Coming Home

Kathy and I live just above the Eastern edge of the Willamette Valley and as we each make our morning commutes over to Salem on the West side, we connect to an odd grid of farm roads, which, at this time of the year, are suddenly grown high at either side with berries and veggies, tall fescu, bent grass and wheat which seem to have risen from nothing. There are interspaced bean fields and acres of cosmos, marigolds and poppies. Lavender fields roll out along the valley floor casting that peculiar and wonderful unfocused purple layer of color that seems to hover about 18 inches above the rich valley soil.

My move here to Oregon has obviously represented a huge change for me and it's taking time for me grow into it, but the recent arrival here of summer, however tardy it may be, is certainly helping. I drove home from a job on Saturday night as dusk was sliding in over the Valley. The smell of the newly cut hay was strong and the aromas from grills and the voices and calls from houses and campgrounds rang through the evening air. For the first time it felt as if summer had arrived and it brought with it a sense of belonging, of joy, and even of relief.

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We had a good meeting of the "board" last Wednesday in Jean's office at Willaby's Catering, where I am the Chef. One of the suggestions I made, in light of a changing economy, one in which not so many companies are able to afford caterers and catered events, that we begin to make and sell food products such as sausages, stocks, salsa and sauces, etc., seemed to go over quite well. With luck, the help of the zoning laws in our neighborhood, and a good marketing program, we may soon be selling Willaby's products designed and cooked by Chef Dave, the Chef of the Woods, in addition to providing fine catering around the Willamette Valley.

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Yesterday afternoon Kathy and I took pitchfork, shovel and gloves out to the garden to do the first harvest of the potatoes we planted not more than 11 weeks ago. We had bought a number of "seed" starters, including red, white and different types of creamers and fingerlings, and the reds had come to flower and then fruit first.

We had a long and rainy spring, and it certainly appeared to have done well by the red potatoes. We dug up and down our two rows of plants, being careful to only apply the pitchfork under and around the plants that had died. I had never dug potatoes before and this was high adventure for me, particularly when Kathy shrieked in triumph when we turned the soil around the very first bush under and it yielded five or six fat reds covered in earth and another four or five tinier spuds. And it went like that up and down the two rows we dug.

It was like digging for Easter eggs and our baskets were definitely full, as were the boxes and old kitchen pots we had brought out. We kept digging and the potatoes kept coming. I was having a ball, down on my knees, pawing through the earth Kathy was turning over, and there was definitely a child-like glee I was experiencing as I kept finding more and more potatoes under the fresh turned earth.

We ended up with between 50 and 60 pounds of fresh reds of varying sizes (but lots of big ones) from our $5 investment in the "seed" potatoes. And now it's up to me to figure out enough ways to use them so we get the most return without burning out. That's the kind of challenge I like.

FINALLY MOVING ON...

Am I here to announce the end of the Chef of the Jungle? Well, the part about the jungle anyway, perhaps. The Chef is in me always. But it certainly appears that any return to the jungle will not be in a cooking capacity. For those of you I haven't been able to tell in person, I have turned down an offer of a working partnership in a restaurant in Dominical and will remain here in Oregon.

The decision was a hard one, very hard. In turning down this very generous offer from some very good people I knew I would be walking away from some things I had dreamed about for quite some time; a partnership, artistic freedom and an opportunity to put my hard work into my own dream rather than the dreams of others.

I had thought that I would make my last stand in a kitchen in Costa Rica and that I would cook there always. I loved the environment, the climate, the fruit, the fish and the freedom that came from heading off in totally new culinary directions for the area I was in. I had been promised that the job I had would be mine until I no longer wanted it. Sadly, the final days of my time at La Cusinga made it clear that I was and would always be a gringo visitor and that Costa Rica is not my country.

When I considered the notion of trying to make what could possibly be my last effort at having my own restaurant in this, the summer I turned 60, I realized that it would never happen in Costa Rica. I watched other gringos attempt to realize their dreams there and saw frustration and failure mount. I watched rules and regulations vary and wander depending on those whom they were being administered to. I listened, and this part makes me so sad, as people I had come to trust and respect, people I had labored hard and long and honorably for, began to recant things they had said as truths. I came to the hard realization that this was the nature of the culture and the society and that it would never work for me to put my last and final eggs in this leaky basket.

So yes, the Chef of the Jungle is hanging up his self-penned sobriquet and is becoming the Chef of the Woods, or the Chef of the Trees, or whatever new moniker may fall upon him. Does it make me sad? Well yes, it does; sad, disappointed and a bit betrayed and hurt as well, but I have moved on and need to keep moving on away from those feelings. I am far too old and have experienced far too much in my life to blame disappointments on anyone but myself. I have always had the (in)ability to hear what I wanted to hear and a dreamer's nature that doesn't always temper what I hear with what is real.

I am lucky and grateful that I have the love of a woman, a wonderful woman; a home that feels for the first time to me in years, like a home; and a job that promises growth and opportunity. The jungle will always be in me, but I now know that the jungle belongs to those who come from it, and not to those who try, however hard, to be part of it.

The Promised Land/Back in the USA

"tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land calling,

and the poor boy's on the line..."

That's what Chuck Berry said, but he wrote that in the early 60's, and as I've been finding out in the seven weeks I've been back, a few things have changed. Not that I was expecting my transition from two years in the jungles of Costa Rica to the United States to be easy or different, I was just not quite prepared for HOW eye-opening it would be.

I had been buying organic produce in Costa Rica, raised by local farmers in local fincas (farms) and had gotten used to the notion that I would be paying a bit more for the quality I would be receiving. What I certainly wasn't prepared for was arriving here and finding out that it was going to put a strain on our budget just to put a fresh green vegetable (and not organic or necessarily local) on our dinner plates each night.

Granted, it has been a long and difficult winter (and granted that this NWestern Oregon valley will turn into an agricultural wonderland sometime soon) and granted the the farmer, the trucker, the broker and the vendor all need to get their nickel (?!) out of the deal. I understand that, but when it costs nearly $1.25 per person just to have fresh sauteed spinach with one's dinner, that is frightening, horrifying. Zucchini was $2.99/# in our market the other day, fresh asparagus trucked "all the way" from California were $4.49/# and artichokes were THREE blinkin' dollars each!! Our default and "go to" vegetable has been broccoli, which is the only vegetable here under $2.00/# and it only gets under that by a penny.

Until I made a wonderful discovery (see below) just this past week, I had nearly given up on the notion of fresh fish, a staple of my eating habits in Costa Rica. We are a mere 90 minutes from the coast and the fish we see here is either water-laden, old and dry, or frozen. On top of that, the prices make a grown man holler; or perhaps weep would be more accurate. I paid $7.99 for "fresh: Canadian rock fish filets (they were on sale) last week and when I opened the package, at least two ounces or water came out of it. And it is just not feasible (even as a treat) to pay $17.99/# for halibut that looks like it went for a long, long ride from the coast before it ever got to us.

I have gotten used to cooking meat again, not that I'd forgotten how, but I needed to re-adjust my thinking to cooking for home. There is a very high quality local range chicken that comes on sale at $.79/# once a month or so at our local market and we have taken to buying three at a time and freezing them. If I do a simple and tasty roast chicken, we can get a first night dinner from it. Another night I shred it either for enchiladas or pasta and Kathy will still have some for sandwiches for her lunch. By buying the whole bird, we are able to get the cost down to about $.70 per person per portion. The irony here, is, of course, that we are able to eat a good portion of protein for less than the cost of our vegetables.

I've also been finding bargains with pork which seems to go on sale fairly regularly as well. I picked up an 18 ounce pork tenderloin on sale at $4.99/# and we got a really nice dinner and three lunches out of it. Pork loin comes on sale here quite a bit as well and that's something I've been able to stretch. We get dinner for two off a two pound roast the first night, escalopes cut thin and sauteed for another meal, another enchilada dinner (I've been honing my Mexican chops) for a third and yet more sandwiches for Kathy to take to work. Again, we can get our portion cost down to less than $.70 per, and again, that is less than the green vegetable that goes on the plate to accompany it.

All of this makes it easier for me to see why fast food restaurants do so well. I am a professional cook who doesn't mind spending time in the kitchen, and it takes time to be creative with where the various parts of our animals are going to go. For single parent families or families with both partners working, it isn't always feasible to buy economically and plan meals accordingly. A quick trip to the local fast food outlet feeds the family quickly, relatively cheaply and requires no planning; fresh vegetables be damned (well, there is lettuce and tomato on the burger, isn't there?).

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A recent discovery through a tip from a co-worker may have done a bit to help with my seafood craving. Pedro, the lead cook at my new job told me the other day that he had seen a place on Lancaster in Salem that had live fish in tanks and that also had whole fish on ice. I had done my internet searching and had even gone old school and used the yellow pages, but as far as I knew there was no such place.

My deep curiosity led me to wander through Salem and over onto Lancaster, a street mostly lined with fast food franchises and strip malls. I nearly drove past the sign it was so hard to see, but there is was, four lanes over; a papered-over storefront in a nearly uninhabited strip mall with a sign that said "Pescados Frescos". Yes, in Spanish. I was going to blow it off and save it for another time, but suddenly two whole lanes cleared to my left and I was able to swing into the left hand turn lane. I hung the left and circled around so that I could get to this nearly hidden outpost that may or may not have good fresh fish.

I pulled right up in front, the only car in the parking lot and ducked into the front door. There was a young Asian woman at the register and a few scant aisles of groceries, but there, at the back, I could see some rather opaque plastic cases and what looked like fish on ice right in front of them. I gave her a quick smile and headed straight to the back. Yes, there in front, on ice, were whole striped bass, mullet, rock fish and even trout. Behind them in the plastic cases were four sizes and types of shrimp, squid and octopus. Next to them was a tank with live Maine lobsters. This was good.

I was delighted with what I saw and my delight turned to near ecstasy when I scanned farther back and saw tanks, big tanks filled with water and live things. The motors of running water filters hummed above them. The only people in the store were the young woman at the register, an older Asian woman in an apron with a broom at the back of the store and me. I nearly skipped over to the tanks and there they were, in the front, sacks of oysters and clams; behind them, huge tanks filled with live tilapia and behind them, further still, live Dungeness crabs, hundreds of them. Eureka, I had found it. Finally, fresh fish and live crabs right here in Salem.

I had to flag down the woman in the back to get her help. She was not entirely interested in me until I expressed my deep desire in buying a crab. I told her I wanted the biggest one she could find. The larger the crab, the better the meat to shell ratio and I wanted meat.

She donned a heavy rubber glove, reached in and started grabbing. The first couple she came up with seemed fine to me, I was so excited by this point, but she shook her head and tossed them back in. After grabbing a step stool to give her a better reach, she immersed her hand way in the back and came up with a large and lively specimen. He was huge (by Dungeness crab standards) and I nodded, yes, yes, yes.

She stood in front of my for a moment, holding up the crab with his legs churning and waving wildly. With brilliant economy of movement she had him in a paper bag and then in a white plastic sack and was thrusting him to me. Nothing more was said. She gestured to the cash register and walked away. That was it; I paid my $5.99/# for him (it came to just over $15) and hustled out to the truck.

I cooked the crab that afternoon in a classic "crab boil" of hot water, cayenne, smoked paprika, bay leaves, black peppercorns, lemons, garlic and onions. I dropped him into the boiling water (and no, this doesn't bother me one bit), let it come back up to a boil, and turned it off. When the water was cooled to tepid, I reached in, drained the crab, put him in a bowl and refrigerated him. I do not rinse the crab off as it just rinses away whatever flavoring agents one has put into the "crab boil".

The next night Kathy and I dined on fresh cracked crab with a green herb aioli, garlic bread and a big green salad with tomatoes and avocados. I was in heaven. Fresh cracked Dungeness crab is one of the first seafood items I learned to eat, at a very young age, and is one of my food cravings. And no, there is no Dungeness crab in Costa Rica. I will go back to the market this week, perhaps for a whole striped bass, perhaps for something else. It depends on what they have and what looks good. It's nice to finally have the choice.

GREEN HERB AIOLI

1/2 Cup Chopped Parsley

1/4 Cup Chopped Chives

3 Garlic Cloves, smashed

1 Whole Egg

Juice of 2 Lemons

Dash of Tabasco

1/2 Cup Canola Oil

1/2 Cup Olive Oil

S&P to taste

In a small food processor, blend the herbs, garlic, tabasco, egg and lemon juice. With the motor running, drizzle in the canola oil slowly at first and then more quickly as the oil is incorporated. Repeat with the olive oil and when all the oil is added check the aioli for thickness. I occasionally like to drizzle a bit of warm water into the sauce with the motor running to make it a bit thinner. Check for salt and pepper and chill for a couple of hours. The flavors improve as the sauce sits.

HOME COOKIN'

HOME COOKIN'; Part 1

It would seem that you can keep the chef out of the restaurant, but you cannot keep the chef out of the kitchen. Now that I am blissfully cohabiting, I have embraced my household duties whole-heartedly. And a particular favorite of mine is the duty of putting dinner on the table each and every night for my overworked (but certainly not under loved) sweetheart.

These few weeks in Oregon have found me adapting rather nicely, and actually cottoning to, cooking at home for two. I know, I know, scold me; this is what at least one partner in every relationship since the beginning of time has done. But for me it represents a sea change in the way I view shopping and cooking; a chance to plan more intimately and shop more economically.

When I cook in a restaurant setting it seems that there is always a way to get rid of the left-overs. They can be incorporated into the next day's lunch special, or, better still, they can live a second life as part of an appetizer or when blended into a sauce or soup. Best of all, the guest who ate the initial offering is rarely around to see it in its second life.

I find that buying for the home, and particularly buying for two, requires far more planning and far more awareness. A former sous-chef of mine used to quote his grandmother to the effect that the definition of eternity was "two people and a ham." So I have embarked into the task of buying smaller amounts, utilizing the freezer far more than I am used to and attempting to paint my leftovers in more attractive and different colors from the palate of taste.

This week I raided the freezer for the second set of chicken breasts I had wrapped up when a pack of four was on sale; for two packets of ground beef that Kathy had obtained as part of the purchase of a quarter of beef; and lastly for a packet of turkey breast meat that had been frozen after we had slow-cooked a whole breast in the crock pot. My mission was to turn them into something new, fresh and not too altogether familiar (although, it should be noted, not all at the same time).

Tuesday, I decided, would be the chicken and this was an easy one. There were two big half breasts; wing bone still attached. We had bacon, we had mushrooms and we had fresh tomatoes. Best of all we had a the rich stock left from the slow cooking of the turkey breast. We had brown rice and we had whole wheat egg noodles; I opted for the noodles. There were also three small heads of fresh broccoli in the refrigerator.

I turned the oven to 450 and turned on both front burners. On one burner I put salted water to boil and on the other went a non-stick 12" fry pan, my favorite all purpose cooking vessel.

While waiting for the water to come to a boil I lightly seasoned the chicken breasts with salt, pepper and smoked paprika. When the fry pan came to heat, I put in a small amount of canola oil and crisped the skin of the chicken breasts. I flipped them over and into the oven they went.

At just that moment the water came to a boil so I blanched the broccoli florets, drained them and shocked them in an icy bath to halt the cooking process. At the cutting board I diced bacon, and tomatoes, quartered mushrooms and peeled and chopped garlic. I also pulled out a few green onions and cut them into small rings. I had the turkey stock ready. I put another pot of salted water on to boil and checked on the chicken.

When the chicken breasts cook meat-side down in the oven it really hastens the cooking process and they were nearly done. I took the pan out, poured off the cooking oil and placed the breasts in again, skin side down, but this time I added the diced bacon. This went back into the oven for five minutes to crisp the bacon. Again the pan came out and this time I lifted up the chicken breasts and scraped the mushrooms, tomato and green onions into the pan. I gave it a bit of a toss, put the chicken on top of the mix and put in in the oven one more time.

The second pot of water had come to a boil so I dropped in a big handful of curled whole wheat noodles and then pulled the chicken out of the oven one more time. I used my tongs to pluck the breasts, crisp and golden brown, out of the pan and put them on a plate. I put the pan on a burner and poured in the rich turkey stock. The aroma of the bacon and roasting mushrooms rushed right up at me. The turkey stock swirled around, picking up the little bits of tomato that had stuck to the bottom of the pan and incorporated them into the sauce. I brought it to a quick boil and then turned down the burner.

The time had come to put it all together! I sauteed a bit of garlic with butter and olive oil and added the broccoli florets with some salt and pepper. I drained off the noodles and tossed them in their cooking pan with a bit of olive oil. I put the chicken breasts back into the pan with the rich aromatic sauce and poured in the juices they'd left on the plate. I poured a bit of the pan sauce into the noodles and it was time to plate.

The noodles went down onto the plate first with the garlicky scented broccoli just above it. I sliced each crisp skinned breast into four thick medallions and overlapped them on top of the noodles. I grabbed a kitchen spoon and ladled the rich aromatic bacon/tomato/mushroom mixture over the top of the slices and to the table we went. It was cold out and this dish was a wonderful aromatic antidote to a rainy chilly night.

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Night 2; Meatloaf ala Chef Dave; or, Calling Up Old Ghosts

I started making this meatloaf recipe in the mid-90's when I worked at the Elite Cafe on Fillmore St. in San Francisco. It started out as a bit of a derivation (read "borrowed") from a recipe used by my friend Philipe LaMancusa at Embarko in the early 90's and the one in Paul Prudhomme's first cookbook.

At the Elite it was cajun spice heavy, and we used a fairly standard gravy for it, made with a dark roux. One of the interesting adaptations that came out of the Elite was my sous chef, Steve Harlow and I mixing pureed canned chipotle chiles with ketchup and our house BBQ sauce for the glaze that would go on top. We both liked how the glaze caramelized as the meatloaf cooked, although at that time we were cooking the loaves in bread loaf pans so we weren't getting good coverage from the glaze.

The recipe took a little trip down to a N'Awlins style restaurant I opened in SF's Cannery called Belle Roux (great reviews, bad location) and was run as a special from time to time. I was fiddling with the gravy and ended up adding deeply caramelized onions to it, echoing a gravy that Philipe (once again) had put on a pork loin dish at Embarko that he called "burnt onion gravy". I used the same glaze there, but was hand forming the loaves so that the glaze would run down over the sides, lending them more of that spicy sweet caramelized goodness.

I took the recipe to the masses when I left Belle Roux and went to work as a Corporate Chef for Gap Inc. The Gap's headquarters was home to rather an upscale cafeteria/cafe and the staff was just over 80% women. That in no way kept the lines on "meatloaf day" from going out the cafe doors and wrapping down through the hallways. We would sell 12-14 meatloafs (loaves?) a day there and would be sold out by 1:00 each afternoon. Diets went by the wayside for the meatloaf and gravy over mashed potatoes.

All of this history brings us to this Wednesday past when I decided that Kathy and I would take full advantage of the packets of ground beef that were the by-product of her quarter beef purchase. I bought a pound and a half of freshly ground unseasoned pork sausage at the local market as the addition of pork makes the meatloaf moister and set out to make a recipe I had not made in at least nine years.

It's a good thing that there was plenty of bacon in the freezer because like so many other Southern/N'Awlins recipes, that's how this one starts. I cut a couple of strips in a fine dice and started them in a pan. Alongside them on the cutting board I had placed the elements of the "holy trinity"; onion, bell pepper (red, in this case, and in most cases for me; I hate the green ones) and celery. As usual, garlic found it's way in there as well. When the bacon was about half cooked and had rendered enough fat, I put a fine mirepoix of the "trinity" into the pan along with a teaspoon or so of a pre-made "cajun" spice blend. I tossed all this together, let it cook for only a few minutes and turned it out onto a sheet pan to chill.

The two packet of beef went into a mixing bowl along with the pork, two eggs, a fistful of breadcrumbs and then what else? We had some ketchup, so I added a bit of that. There was some Stubb's BBQ sauce in the refrigerator so I added a few shakes into the mix. Salt and pepper? Well, of course, along with several dashes of Lea&Perrin's, a few drops of Tabasco and lastly, the chilled spiced vegetables. I mixed all this together and patted it out into a loaf form onto a cookie pan.

The glaze would have to be a bit of an improvisation. We had no chipotle, but we had a Thai-style sweet red chile sauce. We definitely had enough ketchup and we had more BBQ sauce so all three went into a mixing bowl along with a tiny splash more of L&P. I mixed it up and brushed it on, nice and thick. I laid two long strips of bacon across the top in an "X" and the loaf was oven ready. Pretty as a picture it was (so I took one).

With the loaf in a 400 degree oven, it was gravy time. I thin sliced (half moons for me) a big yellow onion and put the slices in a cast iron skillet with a couple of teaspoons of fat I had taken off the turkey stock along with about a third of a cube of butter. The onions were set on a medium heat to cook slowly enough to keep from burning, but hot enough so that they would color; color deeply.

While the onions did their caramelizing thing, I brought about two cups of chicken and turkey stock to boil and then let it simmer. After about 20 minutes of tossing and browning, tossing and browning, the onions were starting to get some color and I was getting bored, so I turned up the heat. With the higher heat I kept tossing the onions in the pan, but was starting to get some of the crisp edges that give this gravy its distinctive flavor. When caramelizing onions, the cook wants them to be brown, limp and evenly cooked. For this gravy, I want the onions browned in the middle, but crisp and nearly (but, oh, not quite) black on the edges.

At what I considered the perfect point, I added a handful of flour to the pan and using a wooden spoon, coaxed it into the liquid fat that surrounded the onions. It thickened quickly and then, as happens, it fell into a softer form as a bit of the liquid from the onions worked its way in. Now it would be like cooking a roux, much like one would for gumbo or other cajun stews.

I tossed and mixed the onions and roux until the color of the roux was nearly like a dark peanut butter; a really dark peanut butter. Very, VERY, carefully, I poured the simmering stock into the skillet and still using the long wooden spoon, stirred the mixture until it was "as one". Still stirring, I brought the gravy to a boil and then reduced it to a low simmer. The browning would have cooked most of the flour taste out, but the gravy now needed a long slow cooking to incorporate all the flavors.

I left the gravy on a low heat to slowly commingle the flavors and turned to the loaf at hand. It was nearly done and I knew that it would need to sit and repose (or reposee, as they say in France). I find that most meatloaves, despite being wonderful straight from the oven, may be better the second day after all the juices have redistributed themselves in the tiny crevices in the meat.

But we were eating it that night and so it would have to rest for as long as we could let it before we had at it.

Mashed potatoes were and are the obvious accompaniment to meatloaf and gravy and I had yukon golds peeled and in the water and boiling away. I keep a jar of roasted garlic cloves in the refrigerator for moments such as this and they awaited their fate of being mashed in with the finished spuds. I had been craving asparagus even though the locals are not quite here yet (late, late Spring) so caved and bought some Mexican product; please don't tell a soul.

The gravy had reached it's desired flavor and doneness, the spuds had been mashed (along with the roasted garlic cloves) and anointed with butter and cream; the asparagus were simmering lightly in a bath of butter and sauteed garlic. All that remained was to put that first cut in the loaf and put the plate together. I broke through the crust and glaze with a sharp knife and was greeted by a waft of steam and a seductively spicy aroma. The mashers went down on the plate surrounded by the asparagus. The slabs of meatloaf went right on top of the potatoes and a generous ladle of gravy covered it all. Dinner was on; really on.

We enjoyed (I enjoyed) this dinner more than anything that I've cooked in quite some time. It may have been nine years, but it was every bit as good as I remembered. Costa Rica may have steered me a bit off meat, but this loaf was divine, heavenly and yes, delicious.

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Night 3; Finally Mexican

I grew up in California and have always loved Mexican food and cooking with Mexican ingredients. I made my first chile rellenos over 40 years ago and perfected a tomatillo "salsa verde" for crab or chicken enchiladas that my sisters both still use. Mexican culture is so deeply entwined with the cultures of both California and Texas, both states where I have lived and it has always been an undercurrent of flavor and style in my cooking.

For nearly all of my time in Costa Rica I drew on influences from Mexican cuisine. I made fruit salsas based on the the "pico de gallo" model; I made guacamole using just fresh avocados, lime, chiles and cilantro; I made vegetarian stuffed chiles that were not too different from my early chiles rellenos and I used Mexican techniques for braising pork with citrus and chiles. But, I have not cooked any real Mexican food in a long, long time.

This week we had big chunks of leftover turkey in our refrigerator from a whole turkey breast that Kathy had braised in the crock pot. I needed a way to use it up that would get us out of the flavors we had been currently eating, and I needed to do something that would get me on a different track. Mexican was something I had been missing, Mexican was something I had been craving and Mexican it was going to be.

The last time I had made Turkey Enchiladas was in Austin two and a half years ago with some Thanksgiving leftovers, but then I had used my old standby green sauce. This time I wanted to find some good quality dried chiles and do a traditional red chile enchilada sauce. It took a little hunting to find the chiles I wanted, but a very helpful young gentlemen in the produce department at Safeway pulled a box of loose packed dried New Mexico chiles out and let me rummage through them to find what I wanted. In addition I bought a pack of dried ancho chiles to balance out and deepen the flavor.

To start the process I heated a cast iron skillet to take the place of the traditional Mexican "comal" and toasted the chiles on each side before immersing them in water to rehydrate. I used the same hot iron pan to dry toast thick slices of onion, halved tomatoes and unpeeled garlic cloves. When each of them were toasted I put them in a blender (I peeled the garlic after toasting) along with the rehydrated chiles that I had stemmed, seeded and torn into pieces. When I blended it all with some of the soaking water, it turned into a beautiful deep, thick, rust colored liquid.

The next step is to lightly "fry" the sauce in hot oil. It seems odd to "fry" a liquid, but it helps to take the raw flavor out of the chiles and intensifies those flavors as well. When the sauce hits the hot oil it comes to a quick boil in the pan. I then turn the flame down and let the sauce simmer for nearly an hour. The smell is haunting and ever so familiar.

I cut and tore our leftover turkey breast into pieces and chunks and put it into a bowl along with cubes of avocado, shredded Monterey Jack cheese, some minced green onions and a healthy ladle of the newly made red sauce. When mixed together, this would be the filling for the enchiladas. I next dipped each white corn tortilla in the hot red sauce to soften it so that it would not tear in the rolling and proceeded to roll up six tortillas. I coated the bottom of a pyrex with more sauce and laid the finished enchiladas in the pan. Another thick coat of the red sauce went over them and then a flurry of grated jack cheese. A layer of foil over the top made our enchiladas oven ready.

While the enchiladas baked I prepared a simple white rice that I mixed with a handful of chopped green onions and cilantro. I anointed a lettuce mix with just lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper and left it to toss when the enchiladas were ready. I took the foil off the enchiladas after 25 minutes and gave them another 15 minutes in the oven so that the cheese took on a nice golden brown color. I pulled them from the over steaming and beautiful.

The plate was simple but colorful; the red of the enchiladas and their sauce, the simple green salad and the speckled green and white of the rice. Kathy and I took out first bites of the enchiladas and it was hauntingly familiar; slightly bitter but with hint of sweetness, spicy but not too, and deep with flavor. I had put a dollop of sour cream on top of them when I had put them on the plate and the blandness of the cream and the turkey/avocado filling were the perfect foils to allow the bite of the red chile sauce to shine through. We powered through these and barely spoke while we did.

It was such a pleasure to experience this classic flavor once again. It brought back so many taste-bud and olfactory memories which in turn sparked a host of thoughts of other meals and other times.

It is one of the powerful properties of food and cooking that it can take us back to so many other places. These three meals each called up flavors from my cooking past and allowed me to revisit and re-practice techniques which will never leave me. It is amazing how a trip to the freezer and the need to rid ourselves of left-overs can open the door to the past and help to remind us that the skills and the flavors are always there.

Same Ocean; Different Waves

Mangos to Artichokes; Palmito to Asparagus

Brisk. Brisk and breezy and wet and downright cold. I am in the Northwestern part of Oregon and everything Kathy, my fiancee, told me about what late winter/early spring here, is true. There is a fire always burning here in the wood stove and thank God there is. I've been rained on, snowed on and yes, even hailed on. There has been, from time to time, an actual patch of blue sky, but only very rarely.

The transition between Costa Rican summer and late winter/early spring in N. West Oregon has been notable. And it is notably difficult for someone who has spent the last 25 months in Central America. But I am here for the best of all possible reasons; love. And for that I am grateful, pleased, blissful and doing my best to be in denial about the climatic conditions

I am told that this is typical for late winter/early spring in these parts and that gradually, ever so gradually conditions improve. It's one of those two steps forward, one step back kind of things, with insidious rain and the occasional sneak attack of snow still waiting to darken skies that would be blue. Or so I am told.

I have come from the jungles outside of Uvita on the south Pacific coast of Costa Rica. I was living down a dirt road with coconut trees in my front yard, iguanas coming in my front door and howler monkeys serenading me just outside the back. Now I am in low mountain forest, living down a dirt road with a horse in the back, deer and elk prancing/thundering across the yard, the occasional moutain lion or bear, and rain; yes, the famous cold Oregon rain.

I've traded toucans for owls, palm trees for cedars, geckos for barn mice and sunsets for hail storms. But I know the weather will change and although I seem to be having trouble keeping my feet warm, it is not something that brings me great distress. Kathy and I live over 11 miles from town and there is a peace here, a silence and a stillness that rivals that of the deep jungles. Rural here in Oregon is not so different from rural in Costa Rica. Farmers are farmers wherever one goes and houses here are just as scattered away from each other as they are down the roads that lead into the hills outside of Uvita.

Our house, the house that Kathy has welcomed me into, is warm, secure, cozy and filled with love. I have taken on the house chores, outside chores and have earned my way into the heart of Molly, her wise and amusing dog. And still I cook. I always cook and here it is just about using different ingredients. I will use the same techniques, I always use the same techniques, but now I return to the slower cooking styles. Braising, roasting and a kitchen filled with lingering smells of legumes, whole birds and yes, meats have replaced an open and airy stove where fish is cooked in seconds and sauces are just tosses of fresh fruits and raw vegetables.

This is winter cooking now and will change as the weather warms. Like the area I came from in Costa Rica, this is an agricultural area, but the changes here are dramatic and the cooking is reflective of those changes, whereas in the Zona Sur there really are no changes of season. At the San Isidro feria I could buy ripe tomatoes year round. The price would change from time to time, but rarely did my cooking reflect radical seasonality. The fruits would change, but the changes in the vegetable seasons were not so nearly apparent.

And so what have I been cooking? Cooking for myself and my loved ones? Funny you should ask. In a bit of a change, I've been eating a lot of my own cooking lately. Kathy and I passed through Austin on our way here and stayed with my sister, Barbara and my brother in law, Pete. I have always enjoyed cooking with my sister and the stop there eased the difficulty of the transition back to life in North America.

We cooked and ate with them a couple of nights and our meals started off with some serious looking inch and half thick Berkshire porterhouse pork chops that ended up in a smoky dry rub and over a mesquite fire. I braised some cavolo nero (black kale/dino kale) to go with garlicky roasted yukon gold potatoes. The next day we hit a cold and blustery Austin farmer's market for fresh shrimp to pair with chaurice and andouille sausages from my friend Jessie Griffith's Dai Due kitchen in a batch of Mardi Gras week Jambalaya. I roasted both tomatoes and shrimp shells (yes, separately) to make a rich stock to cook the shrimp in to put over the rice base and it spicy success.

When we had arrived in Austin it was 72 degrees and that had dropped into the high 40's the next day, but that still didn't prepare me for my arrival in Portland. We got in at 8:45 at night and it was a windy 37 degrees, with a hard sideways rain pelting down. We ended up at Kathy's house, a bit southeast in Scotts Mills, which I'm still getting used to calling "home" around 10:30, and suddenly I was a North American again.

And yes, the food has been decidedly of the cold weather "comfort" nature as it hasn't risen much above 50 in the ten days I've been here and the evenings visit into the mid-30's pretty frequently. The first dinner I cooked was a roasted locally raised organic chicken and really, is there no better comfort food than a roast chicken? Not only does it warm and fill the house with that wonderful roast chicken smell, it is ever so good for the soul.

We are beginning to get some of those first of the spring vegetables and I had forgotten how much I have missed asparagus and artichokes. I grew up in the East Bay in Northern California and learned to eat those two representatives of Spring at an early age. My parents grew asparagus in our back yard in Lafayette and they often teased my about how, in my early years, I even ate the asparagus off their plates as well as those on my own.

Artichokes were even more of a family tradition as we would take two jaunts a year down to the Monterey Peninsula, one in the Spring and one in the Fall (timed coincidentally, or perhaps not) with the two yearly yields of artichokes from the Castroville and Watsonville fields. I learned to eat the prickly thistle at the age of three and have just recently gotten over gazing gape-mouthed at those who have said they have never eaten an artichoke. How could one live without them?

I must have still been in Costa Rican mode then, when the sight of both "A" vegetables caught me by surprise at a local farmstand market. I picked up the banded stalks of asparagus as one might a precious jewel. These were the real deal; locally grown and almost sweet smelling at the stalk. And right next to them were bins of giant globe artichokes with that telltale frost bitten brownish edge at the top of their thistly leaves.

Those two were consumed the first two nights we had them at the house. The asparagus simply par-boiled and then sauteed in butter, served with a roasted rare flatiron steak from locally raised cattle. The slices of the rare (and quite delicious) beef took a backseat while I scarfed down the fat spears while they were still warm from the pan. And yes, they were amazing; sweet in that way that fresh "grass" can be and filled with that totally unique flavor.

The next night we decided to eat vegetarian and feature the artichokes as well as some goodies from Kathy's garden. I had picked through a box of last year's potatoes and onions and picked out the ones that had made it though the winter without rotting. I had been told there were still leeks in the garden. The New York Times had just published some recipes espousing leeks as the great end of winter vegetable and I had culled one I really liked for a potato-leek gratin with gruyere. Perfect.

I tromped through the fresh mud of the garden and pulled the last of the leeks out of the dense earth, their roots clumped with dark black mud. The outside pipes are still turned off to prevent freezing so it was into the kitchen to clean these babies. When I held the fresh leeks under the faucet the mud nearly exploded and flew all over the kitchen. Kathy has taken to surveying the kitchen after I have had my way with it these past few days and saying, while shaking her head, "I live with a chef". And this was certainly one of those moments.

I sliced the potatoes and tossed them with cream and salt and pepper, then layered them in a pyrex. I sliced and de-mudded the leeks and sauteed them in butter with a couple of crushed garlic cloves and laid them over the top of the potatoes. The shredded gruyere went on next and a bit more cream to moisten it all. I liked the way this looked. I covered the top with foil and popped it into the oven.

Now it was time for the chokes. I trimmed off a bit of the stem, but not too much, it is just an extension of the heart, after all, and made sure they stood up without falling. They got plopped into our largest sauce pan and were followed in by a lemon cut in half and squeezed, four crushed garlic cloves and a splash of olive oil. I filled the pot so that it came halfway up the artichokes and put it on to boil. The tops of the chokes stuck out above the edge of the pan and it turned out there was not a top in our kitchen that would fit so I improvised a stainless steel bowl as a lid and it fit nice and snug. The chokes came to a boil and I dropped the heat and affixed the bowl over the top so they could steam to doneness.

I have always been of the "mayonnaise school" as opposed to the "melted butter school" for my dipping sauce of choice and my family was always a Best Foods family. Personally, I find it a good product, but a bit sweet. I countered that by squeezing in more lemon juice and adding a couple of dashes of tabasco. I minced some small green onions quite finely and then stirred in an ounce or two of extra virgin olive oil; Best Foods just got better and I was salivating.

About 40 minutes later I pulled the foil off the gratin for the last ten minutes to get a nice crust on top and pulled a leaf out of one of the chokes to test the doneness. It was all going to happen at the same time. Excellent. We had a ripe avocado and some of those vine-ripened hot-house tomatoes, so I tossed chunks of each with lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper and that was salad. We cut wedges out of the gratin, taking in the sweet smell of the steam; we placed the giant chokes on the plate and we spooned some salad somewhere between the two. It was vegetarian and it was delightful. Kathy went back for seconds on the gratin (and had the last of hit for breakfast); great recipe. And the artichokes? Such a long-lost treat. I could eat another one today.

SMOOTHIE RITUAL

I was in bustling downtown Uvita early this afternoon, dodging semi's in the Costanera and hailing my neighbors in the Corona parking lot. I was doing some final banking and turning the key to my mail box in at the Uvita Information Center when I ran into a friend who asked me, "What are you going to miss most about being here?"

My initial answer to her was that I would miss my friends, that I would miss the small town-ness of where we live. I went on to say that I would really, really miss the cooking I had been doing at La Cusinga and had been, in fact, missing cooking quite a bit over this last four weeks of idleness. But while I was answering her, I wasn't really sure if I was being all that sincere about my answer and that I knew deep in my heart of hearts that there was another answer; the real answer.

What I will really miss, what I will miss deeply, mournfully and significantly is my morning smoothie. I have become a virtual prisoner to the mix of tropical fruits and yogurt that I place reverently into my blender each and every morning. My whole morning used to revolve around the tea ritual. The steeping of the strong black tea and intensely flavored local honey was a huge focal point of my early day but something happened, something changed.

And what happened was that I was becoming much more greatly attuned to the transcendent quality of the fruits I was peeling each day. I was paying more attention to the subtle bite of the goat's milk yogurt I got from the Mennonites. I was turning my morning ritual toward the cutting of the fruit and the layering of the yogurt. Putting tea bags and honey into a tea pot was child's play compared to this, this construction of something so much greater than the sum of its parts.

Did it happen when the passion fruit came into season and I could pull them off the vines in the back yard? Was it when I discovered Irwins, the world's sexiest and most glorious mango, oozing honey from every drop? Or was it perhaps when I started buying a "hand" of sweet bananas at the busy Feria each week from the lovely Tica girl who smiled shyly at me when her father was looking away?

I don't know, I can't say when it turned; that moment when the making of the smoothie became the apex of my morning ritual. Those who know me, my lovely fiancee, Kathy, particularly, will tell you that I am a creature who adores, no, that's inaccurate, demands a morning ritual. The rising, the opening of the doors and windows, flipping on the computer, the first glass of cold mint/green tea to ease down the ibuprofin and fish oil, those are mechanical, yet ritualistic. The tea kettle is filled with water and the flame is lit, the tea bags and honey go into the teapot; ritual.

Everything that follows is ritual as well. I get on the floor to stretch and meditate, I pour the first cup of tea, I read emails, Facebook, SF Gate and the NY Times. I begin the crossword puzzle but I don't finish it; yes, ritual. But I now realize, that all these are just small steps on the path to the true ritual. I know they are because now I am starting to delay the rising from the chair, to savor the moments, the building up to that series of steps that makes, yes makes, the morning.

On the counter are the bananas, the sweet ripe bananas. They are the foundation, the staple and the body of the smoothie. If everyday were a perfect day, next to them would be four or five gold and red oblong Irwin mangos. The Irwin is majestic, soulful, succulent and downright sexual. To me, it is the mango of my dreams, culinary, erotic and otherwise. I worked for a fine, fine produce company my last two years in San Francisco and never once did I taste either bananas or (particularly) mangos that came remotely close to this amazing fruit.

I choose the two ripest bananas and after squeezing the mangos and then passing each of them in front of my twitching nose, I choose today's participant. I lay these on the cutting board and saunter out the back door toward the maracuya bush; home of passion fruit. If I am lucky, there will be a perfect speciman, gold not green, and with that perfect amount of "give". And yes, there is.

The bananas are peeled, broken into chunks and fed into the blender bottom. The mango ritual is next and I love the way the little Wusthof paring knife slides the skins off the tender fruit. I work my way around the seed, cutting off moist sticky slabs of the golden fruit. The mango joins the banana and greedily I suck the mango peels like artichoke leaves so that none of that heavenly flesh goes to waste. I cut the maracuya in half and admire its perfectly formed seed sac and the tiny seeds inside. It is quite a sensual sight. I don't want the passionfruit's acid to spoil the sweetness so only the seedsac from one side of the fruit goes in. There will be more for tomorrow.

I have pulled the yogurt container from the refrigerator along with a bowl of tiny ice cubes (because that's the kind of ice cube trays I have). The container is shaken and the thick white goat's milk yogurt joins the fruits. The flavor of this yogurt is so goaty and distinct, almost a bit much by itself, but oh, the harmony it creates. A handful of ice cubes go in, both for chill and to cut the richness just a bit. I sigh and turn the blender on to 7. Always to 7 and only to 7.

This is a ritual.

I am beginning to salivate and I rock the whirring blender to make sure all the yogurt slides down into the golden mix. When I can no longer hear the ice cubes I know. I know the moment that this has all been building to is approaching. And better yet, I know that this mix will make exactly two, not one, but two glasses of that which makes it possible for me to leave the house, to go forward with my day, to achieve greatness, to deal with challenge, to be the man I know I can be.

The glass is brought forth and the glass mixer is leaned forward for the pour. The smoothie nearly walks out of the mixer, thick, viscous and oh, so golden. It layers itself into the glass as if it knows that this is its sole purpose in life. I sigh with contentment, cover the mixer and hastily put it in the refrigerator. I take my glass to the counter and standing behind it I take that first gulp. And yes, it is the perfect smoothie. It is rich, it is fruity and it is the stuff of dreams. There is a sense and a purpose in going on. This is what ritual is all about, and yes, this is definitely what I will miss the most.

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THE ROAST CHICKEN MEDITATIONS

The Roast Chicken Meditations

It has often been said that if you have a house you want to sell you should bake cookies to entice prospective buyers. I have a deep belief that they would be even further seduced by the scents arising from a chicken roasting to a crackle skinned doneness in the oven. There are few things that I do in my kitchen at home that speak to my basic cooking instincts like roasting a chicken.

There is something so entirely satisfying about readying the bird for the oven; anointing it with a bit of butter, or olive oil or a simple squeeze of lemon; filling it's innards with that same split lemon, or sprigs of fresh rosemary and/or thyme, or several cloves of partially crushed garlic, or, all of the above. I forego the roasting rack that goes beneath the bird and instead build a celebratory pyre of sliced carrots, wedges of onion and more peeled garlic cloves. The bird goes on top and then into the hot oven.

And then, for that proscribed amount of time, perhaps 45 minutes for a smaller specimen, perhaps up to an hour and twenty minutes for a four and a half pound bird, your time is your own. It is just you and that book, or some perfect chicken roasting music (or for me, both) and the smells that begin to waft from the oven. There is of course, the interruption about twenty minutes into the process for the opening of the over door (ahh, more lovely smells) and the placing of the halved or quartered small potatoes around the bird, but it is, if well planned, brief.

The bird is in the oven, the book is in the lap, Bill Frisell is noodling exquisitely on his guitar and all is right with the world. If this isn't cheap and significant therapy, I'm not sure what to recommend that would be. It works wonderfully if it is cold and rainy outside, but I found out yesterday, it works just as well on a tropical late afternoon in Costa Rica. I sat on the back patio, and the book, the music and the smells were all just as they should have been.

It was clear that the climate has no influence on the effect of the roasting chicken on the psyche and the soul when I suddenly looked down and realized I hadn't read a page in several minutes and had not been aware that the cd had moved right on to the next one in the shuffle. I stretched out on the chair behind me and put my feet back up on the chair in front of me. The cicadas were clicking madly and a few goofy "gallinas de la montana" were warbling their insane warble. The sun had slid down behind the coconut trees and the air was rich with the smell of a deeply burnished bird.

So yes, one must arise to rescue the bird, but there is security in knowing that it must, as the French say, "repose" for several minutes before it falls prey to the carving knife. A salad might be made at this point, a simple salad; tomatoes sliced, even an avocado broken into and mixed with a dash of "jugo de mandarina", but this is lazy work, work done at a restful and serene pace. Don't make a dressing, just splash some olive oil and citrus juice on the greens; sea salt and a few grinds of black pepper. The salad will far better accompany the simple flavors of the chicken dressed this way.

It's all ready. Cut the bird anyway you like. I like to start with a leg, but then, I am a "leg man". Grab a few crispy potato pieces, a hunk of two of browned carrot and some of the fallen apart but caramelized wedges of onion. The garlic cloves, roasted to perfection; grab a few of those, too.

Load the plate up and push some of that simply dressed salad on there. Tilt up the roasting pan and pour some of those chicken-y fatty juices over the whole damn thing. Perfect, just perfect.

Eat. And enjoy.