Category Archives: food

Ceremonial Holiday Food …

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Okay, I’ll admit it — I think Thanksgiving is the most boring holiday meal of the year. Perhaps it’s the residue of the Turkey Years, when Mom fed us on a couple of turkeys a month because it was a lot of meat for the dollar, or perhaps it’s just because it *is* the most boring meal of the year — but snore snore snore. Turkey. Stuffing. Mashed potatoes. A couple of sides — brussell sprouts or green beans. Cranberry sauce. Pie.

It’s inviolable. There are variations, sure — every year the magazines plop into my box full of variations, but essentially, you’re stuck with the same meal. For a couple of years there I fled the country — went to Paris for Thanksgiving (I could take a full 10-day vacation and only had to take 3 days off work.) I remember explaining to some French people that it’s a meal no one really likes, but everyone is forced, by the culture, to eat. They were French, a culture in which food ritual is so ingrained that although they were bewildered by the very American excess, and by the somewhat crude nature of the menu — they understood the concept of a shared national meal.

What saves Thanksgiving for me is the annual appearance of those ceremonial dishes that are really horrible, but without which it just doesn’t seem like Thanksgiving. My Aunt Daphne’s Baked Oyster Thing, for example. Beloved to her because it evokes her Maryland girlhood but translated to the Midwest in the 70s and 80s it appeared as a loose gratin of jarred oysters in cream, covered with smashed saltines. To a bunch of 10-15 year olds, it was everything horrible — slimy, wet, oystery and as I recall, a sort of unappealing grey color — but there it was, every year. And we were raised with the kind of manners that required us to take at least a bite, and to thank our beloved Aunt Daphne for the delicious Oyster Thing.

Or my mother’s standard — the Tomato Aspic Ring. This one is right out of some 1960s magazine. A jello mold made with half strawberry jello, half tomato juice into which is suspended a hash of onion, green pepper and celery that has been shredded in the Cuisinart. It’s unmolded onto a lettuce-lined plate, filled with curried mayonnaise and surrounded by a festive garland of canned artichoke hearts and hearts of palm. It’s ridiculous, and actually sort of refreshing, and when my mother tried to retire it, my cousin Denise specifically requested it’s return. It just didn’t feel like a holiday without it.

So folks, spill the beans — what are the ceremonial food items without which your Thanksgiving just wouldn’t feel complete?

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Cognitive Dissonance

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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.

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Linky Monday …

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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.

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Practical Tips for Cooking from Scratch

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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?

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Leftovers are Real Food Too …

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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.

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