Real Chicken

There really is something to all this noise about how overprocessed food doesn't taste like anything. For our New Year's Eve dinner last night I roasted a chicken, via my favorite recipe for such (with lemons in the cavity, from "More Classic Italian Cooking," by Marcella Hazan. But it was not just any chicken. It was a sustainably harvested, free range chicken from Wild Oats. And something shocking happened. It tasted like meat. It actually tastes of chicken. It was quite delicious, actually, and I'm looking very much forward to devouring the rest of it today and tomorrow. So, this supports my current and continued idea to modify our diets by having less meat and buying much higher quality meat when I do buy it. Good thing I like beans.

Bread

I've been baking bread again, now that things have cooled down a smidge. Turns out a quarter of a teaspoon too much yeast actually matters, in case anyone was wondering. The loaf is nice and light but tastes like... yeast. It doesn't help that the loaf seems to have wanted five more minutes in the oven... undercooked yeast. Ew.
I have a hard time letting mistakes be okay, which is a counter-productive attitude in the kitchen. You have to risk mistakes to try new recipes, or learn techniques on a really visceral level. But there is something about investing four hours of your time into something and having it not turn out that is just soooo disappointing. So I think the answer is frequency. If I bake bread once a quarter (finance geek pokes out again), it's a bigger deal to have one flop than if I bake bread twice a month.
Meanwhile, anyone in the Pasadena area who likes the taste of undercooked yeast, there's a loaf of "white whole wheat" walnut bread in my kitchen...

PS - "white whole wheat" is whole wheat from a white wheat plant, not some weird bleached whole grain or something. I bought it by mistake, but they insist it has as much fiber in it and I didn't feel like going back to the grocery store so I tried it. Tastes more like white, which is okay if that's what you want. Frankly I find it a little boring but I can mix it with something else.

Weddings

Wedding food! A great venue for discussing decision making and food. Yesterday we attended the wedding of Rob and Mel, two wonderful people whom we were delighted to see tie the knot. They also fed us quite well. Weddings are tricky for some eaters, because you lack decision making power in your eating. Perhaps you were offered a choice between "chicken and beef" or "meat or vegetarian," but generally speaking, someone is going to serve you something and that is what you get to eat. You don't have to eat it - your host will probably not notice so you aren't really being rude, no matter what your parents taught you about cleaning your plate. You can also say you were so enchanted by their other guests that you forgot about eating. But the real point I'm trying to make is, you can't just order your usual. You have to either select among the probably few options provided or wait until you leave to feed yourself. So what do you do?

First, let me encourage you to approach this setting as an adventure, if you don't already. Left to your own choices, you might never discover anything new. Will you discover something you've never tasted before at a wedding? Well, probably not - people understandably tend to pick things they know a lot of people like. But it had been quite a while since I ate some of the things I had at this wedding, and anyway, you don't have to do the dishes.

I'm pretty easy to feed. I'm not allergic to anything, although octopus upsets my stomach. Most of what I refuse to eat is unlikely to make a catering menu - snails, raw sea urchin, blood pancakes (I have actually eaten those last two so don't say I made them up, and they were both disgusting). But I like to eat healthfully and "spend my calories wisely." So on the traditional wedding guest plate, I often eat all the veggies early on. It's a good trick, to fill up with veggies, which in themselves are healthful and low in calories, although of course one can make them into deep fried lard sticks or cover them with hollandaise (a really good hollandaise is TOTALLY worth the calories, and rare enough that you are unlikely to become spherical on it). I also like to taste each thing carefully and then focus on whatever I like best. It would be a shame to fill up on an uninteresting potato dish only to discover too late that the fish was actually really good. It's also a good trick not to show up at the celebration totally famished. This is particularly important if you intend to imbibe, as you will probably be offered wine or cocktails before your meal, and we all know what that does on an empty stomach. Straight to the head.

This weekend's fete (I strove mightily to get the accent over that e, I swear) was a little different than most in that there was a buffet with four different stations. We were offered French, Pacific Northwest, Asian, and Indian food. (As an aside, this is genius catering - you would have had to be on an All Ham Diet to not find ANYTHING you liked at this buffet.) Definitely time for some strategic decision making. There was no way I would get a representative sampling of those four cuisines on my plate without (a) looking like a complete pig, (b) getting more food than I wanted or would really enjoy, and (c) really just ending up with a mishmash of foods that would not highlight any of them well and be just messy. So I limited myself to the first two. This was a relatively easy decision for me - I just figured I know where to get good, affordable examples of Asian and Indian food near my apartment, and I do not have such sources for French (good but not cheap) or the Pacific Northwest (although it is not entirely unlike California Cuisine - hey, that sounds like a topic for another post!). So. French. Brie en Croute, regardless of how it's spelled, is brie baked in a pastry shell. Brie is God's representative in the cheese world. We are not worthy, and yet it is given to us to accept. With this I received blueberries, dried cranberries, and spiced walnuts. There were also little quichelettes. So cute! And I love quiche. At the Pacific Northwest table, we had more cheeses, including an apricot laden, white, flaky cheese which might have been Stilton? I'll ask my mom later. It was flavorful but not sharp or blue or anything. It was YUMMMMY. Of course, salmon at this station. And roasted veggies. I love this idea - burn the outside to make the inside yummy. Weird and tasty and good, and of course as I cited above, it's good to get some vegetable bulk in there so you don't fill up on brie - unlike God's love, very caloric and might upset the tummy. I left the buffet area with a generous but not embarrassing plate and was very happy with what I ate.

So perhaps this little culinary journey will be helpful to you in your next social eating setting, or maybe give you some ideas for dinner, or perhaps not, but I enjoyed writing it, so I hope you enjoyed reading it. Before I sign off, let me offer one more tip I learned at this wedding - drinking enough wine so you can't feel those sexy but impractical shoes (which were, I swear, the only ones at DSW that went with this dress) is effective but will give your intestines a whirl. (Don't worry, we weren't driving!!!)

Nutrition

Ah, nutrition. I wonder, which spawns more articles in magazines, dieting or sex? In terms of which articles are fun to read, the latter surely wins. But in terms of sheer quantity of crap, dieting probably wins. I have heard so many stupid diets, and let them confuse me and make me feel weird about food I know is perfectly healthful, it's enough to put me off my dinner. Well, no, but it's irksome.

I think the best diet advice I have gotten was not really explicitly given. My parents just taught me to eat well. Eat different things. Don't put too much crap on it. Eat good food, worth tasting, and you won't need to put crap on it. Like the good little chemists they are, when the time came for them to shed a few pounds or cut back on sodium or some other particular restriction that can (but doesn't have to!) come with age, they got scientific about it. "When in doubt, measure something." I learned to calorie count with a precision usually reserved for the truly obsessive. But the real idea here is more economic than anal: Spend your calories wisely, like you would spend your money. If you only get 1800 calories a day, don't spend them on a snickers bar (unless you're really dying for one), go for a smaller piece of really good chocolate. If you really, really must eat five Oreos today (which sometimes is just not negotiable), then make room for them with things like vegetables and plain, whole grain cereals for other meals. The same variety in your diet which will keep you from getting painfully bored and losing the joy of food will help you to meet your nutritional needs like vitamins, minerals and fiber.

The tricky thing for most people is fresh fruits and vegetables. Somehow we don't manage to get those down our throats. I find forming habits around them helps. Try to get at least one serving of fresh vegetables at lunch. It's a lot easier to get two servings of veggies into dinner than three. So if you have salad for lunch, that's great. But everyone can get sick of that after a while. A lot of non-cream soups have good veggies in there. I've been known, in a hurry, to just throw a whole bell pepper (red or green) in my lunch bag, and deal with washing it and cutting it up at lunch time. For my husband, munchy size carrots seem to do the trick. As for fruits, I find if I bring them to work and eat them in the afternoon when I start craving junk food, that works. The hard part is convincing myself to eat the fruit instead of M&Ms. But I find if I tell myself, "eat the grapes and then see if you still want the junk food," by the time I've finished the grapes, I don't want the junk anymore.

The best way to eat well, I find, is to shop well. We eat MUCH better if I spend a good chunk of a weekend afternoon shopping, planning, and reading recipes. This still takes me some time, but I'm getting better at it. But even a couple of twenty to thirty minute trips into the store helps. If I "stay on the outside of the store" (that's in quotes because I found it in one of the pages about the anti-yeast diet I did once - see below) and concentrate on plants and raw ingredients, we do pretty well. For someone who loves food so much, I actually find shopping for food to be not that much fun. But if I make a bit of a sport of it, trying to get in and out with something good for dinner as fast as I can, it's not so bad.

One tiny piece of credit I will give to wacky things like the Atkins diet is that occasionally trying to cut out one thing for a brief period can call our attention to how much of that thing we were consuming. I did a really bizarre zero-sugar diet for a month (September '05) for yeast eradication, not to lose weight. It was challenging, but one thing I realized was, boy, was I eating a lot of sugar! But I noticed that after about three days - one can test this theory without spending a month getting desperately sick of meat salads.

Mostly, however, I think these things do more harm than good. Any diet that causes people to buy "low carb bread" should really be laughed at and ignored. A variety of small portions of very good food, eaten slowly and savored, is the way to go. Cooking it yourself will enable you to control what goes in your belly (and save you money!).

A few more sources on the topic:

Michael Pollan, much more qualified to write on this topic than I am (not like I'm going to let that stop me), said it best, I think: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I've been enjoying "French Women Don't Get Fat" (of course some of them do but it's a catchy title) by Mireille Guiliano, too. I haven't tried the leek soup weekend, but I really got something out of journaling about what I'm eating for a while, and even just forming the habit of, before I put anything in my mouth, taking a brief moment to ask myself *why* I am doing so. More often than I would like to admit, the answer is that I'm bored or require distraction. This is a good time to go for a very flavorful herbal tea. Sometimes I manage to do that. Sometimes I eat the M&Ms anyway, but at least at that point it is a conscious choice.

I imagine there will be more on this topic as I blog along.

Food is more than fuel.

Food is ritual. Food is fellowship. Food is art. Food is communion with the earth. Food is fun. Food is a tool for health. Food can be sensual or utilitarian. Food can be elegant or simple or even both at the same time.

I love food. I like learning about foods. I like learning about food within the context of particular cultures, and how those cultures used their local resources to create their cuisine. I like the healing properties of foods and beverages. I love watching people enjoy food I have prepared for them. I LOVE to eat food.

I've been cooking since I had to stand on a stool to see the top of the kitchen counter, and my mom had to make "suggested placement" dots of cookie dough to help me get the rows straight on the baking sheet. When I flew the nest, I was shocked and horrified to meet people who had never cooked for themselves, or even worse, whose houses contained no home cooking. I learned that, to some people, "home cooked dinner" meant mac-n-cheez. I met people who thought I was a genius because I can bake bread. (I am FAR from a culinary genius, I assure you.) Didn't everyone's dad teach them how to bake bread? Apparently not. In fact, I eventually learned, I was the odd bird out in this regard (we'll just add that to the list of my odd bird qualities). Mine is the first generation of children who don't cook AND whose parents don't cook. Many of our parents could cook, but didn't anymore, either because they were two earner households and this was a relatively new format, or because their moms had finally unchained themselves from the stove, and the heck if they were going back in there. This seems perfectly reasonable. Like all progress, however, the (only) unfortunate downside of the first generation of moms who are not chained to the stove is the first generation of kids who really have never been exposed to cooking.

This is an opportunity. Unshackled from generations and centuries of economic oppression, we are now free to reclaim cooking out of sheer joy, out of the desire to care for ourselves and each other, out of choice. We are free to reclaim the kitchen for our husbands, brothers, and sons. Sure, men have been chefs for ever - ironically, this skill which has been so female at home is so male in the professional world that women have to be tough as nails to break in. But have we allowed men the opportunity to be cozy, nurturing cooks at home, without making various sexist and homophobic comments about their behavior? Now we can. We can learn and teach cooking because, like brushing your teeth and exercising, it is something we all should know how to do, regardless of sex, class, or creative talent. We can encourage boys to be creative with foods and spices, and to create as well as bust things up. They may or may not take to it, to be sure, but at least now they have the opportunity.

But you don't like cooking, you say. You come home tired and hungry, and with little inspiration for creating works of culinary genius. Well, sure, me too. But I have found, much to my annoyance, many times over, that when I hate doing something, if I dive into it, learn about it, and become better at it, then I start to actually like it. There are exceptions, to be sure - the more I learn about compliance, the more I am just stinking DONE with it. Perhaps you will be among the unlucky few who will never take to cooking. But I doubt it. More likely, you will at the very least form a functional vocabulary of skills and dishes that can get you through the work week without too much over-processed, packaged, "emergency rations," and then have your big fancy projects on the weekend when you have more time. Or if the projects don't interest you, perhaps you will at least form the ability to read a grocery store meat counter and produce isle quickly, to see what you want to eat this week. You can form a peaceful competency with food which will serve you well, even if you never delight in culinary creation the way some do. You can feel satisfied in the knowledge that you can take care of yourself and eat healthfully without spending half your take-home pay on Chez Foofy Pants and Hippy Granola Store. You can, in short, learn to cook.