Cookbook pastoral

In Omnivore’s Dilemna, Pollan writes about the “supermarket pastoral”, in which the marketers use a lot of words about pasture and free-range and whatnot to get you to buy stuff and feel good about it.

I’ve been thinking a lot this past holiday week about what I think of as “cookbook pastoral.” It’s not just limited to cookbooks, though. TV shows have just as much to answer for, if not more. But I read more cookbooks than I watch TV so….

But you know what I’m talking about, right? The text that talks about the dough gently rising in a yellow stoneware bowl, covered over with a linen tea towel. The photos of Martha’s beautifully lit, all-white kitchen with a perfectly turned out pie crust, just barely dusted by flour, waiting on a pristine sheet tray to be baked in a $40,000 Viking. The TV hostess (I’m looking at you, Ina) who scoops her sugar out of a rustic mason jar. Or even Nigella’s lushly prosy narration in that seductive British voice, talking about flecks of herbs and streaks of chocolate and plump morsels of dough.

Why, I wonder, is my kitchen never like that? My dough rises in the mixing bowl where I kneaded it, with a piece of plastic wrap over it because, no matter how much you dampen it, a tea towel always results in a dried-out crust on top of the dough. My sugar comes out of that $2 white plastic cannister with white lid that I got on the day I moved into my first apartment. My pie crust is never round and my kitchen is never clean after I’ve mixed up pie crust and my sheet trays are never clean, period.

And, sadly, I have never looked or sounded anything like Nigella.

I know it’s marketing, I know it’s there to sell the dream. But it’s also so much false bunk and that irritates me. I love Cook’s Illustrated, it’s my first source for almost any recipe, but Christopher Kimball’s pseudo-rustic ruminations on country life that open each issue just make me angry. And those handful of times I’ve ever watched Rachel Ray, I always wonder, “Why does she wash her hands that often without pushing up her sleeves?! Doesn’t she get the hems of her sleeves wet?“

The loud and clear implication of all of this is that if you can’t cook this beautifully, with this picturesque simplicity, without making a mess, without getting flour on your black cashmere sweater, then you shouldn’t be doing it at all.

I think of myself as messier cook than normal people. This is possibly true, but I don’t know. Most other people I know don’t cook, so it’s not really a fair comparison. Those that do are usually about as messy as I am. They have pantries that are cluttered and crowded, stoves that need a good wiping, and slightly sticky floors. (This is also a factor of having a small child in the house.)

And project cooking exacerbates this. A fermenting crock of sauerkraut is probably lovely as hell when it’s in a beautiful white crock, glowing against the black stone of a cold counter inside a root cellar/storage pantry. In my kitchen, though, it’s fermenting inside a 1/2 gallon mason jar, wedged on my crowded counter between half-empty bags of Bob’s Red Mill oats and a box of Sunmaid Raisins. You;d never get half-empty plastic bags in Chris Kimball’s pantry.

It’s not cookbook pastoral, but it’s real.

The Penzey’s exception

I have never intended to live a 100 percent locavore life. I’m dedicated to the idea of being as locavore as possible, but I’ve always held in my mind what I think of as “the Penzey’s exception.” And that exception is spices.

I’m not the first person willing to throw over things for some cinnamon and nutmeg. The current geopolitical makeup of the world could be said to have been drawn by spices. (If you don’t believe me, check out Nathanial’s Nutmeg, by Giles Milton.) Armies and navies, entire empires, have been raised and felled in the pursuit of pepper, mace, vanilla, saffron. And now we keep shaker jars of the stuff on the bar at Starbucks and sprinkle them over our drinks.

Don’t get me started on on the world-order effects of salt, chocolate, and sugar, which I know aren’t spices, but work with me here. They still fall under my Penzey’s exception.

Today was my annual holiday Penzey’s run and it was so non locavore that you’d have to be mining salt on the moon to get more extreme. It was the usual suspects, all available at your local megamart: ground ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, vanilla, dutched cocoa, mustard seeds, horseradish powder, caraway, juniper berries (I’m making sauerkraut!), and a couple of herbs. I also got some file powder, because my daughter wanted it and I might get around to making gumbo one of these days.

Most of those things could not be grown in New England.

In all, it ran me about $90 and fit inside a tiny handled bag. Spices are still damned expensive. The vanilla alone ran about $20, and I got the medium bottle — a price reminiscent of the great vanilla shortage of a few years ago. (Did it effect your world the way it did mine? My baking was devastated.) But it’s a lot of bang for your buck. A $20 steak will last for one dinner but a bottle of Tahitian vanilla will last me until after Valentine’s Day.

The cinnamon is other big-ticket item in the Penzey’s world: $14 for 8 oz. But what’s apple pie without cinnamon? Or pumpkin pie? Or snickerdoodles? Or my almost-famous cinnamon buns? And the Penzey’s extra-fancy Vietnamese stuff is so potent that you can cut way back on the amount and still get extra flavor without that chalkiness that happens with too much cinnamon sometimes.

Of course, Penzey’s sells spices in bags rather than bottles, which is good: less waste, less expense, etc. And I can easily transfer them to little 1/4 pint mason jars. But I think I’m going to need a label maker….

 

 

 

Switching my weekly menu

I used to have two aunts, The Aunts, who were old-school homemakers, back when you could get a Masters degree in homemaking. I wish I’d had enough sense to grill them when they were alive because I feel certain they could have taught me some things.

One of the things that they did was have a meal for every night of the week. Which meant that on Fridays, they had hamburgers and iceberg-lettuce salads, and on Mondays they had (I think) spaghetti, etc. I’ve never been able to do that, but I have adopted the idea and adapted it for my own use.  Instead of having a strict schedule, per se, I tend to have a rhythm.

Since Jen was speaking of that recently, I thought I’d let you know what I do.

Monday, I like soup. Fast soup, not long-simmered braises. Often lentils with bacon sprinkled on top. Sometimes butternut squash soup. Occasionally, if I’ve thought ahead, bean soup, like pasta fagioli.

Tuesdays, on the way home from preschool, I pick up some sort of pasta from Dave’s Fresh. Usually some sort of ravioli — often butternut squash in the fall or sweet pea in the spring — but not always. Served with some sort of green, maybe some bread, it’s a pretty good dinner. Sometimes, I do carbonara. I love carbonara and have the waistline to prove it.

On Wednesdays in the fall, I get lamb sausage from Marianne and roast some orange vegetable (sweet potato or winter squash).

On Thursdays, Wang’s Fast Food delivers. Sometimes, RedBones delivers.

Weekends are pretty mixed around here, but autumn Sundays often find me with a long, slow braise that I start after breakfast. That braise serves for lunch for my husband for much of the week.

With the close of the Farmer’s Market, the menu shifts somewhat. It’s going to depend, I think, on the new winter CSA. I didn’t buy nearly enough lamb sausage to keep that going throughout the winter, so I’ll need a new Wednesday meal. (Lamb sausage may be making an appearance in the lentil stew, though, because it’s actually cheaper than the local bacon I can buy starting in a week or so.)  I think I may try to add a homemade pizza on Friday nights, with lots of veggies and a salad. If I do that, though, I’m going ot have to find Lourde’s mozzarella or start making my own. I’ve got a book on how to do that….

I may add a torta to the lentil soup, too. And maybe I’ll stretch the braise by putting it in a pot pie on Sundays. I’ll let you know.

 

 

Putting away the CSA

It’s time to put away the CSA – the growing season is over; the last box is picked up… (not quite, though – we’ll be getting winter storage vegetables for the next several months as well, as we signed up for a winter share.) But tonight, putting away the CSA was not just about saying farewell to the growing season. It was also about, quite literally, PUTTING AWAY all that stuff in the box.

The last share of the season is harder because the share is a bit bigger, and because by the end of the season I’ve always got some backlog of things that will last a while that’s been building up in the fridge. I must have had well over 5lbs of carrots accumulated in there BEFORE today, I saved one of the delicata squash, I’m perpetually sitting on a week’s supply of leeks, and I think there’s still a bag of beets I haven’t used yet.

I couldn’t fit the celery into the refrigerator drawer at all. Fortunately, I’d just figured out a trick for that – I chopped off the leafy parts right away and put a much shorter bunch of celery stalks into the drawer. Last time I did this, I froze the tips raw; this time I tried blanching them for 2 minutes as I’ve read they’ll last longer in the freezer that way. All I’ll use them for is adding to stock anyway – it won’t hurt to have them in the freezer, since I don’t care about the texture!

I’m even overflowing with parsnips and carrots – enough that I also tried the blanching and freezing trick on 2 peeled parsnips so I can use them in my favorite matzo ball soup stock later on in the winter.

I would save a bit space if I chopped the brussels sprouts off of their stalk, but it’s cool looking and I haven’t gotten to it.

And there are still a giant bunch of kale, and collard greens with leaves a foot across, which need to be steamed and frozen, since they won’t fit in the drawer either.

The cabbage – I’ll just have to leave it on a shelf instead of a crisper drawer… at least until I use up 5 lbs of carrots and 4 leeks.

when cooking is faster than takeout

Failure – Wang’s fast food is closed on Tuesdays, which we realized after my daughter’s polite and rational request for chinese food including scallion pancakes, and after I’d decided everything we wanted to order and gotten my mouth watering for our choices.

Completely undeserved success: scallion pancakes are *sooooooo* easy to reproduce at home!

I used Ming Tsai’s recipe here – skipped the resting of the dough, faked the mixing in of the boiling water, to make the dough, and figured so what if the texture was not perfect. Also, we used leeks, which I pre-sauteed a bit (that was the extent of the time my dough rested.) I used half a recipe because it seemed prone to complete disaster – but instead of complete disaster, they tasted like…. scallion pancakes! I somewhat burned 2 out of 3 of them because I was trying to throw together a main course at the same time, but now I know to watch them better.

Practical menus

I’m not a very practical cook.  I like excitement, new foods and new ingredients and very little repetition.  But each weekend, my husband takes my daughter to the grocery store, and they pick out a fish and a vegetable (we have plenty of starch at home), and he cooks dinner.  And she is sooo excited.  She knows there will be fish, she gets to choose what kind.  She knows there will be a steamed vegetable, she gets to choose what kind.  And then recently there was an article in the paper, which among other things said that kids like repetition in their food as well as their books.  And suddenly I realized they were right.

Some kids do like to try new things, and I love that my daughter puts up with my experiments.  But she also likes familiar things.  She loves when we make soup, though the ingredients are never quite the same from time to time.  It’s a familiar process, and a familiar product.  While we make it, she can look forward to it, because she can imagine what it will be like.  And years from now she can look back, and remember afternoons in the kitchen making soup.  So I’m reining myself in.

Instead of looking for new recipes, I’m looking for repeatable meals, ones that I won’t get tired of.  Where possible, ones which can be vegetarian when I want to cook that way.  And preferably ones which are fairly quick to make, at least in right-before-dinner time.

Here’s what I’ve thought of so far:

• stir-fry – ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sherry, and whatever I’m in the mood for
• pasta – with olive oil, garlic, (or sauce) and whatever I’m in the mood for
• garlic bread – with pasta and sauce with sausage.  This is already a traditional meal here, just not frequent, because my garlic bread is mostly butter.
• soup – broth, veggies, beans, and grain
• soup – pureed, served with bread and whatever else it needs to be a meal
• roast meat – with veggies and bread (or other starch)
• salads – quinoa salads, couscous salads, pasta salads, cabbage salads
• stews – meat chunks, vegetable chunks, and liquid

Other things I can’t generalize as well.  Macaroni and cheese, tomato rarebit, chili, tacos, burritos, bruschetta, fondue, pigs in a blanket, pot pie, porridge…  And my mom makes pizza for all of us most weekends, so I stay away from that.

So I’m thinking we’ll have fish one night, and pizza one night.  One night is game night, and I usually don’t cook (at least not dinner).  That leaves four.  I think I’m going to shoot for at least two standards from that list a week, aiming for stir-fry, pasta, and soup most often.  The remaining two can be new recipes, or just less standard ones.  That will make shopping a lot easier too, because if I can’t think what to make, I’ll just get whatever veggies look good, and put them in a stir-fry, soup, or pasta dish.  And it still leaves me room to experiment, which I need.

So here’s my question: What standards am I missing from my list?  It’s a much longer list than I thought I had when I sat down to write it, but what do you guys make all the time, with variations?

Oh, and of course this is dinner.  My breakfast and lunch lists are different.

Thinking about Thanksgiving

Like most foodies, Thanksgiving looms large in my culinary calendar. But it marks a different milestone for me than it does for other foodies.

I’ve never cooked a Thanksgiving meal. I’ve spent my life ferrying around to various other peoples’ houses and eating their meals. Over the years, I’ve been on tap for long distance cooking support, with phone calls at 6 o’clock on the Wed. before asking things like, “Now, explain brining to me, again, please?” But my actual cooking is limited to bringing pies (usually apple) and cranberry sauce. My mom sometimes has me make the gravy.

No, Thanksgiving is important to me because it’s the week of the last of the farmer’s markets.

I know that most people imagine Farmer’s Markets as summer phenomena, filled with luscious tomatoes and crisp greens and tender herbs. But I’ve always preferred the November markets, especially in the afternoon with the low light slanting in among the tents. The tables are less pretty but just as full, and the oyster guy is there with his heavy gloves and table of ice and shells and badly painted “buck a shuck” sign. And I like the piles of winter apples, heaps of root vegetables, the homely bins of brassicas.

Summer produce is a bully, in my opinion, and vain to boot. Oh! I’m so lush and fresh! You must use me right away! Oh, look at me! I’m so pretty, you can’t do anything to me that would make me less pretty! Autumnal produce is humble and sturdy and can sit on my counter for a week while I try to figure out what the hell to do with it.

It’s also when I stock up on stuff I know I’m going to need. I bought out one farm’s worth of hardneck garlic on Wednesday, which was also Lamb Day! My freezer is now full of an avalanche worth of lamb shanks, most of them big enough to kill a burglar with. (Marianne slaughters her lambs in autumn, so they are big and flavorful and can stand up to a long braise. One shank, cooked to shred with some vegetables and beans, and served over barley or cous cous, can feed an entire dinner party of 12 with leftovers.)

I’ll be picking up as many onions as I can carry next week, too. Usually I would also buy a pile of sweet potatoes and squash, too. But this year is a little different, because I’m not facing a long cold winter with only the grocery store to feed me. I (and Abbe and Jen) got winter shares from Brookfield Farm and we’ll be getting root cellar produce every other week or so. I’m excited about this — a whole winter of autumnal produce!

Still, Thanksgiving is near and that means no more oyster guy, no more Lourde’s cheese, no more wandering through the market with my string bags, no more smoked fish guy. What’s more, it means a long cold six months until June, when fresh produce returns.

my old friend ginger

Thanks to the encouragement of my friends here at Always Be Cooking, the 2nd half of the fresh ginger went into two projects, and for each one I got a little more out of it than the recipe said, just by thinking “am I really supposed to get rid of that now?”

Ginger beer starts off with a syrup of sugar, water, and finely grated ginger, steeped for an hour and then poured through a sieve into the bottle with yeast and water. So I sampled whether all that steeping had sucked all the flavor out of the shredded, somewhat sweet ginger – it hadn’t. I scraped that onto a piece of wax paper, sprinkled more sugar on it, rolled it flat between two layers of wax paper, and let it dry on the wax paper, and wound up with a tasty ginger candy sort of thing, lacking some texture and integrity compared to the real product.

Because I wasn’t fully invested in the ginger beer project, and wanted something that was pleasantly gingery but not knock-your-socks off, I used less ginger than the recipe called for for my first 2L test batch.

This left me with just a little bit more ginger – perhaps 2″ of thick root. Just enough for a microbatch of the other project I was hoping to try – homemade pickled ginger. Once again, the first thing to do gave me a bonus – the slivers of ginger had to be blanched for a minute or two in water. So while I proceeded with the recipe (you just dump the blanched ginger in a jar with the same volume of vinegar plus a little sweetener of your choice), I poured off the water into a mug and drank it with a little sugar and lemon.

4 gingery food items, one half a root of fresh ginger in need of using up.

Anatomy of a Cod

I may not have the whole farmhouse from-scratch operation running smoothly, and I may never keep chickens in the backyard, but making good use of what I have and not throwing away perfectly good food are goals I am getting better at. Here’s a snapshot of my almost-efficient fish machine at work, after 18 deliveries of whole fish since June.

This week’s whole fish was 2 small cod, and I pounced right on it for a second shot at preserving and drying my own salt cod. I’ve done a trial run once before, and now I’m looking forward to the 2nd batch being usable for Christmas Eve. So here’s what became of the fish over the next several days:

Day 1: I clean and fillet the fish, winding up with

• fish skins (sadly, must toss, or find a friend who wants to feed their cats raw fish. My usual suspect wasn’t up to this this time, so I tossed the.)
• fish fillets – to cook, or in this case, preserve with salt (they get coated in salt for a day and change, then rinsed and left to dry in the fridge for a week.)
• fish spine(s) with head, tail, and plenty of meat on it, because I am not an expert at filleting
• I reserved the scrappier bits of the fillets to make a little bit of plain fish for K, who requested that it not all be turned into bakalar (as we call salt cod in our house).

Day 2:
Make fish broth with the spines and heads. This is a quick-cooked broth – I put the fish in cold water with bay leaves, salt, pepper, and a splash of vinegar, then bring slowly to a boil, let it boil 10 minutes afterwards, and turn off the heat.

After pouring off the broth, pull cooked meat off the fish carcasses into a storage container, removing small bones as I go. This week’s cooked meat mostly went into cod-salad sandwiches with melted cheese. I mix shredded cooked cod with mayonnaise, celery, seasonings; basically pretending it came out of a can of tuna and go from there. I sometimes put it into fish cakes, or freeze to use later for these purposes or add back into soup.

Also, the scrappy bits of fillets that I saved went into a small person’s serving or two of fried fish (and more than a serving of french fries to go with, for all of us!)
I’ll probably make miso soup with some of the broth. The rest is in the freezer. If there’s an Armageddon soon, we’re all covered for miso soup.

My 6+ lbs of whole cod (2 small fish worth) gave me 2.2lbs of fillets, plus a bit under a pound of cooked shredded fish meat, and about 4 quarts of fish broth. I would probably have gotten more fillets off of one large fish, but somewhat less broth.

Bletting my medlars

We went to Cider Day this weekend and stocked up on many wonderful things — mostly apples and quinces — which will entail many big cooking projects later this week. Stay posted for more details on those. But right now I want to talk about medlars.

What the hell is a medlar you ask? It’s a fruit I’d never heard of until Saturday afternoon standing at a table full of 27 kinds of apples. (They had Sheepsnoses! I love Sheepsnoses for applesauce!) And there is a crate full of… well, what looked like outsized rose hips. They were labeled “medlars” and the blurb explained that they were once popular across Europe and are still popular in the Middle East and that they were, in fact, related to roses.

They are inedible, even when fully ripe, and must be left to soften through internal fermentation. This process is called “bletting”. Having never heard of them or of bletting, I, of course, immediately bought a bagful.

Anyway, I pulled out my Oxford Companion to Food when I got home and confirmed that the blurb on the box was right. (I’ve discovered that farmers are sometimes a little generous or imprecise in their descriptions. What Michael Pollan calls “supermarket pastoral”.) I discovered that they were poplualr in Europe through the Middle Ages until the Victorian era and are “not to everyone’s taste.” DH Lawrence described them in very unkind terms.

My husband, C., is very kind about my flights of food fancies. I can get carried away at the market and wind up with a bowl full of rotting fruit pretty quickly if I’m not industrious. The medlars may or may not be a good example of this. But for now, I’m letting them blett on my table top.

Wish me luck. And send me recipes if you’ve ever heard of these things before!