Mortar & Pestle Time

I recently received a gift from a very dear friend: an authentic clay comal platter. I am using it already to roast tomatoes and tomatillos and various spices to make an adobo sauce. The adobo sauce is then my marinade for various dishes from spare ribs to sloppy joe’s. Slow, soul food cooking where “southern” really refers to South America. But I digresss.

A clay comal platter, as opposed to its contemporary stainless steel version, needs to be seasoned on a regular basis: with a mixture of water and lime powder. Lime powder is calcium hydroxide, for those of you, like me, who had to google it. If you can find the damn stuff in Tel Aviv, let me know. I ranged from building supply houses to restaurant suppliers to the Lewinsky Spice market, with no success. I finally said fuck it and decided to improvise at home.

I took dried (Kfir) lime leaves and ground them up in my mortar and pestle. I know you will say this isn’t even close to being the same thing, but the hell with you. How often do I get to use my mortar and pestle or use it in a sentence? Not to mention, the ground powder will go great in a number of spice mixes I like to use, including a kickass (in my opinion) peanut butter hummus. In any case, I have now treated the porous clay surface of my comal with a perhaps unique kfir lime powder coating, and it is imparting some great flavor to my adobo sauce. So there.

On a more substantive level, I want to again return briefly to the pleasure of things done by hand. Sure I have my share (perhaps more than my share) of electrical gadgets in my soul food kitchen. But it’s the slower, handmade stuff that does it for me: handmade pastas, massaged rubs, visceral stuff like that. Alice Walker has a short story titled “Everyday Use” in her In Love & Trouble collection. I refer you to that far more eloquent piece to get a better sense of what I’m about.