A weekend like this one, when someone decides to murder a bunch of civic-minded folks who have come to a supermarket to chat with their Congresswoman, well, it makes you think about all the things you can’t control in this world.
So I came inside, and I cleaned my floors, and washed my slipcovers, and made an angel food cake with all those egg whites left over from the Christmas profiteroles and then made a loaf of Darina Allen’s Brown Soda Bread (since I was out of regular bread and the sourdough starter needed some time). I’ve got a leftover lamb stew on the stove and the house smells like bread.
I can’t do anything about so much of the craziness of the world. But I can, as Voltaire noted, “tend my own garden.” And so, today, that’s what I did.
Six years ago today Vivi and Lola arrived in our world. It was the first good thing that had happened in a while — both for me, and for my friend Nina, their mom. We’d both had a rough couple of years — people we loved had died, and we were both sort of losing our faith in the universe.
And then this unlikely, and terrifying pregnancy Nina went through worked out. Two squalling babies with full heads of hair emerged, biting the doctors on their way out, and dropped into our world. They were so tiny that they scared me to death. But there we were, four writers in a room in the Billings Hospital trying to name two babies — there was a lot of talk about syllabics, and sounds we liked next to one another. The men both insisted that one of them was going to be Lola, and so she is, while the big sisters wanted Violet.
So we have Vivi and Lola, and today they are six years old. First graders. And as much as I love their older sisters, and their little brother, it was those two twins, who needed someone to hold them during the two years when I needed someone to hold as I came out of the depths of my grief, who will always hold a specific place in my heart. I never thought one of my happiest memories would be sitting on a white couch, watching Barefoot Contessa while it snowed outside and Vivi or Lola howled herself to sleep.
And now they are six, and going to the American Girl store to pick out a present and playing tennis and going to first grade and reading and writing and having opinions. Which is certainly something to be thankful for, and I am …
Funny, this summer, while the garden was in progress, I found myself uninspired, and not actually eating that much from it. Perhaps its because the season was so strange — once my early success with spring greens under hoops burned out (because it got hot, and the plants burned up), I wound up in this long odd period when there wasn’t much out there a person could eat right now, most of it was things like carrots and beets and tomatoes and peppers and beans that took a long long time this summer to ripen.
However, I did put in some time as the season went on putting things up. The beets, for example. I harvested beets three or four times this summer, roasted them off, peeled them and froze them on cookie sheets in the freezer. Then I just popped them into ziploc bags (like the tomatoes in this photo — I just stuck them in a bag and froze them). So now, I can pull a few out, and have beets ready to throw in a salad or in some pasta. The tomatoes too — I’ve been thawing them in by the pyrex dish load, and throwing them in a burrito or using them when I sautee chard. They’re a little watery sometimes, but still so much better than a grocery store tomato. And then there are the pickled peppers. I love those pickled peppers and I’ve been eating them on everything.
For instance, breakfast lately has been burritos made with beans I cooked and froze in pint jars, cheese, chard (one of the few things still growing well in the garden), pickled peppers, previously-frozen tomatoes, and onion. The only things I have to buy in that meal are the tortillas and the cheese. Why this makes me as ridiculously happy as it does, is something of a mystery. I’m working again, so it’s not even like the money I save is that significant. I think it’s just the plain old pleasure of doing something oneself.
What I love about this part of the year, after the garden is over, and after the work of putting things up, is the pleasure inherent in that old phrase, “the fruits of one’s labor.” I’m eating the fruits of my labor — which means that I can find a wide variety of yummy things to eat for days on end without having to go to the grocery store. And that makes me very happy, especially when it’s cold and blustery and snowy outside.
One of the biggest dilemmas I face trying to live small is what to do when things break. I had a trusty old Roper washer that I bought from our friends Chris and Lon when we moved into the townhouse in Hayward all those years ago (10? was it really 10 years ago — must have been). I think we spent $100 for the pair, and Lon and Chris hadn’t paid much more for them new. They were very basic. The washer had hot and cold settings and that was about it. But it worked, and considering I was in my late 30s before I even had a washer dryer of my own, I was pretty happy. The washer broke about a year after I moved up here, and the local fix-it guys put it back together for about a hundred bucks, but when it gave up the ghost last week, I decided that it was probably time to go look for a new one. I mean, another hundred bucks might have kept it going for another four or five years, but it was really old technology, used a lot of water, and well, there comes a time when you have to update.
Of course, at the same time, I needed to replace my brake pads, and got two flat tires. Our local brake and tire shop is great, and fixed the brakes really reasonably, and patched the tires, but it just added to the larger question of the week — when do you patch things, and when do you replace them? For now, the tires are patched, although I’d like new ones with heavier lugs since we’ve been doing so much camping lately, which involves a lot of exploration of logging roads. The flat we got way up on the Stillwater was a real bummer. Fix-a-Flat worked, but it took two cans ($15 bucks total) and we had to drive back down looking for a gas station with a compresser, which burned up half a camping day. Plus a very reasonable $12 bucks each to fix the tires. So for now, the tires are on the patch-it list, and I’m saving some $$ for new ones.
The washer though — the whole new world of washing machines. Even looking at the circulars in the paper made me crazy. Really? People need 125 cycles? Give me a break. And then one lady at the store told me that the front loaders aren’t good if you do small loads, or as she said “if you’re a person who has to do laundry every day.” Every day? One or two shirts? a pair of jeans? no wonder we have an energy crisis. Anyhow, I looked, and then my lovely Sweetheart, who is good at these things, and who has furnished many a rental cabin, went and looked for me. He found a great deal at Lowes, an orphaned washer, with the pedestal drawer thingy, on clearance. It was in the low end of the price range for the fancy new water-and-energy-efficient front loaders, and in the mid-high price range for top loaders. Plus they’d deliver and take away the old one. And there’s the cash-for-clunkers rebate on appliances right now.
So now I have a fancy new front loading washer that looks totally out of place in my shenji basement. But it’s quiet, and I’m testing a load of napkins on it as I type. They say they spin so much water out that it should make my clothesline drying even faster — and maybe in winter I can even restring the basement clothesline.
It’s always such a challenge though. When to buy new, when to buy used, when to patch and fix. In general I tend to patch and patch and patch, and then replace, but even so, I felt sort of bad sending that trusty old Roper off to the landfill. It was a good, basic, no-frills reliable machine. Let’s hope this fancy one with all the electronics lasts as long (I distrust electronics).
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?
I came back from my week in Seattle and found that the hoop houses have been a huge success. The photo above is my first batch of spring greens — arugula, broccoli rabe, komatsuna, and a few dandelions from the yard. I was just thrilled. There were enough thinnings that I’ve been eating my own greens, fresh from the yard, for the first time since last summer.
I have to say, I think part of the reason I came down with strep is that after growing my own veggies, the ones in the store, especially in the winter in Montana, look so sad and tired that I just can’t get excited about cooking or eating them. My greens, on the other hand, are vibrant and fabulous and bright green and were growing and alive just yesterday. This morning, I made my favorite breakfast, greens and eggs rolled up in a tortilla, and it just felt like everything is going to be okay again. I’ve got greens coming up. Spring is back.
The LA Times Recyclist blog has an entry today about a subject near and dear to my heart — cloth tea towels and napkins instead of paper.
First of all, I hate paper napkins — they’re thin and crumply and scratchy. My well-worn cloth napkins (average age at this point — 6-9 years) are soft and absorbant and nice. They don’t slip off your lap. They take care of even the messiest sauce. And when we’re done with them, they go in the hamper just outside the kitchen door. Like the blog poster, the key is quantity. Buy big packs so you don’t run out, and you don’t have to do the laundry that often.
Also, “tea towels” as Lynch calls them. I just always called them kitchen towels, but whatever, nomenclature isn’t the point. The point is, that cloth towels draped through the oven door handle, the fridge door handle, can take care of nearly anything paper towels would. My other trick is to buy cheap white washcloths by the 24-pack. They’re absorbant enough for almost any spill, and you can bleach the living daylights out of them if they get messy (I know, bleach is problematic, but I love bleach). The towels and the washcloths allow me to be a total miser with paper towels. I buy the ones that come perforated at half the width of normal towels, and pretty much all I use them for is wiping out my cast iron pans that I don’t want to use soap on. Or dog messes. Other than that, it’s a cloth towel or a washcloth, that you can rinse out if you need to before tossing in the hamper.
And of course, my clothesline jones is completely satisfied by the sight of cloth napkins, towels and washcloths lined up and basking in the sunshine, as the Sweetheart would say “like regimental Redcoats.”
Although it’s snowy today, it’s been in the sixties all week, which means I can start drying clothes on the line again. I’ve written before about my clothesline love, and I’m always surprised by the number of people who object to clotheslines on principle. I really don’t get it. When I moved in, my house, like most houses in town, had a huge clothesline made from plumbing pipe that was set into about four feet of concrete below ground. We have famously strong winds here in Livingston, and the legacy clotheslines were built to withstand it. I had that clothesline cut down because it was right in the middle of the backyard, and people kept bonking their heads on it.
When I decided I wanted a new clothesline, I splurged on this one by Versaline: the Disappearing Slimline Clothesline. It was expensive, but I’ve been using it steadily for four years now, and it’s held up beautifully. It’s a great clothesline for small spaces, because you can fold it back against the wall when you’re not using it. I leave mine up pretty much all the time, since it’s in a spot where not much else happens in my yard. The other key to using the clothesline a lot is that it’s in a convenient spot — my washer is in the basement, and the line is just outside the basement door.
I use my clothesline all the time, and my sweetheart teases me a little bit about my internal rules for hanging clothes. I like to hang like items together, all the shirts in a row, with their arms hanging down (otherwise you get weird bumps on the shoulders of your shirts, makes you look like you’re shrugging), all the pants in a row, and the cloth napkins, well, that’s a whole line to itself. I like the order to it. And if you’re worried about the neighbors seeing your “smalls” as my English friend Sabrina calls them, just be sure to hang them on the inside where they can’t be seen. There’s no reason a clothesline has to be unsightly.
For me, clotheline love isn’t just about the energy saved. There’s nothing better than sheets that smell like sunshine and breeze. As far as towels go, I leave a couple of them crunchy for the sweetheart who likes them that way, the rest I toss in the dryer for ten minutes to fluff, then hang on the line. It’s one of the easiest ways to save energy, using a clothesline, and although I try not to preach here at LivingSmall, I have to say, that it’s blog policy to encourage clothesline use.
So all this talk about cooking, just ordinary cooking, has gotten me thinking about go-to recipes, the ones you rely on and can do without really thinking. For Michael Ruhlman it’s a roast chicken. Which I’ve got to second. I use Marcella Hazan’s “recipe” which is nothing more than a roast chicken with a lemon stuck full of fork holes inside it. The lemon does wonders.
I’m having the girls over for Oscar night on Sunday, so I’ve been thinking about what to cook.There’s going to be a bunch of us (the Sweetheart is fleeing to his cabin, not a fan of pop culture is he) and we’re all going to be talking on top of one another and swilling wine, so I’m thinking something simple. I’ve got a couple of big roasts in the freezer — I know there’s at least one pork shoulder down there, and a chuck roast, but I might wind up turning to an old favorite, penne with vodka sauce. It’s a great party dish because it holds pretty well, you can make it in enormous quantities, and I’ve never fed it to anyone who didn’t really like it. With bread, and a salad (I’m thinking the marinated beet and grapefruit salad from Urban Italianby Andrew Carmellini.
The penne vodka recipe I use (well, I think I’ve memorized it by now) is from one of the first books I ever worked on, back when I was a starving editorial assistant in New York: The Glamour Food Book, now sadly out of print. It was a collection of recipes that Glamour Magazine pulled together and reprinted, most of which were fast, easy, and reasonably cheap since their target market was young working women who were just starting out. I still have it, and I still cook from it.
So there’s a thought. A mainstream fashion magazine in the 1980s that had recipes, for real food, for food you’d cook for a little dinner party, or to feed yourself on an evening after a long day at work. And it wasn’t considered “cooking from scratch” or anything exotic. It was just cooking. It was just what you did, especially if you were young, and didn’t have much money, and wanted to entertain. Hmm. No wonder I’m such a dinosaur.
So readers, what are your go-to recipes? The ones you use when you don’t want to think about a recipe. When you just want to cook something you know you like, and that you know your friends and family like?
I’ve read several articles in the last few days that have me all het up about the food thing. There seems to be a new and annoying meme out there, that eating real food will make one a “slave” to one’s kitchen. That somehow, “cooking from scratch” is so difficult and so time-consuming that no one can really do it. It’s just too hard.
Well maybe it’s too hard if you’re being an obsessive yuppie about it. People, grow some common sense. Exhibit A is this article in the Sacramento News Review, “Fast vs. Food: How the sustainable-food movement drove one busy family to the brink and back again.” Like a number of articles on this topic I’ve seen lately, the author seems to take an all-or-nothing approach. Either they’re making all their own bread, pizza dough, eating only from CSA boxes and going to the Farmers Market or they’re eating microwave meals from Trader Joes. Or then there was this one, featured on CNN.com, “An Inconvenient Challenge, Eat ‘Real Food’ For a Month” in which Jennifer McGruther, food blogger at The Nourished Kitchen is so restrictive about her definition of “real food” that she has people throwing out everything in their pantries, including dried pasta, and flour — she’s telling people to grind their own flour for goodness sake.
People, this is not helping.
While I realize that part of the appeal for the media is that there’s a meme to be driven — “eating real food is just too hard!” it’s also being driven by the sort of obsessive, perfectionistic, “lifestyle-driven” behavior that gives the whole food movement a bad name. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It can be whatever you can do. I was so aggravated that I emailed my friend Nina, who has five kids, and who cooks them dinner every night because well, we’re midwesterners, we cook dinner. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been at Nina’s any number of times when we’ve ordered pizza (although her kids don’t like the local pizza, which is sort of amusing). Nina’s response was:
I’m just sick of a certain sector of privileged Americans over-thinking and over-classifying everything. Just cook for your kids and cook with your kids whenever possible. Go to the farmer’s market and buy organic when you can. Do what you can because you want to not because you are nailing yourself to the Cross of “slow, organic, homemade, gourmet” or whatever kind of food. My kids usually get organic but I buy bagged stuffing sometimes, instead of pulling my own bread. I make gravy but then serve frozen green beans. Who cares!!!!
Here’s the deal folks. It’s not that complicated. As Michael Pollan keeps repeating ad nauseum “Eat real food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” Go to the grocery store and buy real food. You know, vegetables, pasta, meat, milk, whatever … Avoid things in shiny packages. Buy organic if you can. Buy good meat if you can – -meat that hasn’t been in a feedlot or an industrial packing plant. Why would you buy a frozen pasta meal when it takes just as long to cook some noodles and saute some veggies with chicken or fish or a little meat? I don’t get it. Our parents cooked us dinner every night, and did dishes, and it wasn’t some dreaded life sentence. It’s just dinner. Cook with your kids. Have them help with the dishes — remember chores? Chores aren’t a bad thing.
And sure, if you want to pull some stunt, go ahead. But don’t confuse stunt cooking with ordinary, everyday, cooking cooking. It’s just cooking people, it’s not rocket science.
A weekend like this one, when someone decides to murder a bunch of civic-minded folks who have come to a supermarket to chat with their Congresswoman, well, it makes you think about all the things you can’t control in this world.
Funny, this summer, while the garden was in progress, I found myself uninspired, and not actually eating that much from it. Perhaps its because the season was so strange — once my early success with spring greens under hoops burned out (because it got hot, and the plants burned up), I wound up in this long odd period when there wasn’t much out there a person could eat right now, most of it was things like carrots and beets and tomatoes and peppers and beans that took a long long time this summer to ripen.
