schmindigo

Ici is open & it rocks. First of all, it’s an environmentalist ice cream eater’s dream: metal tasting spoons, & then your ice cream comes in a paper cup, with one of those funny starch-based biodegradable faux-plastic spoons. Can I just say what a relief all that is? I hate the plastic angst that accompanies my trips to most other ice cream shops. Ici gives you guilt-free ice cream. (If you’re one of those people who feels guilty about eating ice cream itself, I can’t help you.) The ice cream does live up to all that advance hype. Catalan hits the tongue first with rich cream, then subtle lemon, cinnamon & anise aftertones. Coffee chocolate chip has an almost cakey, dense texture. Interesting & yummy! My spoonful of Donna’s lime sorbet went pow with a burst of citrusy goodness in my mouth. We’ll be back soon to try more flavors!

Okay people, lest you think it’s all ice cream & cupcakes from here on out, here is an actual Art Moment. I’m back in the saddle with this group show, opening next week. Three photos from the Chinese Restaurant Project, Southern installment, will grace the spiffy walls of the Asia Society in New York.

Official info follows (don’t laugh too hard at the “born in the 70s” thing):

One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now

Thursday, September 7 through Sunday, December 10
At Asia Society and Museum
725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)
New York, NY

Opening reception Thursday, September 7, with a “Meet the Artists” tour starting at 6:30pm; galleries open until 9pm.

Artists in the Exhibition: Michael Arcega, Xavier Cha, Patty Chang, Binh Danh, Mari Eastman, Ala Ebtekar, Chitra Ganesh, Glenn Kaino, Geraldine Lau, Jiha Moon, Laurel Nakadate, Kaz Oshiro, Anna Sew Hoy, Jean Shin, Indigo Som, Mika Tajima, Saira Wasim

Co-Curated By Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa & Susette S. Min

Asia Society presents its first major group show devoted to contemporary Asian American art in more than twelve years. Named after Blondie’s hit song, this uniquely conceived exhibition of works by seventeen Asian American artists—most of them born during the explosion of pop culture in the 1970’s—will draw attention to the most critical and prevalent themes current among today’s young Asian American artists.

Asia Society’s groundbreaking 1994 exhibition, Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, showed the works of artists actively wrestling with their immigrant experience and the sensation of otherness. The current exhibition presents artists for whom other sensibilities and artistic questions have greater importance. One Way or Another includes works in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, installations, and video.

A fully illustrated book, One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, will be available at AsiaStore.

For information on related programs, see AsiaSociety.org or call the Asia Society box office at 212-517-ASIA.

For more information, contact Elaine Merguerian or Jennifer Suh at 212-327-9271

Ici update: At the farmers market yesterday, I saw a woman wearing a pink-sleeved baseball shirt emblazoned with the instantly recognizable Ici logo. I was so surprised that I cried out “How can there be a T-shirt when they’re not even open yet?!” She turned to me with a smile and said “we’re opening next week.” So there you have it, from the horse’s mouth, or at least one of the horses, apparently. Surely they realize how tortured our anticipation has become, especially since it’s not “early August” anymore. The paper is falling off of their windows in a sympathetically impatient way; a peek inside the open door a couple days ago revealed counters & fixtures mostly in place, but still plenty of construction dust.

Ah, summertime! Peaches, heat waves, ...& canvassers. A while back (before the heat wave, actually) the doorbell rang. Through the window I saw a pimply-faced white boy. Opening the door, I demanded, “Are you a canvasser?”

He sort of stumbled, “Uh, I don’t know what that word means, ma’am…” & then began to explain that he was part of some program to the general effect of keeping kids in school.

“Sorry, we never give money at the door…” I interrupted, & then pointing at him, added, “& canvassing is what you’re doing.”

He seemed mortified at this & mumbled assorted apologies as he turned to leave.

Think maybe I have it in me to become one of those terrifying old schoolmarms?

I can be sweet when I want to, though. Pondering what to bring to a sweltering yard party on one of those triple-digit days, I flashed: popsicles! We filled a cooler with fudgesicles, orange creamsicles, & all-fruit bars, & everyone loved it! I get to feel smug about this one, okay? Considering it was my only sign of any brain function at all during an entire week of skull-melting temperatures. You gotta take what you can get sometimes.

The ice cream scene here in Berkeley is getting kinda intense. Here is the situation in which we find ourselves:

It’s been a few years since we graduated from Fenton’s, which just wasn’t the same after the fire. I fondly remember it as the most satisfying place to watch young Asian American dudes from Cal putting away mass quantities of ice cream. (Don’t ask me about this weird fetish of mine. I promise it’s not a Mrs. Robinson thing, more of a latent Chinese mom thing.)

Mostly we’ve been going to Naia, where I usually end up with a “fruit salad” of different flavors from the sorbetto section. In wintertime it’s fun to narrow the theme down even further to a citrus salad of grapefruit, blood orange, lemon & tangerine.

Sketch is great, with a handful of lovingly selected flavors every day & a truly sweet vibe, but its hours are incompatible with late-night ice cream habits, & during the day you have to be willing to put up with Fourth Street madness.

We are breathlessly waiting for the much-hyped, Chez Panisse-pedigreed Ici to open on College; a tantalizingly vague “early August” opening is posted with luscious foodporn pictures on the papered-over windows.

In this state of heightened ice cream awareness, Donna & I were driving through downtown Berkeley this afternoon when I spotted Gelato Milano looking very minimalist & serious about itself. I hollered “Hey, Gelato Milano! Wait!” & Donna executed one of her famous instant-reflex U-turns.

Come to find out, it’s been there for seven months already! Where have we been? Not paying attention, I guess. At first glance it appears to be a pared-down version of Naia, the mere suggestion of which will surely piss the owner off, so don’t mention it unless you want an earful of bitter grievances. He used to be part of the Naia crew back when it was Mondo Gelato, & the parting of ways doesn’t sound pretty. He didn’t come right out & say “I spit upon Naia!” but we got the picture loud & clear that he considers his product to be the real deal, & theirs is “just ice cream”.

We were a bit taken aback by all this negativity, but the gelato more than made up for it. This stuff is rrrrich! The mango tasted like real mangoes & the chocolate did that indescribable good-chocolate thing in your mouth. All the flavors we tasted were way yummy. Gelatowise, he’s leaving Naia in the dust.

Atmospherewise, well, this brings me to something that I have thought lots about in the Chinese restaurant context. (Hey, I bet you were wondering when I’d ever bring that up again.) The beauty of the truly independent small business is that each business becomes an extension of its owner’s personality, & so each Chinese restaurant is unique, even if they are all serving the same fucking rangoons from Sysco.

Grumpy owners tend to do worse than cheerful owners because customers prefer a cheerful vibe, but this is not a hard & fast rule. I for one would choose a moody mom & pop place over some creepy franchise where everyone has gone through a corporate customer service training & wears the same fake smile like it’s part of their same fake uniform. As a grumpy old curmudgeon myself, I appreciate someone being real, & real tends not to be unwaveringly cheerful.

I still think the Milano guy could benefit from toning down his gelato dogma a bit, but the bottom line is, the gelato walks his talk & we’re gonna be back there soon.

For all you pro artists out there, what’s the oldest slide packet you ever got back in the mail? For all the rest of you, understand that so-called “emerging artists” spend way too much time & energy assembling packets (neatly labelled expensive slide dupes, obsessively edited resumes, copies of reviews, annoying “statements”, the all-important SASE) & sending them out to places where we’d like to show our work. Sometimes you get a studio visit &/or a show out of it. Other times, packets end up sitting in enormous piles in the back corner of some gallery, never to be seen again. Most often, though, you get your packet back a year or two later with a note saying thanks but no thanks.

But my fellow artists, have you ever gotten a packet back after SEVEN years?! We’re talking 1999. They had to put extra postage on it. I was flabbergasted at this blast from the past. This has got to be some kind of record, don’t you think?

There’s no better time to blog than right after you said you weren’t going to.

Just some tips for early-summer enjoyment:

1. Little gems have re-appeared at the farmer’s markets! I just cut them in quarters, artfully arrange slices of avocado & mango or peach amongst the lettuce, drizzle on dressing (olive oil, sherry vinegar & dab o’ dijon) & sprinkle with sea salt. Effortless! You can also include on the plate: a couple of oil-cured olives, a young carrot sliced in half lengthwise, some paper-thin radish circles, manchego shavings… whatever you’ve got. Maybe a hardboiled egg?

2. So it’s a nice hot day & you’re bewildered by the vast array of choices facing you at the Sweetheart Cafe. Fear not, because my standard there is standard for a reason: shave ice with lychees & coconut jelly is a refreshing, soothing, white-on-white festival of textures & sweetness that can’t be beat. If you want to avoid styrofoam by bringing your own bowl, I recommend a white bowl, just to stay with the theme.

Hmm… if Indigo’s hands are getting better, why isn’t she blogging?

1. Other computer activities (that would be Photoshop, Photoshop & more Photoshop) are claiming my still-scanty keyboard & mouse quotas.

2. More cooking! Salads galore! Strawberry ice cream! Strawberry everything!

3. Much pondering about writing. It would seem: the more pondering about writing, the more writing. This has been quite assertively not true lately.

With all this, we enter a new, even more stepped down phase of the blog. I realize it’s been quite thin already for the past year or more, but it’s gonna get downright onionskin for the next little while. I’m not gonna kill it dead though, because I might stage a mighty comeback sometime, & besides, the archives are still getting plenty of traffic. (I can’t figure out why people are googling “fat thumb” so often, but hey, whatever works.)

The rest of the website remains frozen in time, circa mid-2004. Someday when my hands are really fiesty & tough, all shall be updated. Until then, my advice is to get off the dang computer & go cook something divine, preferably involving basil. Or peaches.

Finally my hands are somewhat recovered from that last round of yuckiness. In order to stave off further yuckiness I’ll get to the point of this post quickly:

With food so much on my mind lately, I’ve been pondering some of my food choices, especially when it comes to seafood. In my vegetarian 20s I used to make an occasional exception for seafood because I love it so much. Now, years later, I find myself in the odd position of eating poultry much more often than seafood, not because I love poultry so much, but mostly because of a horrifying documentary I saw last year about fishing practices. In an attempt to reconcile my principle-driven desire to avoid fish altogether with my tastebud-driven desire to enjoy eating fish, I have been perusing the very excellent Seafood Watch site where you can download wallet-size guides tailored to different regions of the USA. It’s a little overwhelming, but for now, I’ve decided that I will eat salmon once a year, on my birthday (which happily falls in the middle of salmon season), making sure that the salmon is wild-caught in Alaska.

If you tried to look at my website on Friday, sorry, the venerable Well went down & took me with it. Everything back to normal now. Meanwhile, I shoulda known those last few posts were sounding a little cocky. Both hands are very tired, sore & achey right now. It sucks. I’m gonna go curl up in a little ball until it gets better. Two steps forward, one step back. Kinda like the weather… a sweet dose of sunshine & warmth, now back to torrential downpours. Color me Eeyore.

Good hand news, part one: a while ago I said that I could have spent all this hand-time writing poems about hands, but it just wasn’t like that. Also, toward the beginning of the hand ordeal I had tried to read various, more obvious kinds of writing about hands & hand injuries, & they just weren’t what I needed. They were too much what was already going on in my head: what does the hand do, how does the hand work (or not work), how important is the hand, blah blah. It was all so tedious, so I gave up on such reading pretty quickly. I didn’t realize that what I needed was poetry about hands, written by someone else. Well, I found it & I’m so glad: The Book of a Hundred Hands by Cole Swenson. It’s great. I’m not up on the lingo of how to describe poetry, but it has certain things in common with two other poetry books I’ve really liked recently: Crush by Richard Siken and Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy.

Good hand news, part two: I found a very nice wool coat on deep, deep discount for $29. As may be expected from such a screaming bargain, it required some attention: 2 buttons to be sewn on. Just a few weeks ago I probably would have felt that I could not accomplish such a thing, or would have tried it with my left hand. But no! My right hand said, “I can do that!” & it did! Not only did it, but did it with ease & grace. This made me very, very cheerful. That plus the weather easing up ever so slightly—we have had moments of actual warmth & sunshine in between the continuing rain.

Light at the end o’ the tunnel, perhaps?

I was attacked with a severe bread jones last night. I think it’s the granola’s fault. We’ve been making our own (an adaptation of the Tassajara recipe), so breakfast lately has been granola, strawberries, & Straus maple yogurt—displacing my longstanding toast habit. Lo & behold, 2 or 3 whole weeks went by with nary a loaf of Acme in the house. Suddenly yesterday I needed a slice of levain. So fortunate are we to live in Berkeley, where such an itch can be scratched almost quicker than thought. I ate it first with butter last night, then just now for lunch with Brebiou from the Cheeseboard. Aaaah.

Now that I’ve regained some of my bread molecules, I must also report that slicing the bread was noticeably easier this time! I think the hand may have to share the blame for the bread drought… granola is much easier for the hand to face, first thing in the morning. It was so upsetting not to be able to slice bread (or, more recently, to slice it in an unenjoyable, anxious, struggling way), I guess I had subconsciouly decided I’d rather not eat it at all. Terrible. Hopefully that’s over.

Plus, it’s not raining today!

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I’m only about to say everything that everyone else around here is already saying, so if repetition bores you, stop reading. But I can’t help it, & there’s a reason why everyone is wailing: what is up with the fucking rain??? I swear I’m starting to mold. Half of the plants in our garden have literally drownded. (That’s not a typo. I like “drownded” better than “drowned”.) Notwithstanding jokes about Seattle & clever references to ark-building, we are all truly going insane here in the Bay Area. All I want to do is eat & sleep. I’m not a coffee drinker but I’ve been hitting the Scharffenberger & the organic genmaicha pretty hard. I’ve become convinced that my hand would get well if only it would stop raining. Or more like, how can my hand possibly improve in this weather? I am so fucking impatient.

I did, however, make gnocchi the other day. Remember that French Laundry cookbook from the library? When I checked it out I swore it was only for my reading pleasure, that I was not going to be so foolhardy as to attempt any of the insanely complex recipes. Well. First of all, some of the recipes aren’t actually that complex, & second of all, I am a total sucker for gnocchi, but for various workaholic reasons hadn’t made it in probably ten years, & third of all… see above for weather-induced stircraziness.

My hands did everything they could manage, but in the end my gnocchi inevitably turned out to be a rustic, chunky variation of the recipe. (Hey, you try mashing potatoes with a weak left hand.) It’s actually fairly interesting textural contrast; you get these whole chunks of unmashed potato in the middle of your gnocchi. & since it’s fresh pasta & the sauce calls for half a stick of butter, who’s complaining?

Well, maybe the dishwasher (who, for the record, did not actually complain even though she had every right to). By the time I got done I had used every pot, pan, mixing bowl & utensil in the kitchen. I even thought of making a list of the specific implements for you, but I had too much gnocchi dough stuck to my hands.

Fortunately, the recipe makes a lot of gnocchi:

It’s leftovers heaven!

So, to recap coping mechanisms for interminable, torrential suckiness:
1. Complain (this includes cursing a lot)
2. Eat chocolate
3. Drink caffeinated drinks
4. Sleep
5. Undertake time-consuming, starchy, fatty cooking projects

Kinda hungover from a surfeit of films this week, but everything I saw was good. The SF International Asian American Film Festival always gives me the warm fuzzies, & it just seems to keep getting better year after year. I don’t know how they do it. The festival folks put together such a smorgasbord of great stuff & manage to suffuse the entire proceedings with a friendly, earnest enthusiasm that is blessedly free of posturing, hype, attitude & bullshit. Hats off once again to Chi-hui & crew, y’all rock.

Some highlights of what I saw: Eve & the Firehorse totally nailed 1970s Chinese Canadian girlhood (well… if I may extrapolate from my own 1970s Chinese American girlhood). I really hope they get some USA distribution going on because I want to see it again & bring everyone I know!

Micha Peled’s China Blue left me totally exhausted after watching young garment workers in China toil over mountains of jeans, logging 17-hour workdays for pathetic wages.

I always love good shorts, & this year the paperclip-obsessed Stationery won my heart.

After all that & more, I think I can’t see any more films for a little while. I’ll be reading cookbooks instead, starting with the French Laundry cookbook I checked out from the library. Talk about food porn!

Popover report: 1st try with the new recipe was a nice, poofy success. The popovers leapt cheerfully & confidently out of their silicups, held their mushroom shape well, & were plenty yummy. However, we missed the custardy elasticity of Moosewood’s appropriately-named Custardy Popovers, which contain proportionally twice as much egg. Next time I will use the custardy proportions with the temperature & time of the new recipe & see what happens.

Oh, dear. This is why the net can be so addictive. In my low-computer disengagement I had missed the absurdly silly cupcake rap. (Thanks to SFGate culture blog for cluing me in to this fine manifestation of cupcake consciousness.)

In non-cupcake news, I think I actually am sick, but I’m keeping it under control with various manifestations of Airborne. By the way: in the universe of house brand Airborne knock-offs (of which there are many), my vote for best flavor goes to the one from Albertson’s. It tastes better than real Airborne!

The bad news: my drive n’ swim adventure last week exhausted me so much that I am now trying to fight off a cold. (Well, the bizarrely freezing weather might be a factor, too.) I guess I won’t try that again for a little while. It’s kind of strange how such a tame-sounding experiment can wipe a person out, but Feldenkrais Goddess explained it to me in terms of how the nervous system (already stressed by injury) gets kinda overwhelmed because you are—at least subconsciously—aware that driving is actually a dangerous, potentially lethal activity. Very different from cutting cabbage, which, even if you fail miserably at it, does not kill you.

This brings me to the good news: I passed the cabbage test! I figured out how to cut a cabbage in half! You have to be very mindful, very in-the-moment, very flexible. Just like with the cauliflower, except even more so. Actually I attribute this success more to mental skill than to actual improved hand strength, but both do count for something in my continuing Kitchen Hand Olympics.

All this cabbage-halving is due to my continued love affair with Orangette’s user-friendly braised cabbage recipe, which has proven to be downright elastic in its flexibility. We’ve been tucking in artichokes (the little heart size), as well as whole, slim, young carrots (in multi colors) instead of the chopped ones in the recipe. Also, bulk sea salt seems to do just fine instead of fancy Maldon, & a mixture of red & green cabbage adds to the variety.

I did it! I did it! Yesterday I drove myself to the pool, swam, showered, got dressed & drove myself back home! This is Major Hand Progress. On the other hand (er… no pun intended…) I was totally exhausted for the entire rest of the day, could not do anything but lie on the couch under a down comforter, watching Oprah, & ended up in bed before 9pm. In fact I am still tired today. So maybe I shouldn’t make this a habit quite yet. But it was totally thrilling to realize that I can, in fact, choose to take myself swimming when other modes of transport are unavailable. I’ve been relying heavily upon the generosity of Swimming Kitty’s Swim Team Carpool—Swimming Kitty is so sweet to cart me back & forth all the time, & she won’t even let me give her gas money!—but of course, she can’t always go swimming when I can/want to, & as all swimmers know, sometimes you just gotta swim!

On my way back from the pool, wanting to flex my newfound driving independence—& also knowing I would be too tired to fix myself lunch at home—I stopped at Bakesale Betty’s. Betty’s chicken pot pies have been the subject of great speculation & fantasy, ever since our first visit there many months ago, when we witnessed the piemaking in progress. (That was also the time Betty’s husband gave each of us an entire slice of banana bread!) For one reason & another, I never got to taste the elusive chicken pot pies until yesterday, when I asked, “Is there anything lunchish?” & heard the wonderful, music-to-my-ears reply “We have chicken pot pies, fresh out of the oven!”

So, any time you anticipate such a thing for so long, there is always the distinct possibility of dissappointment, is there not? Well, good news: Betty’s chicken pot pies are everything a chicken pot pie should be, & those are not words you should take lightly, coming from me. First of all: the crust. This is real live, genuine pie pastry, not some shortbread/cobbler/whatever kind of cheaper & easier excuse for pastry. You get the real deal both on the top & on the bottom thus preserving the entirely-enclosed integrity of the pie. How many so-called chicken pot pies out there try to pass themselves off with only a top crust? Feh!

Okay, then, the filling: the chicken is not (as you find too often) overcooked cardboardy white meat. On the contrary, it is perfectly done, in nice big plentiful chunks. You also get nice big chunks of carrots & celery, & the rich sauce is blessedly cornstarch-free. Best of all for me, Betty has a very restrained hand with the pepper. Don’t know why, but a lot of inexpensive lunch foods, especially soups (I could go on about this) & basically anything with a sauce (which includes pot pies), suffer from way too much pepper—perhaps an attempt to compensate for the lack of actual, authentic flavor?—so it is rare indeed to find such unpeppered perfection.

The size is right: enough for a hearty lunch, but not so big that you feel stuffed, & the price is right too: $5 for Everything a Chicken Pot Pie Should Be. I was very, very happy indeed.