Miracle of the purple yam

Beni imo.  Okinawan purple yam.  I crave this food first because of its color: a kind of blooming purple, a purple that blends with midnight indigo, a purple that glows at me when I slit open the drab pale brown skin.  The yam's taste and texture are miraculous too, especially when it starts to caramelize at the edges after long roasting.  The flesh is smooth, dense, sweet as dates.  I eat it with yogurt and cinnamon, or with salty black beans and coconut rice, but mostly I eat it plain, meal after meal, hot or cold.  Complete.  

The intensity of that purple makes me a little afraid, a little thrilled.  In the heart of my kitchen, my comforting routine, comes this acute beauty, the opposite of safety.

Mariage Freres French Breakfast Tea

I woke up in a friend's tiny apartment on a gloomy day on the Upper West Side about ten years ago, rummaged through her tea, and selected a black canister with a funny French label, which I translated as "Marriage Brothers."  A few minutes later, I reflected, "This is the best tea I've ever had."  It still is.  Hints of malt and chocolate, but light and integral to the black tea taste, not added in.  A sip is just very delicate and whole.  I know I am influenced by the aura of French luxury, but I want to describe the flavor, and my resulting mood, as exalted.  Maybe I haven't changed so much since I memorized Baudelaire at 16: "Be intoxicated.  By wine, by poetry, by virtue, as you wish."  I wish tea.

The smoothness of eggplant

As a food lover, I fixate; I rarely get bored. It takes a long time for my longings to detach themselves from any one object. This summer, I have made the same recipe at least five times: Deborah Madison's "Eggplant Stew with Tomatoes, Peppers, and Chickpeas."  It's just a dressed-up tomato sauce, and the eggplant sort of disappears, then reappears as this mysterious smoothness to the taste. The paprika and the little bit of burning that usually happens in my cooking give it a smokiness.  And I cook the chick peas almost to mush so it's all very, very soft. It doesn't really need pasta: I'll be eating it as a meal unto itself now for an unbroken string of lunches and dinners.

My sister sits in the yard with her tomatoes just to spend time with them. Now the harvest. And I, the non-gardener, am lucky enough to roast a few pounds of these.

Simple beans

Dried red beans with water and a pinch of asafoetida in the crockpot around the clock develop this most amazing thick red gravy, which gets even better when you add sauteed onions and garlic and salt toward the end. (Asafoetida or hing from an Indian grocery adds this savory edge and is supposed to make the beans more digestible.) Without any labor, you get to smell this earthy, rich fragrance through the house hour after hour. The result makes canned red beans seem as flavorless as a long-distance winter tomato.

This kind of slow food I can manage.

Broiled figs

Luscious. These sounded slightly fussy and icky to me before I tried them. And in truth, when I made Deborah Madison's recipe for broiled figs with mascarpone cheese a year ago, I found them too rich and oily. But the other day, tired of that slight irritation about the mouth I get from eating a basketful of raw figs, I cut a bunch of dark-skinned, farmer's market figs in half and put them under the broiler. In a spinach salad with goat cheese and my parents' fuji apples and balsamic vinaigrette, they were sumptuous. So soft, sweet, smooth. One of those foods I feel unworthy of.