The Lightness and Texture of Palitaw

Mix three cups of sweet rice flour (same as that used for mochi) with one and a half cups of water. Knead in a bowl until even. Take fistful chunks of dough and roll them with your hands into eggs. Lay them on a (floured) plate and flatten until they are shaped into tongues. Throw them into a pot of boiling water; they should sink like white pebbles. Now this is the secret: they change into petals, become lighter than water, and float (lilitaw) to the surface. This lightness indicates that they are done. Swiftly take them from the pot, drain, and smother with freshly grated coconut. Lay the palitaw neatly on a plate and sprinkle (generously!) with sugar and toasted sesame seeds.

The dough is sticky; it would be best to roll them with dry hands. I would wash my hands occasionally, and then dry them, to get rid of dough build-up on my palms. I prefer ground sesame seeds, as grinding releases the toasty flavor. I was fortunate that my landlady, whose kitchen I am using, has a metate and mano–a “mortar and pestle” made of rough stone, used in Mexico for grinding corn. I love its heft and asperities. I used a whole box of mochi flour for this recipe, a bag of frozen grated coconut, and a table spoon of toasted sesame seeds–all available from the local Asian store.

Unlike mochi that is all gooey and chewey, palitaw is all about texture. The dough itself is bland, but the grated coconut adds a tough bite (and a bit of tartness), while the sprinkled sugar and sesame seeds–mostly for sweetness and nutty flavor–also gives palitaw a nice contrapuntal crunch. I just wish I could have served it on banana leaves!

 

On the Road, Part 8: The Road Home

8 days. 4,040 miles. 129 gallons. -282 to 14505 feet elevation. 7 states.

• Part 1: Houston to Fort Stockton
• Part 2: To Albuquerque
• Part 3: Monument Valley
• Part 4: The Grand Canyon
• Part 5: Las Vegas
• Part 6: Death Valley
• Part 7: Inyo, CA

Phoenix, AZ

On the trip back, we wanted to cover as much driving distance in a day, to make it as painless and cheap as possible. We headed straight south from Lone Pine, on Highway 395, to Barstow, where we took I-40 east, that passed along the Mohave Desert, to Kingman, AZ. Los Angeles would have to be for another trip. We pushed further south on Highway 93–the same one that took us north to Hoover Dam–until we got sick of driving. It was a most desolate road–more so in the dark–that we had determined to stop for the night at the first sign of anything that looked like habitation. That was Wickenburg–a tourist town of guest ranches at the northwest corner of the Sonoran Desert–an hour northeast from downtown Phoenix. There is thus this last leg of I-10, between Phoenix and LA, that I have yet to traverse between the coasts of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Even at night, we could see the shadows of the giant saguaro cacti along the road. The following morning, I had to stop by the freeway and photograph this peculiar vegetation, which, in a way I grew up with, from watching Wile E. Coyote perpetually chasing after Road Runner in Chuck Jones’ almost abstract representations of the deserts of the Southwest.

 

On the Road, Part 7: Inyo, CA

Inyo County

From Badwater, we headed north on Highway 190 to Furnace Creek–an oasis of palm trees and tourist trap amenities. It was getting late in the afternoon, but it turned out to be the best time of the day to see the area around Stovepipe Wells. The Devil’s Cornfield formed endless rows of arrowweed–a bushy shrub adapted to blowing sand and soil erosion by growing in tufts like corn shock. It was amber/gold in the setting sun. Up ahead, we were surprised by sand dunes that suddenly rose on our right; it looked absolutely Saharan with its late afternoon shadows. We got excited–having missed White Sands in New Mexico–and just had to stop and come up close to take pictures. On the sand, we noticed tracks probably made by sidewinders. Spooky!

 

On the Road, Part 6: Death Valley

Source: Google Maps

Amargosa Opera House

What, of all things, is an opera house doing in the middle of the desert? I had stumbled upon Todd Robinson’s documentary Amargosa at UF’s Library West. It tells the story of Marta Becket, a New York danseuse, who, on her way with husband to an engagement in the spring of 1967, found themselves with a flat tire at Death Valley Junction. There she discovered the skeletal remains of Mexican Colonial-style adobe buildings–part of the company town built by Pacific Coast Borax in 1925. It had a recreation hall on the northeast end that had been used as community center for dances, church services, movies, funerals, and town meetings.

I came around the back and looked through the hole in the back door. And it was dark, a very large dark cavern and sunbeams pierced through the cracks in the walls and hit a doll’s head that stared back at me. And kangaroo rats were running around and I could see an old calico curtain hanging from a track. And I really did feel as though I was looking at the other half of myself. Like I was looking in a mirror…

(from “Dancer, Artist Enlivens Death Valley Junction”, Ina Jaffe, NPR)

Marta–already in her forties and at the end of her dancing career–decided to stay, determined to repair the decrepit theater and establish a refuge for her art. She performed ballet and pantomime three times a week, even when no audience showed up: “That was like a dress rehearsal. A dancer has to work. I mean, you have to have even a dress rehearsal so that you have something there when someone does show up.” In fact, she created an audience for herself, by painting the walls with theater denizens from Spanish Renaissance–royalty and commoners, lovers and drunkards, Indian jugglers, flamenco dancers, bullfighters, harlequins, monks, nuns, and whores. The last she based upon the ladies who worked at a bordello across the border in Nevada. “The madam heard that we were opening this theater here, so she brought her girls here every month to my performances. For culture…”

It took four painstaking years to complete the walls, and another two to add a trompe l’oeil vaulted ceiling. It was all-consuming work; her husband eventually abandoned her. Today, in her eighties, she still performs a “sitting-down show”–now to packed crowds of admirers and the curious from all over the world. We sat at dinner behind the booth of a French family who was also staying at the motel adjoining the opera house. An interesting structure in itself, it had in fact been used as a setting in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. (Now why does that not surprise me?)

I once took a train from Madrid to Lisbon to look for a nondescript street called Rua Dos Douradores, whose only significance was being the setting of Fernando Pessoa’s imaginative life as Bernardo Soares (The Book of Disquietude). I find myself, this New Year’s day, off on the same whim, traveling thousands of miles, to admire the imagination of a woman who tenaciously clung against all odds to the creative life.

 

A Tale of Two Winters

Early winter storm over Illinois in December 2008. (Image Source: NASA Earth Observatory)

I look forward to this winter with somewhat morbid curiosity. I had visited Montreal once for Christmas, and Mt. Rigi in the Swiss Alps, so I know what winter is like, but I haven’t actually lived this far north to witness the change of seasons. Champaign-Urbana is the small grey patch in the NASA satellite photo just south of the last ‘n’ in Bloomington–a 2.5-hour drive from Chicago on Lake Michigan. Last night, we were pummeled with seven inches of snow. I peered out my bedroom window at midnight to find everything white–and uncannily bright–so I went out thrilled to take photos of my first winter storm.

The winter season of 2006/2007 was one of the warmest on record. This was grave news at MSNBC:

This winter was the warmest on record worldwide, the U.S. government said Thursday in the latest worrisome report focusing on changing climate.

The report comes just over a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming is very likely caused by human actions and is so severe it will continue for centuries.

(from Global temps set record for warmest winter)

USA Today reported:

“There’s been weird weather all across the United States,” says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, which was walloped by two major snowstorms last month. He blames an El Niño warming pattern in the Pacific for dry and warm conditions elsewhere.

“Another big player is what we call the ‘long-term trend,’ ” said Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel. “That’s a euphemism for global warming.”

(from Warm winter wreaks havoc)