No-Sweat Bread

At long-last, I joined the club: I made my first loaf of the sensational no-knead bread, from the Jim Lahey technique popularized by Mark Bittman in the New York Times a couple years ago.

I have always been a little shy about baking. It always seemed like hard science, and I have always seen myself as more of a poet, better suited to the no-measure, dash-of-this-dash-of-that of cooking. In truth, I greatly enjoy science and have been avoiding the oven all these years more from laziness than anything.

Thanks to Lahey and Bittman, however, even laziness is an unworthy excuse. The entire “active” part of the process takes five minutes, if done with absurd deliberation – maybe eight minutes if one adds in the washing-up time. It takes me longer to ride the five kilometers and back to fetch a loaf of exquisite Transylvania Bakery peasant bread than to make one of my own, leaving aside the time the dough is doing its own thing, with no help from me – fermenting, resting, rising, or baking. Way longer.

Be Careful

I arrived in Austin as dusk was beginning to descend and was at loose-ends until a meeting at noon the next day. I had a relatively sedate, if not exactly sedentary, evening planned. I had mapped-out a three hour trek that would take me to a seemingly well-regarded BBQ joint, into the heart of the downtown South by Southwest Festival scene, and back through the University of Texas campus to the crappy hotel where I was staying.

Forty minutes after setting-out, I found myself on Austin’s East 12th Street, as grim and raw as any nighttime streetscape you might care to imagine. The streets were just empty enough to feel abandoned, just populated enough to exude a palpable desperation. There was almost no car traffic, despite the relative breadth of the thoroughfare. I had no intention, of course, of wandering into an area of human tragedy. Google Maps can chart one’s path to bypass such things as toll roads or highways, but it does not counsel the avoidance of poverty and hopelessness. And I was not of a mind to alter course, in any event.

Sunday Picnic under the Banyan Tree

The Best

The Bakery in Auroville makes the best Pain au Chocolat in the world. Period.

I say this after having done decades of research in Paris. My work has not been as methodical or exhaustive, perhaps, as the arrondissment-by-arrondissment croissant sampling performed by my friend, Rich Pekelney; but it has been reasonably extensive.

It is not that the dough has the diaphanous flakiness of that little bakery on the Rue de Fourcy or uses a chocolate of the silky richness of the place on Rue Saint Louis En L’Ile. On both counts, the Auroville pains au chocolat rate acceptably, not superbly. The true measure of greatness of these pastries is largely a function of location.

There may be a place on this earth in greater need of high-quality pain au chocolat than South India; but, with all due respect for authenticity and origin, Paris is not it; and I’ve yet to discover it. By meeting this serious necessity with deftness and abundance, The Bakery at Auroville wins my vote for the best pain au chocolat in the world.

Salmonberry Jam and Other Acts of Domesticity

Summer has been slow to reach the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, and the natives have been getting restless. While we are sweating our asses off in India all winter, they are slogging through cold, grey, short days. The folks here seem relived and excited, in equal measure, that the cloudless skies of summer finally seem to have arrived.

My major disappointment about the unseasonably cold June is that the blackberries, which grow in such profusion here, will be slow to ripen. Fortunately, the fabulous salmonberry is now ripe for the plucking.

Yet Another Reason Vancouver Rocks

This afternoon, under cool, grey skies, Yoo-Mi and Ellen rolled out the driveway on bicycle; and I launched a sea kayak from the beach in front of the house. Roughly an hour later, we rendezvoused on the dock at Granville Island, and began combing the aisleways of the Public Market for the makings of dinner.

Not a bad way to “run to the store.”

Feed the Need for Speed

Tenzing started skiing this winter; but I was in India, and didn’t have a chance to see him on the hill, much less to teach him myself. Thanks to my mother, and a nice late season at Kirkwood, Zing and I were able to spend the day together cutting-it-up.

I credit ski racing as the single most positive, thoroughly formative influence in my life, from which so many other great things have cascaded. It taught me invaluable lessons about the abundance and easy accessibility of joy, the power of fearlessness, the fascinating relationship between the mental and physical sides of human perfectibility, and the pleasure of kicking ass. It would not disappoint me in the least to see Zing’s obvious love of speed and well-carved turns take him in the same direction.

Eat the Damned Food

I leaned to my right and whispered into Tenzing’s ear so that no one else could hear. My secret message was soon shared with everyone at the table, if not everyone in the restaurant.

“Mimi,” said Tenzing, referring to my mother, “Markie said I should eat the damned food. Do you think I should eat the damned food? I’m not sure I want to eat any more of the damned food.”

Meter-Long Coffee

India is justly famous for its chai – known in Starbucksland by the just-in-case-you-didn’t-get-it-the-first-time, Babelicly echoful moniker “Chai Tea Latte” – but in South India, coffee rules the streets. It is both repast and entertainment, as coffee-wallahs (how do you say “barista” in Tamil?) serve “meter-long coffee,” so called because the dense shot of “filter coffee” and sugary boiled milk are mixed cup-to-cup at full arms’ length. (Not all practitioners achieve the dramatic lengths depicted in my photo, above.)

Mud Between My Toes

Today was yet another pre-dawn morning. We accompanied the teenage students of the Sri Aurobindo International School to ashram-owned paddy lands, near Ousteri Lake on the Pondicherry – Tamil Nadu border, to harvest sesame (til).

For them, as for us, the outing was a way to experience the basic mechanics of agriculture – or at least one significant part of the process – and remind ourselves from where our food comes. It was also hard work and good fun.