Weirdest Birthday Present Ever

I got a durian for my birthday.  How weird is my life?

I have fond memories of this infamously stinky fruit.  It’s a favorite of my mothers, and she will fight you for the last piece.  It’s been years since I’ve had one, but thanks to the global food market, my friend Anthony delivered one, frozen, to my doorstep. I gathered a coalition of the brave and willing and sliced into it.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I like durians anymore.  This specimen tasted like a rotten onion and I couldn’t take more than a few bites.  Perhaps it was underripe–it didn’t have the custardy texture I remembered.  Or maybe freezing doesn’t do the poor fruit any favors.

Still, how many people in this part of the world have the distinction of receiving a durian for their birthday?  For the sheer surprise factor, you can’t beat that.

El Premio Arte y Pico

I am honored, pleased and generally tickled to have received an El Premio Arte Y Pico blog award from Karen at Rambling Spoon. I’ve been following Rambling Spoon since I first discovered food blogs almost two years ago. Reading her reflections on food and human rights in Southeast Asia inspired me to start my own blog. It’s humbling and wonderful to have received praise from such a talented foodie.

The phrase Arte y Pico is a superlative meaning “Wow! The best art! Over the top!” (Clearly, one cannot translate the expression without a lot of exclamation points!!!!!!) The award is a way for bloggers to recognize and honor one another’s work. I take this opportunity to honor the blogs that have most inspired me with their writing, photography, culinary wisdom and creativity.

Official Rules:

1. Choose 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogger community.
2. Each award should have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone, and a link to the blog which bestowed it upon them.
3. The award-winner and the one who has given the prize should include a link to the Arte y Pico blog (English translation here), so everyone will know the origin of this award.

Without further ado, the new winners of the El Premio Arte y Pico blog awards are….

Mercedes at Desert Candy: Mercedes has a love affair with all things Middle Eastern: the food, the language, the land. Reading her blog makes me want to book a plane ticket right now, or at least relocate somewhere where figs and quince are plentiful. In addition to her expertise on middle eastern cuisine, she’s also a creative and knowledgeable chef in her own right.

Pat at The Asian Grandmother’s Cookbook: Pat is a culinary ethnographer, collecting the stories and recipes of women from across East and Southeast Asia. Her blog takes you into the kitchens of these wise women, where the art of cooking has been passed down from mother to daughter to grandmother.

Sarah at The Real Potato: Sarah’s down-to-earth reflections on the political nature of every forkful are a must-read. And when you need it most, there’s advice about how you can keep food on the table when you’re broke and your next pay check is two weeks away.

Jules at Stone Soup: Jules has a great palate and every recipe comes embedded in a well-planned menu. She lives and cooks in Australia, however, which means that whenever I’m too hot and sticky to think about turning on the oven, she’s braising lamb! Search the archives for seasonally-appropriate food for the Northern Hemisphere.

Melissa at The Traveler’s Lunchbox: Along with Karen, Melissa was my inspiration for starting my own blog. Her palate is fantastic, her photographs divine, and her writing impeccable.

The Dissertation, the Oregon Coast, and a Few Raw Oysters

Vacation? Who said vacation?

I meant a writing retreat, the only kind of get-away available to me this summer. It started in January: an idea, the reality of the dissertation and a looming deadline, some conversation, scheming and scheduling. So it happened that I went all the way to Pacific City, Oregon to spend two weeks waking up at five (I love jet lag) to sit at the wooden kitchen table with a tepid cup of tea, cranking out another chapter, distracted only by the view from the window. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I must reveal that I was also distracted by the wan wireless signal that my computer picked up intermittently. Addict, I am.) In lieu of a real vacation, it wasn’t so bad, especially as it came with nightly theological discussions with the friend from grad school who so generously hosted me, long walks on the beach, and meal after meal of fresh seafood. This transplanted beach kid needed to get her fill before returning to the Midwest.

I don’t know if they slurp down raw oysters with nam pla prik in Thailand, but in our family, we’ve always eaten them this way. You wouldn’t think briny oysters would benefit from briny fish sauce–but you would be wrong. It’s not just the fish sauce, the bite of lime and fresh chilies somehow makes the oysters crisper and juicier.

My family has these at Thanksgiving. Having always been warned not to eat oysters in months without an “r,” I was surprised to find Pacific oysters available in the summer. I still think they taste better in the colder months, but if you are so fortunate to have oysters come your way, pound up a batch of nam pla prik and slurp them down. They’re brain food, after all.

Raw Oysters with Nam Pla Prik

If you have leftover oysters, you can make a Tha-style Ceviche by throwing in your additional nam pla prik, extra lime juice, fish sauce, shallots and chilies.

As many oysters as you think you and your friends can eat, shucked and left on the half-shell

Nam pla prik

10 tiny green chilies
1/2 c. fish sauce, to taste
1 lime

Pound green chilies in mortar and pestle. Add fish sauce and lime. Taste and adjust flavors.

The Discovery of India

“What’s Sri Lankan food like? Is it like Indian food?”

I never know how to answer this question. What is Indian food like anyway? There’s the food of South India, redolent of hot chilli and curry leaves. The food of the north uses more yogurt and less coconut milk. The Parsis, the Bengalis, the Gujeratis all have their specialities. So how similar is it to Sri Lankan food? The food of Kerala, based on rice flour and coconut has much more in common with the food of Sri Lanka than the food of Rajastan, where wheat is the staple. So in that sense, there is Indian food that’s a lot like Sri Lankan food. But is there even a such thing as Indian food? And what is Sri Lankan food anyway? Do you mean the food of the coast? The food of the north? The food of central highlands?

I really don’t know what Indian food is, and I certainly don’t pretend to be any expert on the regional cooking of India. Like most people, I’ve learned everything I know about “Indian” food from cookbooks, the Internet, and a few patient friends. This dinner, thrown together in honor of some fabulous halibut I got in Oregon, features what is a Bengali fish curry, according to Cyrus Todiwala. I cooked up a kidney bean curry to use some kidney beans we had boiled the previous week, and some cabbage, the way my mom would have made it (had we had curry leaves, dried chilli and Maldive fish–call it a minimalist Sri Lankan cabbage). Call it a pan-Indian supper, call it whatever you want, it was delicious.

Bengali Fish Curry

1 pound firm fleshed fish (I used halibut here. We had fillets, but you can use steaks as well)
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1/2 tsp. salt
1 medium onion, minced
2 cloves garlic
1/2 inch piece of ginger
1 small green chile
1/2 teaspoon dried red chilli
2 tbsp. ghee (you can also use a neutral flavored oil such as peanut or canola)
1 cup whole milk yogurt
1 tsp. garam masala
2 tbsp. chopped cilantro

Cut fish into bite-sized pieces. Sprinkle with turmeric and salt and set aside while you chop the onion. Pound garlic, ginger and green chilli together. Heat ghee in saucepan. Fry fish two minutes on one side and one minute on the other. Remove from pan. Fry onion briefly, add garlic-ginger paste. When onion is soft, add yogurt and cook until thick. (Warning: This is not the prettiest dish; the yogurt will curdle. Accept and move on. It tastes good.) Taste and adjust for salt.

Add fish to sauce and stir to coat. Bring sauce to simmer and cook one minute. Cover pan and remove from heat. Let sit for ten minutes. Garnish with cilantro.

Kidney Bean Curry

2 cups cooked kidney beans
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic
1/2 in. ginger
1 green chilli
1 tbsp. ghee or neutral flavored oil
2 medium tomatoes, or use canned
1 tsp. ground coriander
1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1 tsp salt (use less if using canned kidney beans)
chopped coriander for garnish

Pound garlic, ginger, and chilli to paste. Heat ghee in saucepan. Add onion and cook until soft. Add ginger-garlic paste. Cook one minute more, then add tomatoes. Add dried spices and cook until tomato has thickened and flavors are beginning to meld. Add kidney beans and cook five minutes more. Taste and adjust for salt. Sprinkle with chopped coriander and serve.

Source: Mamta’s Kitchen, Cyrus Todiwala’s Cafe Spice Namaste

The Lessons of Summer–Finally!

Crêpes with Strawberries and Crème Fraîche

Summer has finally arrived in the Upper Midwest. Due to the cold and wet spring, strawberry season has been delayed by three weeks here, making us all the more anxious for the first taste of local strawberries. Some friends gathered for the very first strawberries of the season. Fiona made homemade crème fraîche; I made crêpes, and there was chocolate and whipped cream as well.

Is there anything better than local strawberries, so much softer and sweeter than the sour monstrosities from California? And to wrap those strawberries in a tender, eggy crêpes? But the real revelation was Fiona’s crème fraîche, made with the cream of grass-fed cows and cultured with kefir grains. It was the best crème fraîche I’ve ever had. Nutty and sweet, even without sugar, with the slightest tang; I swear I could taste the grass that the cows ate, the sun, and the land that nourishes them.

Sitting in the sun, sharing crêpes with strawberries and crème fraîche; I wonder if I would be so grateful for all this had I not waited all year for it. Maybe this is the lesson that the seasons teach; experience all that every season has to offer, taste, touch, smell. Gratitude and impermanence can coexist. They must.

Crème fraîche

The better your cream, the better the crème fraîche will be. Grass-fed, organic and raw is ideal. As I mentioned above, Fiona cultured hers with kefir grains. If you aren’t into making your own kefir, use buttermilk. Be aware, however, that buttermilk enzymes do not digest lactose the way that kefir does. (As a side note, how wonderful it was to have cream without getting a stomach-ache immediately afterwards!)

1 quart heavy cream
1 tbsp. buttermilk

Combine cream and buttermilk. Cover with a cloth and leave in a warm place 18-24 hours. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Crêpes

3 eggs
1 1/4 c. milk (I use lactose-free)
pinch salt
1 c. flour
3 tbsp butter, melted and cooled

Beat eggs until homogenous. Add milk and salt. Mix. Sift flour into egg mixture. Beat again. There will probably be lumps; that’s okay, they will dissolve as the batter sits. Stir in melted butter. Refrigerate overnight. (I have just made the crepes immediately after mixing the batter many times. Aside from the occasional lump, it doesn’t make much difference.)

Heat small (preferably six inch) crepe pan or non-stick pan over high heat. Wipe pan with melted butter or oil. When hot, ladle 1/3 c. batter into pan and swirl to evenly coat bottom of pan. Drip excess batter back into bowl. Cook one minute or until edges of crepe are brown. Flip and cook thirty seconds more.

Spiced Honey Fruit Salad

In order to be a food blogger, you have to live in your senses: the world of taste, smell, touch. Me, I’ve been in my head a lot these days. I’m spending the summer cranking out my dissertation, day after day. Perhaps that’s why I feel so uninspired about this blog, or perhaps the dissertation is sucking all my writing energy, and I don’t have much left over for anything else. I’ll save you the impenetrably dull details, spare the fact that the other night, I dreamt that I was on a date with John Rawls. Apparently, it isn’t enough that I’ve been spending eight to ten hours a day with Professor Rawls for the past two weeks, now, I have to have dinner and drinks with him in my sleep? (No, I don’t know want to know what this says about my subconscious.)

Fortunately, I have a few friends that regularly drag me away from my desk and out of the house. Even more fortunately, these friends are really into potlucks, which forces me into the kitchen, back into my hands and my body. Is there anything more sensual than plunging a knife into a ripe cantaloupe? Grabbing a slippery mango to slice off its peel? And nothing is better on a summer evening that fruit salad with perfectly ripe fruit.

This salad is an invention of my mothers, combining a subtle kiss of warming spices (cloves, caramom, cinnamon, ginger) with the sweetness of summer fruits. It’s simply perfect.

Spiced Fruit Salad

Obviously, you can vary the fruits, but try to include one melon and one fruit from the stone category.

1/2 stick cinnamon
2 cloves
2 pods cardamom
pinch salt
honey to taste, start with 2 tbsp
1/2 c. fresh orange juice (used commercial in a pinch)

1 fragrant ripe cantaloupe
1 pint strawberries
1 ripe mango
1/2 pint raspberries or blackberries
1 peach
rind from 1/2 an orange
1 handful blanched almonds
1/2 c. crystallized ginger, chopped
small handful mint leaves
squeeze of lemon juice, to taste

In small saucepan, heat spices and salt with orange juice. Add honey. Bring to a boil and simmer 10 minutes. Add water if pan threatens to boil dry.

Chop fruit into bite sized pieces. Mix gently with almonds, mint and ginger. Add spiced honey and lemon. Taste and adjust for seasonings.

Source: My mom

Pizza Crust Reconsidered

Let it never be said that I can’t change my mind.

Remember that Todd English pizza crust I loved so much? It was the only pizza crust I’d made for years, but then, I stumbled upon 101 Cookbooks post of master baker Peter Reinhart’s Neapolitan-style pizza. One bite of this crust, and my stand-by crust was forgotten. It’s everything you could want in a pizza crust: flavorful, light and crispy with big dough bubbles. It has the advantage of being much easier to handle as well.

The key, according to Heidi, is a long fermentation that allows the flavor of the yeast to develop. Even better, the whole process is far easier than my other pizza dough. Just toss the dry ingredients together, add cold water, stir and knead until smooth. Throw into the refrigerator for use anytime in the next four days. By far the hardest part is remembering to take the dough out of the fridge two hours before you plan to make your pizza.

Another trick is that this pizza dough is tossed, thus avoiding the heaviness that comes from the weight of the rolling pin squashing down all the yeast bubbles. Tossing pizza is kind of stressful when you’re having friends over and you’re nervous about pitching everyone’s dinner onto the floor, but it’s not so difficult. The dough has a dreamy texture: soft, smooth and supple. You don’t have to toss very high or flashily, just a few inches will stretch the dough whisper thin and bake up into a crispy, light crust. (If this stresses you out, I recommend breathing deeply before tossing the pizza–in through the nose, out through the mouth and TOSS!)

I resisted buying a pizza stone for the longest time. I just got one, and I can’t imagine what I did without it. I don’t have a peel, so I just use a piece of cardboard sprinkled with semolina to slide the pizza onto the stone.

I’ve linked to Heidi’s recipe above, but my adaptation follows. I use a little whole-wheat pastry flour in my recipe. I like the flavor of whole wheat, and mixing all-purpose with a lower gluten flour mimics the softer flour of Italy.

Overnight Pizza Crust

3 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 c. whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp. instant yeast
2 tsp. salt
2 tbsp olive oil
1 3/4 c. cold water
semolina or corn meal

Combine flours, yeast, and salt. Add cold water and olive oil and mix until dough is too heavy to stir. On floured surface (or just in the bowl, which is what I do) knead dough 10 minutes until smooth and no longer sticky. Divide dough into six equal parts. Place on well floured cookie sheet, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight, or for up to four days. You can also freeze some of the dough for later.

The next day, two hours before making the pizza, take dough out of fridge. If using a pizza stone, preheat oven to 500 one hour before making pizza. Pick up the dough and place it over the backs of your fists. Gently stretch the dough by moving your fists apart. If you’re feeling confident, gently toss it a few inches in the air. Catch and stretch again. Do this over a clean surface in case of accidents. When dough is as uniformly thin as it’s going to get, place on peel (or piece of cardboard) sprinkled with cornmeal or semolina. Gently place toppings on pizza; avoid pressing dough down into the peel. Slide pizza onto stone, and bake 8-10 minutes. If you do not have a pizza stone, you can bake pizza on a cookie sheet for 15 minutes.

The Taste of Home

Sri Lankan Crab Curry

They say that you can never go home again. In some ways, the business of growing up and growing old is about coming to terms with this reality. The place you miss, the place you crave, the place where you truly belong–that place no longer exists, if it ever did. Perhaps this is so for everyone, but for us rootless cosmopolitans who belong simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, the old adage is a truth that defines our lives.

No wonder the smells and tastes of childhood are so powerful; they take us as close to home as we can get, however fleeting the experience may be. In Sri Lanka, our relatives in Negombo would make platters of curry with enormous lagoon crabs whenever our family would come to visit. As a child, I could never eat crab curry without getting the curry all over my hands and wrists, dirtying the glass of water I had to keep handy to douse the fire that burned my lips and tongue. An uncle looked on in wordless disgust–he himself possessed the remarkable ability to dismantle a crab with the fingertips of one hand, keeping even his palm clean. (Breaking things apart while keeping his hands clean was a specialty of this particular uncle of mine, but that is a story for another time and venue.)

In North Carolina, making this crab curry was an all-day family event, beginning with an early morning trip to the docks to catch the crabs ourselves. The tide had to either be going out or coming in. If the water level was too low, the crabs would have retreated to deeper waters; too high, and you couldn’t see when they began nibbling at their chicken neck bait. My mother, who only likes to spend time outdoors if there’s a great meal waiting at the end of it, was particularly good at tricking the crabs into her net. Then came the nasty part, from which my sister and I were thankfully excused: maiming the crabs by pulling off their claws and killing them by tearing off their top shells. Once as a teenager, I got stuck with this task when my dad was out of town. I was revolted, but it taught me that I could indeed live up to one of my maxims: don’t eat anything you couldn’t kill yourself. The reward for all this labor came when the large mound of crabs was brought to the table, steaming hot, bathed in a fiery curry fragrant with roasted coconut and spices.

Crack into a crab claw, suck out the mingled juices of the crab and coconut milk. Dig into the sweet flesh of the crab’s body, coated with the dark flavor of roasted coconut, chile, and coriander. Eating crab is a primal experience; you have to get your hands dirty.

How does it taste? It tastes of the sea, of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. It tastes of lands both far and near. It’s the taste of the familiar, of family, and of childhood. It tastes of home.

Sri Lankan Crab Curry

Serves four.

Part I: Making the masala
3/4 c. unsweetened dried coconut (you may also use fresh)
1 1/2 tbsp. fennel seeds
1 tbsp. black peppercorns
6 fresh curry leaves
2 tbsp. coconut milk

Combine the dried coconut, fennel, pepper, and curry leaves and roast in dry skillet over medium-high fire, stirring constantly, until coconut is the color of, I hate to say it, hamster shavings.

Let mixture cool and grind in a blender with 2 tbsp. coconut milk.

Part II: The Curry
1 med. onion, sliced thinly
1/2 piece of ginger, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
6 curry leaves
2 tbsp. peanut oil
2 tbsp. Jaffna or Trincomalee-style curry powder (see note)
1 tsp. paprika
1/2-2 tsp. cayenne pepper (to taste)
1 tbsp. tamarind pulp, soaked in hot water
1 c. coconut milk
fresh lime juice, to taste
salt, to taste

Heat oil in 6 quart pot. Saute onion, garlic, ginger, and curry leaves until onions begin to color (about 7 minutes). Add curry powder, paprika, cayenne pepper, one teaspoon salt and stir. Cook 1 minute more. Squeeze tamarind pulp and add tamarind water to pot. Add dried coconut masala and coconut milk. Stir and cook 10 minutes, until curry is thick. Taste and adjust seasonings with additional salt, cayenne and/or lime if necessary.

Part III: Cleaning the Crabs

18 Atlantic blue crabs (You may also use Pacific Dungenous, but use fewer crabs)
1 tsp. turmeric

With a pair of tongs, lift each crab out of the bag. Be sure it’s alive and kicking. If it seems to be dead, discard. Here comes the nasty bit. Carefully grasp crab from the back with your left hand. Cover your right hand in a dish towel and pry it’s claws off and reserve. Then, on a flat surface, turn the crab upside down, hold the top shell down with your left hand, and, grasping the crab’s legs with your right hand, pull the body away from the top shell. This kills the crab far more quickly humanely than the barbaric American custom of dropping them alive into boiling water.

Discard top shell. Under running water, pull off the “dead man’s fingers” that cover the body. Clean out any dark green matter and the pink organs (anyone know what these are?). However, reserve the orange eggs from the female crabs. Last, either with a large knife or your hands, split the two sides of the crab in two.

When you’ve done about half of the crabs, sprinkle with a dusting of turmeric. Sprinkle another dusting of turmeric when you’ve finishing cleaning all the crabs.

Add crabs to curry. Stirring and tossing occasionally, cook over medium heat for ten minutes.

Serve with white rice and accompaniments.

Note: Jaffna-style curry powder may be ordered here. You can make Trincomalee-style curry powder by roasting dried whole chilies and coriander seeds separately, grinding in a spice grinder and combining. Use 2 parts dried chilies to 1 part coriander seed (measure by weight). Do not even think of using any other kind of curry powder, particular not the foul substance sold at Western grocery stores.

Jamaican Locavore

I have a thing for coconut water. Sometimes, in the middle of a hot, humid, American summer, I feel like I’ll just die if I don’t have a coconut right then. So I compromise and have a can of oversweetened Thai coconut juice. Does it taste good? No. But somehow, it assuages the craving.

So, when I’m in the tropics, I make sure to have as many coconuts as possible. As soon as I got off the plane, I asked our taxi driver if we could stop and have a coconut: jelly, as it’s called in Jamaica. And it was good. Sweet without added sugar, sipped straight from the shell with a straw. And after your belly it full of the coconut water, have the coconut split open for you, a makeshift spoon carved out of a piece of the shell, and scrape the young coconut jelly directly from the shell. Heaven.

Honestly, it was worth the price of the plane tickets alone just to have one coconut a day for six days.

Coconuts aside, no report on Jamaican cuisine would be complete without jerk. I’ve made jerk before, but jerk was meant to be eaten seaside, appetite sharpened by a morning of swimming and sun,
the scent of wood smoke on the breeze. In these seaside shacks, the meat is slowly smoked over embers of the allspice tree, which impart their distinctive flavor to the meat. I went around and tasted the sauces of all the jerk stands at Boston Beach. When I found the best, I flattered and flirted and tried in vain to extract a recipe from the proprietor. No such luck. At least I brought a bottle back for Kassie and CJ, who looked after my cats while I was gone.

Our most memorable meal, however, was in a seaside shack in the quiet fishing village of Manchioneal. On the heels of yet another fruitless expedition, we stopped in Manchioneal on the way back to Port Antonio, ravenous. The locals said that the best restaurant in town was Dada West. “That’s the name of the restaurant?” I asked. “No, that’s the name of the person who cooks there.”

Dada West’s could only be loosely termed a restaurant. It was a tin roof shack with a floor of sand and an enormous stereo system pumping reggae beats to the breeze. In the immaculate kitchen, Dada West cooks up pots of lobster curry, fish stew, and red beans and rice. We laid waste to plates of sweet and sour fish stew within minutes. For dessert, I had tucked a stolen mango from that morning. Dada West lent us a scotch bonnet pepper and some salt, and watched incredulously as my dad cut into the hard, green mango. He was good enough to try a slice, sour as a green apple and fiery with chile. I’m not sure he will be munching on green mangoes himself anytime soon, but it was nice to share something with him after he fed us so well.

It only occurred to me after I returned home how very ascetic our diet in Jamaica was in some ways. Portland was the most lush place I’ve ever been. Look up, and the trees above your head are heavy with bananas, ackee, star and sour apples. The sea teems with fish. We ate local vegetables simply stewed with fish for breakfast lunch and dinner. The funny thing is that I never missed butter, dairy or rich food. Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps I was fish-starved from living in the Midwest. Perhaps, I just fell in love with Jamaica, its people, and the food that comes from its land and sea.

Destination: Jamaica, Port Antonio

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog terribly of late, and when I do show up, I whine endlessly. As my inner reserves of sunlight and warmth dwindled through the winter, I became more and more cranky. So when the opportunity arose to spend spring break by the sea in warm and tropical Jamaica, I grabbed it.

Needing a vacation away from work, I dragged my parents away from the spring-break craziness of resort-infested Montego Bay to serence Portland parish, on the northeastern coast of the island. I won’t lie; there’s not much going on in Port Antonio, the main town. It turns out that when you avoid tourists, you also avoid first-world tourist amenities. In order to have a good time, you must abandon all expectations of what will happen and when. If you hike a mile up the top of a steep hill in search of an art exhibition, only to find that you were misinformed not only about the hotel in question, but also about the date of the exhibition, the only thing to do is to be thankful for the hike itself, through the lush rainforest as beautiful as any nature preserve.

And who can be disappointed when confronted with a view of the sea coming into the cove from the top of the hill?

It was enough, I found, to sit in a park and watch a cricket game, breathing the salty ocean air that I’ve missed so much, feeling the sun on my skin after a winter indoors, and call to a herd of goats going by.

It was lovely to be there with my parents, who, it turns out, feel perfectly at home in tropical islands formerly occupied by the British. The flora of Portland is similar to that of Kandy, the hill town of central Sri Lanka where my mother grew up. In Sri Lanka, vendors on the side of the road sell green mango dipped in a mixture of chile powder and salt. Raw mango is hard to find Stateside, so when we saw an enormous mango tree near our guest house, it’s branches bearing hundreds of hard, green mangoes, we couldn’t resist helping ourselves.

To hear my mother tell stories from her childhood, mango theft is practically in my DNA. We ate our green mango with a generous sprinkling of salt and a chopped Scotch bonnet pepper in place of chile powder.

Of course, my vacation wasn’t all mango-thievery and cricket-watching. I had only five days to make up for my five month sun and sea deficit.

This lagoon is fed both by the sea and by under-water springs, some of which spout hot water. Like many things in Portland, there’s no tourist infrastructure to the lagoon, just a gravel road leading to a cement boat ramp. To swim in the lagoon, you squeeze by the boats and try not to cut your feet on the sharp stones that line the bottom.

I arrived back in Minnesota almost a month ago now, to a stack of papers to be graded, another snow storm, and thankfully, a house full of friends for whom to cook dinner. I was exhausted at work on Tuesday, but I didn’t regret my vacation excess for a second. My sun reserves topped up, I could patiently wait through another six snow storms for spring to finally arrive.