"People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”
Book: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Recipes: The Brazilian Kitchen by Leticia Moreinos Shwartz
Bacalhau a Gomes Sa
(Cod with Fingerling Potatoes and Onions)
3/4 pounds of fingerling potatoes, sliced into rounds and boiled until just tender
5 tbsp olive oil
2 large onions, thinly sliced
Salt and pepper to taste
3 large hard-boiled eggs, sliced into rounds
1/4 cup Kalamata olives, cut in half
1 lb fresh cod (I used 3 fillets)
3 tbsp fresh chives, chopped
Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a large skillet over medium low heat, add the onions, stirring frequently until they are tender, sweet, and translucent (you are not caramelizing these so watch them carefully), about 10 to 15 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 350 and oil a baking dish. Layer your onions, potatoes, and eggs in the bottom of the dish. Place your cod fillets on top and sprinkle your olives over everything. I don't care for olives, so substituted capers instead. Drizzle the remaining olive oil over the whole dish and season with salt and pepper. Bake in the oven until it is just cooked, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven and serve with chives sprinkled on top.
Apart from substituting capers for olives, there is one other change that I would make to this recipe: I would cover the whole baking dish in aluminum foil. The fish was delicious, and the mix of flavors was really intriguing, but the underside of the fish, which had the moisture from the onions, eggs, and potatoes, was far tastier than the top of the fish, which only got a light sprinkling of olive oil and came out a little dry.
Asparagus com Molho de Echallote e Salsinha
1 lb asparagus
3 tbsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 slice of bacon, finely chopped
2 small shallots, finely chopped
1 cup chicken stock
2 tbsp butter, cold, cut into pieces
Pepper to taste
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
Add the salt and baking soda to a pot of water and bring to a boil. Add the asparagus and cook until just tender. Immediately transfer the asparagus to a cold water bath to stop the cooking. Remove from the cold water and dry on paper towels.
Cook the bacon in a large frying pan over medium high heat until it is crispy, about 2 minutes. Lower the heat and add the shallots, stirring frequently and being careful not to brown them, about 2 minutes. Add the stock and reduce by half, about 5 minutes.
Lift the pan a few inches above the heat and shake it back and forth while adding the butter, a piece at a time. The butter will melt and the shaking with help it become incorporated into the sauce. Return the asparagus to the pan and reheat it, being careful not to cook it any further. Add the parsley and Parmesan and serve immediately.
Thank you kitchen helper Julie for being a recipe stickler! I would have thrown all the ingredients together in a baking dish under the broiler. I would also have used at least 3 slices of bacon (how can you eat just 1?). And I would never have "shaken the pan a few inches above the heat" until Julie said, "let's just do what the recipe calls for..." So we did. And it was delicious. Under the broiler, the flavors never would have merged together so well, and adding extra bacon would have made the recipe so salty as to be almost inedible. As it was, it was a perfect complement to our cod dish and a lesson learned about being lazy.
About the book:
It's a fable. A fairly simplistic, easy to understand fable. Don't give up on your dreams. Your treasure is out there if you are willing to test yourself to get it. Oh, and surprise, it's never where, or what you thought it would be, so don't overlook it out of carelessness or demean it because it's not what you thought you wanted.
The Alchemist is a sweet book. It's a quick read and it's somewhat repetitive. There are a great many lessons about the language of the world and alchemy being about something greater than turning lead into gold. You will never succeed if that is all you are hoping alchemy will teach you. It's about taking base things and making them better. That's everyone's Personal Legend, ultimately; to be better, which ought to be obvious, because nobody willfully says, "I want to make my life worse." Sadly there are those who do make their lives worse, seemingly willfully, but of course, they don't see it that way.
My questions about the book revolve around this: If the Arab from the desert has the same dream, in reverse, as the boy has, doesn't that mean he should have found his treasure where the boy was digging by the Pyramids? I guess he didn't follow his dream so the sands of the desert didn't conspire to help him.
My other question is more historical and theoretical. The treasure that the boy finds is "the spoils of a conquest that the country had long ago forgotten, and that some conquistador had failed to tell his children about." Does that mean it was some conquistador's failed Personal Legend? Was it a successful Personal Legend for him but a failed one for some Brazilian Ameridian or Arawak tribal leader? Shouldn't that Conquistador's ancestor have recovered that treasure as part of his Personal Legend? Or better, the ancestors of the conquered tribesmen? Perhaps there weren't any left.
There were Spanish conquistadors in Brazil, I looked it up. Is that slim connection to Brazil all that's intended in this book; that a young man can profit off of the slaughter of indigenous peoples because it was written by "the hand that writes everything?" Is that really the way Personal Legends are supposed to work? Is that Coelho's idea of "making everything better through love?"
Maybe if he'd found his flock of sheep there, I would have been more content. I certainly didn't expect it to be real treasure because the boy had learned that he did not need gold and jewels to be rich, successful, or happy. I'm not very satisfied with the ending of the book.
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