Arroz Doce (Sweet Rice)

One of the years I was living in Bar Harbor I had the worst landlord. Well, no, I had two of the worst; it's difficult to say who was worse. But she owned the first place I had ever rented. Every year for Thanksgiving (or was it Christmas?) she cooked the food of a different nation. She complained to me that she had run out of cuisines, and might have to start repeating. I am fairly certain that this list did not include Portuguese cooking. Just like the 1972 edition of The Joy of Cooking doesn't have Eggplant Parmesan, the most recent edition probably doesn't have Portuguese sweet rice. Not that I'm pretending to purvey "authentic" food from the far corners of the Earth. I only mean that so far as I know there is not a Portuguese dish that has become hip and iconic in the U.S., simultaneously symbolizing the nation and being its own thing.

One does not combine milk with lemon, or anything else acidic, unless one is making buttermilk. This doesn't mean lemony creamy things are completely out--there is hollandaise (which uses lemon more for its chemical properties than its flavor) that combines lemon with butter and egg yolks. Egg yolks don't mind. There is lemon-cream sauce, although I have not tried it (I assume that since it takes tomatoes without curdling it can handle lemon, but maybe not). There is lemon curd, of course, which has nothing to do with dairy, and the filling for lemon bars, which is basically lemon curd.

But apparently it's possible to get the scent and flavor of lemon without the acidity. (What do lemons taste like without citric acid? Damned good, but I don't know.) It's called lemon extract, and I had no idea it existed until my girlfriend informed me that it lent the thick, creamy confection I was eating its lemony flavor.

"You use both the juice and the zest, or just juice?'

She gave me a bewildered, somewhat offended look. "Lemon juice? No no, we use lemon extract."

I was not convinced. Surely lemon extract could not duplicate the bright, fresh flavor of lemon zest and juice? I guess. But it would curdle the milk. And it might actually be better than fresh lemons. I do love extracts. More accurately, I love the smell of extracts. Lemon extract, almond extract, rose water. Almond extract makes a pie of grapes taste like cherries, makes sugar cookies amazing, and completes frangipane. Rose water gives lemonade a lovely fragrance and a needed bitterness. Lemon extract makes sweet rice something other than yet another rice pudding. Although the egg yolks already make it thicker (more or less solid) and more yellow than most. The color creates an interesting illusion of lemon. At least, when I tried it I assumed the color was from the lemon I tasted, not egg yolks.

I can't remember the recipe we used from a cookbook. So here is an intentionally confusing approximation:

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E X T R A C T

Terrorist Fries and Caprese

Tonight, fried potatoes and caprese for everyone! I know, you're thinking what is she feeding her poor family? Has she gone vegetarian and taken them down with her? Dear Husband is as suspicious as you are, and even more suspicious of my excuse of forgetting to buy meat today, but the caprese won him over. (Secretly, though, I have been leaning in the meatless direction. It's so healthy, and good for your heart, and I get tired of meat every day. I don't need to worry about what the DH thinks, he never reads my blog, thank God.) It's a hit all around, so colorful and so Italian! Little freddie hates tomatoes, but after I forced him to eat one bite of caprese--a slice of tomato, a slice of mozzarella, and a basil leaf or two--he couldn't stop eating it. I had to slice up some more tomatoes and pick more basil from our little garden to make us more!

look at that delectable little tidbit,
like a tiny Italian flag

The tomatoes I planted back in early July have finally been putting on fruit and ripening beautifully. Nobody believed me that they'd grow because I'm a black thumb, but I like to think it's getting a bit grey, maybe. Here they are, deep red, sweet, and with that wonderful tomato smell.

DH calls the potatoes I make "terrorist fries." That's not an insult. He loves them, but from day one has called them that. To be honest I've forgotten why. Oh yes, the first time I made them it was during the Bush years, and there was all this anti-French sentiment floating around, which he had to mock by calling them Terrorist instead.

~

Well, as fun as that was, I can't really see the point in making fun of Mormon mothers who blog about cooking for their families. Really it would be much more fun to read them yourself. I cannot possibly match the genius of: "My hubby and I have a new house rule for guarding our waistlines. If you MUST have it, you must MAKE it from scratch!"

And the end, about my imaginary husband's political commentary (actually my brother's), just sounds like me anyway.

There is a problem with fall: that it is fall. I don't really need to spell it out for you, but I will. Summer is ending. The light is lower. It's getting colder. The porch is already getting covered in dead leaves. I've apparently given up trying to write semicoherent posts.

Anyway, I'm surprised that I haven't posted something about "terrorist fries" here before. Maybe it was because I didn't want to share the silly name. Really I'm not sure what else to call them. Chips? What does one call thick-sliced potatoes roasted with lots of olive oil. They taste more or less like french fries, but round, and with a somewhat different texture (in part because the potatoes are never Russet, the variety used for french fries). Like french fries or chips they're good with barbecue sauce, or salt and malt vinegar, or this time I used balsamic because I didn't have any malt vinegar.

There are a limited number of foods I make when I don't really know what to make, and these are one of them. When I need something starchy to go along with odds and ends from the fridge, I often make these. Somehow, throwing them in the oven set to 450 F seems easier than, say, putting on a pot of rice. Their delicacy lies in how thickly they are sliced (about 1cm), which somehow seems less daunting than the subtleties of timing and proportions of water to rice. Sure, I could overbake the potatoes, too, but as long as I check them every couple of minutes, they're very easy to visually assess. When they are browned to your liking, they are done.

They are my brother's creation, although I suppose I increased the oven temperature, at first more out of haste than to create the desired consistency. I don't remember exactly how they came about, but I believe it was when we were having a LAN party. If you know what that is, then I need not say any more, and if you don't, you need not know any more. We were making baked beans and tangelo meringue pie, and, well, maybe we wanted something to go with the baked beans. Maybe we had no potato chips, and one of us suggested (it seems like this would be me) that we make potato chips. I think that was it. I remember us saying to each other that they weren't quite potato chips (they weren't crispy all the way through), they were still really good. Good enough to have stuck, apparently.

Blackberries

Wouldn't it be cool if Himalayan blackberries really came from those mountains? Not really, but my brother and I have constructed a whole mythology around it. It's strung together with a kind of botanical personification: The Himalayan blackberry is so incredibly and invasively successful here because its native home is far harsher. Adapted to cold, cold winters and very little water, here it thrives. Like the Himalayas are a bramble boot-camp.

There is a certain logic to this. They are so at home here and so impossibly hardy that they must come from some otherworldly place, and the Himalayas are that to us, rising to elevations we have never visited and on the other side of the earth. There is something alien in the brambles' utter familiarity with the landscape. Nothing native could grow so well--nativity, after all, must be nurtured. These cannot be destroyed. They will come back year after year from dry slashed up root matter forgotten in the ground. Up my street there is a family who for three years chopped them down, pulled them up, burned them, and sprayed them. They still persisted.

This year's new canes where they were "removed" last year.

My brother and I always laugh when a restoration project we're working on as employees of my father involves pulling up blackberries and planting native plants in their place. We know it won't really work. It's amazing, really, the destruction that these plants excite in people like us. The same people who are melancholy about Arizona's immigration legislation happily engage in what amounts to a campaign of firebombing on an immigrant who was brought here more than 100 years ago. Last year there was a volunteer effort to remove what looks like a multiple acre swath of nothing but blackberries along Ashland Creek. It's doomed, of course, unless the same thing is done every year. This year the new canes have grown quite tall. If anything is clear to me, it's that Himalayan blackberries are here to stay.

But they are non-native and invasive, and thus the perfect scapegoat. We need them to be our punching bag. Without the millions of brown, slain blackberry canes, the native plants planted there would not be so proudly native. The category of native has been eked out through an extensive labor of killing Himalayan blackberries. And other species, sure, but mostly them.

But this is all hocus-pocus. To most of us, blackberries are blackberries. We do not know them as native and non, Pacific and Himalayan. They are simply that ubiquitous bramble that in the late summer bears purple berries. They are the landscape that they "invade."

Though I always wondered if perhaps they came from the lower, greener slopes of the Himalayas, I admit that I didn't know until just now that in fact, if we care to deal in fact, they have nothing to do with the Himalayas. Apparently, Luther Burbank, an American horticulturalist, visited India and there found some blackberry seeds in a market. He grew them, liked them, and decided to call them "Himalayan Giant." Wikipedia and others have pinned down the species' origin to Armenia, someone going so far as to say that the only correct scientific name of the plant is Rubus armeniacus Focke (much taxological confusion surrounds it, called by several names: "R. procerus Muller, R. praecox Bertol., R. grabowskii Weihe ex Gunther et al., or R. discolor Weihe & Nees") A gardening blogger went even further, stubbornly (like a teacher's pet) referring to them as "Armenian blackberries." It is undoubtedly true they are of the region of Armenia, but what of destiny? Who is to say that this plant wasn't meant for world domination any more than it was meant for Armenia? To go even further, and really "naturalize" these things, who's to say it wasn't meant to be massacred?

It bleeds so deliciously. Well, alright, it really doesn't need to be injured or killed to yield its sweetness. Actually, more likely if you pick the berries you will get pricked. Picking blackberries marks you; your hands become stained violet, berry juice sometimes mixed with a little blood. You come back scratched up but happy.

There are quite a few considerations involved in picking blackberries. The first is water: those bushes that grow near water or are irrigated (like near a grassy field) have fatter fruit. Personally, I prefer the places that provide shade, as picking in the late August weather is liable to kill you. My brother is a proponent of two things for serious picking: the two-by-six and the plastic gallon milk jug. The two-by-six (preferably salvaged from lumber scrap) is dropped on top of a productive but mostly inaccessible patch, and used as a platform from which to reach the berries nobody else could. The milk jug, the top 1/8 or so cut off with a knife, is the preferred berry-collecting device: it has a convenient handle, a large opening, and holds quite a lot.

Although my brother is now wary of the herbicides, diesel fuel, and god knows what else contaminating the soil near the railroad tracks, the tracks near the middle school used to be one of our favorite places to pick. I remember one day in late August when we drove there in his cream-colored Mercedes diesel (to run biodiesel, of course) as enormous slate walls of cloud grew above us. It was late in the day, and the light slanted yellow from a slit of unclouded horizon. The excessive details added up then to more than they do now: The four of us picked for an hour, until we were pelted with hail. It hurt, and we ran into the car with our various buckets (gallon milk jugs with the tops cut off, yogurt containers, paper bags, who knows what else) full of berries. Like a scene in an excessively nostalgic film, the fun bulged out a little nastily. The hail increased as we drove to the store, making more and more worrisome sounds on the steel roof. One of us (not me) used a newspaper to shelter himself on his way into the store to get oats, butter, and ice cream. Like all memories, it was mostly made up.

The object of all this youthful running about in a stormy idyll was blackberry crisp a la mode, of course, though we always called it cobbler. In fact "crisp" sounds wrong to me--it couldn't possibly refer to a baked dish of berries topped with (and sometimes lined with) a mixture of oats, butter, and brown sugar. We always made it that way because both my brother and my mother were allergic to wheat.

Baking a crisp was my goal when I picked today, but there weren't enough berries, and the hours of wandering around in the heat looking for enough berries exhausted me. So I will have fresh blackberries with various dairy products: ice cream, yogurt, (lightly) whipped cream. How terrible.

Fresh blackberries are yummy, but baking them in a crisp softens their flavor for good reason: The blackberry is a queer tasting fruit. It's not even clear it is one fruit. The same bush yields various tastes: bitter, sweet, gasoline-like, bland and mealy, moldy, almost always a little sour, and sometimes very sour. Sometimes you accidentally eat an ant, which has its own acrid, strangely complimentary taste.

Much in my life has revolved around blackberries. The first outing an ex (and now friend) and I had together was, I think, picking blackberries. One of my best childhood friends, who is no longer alive, used to eat red, unripe berries from the wall of brambles at the edge of the middle school. He had something to prove, I guess. One summer not too long ago (which probably means something like five years ago) my oldest friend and I made blackberry milkshakes. (Inevitably one of you is now laughing at your own joke: my milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard.) None of these memories are endemic to blackberries, because blackberries do not need endemicity. They pop up all over the place, given just enough water.