A couple of weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and buy Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall‘s Meat book, and in that way that Amazon does, it suggested I might like the River Cottage Cookbook as well — and what do you know? They were right … I now have a big fat crush on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I want to go live at River Cottage and raise pigs and cows and chickens and vegetables with that cute man and his crazy hair.
Over at Wooly Pig, Heath wrote a whole post in response to this question that a reader raised in the comments, and it’s been stuck in my head for the past few days:
How can you reconcile the relationship you develop with these animals with the act of slaughtering them for food? Do you own pets? I’m not trying to insult you but merely trying to understand what I, as a vegan, see as the cognitive dissonance of people like you who are intimately connected with both the raising and slaughtering of food animals.
Heath wrote a great post answering this, but it struck me that he wasn’t getting at the guy’s real issue — for him eating an animal with which one has had an intimate relationship seems unthinkable in the way that eating one’s pet is unthinkable, while for people who work with livestock (or, I’d argue, who hunt) the idea of eating an animal with whom no one had an intimate relationship, as in the case of most industrial and CAFO livestock, seems equally unthinkable.
The last fifty years have seen this huge demographic shift that has left enormous parts of our population with no lived experience around farming or livestock, and so the only relationship they have with animals is with their pets. No one goes through those formative experiences of having known livestock — animals that will eventually wind up on the table and so it seems more foreign and horrifying than perhaps it might if people had more actual experience of being around animals that die so that we can eat them. The things we are unfamiliar with are always somewhat frightening. The difference in American experience of living with livestock animals between when E.B. White wrote “The Death of a Pig” and when Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote “Two Pigs” a couple of weeks ago in the NY Times is such that the two writers could be living in different countries altogether. Where most people understood the waste that White’s dying pig represented, Klinkenborg, in a different America points out that:
The questions people ask make it sound as though I should be morally outraged at myself, as if it’s impossible to scratch the pigs behind the ears and still intend to kill them. If I belonged to a more coherent, traditional rural community — one that comes together for pig-butchering in the fall — I would get to celebrate the ritual in it all, the sudden abundance a well-fed pig represents. It’s hard to act that out when the cast is a gruff farmer and son, and my wife and me, who have been silenced by the solemnity of what we’re watching.
It’s the death of that “more coherent, traditional rural community” that I think is largely responsible for the gulf between people who have only ever known animals as pets, and those who have had relationships with the animals that wind up on their plates. And even when you’ve grown up with animals you’ll eat, it’s never easy. My friend Hope had hysterics every Christmas as a little kid when her dad would go out and kill the goose — she doesn’t raise her own cattle on her ranch because she admits she doesn’t know enough, but she does feel her family on beef she buys from her neighbors. Her kids are growing up eating animals they’ve watched graze outside their windows all summer. They know that meat comes from an animal, and not from a plastic package at the store (and Hopie knows they’re eating animals that were sustainably raised and aren’t full of hormones and antibiotics).
A blog post is too limited a venue to puzzle out the moral ambiguities of veganism vs. meat eating, and while I haven’t read Singer et al, I understand the anti-anthropocentric argument upon which the animals rights movement is built. I guess I just don’t necessarily agree with it. I grew up around throroughbred horses — they are unnatural creatures because we have made them so — high strung, beautiful, big hearted, and on occasion, a little crazy. There is likewise nothing natural about a domestic cattle, sheep or swine — we have, over the centuries, created these creatures to meet specific human needs. In return, the least we can do is husband them appropriately — keep them out of CAFOs, raise them humanely and treat them as the sentient beings they are. We could also work to keep heritage breeds alive by breeding and eating them — otherwise they’re going to die out and we’re going to be left with a very limited gene pool which won’t do either of our species any good.
Everything dies and for me, eating sustainably-produced meat, as well as eating the vegetables out of my garden is a way to connect to the inevitable. (But then again, I’m the one who planted my brother in the garden.) Maybe it’s the latent Catholic in me — but if we started treating our food less as a commodity, and more as a sacrament, then perhaps we’d all be better off.
My friend Robert-the-painter came for dinner last night — like many painters, Robert is also a wonderful cook, and is really invested in local and organic food issues. I made country pork spareribs braised in milk with lots of garlic, thyme, rosemary, sage and a little hot pepper and lemon. Everything except the pork and the lemon was local in that dish — I’m on the list next year for one of my Milk Lady’s pigs, but for now, I’m stuck with what I can get. I also made Clothilde’s yogurt cake with the spiced cherries I put up this summer and lots of almond — it came out a little dry, but good. A salad to round it out, and a teensy bit too much nice red wine, and well, it’s a linky post this Monday morning …
For meat and slaughterhouse issues, take a look at this great post on Stress and Meat Quality over at Wooly Pig about how the USDA rules are hampering their efforts to raise great great pork.
Turns out, no surprise, that eating real food is better for you than the space-age vitamin pill dreams of the Jetsons-era food industry.
And even better — it turns out that eating organic is better yet.
Thanks everyone for chiming in this week — I think this has been the liveliest discussion yet here at LivingSmall and I’m just thrilled. So often, I feel like the lone crank in the wilderness bleating on about how food in boxes is terrible for you and it tastes bad. My cry of despair: Just cook something!
In light of that, I thought some practical links might be an appropriate way to close out the week.
Here’s a terrific site all about home cooking: Simply Recipes
It looks like the kind of place where you could find a solid recipe for just about any occasion, and Elise’s focus isn’t re-creating restaurant food, but creating good solid home food.
I also like 101 Cookbooks — she’s got a terrific piece up today about the recipe entry in Michael Ruhlman’s new book, The Elements of Cooking. Myself, I am not good at following recipes — I usually go off on a tangent someplace and the recipes I find myself going back to again and again are the ones that provide the kind of scaffolding that will allow this. My Beloved Stepmother and the Mighty Hunter are really good at following recipes — which is why they’re both much better Thai and Chinese cooks than I am (up here, if you want Thai food you have to learn to cook it yourself).
As for storage options — I blogged about getting rid of my plastic a few months ago. I ordered a lot of vintage pyrex refrigerator storage containers off of eBay which I’ve been thrilled with. I like that they have glass lids on them as well.
If you want real info on how to store food, I rely on Putting Food By — it’s got info on everything from canning to pickling to freezing.
As for cookbooks:
I learned to cook when I was broke in my 20s and living in NYC by reading James Beard’s duo: Theory and Practice of Good Cooking, and The New James Beard.
Patricia Wells Bistro Cooking is probably the most dog-eared book on my shelves. It’s also stuffed with clippings I’ve cut out of magazines or newspapers. I love this book — it’s my favorite kind of food, for one thing, and every single recipe works. It’s a bombproof book. Everything works. Everything’s delicious. And nothing requires exotic ingredients — it’s good, solid French food and you could easily use these recipes to feed a family.
I love Mario Batali’s Molto Italiano for many of the same reasons I love the Patricia Wells book. There are flavor combinations I wouldn’t have thought of — the lamb shanks with oranges and olives is beyond fabulous.
Staffmeals from Chanterelle would be a great cookbook for anyone feeding a family or looking to change up their weekly repetoire. It’s a collection of recipes that the restaurant feeds its own staff — I’ve used it a lot for parties. It’s all homey food: brisket, lamb shanks, macaroni and cheese, and some great summer barbecue potluck dishes. The potato salad is to die for. (Sadly, it seems to be out of print — maybe check Alibris or AbeBooks or your local used bookstore for a copy.)
What about you all? What are the tips and tricks you rely on to get dinner on the table? Was there a book that you think of as your core cookbook — the one you go back to again and again?
In the comments thread for yesterday’s post on frozen dinners, Maryn made a great comment about why the whole “cooking from scratch” concept might seem so overwhelming to people who are just getting started cooking real food:
I think it’s really important for people who are starting to cook (or cook more, or more healthfully) to hear that the freezer can be your friend. Learning to integrate real cooking into your life seems so huge, if you’re not used to it – OMG I have to cook every dish from scratch every night for the rest of my life??? – that it’s easy to stumble into catastrophic thinking and imagine you will never be using a freezer or microwave (or toaster oven) again. The freezer begins to feel like an evil portal that allows processed food to sneak into your house, when really it’s just another tool for extending good foods’ seasons.
Aha! Well no wonder people are feeling overwhelmed. It never occurred to me that someone would think that your own frozen food wouldn’t “count,” or that folks who have no experience cooking might not consider that you can plan ahead, cook extra and get two or three meals out of one evening in the kitchen.
I rarely eat processed meals from the store, but that doesn’t mean I cook every night. I cook in spurts — and when I cook I almost always deliberately cook more than I’m going to need for that particular meal. For instance, last night I roasted a chicken and a pan of vegetables (onions, carrots, potatoes, brussel sprouts with some of my homemade pancetta and some garlic).
I can roast a chicken on one night, and get another three or four easy meals out of it by reheating or using the chicken breasts in quesadillas or sandwiches for lunch. Those veggies can be reheated, or tossed into a dish with a little cream and cheese for a gratin. Or made into a simple soup.
I think that maybe one of the tricks is to begin to see beyond the immediate horizon of “I’m hungry now.” The processed food industry wants to keep us hobbled to the immediate, wants us to think that cooking real food is “too hard” – there’s all those decisions to make — and dishes to clean up and they want us to believe that their food in boxes “frees” us from all that.
I learned to shop and think about a week’s food budget from my mom when I was in middle school and she was trying to learn to live on not much money after her divorce. She went through a turkey phase — turkey is not expensive, and from one turkey we got a couple of nice dinners, then sandwiches, and a carcass to pick at and then finally, the dread turkey soup. I learned to cook a pot roast for the same reasons — it was a big piece of cheap meat and we could get a couple of dinners out of it, and then make soup. A whole turkey or a big pot roast was cheaper by the portion than a package of chicken breasts or a package of steaks. Here’s where the freezer comes in — who wants to keep eating that damn turkey until it’s gone? So pack up a couple of dinners, pop them in your own freezer, and move on to the next thing. Then next week, when you’ve had a crappy day, you can pull out your own nice food, pop it in the toaster oven or the microwave, and have real food.
Mom also made cookie dough in big batches, and then froze them in logs so we could cut off a few cookies after school and cook them up, either in the oven or in the toaster oven. (One of the things Alice Waters and I seem to have in common — a love of the toaster oven.) Cookie dough in a tube had just come out at that point, and my mother, who is not necessarily a frugal person in some other parts of her life, was appalled by what they were charging. Look, she told me — flour, sugar, butter are all inexpensive. We can make it ourselves for less money out of better ingredients.
With a little practice, this gets easier. And I don’t know, I just can’t help but think that once people start eating real food — food that isn’t full of stabilizers and emulsifiers and added salt and sugar that they’ll begin to realize what they were missing. It doesn’t have to be hard. The difference is negligible between tossing a plastic tray of frozen food into the microwave and reheating a piece of chicken with some veggies in the toaster oven, or putting a bowl of leftover soup in the microwave.
And although Alice Waters has been frightening people by implying that it doesn’t count if you can’t get the most perfect vegetables from your local farmer’s market where you’ve developed a relationship with your farmer — I think her message boils down to pretty much the same thing I’ve been trying to say about cooking. It’s just not that hard. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate thing with dirty dishes all over the kitchen. You can make a simple salad from real ingredients and a fresh dressing, or roast a chicken and then get a couple of other easy dinners out of it that you can reheat later, you can roast some veggies with the chicken and then make a delicious little soup out of them. Whether they’re pristine organic veggies or just ordinary commercial veggies from the produce aisle, I think if we can stop eating them precooked, drowned in chemicals, and frozen in blocks, then we’re making real progress.
In the comments thread on Monday , the topic of frozen dinners came up. Although I relied heavily on the small-size frozen mac-and-cheese and frozen lasagnes that winter after my brother died, for the most part, the weird gumminess of frozen dinners freaks me out.
Yesterday was one of those days — I had a couple of appointments over in Bozeman in the morning and then I just never really caught up. So at six, I found myself staring into the fridge wondering what I was going to eat. I didn’t want leftover lamb and white bean stew, and although I’d thawed a piece of antelope, it was one of those nights where searing a small steak just seemed like far too much work. So I took a look in the freezer — meatloaf? Meatloaf was an idea …
I’ve written about this recipe before — it’s from Mario Batali’s Molto Italiano, a cookbook I adore — everything in it is easy, and delicious, and most important, the recipes work. This is kind of complicated for a meatloaf recipe, but it’s really yummy and it makes a very large meatloaf. Last time I made it, I had a lot left over, so I did what I often do with leftovers, and froze them in individual portions.
This meant that staring into my freezer on a blinky Tuesday night, I had a single portion of frozen meatloaf, and a bag full of cooked greens from my garden that I’d also frozen in single portions last summer. I pulled out one mystery hockey puck of frozen veg — turned out it was roma beans cooked long and slow with a little bacon, one of the delicious surprises of last summer’s garden. I plopped them both in a dish, covered the dish with foil, pulled out a small potato and poked some holes in it. Into the toaster oven it all went at 350 for about an hour while I went downstairs to my writing office and tried to get a little work done.
An hour later, I had dinner in a bowl. Meatloaf. Green beans. A baked potato.
If you’re not cooking at all yet, this might seem daunting, but if you’re a person who does cook, it really doesn’t take a lot of time to freeze things in the kind of portions that will save you on those evenings when you stand there looking into a full refrigerator thinking “there’s nothing to eat.”
Things are a little hectic here at LivingSmall today — so why doesn’t everyone go over to Someday Homesteader and read about Kim’s first deer. It’s really affecting and well, since she did it by herself, without a guide like my Mighty Hunter, I’m kind of in awe.
Because I work at home, I see a lot of TV with the sound off — Oprah had a family on a week ago or so who had a big pile of kids — sextuplets and twins? something like that. The mom was talking about her schedule and how she copes and she mentioned something about what my friend Nina calls “the witching hour” — that hour before dinner where all the kids seem to lose their minds at once. It took a while this mom-on-Oprah was saying, because she cooks “from scratch.” “You cook from scratch!?” Oprah said, as though this was some arcane and exotic practice. “Well yeah,” this mom said. “We do the organic thing, and well … it’s a lot cheaper.” “From scratch?” Oprah said again.
This has been stuck in the back of my head ever since. When did cooking dinner become “cooking from scratch”? I did a little googling, and found these disturbing statistics:
Looking at these stats, I’d be curious to know how many of the 33% who are not eating restaurant takeout are actually cooking, and how many of them are eating out of boxes — but at least it appears they’re cooking something at home.
The eating takeout thing I find really wild — how do people afford it? Fast food I understand — its prime virtues are sameness and cheapness — but I remember when a Boston Market opened in Salt Lake when I was in grad school. I thought about buying dinner there one night when I was fried and it was late — but it was so expensive — much more expensive than buying a pre-roasted chicken at the store, for example.
My friend Nina has four kids, and sure, there were a bunch of nights this summer we ordered pizza, and she’s always got some shortcuts around like pre-grated cheese, but for the most part, she or her husband cook them dinner every night. Nothing elaborate, just dinner. And I know any number of people like myself who live alone who claim it’s “too much trouble” to cook a real meal for themselves — but what are they eating? Are people living on bowls of cereal?
When I first moved in with my brother, he did have a freezer full of Lean Cuisines — and those disgusting Hot Pocket things — and I remember about a year after we’d moved in together as he was making tomato sauce one night (chop and saute an onion and some garlic, add a can of tomatoes and a splash of wine) when he looked at me and said: “If I’d known how easy this was I wouldn’t have been buying jars of sauce all those years.” I guess making sauce in a skillet while the noodles cook does take longer than opening a jar and dumping some on — but it doesn’t take that much longer.
So why the hysterical tone about cooking “from scratch”? Why has this become so out of the mainstream that it’s seen as odd? Am I so old that having had parents who cooked dinner every night for us, just dinner — spaghetti or pork chops or pot roast or our stepmother’s non-gourmet but delicious Chicken Divan — puts me in the “when I was a kid we walked ten miles to school” category?
I find this bewildering. I know I’m a weirdo who takes on food projects like making my own pancetta, or baking bread, or making yogurt — but I’m not talking about that kind of cooking. I’m just talking about regular, every day, feed ourselves and our kids kind of cooking.
When we were kids, we had dinner every Monday night with the Smiths. My mother was single and her friend Mrs. Smith’s husband was out of town on Mondays, and so we’d switch off — one week at our house, one week at theirs. It was always Garbage Dinner, meaning that Mom or Mrs. Smith used up whatever was left in the fridge. Garbage dinners were always an adventure — both my Mom and Mrs. Smith were both creative and also a little wacky — I mean, Mrs. Smith was the kind of person who went to Brazil on her honeymoon and stayed 12 years. She had a great dress-up box from when she’d been a model, and there was a period of two or three years where every time we went to the Smith’s the first thing I did was put on the strapless dress with the big blue cabbage roses and the matching sleeveless cape. It was a fabulous outfit. I remember riding the pony in that dress.
Anyhow, Garbage Dinner was an institution. At our house it usually meant Garbage Soup made from whatever chicken or turkey carcass was lurking in the back of the fridge, plus all the veggies that were getting wilty. At the Smiths we seemed to mostly get toast, custard (their ancient housekeeper Consuela only ate egg whites for breakfast, so there were always a lot of yolks by Monday night) and very strong milky tea. An Anglophile dinner. But you never knew what you might get, and that was half the fun.
Apparently the Waste Reduction Agency in Great Britain has determined that:
The government has started a new campaign to fight waste by reminding people that many of the lovely things about English food involve using up leftovers: bubble and squeak (cabbage and potatoes fried up with an onion), or bread and butter pudding. They’re also reminding people that meal and menu planning, plus simply cooking at home will not only reduce waste and greenhouse gasses, but will fight obesity and contribute to family relations.
I seem to be constitutionally unable to throw food away unless it’s really really gone bad, and I try my best not to let that happen. Getting rid of my plastic containers and using old pyrex refrigerator containers I bought on eBay seems to be helping — it’s easier when you can see everything. This blog post at the Guardian also has some good tips to avoid over-buying at the store (remember, all those 2-for-1 deals might not be your friend). And there’s this groovy Leftover Wizard that I’ve seen mentioned on a few websites. A few good cookbooks can also help — the Joy of Cooking has a lot of tips for leftovers, and a good primer about cooking technique (like this new one from Michael Ruhlman) can give you the skills you need when staring into the depths of your fridge wondering what you’re going to do with that bit of stew, the leftover squash, and half an onion.
And maybe get together with a friend. I know that both my mother and Mrs. Smith liked garbage dinners as much for the adult company and the fact that we’d all play with one another as they did for the chance to clean out the fridge once a week. We kids liked it because it was an adventure — sometimes dinner was weird, but more often than not it was weird in that fun, slightly subversive way that kids love.
Over at Culinate there’s a nice piece by Zanne Miller about making bread with her daughters. What’s interesting is that it was the daughters who instigated the family bread-making, Miller herself admits to thinking that it was going to be too hard, or take too long, or be a pain. It’s a lovely piece about how it’s become part of their family routine.
Now that the weather has cooled off I’ve been making bread again — mostly the no-knead, although I need to go look up the some-knead hybrid I cribbed from Nancy Silverton last week (reminds me, I need to add wheat germ to my shopping list too). It’s not the time-consuming earth-mother chore that people tend to think it is — you can make a delicious loaf of nice clean bread that contains only flour, salt, water, and yeast in two or three short sessions of actual cooking. Bob del Grosso also has a simple bread recipe over at Hunger Artist, and here’s a story in the Times of London about why commercial bread makes you fat and feel terrible, while real bread doesn’t.
What I loved about the piece at Culinate is how Miller and her kids started out with breadmaking as a sort of craft project, and then found it creeping into their lives for the best of the Slow Food reasons — it was something fun they could do together, it gave them a chance to talk to one another while making dinner, and it gave the little girls a sense of mastery over a basic skill. I think that’s why I take such pleasure in making a loaf of bread once a week or so — even if it is just the dead-easy no-knead loaf — people have been making bread for a couple of thousand years, it’d be a shame to see it become some kind of esoteric lost skill.