Month: November 2015

Add Another Thing

~ mary_m ~ Leave a comment

Once upon a time, in a life before kids, I took a short series of cooking classes with John Ash. He’s a nice guy, with a much pickier palate than mine.

I’ve retained three things from those classes, though I only practice two of them:

  • If you blanch your basil for pesto, it will stay green rather than oxidizing. (I never bother.)
  • You can tame raw garlic (for pesto or salad dressing or …) by blanching it in boiling water for about a minute. (This one I do bother with. Tossing individual cloves in a small sauté pan in water to cover is quick and easy and does make a difference.)
  • If a dish doesn’t taste quite right, add a taste element that isn’t yet represented: sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, sour, umami.

That last one, while possibly obvious, is a trick which has saved me from a boring dish countless times. Today, it was squash soup. A simple base of sautéed onions, squash, chicken stock, a middle-eastern spice blend from a friend. This was good! But… it needed something. It had sweet, umami, and a bit of spice. I added some sherry (round and nutty, yet still counts as sour) and it was much better.

Then, of course, my 7 year old refused to even try it (though he did have several servings of salad).

Talking About Cows with Kids

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Recently we were on a lovely, Halloween candy detoxing, ramble through the local woods when the conversation turned to pollution and greenhouse gases. My eight-year-old chimed in with the sober, mostly accurate news that cows burp methane, a greenhouse gas, at alarming rates. Yep, they sure do, I agreed, though I don’t know if your numbers are exactly accurate and there are many factors to consider regarding meat.

I talked some about what I do, which is try to source our meat as carefully as possible, from farmers I feel are doing their best for their land and their animals, and to try to eat nose-to-tail, and then we talked about what more we could do. He suggested if we have salad with every meal we might eat less meat. I brought up meatless Mondays. The truth is neither of us (or anyone else in the household) wants to give up meat altogether. I’ve learned, through trying many different ways of eating, that eating meat makes my body and brain feel better than being vegetarian or vegan, despite knowing something about nutrition and how to prepare a good vegetarian diet. I also have a younger child who already limits what he’ll eat to relatively few things; eliminating chicken and ham would take out major protein sources, eliminating milk would be a huge nutritional blow. In the end, we didn’t come to any conclusions.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about this question. I want my family to eat delicious, nurturing food. I want to live responsibly in the world. I’m a car driving American who is very fond of good steak, living in a place where it’s much much easier to make a good salad in July than it is in November. I have a kid who would gladly live solely on bread, butter, and milk if I let him and will rarely try something new. (I have another kid who is an adventurous eater, for which I am grateful, but I still have to feed both of them.) I think about this, a lot. I also, sometimes, just feed my family hotdogs and boxed mac and cheese.

I <3 Food Writing (More than Recipes)

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I own a full bookcase worth of cookbooks. It is only one bookcase because every time (OK, sometimes a year after every time) it goes over, I do an emotionally traumatic cull and let something go. I love my cookbooks.

I don’t cook much out of books, though. I read them, often cover to cover when I first get them, and then I keep them around for inspiration. If I’m attempting something new or complicated (or old and beloved but not set in stone), I’ll pull out a few different books to read their variations on the theme. I’m generally too non-compliant to follow any recipe word for word. (Unless its chemistry dictates that as the only wise choice, and sometimes, to my chagrin, not even then.)

I sometimes forget that my non-compliance runs deep when I discover new (to me) online food writing. I love reading food blogs as much as I love cookbooks. When I fall in love with a writer, I’ll often try their recipes word for word. And then, after the first few, I relearn the lesson. I’m just not wired that way.

Today, it was the Food Lab’s Ultra-Gooey Stovetop Mac and Cheese. This is an awesome article, full of both science and cheese. I wanted to love the recipe, too. More than that, I hoped to convince my kids to love it, especially the one who refuses to eat “good” mac and cheese, but loves the box kind. This one has real cheese! No dice, though. Too gooey. I suppose I should have guessed from the name and I definitely should have guessed from the cheese to pasta ratio, but I wanted to believe! Next time, I’ll use twice as much pasta. (You may love it as written! I know people who do! Maybe we’re just weird anti-goo people. Sure is a lot of cheese to pasta though.)

It’s Just a Muffin

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With apologies to my gluten intolerant and paleo friends, I’m currently between paying gigs, it’s Autumn, and therefore I’m baking a lot. This topic is liable to crop up more than once in the coming weeks.

Today, the ravenous hordes kids will be home for the afternoon with a couple friends to play D & D, and (partly in an effort to get them to eat something besides every cracker or corn chip in the house) I’m making muffins. Just muffins. Nothing fancy.

Just Muffins go something like this*:

  • 8 oz (1 and a half generous cups) some blend of whole grain flours, maybe with 1/4 rolled oats (4 parts)
  • 2 oz (1 generous quarter cup)  sugar or some similar sweetener (1 part)
  • 8 oz (1 cup) milk or some similar liquid (4 parts)
  • 2 eggs (2 parts)
  • 2 oz (4T, half a stick) melted butter or oil (1 part)
  • scant 1.5 tsp baking powder (1 tsp per 5 oz flour)
  • .75 tsp salt (.5 tsp per 5 oz flour)
  • fruit, nuts, etc.
  • spices

Mix wet ingredients and dry ingredients separately, adding additions such as fruit and nuts to the dry, then fold together until just blended. Bake at 350ºF for ~20 minutes. 8 oz flour yields a dozen or so regular size muffins. 

Within the basic ratios and keeping the baking powder standard, I tend to vary these muffins quite a bit. Today version has spelt flour, buttermilk and milk for the liquid (because I had a tiny bit of buttermilk hanging around), a chopped apple, some cranberries, some apple pie spice. I sprinkled the tops with more apple pie spice mixed with sugar before baking. (Sprinkling the tops with something + sugar is a super easy way to make Just Muffins a little bit more like treats without adding much more sugar. NB: This also works with scones.) They smell delicious.

I have this formula memorized, which means I can often produce muffins as a handy houseguest trick, as well as a quick way to sate the hordes kids. (To take the muffins savory instead of sweet, just dial back the sweetener.) Baking warms the house on a chilly afternoon and muffins go great with tea, which goes great with Autumn.

*Adapted from Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, which is often how I roll when baking.

A Bit of a Manifesto

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I resist online food writing for a variety of reasons: laziness, fear of inadequacy, actual inadequacy. I also resist because I’m no fan of following (or testing) recipes and because, well, I don’t believe there are real answers to anything; whatever I think today, I may just change my mind tomorrow.

That said, I am creating this space to write about food, and, with luck, to read what you, my mysterious yet possible audience, think about food, because food is one of my favorite things. You won’t find many painstaking recipes here. I hope you’ll find instead something to ponder and, perhaps, some inspiration.

That said, here are some things I think today, and will probably think tomorrow, about food & cooking:

Food connects. If I trace dinner far enough back, I find myself contemplating soil organisms and what feeds them. If I trace dinner wide enough, I find the cultures across the globe that influenced this recipe, or that use of a utensil. Every time I cook, I am linked back through the generations of everyone who has cooked. I am linked to everyone at my table and everyone sharing a table with others, across the globe. Much depends on dinner*.

There is no absolute right. This is true both for how we cook, and for how we eat. Yes, there are the ways things have been done and mostly worked out for most people. There are chemical reactions in baking that are fairly reliable. There are rules; those rules are generally breakable. There is huge variation in what produce tastes like, in how baked goods react to the weather, in what we can afford (not just in terms of money, but also time and effort). There is huge variation in what nourishes us. There is huge variation in what we like.

Every choice I make (about food, about anything) has some angle I haven’t considered, some piece of information I acted without or in spite of. Every area is a grey area. There is always more to learn. I still have to eat, though. I have to decide (over and over and over again). I do what I can, when I can, and I try to let the rest go. There is no perfect.

*“Much Depends on Dinner” is the title of a book by Margaret Visser which I haven’t read, but probably would love.