Feeding the Hungry Ghost (19 page)

In a shallow bowl, mix together the flour, ½ teaspoon of the allspice, ½ teaspoon of the turmeric, and the pinch of sea salt.

Squeeze excess water from the tofu, blot dry with a kitchen towel, and cut into bite-size cubes. Working in batches, add the tofu cubes to the bowl and toss gently, until the tofu cubes are evenly dusted with the flour mixture.

In a large sauté pan (with straight sides, as opposed to a skillet, which has sloped sides), heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over mediumhigh heat.

Line a plate with paper towels and place near the stove. Carefully place about half the tofu cubes in the pan, with enough space so that the little guys aren’t crowded. Cook until the tofu cubes get a nice little bit of crust on most sides, turning as needed with a spatula, about 9 to 10 minutes. Transfer the tofu to a plate or paper towel to absorb any extra oil. Repeat with the remaining tofu.

No need to wipe out the pan. Use it to heat the remaining 1 tablespoon oil over medium-high heat. Add the onions, garlic, ginger, jalapeño (if you like), and the remaining teaspoon each turmeric and allspice. Cook, stirring now and again, until the onions are golden from the turmeric, fragrant, and slightly tender, 5 to 8 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium, as needed, if the onions are sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Add your lovely chopped greens, a handful at a time, and cook until they just wilt, about 8 minutes for bok choy, just a minute or so for napa cabbage — callaloo’s cook time is somewhere in the middle. Add the mango and lime juice and stir to combine.

Toss in the tofu and stir gently to heat through, about 4 to 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Stir in the cilantro and scatter the cashews on top.

Easy, fabulous.

GENTLE NUDGE
the
SEVENTH: TENDING —
and
HARVESTING — YOUR OWN GARDEN

Voltaire said we must tend our own gardens. He meant it’s tough to change the world and it can get ugly and overwhelming out there, anyway. Be strategic, specific, use your energy to nurture your strengths. That, in turn, makes your own world better.

Voltaire was speaking in metaphor. These are days that call for action, not words, though. While you’re tending your own metaphoric plot of ground, tend some real stuff. Grow some of what you eat.

As a teenage Goth, I got into gardening for the romance — Keats’s Isabella watered her pot of basil with her tears (her lover’s head was inside the urn; there were issues). My teenage metaphoric garden had unnaturally high yields of angst. But it turned out I could grow more productive things, not just basil, but aru-gula and tomatoes and collards and okra and peppers and broccoli. It felt weirdly empowering, providing a sense of Emersonian self-reliance along with the vegetables. I dialed down a little bit on the eyeliner.

Voltaire never said our gardens have to be big. Just growing a pot of herbs on a sunny windowsill will yield enough to spark up some salads and make you part of the growing process, a coaxer and creator of life. Growing gives you something from almost nothing. Nature is incredibly benevolent. I am not the dirt whisperer. My plants grow because they’re in healthy soil and get the sun and water they need. Would that our own needs were so simple.

There is no better teacher than a garden — of any size. It reveals the rhythms of the earth. It shows how all its elements, from the seed to the soil to the sun, come together to produce what you eat in a minute.

It teaches humility. I don’t kid myself. I may be growing vegetables, or trying to, but the earth is running this show, not me. I had big plans when I planted purslane — tomato and purslane salad, for one. The purslane had other ideas. Like not growing. The seeds, from a local organic farmer, sprouted. All very exciting. I made much over the seedlings, praising them mightily. Then they died. Too much sun? Not enough sun? Not enough water? Poor soil drainage? Poor self-esteem?

It does not help to yell at plants. It does not make them grow faster. Or at all. Growth happens as it does, if it does — over time. I hate this. I like the point of things, the result, the harvest, more than the process. But I am learning.

Growing teaches the sweet rewards of patience. I try to think of time as the secret ingredient in cooking, the necessary but natural input in the soil, the trick that turns hey-how-are-ya into true friendship, the magic that makes everything come together. This was the lesson I harvested instead of purslane.

If I have crop failure, it’s annoying, disappointing. But it reminds me just how dependent we are on the earth and how grateful I am for true organic farmers who grow the bulk of what I eat. It teaches gratitude, to cultivate a little reverence along with your radicchio. It makes me more grateful for the miracle of fresh, ripe tomatoes.

Their names alone delight — Cherokee Purple, Mr. Stripey, Pink Ping Pong. They’re heirlooms from local farmers and gifted gardener friends. As
heirloom
suggests, they’ve been bred over generations and passed down with love, recognized for the treasures they are. They bear but the slightest resemblance to the basic beefsteak tomatoes in your supermarket, green gassed and baseball hard. I’m tired of tasteless tomatoes, tired of our increasingly
one-variety-is-all-you-get world. Why shy from variety? Why deny ourselves flavor?

My heirlooms grow leafy and leggy inside a three-foot tomato cage. They are smaller than supermarket tomatoes and not always pinup perfect, but they’re tender, juicy, yielding, warm from the sun, tempting your hands, your mouth. They have give, they have heft, they have chi.

Bring your face to them. Breathe in. Tomato plants give off a scent some call astringent. I call it sexual musk. Fresh tomatoes make you want to bring them directly to your mouth, to touch their thin membrane of skin with your lips, to enter the fruit with your teeth. It is not for nothing the French have called the tomato
pomme d’amour
— “apple of love.”

This may be other than what Voltaire had in mind when he wrote of tending your own garden, but he was a Frenchman, after all. He would understand. At least he’d deign to have some salad.

Summer Tomato Salad with Za’atar

This summer salad relies on fresh, ripe tomatoes and little else. It comes together superfast. Find za’atar, a spice blend of sumac, thyme, and sesame seeds, in most Middle Eastern markets. It adds a haunting, elusive flavor — the taste of wisdom. Should the za’atar itself prove elusive to obtain, the salad will still be bright and happy without it — though perhaps not as wise.

Nice with a fluffy, whole grainy dish like the Judeo-Christian Barley Salad (
page 69
).

Serves 4

3 gorgeous ripe tomatoes, chopped, or 3 cups grape tomatoes, halved, or a mix of the two

Juice of 2 or 3 lemons

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 fennel bulb, halved (if large) and thinly sliced

2 scallions, chopped

1 handful kalamata olives, pitted

1 handful fresh mint

1 tablespoon za’atar

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

First, grow your tomatoes.

Okay, that step is optional.

In a small bowl, whisk together the lemon juice and olive oil until emulsified.

Add the fennel, tomatoes, scallions, and olives and toss to combine. Gently fold in the mint and the za’atar. Season with salt and pepper.

Enjoy at room temperature.

INTENSE HEAT

I don’t associate fasting with greater spiritual insight. Benjamin would prefer not to associate with fasting at all. But I fast at Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, which falls late in the harvest season — one shot, one day, and you’re good to go. It reminds me to appreciate the simple things I take for granted — a good, strong cup of joe in the morning, a fresh, gentle pear at lunch.

But, you know, it’s a single day off your feed; it is not a marathon fast like Lent or Ramadan. Ramadan takes its name from
al-ramad
— intense heat. It happens during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, the hottest month of the year — usually corresponding to July. It’s thirty days of prayer and fasting from dawn to dusk, a time of returning to yourself and your family, of pledging your faith anew.

We are too easily distracted by silly worldly things. We always have been. It’s the way we’re made. Two hundred years before iPhones and reality shows,
Wordsworth wrote: “The world is too much with us;
late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

I would have lost the exclamation point at the end, but the poem’s meaning resonates. I’m fully guilty of distraction, of making myself crazy over nothing. The ritual of Ramadan appeals to me, and summer is the time to do it — it makes for a kind of bikram penance. Hot weather takes a whack at our appetites and burns away our less pleasant qualities, boiling us down to the essence of ourselves. At least that was my experience in Morocco.

Most of the Sahara is what’s known as stone desert, miles and miles of flat, dusty, stone-pocked, blasted lunar landscape. Benjamin and I had been driving all day on the rocky, roadless surface, reaching, by nightfall, a
ksar,
a compound made of mud, standing all by itself, miles from anywhere at all.

In the dark, the wind blew, the sand stung us. We knocked at the thick, arched wooden door, and after a time, a woman in robes admitted us. Inside, within the
ksar
’s high walls, the wind stopped, the air became still and silent. She showed us to our bare room, then to the central courtyard, strung with colored lights and lit with lanterns. We should come out when we were ready, she said. She would bring us dinner.

In Marrakech, we’d stayed at a
riad,
a traditional Moroccan
home built around a central courtyard. Our room was at one end, next to the kitchen, from which came heady aromas. I tiptoed by and watched two staff women at work. They were easy together in the kitchen, with its elaborate black-and-white tiled floor and not a single modern appliance in sight. They were working, but talking, too, and laughing, dancing, singing — and sometimes ululating — to music. People cook together, friends and extended family — that’s what they do. And there is always something to be done in the kitchen, so after beating back shyness, I joined them. I picked up a knife — duller than mine at home but capable of chopping carrots, onions, and zucchini for a vegetable tagine, Morocco’s famed slow-simmering stew. One cook steamed and fluffed couscous. Her friend flipped semolina griddle bread. The only Arabic phrase I knew was, “Please, special price? For me?” It didn’t matter. We could gesture, we could smile, we could nod to create a richly flavored meal and, to me, a richer day.

In Fez, we had gone shopping in the souks, where vendors displayed barrows brimming with thistly wild artichokes; bins of lustrous purple eggplants; baskets of fresh, fragrant mint; figs spilling their seeds and secrets; pyramids of dried apricots, furled like ears; pillar-size jars of spices; burlap bags filled with grains and dried beans; and at the local butcher’s stall, the head of a camel. The rest of him was missing.

In the desert, though, miles from anywhere, including the nearest market, local food takes on a different meaning. Nothing in the Sahara is local except dates and olives. In one of the great cosmic coincidences, though, they are among the most sustaining foods. They’re what you’re first served at Iftar, the breaking of the fast at the end of day during Ramadan, and they were what our robed hostess set down in front of us. Then she brought out
a ceramic cooking vessel with a conical lid. This, too, is called a tagine.

She lifted the lid, revealing not a vegetable stew, but a tumble of rice and a perfumed steam that promised something more. The rice was studded with toasted almonds, heady with saffron and olive oil, and, every now and again, never when you’d expect it, you’d come to another sliver of date. Tender, crunchy, simple but somehow thrilling, it was made entirely of pantry staples and a certain amount of genius. It was the perfect thing at journey’s end, like being enveloped in the arms of a friend.