I decided to get the ingredients to try bitter melon stuffed with ground pork and a chile/bean sauce to mellow the bitterness of the melon. To Sam’s delight, I also brought home dumplings, green tea mochi, and rambutan—spiky looking little fruits, the size of plums. These last even the cashier didn’t recognize and had to ask others what they were. We discovered that they have a delicious, sweet, almost grape-like texture and flavor. We learned that these fruits that look like sea urchins are the apples of South East Asian, so we started planning a trip to Vietnam.

The stuffed bitter melon was delicious with its balance of bitter, sweet, salty, spicy Here’s my version:

1/2 lb. ground pork

2 T. soy sauce

1 T. chopped fresh ginger

2 T. chopped fresh green onions

2 T. chopped fresh garlic

1 T. lime juice

1 bitter melon, halved and de-seeded, then halved again.

Chili-bean sauce (store bought)

Combine the first six ingredients. Stuff into the melon and steam in a big skillet with a cup of water for 20 minutes. Check periodically to see if more water needs to be added. 

Serve with more green onions to garnish and chili-bean sauce. 

As I continued to wander around, a man led me to the very back of the store in the corner where there were Ziplock bags of freshly made "kenkey," a fermented corn paste. "This is what we eat in Ghana," he told me. I took the smallest package I could find, which still wasn't very small. The clerk then added a tub of spicy shrimp paste to my basket. "About ten o'clock in the morning in Ghana," he said, "people will eat a little kenkey with some shrimp paste and then they won't need to eat for the rest of the day until evening."

That night, I heated up the kenkey and added the shrimp paste: a powerful taste sensation. The spicy shrimp paste--ginger, hot peppers, garlic and dried fish--was just to the edge of my spice capacity, and the peppers were something like a chipotle in their smokiness. The kenkey is a very dense cornmeal with a strong sour taste. I can't say that it was the most delicious meal I have ever eaten.  The sour and spicy fought with each other in my mouth, and I could only eat tiny bites at a time. Later a friend told me that of all the Ghanaian starches, kenkey was her least favorite. But I could see how it was good nourishing food that could take you a long way into the day.

Last night, I finally boiled up my enormous African yam--as I found out that my huge tuber was called. It pureed into a beautiful silky and light texture like my mother-in-laws creamy mashed potatoes, and will make a great base for soup or a starch for some kind of curry. I think I will try it with the shrimp paste and see if that goes better.

Today is the release day for See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity. One friend suggested I celebrate with a Godiva hot chocolate. Another suggested a drink called The Aviation. I admit I am stuck. It seems wrong to let a moment for celebration pass without some kind of acknowledgement. But I did eat quite a bit of Halloweeen candy yesterday. You see the dilemma. I am open to suggestions.

I ordered something called "The Southern," partly because I was intrigued by the name. In the U.S. "The Southern" would probably mean grits, but here it meant pierogis. This still has me mystified. What "south" is indicated by potato and cheese pierogis? Is it the south of Poland--Krakow--where I first tasted pierogis? Or the south, and Polish, part of Chicago? I have no idea, but I'd welcome thoughts.

My disorientation continued as Rachel and I listened to a couple of old farmers in the next booth talking rapidly in a language I didn't recognize.

"What is that?" I asked her.

"Plattdeutsch," she said, grinning.

A "southern" breakfast in a northern town, in a restaurant run by East Asians, in a place where at least four languages are spoken readily. Fun.

If you want to eat off the beaten path, go to southern Manitoba.

Last weekend, I took the train from Chicago to Grand Forks, North Dakota and then crossed the border into southern Manitoba. Because I have been trying to make this trip for eleven years, the journey had the feeling of a pilgrimage.

(My first attempt to go to Manitoba was aborted at O'Hare when I realized I had left my passport back home in Leadville. My second attempt was also aborted at O'Hare when I got word of a family crisis. Would the third time be the charm?)

When I finally crossed the border with my friend Rachel, it was dawn and the sky was clear, enormous and just turning pink. The fields of corn, soybeans, canola and sunflower had been turned over, for the most part, and the leaves on the few trees were brown or fallen. The grasses in the ditches and along the river were spectacular brown, gold, pink and orange.

One of our first stops was in Rachel's favorite little town in Manitoba, Neubergthal, where many of the houses still have their barns attached, in the traditional Mennonite way. Neubergthal is a little stretch of highway, without a commercial location of any kind. It was early morning, and a few children were waiting at the end of their driveways for the school bus.

"I would love to live in Neubergthal," Rachel said. At first, I couldn't imagine why. As I looked around at the leaf strewn lawns and the roughly hedged yards, I had a hard time understanding Neubergthal as a place. It had, on the surface, so little to define it. There was no river, no forest, certainly no buildings that hemmed it in to create what I thought of as a sense of space. I realized that I was looking at Neubergthal and wondering where, under all that sky, would I hide?

Rachel saw it differently. In the city, she feels boxed in by the houses; everyone's boundaries end too soon. When her sister lived close by, she could hang a towel out her window to signal how the night had been. That helped Rachel feel that she could extend herself a little bit beyond her own particular box. But in Neubergthal, she imagines that she could live expansively against the sky.

Judy, a woman who crosses the border between guest, volunteer and angel, would often stop me and place both her hands on the top of my head. I am sure it was a strange sight. For one thing, Judy is at least a foot taller than me. Her gesture was part blessing, part road block. But it never failed to slow me down and set me a little bit more right. It was as though she could put the energy back into my body through her warm hands, as if she were handing back to me little pieces of myself that she was watching fly around the room.

I often think of Judy's hands on my commute to work. I arrive at the Ogilvie Transportation Center, thinking, "Do I have my keys? Do I have my wallet? Did I forget my phone?" I start the walk up Monroe with hundreds of other rushing commuters, heads down, shoes clicking. I feel Judy's hands on my head, part blessing, part road block.

"The Great Way is easy," I read in the Tao Te Ching this morning. "Yet people prefer the side paths. Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao."

A friend of mine recently sent me a recipe for a bowl of oatmeal that has fifteen different ingredients including chia seeds, bee pollen, goji berries and (I'm not kidding) kimchi. So I thought I would also go to the supplement section of Whole Foods and price what it would cost to make this oatmeal as well. 

On this evening, a crowd had gathered around a woman demonstrating the varied uses of a Vitamix who spoke enthusiastically into a clipped-on microphone like an evangelical preacher. Many people roamed and picked up samples, as I did. Whole Foods seemed like the place to be. I wished I had dressed up a little more.

Perhaps the evening's most extraordinary discovery was that if you buy flax seed in the bulk section along with oats and dried beans, you will pay $1.99/pound for it. But if you wander across the store to the food supplement section, the very same flax seed suddenly increases dramatically in value. It is $5.59 for a 12 oz. bag. What is the story here? Can I come to any other conclusion than that Whole Foods has decided (rather cynically) that people who buy health supplements are dupes who will pay any price for the experience of feeling healthy? 

The bittermelon was a revelation--pungent, explode-your-tastebuds bitter. Of the two, the Indian was definitely stronger and more acrid, while the Chinese was strong, but palatable. For our experiment, I decided to mix bittermelon with potato and create a stirfry, along the lines of cumin potatoes. I added both the turmeric root and the tindoras, along with garlic and onions. The stirfry was a brilliant orange-green that made Sam wince. But it was delicious, in its own crazy way. I have been craving it ever since. Bittermelon is definitely missing from my diet on a regular basis. I could feel my digestion improving by the minute. And fresh turmeric root is something I will start eating daily, raw.

We had less luck, I will admit, with the breadfruit. Because of the hot weather, I did not feel like baking it. So I boiled it and tried to mash it like a potato. It turned into kind of a sticky muck. Peter and I continued to eat it gamely, frying it up with our eggs in the morning, but I don't think I will be returning to buy another one any time soon.

But we lived on hatchipuri, which we thought of as "Russian pizza." Peter and I didn't actually know each other at this time. We both lived in Krasnodar, but a year apart. Our experiences of hatchipuri were also different. Peter, being male, often went to the steamy little cafes where hatchipuri came out of the ovens and could be eaten with glasses of warm Fanta or warm beer. I usually ate my hatchipuri on the street because it made me nervous to be stared at while sitting in these male-dominated cafes. 

In Krasnodar, the hatchipuri is like flat-bread or pizza dough with salty cheese spilling out. When I've tried to bake hatchipuri in the U.S., I've used a really simple dough of water, yeast, salt and flour and the rolled it out with oil. But I've never found a satisfying cheese. The best, but still far away, result came from mixing Muenster with butter and egg and using it as a filling. This was pretty killer dipped into borsch, but it wasn't really anything like the Georgian cheese we ate in Krasnodar. 

At Argo's Georgian Bakery on Devon, the dough was more like croissant dough than the flatbread I remember. It is flaky and light, but not as satisfying or chewy as my most ideal hatchipuri. At the same time, the cheese is perfect--just salty and crumbly enough to evoke feta, but with a difference I can't quite put my finger on. It is baked on a traditional-style round oven in the middle of the store, and Alex kindly tolerated my rusty Russian while I added adzhika and lavash to my bill.