1) I feel a poem coming on. It's admittedly silly. Yesterday's string of poet emails included this question: Under what set of circumstances would you throw down $54K on a 1926 Macallan? And for some, it would entail some deep and true love, or mending one's relationship with Jesus after funding grad school. I say this: it would entail someone resurrecting Akira Kurosawa from the dead, so that we could sit at a nice old oaken table with Babelfishes in our ears, no recording devices to spoil the honesty, and a steaming cast iron pot of sukiyaki between us, and him telling me his version of the story as to why and how he and Toshirô Mifune broke up their cinematic bro-mance. It just seems more tasty than reading the book.
Anyway.
2) I feel some poems coming on. I have been thinking about (am always thinking about) gender and domesticity, about an individual being so culturally circumscribed within it, that there is no space for the individual to contribute to the terms by which she is circumscribed. And then there are socioeconomic terms, of indentured servitude, of enslavement, as in this article, which are making me reevaluate why it is I, in my position, feel compelled to write poems on gender and domesticity. I also feel that thinking on what Harryette Mullen has done in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T, that I wouldn't necessarily be able to contribute anything "new" here. And I am wondering if it's such a bad thing, an inability to contribute anything "new," whether this means I ought to be writing domesticity at all.
3) On Filipino food as active communal/community experience/participation. Sunny has written a food post as well, and while he discusses first generation immigrants' claims that what is homemade will always be better than what is prepared and served in restaurants, and how what is prepared in restaurants "just isn't the same," it dawns on me that part of what "just isn't the same," is that social experience of hanging around the kitchen or the grill making kuwento, drinking, tsismising and all. This is important, whether or not those making kuwento are actually participating in the food preparation. I am thinking there must be something terribly disconnected or sterile feeling, or inappropriately too formal about simply having food presented at your dining room table by people you may not know, coming from elsewhere (offset or even offstage). I think about the kitchen as the center (or even the heart) of so many Filipino American households. And that no matter how accommodating the sala, everyone still finds it most comfortable gathering around the kitchen table, even after all the chairs are taken.
4) On rice cake disambiguation. I say "puto," and it could mean many things. I say "rice cake" and it could mean many more things. A Filipino gentleman at my work said to me, "Oh, you are making a bibingka?" I google searched "puto" for a proper steamed rice cake recipe, because there were so many in the Filipino cookbooks I have at home (some rice cake recipes don't even contain rice flour), and all I wanted was to cook the perfect, soft, round kind that you'd find at Goldilocks Bakery. These. Butter puto at Goldilocks is the best thing ever.
I should have known better than to settle on a recipe calling for coconut milk instead of water, if I was trying to make Goldilocks puto. But after thumbing through the many "rice cake" recipes in Reynaldo Alejandro's Philippine Cookbook (admittedly not the best cookbook but I think the one everyone has), and thinking this recipe to be the most simple, that is what I made yesterday evening, steamed rice cakes made with coconut milk. I omitted the anise seeds. They're very dense, with that sticky rice consistency, not at all cakey. Even with baking powder, they didn't rise as much as I'd hoped they would. Not bad for a first try at a food item so allegedly simple. Really, the most challenging thing was steaming with a makeshift steamer, for the Chinatown bamboo steamer I have just wasn't big enough for the silicone muffin tray. Time to size upgrade on the steamer; I think the bamboo adds a nice aroma that you simply do not get from stainless steel. By the way, if you've paid $17.95 for a bamboo steamer, you've not only paid about $12 to $14 too much, you've also bought it at the wrong place. Next attempt: puto, the non-coconut milk version.
