Food and Fat

Food & Fat

You know that book French Women Don't Get Fat? Well I know a French woman, and she is fat. So there. I also know an American woman who is thin. She eats nothing but cigarettes, and she looks wonderful in clothes. Where does that leave the rest of us? I have no idea.

These thoughts are brought on by the fact that I turned 40 and instantly gained ten pounds. It's not like a had fun doing it. It's not like I ate a bunch of great food and had to pay the price. It was just age. And I realized that I could spend the second half of my life in bunker mode eating hard boiled eggs and fiber pellets and maybe stay my usual size. Or I could cook and eat and live life and be fat. Is there another way? I doubt it.

I went to the library and read Fight Fat After Forty. It's about three hundred pages, but I can get it down to six words: lift weights, eat fewer carbs, relax. The relax part comes from the notion that you overeat because you're stressed. For me the take away message was: nap. (The book recommends yoga and meditation, but yoga makes me anxious about whether I’m relaxed enough, and meditation is just torture.) So I started napping every day, and it’s wonderful, but I’m still fat. Then I started lifting weights twice a week, and it's the most boring thing I've ever done in my life. And I’m still fat. That leaves the carbs. Oh dear.

Of course I’ve been on the South Beach Diet—who hasn’t? At least I’ve done my personal variation of the South Beach Diet, which is pretty much what it says in the book (almost no carbs) but I add quite a bit of fat to cheer myself up. The real South Beach Diet has you eating a lot of non-fat ricotta and egg whites and ground turkey. I might as well go in the back yard and eat grass. It is just not going to happen. Instead I make fabulous little crustless quiches with sauted chard and onions and goat cheese. And I eat salmon and artichokes and leeks and eggplant, and deviled eggs and little roll-ups of ham and swiss cheese and crunchy lettuce. I eat steak. This costs a fortune, so it's a good thing that the longest I can stay on the diet is about three weeks. I usually lose about seven pounds. And yes, I gain the weight back, but it usually takes about six months, and I'd probably gain that weight anyway, so by losing the weight first, I break even.

The problem with any super-low carb diet is you can't do it from late spring to late fall or else you'd miss cherries in the spring, peaches and plums and tomatoes and corn in the summer, apples and chestnuts and acorn squash in the fall. And what about strawberries? It would be mocking Providence not to eat those things in season. You do not reject the gifts of the gods. But in mid-winter, you can go a few weeks without carbs without sinning against nature.

We’ve all heard the advice that you shouldn’t go on a diet, you should just start thinking like a thin person. How do thin people think? I suppose thin people can live with a bag of chocolate chips in the pantry for months on end and never eat them because it simply doesn’t occur to them. Are they brain dead? When I have treats in the house, there’s always a loop playing in my head that goes: chocolate chips, chocolate chips, chocolate chips, not right now, chocolate chips, not right now, chocolate chips, not right now, chocolate chips, CHOCOLATE CHIPS, RIGHT NOW. And then I eat half a bag of chocolate chips. And they’re wonderful.

So, like Chief Joseph, I will fight no more forever. And I will be a little fat. And right now I’ll go to the Farmer’s Market to get some Japanese sweet potatoes. They taste like a cross between yams and chestnuts. I’ll cook them in the slow cooker for two and a half hours while I’m at work. When I come home the house will smell warm even if it isn’t. Enzo will eat his plain, right out of his hand—they’re long and skinny, easy for a two-year-old to grip. I’ll eat mine sliced with walnuts and maybe dried cranberries, a touch of olive oil, a tiny splash of balsamic vinegar, a little salt and pepper. I’ll put a gob of peanut butter on Enzo’s plate, and he’ll mash the sweet potato into the peanut butter and eat it, and I will look proudly as his peanut-buttery face and think: he’s cooking!

Dreaming of Fall Food

Dreaming of Fall Food

The real New Year begins in the fall, not on any specific date, but you know it when it's here. You know it from the cool nights and hot-but-not-too-hot days. You know it from kids going back to school and sample ballots and fall catalogs arriving in the mail. You know it from leaves turning and from apples and chestnuts and pomegranates and persimmons in the farmer's market. But you know it especially from the apples. There are so many kinds, and just so many, period. They speak of plenty.

My ritual fall harvest feast--which I have by myself--is the first perfect apple with cheddar cheese and red wine. I'm not particular about the wine, as long as it's cheap, because that's my rule. And you can substitute peanut butter for the cheese if you want. But the apple has to be just right, and in the fall it finally is--crisp and tart and sweet and crunchy, usually a golden delicious or, even better, a pink lady, queen of apples with her startling white flesh.

In the fall it’s suddenly no longer too hot to cook, and I realize that I'm starving. Not that I start actually cooking. But I start fantasizing about it.

For several falls in succession I've been fantasizing about a variation on pumpkin pie that I call pumpkin flan with piecrust cookies. It's a recipe born of a problem: to make a piecrust that stays in one piece you need to use enough water to make the dough stick together. But too much water makes the crust tough. My innovation--keep in mind this is all in my mind, we're not talking about actual cooking here--anyway my innovation is that you use and a little more fat and a little less water, and the dough rolls out all crazy and messy with tears and fissures, but it doesn't matter because once it's rolled out you just cut out little rectangles, sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and bake them in a hot, hot oven for about seven minutes, and they're wonderful. That's the piecrust cookies part.

The pumpkin flan part is just pumpkin pie filling (follow the recipe on the Libby’s can) cooked in custard cups lined with caramelized sugar. You could give the caramelized sugar a ginger kick by boiling about half a cup of water with slices of fresh ginger, taking out the ginger, adding about two cups of sugar, then cooking until caramelized. Or you could put cardamom in the sugar. Anyway, you do the caramelized sugar however you want, swirl it in the custard cups, then add the pumpkin filling and cook in a water bath for about an hour. Then you eat the pumpkin flans with the piecrust cookies on the side. And you are completely happy.

I've been having this fantasy for so long that actually cooking it might ruin it. But since I've set out to write about my fantasy pumpkin flan, I think I also have to cook the darn thing. So I’ll do that and report back.

Results: Before I get into the actual results, I have to explain something about my history with piecrust. I used to make wonderful piecrust. My mom and I were piecrust cultists, horribly competitive. And now I don't know how to do it anymore. Perhaps it's age, the inevitable coarsening of character, the loss of a light touch--and a light touch is everything in piecrust. But that makes no sense because my mom still makes good piecrust. She wins.

Anyway, the piecrust cookies were awful. I used butter because that was what I had on hand. I no longer keep lard and Crisco around as staples, and it's very sad. Butter is wrong for piecrust. I know this. And I used it anyway. But the pumpkin flans were a little too sweet what with all the caramelized sugar. Next time I'll cut the sugar in the filling to balance out the sweetness in the caramel. Even so, the flans were pretty good. Almost as good as pumpkin pie.

Slow Food/Fast Food

Slow Food/Fast Food

One Saturday last month I called my mom so she could tell me what to
cook for dinner. I was uninspired. I also had no food in the house
and no time to go to the grocery store. It was still hot, and all I
felt like eating was Cheerios, but we'd had Cheerios for breakfast. Also
possibly for lunch. And I have a two-year-old and all the nutrition
guilt that comes with that. So I called my mom, thinking she'd say
something like, “scrabbled eggs,” which I had the ingredients for and could
probably handle.

Anyway, I called, and my dad said she'd have to call me back--her hands
were full of chicken. Later she called and explained that she'd
been chopping the heads off chickens. I asked her what brought that on.

It turns out that my parents’ church is sponsoring a family of recent Iraqi immigrants. Lompoc, California has a very nice federal prison and an Air Force base, but no halal butcher, so this family has been eating vegetarian and longing for meat. They live in an apartment which has no slaughtering facilities. So my parents invited them over to butcher chickens in the proper way, and this project naturally blossomed into preparing a fabulous Iraqi feast. All this is incredibly admirable, and I'm really glad they're doing it and even more glad that I don't have to. I don’t want to look a fowl in the eye before eating him or her.

As far as I know this was my mom’s first slaughtering experience, but she was doing slow food before it was invented. When I was a kid she cured her own olives. She made goat cheese, and yes, they were our goats. She plucked grape leaves and stuffed them. She’d put a grenade in your lunch box before a Twinkie. We complained constantly.

And this brings me to the slow food movement—another example of something I totally admire and I’m really glad they’re doing it and even more glad that I don’t have to. I want to be the person that plants an assortment of gourmet lettuces and then at dinner time wanders out to the garden to pluck a few choice baby leaves, then washes them in several changes of cold water and finally eats them with extra virgin olive oil and just a sprinkling of the very best parmesan. I would like to have a smaller footprint. Also a smaller butt print. I would also like to have the goat or cow for the parmesan in my backyard. And I would like to live wherever you have to live to make real parmigiano reggiano cheese. I’ll bet it’s really nice there.

But I am an American. We work too hard. We indulge our children. We eat fast food. We also eat pre-washed lettuce from a bag, which I consider to be one of major advances of the 20th century, along with the wide availability of good bread. And where would we be without frozen orange juice and chicken pot pies? My whole family would have scurvy—that’s where we’d be.

I’m not sure where this fits into the fast food/slow food discussion, but I have a piece of salt pork in my refrigerator that is older than my son. It may outlive my son. That's the beauty of nitrates and sealed plastic packaging. There is something very comforting about having a few bags of dried beans and some salt pork on hand. Isn’t that the meal that won the West? We could eat that for a week if we really needed to—hunched in the attic while the flood waters rise, waiting for the rescue helicopter, eating our beans and salt pork—full of fear, full of hope, and full of beans.