Epilogue - Bacalhau a Gomes Sa, Asparagus com Molho de Echallote e Salsinha and Predictably, Your Treasure is Never Where You Think It Will Be

"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.

Part 2 - Glinha Moreninha and Paulo Coelho's Short Novel or Long Fable

"Ever since he had been a child, he had wanted to know the world, and this was much more important to him than knowing God and learning about man’s sins."

Book:  The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Recipes:  The Brazilian Kitchen by Leticia Moreinos Shwartz

Glinha Moreninha

(Chicken Braised with Caramelized Onions)

4 whole chicken legs, cut into legs and thighs (I just used thighs)
Salt and pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
2 large onions, finely sliced
3 cloves garlic, sliced
1/2 cup Madeira wine
3 cups chicken stock
2 ripe plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
2 tbsp fresh parsley


Wipe the chicken with a paper towel.  Season with salt and pepper and brown in olive oil over medium high heat, about 4 minutes per side.  If you were feeling "healthy" and trimmed the fat off your chicken, and this caused your chicken skin to separate from your chicken meat, and this caused your chicken meat to stick to the pan, learn your lesson about "healthy," remove your now skinless chicken to a bowl, deglaze the pan with just a little sweet white wine, strain through a sieve, and reserve.


If your fatty, crispy skinned, delicious chicken didn't stick, just remove it to a bowl, turn the heat to medium-low, and add the onions.  Cook the onions until they caramelize, stirring frequently, about 25-30 minutes.  The book says low heat, which will take much, much longer; cooking guru Jerilyn assures me that you can get it done in 25 minutes over medium low without burning them.  If you see the edges start to burn, the book says you can add a teaspoon of water to the pan.  Add the garlic and cook for another minute.  Deglaze with the Madeira and reduce almost completely.  Add the stock and bring to a boil. 

Return the chicken to the pan with any juices from the bowl.  Braise over very low heat for 2 hours, with the pan partly covered (if the sauce is too thin, remove the cover).  Add the tomatoes (I only had one, and it wasn't as ripe as it could have been - using 2 very ripe ones would have made the recipe a little less brown), season with salt and pepper, and garnish with parsley.  Serve with rice. 

Sigh.  This recipe, though it smelled absolutely divine, turned into a near disaster.  I forgot to turn the heat down.  Many years ago, I learned the best braising trick ever; guaranteed to make even your beef come out tender, and it works like a charm every time.  Boil with the lid on for 45 minutes and the lid off for an hour.  I thought it would save me 15 minutes.  I left it to boil with the lid on, forgot to reduce the heat, and blogged my last Russian blog.  It scorched the chicken and onions on the bottom of the pan.  


I nearly cried and threw it all away.  Then I told myself to just taste it and see whether all the chicken had absorbed the scorched flavor.  It hadn't.  I cut off the blackened parts, scraped out the few unburnt onions, and started the sauce from scratch.  Unfortunately, it was already 8:00 on a work night and I was out of onions.  I added some scallions that were wilting in my fridge for flavor and gently simmered the sauce.  I steamed my rice with mushroom bouillon in the water and broiled asparagus with butter, garlic, lemon, and almond slivers.  I was fearful that this time I really would have to pay up on my offer to order a pizza in case dinner sucked. 


The chicken, far from being dried out by its scorching, was falling off the bone almost as though I'd pulled it.  It was delicious and if I'm not mistaken, the leftovers were scarfed down the very next afternoon.  I know I enjoyed mine at work during lunch.  Of course, I think it would have been far more authentic if I'd managed to remember 2 important rules of cooking, namely, don't put your heat too high, and don't get distracted.  


About the book:


Paulo Coelho's novel reads like a fable.  The character is "the boy."  He is on his quest for his life's dream, his "Personal Legend."  He meets many people who help him on his way because, he learns, the whole world conspires to assist anyone who is truly looking for their personal legend.  He has already left the seminary school, where his parents wished he would become something grand; he has sold his sheep and left off his shepherding, where he had the freedom to wander Andalusia; he has abandoned his job as assistant to a seller of crystals, where he made enough money to buy double the sheep of his former flock and a license to import foreign wares; and now he has left behind his love in the desert, because she understands about Personal Legends and would be ashamed to think that she had ever held him back.  


In the process, rather than learning of the world instead of learning of god, he learns to know god through the sacrifices of the world, "we are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”


He also learns the lessons of life and death, "'I’m alive,'  he said to the boy, as they ate a bunch of dates one night, with no fires and no moon. 'When I’m eating, that’s all I think about. If I’m on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight, it will be just as good a day to die as any other. Because I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. You’ll see that there is life in the desert, that there are stars in the heavens, and that tribesmen fight because they are part of the human race. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living right now.'"  I like what he says about war and human nature.  It makes a nice segue from War and Peace and parallel's Tolstoy's theories of determinism.  


Somehow, because this book seems so much like a fable to me right now, I feel as though it is simple and straightforward and therefore my discussion of it seems simplistic to me.  I have a feeling that it will only be when I've finished the book that I will have more thoughtful things to say about it.  That should be tomorrow, as I'm already 90% through it.  It's a very short novel. 

I was also more than a little disappointed that not only is the novel not set in Brazil, it's not even set in Portugal.


As promised, here are 2 of the next Brazilian books that I'll be reading:  
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria
Iracema by Jose de Alencar