Bon Appétit Redux

I wrote "Bon Appétit" as an assignment for a creative writing class at El Camino in 1995. That is to say, I was given a totally different assignment, and this is what I turned in. Amazingly, I still got an A.

I reworked this a couple of times as my rebellious emotions mellowed with age and my writing skills sharpened with time. For Dad, whose birthday would have been yesterday, and for Jolene and Joselyn, who were also at the table.

Joanie Harmon, "The Power of Three"
Digital photograph, 2005

Every Thursday morning, there was a farmer’s market at the Redondo Beach pier. My parents would take my sisters and me to do the week’s shopping for fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish. The sun seemed brighter then, with the sky a pale and cloudless blue, the color of a 1964 Ford Falcon.

My sister and I would follow our parents silently through the stalls, drinking in all the sights, smells, and sounds of a world beyond our sterile suburban existence. At home, nature thrived on man-made terms in neat ceramic planters and manicured lawns. At the pier it was less controlled, the shoppers and diners drawn by the opportunity to eat fish that had been breathing only minutes before it was cooked.

Our father was the chef of the family and selected ingredients for a weekly menu that would make today’s dietitians raise their eyebrows in horror. My favorite part of the trip was to watch him select live crabs from a swirling tank of sea water. We marveled at these crustaceans that looked like the gaudy toys we bought at the supermarket. But these fantastic creatures were transformed into dinner through a steamy demise on the kitchen stove.

In the days before salt, sugar, butter, and love were taken out of food so that we could all live a little longer, Dad would serve thick steaks with baked potatoes wrapped in foil. He would fry up the fat that he trimmed off and let us eat it as "cracklings." Liver and onions were served with a strip on bacon, and spaghetti with meat sauce was topped with fragrant shreds of parmesan cheese. I would pluck the tomatoes that he grew in the backyard off the vine and eat them greedily before my mother would make me wash the sunshine off of them.

My sisters and I ate with gusto and abandon, never counting calories or the number of helpings we consumed. For the most part, a youthful metabolism took care of any excess. Our parents made food a celebration, an embodiment of parental concern and well-being at home.

While Dad reigned over the kitchen, Mom applied her hand to the rest of the house and our collective psyche. She slipcovered the sofa with clear vinyl to protect it - and anyone from getting comfortable, and installed electric icons of the Virgin Mary around the house to protect us from ourselves. Every window in the house was covered with decorative iron bars that were supposed to keep intruders out, but only succeeded in keeping its inhabitants in.

The one redeeming feature of Mom's décor was a profusion of flowers from the weekly shopping excursion, supplied by a local family that grew their wares on several acres in Palos Verdes. I was intoxicated by the brilliance of pink stargazer lilies, flaming red and yellow poppies, and smoky blue irises that made my 64-color box of Crayolas pale in comparison. These flowers would fill the house with an unparalleled light and scent that could only have come from the earth, a welcome antidote to the iron bars and dark Spanish furnishings that Mom favored.

Each in their own way, our parents embodied the conflicting sides of our natures. Dad had a zest for life that pervaded the simplest thought and action without compromise. Mom had an equally strong tendency, with good intentions nonetheless, to subdue such abandon. Dad died when I was eleven, taking his decadent cuisine and blue skies with him. Mom attempted to fill both parental roles and put us on high-fiber, low-cholesterol diets that cleared our systems of unnecessary toxins - as well as part of the joy of living.

The sundrenched bouquets from the farmer’s market were replaced by concoctions of silk flowers that never wilted or left water rings on the piano. Once at Christmas, I scorched the varnish on the piano lid by burning candles arranged on fragrant - and very, very dry - pine boughs that went up in unexpected flames. Disaster was quickly averted, but the scar on the piano remains as a reminder that life is messy. Growing up, apparently, was as well.

In my own home as an adult, I tempered my mother's heightened sense of order and denial with generous portions of  Dad’s joie de vivre. I left my blinds and windows open. I would regularly offset a healthy dinner of a big salad with half a carton of Chunky Monkey for dessert. My middle-aged metabolism demands that I work off the excesses of good living at the gym, but it’s worth the effort. Thanks to our imaginative parents who made the acts of everyday living an art, my sisters and I are quite adept at having our cake and eating it too.

- 1995; revised 12/24/11, 05/11/11

Rock and Roll: Dosa Buffet at Woodlands Indian Cuisine

If they ever found a way to make bacon out of tofu, I would so convert to vegetarianism. Until recently in Western cuisine, meat-free has tended to be flavor-free. Not so in Indian cooking, where vegetarians enjoy an exotic cuisine that fits within their dietary boundaries, one so full of enticing aromas and textures that you don't really miss the meat.

But to me, one of the benchmarks of great Indian cuisine is the bread.

The colors: Wednesday night veggie buffet at Woodlands

Growing up in what was then the culinary wasteland of Redondo Beach, The Clay Pit provided a passage to India at the South Bay Galleria. My most vivid memory was of the fresh baked naan, which my sisters and I thought was special because it was fresh bread, baked right in the food court. Samosa House is my go-to spot on the Westside, a Culver City institution that serves small plates of crispy and colorful chaat, fragrant mango lassi, and the namesake potato pockets. There I indulge in my favorite combo plate with wheat chapati, which I use to scoop up bites of spinach saag and stewed jackfruit. But at Woodlands in Chatsworth, the idea of fresh baked is taken to a new level with the Wednesday night all-you-can-eat dosa buffet.

The adventure starts at the buffet table, where you can fill your metal tray with a bit of everything. Woodlands, which describes the spread as "Indo- Chinese," includes a Manchurian dumpling in a savory red sauce called idly. The name also refers to small rounds of a white and spongy bread with a texture reminiscent of Ethiopian injera or Filipino puto. A fiery soy sauce-based vegetable stir-fry adds color to the tray, as does a salty lemon chutney and fresh mint sauce to drizzle onto crispy pappadums. 

Dosa-do: My tastebuds do an allemande left with the fiery mysore masala dosa.

But it is the fresh dosa, each made freshly to order, that is the star of the buffet firmament. Harvey and I started with masala dosa, a large crispy lentil and rice-based crepe filled with saffron-hued mashed potatoes, and a version of the same thing with sauteed onions. The second round included the whimsically-named paper masala dosa, which was a masala dosa made with rice flour only and the mysore masala dosa, which promptly set my mouth on fire and heightened my anticipation of dessert.

And what a dessert it was. Payasam is a gentle concoction of vermicelli noodles cooked in milk and enhanced by cardamom. I brought up two half- filled stainless steel cups of the pudding-like dish to the table, just in case we ended up not liking it. We loved it, but were too full of dosas to want more. 

Sweet relief: Payasam or kheer helped put out the smolder of the mysore masala dosa.

Edible Book Festival at UCLA Provides Food for Thought

If you’ve ever wanted to eat your words – or for that matter, the words of Geoffrey Chaucer or Dr. Seuss – the opportunity arose at UCLA’s Powell Library where creative chefs and bakers presented literary-themed creations for the 4th Annual Edible Book Festival on April 5. A lucky 13 entries of literally digestible prose competed for the titles of Best Student Entry, Most Creative, People's Choice, and Best Tasting.

A bumper crop of mini-cupcakes depicts "The Edible Garden" by the editors of Sunset Magazine. Complete with pretzel plant stakes and garden gnomes fashioned from Starburst Fruit Chews, this tasty tableau by UCLA staff members Dana Iwata, Laura Juarez, and Elaine Sakamoto won the "People's Choice Award."

Metaphors for reading and books often have to do with eating. You say that you “devoured” a good read; a novel can be spicy or saccharine. Creative bakers and readers among students, faculty, and staff at UCLA entered their lit-inspired creations – mostly of the cake variety. If a major in the confectionery arts was made available among the university’s degree programs, these entries would have been at the top of the class. Undergrads Kimmie Eng and Hannah Bishop-Moser created a toothsome take on the children’s classic, “The Rainbow Fish.” “It was read to me all the time when I was little,” recalled Bishop-Moser. “It’s just a really sweet book about learning how to share. I thought it would make a really great entry too, because it’s so colorful and sparkly.”

Kimmie Eng shows off "The Rainbow Fish," which she created with Hannah Bishop- Moser. The baking buddies took the prize for "Best Student Entry."

Their pumpkin cake, which was topped with an ocean of cream cheese frosting, was decorated with cookie characters from “The Rainbow Fish.” In the spirit of the book’s message on sharing, Eng and Bishop-Moser compromised to suit the latter’s vegan dietary preferences.

“The cookies are vegan Mexican wedding cookies,” said Bishop-Moser, an ecology behavior and evolution major. “We made a compromise – half the entry is vegan and half isn’t.”

The Edible Book Festival, which is an international event co-created by late UCLA alumna Judith A. Hoffberg, is usually celebrated near the April 1 birthday of French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose book, “The Physiology of Taste,” has been a definitive text for foodies of the 19th century and beyond.

Brillat-Savarin’s book describes every aspect of taste, including its relationship to the other four senses of sight, sound, touch, and smell. With that in mind, judges of the Edible Book competition really had their work cut out for them. Professor of information studies Johanna Drucker is an advocate for the physical artistry and history of the book, as adept at teaching the intricacies of an antique printing press as she is  expanding the world of digital scholarship. At the Edible Book Festival, however, her concerns were more immediate.

“Everything has to taste good, because one of the categories is “Best Tasting,” said Drucker. “I don’t want to eat anything that has artificial flavor. A lot of the stuff has some color in it that I’ll bet doesn’t come from the natural world. And some of the glitter gives me pause.” Despite her discerning palate, Drucker found the entries to be a feast for the eyes.

Armed with her appetite for creativity - and a bottle of Crystal Geyser to cleanse the palate - Professor Johanna Drucker prepares to judge the wide variety of entries.

“[The festival] makes people be creative with food,” Drucker noted. “It makes them have to think about how to use the materials of icing and cake as sculpture, as well as thinking about it as taste.”

All but two entries at the Festival were made of cake. There was an inviting tray of salted caramel patties that depicted the novel, “The Book of Salt.” And in the spirit of the Easter season, Tara Prescott, a lecturer in UCLA Writing Programs, created her homage to “The Hunger Games” and its characters with a basket of dyed hard-boiled eggs.

“I was in the Research Library yesterday and I saw a flier and thought, ‘That sounds like a lot of fun,’” Prescott said of her quick decision to enter the Festival. “I’m a big fan of “The Hunger Games,” and the film adaptation came out recently, so it’s been on my mind.”

The decision to make colored eggs occurred to Prescott who says she doesn’t bake, but loves to do things like decorate eggs. “I was thinking that there are a few egg references in the text,” she says. “The hard part will be breaking them to eat them. I’ll eat ‘Haymitch’ first, and save ‘Effie’ for last.”

Lecturer Tara Prescott shows off her literary style with colored eggs representing text and characters from "The Hunger Games" and "Moby Dick" tee.

Prescott says that the Festival gives participants “one way of translating from one medium into an unusual medium. Reading is an intellectual activity and this gives you a tangible, hands-on [activity].”

“It’s one thing for [an idea] to be in a book, but it’s another thing to bring it to life in your own way,” said Bishop- Moser. “It was nice to interpret the entire book in one scene, really look at all the pictures and the meaning, and see how we can put all that meaning in our entry and make it our own.”

Although readers don’t typically notice food references in literature unless they are foodies or very hungry, books themselves are actually full of them. From the briny pleasure of a clam chowder served in “Moby Dick” to the elegant banquet of quail and pomegranates in “Madame Bovary,” the consumption of food provides a story’s setting and breathes life into its characters. Prescott said that two of her favorite food references in literature were Leopold Bloom’s “very pungent [mutton] kidney” in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and Charles Swann’s madeleine in Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” Drucker, however, takes a less literal approach when inventing her “edible book.”

“I’d be inclined to do something from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by William Blake,” she said. “[I’d have] taste contrast- some really intense flavors with some gentle or mild flavors, because Blake’s Heaven and Hell aren’t really good and evil. They’re different kinds of forces of intensity.”

Graduate student Alethia Shih won "Most Creative" with her fondant- coated depiction of "The Cat in the Hat."


Ultimately for Drucker, the task at hand dictated that she would find the proof in the pudding – or the Dr. Seuss-inspired cake pops. When asked how the Festival entries illustrated the relationship between the senses and literature, she said, “I’ll have to tell you after I taste them – to see if the ‘Cat in the Hat’ really tastes like the ‘Cat in the Hat.’”


Another homage to Dr. Seuss: "The Lorax" speaks for the truffula trees - and for a student's baking talents.

 Bishop-Moser and Eng, who is an anthropology major, bake together often – and it showed. The “Rainbow Fish” entry was a real catch, in looks and taste, and won the prize for “Best Student Entry.” Their prize included official UCLA Library aprons for each of them, a certificate - and proof of their excellent baking skills, an empty cake platter.

The Edible Book Festival was one of the most lighthearted events I’ve seen on the UCLA campus so far, and definitely brought a touch of levity to the hallowed halls of the Powell Library. Letting ‘em eat cake conjures up a celebratory mood and brings people together to admire the creativity of students and colleagues, compare recipes, and even become inspired to bake something themselves.


In my short time at UCLA, one of the campus’s most outstanding features is the atmosphere of collegiality among the students. The environment fosters a bond of friendship that seems to form readily between people of all ethnicities and cultures. Perhaps the willingness to come together comes from the fact that the majority of them are out-of-towners, and want to get the most out of their college experience, or more significantly from the fact that they were all intelligent enough to make it to UCLA., but it’s heartening to see. And as in the case of the creators of “The Rainbow Fish” cake, it engenders a spirit of collaboration and creativity.

Chaucer's saucy Wyfe of Bath from "The Canterbury Tales" gets her just desserts.

“Our next project is going to be cinnamon rolls but instead of cinnamon, it’s going to be flavored with cardamom, rose, and almond, “said Bishop-Moser. “I saw the recipe and said, ‘This looks amazing, I have to make it with Kimmie.”

For a Daily Bruin video of UCLA's Edible Book Festival, click here.

Photos by Matt Palmer