Savory Sundays #5: Bastardized insalata caprese and meatloaf patties

I generally dislike Rachel Ray.  She’s so damned chipper, like a rabid chipmunk.  However, I used to watch 30 Minute Meals when I was in college.  At that time, I was just starting to really get into the nitty gritty of cooking and had pretty much stopped using mixes.  I was reading cookbooks and food literature like it was all going to be burned tomorrow and Food Network was a primary source of inspiration even if not of accurate information.  Let’s face it, FoodTV can be about as informative as the History channel is these days.  And Rachel Ray’s ideas, recipes and information are definitely not often things I’d actually want to eat.  I watched her show, however, because I watched ALL of the shows and took methods, techniques, ideas, and recipes in bits and pieces from all of the Food Network chefs to develop the style of cooking that I’ve created over the years. 

I have no memory of the original recipe for these meatloaf patties, and it ends up slightly different every time too because I’ve never written it down.  This is an easy one to be creative with and I think of this as less of a recipe and more as a technique.  You can use almost anything you have lying around the kitchen and it’s almost guaranteed to end up yummy and satisfying.

When I stopped eating beef about a decade ago, one of the few things I actually missed was meatloaf.  Yes, I know it’s terribly uncool, but I have always loved a good meatloaf.  I eventually figured out that I could make it with ground turkey (I was still mostly cooking from boxes and mixes at this time, but definitely learning and experimenting), but it’s time consuming and it makes a lot.  Ray’s meatloaf patties were a perfect solution!  I could make the patties and do all kinds of things with them.  I’ve had them on buns as a sandwich, over pasta, over rice, by themselves – it doesn’t matter, they’re just good.  They can also be part of a very seasonal meal.  This time around, I made them a little bit summery with some pesto, but they’re also excellent with gravy made from the tidbits leftover in the skillet after cooking the patties. 

I served it, this time, with a side of bastardized insalata caprese.  I say it’s bastardized, because typically this dish is served using large slices of tomatoes and mozzarella.  However, the garden gave us a nice harvest of red cherry and yellow pear tomatoes today, so I halved them, and sprinkled some fresh basil over them (The proper cut for basil is called “chiffonade”.  To do this, pluck the leaves off the stems, pile them on top of each other, roll them up like a newspaper and cut into strips crosswise). I took a ball of fresh mozzarella, cut it up into small pieces and put that in the bowl with the tomatoes and basil.  Ideally, I would have used the small “pellets” that come in a container of water, but Safeway doesn’t seem to carry those, so I had to use a ball this time.  Whatever you have, doesn’t matter what shape it comes in.  Anyway, I like to put just a little salt and pepper over it all, and then drizzle with olive oil and vinegar.  I’ve used red balsamic, white balsamic, Italian herb infused and sherry vinegars and they’re all good, but my favorite is the sherry vinegar.   At any rate, I did this before I started anything else so that the flavors could mingle while I made the rest of dinner.  DO NOT REFRIGERATE!  Tomatoes lose flavor when refrigerated and cold things don’t meld as well as things at room temperature, so just let the insalata sit on the kitchen table while you work on the rest.

While the tomatoes are marinating, put some water on to boil for egg noodles.

And while the water is getting hot for the noodles, take one package ground turkey and add an egg, herbs and seasonings to taste, a diced onion, a couple of cloves of chopped garlic, a handful of parmesan cheese, and about 2/3 of a cup of bread crumbs (if you’re gluten free, Bob’s Redmill makes some excellent gluten free breadcrumbs that have a nice light nutty flavor to them). 

*Random rant: This shit needs to be mixed up.  Sure, you can dirty a spoon, but why?  Don’t be afraid to be hands-on with your food!  Dive right in there; squish it up with your hand!  Especially if you’re a very tactile person; my hands seem to be much better at telling me when something is properly mixed than my eyes are.  Cooking should be an experience for all of the senses and touch is definitely an important one.  Experience teaches your hands to tell you when something is wrong that your eyes may not catch (like a slimy texture where there shouldn’t be, for example).  Also, there’s just no need to dirty a spoon if you don’t have to, and since you’re going to be forming the patties anyway, you’re still going to be getting your hands in it.  No sense in holding back – your hands are two of the best mixing tools you have and, miraculously enough, they are washable!  End rant.

Squish the contents of your bowl together. 

Add about a tablespoon or two of olive oil to a skillet and get it nice and hot on medium-high heat.  Form the turkey mixture into large meatballs about an inch and a half in diameter, then flatten to form patties and put in the hot pan.  Cook about 12 minutes on each side until nicely browned and cooked all the way through.  I put a baking rack on a plate and put the finished ones on there while I cook the rest.  Don’t forget to throw your noodles in the water when it gets to boiling. You can use whatever kind of noodles you like – I like to use whole wheat egg noodles.

When the noodles are done, drain them and mix about a quarter to a half of a cup of pesto in with them (if using half a bag of noodles, a quarter, or up to a half cup for a full bag of noodles).  Put a pile of pesto’d noodles on a plate, then put a couple of your medallions on top.  From here, you can do several things.

You could throw some stir fried vegetables in with the pasta before you pesto, or pile them on top of the pasta with your patties. I sautéed mushrooms in butter and olive oil and piled them on my pasta with my patties.  I also put a little more pesto over the top of my patties, and sprinkled just a little more parmesan on the top of the whole mess. 

A seasonal variation:  These are excellent with gravy as well, especially in the winter.  Make as above, leaving out all pesto-related steps.  Instead, wait until the patties are cooked, add two tablespoons of butter to the pan.  Once melted, add two tablespoons of flour and mix to make a roux.  Allow to brown very slightly, then slowly add about 1 ½ cups stock and let it come to a slow boil while stirring constantly and making sure to scrape all the little turkey and seasoning bits from the pan into your sauce.  When sufficiently thickened (when it thickly coats the back of a spoon), take it off the heat and ladle it over your patties and noodles (or rice or quinoa or even mashed potatoes!).  Serve with roasted root vegetables on the side or incorporated into the main dish and enjoy!

Savory Sundays #4: Zucchini-Cheddar Bread

Like most families who plant zucchini in the summer garden, my family always had way too much of this particular vegetable. My mother did terrible things to it like freezing and boiling it that basically reduced this mild and versatile member of the squash family into a bowl of watery mush.  It was horrid, but for many years, I was unaware the zucchini did not have to be so… slimy.  I swore I’d never touch the stuff as an adult, but like most things kids say they’ll never do as adults, we’re now growing our own zucchini.  And yes, we have too much.

A couple of weeks ago, we went on vacation for five days and when we came back, we had a zucchini the size of a small boat lazily resting on the garden bed.  Of course, my first thought was “zucchini bread!” 

There are probably as many zucchini bread recipes out there are people who make zucchini bread.  Most seem to take the form of a quick batter bread, and many sweet and spiced.  Zucchini is a wonderful ingredient in bread because of the moisture and mild flavor it contributes and at about a cup of shredded zucchini per loaf, you can get a couple of loaves out of mid-sized zukes.  The behemoth we pulled out of our garden was big enough that I’ve made three loaves out of it, and have enough left for two or three more.  This baby was huge, and the bigger they are, the better they are for things like breads and pancakes (smaller, baby zukes are better for sautéing and salads because they have more flavor).

Anyway, my favorite zucchini bread recipe is savory, cheesy and almost biscuit-like.  The original recipe comes from The Joy of Cooking, but I’ve tinkered with it just a little.  Don’t have it?  You should.

Zucchini Cheddar Bread

Preheat oven to 375F and grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan.

Whisk together in a large bowl:

2 C all-purpose flour

½ C  Bob’s Red Mill 10 Grain Flour

½ C White whole wheat flour

4 Tsp Baking powder

½ Tsp Baking soda

Add and toss to separate and coat with flour:

1 C Zucchini, shredded

¾ C Sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

¼ C Leeks, chopped

1 ½ Tsp Thyme, dried

Whisk together in a smaller bowl:

2 Large eggs

1 C Buttermilk

4 Tbl Butter, melted

Add egg mixture to the flour mixture and mix with a few light strokes, just until the dry ingredients are moistened.  The batter should not be smooth.  Bake about 55-60 minutes.

This bread goes fabulously with a bowl of soup, as toast with a little butter on it for breakfast, or just plain by itself.  It’s flavorful, cheesy and moist and one of my absolute favorite summer breads.

Savory Sundays #3: Late Summer Turkey Soup

My favorite way of learning a technique or a type of dish is repetition.  My first winter in Seattle, I wanted soup constantly; the weather just screamed “Soup Day!” and who was I to say no?  I lived with five guys at the time and though many things in that house left much to be desired, I will say that they all played nice while I decided to perfect my soup making.  They got a little crabby after almost a month on a mostly liquid diet (for which I can’t really blame them), but I did get really good at making soup.  I love being able to whip up a soup out of just about anything I happen to have on hand and know that it’s going to come out tasty.  This soup was no exception.  In fact, this is one of the best soups I've ever made.

I started with a couple of small onions from the garden.  I diced them up small and put them in the pot with about four tablespoons of butter. 

Rummaging around in the fridge, I found some wonderful German fingerling potatoes from the farmers market, and some carrots that needed to be used up.  I chopped them up in about half-inch sized pieces. When the onions had turned translucent in the pot, I threw the potatoes and carrots in with them.

When the carrots got bright, I stirred in about a quarter of a cup of while whole wheat flour, mixing until the vegetables were evenly coated with butter and flour.

Letting that sautée for a minute, I prepared six cups of stock and added it to the vegetables slowing, making sure the flour mixed in thoroughly as I went to avoid lumps.

To this, I added two whole sprigs each of rosemary and thyme (sticks and all), and about three-quarter teaspoons each of celery seed, garlic powder and onion powder, as well as a sprinkle of garlic salt and some fresh ground five pepper blend, a couple of dried red chilies, a couple of cloves of garlic and a couple of bay leaves.  I also had some leftover turkey breast in the freezer from one that I roasted last month, so I tossed that into the pot too.  

The turkey was still frozen when I put it in the pot, but after about 25 minutes, it was thawed, so I pulled it out, shredded it and threw it back into the pot.  At this time, I also pulled out my now bare herb stems and bay leaves.  The soup was basically done, so I re-seasoned. 

Re-seasoning is, to my mind, one of the most important steps in building an excellent soup.  It creates a soup with layers of flavors and adds nice color to the soup (green floaties in amongst the orange and white).  So at this time, I added another sprig each of rosemary and thyme (without the sticks this time), another grind of pepper, and some fresh, whole leaf oregano.  And, for good measure and a little creaminess (and because I had some), at the very end, I added ½ cup of buttermilk.

This is an excellent, full-bodied, flavorful soup, excellent for those late summer/early fall days that call for a little home cooking.  Goes excellently with next week's Sunday savory, Zucchini Cheddar Bread.

Savory Sundays #2: Blackberry Cobbler

I don't know what possessed me to try to start blogging in earnest two weeks before moving house, right as summer was coming upon us, but I failed miserably. I really did try hard to come back at first, scheduling a major cooking marathon for myself one week before moving and a few times even doing the cooking, taking the pictures and just never getting to the point of sitting down and writing the associated blog. Unfortunately, and I knew this, the writing should be done the same day as the cooking, otherwise important things may be forgotten in the telling.

At any rate, the end of summer is upon us and with it, of course, comes blackberry season. We now have, since our move, twenty-six acres of woodland (designated as a city park) across the street from us, complete with brambling blackberries just begging for a trip to my kitchen. We picked about ten pounds of blackberries over a couple of days between the park and another spot we found a little further around the corner. Most of that went into a pot with some honey for jam and a few made it to the freezer, but no way, no how, can ten pounds of black berries be picked without a blackberry cobbler appearing.

I was eleven years old the first time I ate a blackberry. Blackberries don’t grow in New England like they do in the Pacific Northwest; until my family moved west, I had grown up eating wild blueberries and raspberries. However, we arrived in Oregon at the end of July, right as blackberry season was really picking up some speed. It didn’t take us long to learn to look forward to the summer blackberry harvest because of all the wonderful things that could be done with them.

When I was in high school, it became my job to pick the blackberries to fulfill orders at the family farm. I would have to get up early on school-less summer days, cover up from head to foot to protect myself against the thorns, and get over to the farm to get the berries picked before the mercury got too high. No easy feat in a place that can be as hot as 90 degrees at nine in the morning. As much as I loved eating these berries as a kid, I utterly loathed picking them.

But now I’m an adult and it’s all on my terms, which makes the whole process much more appealing. Up here in Seattle, blackberry season seems to come in mid-August and, if we’re lucky and it doesn’t start raining, goes well into September. We’ve noticed the berries picking up some speed, so Jami and I went picking and managed to get about five pounds of berries in about an hour. Of course, a cobbler was necessary.

This recipe, like so many of my recipes, originates in The Joy of Cooking; it is an adaptation of their recipe for blueberry cobbler.

Blackberry Cobbler

Preheat oven to 375F.

In an ungreased 2qt casserole, about two inches deep, mix:

3 pints Blackberries

¼ C White sugar

¼ C Brown sugar

2 Tbl Cornstarch or ¼ C flour

1 Tsp Lemon juice

In a separate bowl, whisk together:

1 C All-purpose flour

1/3 C White whole wheat flour

2 Tbl Sugar

¾ Tsp Baking powder

¼ Tsp Baking soda

½ C Dried unsweetened coconut, flaked

½ C Walnuts, chopped

Add:

5 Tbl Butter, cold.

Here is my favorite trick for making pastries: If you don’t have a pastry cutter, hate the trick with two knives or have arthritic hands that won’t let you break the butter down in the flour, get out your cheese grater. Grate the butter right into the bowl of flour. Stop about half way through to mix, then grate the rest in. So much easier!

Whisk together in a small bowl, then add to the flour mixture:

½ C Sour cream

¼ C Buttermilk or heavy cream

Spread dough over blackberries by dropping small spoonfuls over the top until the berries are mostly covered.

Bake 45-50 minutes, allow to cool for fifteen minutes before serving.

Of course, this would be fantastic with a little vanilla ice cream, or even just with a drizzle of cream over the top.

It tasted wonderful; the coconut and walnuts in the batter combined brilliantly with the sweet-tart of the blackberries for a delicious and unique flavor combination. This could be done with pretty much any seasonal fruit, with any nut or seed combination.

Tune in next week for our first actual savory, Savory Sunday.

A tough move

I realize I'm being ridiculous. Logically, I know I'm being childish, but one of the lessons I've learned in the last few years that's brought me to this place is that knowledge and emotions often have nothing to do with each other. Knowing that I'm being childish isn't stopping me from feeling the way I do.

This is the first place I've ever lived where no one could get to me if I didn't want them to. It's the first place I've ever lived where I felt safe and knew that I could leave something that was hurting me on the other side of the door. It's the first place that I've really felt at home, settled and even slightly stable. It's the first place I've lived that I was able to add another person to the equation and not have it completely undo my life. It's the first place I've lived that I really enjoyed coming home to at the end of the day and didn't have to worry about what sort of disaster would take place once I got there.

Of course I realize these things can't be attributed to the space and structure, but are instead due to work I've done on myself in the last three years. I know this, but it doesn't matter. This has been my safe place; my happy place; my sanctuary from the world for the most important and best three years of my life. I became a new person in this place. And even while I know that I can't attribute the change to the space, I know that the space was integral to that change.

When I moved in, I blessed the apartment and dedicated the space to health, growth and creativity. Those things certainly happened here. Being in this space allowed me to hide, to sit and cry for hours and days, turn up my music and dance like an idiot, sit numbly contemplating every last fuck up I have made, laugh at stupid things all by myself in the middle of the night, scream and yell at thin air, sing at the top of my voice and otherwise completely fucking lose my mind in every way possible.

Which I desperately needed to do.

And it helped. Then I found Jami and she joined me here and, as indicated, it did not completely unravel my life. In fact, it in all ways made my life better. And now it's time for us to move on into a space that allows us to live more like we want to live; a space that's ours (in someone else's house).

But I'm scared. I've been good here. I've been happy here, and safe and healthy in a way that I don't think I've ever been. And there's some stupid part of me that doesn't care how much I know that this isn't about a fucking apartment and is totally afraid that leaving it is going to cause every good thing I've managed to accomplish for myself in the last three years to come completely unraveled. I feel scared and vulnerable and unsettled; for the past month, I've been having dreams that I get home from work and my mother is sitting in my new living room waiting for me. I don't need to be Freud to understand that I don't feel secure in the idea that I can properly protect myself once I leave here.

But it's too late to change my mind. More importantly, I can feel this apartment trying to spit me out. I've accomplished what I needed to here and have outgrown the space; it is time to move on whether I feel ready to or not. But this is hard. As soon as I put the first item in the first box, I won't really live here anymore. I've been putting it off all night, but now I'm going to hit POST and face my bookshelves, box in hand, and promise them better organization in the next place, just like I do every time I move.

Savory Sundays #1: Strawberry-Cinnamon Coffee Cake with Orange Zest

So, taking a cue from my wonderful girlfriend who inspires me in so many ways, I have decided that it is past time to get this mostly unused blog up and running. I have a need to write (even if I do find a million excuses every day not to sit my butt down and do it), and I also have a need to cook as this is what helps me retain what little sanity remains to me. In addition, every time I've blogged about food, I've gotten requests for recipes and even pics. So, in the fashion of Jami's Wily Wednesdays in which she posts a new art project to her blog every Wednesday, and Kyle Hepworth's Something a week, I will now institute Savory Sundays. Savory Sunday blogs will feature one new recipe either attempted or created by me and written about here where you will get a recipe to try and picture to oogle. It seems to hit three birds with one stone, so let's give it a shot.

Disclaimer: The name is actually a bit of a misnomer as our first Sunday savory is actually a Sunday sweet.

Strawberries have been abundant and inexpensive lately, so I've been buying them left and right. We can only get through them so quickly though, and one of my favorite ways to use up fruit that's slightly past it's prime is to bake it into something. Therefore, this week we have Strawberry-Cinnamon Coffee Cake with Orange Zest.

I've spent all weekend trying to think of a good recipe for my kick off, but nothing was coming to me. I think it was probably my mind trying to block me again, but after a while, I was finally able to come up with a short list of ingredients I wanted to play with. I didn't get too wild here: strawberries, cinnamon, oatmeal and orange.

I googled strawberry cake and strawberry bread, but all of the recipes I found seemed like the end product would taste like it came out of a box. We all know I'm no fan of food from boxes, so I set about making some modifications to the easiest and most basic recipe. Here is what followed:

Strawberry-Cinnamon Coffee Cake with Orange Zest

In a medium sized bowl, I combined the following:

1/2 C White whole wheat flour
1/2 C All-purpose unbleached flour
1/2 C Sugar
1 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp Cloves
1/8 tsp Ground mace
2 tsp baking powder

I use the two flours because I prefer whole wheat flour for the fact that it is less processed and more nutritious than all-purpose flours. White whole wheat is wonderful to bake with, and has a higher rise than regular whole wheat flours, but I find that the end product can still be somewhat dense. The compromise of 50/50 seems to work better (as compared to the 1:2 general rule when using traditional whole wheat flour). In places where the end result is not expected to rise (as in the topping recipe below), I generally use the white whole wheat exclusively.

In a larger bowl, I combined:

1 Egg
1/2 C Milk
2 tsp Butter, melted
The zest of half an orange

Once the egg was evenly distributed and these ingredients were well blended, I added the flour mixture and stirred until the batter was smooth.

After pouring the batter into a 9x9 pan and making sure it was evenly distributed, I topped it with about 1 1/2 cups sliced, fresh strawberries.

In the medium bowl that had held the flour mixture, I combined:

1/2 C White whole wheat flour
1/2 C Brown sugar
1/4 C Rolled oats
1/4 C Butter, softened
1/4 C Nuts, chopped

I combined these to a crumble using my hand in the bowl and evenly distributed it over the top of the strawberries, then baked it for approximately 30 minutes.

The end result:



And this is what it looked like on the plate. The combination of the crunchy, crumbly topping, the tart and sweet strawberries, and the orange zested spice cake underneath was delicious and flavorful, combining a variety of flavors and textures in each bite.



What I would do differently next time:

Thanks to my electric oven, some of the peaks of the topping blackened. Next time, I will probably cover the pan with aluminum foil for the first half of baking to prevent this.

Also, I would probably cut as much as half of the sugar next time. This cake is delicious as is, but the worst thing in it is the full cup of sugar (between the cake and the topping) in addition to the natural sugars in the strawberries. I think next time I'll use 1/4 cup each in the cake and topping.

The vote:

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

I will definitely be making this again. One of my guinea pigs went back for more.... twice. It's a spicy, fruity, moist and soft cake with a wonderfully nutty and sweet crunchy topping that's basically impossible to refuse.

From Dirt to Digestion

My plan to start writing a food research blog has failed. When I came up with the idea, I was a week out from seeing Michael Pollan speak at Benaroya Hall and had some very lofty ideas about what I wanted to work on. Unfortunately, I’m just not in the place I need to be right now to write the kind of blog I was dreaming of. One day, the research bug will hit me so hard it will knock me into a forgotten set of Encyclopedia Britannica, but for now, let’s just say that my lofty ideals regarding food still hold true and that I want to share them with you.

I’ve been experiencing a measure of pride lately as we dig up fresh garden beds, shop for edible seed starts and start some of our own. It’s exciting to put a plant in the ground and watch it grow; it’s more exciting to put a plant in the ground knowing that it will grow into something I can eat. Food is an amazing thing to me and I honestly can’t find much in life that’s more exciting than putting a seed in the dirt and giving it some water, watching it get bigger daily and eventually turn into something I can eat, but that’s not where the fun stops at all! The real blast for me is carrying that thing I miraculously created out of dirt, water and sunlight into the kitchen and finding the best way to eat it – that is, of course, if it gets that far. Untold pounds of produce have passed through my hands over the decades, never to even see a kitchen before I’d consumed them. From dirt to digestion in a matter of moments; you simply can’t get more flavorful, nutritious food than that.

I was never a kid who had to be told to eat my veggies unless it was zucchini which, to be fair, my mother seemed to think was acceptable in boiled form. Between my parents’ house and the family farm, I was rarely out of arm’s reach of a fresh piece of fruit just fallen from the tree, a vegetable ready for plucking off its vine, an edible flower or a pleasantly munchable herb. In my family, a walk through the yard was the best way to get an afternoon snack, and dinner often had a carbon footprint of about 100 yards – and that only because we kept our meat chickens and turkeys up the hill.

Thinking back on this childhood in Eden (and how little I really appreciated it at the time), I recognize several things. For one, I was healthier. Working in the gardens and snacking off the plants around me as I went was just plain healthier than sitting on my ass in a windowless office eating microwaved leftovers of last night’s dinner. Also, I was far more in tune with the seasons. When you’re working the land, you KNOW when winter is coming, and spring is the most exciting time of the year. The plants and the sky tell you when it is. Living in an apartment in the city and working in the previously mentioned windowless office, it’s quite easy to miss the early signs of weather change and not fully realize what season it is until it’s in full swing. I also cannot deny that my food tasted better. When I buy conventionally raised eggs from the grocery store and think about the ones we used to raise, I’m repulsed by the colorless, runny slime I see before me and want to call the whole dish off. Yolks should be bright, sunshine yellow and whites should be almost like gel; able to hold up on their own, not running all over the pan.

It has recently been declared that we have entered an entirely new historic epoch – one not named after geology or any natural Earth processes that might be going on. The new epoch we are in has been dubbed Anthropocene, so named for the influence humans have had and continue to exert on the natural world. In this epoch, people live in cities and gather food that has been manufactured by machines and is presented in boxes and bags inside buildings illuminated with artificial light; gone is the stark reality of hunting and foraging or going without. A very small percentage of the offerings in a grocery store actually resemble the kind of food I ate growing up. For many, food is now their closest connection to nature, and even that is several steps removed from natural processes.

The Anthropocene human doesn’t even have to know what season it is because the same foods are available to them year-round. There are no seasonal limitations in the modern industrial food chain (there is also very little real food, but that’s an entry for another day). The modern human has a job to do and doesn’t have time to feed him/herself, and often not the skills to do it, either. A great many modern humans in America do not know how to find food in the wild, grow food in their backyards, or cook food in their kitchens.

We live in an epoch of urban sprawl where food is valued not for its flavor or its origins and creation, but for its speed, convenience and cost. Food is the only thing we buy where we almost always think cheaper is better, regardless of how it was made. Take, for instance, two hamburgers: One is made from locally raised cows that lived outside and ate grass, has cheese that came from a local dairy, tomatoes, lettuce and onions from the garden down the street, homemade condiments and fresh, homemade buns, but costs about $12 with a side of locally grown French fried potatoes. The other hamburger was raised in a CAFO on corn and always had a roof over its head, has a plasticky slice of pasteurized, processed, American cheese food product on it, doesn’t have a tomato because of a cold snap in California, lettuce and onions of unknown origin, commercially made condiments and an enriched bun with no flavor that’s going to turn to gluey paste as soon as you bite into it, but only costs $6 with a side of genetically engineered French fried Russet potatoes. In a survey of 100 members of the general public that I conducted back in college (Fall, 2004), 67 respondents would have gone for the latter just because it was cheaper and $6 was about the value they put on a hamburger. Of those 67, only 23 admitted that the first burger would have tasted better, but still didn’t want to spend the money on it.

In other countries, food is part of the culture. The French think they taught the rest of us how to cook. The Chinese never greet a guest without offering them something to eat and drink. Major holidays and festivals will send people to work in their kitchens for days and even weeks at a time in preparation of the festivities. In America, people hire chain grocery stores to create their side dishes for them because they only have time (or often the skills) to handle more than one dish themselves. In America, food is something you grab on your way to the next thing, and this baffles my mind because we still mostly judge food by its flavor – do I enjoy eating this? – but we’ve also fallen victim to Nutritionalism, wherein we judge our food purely by what we know about it scientifically (completely forgetting that this is constantly changing).

Maybe I’ve been spoiled. Maybe growing up the way I did put some high and mighty ideas in my head about what food should be. But I see the modern industrial food chain making people sick and creating ignorance; there are people who don’t know that milk comes from cows or that chicken meat actually comes from those funny-looking flightless birds, and they can’t identify fresh produce just by looking at it because it’s not available in the urban centers in which they live. Yes! In the United States of America, the land of plenty where everything is over-produced, there are places where people do not have access to unprocessed, perishable food. But what I don’t understand at all is why more people aren’t interested in their food before it hits their mouths.

I have felt such great pride lately as I recreate my kitchen and my life to cut down on waste and grow and preserve as much of my own food as possible. I feel grateful for the ability to wean myself even further off the industrial food chain as I learn quick and easy bread recipes, how to make yogurt and collect wild yeast. My goal is to stop buying anything I can make myself, and as a result, I’m learning so much awesome stuff and cutting down on waste and consumption (not to mention cutting my grocery bill in half!) as I go. I wish that I could imbue those around me with this same curiosity and passion and inspire them to excitement about something as simple and complex as a tomato. We spend so much of our lives eating – in fact, we die if we don’t – and good food is such a pleasurable experience that skipping to the meal without truly understanding and taking part in the process of getting it to the table seems like a disrespectful failure and a slap in the face of what it means to be human.

Eat to Live/Live to Eat

Do you eat to live, or do you live to eat? It’s a philosophical question that often requires some thought due simply to the fact that the respondent probably hasn’t previously contemplated it. On the surface, it’s a question of whether a person loves and savors food or whether they see it as a means of survival. The person who lives to eat is much more likely to see food as a philosophic and political focus; the person who eats to live likely eats only to sustain themselves, doesn’t particularly care what they eat, and does not see (or perhaps simply does not care about) the philosophic and political aspects of food. Notoriously, most of America eats to live and doesn’t even understand the difference.

My own relationship with food, now thirty-three years long, is varied and, as I’ve come to realize in recent years, somewhat unique. First off, I grew up with a stay-at-home mother who managed the household, raised the kids, did all the cooking, cleaning and laundry and was, for the most part, pretty damn good at it. When I was little, we lived in New England and I remember having hot dogs and Burger King for dinner, but there was also homemade macaroni and cheese and fried spam sandwiches. Not to say that fruits and vegetables and homemade dinners were uncommon or rare; they absolutely were not. But all of our food came from the grocery store, and much of it came from bags, boxes and cans. But things changed drastically after we moved to Oregon.

In Oregon, my grandmother and uncles were running a small commercial organic vegetable farm and fruit orchard on five acres of land. They had chickens for eggs, specialized in gourmet lettuces (before such things were popular), had somewhere near 30 different types of fruit (and a couple of almond trees), and sold their goods to local gourmet restaurants, of which there are many in southern Oregon. Their outlook on food was quite a bit different than my mother’s; they ate food they grew themselves, they bought plain yogurt and added their own fruit to it, they didn’t eat hot dogs because they were too busy barbecuing turkeys and salmon in herbal rubs they grew themselves. While we were piling Mom’s uber-gooey mac and cheese onto our plates at the kitchen table, my uncles were dining on pheasant and salads separated from the ground not thirty minutes before, garnished with edible flowers (another specialty of the farm’s) and served in the open air under the trees of the orchard with a locally brewed beer.

When we moved to Oregon and joined in on the turkey barbecues, my mother’s cooking style changed drastically. Fewer things came from boxes and cans and most of our vegetables came from our own backyard. For a few years, she and a friend even raised their own chickens (and turkeys, a few times); by the end of the summer, they would each have fifty chickens apiece in the deep freeze to help get our families through the winter. She started using herbs instead of breading, which I did not at first appreciate. We grew so much zucchini that I grew to thoroughly loathe it (something that took me 10 years of adulthood to finally get past). Everything we grew was organic because pesticides, at the very least, get into the ground water. You can rinse your veggies off, but you can’t rinse your water off was the thinking that seemed to support the practice.

My family weren’t food politicians in any sense; when they needed a vegetable they didn’t have or couldn’t grow, they bought it and it was rarely organic, locally grown or necessarily in season. My parents grew vegetables and raised chickens because it was cheaper than buying them and we were dirt poor. While my parents had found a way to save money, my uncles had found a way to make money. They hired me to work on the farm during the summers, helping to pick and wash the orders, mow the orchard, pick fruit (blackberry duty was much dreaded) and be the go-for person when items needed to be retrieved. I probably wasn’t needed, but my uncles did me a huge favor that I admittedly didn’t recognize at the time by paying me to help.

I came to deeply appreciate good food during this period and in my first years of adulthood, when I neither cooked nor knew how to cook, I always thought nostalgically of my family’s cooking. Though my mother had threatened me with cooking lessons, I had always made sure to avoid them as I had no desire to be stuck in the kitchen with my mother telling me what to do. So of course, when I moved out had absolutely no idea how to cook for myself and began to live off things like pasta and cheese (not even macaroni and cheese – this was just pasta with grated cheese sprinkled over the top), Subway sandwiches, ramen, rice-a-roni and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Eventually (and inevitably), I got sick of this diet and was too poor to continue buying Subway almost daily. I started making bread because of strong memories of my mother and grandmother making bread on a regular basis when I was a kid. I also knew I could get a lot more loaves out of a bag of flour than I could out of a bag of bread. I started using Pasta-roni mixes and adding things like chicken and fresh mushrooms to them. After a while, I started figuring that I could make the same things without mixes, so I started experimenting with cooking from scratch.

My early experiments, though almost always delicious and accompanied by fresh salads or steamed vegetables, weren’t exactly healthy; I’m amazed that there are survivors of my twice-baked potato and buttered steak dinners. But over time, I slowly came back to the food principals with which I had grown up on the farm: Eat fresh, eat healthy, eat well. This captivated me. In order to do this right, I realized that following recipes wasn’t going to cut it; I needed to learn about food, I needed to know how food worked, where it came from and what it was for. As an anthropology student in college, I initially intended to study ethnomusicology. But I quickly found myself getting more interested in the food served at the festivals and rituals I studied than in the music being played at them. At the same time, I found myself avoiding homework by playing endlessly in the kitchen. Within a couple of terms, I changed my focus and instead studied American food culture. I learned about fast food and slow food, I read Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and MFK Fisher. I read my cookbooks like they were NY Times bestsellers and absorbed the Food Channel’s eye candy (including Giada De Laurentiis) like a sponge.

I became a person who lives to eat; I view food holistically as a philosophy and way of life. Some things about our food are so fundamentally human (bread making!) and others are so completely wrong (GMO Round-Up Ready Corn by Monsanto), but I think many are just forgotten by the average American practitioner of nutritionism (a paradigm that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine the value of individual food stuffs in the diet). I don’t believe that vegetables come in bags, that everything we eat needs to be laced with corn and sodium or that feed lot beef is healthy and good for you. I firmly believe that until recently, humans coexisted with the Earth symbiotically and that Americans are now eating ourselves – and the planet – to death.

After close to a decade of studying food, food culture and food politics, I hope that I might be able to impart some small amount of wisdom regarding our relationship with food. In the coming weeks, I intend to post a series of blogs on food, our relationship with it, and its current place in the world through topics such as corn, fast food, nutritionism, GMO’s, and the cultural contexts of eating. I hope for these to be a catalyst for discussion and food for thought; maybe you’ll even stop eating to live, and start living to eat.