Monthly Archives: April 2010

Go Roast a Chicken

Posted on by
apple roasted chicken de 91552433 300x234 Go Roast a Chicken

photo credit: countryliving.com

Continuing the discussion about cooking, and having time to cook, Michael Ruhlman threw down the gauntlet at the IACP event in Portland, Oregon last week when he called “bullshit” on the idea that we all lead such busy lives that we don’t have time to cook. Ruhlman’s point is that we all have the same number of hours in the day, and we choose how to use them — many of us may choose not to cook, but by claiming we’re “too busy” we’re just buying into propaganda the food industry has been selling us, nonstop, for the past 30 years.

Here’s a Wendell Berry quote on the same subject from “The Pleasures of Food”:

“The food industrialists have by now persuaded milions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. THey will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.”

This essay was published in 1989, and as the popularity of “nutrition drinks” like Ensure and whatever the horrible one is that they try to get people to feed to their kids (I saw a TV ad the other day urging mothers to give their kids this drink when they won’t eat vegetables) all I could think of was Berry. I’d also argue that the fast-food drive-through window is in many ways the equivalent of Berry’s consumer strapped to the table. Passive consumption, consumed while passively restrained in an automobile.

I sometimes worry about preaching about cooking since I work at home and I don’t have kids — the two excuses people cite most often about why they can’t cook. Working at home is a choice I made, and one I’ve paid for in reduced income on a couple of occasions. What I’ve gotten in return is a level of autonomy that is worth more than money to me. It’s a choice I made. Every time I saw an opportunity to work at home I took it, starting in my twenties. We make choices. And I know it’s a shitty economy right now, and anyone with a job is being driven to work as many hours as the corporate machine can get out of them, but I think that one of the larger issues these discussions about food and cooking and home life are bringing up are questions about whether those choices make sense. In some ways I think what the food-and-cooking advocates who question the industrial food paradigm are also questioning is the industrial work paradigm. There aren’t any easy answers, but it’s my hope that the recent economic crash might have distracted everyone for a moment from the incessant acquisition of useless crap, that maybe it’s given us all a chance to come up for air, to question whether commuting in a car for long distances to a job that eats up all our time just so we can make enough money to pay for the car and the gas and the house in the suburbs that we’re never in because we’re so “busy” working so hard, well, maybe it’s giving us a chance to ask whether this system makes any sense at all.

Which brings us back to cooking, and time. I’m old-fashioned. I believe in meals not snacks, and I believe in cooking for yourself, not letting some anonymous, safety-challenged industrial force do it for you. I’m also a sort of artsy hippie weirdo, who reacted to my first office with florescent lights twenty-five years ago by trying to figure out how to get the hell out of there. So take it as you will. But I’m with Ruhlman on this one. “No time to cook” is bullshit. Everyone seems to have time to commute, or shop, or as he puts it “dick around on the internet.” How can we not have time to cook? To feed ourselves and our families? It’s not rocket science people, it’s just dinner.

Over the Easter holiday, my adopted family was back in town, and because we all miss them, their house is full of people when they’re home. They’ve got five kids of their own, and most evenings there were at least eight or nine kids in the house, and anywhere from three to five grown-ups. And we cooked dinner. One night Elwood threw a couple of chickens in the oven, and a pan of potatoes. We made a big salad. When the chickens came out he put them on a big board, and chopped them up almost Chinese-style. The kids all ate chicken, and hot roasted potatoes, and salad. The next night, we threw a ham in the oven in the afternoon, and twenty minutes before serving, threw a sheet pan of asparagus in along with a loaf of bread. Again, plenty for everyone, and no big deal. Meat, veg, and a starch. A big long table full of chattering kids passing food around, helping the littler kids out, while we stood around the kitchen with glasses of wine, catching up and filling our own plates. It wasn’t hard. There were no tricky recipes or big-deal meal planning involved. We all pitched in with the kids and the dishes and we did what makes us family, we ate together.

Or perhaps, if you need some extra incentive to start cooking, you might consider Ruhlman’s suggestion for using the hour it takes to cook a roasted chicken and some vegetables — repairing to the bedroom and reconnecting with your beloved. Because at root, this is what it’s all about, the cooking thing. Being there together. Feeding our loved ones, taking care of them and ourselves. What’s any of the rest of it worth if we’re not doing that?

share save 171 16 Go Roast a Chicken

The Snack Issue …

Posted on by

popcorn The Snack Issue ...
So I was browsing around this morning and came across A Year of Inconvenience, a blog written by a woman who manages a food co-op and yet, who after watching Julie & Julia, and reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, decided to see if she could spend a year avoiding the central aisles of her own store, the place where the “convenience” foods reside.

Like a lot of these “project blogs” I would probably quibble with some of her definitions of “convenience foods.” As far as I’m concerned, canned tomatoes, canned beans, pasta, and reasonably plain crackers (I’m a big fan of the Stoned Wheat Thin) are staples. And I’m not really her target audience — I rarely shop the middle aisles, and when I do I’m in there for staples like flour or rice or pasta or beans, or Asian condiments. I don’t buy mixes, or “simmer sauces” — I don’t even like spaghetti sauce in a jar because it tastes too gloppy to me. I just don’t think about cooking that way, in part because I like my own food better than most prepared stuff, and I’m cheap — the pre-packaged stuff seems so expensive most of the time for what you get. But this is all ground we’ve been over time and time again.

What struck me reading A Year of Inconvenience is how ubiquitous “snacks” have become in our society. One of her concerns is replacing the snack foods — and to her credit, she goes ahead and makes hard pretzels!

I was raised by parents who were deeply opposed to snacks. We got three squares a day, and in Junior High and High School a very modest after-school nosh, but the concept of something like a “snack drawer” or “snack closet” in our house was unthinkable. Even after-school snacks were something like a toasted bagel with cheese, or homemade cookies (an ongoing source of war between Patrick and the not-yet-beloved Stepmother in junior high — she believed in rationing, he’d sneak them from the bottom of the tin). We never had chips, or store cookies, or packages of stuff in the house, just as we weren’t allowed to drink pop as kids. My parents were so pro-milk/anti-pop that even at the horse shows my mother ran when we were little, the catering guy, the legendary Mr. Pasquesi, kept those little cartons of milk in his ice chest for my brother and I, and wouldn’t sell us pop.

So the explosion of snack foods is something I’ve never really paid any attention to, and since I don’t have kids, I’ve been spared the tyranny of snack duty for school teams and activities. I still don’t fundamentally understand snacking. We eat dinner really late around here, so sometimes I’ll have some olives, or cheese and crackers around five (it’s a long time until our 9pm-ish dinner time), but the appeal/lure/siren song of snack products is something that’s thankfully lost on me.

The struggle with weight is one I’m not unfamiliar with, but it seems that this idea that we need to have food at our fingertips at every moment of the day (like the idea, pushed by the bottled water people that if we’re not clutching a beverage at all times, we’ll perish of thirst), is one of the reasons our population is growing larger and larger and larger. And perhaps, as we start weaning ourselves from packaged food in general — the frozen dinners, the “mixes” the sauces in jars, the horrible pre-cooked meals in the meat case (really? you want a pot roast cooked in a factory somewhere?), the snack issue will begin to recede as well. Once you start seeing food in boxes and bags as odd, and full of weird ingredients and too much salt, then “snacks” start to look weird too. I don’t know, if you need a “snack” make some popcorn — on the stove, in a pan, with a little oil. It’s really good.

share save 171 16 The Snack Issue ...

Cold Frames, Tomatoes, Peppers

Posted on by

IMG 0296 225x300 Cold Frames, Tomatoes, Peppers

It’s all about season extension up here in Montana, and these cold frames are one of my primary means of making the most of what I’ve got. I build them a little more than five years ago (Nina was pregnant with the twins, who are five now) and they work really well for a couple of reasons.

One is that they’re just outside the back door. This early in the season, I put flats out during the day, but bring them in at night. It’s just too cold, and I don’t want to risk losing the seedlings and having to start over. As it gets warmer, I’ll leave things out overnight, and I’ve been known to light a Virgin of Guadalupe candle out there to keep the temps above freezing. The other key to these cold frames is the double-wall plastic. I can’t remember where I bought it, just google greenhouse plastic, but because it breaks up the UV rays, it keeps the seedlings from burning up.

I need to get to work and start some other seedlings — flowers, broccoli, tomatillos, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Maybe this week. Outside, I have tons of Chinese cabbages and veggies under one hoop house, and broccoli rabe, arugula, spinach, and komatsuna, my new favorite vegetable, under the other. Those are all doing stupendously and I’ve been joyfully eating my own greens for two weeks now. In the exposed garden I’ve planted peas, and onions — I need to get some turnips and beets and chard and carrots in, but the weather was wonky this weekend. Intermittently cold.

It’s funny, the first couple of years I was really driven by my veggie garden, and now I”m a lot more relaxed. I like it. I LOVE eating my own vegetables (I’m convinced part of the reason I was so sick this winter was that I wasn’t eating my own veggies). But I’m a lot less driven? uptight? insane? about the whole thing these days. Things will get planted. Things will get eaten. Another year, another revolution around the sun.

share save 171 16 Cold Frames, Tomatoes, Peppers

Bluebirds and SandHill Cranes

Posted on by

WesternBluebirdparents 300x286 Bluebirds and SandHill Cranes
Spring has sprung here in Montana. The bluebirds are back — there’s a number of them zipping around up at the cabin (although I haven’t seen anything as dramatic as this photo). They’re a color blue that you can’t quite believe exists in nature, much less that it’s zipping around out there catching bugs, building nests and having babies. At the end of last summer, when we were hiking up on the Judith Wildlife Reserve, we saw hundreds of them flocking up to migrate. It was wild, little blue shards everywhere you looked.

And the Sandhill cranes are back. There’s a pair down at the bottom of the road to the cabin. In the evening I sometimes mistake them for deer at first, because they’re the same brown color and they’re big, but then they move and there’s no mistaking them. A breeding pair, who have apparently been there for decades (or they’re handing the spot down between generations). There’s another breeding pair I see when I drive back into town, on the O’Hare ranch — two or three mornings I’ve seen them flying toward the Yellowstone.

And then the other night I heard what sounded like a mother coyote teaching pups to hunt. There was at least one adult voice, and a whole number of high-pitched, excited voices that sounded like puppies to me. I couldn’t see them since they were over a swale, but there are a lot of bunnies up there, and it would be a great place to teach pups to hunt. And that big healthy bitch coyote I saw several times this winter certainly looked like she was a good candidate for reproduction. She’s beautiful. A big reddish ruff, healthy coat, and from the number of deer legs my oh-so-domestic dogs have found, well fed.

So here’s to spring in Montana, and to wildlife babies all around.

share save 171 16 Bluebirds and SandHill Cranes

Hoop House!

Posted on by

IMG 0294 300x225 Hoop House!

This is what I found when I opened the hoop house to water this morning — real greens! Greens I can eat! I am beyond thrilled with how well these have worked out this year. The binder clips have kept the plastic from blowing off, even in the worst winds Livingston has to offer (winds that cause them to close the interstate and run all the semi-trailers through town). The plastic has kept it warm in there through a couple of weeks of freezing nights. And I’m sure the fact that we’ve had three or four 70-degree days hasn’t hurt.

But after a couple of months of fighting off low-grade colds and then strep, I’m beyond thrilled to be eating my own greens again. I can’t think of anything that will restore your health faster than your own dark green veggies, some sunshine, backyard eggs, and nice long walks through town in the early evening with the dog.

I can’t wait to see how the hoop houses work for the peppers. They don’t like cool nights, which is what we almost always have. I wish they were prettier, but I’ll settle for effective.

share save 171 16 Hoop House!