Walk With Me

In the shopping center near my parents’ old apartment, there was a flower shop that stood apart from the rest of the storefronts, angular like a kiosk dropped there accidentally. Home for the holidays on winter break, I carefully filled an application there, even listed my hobbies (cooking, reading, writing), left out where I was from, and confessed to my lack of experience. I could identify roses, carnations, and tulips but couldn’t tell apart poinsettias from amaryllis. It didn’t matter. When I handed it to the lady behind the counter, she asked if I had a driver’s license and sighed with relief when I opened my wallet. Never mind that I hadn’t driven since I totaled the used ’72 Firebird my parents had scraped together the funds to buy for my graduation. She called her husband who was out making deliveries to give him the good news. He rushed back to give me the keys to a white Dodge van in the parking lot with it’s rear doors thrown open displaying several wreaths with huge red bows destined for a house in Atherton.

I was terrified. The van was like a small bus. I drove ten miles an hour with my foot on the brakes, peering over the steering wheel, sweaty palms clenching it like a lifesaver. How do I get to Atherton? Where the hell is Atherton? I had an address on Oak Grove and a map open on the passenger seat. I was lost. Circling Menlo Park, stopping to read the house numbers, realizing too late I was in the wrong town. Joyous when I finally found the house, I parked and carried the enormous wreath to an iron gate that opened to a long driveway. I heard the bark before I saw the German Shepard bounding toward me, all fangs, snarl and spit with nothing between us but laurel and holly, so I bolted like a scared rabbit back to the van. It was noon when I had left the shop and four-fifteen when I pulled into their parking spot, pretty scraped up from trying to squeeze into the driver’s seat with a holly wreath.

The proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Wells, didn’t fire me. Instead, they let me stay in the shop to help take orders and learn to assemble flowers and wreaths in elaborate baskets. I was glad for this paid apprenticeship and they never asked me to make another delivery. Their children were grown with families of their own, they had both graduated from Berkeley and I suppose they were glad to have a student from their alma mater around. They once asked me where I was from originally and I lied, of course. No one in her right mind would confess to being Iranian in the middle of the hostage crisis.

My day started at nine when I helped Mr. Wells pull all the Christmas greens out front, all the while quizzing me on their names, then leaving me to arrange the giant clay pots of cyclamen and boxwood topiaries. Back inside, Mrs. W would offer me some of her Earl Grey tea and we’d go about the store and in the fridge “to shop”, as she liked to say, for that day’s orders. We filled the hours quickly. At noon I would be sent to the deli to pick up their usual (pastrami on rye) while I ate a tuna sandwich from home. They were generous with their knowledge and I proved to be reliable as long as I didn’t have to drive. After lunch, I’d help pack the van and Mr. Wells would leave to make the deliveries, always rolling down the window to call out “Now you girls hold down the fort 'til I get back!”

And we did. I helped guys who were buying flowers for their dates, ladies looking for pretty centerpieces for their dinner parties, and once, a nice man with shaggy hair who stopped in to buy some ferns and camellias. Together we carried the plants to his pick up truck and he followed me back into the shop and handed me a check. When I asked to see his driver’s license, his face lit up with a smile. I took down the number like I’d been told to do and he left whistling. Closing the drawer that evening, Mr. Wells gasped, “Neil Young was here? Here in my shop? Donia did you see him? Martha, did you help him? Look, look, look at this check!” He caressed the signature. “Who’s Neil Young?” I asked. He stared at me, incredulous.

Already dark by five thirty, I would bring the greenery inside and carry a watering can around the store, giving the plants one last drink. My father would often take an evening stroll and walk me home. More than once I saw him standing a few yards away in the waning light, wearing his dark wool coat with the collar turned up, hands shoved in his pockets. I’d wave. He’d nod and look away, quietly sobbing. His shoulders told me—oh how they shook. My father buried his face in his coat and waited for me to finish. We walked home in silence and you would think I’d have asked “Why are you crying, Daddy?” But no, I was too afraid of the answer: because it wasn’t meant to happen this way, because I dreamed a different dream for my daughters, because you have dirt under your fingernails, because you are too young, because you’re giving up your youth, because. His daughter should not have to work in a flower shop, for god’s sake! But my parents had taught me everything I knew about hard work. And what about everything they’d given up for me? Their home, their country, brothers and sisters, friends, patients, work, family albums, all left behind so I could be here, in this world of possibilities, to live in it, free and in charge of my own becoming.

By the time we reached our front door, one of us would wonder aloud what my mother had made for dinner and the spell was broken. My mother opened the door and pulled me in for a hug and a sniff. She said she liked the wintry smell we carried inside and while I washed up, I’d hear them in the kitchen carrying silverware and glasses, the evening news coming on, and the smell of rice and stew that drew us to the table where we were no longer unmoored. The television glowed and while we waited for Jeopardy, I told them about my day, sometimes embellishing an encounter to draw a chuckle. My mother nourished us, anchored us, and slowly we felt the ebb of the emotion that had blindsided us out there.

Three weeks went by and it was time to go back to school. I hated leaving the cozy routine of the shop. They even had a little goodbye party for me. Mr. Wells, always generous, said, “Invite your mom and dad!” But on my last afternoon, it was just the three of us, and a carrot cake. Neil Young on the stereo. A few weeks later, I wrote to the Wells and told them where I was from. Originally. They wrote back and said they didn’t care.

Ancient Fruit

Quince, Apples, and Pears  1886 Paul Cezanne

My friend Julia and I met a thousand years ago. Just days before I opened my restaurant L’Amie Donia, I ran an ad in the Palo Alto Weekly looking for line cooks and dishwashers. My office was a desk my sister had hauled out of her garage and tucked into a corner of the cozy storage room where I wrote menus and listened to NPR nestled between one hundred pound bags of flour, five gallon bins of cornmeal, gunny sacks of lentils, rice, and cannellini beans. Slowly, slowly, I had been stocking our pantry and preparing for our opening, scared out of my mind, running on coffee and adrenaline. Julia came by one morning holding out an application she’d only half filled. A tall, skinny, tanned blond, with strong ropey arms who sat on the floor even though I offered her my chair (there wasn’t room for two chairs), wearing a white T-shirt that smelled of laundry soap with faded jeans and Tevas. Who is this girl? I thought. She had just arrived home from a long cycling trip through Washington State, when her mother had shown her the ad and here she was, sitting cross legged against a case of wine, sizing me up with pursed lips (they didn’t stay that way for long). I could only offer seven dollars an hour. Okay. What time shall I be here? When I arrived the next morning at seven, she was already there, sitting by the front door on the ground in another clean white T-shirt, her hair in a loose bun. I unlocked the door, we walked in, and for the next two years, she never left my side.

To say those first few months were hard is like saying war is hard. Ask a soldier to describe the front lines, and if she’s come home unscathed, perhaps you’ll hear how poorly reality compares with what she remembers as the swell of daunting tasks intensified and swallowed her whole and that she would not exchange any of it for the easy industry of an air conditioned office with a coffee maker and a microwave in a break room. Even on grim days when incident and no-show dishwashers collided, we summoned grace in the kitchen, and I’d go home only to return just a few hours later, playing with the keys in my pocket, ready to do it all over again. I’m here because you’re here, you go, I go, put the coffee on, crank up the ovens, roast the veal bones, blanch the fries, freeze the dough, cook the apples, strain the stock, check the walk in, mise-en-place, mise-en-place, mise-en-place, whatever we can do, we will do, and no one leaves until it gets done. Yes chef.

Within this orbit, rich with friendship and work, cooks come to know each other all too well, and it wasn’t long before Julia showed her mettle. This shy, freckled girl swore like a sailor and cooked like a couple of grandmothers, reaching back to essential ingredients before they were gussied up. Ask her to make pot roast and she’d sigh, intoxicated from the beefy aroma, as if it was already on her fork. And she provided the soundtrack to those long hours we spent prepping before the doors opened. Annie Lenox, The Pretenders, Sinead, so loud, the lady next door complained. Goodbye NPR. Alchemy and curiosity made Julia a wonderful chef—like her freckles, she was born into her talent. So when she was certain that I had a very capable brigade, she went off to take the helm of another kitchen in San Francisco and we remained war buddies with plenty of scars and mangled joints for souvenirs.

The other day, I came home to find a humungous bag of lumpy, yellow quince on my porch. No note. No sorry I missed you. I reached and put one right up to my nose to sniff its lemon rose scent through a gray fuzzy coat. It didn’t take me two seconds to know who they were from. Like I said, we know each other all too well. A different fellow might have forgotten how crazy I am for this ancient fruit. Julia remembered.

I’m making this Quince Cranberry sauce to take to Thanksgiving dinner at my sister-in-law’s house. That is, if I don’t eat it all before then with yogurt and granola.

Quince Cranberry Sauce

8 medium size quinces, peeled, seeded, and cut into eighths

1 ½ cups sugar

2 Tablespoons honey

2 cups water

Zest and juice of 2 oranges

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

4-5 cardamom pods cracked

2 cups fresh cranberries

Peel and core the quince very carefully, removing any fibrous pieces. Save a tablespoon of seeds. They’re packed with pectin and will give your sauce a lovely honey consistency.

In a large saucepan, combine the sugar, honey, water, citrus juice and zest and bring to a simmer on medium heat. Wrap the crushed cardamom pods and a tablespoon of quince seeds in a piece of cheesecloth and place in the warm liquid.

Add the quince and place a piece of parchment paper with a 2 inch hole cut in the center on top to keep the fruit immersed and allow steam to escape. Simmer for an hour until the quince are tender and have begun to turn rosy.

Gently fold the cranberries with the poached quince and simmer on low heat another 45 minutes until thickened and glossy. Remove the spice pouch. Pour into jelly jars, seal, and keep refrigerated.

Lessons in Anatomy

Picasso Bullfighters

You have to wonder sometimes if we’re really in the twenty first century. We may have devices in our palms that can instantly connect and inform us, but judging from our political discourse, particularly in the realm of women’s health, we have become so prudish, obtuse, and uninformed, it may well be the sixteenth century when women donned chastity belts and men decided their fate. My mother was a midwife who had seen her share of happy and tragic childbirth, and she urged an open dialogue about sex that today would be labeled as “TMI”. In this era of contentious debate over our reproductive rights, I’m reminded of a rainy afternoon she spent giving me, what you may call, too much information.

I came home from school to find my mother waiting for me on the couch. The coffee table was set with cups and saucers, a teapot, and a plate of currant cake. If I were six, I would have thought we were having a tea party like we used to, when she sat in a circle with my dolls and teddy bears waiting for me to hand her a dollsize cup. At eleven, this request to come to the living room seemed too formal and I worried she had received a call from school forcing her to leave work early.

 My mother sat on the edge of the couch in her cream colored wool skirt and a silk blouse with a pattern of pink buds on a green vine. She couldn’t be prettier, my mother, with her slim ankles and sheer hose, a notebook open to a blank page on her lap. Without fidgeting, she dove right in. “Now darling, I want to explain to you how human beings reproduce. You may have some ideas, you may have heard things from your sisters, but I’d like to tell you the facts.” Well, she needn’t have worried, because my sisters were as forthcoming about the secrets of the human reproductive system as the Shah’s intelligence ministry, speaking in code and stopping mid-sentence if I wandered into their rooms. My mother was a nurse and a midwife schooled in England. “Right, you see this?” She took a pencil to draw a diagram, stretching her vowels as her pencil curved around the uterus. “These here you see, are the fallopian tubes – a bit like a bull’s head, hmm? And these here are the ovaries.” I sat close to her, my eyes glued to the drawing. Bull’s head? She erased the right ovary to match the left one. “See these sacs? They hold all your eggs. And it all starts here. When you get your period…” Period, I had heard of it in the bathroom from some of my advanced classmates, but until that afternoon, I had no idea what nature had in store for me. I didn’t know I carried so many eggs around (my entire allocation) in those tiny pouches. “You, me, your teachers, the kittens next door, everything came out of an egg.” Hunh.

My mother poured tea and stirred milk and a teaspoon of sugar in each cup. Then she sliced two pieces of cake, one larger than the other, knowing how I loved that yellow cake studded with currants. I had come in from a cold rain to this room with a lush Persian rug of reds, rose, and turquoise vines, where a radiator sputtered, and my mother waited to share a remarkable secret. For the next hour or so she filled blank sheets with impressive drawings of male organs, female genitalia, and what happens when they meet. Hard to believe, really, that I had made it to eleven not knowing this secret. Suddenly all those games of Doctor I’d played with my cousins seemed suspect. Had they known? Was I the simple one in our gang? Or were we all innocent when we played House or Teacher?

That my mother was extraordinary was not clear to me then. Iran in 1973, six years before the revolution, may have boasted modernity, but the subject of sex was barred, mired in ancient taboos. In a country where sex and shame are synonyms, where a woman carries the weight of her virginity like an iron curtain, there is little chance for a girl to know anything about her sexuality except for its implications of submission, surrender, and shame. The saying goes: “Better to bear a snake than a daughter.” Girls are corralled and cloaked in the guise of protecting the family honor. My mother did not want her daughters to grow up under a veil, refusing to surrender to a skewed natural order dictated by men to suppress women, turning the curse of being a woman into a blessing, opening my eyes before I could fall prey to ignorance, so I could stride through life unencumbered. With a unique approach to sex education, she intercepted the cultural taboos inflicted on women. My mother made her own rules, abiding by a personal code of conduct. On her nightstand was a worn copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. For years I had stared at the cover, leafed through its pages, disappointed to find no pictures. The summer I turned fifteen, she suggested I read it while on holiday. What, until then, I thought was some sort of sex manual, turned out to be a handbook on how a woman can become a sovereign self in a patriarchal society.

 “Come,” she said “I’ll show you the cabinet where we keep the Kotex. You should know how to use them in case I’m at work when you get it.” We returned to the sofa for another slice of cake. She chuckled to herself before reminding me of an earlier anatomy lesson. There had been a long stretch in kindergarten when I refused to wear pants, convinced that if I did, I would turn into a boy. I attended a coed international school with teachers and students from all over the world. Every day I insisted on wearing a white cotton summer dress my mother had sewn for me with a pineapple pattern. By late autumn, my mother had had enough. One afternoon, she staged a viewing while I was busy lining up dolls for a round of my favorite game, “Mrs. Harkins” (my kindergarten teacher’s name). I enjoyed playing the role of the teacher immensely, tapping my dolls with a ruler, asking them to copy what I drew on a chalkboard easel, scolding them for slouching or coming to school with unruly hair. Knowing I’d become so absorbed in role-playing that I would forget to pee, my mother said she poked her head in to remind me to go to the bathroom. Indeed I stood agitated with my legs twisted, all the while yelling at my dolls to keep quiet. Turning to leave, I warned, “Mrs. Harkins has to pee! Stay still!” When I opened the door to the bathroom I shared with my parents I saw my father in the shower with the curtain open. “Hello there!” he waved cheerfully as if we had just run into each other at the park. But for the frothy soapsuds that sat on his chest, he stood naked in the steam rising from the scalding water in the tub. Stunned, I forgot I had to pee. “What’s that?” I cried. My father was a doctor and completely casual about his private parts. Like lifting the hood of a car to show his daughter the engine and the battery, he continued to explain how all boys had a penis and two testicles, some bigger, some smaller, how you should never kick or punch a boy there unless he’s bothering you, and never allow one to touch you, elaborating on mammals, hair, breasts, egg sacs, you name it. I’m not sure how long I stayed listening to my father’s lecture, but Mrs. Harkins left the bathroom somewhat bewildered. The pineapple dress was washed, ironed, and folded into a bag of hand-me-downs, and my mother celebrated by buying me a pair of itchy wool pants.

The subject of sex did not come up again until the fall of seventh grade. Our new science teacher, Mr. Prewitt, had driven his motorcycle through Turkey to Iran. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and dark brown corduroy pants with suede ankle boots and walked the length of our classroom in long, measured strides, stopping to push back long hair behind his ears to make a point. I adored him. So forthcoming was he with his knowledge that he made our other teachers look stingy, sticking to their carefully composed curriculums. In Mr. Prewitt’s class the bell always seemed to ring just minutes after we’d begun, and each day I left wondering what he had in store for tomorrow. In November, he announced that we would finish the semester learning about the human reproductive system, reminding us to bring fresh notebooks and be prepared to do some drawings while ignoring our stifled gasps and snickers. Having had an extensive introduction to the subject over tea and cake, I felt confident. Little did I know of the turmoil brewing behind the scenes in the principal’s office. Not having sanctioned preemptive sex education, parents were in an uproar. The principal had asked my mother to intervene knowing she was well liked, respected, and as a nurse, could persuade the parents that their kids would only benefit from knowing the facts. What followed was more tea and cake – only this time she hosted forty anxious parents, and her diplomacy paid off. How comforting it was over the next few weeks to sit in Mr. Prewitt’s class, to follow the path of his yellow chalk as he drew the now familiar shapes, and copy them in my brand new spiral notebook. I owe that A+ to my mother.

This fall with the election looming and the on-going archaic discussion over contraception, abortion, and Planned Parenthood, I am reminded again of my mother’s eloquent anatomy lesson and her insistence on a sovereign self. I daresay that midwives are better equipped than politicians to insist on a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, but I can’t help wonder which candidate would speak to his children with ease and candor about these issues and ensure the rights of our daughters and grand daughters. The fact is my parents taught me about sex the same way they taught me how to swim, drive, fold laundry, sew a button, and boil an egg. It was sensible, matter-of-fact, and always with a touch of humor. And thanks to Mr. Prewitt, who traveled across the world to another continent to teach a bunch of awkward, pubescent seventh graders about sex, a few of us managed to grow up informed and unencumbered by ancient dogma. Their pragmatism is sorely missed.

Morning Cake

The first book I bought for my son was In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak. He wasn’t born yet and he didn’t have a name, but the ultrasound gave us a clear picture and the very next day, I was off to Kepler’s bookstore. I even inscribed it right there at the register: For my son and his good appetite. It hardly mattered that I had discovered this book in my twenties—it’s supple and squishy illustrations of the bakers who bake till dawn so we can have cake in the morn, spoke to me. At the time I was working ungodly bakers’ hours, sleepwalking the streets of downtown San Francisco to my job in a basement kitchen where I made enormous tubs of muffin batter.

So while my husband went to the paint store for cans of sky blue, my mother bought spools of yarn, and my sister brought over her daughter’s rocking horse, I started my son’s library. Soon his bookshelf held an impressive collection, from The Polar Express, The Giving Tree and Stone Soup, to Rascal, The Phantom Tollbooth, and To Kill a Mocking Bird. But the very first, and the books we read most often, were Sendak’s, such that Max, Mickey and Pierre were part of our family. We read them once, we read them twice, and we always made our chicken soup with rice.

Last year, I listened to Maurice Sendak’s last interview on Fresh Air while driving home. It sounded like Terry Gross was choking back tears, too, when Sendak said, “Almost certainly I will go before you so I won’t have to miss you. I will cry my way all the way to the grave. Live your life, live your life, live your life.” Remembering his earlier interviews, when he said the monsters in The Wild Things Are were modeled after the adults in his life (he had found grown-ups grotesque and never wanted to grow up to look like them with their yellow teeth, big ears and hideous hairs coming out of their noses) I wondered who looked back, when, as an old man, he’d catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Defying the world of adults, I bet he saw a ten year old boy.

Lately, my son has been spending a lot of time at the stove on Sunday mornings— inventing pancakes with sautéed bananas and chocolate, berries and yogurt, and last week, with a potato he dug out of the backyard (a compost gift). I stay out of his way, resisting the urge to butt in and flip the bananas, busying myself with the coffee press and taking photos of his creations to send to friends who inevitably reply “The apple doesn’t fall…,” and all that and I say, “Nah, he just has a good appetite.” I predicted it. More than a few have asked for his deep dish pancake recipe. So on Sunday, we poured milk in the batter and remembered Maurice Sendak, reading In The Night Kitchen out loud for what may have been the thousandth time. It was Mother’s Day, so I sat on a stool with a cup of coffee watching the careful preparation of morning cake with the season’s first cherries.

Thank you Maurice.

Writing Workshop

                                                       Pierre Bonnard,  The Letter  1906

At eleven, I was an awkward sixth grader at the Tehran International School where we were taught in English and Farsi. But on the slow bus ride home, sheets of rain falling against the windshield, you heard Norwegian, Hindi, or French in high-pitched voices rising above Radio Tehran’s tinny broadcast from the driver’s transistor radio.

Ever since my mother had started her new job, I had been letting myself in with a key she had duplicated for me on a Mickey Mouse keychain. I fretted over the key – turning it in my palm like worry beads from the moment I shut the door in the morning until I pushed it into the lock every afternoon. When the bus dropped me off, I took the stairs two at a time to get inside. I missed our afternoons. With my father at work until ten and my sisters away at college, I wasn’t crazy about coming home to an empty apartment. It took me a while to get used to sitting down alone and pulling pieces of braided bread to spread with jam she had left on the kitchen table next to a tin of cocoa and a note she had written that morning before leaving for work. She wrote—sometimes in English, sometimes in Farsi, on flowery stationery I had given for her birthday—detailed descriptions of our dinner, a recipe for salad dressing, a funny reminder about boxer shorts drying on the balcony, and her thoughts about my science project or a book she was reading. That my mother would sit down and write a letter to her daughter while she ate her toast every morning seems Victorian, but she wrote without a trace of prudishness, filling sheets of violet paper with ideas and humor and warmth. Until then, I had filled my composition books with dull paragraphs that read like lists, but her writing read like a conversation you felt privileged to be a part of. I read them again and again, filling the hours until she came home, then paced near the window overlooking the street hoping to catch a glimpse of her car before she turned into our driveway. I chopped cucumbers and tomatoes for our salad, stirred a dressing with lemon juice and olive oil, and counted to one hundred before checking the street again.

In my case the term latchkey kid is unjust. It implies neglect or the stretching of a family’s fabric. The intimacy of those letters proved that I was my mother’s confidante and when I read them, I felt cared for. Cherished. I began writing letters back. In fact, I became obsessed with paper—spending hours at the corner sundry shop in front of their small display of stationery and school supplies, taking an eternity to decide on a tablet of lined or blank sheets. I held the new notebook in my hands like a prayer book, hoping to fill its pages with words that I would later fold and leave on my mother’s pillow. Often, they were apologies—like I’m sorry I used the wrong sponge to wash the dishes, or I didn’t mean to ignore your friend’s daughter who is a year younger than me, and so on.

This letter exchange continued in my adulthood. While dating my husband, I was working grueling hours and he was often traveling for work. It was the era before email and we wrote to each other every day. Coming home dead tired I’d find an envelope in my mailbox with a seductive red and blue airmail trim, my name and address in his boyish handwriting. There was no way I was going to wait until morning to write back. Still enamored with paper, I chose the sheets lovingly and slowly we learned about each other. Now that’s Victorian! Even now, if one of us is leaving early or coming home later than usual, tender reminders are left on the kitchen counter. When our son learned to read, we tucked notes into his lunch box written in big block letters—I HOPE THIS IS THE BEST BURRITO YOU HAVE EVER EATEN!, or under his pillow from the tooth fairy, that gradually grew lengthier with illustrations and jokes. So far his replies to us have been brief, sometimes apologetic—Sorry, I left the light on. But apart from the words, we are knowing each other through our handwriting—the small close print, the big loopy cursive, tell us we are cared for. Cherished.

I don’t have my mother’s letters. They were left behind along with every glass and every spoon in our home in Tehran when we were forced into exile, but the writing lessons, even the recipes and reminders, are embedded in me like a constant companion.

In Celebration of Mother’s Day with Donia Bijan, Author of Maman's Homesick Pie

Menlo Park author and renowned chef Donia Bijan will discuss her book, Maman’s Homesick Pie: A PERSIAN HEART IN AN AMERICAN KITCHEN on Sunday, May 6^th from 3-5 pm at the Menlo Park Council Chambers, 701 Laurel Street.  Part memoir/part cookbook, Ms. Bijan uses the language of food to tell her story, and to honor her mother from whom she learned to cook and to follow her dreams.

Ms. Bijan and her book have received praise from numerous national publications such as Family Circle and Publishers Weekly:

“Treat yourself to this delectable debut …ultimately this memoir is a loving tribute to her mother, her heritage—and food. Pour yourself a cup of cardamom tea (recipe included), and indulge in this savory slice of life.” —Family Circle

A “wonderfully written memoir … so well rendered … Bijan writes movingly of her parents’ accomplishments, their difficulty adjusting to their new home, and her own burgeoning love of food and cooking … Like the perfect dessert, each chapter ends with recipes.”—Publishers Weekly

For more information about the author and her book visit: www.doniabijan.com.

For event details, call Roberta Roth at 650-330-2512 or e-mail Roberta at rlroth@menlopark.org.

Thorny with a Big Heart

Who can resist the allure of an artichoke – the bud of a thistle flower? I was a freshman in college during my first spring in California, when a girl in my dorm came back from a trip downtown with a bag of artichokes. She got permission to use the roach infested kitchen – reserved for upperclassmen – to boil them and invited a few us to join her at the picnic tables outside the cafeteria, where we plucked and dipped the thorny leaves in Miracle Whip. The days were longer and I remember we stayed out there until dusk, leisurely stacking the damp discarded leaves like a deck of cards and fanning them out until the sun went down. Those days, it seemed we had all the time in the world.

Although I enjoyed my share of doughy Domino’s pizza, I often sought the nutty taste of artichokes. From March through May you could buy four for a dollar at the grocery store, and for twenty five cents I had dinner that lasted longer than a bowl of ramen. Soon, lemon juice and olive oil replaced the cloying mayonnaise, and of course, nothing was more rewarding than scooping out the fuzzy choke and biting into that warm meaty heart.

I didn’t know then that artichokes are a California commodity. The first farms were planted on a few acres near Half Moon Bay by Italian immigrants in the late 1800s. The cool foggy summers, mild winters and proximity to the ocean were the perfect growing climate, producing a heavy spring crop and a lighter fall crop that today provides nearly one hundred percent of the nation’s supply. It’s a labor-intensive plant requiring hand harvesting with a knife and tossing the buds into a sack that workers carry on their backs as they walk in between the rows. Attempts at developing thorn-free varieties that can be harvested year round have not been able to surpass the taste of the perennial Green Globe. So from now until May, we feast on artichokes – steamed, grilled, braised, fried, raw, buried under ashes or stuffed – nothing spells spring quite like it.

It wasn’t until I went to France that my whole-steamed method seemed archaic. I was given crates of artichokes to prep and watched wide-eyed as my fellow cooks stripped the silvery green suit of armor going straight for the heart, whacking away at great speed and amassing mountains of leaves. The shelves in the walk-in refrigerator held buckets of artichoke hearts with long trimmed stems like old fashioned champagne glasses floating in acidulated water. I learned to shred through cases but never stopped lamenting the waste of all those teaspoons of flesh at the base of each leaf. Later, working for a frugal chef, I boiled the leaves and scraped their ends to make a luscious puree with lemon, shallots and butter for an exquisitely simple rack of lamb.

Back in California, I waited for March and the first sign of my prickly crop to launch the spring menu. We paraded them in a butter lettuce salad with chunks of seared foie gras, in lemony broths poached with fish and saffron, on savory tarts with hazelnut butter and ricotta, and yes, we scrimped and scraped the leaves to fill ravioli. And when the first case of baby artichokes arrived, we braised them with carrots and pearl onions, dry white wine and bay leaves, to eat warm in a shallow bowl with good crusty bread – unhurried, like we had all the time in the world.

L’Amie Donia’s Braised Artichokes

Serves 4-6

2 carrots

½ pound pearl onions

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 bay leaf

2 sprigs of thyme

2 pounds baby artichokes or 6-8 medium artichokes

2 lemons and zest of one

¼ teaspoon saffron

5 tablespoons olive oil

1 cup dry white wine

Vegetable broth or water

1 tablespoon capers

1 tablespoon chopped Italian parsley

-Peel the carrots and cut into ¼ inch slices. Peel the pearl onions and leave whole.

-Cut the stems of the artichokes and cut about ¾ inch off the tops, then break off 2 rows of leaves from the base and trim the bottoms. Gently spread the leaves of each artichoke and use a small spoon to remove the choke. Place in a bowl of cold water with the juice of one lemon.

-In a heavy saucepan, warm 4 tablespoons of olive oil over low heat. Slowly cook the carrots and onions until they begin to turn golden. Arrange the artichokes in the pan in a single layer. Add the bay leaf, fresh thyme, crushed garlic, the juice and zest of one lemon, saffron, and salt and pepper to taste.

-Pour the wine over the artichokes and add vegetable broth or water until they are just immersed. Cover and cook over medium heat for 15-20 minutes, then remove the lid, add capers, and reduce the cooking liquid over medium high heat. Use the tip of a paring knife to test the artichokes and remove from heat when they are tender.

-Sprinkle with parsley and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Serve warm in a bowl with good bread to mop up the juices, or as a side dish with roast lamb, rabbit, or fish.