the desire to know about the world beyond the borders of iceberg lettuce be discouraged as "elite"? Why should we shy away from greater flavor and nutrition? Call it by its original English name, Joe rocket, if that feels less threatening. Either way, lettuce hope that by the end of tonight, this country will welcome a new kind of greenery into the White House.

Pumpkin hangover

This little pumpkin had too much Halloween fun! I hope y'all had an exciting Halloween weekend. I didn't get to carve a pumpkin this year, but I did witness some really intense pumpkin carving action involving precision tools and stencils of the Cheshire Cat and Sarah Palin's face at my friend Andy's pre-Halloween party. Check out more crazy pumpkins at Epicurious, where I found this amazing barfing pumpkin. You should also check out Andy's freaky wonderful illustrations and comics at andysaurus.com. He spent today selling his comics, t-shirts, and prints at the Alternative Press Expo.

Some people like to carve faces out of pumpkins, others like to sit on them. Henry David Thoreau in his celebration of humble woodland hermitude, Walden, can't seem to make up his mind on this question of pumpkin usage. First he declares, "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." Later on, he decides he's above this crude business of pumpkin sitting, and that all it takes is some clever thrifting to find adequate seating: "None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture!"

Still others like to write songs about pumpkins. For example: Shrimp Boat's "Pumpkin Lover" or Devendra Banhart's "Pumpkin Seeds," not to be confused with The Smashing Pumpkins' entire album called Pumpkin Seeds. I haven't been able to make out how or if pumpkins actually factor into the Shrimp Boat song, but I did manage to catch the part where Mr. Devendra sings: "You ever make a soup out of pumpkin seeds? There's a lot of skin and flesh I should have never seen..."

More on pumpkins to come! Just you wait.