If you were shipwrecked on a desert island with only one food, what
would you choose? Think survival. Only unprocessed, raw ingredients are
allowed in this exercise — no energy bars or hamburgers.
Call it coincidence, call it cosmic, call it luck, but if you really
were trapped on a desert island, one of the best foods you could hope
to find is a food you’d actually be likely to find. Packed with energy,
protein, fiber, vitamins, and many other nutrients, coconut is a
complete and proven survival food.
The coconut inhabits innumerable deserted islands thanks to a
dispersal method by which it slowly floats around the ocean and
occasionally makes landfall on suitable shores, where it sprouts and
colonizes. This is one reason why coconut is the poster child for my
personal culinary style: the Slow-Boat School of Cooking.
Slow-boat cooking is a regional cuisine focused on local ingredients
but not to the point of dogma. Slow-boating allows the strategic
application of select ingredients from faraway places — like
coconuts — provided they adhere to two basic rules:
1) The faraway food in question cannot be grown at home, ever. This
rules out imported fruits like strawberries and apples from the
southern hemisphere in winter, when they’re out of season at home.
Slow-boat principles dictate that you preserve local foods in season
and use the storage forms all year long, rather than buying the
imported version out of season.
Ingredients like coconuts, chocolate, and black pepper cannot be
grown at home. They also satisfy the second requirement.
2) Imported ingredients are allowed if they can be transported
slowly, unrefrigerated — like the spice and pasta Marco Polo
brought home from China. Polo did not bring back fresh lychee fruits or
frozen pot stickers, which would have rotted and melted. Shipping food
slowly, unrefrigerated, is the most efficient way. While realistically
it’s hard to know by what mode your food arrived, if, in the evolution
of our cuisine, we stick to foods that could be transported by slow
boat, then we hold open the possibility that they will be. And we’ll
create cuisines that could someday be close to carbon neutral, if some
shipping companies would go back to using sailboats. Languedoc
vineyards in France have in fact begun shipping its wine this way.
Wine could challenge coconuts as a slow-boat poster product —
think message in a bottle — were it not for the fact that so much
good wine is produced closer to home.
Coconut brings a flavor and richness to the table that is as close
to magical as food can get. It mixes harmoniously with many local
ingredients, and today I’m going to focus on how it can be applied to
elk and green chile.
The first step is to thaw your meat, which doesn’t have to be elk.
It could be anything, even fish. If you have frozen green chile, thaw
that too. If not, hang in there.
Many cooks, even in tropical countries where the coconuts drop from
the trees, balk at making their own coconut milk. And while canned
coconut milk qualifies as slow-boat friendly, I prefer to make it
fresh.
Picking a good coconut can be a crapshoot, but you can improve your
odds by choosing coconuts that feel heavy for their size, don’t have
cracks or mold on the outside, and have audible water sloshing inside.
Consider bringing a bowl to the store. Smash your new coconut on the
parking lot, drain the water into the bowl, and taste it. If it tastes
rotten, exchange the coconut for another and try again. Alternatively,
you can keep a can of coconut milk as a backup in case of a bad
coconut.
Pull apart your smashed coconut and bake the broken shards at 350
for 30 minutes, or until the edges start to turn golden. Remove from
heat and let cool. Chop the flesh, which should pull away from the
shell easily with a butter knife or spoon, and put it in a food
processor or blender. Grind for about three minutes, then slowly add
two cups of water. Blend/process for three more minutes. Let steep for
15 minutes, then pour the whole business through a filter. A tea
strainer or paint strainer works well, as does cheesecloth or other
cotton material stretched over a bowl. Squeeze all the liquid into a
bowl, and set aside the leftover coconut flesh and add to your next
stir-fry.
Cut your meat into one-inch chunks and squeeze a few slow-boat limes
over the chunks. Marinate 15 minutes, and then brown the meat in a pan
with hot oil. When brown, add a sliced onion, a few chopped garlic
cloves, and some lime leaves (I get mine from a local greenhouse).
I buy green chiles by the bushel in August, when they’re in season,
and roast and freeze them for year-round use. If you didn’t do this,
you have permission to go buy fresh Anaheim or New Mexico chile peppers
from the store, and roast them yourself to make this dish. It won’t be
slow-boat, but it will be good practice and will hopefully motivate you
to come aboard the slow boat this summer and freeze a stash of roasted
green chile.
While the meat is browning, peel and clean seven to 10 chiles under
running water, removing seeds if you wish, and chop them.
After you add the onions and garlic to the pan, let them cook until
they start to sweat, then add your coconut milk. Stir, add soy sauce to
taste, and squeeze in a few more limes. Simmer five minutes, add the
green chile, simmer two more minutes, and turn off the heat. Serve with
rice, and garnish with cilantro if you have any on board.
