Home Sweet Chicken

Posted on November 30, 2008 by cmf

While it was indeed a lovely drive up the Clearwater river yesterday on the way home from Seattle, it made for a very long day in the car — I didn’t get back until nearly ten and I was all road buzzy when I got here. But today was lovely — walked the dog, did some grocery shopping, and then tried to decide what to do with the requisite homecoming chicken.

I seem to be compelled to cook a chicken after returning from a trip. I’ve written any number of times about my mystical belief in the power of a well-cooked chicken to make everything right in the world, but I have to admit, I went back and forth on whether or not to do a chicken. I have so much food in my freezers already — half a pig, for instance, and there’s a substantial amount of lamb left, and even some cut-up chicken. But no, nothing else would really do so Raymond-the-dog and I walked to the grocery store and bought a chicken. It doesn’t feel like home until I’ve cooked a chicken.

Tonight is Poulet Bonne Femme or white coq au vin — a whole chicken, browned all over, then cooked with onions, carrots, parsnips (they were in the sale bin at the grocery this am), garlic, spices and a little white wine and spices. The whole house is beginning to smell like wine and chicken, the dogs are sleeping in their respective spots, and I’m reading Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson. All is indeed well with the world.

Eating from the Pantry

Posted on November 19, 2008 by cmf

So, these past few weeks have been killer at work — we’re moving to some new tools, which is exciting and frustrating and involves a lot of training, and of course, everyone is a little nervous in the current economic climate — so it’s been long days at the computer after which I reel out of my home office slightly stunned that I can be as blinky and fried as I am considering that I haven’t even left the house. The weirdness of telecommuting — your job comes to you.

However, the silver lining has been that I was slightly crazed this summer and put up a lot of food. Which means that at the end of the day, dinner is actually kind of working out — polenta has been a staple lately — I’ve discovered that the rice cooker set on slow cook is the bomb for polenta. I have all that sauce I put up, and a freezer full of cooked greens, and I did a (small) pork shoulder in red chile last week, which as we all know you can reheat ad infinitum. So polenta with greens, or polenta with sauce, or polenta with pulled pork. Or pasta with any of the above. I also made an oddball dish the other day that turned out well — I took half a ham slab, and put it in a dish on top of a small savoy cabbage from the garden chopped up with a few garden carrots and potatoes and some of the little onions I grew. A few garlic slices, some salt and pepper, a good slug of white wine and a sprinkling of Herbes de la Garrigue from World Spice, then in the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes. I did it in one of my pyrex dishes from eBay that had a lid, so I cooked it covered for about 30 minutes, then took the lid off so the spuds and the ham got nice and crispy. It was way too much food, which means that it’s more than one dinner, which is good when I’m blinky after a long day at the computer.

The other thing I’ve been trying to do is to up the ratio of veggies to whatever meat is on the plate — so a little ham and a lot of veggies, a nice pile of polenta with a little sauce, or greens, or an egg. Basic cucina povera, which is, as we’re all discovering, actually a healthier way to live. Which isn’t to say that last night, after another long long day, I wasn’t tempted to call out for something — a pizza or Chinese food — but takeout in our little town takes forever, and it didn’t seem worth it when I have a fridge and pantry full of food. So I reheated some pork, and some rice, and chopped up a bunch of cilantro and scallions, and in 15 minutes I had a nice hot bowl of food (and I hadn’t dropped fifteen dollars in the middle of the week).

Blogging Post-Election

Posted on November 18, 2008 by cmf

I’ve been in something of a blogging slump. I mean, it seems weird to be blogging about say, my newfound love of salted butter, in a world in which the financial markets are all collapsing and we have a president-elect who astonishes one every day with his deliberation and well, leadership. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt this way. As though I have a government I could actually trust to do the right thing — that is, even if they’re not doing every little thing I’d like, that I trust is actually working for the good of the nation (and the good of the global community). I’m finding it a little unsettling — unsettling in a good way, but unsettling nonetheless.

I’m also a little unmoored by the sudden manner in which the nation has been plunged into living small — and the screeching from the media that by doing so, we’re destroying the American economy. Something seems off to me. If our economy is so delicate that by simply not buying a new car every year we can destroy it, then perhaps we need to rethink our relationship to “growth” — as even Obama has said, every crisis bears an opportunity, and perhaps this is one. Can we, as a nation, rethink our relationship to stuff? Do we really need to consume at the rate we have been? Can we dial it back without causing a total collapse? Where is the balance?

I’m a little disoriented. It might take a while to figure out what it means to live in a world where you don’t actually feel like you’re shouting in the wilderness.

Winter Salad

Posted on November 11, 2008 by cmf

I have a confession to make. I don’t really like salads much, particularly not in winter. Salad just seems so cold somehow. However, I am a big fan of what I like to call “winter salad” — a sort of cole slaw. Cabbage, red onion, carrot all shredded up and dressed with lime juice, salt, olive oil and some New Mexico chile. It’s crunchy and tart and goes with just about any sandwich or lunchtime quesadlila.

I made this one last week from one of my four savoy cabbages I grew this summer, and the onions and carrots also came from the garden. Raw cabbage is supposed to be really good for you, but mostly I just like this because it’s green and crunchy and goes with everything.

I also started a batch of sauerkraut last night. I used a clean, scrubbed kitchen pail since I don’t have a crock. I bought a monster cabbage grown locally by the Hutterites — it was a six pound cabbage. The recipe I went with is from Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning by the Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante. I love this book — it’s full of all sorts of very old world preservation techniques. I sliced up the cabbage and layered it with a couple of sliced onions, some bay leaves, cumin and coriander seeds. I sprinkled a big soup spoon of pickling salt over every layer. I then tamped it all down with a potato masher until it was wet, then covered the whole thing with a ginormous ziploc bag filled with enough water to form a seal. Then I set it in the pantry and we’ll see what transpires.

“Family” Dinner

Posted on November 10, 2008 by cmf

A few weeks ago my girlfriend Deb called me on a Sunday evening. Sunday evenings can be bleak when you’re single and don’t have kids — it’s the time of the week when one can feel most adrift. And winter is upon us — it’s dark by five these days and we’re all living with a tiny bit of dread knowing that the wind will start up again. “Why don’t we do dinner a couple of times a month?” Debbie suggested. “We could get single people together, and rotate it to different houses.”

So last night, we did. There were six of us — two people who have just moved to town and four of us who’ve been here for a while. I had a lovely piece of lamb shoulder from the half a lamb I bought last spring so I did Mario Batali’s recipe (it’s for shanks, but same difference) — braised lamb with orange and rosemary and green olives. Debbie made polenta, Robert brought a salad, and Margie did bright green brussels sprouts with bacon. We set the table, and toasted the new president and ate a lovely dinner together. There was lively conversation, nice wine (it helps that Debbie runs the wine store) and Mark, who has just moved to town and who had to duck out to do a radio interview with a station back in Michigan read us a couple of poems out of the book for which he was being interviewed.

It was so much fun. Next month is of course, kind of busy with holiday parties but we’re going to try to sneak in another Sunday night. Everyone agreed it was lovely to be together and somehow, the Sunday night vibe, as well as the general admission from all of us at that table that Sunday nights can get lonely when you’re single, well, it felt like something a little more than just a dinner party. We all agreed to get one another through the winter. We’re going to share food, and wine, and our art on Sunday nights and maybe this way the winter won’t seem so long.

Bending the arc of history …

Posted on November 6, 2008 by cmf

“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King

“We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.” President-elect Barack Obama, victory speech.

I couldn’t post yesterday. I was too overwhelmed. I spent much of yesterday reading around the internets, trying to put my finger on just how this felt to me. Of course, there was elation. Of course there was civic pride that we have finally taken this enormous leap as a nation and while we are by no means “over” racism, we have finally chosen someone based on the content of his character and have not let the color of his skin disqualify him. I was filled with pride for my hometown, Chicago. Look what forty years has wrought — Grant Park filled with all those elated, teary faces looking up in hope right there on the grounds where the old mayor sicced the cops on the hippies. It felt like something had been made right.

But those were not my battles. Civil rights was not my battle. Nor were the cultural battles of the sixties. My battle was a different one, and it feels today like the battle that began during the first election I ever cared about and argued with my parents over, the 1980 election that brought us Reagan, it feels like that battle is finally over.

I was in Paris in 1984 when Reagan was re-elected and I remember one night in a hotel room with a group of shiny privileged suburban American kids playing a word association game. They were the young Republicans who bought with glee into the idea that greed was good, that individualism was freedom, that we owe nothing to our fellow citizens but the opportunity to compete with us on a rigged playing field. They believed wealth would trickle down (while I, who had been raised broke among rich people, knew how unlikely that scenario was). They loved that after all the Free to Be You and Me sharing and caring hippie stuff we’d been raised with that Ronald Reagan came along and told them they were just fine the way there were, that shopping was good, that America was an empire and that we were the champions. And that as champions, they owed nothing to anyone. It was all theirs.

I hated it. I hated it then and I have hated it for the past 28 years. While I have friends and relatives who dearly wanted to see Hillary in the White House as a vindication of their dreams as women, I have wanted, since the beginning, to see Barack Obama, a man who has talked consistently of hope, of community action, of our highest historical ideals as a nation — I have wanted to see this man who talks the language we’ve seen debased and mocked these many years, and whose actions back up that idealistic language — that’s who I wanted to see elected to the presidency of the United States.

Gary Kamiya over at Salon has an piece entitled Taking our Country Back where he parses the many many ways that Obama’s election signals the end of this particularly shameful episode in our history. I urge you to go take a look. As for myself, I am looking forward to a government that does not debase language as a smokescreen for robbery. I am looking forward to being governed by someone who has read widely and deeply in our national literature, and who is, like some of us, a gigantic nerd about the ideals upon which our great American experiment was founded, and has been carried out. Most of all, I am looking forward to being governed by someone who speaks to the American people like grown ups, who speaks to us as people who are capable of carrying complex ideas, and who calls us to be better than we are. Who calls to us to reach out to one another. Whose campaign made me go out there and knock on doors and talk to people in my neighborhood, no matter how uncomfortable that made me. I am looking forward to being lead, and governed by someone who believes that government can and must be a force for civic good, and it is a rising tide that raises all our boats, together.

Walt Whitman on Election Day

Posted on November 4, 2008 by cmf

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,’Twould not be you, Niagara – nor you, ye limitless prairies – nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite – nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones – nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes – nor Mississippi’s stream:

This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name – the still small voice vibrating -America’s choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen – the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous’d – sea-board and inland – Texas to Maine – the Prairie States – Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West – the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling – (a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s): the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity – welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

- Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify – while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

–Walt Whitman (via Robert Pinsky and the Boston Globe)

Day of the Dead

Posted on November 3, 2008 by cmf

Last week at work was just insane — hence the dearth of blogging — and I spent most of the weekend in recovery-mode. I was so knackered that I totally bailed on Halloween — went to bed at 8:30 that night.

But I did manage to pull together a Day of the Dead altar this year. I was in Chicago for the anniversary of Patrick’s death, and it’s been one of those years. My friend Jim lost his beloved Mari (and Isabella lost her mother), David Foster Wallace’s suicide hit me hard, there were two deaths on my dog walking route — Karen, who killed herself and Harold, who died of old age. And so, it felt like a year that needed an altar. I bought a lot of bright flowers (although I couldn’t find marigolds which are traditional) and set out some candles and pictures and lit some incense as an offering. Then Saturday night I just sort of hunkered down with my Beloved Dead, and watched Truly Madly Deeply — my favorite movie about grief (which come to think of it. Anthony Mingella is one of the people we lost this year). It’s such a wonderful movie — Alan Rickman is sexy and annoying, Juliet Stevenson is wonderful — and it’s so dead-on about the bittersweet joy that is moving out into the world again after a big loss.

It was actually quite a lovely evening. I was still exhausted — I think I might have made it up until 10 that night, and I slept in to the extent that the dogs were confused, but it was a good, sweet restorative weekend.

And now, if we can all just make it through the next 48 hours — please please please go vote for Obama. Call everyone you know and tell them to vote for Obama. Do what you can tomorrow — drive people to the polls, make GOTV calls, bake cookies for people waiting in line so they’ll stay there. We can do this. I know that as a nation we can do this. (It’s even looking like there’s a chance he could win Montana, which would be SO exciting.)

Ode to a Canning Jar

Posted on October 29, 2008 by cmf

I was washing dishes the other day and this jar came to the top of the pile. It’s a jar I bought honey in when we lived in California — seven or eight years ago now. This is what I love about mason jars — that they last forever.

About a year ago I got rid of all the plastic containers in my house. I bought a bunch of old pyrex refrigerator storage containers on eBay, and I’ve been using canning jars for everything else. It works perfectly. For braised things like the pork with New Mexico chile (thanks Deb for the chile — it’s SO delicious) I use one of those flat yellow pyrex dishes with the lid. For soups and anything else semi-liquid, I use canning jars. I also have all my dry goods stored in canning jars in the pantry — beans, rices, dried mushrooms, salted black beans.

The thing about canning jars — they’re cheap. You can find them in secondhand stores for almost nothing, or you can buy a dozen brand new jars with lids and screw tops for 8-12 bucks. While you can only use a lid once for proper canning, for just everyday storage, you can use them over and over. Just wash them. And glass is inert. There’s no weird chemicals leaking into my food. And I think they’re very attractive — I love my pantry with all the jars lined up, where you can see all the different beans and peas and other stuff.
As anyone knows who has been reading my little site for any time now, I’m really interested in older technologies that still work well. I like new technologies too — don’t get me wrong, I’m having a ball with all the Web 2.0 stuff we’re doing at work, and if it wasn’t for new technology I wouldn’t be able to live here in Montana. But I’m also really interested in the older stuff that suddenly a lot of us seem to be rediscovering. Canning. Knitting. Growing veggies in your backyard. Maybe this financial crisis will inspire some more of this kind of rediscovery. Ways of living with less waste, more reuse — consuming less quantity but perhaps a little more quality? A tiny silver lining perhaps?

Trumpeter Swans!

Posted on October 27, 2008 by cmf

Although setting out on morning dog walks in the dark (at 7:30) is sort of a drag, the reward is that by the time we get to the dog park at Mayor’s Landing, which is a bluff overlooking the Yellowstone, we get to watch the sunrise over the Crazy Mountains to the northeast. It’s just lovely. It’s so lovely that I stop and look and feel very grateful that I live here. Every morning. The exercise is good, but the gratitude is even better.

So this morning as we turned to head home, I heard what I thought was geese, but when I looked up, they weren’t geese, they were trumpeter swans! Three of them, great big necks stretched out, flying into the southwest.

Things might be a little scary all around — the financial news is bad again this morning, a dear one just got some alarming medical tests back, and the election is making us all very nervous. But on the other hand, the sun is still rising, the river is flowing as it has for centuries, the leaves have turned yellow, and there were three trumpeter swans flying overhead. A good thing.

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Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Yearly Archives: 2008