113 ~ Life lived through moussaka (or, ‘From moussaka to Oaxaca’)
With this abundantly dry and sunny autumn, the gardens have been pushing out an abundance of late season produce - tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, cabbages, kale, multiple re-growths of broccoli, etc. Also, my two pear and two apple trees finally came into their own this year and produced bumper crops. The corn was also fairly productive and, as usual, abundant in its beauty.
Jewelry box on a stalk.
An October haul of cabbages and the last of the ‘sun gold’ cherry tomatoes.
I’ve not had time to write many posts of late in large measure because I've been so occupied with preservation, and getting 'stories' into jars or into the freezer for winter: tomato sauce, ratatouille, sauerkraut, canned ginger pears, apple-pear chutney, green tomato chutney, apple-pear sauce, dried pears, dried apples... The list goes on.
A pot of apple-pear chutney on the simmer; the kitchen smells very good when making chutney…
In this season of scrambling to use or preserve all the goodness coming from the gardens, something I like to make is moussaka, because it's a delicious way to reduce in one go the volume of eggplant and tomatoes on hand. The recipe I use is from my French friend Roland. He and I used to share a house in Vientiane, Laos. He was the country director there for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and I was working on Saola conservation, and also as an advisor to the Lao government on the protection of a large national park. We had in common a fondness for nature, and of good food. Roland is one of the best cooks I've ever known (there were bennies to being his housemate…)
Here's one of my favorite photos - Roland upon his return after some holiday home leave in France. For the flight back to Laos he filled a small suitcase with his clothes, and he filled a second, larger one with this:
His ‘essentials’ of caviar, smoked salmon, foie gras, canned chestnuts, French cheese, French wine and so forth (it reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon I love, of the “French army knife” - each of the ‘blades’ is a corkscrew).
It was extraordinary to watch Roland’s love, and talent, for cooking. Every evening he'd come home from a long day at the WWF office, and dive into the kitchen for an hour or more to prepare a stellar meal from scratch. The same again on weekends - so it was commonly 7 evenings/week he'd be in the kitchen (we get good at what we do a lot...). Often it was a humid 90 degrees (or more) outside, and maybe 95° or 100° in our kitchen once the oven and stoves got rolling. But Roland didn't mind, he'd just strip down to a pair of shorts and calmly go at it.
The wizard at his daily alchemy.
Of course, Roland didn't follow recipes; like all the best cooks I know - he just cooked. But I liked his moussaka so much I asked him to put it to the words of a recipe. This was more than ten years ago, and I still go back to his recipe almost every autumn, as I did recently, when the eggplants are purple and plump. It’s simple, but the end product fantastic. I'll share the recipe (with a couple of notations) here.
What I like about this recent batch of moussaka (photo at top) is that it was a meal of connection, which I could feel as I first prepared it, and later enjoyed (and shared with my current housemate, Grant): Starting with a recipe from of a friend, and using it to choreograph the input of eggplants, tomatoes, garlic and onions I’d first nursed through the summer and then gathered from the garden; Sichuan pepper (a.k.a., mak kheng) collected by a Lao villager I knew from his pepper tree; ground venison (substituted for the recipe’s lamb) from a doe I killed on a still evening in the woods last fall, while hunting with Corina; and milk for the moussaka's bechamel sauce hand-milked by my neighbor.
Frank Lloyd Wright called his home Taliesin his "biography in wood and stone". In some ways, that pot of moussaka is mine.
It's one of the gifts of food - the capacity to connect us. And a time for that comes next Saturday, November 2 - the Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), celebrated in Mexico and other places where people of Mexican heritage have settled. Feeding the spirits of departed loved ones with some of their foods is a beautiful part of the tradition (and one I'll be observing on Saturday). Connection is one of the most important things we have in this world, and food can help us get there. Reach for the chance as you can.
On a related note, a wee reminder in this whirl of election season rhetoric: Mexicans and Mexican culture didn't so much immigrate into America - they simply stayed behind in Mexican territory that was taken by the US in a war in 1846-1848; a war that Ulysses S. Grant himself called "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation". So if some folks of Hispanic heritage stayed behind in places like "El Paso", "San Diego", “Los Angeles” or "New Mexico", or want to revisit land that was once theirs, I'll not begrudge them. Welcome - and welcome home.
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"Autumn is a second spring, when every leaf is a flower". - Albert Camus
"The red schoolhouse I attend in fall, is sumac".
- Bird in the Bush