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The Homemade Freak Flags of the Resistance

The Homemade Freak Flags of the Resistance

Three tunic tops on a clothesline. From left to right, they're white, pink, and green.

Himself has a stupendous collection of garage sale art. He grew up in an antique-y family, his mother had booths in group shops for years, and he remembers childhood weekends spent in the back of the station wagon, way too early in the morning, heading off to find treasure. The art collection has themes. For example, one room in the detached motel bungalow at the cabin is birds, and the other is vintage western travel swag. The main room at the cabin has a collection of three-legged ungulates, mostly elk, including a needlepointed scene I found at our now-closed Senior Center thrift shop. They had a rule, he and his ex-wife — they couldn’t spend more than a buck for unframed paintings, five bucks for framed ones. The needlepoint cost me ten bucks, but you know, inflation. They weren’t “collecting outsider art” — they were finding cool things to put on their walls.

For decades, he’s done construction work, mostly renovations, and for a long time he sort of specialized in modernizing old cabins. “Why,” he keeps asking me, as the person who grew up among the wealthy, “why do rich people all want exactly the same house?”

You know what he means — out here, the standard-issue second home or retirement home is usually log, dyed that weird orange color, with a green metal roof. There’s a pointy “great room” window, a deck, and usually something that looks like a barn but actually houses an RV, various 4-wheelers, and at least 2 SUVs. Inside the place will be furnished with oversized peeled-log furniture upholstered in fake Pendleton blanket textiles. Often there are chandeliers made from antlers.

You see the same thing with people dressing alike — the Instagram blonde mommies with a naked toddler on a hip, wearing that flat brim hat and photographed wearing a skirt and boots and feeding the chickens. The fly fishermen who all wear exactly the same shirt. The sporty Bozeman yuppies who pay too much money for the Patagonia jacket of the year because that’s what their people wear.

I really noticed this a few years ago when I started making my own clothes. I loved the clothes I was making, and for the first time felt comfortable in my skin. I’m short, have never been skinny, and most ready-to-wear never fit me right. I have a core set of 5 or 6 patterns I turn to for everyday, although I’m feeling like this summer I might shake a few of them up. They’re shapes that look good on me, that are comfortable, and that allow me to do all the things I want to do every day: go for a walk, work in the garden, curl up in a chair and read a book, sit at my desk and do my day job, ride a bike. Even, for those couple of years I was at MSU, teach.

I started sewing again in my late 40s because I kept seeing simple clothes in nice fabrics in fancy stores that were wildly too expensive for me. And so I started making them. I found some good fabric sources online. I bought a nice basic Singer that does zigzag and buttonholes. As I sewed more regularly, I got better at it, and figured out how to modify a pattern, learned how to keep pockets from gapping, learned how to re-cut a garment that didn’t work like I wanted it to.

I learned how to take charge of my own clothes. As Karie Westermann, the knitting designer likes to say: Making stuff is powerful. Making stuff gives you agency. Making stuff transforms. Making stuff makes something out of nothing. Go make stuff.

Himself has a saying: “that’s just lifestyle stuff.” Meaning, that’s just something someone else told you you should want and so you’re chasing it to make yourself look hip, or important, or wealthy, or whatever. The someone else is the giant machine of consumer capitalism, one that’s infiltrated every part of our lives, and like all good structural systems, made itself largely invisible. Consumer capitalism needs for us to keep chasing the hit, over and over and over. Buying stuff then throwing it out to buy different stuff because styles have changed. And styles have changed so you’ll buy new stuff. And go into debt to do it.

In order to keep doing this, capitalism needs to convince us we’re helpless. That we’re helpless even at the level of what we want. Hence the army of “influencers” to tell us what the color of the year is, or the 10 hottest trends in interior design or what your outdoor patio “room” should look like.

Capitalism needs to convince us that we can’t do it ourselves. That cooking is too hard, so we should buy prepared food or order out. That sewing simple clothing or curtains or throw pillows is some mysterious process that won’t work and you’ll look weird and you can’t do it yourself. And if you’re looking for eco-friendly throw blankets, make sure to check out In2Green collections! When you can actually make something you’d like, and enjoy making it, and then wear it for years. That you can’t pull together a room from things you found at garage sales or inherited from your grandparents or found at junk shops because that won’t be a “look”.

One of my hopes as we come out of the pandemic is that people discover they’re capable of figuring out what they actually like. I love my living room, but it’s a cobbled together collection of furniture, about half of which is hand-me-downs, and family stuff, and piles of books, and some nice pieces of art, and some funny framed things that Himself has given me over the years. It’s warm and cozy and a tiny bit cluttered and it’s exactly how I want it.

Or take my backyard. Now that we’re coming out of pandemic, I’m occasionally having people over, and we’re at that stage of the year where the backyard looks terrible. I mulched the beds in straw over the winter, and it looks very messy right now. The chickens are churning it up, and while there’s a few daffodils poking through, mostly its a lot of straw and my raised-bed veg garden that doesn’t have anything growing in it yet. My apple trees got hit hard by fireblight a few years ago and I didn’t cut them down and start over. One tree has a big dead section, but is regenerating just like one did on the other side of the yard. One tree is dead, with suckers. I grafted a varietal I like better onto a couple of the suckers. We’ll just have to wait and see whether they turn into a real tree. For now, the dead skeleton holds up the twinkle lights I like in the evening when I want to sit out there and read.

Livingston has shifted from being the town full of aging hippies and artists it was when I moved here 20 years ago (there has also always been about half the town made up of conservative ranchers and church people. I’ve heard stories of the epic fights that would break out between the hippie bar and the rancher bar back in the day) to a town with a much bigger contingent of rich retirees and second home owners. And a couple of people from my past, people with money, people whose aesthetic is still very much based on what Himself would call lifestyle have moved here. It has me feeling preemptively defensive about my “messy” garden and my “weird” clothes. I fled that world a long time ago, but the critical voice of the snob is one I can hear in my head without having to try very hard.

Resistance can be tricky. I forget that most people haven’t spent their adult life trying to resist, trying to escape the constraints of corporate jobs and culture. I’ve worked corporate jobs for 20 years, but as a kind of corner case. I’ve worked at home full time. I’ve been a contractor for most of it. I’ve gotten laid off because I had no interest in management or climbing a ladder. I just wanted enough money to pay off my debts, put something away so I don’t starve as an old woman, and have enough to get by day to day. I kept hoping I’d find a clear patch where I could get some traction on the writing, find a way to make it a career. That part didn’t work out, but I did get a house and a garden and a life and a nice partner and some chickens and a dog. I’m getting to where there’s a clear space for the writing. It’s all good.

What I didn’t get, because I did not want it, and never wanted to chase it, was the kind of wealth I grew up around. The kind of wealth that is deeply invested in having the right kind of house in the right kind of place with the right kind of decoration and then showing it off with that slightly hysterical tinge, see? See? Look at our fabulous life?! That some of those folks are showing up here, and bringing that energy with them, is … problematic.

The culture wants us to be consumers, not participants. I love my space, and my odd clothes, but the imposed conformity of capitalism, and the way it seeks to divide and label us by the things we wear and have and drive can leave a person feeling a tiny bit exposed. If I have a utopian dream, it’s a world where we can all be our inner weirdos all the time. That they don’t have to be hidden inner weirdos anymore. Where it’s the ones who don’t have a freak flag to fly who are considered odd.

We’re still on the tippy edge of fascism here as a nation, and conformity is a huge part of that. I think it’s why it bothers me so much that the people who can now afford to move here are the ones who want the same houses. Who want their house to look like everyone else’s, who want to wear the uniform, whether it’s jeans with a crease, boots and a cowboy hat, or the fly fisherman’s shirt, or the blonde girls with the flat-brim hat, tow-headed baby and the boots/skirt combo. There’s such an urge to conform, to choose a lifestyle, and for so many people those lifestyles are connected to a brand. “I just love that Patagonia lifestyle” someone commented on an instagram post my cousin put up for Father’s Day, talking about what a great dad her husband is. He had a Patagonia hat on. Talk about missing the point.

One thing I’m working toward in this longer collection I’m trying to pull together is to articulate why I believe that making things is an act of resistance. All those paintings Himself collected, none of those people thought they were going to be great artists, but you can feel the joy in making something in their work. My garden doesn’t look like one of those English garden shows, and for much of the year it’s really kind of a mess, but for a couple of months in the middle of the summer there are roses and fruit trees and a vegetable garden and hollyhocks and it’s glorious. There’s so much creative energy in the world that’s just gotten channeled into shopping these past few decades, and among the things we’re going to have to do to save ourselves from drowning in our own filth on this planet is to learn to stop fucking shopping. One way to do that is to learn how to make something. Learn to take joy in the process. Learn to like being terrible at something again. Make a painting or a cake or plant some peas or knit a pair of mittens. Take something you already have and reuse it. And if you know how to do something, teach someone else.

Of all the joyful things that have happened in the years I’ve lived here, maybe the best is all those holidays my nieces came over here to cook with me. We’d figure out a project, and hang out, and talk about their lives, and it’s one reason we have real relationships now that they’re starting to be adults. One texted me yesterday, about Easter desserts. We talked about desserts we’ve made over the years, brainstormed what she wanted to cook for her group of folks in LA, talked about a short story she’d written, and what she wanted to do about school next year. Maybe people bond like that over shopping, but I don’t, and that our relationship is built on making stuff is one of the great joys of my childless middle age. So let your freak flag fly, and let it fly on a clothesline, and let’s all try to come out of this pandemic a little smarter than when we went into it.

Blast from the Past

Blast from the Past

bassine de confiture ancienne

[I’m up against a bunch of deadlines, and just don’t have any blogging mojo right now, so here’s an oldie but goodie from the archives. Back soon.]

Behold, my gorgeous Veritable Ancienne Bassine A Confiture en Cuivre, 10L. I got it on eBay France (which is a very dangerous site), although if you click the link above, they’re also available on Amazon. I first saw the Beautiful French Jam Pot in this piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about small jam-makers in the Bay Area. There was a charming photo of Rachel Saunders of the Blue Chair Fruit Company making jam, and behind her on the stove you can see one of these pots. I emailed her, asking about the pot, and wondering whether the fact that it’s unlined copper is a problem. She pinged me right back and said this: “Actually, these are THE classic pots for jam making. Once the fruit has been combined with sugar, it will not react with the copper — in fact, quite the opposite; it does not affect the flavor at all, unlike aluminum and various other metals, and it makes the cooking SO much easier. I can’t recommend it enough; the only thing to remember is, don’t put fruit by itself into a copper kettle, or it will react!”

So off I went to eBay France, which is, as I said, a very dangereuse place for someone like me, and I found this great pan, with a big long copper and brass spoon to match, and it was expensive, but not outrageously so — I clicked PayPal, and six weeks later, look what arrived at my door (along with a very sweet little ceramic candleholder that the seller threw in as a petit cadeau). I was beside myself with joy, and the first thing I did was go down to the cellar and clean out all the frozen plums that have been languishing down there since last fall. We’re so far behind the season this year that there isn’t any new fruit, but as you can see here, I had plenty to fill my gorgeous bassine.  full of fruit I pitted them, and weighed them as they went in, and it was about 20 pounds of fruit. Of course, I forgot that I’d need room for 15 pounds of sugar (I generally go on a ratio of one part fruit to 3/4 part sugar for jam), but with some melting and stirring, it all fit. Then I used my mini-chop to whiz up the zest from four lemons, and a big chunk of fresh ginger, which I stirred in as well.

I love love love this pot. Rachel was right — the temperature control is fabulous — there’s enough room with that wide top that it didn’t boil over, and there wasn’t any sticking or scorching. Through no fault of the pots, I did overcook it some — there was so much liquid that came off the plums that I kept thinking I needed to boil it down some more. My mistake — the jam is very thick, almost like a fruit leather, but it tastes great.  The ginger and lemon zest add just the right zing — I’ve been eating it the past few mornings on leftover frozen pecan biscuits (that I made for my Easter party — I got a little carried away and had a couple of dozen frozen leftovers — but they’re great — you can just pop them frozen into the toaster oven and there you go). Anyhow, I’ve been taking a pecan biscuit, splitting it open, slathering it with yogurt cheese and then drizzling some of this jam over the top (a minute in the microwave makes it drizzle-able). Yum.

plum ginger jam jars Here are the fruits of my labors. Ten pint jars and a dozen half-pints. Hostess and holiday gifts … and just yumminess on the shelf. Yay. Summer is here. There’s jam to be made and a gorgeous pot to make it in ….

The First Morels!

The First Morels!

There they are — the first morels of the season. The Sweetheart and I found them up behind his cabin yesterday — eleven of them, nearly 12 ounces total (yes, I’m a nerd, I weighed them). It never gets old, the thrill of finding a mushroom in the grass.

I also found a couple of nice clumps of early oyster mushrooms. Little bitty ones, which sauteed up beautifully. So last night we had mushroom pizzas — one with morels and red onion and sausage and one with greens from the hoop house and sausage and both kinds of mushrooms (someone doesn’t like the oyster mushrooms, he only likes the morels).

I’ve written about mushroom hunting so often that I’m sure you’re all bored with hearing me blather on about how it’s my favorite outdoor activity. But it is. You get to hike very slowly, you’re outdoors, in some cases, like yesterday morning, you’re with someone you really like, and then you get to come home and cook delicious mushrooms in lots of butter and garlic. Here’s a shot of the oyster mushrooms cooking down:

Go Roast a Chicken

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?

The Snack Issue …

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.

New Bookslut Column

New Bookslut Column


My new cookbook column is up at Bookslut. And weirdly enough, it’s on a similar topic as the Bourdain Techniques show I also wrote about this morning. Here’s a little excerpt:

There are a lot of cookbooks that wash up at my door these days, and while they’re all interesting, most of them are just full of recipes. Often, they’re interesting recipes, and many times they are recipes I’d like to eat if someone served them to me, but I’m probably not going to go out and source them just to cook one recipe. What I want are more cookbooks that teach me how to get away from recipes, and just to cook.

What is “Real” Cooking?

What is “Real” Cooking?

It’s that time of the month when I write my Bookslut review (will post link when it’s up) and the topic of why we cook, and what constitutes “real” cooking, and what we go to cookbooks and food websites and food blogs looking for has once again bubbled up to the top of my head.

I love my cookbook review gig, in no small part due to the stream of cookbooks that is flowing toward my house these days. I love cookbooks. As a teenager I used to read them like novels, and my very first professional job out of college was working as an editorial assistant on the Best of Gourmet series, and the encyclopedic Gourmet’s Best Desserts. And yet, so many of the cookbooks that come across my threshhold seem merely to be collections of recipes. There are a lot of interesting recipes, and often I find a combination of ingredients I wouldn’t have thought of (beets and grapefruit this winter, much to the horror of the Sweetheart). But too often, I’m left feeling that that’s all there is, a collection of recipes; that despite the gorgeous photos and all the rest, these cookbooks are more about individual dishes than they are about cooking.

As I was mulling over this issue, I came across this terrific post over at A Life of Spice, about how some readers of cookbooks, and cooking blogs, see a complicated recipe as a sign of authenticity. A Life of Spice is written by Monica Bhide, author of Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen. In this post, she tells the story of a reader, who accosted her at an event, claiming her book was “too simplistic”. Bhide was shocked, she’d tried to write a cookbook for busy modern cooks. What did this woman mean?

I probed her a little, and her response surprised me even more. She loved the dish, and so did everyone who ate it. But it did not fulfill her cooking aspirations. “Indian cooking is supposed to be hard,” she said. “And this book made it seem easy. That isn’t real Indian cooking, right?”

“Real” cooking. It begs the question, what kinds of cooking do we consider “real”? Is cooking an everyday skill that we use to feed our friends and family, or is it some arcane hobby that we pull out to impress dinner guests or to prove to ourselves that we can master something difficult?

I guess I’d argue that it’s both, although my inclination is always to avoid the “hard” cooking — I have less than no interest in learning how to use any of the techniques of molecular gastronomy; I don’t want to cook food that gets stacked in a tower; I avoid recipes with long lists of ingredients; and in general, I gravitate toward home cooking rather than restaurant cooking.

But on a social level, I’m less concerned about cooking enthusiasts who want to play around with “hard” recipes than I am by the steady erosion of basic cooking skills in the general population. I’ve written before about how I’d love to see mandatory (and interesting) home economics courses taught in schools, courses that include not just basic cooking and sewing, but budgets and checkbooks and credit as well. Our local food bank recently ran a promotion where they gave people slow cookers, so they could begin to learn how to feed themselves and their families real food, despite their busy schedules.

And yet, even in this terrific profile the Sacramento Bee wrote about Elise Bauer, of Simply Recipes, she mentions that she started the blog because:

“I didn’t know how to make a roast,” she recalls. “I knew how to make quesadillas.”
Her education began by watching her parents cook and using their recipes. Bauer’s blog – originally at elise.com – incorporated that learning and used short, homey stories to introduce carefully described, workable recipes.”

Even after building one of the most successful recipe sites on the web, Bauer tells the Bee that: “I don’t claim to be a cook,” she said. “My mom knows how to cook a meal. I know how to cook one thing at a time.”

Which begs the question, what are we trying to learn here? How to cook recipes, or how to cook for our families? What’s the point of all these blogs and TV shows and magazines and cookbooks if people still don’t have the basic skills necessary to look around the house, count heads, and pull basic ingredients out of the fridge and the pantry to make a meal for them? A meal, nothing fancy, just dinner.

Makin’ Bacon

Makin’ Bacon


Although I’ve made pancetta a couple of times (once even landing myself in the local paper for my efforts), I’ve never made plain old bacon before. Because of my Bookslut gig, there seem to be an increasing number of cookbooks about canning, pickling, and preserving washing up on my doorstep. For bacon, I turned to Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects (sorry Ruhlman, wanted to branch out).

I had one slab of pork belly left in the freezer, and we’re running out of bacon around here, so I thought I’d make a go of it. This was a terrific recipe. Salt, sugar, pink salt (I used Morton’s Tender Quick which contains all of the above), then I added aleppo pepper and black pepper. Into a ziploc bag it went, and into the fridge, where I flipped it over once day for about a week. Then comes the interesting part. With pancetta, this is where you rinse it, roll it, and hang it for another couple of weeks. Karen Solomon’s recipe has you cooking and/or smoking the bacon at this point. Smoking is a frontier I haven’t yet explored, so I went with fake smoking. I mixed three tablespoons each of liquid smoke and maple syrup, and brushed that all over the bacon. Then it roasted at 200 degrees for a couple of hours. The house smelled wonderful, and I now have a slab of delicious, meaty, local bacon that came from one of Isabelle’s pigs up on the Cokedale road … yum. If you have a reliable source of good pork belly, this is easy and delicious, and totally worth the very minor effort.

Potato-Chipolte Love …

Potato-Chipolte Love …


I had to go to Bozeman yesterday to do some errands, and I had lunch at my favorite little restaurant, La Tinga. There aren’t many things I miss from California, but taquerias and Asian food are among them. I had about ten minutes before my haircut, so I ducked in for a taco or two, including one that had chicken and potatoes and a mildly-hot red chile sauce. It blew my mind. I hadn’t really expected it to, but something about the plain mealy potatoes and the chiles, with a little chicken in the mix, it was delicious. On the way home, I was still obsessed with that flavor, so I broke out the Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless cookbooks, and went to work. I wound up pretty much following a recipe from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant flavors of a World-Class Cuisine for Smoky Shredded Chicken and Potatoes with Spicy Roasted Tomatoes. Well, as much as I’m capable of following a recipe anyhow.

Here’s what I did: chopped and sauteed an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, then added a can of tomatoes, about four chipolte chiles with a little bit of their sauce, a generous tablespoon or so of the oregano I dried last fall, and a big sprinkling of the New Mexican Chile that my friend Deb sent me from Chimayo. It looked a little dry, so I added a half-pint jar of my own tomato sauce I put up last fall, which is kind of watery. I let that simmer for a bit while I peeled and diced three big russet potatoes, and cut a package of Coleman Organic chicken thighs into little pieces. The Sweetheart came home about then, cold and tired after a day of roofing in spring snow squalls, so while he climbed in a hot bathtub, I added the chicken and potatoes to the sauce and let the whole thing simmer on low for about an hour or so while we chatted and read the papers and hung out.

We ate it last night with warm tortillas, chopped scallions and cilantro, and sour cream. This morning, I heated up a burrito and topped it with a fried egg. I am crazy in love with this flavor. It’s not too spicy, and I think it’d be just as delicious without the chicken (or you could also add pork instead of chicken). Something about the potato and chiles together is really wonderful. This might become a staple around here, especially for breakfast.

Nori Lunch

Nori Lunch

I’ve been obsessed with nori rolls lately. I got the idea from Cathy Erway’s delightful book, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, which I reviewed for Bookslut about a month ago. After this long winter, I’ve been craving crunch, and veggies, or maybe there’s something in the seaweed that my body craves, but it’s been nori rolls for lunch for a couple of weeks now.

The thing is, nori rolls are actually quite easy. I like the rice warm, so I either make up a fresh batch in the rice cooker, or simply scoop out about a rice-bowl’s worth of leftover rice, add some rice vinegar, and heat it in the microwave. Then spread it out on the nori sheet, and add whatever is around. For a while, I was eating leftover steak, cucumber, and scallion nori rolls. Lateley, I’ve been making a little salmon salad with my near-miss Costco salmon then adding a few slices of my homemade pickled oyster mushrooms (sadly, I’ve run out of these. Thank goodness spring is on its way), some cucumber for crunch, slices of pickled ginger, and a generous sprinkle of chopped cilantro. Roll it all up, slice, add a sliced orange, and it’s a nice lunch. Filling but mostly veg and grain (since the Someone doesn’t eat veggies, I try to load up at lunch). And nice. Pretty. I think it’s good to have a nice-looking meal. It cheers a person up, especially a person who is beginning to worry about the freelance life. Look, doom is not at hand. It’s a lovely lunch!

I’d also think this wouldn’t be a bad choice if you had to go into an office. Not difficult to pack, you can always slice it up in the lunch room or break room, and there you go, nice clean food you made yourself, that didn’t cost you eight bucks. (One reason I often brown-bagged, not only do I like my own food better most of the time, but I’m cheap.)