Umeshu: How a Workshop Saved My Weekend

On Sunday I was in a funk. It was an unspecific funk, one that had me feeling anxious and a little trapped. I spent the morning drawing little pleasure from the rituals that usually feed me on weekends (moving my body outdoors, spending hours with the Sunday New York Times, cooking) and flitted instead from email to Instagram to Facebook in a part-communicative, part-voyeuristic media binge that left me feeling even more like a caged animal. Luckily, a friend had signed me up for a workshop on how to make Umeshu, a kind of Japanese plum cordial made from Ume plums. In my cantankerous mood I was half dreading the commitment and half relieved that I had such an event to anchor my day and get me out of the house.

I heard about the workshop through the Peko Peko mailing list.  I had never tasted Umeshu before but everything I had ever tasted or seen of Peko Peko was beautiful, and delicious. A class hosted by them was bound to be worthwhile. Plus they promised snacks.

I arrived at Peko Peko headquarters--a nondescript building in Oakland--to find Yoko, one of the owners of Umami Mart, waiting outside to greet the workshop attendees. At the top of the dark stairway was a large, virtually empty room with a stage in one corner, old church pews pushed against the walls, and a few booths where the other students of the day mingled politely. I circulated the room like a tourist, taking pleasure in the details: a hand drawn sign on a neighbor's door, the intersection of a painted floor and tile, a room full of strangers: a mix of farmers, avid Umeshu drinkers looking for a more economical way to slake their thirst, Japanese natives living in California who grew up with Umeshu but had never made it themselves, and curious home cooks.

Before long we were each holding a file folder with neatly printed sheets of information. Junko, a staff member of Peko Peko, instructed us on the Umeshu process from beginning to end. She gave us history of the fruit (brought to Japan from China in 6th or 7th century), an explanation of what Umeshu is (a fruit cordial or liquer made from Ume and some kind of high proof alcohol), and, with a pride akin to showing off one's children, showed us photos of previous batches she has made of Umeshu using different kinds of Ume, alcohol, and types of sugar.

Eventually we were each given a jar and a recipe, and with Junko's gentle guidance we went through each step of making Umeshu. We sterilized the jars with vodka.

We selected our fruit, which resembles an apricot despite being called a plum. We then carefully nudged the stems from the depressions in the top of each one, using bamboo skewers, trying not to puncture the fuzzy skins.

We layered rock sugar and whole ume in our jars and then covered it all in vodka.

Finally, jars filled, we tasted a batch of Junko's Umeshu from last year while we ate homemade tofu, yellowtail sashimi and salmon croquets. 

The Umeshu was delicious. It was sweet and plummy at first (like the best fruit roll up, one woman said to me), and as I swallowed it turned tart on the tongue and left the mouth feeling refreshed and clean. I felt rejuvenated. On the drive home, my Umeshu jar buckled into the passenger seat, I couldn't stop thinking about the trajectory of the day and how much power we have, as individuals, to change our own stories. Sitting in my booth, cleaning the fragrant fruit and chatting with a fellow student, my agitated morning was a distant memory. I was calm. My mind was engaged. I felt at once shy and emboldened by being in a new place, out of my element but not overly so. It reminded me of traveling.

When we travel to foreign places we are forced to be men and women of action. We have no choice but to try new things, new foods, new words, to experience new smells and sights and customs. The only other choice is to hide out in our hotel rooms and the sheer cost of a vacation is usually incentive enough not to do that. Why, then, do we so readily abandon that same sense of curiosity and courage in our day to day? Why do we rationalize ourselves out of new experiences? Why do we let the scope of our daily lives get small?

Umeshu saved my weekend, and probably the weeks to come. My unsolicited advice to you is this: That recipe you've been meaning to try? Make it. The person you've been friend-flirting with? Call and make a date. That town or museum or hiking trail you keep hearing great things about but haven't made it to? Go there. A family member used to exasperate me when I complained of having nothing to do by saying "Only the boring are bored." Harsh perhaps, but in a way, true. To be bored is to throw up your hands in defeat. To be bored is to assume that you have seen all there is to see, tried everything under the sun, stimulated every different part of your personality. To be bored is to pace the room like a caged animal. You may be the animal, but remember, you are also the zoo keeper.

Maggie's Salad

Last weekend I had the privilege of being a bridesmaid in my friend Bree's wedding. Let me just say, in all my years of working closely with brides and more recently, seeing friends get married, I have never seen anyone so completely unruffled by stress on her wedding weekend. From the second I saw her Friday afternoon, through the hung over post-wedding brunch she was nothing but smiles, beautiful and beaming and clearly having the best weekend of her life. It was a joy to witness. An added bonus to the whole event was the reunion of some of my closest girl friends from high school. Cliche as it is, it is all too true that it does not matter how much time has passed, we drop right back in like we never skipped a beat. The only thing that has changed is each of them has become even more brilliant, more accomplished, wiser and stronger, sharper witted and bigger hearted.

The bittersweet side of the weekend was that I had to say goodbye to my man for a month. Pete's alpine climbing excursions have become common enough that you would think I would be used to saying goodbye. But while it gets easier, it is never easy and I was grateful that after saying goodbye to him in my dear friend Maggie's apartment I got to turn around and fall into a long, tight hug, and the same steady shoulder I have leaned upon, literally and figuratively, since I was 15 years old. After the bender of a weekend and my rattled nerves at sending my love into the icy mountains of Patagonia, I wanted something comforting and nourishing and simple. Salad. I know. It doesn't seem like comfort food but it was. It was as green as a salad can get, (as green as this one, also written about as a comfort food of sorts), and packed with all the things I had leeched out of my body with the weekend's festivities. The salad in and of itself is nourishing and nutritionally pious, no question about it. But the most restorative, nourishing part about it was making it and eating it with Maggie, weaving in and out of conversations covering every aspect of our lives, present, past and future.

There is a lot of emphasis these days on the food going in to our bodies, the value of each individual component, but half the time the way we eat a meal is just as important--if not more so--than the virtue of the meal itself. It doesn't have to be fancy or even particularly inventive. Just made with love, shared with love, and eaten with gusto (and probably a good glass of wine).

I used half of the ingredients we bought and left the other half in Maggie's fridge. When I came home to California, to my empty house, I recreated the dish. While I was throwing it together I got a text from Maggie, "How do I slice this fennel?"  I sent her the answer and sat down with my own green bowl, feeling suddenly a little less lonely, knowing that sturdy shoulder was only a text message away.

Slice the bulb in half...

...and then in half again.

This salad has endless variations. You can use your own favorite dressing, add different green things, more green things, other-colored things.... I added raw pumpkin seeds to mine one day and a poached egg the next. The key, no matter what, is to chop your ingredients to roughly the same size so you get all the flavors and textures in each bite.

Maggie's Salad (serves 2 for dinner)

Two big handfuls of spinach (about 2 cups)

1/2 a small bulb of fennel

One avocado 

2-3 stalks of celery

a handful of basil leaves

half a small head of broccoli

for the vinaigrette

1/2 t raw honey

1/2 t dijon mustard

juice of half a lemon

salt

1/4 cup good, green tasting extra virgin olive oil

Wash the spinach well by submerging it in a bowl of water and lifting the leaves out so the grit settles in the bottom of the bowl. Spin dry and chop roughly.

Trim the fronds from the fennel (you can add some into the salad if you like), and slice the bulb vertically in half, and then in half again. Slice thinly.

Slice the celery the same thinness as the fennel pieces. I cut mine on the diagonal.

Cut the avocado in half and remove the pit. Using a paring knife, slice the flesh three or four times, top to bottom, and then five or six times side to side, making a grid. Using a large spoon, scoop and scrape the avocado out of the skin. Repeat with the other half.

Slice the broccoli head in half, top to bottom and chop the half you are using, roughly, into pieces around the same size as the rest of the veggies.

Stack the basil leaves on top of one another and roll them up like a cigar. Using a good sharp knife (a dull one will bruise it) slice the cigar in thin strips.

Put all the salad ingredients in a large mixing bowl. In a small bowl whisk the honey, mustard, lemon juice and salt together until the ingredients are well integrated and there are no lumps of honey left. Slowly, in a stead stream, whisk the olive oil in. Taste and adjust the acid/salt/sweetness as needed.

Pour the dressing over the salad and toss gently until everything is nicely coated but not drenched. You may not need all the dressing in which case you can store the remainder in a jar at room temperature for a week.

Share with someone you love!

A New Year's Intention

 "I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false." Rainer Maria Rilke

There is great power in setting an intention, whether its written, spoken, or silently set in your own mind. 

What is your intention for 2013?

TIME OUT!

First of all, I want to say thank you to everyone for your comments and notes about my last post. It was my first really personal post and I was feeling a little shy about it. The immediate outpouring of positive responses was so encouraging and much appreciated. Please keep letting me know what you enjoy reading about!

So I had this long and nuanced post planned for this week about how stress correlates to illness and about how to seek balance in our lives and about seasonality and a few other things. Finally I realized I had written an overly verbose version of something quite simple that I want to say.

Here it is: I AM CALLING A TIME OUT.

I'm calling it for me and I'm calling it for you because chances are, you aren't calling it for yourself. It's a time out from To-Do Lists, from emails, from chores, and most importantly, from anything that involves the phrase "I should". We spend so much time running around trying to maximize our efficiency, and no matter how productive we are there is still this mounting pressure to do more, do better, and do it faster. Well not right now.

Right now it's tea time. 

Pull out your favorite mug, sit down and put your feet up. Maybe read a book, or better yet, do nothing more than admire your wool-clad toes and let the tea and the time do their work. You deserve it. I know you do.

Masala Chai

I won't bother to write a recipe here because I barely adapted it at all from one of my favorite blogs, Yummy Supper. I used almond milk, upped the amount of cardamom because I love it, and decided not to sweeten the tea but to add a little rose water which I find particularly calming when I am out of sorts.

I chose Masala Chai because when I traveled in India with my friend Rachel it was this sweet, milky, hot beverage that got us through each day. It revived us after 36 hour train rides, unnerving interactions on the street, the confusion of Indian bureaucracy and the general nerve-fraying experiences of traveling in a country that big, that crowded, and that stimulating (and thus draining).

Ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, pepper and star anise all have a mild stimulant effect which is at once comforting and rejuvenating. These spices warm the body, aid digestion, and help restore sharpness and focus to a fatigued mind.

Waking up from Routine

Photo by Ann Grinnell

I am a creature of habit. I love my routines. But lately I have been thinking about the dual nature of any practice that becomes rote. Routine is often positive --a weekly yoga class, a meatless Monday dinner, reading to a loved one before bed, a morning run. But even the best and healthiest of routines put us into a kind of autopilot. The repetition and the safety and the eventual thoughtlessness with which we ascribe to routine can prevent us at times from being in the world. I mean really being in the moment with all the senses engaged. Routine can make our worlds small, the focus narrow.

For the past few months I have been waking up early in the morning (against my instinct to hit snooze for the fourth time) to write for a while before my day of DOING THINGS begins. I sit in the same place, in the same way, with a cup of hot water and the shades pulled up and I watch the morning, the subtly shifting but mostly unchanged scene outside my window. After a few weeks I decided to sit outside instead of looking at the outside. It was a transformative experience. I felt--pardon the terrible cliche--alive. Instead of seeing the wind in the oak trees I felt the wind on my face. Instead of noticing a bird on a blooming sunflower I heard and watched two little finches flirt and fight over the leafy perch. Instead of noting the morning fog I smelled the Pacific, felt the salty damp on my skin. 

It's gotten me thinking--what do I miss each day by being a slave to even the healthiest of my routines? What passes me by? What and who do I take for granted? What do I miss by sticking to what I already know? 

I don't mean to say that we should forsake routine altogether in the name of potential experiential bliss.  But I would like to suggest that most of us could benefit from occasionally lifting our heads, and opening our senses to the unfamiliar. 

Erica greets the unknown

So often we think of health as something achieved by a careful calculation of nutrients taken in, calories expended, and vices moderated or avoided altogether. With all that calculating we forget sometimes to factor in pleasure, the wonder that can come from a spontaneous adventure, the unpredictable and hilarious turns that an unplanned night can take, the nourishment we receive from honestly connecting with another person. 

As always this is one woman’s opinion. But after a couple of months of deciding to say yes to just about everything and of relaxing my sometimes rigid rules and routines, I urge you to change it up. Don’t wait for the new year to try new things or to resolve. Start today. The changes can be small. Go for a walk alone without your headphones; sit in a different chair at your kitchen table; tell a loved one exactly why he or she is loved; eat your meal without reading or watching a screen or listening to music; get in the car, pick a direction, and explore like a tourist even in your own town; stay up to watch a meteor shower; get up to watch the sun rise; see and taste and smell and touch everything; become acutely aware of even the tiniest gifts--the sweetness of a breath taken in and let go.