WAITING FOR LUNCH

Little has been written about waiting for lunch, one of the most important activities in modern life. The reasons for this lack are compound. Predominant among them perhaps is the fact that one is, after all, waiting for lunch, an activity that by its inherently obsessive nature precludes other forms of creative endeavor, such as putting the final touches to that unfinished symphony in the case of Franz Schubert; it is as well the reason so many of Monet's paintings remained mere impressions. For this is the time of day when the mind turns irresistably from merely creative or commercial concerns to profound meditations upon the Blue Plate Special. And if at such moments one should attempt anything creative, it comes to resemble in character the present short essay, in which fashion one could maunder at some additional length, but lunchtime is finally here.

LOCAL LUNCH

Yesterday morning when I went out to empty the wood ash onto the fallowing part of the garden, on my way back I grabbed a good couple handfuls of big-leaf spinach and snagged a few large shiitake from the logs, then went inside and for lunch started sauteing some garlic in olive oil while I sliced the shiitake to translucent thinness, then I threw the slices in with the garlic, stirring now and then to softness and even greater translucency while I tore the spinach leaves into mouth-sized pieces, poured some broth into the pan with the garlic and mushrooms, turned the flame high and threw in the spinach, tossed with a spatula till the broth reduced then put it all in a nice local mingei bowl and ate it together with some local rice in another nice local mingei bowl. Boy was that locally delicious.

INAKA LUNCH

When you've lived in another country for as long as I have - especially in another countryside, where the traditions prevail - after a while you tend to become inured and no longer see the difference from the culture you were born and raised in; you lose the instinctive ability to compare, that you had when you first arrived.

So in order to maintain a reasonable spiritocultural balance, I've made it a habit to every once in a while force myself to look at the moment with all the original eyeball I can muster, such as I did at lunch today. After a morning of working in the garden I sat down at the table to eat and managed to observe how utterly different this looked (and was) from an American lunch, such as in a truck stop, The Four Seasons, a Nebraska farm kitchen, any one of the countless places that comprise a nation lunching.

Laid out before me on the table was a lunch comprising:

Brown rice with yuzukosho
Kinpira gobo (using mini-gobo)
Fresh mountain tomato, eighthed
Sesame tofu with wasabi and tamari shoyu
Stew of green beans, carrots and shiitake
Dessert: a piece of pear later

No meat, no dairy, no fat, no pesticides, lots of fiber, organics from our garden (beans, tomatoes, gobo-- Littlefoot got my September carrots in July) or from the local co-op; organic rice from the elderly rice farmer across the lake.

Delicious, filling, light, low cost, varied, visually nourishing (especially the tomatoes, and the green wasabi atop the amber of sesame tofu (talk about 'mouth feel'!) with dark-brown tamari poured over), not to mention a whole summerful of nutes, all sauced with a morning's work in the garden.

Way different from lunch at the Union Diner, as I recall.