I want to write something about luck and laziness and the openness to possibility that comes with true sloth.
Organized people never get the satisfaction of lying on the couch reading, then wanting to write something and just reaching down into the couch cushions and finding a pen right there. Hurrah! It’s rare, but all the more wonderful for that.
They also don’t get to make the following discoveries:
Last weekend I threw out some garam masala that had been stored in a Tupperware for a few years. I washed the Tupperware, but not vigorously. A yellow tinge and scent of Indian spice clings to it. This morning, I put my oatmeal in it and took it to work. And so I discovered the complicated deliciousness of steelcut oatmeal with raisins, dried apples, almonds and a hint of garam masala.
Last month we visited friends. Their wonderfully civilized custom is he cooks, she cleans up the next morning. Or afternoon. For dinner one night he cooked an amazing couscous with fresh mint and lot of other stuff. The next morning I sliced up an apple for Enzo. I could have washed the knife and cutting board first. But I didn’t, and that’s how I discovered that apples with a touch of mint—just what was left on the knife and cutting board--are delicious together.
A couple of nights ago, Enzo and I were cooking together. He still sucks at it, but we both enjoy it. And it’s the only interest we share. I gave him a cooked Japanese sweet potato to hack at, but of course he wanted what I was hacking at: a red bell pepper. So I handed one over, partly cut, seeds still inside.
I was making fried sweet potatoes, which are pretty much a dessert. I invented this dish in my mind a long time ago, and finally I decided to cook it. We usually have cooked sweet potatoes on hand in the winter: two and a half hours in the slow cooker on low—no water, just wash them, put them in wet, and that’s plenty of moisture. Anyway, I sliced some cold cooked sweet potatoes, sauted them in a lot of butter, sprinkled them with salt and the spiced sugar that I use for toast. (Sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, cardamom—your basic fall baking spices.) Oh, and I put some walnuts in there too.
But back to Enzo and our discovery. Of course when he saw me sprinkling the spiced sugar from a little shaker thing, he wanted it. So I gave it to him, and he shook and shook and shook the spiced sugar into and around and on the red bell pepper. Then he mashed it in. I let him do it---let him complete the mess to its fullest, and when the sugar was gone that was the end of that project.
We ate dinner. The sweet potatoes were great—buttery crisp caramelized sugar on the outside, soft chestnut-like savory-sweet on the inside. I think blue cheese would have been good with that, now that I think about it.
We cleaned up. I cleaned up. Of course the red pepper was a mess, but I’m not about to throw away food because it’s been mashed around a bit. I rinsed the sugar-spice off and sliced it lengthwise for my lunch the next day. And it was wonderful—just a little sweeter than your usual bell pepper, still crisp, with a hint of winter spices.
Besides the luck of these combinations, what I learned from all this is that subtly isn’t all bad. My general philosophy is More is Better, and I’m not saying that’s wrong, God forbid. But it turns out that a tiny hint of garam masala is all you really want in your oatmeal. A whiff of leftover mint is enough for a fresh crisp apple. A remembrance of sugar and spice is all a red bell pepper needs.
As my yoga teacher used to say, back when I went to yoga: Do Less. I can only Do Less by accident, it seems. But just being open to accident is something. It’s a start. Oh happy Chance—my personal domestic goddess.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Wonder Bread
Is there a Nobel Prize for baking? If not, why not? Splitting the atom was nice, but you can't eat it.
Since there probably isn’t a Nobel Prize for food, I nominate Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street bakery for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Also for the Nobel Peace Prize, which seems to go to whoever has most improved human existence in some tangible way. Move over Al Gore. This man is a hero and a national treasure.
In case you’ve been preoccupied with electioneering matters for the last two years, Jim Lahey is the guy who invented the famous no-knead slow-rise bread that has swept the globe. The recipe first came out in the New York Times two years ago. It has since been featured in Vogue and been re-printed in the food sections of most decent newspapers. It is on U-tube. It is easy as pie (way easier actually) and freakishly delicious. The original New York Times article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html.
Everyone knows that gluten is what makes good bread good. Gluten gives bread chewiness and texture and makes those big holes in the crumb possible. Conventional bread baking develops gluten mechanically, by kneading. Mr. Lahey figured out that you can skip the kneading and develop gluten chemically by letting the bread rise slowly, slowly for about 12-18 hours. I say “chemically” in the breeziest possible meaning of that word. The gluten molecule lengthens and strengthens and complicates itself in some marvelous way if you just leave it alone to rise slowly. Mr. Lahey’s recipe calls for just a pinch of yeast to slow the rising. His genius was to get out of the way and let nature do its work.
Then there’s the crust. Mr. Lahey’s dough is very wet. You put this wet, slowly risen dough in a ceramic or cast iron lidded pot pre-heated to about 450 degrees, and the wetness of the dough and the super-hotness of the pot create the crustiest, chewiest crust you ever saw or tasted. I’m sure there’s chemistry to that part too, but I don’t know what it is. I do know that it works. It is not just like the best old world artisan bread, it IS that.
The technique is radical. The product is classical. This bread is what Jesus ate. Make that Moses. It is ancient, basic, staff-of-life stuff. It’s as if someone discovered a simple and significant improvement in the design of the wheel. How surprising. How wonderful. It lights up the world a little bit.
(Photo credit, Todd Anderson; baking credit, Annie Anderson.)
New & Improved (NOT!)
Remember the early Quisinart food processors? You could push a whole (small) russet potato through the feed tube and get thin, perfect rounds. You could also julienne your whole forearm. Those were the days. Now they’ve added so many safety features that the machine is useless for slicing and dicing. You pretty much have to julienne the carrot in advance just to fit it in the feed tube.
On the other hand, the safety features are so intense (you cannot turn the thing on until you’ve locked it down like a safe) that once I’ve got it set up, I let Enzo pretty much do what he wants with it. What he wants is to turn it on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off. Ooooooooon. Off! Ooooooooooooooooooooon. Off! He likes the pulse feature.
But the best cooking tools haven’t changed. Early Man (or Early Woman) braised mastadon shanks in a Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot. The design hasn’t changed since. I inherited my grandma’s, which we all think of as her bean pot, though she cooked many other things in it. The pot is persimmon colored, nine quart. The handle on the lid is a little melted, and in a few spots the enamel is almost worn through. How many millions of pink beans have simmered in that pot with onion, carrot, celery, and a big ham hock? Those beans are not complicated, but mine never turn out as tasty as hers. Maybe I’m over-complicating them. I can never resist adding coriander or forty cloves of garlic or some other innovation.
Speaking of over-complicating things: new and improved kitchen gadgets. They hold such promise, don’t they? The rocky path will be made smooth, the pits will practically jump out of the cherries, and you’ll conquer the world armed only with a mini-blow torch and a battery-powered vegetable peeler, as seen on Oprah. What a total lie. And yet I just went online to look for absurd and baroque gadgets to use as examples, and I almost bought an herb spinner. It was so adorable!
New cooking gadgets will not make your life easier. They will only clutter up the drawer and make it harder to find the tools you actually use. You don’t need a special gadget for making a perfect helix of citrus rind. You do need a wooden spoon, but you can’t find it because it’s buried under the helix gadget. You don’t need corn zipper, a tomato slicer or a mango pitter. You need a ten-inch chef knife. You don’t need an avocado masher or a fruit muddler. You need a two-year-old with a fork. You don’t need a Crockpot. You need my grandma’s bean pot on the back burner of a 1940’s O’Keefe and Merritt gas stove on low.
That brings me to my stove—that chrome curvaceous beauty. It’s older than I am and far more functional. It’s the opposite of a gadget. It’s more like a tank. When all the pilots are lit, it’s warm to the touch even when you’re not cooking anything. In the wintertime, before we had Enzo, I would toast my toes at the open oven door, as if it were a crackling fireplace. I would read about cooking and sometimes actually cook, and I would drink hot chocolate and be warm.
This winter I want to learn to make good beef stew. Mine never turns out right, I think because instead of browning the meat, I grey it. Maybe if I use grandma’s bean pot the patina of a thousand rich stews will rub off somehow and change my luck. Having that bean pot simmering on the back burner with rich meaty stew scenting the air seems like the definition of safe and warm.
When I launch Enzo into the world, I would like to send him with that bean pot. I hope he knows what to do with it. And I hope it keeps him safe and warm.
On the other hand, the safety features are so intense (you cannot turn the thing on until you’ve locked it down like a safe) that once I’ve got it set up, I let Enzo pretty much do what he wants with it. What he wants is to turn it on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off. Ooooooooon. Off! Ooooooooooooooooooooon. Off! He likes the pulse feature.
But the best cooking tools haven’t changed. Early Man (or Early Woman) braised mastadon shanks in a Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot. The design hasn’t changed since. I inherited my grandma’s, which we all think of as her bean pot, though she cooked many other things in it. The pot is persimmon colored, nine quart. The handle on the lid is a little melted, and in a few spots the enamel is almost worn through. How many millions of pink beans have simmered in that pot with onion, carrot, celery, and a big ham hock? Those beans are not complicated, but mine never turn out as tasty as hers. Maybe I’m over-complicating them. I can never resist adding coriander or forty cloves of garlic or some other innovation.
Speaking of over-complicating things: new and improved kitchen gadgets. They hold such promise, don’t they? The rocky path will be made smooth, the pits will practically jump out of the cherries, and you’ll conquer the world armed only with a mini-blow torch and a battery-powered vegetable peeler, as seen on Oprah. What a total lie. And yet I just went online to look for absurd and baroque gadgets to use as examples, and I almost bought an herb spinner. It was so adorable!
New cooking gadgets will not make your life easier. They will only clutter up the drawer and make it harder to find the tools you actually use. You don’t need a special gadget for making a perfect helix of citrus rind. You do need a wooden spoon, but you can’t find it because it’s buried under the helix gadget. You don’t need corn zipper, a tomato slicer or a mango pitter. You need a ten-inch chef knife. You don’t need an avocado masher or a fruit muddler. You need a two-year-old with a fork. You don’t need a Crockpot. You need my grandma’s bean pot on the back burner of a 1940’s O’Keefe and Merritt gas stove on low.
That brings me to my stove—that chrome curvaceous beauty. It’s older than I am and far more functional. It’s the opposite of a gadget. It’s more like a tank. When all the pilots are lit, it’s warm to the touch even when you’re not cooking anything. In the wintertime, before we had Enzo, I would toast my toes at the open oven door, as if it were a crackling fireplace. I would read about cooking and sometimes actually cook, and I would drink hot chocolate and be warm.
This winter I want to learn to make good beef stew. Mine never turns out right, I think because instead of browning the meat, I grey it. Maybe if I use grandma’s bean pot the patina of a thousand rich stews will rub off somehow and change my luck. Having that bean pot simmering on the back burner with rich meaty stew scenting the air seems like the definition of safe and warm.
When I launch Enzo into the world, I would like to send him with that bean pot. I hope he knows what to do with it. And I hope it keeps him safe and warm.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Food In Books
Two of my favorite books are Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They’re full of hunger and weather and wonderful food. There seems to be something about being honestly physically hungry that goes with being young. And so nothing gives the feeling of young vital life in a book like food and a lot of it.
In Farmer Boy there’s that scene where mother makes pancakes, and on each pancake she puts butter and brown sugar and then stacks on another and another, and the melted butter and brown sugar drip down the sides. There are great slabs of ham and sausage. There are homemade donuts—simple twists, not those new-fangled circle-shaped kind. And then they have pie.
And in A Moveable Feast there’s that day when he stupidly tries to save money by not eating, and then he walks through the cold Paris streets and ends up having cold beer and potatoes and probably something else, but the part I remember is how he uses the potatoes to soak up the olive oil. And on another day he has oysters, the cheap Portuguese kind, with cold white wine. And what about the eau de vie at Gertrude Stein’s—liqueurs that are the essence or raspberry or pear.
The books I read as a kid are lodged in my mind in a way that feels biological. The trance-like reading of childhood is different from anything else. I read Farmer Boy many times. Our mom read it to us many times. I re-read it recently, and it was still good. I first read A Moveable Feast in college. It was assigned for a class, and I read it right through and then right through all over again. I was nineteen or twenty. Already it was rare for me to fall into a book the way I used to as a kid, and I fell into this one. It was wonderful.
I keep trying to say something about being young and how touching it is to look back on some parts of it. (I’d rather hang myself than actually be young again.) For me reading and eating are two things I did better then than I do now. I did both with true hunger, and I miss that.
I am writing this from memory. I haven’t looked up the food scenes in those books, and I probably got a few things wrong. But the food is what I remember best. In A Moveable Feast there’s such a strong feeling of memory and sadness—nostalgia, I guess. There’s that scene where Hemingway’s older artist friend asks him if food still tastes good. Hemingway says that it does, and you know that for his friend it doesn’t. The food all through the book seems to be remembered with such vividness and also sadness, as if he’s remembering when food still tasted good. It sort of breaks your heart, but in a good way.
In Farmer Boy there’s that scene where mother makes pancakes, and on each pancake she puts butter and brown sugar and then stacks on another and another, and the melted butter and brown sugar drip down the sides. There are great slabs of ham and sausage. There are homemade donuts—simple twists, not those new-fangled circle-shaped kind. And then they have pie.
And in A Moveable Feast there’s that day when he stupidly tries to save money by not eating, and then he walks through the cold Paris streets and ends up having cold beer and potatoes and probably something else, but the part I remember is how he uses the potatoes to soak up the olive oil. And on another day he has oysters, the cheap Portuguese kind, with cold white wine. And what about the eau de vie at Gertrude Stein’s—liqueurs that are the essence or raspberry or pear.
The books I read as a kid are lodged in my mind in a way that feels biological. The trance-like reading of childhood is different from anything else. I read Farmer Boy many times. Our mom read it to us many times. I re-read it recently, and it was still good. I first read A Moveable Feast in college. It was assigned for a class, and I read it right through and then right through all over again. I was nineteen or twenty. Already it was rare for me to fall into a book the way I used to as a kid, and I fell into this one. It was wonderful.
I keep trying to say something about being young and how touching it is to look back on some parts of it. (I’d rather hang myself than actually be young again.) For me reading and eating are two things I did better then than I do now. I did both with true hunger, and I miss that.
I am writing this from memory. I haven’t looked up the food scenes in those books, and I probably got a few things wrong. But the food is what I remember best. In A Moveable Feast there’s such a strong feeling of memory and sadness—nostalgia, I guess. There’s that scene where Hemingway’s older artist friend asks him if food still tastes good. Hemingway says that it does, and you know that for his friend it doesn’t. The food all through the book seems to be remembered with such vividness and also sadness, as if he’s remembering when food still tasted good. It sort of breaks your heart, but in a good way.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Quesadillas
One of my earliest memories is of a quesadilla. I am in the steep sloping back yard of our house in Guatemala. I am playing near a swing and eating a warm corn tortilla filled with cream cheese. That’s all. Nothing happens. I eat the quesadilla.
Another memory from that time: the tortilla lady, who I remember as enormous, but who probably wasn’t, comes to the house with a huge basket of freshly made corn tortillas on her head. The basket comes down. A transaction. My mom gives me one right away, and I eat it, plain, warm and wonderful.
Fast-forward about 37 years…
*
Every other month I get my Fine Cooking magazine in the mail. It resembles my real cooking life about as much as the models in Vogue resemble me, and I adore it.
In my real cooking life I have an outside-the-home job and a toddler, and I make a lot of quesadillas, which I love eating while reading about how to cook a crown roast of pork with Asian ginger glaze or how to braise a pear in marsala, honey and fresh thyme. It brings together my two favorite things, reading and eating, in the closest possible way.
Another advantage to reading about food: it’s highly interruptible. You’re not going to miss some crucial plot turn if you’re reading about how to get the lumps out of gravy. And let's face it, I only get to read for a few minutes at a time before HE needs or wants something. So I make and eat easy food and read about hard food, and it all works out pretty well.
Enzo loves to help in the kitchen, but he has no sense of moderation.
You give him something to stir, and he stirs it onto the counter and
floor and himself, all with great joy. So the trick is to give him
something to do that doesn't involve liquids or sharp knives, and then
cook dinner really fast while he's occupied with his own project.
So I'll give him a butter knife and a cooked whole sweet potato, and he
cuts it up. 'Cuts' is a generous description. 'Hacks' might be more
accurate. There's also a lot of mashing. Sometimes we eat the results.
Sometimes I secretly throw them away.
Meanwhile I'm cooking whatever we're actually going to eat, usually
quesadillas. Cheddar, flour tortillas and butter pretty much do it
for us. But you can branch out: mozzarella, store-bought pesto and a touch of tomato paste = instant pizza. Goat cheese, leftover caramelized onions and halved cherry tomatoes are good in the summer. (I make caramelized onions in the slow cooker, which is the only way you can possibly do it in my circumstances.) Feta, some other meltier cheese, and chopped kalmata olives make a sort of Greek quesadilla, especially if you dip it in yogurt-lemon-garlic-mayo-dill sauce. And of course you can put cooked chicken with pretty much any cheese, and it works.
A few months ago, or maybe years, Fine Cooking actually had an article on quesadillas. The premise of the article was, anything with melted cheese in a tortilla counts, so use your imagination. There was a recipe for four-cheese quesadillas fried in garlic butter and for fontina and mushroom quesadillas fried in parmesan butter. Of course it feels good to have what you’re already doing described officially in a magazine. You feel less a slut when your endless quesadillas get this kind of dignified treatment. You also feel like they stole your ideas, but of course there is no originality in cooking. All recipes are just variations and reminders of good things to eat. (I just looked up the issue, July of 2006, which predates my own quesadilla jag. This means I have been stealing from them, not the other way around.)
Anyway, Enzo and I both really like quesadillas. It’s one of the few things we agree on. When I’m cooking, I sometimes pause for a moment and watch him hacking at his sweet potato with such pure concentration, and I wonder if his first memory will be a food memory. It seems likely. I hope it’s a good one.
Another memory from that time: the tortilla lady, who I remember as enormous, but who probably wasn’t, comes to the house with a huge basket of freshly made corn tortillas on her head. The basket comes down. A transaction. My mom gives me one right away, and I eat it, plain, warm and wonderful.
Fast-forward about 37 years…
*
Every other month I get my Fine Cooking magazine in the mail. It resembles my real cooking life about as much as the models in Vogue resemble me, and I adore it.
In my real cooking life I have an outside-the-home job and a toddler, and I make a lot of quesadillas, which I love eating while reading about how to cook a crown roast of pork with Asian ginger glaze or how to braise a pear in marsala, honey and fresh thyme. It brings together my two favorite things, reading and eating, in the closest possible way.
Another advantage to reading about food: it’s highly interruptible. You’re not going to miss some crucial plot turn if you’re reading about how to get the lumps out of gravy. And let's face it, I only get to read for a few minutes at a time before HE needs or wants something. So I make and eat easy food and read about hard food, and it all works out pretty well.
Enzo loves to help in the kitchen, but he has no sense of moderation.
You give him something to stir, and he stirs it onto the counter and
floor and himself, all with great joy. So the trick is to give him
something to do that doesn't involve liquids or sharp knives, and then
cook dinner really fast while he's occupied with his own project.
So I'll give him a butter knife and a cooked whole sweet potato, and he
cuts it up. 'Cuts' is a generous description. 'Hacks' might be more
accurate. There's also a lot of mashing. Sometimes we eat the results.
Sometimes I secretly throw them away.
Meanwhile I'm cooking whatever we're actually going to eat, usually
quesadillas. Cheddar, flour tortillas and butter pretty much do it
for us. But you can branch out: mozzarella, store-bought pesto and a touch of tomato paste = instant pizza. Goat cheese, leftover caramelized onions and halved cherry tomatoes are good in the summer. (I make caramelized onions in the slow cooker, which is the only way you can possibly do it in my circumstances.) Feta, some other meltier cheese, and chopped kalmata olives make a sort of Greek quesadilla, especially if you dip it in yogurt-lemon-garlic-mayo-dill sauce. And of course you can put cooked chicken with pretty much any cheese, and it works.
A few months ago, or maybe years, Fine Cooking actually had an article on quesadillas. The premise of the article was, anything with melted cheese in a tortilla counts, so use your imagination. There was a recipe for four-cheese quesadillas fried in garlic butter and for fontina and mushroom quesadillas fried in parmesan butter. Of course it feels good to have what you’re already doing described officially in a magazine. You feel less a slut when your endless quesadillas get this kind of dignified treatment. You also feel like they stole your ideas, but of course there is no originality in cooking. All recipes are just variations and reminders of good things to eat. (I just looked up the issue, July of 2006, which predates my own quesadilla jag. This means I have been stealing from them, not the other way around.)
Anyway, Enzo and I both really like quesadillas. It’s one of the few things we agree on. When I’m cooking, I sometimes pause for a moment and watch him hacking at his sweet potato with such pure concentration, and I wonder if his first memory will be a food memory. It seems likely. I hope it’s a good one.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
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.
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