Browsed by
Month: November 2011

Organized!

Organized!

My kitchen is the one part of my house that has still, after almost 10 years, not been renovated. It’s one of those tricky cases — if I pull the appliances out to paint, I might as well replace the floor. And if I’m replacing the floor then maybe I should have that problematic weird wall pulled out. But I don’t really have the funding to do all that, and well, the kitchen works surprisingly well in it’s unrenovated state, and so, nothing gets done. Sigh.

I’m considering painting it over the holidays. The Big Corporation I work for closes for a week so I’ve got to take the time off, and as long as I’m not getting paid, I might as well do something useful. But then there’s the floor issue, and I’m not sure I have the money to replace the floor, and then there’s the timing issue — will the floor guys be working that week? You can see where this goes. I’ll have to talk to Himself about it, since he’s the contractor and all and see what he thinks. I hate to paint, but I’m not bad at it, and it’s certainly cheaper than hiring someone (including Himself).

However, there was one easy fix I did yesterday that has made me feeling much more sanguine about my un-done kitchen. I had one bookshelf in there already — the one with the chiles hanging off it, but what with the CookBookSlut work (another column should be up next week) the cookbook situation was getting out of hand. There was this messy pile, with other messy stuff tucked in the corner, and messy re-usable grocery bags stuffed underneath.

So I succumbed to the Big Box store, where I found a new five shelf white unit for a ridiculously low price. I put it together, then finally had the space to organize the cookbooks.
I’m really trying not to keep them all — just the ones I think I’ll actually use. The others I’ve been selling to Powells (in exchange for yet more books — when I’m an old lady they’re going to find me buried under a pile of books). It makes me ridiculously happy to look over at that corner now — there are sections now for English cooking, Reference, Essays, American, Mushroom cookbooks, Vegetable/vegetarian, Baking, Greek, Italian, French, Asian, Meat/Charcuterie and Canning/Pickling. (You can take the girl out of the bookstore, but you can never really take the bookstore clerk out of the girl). I can see things now. I can find things.

I’ve also been playing around with this fun site called Eat Your Books. They comp’ed me for a membership, but it’s not very expensive — $25 for a year and if you have a lot of cookbooks, as you can see I do, I think it’s kind of a great idea. You search their database for cookbooks you own, then click to add them to your “bookshelf” — what they provide is an expanded database of the indexes of those books, complete with lists of major ingredients. So, for example, if I’m looking at the last of the lamb in my freezer, and wondering what to do with it, I can type Lamb into the recipe index on “My Bookshelf” and it will kick up all the lamb recipes in the books I own — then you can drill down if you want, lamb and ginger, or lamb and grilled, etc. What I’m liking about it is that it reminds me of cookbooks I haven’t used in a while, as well as that it provides an easy access to some of the encyclopedic cookbooks like Joy or the Sunset Cookbook that I often forget to consult. They’ll also kick out shopping lists for you, and I’m sure there are a bunch of other features I haven’t figured out yet.

So there we are, one small corner of the kitchen re-organized (or perhaps just organized), one small clot of chaos defeated. Now, what to make for dinner?

Stealth Salt?!?

Stealth Salt?!?

From this morning’s paper, an AP article about Thanksgiving dinner that had both of us apoplectic with …. with … with outrage at the manner in which the corporate media normalizes Corporate Food. Here’s the lede:

No need for a salt shaker on the Thanksgiving table: Unless you really cooked from scratch, there’s lots of sodium already hidden in the menu. … The traditional Thanksgiving fixings show how easy sodium can sneak into the foods you’d least expect.

Sneak into your food?!? The salt doesn’t “sneak into” your food — the Big Ag corporations and the Big Food companies put it there. Processed food is just that — processed. That means it’s had salt and sugar and all sorts of creepy chemicals added to it so that the Big Food companies can then sell it to you for too much money while trying to pull a fast one by convincing you it’s a) easier and b) “better” for you. And the idea that “really cooking from scratch” is the exception, not the norm, and an exception so rare that the AP feels they have to warn you about the salt, sneaking into your food, all by itself, while you’re not looking — well, now we’re back to outrage square one again.

I’m not the only one pointing this out, not by a long shot — here’s Michael Ruhlman’s original rant about Salt, and here’s a later one with a lot of links to scientific studies. Basically, we both agree — if you’re worried about salt, or have high blood pressure, then cook your own food from whole, unprocessed ingredients (and buy good meat, from reputable producers who don’t shoot it full of brine) and watch how you season it. Otherwise, the salt you add at the table, or while cooking wholesome real food for yourself and your family poses no danger. The piles of salt that food processors add to all that junk they’re selling in the frozen case and the middle aisles of the supermarket — well yeah, that shit will kill you. So why eat it?

This is exactly the sort of crappy article I was complaining about yesterday. Thanksgiving is not rocket science. Green beans are better without gloppy cream-of-mushroom soup on them. Stuffing is just stale bread, onions, garlic, herbs, butter and some broth or wine to moisten it. Gravy is pan juices with flour to thicken. Turkey is just a big bird. Mashed potatoes are exactly that — potatoes cooked in water until tender, then mashed. Pumpkin pie is something better left off the table, if you’re asking me — perhaps a nice French Yogurt Cake instead.

It’s not rocket science and the people in factories, or in big chain restaurants do not know how to do it better than you do.

It’s Just a Turkey …

It’s Just a Turkey …

Sigh. Every year. The endless parade of newspaper and magazine articles, the FoodTV episodes, the endless parade of drek from the media implying that cooking Thanksgiving dinner is on par with neurosurgery, wing walking, base jumping.

It’s just a turkey. Thaw it and roast it — make a few side dishes, call the people you love and gather them around your table. That’s it. Doesn’t have to be good china, doesn’t have to be 14 dishes, doesn’t even have to be 14 people — just cook something and invite people to share it with you.

Now granted, I learned to cook a turkey when I was about 10, and we had no money after my parents’ divorce and my mother fed us on turkey for a couple of winters. A turkey will keep a family of three, even with two ravenous pre-teens, afloat for a week, easy. Roast turkey, turkey sandwiches, turkey-noodle-casserole, and finally, the dreaded turkey soup. As a result, I am not always a big fan of the turkey, unlike my Beloved, who loves turkey above all other meats.

I guess my main point is the thing that bugs me is the way the Food Industry uses the annual holiday to reinforce the idea that Cooking Is Hard, and that Cooking Is Drudgery and that You Can Do It Wrong if you aren’t led by the nose by the authorities.

Go to town people. Have some fun. Cook stuff you like this year instead of the stuff you think you’re supposed to love. If you like to experiment, try a new recipe — we still laugh at the year my dad and my stepmother tried this baroque recipe where the turkey was coated in a thick paste of spices and a flour slurry — the paste coating burned — black black black. And then it wouldn’t come off — we wound up chipping it off in teeny little pieces, with most of the skin still attached, which was okay because the skin was all flabby and icky under the paste. It was hilarious. It was sort of horrible, but it was hilarious …

So readers — cough it up — what’s your best Thanksgiving cooking story? Either triumph or tragedy —

Christmas Cultural Dissonance …

Christmas Cultural Dissonance …

Ray asks: Christmas consumerism? What's a body to do?

For some reason, the annual consumerist frenzy of “Christmas” seems even more dissonant to me than usual. It’s clear there’s a class thing with the Christmas frenzy — there are people for whom the once-a-year pile of stuff under the tree is really really important, and there are people for whom it’s not. I have to admit, I grew up in a family who mostly believed in keeping it simple at Christmas. And although as a kid I was bummed by my parents’ knee-jerk rejection of anything like the “toy of the year” as consumerist claptrap (well, there was also an element of snobbery involved), in the long run, I’m glad to have been raised by people who almost always questioned the validity of marketing and taught us to be suspicious of its claims.

At any rate, the Christmas thing. If I was the kind of person who understood lining up all night outside some big-box store to buy cheap electronics or the “must have” toy of the year, I wouldn’t be the kind of person who moved to Montana where there isn’t really any shopping. By temperament, I’m not much of a shopper, but this year, the media-driven frenzy seems even more weird than usual. Like there’s some huge cultural disconnect between the media/powers-that-be who want to insist that everything is fine! that we’re all going shopping! that it’s Christmas! and the rest of us who have been growing gardens and canning and learning to bike commute because who can afford gas and car insurance anymore? Between the television advertisers and the Occupy movement folks — really? lining up for the entirely manufactured non-event that is “Black Thursday” when our young people are camping in city parks demonstrating against the stacked deck that is our current financial system? To whom do they think they’re advertising? There’s 10% official unemployment out there — which means unofficial unemployment is at least double that — especially in minority communities.

My beloved sometimes accuses the entire sustainability/urban homesteading thing of being a “lifestyle” issue — that is, not something one does to really save money or change the way you live but because chicken coops are hip, and canning and DIY are cool. I think he’s right to a certain extent, but on the other hand, there are a lot of people learning to get by with less. While I’d like to see people have jobs again, I don’t think we need to return to the rampant consumer excess that drove the housing bubble. We all bought a lot of junk, and went into debt to do it (I’m not innocent of this). On the one hand, we’re being bombarded with consumerist Christmas junk on tv and in the newspaper and in the “straight” media, and on the other hand I’m reading things like this  terrific article over at Yes! Magazine about a couple who discovered that life on the “wrong side” of town opened their family up to community in a way that enriched their lives, and the inimitable Harriet Fastenfest’s piece over at Culinate on “the University of Grandmothers” who worry because “people don’t know how to be poor” anymore.

As aways, my peeps will be receiving food boxes of stuff I’ve made, perhaps some lovely items of clothing re-purposed from thrift stores, and if you’re a kid, art supplies. So readers — what are you doing about the Christmas issue? Shopping? Not shopping? Making things? What about those of you with little kids — how are you doing the “magic of Christmas” without getting sucked into the consumerist frenzy?

Battening Down the Hatches

Battening Down the Hatches

A bushel of black kale, ready for the freezer

My first post-deadline, post-travel weekend and although I was woefully short on new fiction pages produced, I did get some long-neglected house-and-garden tasks done.

First of all, I’m feeling sanguine about winter because, at long last, we got our whole pig! It took a long time this  year because, well, the small packer/butcher operation we buy from sold more post-fair pig specials than they had pigs. So we had to wait for them to get more local pigs (they promised me it wasn’t a CAFO pig), and then for them to make the delicious hams and bacon. There’s nothing like going into a winter with a freezer full of pork. Also, if you get used to buying meat by the share (or if you have nice friends who give you hunks of elk, or venison, or antelope, or their own homegrown beef), and you are a person who works at home, you get really really used to not having to go to the store. It was just weird not having enough in the freezer that dinner is a choice of what to thaw. I found it unsettling. Now we’re fat on pig, the new chickens are laying, I’ve got a pantry full of pickles and fruit, there’s homemade sauerkraut in the fridge, and as you can see above, kale for the freezer.

Putting up greens is a tiny bit time consuming, but worth it. Again — there’s nothing like being able to “shop the freezer” and I like knowing that I’m really the only one who has been handling my veggies. This is black kale, also known as Dino Kale and Laccinato Kale. It’s the long skinny-leafed kale, and I love it for soups, and in the morning sauteed with onion, garlic and hot pepper with a fried egg on top (a little bacon is also welcome in the mix). This was a bushel of kale. I filled the sink with cool water while my biggest pot was coming to a boil, then used garden scissors to clip the leaves into semi-bite-sized pieces. I swished them around, then put them in the boiling water to blanch. The cookbooks say to boil them for 3 minutes, but I just leave them in the hot water, even if it hasn’t come all the way back to a boil, until they turn a deep, electric green. In the meantime, drain the rinse water and re-fill the sink with cold water and ice. The blanched greens go in the ice water to cool off. A bushel was two sinks and two batches in my biggest stockpot. I drained them in collanders, then used the salad spinner to prep them for the vaccuum sealer. Two serious spins in the salad spinner I found, got enough water out that I didn’t overwhelm the vaccuum sealer. I wound up with nine fairly solid bags of kale. There’s probably just as much curly kale out there, which I’m nursing along as fresh playing chicken with the weather. I’ve found I can keep eating kale out of the garden until we get a multi-day spate of below-zero weather — with any luck, I can get through most of December, but really, one never knows.

I also put up some pears this morning — I stole some pears out of a neighbor’s yard. A neglected tree in a rental house. They were small and hard, but after a couple of weeks in a bowl on the kitchen counter they took on a beautiful rosy hue, and smelled divine. I did them before the kale, using the stockpot of water I was bringing to a boil to sterilize a few jars and lids, and then to process them. I made a simple syrup from equal parts red wine (Bota Box malbec) and sugar. Half a vanilla bean, the zest and juice of a lemon, a piece of cinnamon stick and a couple of cloves also went in. I peeled, cored and sliced the little pears, then poached them and packed them in the simple syrup. Twenty minutes in a hot water bath and either I have an instant-dessert (over ice cream?) or a present for someone’s Christmas box.

My last chore was modifying the chicken house door. The chicken house has a much more beautiful door than a chicken house really deserves — but it came out of the Sweetheart’s immense store of salvaged, recycled, bought on sale contractor supplies, and it was just the right size to lean in, collect eggs, and clean out the bedding. The problem is, that in the winter, it was too big to keep much heat inside, even with a light bulb. So today, I took it off and cut a chicken-sized hole in the door, and put it back on it’s hinges. Now they’ll stay warm, and I can still get in when I need to (knock wood, because I’m in the middle of town, so far I haven’t had varmint problems, but it is a risk. I kept the piece of wood figuring I can put it on a hinge if need be).

I also lucked out and the Sweetheart fixed the broken dog door while I type up a bid for him, so the wind is no longer blowing directly into the kitchen. All in all, a very satisfying weekend of house and backyard farming tasks. Winter is upon us, and I do have to admit, I’m looking forward to holing up and carrying the deadline energy back over into my own work, but there’s also something so pleasant about an afternoon in the kitchen, listening to back podcasts of Fresh Air, and putting up food for the winter.