Posole

Just after I dry off from a shower, I spray a little vanilla perfume on my chest and neck. After I get dressed, I spray my clothing once more. Later in the day, I spray again, hair, wrists, neck. This might be a bit excessive, I know, but it's quite pleasant to walk around smelling like a cookie. Also, adding scent in layers at different times seems to infuse time with a depth of bodily presence. Different notes of the perfume emanate in various tones, rippling at multiple paces like stones of various sizes tossed into a calm lake. Vanilla, like lavender, gives me calm, provides a boundary of scent around me, not like a wall, but like a sweet concentricity.

The nature of existence is that it doesn't hit you all at once. People too ought to be like this, and wines too, and food. Subtle, in layers, in time.

Switch your brain over to oregano, will you? Imagine too cumin. I'm making posole. Don't eat that red chile pod all at once. Such as: The same tactic / layering scent as taste / as spice through time / in the composition of the soup / holds true for the body / the soup holds true/ food as for my own self. In other words,

I start with the corn, soak them with a few oregano leaves. Here they taste like dry lime, a seaboard, a washing of the desert, some petrichor, a coral reef dried up, a matate dry and licked. I soak the corn and then I put it on the stove to simmer.

An hour or so later, I start the pork, cover it with water, turn on another burner. And I add: an onion cut in half studded with cloves, a pinch of oregano, a pinch of cumin seeds, fresh thyme (I don't bother taking the leaves off the stems) whole garlic cloves, ten black pepper corns and a crushed red chile pod, without its seeds. All of this is inedible, smells like water, needs time. The oregano is just plant material in water, making tea.

When the pork is shreddable and edible, it's time to strike up the sautee pan. Chopped onion, celery, and more garlic get transluscent in the slow heating olive oil. Then I add oregano and cumin seeds, ground up this time in a little mortar & pestle. It's fresh, and scented, and hunger arises around me like a perfume. I strain the broth into the hominy which has popped open, mealy and dense like a geode in sandstone. Then I add the spiced up onion/celery/garlic mix, then the shredded pork.

Finally, the red chile sauce. I use a powder now, I've got some mean stuff from Dixon, NM. I roast it in a dry pan with guess what...oregano & cumin, and some marjoram for good measure. Add salt; it all starts to turn from the color of an indian paintbrush to a dark hot crimson, and the piquancy threatens the air. Like I'm making a roux, I add a little fat (olive oil) and then some broth from the soup, stir with a wooden spoon, and it turns to velvet in the pan, softening and bubbling up. Add more broth and stir some more. The oregano is part of the red chile now, and the cumin helps give it a toasty depth; both bring down the acidic nightshade into a real hot palate, love, don't give me chocolate for valentine's day, make me red chile and serve it to me on a hot corn tortilla. But this red chile is for the soup, and I stir a few spoonfuls in and the whole soup comes together.

All those layers of spice at different levels of cooking and different combination cannot be reduced to one step, one spray. Soup, like the self in a day, is all about time. I let the flavors simmer together for another hour or so. Then we sit down to eat, adding fresh cilantro and sour cream and lime to our bowls. Hot tortillas instead of bread: more corn, more love, it's always New Mexico in my heart, it's always Christmas with posole.

p.s. Much of this recipe comes from With a Measure of Grace a wonderful cookbook by Blake Spalding and Jennifer Castle. I do recommend checking it out for a more straight-forward how-to.