Feeding the Hungry Ghost (18 page)

Authors: Ellen Kanner

BOOK: Feeding the Hungry Ghost

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This mayoless Moroccan carrot salad is one of my favorite summer dishes. It’s seasonal, bright to the eye, bright with flavor, and absurdly easy to make. It needs just a little kitchen heat — a minute or two to toast the spices. And it stands up beautifully at a picnic or a day at the beach.

Moroccan Carrot Salad

Serves 6 to 8

1 pound carrots

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground paprika; sweet is traditional, smoked is edgy but quite nice

Generous pinch of cayenne pepper or, if you have it, Aleppo pepper

2 teaspoons agave nectar or honey

Juice of 1 or 2 lemons

½ teaspoon sea salt

1 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, coarsely chopped

Coarsely shred the carrots in a food processor or cut into ¼-inch matchsticks, your call. Dump into a good-size bowl and set aside.

In a small skillet, heat the oil, cumin, paprika, and cayenne over low heat, stirring now and again until spices darken and the whole thing turns fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool.

Pour the spiced oil over the carrots. Add the agave nectar, lemon juice, and sea salt, and stir until the carrots are evenly coated. (The carrot salad can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for a day.)

Just before serving, gently stir in the parsley. Enjoy slightly chilled but not gelid.

WHAT I LEARNED
in
SUMMER SCHOOL

Childhood summer stretched on even after the fireworks of the Fourth were over. Some of my friends went off to camp. I rather felt sorry for them. Summer unleashed in me a lightness, a license to
be,
rather than to do, to spend the day outside in the sun with dogs and books, and making my rounds to indulgent neighbors. Each day was simple, sweet and golden, like the single drop of nectar in an ixora blossom, and the whole world was my friend.

My parents do not even like the beach. They went to please me. And because they needed a diversion but couldn’t afford a real vacation. My father sported sideburns in those days or in my memory, and the ocean was blue and high and fierce. It is so flat now. It is a softer blue, a calmer friend, its rowdy days all but forgotten. Or perhaps I’m the tame one now. Tamer and busier.

I do not heed the call of summer the way I did — too many things to get to. I have lost my girlhood gift for being here now. I am good at being at least fifteen minutes ahead and live in an anxious state of perpetual what-comes-next-ness. It keeps me in favor with editors because I never miss a deadline. It has kept me out of trouble the few times I’ve done commercial kitchen prep because I can keep up and not piss off the chef. I’m conscientious, reliable, but not patient. I am impatient with my own impatience, my own limitations.

I was ranting to a friend about this. She gave me one of her great Mona Lisa smiles and this advice: “Embrace your mess.”

Are you kidding me? Oh, I know our strengths and our weaknesses are often two halves of the same. I have no trouble embracing
your
mess. Your mess is charming, your mess is just fine. It’s my own that drives me forty kinds of crazy. On the list of character flaws: my out-of-the-box nervousness, my stupid tendency to want to be everybody’s best friend, my resistance to doing things the easy way, my inability to cut myself some slack.

Change is possible. Radical character makeovers are tougher. The best I can hope for is to take a break from busting my butt, every now and again. Maybe just once a year. And summer is the time to do it, when I can learn from an excellent role model — the whole earth.

During the months when the earth and the sun are best buds, the planet itself takes a break. This is not winter dormancy. It’s the promise of spring fulfilled; it’s taking a holiday after a job well done. The warm temperature and warm light of summer say come out to play — the time is right, and the produce is ripe. We call fruits and vegetables “produce” because, well, the earth has produced them, sometimes with some help from us. So come. Eat. Wear sunscreen.

Here in my backyard, the collards keep going and growing, impervious to both cold and heat, their leaves as tough and big as elephant ears. The rest of my wee garden has yielded up its lot — heirloom tomatoes, odd shaped, sun warmed, and sweet; arugula, with its Victorian, scalloped leaves and punk pepper kick; long curls of red Russian kale; rainbow chard, with its clean, ozone taste, tender leaves, and neon-bright red-and-yellow stems.

Bees and zebra longwing butterflies zip in and out of our firebush, a lacy puff of red blossoms like the fireworks I love. Here is the open sky and benevolent sun. And here, minutes away, is the broad basin of the Atlantic, a phalanx of brown pelicans zooming just above the water, their wings fanned out, creating not so much as a ripple on the surface. A calm falls over me, and a smidge of space opens between my cervical vertebrae, usually tension fused into a state of oneness.

Embrace your mess — a lot of value in those three words.

Other useful three-word advice:

Be here now.

Breathe. It helps.

And there’s what my father said to me right before he lowered my bridal veil and walked me down an absurd spiral staircase to waiting wedding guests and my groom — Don’t fuck up.

I am constantly trying for all the above, to relearn what birds and insects know, what I once knew by instinct, knew from the inside — to live in the moment and be grateful for it.

Even Job, that miserable guy from the Bible, said:

But ask the animals,
and they will teach you,
or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish of the sea inform you.

Which of all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature
and the breath of all mankind.

It is about letting go, surrendering, being vulnerable and open to possibility, expanding, inhabiting the moment rather than rushing through it on our way to somewhere else. Which is a great way to approach seasonal eating. (And you didn’t think I could work this back around to food, did you?)

Barbecue is for other people. Summer for me is the sticky, sweet, in-your-face flavors of mango and lychee.

Lychees were always easy to love, their perfume and sweetness made for a child’s palate, and they offer forth abundant tactile pleasure. The carapace of the lychee is hard, bumpy, and red, with a puckery, tannic taste. Peel that away for the fruit — smooth, slippery, glowing white. Pop it in your mouth. It is so tender and full of juice, you barely have to chew — it gives itself up to you until at its center, you come to the smooth, oblong seed the color of cinnabar. Lychees are not to be eaten parsimoniously. They invite a blessed trance of eating until they are gone.

Mangoes were a harder sell to me as a child. As an uptight kid, I wanted everything tidy and symmetrical. There is nothing tidy about a mango. They’d fall with a thud from our tree in the backyard, exploding into a messy yuck. I would have been happy to leave them as a feast for the possums, who’d bore through them with their sharp teeth. Mangoes resembled possums, hanging down on long stems the way possums could hang from the tree by their tails. But one of my chores was to get to the mangoes and clean them up before they stained the deck. The sticky sap, with
its whiff of turpentine, itched, put me in a sneezing fit, and made my eyelids swell until my eyes were slits.

There was no escaping them. Mangoes and avocados are to South Florida summer what zucchini is elsewhere in the country. No sooner would I recover from cleaning up the backyard than our neighbors would give their own mangoes to us — no, press them upon us unbidden.

You could count on a mango having a hairy, odd-shaped pit. That was the only sure thing about it. Sometimes a mango had fibers that would stick in your teeth, and sometimes it was slippery. A banana required no guesswork. It was always soft, sweet, unsurprising. But you could never tell what you were going to get with a mango. Well, no wonder; there are over four hundred varieties of mango, and a goodly number of them grow in South Florida.

I long ago outgrew my childhood mango allergy and aversion. You’ve got extras? I’m glad to take them off your hands. Mangoes have a sort of reptilian-looking rind that comes in sherbet colors — pale green, butter yellow, orange slouching toward red. It is inedible and must be peeled away, revealing the golden flesh inside. The fruit tastes of honey and peach, with a whispering of carrot. They’re richer in vitamin C than oranges, crazy with potassium and beta-carotene, and just incredibly, delectably good.

To get at the goodness within, take a knife and gently score the mango in quarters. Don’t try to cut through it — that funky pit will not allow you to. Just grab the top of each section and pull down. The skin will peel away from the flesh. Then slice, chop, or dice the mango, as you like. You can suck on that pit, albeit hairy and untidy in the extreme, and it will in no wise disappoint. It
may, however, dribble a trail of golden juice down your shirt, an indelible reminder of your bliss.

There is a two-week window in July when both the lychees and mangoes are ripe and the air is heady with jasmine, real jasmine, the white blooms suddenly popping open under cover of darkness like the specter of a woman who appears only at night, dizzying the air with her perfume.

Breathe in the jasmine and eat the fruit now before it is gone, eat with abandon and without clothing, because it is so hot and both mangoes and lychees are so juicy. I’ve sacrificed more than one T-shirt to mango stains and have not regretted it. Lychees taught me pleasure, but mangoes remind me of the rewards of embracing my mess.

WEST INDIAN MANGO MADNESS

Gorgeous, ripe summer fruit deserves to be eaten as is, without additives, frippery, or monkeying. No lycheetinis, no raspberry frappés, and no mango upside-down cakes. However, there are exceptions. Mangoes are your friends. During the assault of fruit when you can’t keep pace with the glut, you can peel, slice, and freeze them for later. Or you can say what the hell and make this curry, which isn’t really mad, but it’s mango, which adds just the right sweet and tang to this island-inspired dish.

It’s mild of spice, although you can ramp up the heat, and the whole thing comes together in a few minutes. Callaloo is better known elsewhere as amaranth, and if you know it at all, it’s because of its tiny whole grains. In the Caribbean, it’s beloved for its greens, emerald bright to brighten the spirit. If callaloo’s not fresh and local, bok choy or napa cabbage is in season and glad to take its place.

West Indian Mango Madness

It’s summer, so serve the madness more toward room temperature than flat-out hot off the stove. Pair with brown rice, Caribbean pigeon peas and rice, or roti or Flatbread from a Starter (
page 214
).

Serves 4

cup cashews