Slaughterhouse Rye (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Caraway Seed)

Wow, it’s been so long I’m not sure I remember how to do this <rolls up sleeves> but here we go just the same.

My adopted mother is Hungarian.  That means when I was growing up there was always a lidded crock of opaque bacon grease in the back of the fridge, sauerkraut in the crisper drawer and sour cream in, well, everything.  While I’d be the last to suggest that sour cream doesn’t belong in everything (rumor has it as a child I’d actually request the stuff in lieu of ice cream) I can honestly say I got some mixed messages about food from a young age.

Like most bored women her age, my mother struggled with her weight.  I think.  I know for  fact she struggled with mine. When I was young my mother saw my weight as a personal affront as she was already so preoccupied with her own. While one week she’d be frying things in lard, the next there was nothing in the fridge but some carrot sticks.  She tried every fad diet on the market and, by virtue of trickle-down body image (if you recall, everything trickled down in the 80’s) so did I.  Not that I wanted to, by the way.  I’d like to point that out.  No kid wants to live on cottage cheese and melba toast or pull out her lunch at school only to find a rye cracker and a diet coke.  (and since when has diet coke ever been a good idea?!?  I mean, really, I might as well have come to school with a brown bag of Virginia Slims, a pack of matches and a little napkin note that said willpower!)

I think my mother was expecting her cabbage patch kid to grow into a Barbie doll, and I just wasn’t wired that way.  My sister, also adopted (no relation) was somehow blessed with blond hair, blue eyes, a perfect metabolism and the most obnoxious of human traits, picky eating.  You guessed it, she stayed stick thin.  I, on the other hand, well, didn’t.

In the intervening years I’ve done a lot of soul-searching, trying to determine which, if any, ideas of body image I grew up with were worth keeping around.  I’ve had to remove a lot of negativity from my life (including, unfortunately, my parents).  I’ve learned the fine art of moderation in all things (even sour cream).  I’ve also come to enjoy cooking for my partner.  We both struggle with the food=love concept.  Now though I exercise it a little differently.  Because I love her, I cook meals from whole foods without processed crap or chemicals or GMOs or excess fat because I want to keep her and that beautiful heart of hers healthy for as long as I can.

I think that’s a distinction my mother wasn’t able to understand. To her, food had always been good for you.  The foods she grew up with were based on traditions that had been handed down for centuries.  They came from places where the people were tied to the land and always had been, where the only food people had came directly from the earth.  The high consumption of meat and dairy was balanced with all manner of vegetable and grain and had served to keep entire populations alive and healthy for as long as anyone could remember.

In the American diet of the 1980’s especially, saw a shift in the nutritional paradigm.  (Remember how our plates used to look?  I sat down to an incomplete peace sign every night with some wilty, sludge of canned spinach occupying the smallest wedge.)  My mother’s rich familial traditions couldn’t have anticipated the changes in the modern diet that included frozen vegetables in “cheez” sauce, pizza rolls, chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs or Lipton Noodles and Sauce among others.  We were, all of us, slowly falling victim to the processed food revolution.  Once processed foods began taking the place of real foods, our plates began growing even more lopsided.  And so did we.

Ultimately I’m pretty sure I can’t even blame my mother for falling victim to convenience and clever marketing.  Sure I emerged from childhood with a warped view of food and my own body but, really, I was a girl.  To a certain extent, we all did.  These days I take pride in my ability to distance myself from both unhealthy thinking and unhealthy food.  I have to be careful though not to throw the baby out with bathwater.

It’s funny the direction this post has taken.  I just set out to write a blog about how I had rye toast this morning for breakfast. It’s true.  It was perfectly toasted and I enjoyed it immensely and that was the bulk of what I wanted to tell you.  It doesn’t seem like much but the humble caraway seed, the flavor that most completely embodies for me all the flavors of my childhood, the seed that once caught in my throat like the bitterest pill…is actually pretty tasty.

When I finally had to make the decision to stop communicating with my parents, one of my biggest regrets was that I hadn’t gotten some of the family recipes first.  I know that may seem shallow but it’s about connection.  Those are the flavors of my childhood and, despite her shortcomings, my mother was a hell of a cook. I think it’s funny that after all the conflict, the disappointment and the wistful remembrances of childhood lost, I can still think back to some of the food and smile. Regardless of what might have happened later, these dishes were once prepared for me with love.

That’s what food can be.  For a long time I rebelled against anything that reminded me of those awful later times.  I wouldn’t go near a paprikash if you paid me.  But I can’t help it; some people have a sweet tooth, my teeth are sour, fermenty, creamy and meaty.  Those are the flavors I gravitate toward no matter how hard I try to reshape my palate.  I’ve traveled the world and experienced some amazing flavors but, at the end of the day, especially when I’m tired, I’m always going to return to my roots.  I guess that’s really the message.  We all need to embrace our roots.

Life is about feeling and sharing the things that make us happy.  When I want to tell my lover about my childhood, I break out the sauerkraut and that’s okay.  It’s my tradition now to do with what I will.  And someday, when I feed my children the things that make my palate sing, I will be giving them myself. It’s my job to cook with honesty and joy from the depths of my being and experience.

My new mantra? May I feed the people I love with mindfulness and joy so that they may be nourished in body and spirit.

I can grow stronger and more beautiful when I love the seed that I was and the tree I am becoming.  No Exceptions!

Now go out and realize your joy!

And while you’re at it, make yourself some toast.

A Year Without Halloween

In my last post, I wrote a little about what it’s like here in New Jersey these days.  (I also named it after an AMAZING Margaret Atwood book.  Seriously, go read it!)  The thing is, before the storm, it was almost Halloween.  I’m a bit of a Halloween freak and I was really stoked in anticipation of the knocks on the door, the neighbors coming around, the decorations, you know, the usual trapping of the holiday.  We even bought a ghostly white pumpkin at the neighborhood farm stand and I had planned to make a scarecrow for the porch using this bit of prized produce for its jack-o-lantern head.  But then Sandy blew through and Halloween got, well, cancelled.

It was strange, to say the least.  Being on one of the few streets in town that made it through the storm with power, water and very little damage, Cara and I had spent the morning packing whatever useful things we could find and bringing them to a shelter.  Then, later, as the sun went down, the streets were empty.  And dark.  And quiet.  Okay, okay, from somewhere a few streets down we heard a generator but that was about it.  No kids, no costumes, no candy, no nothing.  Talk about spooky.

And I still had that pumpkin.  Finally, today, I got around to tackling it.  I stuffed it with rice, quinoa, lentils, mushrooms, some chicken sausage and dried herbs from our garden this summer (yeah, basically I cleaned out the pantry-a lot of grocery stores still aren’t running at normal capacity) and here it is.  Happy belated Halloween, guys!

 

The Year of the Flood

So, I know I haven’t written in a while.  The only explanation I have for that is that I live in New Jersey.  That in itself speaks volumes these days.  I think.  I mean, tell me if I’m wrong. The long and short of it though is that I’ve been taking a break in the kitchen.  I’ve traded in my spatula for a crow bar, my Wusthoffor a utility knife and I’ve set to work trying to clean up this mess.  It’s been sobering, to say the least, to see all the devastation.  I’ve been doing demolition on flood-damaged houses.  I’m talking soaked sheetrock four feet up the wall and furniture that leaks sea-water when you open the drawers.  I’ve seen the strangest of soups: pasta floating out of its box across a flooded basement, cans with their labels washed away, freezers oozing out their contents onto buckled linoleum, you get the idea.  It’s none too appetizing to say the least.

In all this gory wreckage though, there were some shining moments, some of them even of a culinary nature.  For instance, one of the homeowners we were working with (someone who was watching us tear out his walls and still had the wherewithal to ask us to be sure not to scratch the hardwood floor- which had already been removed!) ordered pizza for the entire 6 person crew, bought sodas and set out a makeshift picnic table for us all to sit at.  We’d been working since just after dawn and I’m not sure I’ve ever had a better slice.  It’s amazing what kindness and a hot meal will do.

Speaking of warmth, I can’t finish this post without a shout-out to a group of three ladies we’ve been running into every day.  They drive the worst hit neighborhoods in a minivan with a hand printed sign of prayers on the side and offer people hot chocolate, coffee, tea and, until they run out, donuts.  The other day, during the nor’easter when we were working through the weather, a cup of hot chocolate did more than warm my hands, it was a gentle reminder that there are people who care and that sometimes in hard times, it’s the smallest comforts that matter most.  I’m not really a Christian, in fact, my leanings are almost decidedly Buddhist but when you are called upon to offer those comforts to perfect strangers, all I have to say to that is bless those ladies and their kindness.  May you all be met with such kindness, y’all, and may you pay it forward any way you can.

Loose Links in the Food Chain

Okay, so, here’s the proposition:  Mary Alice and her kids come by in the morning and talk turns to rice pudding (more reliable than politics and a sight more entertaining).  Perhaps you, too have had a conversation like this:

Mary Alice-“Every time I order rice pudding at a restaurant I think to myself-it should be so easy to make this, my mom did, my husband’s mom does, but for whatever reason, after I leave I just never get around to it until I’m back at a restaurant ordering it again.  I mean, where do you start?  What kind of rice do you even use?”

Me- “You know, I don’t know.  My mom would make rice pudding in a double boiler all day long, I never did catch the recipe.”

And it was at that moment we realized we were victims of a break in the food chain.  Now I’m not talking about the predator/prey food chain, I mean the tradition of handing down recipes from one generation to another that links us to all those that came before us; that unknowing bond we share with our ancestors, our ethnicity and our culture.  It’s what’s kept our food choices and preparation methods sacrosanct since time immemorial and comprises a rich and varied oral history, as it were, that tells us the story of who we are.

Some time ago there was a rift in the food/taste continuum, if you’ll pardon my moment of geek, when convenience, artificial flavors and processed “foodstuffs” stood in for our traditional, handed-down recipes.  We began modifying our produce for transportability instead of flavor, fattening our livestock with hormones that made them sick and curing that sickness with indiscriminate applications of antibiotics, refining and bleaching our grains and then “enriching” them after the fact with only part of the nutrients we stripped away.  In many instances we’ve turned over the reins of food productions to huge conglomerates concerned less with the quality of the food, our health or that of the land, worker’s safety, animal welfare, ecology or even ethical practices but rather the simple business of making a profit; at any cost.

Some time ago I realized, sadly and to my surprise, that even if I followed her recipes to the letter, I could never taste the flavors Julia Child encountered in France.  Even with our global market place where we can access truffles, saffron, single origin coffee from tiny shaded estates in Tanzania and all the spices of Tangier, food has changed!  Gone are the fat-backed acorn-fed hogs of Julia’s kitchen, gone the varied strains of wheat and barley, gone are the tiny farms with apples unique in all the world, now plowed under to make way for housing developments, factory farms, golf courses even.  Or perhaps not exactly gone, just out of circulation.  Preserved in the fields and furrows and tiny pockets of biological diversity that still persist on the small farm. The truth of the matter is though, for better or worse, as our commercial marketplaces grow, the available diversity shrinks.

Now, I’m the last person to say that we shouldn’t take advantage of foods from far away.  A cup of Ethiopian Harrar will draw me in from miles away and I can tell you for a fact that there’s something in New York City water that makes for the best pizza crust on the planet but I’m also a firm believer that some foods just don’t need messing with.  I’m no neophobe, hell, I’ll eat anything once, but there’s a reason some foods have been handed down for so long, a reason some recipes are more closely guarded than the family silver. It’s cause they’re time-tested, cause they remind us of where we came from and cause they’re just plain good!  So, come with me as I try to reclaim one of these old recipes through an afternoon of experimentation and attempt to recreate the a classic with: The Trial and Error Rice Pudding Recipe.

Notice of Public Theft-UPDATE

I got this picture in a text from the cantaloupe’s “rightful owner” today.  The caption read: Tastiest compost cantaloupe I’ve ever had :).  Now I don’t know about you but that just makes me wanna steal the next one so hard! So I’m putting you on warning.  Lookout, Shannon, you’ve just been warned! This is your warning, right now.  Keep an eye on yer ‘loupes cause I’m a-comin for them!

PUBLIC NOTICE OF IMPENDING THEFT!

Public Notice is hereby given that the above pictured cantaloupe will, in fact, be stolen.

Soon.

By me.

No, no, scratch that.  It’s less like stealing and more like… bounty hunting.  Yeah! So how about:

Public Notice: The above pictured fugitive will hereby be brought to justice (in other words, my house) for the following offenses: 1) Escape. 2) Deliciousness.

Hear me out though. You see, it’s not some wild cantaloupe, or even a cultivation refugee.   This plucky li’l guy grew out of the former site of a compost pile so I like to think of this melon as more of a rogue element, a melon on the lam,  a criminal Cucurbitaceae.

In case you didn’t know, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, luffas (real ones) melons, lots of vines and gourds are all in the Cucurbitaceae camp, making it one expansive, not to mention sprawling, family.  In high school, the cantaloupe got voted most likely to succeed and it does, often in some pretty strange places.  As you can see from my stealthily documented reconnaissance files above, this one’s climbed up a conveniently placed trellis.  Take THAT twisted bed-sheet rope and improvised pontoon!

Okay, okay, so Shannon’s back yard isn’t exactly Alcatraz but I’m sure you’ll agree that we can’t just have melons running wild, traipsing about, flaunting their juicy ripeness to innocent passers-by, right?  You see, bringing in these fugitives is the only thing we as responsible friends, neighbors, citizens can do!  It is up to us, to me, specifically, to collect this and other escaped melons, rounding up the rebels and eating them with some thinly sliced prosciutto, fresh basil and a dusting of cayenne pepper.

It’s tough work, this bounty gardening, but someone’s got to do it!

Falling for Autumn

I ran across this post tonight after a wander in the early evening.  The moon was a huge, yellow sickle hanging low in the freshly scrubbed sky and I was wearing… a hoodie.  I love the fall.  So, with no further ado- a hymn to all foods summer:

Yesterday it rained throughout the day and as a result, by nightfall, not only was there a spectacular light show but the wind had taken on that almost mythological midsummer quality: chilly.  Like an engraved invitation to dreamland, a night like this would not pass without the appropriate fanfare.

I put on pants.

So far sleeping at the farmhouse this summer has been an experience one could only categorize as miserable at best.  With only a single window and a tiny fan on the second floor it was as if when the rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief after the heat of the day, it exhaled it into my face.  My hosts had a bulky air conditioning unit in their bedroom that hummed and chugged and leaked all night long and into the day, keeping their bedroom consistently cool and dry.   Truth be told, for all my talk of simplicity, that sounded like heaven.   Still though, if what they say of suffering is true, no one was about to enjoy the night like I was.

If you listen to what the seasons tell us, while the livin’ might be easy, the summer is hard.  It’s hot, insects pierce your skin, sudden rainstorms soak you to the bone (a much bigger problem when we slept outside or if you’re camping) and while the forage is plentiful, it’s still going to be a while before the big ticket items roll in.

If you’ve ever opted for gazpacho over pot roast, chosen a chilled cherry soup instead of chicken noodle or eaten a cucumber sandwich, well, ever, you’ve eaten seasonally.  Right around the changing of the guard between July and August we can collect a plethora of all things juicy and sweet.  Summer is a time when we stock up on our vitamins by eating foods in all sorts of fantastical colors: from the immediacy of a strawberry’s red to the secret blush of plums, peaches like concentrated sunshine and cherries more vivid than sunsets.  Red dye #3 can’t hold a candle to what nature’s been cooking up for years.

With all the apples and squash I’ve been cooking lately, it’s nice to remember how beautiful, if oppressive, summer can be.  I think it makes these chilly nights that much more cozy.  Maybe I’ll let you know if I can tear myself away from the fire and the homemade pumpkin hot chocolate I’ll be drinking a little later on…

Here’s What I Know So Far

We eat wrong.

Many billions of dollars is changing hands to keep it that way.

Government funding helps keep it that way.

Our wrong eating makes us sick.

Our sickness makes us poor.

Our poverty make our voices small compared to the billions of dollars changing hands to keep it that way.

The phrase:”You are what you eat” shouldn’t be frightening.

Eating isn’t a choice- no one can afford conscientious objection.

Real food isn’t a luxury, it’s a right:  All human beings have the right to safe, healthy food.

What we eat is our choice and our choices are measured in dollars.

Giving our dollars to bad food companies makes more bad food.

Buying bad food is like watering weeds and wondering why your garden won’t grow.

Choosing real food will enable ethical producers to make more real food.

More real food means real food will cost less, be more available and exist in greater variety.

When everyone can eat real food, diseases will be tamed, insurance companies will have less claims, pharmaceutical companies will stop profiting from our obesity, heart disease and diabetes, our children will be healthy, our lifespans will lengthen and we will stop losing people we love to dietary illnesses.

And, perhaps most importantly…

Food will taste good again!

I don’t fancy myself a conspiracy nut.  I vet all my facts, I look up the numbers, I read the articles and the truth is simple.  And pretty convincing.  Won’t you join me in spreading the message?

Eat real food. Live real life.

Now You’re Cooking With Gas

And if that phrase caught your eye,  you might also know where the beef is.

Seriously though, let’s talk for just a moment about where our food comes from.  I know, I know-the grocery store.  Before that though?  Where did it come from?  How far away?

They say, on average, our food  travels 1,500 miles to get to our plates.  Of course that depends on what you’re eating and where you live.

This means that no matter what you’re cooking or how, the first ingredient in your food is gas.  It’s the most expensive and the worst for you (or at least it’s up there with the sodium and high fructose corn syrup) and, like most things in our food that will eventually kill us; it’s hidden.

I, for one, believe in knowing what’s in my food and if there’s a dose of petroleum in every hothouse tomato, I don’t want it.  See, I’m a consumer and I call the shots.  That’s how this whole system works.

So- the distance your food travels is called food-miles and the money you spend on it is called food-dollars.  Want the system to change? Spend the majority of your food-dollars on stuff that’s traveled the least food-miles!  I’m sure someone can come up with a chart of inverse proportions that explains this to the true geeks out there but for the masses it’s simple: Don’t Buy Shit From Far Away!

A great book to read on this subject is Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. She’s got a great way of pointing out how local might just be closer than you think.

To this end Cara and I have been trying to grow and barter a lot of our food but we’re realistic.  Neither of us has visions of a victory garden with corn and wheat stretching to the sunset (or back fence, whichever comes first) so we buy our produce at the local farm stand. And at the grocery store we read labels!  The closer the better.  Of course this doesn’t cover everything- every once in a while a girl needs a pineapple or some French cheese (in Cara’s case, Brown Sauce) and there’s nothing wrong with that!  Cooking, eating, hell, Living is about balance.

One last thought: Did you know the distance from New York City to Key West, Florida is about 1500 miles?   Mapquest call that a 24 hour straight shot drive.  I’d like to think of myself as a little more resilient than a tomato but after a drive like that I doubt either of us would be so fresh. Just sayin.

…Wonder how they do that… 😉

More on that later.