NY Girl Eats World

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Rainforest M&M's

Our driver, James, stopped the truck abruptly at the side of the rainforest road. He leapt out and went bounding into the foliage, letting out a yelp now and again to scare away the unseen snakes. The rest of us –- four 20-something American girls, a 30-something man from Halifax and our 23-year-old Rastafarian guide –- remained in the back of the safari-style pickup.

“What’s he see, Lloyd?” I asked the guide, who’d become our fast friend.

“A cocoa tree,” he answered, with an ever-present smile.

James quickly returned holding up a large yellow-green pod as one might present a prize-winning fish by its tail. He passed it up to Lloyd and hopped back behind the wheel to bring us out of the Venus Rainforest Preserve –- a cool, dense patch in St. Lucia’s 19,000-acre rainforest blanket.

Taking a good look at the football-shaped pod, I was incredulous. “That’s where cocoa comes from?”

Lloyd fished out his pocket knife and slid it cleanly around the diameter of the pod until the shell parted into two. He carefully pulled the top half straight out the bottom and held it up so we could see the milky-colored, sponge-like pulp inside.

“We call these rainforest M&M’s,” Lloyd announced, eyes shining and lips smiling still.

He plucked a piece off the dangling flesh and it came away like the segment of an orange. Popping it into his mouth, he warned, “Don’t chew it. Just suck on it.”

I followed Lloyd’s directions. The segment pulled away and had the sticky consistency of a slice of ripe banana. I was immediately struck by its sweetness as the white flesh disintegrated in my mouth. I sucked on it down to the large pit –- the cocoa bean.

The bean was the color of a kalamata olive and had no flavor at all, though Lloyd advised us not to chew it. “It’s too hard,” he said.

In the 1950’s St. Lucia had a booming cocoa business. But the crop was soon supplanted by the more lucrative banana –- “green gold,” the fruit was called. Forests were bulldozed to make way for banana fields. And then the economic tide turned again in the 90’s, when the European Union began favoring banana exporters in Latin America. Now tourism is St. Lucia’s sustaining industry, but cocoa is starting to step back into the spotlight.

UK chocolatier Hotel Chocolat is currently developing a cocoa estate on the island and plans to build a chocolate factory. Then, if all goes well, they’ll build – oh, be still my beating heart! –- a chocolate-themed boutique hotel. (I hope that means I can eat the bed after I'm done sleeping on it.)

It’s not likely Lloyd’s “rainforest M&M’s” will go on the market anytime soon. But it’s beautiful to know that even without man and machinery to roast, mash and coax the cocoa beans into a contrived confection, there's luscious sweetness locked inside the virgin cocoa pod -- and all you have to do is open it.

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FOR MORE ST. LUCIA PHOTOS, SEE MY JOURNAL.

Thursday Farmers' Market

OK, as promised, a little on my new neighborhood. Of course I could come right out and say where I'm living now, but where's the fun in that? So let the games begin!

This collection of photos comes from my first visit to the weekly farmers' market. It's a modest gathering of mostly upstate fruit and vegetable farmers who set up tented stalls on a side street across from my apartment building. My first purchases were complete whims -- no plan of attack whatsoever: fresh cilantro, lettuce, cranberry beans, rosa bianca eggplants, and two types of apples.

I ended up using the cilantro and lettuce for a cold salad with chicken and avocado (the latter of which I purchased from a fruit vendor on a nearby corner and quickly learned an important lesson: when the sign reads "two for $1," one avocado is going to be overripe and moldy unless you pick the fruit yourself.) On another day I boiled the cranberry beans and let them stew in a dish of warm garlic-infused oil, diced tomato and onion. I diced up the eggplant and sauteed them in garlic and oil until they were melt-in-your-mouth tender. Then I showered them in grated grana. And the apples, well, they were meant for munching.

But the loot I toted home in plastic bags that day wasn't my favorite part of the farmers' market. It was being there in the thick of it and realizing that my neighbors were as beautifully diverse as the cornucopia of produce laid out for purchase. Have a look...

Ripe with Opportunity

Hey, everyone! I can only imagine what you think happened to me (did she get lost on her way to eat the world? did she jump ship and move to Spain to drown herself in Padron peppers?...). Forgive me for the long silence. I've been a very busy girl, including moving to a new and exciting 'hood that I'll introduce to you soon. But the doctor is in now, and ready to pull NY Girl Eats World out of her coma. Will you rejoin me?

Helping me jump-start the effort is my dear friend and talented writer John Clare, who last wrote about the incomparable Old Town Bar. As the freakishly summery weather we've been having in New York takes its last balmy breath, John brings us to the beach for one last visit. Enjoy.

By John Clare

Gore Vidal has an extremely short list of opportunities never to pass up: appearing on television and having sex.

Standing at the edge of the Atlantic on the unofficial last day of Summer 2007, I added one more activity to never miss: throwing yourself into the sea.

It was late morning with an onshore wind of teeth and muscle. Under an almost white, cloudless sky, the waves arrived at a sharp angle to the beach, not as stately thumpers (although they were big enough) but coming quickly, white- capped, as urgent as the wind.

Far out the sea was almost black, topped by froth, but in closer the water was green, fighting its way to the wet, pure sand of the beach.

I wasn’t alone, but nearly so. There were two young families, set up with chairs, baskets of food, shovels, pails, and kids having a three-way comedy with umbrellas and the wind. The smell of grilled meat, the pop of beer and soda bottles.

Voices carried in the wild acoustics of the wind. Monarch butterflies played in the dunes, dancing crazily over the beach and then being driven back to the dunes. Could they really be making preparations to winter in Mexico?

A four-year-old girl came and stood next to me, a ripe, half-gnawed peach in one fist and without a greeting told me that Bootsie the cat left home and never came back but we made posters telling people about Bootsie and put them up on telephone poles and at the deli but Mommy said that even if we didn’t find Bootsie it only meant some nice family had taken her in to love her like we did.

Her father came and stood next to her, also holding a supremely ripe peach from an orchard just a few miles up the road. When I caught his eye he raised his eyebrows at his daughter’s narrative. He ate delicately, catching the juice after a bite in a cupped hand, but the girl was doing real damage to the fruit, her mouth and chin smeared red with juice.

Down the beach another young man was calling to his little ones, pointing at something moving in the waves, coming in at that sharp angle, close to the shore. An older man with a sun-weathered body saw the same thing and began screwing a spinning reel to a rod.

It was a dark amoeba shape in the green water, five feet wide and ten feet long. But then it sensuously reversed those dimensions, drifting at the tops of waves, ten feet from the beach. As it came closer, the form was alive --  thousands of tiny bait fish, schooled up, driven in this close to shore by bluefish and striped bass.

The fisherman cast over the undulating school, looking to hook the big predators who feed on the run by slamming into schools of bait fish, which are also called “killies” along this coast. Gulls wheeled above the changeling school, falling dead weight into the fish, others knifing down for a closer look before banking away.

I scolded myself – when was the last time I’d gone out for blues and stripers?  I’d forgotten that fishing, like virtue, is its own reward.

Both fathers took their children’s toy pails and waded in to capture a few fish, but like the fisherman they had no luck, the school dissolving at their sweeps and then reforming. Everyone was smiling, pointing, except the man holding the fishing rod, who finally gave up, scowling.

The school passed. I waded in, waiting for the right wave and then diving through it. I pulled hard through the green-lit world of cleanliness, coldness and startling power – always bringing a thrill of fear – and surfaced, carried in the breathing swells, exhilarated.

Weightless, I watched waves rushing toward the obscured beach, then rose with the waves at my back to see over the dunes, and dropped again, no land in sight. Nothing but cruising, indifferent gulls and the great bowl of sky.

I thought of opportunities missed. Why didn’t I have peaches this morning?

The current had real authority, pulling me where it wanted. I started swimming, surfing the waves, and swimming again, fighting the undertow, finally finding my feet and hearing again the voices in the wind.

The physical euphoria stayed with me, but there was something more. For a short time I’d been like the slithering school of killies, inseparable from the sea. I was the poet’s question: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Peaches, I thought, my face in a towel, almost regaining my breath. Ripe peaches.

Insatiable

An apology to my future husband: I’m going to make one irritating pregnant lady.

Relax. I’m not getting married yet. And I’m certainly not pregnant. But I’ve already experienced how powerful and strange exotic my cravings can be.

There’s been one particular craving smoldering in the back of my belly for longer than I’d like to admit. It’s almost embarrassing. Borderline obsessive, too. There’s actually a food that I’ve quietly longed for since the day I packed my bags and left Madrid – six years ago.

No, it’s not Iberico ham. I’ve kept that one at bay by chomping on imported cousins – non-Iberico serrano, Italian prosciutto, and the like. It’s not tortilla española, either. Although I haven’t mastered the Spanish egg-and-potato omelet-cake, I can make a pretty good frittata. See, for all my favorite dishes, I’ve been able to find at least a semi-adequate substitute. Though admittedly inferior to the originals, they’ve at least been able to douse the flame of longing. But there’s one food that has no substitute or second cousin.

OK, have I tortured you enough? Well, good! Now you know 1/100th of what I’ve been feeling.

So here it is: See those innocent green peppers in the pictures? That's it. Nothing more. They're called pimientos de Padrón -- or, peppers from Padrón, a damp, chilly town in northwestern Spain.

This may be a let-down for people familiar with these thumb-sized  vegetables. Because, well, that’s just what they are – rabbit food. Funny thing is that I don’t even like green peppers. The only way I’ll eat green bell peppers is if they’re sautéed (never raw! ew!) with onions or mixed with the sweeter red or orange kinds.

But Padrón peppers are different. They’re actually sweet. And when they’re properly cooked in olive oil then sprinkled with really fine sea salt, they’re smoky and irresistible. Occasionally – maybe one in every 10 – you'll find a hot one that can sear the surface of your tongue and light up the soft insides of your cheeks. But that’s the sport of eating these “innocent” peppers.

In Spain, pimientos de Padrón are commonplace bar food. My taste-memory brings me back to a dim, narrow tapas joint – maybe six tables and a beat-up bar – just off a grooved cobblestone street in Madrid. One hand cradling a water glass of inky-red vino, I use the other to pluck Padrón from a tiny ceramic dish in the center of the table. The peppers recline in a pool of honey-colored oil, their skins charred, wrinkled and blistered. I hold the stem on the other side of my clenched teeth and pull. A pile of frayed stems builds on my bread dish. Few of my friends are actually eating the Padrón with equal fervor. They’re going for the cheese and the olives, the shrimp in garlic-oil and the croquettes, instead.

Only a few farms in the U.S. actually grow Padrón. Naturally none of them are close to me. But I’d known for a while that I could get them through La Tienda, an online shop specializing in Spanish products. I don’t know what made me finally do it. The price had always been intimidating; at $14/pound and then added shipping costs, it wasn’t encouraging. But then something inside me snapped. As if someone had puffed up their cheeks and exhaled a mouthful of oxygen on my craving-flame; I had no choice: I HAD TO HAVE THEM.

NOW.

They arrived encased like Russian nesting dolls – first a cardboard box, then a Styrofoam cooler and finally a plastic container. I’d never watched anyone cook them in Spain so I went with my instincts. I washed the peppers – about 80 in a pound – and filled a saute pan with a generous amount of oil. In anticipation, I’d bought really good sea salt to grind over them just before serving. I put the flame on medium-high and started with a handful of peppers. I quickly learned that their skins are thin and tender. They soften quickly and char even faster. I turned down the flame and worked at a clip.

In no time I had a platter of Padrón that in Spain would’ve fed no less than ten groups of bar-hoppers. But I ate them all. No, I shared them with a friend. But together we polished off the platter in one sitting. In one 15-minute period they were gone – vaporized into another taste-memory. But what a glorious 15 minutes! A desire that had lain dormant for six years suddenly satisfied in one feverish feeding frenzy.

I turned to Phil and asked him if they were as good as I had made them out to be. He smiled, nodded enthusiastically, and assured me they were. Of course the reason I’d asked him was to check if I was crazy –  to gauge whether years of longing for Spain had reshaped the memory of Padrón into something that it really wasn’t.

As I gnashed my last pepper I began to understand what this whole craving had been about. Yes, I'd longed for the taste of Padrón, but also something deeper: a life in Spain as inaccessible to me now as those little green peppers.