Tree of Life

Opa! It's been like a million years since I last posted and everyone I once knew has probably moved on to greener online pastures. But phooooooo! That's the sound of me blowing the dust off this space so we can pick up from where we left off. I am still in Brazil, had to take an unintended hiatus from Weird Vegetables because I was up in the highlands of Minas Gerais (the General Mines, very mystical, very mineral, northwest of Rio de Janeiro) doing my Sir Richard Burton thing, living about a half-hour walk from the Internet cafe where the keyboards were sticky and the bandwidth was excruciatingly narrow.

Here are some views of my near-daily sojourn into the old colonial center of Ouro Preto (Black Gold, yargh!), a town that boomed during the 18th-century gold rush, from which sprang a disproportionate number of impressive baroque churches filled with golden altars and black saints, all surrounded by a chain of dark green mountains forming the Serra do Espinhaço.

mineral spirits

ouro preto

igreja são francisco (the church of my hometown's namesake)

ouro preto city center, a good place for a university student protest

Aside from my jaunts into town, where I found some small but very satisfying farmers' markets (more on that to come), I sat reading and writing in front of my little red window with its little green banana palm view while drinking miner's coffee from a little red mug.

But you came for vegetables, and here I am giving you mineral nuggets from my recent life. But it all comes around because on my travels, I met the sweetest Mineiro couple, a pair of retired university professors, one a geologist and the other a chemical engineer, Dimas and Claudia. Claudia's work centers on the Moringa oleifera, a tree of most magical properties, which include purifying water into a potable state, healing and disinfecting wounds, and restoring the vital vitamins to malnourished souls. After inviting me to lunch one day (Mineiros are famous for their hospitality and home cooking), they showed me around their home, and let me take a sprig from the Moringa oleifera sapling they were cultivating in the backyard. I crushed its delicate, benevolent fringe of leaves into my notebook for safekeeping (top photo). In another room, they had laid out fronds of leaves and the tree's small yellow-white flowers to dry in order to crush into a powder to sprinkle on food.

The leaves have a distinctly bitter taste but not so strong as to be unbearable and gave me the sensation of chewing on tiny, fresh tea leaves. Here is a site that calls it "The Miracle Tree" and enumerates the many benefits of its seed pods, leaves, flowers, bark, and roots. The tree originates in tropical Africa and India and is known commonly in English as the horseradish tree, clarifier tree, and drumstick tree. The site also reports its East African alias as "mother's best friend." In Brazil, it is also known as the horseradish tree, good nut or "do-gooder" nut (noz-de-bem), and "corner okra" (chiabo-de-quina) for its long, okra-looking seed pods (also the origin of the "drumstick" nickname). It seems that every single part of this tree has some amazing restorative properties, as our good friend Wikipedia affirms.

sweet botanical assemblage from this site.

Engaging in corroborative library research, I came across some very nutritious tree books by Harri Lorenzi, who seems to be the reigning king of popular plant literature here in Brazil. He tells us that in India the seeds are ground into a paste to treat wounds or are toasted and enjoyed as a nutritious snack. In the northeast of Brazil, they cook the leaves with beans or eat them in a salad with tangy vinagreira, or purple hibiscus leaves. The tree has natural antibacterial components, and it is this (as far as I understand it!) that makes the seeds absorb impurities in water and thus drinkable for our delicately calibrated human systems. The leaves, roots, and seeds also have anti-inflammatory abilities, which make them good for treating wounds. As if that weren't enough, the leaves are also said to be helpful for diabetics to decrease their blood glucose levels, while the seed pods contain all the essential amino acids (super food alert), plus high levels of beta-carotene, Vitamin C, iron, and potassium.

In short, this tree is a crazy miracle. I am glad to have befriended it and to pass it on to you all. Though North American climates are not ideal for the Moringa, your local or online health store may offer the oil essence of this tree of life.

Now that I am in São Paulo, land of cultural over-stimulation and limitless wi-fi, the posts will return to their regular once-a-week (or more!) frequency.

Vegetarian “Feijoada” What?!

So there’s this girl who goes by the vegname of Kale Daikon and tells everyone she’s in Brazil investigating South American weird vegetables (and the intersection of Brazilian and North American poetry), but it’s all on the Internet, so for all anyone knows, she could be in Pittsburg making up stories based on a 2005 edition of the Lonely Planet Brazil found in the free box of a used bookstore and posting photos ripped from random websites. But really, I assure you, It’s All True and being broadcast from Rio de Janeiro.

She sits in a room on a Friday night taping three months of receipts into a graph-paper notebook and taking photos of the carefully arranged and labeled receipts so that the U.S. government will reimburse her for every centavo spent on books, photocopies, and subway transportation. Feeling spleenetique and saturated in the thumping sounds of the baile funk blasting from the favela across the way, she gets up, spies on the neighbor’s chubby goat, and takes a break from the tedium to write about the vegetarian “feijoada” she recently made.

This is a Kale that grew up believing a meal wasn’t a meal without meat but who in the last five years has moved steadily toward eating mostly vegetables and “happy” meat (there is no such thing as happily murdered meat, you disgusting human, say the real vegetarians and militant vegans). Her current predicament is that, now finding herself in the land of meat-only meals but with little information on where to find non-industrial “happy” (less tragic?) meat, she finds herself caught in a strange limbo land where she doesn’t exactly call herself vegetarian but has stopped eating meat almost entirely--exceptions made here and there for the torresmo that gets sprinkled on her caldo de feijão at the botecos (the corner bar classic of black bean soup that always arrives with a topping of parsley and crackly pork skin bits).

Not historically a fan of mock meat (seitanic substitutes and suspiciously processed soy), but recovering from a bout of dengue fever that has left her weakened and with blood tests showing a serious dip in B12, she finds herself powerfully drawn to the package of vegetarian feijoada “meat” blops offered for purchase at her favorite local natural foods store, Grão Integral, or “Whole Grain.” The ingredients in this "Mistura para feijoada vegetariana" are listed as: smoked gluten (what?), smoked soy protein (smoked? is there another translation for defumado?), smoked tofu, and "aromatic herbs." Verrrry mysterious.

Feijoada, it should be noted, is the typical national Brazilian dish, famous for its mix of mysterious meat parts (pork scraps, ears, tails, assorted beef parts, sausage slices) camouflaged in a black bean stew. Debate continues over whether this all-day slow-cooked meal to serve at Saturday family feasts, birthdays, and graduation get-togethers is the now-valorized dish derived from a necessarily resourceful slave culture or the descendent of European stews enjoyed by colonial aristocrats, such as the Portuguese cozido and the French cassoulet. It is hard from this vantage point to determine where exactly the truth lies, but the black bean bears its factual weight as the great unifying legume of Brazil (with manioc as the country’s prime root).

This is all to say that bestowing the name “feijoada” on this dish that I cooked up on a Sunday when the pressure cooker was calling out to be used is a serious travesty on two counts: 1) it contains no trace of random pig and cow bits and bobs and 2) is made with brown beans instead of the signature black beans.

This dish may be a poorly-disguised impostor, but it is authentic in at least one aspect relevant to this blog: the smoked soy mock meat blops, which were intentionally varied in shape and color to simulate the vaguely disturbing and curious lumps that one finds buried in the black swirl of traditional feijoada, were very much indeed the Weirdest of Vegetables. They bore an unsettling resemblance to kibble when poured into a shallow dish:

Once boiled for almost an hour with the beans (taking the pressure cooker shortcut), the blops became chewy and bean-juice-saturated and slightly salty, bearing an uncannily meaty texture of alien familiarity. Their buoyant spongency also made them float to the top. The "meat" was a little freaky, but the beans were reassuringly tasty in their broth fortified with the flavors of bay leaf, salt, garlic, and hot pepper oil.

Despite this freakshow experiment that I was ashamed to serve to any true Brazilian, I must claim some credit for at least attempting to complete the “feijoada” with the proper accompaniments: rice (though brown instead of white), sauteed kale (though my chiffonade was too fat), farinha (a yellowish manioc flour that is almost like pouring sand on your meal but is subtly tasty and adds a pleasingly rough layer when mixed into the beans), and sliced oranges meant to be eaten with the meal (not after) to aid digestion.

Feijão Guandu: or Pigeon Peas, aka the Biological Plow!

Wow wow wow! I bought these magic beans the other day from the sweet Japanese-Brazilian ladies at the Saturday organic farmers' market in my neighborhood (Glória) and was not disappointed. After my brief flirtation with monochromatic meals, I've returned to my usual programming of technicolor eating and these carnivalesque beauties caught my eye immediately.

They are called feijão guandu, or guandu beans, sometimes feijão andu, and seem to be some variant on what is known as the pigeon pea. These came fresh, a tiny bit sprouted, from a farm west of Rio, R$5 for a baggie. Dried, they fade to a light brown and pale green, but these ranged from wine-dark to red, vibrant brown, lime green, and mustard, like a handful of hearty jellybeans.

 Why are they magic? Well, this here legume is an old toughie with a heart of gold: drought-resistant, heat-resistant, and produces protein-rich beans even in poor soil conditions, breaks hard ground in search of water, thus opening the soil up for the more fragile roots of other plants, and is one of those special earth-workers known as "nitrogen fixers." This means it makes atmospheric nitrogen biologically available to other plants, causing it to be used as "green manure" (how I love this term!), or a cover crop, to regenerate nutrient-depleted soil.

This informative blog (in Portuguese) tells us feijão guandu is known as the "biological plow" (arado biológico). More scientific information is here (also in Portuguese, sorry). But, ah!, here is a thorough blog post on the guandu bean that I just found in English, with assorted recipes. Apparently, the English name, pigeon pea, comes from the legume's use as poultry feed in the U.S. during the 19th century.

It turns out you can eat them raw, but I cooked these guandus in the normal way I cook beans here, except I added some special wild tomatoes and beautifully twisted, tiny organic carrots (a rarity in Rio, where carrots are normally grotesquely gigantic, over-fertilized, stick-straight and rock-hard monstrosities). They struck me as somewhere between brown beans and lentils and have that deep, dense flavor of nutrient-rich foods (dark leafy greens also strike me as having this hard-to-describe taste, though beans and greens are flavor worlds apart), though with a certain lightness that I think had to do with their freshness. Below is more or less what I did.

BEANS, Weird Vegetables Brazilian Style*

*elaborations on the instructions printed on a bag of dried brown beans (feijão carioquinha) someone left in my kitchen in Rio

1 baggie or 1.5 cups of fresh beans (if dried, then soak overnight)
4 cloves of garlic, 2 peeled & crushed, 2 tiny dice
1 onion, diced
1 tomato, diced (or 2 large handfuls of wild or cherry tomatoes)
1-2 small carrots, diced (optional)
1 small bunch of cilantro

Rinse beans and dump into a pressure cooker pot. If no pressure cooker lives in your kitchen, then use a regular pot, but double the time. Fill with water to about 1.5 inches over the beans. Add the 2 cloves of crushed garlic. Pressure cook that baby for 30 minutes. Some people say that guandu beans can be bitter and they toss out the water after the first boil and refill it, but these fresh beans had no bitterness to them. While the beans are cooking, rinse and chop all that other stuff.

When the beans are soft enough to eat (or pressure cooked and you've let out all the steam by slipping a fork under the whistle-top blow hole thing and lifting), drain them but keep the liquid for later. Mash about a quarter to a third of the beans with a fork. This is what the supermarket bean bag told me to do, and I was really into this tactic of mixing of textures: mashy bean pulp with whole beans. I just mash them against the side of the sieve but you can do it in a bowl with a wooden spoon if that feels more civilized to you.

Heat up two teaspoons of olive oil in a large pan and sautee the rest of the garlic and the onions until the onions are almost transparent. Add the tomatoes and let their juices get nice and mixed up with the rest. And the carrots if you are adding carrots. Then add the beans. Little by little, add as much of the bean liquid as you need to make the whole concoction reach your ideal consistency. Add salt to taste (2-3 teaspoons perhaps) and mix well. Then add the spiciness vehicle of your choice. I've been using my homemade chili pepper oil, which has divine effects, but add a few whole or minced chili peppers would also be tasty.

Finally, sprinkle with cilantro. Sadly, the guandu beans are not so vibrantly varied after being cooked, but are very tasty all the same.  Uma delícia!

Monochromatic Mealtime

 

Sophie had already made a name for herself by turning aspects of her intimate life into art when Paul borrowed some of these aspects to construct the character Maria in his Leviathan of a novel. The two were friends, Paul and Sophie, and the latter thought she would turn the whole thing into a Double Game by bringing her own life closer to the parts Paul had invented for Maria. One of Maria's obsessions was eating monochromatic meals. The passage from the novel that describes these feasts for the eyes goes:

Some weeks, she would indulge in what she called "the chromatic diet," restricting herself to foods of a single color on any given day. Monday orange: carrots, cantaloupe, boiled shrimp. Tuesday red: tomatoes, persimmons, steak tartare. Wednesday white: flounder, potatoes, cottage cheese. Thursday green: cucumbers, broccoli, spinach—-and so on, all the way through the last meal on Sunday.

While Sophie had never before thought of this particular concept, she shared Maria's pleasure in setting herself certain rules to follow with severity until she tired of the game and moved onto another. Paul was correct in characterizing it as an indulgent restriction. But Sophie, more of a perfectionist than even Paul imagined for Maria, filled in the details for the rest of the days and made the elements adhere even more closely to each day's color scheme. Sophie writes:

To be like Maria, during the week of December 14, 1992, I ate Orange on Monday, Red on Tuesday, White on Wednesday, and Green Thursday. Since Paul Auster had given his character the other days off, I made Friday Yellow and Saturday Pink. As for Sunday, I decided to devote it to the full spectrum of colors, setting out for six guests the six menus tested over the week.

The act of eating involves such a chaotic complex of senses, feelings, memories, and meanings that it can sometimes be comforting to try to simplify the basic elements.

To what extent does eating become a conceptual act so that we care more about the idea of what we eat than the food itself?

In this case, one must imagine that the sense of order and visual harmony of these meals gave more pleasure than their actual taste. I myself would rather gaze at Orange than wash a mouthful of shrimp laced with cantaloupe down with orange juice.

When I was a child, I would often eat my meal in one section at a time, finishing one entire portion before moving clockwise on to the next: first green beans, then mashed potatoes, then the pork chop, and finishing with my apple juice. Other people would be upset by this unnatural method but could never quite give a convincing reason for what was wrong with it.

Nowadays, I find myself most obsessed with the richness of the color variations in my meals and worrying when they are overly monotone, so precisely the opposite of Sophie/Maria. I like multi-colored mosaic meals mainly for their aesthetic balance—my food makes me happy when many colors play together—but varied colors also suggest a fuller range of nutrients, giving me a practical alibi for this personal preference. Once in awhile I find myself suddenly faced with an accidentally monochromatic meal. Ever since I experienced Sophie Calle's Double Game, I am less apt to "fix" it with more color and instead eat these meals in homage to her, smiling to myself about the various games we consciously or unconsciously play in putting a meal together. My most recent monochromatic meal was Off-White: mashed potatoes, cauliflower puree, and mozarella melted on toast. I drank goat milk.

The other night, I decided to revisit my indulgent restriction from childhood of eating my meal in fractions but this time doing it in an even more extreme way, by eating each section separately in the same bowl that I would empty then refill with the next portion.

  

Green : Beans

        Red : Tomatoes

         Yellow : Batata Baroa

This last is my favorite kind of potato here in Brazil, batata baroa, also known as Peruvian parsnip, though it tastes like a lighter version of sweet potato.

I ate very slowly and did nothing else besides pay careful, yet leisurely, attention to each part of this meal in thirds.

The taste and texture of the green, crunchy, slightly salty;
the red, grainy-soft, watery, ripe;
the yellow, creamy, sunshine, hearty sweetness.

This is the practical alibi of these seemingly silly food games: to remind us of how to see and taste what we eat. We put down our books, forget our need to make conversation, stop thinking about what we are going to do afterward, and merely look, then taste and feel what has entered our mouths at that moment.

Spooning

Dear vegetable lovers,

I do apologize for the extended pause in Weird Vegetable adventures. I've been traveling and working on other projects but continue to ponder the mysteries of the vegetable universe. Today, while scraping brown rice crust from the bottom of a pot with a small wooden spoon, I got emotional about how much I love small wooden spoons. That is to say, it's getting a little loopy around here. More reports from Rio as soon as I get my head together again and stop dreaming about fossilized geckos and snakes whose faces spell out the word O V O (egg in Portuguese).

Here is another photo of my beloved wooden spoon, with other objects for scale.

More soon,
KD

In-Flight Asparagus

Taking a brief interlude from my new marmoset-and-manioc-rich life in Rio de Janeiro, I flew to San Francisco last week for a wedding and a conference (am weary and slightly disoriented in Bloomington, Indiana and my world of vegetables is as bleak as this blank-walled dorm room I am now experiencing insomnia in). On the São Paulo-Washington D.C. leg, the international in-flight vegetarian meal was less despondent than I had anticipated. The broccoli, zucchini, and carrots were no surprise, but a most intriguing effect was made by the lone asparagus spear that lay across my corn-speckled rice. It was as though the gray eminence that determines our airborne culinary fate had experienced a sudden moment of gaiety, a giddy nostalgia for the springtime asparagus that used to shoot up along the country road on his way home from school, and had decided to bestow upon us this single stroke of frivolity. Much was lost in the translation from the bright green spear of that country road to the over-steamed specimen that sagged indifferently in the spot-lit darkness of my red-eye flight. But still, I ate around it and drew that drooping final morsel to my lips with a grand flourish.

Weird Salad

Radicchio in the tropics?

Balsamic vinegar in a spray bottle?

Packaged fried garlic?

All a bit out of my ordinary.

 But I'll try anything once. (spray spray, crunch crunch!)