SpiceLines

The best juleps are homemade, of course: Here, sipping
quality bourbon, simple syrup, and fresh mint in a silver cup.

April showers, sometimes tropical, have propelled the garden mint skywards. A few days ago there were just a few paltry shoots poking out of the ground. Now a towering phalanx of purple-stemmed English peppermint with the most luscious fragrance has slipped through the boxwood hedge and is engulfing the jalapenos.

Just in time for the Kentucky Derby this Saturday. Will Recapturetheglory nose out bookmakers’ favorites like Big Brown or Colonel John? I have no idea. But I do know one thing: All that mint is just calling for a julep. Or two.

In Coatepec, Veracruz, Don Ruperto Opoch now
sells Altura coffee to buyers in South Korea. A
post on SpiceLines brought him to their attention.

You’ve heard of the “butterfly effect,” haven’t you? It’s the idea, put forth by Conrad Lorenz, that the whisper soft beating of of a butterfly’s wing may stir up air currents that create a storm thousands of miles away.

Something like the butterfly effect seems to have happened in Veracruz. And it’s very good news.

Two years ago, I wrote about the plight of Don Ruperto Opoch, a genteel third generation organic coffee farmer whose story nearly broke my heart ("Veracruz: Great Coffee If You Can Find It; a Grower’s Lament"). "We are starving," he told me with simple dignity. After a lifetime of hard work and passion for his craft, he was slowly watching his entire world slip away.

Diary of an obsession: It took four weeks and a dozen failed attempts before I
was able to replicate the sumptuous red snapper curry I tasted in India.

This is what happens when I become obsessed with a recipe:

In the last few weeks, I’ve cooked 9 pounds of red snapper, cracked open 13 coconuts, and bought so many fresh curry leaves that Thomas and James, the owners of our local Indian grocery, thought they’d found the promised land.

I flew through the kilo of dried Kashmiri chilies I hand-carried back from Goa, then spent days calling and emailing around the country looking for more. I fried so much chili paste that the house filled up with eye-watering fumes. Doors slammed, imprecations were muttered. And let’s not talk about clogging the sink with grated coconut, or the many sample containers that clogged the refrigerator.

Fresh curry leaves, plucked in a Hindu family's garden in Kerala, lend a pleasingly
bitter edge to fish, coconut and vegetable curries. They have nothing to do with
curry powder.

Fresh curry leaves are one of the more mysterious ingredients in Indian cooking.

These green, almond-shaped leaves have nothing to do with curry powder, of course. Nor are they related to the lacy, pale grey curry plant that appears at herb stands in early summer.

But curry and curry leaves do have one thing in common: the word “curry” which derives from the Tamil kari, meaning soup or sauce. And it all makes sense when you discover that the fresh leaves are widely used to season the fish, coconut and vegetable curries of South India.

Andrea Nguyen is the author of Into the Vietnamese
Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors.

The first thing I notice about Andrea Nguyen, as she strolls through the crowded dining room, is the crinkly good humor in her eyes and her winning smile. Being female, the second thing I notice is her hair. It is thick and black, and the cut is casual chic with a few jagged ends, almost—but not quite--as if she had scissored it herself. Dressed in a tight zip up Juicy Couture-style jacket, she stands out among the woozy academic types ruminating over breakfast this chilly spring morning.

At 39, Nguyen is arguably the most compelling voice in the American Vietnamese food world. Her 2006 cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Food Ways, Modern Flavors was a finalist for the James Beard Award of Excellence and garnered a Chicago Tribune review that compared her to Julia Child. The book, written in a friendly, down to earth style, not only clarifies Vietnam’s somewhat mystifying culinary heritage, but also explains in detail the role of such unfamiliar ingredients as fish sauce---where it came from, how it’s made and why you might add salt to this already salty condiment. In the nicest possible way, it establishes the author as an authority on the food of her homeland.

Vietnamese cooking is a "crazy animal all its own." This dish combines Chinese
stir-frying and Indian-style curry powder with such common Southeast Asian
ingredients as lemongrass and fish sauce.

This is real comfort food, Vietnamese-style.

In her acclaimed cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors, Andrea Nguyen says this recipe was inspired by a dish her mother makes, using whole skinless drumsticks, cooked first on the stovetop and then finished in the oven. Her own, quicker version begins with boneless, skinless chicken thighs. She writes:

“The ingredients of this intensely flavored chicken dish resemble those of a curry, but here they are stir-fried, rather than simmered together in a sauce to retain their individuality. You’ll taste the sweetness of coconut milk and shallots, the heat of the chiles (fresh and dried in the curry powder), and the citrus of lemongrass, plus the bell pepper adds color and softness.”

In the Mumbai airport, the mosquitoes were the size of hummingbirds.

Naturally, the DEET repellent was in my checked bag. But in years to come, it seems, we may be slathering ourselves with repellents spiked with pepper-related acylpiperidines to avoid malaria, yellow fever and West Nile virus.

A good thing, too. DEET was no match for India's stealth mosquitoes.

This organic Altura coffee from Veracruz is bright and acidic, with hints of caramel
or burned sugar, almonds and possibly molasses.

“They sniffed and slurped. Then came the tricky part: finding the mot juste to describe the flavors….’I tasted nuts and bark in the Guatemalan,’ said Katsu Tanaka…’And basil and jasmine in the Sumatra.’ A hush fell over the room; perhaps the others were intimidated by Mr. Tanaka’s sophisticated palate.”

--From “Do I Detect a Hint of… Joe?” Hannah Wallace, The New York Times, May 29, 2006, p. E6

It’s an experience we’ve all had. If not with coffee, then with chocolate or olive oil. Certainly with wine.

Someone with an insufferably sensitive palate tastes leather, green bananas, and other quirky ingredients while I’m stumbling around, trying to articulate something a little more specific than, “Umm, this dark chocolate tastes really good.”