postcards from america

Private Cooking in Kauai:
When B asked me to join her invitation as a private chef for a family reunion on the island of Kauai, it was an irresistible way to escape the winter doldrums. Kauai is a small green island that lies in the northwest of the Hawaiian archipelago (the world’s most isolated group of islands at almost 3000kms distance from the nearest continent).

The patriarch’s 90th birthday was the occasion to bring together nearly 30 members spanning four generations. The hub of activities was a wonderful 19thC plantation house built by early missionaries on Hanalei Bay. My greatest anxiety was that we might not have much more than taro, pineapple and fish to cook with for 2 weeks, but we were to be pleasantly surprised.
A volcanic tropical paradise of 60,000 people and haven for outdoor enthusiasts with caves to explore, seas to fish and kayak, steep pinnacles to trek, waves to surf, lagoons and bays to swim and rivers to paddle, Kauai boasts one of the world’s highest rainfalls at over 400”!
The Pacific island “life a la manjana” mentality draws a mix of old hippies living “au naturel”, wealthy mainlanders with sprawling holiday estates, and a local mix of islanders (Hawaiian, Filipino etc) whose traditional cultures have long been wiped out by earlier missionaries.
Most dawns brought a torrent of rain ensuring a phenomenal growth rate for plants, followed by brilliant sunshine. The island’s most renowned fish providore was only around the corner with daily supplies of ahi (tuna), mahimahi (dolphin fish), ono (wahoo), uku (snapper), monchong (a type of pomfret) remarkable for their size and freshness but lacking finesse when it came to breaking the fish down.

Hanalei also boasted a twice-weekly farmers’ market and an outstanding albeit expensive organic healthfood shop. Less than 20 minutes away at Kapaa and Kilauea were two other farmers’ markets.
These markets proved to be our godsend, especially the stalls of Hannah and Maria, who had Asian treasures in their garden that they brought to sell specially for us: freshly dug turmeric and new season ginger, curry leaves, cinnamon leaves, lemongrass and unusual herbs.
Luscious mangos and rich creamy avocados were the size of footballs. Sugarloaf pineapples were white-fleshed, intensely sweet and non acidic. Lilikoi and sunrise papayas were super fragrant.
The variety of fruits was heady – rose apples, custard fruit, lychees, a native cherry, Buddha’s hand, jackfruit, carambola, dragonfruit – and heavenly because they are all sun-ripened and ready for eating immediately or within days. The vegetable sections were just as inspiring with a wide variety of lettuces, Asian greens, watercress, plump eggplant, delicate beans and flavoursome tomatoes.

Not much for formality, the family gathered, after cocktails on the lanai, at a long table in a dining room that served as museum to the Wilcox family history, and grazed at elaborate buffets that ranged from homely to “piss elegant”. Desserts were a highlight and inevitably pavlova appeared on the menu as well as pecan pie. Fresh abalone hauled over from California by one of the guests involved great skill in preparing it for cooking, a hefty task and not for the faint-hearted. Well versed in the art, Eric whiled away an afternoon removing the abalone from their shells and detaching the feet, the innards, the guts and the skin. Pounded, sliced and fried, they were much appreciated.
In other ways this part of the world is reminiscent of an earlier era where helmets are not worn, kids climb into the back of utes and open fires are allowed on the beach. BBQing with the sand between the toes was a treat, as were the daily swims.

AMERICAN IMPRESSIONS:

This visit to America was not without trepidation. After all, the political landscape under Bush was hardly enamouring and it had been nearly two decades since my last visit. In that time since Reagan considerable disillusion had set in, indeed a sort of grieving given that typically perhaps of a child born in the fifties, America had been the first foreign culture to fall in love with for its sense of freedom and idealism and a cultural view of happiness and possibility that pervaded our growing up. Our mythic idyll was youth culture and easy living lifestyles of back yard barbeques and beach holidays, but also the assassination of Kennedy, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, feminism…And now with the mire of Katrina, the Iraq War and the scandals of Wall Street and economic collapse to confront found my view to be perplexed.
Paradoxically there were many surprises in store, not least the realisation that the great things about America are still there, but most joyfully an absence of ageism, a sense of optimism, an eagerness and way of being open around ideas, experiments, and a “can-do” mentality.

Our journey meandered from autumnal Park City to Cambridge, Boston, Cape Cod and New York, where the air was somewhat rarified and bore little resemblance to the increasingly depressing aspects of myopic, fundamentalist, prejudiced, parochial middle America described in another wonderful American journey, Don Watson’s recent meditation and observation over nearly 40,000 kilometres travelled by trains and road that had formed my preparatory reading.

Park City was between seasons, ablaze with reds and golds as trees donned their autumn colour and in party-mode. Renowned as a ski resort and major home to Sundance Film festival screenings, this old silver mining town has been beautifully conserved. In September the locals maximize as it as an outdoor playground for trekking, fly fishing, cycling. They also celebrate a sense of community and creativity with weekly outdoor street markets and the high street galleries all opened late one night. A stand out was the brickart exhibition by lawyer turned Lego sculptor, Nathan Sawaya whose life size pieces are composed of many thousand toy building blocks creating humorous, challenging, startling, mostly anthropomorphic 3-D pieces.



LIGHTER LIVING
Other than picture perfect seaside villages, a dreamscape of marshes, wild cranberry bogs, the steely gray of the Atlantic Ocean, and picturesque shingle-clad and clapboard colonial houses in Cape Cod, the main reason to visit this gorgeous outpost of Boston was to see my sister and meet my 9-year old nephew for the first time and also reconnect with a niece I last saw during my birthday celebrations in Rajasthan seven years ago.
Evolving familial relationships over time and distance is not without challenges. Somehow our memories of each can be trapped in the time warp of the era when we left the country.
None the less there are those things that bind as we discovered parallel lives in some aspects: an enduring passion for good food and wines, a fascination with prevention rather than cure in the pursuit of well-being and good health. Where my life-changing passion has been yoga, Marjolein’s has been Pilates. Over fifteen years she has built a successful enterprise and is now recognized as a master of the Pilates Method, and as the premier expert in home Pilates reformers. She has brought Pilates reformers and quality training videos into hundreds of thousands of households all over the world.
Her Lighter Living brand has also developed a range of complimentary products for living life well from stunning probiotic food bars, to nutritional powders, an organic skin and body care range to a mattress made not only for sublime sleep but also perfect lumbar support. She brings a lot of fun and joy as well as ethical intelligence and tools for healthy living.

New York New York

For a decade my most beloved city has been Paris followed closely by Istanbul. Now there is a new contender after visiting New York again. Six days was simply not enough time to get reacquainted with this grand dame after an absence of 20 years. Friends and frequent visitors to this vibrant of vibrant cities armed me with their list of recommendations. The indispensable guide was “City Secrets New York”, the brilliant volume in an innovative travel series masterminded and edited by the architect Robert Kahn (it also includes the cities of Italy, London, Rome and soon to be released, Paris and Beijing).
New York contributors include novelists, journalists, poet laureate Mark Strand, neurologist Oliver Sacks, architects Richard Meier and Philip Johnson, MoMA director Glenn Lowry and many others including historians, urban archaeologists, gourmets, curators and filmmakers. Their essays range from the erudite to the humorous, the scholarly to the quirky but together create a grand tour of the city’s art, food, shopping, architecture, and cultural and historic landmarks in all five boroughs. The books are elegant, clothbound and fit in your pocket.

Having just read Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, set inn the 1950's, it was fascinating to stay amongst the new bohemian scene of Williamsburg and see the rapid gentrification of once gritty immigrant enclaves. The downside is that for old habitués, increasing rents are already driving them to find new spaces. And throughout the city many storefront closings are the superficial signs of the battering from the recession.

Case in point, our talented sculptor friend Farah has had to move studio spaces five times in as many years and was displaying her most recent work in a new condo complex in the hope that this would encourage more passing traffic to see her wonderful “mosquito” series.


Small museums allow you to survey a marvellous collection in entirety in a single visit. I had absolutely loved the Frick Collection all those years ago and this time visited the stunning, intimate Neue Gallerie housed in an elegant Vanderbilt mansion and home to a superb collection of 20thC German and Austrian paintings and decorative art. The cafés with their turn of the century décor and Viennese specialties were drawing even bigger crowds that the Kokoschka retrospective on at the time. It was wonderful to be up close and personal with their glorious Klimt, an artist I fist fell in love with when I lived as a young student in Vienna in 1970.

If you are visiting this grand city soon do not miss the spellbinding William Blake exhibition on until early January. These superlative watercolours allow you to appreciate the creativity of this astounding visionary. From the impressive collections at The Morgon Library and Museum, another New York treasure.


The Greenmarket at Union Square was an absolute revelation in possibility for access to truly superior and extremely affordable, fresh, often organic produce available four times a week in the middle of a vast city. I visited each day it was open, revelling in the variety of late summer harvest: heritage tomatoes of every colour and shape, a huge variety of squash and autumn mushrooms, wild-caught fish and seafood, late season deeply perfumed peaches, nectarines and figs and early apples and pears direct from upstate farms, even New York wines. Nearby on Bleeker Street wonderful Mediterranean delis and bread shops and particularly Murrays Cheese Shop supplemented the shopping basket with delicacies and deliciousness. Also around the corner, Wholefoods and Trader Joes, stores the likes of which are as yet completely unknown to us here, provided the doings for several excellent lunches.

Macro, now closed, had clearly been inspired by the model, but was absurdly expensive even for the well-heeled. In the States, despite their reputation for an indifferent and mass produced eating culture, these stores thrive because the variety available is vast, the quality is outstanding compared with the average supermarket shelf, the commitment to truly natural and organic is all pervasive, and the pricing is both fair and very affordable.
Indeed a week in the big apple revealed how very reasonable it is to eat and drink very well. $12 buys you a stunning cocktail (120mls of top shelf liquor in the base), $55 a superb seasonal tasting menu in a Michelin rated restaurant (such as Dressler in Brooklyn), and $7.99 a pound of any combination of salads and hot dishes from Wholefoods that are well seasoned, flavoursome and still lively with freshness. Coming home drew stark attention to how costly our food has become, to wit $75 a kg of King George Whiting fillets or $45 for flathead.

I caught up with a friend who left Australia 10 years ago. Returning to the States she changed her course in life and trained as a chef in New York at ICE®. On 11 September 2001 Darlene was responsible for a promotion of Spanish Food and Wine at Windows on the World. She rang in early that morning to make sure her team was on schedule as she had been delayed. The rest as we know is history. Her response was to become the Director for Windows of Hope, a charitable foundation that raised some $24million in the last decade to assist in myriad ways the members of some 150 families who lost loved ones who worked in the food, beverage and hospitality industries in the World Trade Center attack. In this time she became acquainted with so many of the cities leading chefs who supported her fundraising endeavours and has now established her own consultancy business. Today this means she can snare for friends just hitting town even the most hard won tables at the best restaurants. In chatting over new directions she mentioned her best dining experiences this year, enjoyed with other chefs:

Swiss by birth, Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park that has just won a four start accolade from the New York Times, and Corton, located in the heart of Tribeca. Corton is a partnership between renowned restaurateur Drew Nieporent and chef Paul Liebrandt.

The last high note was walking the new High Line. What a fabulous revivification of the derelict railway that used to service the meatpacking district for over a century. Spanning 22 city blocks between and through buildings starting at Gansevoort Street and 10th, this new public space was being hugely enjoyed by New Yorkers on a late summer’s day. For more wonderful photos of its progress since 2006 go to this link.
A visionary effort on the part of a residents group, this 3rd level park (reminiscent of the beautiful walk recreated over the old viaducts in Paris, Promenade Plantée (Coulée Verte) 11e + 12e) has jaw dropping views of the Hudson River, over the Chelsea Piers to New Jersey, all the way down to the distant silhouette of the statue of Liberty and close up and personal with the daring new Standard, anything but standard hotel by André Balazs.
I most admired the gentle perfumes wafting up from the very naturalistic mostly indigenous planting, such an antidote to the concrete smell of the city, the integration into the design of its original function by incorporating tracks, the built in wooden seating, beautifully crafted, for sunbathing, gathering, conversation and contemplation.
Negronis and a perfect Côtes-du-Rhône was enjoyed at the bustling Pastis owned by Keith McNally, along with a hearty and authentic gratinéed onion soup.
This W 14th precinct also boasts some terrific fashion icons such as the genius Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, Stella McCartney, the mother-ship for Apple-heads, the Chelsea markets, so wonderful for browsers and shoppers with deep pockets alike.

Lastly, I also caught up with the brains behind Tour de Forks, Lisa and Melissa who originally hails from Australia. They brought me up to date on their latest developments. The girls have recently joined the travel board at Bon Appétit. Their theme and motivation is to offer Uncommon Epicurean Adventures and the discovery of history, culture and people - through cuisine. Testimonials from guests who have undertaken their tours have raved especially about their unrivalled programmes in Sicily where famed author, Mary Taylor Simetti conducts their market tour and Puglia. New to their portfolio next year are South Africa’s CapeTown and Winelands, and Julia Child’s Paris + Provence.
Together we are collaborating on a culinary program in Rajasthan in October. The tour will bring to bear the evolution of my fifteen year relationship with the kitchens of north India: private homes, royal palaces, swank hotels, spirited young chefs, traditions and innovations.