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Jan 16, 2012
Not an Artichoke, Nor From Jerusalem
The Artist’s Institute
Michael Connor, Alex Freedman and Marina Zurkow
The Chefs:
Lucullan Foods
Lauryn Tyrell, Loryn Hatch, and Albert
The Foragers:
Holly Drake, Oliver Kellhammer, Bun Lai, Andrew Nundel
and your hosts.
The Menu:
Sumac Manahatta
Winged sumac berry infusion with vodka
Gingko Nuts
Boiled in milk and honey, oven-dried then fried with a salt and sugar sprinkle
Smoked Shad
Served on Japanese rice crackers with Homemade Creme Fraiche, cucumber and dill.
Whore’s Eggs
One Maine Sea urchin “tongue” and one Fishers Island oyster, served on a wild foraged oyster shell from the Connecticut Coast. The urchin rests on a piece of Tong Ho (Crystanthemum leucanthemum, the domesticated variety of a wild local plant)
The oyster rests on blanched wild seaweed. Wedgelet of lemon.
Invasive Knotweed Soup
Foraged Japanese knotweed made with a vegetable stock including fennel, star anise, oranges, and apples, simmered with potato, and pureed with a handful of spinach. Served with blanched potatoes, and fried Japanese baby eels. Finished with olive oil, and Maldon sea salt.
Cannonball Algae
Marinated cannonball jellyfish in a vinaigrette with citrus, yuzu koshu, shallot and garlic, and served with wakame and hijiki seaweed, radish, cucumber. and garnished with mint.
Asian Shore Crab with Knife Handle Toffle
“This dish started with Bun Lai’s wild Oysters. We had about 50 of them, which we shucked and kept in their liquor. We used some of the liquor to make the base for our seafood sauce. Littleneck clams, cockles, squid, and wild oysters simmered in their own juices and aromatics. Then finished with a little bit of butter and sea urchin (which made it creamy). The rice was cooked in a shellfish stock fortified with squid ink (which made the rice black). The plate was composed of a tong ho puree ( quick steamed tong ho with garlic chives and olive oil, then pureed), black rice, Purple yams, the seafood sauce and of course, the Asian shore crab (killed, blanched, dried, and flash fried).”
– narrated by chef Lauryn Tyrell
Pine Affogato
Pine infused cream custard and pine sake, served in espresso cups.
Vanilla Ice Cream with Autumn Olive Berry
Autumn Olive Berry jam atop a tiny scoop of vanilla ice cream
 The Artist's Institute transformed Hello everyone:
A few things about this evening’s “Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem”.
Please arrive on time at 7:30. The dinner consists of 5 courses, and
belated arrivals will affect the flow of the meal.
The dinner is pescatarian, gluten free, and consists mainly of shellfish.
We will also be serving Gingko nuts (Ginkgo Biloba) as a cocktail snack.
As Gingko is shown to increase the effects of MAO inhibitors, if you are
epileptic or currently taking a MAO inhibitor, such anticoagulants or anti
depression medication, we suggest that you do not engage with the Gingko.
If you have any food allergies, please email us by 3pm, and we will plate your
meal accordingly.
Please let us know if you have any further questions, and we look forward
to seeing you all this evening.
Yours,
Alex Freedman and Michael Connor
 Menu for the evening
 place setting
sensory sparks
at the table
who is there
how to have a conversation with them and not just yourselfs
interspecies queers
how to have a conversation
what do you let them say
the things that go in your mouth
all the way down
slippery, bumpy, trembling, jagged, stringy, hot, icy, juicy, dry
skin spices (capsaicin, ginger, menthol, strong honey)
smoke in food, chiles in steam vapors
trace the messes
put animals in your mouth
big macs, tartar, in saran, on bones
be terse
be a completist
produce short circuits
fuck craft like you love it
make a handbag
make oryoki
make a sachet
 "NYC Local Seal," Haud Nomine Tantum (Not in Name Alone). Marina Zurkow 2012
You are invited to “Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem,” a dinner that renders the local exotic, and the exotic all too local.
We are serving a meal harvested in nearby waters or foraged on the adjoining shores. Tong-ho. Whores’ eggs. Knotweed. Sapidissima. Sumac. These words feel strangely potent in the mouth. Language frames our experience of food, and these names evoke rich and bloody histories that have identified them as food or as pest. And we promise: they taste very good.
Some are native species that have populated the New York region for millennia, while others are invaders: species brought here as hitchhikers or once-welcome foreign guests. We shall feast Haud Nomine Tantum (not in name alone).
Please join us for a five-course meal, wine, special toasts, and cocktails, in an event conceived by the artist Marina Zurkow.
Monday, January 16th, 2012
7:30pm
The event is sold out.
 Foraging in Marine Park in early December
I am co-conceiving a dinner that takes a new look at the “local” (info in next post) with Michael Connor and Alex Freedman at The Artist’s Institute (Anthony Huberman/Hunter College space in the LES) on Monday Jan 16. A lot of amazing people were involved -
- Environmental artist Oliver Kellhammer helped us forage at Marine Park, thanks to good tips from Wildman Steve Brill
- Andrew Nundel, a forager in Gloucester MA , whom I met through the Forage Ahead Yahoo Group generously donated his stash of frozen Japanese knotweed
- The chefs Lauryn and Albert from Lucullan Foods are fabulous and exciting to be around, they know so much are are truly adventurers
- and Bun Lai, the owner and genius behind New Haven’s Miya’s Sushi, whom I found through this GOOD article: “When Life Gives You Invasive Species, Make Sushi” that 10 different people sent me. Bun Lai is a gustatory superhero.
Here’s the text he sent Michael today:
I just finished foraging. I caught roughly fifty Asian shore crabs, thirty wild oysters and a bunch of wild rock seaweed. I also made you all five bottles of sake from fresh pine needles. Native Americans used to eat the inner cambrium of pine during winter months when scurvy would be a problem because pine contains a lot of vitamin c.
Check out Bun Lai’s blog
From Timothy Morton’s blog Ecology Without Nature, on OOO and meditation:
I’m going to paste here something I wrote for the nonviolence conference on meditation, because it may ring some bells with people. The line of thinking is based on my argument that OOO objects (everything) are fundamentally inconsistent, because of a rift between essence and appearance. This has political implications:
[H]ow does meditation look on the ground, in practice, “where the rubber meets the road” to use the awful bureaucratic phrase? One is allowing one’s thoughts to exist, without trying to delete them. Thus one is allowing oneself to be inconsistent: the mind is making some effort towards mindfulness, yet there are also thoughts occurring that distract the mind. In higher forms of meditation, the practice has less effort. One is simply allowing whatever happens to happen, no matter what the thought is. Some kind of commitment is required, a commitment not to adjust what is happening. This non-adjusting allows beings to resound in all their contradictory plenitude. Since all phenomena radiate from the nature of mind or from Atman (and so forth, depending on which school of thought one is following), all is purified in advance within the larger space of freedom. Purified here means left in its natural state, which is open and vivid. There thus arises what in Mahamudra and Dzogchen is called non-meditation. This non-meditation is different from not meditating, and also different from meditating. It is simply coexisting with what is. Meditation simply is nonviolence, which means allowing the rift between essence and appearance to persist.
In meditation then, one is both p and not-p at the same time. One is a living contradiction, the contradiction that defines living as such. One coexists in the simplest possible way, namely with oneself. Narcissism thus means self-relating, which means other-relating. Since being myself means never directly being myself, my existence is coexistence, even when hypothetically I am totally on my own. Meditation is thus nonviolent, not simply because it means you are trying to make yourself be gentle, but because you are allowing yourself to exist in your inconsistency. In a group of meditators, this nonviolent coexistence becomes vivid. The person on your left might be plotting to take over the Universe. But what on Earth is he going to do about it in that moment? He is meditating!
Meditation means allowing at least one thing to be inconsistent. Allowing the rift between essence and appearance to persist without causing it to close and thus for essence to evaporate. Nonviolence. Humans must get used to the depth of nonviolence in their being. The Greek term for this getting-used-to is mathēsis, which is fully thought not simply as calculation, but as acclimatization, as growing accustomed to the truth of things. The Tibetan for this getting-used-to is gom, which is the term for meditation. In Buddhism there are three stages of learning: hearing, contemplating, and meditating. Hearing is thorough attunement to the dharma. Contemplating is more deeply digesting it into one’s being. Meditating is enacting it, living it, embodying it. This embodiment just is nonviolence, a nonviolence that attunes the layers of a human being—cultural forms, attitudes, psychological states, biological equilibriums, physical being, mind, heart, flesh, bone—to the fundamental inconsistency of reality.
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