tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-385560212024-03-19T03:17:15.886-04:00Better Politics Through FoodEating my way towards the revolution.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-18757477726225591522007-07-10T22:16:00.000-04:002007-07-10T22:40:41.148-04:00How To Cook Dinner When It Is A Million Goddamned Degrees1. Before you leave the house in the morning, put a large glass jar full of water and dried beans where it will get sun all day. (If you are lucky, your roommate will move it to follow the sun as the day goes on.)<br /><br />2. When you get home, after you have showered, put on boxer shorts and a ribbed tank top, and had three glasses of sun tea, carry your rice cooker (preferably a large one with a vented top) to the back porch, and plug it in. (If you are not lucky enough to have an outlet on your back porch, run an extension cord.) Add the beans and a bunch more water. Cook for 10-15 minutes, or until the beans are done (the skins split when you blow on them, and then are soft through).<br /><br />3. When the beans are done, add raw rice, chopped <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/splatworldwide/142563055/">garlic</a> <a href="http://blog.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2006/06/my_friend_the_garlic_scape_1.html">scapes </a>, whole cumin, whole dried chipotle peppers, and salt. Let them cook.<br /><br />4. When the rice is about cooked through, stir in chopped fresh green beans (or snow peas, fresh peas, etc).<br /><br />5. Let cool. Eat, still in your underwear, in front of an open screen door with the ceiling fan on high. Follow with lemon sorbet.<br /><br />-------<br /><br />I also cook in the crockpot on the porch sometimes. And last night, we got takeout. What do you when it's too hot to breathe, let alone make dinner?ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com67tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-83391344778930108072007-07-08T10:06:00.000-04:002007-07-09T10:07:03.836-04:00Gravy Tasting<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/590779042/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1279/590779042_6a72c1f3c9.jpg" alt="The Table is Set" height="375" width="500" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">We had a gravy tasting the other night.<br /><br />As a vegetarian and gluten-free household, we don't eat normal, wheat-thickened, chicken-juice-based gravy. But gravy is good. Gravy is smooth and fatty and comforting. Gravy is biscuits and gravy at a two AM diner, gravy is that one Thanksgiving that actually felt like a Rockwell painting, gravy is birthday dinners and everything right with the world.<br /><br />I grew up in a household where gravy was never from a can or jar or packet. This was not because my mom was some sort of anti-packaged-food zealot; it was just because gravy is idiotically easy to make. You take the the broth from under your turkey, you make a roux, you add the broth and some canned chicken broth. This was always done while the family was frantically carrying the last few dishes to the holdiay table, and while my dad was pouring ginger ale into our fancy glasses and my brother was lighting the candles. It was not a moment of stress. Gravy was just the last thing to get made.<br /><br />But I was worried about making vegetarian gravy, actually. I was worried that using this method would never produce gravy that tasted like gravy; I was worried it would taste like vegetables instead. Not that I don't like vegetables...but that's not gravy. So I was in Whole Foods, and saw some instant gravy packets. I picked them up, went home, and announced to the family, "We're having a gravy tasting tonight."<br /><br />"OK," they said.<br /></div></div><br />The gravy tasting was held outside, because it was hot and sticky, and because I love nothing more than to grill things. We gathered around our new backyard table in our deck chairs that I trashpicked off the street.<br /><br />The accompanying dishes were:<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/590779298/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1272/590779298_73e9e3a252_m.jpg" alt="Grilled Snowpeas" height="180" width="240" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/590779354/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1438/590779354_44abc2d677_m.jpg" alt="Grilled Broccolini, Small Potatoes, and Marinated Summer Squash" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Snowpeas, cooked in tin foil on the grill<br />Grilled Broccolini<br />Grilled New Potatoes<br />Grilled Marinated Summer Squash (this one was a palate cleanser)<br /></div><br />However, what you really care about is the gravy. I had four different varieties. All but one were vegan and cholesterol free; all of them were gluten-free, vegetarian, and a lot healthier for you than regular gravy. Here are the brands:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/748233262/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1008/748233262_9789365c75.jpg" alt="gravy brands" height="375" width="500" /></a><br /></div><br />The brands are:<br />#1: Road's End Organics Golden Gravy Mix, purchased at Whole Foods Columbus Circle, makes one cup of gravy<br />#2: Road's End Organics Savory Herb Gravy Mix, purchased at Whole Foods Columbus Circle, makes one cup of gravy<br />#3: Orgran Natural Gravy Mix, purchased at Fairway in Red Hook, Brooklyn, makes a lot of servings<br />#4: Pacific Organic Mushroom Broth, purchased at the Park Slope Food Coop, makes 4 1-cup portions of gravy (or some mushroom soup).<br /><br />Directions for the first three were identical: boil water, add powder, let thicken five minutes, serve. For the fourth, I melted butter in the pan, added an equal amount of cornstarch, let it cook for a moment, and then added a cup of mushroom broth. The thing to remember (and which I always forget) is that cornstarch roux has much less holding power than flour roux. This amount of broth probably could have handled 4 tbsp each of butter and cornstarch before it got too thick.<br /><br />And here is what they looked like, cooked and in their bowls.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/590779162/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1381/590779162_ea32a249fe_m.jpg" alt="Numbers 1 and 2" height="180" width="240" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/590779206/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1330/590779206_ca71bfd532_m.jpg" alt="Numbers 3 and 4" height="240" width="180" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Number 1 on the right, #2 on the left Number 3 on top, #4 on bottom<br /></div><br />Numbers 1 & 2 had started to congeal unpleasantly by the time they were served, about 5-10 minutes after cooking. When stirred, they became a good consistency again...until they set up again. Number 3 remained a good consistency throughout. Number 4 was quite runny, because I only used 2tbsp each of butter and cornstarch.<br /><br />So, what was the verdict?<br /><br />Very, very mixed. None of them were prima facie disgusting. Number one had the Boy, who grew up in the South, singing about how we needed to make biscuits and have biscuits and gravy RIGHT THEN. However, that was the closest we got to an endorsement of the bunch. Number 2 tasted just like #1, only with a bunch of store-bought "Italian Seasoning Blend" dumped in. Not bad, and decent with the broccolini...but not gravy. Number 3 tasted like precisely nothing; no bad aftertaste, but no substantive taste at all. Number 4 tasted like mushrooms; the Boy compared it to mushroom soup. However, even he (the biggest mushroom lover in the bunch) was dissastisfied with its gravy-potential.<br /><br />Unfortunately, we cannot whole-heartedly endorse any of these. If you're a vegetarian who has been craving those biscuits and gravy of your childhood, Road's End Organics Golden Gravy Mix will make you feel like a meat-eating kid again. But, apart from that, there isn't much going on here.<br /><br />However, I'm wondering about the Orgran mix. (Partially because I still have most of the bag in my cabinet, and I dislike throwing things away.) As I said, you need a lot of cornstarch roux to make a gravy come together, and rice flour can sometimes produce an unpleasant grittyness. But one tablespoon of the Orgran mix turned a cup of water into a thick, brown gel. Granted, it didn't taste like anything, but it definitely has thickening power. My next gravy experiment will probably be to take vegetable broth (Imagine's No-Chicken Broth is the store-bought house favorite, or I make my own) and thicken it with the Orgran mix. Maybe then I'll have found a gravy worth eating.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-44510530850684221732007-07-06T23:13:00.000-04:002007-07-06T23:14:48.442-04:00Culinary Highlights of My Honeymoon, Part 1 (of 10 or so)I was originally going to do my honeymoon food review all in one piece. However, <a href="http://wherestherevolution.blogspot.com">Bazu'</a>s recent updates from her trip to Puerto Rico, while making me desperate to get on a plane, also reminded me that posts with lots of photos take forever to load in my RSS reader. On the off chance any of you have the same problem, I'll be doing these a few at a time.<br /><br />In any case:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Culinary Highlight #1: <span style="font-style: italic;">Breakfast on Amtrak #97, the Silver Meteor, Between Jesup, GA and Jacksonville, FL</span></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/743909282/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1043/743909282_8e832bf71f_m.jpg" alt="departures board, penn station" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /></div><br /><br />We had boarded the train the afternoon before in New York, and were about half way through our twenty-seven hour tour of the Eastern US from the comforts of an 8 by 4 bunk. It was the early dawn, and we were bleary-eyed from a night spent trying very hard to sleep in a single bunk...and then giving up and splitting up onto two bunks. We stumbled into the dining car to make sure that we got that breakfast we had paid for with our sleeping compartment tickets, before they stopped serving.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/743186355/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1045/743186355_03879483cc_m.jpg" alt="welcome aboard" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /></div><br />My memories of the meal are almost hallucinatory, blinded by exhaustion and the rhythm of the train rocking slowly along its path. It was not yet eight. The light streamed through the train car windows, and the flat rural landscape of South Georgia tore by us at seventy miles an hour. We sat alone at a table together. I drank hot tea with two lemon slices and a sugar. We were in a small hum of sleepyness and love, and we ordered breakfast.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/514292228/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/199/514292228_2ba3655058_m.jpg" alt="wife's breakfast on the silver meteor" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /></div><br />The Wife ordered the 'breakfast scramble,' which came with French toast. She asked for them not bring the French toast, but they forgot. Luckily, I was able to extract them for my own purposes. The Wife describes it as "actually decent...cheesy without really noticing the cheese...and the potato was sooooo soft, it almost melted...and whatever the sausage was was decent, and the egg was ok, but the potato was sooooo good."<br /><br />I ate her French toast. If you like your French toast dry and not too eggy, than it was perfect. I really enjoyed it. I had ordered an abomination called "The Continental," which came with a lousy croissant, cereal and milk, yogurt, and very bad fruit salad. The French toast was the good part.<br /><br />We stumbled back to the room again, which had been helpfully made up by our steward, looked out the window for a few minutes, and then fell asleep until Deland.<br /><br /><br />Nota bene: on the way back I ordered the Southwest Omlette. It was much better. And the Wife was right about the potatoes being excellent.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/743186375/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1381/743186375_fc01087322_m.jpg" alt="southwest omelette" height="180" width="240" /></a></div>ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-69772286085505225702007-07-06T20:40:00.000-04:002007-07-06T20:40:16.034-04:00Be A Man (A Feminism Friday Post)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.rcs.k12.va.us/csjh/06_07_web/drewH/Knives.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.rcs.k12.va.us/csjh/06_07_web/drewH/Knives.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>I caught a rerun of an episode of Top Chef this afternoon. If you've been watching, it was the one with the barbecue challenge, where the cute southern dyke got eliminated. Towards the end of this episode, Howie and Joey get into a little argument. I'm not a fan of either of them; Joey uses the fact that he's from New York City as if it inherently means he's better than everyone else. Granted, New York City is AWESOME and INHERENTLY BETTER THAN EVERYWHERE ELSE. But you, mister, you are a schmuck, and there are lots like you here. You are un-awesome. Howie, on the other hand, is merely nothing special. He has screwed up pretty seriously in two of the four episodes so far, so I'm guessing he's no great shakes. Also, he was the first to trot out the "I'm not here to make friends" trope, which I find boring and insufficient. Both of these guys are big beefy white dudes, probably Italian, based purely on looks.<br /><br />Right after they leave the judging room to wait to find out who has been eliminated (both were ranked in the bottom four), Howie and Joey get involved in a detailed argument about the meaning of masculinity. (OK, they don't think that's what they're doing. But, dude, it so is.) Joey has just said in front of the judges that Howie should go home, because of a previous (serious) mistake and because he was in the bottom four again. Between them leaving the judges room, the editors have inserted a clip of Joey saying "My blood flows red, and competition brings out the animal in me." When they get back out to the waiting room, Joey yells at Howie to "step up and be a man."<br /><br />What, precisely does "be a man" mean here? Cooking is simultaneously a feminized field (the proper domain of the housewife, the private sphere par excellence, the location in which to be barefoot and pregnant), and a masculinized field (knives, fire, people yelling at each other, military metaphors, a lot of cock-measuring, pun intended). So clearly, to "be a man" is to force the act of being a chef into that masculinized field, to abolish the gender ambiguity. Joey is attacking Howie for being insufficiently aggressive. In front of the judges, Howie apologied for his work being not very good and vowed to do better. This was too feminine for Joey; he wanted Howie to be aggressive, defensive--to enact a sort of violent masculinity.<br /><br />Howie responds to Joey in equal volume, and with an equally aggressive tone of voice. He says to Joey, "You've been blaming everybody else for your bullshit. Shake somebody's hand to be a fucking man. You be a fucking man." Here, he argues that masculinity is not about aggression. It isn't about being mean enough or loud enough. Instead, it is about responsibility. Joey does not take responsibility for his mistakes in cooking; his statements in front of the judges, and in general, show a disregard for the opinions of others. Howie is willing to admit his mistakes (his inability to get one of his proteins plated in an earlier challenge, for instance) and to own up to them. This, in his opinion, makes him more of a man than Joey. If he had been eliminated, he says "I woulda been a fucking man about it, but you wanna bitch like a little girl" about the possibility of elimination. At this point, Joey recedes into an adolescent sulk, and we cut back to the impossibly beautiful Padma Lakshmi leading the judges.<br /><br />I think that Howie's version of masculinity is the better; I also think it 'wins the argument,' for lack of a better term. In any case, Joey gives up. But I also think that's the problem of Joey's masculinity--it only works if you get people to acquiesce to it. When Howie says, "no, MY masculinity, asshole!" Joey can just go, "whatever, dude." It's like how Eddie Izzard says--when someone yells "Bloke in a dress!" at you, they don't cope well when you say, "yeah, and?"<br /><br />What do you think--about masculinity and kitchens or about this season's Top Chef?<br /><br />(The Feminism Friday concept comes to us courtesy of <a href="http://thinkinggirl.wordpress.com/">Thinking Girl</a>. Why not reserve some space in every week for a little gender revolution?)ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-92121486295049549552007-06-22T12:31:00.001-04:002007-06-22T13:04:01.042-04:00Apology and MemeI'm back again from the Real World. Sorry about the hiatus. After getting back from the honeymoon, I collapsed into "Get! My! Life! Together!" Mode. My summer to-do list is pretty formidable:<br /><br />SCHOOL RELATED<br />1. Write and present paper at National Women's Studies Association conference, End of June<br />2. Write paper for Middle Eastern Studies Association (draft due October 15, but best to get it done now)<br />3. Start my field seminar reading and preparing for my first field exam in January (for those who aren't academics: you know how all your college professors had read the same 200 books? That's what a field seminar is for.)<br /><br />MONEY RELATED<br />1. Figure out how to make enough money to get by without stipend this summer.<br />2. Sell all the leftover wedding and other crap on Craigslist, Amazon, Ebay. (Freecycle whatever is left at the end.)<br /><br />LIFE RELATED<br />1. Clean the freakin' house.<br />2. Garden a lot.<br />3. Preserve local and organic veggies for use in the winter.<br />4. Watch a whole lot of CSI.<br />5. Blog like a lunatic.<br /><br />So far I'm doing reasonably well: the NWSA paper is just about ready to go, I'm slogging my way through incredibly boring books, I've got twice the usual babysitting which is fixing the money thing, the process of blanching and freezing veggies is proceeding apace, and there are about a million CSIs (both Las Vegas and Miami; the original is a better show, but Miami is both beautifully shot and stupid beyond my wildest dreams, so it's a different sort of pleasurable) sitting on the TiVo right now. <br /><br />Now it's time to work on the blogging thing. Bear with me. I'll probably do a post every day or every two days or so until I'm done with the posts I have in the queue.<br /><br />In the meantime, <a href="http://wherestherevolution.blogspot.com/">bazu</a> tagged me like a MILLION YEARS AGO to list some favorite blogs. I thought for a while about what I should do. A really high percentage of my readers here are foodies, I think; however, my personal blogroll is pretty evenly split into three categories: politics, feminism, and food, with a small subcategory of blogging about the academy. If anyone is interested in what academics I read, I'll be happy to share, but for now I'll post two each on politics and feminism, and one food blog.<br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.juancole.com">Informed Comment</a>. To be terribly blunt, if you aren't reading Juan Cole, you probably don't have a good sense of what is happening in Iraq. I mean, unless you are reading 3-4 Arabic newspapers a day and have a background in Iranian and Iraqi history. In which case, you're probably set. I don't always agree with Cole's analysis, but the sheer facticity of his blog makes it really necessary. Every day, he starts out his posts with a body count of Iraqis, Americans, and others killed in Iraq. I think we need that wakeup call, and I think we need it every day.</li><li><a href="http://www.abuaardvark.com">Abu Aardvark</a>. Marc Lynch writes mainly about the Arab media these days. His analysis of media, public spheres, and American-Arab relations are pretty excellent. This is a little more wonkish than IC, but, hey, I'm a doctoral candidate, I'm SUPPOSED to be a wonk.</li><li><a href="http://shabanamir.com/koonj/">Koonj.</a> Shabana Mir is an extremely smart writer. Her discussions of religion, academia, and motherhood are powerful and sensitive. She is posting less frequently than she used to (due to the very real politics of being on the academic job market), but everything she writes is still worth reading.</li><li><a href="http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/">Bitch, Ph.D</a>. Are you a woman in academia? Then get over there. All the snark you can handle, and a lot of very good writing about motherhood, the politics of women's bodies, and bras.</li><li><a href="http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com">Tigers and Strawberries</a>. Barbara's recipes for Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese food are incredibly useful if, like me, you love the flavors but can't quite figure out how to get them at home. She is very methodical in how she writes, which is an absolute blessing. Also she has a cute baby who she posts pictures of a lot. (I'm realizing I'm writing about babies a lot. Hmm.)</li></ul>OK! Back to the CSI watching and green-bean-blanching. It's a good life.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-47636711044643512232007-05-26T01:09:00.000-04:002007-05-26T01:37:59.253-04:00YizardsA few weeks back, the Princess (remember her? Probably not; no one was reading this blog <a href="http://betterpoliticsthroughfood.blogspot.com/2007/01/balanced-meal.html">back then</a>. Back to the <a href="http://betterpoliticsthroughfood.blogspot.com/2007/01/cast-of-characters.html">Cast of Characters</a> with you!) and I were on the bus to the library. I had started talking, why I don't know, about lizards.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/514283306/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/204/514283306_fd973687f0_m.jpg" alt="lizard on rock" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /></div><br />"I don't yike yizards," the Princess said. She hasn't yet mastered the [l] phoneme, although she is much better with [r] than most three-year-olds. (Linguistically, they're related. It's been a long time since freshman linguistics, so I can't tell you more than that, but I'm right.) The problem is, this is addictive. After a while you start asking her if she wants orange juice or yemonade, or telling her that the yibrary is two blocks away. "Yike" for "like" has become a common substitution in the house, if one is trying to be particularly cute or make a point.<br /><br />"Why don't you like lizards?" I asked.<br /><br />"They are scary and yucky and they taste bad," she said.<br /><br />They taste bad?<br /><br />The Wife and I just listened to a fascinating <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/02/04">episode</a> of <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/">Radio Lab</a> while driving around Miami earlier this week. Radio Lab is an excellent combination of geekery and good audio production, made at WNYC, our hometown NPR, and available--for free--through iTunes and probably various other means of obtaining podcasts. Anyway, they were talking about the notion of the self, and how humans come to have it, and one of the things they talked about was how we have the ability to come up with abstract concepts. So we can look at a red thing, and understand red as separate from the other properties of it. We can put elements together--for instance, we can see a bird, and see a baby, and imagine a winged baby, a cherub.<br /><br />I wonder if this isn't how we imagine food. We are able to assign qualities to it, in advance of tasting it. When someone says something tastes like cloves, I can imagine it, to a limited extent, because I can separate out the "clove-taste" element of a clove, as separate from the shape, the texture, the unpleasant sensation of biting down on one unexpectedly in your pumpkin pie, the way they feel when you push them into an orange. If someone tells me that a new food is bitter, or sweet, or floral, then I can think of it, and I know what it tastes like, maybe, a little.<br /><br />How does the Princess know lizards taste bad?<br /><br />What qualities is she able to assign to them, from her understanding of lizards? She has only seen them on television, and at the children's museum. Is it the smell? The fact that they are scaly? The fact that she is a little frightened of them?<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/514283312/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/207/514283312_6e2c4eb203_m.jpg" alt="camoflage lizard" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /></div><br />Me? I don't know what lizards taste like. Everyone says chicken, but I think that's a lack of imagination. What I do know is I love the little lizards that seem to be everywhere I look right about now. I first saw a wild lizard the first time I went to France; they lay sunning themselves on the deck near the pool, just like we did. They are all over Florida, fast ones, ones with brown heads and black bodies and ones with speckles and even some green ones. They make this place seem magical. I love to watch them scurry away from our footsteps, to see them become still and hope I don't see them.<br /><br />I yike yizards. Someday, I'll have to convince the Princess.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-15914912757456155692007-05-20T23:16:00.000-04:002007-05-20T23:16:15.501-04:00I Got Married.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/222/498066984_c7a3b79cda.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/222/498066984_c7a3b79cda.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I guess she really is The Wife now, huh?<br /><br />(That's me doing the dipping, and her laughing and desperately hoping my first act of marriage is not to drop her, on the roof of our reception space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.)<br /><br />The wedding was last Saturday, and it was fabulous. There were friends. There was family. There were explosions of drama--exes meeting, crazy relatives being crazy, lost cabs, flowergirl fits, etc. There were freight elevator rides, walks along the Brooklyn waterfront, and a solid hour of silence and singing and me crying the entire. freaking. time.<br /><br />Oh yeah. And there was cake.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/187/498091781_991076ce4e.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/187/498091781_991076ce4e.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">The blue things: cupcakes from <a href="http://www.crumbsbakeshop.com/">Crumbs</a>. The orange things up front: sweets from <a href="http://www.sukhadia.com/">Sukhadia's</a>. The assorted things in bowls--chocolate covered raisins, Lindt truffles, etc. The white thing up front: a gluten-free buttercream-iced vanilla cake (I let her pick) from <a href="http://www.mrritts.com/">Mr. Ritts</a> in Philadelphia, where our family is from.</span><br /><br />The food decision that the Wife and I made that defined the entire wedding for us was the decision to have all the food be vegetarian and gluten free. As I talked about in my <a href="http://betterpoliticsthroughfood.blogspot.com/2007/01/ontological-status-of-my-deprivation.html">ontology of eating</a> post, we both have very good, very different reasons for eating the way we do. I have a strong ethical conviction that eating meat is bad (and she shares it partially), and she has a strong ethical conviction that eating gluten is bad for her (and I share it totally, for her). So there wasn't any meat laying around, although there was some cheese, since I still eat it; there wasn't any gluten served except in the form of cupcakes for the guests. (A gluten-free wedding cake was just too darn expensive.)<br /><br />The problem is that no one liked this decision but us. My mother-in-law kept asking what we would serve the guests who don't want to eat gluten-free. An aunt of mine let us know that, since we asked for dietary restrictions, several of my family members eat meat, "though they'd be OK with fish."<br /><br />God forbid if they knew that we almost served vegan cupcakes. (We did get a dozen from <a href="http://www.menupages.com/restaurantdetails.asp?neighborhoodid=0&restaurantid=5860">'Snice</a> for our vegan guests, and almost used them for all the cupcakes...but the vanilla ones looked healthy, and we knew that would scare someone off.)<br /><br />Before the wedding, I wrote out a little list of what I wanted our wedding food to be about, in declining order of importance. It went like this:<br /><ul><li>Pleasure. I want the food to rock. I want it to be amazing. I want to eat so much my dress breaks from the strain of all of it. I want leftovers.</li><li>Politics. I want to not kill any animals for my wedding. I want what we eat to be as sustainably sourced as possible. I want Long Island wine and upstate goat cheese.</li><li>Convenience. I want not to have to deal with how it gets to the reception space. I want someone else to serve it so none of my bridesmaids have to.</li><li>Making People With No Sense Of Taste Who Are Scared Of Food Happy.</li></ul><br />And you know what? We did it, in declining order of importance. Most of the food came from <a href="http://www.tiffinwallah.us/">Tiffinwallah</a>, which is the newest branch of the masterpiece that is Chennai Garden. The wine came from <a href="http://www.vintagenewyork.com/">Vintage New York</a>, which only stocks local wines, and the flowers (though not the goat cheese, sadly) came from the Greenmarket. All of it got delivered, and we hired a staffing agency to serve it to us.<br /><br />And we ordered a goddamn gluten-free vegetarian lasagna and a bunch of roasted potatoes from <a href="http://www.fairwaymarket.com/">Fairway</a> for everyone scared of food. Because I may be pissed, but I can't hate them entirely.<br /><br />So we ate fantastically, and in celebration. I spilled curry on my dress and we have about a million bottles of Standing Stone Riesling and San Pelligrino and very decent $8 sparkling wine waiting for us at home. We danced with each other, with our fathers and mothers (and even one grandfather) and wore fabulous dresses and did I mention I cried?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/194/498063876_3ad07b0b95.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/194/498063876_3ad07b0b95.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a>And you know, I think we convinced our families in the end. At the rehersal dinner, my dad turned to me as he ate his spare ribs and said, "It was very nice of you to allow your guests to have meat tonight." And he meant it. (The best part? The Wife and I had just chosen the restaurant. Dad was footing the bill.)<br /><br />This is how we teach our politics. We live joyfully in them. We bring our spirits prayerfully or powerfully or however we are moved, and we are models for how we live the world we want. You want to convince people gay weddings are not Teh Evil? You send them to one, where they can witness two people joining together and see what is there at the base of it. (And we got married using vows from the 17th century, 'promising with Divine Assistance to be unto thee a loving and faithful wife.' Suck on <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span>.) You want people to begin to eat a less dead-animal-filled diet? Fill them up on sukhi bhaji and grilled asparagus. You want to teach people how to party? Just party, man.<br /><br />People keep saying things to us or our parents like, "It was the best wedding I've ever been to." "Now I really want to get married." "Quaker weddings are so amazing." Maybe they say this to all brides, I don't know. But I feel like this is a kernal of some change we have sent out into the universe, and I think I can watch it grow.<br /><br />(All photos in this post copyright <a href="http://www.closedcirclephoto.com/">Closed Circle Photo</a>. The photographer is not only a brilliant, brilliant lady, but a close personal friend AND my ex-girlfriend so don't touch her stuff. I mean it.)ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com96tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-34212873572902681882007-05-07T01:23:00.000-04:002007-05-07T01:23:57.856-04:00three meals from the brinkApparently I'm doing threes lately.<br /><br />Look, my wedding is on Saturday. (Note to self: EEEEEEK!) Over the course of this week, I'm going to blog about it a lot--about my bachelorette party, about the catering decisions, and of course about all the fun femme details. And then when it's done, I'm pretty sure I'll blog from my honeymoon road trip from Key West to Savannah. (Got ideas for good veggie or GF places along A1A? We'll be needing them.)<br /><br />But for right now, a brief look into my life...and dinners.<br /><br />Dinner #1. Sous-Chef.<br /><br />I'm the A-chef in the house. I cook a lot, I cook impulsively, and I'm bossy as hell. So when it's me and the Boy in the kitchen, I'm in charge. Chop this, I say. Get me that. No, finer. Do we have any of this? Stir the pot, I have to mix something. And he's good natured about it, and an excellent sous chef.<br /><br />But I am le crazy right now. To the max. And so I'm letting the Boy take his turn as A-chef, every once in a while. And if he's smart, he picks the one cuisine where he is the acknowledged master: Mexican food. (Really, I don't think that's fair. Just because I don't have a food-professional Mexican grandma to call doesn't make me <span style="font-style: italic;">bad</span> at cooking Mexican food. Hmph.)<br /><br />There is something satisfying about being a sous. You aren't responsible for anything other than your single task. You cook the thing, you make it right, you don't screw it up. There's no big picture. Being a sous chef is about being in the moment, and letting everything else fade away.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/487701212/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/487701212_736215c5a3_m.jpg" alt="chile relleño, rice and beans, chèvre" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Chile relleño; arroz y frijoles; queso de cabra (that's chèvre for most of us)</span><br /></div><br />The chile is stuffed with textured vegetable protein (we buy a bulk GF version at our food coop) rehydrated in tomato juice, sauteed tomato, and chopped ricotta salata, battered in beaten egg whites and cornstarch, and shallow-fried. The beans are pintos, which are more authentic than black beans for most Mexican cuisine, and they are sauteed with cooked rice, chopped shallots, and cilantro. The chèvre is just because who doesn't love chèvre?<br /><br />2. Dinner #2. Peace<br /><br />I live with a celiac. I know stomach distress. And I had it. The work. The pressure. Knowing everything I had to do between then and the wedding: the two papers, the problem sets for statistics, the interview for next semester's TA job. Learning how to walk in heels, doing seating arrangements, making sure someone can deliver the Indian food, getting to the Greenmarket to order the flowers. My digestive track gave out on me. Fix us, Emily, it said.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/487701218/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/231/487701218_b21f4ca714.jpg" alt="shoes, books, snap peas" height="500" width="375" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Wedding shoes; homework; dinner</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">It's steamed white basmati rice, steamed snow peas, and wheat-free tamari with garlic and ginger. It was filling, and calming.<br /><br />I'm doing other things to try to keep my body going over this next stressful patch. I'm hitting the probiotics hard: yogurt, kombucha, and these fabulous candy bars with lactobacillus in them that they sell at Whole Foods. I'm also cutting out uncultured dairy nearly entirely; like most human beings, I'm at least a little lactose intolerant, and I don't want to give my body anything additional to deal with.<br /><br />Dinner #3. Impulse.<br /><br />I walked in the door from class. I was in a good mood, cheerful about the impending wedding, the fact that it wasn't quite dark yet, and being done with a little more work. My Wife looks up at me from our couch, smiles, and says, "I just watched <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alton_Brown">Alton</a> make macaroni and cheese. Can we have it for dinner?"<br /><br />I was in a good mood. "Sure," I said.<br /><br />I then noticed that we were nearly out of, well, food. So I sent the Wife to the Yemeni bodega down the street for a half-gallon of milk (W: "The guy at the store thought I was you. Although I should know what to say to what he said." Me: "What did he say?" W: "Kay hai? Something like that?" "كيف حالك؟" "Yeah, that." "You say بحر.") and went through the cheese drawer. Turns out we had some really old gruyère and a little bit of cheddar. We also used up our last bag of Tinkyada spirals on it; I couldn't make extra like I usually do.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/487701224/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/203/487701224_4937a43d9b_m.jpg" alt="mac and cheese" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Gruyère Mac and Cheese</span><br /></div><br />This is actually a simplified version of my regular recipe. Boil pasta in one pot. Meanwhile, melt 2 tbsp butter in a large saucier, sauce pan, or something big enough to hold all that pasta once it is boiled. Add 2 tbsp cornstarch (wheat flour is ok, if you do that sort of thing). Let it brown slightly. Pour in...some milk. I didn't measure. About half a half-gallon, whatever that is. Whisk. Once it starts thickening, add a whole bunch of diced or shredded or crumbled gruyère and whatever other cheese you have in the house that won't taste nasty with it. When the cheese is melted through, dump the pasta into the sauce. Turn the heat off, stir, and pour the whole thing into a casserole. Run it under the broiler until the top looks crispety-crunchety. Makes many fewer servings than you would think, because everyone takes seconds. In fact, it's so good the blogger forgot to document it before she took her own serving.<br /></div></div></div></div>ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-68488702064103276412007-05-01T17:04:00.000-04:002007-05-01T17:08:21.037-04:00Eating in SolidarityThis is the most banal post you could imagine in support of the <a href="http://www.mayday2007.org/">immigration demonstrations today</a>, but I had to write something. As anyone who has sniffed at my politics even briefly could probably guess, I fully support the right of undocumented immigrants to legalize their status without criminal prosecution. But I spent today in the library writing papers (incidentally, about migration), instead of <a href="http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=69259">out</a> on the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/us/01cnd-immig.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin">streets</a>, so this is my food-blog gesture of solidary.<br /><br />We eat the way we do because of migration.<br /><br />Without migrants, South Asia wouldn't have alu gobi.<br />Without migrants, Britain wouldn't have chicken tikka masala.<br /><br />Without migrants, Ireland wouldn't have colcannon.<br />Without migrants, America wouldn't have Guinness.<br /><br />Without migrants, Italy wouldn't have tomato sauce or polenta.<br />Without migrants, America wouldn't have pizza.<br /><br />Without migrants, Thailand wouldn't have sriracha.<br />Without migrants, America wouldn't have pad thai.<br /><br />Without migrants, there would be no latkes on the Hanukkah table.<br />Without migrants, there would be no Hanukkah tables in the US. <br /><br />Without migrants, Mexico might never have developed the wheat flour tortilla.<br />Without migrants, I wouldn't be writing this while eating guacamole soft tacos and salsa verde.<br /><br />All migrations are not the same. But all migrations carry food with them. And if you like to eat, you damn well better like migration. <br /><br />So come on. Stop deporting mothers with infants. Stop deporting teenagers to countries they don't remember and don't want to see yet. Stop breaking apart communities in the service of a policy goal which will never be met. <br /><br />We live in a country of immigrants, and we eat the bounty of that every day. So we should be greatful, and we should be happy, and we should always be hungry.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-80256110228086814922007-04-25T10:00:00.000-04:002007-04-25T10:27:34.399-04:00Three Random Thoughts (Two with Photos!)1) I saw this in the window of a supermarket when The Wife and I were on vacation in Rehoboth back in January. Alongside a row of photos of cheese, flowers, bread, vegetables, there were these:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/228/472426266_1479a20c5b.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/228/472426266_1479a20c5b.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />And it got me thinking. How do Americans deal with images of animals being used to represent food? We are notoriously squeamish about these things. Anyone remember the Simpsons episode where Lisa becomes a vegetarian? They go to a petting zoo, where Lisa meets this supercute little lamb, and then they have lamb chops for dinner, and she freaks out. (This episode also contains this exchange, which I am doing from memory, so probably won't get right:<br /><br />Lisa: I'm not eating anything that came from an animal.<br />Homer: So no bacon?<br />Lisa: No.<br />Homer: No ham?<br />Lisa: No.<br />Homer: No pork?<br />Lisa: Dad, those are all from the same animal.<br />Homer (sarcastically): <span style="font-style: italic;">Sure</span>, Lisa. A wonderful, <span style="font-style: italic;">magical</span> animal.)<br /><br />I spent about 2 weeks in Israel/Palestine (mostly Palestine) 2 years ago. One of the first things I learned about the Old City of Jerusalem was that I shouldn't take a certain path through the Muslim Quarter after midnight, because it had all the butcher shops. For meat to be halal, it has to be bled, just like kosher meat does; it has to be hung, so that all the blood is gone, rendering the meat acceptable. So after the butcher shops closed, they would hose out their shops, and the streets (which were ancient, and therefore did not have modern drainage) smelled of blood. Vegetarian-me freaked out, a little bit. But the people who shopped at these stalls didn't have a problem with the smell, because they knew where it came from; it meant the meat was freshly bled, halal, and not too old.<br /><br />But Americans: We want our meat to smell like styrofoam. So how do we react to advertising images of cows to convince us to buy steak?<br /><br /><br />2) This is my brother.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/217/472426268_4e52b582db.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/217/472426268_4e52b582db.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />He's holding a box of (sit down) USDA certified organic Kraft Mac N Cheese. Oh yes. It comes in organic.<br /><br />Two things: a) My 17 year old brother (yes, I know, he doesn't look it) is apparently convincing my folks that they should eat more healthily and should eat more organic food. My mom, who raised me (and him) eating a lot of tofu and brown rice for the suburbs in the 90s, is on board; my dad is pretty go-with-the-flow. But my brother is driving the organic food purchases in the household. There is hope for future generations. 2) Tom reports that the organic mac and cheese is not that insane orange color. I am simultaneously cheered by this fact, and saddened a little. I mean, the orange stuff is good, you know?<br /><br /><br />3) Not food related, but this is a public service announcement.<br /><br />The following people are allowed to wear "I (heart) lesbians" shirts:<br /><br />a) Women. You do not need to be/look like a lesbian. You could just be expressing solidarity or something.<br /><br />b) Gay men. You need to be clearly readable as gay. If you are not clearly readable as gay (which I support, I hate how all gay people have to look alike to get read as gay, ask me how I feel about having long hair sometime), then you MUST indicate so on your shirt somehow. Like, get a big black sharpie and write BECAUSE LESBIANS ARE SO IMPORTANT TO THE QUEER RIGHTS MOVEMENT FROM WHICH I BENEFIT AS A BIG OL' GAY or BECAUSE US GIRLS NEED SOMEONE TO OPEN THE JARS or I'M REALLY REALLY GAY AND THIS SHIRT IS AN ACT OF CROSS-QUEER REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNITY MAKING or something similar.<br /><br />People who are not allowed to wear "I (heart) lesbians" shirts:<br />Straight men. (Especially not straight men in yellow board shorts with sunglasses on their heads. Folks, it's April, and this is New York. If you were in Los Angeles, I'd forgive you. But here? Never.)<br /><br />Why? BECAUSE YOU LOOK LIKE A MISOGYNIST FRAT BOY WHO IS BEING URBAN-OUTFITTERS-FAUX-IRONIC AND SIMULTANIOUSLY PUBLICLY ANNOUNCING YOUR PORN PREFERENCES.<br /><br />Really, straight men, this is for your own good. Because I may be a Quaker and a pacifist, but there are a lot of lesbians out there who could kick you from here to next Tuesday if they wanted to. And if you keep wearing that shirt, they'll want to.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-86160215542610710252007-04-14T01:07:00.000-04:002007-04-14T01:08:07.828-04:00FauchéeWhen I was in seventh-grade French, I learned a new word: fauché(e). It means "broke." The teacher explained the difference like this: If you don't make a lot of money, and don't have anything in the bank, etc, then you say, "<span style="font-style: italic;">je suis pauvre</span>," I am poor. But the richest person in the world could be stuck without any cash on him, and then he'd say "<span style="font-style: italic;">je suis fauché.</span>"<br /><br />I grew up lower-middle-class in a very upper-middle-class town. My dad is, for all intents and purposes, a skilled laborer; my mother didn't work until I was in high school, when she started doing entry-level work for the school district. We owned a house, but a smallish one on a mixed-race block. Money was never absent, but it was tight, and I knew it. In retrospect, it wasn't that uncommon a situation, but it was mine, and I felt fairly alone in it at the time.<br />I grew up seething class anxiety. I didn't dress like rich kids, shop like rich kids, eat like rich kids. Part of my anxiety came across as criticism of the materialism of the rich. The other part came across as terror of being identified as other. I grew up near the King of Prussia Mall, which is a huge, elegant temple of shopping. It has plush chairs, not benches. Marble columns and floors. Versace and Tiffany's and Burberry. I was terrified of the King of Prussia Mall. I went there for the first time with The Wife, who belonged firmly on the other side of that class divide that I saw. I hid behind her. I had panic attacks. I couldn't be in that mall. It scared me too much.<br /><br />Then I went away to get my Ivy League degree, and I met real rich people. Like serious, serious richness. Richness beyond my wildest dreams. We were on a level in a way we hadn't been in high school, because now we were all the elite of a nation together. And I was better than most of them.<br /><br />I also met poor folks. The people I organized with on a daily basis came from the backwoods south and from urban ghettos, and from countries on the other side of an exchange rate. Among these folks, I came from privilege. So I came to understand both that there are real live rich people out there, who are not as scary as I thought, and something concrete about what poverty looks like, and how it differed from my experience.<br /><br />Now I live in a lower-middle class neighborhood that might be transitioning upward, in the middle of a giant concentration of wealth that still makes me nervous. Sure, now I can cope with it, but that doesn't mean that my inner seventeen-year-old doesn't get a little nervous when I go out for lunch on the Upper East Side. It's just that, now, I know how to dress for it. It's true: I have different outfits in my closet for what part of the city I'm going to. The jeans with holes are fine if I'm working in the garden or walking down to the drug store or dollar store; the straight-men's jeans are fine for babysitting or working a Co-op shift; the gay men's jeans and ribbed tank tops are good for going to class; if I'm heading uptown, I've got button-down shirts to layer over top.<br /><br />But I'm sitting here, in the middle of this fabulous wealth and this warm and not rich neighborhood, and I can tell you: <span style="font-style: italic;">Je ne suis pas pauvre. Mais je suis fauchée.</span><br /><br />I'm occasionally astounded by how much the three of us bring in, combined. All told, it's something like $75K a year. That's a fabulous amount of money to me, even though it's not a lot per person. Living in this city, though, and wanting those things that belong properly to folks of our aspirational class, we don't have much left over.<br /><br />So I think about everything we can do to save money. I'm the one out there growing our own produce in the summer and canning it for the winter. I'm the one who pulls the last of whatever is about to go bad out of the fridge and cooks with it, so we don't have to buy more food. I'm the one who wonders what she's going to do now that all of her jeans either don't fit or have holes.<br /><br />Why am I the one? Because I'm the housewife. The Wife gets up in the morning and goes to her ten-to-six office job; the Boy's a personal assistant and professional dancer, so he's out of the house until 9 nearly every night. I sit home alone, writing, reading, thinking. And cooking. And gardening. And scrimping.<br /><br />I'm thinking of this today because of <a href="http://tinycatpants.wordpress.com/2007/04/12/will-my-inconvenience-save-the-world/">Aunt B's</a> post about wanting to hold on to the pleasures of middle-class life, and not give them up in order to 'save the world.' She catches some of the tension in this: simultaneously one spends less to be ethical (turning off the lights) and spends more (buying organic soap). We simplify our lives through consumption (witness Real Simple magazine, which provides hundreds of ways a month to spend money to get simpler). If we want to live right, we have to simultaneously have money and give it up.<br /><br />One of the ways to do this--and the way that the three of us have done it--is to disaggregate social from economic class. We each renounced the economic status that could have come to us as graduates of elite Eastern colleges. However, we maintained the social status of solidly middle-class America: we need wireless internet and a DVR and organic orange juice. In order to do all of that, we have to scrimp in some places and spend in others. We need to put more work in to be able to get some things that we could have effortlessly, if we rejoined our social and economic class. Seriously, folks, if I got a job in i-banking rather than a PhD, all these troubles would just go away.<br /><br />I live the way I do (I won't speak for my family) because it allows me to be in touch with my politics. I would rather seek justice than cash. I want to live in a morally defensible relationship to the environment and the people around me. But, in order to make these moves, I have to replace the money I could be making with my own housework, so that I can help maintain my household's social class, while we all collectively renounce our economic class.<br />And here I am reminded of <a href="http://brownfemipower.com/">brownfemipower</a>'s posts she called "Poverty Diaries." She <a href="http://brownfemipower.com/?p=299">wrote</a>:<br /><blockquote>Life is so much slower for poor people. A bus ride to anywhere is going to take at least 40 min’s. Cooking everything from scratch means supper is often started the night before. A quick trip the grocery store is replaced with a day long biking marathon to buy as many groceries as can be stuffed into the kid carrier. Dial up often takes minutes to load pages (seriously, the best thing we did was put the computer into the kitchen–I can clean/cook while a page loads). Clothes hang dry on the line out back, and microwavable food must be cooked in the oven.<br /><br />Going slower like this is pleasant in many ways–a whole life time of “need to do stuff” is eliminated by the sole fact that there is no transportation, no phone, no money. But at the same time, a slower life means living closer to the edge than is entirely comfortable. If you forget to turn on the crock pot, it will be a whole day before you can eat that particular meal. If it is raining the day you have planned from grocery shopping–well, so much for food. If you have ants attacking the roots of your plants (as they are currently doing to my corn and sweat peas) it will be a whole year before you can repair the damage to the soil. If your kid breaks her arm, you better pray you have a neighbor who has a car.<br /><br />Living close to the edge has really helped me see how capitalism (in the beginning) was influenced in large part by fear more than greed. When you’ve been told by your government and your god that you must “conquer the land” and live way the hell out in the middle of no where all by yourself, how scary is it to know that one fuck up, one day of sickness, could lead to your very destruction? How much safer is one allowed to feel knowing that all you need is a little pesticide and some lab made fertilizer to ensure food for the winter?</blockquote><br />So here again I have to acknowledge my class status. Sure, I may fight to get my soil to be fertile with the compost from last year's garden, or I may put dried beans in the crockpot rather than buying lots of fancy prepared food. But when push comes to shove, I know how late the Thai place delivers.<br /><br />There may not be a coherent argument here. This may just be the beginning of a set of thoughts. But the relationship between social class, economic class, women's labor in the home, politics, and poverty is complicated. If we are going to try to eat and live collectively and in just relations to each other, we have to think about these things--and do them together.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-28719973630792990212007-04-10T18:02:00.000-04:002007-04-10T19:38:36.639-04:00The Armed CanariesThe setting: a graduate seminar on the politics of identity. Early evening in New York City in a windowless, linoleum-lined classroom.<br /><br />The reading for the evening: <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GUIMIN.html">The Miner's Canary</a>, by Lani Guinier and Gerard Torres. As they explain on their <a href="http://www.minerscanary.org/">project website</a>, their argument is that problems experienced by racialized minorties are signals for broader problems in our social structure, and that political race can be a tool to change those broader problems (in addition to those original racial problems.)<br /><br />The radically androgynous feminist grad student with thick rimmed glasses wearing a boy's oxford shirt and Converse sneakers (you know the type) says: "What if the racialized minorities don't all want to work together? <span style="font-weight: bold;">Why can't the canaries arm themselves?</span>"<br /><br />And the food & politics blogger sitting next to her has a moment.<br /><br />I give you: The Armed Canaries.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/453390510/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/209/453390510_d89c26e3fe_m.jpg" alt="The Armed Canaries" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /><br />Revolution. It's for the birds.<br /><br />They each have individual secret identities, as well, used as code names to protect them from the feds.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/453390528/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/179/453390528_04c7dbc6ce_m.jpg" alt="Yuri Canari" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /><br />Yuri Kanari. She takes her name from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Kochiyama">Yuri Kochiyama</a>, the radical Japanese-American feminist and friend of Malcom X.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/453390532/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/216/453390532_409908c3f3_m.jpg" alt="Angela Canari" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /><br />Angela Canari. She took the name in honor of <a href="http://humwww.ucsc.edu/HistCon/faculty_davis.htm">Angela Davis</a>, the black revolutionary feminist academic.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/453390534/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/453390534_ba9e84f0c4_m.jpg" alt="Antonio Canari" height="180" width="240" /></a><br /><br />And here is Antonio Canarsci. He renamed himself after <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramsci">Antonio Gramsci</a>, imprisoned Communist and theorist of hegemony.<br /><br />(No, I don't eat peeps, although I did make some merangue ones that were pretty lousy looking but yummy tasting. I'm trying to cut out gelatin, so no more marshmallows for me. But the Wife is a fan of the stale ones. Lucky for me she bought yellow.)ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-58405103293426288822007-03-30T10:40:00.000-04:002007-03-30T10:40:38.564-04:00Beans!I got beans in the mail!<br /><br />For those who don't know, every December Pim over at <a href="http://chezpim.typepad.com/">Chez Pim</a> organizes <a href="http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2006/12/menu_for_hope_i_5.html">Menu for Hope</a>, which raises money to feed hungry people internationally by having food bloggers auction off prizes--books, dinners, cooked treats, ingredients, etc. This year, over $60,000 went to the World Food Programme.<br /><br />There's something politically ambivalent about raffles like this. It structures giving around needing to be rewarded for the giving, such that only when your own wellbeing is increased by giving will you give. This means, in essense, that those who need financial assistance aren't worthy of receiving assistance unless they can give something back, which exacerbates their subserviant position vis-a-vis the donors. There's also the global politics of food aid, which some have argued helps keep famine cycles going in the developing world by preventing governments from having to answer fully to their populations for allowing mass starvation. (This is the argument of Alex de Waal's <span style="font-style: italic;">Famine Crimes</span>; those with academic access can read this review on JSTOR, and others can check it out <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=20773">here</a> and <a href="http://www.jamescurrey.co.uk/jcurrey/display.asp?K=181604587575756&cid=jcurrey&sf_01=CAUTHOR&st_02=famine+crimes&sf_02=CTITLE&sf_03=KEYWORD&sf_04=series&st_06=%2C+&sf_05=SORT%5FDATE&sf_06=SORT%2C+BINDING%5FCODE&m=1&dc=1">here</a>. The basic thesis goes back to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen">Amartya Sen</a>'s work on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poverty-Famines-Essay-Entitlement-Deprivation/dp/0198284632">famine</a>.) Finally, it's actually against my religion--Quakers strongly advise against participating games of chance, even those that frame themselves as "schemes of benevolence." Obviously, that doesn't matter to most people, but it's something I think about.<br /><br />However, I decided to bid, because, well, I believe in the UN system, including the WFP, and because some of the prizes were fantastic. There's also the simple fact that, although there are lots of things wrong-ish with these sorts of events, there's also something really right: people giving nice things to strangers in order to help other strangers. So I bid. And I won beans.<br /><br />Specifically, six pound of beans, a pound of quinoa, a pound of amaranth, a pound of popcorn, a bottle of hot sauce, and a lovely calendar, generously donated by <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/">Rancho Gordo</a>, an amazing grower of heirloom beans and grains in Napa. When I was in the Bay Area in June, I bought a pound of their <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&Product_Code=ANAB01&Category_Code=DHAHB4">Anasazi</a> beans, which are spotted red and black and have a flavor in the pinto family; they were delicious, and I got hooked. So it was clearly necessary to bid for them--and I won!<br /><br />I got to select my bean varieties, so I got a good mix. <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&Product_Code=FLAGB01&Category_Code=DHAHB4">Flageolets</a>, for cassoulet.<span style="text-decoration: underline;"> </span><a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&Product_Code=VARB01&Category_Code=DHAHB4">Vallarta</a>, because they are green in the picture. <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&Product_Code=GOODMOTHER01&Category_Code=DHAHB4">Good Mother Stallard</a>, because the description is so glowing. <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&Product_Code=TEPB01&Category_Code=DHAHB4">Brown Tepary Beans</a>, one of the oldest varieties cultivated, which <a href="http://www.environment.nau.edu/aboutcse/Gary_Paul_Nabhan.htm">Gary Paul Nabhan</a> wrote about so eloquently in his book <a href="http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/002017.htm">Coming Home to Eat</a>. <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&Product_Code=TIGB01&Category_Code=DHAHB4">Ojos de Tigre</a>, for the stripes. And <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;Product_Code=VAQUERO01&Category_Code=DHAHB4">Vaqueros</a>, because, while I loved the Anasazi beans, I had to try something new. The grains look lovely, and the hot sauce is powerful, which is what I like.<br /><br />The calendar is fun, but it caused a fight in the household. It has a picture called La Jóven de Limones, and The Boy and I had a large fight about the meaning of the title. Essentially, we were agreeing, but we felt the need to yell, because we were using different terms to explain the same thing. Because one of us is a native speaker of Spanish, and one of us pretends she is a linguist. I won't recap the fight, because it was too dumb for words, but it revolved around this essential point:<br /><br />In Spanish, these are <span style="font-style: italic;">limónes</span>:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.hort.purdue.edu/ext/senior/fruits/images/small/lime.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.hort.purdue.edu/ext/senior/fruits/images/small/lime.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>And these are <span style="font-style: italic;">limas</span>:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.hort.cornell.edu/4hplants/Fruits/Images/Lemon-22main.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://www.hort.cornell.edu/4hplants/Fruits/Images/Lemon-22main.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />We didn't disagree about that. Like I said, not worth recapping. We tend to call them the green ones and the yellow ones around here, just to be clear.<br /><br />Getting back to the beans, I've started using them. You saw the Good Mother Stallards at the <a href="http://betterpoliticsthroughfood.blogspot.com/2007/02/worship-and-dinner.html">dinner party</a> we held a few weeks back; they were definitely a hit, and I'm sad they're gone. The night I got the beans, I cooked up some of the Vallartas. Mine are much browner than in the photos. They were, however, the best freakin' beans I've ever had. Since I had been reading Barbara's <a href="http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2007/02/01/asian-ways-with-american-winter-greens-part-ii/">entries</a> on <a href="http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2007/01/23/asian-ways-with-american-winter-greens-part-i/">greens</a>, and I had some spinach aging quickly in the fridge and a new bunch of kale, this recipe came together easily.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2dmBfz0X3d8vLhyfDXnhuSEK8wdZkC6DvUxOnxSSGmdGket9zLU1sfVxAk4pTtJHLFjCby2H_BqhrUNg9tkR2V1A0FUx_HU2AjIpAp2uzru9VirviXJaszSgBjIIBmmvdmzM/s1600-h/IMG_3056.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2dmBfz0X3d8vLhyfDXnhuSEK8wdZkC6DvUxOnxSSGmdGket9zLU1sfVxAk4pTtJHLFjCby2H_BqhrUNg9tkR2V1A0FUx_HU2AjIpAp2uzru9VirviXJaszSgBjIIBmmvdmzM/s200/IMG_3056.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5027895622109715042" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center; font-style: italic;">Rancho Gordo Beans and Greens<br /><br /></div>Put one cup dried Vallarta beans in water on the stove, and boil until done, about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, pull the leaves of half a bunch of <a href="http://www.seedsavers.org/prodinfo.asp?number=623">lacinato kale</a> off the stems in long strips, and throw them in a bowl of cold water with two handfuls of baby spinach. Chop an onion and two cloves of garlic. When the beans are mostly done (edible but still hard at the center), heat olive oil in a pan (I used a 2 3/4 quart enameled cast-iron dutch oven) over medium-high heat and add the onions and a smidge of salt. Once they have started to soften, add the garlic and let it cook briefly. While it is cooking, pull all of the greens out and chop them quickly into decent size pieces. (It came to about 4 cups of greens.) Toss them into the pan, stirring to cover them with the oil while sprinkling with a little more salt. Let it cook slowly. Once the beans are just a hair short of done (when the skins just start splitting when you blow on the hot beans), pull them out and add them to the greens, along with enough cooking liquid to almost cover the beans over the greens. Add as much <a href="http://www.ranchogordo.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RG&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;Product_Code=RIOFCH01&Category_Code=CACP3">Rio Fuego Very Hot Sauce</a> as you want. Cover the pot and let simmer for 5-7 minutes. Uncover, let the liquid cook off, and serve immediately, with more hot sauce if necessary.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-65040991787476521522007-03-26T10:27:00.000-04:002007-03-26T10:57:23.937-04:00Freezing the GoodnessI return to the real world today, after a brief foray into a mysterious land called Spring Break, which puports to be some sort of 'vacation' or 'holiday' but, at least in my case, looked identical to a normal week, just without the 8 hours of class. You know, I remember spring break in college--the senior year getaway to Paris, the trip with Model UN to Brazil, the other, less pleasant weeks--and this pseudo-vacation just doesn't cut it.<br /><br />(However, I did apparently take a vacation from blogging. I'll blame that on midterm exam + presentation + week of 'vacation,' if you don't mind.)<br /><br />One of the main things I did over break, however, was cook. I took a bunch of hours on Friday, and cooked and packaged and froze food to keep me and my household going over the next seven weeks of forced march to the end of my semester and my wedding, which happen to coincide perfectly. (Final exam on Thursday, wedding on Saturday, papers due and leave for honeymoon on Monday.)<br /><br />Here are the results:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/435104724/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/157/435104724_63563aedb6.jpg" alt="freezer" height="375" width="500" /></a><br /></div><br />This is my freezer. Obviously I didn't make everything in here, but here's a tour:<br /><br />Top shelf, left to right: corn and cheese empanadas, vegetable korma with rice and dal, xanthan gum for gluten-free baking, frozen bought cilantro and basil, broccoli I steamed and froze, gluten-free frozen pizza, bag of scraps for stock, ice pack.<br /><br />Bottom shelf, left to right: peanut butter cup ice cream, millet pilaf with kale and chickpeas, bagels, millet pilaf with lentils, beet stems, and broccoli, mole-from-a-jar over mixed vegetables and rice, black bean soup (in yogurt container), more millet with lentils, beet stems, and broccoli, homemade polenta, big yogurt container full of Moroccan chickpeas with dried fruit, more empanadas (bean and rice), matar tofu with rice and dal, black bean chipotle burgers (gluten-free).<br /><br /><br />And, for good measure, the freezer door:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51552668@N00/435104730/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/148/435104730_9d2d215afd.jpg" alt="freezer door" height="375" width="500" /></a><br /></div><br />Top shelf, left to right: catnip, strawberry chardonnay sorbet, more peanut butter cup ice cream, extra butter, caramel ice cream purchased sometime last calendar year, candy bought in Rehoboth.<br /><br />Bottom shelf, left to right: chicken hotdogs none of the carnivores in the house like which are therefore languishing in the freezer, frozen mixed vegetables, almond flour, gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate peanut butter fudge rice ice cream, brown rice flour, soy flour.<br /><br />(Not pictured: the broccoli, polenta, and beets that I put in the fridge to use sooner rather than later, and the black bean soup I moved to the fridge to force me to eat it--it's 2 months old already.)<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(To answer the obvious questions: This is about a week's supply of ice cream for the three of us. The catnip is in the freezer because the cats can find it anywhere else.) </span><br /><br />This is such a strange task of housewifery, preparing meals in advance and storing them in the freezer. For me, though, it's about survival. Here's the dirty little secret in all of this bounty: I'm going to eat 95% of it. That's right. While the polenta in the fridge and the double batch of pasta I make every other week or so ends up eaten by all of us, this stuff is mainly for me to eat while I'm working, when I get home late and the Wife has other leftovers to eat, or when I'm commuting between babysitting and class. The reasons are many: I don't have time to cook from scratch every time I'm hungry, I don't have the money to buy something to eat every day, and too much takeout and prepared food gets old, gets expensive, and gets unhealthy.<br /><br />This is self-care you are witnessing, which makes it possible for me to care for those around me. I know it's not that radical to some...but I have some trouble with it, so it's a step.<br /><br />So now, back into the abyss. I have a post for later this week on schemes of benevolence, the famine relief industry, and the names of citrus fruits in Spanish; and another coming soon on the politics of wedding consumption. So keep your eyes on this space. I promise, I'm off vacation now. Not that I even noticed.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-56862711239748271812007-02-25T00:36:00.000-05:002007-02-25T00:50:56.528-05:00Worship and DinnerThe Wife and I just held our first real dinner party in this house. It was a potluck for our Quaker Meeting (equivalent to our church), to welcome a new member into the community. In general, it went really well--assuming your definition of really well is open to encompassing a kid throwing a fit because he was in an unusual environment, a mom who has been sick as a dog for a week, extra guests and extra food sensitivities.<br /><br />Part of what is important about food is how it makes community. I think this is particularly true in religious communities. I was raised Catholic; there, it was about the sanctified food of the Body and Blood of Christ. Among Quakers, it's social hour, that period after <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Society_of_Friends#Unprogrammed_worship">Meeting for Worship</a> when we drink coffee, eat saltines with peanut butter, and talk. By committing this act of eating together, so closely tied together with the experience of the divine, no matter what we name it, we draw ourselves closer to some center we stand around, until we touch each other, gently, at the edges.<br /><br />But the dynamics of this are complicated by the dynamics of what we can eat. The Body and Blood are made of wheat and alcohol; and do crackers and peanut butter set any better precident? I've taken it upon myself to bring things to Meeting whenever we have a 'big eating event,' such as a potluck, or the afternoons before <a href="http://www.qis.net/%7Edaruma/business.html">Business Meeting</a> when folks eat lunch to prepare for the three hours of worship-slash-collective-self-government that is about to happen. My dishes always come neatly labelled "VEGAN/NO DAIRY, EGGS, OR MEAT/FISH/SHELLFISH, GLUTEN/WHEAT FREE, NO CORN OR SOY, ASK IN KITCHEN FOR DETAILS" so that people know, at least, what they are getting into. I want to extend that community created through eating to everyone around me.<br /><br />Which is part of why tonight was complicated. Among the 10 people at the table, one has celiac disease and is gluten free, one follows a gluten-free/casein-free/soy-free diet, one is a vegetarian, one is on a 3 week detox diet that involves, inter alia, no gluten, no animal products, and no refined sugar, and one has multiple, but mild, food sensitivities and avoids gluten, soy, corn, dairy, kidney beans, and I think some other things I didn't catch. 2 of those people didn't announce their sensitivities in advance, which made things a little awkward: I would have kept the crackers separate if I'd known that there was an dairy allergy (as opposed to avoidance) in the bunch, for instance, and probably wouldn't have put the cheese at little-kid-height. But I had my brain on sensitivities, knew what was in everything I put out, and even pulled the cake mix bag out of the recycling so everyone could read the ingredients.<br /><br />As we sat down to eat, we held hands to say a silent Quaker grace. In that moment, I felt the connection. Each of the ten people in my house to each was a tangible spiritual being, and for that moment, we bumped into each other and stayed there. The woman we were welcoming squeezed my hand, and I opened my eyes. We all looked around the table, and there was a moment when we exhaled, together. Then we smiled down at our bowls of soup and began to eat.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Menu for Spiritual Enlightenment</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">In Honor of Nichole</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hors d'oeuvres:</span><br />Cheese plate: fresh chevre, New York cheddar, and raclette<br />Crackers: Almond Nut Thins (contains nuts, dairy), Tamari Sesame Rice Crackers (contains soy, sesame seeds), corn crispbreads (contains corn, rice)<br />Kalamata and Picholine Olives<br />Mixed nuts (pecans, roasted cashews, and raw almonds)<br />Vegan Terrine (purchased, though I had wanted to make one)<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Drinks:</span><br />Unfiltered apple juice<br />Orange juice<br />Filtered water<br />2005 Côtes du Rhone (red--is there another type?) (brought by Ted)<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">First Course</span><br />Potato-Leek Soup (by Ted and Nina)<br /><br />Main Course<br />Romaine Salad with carrots, cucumbers, grape tomatoes, and string beans (by Mary and Helen)<br />Polenta, served with Good Mother Stollard Beans cooked in sage and garlic (by me and The Wife)<br />Green beans cooked with shallots and garlic (by Shannon and Giancarlo)<br /><br />Dessert<br />Namaste Spice Cake<br />Apple Millet<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Recipes:</span><br /></div><span style="font-weight: bold;">Polenta: </span>I made crock-pot polenta, since I didn't want to have to jump up and cook during dinner. 6 cups water, 2 cups stone-ground cornmeal, teaspoon of salt, on high for 3 hours, on low for 2.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Beans with sage: </span>Boil as many Good Mother Stollard beans as possible. Cranberry, Borlotti, or Pinto beans would be a good substitute. When boiled, drain, and put a good amount of olive oil or butter in the pan. If using butter, let it brown slightly. Add the beans, along with tons of chopped fresh sage and 2-3 cloves of garlic. Cook until the outside skins of the beans become crispy and crunchy, and they have started to stick to the pan. Serve over polenta.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Apple Millet: </span>Chop 1/4 cup dried apples. Rehydrate in warm water, about a cup but there's no need to measure. (This step can be done up to a few days in advance and then stored in the fridge, or can sit on the counter for a few hours while you do other things.) Drain the apples, pour the liquid into a measuring cup, and top off with enough apple juice (unfiltered, unsweetened, please) to make 2 cups. Put 1 cup millet, the rehydrated apples, the apple juice/soaking liquid, and about 1/2 cup more water into a pot with a sprinkling of cinnamon. Simmer until the millet is done, about 20 minutes to half an hour. Does not need to be served immediately.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-66251469489388341982007-02-11T23:14:00.000-05:002007-02-12T23:44:21.940-05:00Vegetable Love: Green Beans and Flageolets over Sweet Potato-Parsnip Puree<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/388775612_53c277c79c.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/388775612_53c277c79c.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Valentine's Day is about love.<br /><br />All kinds of love.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/129/388775606_a41b4f400d.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/129/388775606_a41b4f400d.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Earth love.</span> This is a pile of compost in the making. Compost is an amazing gift you can give to the environment; it takes lots of trash out of the wastestream, and puts nutrients back into the scarred New York City soil I live in. I keep two bins in the backyard, one an old broken plastic box with worms in it, and another a supposed-to-be-a-compost bin without worms. Start composting already: <a href="http://www.lesecologycenter.org/composting.html">LES Ecology Center.</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/388775608_ad490e7be3.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/388775608_ad490e7be3.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Stock love. </span>I love making scrap stock. It makes me feel like thrifty; it makes me fell like a pioneer woman, out somewhere in the Oklahoma territory, living by my bootstraps; and it's fun. I save the tops of leeks and scallions, carrot and parsnip peels, and celery that's about to go off in the freezer, balance them out with fresh veggies, and cook to death with salt, garlic, dried herbs, and peppercorns. You're seeing last night's leek tops, and tonight's parsnip peels.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Without-a-net love.</span> <a href="http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2007/02/vegetable-love.html">Susan at Fat-Free Vegan</a> set the terms for the experiment, so I had to do something I don't ever do: leave out the butter, cream, and oil. I love butter, cream, and oil. But I did this, to try it. And I think it worked.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/131/388777611_e631fb5cdb.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/131/388777611_e631fb5cdb.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Wife Love. </span>She's got a very limited range of veggies, my wife does. So I've learned how to cook with the ones she likes, so she eats it. It's not what I would do if I were queen of her. But I'm not queen of her. I'm her wife. So here, in one place, are nearly all of the vegetables she eats: parnsips, sweet potatoes, and green beans. If I'd served a salad with romaine lettuce, carrots, and cucumbers, we'd have been pretty close to 100%. (She says she likes potatoes, from the other side of the couch.)<br /><br /><br /><br />And so:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Recipe Love.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Green Beans and Flageolets over Sweet Potato-Parsnip Puree</span><br /></div><br />Cut up sweet potato and parsnips: I used 3 cups sweet potato and 1.5 cups parsnips, but these are flexible. In large-ish sauce pan, bring an inch of water to a boil, with one dried chile (mine come from Hepworth Farms on Long Island), a sprinkle of salt, and two smallish cloves of garlic. Once it comes to a boil, add the root veggies and cover. Steam for ten minutes. Top and tail about a cup of green beans, and fetch about a cup of pre-cooked flageolet beans from the fridge. When the veggies are steamed, pull them out of the water. Mash lightly with a large spoon, or whatever you've got. I drained the water from the pan and added about 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil, but I'm guessing you could skip this step and use part of the steaming water to cook the green beans. Add back the garlic and chili, and sautee the green beans and flageolets over medium-high heat until the green beans change to bright green and the flageolets start to get crispy. Fill bowls with puree, and top with beans and beans. The chili is just for garnish there.<br /><br />Love. It's in season.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-41108938813008597512007-02-04T22:26:00.000-05:002007-02-04T22:52:29.417-05:00Political Borscht<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnYJsu1Mat6pG9y38H1QqQoWcotEaE5VppGmLh2OxI72w0C70Eop8uwDVNC_TYmg4qNjKzMPzdxusYGtmBX5ZDdrVlXJmYBLd9gnm6wmnoHyX__3UQtm9CIyMAKY0llWcXKjXm/s1600-h/IMG_3077.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnYJsu1Mat6pG9y38H1QqQoWcotEaE5VppGmLh2OxI72w0C70Eop8uwDVNC_TYmg4qNjKzMPzdxusYGtmBX5ZDdrVlXJmYBLd9gnm6wmnoHyX__3UQtm9CIyMAKY0llWcXKjXm/s320/IMG_3077.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5027891902668036690" border="0" /></a><br />(I know several earnest thoughtful women who would rather see their children peaked than brew something with the foreign name minestrone, because in this year of 1942 the United States is at war with Italy. There is a fundamental if tiring truth about all this, and you and I can only hope that right will conquer over might before too long.) [In the 1950's some people feel helplessly antagonistic to <span style="font-style: italic;">borscht!</span> Fortunately, I do not.]<br /> --M.F.K. Fischer, <span style="font-style: italic;">How to Cook A Wolf. </span>(In parantheses, from the 1942 edition; in brackets, added in the 1951 edition.)<br /><br />Freedom Fries? Falafel? What are the politically despised foods of our war?<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Cold War Hot Borscht</span><br /></div>Chop 2 beets and one carrot into small chunks. (The beets may be previously steamed or roasted.) Slice one scallion roughly, or one substantial slice of onion. Put them in a pot with one clove garlic and some salt. Add enough water to cover, bring to a boil, and simmer until the vegetables are tender, topping off the water when it gets too low. When vegetables are tender, puree in a blender or with a stick blender. Serve with yogurt or sour cream, and chopped fresh chives if you've got 'em. Makes 2 generous servings.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-1168509641080834552007-02-02T12:50:00.000-05:002007-02-02T12:50:57.944-05:00Fresh, Local, Whatevs<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ_2CHSiqdeP0k0vYgTvKapa0ZOAZUSGFpYFOs-s_RcB8IHcQvoty3l2Dp-wkDe93asv8IbnUsggki2HmHyYB1KjQCqrcr69Aa-FnyDEduj7wI-jJ7l_ilj8WZefnllYNzO99L/s1600-h/IMG_2981.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ_2CHSiqdeP0k0vYgTvKapa0ZOAZUSGFpYFOs-s_RcB8IHcQvoty3l2Dp-wkDe93asv8IbnUsggki2HmHyYB1KjQCqrcr69Aa-FnyDEduj7wI-jJ7l_ilj8WZefnllYNzO99L/s320/IMG_2981.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5019038108379775106" border="0" /></a><br />I won't buy tomatoes, peaches, or other summer foods in the winter. It's an environmental disaster hauling produce halfway across the world so that we don't have to remember that things don't grow in January in the Northeast. I try to stick to the kale grown in greenhouses upstate and the root vegetables and apples from local farms. When I do break down and buy long-haul produce, I try to minimize the distance it has travelled: my cucumbers come from the Dominican Republic, not Mexico, and my oranges come from Florida, not California.<br /><br />So I'm all freakin' militant about seasonal, fresh, local food. Then I smell a bag of dried peaches. Goddamnit.<br /><br />Peaches are my favorite fruit. They are so sensuous and liquid, falling apart on your lips, spilling juice so readily. Their fragrence carries across distances, pulls you in. I prefer yellow peaches, with their stronger flavor, but white peaches carry the memory of my first trip to France, when my Laotien host mother bought a bushel of them and peeled them for us to eat. I thought this was a strange peach they only had in Europe, and fell hopelessly in love with them as a symbol of that foreignness. (I love <span style="font-style: italic;">canari,</span> called canary melon in the US, for the same reason.)<br /><br />So peaches. I wanted peaches. I wanted them with a passion I could not describe. I wanted them NOW. I wanted them even though they weren't there to have.<br /><br />In the end, I compromised. I bought a bag of frozen sliced peaches. They came from Washington; I hope they were grown locally to where they were frozen, at least. When I got home, I dumped them, still frozen, into a sauce pan, brought them (and the juice they bled) to a boil, added maple syrup (because frozen fruit is never as sweet as fresh) and ate the whole bag in one sitting.<br /><br />What do we do with ourselves as lovers of food who also care about the politics of it? What do we do when we love <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras">foie gras</a> but hate the <a href="http://www.goveg.com/feat/foie/">torture of geese</a>? (Side note: I've actually eaten foie gras, during a phase of flexible vegetarianism, and found the fuss over it absurd. It's like if butter were made of meat. I'll take the stick of butter + steak any day over "stick of butter that tastes like steak.") If we are ethical vegetarians sitting in front of plates of our mother's pot roast? If we don't want to eat out of season, but crave a peach?<br /><br />I don't have answers here. I just have questions, and an empty bag of frozen peaches sitting in my trash can.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-85681059247369540882007-01-29T02:53:00.000-05:002007-01-29T01:05:00.192-05:00Actual Line From The Wife(We are reading an email newsletter from a fancy chocolate shop in the city. It says, "Say 'I Love You' With Chocolate!")<br /><br />Wife: Oh god, no, you should not say 'I love you' with chocolate.<br /><br />Me: What's wrong with that? I love you, I like chocolate.<br /><br />Wife: No, you should give me chocolate <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> say 'I love you.' They should be separate things.<br /><br />So Sayeth She.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-30914213243200870682007-01-22T22:34:00.000-05:002007-01-23T02:52:42.332-05:00In Which Sangria Fixes EverythingI had half a post written about the semester beginning, and about how I'm a big ball of nerves, and about all my anxiety, and about how I'm having to give up a lot of cooking, because I have so much work and so little time and need to train myself to focus. And then something happened.<br /><br />I got drunk.<br /><br />More specifically, I went out to drink with a bunch of folks from my class at <a href="http://newyork.citysearch.com/profile/7104920/new_york_ny/spain_restaurant_bar.html">Spain</a>, a dive-ish tapas bar. I sat with folks I know and folks I don't, and we talked about department politics, city politics, babies/weddings/not having them, and the sex lives of our friends. And I drank two half-pitchers of sangria, and ate about ten pounds of <a href="http://spain.othercountries.com/otherspain/pages/recipes/bravas.asp">patatas bravas</a>, which are thin slices of potato (thicker than potato chips, but not by much) slathered in bottled hot sauce and are the only vegetarian tapa that ever comes out of that damn kitchen, and I walked to the subway slightly dizzy and giddy in the light of the flurries landing on my head.<br /><br />I'm a lightweight. I always have been, and I actually have cultivated the talent. When I drank more regularly in college, I noticed when my tolerance increased and cut back on drinking, to keep my tolerance down. I want to get giggly on a glass of wine. I want to have my head spin easily.<br /><br />And there is something in the sociality of drinking with people that sucks me in. My first drink was in a boîte in the south of France with my host sisters, who poured me whisky and coke. My second was poured for me by a guy who, after that, became my closest friend for nine months, at which point he failed to answer my emails for a summer, at which point we were peaceful and friendly to each other for the remainder of our time at school. My first time drinking with the Boy, when he got drunk for the first time in--five years?--at a formal dance, and my mother carried the photo of us together, glassy-eyed trashed, in her purse for years. The night the Boy and two friends and I were walking home from pitchers of sangria and nachos at <a href="http://www.culinarymenus.com/vivazapata.htm">Viva's</a>, and I slipped on the ice and got a hematoma in my hand but didn't care because, and this was the important part, <span style="font-style: italic;">my cigarette did not go out</span>. Blenders of chocolate milkshakes spiked with vanilla vodka, split between the four of us in the commune, laying on the floor of the trailer at the beach, feeling like a family as we played round after round of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_10">Phase 10</a> and laughed, and laughed.<br /><br />And tonight. Tonight was drinking with people who I want to like me. Tonight was taking half a moment off from my panic and anxiety, half a moment off from being terrified about ruining everything in my life, and drank.<br /><br />And something amazing happened when I came home. I made the Wife a frozen pizza and some romain lettuce with dressing. And then I made salad. It was just baby spinach and fresh goat cheese and pomegranite-balsamic vinaigrette. It took five minutes. But it was...amazing. The dressing was just right--sweet in a way I haven't tasted before. It was simple and clear. I may not have time this semester to spend hours cooking, like I like to. But I can feed myself, and I can do it right.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Pomegranite-balsamic vinaigrette, for when everything needs to be OK</span><br /></div>Mix equal parts pomegranate molasses, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil if, like me, you like your vinaigrette sour. If not, toy with it; the pomegranate molasses is sweet-sour and smokey in flavor. Good on any sort of salad, especially, I realized tonight, on the plainest ones.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-84833089826489625872007-01-22T09:32:00.000-05:002007-02-02T11:17:45.951-05:00Menus From VacationNo one eats well on vacation. Normally, you don't even have the ability to cook, so you're stuck eating nasty restaurant food on the edge of your hotel bed. If you're like me and the Wife, you're stuck at the few restaurants that can accommodate both of your eating habits. (At Outback Steakhouse, I can eat the blue cheese salad, she gets the Chicken on the Barbie, and we split the flourless chocolate cake for dessert. Mexican is easy, so is Indian.)<br /><br />Luckily, we have a kitchen here at at the trailer, so we can cook for ourselves. But there's very little in the cabinet here, meaning we have to buy whatever we are going to eat. We brought some polenta, some Tinkyada pasta (the only really edible gluten-free brand), and breakfast cereal, and bought basic supplies at the SuperFresh and the two health food stores. (The one in the Midway Plaza has a good selection of frozen baked goods; the one on Rehoboth Avenue is better with dry goods, including a full selection of Tinkyada products and DeeTee's pizzelles). But that means that we're on a limited menu for the week. Here's what we put together.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sunday:</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Breakfast:</span> Fried Eggs<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dinner: </span>Black Bean Chili and Cornbread<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Cornbread:</span> Gluten-Free Pantry's Yankee Cornbread Mix. The mix called for buttermilk, which was a pain because we only needed a third of the quart and I have no idea what to do with the rest.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Chili:</span> I made the whole 1 pound bag of beans, and put most of it away for the rest of the week. Then I made this:<br /><br />Bring to a boil 2 c beans and 3 cups broth from boiling. (Don't use the liquid from canned beans; it's gross. Instead, add water or broth.) Add 1 cup uncooked rice, 1 chopped carrot, 1/2 chopped onion, 1/2 chopped potato, 2 cloves chopped garlic, 1 cup frozen green beans or other frozen veggies. I didn't get to add frozen veggies, because my bag of frozen green beans was totally gross and dried out; they were really old. Blast those grocery stores with low turnover in organic frozen goods. Add whatever spices are in the cabinet, preferably cumin and chili powder, but in my case, McCormick Montreal Steak Seasoning, celery salt, and paprika. I have to say, our version turned out pretty lousy. But the cornbread is top-notch.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Monday:</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Breakfast: </span>GluteNo Plain Bagel with cream cheese<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Lunch:</span> (eaten at 6 PM) Pizza and Salad<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Pizza:</span> Amy's Gluten-Free Cheese Pizza. Tastes a lot like their non-GF pizzas, guaranteed vegetarian. As good as frozen pizza gets, in my opinion. Cooks better cut into quarters.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Salad:</span> Half a head of romaine lettuce divided between the two of us, one chopped carrot each, Newman's Own Oil and Vinegar Salad Dressing. Lettuce was bitter. Again with the old produce.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dessert: </span>(eaten in place of dinner when I awoke from my nap at eleven) Kinnikinnik Chocolate Frosted Donuts, chocolate peanut butter ice cream<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tuesday:</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Breakfast:</span> A banana for me, an Ensure for the Wife<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Lunch:</span> La Tolteca, which is a little Delaware chain. She had Bola Chile Dip and I had Huevos Rancheros.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dinner: </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Polenta and Black Beans.</span><br /><br />Beans for polenta is best made with cannellini or pinto beans, browned butter, fresh sage, and no broth. Sometime I'll give you a recipe. Until then: melt 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon olive oil in saucepan. Add two chopped cloves garlic. Cook briefly, but do not brown. Add 1.5 cups black beans and 2 cups liquid. Sprinkle in sage if you have it, or herbes de provence. I used "Italian seasoning" and celery salt. Cook it down until the liquid is mostly gone. Then, slightly mash the beans and cook until the liquid is nearly entirely gone. Serve over hot, soft polenta, sprinkled with salt and probably with more butter.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Wednesday:</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Breakfast:</span> We split a GluteNo Bagel with cream cheese.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Lunch: </span>A pack of peanut M&Ms, a 'chai tea latte' (see <a href="http://betterpoliticsthroughfood.blogspot.com/2007/01/breakfast-slowly.html">below</a> for what I think of those), a bag of movie theater popcorn and a bottle of Boylan's root beer, all split. We were on the go.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOeFmvUWFjeuU83b4ro6ZmnuqX5SE9VcEIwep4dIHQn1Nu9dNCbkb8HELdsJ9bOJQUGsjliyXXJPTrgphEhubxa5jxpNZ3aBFbGsf37__jqAxJ_60_3KxJ5JAgeWDEwH6HL0Xe/s1600-h/IMG_3016.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOeFmvUWFjeuU83b4ro6ZmnuqX5SE9VcEIwep4dIHQn1Nu9dNCbkb8HELdsJ9bOJQUGsjliyXXJPTrgphEhubxa5jxpNZ3aBFbGsf37__jqAxJ_60_3KxJ5JAgeWDEwH6HL0Xe/s200/IMG_3016.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5026971207708662338" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dinner: </span>Salad (same as made on Monday) for both of us. I had hummus, toasted black bread, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sriracha">sriracha</a>. Thumbs way up to sriracha, which <a href="http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com/2006/06/08/i-had-to-do-it-bulgogi-burgers/">Barbara</a> calls "the rooster." I've never gotten a bottle before, purely through chance, but it's a hotter, chunkier tabasco.<br /><br />The Wife had a mug of Imagine Cream of Tomato soup (which is vegan, despite the name). We're both huge fans of the tomato soup (though I'm off tomatoes for the moment, grrrrr), and also buy their No-Chicken Broth for cooking at home. However, I've never been as impressed with their other soups; the corn and the potato leek are both way too bland for me. I want them to taste more like, respectively, corn and potatoes and leeks. (In fact, I've added potatoes and leeks to the potato leek soup, and lo and behold, it turns good.) This probably works for the tomato because tomato flavor holds up so well to heavy processing, and because tomato soup is not supposed to taste 'fresh.' In any case, try the soups, but don't expect fresh vegetable flavor. They are, however, a damn sight better than most packaged soups.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dessert:</span> My aunt who lives down here came over, and we had tea and custard.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1POy0iX3y5akmlSsnA8pq2utCA3nnvgE9eruyFZL4LmmX5jrAYdLfm2YShmXgSl3muk0BK_m21404kkcgdIv2ppXxqbL_ClLxHvzysyO7STHSnm1VUNi_4BLk-hhUKiVri666/s1600-h/IMG_3018.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1POy0iX3y5akmlSsnA8pq2utCA3nnvgE9eruyFZL4LmmX5jrAYdLfm2YShmXgSl3muk0BK_m21404kkcgdIv2ppXxqbL_ClLxHvzysyO7STHSnm1VUNi_4BLk-hhUKiVri666/s200/IMG_3018.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5025538878610034418" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Maple and Spice Custard</span><br />Preheat over to 350 degrees. Place a large baking dish (a 9x13 pan) half-full of water in it; this is called a bain-marie, and helps the custard not curdle. Heat 2 cups milk, 1/2 cup maple syrup, a dash of powdered cinnamon and a dash of powdered cardamom on the stove. In a casserole dish small enough to fit in the baking dish, beat three eggs. When milk begins to steam, pour it extremely slowly into the eggs, whisking all the while. Put the casserole in the bain-marie, and bake for 30 minutes. Can be served warm or cold. If you don't have maple syrup, you can make this with 1/2 cup sugar; beat it with the eggs. Whole spices can be boiled in the milk and then strained out, if you've got them.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Thursday: </span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Breakfast: </span> Fried egg for The Wife. I made what I'm calling scrambled tortilla, by which I mean tortilla in the Spanish, not Mexican sense.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLjCrBciIT_YR7soSyqwRVOqf88hmHDBYrlwVtqU6yWTDFfmt2qgqSylnzeWwKS4B0xX0dW9pnJ2U4ko3FvtXR_sDincj1iqyrLbgo16FhACS0aN_5h_QF7yCNd-eFkzLHVbwD/s1600-h/IMG_3024.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLjCrBciIT_YR7soSyqwRVOqf88hmHDBYrlwVtqU6yWTDFfmt2qgqSylnzeWwKS4B0xX0dW9pnJ2U4ko3FvtXR_sDincj1iqyrLbgo16FhACS0aN_5h_QF7yCNd-eFkzLHVbwD/s200/IMG_3024.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5026970713787423282" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Scrambled Tortilla</span><br />Cut half a potato and a thick slice of onion very thin. Saute in oil or butter (or both) with a hefty spoonful of chili garlic sauce, or another hot sauce. When the onions look soft and the potatoes look brown, crack an egg over the whole deal. You can probably turn off the stove and cook the egg entirely on residual heat, especially if you're stuck with a stupid electric range (I hate electric ranges). Serve with more hot sauce and some salt. Defend against interested cats.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Early Evening Snack:</span> Tomato soup for The Wife. Hummus, carrot, and rice crackers for me.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dinner: </span>NACHOS!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">My Nachos</span><br />Dump a whole bag of tortilla chips onto a baking sheet that you've covered with aluminum foil. Sprinkle a cup and a half of drained and rinsed black beans over the top. Cover with cheddar cheese until the beans are mostly obscured, and sprinkle cumin and chili powder over top. (Having neither of those, I used garlic salt and paprika.) Bake in a 350 oven for about ten minutes, or until the cheese is fully melted. Serve with dips of choice. Our dips of the evening were Desert Pepper Chipotle Black Bean Dip and chili garlic sauce mixed with cream cheese and melted in the microwave, which is pretty tasty but has given me a stomach ache every time I've eaten it.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Friday:</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Breakfast: </span>Bagel for her, toast for me.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Lunch: </span>A Mexican restaurant two blocks from the beach on Garfield Parkway in Bethany, which is two towns south of Rehoboth. The restaurant was run by surfer-ish white dudes, and the food they turned out was inauthentic but fairly tasty.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dinner: </span>I tried to make macaroni and cheese, but something went terribly wrong with the cheese sauce. I didn't have cornstarch, which is my flour-substitute for gravies and béchamel sauces, and so was going to thicken with instant polenta, but the cheese didn't melt right, and it all turned into a gloppy mess. So we had pasta instead. Hers with butter and salt, mine with sauteed onions and celery seed.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Saturday:</span><br /></div>The Day Of Eating Leftovers. I can't actually remember any organized meals; we just ate everything in the fridge. All day. Until we left. Then it was chips and honey roasted cashews and Mr. Pibb in the car all the way home.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-37268776001980460402007-01-17T17:56:00.000-05:002007-01-17T17:57:04.965-05:00On VacationThe Wife and I are spending a week of vacation, along with the cats, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, hence the radio silence. My grandmother had a trailer down here, and when she died she left it to my parents and aunt and uncle. Yes, I do usually go through that circuitous way of explaining why I have a place to come to here; I hate the idea of saying that "my parents have a place in Rehoboth," because I hate the idea that people will think of me as coming from that sort of class background. The truth is, my parents are broke, and I was raised broke but middle-class in a very non-broke, upper middle class town. I don't like to sound like I came from money, which is why I say it like that. I also avoid saying where I went to college for as long as possible, because I attended somewhere that bleeds blue (and that's a hint), and I don't want people to think that I'm one of them when I'm talking. Anyway. So we're in Rehoboth.<br /><br />Haven't been here long enough to have complex thoughts, but here are a few:<br /><br />1) The Wife and I rented a Prius for the week. I have to say, it is a mighty fine car. I can't drive, but the Wife assures me that it drives excellently; she says she would like it a lot even if it weren't a hybrid. The little screen that shows where energy is being pulled at any moment is really great, especially for a passenger who doesn't have to do anything. Not great trunk space, but the rest is fabulous. As much as I like it, though, something bugs me about the emphasis on hybrid cars, as opposed to biodiesel, all-electric, or other fuels for cars. I mean, sure, it's fabulous that we're getting 47 miles per gallon, but we're still putting out exhaust. Less is good, but it does not equal none, and none is a good target to aim for. Especially on today, when it was seventy in January. Guess what? When we came down last year, it was seventy in January too. It shouldn't be more than fifty.<br /><br />2) Once you get out of Wilmington, Delaware very quickly becomes rural. Most of the drive down route 1 is through fields, now barren, but full of corn and strawberries and other crops in the summer. Why, then, is it so impossible to find local produce down here? In the summer, there are a few produce places along 1, before you get to the actual beaches, that sell locally grown food. But there is nothing available once you get into the town. Where does the food grown not ten miles from here end up? Why isn't it feeding people here, en route to feeding people elsewhere? And why, then, are people who shop in this town stuck with buying lousy vegetables and fruit trucked in from elsewhere? Something is seriously wrong with the food economy in rural Delaware.<br /><br />3) When I asked if the huevos rancheros were vegetarian at the wonderful Mexican restaurant down here, the waiter looked very confused for a moment. And then he said, "No, not really..." and I expected him to let me know that everything in the entire restaurant was cooked in gallons of lard. Which was very possible. Then he said, "You know, it comes from a hen." And I was extremely, extremely happy. (It remains possible that everything there is fried in gallons of lard, but I'm choosing not to ask. Also, they changed their salsa recipe, and not for the better. Boo.)<br /><br />4) A really surprising amount of gluten-free food in the regular supermarkets, and more in the health food stores. Thumbs up to Kinnikinnick chocolate-frosted donuts, Gluten-Free Pantry cornbread mix, and GluteNo bagels. However, organic produce selection is lousy, organic butter costs $6/pound, organic eggs are $3/dozen. Again with the ambivalence. <br /><br />5) I'm ambivalently a fan of outlet shopping. Discuss your opinions on the subject.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-1168506018506351232007-01-13T03:36:00.000-05:002007-01-16T14:06:33.355-05:00What I Talk About When I Talk About Food & PoliticsWhen I say "better politics through food," what the hell do I mean?<br /><br />Wait, let me start this over.<br /><br />There are a lot of ways to relate "food" and "politics." So what, particularly, am I talking about? What is my focus? Let me go through a bunch of the different ways of relating these terms, and try to explain where I locate myself, most of the time.<br /><br />To start: the term "food" should be pretty self-explanatory, but I don't only mean food objects, like apples or steaks or boxes of Lucky Charms. I mean the entire system through which our food is produced--farms, slaughterhouses, supermarkets, backyard gardens--and the social ways in which we consume it--in schools, with family, alone in our cars, standing on the corner outside the bodega. By politics, I most certainly do not mean (only) things that happen in government, during elections, or as part of lobbying. I also mean the interactions between people that are about power--that is, how power, which can be located in social interactions or in the form of the state, affects us as individuals, communities, and societies.<br /><br />Power and politics have a lot to do with the way food is distributed in the contemporary world. A lot of people don't have enough food. A lot more people don't have food that is appropriately nutritional. Other people eat too much and particular sorts of food as part of a lifestyle of overconsumption. Clean your plate, there are starving children in Ethiopia. These distributional issues are serious. They kill people. They doom others to a life of poor health. These distributional issues are a part of why I'm a vegetarian: meat is wasteful, in that it takes grain which could feed many and turns it into meat that can feed a few. But I'm not here writing about world hunger, or the injustice of how food is marketed in poor, non-white communities in the US. I'm not focusing on how food is distributed through class, race, and gender in the US or elsewhere in the world. I will write about these things where they intersect with the things I am thinking about, but they are not my main focus.<br /><br />Another place where politics and food come together is sustainable consumption. When most people talk about food and politics, they are talking about the organic, sustainable, fair trade, and local food movements. There is no question that eating locally produced, organic, fairly traded food is more sustainable than eating things shipped across the world, covered in chemicals that will poison you, the people who grew it, and the people who processed it, for which no one involved in the production was paid a fair wage. To me, each of these individual ideas is so obvious that it seems silly to proselytize about them. Organic food doesn't contain poison; you gotta like that. Fairly traded food is made by people who are suddenly making a decent wage, which is either just human decency or, if you are a pro-liberalization type, means global economic growth for all. Local food is the clearest sell. Food produced close to where you live cuts down substantially on the carbon (and other pollutant) emissions associated with your food's production, shipping, and selling. It supports a secure local food infrastructure, meaning that in the event that, say, nothing can get between California and New York because of (insert major disaster), I still get to eat. Most importantly from a foodie's point of view, local food doesn't taste like crap all the time. Tomatoes shipped from California are picked hard and green and chemically treated to turn red. Apples that have to get here from Washington state have to be like little rocks. Peaches from Georgia can't bruise on the way. Blech. It's all cardboard. Give me the bushels of peaches in July I get at the Greenmarket anytime.<br /><br />As with distribution, this is something I care about. I buy organic, local, and fairly traded products for the majority of my food shopping. I will buy minimally treated conventional produce if its locally grown, but I prefer to get organic and local. This is a major part of my consumption life. But I will not spend all my time singing the praises of the local tomato, or lecturing about farmer's markets, or talking about seasonality. They'll come up, probably frequently, but that's not what I'm doing here.<br /><br />I want to talk about food as a social object. Eating, cooking, buying food, going to restaurants: these are socially mediated phenomena, which make sense in a social context and can be used to interpret that social context. The actions we take in our everyday lives are a part of the broader social reality with which we all interact. As Foucault would say, we are all in the discourse, and we cannot escape so easily.<br /><br />Food is particularly fraught with social significance. For some of us, mostly women, it connects to our struggle to fit into the conception of what a 'beautiful' or 'normal' female body is. This isn't just a matter of eating disorders. The Wife, having been sick all her life from eating food with gluten in it, and undiagnosed until a year and a half ago, has struggled with being thought anorexic, with having a body so thin that it is clearly abnormal and judged. This is painful, in a way that is connected to the pain heavy women feel, but not identical. In any case, the relationship that the Wife has to food is inherently connected to the social constructions of gender in our society, and the power relations they create.<br /><br />For others, food means our relationship with our culture or class. The Boy's family always had a pan of refried beans on the stove, because they were Mexican; it was that smell that separated him from the world outside his door, which literally smelled of WonderBread, since he grew up near their factory. To not have beans would be to be not Mexican. Immigrants and their children and people of color struggle with the connections between food and culture: they accept or reject old food, and it has to do with how their identities as Other than mainstream white Americans can be accepted or rejected.<br /><br />Food is essentially connected to our bodies: hunger is physical, as is the pleasure of eating. My relationship with my body is hostile and filled with struggle, as a result of years of serious illness and disability. When I was really, really sick, I couldn't eat. Coming back into eating--and being able to enjoy my body through feeding it--was healing. Because food is both bodily and social, we as social beings are able to use food to bridge between our body/senses and our emotions and mind. We can be embodied and cared for at the same time. This gives food the ability to bring the social, and the political, very close into our bodies. I write about food and politics as a feminist: the personal is political, and the political is very personal, nestled close to our chests, living on our forks and in our long dinner conversations. We live politics through our food.<br /><br />That's what I want to write about. We experience politics whenever we engage in the socially fraught act of eating food, buying it, preparing it. I want to find the politics in the eating and cooking I do, and I want to tease them out to find what can be transformatory in them.<br /><br />And then there's that word, "better." What about politics would be better if we thought about food politically? I think that political organizing, political movements, and political thinking work best when they are embedded in an understanding of culture, society, and people which gives them rich levels of interpretation. If you are only thinking about the mechanics of politics, you will proceed mechanistically. Eventually, treating people as cogs will wear them out, just as cogs wear out over time. But treating people like people, giving them a rich experience that provides them with the ability to grow and flourish, means that they can stay in the moment, stay in the movement, and replenish themselves while keeping up the struggle. Politics is better for the people involved if it is a place well fed with caring, attention, individuality, and concrete and metaphorical food for all.<br /><br />So this is what I mean by "better politics through food." I want to find how food and the things it exposes and connects can together lead us into different ways of thinking about politics, so that we can engage in the transformation into a more just and, hopefully, better tasting one.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-1168509663227891172007-01-12T05:00:00.000-05:002007-01-16T14:00:19.587-05:00The Ontological Status of My Deprivation: On Balancing Food IssuesThe Wife and I went out for brunch. We don't do this often, but we had things to do in Manhattan, so we found a place that served fancy schmancy breakfasts at an hour late enough to allow us to make it. She ordered scrambled eggs with bacon and a small salad. I got their vegetarian eggs benedict (I can't remember what the non-Canadian bacon was, but I remember thinking it was mediocre). I drank tea, she drank Coke, and we talked about her job, my classes, our wedding, our housemates, and probably Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At some point, she offered me what was left of her salad. I like salad, so I said, "Sure." I shoved it onto my plate and started eating.<br /><br />Bacon. It tasted like bacon. Warm, smokey, fatty bacon. The slices she ate must have laid over it when it was served. "Goddamnit," I said to her. "Your salad tastes like bacon. That's just mean."<br /><br />"You could eat bacon, if you wanted to," she said. "And, I mean, you ate an English muffin right in front of me."<br /><br />"You don't have anything against English muffins. And I didn't put it on your plate."<br /><br />"I'd get sick if I had an English muffin. You're still eating the bacon-y salad."<br /><br />And it's true. I ate the whole, bacon-flavored thing.<br /><br />Both of us eat restricted diets. I'm what's commonly called a lacto-ovo vegetarian: I eat eggs and dairy products, but no meat, poultry, fish, or seafood. I would term it as not eating anything that had been alive, although the 'aliveness' of eggs is open for debate. (The historical debate has come down across the board. For South Asian vegetarians, eggs are meat; for those who keep kosher, they are dairy.) The Wife, on the other hand, is a celiac. Celiac disease is a condition where certain proteins, called gluten, in wheat, rye, and barley cause the small intestine to, for lack of a better explanation, quit and move to Venezuela, which is not what you want a body part doing. The only way to cure the disease is to avoid wheat, rye, barley, and oats (which are usually contaminated with gluten) entirely. For the rest of your life.<br /><br />We also don't share each other's restrictions. There is a "gluten drawer" in the fridge with pita bread, whole wheat sandwich bread, and knishes for me and the Boy to eat. She eats pepperoni sandwiches for lunch three days a week.<br /><br />We have something in common with our different restrictions. Neither of us dislikes the food we can't eat. I crave bacon, hot dogs, sausages. Part of her wants bread, pizza, donuts. But we choose not to eat them because the way we want to live our lives includes not eating these foods, and the benefits we get (ethically, medically) from forgoing these things we want.<br /><br />The issue here is the different ontological statuses of our food restrictions, by which I mean the way they came into being and their fundamental nature. I'm a vegetarian because I think eating meat is morally indefensible for a whole host of ways. (Something seems wrong about killing other living creatures; meat production is environmentally destructive; the meat industry is cruel in the extreme to animals living in it. I'll leave out the 'meat is gross' issue.) Being a vegetarian comes from a place about ethics and morality, about living a life I feel is justifiable. So I don't eat meat.<br /><br />The Wife, on the other hand, does not eat gluten because her health depends on it. Since going gluten-free, she has gained weight for the first time in her adult life. She has stopped having what I will obliquely call "tummy trouble" that traps her in the bathroom for an hour at a time. She has more energy than she ever had before. If she eats gluten accidentally, she becomes physically ill. This is about living without suffering.<br /><br />Our differences in eating stems from different sorts of ideas about "the good life." The good life is the goal of a number of "ethical" branches of moral philosophy, beginning with the work of Aristotle and leading to Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen today, which present various ideas of what the good life consists of. The point is that each individual gets to determine what her good life is, and from there act accordingly.<br /><br />My notion of the good life revolves around notions of doing right. In this, the ethical (what is required to live a good life) comes close, some would say too close, to the moral, that which all human beings are required to do in order to live in society. But vegetarianism, not killing animals for my own pleasure, is to me ethical, a decision that I make in order to live the "good life" with a clear conscience.<br /><br />The Wife, on the other hand, chooses not to eat gluten out of another idea of the good life, one that involves bodily well-being and lack of physical suffering. Her good life involves being free of pain and capable of living her everyday life with fewer restrictions than previously. <br /><br />The trouble is the tendency to make one of these ideas of the good life prior to the other--that is, to decide one is a better life. I could easily argue that, since my good life is more moral than hers, mine wins. Therefore, no more pepperoni in the house, no more turkey on Thanksgiving. However, she could respond that my good life is about adherence to a principle, not to anything concrete, where as she concretely suffers if she eats gluten. No more gluten drawer, no more sneaking donuts on the side.<br /><br />She doesn't have anything against English muffins. Nothing is going to happen to me if I eat bacon.<br /><br />I think this arguing over the ontology and ethics of our food preferences is silly, though. We each are acting out of confirmed beliefs about what makes our life good. We also recognize the importance of each other's beliefs, and respect them. When I said I couldn't cook a turkey, she said, OK. We'll order one. When she says I can't buy croissants when we're out, I say, OK. I'll eat something else. This is the way we manage our life together, by recognizing what we each have to say about food and the good life. And that's why, I think, our life together is so good.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38556021.post-1168496256210452112007-01-11T01:05:00.000-05:002007-01-11T05:02:24.250-05:00Happy Birthday, BoyThe Boy's birthday just passed. I made a fabulous meal for the house, which we devoured before I could photograph it. But, though I'll talk about the food (because I'm me), I want to talk about The Boy. Because he deserves it.<br /><br />To talk about politics for a moment, the way our relationship works in the world is complicated, and it's about who is allowed to form complex, devoted relationships with whom. It's understood, in our culture, that people can form romantic attachments that are life-long, committed, adoring, and passionate. In fact, that's what most people aspire to; that's what marriage is about in our current cultural understanding. (Marriage wasn't about that a hundred and fifty years ago; it was those beloved Victorians who made it what it is today, conceptually. But marriage is a topic for another post, probably associated with a cake tasting at some later point.) There is also an understanding that women can form passionate, life-long bonds with each other that are not necessarily sexual, but that are entirely committed. This is what <span style="font-style: italic;">Sex in the City</span> was about, really, and the whole stupid sisterhood genre of chick lit. Men don't get to form these relationships, because our society doesn't really believe that men can have those sorts of emotions without being terribly conflicted about it. (The only real, close relationship between two unrelated men I've seen on TV is the relationship between Turk and J.D. on <span style="font-style: italic;">Scrubs. Scrubs</span> has really fascinating, and I think useful, politics. But that's another post.) But for a man and a woman to be in that sort of committed friendship--it's odd. It smacks of suppressed sexual tension. It's unseemly.<br /><br />For a man and a woman to be in that sort of committed friendship--it's odd. It smacks of suppressed sexual tension. It's unseemly. It's only allowed between a woman and a gay man, which strips the sex out of it (just as relationships between women have the sex stripped out). However, the 'hag' (female pal of fabulous gay man) is always, always straight. Or bisexual in the popular, flirty way that is so commonly discussed these days. (And I'm pro-bisexual. I might identify as bisexual, if I didn't hate men. But a lot of people are pop bisexual these days, and it's corny and stupid and I'm a revolutionary queer so get the hell away from me.) There is no cultural space for a lesbian to be a hag, or, as is more appropriate for me and the Boy, for a gay man and a lesbian to form the sort of committed, loving friendship that women are allowed to form together, or that exists in a different form between spouses/lovers/partners/whatever your generic for things like that is.<br /><br />So when we're together, the Boy and I get read as one of two things. Either we're a couple, or I'm his [straight] hag. The couple thing I kinda get. We hold hands in public; we walk arm in arm; we call each other "baby," "honey," and "mama;" we wear each other's clothes; we end all our phone calls with "love you." Compulsory heterosexuality reads us as a straight couple. We realize we look like a couple, and find it terribly funny. In fact, I regularly call him my boyfriend.<br /><br />But, if you read him as gay, assuming I'm straight? That doesn't make any freakin' sense, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it does--I don't dress dykey, I don't have short hair, I only have one piercing per ear. (I do have cat's-eye glasses, and wear Timberland boots, but that's insufficent, apparently.) But, when I am 'hagging' (by which I mean accompanying him, in wing-man style, on bouts of organized and slightly drunken gayness) why, oh why oh why, does mainstream gay male culture have to read me as straight? Come on, people. Lesbians can be fabulous too!<br /><br />Well, maybe that's my problem.<br /><br />But the politics of relationships between gay men and lesbians, or, more accurately, between men and women in the broader queer community, are not the point of this post. I'm getting away from what is supposed to be important here, which is the Boy, and why I am so grateful for him in my life. This guy is totally dedicated to those he loves. He is completely emotionally open and honest. When you are with him, he is there. I need people like that in my life. (The Wife is like that, too, in a slightly different way, but it's good to have backup. For emergencies. And I have those sorts of emergencies frequently.)<br /><br />And it's amazing to live with people who you can trust. Who you can count on. Who really want to live the way you do, so that you can make it work. A beloved roommate just moved out (very, very far out, different-state out), and while I loved her (and still do), we didn't always agree about how to live. But Wife, Boy, and I, we are on the exact same page.<br /><br />The real way you can tell this is that we all walk in the door and take off our pants. We then spend the rest of the evening in our panties (which I assert applies to both male and female underpants, plus what he wears are totally panties and nothing butcher), reading our email, watching shows we TiVoed, and eating. It is totally together and united and beautiful. And pantsless. (I'm not wearing pants as I type this, in fact.)<br /><br />And he has not been happy recently. There's a lousy job, which I won't write about since I'm pretty sure there's a confidentiality agreement involved; there's a bad breakup, which I won't write about because no one involved was an asshole, it just sucked; there are life decisions to be pondered, which I won't write about because everyone in their mid-twenties is having a similar version of the same thing. But he's not happy. So I have to be there for him. And the main way I know how to do that is through cooking.<br /><br />Luckily, he's Mexican, and therefore believes that cooking=love as much as I do.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/476/677/1600/107512/IMG_2838.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/476/677/200/699561/IMG_2838.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >The Boy, at the beach last fall.</span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Menu for a Slightly Sad Best Friend, Upon Turning 25</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Salad course:</span><br />Romaine lettuce, sliced steamed beets, and goat cheese rolled in real Mexican chili powder, served with balsamic vinaigrette<br /><ul><li>The goat cheese was Fairway brand, and I wasn't too impressed. Not assertive and goat-y enough for me. My Mexican chili powder comes from Kansas, of all places, but the Boy asserts that it is authentic. And since he gets mad when people put tomatoes in guacamole, I think he knows from authentic.</li></ul><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Main Course:</span><br />Brie Souffle<br />Yukon Gold Potatoes with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbes_de_provence">Herbes de Provence</a> Infused Olive Oil<br /><ul><li>To make brie souffle, add an entire wedge of brie, rind removed and cut in chunks, to the bérnaise (white) sauce you are using as the base, along with the egg yolks. More brie is always good, but even with just one wedge of lousy cheese the flavor will be excellent. I infused the oil by warming about a quarter cup of olive oil (mixed with some canola, to prevent smoking) to about 200 degrees in my smallest cast iron skillet, adding the dried herbs, and turning off the heat. It sat for about an hour, at which point I strained it and poured it over the chopped potatoes. Don't use cast iron if you want to store the oil; the iron which leaches into the oil, while yummy if you are an anemic vegetarian like myself, would make the oil go rancid more quickly.</li></ul><span style="font-style: italic;">Dessert</span><br /><a href="https://www.namastefoods.com/shopping/storefront/cgi-bin/item_list.cgi">Namaste Spice Cake</a>, sprinkled with powdered sugar<br /><ul><li>The Namaste Vanilla Cake is also excellent.</li></ul><span style="font-style: italic;">Wine Pairing</span><br />Réservé Maison Nicolas 2005 (chardonnay)<br /><ul><li>This is not an informed pairing; I had two bottles of red in the house, and one of white. I asked <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/food_porn/">LiveJournal</a> to help me, but got mixed responses. Something in me said "white with eggs," which is why I went with it. But, ya know, I didn't really care. It was good; I'd recommend it.</li></ul>Serve, on the good china, in the new dining room, on a table with a table cloth. Spend two hours, at least, sitting together as a house, laughing, feeding the cats bits of souffle, and talking about life. Repeat more often than once a year.<br /><br />Love you, baby. Happy birthday.ajnabiehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00256162101696026785noreply@blogger.com2