Poor Man's Feast —

My father used to say that the best way to tell if you were in a Jewish neighborhood was to count the number of Chinese restaurants. Not that it mattered much to us — I grew up in a totally mixed town and regularly shared meals with friends who were Somali, Indian, Saudi, Japanese, Israeli, Pakistani, French, Taiwanese, Malay, Puerto Rican, Polish, German, and Dutch. And frankly, if I had my druthers and could choose to live absolutely anywhere, I would pack up my current neighbors (I adore them) and we’d all move to a neighborhood like the one I grew up in, running in and out of each other’s houses to celebrate Diwali and Eid, Rosh Hashanah and Chú Xī. I know it all sounds nice and liberal and let’s all hold hands and dance around the maypole, but it’s a pretty cool thing when you can shelve your differences — political, religious, whatever — and just feed each other delicious, surprising, excellent food. And I will go to my grave believing that if everyone stopped yammering at each other and just broke bread together, things would be much easier.

Anyway, back to the Chinese restaurant issue: my father was right, as he often was. Jews love — LOVE — Chinese food, for reasons I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Maybe it’s because everyone knows that the only place that pork is kosher is when it’s in an eggroll; I don’t know for sure. But there does seem to me to be a direct connection between kreplach and dumplings, so maybe that’s the original link: the word on the street is that kreplach made its way to Eastern Europe in the 14th century, via Venice, via the Spice Route, via the Far East.

I have a neighbor, Dan, whose eighty-something immigrant mother stands at her stove in the Bronx every year, dropping kreplach into a pot of boiling water; these dumplings — traditionally a way to use up stray bits of leftover meat, as all sorts of meat dumplings invariably do, regardless of heritage — never make it to the plate, because Dan and his family hover around and eat them the minute they come out of the pot. It’s the rule of noodles + meat that nobody ever talks about: look at the kreplach recipe card handed down by any ancient bubbe, and you’ll rarely see serving instructions. There’s a reason for that: they never make it to the table.

Today at sundown is the start of Kol Nidre, the holiest night in the Jewish calendar, and for the first time in years — I mean, really, YEARS — I’m going to temple with Dan (see above) and his wife. I don’t really understand why, suddenly, this is something I feel like I have to do, but the idea of slowing down and reflecting and atoning feels kind of important to me. There’s a fast involved — 24 hours until sundown the next evening — and I’m not entirely sure I’ll make it if my blood sugar crashes and I start craving mortadella. But assuming I do make it, I’ve decided to break fast not with the traditional scrambled eggs and challah, or lox and bagels. This year, I want dumplings. Could be kreplach or pierogi or Turkish manti or tortelloni or my father’s favorite, Ukrainian vareniki, too, I suppose. I could also add blintzes to that list, since, on the face of it, they’re just another way to roll something good up — cheese, potatoes, or fruit — in a noodle that you then lightly fry until golden, and eat warm.

This year, I blame all of my dumpling mania on the power of suggestion, and my tripping over Heidi Swanson’s great post about making vegetarian yellow split pea potstickers to take as an in-flight snack while she hurtles over the earth in a plane bound for London, from her home in San Francisco. That’s the thing I love about Heidi (among many other things): I can’t even get through security without having my potato chips confiscated by a uniformed woman with long pink fingernails and a Tazer, and Heidi manages to make it through with homemade dumplings and chile dipping sauce. Oh well. In any case, they looked fabulous and suggestive, and they reminded me of the time when I read a piece about Kenny Lao’s Rickshaw Dumplings, and for weeks after that, I couldn’t eat anything else. I made them at home, and filled them with all manner of ingredient: chicken (very good), turkey (not so great), pork (great, but not on Yom Kippur), and an Asian-ized colcannonish kind of thing involving mustard greens, a bit of potato, hot red chile oil, and sesame oil (excellent). Although I tend to steer clear of those opalescent green dumplings that Chinese restaurants tout as being vegetarian purely by way of their Kermit-like color (GREEN! HEALTH!), I still believe that draped in a dumpling wrapper, even a shoe would be edible.

Tomorrow evening, I won’t be going anywhere near lox and scrambled eggs. When the holiday is over and I can start accumulating all of the coming year’s transgressions in my big, fat TRANSGRESSIONS folder, I’ll be doing so while holding chopsticks and dunking my soft pillows of goodness into a sweet, spicy dipping sauce.

After all, it’s my heritage.

Asian Mustard Green Dumplings with Sweet Spicy Dipping Sauce

This recipe was born out of the deep sadness I felt recently while visiting a local Chinese restaurant in my Connecticut town; I didn’t feel much like pork, so I ordered the vegetarian variety, and they arrived, a sort of globby, unrecognizable mass of non-meat substance packed inside a traffic light green wrapper/purse. What would happen, I thought, if you replaced the unrecognizable mass with bitter Fall greens — mustard is my preference — and cooked them down to a delicious, spicy tangle in a bit of sesame oil and tamari, adding grated ginger, garlic, and scallions? What would further happen, I wondered, if you fried them quickly, and then dipped the dumplings in a sweet/spicy sauce? I found out: you get a light, crunchy, tender, dumpling that, in its bitter sweetness manages to hit all the big Jewish New Year points. Furthermore, it’s vegetarian — VEGAN, even — and if you can manage to find rice flour wrappers and super high-quality tamari, it will be gluten-free. (And if you can’t find them, you can go here, to Andrea Nguyen’s brilliant post about making gluten-free dumplings. Andrea is the author of, among other spectacular books, the Asian dumpling bible, called, appropriately, Asian Dumplings.) As for the potato, put it in; leave it out. The dumplings held together perfectly without it, but it will offer some heft, should you need it.

Makes approximately 2 dozen

4 tablespoons neutral oil (I prefer grapeseed or canola), divided

4 loosely packed cups fresh mustard greens, thoroughly rinsed of dirt and dried in a clean kitchen towel

1/4 cup diced waxy potato (optional)

1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger

4 scallions, white and light green parts only, chopped (darker tops reserved)

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

1/2 teaspoon hot chili oil

1 tablespoon tamari

Shanghai-style, round wonton wrappers (store bought)

Dipping sauce:

1/4 cup tamari or soy sauce (reduced sodium is fine)

reserved liquid from greens

reserved scallion tops

1/4 teaspoon prepared Thai roasted chile sauce (nahm prik pao)

1/4 teaspoon sugar (optional)

Heat 2 tablespoons of the neutral oil in a large, straight-sided saute pan set over medium high heat, until it shimmers. Carefully add the mustard greens, tossing them with long-handled tongs until they just begin to wilt. Add the potato (if using), ginger, scallions, and garlic, and continue to cook, reducing the heat to medium low if the pan begins to dry out. Add the sesame and chile oils along with the tamari, and continue to cook until the greens have completely wilted, the potato has cooked through, and the garlic is opaque, about eight minutes.

Remove the pan from the heat. Set a small colander in a bowl, and let the greens mixture rest in it; press them with the back of a large spoon, to extract as much liquid from them as possible, but reserve it, and strain it out through a fine mesh sieve. Set it aside.

Place the wrappers side by side on a lightly floured work surface and set a small bowl of cold water nearby. Using a dinner teaspoon (or a grapefruit spoon, which works really well), place a small amount of filling in the center of each wrapper (see image above). Dip your index finger in the water, and lightly dampen the outer edge of the wrapper. Fold it in half to make a half moon, and press to seal it. You can crimp it with a fork, or pleat it if you’re feeling fancy, but I don’t bother. Repeat, until all the filling is used up.

At this point, you can freeze the dumplings on a cookie sheet, and then place them in a zip lock bag for a few months; this means that one day, when you get home from work and it’s late and you’re hungry and tired, you can throw them into some broth, or fry them up and have a quick dinner. And you’ll thank me.

Moving on:

Combine all the dipping sauce ingredients in a bowl, and set aside. Taste and adjust the sweetness and heat, adding teaspoons of water to thin, as necessary.

Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons of neutral oil in a large skillet over medium high heat until it shimmers. Add the dumplings, and DO NOT MOVE THEM. Don’t shake the pan, don’t stir, don’t flip them around. Let them brown for about four minutes, and then very carefully pour in three quarters of a cup of water (it will sputter furiously). Quickly cover the pan, and give it a good few shakes before letting it rest. Continue cooking the dumplings for another three or four minutes, remove the cover, and serve immediately, with the dipping sauce.

What I waited for.

Sometime in the mid-seventies, when I was a young teenager, my parents and I stood for hours outside a movie theater on Third Avenue, across the street from the back entrance to Bloomingdales. The line stretched out the door and around the block, and snaked east towards the Queensborough Bridge, which, every time a truck drove over it, rattled and shook the very ground we were standing on, like a small earthquake.

“When can we go in?” I whined at my father, shifting my pouty, angst-ridden teenage self from Dr. Scholl’s Exercise Sandal to Dr. Scholl’s Exercise Sandal, folding my arms across my chest. I stared at the sky, annoyed. I might have stamped my foot.

“When they say we can,” he said glumly, lighting two cigarettes. He handed one of them to my mother who took a long, sweet, lipsticked drag off it as she gazed into the distance, propped in her ever-present model’s pose, her right knee bent in slightly towards her left, her hips slung down and under, like she was about to sit down on a bench.

We were on line that day to see Annie Hall, and there was a scene in the movie where Alvie and Annie are standing on line outside a theater across town, on Broadway, waiting to get in to see a documentary about Nazis. They wait there together, both of them cranky and aggravated, and when a professor standing behind him starts to pontificate loudly about modern media and culture, Alvie begs us, right through the fourth wall, for a large sock filled with horse manure.

It has far less to do with the fact that there’s this supercilious academic jackass standing on line behind him — going on about Fellini and cohesive structure and La Strada and negative imagery — and far more to do with the the fact that no one ever likes to wait. Waiting is a bore. It’s a waste of our time. But more than that, it leaves the twitchy and nervous among us feeling vulnerable and prone, like a naked, cold newborn; it leaves us helpless, and in that state, we risk absorbing all the mishegas that swirls around us, like a psychic sponge. I was once in Nice with a few friends; we had just flown in from New York and were sitting in a tiny, poolside restaurant attached to the hotel we were staying in. Our waiter brought our menus, and took his time coming back to us to take our order; when it was clear that he was operating on French time — everything took a while, by American standards — one of my friends jumped up and shouted, red-faced,

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?? WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOREVER!

I WANT MY FOOD NOW!

NOW NOW NOW!

“Have you just marched through the Sahara, madame?” the waiter asked, nonplussed, before walking away.

The thing is, when we wait — on line at the DMV, or for a delivery, or for the first course to come, or for the cable guy to show up, or for a machine at the gym, or for a test result — the metaphysical car keys are snatched right out of our hands, and replaced with the fact that we’re no longer at the steering wheel: we’re out of control. This particular friend of mine who shouted at the waiter in Nice doesn’t like being out of control, even though the universe had other plans for her.

You thought the world was moving on your watch? the Universe snickers. Well guess again, Chuckles.

I’ve heard every argument under the sun for why Americans are stuck on fast/instant/processed food, and issues like economics, food deserts, sheer ignorance, addiction, and bad habit obviously come into play. But nobody ever talks about the fact that we’re also a country that thrives, regardless of socioeconomic status, on time-saving, and speed: our oil changes are done in a Jiffy; our film is developed in an hour; movies are downloaded in an instant; we don’t have to get out of the car to use the ATM or to make a deposit; airline check-ins are done by computer; entire Thanksgiving dinners are nuked in a microwave or bought in a can. That European construct — the coffee house — where you could go and sit down with a newspaper or a friend and just have a small cup of coffee and a slice of pie in the middle of the day, has gone the way of the drive-thru: almost every suburban Starbucks now has one. It’s all rush-rush-rush, Hello may I help you, can I take your order please, thank you and please haul your Yukon up to the next window.

Americans wait for nothing; we’re people of convenience, of demand and entitlement, and the myth that it keeps us and everything around us in control. We loathe idleness, both practical and psychic. If we’re not doing ten other things—or thinking about doing them— while we’re drinking our latte or getting cash from the ATM, or heating dinner in the microwave and eating it standing up while watching The Biggest Loser, we’re convinced that we’re not good enough, or that the world is getting away from us, or that someone, god forbid, might be getting ahead faster than we are.

Recently, I was talking to a neighbor — someone I don’t know well —about our garden; he wanted to know what we we grew over the summer, so I told him.

“Some long Italian flat beans, some tomatoes, some zucchini–”

He cocked his head a bit, and pointed to one of our front yard boxes, still packed with lush, emerald green foliage.

“What’s that?”

“Potatoes–” I said, walking him over to the box.

“Why don’t you pick them?” he asked.

“Because,” I said, “we have to wait.”

“But could you pick them now? Would they be ready?”

“No,” I said again, “we have to wait.”

“But what do you do while you wait? Can you eat the leaves? Or the blossoms, maybe?” he asked, hopeful.

“Nope,” I said, jamming my hands in my pockets. “We just have to wait.”

He looked at me like I had three heads and then asked, “How about those vines, over there?”

“Winter squash,” I said. “They’re not ready yet, either.”

“How long do they take?” he asked.

“It can be months–” I said, “Broccoli, too. We planted it in early August so if we’re lucky, we’ll have it in mid-November.”

“Why don’t you just buy it?” he asked me, like I was an imbecile.

“Because it’s worth the wait,” I said.

“But who the hell has the time—” he mumbled, and walked away, late for an appointment.

That’s the thing about waiting, when it comes to food; most times, it’s a very good thing. Because the act of waiting forces something else on us which most of us don’t have a whole lot of: patience, and time. It takes patience and time for winter squash to grow; for bread to rise; for the flavors in the braise to develop; for potatoes to get to the point where you can actually use them. Right now, I don’t have a whole lot of time, between writing my book and this blog and a slew of other articles, editing cookbooks, taking care of our house, making sure that Susan gets a good dinner when she returns home from her commute into New York every day, making sure that the dogs are walked and that they’re fed and vetted, making sure to call my mother and my cousins and my aunt and my mother-in-law, trying to get to the gym so that I don’t blow up into something that looks like the Hindenburg … it’s all a giant time suck. And I don’t have children, so I can’t even add soccer mom to that list. (Imagine if I could.)

But I find myself inadvertently drawn to things that force me to wait: I make bread that requires I be stuck in the house for the second punch-down; I make long braises that require I hang around; I grow things that have to hang out in or on the ground for a really long time — garlic, carrots, winter squash, broccoli — because I assume they’ll be a lot more delicious than the stuff that’s chemically induced to grow quickly and assertively and in sync with some corporate supermarket’s supply chain needs. That’s not really growing vegetables any more than a CAFO is hog farming.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but in this go-go world — where everything is instant, or mechanized — being forced to wait, to slow down, to have patience, to take time, makes me feel a little less like a chicken with its head cut off. If I take the time to seriously cook down that soffrito — slowly, carefully so that it doesn’t burn but instead builds a thick base layer of flavor — I’m not going to be able to walk away from it, or get distracted. I can head into my office down the hall from the kitchen and finish a chapter, or write a recipe, but I can’t just turn my back wholesale.

This year, with a major deadline looming, and without planning to, we planted nothing that didn’t need a lot of time, and it forced us to slow down a little, and to wait. We did have one butternut squash that ripened quickly, though, and I made a simple butternut squash soup with it, and it paid us back with four very elemental lunches. Beyond that, we’re still waiting on the potatoes, and the rest of the acorn squash, and the garlic for next year’s harvest.

They’ll be worth the time it takes.

On Dumplings and Kreplach

On Waiting

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