balsamic eggplant gnocchi

I spent the weekend wrapped up in a yoga stage ("stage" being one of those lovely words that I only really know in French, meaning something between a retreat, intensive, and internship... in this case meaning four hours on Saturday after rehearsing in the morning and then five hours today in the yoga studio downtown, working with Camélia, the teacher of my teacher/grandmother willow/guru lady).  Lots of thinking and acknowledging thoughts and trying to figure out my own heart, which lead me to spend the evening quietly by myself, cooking and smiling. So, voilà, the fruits of my labour:


Balsamic Eggplant Gnocchi
-- This fills up two hungry people.  Gnocchi satisfies all sorts of cravings, so this doesn't really need a side dish, but if you wanted, it would be great with fresh citrus-y greens and a glass of good red wine.  I love gnocchi's texture, but if you don't have any on hand I'm sure would be great over almost any pasta (except somehow in my head spaghetti... Angel hair, fettucini and any shorter tubular pasta all seem like they'd have a good chance), and it's fun to have a non-tomato veggie sauce in the repertoire. Gnocchi has a fair amount of protein (a large portion - 200g - of gnocchi is around 400 calories and 13 g of protein), but if you really wanted to amp that up you could add some tofu to the sauce as well. If you don't have bouillon, just salted water will do, but a little extra flavor is always nice. And naturally, the veggies can substituted in and out at will, depending on your tastes and who you're serving and what you have within the nearest meter or two. Malheureusement, I happened to leave the goat cheese out, meaning naturally I had to suffer through a cheese course after dinner, a few slices of a crisp granny smith apple with goat cheese, which was pretty perfect.  Dessert should be on the light-and-fluffy side, maybe just fruit or a pudding or lemon meringue... All told it takes 50 minutes or so to cook, but 20 minutes of that is downtime while the eggplant sits. --

You need:
1 medium eggplant/aubergine
salt
paper towel (not to eat, clearly... but to gather anyway)
1 yellow onion
3 small carrots
4-5 white mushrooms
1 large clove of garlic
handful of corn, either thawed from frozen or canned
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
herbes de provence
1/2 of a vegetable broth bullion cube
1 packet of gnocchi, flour or potato (mine was 400 g, for 2 people)
goat cheese for sprinkling (or if that's not your thing, I'm sure a good parmesan or feta would also be all sorts of yummy)

Start by slicing off the ends of the eggplant and then cutting it into rounds about a half inch / one cm thick.  Line a bowl or colander with paper towel and place one layer of eggplant inside, then sprinkle with salt.  Repeat the paper towel - eggplant - salt - paper towel until you've used up all the eggplant, and let sit for 20-30 minutes.

--I can't remember where I learned this (the Moosewood cookbook maybe?), but it draws the moisture out and helps the eggplant cook with more concentrated flavor, while being less goopy and I think also needing less oil. Happy day all around. Feel free to have a glass of wine, do some yoga, or see if you can't plan out the rest of your life in the 20 minutes or so that you have before you need to start cutting up onion... --

Heat the olive oil in a fairly big sauce pan, just enough to get the whole bottom of the pan slippery.  Dice the onion and cook over medium-low heat for about 5-7 minutes, until the onion starts to become soft and wonderful smelling, stirring occasionally. Toss in a pinch of the herbes de provence when you feel like it.

Wipe off the salt from the eggplant if you can with the paper towel, and cut it into cubes.  Toss it in with the onion and keep stirring every so often.

Cut up the mushroom and carrots, relatively small, and dice the garlic.  After letting the eggplant cook for about 10 minutes (aka your cutting and dicing time), just as it starts to become soft, add the other veggies and garlic, stir, and let them cook as well.

After a minute or two, add a splash of balsamic vinegar, making sure to stir it in as it bubbles away.  I wanted to taste the eggplant, so I used a fairly small glug (that'd be the official measurement) to make sure the other flavors came through, but as per everything, to taste.

Add the corn, for a little pop of color, and keep stirring and cooking for another 5 minutes -- about as long as it takes for the gnocchi to be ready.

Boil a large pot of water, with the vegetable bouillon dissolving as the water comes to a boil. Add the gnocchi, and cook as the packet instructs, which should be to wait for the gnocchi to pop up to the surface and then cook another minute or so before straining or scooping out with a slotted spoon.

Serve! Gnocchi, vegetables, and then top with the goat cheese and let the heat of the food make it just the right amount of melted and gooey. The eggplant should be soft and almost creamy, the gnocchi their own firm-but-squishy texture, and the carrots and other veggies with just a hint of crunch. All that's left is to enjoy!

le printemps

The beginning of March and spring is here in full force -- I'm sitting out on the back porch in my petit coin de soleil (little corner of sunshine) as I type this, my new favorite spot for reading and lunching. Afternoons in the sun have been full of trampolines and children, good books and simple, extraordinary food, lounging along the Garonne River (beside a bare-chested Julian!!) and meeting exciting new people.  Life's been pushing forward in spurts recently, racing ahead without me and then stalling out as soon as I arrive, but with the arrival of real solid sunshine I think I've found my footing again.

Isaure, sur le trampoline 

I guess firstly, I should talk about the big news that's shaped the past few weeks:  I had my meeting with Kader, the director-to-be, and am really excited about some of the things he's passionate about bringing to the company, and so signed my name on a contract that will keep me in Toulouse through July or so of 2014.  Two and a half more years stretching out in front of me in one place, that I love but also happens to be on the other side of the world from home, naturally set off a mini wave of homesickness, mostly manifested in staring at pictures of the Seattle skyline on Pinterest.  Luckily the ridiculousness of said wallowing and inevitability of missing home at the same time I'm committing to being far away wasn't exactly lost on me, so I had a pretty good sense of humor about it :)

And while three full years is longer than I've committed myself to anything apart from maybe chocolate, I am also realizing how nice it might be to settle in one place for a little.  Three years in France becomes a whole different affair than a nine-month-lark, and it gives me a chance to really invest in my life here.  It's exciting to think about a new apartment and how good my French will be and getting to watch the kids grow up, not to mention the places I can travel to from here and the far-away possibility that it might be more than just a few years.  That remains many steps down the road; part of what I am trying to keep defining now is the answer to what I want to accomplish with my dance career. I know now that dancing can make me really truly blissfully happy, that having this as a career is one of those "shrug your shoulder and grin and shake your head about how incredibly lucky you are" type things. I have had a few people in the past week or two repeat exactly that back to me, some version of "oh, so you're living your childhood dream dancing in the south of France?" and um, yup, that's exactly what I'm doing. So the next question becomes what do I want to do this to accomplish, what's the bigger picture, at what point would I be willing to let go of this really wonderful life to search for the next, different, really wonderful life? It is going to take some mulling, naturally, but it's all of a happy sort.

So beyond that, the day to day routine of the past bit.... We've been rehearsing Allegro Brillante by Balanchine, which is fun and hard and lightning fast (naturally I'm the tallest girl doing it by a few inches), but also natural and clear and I know at least what it's supposed to be.  It is not there yet, but I know what it is supposed to look like, what I need to work on and how to get to a good final product -- a nice alternative to Jacopo's piece, though I can't help but hunger after the chance to really get to work on and perform something closer to that, where all my boundaries are pushed in different directions and you never quite know what is going to arrive when you're out there on stage.

Philippe, sur le trampoline

I have also tucked myself into the youth/student chapter of Amnesty International in Toulouse, which has been great fun. It is so nice to be around students, and a different social circle, and to throw myself into a cause completely separate from dance (and brainstorm ways to make the worlds intersect). I'm off to a concert in a few minutes actually, where we'll be outside asking patrons to sign petitions asking free various political prisoners before and after the show (and get to see a free concert in the meantime). It feels good to be involved a little more directly in some of their activism, to see what they're doing and be a little more aware of the happenings outside the dance world or mainstream media headlines. Combining that and good books -- I've given up watching TV on my computer for the 40 days happening to fall between Mardi Gras and Easter but having nothing to do with Catholicism -- and yoga intensives and good friends and sunshine, life here is pretty good. La belle vie dans le printemps, all that :)

jacopo

The past month has flown by, I really can't quite fathom how on Earth it's March already. The four weeks following the January program (for the not so bright ones out there that'd qualify as February) were swallowed up by rehearsing Spazio-Tempo, an incredible contemporary piece by Jacopo Godani. I'm second cast -- which probably we're not going have time to rehearse and perform -- so mostly taken it as a few weeks of vacation from ballet, throwing myself into just workshopping his choreography and style of dancing.

Jacopo is an Italian fireball, shaved bald ex-Forsythe dancer with a slightly protruding belly and a mouth that would make a sailor blush, no matter if the sailor was Italian, French, English, Spanish, or Japanese. He and his assistant, Francesca, ran a shock-and-awe campaign for pretty much the whole time they were here, trying to jolt the dancers out of the habits built into our bodies in thousands and thousands of hours of class and rehearsal, to throw away the classical movement style and approach carrying our body from a whole different direction. Not the easiest task in 3 or 4 weeks, but an incredible experience. His movement style is wriggly and interesting and relaxed -- think of how to get from point A to point B in the simplest fashion, a straight line using muscles and form.... that's the opposite of what Jacopo wants. He wants interesting, complicated, natural (well, not natural for ballerinas), defined by the ends of your fingers, the tips of your toes, and originating from your pelvis. Crude, funny, demanding, vulgar, bit by bit Jacopo got across his theory of movement, the energy he wants between dancers on stage, how he plays with the music, and his method of dancing where you relax and let the bones move and the movements happen even more wriggly as you push harder, rather than using the muscles to force it.

Naturally, the weeks have been chalk full of quotes and laughs.  The reigning favorite is "It's almost as though you're all swords, and I want your body to be a fucking nuclear weapon" -- one of his core philosophies is that classical ballet is an antiquated art form, made for the aristocracy of Louis XIV's court, and the world has evolved since then.  Why would you want to dance like they did two hundred years ago, when you can dance like someone from the 21st century?  Being stiff and held upright and poised and coiffed.... all of that is old.  Instead let the norms of the surrounding world into the studio, walk like a person, have pas de deux's where both people are partnering each other rather than just the man lifting the woman as some perfect object, look into each other's eyes.  Don't look out to the audience, look at each other, build the feeling of a "fucking communist revolution" in the ranks of the dancers, where we all shout out loud the counts to be sure we're together, race together against the music to hit the last position and hoooooollllldddd.... until Crash! the musical cue hits and we race to the next stopping point. This is not a ballet about a prince and a princess reigning over their court, but a group of 12, intermixing and challenging each other and pushing each other on for the whole half hour of the piece.

Philosophy of the feeling of the piece aside, there's also the actual executing-the-choreography piece.  He wants movement that is completely counter to classical ballet -- relaxing instead of holding, letting joints and bones move while muscles bounce and rebound instead of place each thing exactly so -- while retaining the line and pointe work and vocabulary of classical dance.  Equally though, he rejects the early 20th century versions of modern, where lines were straightened instead of curved, the weight was dropped down, pointe shoes discarded. Instead he's looking for something different, closer to Forsythe, but looser, lighter, shapes defined in space so fast that the path of the fingertips is crucial because it is what leave the traces in the audience's vision that hover after the body has moved on to the next step. To get the results though usually requires Francesca in your face, yelling "move from your ass!" as you try to get your body to be subject to your mind rather than the years of training you've drilled into your muscles, or him calling across the room: "Open your ass hole!" as you try to do a pirouette (while moving the whole top of your body in a wave, naturally, despite the 2 in diameter of your pointe shoe tip that you're balancing on).... And my personal favorite as an illustration to Julian as he held his arms out in a circle directly out from his chest and let Pascale, his partner, drop through them to kneel on the floor -- "it's like you're the asshole, and she's the turd coming out.  pfffttt" with a little hand wave to illustrate exactly how she was supposed to drop out of the space he defined.  What fun :)

This is all for the program at the end of March, so we have a few more weeks to work on it and get it into our blood before he comes back and kills us all as we get into the theatre.  I can't tell you how many things where, if we do them not quite how he wants, he "will come up on stage and slit your throats!" which is decent enough motivation. More to come soon on the rest of life and the other half of this program -- Allegro Brillante by Balanchine (that'll be me) and Tchai Pas and Por Vos Mueros by Nacho Duato -- but for now, there's a snapshot at least of Jacopo.  If I got you interested, just above is the link to the pas de deux that I'm learning, performed by Dresden, so you can get a visual sense of what he's asking for.  See if you can't spot the asshole and turd moment ;)