Life From Scratch

by Sasha Martin

  A large, whole fish like snapper, grouper, or tuna, ready to cook—about 5 pounds—or a couple small whole fish (1½ to 2 pounds each), ready to cook

  Spice paste (makes about ⅔ cup):

  Half a medium onion, quartered

  4 cloves garlic

  5 curry leaves

  2 teaspoons black peppercorns, lightly cracked

  2 teaspoons ground cumin

  2 teaspoons salt

  2 teaspoons chili powder (or to taste)

  Habanero pepper (to taste)

  A touch of vegetable oil

  Finishing touches:

  1 lime, sliced in half-moons

  Add the onion, garlic, cumin, curry leaves, black peppercorns, and salt to the food processor. Spoon in the chili powder and hunks of habanero to taste (for a less incendiary rub, omit the habanero). Puree into a thick paste, scraping the sides once or twice with a spatula.

  To prepare the fish, rinse and dry it. Cut diagonal slits along both sides of the body—about every 2 inches—to ensure even cooking. Wearing gloves to protect the hands from the spice, spread the paste all over, being sure to rub it into the crevices and belly cavity. Let rest this way for a good half hour.

  Preheat the oven to 375°F.

  Roast the whole fish on a lightly oiled rack over a foil-lined baking sheet until the crust is deeply browned, the flesh flakes easily, and a food thermometer placed into the thickest part of the fish reaches 135° to 140°F.

  Cooking times will depend on the size and type of fish used; the general guideline for a whole fish is 8 to 12 minutes per inch thickness of fish (take measurements from the girthy middle). The weight and number of fish will also impact things: A 5-pound snapper might take 45 to 55 minutes, whereas two 1½-pound fish might take 35 to 40 minutes. When in doubt, insert a knife and gently try to flake the flesh at its thickest section, down near the bone.

  Finishing touches: Serve the whole fish at the dinner table. Lift the upper fillet off of the bone by cutting along the backbone and sides, then slide a spatula between the fillet and the rib cage to lift the top fillet off. For the bottom fillet, do not flip the fish; simply lift off the backbone from the tail end to reveal the fillet below. Be mindful of any bones, but enjoy the spicy skin. Serve with rice and a squeeze of lime.

  CHAPTER 28

  One Family

  ONCE BACK IN TULSA, I miss my family more than ever. But in the summer I find unexpected solace in Mongolia. It is impossible to feel sorry for myself after reading about Mongolian nomads.

  Between the constant moving (about five times a year with the changing seasons) and the Gobi’s brutal winters (especially in the mountainous north and on the dry, grassy steppes, where temperatures can plummet to minus 40°F), Mongolians have to be tough. Even their homes—tents made of wood and felt called gers or yurts—are portable. Since little can grow in their country’s harsh conditions, they rely on meat—30 percent of the population breeds livestock. With a lifestyle constantly on the go, the food has to fit in when it can.

  But the nomads are never truly homeless. Never alone. For starters, the hospitality is extensive; anyone who turns up at a nomad’s tent will be invited for a meal and even an overnight stay. When something happens, good or bad, other nomads show up to help. They come out of nowhere, from miles away, from over bleak hills through the vast emptiness. And they chip in however they can. Although it can seem like each family unit is isolated in nothing but a giant expanse of blue sky and crusty grass, nothing could be further than the truth. These are real neighbors. Friends. Family.

  I realize with astonishment that there is a way to have a family, even from afar. But it involves reaching out continually, and communicating. In the meanwhile, even our neighbors have a role to play.

  We need each other, near and far.

  That’s when the packages from Mom start arriving. Each one contains several three-inch binders—17 total, with thousands upon thousands of pages comprising every single post and reader comment of my blog since day one.

  “Mom!” I exclaim when I call her. “What is all this?!”

  “I thought you should have a backup of the website. You’ve worked so hard.”

  I laugh. “Oh, Mom, Keith does back it up—on two different …” I stop myself before I get too technical. I explain that Keith knows what he’s doing. In fact, he’d recently been offered a double promotion to senior technical engineer responsible for 911 design and structure on a national scale for AT&T.

  “Don’t worry, Mom—he can handle this blog. It’s safe.”

  “What if the Internet disappears someday, Sash? You can’t take any chances.”

  Ava helps me line up the binders that span half the office wall. I tell her what they contain and she repeats the words, stringing them together for the first time: “Gwobal Twable Abenture.”

  Mom isn’t the only one waxing nostalgic.

  The international meals now pepper our whole week. I realize that we’ve already tried more than 500 recipes: We’ve made our own sushi, preserved peppers from our garden, and learned to make chicken 32 ways, with versions from every continent.

  On any given day, we might eat a Greek salad with green bean soup from Luxembourg and naan from Afghanistan. Dessert just as well might be Ireland’s famed Dark Chocolate Guinness Cake With Baileys Buttercream, as a tropical fruit salad inspired by Rwanda, heavy with banana and avocado. Even Grace cooks the food from her New Jersey home, every so often sharing photos of her renditions with me. It makes me feel a little closer to her somehow, almost as though we’re sharing a kitchen.

  That fall, winter won’t come. Summer lingers in the air, hot and humid, well into October. There’s only about a year left to the adventure; Ava is three and a half. As I’m deciding whether or not I should bother putting a pumpkin on our hot stoop for fear it’ll rot in the sun, I get a Facebook message from Toni.

  I haven’t heard from her in a couple of years. She says she wants to visit in November. “Yes,” I type, without hesitation, “Please come.”

  The week we cook Samoa, Toni arrives from Boston with her laugh still full of ripples. I am transported to another era, even though we’re both grown women; she now uses her neuroscience degree to research alternative medicine. She brings small gifts: a Wonder Woman apron for me, a Superman mug for Keith, and Superman pajamas for Ava.

  I don’t have gifts, I tell Toni, but I do have Samoa. I warn her she might not like the food; it’s going to be a big pot of spinach and canned meat cooked in coconut milk. I wince as I describe it, but she nods enthusiastically.

  I rinse the spinach and add it to the stirring pot, along with the meat and coconut milk. As the mixture simmers down into a swampy stew, I explain that I got the recipe idea from my mom, who once stayed in Samoa when she was pregnant with me.

  “I didn’t know that,” Toni says. I realize how little she knows about my childhood—my first childhood.

  “I don’t know why I never asked you about it,” she adds.

  “We were just kids,” I say, shrugging it off. But there’s a twinge of pain in my eyes I can only hide by looking away.

  For dessert, we head to the kitchen to make koko Samoa—Samoan rice pudding. First, I steam the rice. In another pot, I plunk a few chocolate squares into coconut milk. As the two slump together, I zest in a heavy orange. The citrus oil mists my hand and glistens on the brown surface before my spoon folds it deeper into the pot. I draw a breath. Bitter zest might not sweeten the mix, but it does deliver a gust from the rambling orchard in which it once grew.

  Toni helps me tip the tender rice into the chocolate and coconut milk. I whip with tight circles. But something is wrong. The mixture doesn’t thicken.

  Toni leans over the mixture and suggests cooking the rice with the coconut milk. She speaks with the confidence of experience; rice pudding is one of her favorite desserts. She adds that when the dry rice plumps with liquid, the outer starches slough off like the scarf and hat of a hot traveler. These swirl ab
out and thicken the coconut milk.

  But I don’t have any more coconut milk to try the recipe a second time.

  “I don’t mind,” she says as she ladles herself a bowl of the too-thin pudding. It’s chocolate, after all.

  While we spoon the thin dessert, I ask Toni about her parents.

  She smooths her napkin, “Good. They’re … good.”

  “I stopped reaching out after my wedding. I thought it best to honor their wishes. But I can start again, if you think they …”

  She nods, and then slowly shakes her head. “I would just leave it alone.”

  She sighs. “They’ve never really talked about your stay with us. I don’t think they know how. Maybe that comes from their childhoods; both of them lost a relative in sudden, tragic deaths—Papa’s brother, Mama’s mother.”

  For the first time, I tell her about how Patricia blamed me for Michael’s death. Her face falls.

  “Oh, Sasha …” She swallows hard, looking down. “That might be my doing. I told them his death was their fault. I was so angry—at them, at myself, at God. I didn’t know how to deal with the feelings. I didn’t think my outburst would affect you. I’m sorry.” She brings her tear-filled eyes back to mine. “Communication isn’t our family’s strongest suit. It wasn’t until just recently that I learned how to name my feelings about anything.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” I say quickly, seeing her flounder. “We were all young and struggling—unsure what to do with our emotions. It’s not like I handled it well. And later, I wasn’t banging down their door. I just … disappeared.”

  She leans forward, “Maybe they were afraid to make you their daughter. We could all see how much you missed your family.”

  I think about how exhausting it must have been to pour so much energy into me when I wouldn’t even let myself be their daughter.

  “But I still want to be your sister,” she quickly assures. “If I ever get married, I’m going to invite you to the wedding.”

  I shake my head quickly. “No, I—the sentiment is nice, but I wouldn’t want to fill your special day with that kind of stress. You don’t need it. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think I can take another rejection. I’ll always be open if they want to reconnect, but at some point I just have to say enough is enough.”

  She shakes her head, tears falling down her cheeks. I put my hand on hers.

  “This is enough,” I tell her, gesturing between us, softening. “This is good.”

  There’s a Samoan proverb that says, “O le fogava ‘a e tasi”: We are one family. I cannot help but wonder if Mom knew the quote when she sent us to live with the Dumonts.

  After Toni leaves, I call Mom and ask her.

  “Of course!” she chides, “Those people help each other—they know you can’t raise a child alone. Look—if a teen gets in trouble, the whole village has a meeting. Family, friends, neighbors. That’s what Margaret Mead’s research was all about—that was the main point of my trip. I wanted to see firsthand what I’d studied in psychology class.”

  Understanding came like a thunderclap. Mom had used the wisdom of the islands to circumnavigate her tough parental choices.

  That night, I write a post about Samoa and talk about Mom’s time there: how she was a free spirit, dropping everything and exploring in an era when few women would have dreamed of traveling single, pregnant, and with a toddler.

  Grace sends me a message, asking how I can always paint such a rosy picture of Mom.

  “We were the ones she escaped from when she went halfway around the world,” she said. “We were her ‘drop everything.’ Sometimes you seem to forget about all her children when talking about her.”

  But even as I read her words, I do the math: The divorce was years before Mom’s trip to Samoa. For the first time, I wonder if Grace grew up feeling like I took her mother away from her. Horrified, I want to apologize, tell her I was insensitive—not just about the blog post, but for never realizing how hard it must have been for her to see me living with Mom, even for those ten short years.

  I read on.

  “I don’t know if you understand how important you and Michael were to me, Tim, and Connor … we loved you and yearned for a relationship with you. We never ever forgot about you … ever! We did what we could to stay connected. I constantly missed you both, I sooooo wanted my sister!”

  In her words, I see my own heart reflected.

  Slowly and carefully, I write: “I couldn’t have made it without you—truly! About Mom—I’m so sorry. We have different experiences, different memories, so of course we see her—and Samoa—differently. I might paint a rosy picture—too rosy at times—but when it comes to parents, she’s all I have, Grace.”

  “I only had my dad,” she replies, and I can feel her pain through the letters on my glowing screen.

  “I never had that choice,” I type back. “Sure, sometimes I wonder about Mom’s choices. I used to try to make her the parent I needed her to be, but she is who she is. She’s all I have.

  “It hurts too much to be angry at anyone, let alone my own mother. And she is there for me now. Under it all, I know she operates out of love. I have to love her back, Grace. It’s not even a choice any more. It just is.”

  Samoan Chocolate & Orange Coconut Rice Pudding

  There’s nothing like chocolate for breakfast. This Samoan pudding uses koko Samoa (the tower of cocoa nibs and chocolate for which this dessert is named), a few orange leaves from the canopy, and fresh-squeezed coconut milk. For those of us on the mainland, dark chocolate chips and grated orange peel get across the spirit of things. As rich as this is, I find a small bowl does the trick.

  1 cup white rice (preferably medium-grain)

  4 cups water

  15 ounces coconut milk, fresh or canned

  Zest of 1 orange (or 2 to 3 orange leaves)

  ¾ cup (4 ounces) dark chocolate chips

  ½ cup sugar, or to taste

  Finishing touches:

  A small pitcher of coconut milk (optional)

  Add the rice, water, coconut milk, and orange zest to a medium pot. Bring to a simmer over high heat. Reduce heat, and maintain a gentle bubble (uncovered) for 20 to 25 minutes, or until very thick. Stir occasionally. Remove from heat, and stir in the chocolate and as much sugar as you can stand. At first the chocolate will melt unevenly. Give it a few minutes—it’ll smooth out. Serve warm, with a drizzle of extra coconut milk if desired.

  Enough for 8 to 10

  PART SIX

  Feast of Nations

  “A ripened fruit does not cling to the vine.”

  —Zimbabwean proverb

  CHAPTER 29

  A True Global Table

  SORRY, IT’S TOO COLD to eat on the front lawn,” I tease.

  Our neighbors shake their heads regretfully. We’ve invited the Beards and their girlfriends over for a San Marino potluck. There was much laughter when we realized we’d unwittingly made the same recipe for this tiny country nestled inside the mountains of Italy: swallows’ nests, called nidi di rondine.

  Given the choice, I’d do it again. Swallows’ nests are like a cross between white lasagna and cinnamon buns. A drop cloth of pasta dough is smeared with béchamel sauce, layered with ham and Emmentaler cheese, rolled into a log, and sliced. A second dose of béchamel is spooned into a casserole. The coils nestle in this white bed, insulated from the dry oven heat.

  A second quick-fix version uses puff pastry and tomato sauce. This is what the Beards made. There’s no sweating over béchamel, there’s no rolling of homemade pasta dough. But the buttery rosettes are equally decadent.

  The Beards have inhaled both casseroles; there’s not a drop of tomato or béchamel sauce on the pans.

  “That was incredible,” van Gogh says.

  “The best moment of my life,” adds George Michael.

  “It seems a shame,” I muse, “that not everyone can experience what we experienced over these last years—to taste the world’s
beauty. All of it.”

  I’m not certain if I’m feeling nostalgic because it’s the week after Toni left, or if it’s because there’s only one year left to the adventure. The list of remaining countries, less than 50, feels truncated. Though I know it is the last country we’ll cook, I find myself looking past Zimbabwe into the gutters of the page, as though I might find a forgotten country there.

  “Your mom must be proud,” Bob Ross says.

  I nod, smiling. “Yeah, I guess she is.” I tell them about the Bulgarian man who came by two years earlier, and how Mom and I talked about inviting the whole world to come together around a single table.

  “I just can’t seem to get the idea out of my head. I’d love to do something like that.” I look at Ava. She’s trying to use her small knife to cut her pasta in pieces. She’s three, speaking in full sentences. I feel both insanely proud, and also at a loss, somehow.

  “Kids grow up knowing there’s a big world out there. If they could just see all that food, from every country in the world in one place, they’d realize that we’re all connected. Since the beginning of this project, and since I arrived here, I’ve felt that Tulsa has offered up the best of its markets and produce. Now I guess I want to pay it forward.”

  The Beards nod in pendulous enthusiasm.

  “That’s a great idea,” one of them says. “A spectacle like that could really change people’s perspectives. But how are you going to cook all that food in one day?”

  Keith suggests a citywide potluck, but the question of food safety makes us all squirm.

  I think about the movie Babette’s Feast, my inspiration for going to culinary school years earlier. The heroine created a French feast, food from just one country, fed to a small group. But the effort took her days. I imagine multiplying her feast by 195. It would be a tremendous amount of food—too much for one person.