What is this?
Another day and such beauty around me: sitting by Tara on the steps in the warm sun. The stream was flowing merrily down the hill, chilling the milk bottles.
The purple potato side dish from the previous night’s curry had turned into a colourful Spanish omelette with a bit of an Indian flair. I had never before used purple potatoes, but I would do so again, as I found the colours fascinating to work with and the texture waxy. People’s faces were full of wonder, asking the question “what is it?” as they prodded the spuds with their forks, trying to decipher what they were.
The four people in the kitchen team were full of generosity and awareness. After the work period, John came down for his third coffee of the day and sat on the bench next to Dan, enjoying the sunshine. They were a pleasure to watch: a truly dashing brace of men.
I had left some onions cooking with cumin seeds and salt. Onions are the foundation of my cooking and I like to pick the big Spanish ones as time is limited: peeling and chopping one of them yields the equivalent of three or four small ones. I like to cook onions well, until they are translucent. It is important not to hurry them, not to burn them. Burnt onions turn bitter. I cover them and let them sweat, as steam helps in the cooking. I love stirring them and watching as they change from the uniform yellowish colour to crystal-like translucent strips that sweat and ooze. They seem to be asking to be joined by others: vegetables, spices, stock. Slow cooking makes such a difference to both flavour and digestion.
I used the onions as a base to make the lentil cottage pie base, and I made the topping with vegetables grown at Evan’s farm, down in the valley: parsnips, carrots, celeriac, butternut squash and potatoes. The mash was so rooty and sweet, and the bits I left chunky added a wonderful texture.
What do I come here for? Why do I feel like I wanted John to change my task? I come here to cook, and if cooking is what I came for then it is what I do. I cook, I soak quinoa, I burn aubergines on the stove until they char, I taste, I sieve, I boil and steam and squeeze and chop, crush and slice and stir. I measure and I bake, I trust, invent, improvise, I create, experiment, dance, fail, start again. I run, set tables, arrange fruit bowls, wash up, always aided by the constant soundtrack of the roars, the clangs, the drips, the hisses and rustles and rumbles of everything around me.
As I opened the refectory door to ring the bell, to tell people that the food was ready, a red kite flew quite low, over the sycamores and across the Chan Hall’s roof and started circling around the hut. The numbers of red kites have increased with the years and they seem to feel less unnerved by human presence than they used to.
What is this?
Why do I keep coming back here to the Maenllwyd, to cook, to break my back, to get exhausted, to peel away my layers of suffering, to stir the big pot of emotions? I arrive with a carload of raw materials, like the artist walking up a hill with a blank canvas and a bag of paint and brushes. When I reach the house I cannot help myself from smiling. Whatever anxiety I have brought with me drops. As soon as I go through the last gate my body shivers, as if I am arriving somewhere strangely familiar, like the sacred garden of my childhood. Arriving in this remote corner of Wales, the house and particularly the kitchen has always felt like coming home. It was many retreats after the first that I realised that I was coming home to myself. In some way, all the elements, particularly silence, meditation and cooking were enabling my true self to come out to play.
Some evenings, during supper, John would break the silence with an instruction and a question.
“Hold your question! Where is your mind? Hold your method!”
On this particular evening he said, “Where else could you get a meal like this?”
After supper, people sat by the fire. There was a beautiful full moon. The nights were cold but the days were full of autumnal glory. It was now Thursday and the week had almost gone by. I finished the day with a wonderful walk all the way up the hill. The colours of the landscape were whimsical, as the season started turning. As I came back to the house, I came across the group of sheep that had been moved in the evening so that they could graze behind the house. An old raggedy sheep and I had an eye-to-eye encounter. Our gazes locked; it felt like an attempt at communication.
What is this?
The beauty of life pulsating, the perfection of a single brown lentil on the palm of one’s hand, the complexity of my biochemistry, the billions of years of evolution that are my hands. Moss growing on a bench, alive and thriving. Being a witness did not feel enough, yet I immersed myself in its lushness. I gleamed and it filled my heart. My heart, like a beautiful chunk of moss.
The last day was a Friday. I made apple cake with cranberries, cinnamon, pecans and rose petals. It was a wholesome bake, and was completely invented. There was no recipe, so there would never again be one like it. At John’s request I made cauliflower curry with spiced rice, a raita of yogurt with cucumber and fresh mint, and chapattis. I had a lot of oranges left so I cut them into wedges and sprinkled them with cinnamon. This is another Moroccan discovery. The oranges need to be sweet and juicy and the sprinkling of cinnamon light. The combination is mind-blowing. Nothing but fresh oranges and cinnamon.
The kitchen was slowly emptying, things were going back into boxes, crates and pantry bins. It was a sad feeling yet I was ready to go home. On the last evening, John prepared a beautiful evening puja in the Chan Hall with a lot of chanting and playing of Tibetan instruments. The altar had never looked so glorious. As the cabbage flowers dropped their leaves, they had become little cradles for conkers and balls of moss.
Chapter Eleven
Fina
When I was little, my grandmother Fina’s house in the village of La Granja was always busy. It housed a big general store, a bakery and a post office. Life pulsated in every corner and the village’s daytime social life revolved around their big fridge counters where tapas and aperitifs were served to friends and shoppers just before lunchtime. My uncle Jorge lived with my grandparents. He loved walking in the wild terrain around La Granja, and was forever finding orphan animals on his early morning walks. He used to bring them back to be domesticated. So apart from dogs, horses and chickens, we also had the friendliest wild pigs, baby deer, and wild cats that looked like mini leopards and had to be kept in a cage.
My grandfather and uncles used to get up very early to bake bread for the shop, and then deliver it to houses in the neighbouring villages. People left a shopping bag hanging from a tree or a hedge outside their house with a note saying how much and what kind of bread they would like for the day. They paid at the end of the month: everyone had credit. If I was able to get up early enough, I would accompany my uncle on a delivery in the new Citroën wagon or in the estanciera, packed with giant wicker baskets filled with French bread, croissants and criollitos. Criollitos are a square, flaky, bread bun made with a lot of fat, so they melt in your mouth. Deliveries were very sociable and at the end of the round, if I was lucky, we would stop at my Great Aunt Marta’s house. She was my grandmother’s youngest sister. She loved to cook and had enormous fig trees outside the cottage-like house. Much of the garden was wild, like a meadow. She had an orchard and a kitchen garden where she grew beautiful vegetables. Her breath always smelled of garlic. She used to make and sell alfajores, which are buttery biscuits sandwiched with dulce de leche, a thick caramel which we use in most of our cakes and sweets in Argentina. I was not allowed dulce de leche because of my dairy allergies but she loved to indulge me, so she always sneaked one to me as I hid under the table where my uncle couldn’t see me. Even today I ask people to bring alfajores when they are visiting from Argentina.
Work was hard and food was important. My grandfather, Oscar, who was of French Basque descent, expected cooked lunches and suppers. Fina made big dishes of ravioli and of perfectly shaped gnocchi. She slow-cooked rich stews and ragus for hours, baked polenta and roasted her own chickens in the bakery’s wood-fired oven.
She was always thi
nking ahead, often rising at dawn to begin her preparations. She used to take me to the peach trees and show me which ones to pick for her favourite dish of baked peaches. I loved being lifted to pick the peaches, prodding them with my finger to check if they were ripe enough. I stroked the furry surface and inhaled the honey peach scent. We would put them in a wicker basket, wash them and halve them and line them up on a baking tray with a sprinkle of sugar and sometimes a few sprigs of lavender. We would do the same with figs, pears, plums and quinces.
At the end of the summer, Fina and my mother would make jams outdoors, in a giant copper pot over embers. They stewed the fruit slowly, with sugar, sometimes leaving it to reduce for a couple of days. My job was to decant the jam into a pretty dish and prepare the tray for afternoon tea in the garden.
Their cellar was full of treasures. My grandfather kept a store of cured hams and salamis from Colonia Caroya and let them hang from the oak beams. The shelves were packed with jars, wine bottles and junk. People came from the whole district to buy food in the shop because the quality was so high.
Occasionally we used to go to Colonia Caroya, which was one of the first agricultural colonies created during the Italian immigration of the nineteenth century. Groups of settlers from Friuli were allocated farms in these fertile lands. Fina’s family came with very little, escaping the feudal farming system of their homeland. They left their country and families to build a new life and never looked back, as it was impossible for them to return home, even for a visit. They worked hard, building up their lives from nothing, including each brick and tile of the house. They made mattresses from wool and the women made all the clothes.
The things that I used to take for granted take on a new dimension now that I live in a different climate. I miss the hot afternoons, sitting eating pears with Fina. I miss the way she quartered and cored the pears and the way we shared them: the slurpiness and the joy. With sun-bleached tea-towels on our laps to soak up the pear juice, we sat in the shade and talked, sharing stories, planning supper. We prepared big trays of peeled pears to be blasted in the wood-fired oven, sprinkled with a little brown sugar, butter and a splash of La Negrita rum. We waited by the oven while the pears baked. If I listened carefully, I could hear the noises of the heat softening the fruit, caramelising the seeping syrup like treacle. To accompany the baked pears, we made crème anglaise from scratch, using eggs from her plump hens. I still remember the intense yellow of the custard.
Last year I took Fina to her ancestral home in Colonia Caroya and spent the afternoon with her cousin Pablo who now lives in the house. There were grapes on the vines, and a well-kept vegetable garden. A crowd of pears sat ripening on a wooden table. I kept looking at them and finally, just as we were standing up to walk around the grounds, I asked Pablo if I could have a pear. The moment I bit into it, all the pear memory in my body began spinning. I tasted that pear, and with it, I savoured my childhood once again.
Alfajores
Makes approximately 40 biscuits
260 g cornflour
170 g plain flour (good quality OOO flour is even better)
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
200 g butter
110 g caster sugar
The yolks of three eggs
1 tsp brandy or cognac
Zest of one lemon
Dulce de leche
Desiccated coconut
Dulce de leche is a thick, milk-based, caramel sauce. You can buy it in many supermarkets and in specialist shops. You can try making your own by boiling a tin of sweetened condensed milk for an hour or longer; the thicker the consistency the better. Leaving the tin unopened, place in a pan full of water and boil for an hour and ten minutes, making sure that there is always plenty of water for the tin to be covered while it boils.
Sift together the plain flour, cornflour, baking soda and baking powder and set aside.
Beat the butter with the sugar until creamy and the sugar has dissolved.
Add the yolks to the butter/sugar mixture one by one, mixing well after each one.
Perfume with the cognac and the lemon zest.
With a spatula incorporate the dry ingredients, mixing well. Bring the mixture together into a firm dough.
Leave the dough to rest wrapped in cling film in the fridge at least for an hour. You can also freeze it for up to three months.
Pre-heat the oven to 160°C.
Roll the dough to a thickness of 4-5 mm. If the dough is too crumbly to roll out, bind with a little milk. Cut into round discs, about 4cm across.
Place the discs on a greased oven tray and return to the fridge for five minutes.
Bake the biscuits until they are firm but not brown.
After cooling, you can either store the biscuits in a tin or make the alfajores the same day.
Sandwich the biscuits together with a thick layer of dulce de leche. Roll the sides of the sandwiched biscuits in the coconut, pressing slightly so that the coconut sticks to the dulce de leche.
Alfajores will keep in a cool place for up to seven days.
Chapter Twelve
Retreat Six: The Pilgrim Cook
She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies.
~ George Byron
This was my third retreat in less than a month: a koan retreat led by Simon Child. A koan retreat is an investigative retreat in which practitioners take on a traditional short pithy Zen story (a koan) to practise with. The stories are sometimes seen as puzzles to work your way through, but this may be a poor understanding. The koan is a story that often relates an encounter between a master and disciple, usually in ancient China, and the koan often has an implied question, which is usually “what is going on here?”. There is no answer to a koan and those that pick them up looking for an answer will struggle long and hard. The koan is really a sounding board: what is important is what resonance it generates in you and what responses it eventually pulls out of you. You start off puzzling about what happened a thousand years ago, but the true response is about what is happening here and now in you.
The weather had been cold for the first two retreats, and the landscape was barren after the harshest winter in my memory. At times I wore three layers of clothes to keep warm. On this third retreat, despite the heavy snowfalls and two digit sub-zero temperatures of not so long before, things were beginning to revive. As I got ready for the retreat I noticed that bulbs were coming through. The tender maroon shoots of what would become our lovage plant were sprouting: their see-through, green leaves looked like flowers. Birds sang raucously, matching my excitement with theirs. Things were waking up, the sun was shining, and we had made it through the winter!
I felt serene and tranquil after a very emotional couple of weeks. I could not help marvelling at how much can be achieved with a raw, open, Buddha heart. The intensity of the practice had left me in quite a cathartic space, and I was working on old issues with a different understanding. I felt an enormous compassion towards my own suffering and towards my family, who are so affected by it.
I made a leek and potato soup thinking of my son, Ian. I miss my children when I come on retreats, but they are not keen on the type of food I cook here, mostly because I like experimenting and they prefer familiar flavours, for which their dad is a reliable source. Ian loves leek and potato soup, and I was missing him a lot.
I melted some butter in the pan and added a squirt of olive oil, a pinch of sea salt, freshly milled black pepper and a few saffron strands that rapidly began to seep their yellow-redness into the fat. I had never done this before, but I knew that saffron and potatoes were a good combination so it was worth an experiment. I only had a few leeks so I started with onions, cooking them until translucent, then a chopped carrot and a few stalks of celery, cut to the same size as the carrot. I added the carrot and celery to provide flavour, rather than to be noticed much. Then I added the leeks, a bit more seasoning, and covered the pot. I turned the flame
to very low, and left the vegetables to cook and sweat. Then I added new potatoes, skins still on, sliced roughly. I don’t liquidise soups: a chunky leek and potato soup is highly comforting. I strained the homemade vegetable stock onto the soup and let it cook slowly for an hour. Then I let it sit until half an hour before serving, checked the seasoning, and brought it back to the boil.
I had an interview with Simon. I felt washed out emotionally, almost as if the recent Japanese tsunami had had an effect on my soul. I reflected on our attachment to comfort, to the idea of life as a permanent thing. Yet in a second, everything can change. Life as we know it can be devastated, flattened, washed away. And despite it all, life goes on. The earth keeps moving and people go about their business.
I baked two trays of flapjack. It was like toffee when it finally cooled down, different, with a gooey, yet crunchy, texture.
For supper, I picked a few of the new leaves of lovage, just for a hint in the stew. I had dried some in the Rayburn last autumn, but the intensity of the new plant took the mushrooms to a different dimension.
The next day was beautiful, but cold. I had a burn on my leg from the hot water bottle I had taken to bed with me the previous night. It had blistered and looked nasty. I made pot after pot of green tea for the tables at meal times, to keep people warm. Chinese green tea leaves benefit from being re-used, so I kept recycling them.
In the afternoon, I made brownies. Baking always feels like an adventure. I topped the batter with dry rose petals I had brought back from Morocco, which made the two trays look beautiful as they went in the oven. The petals were hardly noticeable after the brownies cooked, but there was a hint of rose in their flavour. If people really tasted each bite, they noticed.
Scented brownies
Tales From a Zen Kitchen Page 10