We just moved yesterday, which is why I haven’t been posting much lately. Too busy packing. We still have most of the kitchen left to pack. Mostly the food. The pots and pans are all moved.
Two things came out of this move—first, we discovered we had a weevil infestation. We’d had one, but thought we’d cleared it out. Then I started finding things with little weevils in them, and pasta dust here and there (that’s a sure sign). I read something once about how if you had flour that was weevil infested, you could freeze it for some amount of time, and then sift the weevils out of it and use it. I find the idea of that to be so disgusting that I can’t even fathom doing it. Anything we found that was even remotely suspect went in the trash. After about three shelves of icky little black bugs and packages with little teeny bullet holes in them, I was so creeped out I had to ask Alex to finish the job. I’m not usually girly like that, but this was just too much.
The second (and relatively less disgusting, although as I say, it’s relative) thing is that I realize I keep certain foods for a very long time. Mostly for no good reason. I knew I had a container of Liquid Smoke from about 1971. We’ve been toting that thing around for years. My mother bought it, and she’s been dead for 14 years, so that gives you some idea of just how old this stuff is. And I would never use it. Never. Even if I had a recipe that called for Liquid Smoke (and I’ve seen some lately, which makes me wonder what’s coming back next—dehydrated minced onions? MSG? *Shudder*) I’d go out and buy a new bottle of it. So why, I wonder, do I keep this thing?
The same question occurred to me when I found a little shaker of Molly McButter. That would have been from my early 90s low fat days. So again, we’re talking about something that’s pretty darned old. And because I have this major aversion to using chemicals for cooking (except for Diet Coke cake), I would never use Molly McButter. So why not throw it away? Why have I moved it from East coast to West, and between three houses in the East, and two houses (and counting) in the West? WHY? This is something I can’t fathom about myself.
I’m not particularly frugal, I don’t have sentimental attachment to these things (OK, maybe to the Liquid Smoke with its 89 cent price sticker on it, but definitely not the Molly McButter), and I know I’ll never use them. So why not bite the bullet and get rid of them? Can’t answer that.
Since I have to go over and clean out the rest of our former house, I’m going to end here, but I’m sure I’ll find several other things that we’ve been dragging around for years that I’ll never use. But I still won’t throw them out. Maybe I’ll spend the time packing thinking about why it is that I'm such a culinary pack rat, and have an actual answer for another post.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Thursday, April 05, 2007
My Addiction
I have a confession to make. I am an addict. Yes, I admit it. It’s a recent development, but one that I wouldn’t have expected, so I didn’t have any defenses prepared against it. It just snuck up on me. I have this (somewhat) new job, and everyone here is into it, so I naturally got dragged along once or twice, and I figured I’d go, but it would be harmless. I’d just be enduring this, not really participating.
Boy, was I wrong. I’m hooked.
If you’d told me two years ago, or even a year ago, that one day I would have to admit this addiction, I’ve have laughed in your face. But now I have to confront it.
I love Japanese food. There, I said it.
And I don’t mean sushi either. I’m still not caving to the call of sushi. It doesn’t call that loudly to me, and it doesn’t appeal. I love the idea of those delicate little rice roll things, but frankly there are just too many things in there that I’m not really interested in. My weakness is the bento box.
It started innocently enough. Some coworkers were going out for “all you can eat sushi” at the local Benihana. I was assured I could order from the menu, so I agreed to go. I got a salad and tempura scallops. The dressing on the salad was a wonderful slightly creamy (in texture, not in content) ginger flavored one. “Not bad,” I thought. Of course, the scallops were great—hey, deep fried anything, right?
A couple of weeks later, a friend suggested a Japanese place up the street. Only what she suggested was “a curry.” I had visions of Indian, which I adore. It turned out to be a Japanese place that serves a curry noodle soup (I had no idea the Japanese used curry powder), so I figured I’d just deal. I got a bento box with chicken yakisoba, and tempura. Of course it came with all the usual accompaniments: miso soup (I’m still not a huge fan of this), a salad (again, tasty dressing), rice. It was surprisingly satisfying for what seemed like not a ton of food (there’s plenty of rice, but I try to stay away from rice, and the primary offerings are in somewhat delicate portions).
Last week, after a lunchtime trip to get my hair cut, my husband suggested that, in the interest of speed, we just order take out from the Japanese place on the ground floor of our office building. I got a chicken and a beef component in my bento box. I couldn’t tell you what they were called (the beef sounds something like kohlrabi beef, but that’s not it). The chicken was a sautéed dish with lots of cabbage (I love cabbage), and the beef was grilled short ribs. The salad had a slightly sweet dressing on it that was more vinegar-and-oil like than the one at Benihana, but was still wonderful. These boxes come with six pieces of sushi (I just ignore it), and the ubiquitous miso soup.
Since then I’ve had two more bento boxes from the place in the lobby. I’m sadly hooked. The worst thing about it is that a bento box costs a minimum of ten bucks, and that’s $50 a week for lunch, minimum. Really, I can’t afford that (my monthly daycare costs are somewhere in the range of the national debt, so eating out every day really isn’t an option for me).
What’s an addict to do?
I suppose I could do the other thing that would have caused me to laugh in the face of anyone who suggested it a year ago: I could buy a Japanese cookbook and learn to make the beef, the chicken, and the salad dressing myself. This is what I normally do when I find a new kind of food I like, although I wouldn’t have ever expected to be actually mulling over the idea of buying Japanese cookbook.
I guess the cookbook option is probably the best way to go. It’s a single expense (minus the cost of the ingredients, which I don’t really count, because we have to buy food anyway, so to buy a Japanese ingredient, instead of a can of enchilada sauce or some other ingredient, is negligible), plus I enjoy the thrill of the hunt in finding the cookbook that has the majority of what I want in it, and then I make a mental list of other cookbooks that I might pick up at a later date that also look good.
This really took me by surprise. I’m still a little shaken and having trouble accepting the truth. There must be a support group for people like me. There seems to be for everyone else, after all. And just wait—in another year, I’ll have to confess to being a sushi addict. Where will it all end?
Boy, was I wrong. I’m hooked.
If you’d told me two years ago, or even a year ago, that one day I would have to admit this addiction, I’ve have laughed in your face. But now I have to confront it.
I love Japanese food. There, I said it.
And I don’t mean sushi either. I’m still not caving to the call of sushi. It doesn’t call that loudly to me, and it doesn’t appeal. I love the idea of those delicate little rice roll things, but frankly there are just too many things in there that I’m not really interested in. My weakness is the bento box.
It started innocently enough. Some coworkers were going out for “all you can eat sushi” at the local Benihana. I was assured I could order from the menu, so I agreed to go. I got a salad and tempura scallops. The dressing on the salad was a wonderful slightly creamy (in texture, not in content) ginger flavored one. “Not bad,” I thought. Of course, the scallops were great—hey, deep fried anything, right?
A couple of weeks later, a friend suggested a Japanese place up the street. Only what she suggested was “a curry.” I had visions of Indian, which I adore. It turned out to be a Japanese place that serves a curry noodle soup (I had no idea the Japanese used curry powder), so I figured I’d just deal. I got a bento box with chicken yakisoba, and tempura. Of course it came with all the usual accompaniments: miso soup (I’m still not a huge fan of this), a salad (again, tasty dressing), rice. It was surprisingly satisfying for what seemed like not a ton of food (there’s plenty of rice, but I try to stay away from rice, and the primary offerings are in somewhat delicate portions).
Last week, after a lunchtime trip to get my hair cut, my husband suggested that, in the interest of speed, we just order take out from the Japanese place on the ground floor of our office building. I got a chicken and a beef component in my bento box. I couldn’t tell you what they were called (the beef sounds something like kohlrabi beef, but that’s not it). The chicken was a sautéed dish with lots of cabbage (I love cabbage), and the beef was grilled short ribs. The salad had a slightly sweet dressing on it that was more vinegar-and-oil like than the one at Benihana, but was still wonderful. These boxes come with six pieces of sushi (I just ignore it), and the ubiquitous miso soup.
Since then I’ve had two more bento boxes from the place in the lobby. I’m sadly hooked. The worst thing about it is that a bento box costs a minimum of ten bucks, and that’s $50 a week for lunch, minimum. Really, I can’t afford that (my monthly daycare costs are somewhere in the range of the national debt, so eating out every day really isn’t an option for me).
What’s an addict to do?
I suppose I could do the other thing that would have caused me to laugh in the face of anyone who suggested it a year ago: I could buy a Japanese cookbook and learn to make the beef, the chicken, and the salad dressing myself. This is what I normally do when I find a new kind of food I like, although I wouldn’t have ever expected to be actually mulling over the idea of buying Japanese cookbook.
I guess the cookbook option is probably the best way to go. It’s a single expense (minus the cost of the ingredients, which I don’t really count, because we have to buy food anyway, so to buy a Japanese ingredient, instead of a can of enchilada sauce or some other ingredient, is negligible), plus I enjoy the thrill of the hunt in finding the cookbook that has the majority of what I want in it, and then I make a mental list of other cookbooks that I might pick up at a later date that also look good.
This really took me by surprise. I’m still a little shaken and having trouble accepting the truth. There must be a support group for people like me. There seems to be for everyone else, after all. And just wait—in another year, I’ll have to confess to being a sushi addict. Where will it all end?
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Christmas...um...Treats
Even though it’s nearly Spring, something the other day happened to remind me of Christmas. Actually, it was the bag of red, green, and silver foil wrapped Hershey’s Kisses I found that were plainly left over from Christmas. I tend to buy the holiday wrapped candy a week or so after the holiday at half price. A Hershey’s Kiss wrapped in green foil is still a Hershey’s Kiss, after all.
This discovery reminded me of some of the more memorable holiday foods I’ve come into contact with over the years. The holidays are typically a time of indulgence, of course, and I’ve done my share of indulging, I admit. Interestingly, the things that stand out most in my memory are not the really wonderful things I’ve had, but the less wonderful, or even very awful ones.
When I was small, my grandmother used to send us boxes of baked goods every Christmas. There are only two things that she sent that really made an impression on me, and again, it’s because they were both fairly horrible, in retrospect. At the time I thought they were pretty good. The first was a variation on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and the second was Twinkies. I think my grandmother knew how much I liked junky foods like those, and in an effort to save money (always a top priority for her) she decided to make them for me, rather than buy them.
The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup things were chocolate covered peanut butter balls. If you don’t know this, peanut butter gets grainy when it’s refrigerated. I don’t mind that texture, but chocolate gets waxy when it’s refrigerated, and I do mind that. Also, my grandmother always put raisins in her peanut butter balls. I don’t like raisins plain to start with, but I sure don’t like them in things. So to sully perfectly good peanut butter and chocolate with raisins is just downright wrong in my book, and then to refrigerate it on top of that renders the whole product totally inedible. Since she was sending the stuff out of the kindness of her heart, I didn’t very well feel like I could complain (not that I’m not complaining now, but I would never have hurt her feelings by saying anything to her).
The Twinkies were just kind of weird. I really have no idea what she used for “creme” filling, only that it wasn’t white frosting (which is pretty much what Twinkie filling is—white frosting, probably made with pure lard and sugar, likely with some titanium dioxide tossed in for good measure and whitening and brightening purposes). She made a simple sponge cake, and then cut it into rectangles, which she layered together with this “creme”. I remember eating them, and liking them fairly well, but today I have to agree with my aunt. At the time she remarked “Who would bother to make a Twinkie?” (and the question wasn’t posed as to why you wouldn’t simply go buy them, but more why anyone would want to have anything to do with a Twinkie in any form at all).
Since then I have actually seen "Twinkie" pans for sale through the Williams-Sonoma catalog. Clearly there are people who feel that homemade Twinkies are a good idea. It takes all kinds, I guess.
My husband’s grandmother was also a seasonal baker. She made mostly cookies—chocolate chip, Mexican wedding cakes, and the like—and fudge. He said they were great when he was a kid, but last batch that was inflicted on me was pretty terrible. The cookies were either hard as rocks or flavorless, or both, and the fudge was like eating chocolate plastic. He agreed that it was all horrible, and we sewed all of it at intervals along the Taconic State Parkway as we drove home. I’m not sure if her offerings were always so terrible, or if they just deteriorated as she aged. It’s not the sort of thing I can gauge because I never tasted anything until it had gone past awful, and he might be remembering the flavor in the forgiving glow of childhood nostalgia. She has now grown too old for holiday baking, for which we are all somewhat guiltily grateful.
I think the person who provided the most repulsive holiday “treat” was Aunt Stevie. Aunt Stevie was married to Uncle Mike (before he died, of course), and was my husband’s great aunt. Aunt Stevie lived in Sacramento or something, and every Christmas she would send a “tower o’ treats” thing to my husband’s grandparents “for everyone to share.” This was a very kind gesture, but the tower consisted of Aplets and Cotlets. Aplets and Cotlets are the most horrid candy every made (I use the term “candy” loosely, since I’m not sure they're not actually made of melted-down rubber bands). Interestingly, I recently found out that they're made not far from where I now live. That doesn’t improve their flavor or texture, but now I’m grossed out by something made locally. I feel I’m contributing to saving the environment, somehow.
During one holiday celebration, my husband’s grandmother (nickname Grammy), kept insisting that we take some with us. My mother-in-law, sister-in-law and I protested that we didn’t want to deprive them of Aunt Stevie’s gift. Grammy kept saying that Stevie had sent them “for the family to share.” Finally, in an effort to get out of there before St. Patrick’s Day, I grabbed the smallest box and said “OK, thanks--well, we’ll be on our way.” On the way out the door, my mother-in-law asked me low in my ear which box I’d taken. “The smallest one,” I hissed back. Needless to say the box was promptly consigned to the trash compactor (still in its cellophane wrapper) the minute we arrived back at my in-laws’ house.
My husband says my in-laws used to get a fruitcake from his grandparents every year that was fairly nasty. But fruitcake is so clichéd that it doesn’t even get a mention in annals of Nasty Holiday Treat Gifts. My preference is for unusual disgusting holiday treats. If I have to eat something yucky and pretend i like it, at least I want it to be something yucky and interesting.
This discovery reminded me of some of the more memorable holiday foods I’ve come into contact with over the years. The holidays are typically a time of indulgence, of course, and I’ve done my share of indulging, I admit. Interestingly, the things that stand out most in my memory are not the really wonderful things I’ve had, but the less wonderful, or even very awful ones.
When I was small, my grandmother used to send us boxes of baked goods every Christmas. There are only two things that she sent that really made an impression on me, and again, it’s because they were both fairly horrible, in retrospect. At the time I thought they were pretty good. The first was a variation on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and the second was Twinkies. I think my grandmother knew how much I liked junky foods like those, and in an effort to save money (always a top priority for her) she decided to make them for me, rather than buy them.
The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup things were chocolate covered peanut butter balls. If you don’t know this, peanut butter gets grainy when it’s refrigerated. I don’t mind that texture, but chocolate gets waxy when it’s refrigerated, and I do mind that. Also, my grandmother always put raisins in her peanut butter balls. I don’t like raisins plain to start with, but I sure don’t like them in things. So to sully perfectly good peanut butter and chocolate with raisins is just downright wrong in my book, and then to refrigerate it on top of that renders the whole product totally inedible. Since she was sending the stuff out of the kindness of her heart, I didn’t very well feel like I could complain (not that I’m not complaining now, but I would never have hurt her feelings by saying anything to her).
The Twinkies were just kind of weird. I really have no idea what she used for “creme” filling, only that it wasn’t white frosting (which is pretty much what Twinkie filling is—white frosting, probably made with pure lard and sugar, likely with some titanium dioxide tossed in for good measure and whitening and brightening purposes). She made a simple sponge cake, and then cut it into rectangles, which she layered together with this “creme”. I remember eating them, and liking them fairly well, but today I have to agree with my aunt. At the time she remarked “Who would bother to make a Twinkie?” (and the question wasn’t posed as to why you wouldn’t simply go buy them, but more why anyone would want to have anything to do with a Twinkie in any form at all).
Since then I have actually seen "Twinkie" pans for sale through the Williams-Sonoma catalog. Clearly there are people who feel that homemade Twinkies are a good idea. It takes all kinds, I guess.
My husband’s grandmother was also a seasonal baker. She made mostly cookies—chocolate chip, Mexican wedding cakes, and the like—and fudge. He said they were great when he was a kid, but last batch that was inflicted on me was pretty terrible. The cookies were either hard as rocks or flavorless, or both, and the fudge was like eating chocolate plastic. He agreed that it was all horrible, and we sewed all of it at intervals along the Taconic State Parkway as we drove home. I’m not sure if her offerings were always so terrible, or if they just deteriorated as she aged. It’s not the sort of thing I can gauge because I never tasted anything until it had gone past awful, and he might be remembering the flavor in the forgiving glow of childhood nostalgia. She has now grown too old for holiday baking, for which we are all somewhat guiltily grateful.
I think the person who provided the most repulsive holiday “treat” was Aunt Stevie. Aunt Stevie was married to Uncle Mike (before he died, of course), and was my husband’s great aunt. Aunt Stevie lived in Sacramento or something, and every Christmas she would send a “tower o’ treats” thing to my husband’s grandparents “for everyone to share.” This was a very kind gesture, but the tower consisted of Aplets and Cotlets. Aplets and Cotlets are the most horrid candy every made (I use the term “candy” loosely, since I’m not sure they're not actually made of melted-down rubber bands). Interestingly, I recently found out that they're made not far from where I now live. That doesn’t improve their flavor or texture, but now I’m grossed out by something made locally. I feel I’m contributing to saving the environment, somehow.
During one holiday celebration, my husband’s grandmother (nickname Grammy), kept insisting that we take some with us. My mother-in-law, sister-in-law and I protested that we didn’t want to deprive them of Aunt Stevie’s gift. Grammy kept saying that Stevie had sent them “for the family to share.” Finally, in an effort to get out of there before St. Patrick’s Day, I grabbed the smallest box and said “OK, thanks--well, we’ll be on our way.” On the way out the door, my mother-in-law asked me low in my ear which box I’d taken. “The smallest one,” I hissed back. Needless to say the box was promptly consigned to the trash compactor (still in its cellophane wrapper) the minute we arrived back at my in-laws’ house.
My husband says my in-laws used to get a fruitcake from his grandparents every year that was fairly nasty. But fruitcake is so clichéd that it doesn’t even get a mention in annals of Nasty Holiday Treat Gifts. My preference is for unusual disgusting holiday treats. If I have to eat something yucky and pretend i like it, at least I want it to be something yucky and interesting.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Spring Fling
Spring is on its way (although I know my friends on the East coast, being threatened with one of those last-ditch, dammit-it’s-still-winter, this-will-kill-all-my-daffodils-that-have-started-to-come-up snows that hit the DC area don’t necessarily think so). But here in the Pacific Northwest the daffodils, crocuses, and primroses are blooming away. It’s raining, of course, but things are blooming. And chefs are starting to talk about “spring food” ad nauseum.
I think of “spring food” as those things that are available (or are only supposed to be available) for a short window during the spring months, and that chefs clutch at because they’re sick to death of coming up with new ways to serve Hubbard squash and parsnips. Some of them are kind of yucky, frankly.
Exhibit A in the yucky category is morel mushrooms. These things look like partially shriveled sponges with a stem. I actually like mushrooms (cooked, anyway), but I can’t get past the appearance of morels. They’re considered a big treat, and restaurant menus offer all kinds of things with and under morel mushroom sauces, but their appeal just eludes me.
Fiddlehead ferns run a close second to morel mushrooms. I suppose after a winter of near-starvation, little curled bits of fern might look appetizing, but I’m not sure of that, even. I think I can’t get past the idea that I’d be eating fern. At no other time of the year do we seriously consider eating something that many people keep as a houseplant (unless you’re into eating cactus, which I am not). Yet these are considered a rare delicacy, and many people rush to farmers markets searching for them.
My West coast friends won’t recognize the shad as a spring food (or maybe even at all), but I’ve known perfectly normal East coast people who go berserk when the shad are running. Once when I was about 12 we were invited to the house of some friends of my parents for a shad dinner. As far as I can tell, shad is just fish, and I’ve never been one to get particularly excited about fish. The truly awful part of this dinner was the shad roe. I know some people like fish eggs. I know some people like Yani, too. I didn’t like shad roe (or really, any roe. I don’t much care for Yani, either). Part of it may have been a texture thing—I had braces at the time, and I took one bite of the stuff and it all squished up into my braces and felt…really gross. I’ve never really been inspired to try it again.
Many people I know are crazy for asparagus. It’s this great indulgence. I don’t like it. I’ve eaten it a couple of times, usually in a situation where I’m a guest at someone’s home and it would be rude not to, and I just can’t warm up to the stuff. I find it bitter and metallic tasting. I get really tired of the magazine articles this time of year that gush about fresh asparagus and how wonderful it is and all the fabulous things you can do with it. I just don’t get it.
Lamb, on the other hand, I do get. I love lamb. I know it means the demise of cute cuddly little creatures, but it’s so good that I overlook that. In this country we mostly eat either leg of lamb or rack of lamb, and I’m OK with both of those, but I also would like to see some more variety in what’s available to us. Lamb steaks, lamb backstrap—these things are hard to find. I’ve read recipes for lamb neck that sound pretty decent, although I understand it’s not an easy cut of meat to cook. For many people, Easter dinner is lamb. My grandmother has been known to serve it for Christmas dinner too. I find it a little odd at Christmas, and its constant availability takes something away from it.
Often the Easter lamb is served with new red potatoes. The problem with “new” potatoes these days is that there never seems to be a time when they’re not available, so it’s hard to get excited about them just in the spring. There are recipes all year long for “new” potato salad and the like. This is actually similar to the problem I have with lamb, and asparagus too (except that I actually like new potatoes): it just seems to be available all year long now. People serve asparagus for Christmas dinner (my grandmother actually did last year—along with the leg of lamb). It’s the “vegetable” with entrees in restaurants all year long. Things lose their specialness if you just serve them all the time.
That’s the complaint I have with ham at Easter. I like ham OK. It’s not my favorite, but it can be pretty tasty. The thing is, it’s available the whole year around. I can walk into my local Honeybaked Ham store any day of the year and get a ham. So again, I’ve started to not identify it with spring because it’s so universally available.
However, I do like the longer days, the fact that it’s often warmer (except when those unexpected snowstorms hit), and the fact that more and better fresh produce is coming my way. What I seem to have issues with is the food that’s available right now. It seems like I either don’t like it, or that it’s not unusual or rare enough for me to get excited about it in the spring. Clearly, that’s my own problem to deal with. At least I don’t have to figure out something interesting to do with a Hubbard squash for the 63rd night in a row.
I think of “spring food” as those things that are available (or are only supposed to be available) for a short window during the spring months, and that chefs clutch at because they’re sick to death of coming up with new ways to serve Hubbard squash and parsnips. Some of them are kind of yucky, frankly.
Exhibit A in the yucky category is morel mushrooms. These things look like partially shriveled sponges with a stem. I actually like mushrooms (cooked, anyway), but I can’t get past the appearance of morels. They’re considered a big treat, and restaurant menus offer all kinds of things with and under morel mushroom sauces, but their appeal just eludes me.
Fiddlehead ferns run a close second to morel mushrooms. I suppose after a winter of near-starvation, little curled bits of fern might look appetizing, but I’m not sure of that, even. I think I can’t get past the idea that I’d be eating fern. At no other time of the year do we seriously consider eating something that many people keep as a houseplant (unless you’re into eating cactus, which I am not). Yet these are considered a rare delicacy, and many people rush to farmers markets searching for them.
My West coast friends won’t recognize the shad as a spring food (or maybe even at all), but I’ve known perfectly normal East coast people who go berserk when the shad are running. Once when I was about 12 we were invited to the house of some friends of my parents for a shad dinner. As far as I can tell, shad is just fish, and I’ve never been one to get particularly excited about fish. The truly awful part of this dinner was the shad roe. I know some people like fish eggs. I know some people like Yani, too. I didn’t like shad roe (or really, any roe. I don’t much care for Yani, either). Part of it may have been a texture thing—I had braces at the time, and I took one bite of the stuff and it all squished up into my braces and felt…really gross. I’ve never really been inspired to try it again.
Many people I know are crazy for asparagus. It’s this great indulgence. I don’t like it. I’ve eaten it a couple of times, usually in a situation where I’m a guest at someone’s home and it would be rude not to, and I just can’t warm up to the stuff. I find it bitter and metallic tasting. I get really tired of the magazine articles this time of year that gush about fresh asparagus and how wonderful it is and all the fabulous things you can do with it. I just don’t get it.
Lamb, on the other hand, I do get. I love lamb. I know it means the demise of cute cuddly little creatures, but it’s so good that I overlook that. In this country we mostly eat either leg of lamb or rack of lamb, and I’m OK with both of those, but I also would like to see some more variety in what’s available to us. Lamb steaks, lamb backstrap—these things are hard to find. I’ve read recipes for lamb neck that sound pretty decent, although I understand it’s not an easy cut of meat to cook. For many people, Easter dinner is lamb. My grandmother has been known to serve it for Christmas dinner too. I find it a little odd at Christmas, and its constant availability takes something away from it.
Often the Easter lamb is served with new red potatoes. The problem with “new” potatoes these days is that there never seems to be a time when they’re not available, so it’s hard to get excited about them just in the spring. There are recipes all year long for “new” potato salad and the like. This is actually similar to the problem I have with lamb, and asparagus too (except that I actually like new potatoes): it just seems to be available all year long now. People serve asparagus for Christmas dinner (my grandmother actually did last year—along with the leg of lamb). It’s the “vegetable” with entrees in restaurants all year long. Things lose their specialness if you just serve them all the time.
That’s the complaint I have with ham at Easter. I like ham OK. It’s not my favorite, but it can be pretty tasty. The thing is, it’s available the whole year around. I can walk into my local Honeybaked Ham store any day of the year and get a ham. So again, I’ve started to not identify it with spring because it’s so universally available.
However, I do like the longer days, the fact that it’s often warmer (except when those unexpected snowstorms hit), and the fact that more and better fresh produce is coming my way. What I seem to have issues with is the food that’s available right now. It seems like I either don’t like it, or that it’s not unusual or rare enough for me to get excited about it in the spring. Clearly, that’s my own problem to deal with. At least I don’t have to figure out something interesting to do with a Hubbard squash for the 63rd night in a row.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
To Buy or Not to Buy
In almost every cookbook I read, there is a section on equipment. The content varies only a little from one to another. They talk about pots and pans, baking equipment, knives, miscellaneous utensils, and sometimes, small appliances. In almost every case, these missives urge you to buy the best of everything that you can afford. I would say that’s partly true, and partly not true. And so, because I sometimes disagree with the generally published standards of kitchen equipment expenditure, I offer my own guidelines, based on my own experiences with things that have lasted forever, and things that have fallen apart within two weeks of purchase. I’m sure I won’t cover every possible item available. Some things just aren’t worth discussing (I personally use jarred grated ginger, so although I have a ginger grater, I never use it and my advice on ginger grater purchasing is “Don’t.” Buy the jarred stuff and save yourself the trouble).
Wooden Spoons:
I’ve bought really cheap wooden spoons, and I’ve bought the ones that cost more than five bucks apiece and I honestly can’t tell any difference in their performance (if you will). One cooking equipment site offers olivewood spoons for $7.99 each. Their promotional text assures you that they have “more depth and durability than you can find with average wooden utensils.” Their description talks only about the aesthetics of said spoon: “a pleasure to use,” “distinctive grain and color variations,” “one-of-a-kind.” What I gather here is that while they’d like you to believe that olivewood at 8 bucks a pop is somehow more long-lasting than whatever crap wood they use for the spoons you buy in the grocery store in three packs with brand names like “Chefs Friend,” the truth is that all you get for your $8 is a spoon with a distinctive wood grain pattern. $8 for wood patterning sounds pretty steep to me. My advice is go with whatever is available unless you’re really out to impress your friends with what beautiful spoons you’re capable of buying.
Some people may say that stainless steel is the only way to go. I agree and don’t. I have stainless steel spoons, and they’re nice. They’re also expensive. And if, like so many people I know, you have nonstick cookware, you can’t use them to stir things while cooking. Wood is cheap, can be used on both regular and nonstick cookware, and can be affordably replaced when it wears out. As for the argument that wood harbors food particles that grow bacteria, I have a single word: bleach. If you’re that worried about bacteria, use a water and bleach solution to wash everything in your kitchen. Problem solved.
Knives:
Do I even need to say it? Spend the money on knives. Then spend the money and the time having them professionally sharpened. Again, I’ve bought cheap, and I’ve bought expensive, and I can tell you that it really does matter. Cheap knives have handles that fall off, have blades that don’t stay sharp, are hard to sharpen, actually aren’t worth sharpening, and so you really just wind up tossing them and buying new cheap knives and the cycle starts all over again. I won’t bore you with the “Buy these three knives if you can only afford a couple” advice. Buy any basic cookbook and read what’s already been written 900 times.
There’s a company that shall remain nameless, that promotes its wares via annoying “Come to my house and buy crap” parties, that sells what are probably the worst knives in history. Although they may have upgraded since I last saw them, when I was introduced to them they were inexpensive stainless steel, with a glued on handle. If you asked about things like quality of the steel used, handle attachment method, or anything remotely related to the quality of the product, the sales person would carefully steer the topic of conversation back to the self-sharpening sleeves—aren’t these handy? You’ll never sharpen your knives again! What they didn’t say was that they weren’t worth sharpening. The company did offer a lifetime guarantee, but I’ve never seen the use in that—you promise me that if your product fails for whatever reason, you will replace it with the same crummy product?
Anyway, the long and short of it is, buy the best knives you can afford, and upgrade as soon as you can. Oh, and never use your good chef’s knife to try to pry apart two partly frozen bone-in chicken breasts. Just another in a long line of opportunities for you to learn from my mistakes.
Spatulas:
Spatulas used to be a little more hit-and-miss, but since the advent of high temperature resistant silicone, it’s really easy to get good not-too-expensive spatulas. While I won’t pay $8 for a wooden spoon, I will pay $6 for a spatula. This past Christmas I bought my husband three or four with cute designs on (really more in) them—gingerbread men, snowflakes, hearts, pumpkins. They ranged in price from $3 to almost $7. You can get them for $2, but they won’t have the heads that withstand temperatures up to 7 million degrees Fahrenheit or whatever it is. For a couple of bucks more, you can get the ones that will. Since spatulas aren’t really a major purchase to begin with, get what you can afford at the time. You’ll have to replace them eventually anyway. And when you do, maybe you can find cute ones with pictures of little cherries in them.
Measuring Spoons/Cups:
First let me say that it’s worthwhile to have as many sets of measuring cups and spoons as you feel comfortable with (some people feel their space is overwhelmed by three sets; I myself have four sets of cups, and five of spoons). Metal is better than plastic in both cases. For about twenty years my mother had a set of plastic measuring cups in a sort of olive-y green. The half cup measure had a handle that looked like you’d walked in and caught the cup in the process of spontaneously turning from a solid to a liquid—there was even a big drip, frozen as it oozed away from the main part of the handle. That’s because it fell on the heating element of the dishwasher and was, in fact, in the process of turning from a solid to a liquid when the cycle stopped and the element cooled down. So I say metal is better, because you don’t have that risk.
Other than that, my only personal prejudice is against gadgets that have fancy leveling devices on them. Some measuring spoons come with a sort of plastic plate that slides out over the bowl of the spoon to level off whatever dry ingredient you’re measuring. Weight Watchers promotes these as being helpful in achieving really accurate measuring results. Aside from thinking this is for unbelievably lazy people who can’t use the back of a knife to level, I find these little things hard to clean. Food gets trapped under the little plate and it’s just downright unsanitary. Those measuring cups that have a plunger in them so you can adjust the amount by pushing up on a plunger are in the same “lazy person’s tool” category in my opinion. If you’re too tired to use a simple cup to measure an ingredient, go take a nap.
I also have glass measuring cups for liquids. At this point I have only a single one cup measure, a single two cup measure, and a four cup measure. I want one more of each. I happen to have an as-yet-unnamed fear of washing out measuring cups in the middle of a recipe (modern psychology is working on a name for this phobia—my husband calls it “laziness.” Is there an irony in my criticizing people for not being energetic enough to level off a measuring spoon with a knife, yet being unwilling to take the 90 seconds to wash out a liquid measure mid-recipe? Probably). OK, perhaps it’s not so much a fear as an aversion to doing it. In either case, I want more glass liquid measuring cups. You can get perfectly good Pyrex ones at the grocery store, which is exactly where mine come from. Don’t bother with high end kitchen shops for these.
Mixing Bowls:
I actually collect old Pyrex mixing bowls, mostly because I think they look cool. The fact that they could also go in the oven is just kind of an unnecessary bonus for me. I never actually put them in the oven. I don’t think it’s worth it to spend double digit dollars on sets of mixing bowls. Glass ones break, plastic ones will warp and distort in the dishwasher, ceramic ones will also break, metal ones get dented. You really can’t say that one particular type is better than another. I have some of each kind.
Glass, in addition to breaking, is also pretty heavy. This is fine if you’re mixing, but not so great when it comes time to pour something like batter. Also, glass bowls more than any other seem to have a very distinctly conical shape to them, making them much wider at the top than at the bottom. It’s harder to mix evenly in this shape of bowl, I find, especially if I’m using a handheld electric mixer. The one exception to this rule that I’ve found is the sets of nesting bowls you can buy that come in sizes from huge mixing, to single egg yolk.
Ceramic or pottery bowls also tend toward a conical shape, and also are pretty heavy. Unless they’re actually dropped flat out on a ceramic tile floor, they don’t necessarily break, but they do tend to crack, which I find more disheartening somehow—it looks like it should still be functional, but it really isn’t. The nice thing about them is that they’re usually prettier than glass bowls. They can actually be used as serving pieces if necessary, and can also be bought to match your kitchen’s color scheme, if you’re one of those people. I’m not.
Metal bowls are lightweight, don’t crack or break, and usually have rounded bottoms that make it easy to stir and mix. They aren’t particularly attractive, but if you’re into that food service I’m-a-serious-cook look, they’re for you. They do conduct heat, so they’re not the best thing for mixing up hot liquids. And while they don’t break, they do dent. Some people may look at the dents as a kind of badge of distinction, showing the world that not only are they a serious cook, but they are a serious cook of long standing. The only metal mixing bowl I have is one that will hold a triple recipe of bread dough during rising. Only a metal bowl will work in this capacity, because any other material would be so heavy that it would be impossible to carry around. Plastic would work, but it would be too flimsy, unless it was pretty heavy plastic, in which case it would probably also be pretty heavy.
Plastic mixing bowls are inexpensive, but if you run them through the dishwasher enough times, they’ll eventually melt. They also are prone to staining by things like tomatoes. Sometimes, however, the plastic bowls will come with a rubber gasket of sorts around the foot of the bowl, which makes them nice for making things that require two hands (one for stirring, one for pouring something while stirring). They won’t scoot all over the counter. And like metal bowls, they tend to have pretty well rounded bottoms. They’re not very pretty, but they have their uses. Having bought one set, I’m not sure I’d seek them out again, but if I were given a set as a gift, I wouldn’t take the trouble to exchange them.
Pots & Pans:
Another area in which I’m not going to repeat what’s already been written a thousand times. Cheap is cheap, expensive is good. There are a number of cookbooks that talk about the efficiency of heat conductivity of various materials. If you have a pot that always seems to burn whatever is cooked in it, it’s probably because it’s a cheap pot. My father in law has what must be the world’s worst 8 quart saucepan. I made spaghetti sauce in it once and it burned the daylights out of it. His girlfriend told me it does that to everything she cooks in it. “Then WHY,” I asked her “don’t you throw it OUT?” Answer: (I received none, I’m just guessing here) because they couldn’t think of anything better to replace it with. It seems to me they could use a dinner plate and it would be just as functional as that stupid pot was. Yes, I’m a little bitter that it ruined my spaghetti sauce. Does it show that much?
Appliances:
I try to stick with reasonable brand names for appliances. It’s been my experience that things like a $16 Sup-R-Mix blender by Ampco doesn’t really last long. I also try to stay reasonable. While I might want the Cuisinart 14 cup food processor, I don’t really need it. Of course, the 14 cup is only $50 more than the 7 cup, and the same price as the 11 cup, so there’s a sort of dilemma there, but I try not to go overboard. The short version is, it’s worth it to spend the money on a brand you know and that has a good reputation. Otherwise you’ll just end up replacing them over and over again.
General Gadgetry:
Some things are wonderful and absolutely worth buying (and are generally pretty cheap into the bargain). Those slicers that cut an apple in wedges, a cutter that will make square fries out of a potato, microplane graters, the new silicon pastry “brushes” (no more little pastry brush fibers in your food).
Some things, however, are just more trouble than they’re worth. Batter dispensers, waffle stands, mushroom slicers, ice cream sandwich presses (really!), cookie presses (I have never been able to get one of these things to work), and breading sets (three rectangular pans that fit on a frame and hold milk, egg, and breadcrumbs).
The other day, however, I saw the ultimate in worthless gadgets. It looked very complicated and it took me awhile to figure out what it was. It had a five things that looked like pizza cutters, separated by adjustable dividers in an X shape. Finally it occurred to me that it was used to cut rectangles of dough into even strips of varying widths. It was called an Adjustable Dough Divider. It was recommended for cutting puff pastry, shortcrust pastry and other doughs. I realized I already had a set of tools that would do this. I call them “a knife” and “a ruler.” I have a plastic ruler that I bought at the drug store and use only for measuring things while I’m cooking (the diameter of a circle of pie crust, the width of a strip of puff pastry). I think the ruler set me back about 65 cents. I can use the knife for dozens of other tasks as well. The Adjustable Dough Divider was $64.95.
Wooden Spoons:
I’ve bought really cheap wooden spoons, and I’ve bought the ones that cost more than five bucks apiece and I honestly can’t tell any difference in their performance (if you will). One cooking equipment site offers olivewood spoons for $7.99 each. Their promotional text assures you that they have “more depth and durability than you can find with average wooden utensils.” Their description talks only about the aesthetics of said spoon: “a pleasure to use,” “distinctive grain and color variations,” “one-of-a-kind.” What I gather here is that while they’d like you to believe that olivewood at 8 bucks a pop is somehow more long-lasting than whatever crap wood they use for the spoons you buy in the grocery store in three packs with brand names like “Chefs Friend,” the truth is that all you get for your $8 is a spoon with a distinctive wood grain pattern. $8 for wood patterning sounds pretty steep to me. My advice is go with whatever is available unless you’re really out to impress your friends with what beautiful spoons you’re capable of buying.
Some people may say that stainless steel is the only way to go. I agree and don’t. I have stainless steel spoons, and they’re nice. They’re also expensive. And if, like so many people I know, you have nonstick cookware, you can’t use them to stir things while cooking. Wood is cheap, can be used on both regular and nonstick cookware, and can be affordably replaced when it wears out. As for the argument that wood harbors food particles that grow bacteria, I have a single word: bleach. If you’re that worried about bacteria, use a water and bleach solution to wash everything in your kitchen. Problem solved.
Knives:
Do I even need to say it? Spend the money on knives. Then spend the money and the time having them professionally sharpened. Again, I’ve bought cheap, and I’ve bought expensive, and I can tell you that it really does matter. Cheap knives have handles that fall off, have blades that don’t stay sharp, are hard to sharpen, actually aren’t worth sharpening, and so you really just wind up tossing them and buying new cheap knives and the cycle starts all over again. I won’t bore you with the “Buy these three knives if you can only afford a couple” advice. Buy any basic cookbook and read what’s already been written 900 times.
There’s a company that shall remain nameless, that promotes its wares via annoying “Come to my house and buy crap” parties, that sells what are probably the worst knives in history. Although they may have upgraded since I last saw them, when I was introduced to them they were inexpensive stainless steel, with a glued on handle. If you asked about things like quality of the steel used, handle attachment method, or anything remotely related to the quality of the product, the sales person would carefully steer the topic of conversation back to the self-sharpening sleeves—aren’t these handy? You’ll never sharpen your knives again! What they didn’t say was that they weren’t worth sharpening. The company did offer a lifetime guarantee, but I’ve never seen the use in that—you promise me that if your product fails for whatever reason, you will replace it with the same crummy product?
Anyway, the long and short of it is, buy the best knives you can afford, and upgrade as soon as you can. Oh, and never use your good chef’s knife to try to pry apart two partly frozen bone-in chicken breasts. Just another in a long line of opportunities for you to learn from my mistakes.
Spatulas:
Spatulas used to be a little more hit-and-miss, but since the advent of high temperature resistant silicone, it’s really easy to get good not-too-expensive spatulas. While I won’t pay $8 for a wooden spoon, I will pay $6 for a spatula. This past Christmas I bought my husband three or four with cute designs on (really more in) them—gingerbread men, snowflakes, hearts, pumpkins. They ranged in price from $3 to almost $7. You can get them for $2, but they won’t have the heads that withstand temperatures up to 7 million degrees Fahrenheit or whatever it is. For a couple of bucks more, you can get the ones that will. Since spatulas aren’t really a major purchase to begin with, get what you can afford at the time. You’ll have to replace them eventually anyway. And when you do, maybe you can find cute ones with pictures of little cherries in them.
Measuring Spoons/Cups:
First let me say that it’s worthwhile to have as many sets of measuring cups and spoons as you feel comfortable with (some people feel their space is overwhelmed by three sets; I myself have four sets of cups, and five of spoons). Metal is better than plastic in both cases. For about twenty years my mother had a set of plastic measuring cups in a sort of olive-y green. The half cup measure had a handle that looked like you’d walked in and caught the cup in the process of spontaneously turning from a solid to a liquid—there was even a big drip, frozen as it oozed away from the main part of the handle. That’s because it fell on the heating element of the dishwasher and was, in fact, in the process of turning from a solid to a liquid when the cycle stopped and the element cooled down. So I say metal is better, because you don’t have that risk.
Other than that, my only personal prejudice is against gadgets that have fancy leveling devices on them. Some measuring spoons come with a sort of plastic plate that slides out over the bowl of the spoon to level off whatever dry ingredient you’re measuring. Weight Watchers promotes these as being helpful in achieving really accurate measuring results. Aside from thinking this is for unbelievably lazy people who can’t use the back of a knife to level, I find these little things hard to clean. Food gets trapped under the little plate and it’s just downright unsanitary. Those measuring cups that have a plunger in them so you can adjust the amount by pushing up on a plunger are in the same “lazy person’s tool” category in my opinion. If you’re too tired to use a simple cup to measure an ingredient, go take a nap.
I also have glass measuring cups for liquids. At this point I have only a single one cup measure, a single two cup measure, and a four cup measure. I want one more of each. I happen to have an as-yet-unnamed fear of washing out measuring cups in the middle of a recipe (modern psychology is working on a name for this phobia—my husband calls it “laziness.” Is there an irony in my criticizing people for not being energetic enough to level off a measuring spoon with a knife, yet being unwilling to take the 90 seconds to wash out a liquid measure mid-recipe? Probably). OK, perhaps it’s not so much a fear as an aversion to doing it. In either case, I want more glass liquid measuring cups. You can get perfectly good Pyrex ones at the grocery store, which is exactly where mine come from. Don’t bother with high end kitchen shops for these.
Mixing Bowls:
I actually collect old Pyrex mixing bowls, mostly because I think they look cool. The fact that they could also go in the oven is just kind of an unnecessary bonus for me. I never actually put them in the oven. I don’t think it’s worth it to spend double digit dollars on sets of mixing bowls. Glass ones break, plastic ones will warp and distort in the dishwasher, ceramic ones will also break, metal ones get dented. You really can’t say that one particular type is better than another. I have some of each kind.
Glass, in addition to breaking, is also pretty heavy. This is fine if you’re mixing, but not so great when it comes time to pour something like batter. Also, glass bowls more than any other seem to have a very distinctly conical shape to them, making them much wider at the top than at the bottom. It’s harder to mix evenly in this shape of bowl, I find, especially if I’m using a handheld electric mixer. The one exception to this rule that I’ve found is the sets of nesting bowls you can buy that come in sizes from huge mixing, to single egg yolk.
Ceramic or pottery bowls also tend toward a conical shape, and also are pretty heavy. Unless they’re actually dropped flat out on a ceramic tile floor, they don’t necessarily break, but they do tend to crack, which I find more disheartening somehow—it looks like it should still be functional, but it really isn’t. The nice thing about them is that they’re usually prettier than glass bowls. They can actually be used as serving pieces if necessary, and can also be bought to match your kitchen’s color scheme, if you’re one of those people. I’m not.
Metal bowls are lightweight, don’t crack or break, and usually have rounded bottoms that make it easy to stir and mix. They aren’t particularly attractive, but if you’re into that food service I’m-a-serious-cook look, they’re for you. They do conduct heat, so they’re not the best thing for mixing up hot liquids. And while they don’t break, they do dent. Some people may look at the dents as a kind of badge of distinction, showing the world that not only are they a serious cook, but they are a serious cook of long standing. The only metal mixing bowl I have is one that will hold a triple recipe of bread dough during rising. Only a metal bowl will work in this capacity, because any other material would be so heavy that it would be impossible to carry around. Plastic would work, but it would be too flimsy, unless it was pretty heavy plastic, in which case it would probably also be pretty heavy.
Plastic mixing bowls are inexpensive, but if you run them through the dishwasher enough times, they’ll eventually melt. They also are prone to staining by things like tomatoes. Sometimes, however, the plastic bowls will come with a rubber gasket of sorts around the foot of the bowl, which makes them nice for making things that require two hands (one for stirring, one for pouring something while stirring). They won’t scoot all over the counter. And like metal bowls, they tend to have pretty well rounded bottoms. They’re not very pretty, but they have their uses. Having bought one set, I’m not sure I’d seek them out again, but if I were given a set as a gift, I wouldn’t take the trouble to exchange them.
Pots & Pans:
Another area in which I’m not going to repeat what’s already been written a thousand times. Cheap is cheap, expensive is good. There are a number of cookbooks that talk about the efficiency of heat conductivity of various materials. If you have a pot that always seems to burn whatever is cooked in it, it’s probably because it’s a cheap pot. My father in law has what must be the world’s worst 8 quart saucepan. I made spaghetti sauce in it once and it burned the daylights out of it. His girlfriend told me it does that to everything she cooks in it. “Then WHY,” I asked her “don’t you throw it OUT?” Answer: (I received none, I’m just guessing here) because they couldn’t think of anything better to replace it with. It seems to me they could use a dinner plate and it would be just as functional as that stupid pot was. Yes, I’m a little bitter that it ruined my spaghetti sauce. Does it show that much?
Appliances:
I try to stick with reasonable brand names for appliances. It’s been my experience that things like a $16 Sup-R-Mix blender by Ampco doesn’t really last long. I also try to stay reasonable. While I might want the Cuisinart 14 cup food processor, I don’t really need it. Of course, the 14 cup is only $50 more than the 7 cup, and the same price as the 11 cup, so there’s a sort of dilemma there, but I try not to go overboard. The short version is, it’s worth it to spend the money on a brand you know and that has a good reputation. Otherwise you’ll just end up replacing them over and over again.
General Gadgetry:
Some things are wonderful and absolutely worth buying (and are generally pretty cheap into the bargain). Those slicers that cut an apple in wedges, a cutter that will make square fries out of a potato, microplane graters, the new silicon pastry “brushes” (no more little pastry brush fibers in your food).
Some things, however, are just more trouble than they’re worth. Batter dispensers, waffle stands, mushroom slicers, ice cream sandwich presses (really!), cookie presses (I have never been able to get one of these things to work), and breading sets (three rectangular pans that fit on a frame and hold milk, egg, and breadcrumbs).
The other day, however, I saw the ultimate in worthless gadgets. It looked very complicated and it took me awhile to figure out what it was. It had a five things that looked like pizza cutters, separated by adjustable dividers in an X shape. Finally it occurred to me that it was used to cut rectangles of dough into even strips of varying widths. It was called an Adjustable Dough Divider. It was recommended for cutting puff pastry, shortcrust pastry and other doughs. I realized I already had a set of tools that would do this. I call them “a knife” and “a ruler.” I have a plastic ruler that I bought at the drug store and use only for measuring things while I’m cooking (the diameter of a circle of pie crust, the width of a strip of puff pastry). I think the ruler set me back about 65 cents. I can use the knife for dozens of other tasks as well. The Adjustable Dough Divider was $64.95.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Please Mr. Postman
I have long said there’s nothing you can’t buy on the Internet. This is what I love about it. When a friend was getting married, and everyone in our office had chipped in to buy her a Kitchen Aid mixer and sausage making attachment, someone speculated about how the friend was going to make sausages: where on earth would she find sausage casings? Testing my theory, I did a quick search and found sausagesupplies.com. Synthetic, or natural?
One of the reasons I love that you can buy anything on the Internet is because I do buy all sorts of weird things on the Internet. Beyond Christmas and birthdays—for which I naturally do all of my shopping on the web—I buy all sorts of ingredients and food products online. I don’t mean premade food products from places like Williams-Sonoma, or Fruit of the Month Club offerings from Harry and David. It’s a little stranger than that.
First of all, I mail order eggs. Because I make mayonnaise from scratch, and I don’t want to be afraid to let my children lick the spoon when I make cookies, I used to buy pasteurized eggs at the grocery store. When we moved, I found that they didn’t carry them at any of the grocery stores near us. It is possible to make mayonnaise with egg substitute, which was a suggestion I read in a cookbook, but it really doesn’t taste very good. I found the company that sells the eggs online, and discovered that they would mail order them to me. I pay almost as much in shipping as I do for the eggs, but it’s worth it. I also have to buy five dozen at a time, but since they last pretty much forever, that’s not such an issue.
The first question that most people ask (after “Are you nuts?”) is “Don’t they arrive all broken?” The answer is, once. I had placed two orders with the company, and both had arrived with nary a shell cracked. Then this past Christmas, I realized I was running low, and should order a new box. My word of advice to anyone thinking of buying eggs via mail order is to avoid the holiday season. More than half of the eggs were broken when I opened the box. I emailed their customer service, and they sent me out a new shipment of eggs at no charge (which meant I had seven dozen eggs). While one or two of the second batch were broken, it was certainly not an unreasonable state of affairs. I happen to know from a college professor I once had, who worked in a UPS warehouse during grad school, that the people at UPS treat packages atrociously and it gets worse over the holidays. Evidently they’re hostile and angry because they get paid peanuts, but rather than buying assault rifles, they take out their aggressions on a bunch of innocent corrugated cardboard boxes full of My Little Pony dolls, Matchbox cars, and (in my case) pasteurized eggs.
Over the years I’ve bought one-off oddball things via mail. The King Arthur Flour Company sells all kinds of useful, hard-to-find items in their Baker’s Catalog. One year my husband decided he wanted a Malted Milk Ball cake for his birthday. I had seen the recipe and offered him a choice of several cakes, and he picked that one. The only problem was that the recipe called for malted milk powder, and I couldn’t find that at any of the specialty shops near me. Something sent me to the King Arthur Flour Company website and there, lo and behold, along with things like pretzel salt and cheese powder, was malted milk powder. I ordered it (again, the shipping was outrageous—this is the only drawback to mail order, I’ve found), and it arrived in time for me to make the birthday cake. I did learn a lesson, though: if you’re going to put crushed malted milk balls on top of a cake as a garnish, do so just before it’s served. They’ll melt if they’re scattered over the moist frosting and sit there overnight.
Once upon a time when I believed that Dr. Atkins held the solution to my weight loss problems, I ate bunless hot dogs by the pound (along with bacon and chicken salad). Normally I eat my hot dogs with yellow mustard, but for some reason this just didn’t cut it with the bunless version. Somehow I found champagne mustard. It made my hot dogs wonderful, and I soon went through a whole jar. I don’t remember where I got it, but for some reason I couldn’t get any more at any of the stores near me. In my protein-induced insanity, I was desperate. Enter the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. This place sells every kind of mustard you’ve ever heard of (and about nine thousand kinds you haven’t heard of). Sure enough, my champagne mustard was one of their offerings. I promptly ordered several jars. Although my experience with Atkins was a bust (let’s face it—there is no silver bullet for weight loss), the mustard was a success. I don’t order it on a regular basis anymore, but I have ordered people gifts from the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum.
Then there are things that I’ve often considered buying, but haven’t yet got around to it. The one that I think of most often is Pierce’s Pit Bar-b-que. Pierce’s is a little dive outside of Williamsburg, VA, where my husband went to college. Actually, it’s in a town called Toano, which is just about as charming as its name makes it sound. In order to get there, you drive for about fifteen minutes along an access road that parallels the highway before you come to a yellow and orange building with lots of picnic tables and lots of cars in the parking lot. “What’s this?” you think the first time you see it, “And why are all these people at this dumpy place?” I’d add that you might even be able to say that to the person who brought you there and get your questions answered, because the likelihood that you’re going to find Pierce’s on your own is pretty slim. There are a couple of highway signs directing you to it, but unless you’ve heard that it’s great and you’re dying to try it, you’re going to give up your quest after the first mile or two and just go for the McDonald’s at the interchange.
Now that I no longer live anywhere near Pierce’s, the only way for me to get it is via mail order. And they do take orders. You can get their great bar-b-que by the pound, and you used to be able to buy packages of their squishy rolls, sent to you overnight. If only all the places I loved that I was no longer close to would ship me their food. The only downside is that you can’t get their coleslaw shipped too. Their coleslaw is too sweet on its own, but you need that sugar to cut the heat of the sauce they use. It’s not excessive, but it’s hot enough that it needs a little tempering. In fact, my husband may get Pierce’s for his birthday in a couple of months.
These days I also buy kind of strange food items as gifts. This past Christmas one of my uncles, who also happens to have a taste for oddball food products, almost got Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup as a present. He didn’t because the shipping to get it in time would have cost me too much (I didn’t think to get it for him until pretty late in the game), but he’ll probably get something like that next year. I found a book called “Food Finds” that breaks out by category all kinds of small producers of usual and unusual foods. Whatever kind of jam, beverage, cookie, bread, meat, or vegetable you’re looking for, someone somewhere makes it. You can get things like Nut Goodies shipped to your door (these are a marshmallow, caramel, chocolate and peanut candybar-ish thing sold in the South), you can buy Cherry Wine soda, Cajun flavored potato chips, and frozen grouse. Whatever you crave, it’s all there on the Internet. What a wonderful country this is.
One of the reasons I love that you can buy anything on the Internet is because I do buy all sorts of weird things on the Internet. Beyond Christmas and birthdays—for which I naturally do all of my shopping on the web—I buy all sorts of ingredients and food products online. I don’t mean premade food products from places like Williams-Sonoma, or Fruit of the Month Club offerings from Harry and David. It’s a little stranger than that.
First of all, I mail order eggs. Because I make mayonnaise from scratch, and I don’t want to be afraid to let my children lick the spoon when I make cookies, I used to buy pasteurized eggs at the grocery store. When we moved, I found that they didn’t carry them at any of the grocery stores near us. It is possible to make mayonnaise with egg substitute, which was a suggestion I read in a cookbook, but it really doesn’t taste very good. I found the company that sells the eggs online, and discovered that they would mail order them to me. I pay almost as much in shipping as I do for the eggs, but it’s worth it. I also have to buy five dozen at a time, but since they last pretty much forever, that’s not such an issue.
The first question that most people ask (after “Are you nuts?”) is “Don’t they arrive all broken?” The answer is, once. I had placed two orders with the company, and both had arrived with nary a shell cracked. Then this past Christmas, I realized I was running low, and should order a new box. My word of advice to anyone thinking of buying eggs via mail order is to avoid the holiday season. More than half of the eggs were broken when I opened the box. I emailed their customer service, and they sent me out a new shipment of eggs at no charge (which meant I had seven dozen eggs). While one or two of the second batch were broken, it was certainly not an unreasonable state of affairs. I happen to know from a college professor I once had, who worked in a UPS warehouse during grad school, that the people at UPS treat packages atrociously and it gets worse over the holidays. Evidently they’re hostile and angry because they get paid peanuts, but rather than buying assault rifles, they take out their aggressions on a bunch of innocent corrugated cardboard boxes full of My Little Pony dolls, Matchbox cars, and (in my case) pasteurized eggs.
Over the years I’ve bought one-off oddball things via mail. The King Arthur Flour Company sells all kinds of useful, hard-to-find items in their Baker’s Catalog. One year my husband decided he wanted a Malted Milk Ball cake for his birthday. I had seen the recipe and offered him a choice of several cakes, and he picked that one. The only problem was that the recipe called for malted milk powder, and I couldn’t find that at any of the specialty shops near me. Something sent me to the King Arthur Flour Company website and there, lo and behold, along with things like pretzel salt and cheese powder, was malted milk powder. I ordered it (again, the shipping was outrageous—this is the only drawback to mail order, I’ve found), and it arrived in time for me to make the birthday cake. I did learn a lesson, though: if you’re going to put crushed malted milk balls on top of a cake as a garnish, do so just before it’s served. They’ll melt if they’re scattered over the moist frosting and sit there overnight.
Once upon a time when I believed that Dr. Atkins held the solution to my weight loss problems, I ate bunless hot dogs by the pound (along with bacon and chicken salad). Normally I eat my hot dogs with yellow mustard, but for some reason this just didn’t cut it with the bunless version. Somehow I found champagne mustard. It made my hot dogs wonderful, and I soon went through a whole jar. I don’t remember where I got it, but for some reason I couldn’t get any more at any of the stores near me. In my protein-induced insanity, I was desperate. Enter the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. This place sells every kind of mustard you’ve ever heard of (and about nine thousand kinds you haven’t heard of). Sure enough, my champagne mustard was one of their offerings. I promptly ordered several jars. Although my experience with Atkins was a bust (let’s face it—there is no silver bullet for weight loss), the mustard was a success. I don’t order it on a regular basis anymore, but I have ordered people gifts from the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum.
Then there are things that I’ve often considered buying, but haven’t yet got around to it. The one that I think of most often is Pierce’s Pit Bar-b-que. Pierce’s is a little dive outside of Williamsburg, VA, where my husband went to college. Actually, it’s in a town called Toano, which is just about as charming as its name makes it sound. In order to get there, you drive for about fifteen minutes along an access road that parallels the highway before you come to a yellow and orange building with lots of picnic tables and lots of cars in the parking lot. “What’s this?” you think the first time you see it, “And why are all these people at this dumpy place?” I’d add that you might even be able to say that to the person who brought you there and get your questions answered, because the likelihood that you’re going to find Pierce’s on your own is pretty slim. There are a couple of highway signs directing you to it, but unless you’ve heard that it’s great and you’re dying to try it, you’re going to give up your quest after the first mile or two and just go for the McDonald’s at the interchange.
Now that I no longer live anywhere near Pierce’s, the only way for me to get it is via mail order. And they do take orders. You can get their great bar-b-que by the pound, and you used to be able to buy packages of their squishy rolls, sent to you overnight. If only all the places I loved that I was no longer close to would ship me their food. The only downside is that you can’t get their coleslaw shipped too. Their coleslaw is too sweet on its own, but you need that sugar to cut the heat of the sauce they use. It’s not excessive, but it’s hot enough that it needs a little tempering. In fact, my husband may get Pierce’s for his birthday in a couple of months.
These days I also buy kind of strange food items as gifts. This past Christmas one of my uncles, who also happens to have a taste for oddball food products, almost got Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup as a present. He didn’t because the shipping to get it in time would have cost me too much (I didn’t think to get it for him until pretty late in the game), but he’ll probably get something like that next year. I found a book called “Food Finds” that breaks out by category all kinds of small producers of usual and unusual foods. Whatever kind of jam, beverage, cookie, bread, meat, or vegetable you’re looking for, someone somewhere makes it. You can get things like Nut Goodies shipped to your door (these are a marshmallow, caramel, chocolate and peanut candybar-ish thing sold in the South), you can buy Cherry Wine soda, Cajun flavored potato chips, and frozen grouse. Whatever you crave, it’s all there on the Internet. What a wonderful country this is.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Alpha-Beta Cooking
“Men have gotten better at cooking, and that’s all positive. But men can’t share. If you can find a man who’s OK with a woman being in charge in the kitchen, tell any woman to marry him immediately.”
So says Alan Richman, the well-known food writer, in an article for the New York Times on alpha and beta cooks. The alpha cook is usually the woman, or used to be back in the days when he was the breadwinner and she the bread maker. These days, as men are cooking more and more, they now feel themselves in charge in the kitchen, and there’s a struggle. Many women (including Richman’s own wife, from whom he is now separated, although she says the kitchen struggles had nothing to do with it, and it was an amicable parting) are now taking a backseat to their male partners, who are more and more often responsible for whipping up dinner, either on Tuesday night, or Thanksgiving night.
In our house, we have the problem of dual alpha cooks. We’re each inclined to watch the other and think “You’re doing that wrong.” God help us if I plan the menu, and let him execute it. He’ll put dinner on the table and I’ll say, “Well, this is very nice. Thank you. Of course, I was planning to roast the green beans with shallots, instead of sautéing them with bacon, but its’ still nice…and I was going to make a béarnaise sauce for the filet mignon, instead of a mustard sauce…but it’s OK…and I was going to run these mashed potatoes through the ricer…but it’s fine.”
Ungrateful, you say? It’s part of being an alpha cook. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, it’s just that I had a meal planned and when, for one reason or another, he winds up being the one to cook it, he doesn’t always do it the way I would have. Even if I tell him how I was planning to do it.
That’s where the “This is nice but…” comments come into play. I say “Here’s what we’re having and I’m thinking this, this, and this.” He says “OK” and then proceeds to do what he wants, regardless of my instruction.
Don’t think the reverse never happens either. I’ll be making cookies, and he’ll come out and say “I was going to make Toll House bars.” I’ll say “Well, you’re getting oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.” I can see the thought as though it was in a bubble over his head, “But I wanted Toll House bars.” The bubble over my head is smaller: “Tough.”
We’ve known from the beginning that we were both alpha cooks, and that things were not going to be sunshine and roses as far as our cooking together went. I knew it as soon as I tasted his white sauce (I have no idea when he figured it out; maybe when I opened my mouth and criticized his white sauce). He didn’t salt it. Do you know what white sauce with no salt tastes like? It tastes like flour and butter with some kind of liquid in it. It tastes like hell, that’s what it tastes like.
This put me in a position of superiority in my mind (arrogant, you say? Maybe, but I can make good white sauce). You can’t make sauces, I thought. I can. In this way, if no other, my cooking skills are superior to yours. Why did I feel the neurotic need to assure myself that my cooking skills were at least as good as, if not superior to, his? Because he’s very critical, that’s why. If something burns, sticks, or otherwise doesn’t turn out, he’ll say “I thought that might happen. I noticed you weren't stirring it frequently enough.” Well, thanks.
His feeling of superiority comes from his belief that his methods are more professional than mine. “I clean as I go,” he insists, “I learned how working in restaurants.” His tone, I might add, is smug. I too learned to cook in a commercial kitchen, and I know how to clean as I go. I admit I don’t always, but then in a commercial kitchen, you have 40 gallon sinks in which to put dirty pots and pans. We don’t yet have these at home. Also, the kitchens we’ve been working in for the past 13 years have all been atrociously designed, which makes cleaning as you go a challenge (our next kitchen will be designed by us, so if the design is poor, at least we have no one to blame but ourselves). Still, he feels that his process is superior to mine, therefore he must be a better cook.
Then too, we constantly fight over how much salt goes in our food. He barely salts. I salt to a degree that he sometimes finds overwhelming. We argue about this. Salt, I say, needs to be added while you’re cooking, not afterwards. In some cases, salting after the fact is useless. He maintains that everything can have salt added to it at the table and be fine. So when I cook I salt my way, and when I ask how it is, he responds, “A little salty, but it’s good.” When he cooks he salts his way and I add extra salt at the table. He notices.
I’ve read articles in cooking magazines that give menus that couples can make together. Most of these offer both organizational structures: one person is in charge, while the other is a prep or sous chef, or each person takes a dish or two and is solely responsible for preparing those components. Really we work better with the latter model. If one of us is in charge, s/he is just too bossy and the other person winds up either pissed off or with hurt feelings (or sometimes both).
Part of my problem is that I feel like I really “own” the kitchen. I make the menus, I make the grocery lists, when we move into a new kitchen I’m the one who dictates the organization of the space. Therefore I must be in charge, right? Not as he sees it. I think he feels like I’m the kitchen manager, and he’s the executive chef. I’m responsible for making sure he has everything he needs to work his magic. I do the drudge work of deciding that we’ll have chicken, buying the chicken, making sure we have ingredients for turning the chicken into something delicious (including having all utensils and cooking implements in convenient locations), and then he steps in with his expertise and, voila! Dinner.
Despite all this, we actually do pretty well together in the kitchen, provided we have our own workstations and don’t have to cross paths too often. We’re building a new house, and the kitchen is quite large, and I will see to it that we have things like measuring cups, measuring spoons, and knives on both sides of the kitchen. The truth is that I like that he can (and will) cook. I have a friend whose significant other wouldn’t make himself a peanut butter sandwich if he was starving, but feels free to criticize anything she makes. My husband is OK with me being in charge in the kitchen, just so long as he doesn’t have to be in there at the same time. Or if he is in there, he can sit there with a drink and kibbutz my process and technique. It’s only fair—I do the same to him. I always remind him to add salt. He always ignores me.
So says Alan Richman, the well-known food writer, in an article for the New York Times on alpha and beta cooks. The alpha cook is usually the woman, or used to be back in the days when he was the breadwinner and she the bread maker. These days, as men are cooking more and more, they now feel themselves in charge in the kitchen, and there’s a struggle. Many women (including Richman’s own wife, from whom he is now separated, although she says the kitchen struggles had nothing to do with it, and it was an amicable parting) are now taking a backseat to their male partners, who are more and more often responsible for whipping up dinner, either on Tuesday night, or Thanksgiving night.
In our house, we have the problem of dual alpha cooks. We’re each inclined to watch the other and think “You’re doing that wrong.” God help us if I plan the menu, and let him execute it. He’ll put dinner on the table and I’ll say, “Well, this is very nice. Thank you. Of course, I was planning to roast the green beans with shallots, instead of sautéing them with bacon, but its’ still nice…and I was going to make a béarnaise sauce for the filet mignon, instead of a mustard sauce…but it’s OK…and I was going to run these mashed potatoes through the ricer…but it’s fine.”
Ungrateful, you say? It’s part of being an alpha cook. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, it’s just that I had a meal planned and when, for one reason or another, he winds up being the one to cook it, he doesn’t always do it the way I would have. Even if I tell him how I was planning to do it.
That’s where the “This is nice but…” comments come into play. I say “Here’s what we’re having and I’m thinking this, this, and this.” He says “OK” and then proceeds to do what he wants, regardless of my instruction.
Don’t think the reverse never happens either. I’ll be making cookies, and he’ll come out and say “I was going to make Toll House bars.” I’ll say “Well, you’re getting oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.” I can see the thought as though it was in a bubble over his head, “But I wanted Toll House bars.” The bubble over my head is smaller: “Tough.”
We’ve known from the beginning that we were both alpha cooks, and that things were not going to be sunshine and roses as far as our cooking together went. I knew it as soon as I tasted his white sauce (I have no idea when he figured it out; maybe when I opened my mouth and criticized his white sauce). He didn’t salt it. Do you know what white sauce with no salt tastes like? It tastes like flour and butter with some kind of liquid in it. It tastes like hell, that’s what it tastes like.
This put me in a position of superiority in my mind (arrogant, you say? Maybe, but I can make good white sauce). You can’t make sauces, I thought. I can. In this way, if no other, my cooking skills are superior to yours. Why did I feel the neurotic need to assure myself that my cooking skills were at least as good as, if not superior to, his? Because he’s very critical, that’s why. If something burns, sticks, or otherwise doesn’t turn out, he’ll say “I thought that might happen. I noticed you weren't stirring it frequently enough.” Well, thanks.
His feeling of superiority comes from his belief that his methods are more professional than mine. “I clean as I go,” he insists, “I learned how working in restaurants.” His tone, I might add, is smug. I too learned to cook in a commercial kitchen, and I know how to clean as I go. I admit I don’t always, but then in a commercial kitchen, you have 40 gallon sinks in which to put dirty pots and pans. We don’t yet have these at home. Also, the kitchens we’ve been working in for the past 13 years have all been atrociously designed, which makes cleaning as you go a challenge (our next kitchen will be designed by us, so if the design is poor, at least we have no one to blame but ourselves). Still, he feels that his process is superior to mine, therefore he must be a better cook.
Then too, we constantly fight over how much salt goes in our food. He barely salts. I salt to a degree that he sometimes finds overwhelming. We argue about this. Salt, I say, needs to be added while you’re cooking, not afterwards. In some cases, salting after the fact is useless. He maintains that everything can have salt added to it at the table and be fine. So when I cook I salt my way, and when I ask how it is, he responds, “A little salty, but it’s good.” When he cooks he salts his way and I add extra salt at the table. He notices.
I’ve read articles in cooking magazines that give menus that couples can make together. Most of these offer both organizational structures: one person is in charge, while the other is a prep or sous chef, or each person takes a dish or two and is solely responsible for preparing those components. Really we work better with the latter model. If one of us is in charge, s/he is just too bossy and the other person winds up either pissed off or with hurt feelings (or sometimes both).
Part of my problem is that I feel like I really “own” the kitchen. I make the menus, I make the grocery lists, when we move into a new kitchen I’m the one who dictates the organization of the space. Therefore I must be in charge, right? Not as he sees it. I think he feels like I’m the kitchen manager, and he’s the executive chef. I’m responsible for making sure he has everything he needs to work his magic. I do the drudge work of deciding that we’ll have chicken, buying the chicken, making sure we have ingredients for turning the chicken into something delicious (including having all utensils and cooking implements in convenient locations), and then he steps in with his expertise and, voila! Dinner.
Despite all this, we actually do pretty well together in the kitchen, provided we have our own workstations and don’t have to cross paths too often. We’re building a new house, and the kitchen is quite large, and I will see to it that we have things like measuring cups, measuring spoons, and knives on both sides of the kitchen. The truth is that I like that he can (and will) cook. I have a friend whose significant other wouldn’t make himself a peanut butter sandwich if he was starving, but feels free to criticize anything she makes. My husband is OK with me being in charge in the kitchen, just so long as he doesn’t have to be in there at the same time. Or if he is in there, he can sit there with a drink and kibbutz my process and technique. It’s only fair—I do the same to him. I always remind him to add salt. He always ignores me.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Candy Fix
I didn’t get a box of candy for Valentine’s Day. That’s OK—I don’t really need it. This candy- and flower-centric holiday got me thinking about candy in general. I love candy. I have a serious sweet tooth and have even been known to eat brown sugar straight. Not directly from the bag off a spoon or anything, but if a little clump happens to fall on the counter while I’m making cookies, I don’t have any hesitation about blotting it up with a finger and eating it. My husband cringes.
I’m mostly a milk chocolate gal, although I’ve been slowly converting to dark chocolate of late years. Right now I can go either way. I’ve tried that oft-recommended dieters’ tip to eat a single piece of very high quality dark chocolate and savor it slowly. I frankly think it’s bull. I’ve done it, but all it does is make me think “That was fine. Now, what’s for dessert?”
As with all children, I started eating candy as a pretty young kid (except some people I knew who were the neighbors of a family friend, who never gave their kids refined sugar—my friend’s son came home from an afternoon spent there one time and, when asked if he had fun, replied in a tone of painful disdain “Mom, she gave us granola for a snack.” I had to agree with him that that pretty well summed up his experience). I got my candy bars at Higger’s Drug Store up the street from my house. They cost a dime. Having heard repeatedly to my disgust and boredom as a kid about when candy bars cost a nickel, I always swore I wouldn’t use that line: “They cost a dime.” How great the divide sometimes between theory and practice.
For some reason when I was younger, I always bought Chunky bars. Except that they weren’t bars. They were cubes of chocolate. Really more of a bizarre trapezoid shape. They looked like pyramids that had had their top two-thirds whacked off. I’m not sure why, because I was perfectly adept at reading, but I could never manage to remember which one did, and which one did not have the raisins in it—the silver wrapper or some other color wrapper. I hate raisins in chocolate bars. It’s an outrage.
I also remember buying Marathon bars. I seem to be the only person who ever did because 1) they no longer make them and 2) I’ve never found anyone else who even remembers them, much less also ate them. They were long braids of caramel covered with milk chocolate. The ads on TV had an image of the “braid” going past and past and past….clearly intending to convey the message that the “Marathon” bar lasted a long time. This characteristic of lasting a long time seems to have been a big feature to promote in candy bars during the late 70s and 80s. The Charleston Chew and, I think, Sugar Daddies and Sugar Mamas, made the same claim. In the 90s they seemed to move to more of almost a “meal replacement” strategy. Snickers bars, as I recall, ran a campaign promoting a Snickers bar as a way to fill you up, and carry you until your next meal.
I always wanted stuff in my candy bars. Peanut butter, peanuts, caramel, nougat (whatever the hell that is), or that fluff in a Three Musketeers bar (whatever the hell that is). I went to Dublin on business once and spent about 50 bucks in a newsagents buying candy bars that we didn’t have in America. I noticed that they had an awful lot of offerings with raisins (ugh), but an equal number with caramel. Fortunately none of them seemed to sully the glorious caramel with the vile raisins. Caramel is my favorite candy bar filling, followed by peanut butter as a close second. Actually, hazelnut anything is my favorite candy filling, but very few of the “big” candy makers offer a candy bar with hazelnuts in it. Too expensive, I would guess.
In high school I went to Australia and was there introduced to three kinds of candy bars that I’d never had before, two of which are now available at my local grocery store. There was the Violet Crumble, which was kind of a grainy sugar, flavored with essence of violet (which sounds gross and weird, but was actually OK). The Flake bar was nothing more than very, very thin leaves of milk chocolate that would have been pretty good, except that they were so delicate that what you wound up with was a candy wrapper full of chocolate shards. You just kind of “drank” the chocolate out of the wrapper, which you opened at one end to form a tube. Then there was a honeycomb concoction the name of which escapes me. I’ve since seen this in Australian cooking magazines called generically “honeycomb” and recommended as being used to top ice cream when smashed to smithereens. It was very crunchy, and did have a distinct honey flavor. Its disadvantage was that it really stuck in your teeth. All three of these, if I’m not mistaken, were manufactured by the Cadbury company.
Cadbury is much bigger overseas than it is in this country. In this country we have Hershey’s, and M&M Mars to pretty much own the candy market. I remember reading that in the 1940s Hershey’s representatives used to go to elementary schools and hand out candy bars to all the kids. The taste of chocolate is (as you no doubt have read), like so many food products, subject to its recipe. A little more of this, a little less of that, and you’ve got a completely different taste, even though it’s still “milk chocolate.” Hershey’s idea was that kids would get hooked on Hershey bars at a young age and would come to think that the flavor of Hershey’s milk chocolate was what chocolate was “supposed” to taste like. Any other recipe would taste odd to them, and they would (in theory) find it to be inferior to the flavor of Hershey’s.
Now we also have Godiva chocolates, which used to have an air of exclusivity about them, but are now sold in every possible outlet, including gas stations and nail salons. I still think they’re good chocolates, but they’re mainstream now. This move in America to make mainstream what used to be luxury items I think is a large part of what contributes to our dietary problems. Things that used to be special occasion dishes—Fettuccini Alfredo, elaborate desserts made with pastry cream, rack of lamb—are now so commonplace that they’ve lost their impact and we don’t appreciate them anymore. As a result, we consume them too casually. Of course, the antidote for that may well be a return to the days when we ate Hamburger Helper (which of course comes in an Alfredo flavor in the form of Chicken and Tuna Helpers) and Betty Crocker Au Gratin Potatoes for dinner, which I really can’t see as a win-win situation for anyone (except maybe General Foods). Sure, it would make “special” meals much more appealing by contrast, but it would mean we’d be eating dehydrated potatoes three hundred plus days a year, and I don’t know if I could handle that, myself.
As usual, I digress. So instead of Godiva as our exclusive chocolates, we now have “artisanal” chocolates made in small batches by hand. Often these chocolate makers have an unfortunate tendency to try jazz up (as I’m sure they see it) plain old boring chocolate, and they mix in just plain weird stuff like chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and (yes, I’ve seen this) curry powder. I really don’t think that I can think of a more disgusting thing to do to perfectly good chocolate than stick curry powder in it. I love curry powder, but it doesn’t belong in chocolate.
The big candy manufacturers have their own tricks to try to lure us into buying more candy. They’ve created countless variations on old favorites. Where we used to buy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars, and M&Ms, we can now buy Caramel or White Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars filled with caramel, and M&Ms filled with peanut butter. All of these are perfectly fine, but we’re spoiled with choices. I kind of wish we could go back to the days when my most perplexing candy problem was remembering which color Chunky wrapper had the raisins, and which did not.
I’ve always had a kind of affection for the niche candy bars. I went through phases as a kid (in the post-Chunky era) when I was attracted to Zero bars, Fifth Avenue, Zagnut, and Clark bars. With the exception of Zero bars, all of these are variations on peanut butter flavored candy. The Zero bar is a chocolate nougat, covered with something that I wasn’t clear on—it was white, but it wasn’t really white chocolate. White chocolate is an abomination, and should be outlawed. It’s not chocolate, and it just tastes like very sweet wax. In fact, I’ve found by checking the Hershey’s website (thank you, Internet) that the coating is “white fudge.” Maybe that’s just a fancy way of saying white chocolate, but in any event, there’s so little of it in a Zero bar that it manages not to offend.
In the 80s, when we all became so ludicrously afraid of fat in anything, several companies introduced reduced fat chocolate. For some time I was a devotee of Sweet Escapes candy bars, and we all started buying Three Musketeers because they were “low fat” (which translated, really, to “high air content” but that concept seemed to either elude us or not matter, so keen were we to be able to have our cake and eat it too, or in this case, to have our chocolate but not the fat). Most of these reduced fat offerings seem to no longer be available, as many people have come to their senses. Or at least switched to low carb candy bars, which I think must be pretty disgusting, so I’ve never bothered to try one. Now you can also buy chocolate bars that are enhanced with “nutrients.” This seems the most ridiculous concept of all to me. The idea of eating chocolate and soothing the guilt by reminding oneself that the candy contains calcium, or vitamin A, or something. I say, if you want vitamin A, eat a carrot. If you want chocolate, eat chocolate.
The chocolate I eat these days tends to be mostly in things, rather than just solo. I make things like chocolate chip cookies (with Toll House morsels—no overpriced Sharffen Berger shards for me, thanks). Although I love chocolate, I don’t really like chocolate ice cream, as I think the aftertaste is too strong, and if they put chocolate bits of any kind in ice cream, the effect of freezing on chocolate makes it waxy, which I loathe. I’ve also just discovered chocolate covered Altoids, which they’ve been handing out as free samples as I walk to work every morning. Doubtless these are just Altoids that are in some way deficient—chipped or otherwise deformed—that they coat with dark chocolate, but they’re really not bad. Four of them are a little mouthful, they give me a quick chocolate fix, and offer a little breath freshening bonus. The chocolate softens the usually overpowering peppermint of the mint itself.
Of course, the health reporters of the world keep assuring me that chocolate (dark chocolate, anyway) is good for my heart, and that a little bit won’t hurt me and may even be good for me. While I find this interesting information, I’m not eating chocolate because it might be good for me. I’m eating it because I like it. Even though I didn’t get any for Valentine’s Day.
P.S. For those who live close to a Godiva store, or a Barnes & Noble, and want to stock up, the day after a “chocolate” holiday (Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas), Godiva stores and BN sell the boxes of chocolates that have holiday-themed decorations at half price. My husband and I used to go and buy twice as much candy as we could have bought two days earlier, and then hang on to it, eating it a piece or two at a time over the next few months. In fact, I think we still have a box up on a high shelf from one of these buying binges. If you like Godiva chocolates, but are squeamish about the idea of paying 25 bucks a pound for it, this is the way to go.
I’m mostly a milk chocolate gal, although I’ve been slowly converting to dark chocolate of late years. Right now I can go either way. I’ve tried that oft-recommended dieters’ tip to eat a single piece of very high quality dark chocolate and savor it slowly. I frankly think it’s bull. I’ve done it, but all it does is make me think “That was fine. Now, what’s for dessert?”
As with all children, I started eating candy as a pretty young kid (except some people I knew who were the neighbors of a family friend, who never gave their kids refined sugar—my friend’s son came home from an afternoon spent there one time and, when asked if he had fun, replied in a tone of painful disdain “Mom, she gave us granola for a snack.” I had to agree with him that that pretty well summed up his experience). I got my candy bars at Higger’s Drug Store up the street from my house. They cost a dime. Having heard repeatedly to my disgust and boredom as a kid about when candy bars cost a nickel, I always swore I wouldn’t use that line: “They cost a dime.” How great the divide sometimes between theory and practice.
For some reason when I was younger, I always bought Chunky bars. Except that they weren’t bars. They were cubes of chocolate. Really more of a bizarre trapezoid shape. They looked like pyramids that had had their top two-thirds whacked off. I’m not sure why, because I was perfectly adept at reading, but I could never manage to remember which one did, and which one did not have the raisins in it—the silver wrapper or some other color wrapper. I hate raisins in chocolate bars. It’s an outrage.
I also remember buying Marathon bars. I seem to be the only person who ever did because 1) they no longer make them and 2) I’ve never found anyone else who even remembers them, much less also ate them. They were long braids of caramel covered with milk chocolate. The ads on TV had an image of the “braid” going past and past and past….clearly intending to convey the message that the “Marathon” bar lasted a long time. This characteristic of lasting a long time seems to have been a big feature to promote in candy bars during the late 70s and 80s. The Charleston Chew and, I think, Sugar Daddies and Sugar Mamas, made the same claim. In the 90s they seemed to move to more of almost a “meal replacement” strategy. Snickers bars, as I recall, ran a campaign promoting a Snickers bar as a way to fill you up, and carry you until your next meal.
I always wanted stuff in my candy bars. Peanut butter, peanuts, caramel, nougat (whatever the hell that is), or that fluff in a Three Musketeers bar (whatever the hell that is). I went to Dublin on business once and spent about 50 bucks in a newsagents buying candy bars that we didn’t have in America. I noticed that they had an awful lot of offerings with raisins (ugh), but an equal number with caramel. Fortunately none of them seemed to sully the glorious caramel with the vile raisins. Caramel is my favorite candy bar filling, followed by peanut butter as a close second. Actually, hazelnut anything is my favorite candy filling, but very few of the “big” candy makers offer a candy bar with hazelnuts in it. Too expensive, I would guess.
In high school I went to Australia and was there introduced to three kinds of candy bars that I’d never had before, two of which are now available at my local grocery store. There was the Violet Crumble, which was kind of a grainy sugar, flavored with essence of violet (which sounds gross and weird, but was actually OK). The Flake bar was nothing more than very, very thin leaves of milk chocolate that would have been pretty good, except that they were so delicate that what you wound up with was a candy wrapper full of chocolate shards. You just kind of “drank” the chocolate out of the wrapper, which you opened at one end to form a tube. Then there was a honeycomb concoction the name of which escapes me. I’ve since seen this in Australian cooking magazines called generically “honeycomb” and recommended as being used to top ice cream when smashed to smithereens. It was very crunchy, and did have a distinct honey flavor. Its disadvantage was that it really stuck in your teeth. All three of these, if I’m not mistaken, were manufactured by the Cadbury company.
Cadbury is much bigger overseas than it is in this country. In this country we have Hershey’s, and M&M Mars to pretty much own the candy market. I remember reading that in the 1940s Hershey’s representatives used to go to elementary schools and hand out candy bars to all the kids. The taste of chocolate is (as you no doubt have read), like so many food products, subject to its recipe. A little more of this, a little less of that, and you’ve got a completely different taste, even though it’s still “milk chocolate.” Hershey’s idea was that kids would get hooked on Hershey bars at a young age and would come to think that the flavor of Hershey’s milk chocolate was what chocolate was “supposed” to taste like. Any other recipe would taste odd to them, and they would (in theory) find it to be inferior to the flavor of Hershey’s.
Now we also have Godiva chocolates, which used to have an air of exclusivity about them, but are now sold in every possible outlet, including gas stations and nail salons. I still think they’re good chocolates, but they’re mainstream now. This move in America to make mainstream what used to be luxury items I think is a large part of what contributes to our dietary problems. Things that used to be special occasion dishes—Fettuccini Alfredo, elaborate desserts made with pastry cream, rack of lamb—are now so commonplace that they’ve lost their impact and we don’t appreciate them anymore. As a result, we consume them too casually. Of course, the antidote for that may well be a return to the days when we ate Hamburger Helper (which of course comes in an Alfredo flavor in the form of Chicken and Tuna Helpers) and Betty Crocker Au Gratin Potatoes for dinner, which I really can’t see as a win-win situation for anyone (except maybe General Foods). Sure, it would make “special” meals much more appealing by contrast, but it would mean we’d be eating dehydrated potatoes three hundred plus days a year, and I don’t know if I could handle that, myself.
As usual, I digress. So instead of Godiva as our exclusive chocolates, we now have “artisanal” chocolates made in small batches by hand. Often these chocolate makers have an unfortunate tendency to try jazz up (as I’m sure they see it) plain old boring chocolate, and they mix in just plain weird stuff like chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and (yes, I’ve seen this) curry powder. I really don’t think that I can think of a more disgusting thing to do to perfectly good chocolate than stick curry powder in it. I love curry powder, but it doesn’t belong in chocolate.
The big candy manufacturers have their own tricks to try to lure us into buying more candy. They’ve created countless variations on old favorites. Where we used to buy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars, and M&Ms, we can now buy Caramel or White Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars filled with caramel, and M&Ms filled with peanut butter. All of these are perfectly fine, but we’re spoiled with choices. I kind of wish we could go back to the days when my most perplexing candy problem was remembering which color Chunky wrapper had the raisins, and which did not.
I’ve always had a kind of affection for the niche candy bars. I went through phases as a kid (in the post-Chunky era) when I was attracted to Zero bars, Fifth Avenue, Zagnut, and Clark bars. With the exception of Zero bars, all of these are variations on peanut butter flavored candy. The Zero bar is a chocolate nougat, covered with something that I wasn’t clear on—it was white, but it wasn’t really white chocolate. White chocolate is an abomination, and should be outlawed. It’s not chocolate, and it just tastes like very sweet wax. In fact, I’ve found by checking the Hershey’s website (thank you, Internet) that the coating is “white fudge.” Maybe that’s just a fancy way of saying white chocolate, but in any event, there’s so little of it in a Zero bar that it manages not to offend.
In the 80s, when we all became so ludicrously afraid of fat in anything, several companies introduced reduced fat chocolate. For some time I was a devotee of Sweet Escapes candy bars, and we all started buying Three Musketeers because they were “low fat” (which translated, really, to “high air content” but that concept seemed to either elude us or not matter, so keen were we to be able to have our cake and eat it too, or in this case, to have our chocolate but not the fat). Most of these reduced fat offerings seem to no longer be available, as many people have come to their senses. Or at least switched to low carb candy bars, which I think must be pretty disgusting, so I’ve never bothered to try one. Now you can also buy chocolate bars that are enhanced with “nutrients.” This seems the most ridiculous concept of all to me. The idea of eating chocolate and soothing the guilt by reminding oneself that the candy contains calcium, or vitamin A, or something. I say, if you want vitamin A, eat a carrot. If you want chocolate, eat chocolate.
The chocolate I eat these days tends to be mostly in things, rather than just solo. I make things like chocolate chip cookies (with Toll House morsels—no overpriced Sharffen Berger shards for me, thanks). Although I love chocolate, I don’t really like chocolate ice cream, as I think the aftertaste is too strong, and if they put chocolate bits of any kind in ice cream, the effect of freezing on chocolate makes it waxy, which I loathe. I’ve also just discovered chocolate covered Altoids, which they’ve been handing out as free samples as I walk to work every morning. Doubtless these are just Altoids that are in some way deficient—chipped or otherwise deformed—that they coat with dark chocolate, but they’re really not bad. Four of them are a little mouthful, they give me a quick chocolate fix, and offer a little breath freshening bonus. The chocolate softens the usually overpowering peppermint of the mint itself.
Of course, the health reporters of the world keep assuring me that chocolate (dark chocolate, anyway) is good for my heart, and that a little bit won’t hurt me and may even be good for me. While I find this interesting information, I’m not eating chocolate because it might be good for me. I’m eating it because I like it. Even though I didn’t get any for Valentine’s Day.
P.S. For those who live close to a Godiva store, or a Barnes & Noble, and want to stock up, the day after a “chocolate” holiday (Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas), Godiva stores and BN sell the boxes of chocolates that have holiday-themed decorations at half price. My husband and I used to go and buy twice as much candy as we could have bought two days earlier, and then hang on to it, eating it a piece or two at a time over the next few months. In fact, I think we still have a box up on a high shelf from one of these buying binges. If you like Godiva chocolates, but are squeamish about the idea of paying 25 bucks a pound for it, this is the way to go.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Just Plain Yucky Food
Something got me to thinking about unappealing food tonight, and I started thinking about the worst foods or meals I’ve ever had or heard about. Thankfully, most of them are just things I’ve heard about, rather than actually been forced to eat and be polite about. Most of them seem to be the creations of relatives. I’m not sure if this is because I eat more of my relatives’ food than I do of other peoples’, or if it says something about my relatives’ cooking.
The only unappealing food that I thought of that I’d actually eaten was pre-cooked bacon that had been microwaved. I don’t mean the packaged stuff from the grocery store that’s intended to be heated up in the microwave. I mean bacon that has been cooked by conventional means, put into a baggie in the refrigerator for a day or two (or more—I don’t even want to know), and then reheated in the microwave.
Interestingly, I’ve not only heard of this being done, but actually been forced to eat it. My friend’s mother in law does this and she told me about it. My own mother in law did it, as does my grandmother (or did—I’m not sure she really makes bacon anymore, since she really only cooks for herself now). The thing about bacon that has been subjected to this treatment is that it becomes bacon bits. On both occasions I was served it, it was really more a pile of dark brown crumbs than anything resembling strips of bacon. I can understand if this is the way you serve bacon occasionally, but in all three cases, this was their standard. They would cook off a package of bacon one day, then store it until they needed it, and reheat it in the microwave, whereupon it would dissolve into the aforementioned crumbs.
I think my grandmother did this because she bought a microwave back in the early 80s when they were still novel and interesting, and she was testing out its capabilities. When she discovered that she could have bacon in 15 seconds, well, she was thrilled. My mother in law did it out of a need to eat quickly. When hunger overtook my mother in law, there was no waiting. She was going to eat the first thing that came to hand, and if that was microwaved bacon, fine. If it was a box of graham cracker crumbs, or a raw onion, fine.
I think my friend’s mother in law was motivated by a total lack of caring about food quality. She was the type of woman who claimed that she’d provided meals for her family for twenty or thirty years or whatever it was, and she was “retiring.” Hanging up her apron, thanks. I’ve found that most women who claim they’re going to stop cooking because they’ve been doing it for so many years were never very good cooks to begin with. They turned out barely edible, largely uninteresting and unmemorable meals for all those years. Generally their families applaud (if silently) when they announce their retirement from culinary responsibilities.
Beyond that, I’ve mostly been treated to descriptions of unappetizing meals.
My husband came home from a visit to his cousin/godmother’s house one year with a horror story. First let me say that his cousin knows she’s a dreadful cook, and doesn’t try to do it often. They eat out every night. They’re an interesting combination: non-cookers, but cheap. As a result, they only eat at restaurants that are all-you-can-eat buffets, or for which they have a buy-one-get-one-free, or early bird coupon. On the occasion of my husband’s visit to their house, she decided to try to cook.
She served ham left over from Easter (it was only a week or so after Easter, so that’s not as bad as it might sound). It was a purchased ham, so there wasn’t much she could do to screw it up. The side dishes she made were Au Gratin Potatoes from a box (actually OK with my husband, because he kind of likes those), and green beans. It was the green beans that were notable. She made them in the pressure cooker. They were, according to my husband, grey. She couldn’t figure out why he didn’t want seconds.
My father in law has a stock of revolting recipes that he pulls out every now and then. He’s since moved to a small condo, but we used to go visit him when he lived in a larger house, and for some reason our visit always inspired him to have a “cookout” or a “family dinner” (depending on the season, and despite the fact that we’d already seen everyone who was invited at least two other times on any trip there). My husband and I always cooked for these gatherings, with superfluous menu input by my father in law. We’d set the menu, and he’d spend the 24 hours leading up to the event trying to add things that were unnecessary, unappetizing, and unwelcome.
“What about a cake?” he’d suggest at breakfast the morning of the party, “I have one downstairs in the freezer.” What he failed to mention was that the cake was a fully frosted cake (generally not the sort of thing that freezes well) that had been frozen since my mother in law had passed away two years earlier. We’d decline.
Always, without fail, he would suggest the addition that I found most vile, and to which we responded in the negative most vehemently. This was canned ham cooked in the slow cooker with pineapple juice. It seems this was kind of a specialty of his. Canned ham is disgusting to start with, but cook it in the slow cooker with pineapple juice and I think you really would have the most revolting concoction known to man.
My family has come up with a few winners too, most memorably a meal my grandmother offered to cook my husband when I was in the hospital after the birth of my first son. She’d come to stay and help out, and she offered to make my husband something along the lines of oriental tuna served over a baked potato. I’m not sure he how, but he managed to decline politely and without offending her.
As I say, somehow I managed to dodge most of these bullets one way or another. I’m sure when my children grow up and get married, their spouses will complain about my cooking for one reason or another. However, it won’t be because I’ve served them canned ham or microwaved bacon. They’ll have to find something else to complain about, I guess.
The only unappealing food that I thought of that I’d actually eaten was pre-cooked bacon that had been microwaved. I don’t mean the packaged stuff from the grocery store that’s intended to be heated up in the microwave. I mean bacon that has been cooked by conventional means, put into a baggie in the refrigerator for a day or two (or more—I don’t even want to know), and then reheated in the microwave.
Interestingly, I’ve not only heard of this being done, but actually been forced to eat it. My friend’s mother in law does this and she told me about it. My own mother in law did it, as does my grandmother (or did—I’m not sure she really makes bacon anymore, since she really only cooks for herself now). The thing about bacon that has been subjected to this treatment is that it becomes bacon bits. On both occasions I was served it, it was really more a pile of dark brown crumbs than anything resembling strips of bacon. I can understand if this is the way you serve bacon occasionally, but in all three cases, this was their standard. They would cook off a package of bacon one day, then store it until they needed it, and reheat it in the microwave, whereupon it would dissolve into the aforementioned crumbs.
I think my grandmother did this because she bought a microwave back in the early 80s when they were still novel and interesting, and she was testing out its capabilities. When she discovered that she could have bacon in 15 seconds, well, she was thrilled. My mother in law did it out of a need to eat quickly. When hunger overtook my mother in law, there was no waiting. She was going to eat the first thing that came to hand, and if that was microwaved bacon, fine. If it was a box of graham cracker crumbs, or a raw onion, fine.
I think my friend’s mother in law was motivated by a total lack of caring about food quality. She was the type of woman who claimed that she’d provided meals for her family for twenty or thirty years or whatever it was, and she was “retiring.” Hanging up her apron, thanks. I’ve found that most women who claim they’re going to stop cooking because they’ve been doing it for so many years were never very good cooks to begin with. They turned out barely edible, largely uninteresting and unmemorable meals for all those years. Generally their families applaud (if silently) when they announce their retirement from culinary responsibilities.
Beyond that, I’ve mostly been treated to descriptions of unappetizing meals.
My husband came home from a visit to his cousin/godmother’s house one year with a horror story. First let me say that his cousin knows she’s a dreadful cook, and doesn’t try to do it often. They eat out every night. They’re an interesting combination: non-cookers, but cheap. As a result, they only eat at restaurants that are all-you-can-eat buffets, or for which they have a buy-one-get-one-free, or early bird coupon. On the occasion of my husband’s visit to their house, she decided to try to cook.
She served ham left over from Easter (it was only a week or so after Easter, so that’s not as bad as it might sound). It was a purchased ham, so there wasn’t much she could do to screw it up. The side dishes she made were Au Gratin Potatoes from a box (actually OK with my husband, because he kind of likes those), and green beans. It was the green beans that were notable. She made them in the pressure cooker. They were, according to my husband, grey. She couldn’t figure out why he didn’t want seconds.
My father in law has a stock of revolting recipes that he pulls out every now and then. He’s since moved to a small condo, but we used to go visit him when he lived in a larger house, and for some reason our visit always inspired him to have a “cookout” or a “family dinner” (depending on the season, and despite the fact that we’d already seen everyone who was invited at least two other times on any trip there). My husband and I always cooked for these gatherings, with superfluous menu input by my father in law. We’d set the menu, and he’d spend the 24 hours leading up to the event trying to add things that were unnecessary, unappetizing, and unwelcome.
“What about a cake?” he’d suggest at breakfast the morning of the party, “I have one downstairs in the freezer.” What he failed to mention was that the cake was a fully frosted cake (generally not the sort of thing that freezes well) that had been frozen since my mother in law had passed away two years earlier. We’d decline.
Always, without fail, he would suggest the addition that I found most vile, and to which we responded in the negative most vehemently. This was canned ham cooked in the slow cooker with pineapple juice. It seems this was kind of a specialty of his. Canned ham is disgusting to start with, but cook it in the slow cooker with pineapple juice and I think you really would have the most revolting concoction known to man.
My family has come up with a few winners too, most memorably a meal my grandmother offered to cook my husband when I was in the hospital after the birth of my first son. She’d come to stay and help out, and she offered to make my husband something along the lines of oriental tuna served over a baked potato. I’m not sure he how, but he managed to decline politely and without offending her.
As I say, somehow I managed to dodge most of these bullets one way or another. I’m sure when my children grow up and get married, their spouses will complain about my cooking for one reason or another. However, it won’t be because I’ve served them canned ham or microwaved bacon. They’ll have to find something else to complain about, I guess.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Status Update
Ho-kay. Here we go again. I got a job offer, and the job starts Monday. SO. Once again, I may be a little quiet until I can get into a regular groove and start posting one to two times a week, as I had always intended.
The job, btw, is with my husband's company, so that'll be convenient. For the most part we can commute together, which is kind of nice.
I'll try to get something posted in the next three days, and then see what I can do from there.
Happy Groundhog Day!
The job, btw, is with my husband's company, so that'll be convenient. For the most part we can commute together, which is kind of nice.
I'll try to get something posted in the next three days, and then see what I can do from there.
Happy Groundhog Day!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Advice for the Diet Dilemma (A Bit Lengthy, I'm Afraid)
Once again the New York Times has provided me with my topic du jour. In the Times magazine on Sunday, January 28, there was an article about food science and eating by Michael Pollan, author of the book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma." He talks about how scientists have broken “food” down in to “nutrients” to the point where we, the American public, don’t have a clue what we should be eating. As a result, we subsist on Diet Coke and Lean Cuisines.
Pollan offers a few “rules” for eating, which I’ve been thinking about. This is a little stream of consciousness, but here are his rules, along with my thoughts. It’s worth noting that I’m not setting out to answer any questions here; I’m just asking them. If I answer them through my thought processes, well, bonus.
1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
My great-great-grandmother was a woman we call Grandmother Henley (well, one of them was…I’m picking the one I’m actually familiar with, although of course I never met her, but my great-grandmother told me about her, and my grandmother always speaks of her as Grandmother Henley). Going back to her is smart, because I know for a fact that my great-grandmother ate things like Wise Potato Chips, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other Evil Processed Foods. Grandmother Henley would not, it’s true, recognize Go-Gurt as a food (I barely do, in spite of the fact that my son likes them; blue yogurt—how vile!), but I’ve got some questions and hesitations about other things.
Chocolate graham crackers spring to mind. Graham crackers have been around for a long time. Doubtless Grandmother Henley would recognize them as “food,” but what about the chocolate part? Making graham crackers chocolate involves nothing more than adding some cocoa powder to the dough, and she would also recognize cocoa powder as food. Does that mean chocolate graham crackers are OK? Of course, according to some of the later guidelines, the answer is pretty much no, but there’s more.
I eat egg and cheese English muffins from McDonald’s (you order an Egg McMuffin and tell them to hold the Canadian bacon). Based on this guideline, this is food, but I quite doubt Grandmother Henley would recognize it as such. There was no such thing as a “breakfast sandwich” in her day. Even if I make this at home (since we all know that the McDonald’s cheese and English muffins are loaded with Evil Preservatives and other naughty ingredients), would it still count as food according to this rule? I suppose so, but I don’t really know.
OK, moving on.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
I’ve heard this before and it gives me pause every time. Quaker Oats, probably the most benign food in the free world, carries a health claim about reduction of the risk of heart disease. Am I to avoid Quaker Oats? And what about Bush’s Black Beans: “May Reduce Your Risk of Heart Disease”; or Libby’s Pumpkin: “Excellent Source of Vitamin A & Fiber”; or Del Monte Sliced Carrots: “Only 5g of Net Carbs Per Serving”? Or my Fresh Express Baby Spinach: “Packed with Nutrition! Vitamins A, K & C! Folic Acid! Iron! Lutein!” (If you think I spend a lot of time wandering around my kitchen reading food labels, well, that’s where you’re right.) I can see that Mr. Pollan is talking about something like a plain old leek from the produce department, which bears no label at all, but this particular piece of advice could prove confusing to the average idiot (of which there seem to be a frightening number in this world, alas, alas).
Of course Kellogg’s Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars are something on which I’d take a pass. Besides sounding downright revolting, they’re clearly processed within an inch of their lives, and the fact that the person who dreamed these up had a Strawberry Shortcake doll as a kid is the closest they ever got to anything even vaguely resembling a strawberry.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.
Here we have a slight problem with the deluge of food and nutrition reporting interfering with the recommended course of action. Thanks to Better Living Through Chemistry, I can pronounce Aspartame, guar gum, titanim dioxide, and ascorbic acid, and worse, I know what they all are (respectively: an artificial sweetener whose arrangement of molecules closely mimics that of real sugar, a thickener from the guar bean shrub, a chemical used as a “brightener” in products such as white toothpaste and canned frosting, and the formal name for vitamin C. I got a D- in high school Chemistry. Pathetic, isn’t it?)
More than five in number is tricky, because sometimes perfectly healthy products have more than five ingredients. I’ve never heard of anyone slamming Worcestershire sauce (except my friend E, who hates it—but then, she’s not deriding its health properties, only its taste), and yet my bottle of Worcestershire sauce lists 13 ingredients, including the much-dreaded high-fructose corn syrup.
High-fructose corn syrup is the next trans fat. Or maybe it’s just a companion evil to trans fat. It’s said to be in just about everything (a claim I won’t dispute, since it’s bloody true), and it’s said that the human body does not need that crap. Again, no argument. But if we can’t eat ANYthing with high-fructose corn syrup in it, what ARE we to eat? Are we expected to sit around and gnaw on raw, unseasoned carrots and celery sticks? Or am I to comb natural foods stores for Worcestershire sauce that doesn’t have HFCS in it? With four kids, I frankly don’t have that kind of time.
So maybe we go with the last sentence here and assume that none of the characteristics mentioned is harmful in and of themselves, use the Worcestershire sauce (except E) and get over it.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.
I’ve whined about the inconvenience (timing) and availability (seasonality and location) of farmers' markets before. I will not again.
5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.
“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.
Ah, this is an interesting argument, and one that really got me started thinking about this article. Eat Less. As Americans we eat an enormous amount of food. This morning alone I’ve probably eaten more food than some inhabitants of the Third World eat in a week. It was all, I might point out, pretty much crap.
I completely agree that if the food is of a really high quality, I need far less of it to be satisfied. The caveat is that if I spend a lot of money on it, I feel like I should bloody well eat it all, instead of tossing it when I’m full. In my home I can, of course, better control portion sizes. In restaurants it’s a different story.
Yesterday I had lunch at a local pub that serves pretty decent food. Since this article was still on my mind, I ordered something that I felt pretty closely adhered to the guidelines set forth here. It was a spinach salad (see #6 about eating more leaves), with bleu cheese, sautéed red onions and apples, walnuts, and a balsamic dressing. I asked for sautéed shrimp to get a little protein as well. The salad was $8.95. The added shrimp were $5.95 (roughly a buck a shrimp). You can bet that at that price, there was no Hara Hachi Bu-ing for me. I ate it all. I could probably have stopped about two thirds of the way through—maybe even half way through--but that would have meant leaving about three shrimp, and I just couldn’t stand to do that. Yes, better in the trash than on my tush, I suppose, but I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t brought up as a member of the now-cliched “Clean Plate Club,” but something in me (years of my grandmother’s frugality finally wearing off on me? Sheer guilt?) just wouldn’t let me send that plate to the kitchen with two or three uneaten shrimp, and a pile of other salad ingredients, on it.
We Americans seem to have an interesting problem of our own devising. We’ve forced restaurants to provide huge, huge portions in response to our insistence that we “get what we pay for,” and yet we feel guilty wasting the money if we don’t eat every bite of food, no matter how overfull it makes us feel. Personally, I would have been just as happy with a $5 salad, and $3 worth of shrimp, and been able to eat it all without feeling too full or too guilty. The restaurant didn’t offer $5 worth of that salad, because their patrons want a bigger salad, something more filling.
I’m happy eating at home most of the time, but what’s a pig to do when she goes out to eat? Try to control myself, I guess, and see if I can get half orders of things, or maybe doggie bags (however, salad does not lend itself to a doggie bag).
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.
I’m tired of hearing this “meat more as a flavoring” line, even from Thomas Jefferson. How about if I just eat less meat and more vegetables?
7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.
Oh dear. What about mixing the eating habits of different cultures? What if I want to eat like the French AND the Italians? And the Chinese? And the Indians? And the Thais? I like all those different kinds of food, and I don’t want to limit myself to just one. Maybe there are some similarities in all those cultures that can be incorporated into our own eating habits. The small portions, and no seconds or snacking ideas sound like they might bridge all of the healthy non-American styles of eating. Is that the way to go? So many questions.
8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.
I do cook, so problem solved there. Right now I can’t plant a garden, but when I can, I will. Case closed on that one.
9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.
Earlier in this article, Pollan mentions that four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat: wheat, soybeans, corn, and rice. So adding new species…hm. That’s kind of a tricky one, because really, what’s available to us? Fish, chicken (I’ll lump duck and turkey in here too), pork, beef, lamb. Various fruits and vegetables. The Grains (and things like seeds and legumes).
I think his statement about adding new “species” as opposed to new “foods” to one’s diet is confusing. The dictionary definition of a species is “…the smallest group of classification. A species generally consists of all the individual organisms of a natural population which are able to interbreed, generally sharing similar appearance, characteristics and genetics due to having relatively recent common ancestors.” So Brassica oleracea is a species, but I’m sure Pollan would say that we shouldn’t just add cabbage alone to our diets, but also add brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli, all of which fall into the species B. oleracea. I think the advice “add more different foods” is sufficient. It ought to be followed by the statement “Try everything you can find that’s edible.”
What I find to be a problem about this is that often some fruits and vegetables just aren’t good in their natural state. Ever eaten raw broccoli rabe (or rapini, as it’s sometimes called)? Or raw quince? Yuck. Yet cooked, those two things are wonderful, and I love them. The problem is twofold, it seems to me—first, people don’t eat enough of a variety of fruits and vegetables, and second, we don’t know how to prepare them to make them tasty. If we just follow the “add more” rule, stroll into the grocery store and buy the first unfamiliar vegetable that comes to hand, and eat it as is, more likley than not we’re going to be turned way off. What’s a would-be adventerous eater to do?
My solution, as always, is to buy more cookbooks. I’m not recommending this for everyone, necessarily, but based on the advice above to cook more, I’d say it would work for those truly dedicated to trying to eat better. I have several vegetable and vegetarian cookbooks, and I like “regular” cookbooks that have big sections on ways to cook different vegetables. In fact, say what you will about the “low carb” craze, it has produced a few very good cookbooks that focus on vegetable preparations.
At the beginning of this article, Mr. Pollan gives the solution to our diet and nutrition problems in 7 words (with a couple of sentences of clarification): Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products.
And buy more cookbooks. He forgot that.
Pollan offers a few “rules” for eating, which I’ve been thinking about. This is a little stream of consciousness, but here are his rules, along with my thoughts. It’s worth noting that I’m not setting out to answer any questions here; I’m just asking them. If I answer them through my thought processes, well, bonus.
1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
My great-great-grandmother was a woman we call Grandmother Henley (well, one of them was…I’m picking the one I’m actually familiar with, although of course I never met her, but my great-grandmother told me about her, and my grandmother always speaks of her as Grandmother Henley). Going back to her is smart, because I know for a fact that my great-grandmother ate things like Wise Potato Chips, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other Evil Processed Foods. Grandmother Henley would not, it’s true, recognize Go-Gurt as a food (I barely do, in spite of the fact that my son likes them; blue yogurt—how vile!), but I’ve got some questions and hesitations about other things.
Chocolate graham crackers spring to mind. Graham crackers have been around for a long time. Doubtless Grandmother Henley would recognize them as “food,” but what about the chocolate part? Making graham crackers chocolate involves nothing more than adding some cocoa powder to the dough, and she would also recognize cocoa powder as food. Does that mean chocolate graham crackers are OK? Of course, according to some of the later guidelines, the answer is pretty much no, but there’s more.
I eat egg and cheese English muffins from McDonald’s (you order an Egg McMuffin and tell them to hold the Canadian bacon). Based on this guideline, this is food, but I quite doubt Grandmother Henley would recognize it as such. There was no such thing as a “breakfast sandwich” in her day. Even if I make this at home (since we all know that the McDonald’s cheese and English muffins are loaded with Evil Preservatives and other naughty ingredients), would it still count as food according to this rule? I suppose so, but I don’t really know.
OK, moving on.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
I’ve heard this before and it gives me pause every time. Quaker Oats, probably the most benign food in the free world, carries a health claim about reduction of the risk of heart disease. Am I to avoid Quaker Oats? And what about Bush’s Black Beans: “May Reduce Your Risk of Heart Disease”; or Libby’s Pumpkin: “Excellent Source of Vitamin A & Fiber”; or Del Monte Sliced Carrots: “Only 5g of Net Carbs Per Serving”? Or my Fresh Express Baby Spinach: “Packed with Nutrition! Vitamins A, K & C! Folic Acid! Iron! Lutein!” (If you think I spend a lot of time wandering around my kitchen reading food labels, well, that’s where you’re right.) I can see that Mr. Pollan is talking about something like a plain old leek from the produce department, which bears no label at all, but this particular piece of advice could prove confusing to the average idiot (of which there seem to be a frightening number in this world, alas, alas).
Of course Kellogg’s Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars are something on which I’d take a pass. Besides sounding downright revolting, they’re clearly processed within an inch of their lives, and the fact that the person who dreamed these up had a Strawberry Shortcake doll as a kid is the closest they ever got to anything even vaguely resembling a strawberry.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.
Here we have a slight problem with the deluge of food and nutrition reporting interfering with the recommended course of action. Thanks to Better Living Through Chemistry, I can pronounce Aspartame, guar gum, titanim dioxide, and ascorbic acid, and worse, I know what they all are (respectively: an artificial sweetener whose arrangement of molecules closely mimics that of real sugar, a thickener from the guar bean shrub, a chemical used as a “brightener” in products such as white toothpaste and canned frosting, and the formal name for vitamin C. I got a D- in high school Chemistry. Pathetic, isn’t it?)
More than five in number is tricky, because sometimes perfectly healthy products have more than five ingredients. I’ve never heard of anyone slamming Worcestershire sauce (except my friend E, who hates it—but then, she’s not deriding its health properties, only its taste), and yet my bottle of Worcestershire sauce lists 13 ingredients, including the much-dreaded high-fructose corn syrup.
High-fructose corn syrup is the next trans fat. Or maybe it’s just a companion evil to trans fat. It’s said to be in just about everything (a claim I won’t dispute, since it’s bloody true), and it’s said that the human body does not need that crap. Again, no argument. But if we can’t eat ANYthing with high-fructose corn syrup in it, what ARE we to eat? Are we expected to sit around and gnaw on raw, unseasoned carrots and celery sticks? Or am I to comb natural foods stores for Worcestershire sauce that doesn’t have HFCS in it? With four kids, I frankly don’t have that kind of time.
So maybe we go with the last sentence here and assume that none of the characteristics mentioned is harmful in and of themselves, use the Worcestershire sauce (except E) and get over it.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.
I’ve whined about the inconvenience (timing) and availability (seasonality and location) of farmers' markets before. I will not again.
5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.
“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.
Ah, this is an interesting argument, and one that really got me started thinking about this article. Eat Less. As Americans we eat an enormous amount of food. This morning alone I’ve probably eaten more food than some inhabitants of the Third World eat in a week. It was all, I might point out, pretty much crap.
I completely agree that if the food is of a really high quality, I need far less of it to be satisfied. The caveat is that if I spend a lot of money on it, I feel like I should bloody well eat it all, instead of tossing it when I’m full. In my home I can, of course, better control portion sizes. In restaurants it’s a different story.
Yesterday I had lunch at a local pub that serves pretty decent food. Since this article was still on my mind, I ordered something that I felt pretty closely adhered to the guidelines set forth here. It was a spinach salad (see #6 about eating more leaves), with bleu cheese, sautéed red onions and apples, walnuts, and a balsamic dressing. I asked for sautéed shrimp to get a little protein as well. The salad was $8.95. The added shrimp were $5.95 (roughly a buck a shrimp). You can bet that at that price, there was no Hara Hachi Bu-ing for me. I ate it all. I could probably have stopped about two thirds of the way through—maybe even half way through--but that would have meant leaving about three shrimp, and I just couldn’t stand to do that. Yes, better in the trash than on my tush, I suppose, but I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t brought up as a member of the now-cliched “Clean Plate Club,” but something in me (years of my grandmother’s frugality finally wearing off on me? Sheer guilt?) just wouldn’t let me send that plate to the kitchen with two or three uneaten shrimp, and a pile of other salad ingredients, on it.
We Americans seem to have an interesting problem of our own devising. We’ve forced restaurants to provide huge, huge portions in response to our insistence that we “get what we pay for,” and yet we feel guilty wasting the money if we don’t eat every bite of food, no matter how overfull it makes us feel. Personally, I would have been just as happy with a $5 salad, and $3 worth of shrimp, and been able to eat it all without feeling too full or too guilty. The restaurant didn’t offer $5 worth of that salad, because their patrons want a bigger salad, something more filling.
I’m happy eating at home most of the time, but what’s a pig to do when she goes out to eat? Try to control myself, I guess, and see if I can get half orders of things, or maybe doggie bags (however, salad does not lend itself to a doggie bag).
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.
I’m tired of hearing this “meat more as a flavoring” line, even from Thomas Jefferson. How about if I just eat less meat and more vegetables?
7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.
Oh dear. What about mixing the eating habits of different cultures? What if I want to eat like the French AND the Italians? And the Chinese? And the Indians? And the Thais? I like all those different kinds of food, and I don’t want to limit myself to just one. Maybe there are some similarities in all those cultures that can be incorporated into our own eating habits. The small portions, and no seconds or snacking ideas sound like they might bridge all of the healthy non-American styles of eating. Is that the way to go? So many questions.
8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.
I do cook, so problem solved there. Right now I can’t plant a garden, but when I can, I will. Case closed on that one.
9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.
Earlier in this article, Pollan mentions that four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat: wheat, soybeans, corn, and rice. So adding new species…hm. That’s kind of a tricky one, because really, what’s available to us? Fish, chicken (I’ll lump duck and turkey in here too), pork, beef, lamb. Various fruits and vegetables. The Grains (and things like seeds and legumes).
I think his statement about adding new “species” as opposed to new “foods” to one’s diet is confusing. The dictionary definition of a species is “…the smallest group of classification. A species generally consists of all the individual organisms of a natural population which are able to interbreed, generally sharing similar appearance, characteristics and genetics due to having relatively recent common ancestors.” So Brassica oleracea is a species, but I’m sure Pollan would say that we shouldn’t just add cabbage alone to our diets, but also add brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli, all of which fall into the species B. oleracea. I think the advice “add more different foods” is sufficient. It ought to be followed by the statement “Try everything you can find that’s edible.”
What I find to be a problem about this is that often some fruits and vegetables just aren’t good in their natural state. Ever eaten raw broccoli rabe (or rapini, as it’s sometimes called)? Or raw quince? Yuck. Yet cooked, those two things are wonderful, and I love them. The problem is twofold, it seems to me—first, people don’t eat enough of a variety of fruits and vegetables, and second, we don’t know how to prepare them to make them tasty. If we just follow the “add more” rule, stroll into the grocery store and buy the first unfamiliar vegetable that comes to hand, and eat it as is, more likley than not we’re going to be turned way off. What’s a would-be adventerous eater to do?
My solution, as always, is to buy more cookbooks. I’m not recommending this for everyone, necessarily, but based on the advice above to cook more, I’d say it would work for those truly dedicated to trying to eat better. I have several vegetable and vegetarian cookbooks, and I like “regular” cookbooks that have big sections on ways to cook different vegetables. In fact, say what you will about the “low carb” craze, it has produced a few very good cookbooks that focus on vegetable preparations.
At the beginning of this article, Mr. Pollan gives the solution to our diet and nutrition problems in 7 words (with a couple of sentences of clarification): Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products.
And buy more cookbooks. He forgot that.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
What a Crock
Here we are smack dab in the middle of Crock Pot weather, and I have yet to use mine. Interestingly, I’m in a position where the complaints I have with how Crock Pots (or I should correctly say “slow cookers” since Crock Pot is actually a name trademarked by Rival for their brand of slow cooker) function shouldn’t really be an issue. Right now I’m home all day, so I’d be able to put things in a slow cooker and have it cook for just 6 or 8 hours, the way most recipes recommend.
In general, I don’t think slow cookers work the way they’re supposed to. The idea is that you put a bunch of stuff in the pot, plug the pot in, leave for work, return home and find dinner waiting. That’s the theory. When slow cookers first seemed to hit their stride, back in the 1970s (at least, that’s when I remember my mother most using a slow cooker) that was probably fine. People in general didn’t rush out of the house at 6 a.m. and come tearing back in at 6:30 at night, or later. My mother used to leave for work at a very civilized 8:30 a.m. She was generally home by 6.
Today, when I’m working, I leave my house at 6:15 and return home just about 12 hours later. That’s approximately three hours longer than my mother’s absence from the house in the 1970s. Most slow cooker recipes—at least the ones that I have—all seem to call for food to be cooked for 8 hours, give or take. That’s four hours less than I’m gone from home. I could see if my mother put something in to cook at 8 a.m., and came back home at 6 that it might be OK; slow cookers are, after all, a very low heat, so an extra hour or two really shouldn’t make too much difference. However, I have trouble believing that an extra four hours wouldn’t impact the quality of the food. Unless, of course, all you make is beef stew.
Those who develop recipes for slow cookers would have you believe that you can make just about anything short of chocolate éclairs or ice cream in a slow cooker. Yeah, maybe in their slow cooker, with them standing around developing recipes next to it all day long, available to turn if off when the cooking time is over.
Additionally, many recipes (even those for beef stew) call for a fairly significant amount of prep work prior to the actual pot-plugging-in. Slicing vegetables, dredging with flour, browning meat. This is too much work for me to undertake at 5:45 a.m., even assuming I did have the time to do it then. I’m just not that highly functional at that hour. I’d slice off a finger, or the baby would wind up dredged in flour. It would be hard to explain that to daycare.
So ideally, I should be able to prep everything the night before, put it in the pot part and refrigerate it overnight, then drop the pot into the heating element and turn it on as I head out the door. Again, however, we have that 8 hour cook time versus 12 hour “away” time issue. The obvious solution is a pot that has a timer built into it.
They make this. I was so excited when I found it. It’s called a Smart Pot and it’s made by Rival (so it’s a Crock Pot). I told my husband, “This is what we need!” and he bought it for me then and there. Smart man. Dumb me. I should have looked more carefully to see how the thing actually worked. They did almost what they needed to do, but they missed the mark in a very critical way.
The Smart Pot allows you to set the cooker to cook for two, four, six, or eight hours. After that amount of time, it shifts to a “low” or “hold” setting. The catch is that as soon as you plug the pot in and select the number of hours you want it to cook, it starts cooking. Well, duh, you say. Yes, but what it needs to do is turn itself on 8 hours before I arrive home. Assuming that’s 6 p.m., that means the pot needs to turn on at 10 a.m. The Smart Pot doesn’t do this. It needs a clock that can be set for “On: 10 a.m.” and the length of the cooking time set to 8 hours.
I see the problem the slow cooker manufacturers face. If I took a pot of food out of the refrigerator (or even just put the ingredients into the pot cold) at 6 a.m., and then it didn’t start cooking until 10 a.m., the food would be sitting unrefrigerated, growing bacteria and god knows what else, for four hours before it started cooking. Here in Litigation Land, that would be a field day for people who felt a little queasy after Mom’s Slow Cooker Spam Loaf or whatever it was. Clearly the fact that the Spam Loaf ingredients sat out for four hours before starting to cook caused bacterial growth that led to food poisoning (and never mind that the idea of Spam Loaf is, in itself, pretty nauseating). Let’s sue!
At the same time, what they’ve got now simply doesn’t work. Don’t tell me that the hold setting it uses is really, really low heat. Any heat is going to continue to cook the food. I just do not believe that four-plus hours at even the lowest of heat settings isn’t going to compromise the quality of the food produced (unless, as I said earlier, it’s beef stew—but then why do I need a single appliance just to make beef stew?).
I know I’m going to be driven to what my husband’s mother finally did. She had this same complaint about slow cookers years ago (it's not just whiny me). She went out and bought one of those timers you plug your lamps into when you go on vacation so the lights will go on at dark and back off again a couple of hours later, so it looks like someone turned off the lamp to go to bed. She plugged her slow cooker into it, set it for the correct time to begin cooking to ensure that dinner would be ready when she got home, and went off to work. None of her family ever got food poisoning that way. They got to eat more than beef stew from the slow cooker, too.
In general, I don’t think slow cookers work the way they’re supposed to. The idea is that you put a bunch of stuff in the pot, plug the pot in, leave for work, return home and find dinner waiting. That’s the theory. When slow cookers first seemed to hit their stride, back in the 1970s (at least, that’s when I remember my mother most using a slow cooker) that was probably fine. People in general didn’t rush out of the house at 6 a.m. and come tearing back in at 6:30 at night, or later. My mother used to leave for work at a very civilized 8:30 a.m. She was generally home by 6.
Today, when I’m working, I leave my house at 6:15 and return home just about 12 hours later. That’s approximately three hours longer than my mother’s absence from the house in the 1970s. Most slow cooker recipes—at least the ones that I have—all seem to call for food to be cooked for 8 hours, give or take. That’s four hours less than I’m gone from home. I could see if my mother put something in to cook at 8 a.m., and came back home at 6 that it might be OK; slow cookers are, after all, a very low heat, so an extra hour or two really shouldn’t make too much difference. However, I have trouble believing that an extra four hours wouldn’t impact the quality of the food. Unless, of course, all you make is beef stew.
Those who develop recipes for slow cookers would have you believe that you can make just about anything short of chocolate éclairs or ice cream in a slow cooker. Yeah, maybe in their slow cooker, with them standing around developing recipes next to it all day long, available to turn if off when the cooking time is over.
Additionally, many recipes (even those for beef stew) call for a fairly significant amount of prep work prior to the actual pot-plugging-in. Slicing vegetables, dredging with flour, browning meat. This is too much work for me to undertake at 5:45 a.m., even assuming I did have the time to do it then. I’m just not that highly functional at that hour. I’d slice off a finger, or the baby would wind up dredged in flour. It would be hard to explain that to daycare.
So ideally, I should be able to prep everything the night before, put it in the pot part and refrigerate it overnight, then drop the pot into the heating element and turn it on as I head out the door. Again, however, we have that 8 hour cook time versus 12 hour “away” time issue. The obvious solution is a pot that has a timer built into it.
They make this. I was so excited when I found it. It’s called a Smart Pot and it’s made by Rival (so it’s a Crock Pot). I told my husband, “This is what we need!” and he bought it for me then and there. Smart man. Dumb me. I should have looked more carefully to see how the thing actually worked. They did almost what they needed to do, but they missed the mark in a very critical way.
The Smart Pot allows you to set the cooker to cook for two, four, six, or eight hours. After that amount of time, it shifts to a “low” or “hold” setting. The catch is that as soon as you plug the pot in and select the number of hours you want it to cook, it starts cooking. Well, duh, you say. Yes, but what it needs to do is turn itself on 8 hours before I arrive home. Assuming that’s 6 p.m., that means the pot needs to turn on at 10 a.m. The Smart Pot doesn’t do this. It needs a clock that can be set for “On: 10 a.m.” and the length of the cooking time set to 8 hours.
I see the problem the slow cooker manufacturers face. If I took a pot of food out of the refrigerator (or even just put the ingredients into the pot cold) at 6 a.m., and then it didn’t start cooking until 10 a.m., the food would be sitting unrefrigerated, growing bacteria and god knows what else, for four hours before it started cooking. Here in Litigation Land, that would be a field day for people who felt a little queasy after Mom’s Slow Cooker Spam Loaf or whatever it was. Clearly the fact that the Spam Loaf ingredients sat out for four hours before starting to cook caused bacterial growth that led to food poisoning (and never mind that the idea of Spam Loaf is, in itself, pretty nauseating). Let’s sue!
At the same time, what they’ve got now simply doesn’t work. Don’t tell me that the hold setting it uses is really, really low heat. Any heat is going to continue to cook the food. I just do not believe that four-plus hours at even the lowest of heat settings isn’t going to compromise the quality of the food produced (unless, as I said earlier, it’s beef stew—but then why do I need a single appliance just to make beef stew?).
I know I’m going to be driven to what my husband’s mother finally did. She had this same complaint about slow cookers years ago (it's not just whiny me). She went out and bought one of those timers you plug your lamps into when you go on vacation so the lights will go on at dark and back off again a couple of hours later, so it looks like someone turned off the lamp to go to bed. She plugged her slow cooker into it, set it for the correct time to begin cooking to ensure that dinner would be ready when she got home, and went off to work. None of her family ever got food poisoning that way. They got to eat more than beef stew from the slow cooker, too.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Obsession (A Mostly Non-Food Entry)
Ever since I was a small child, I've found myself obsessed with the printed word. I'll read just about anything. Of course, I have my preferences, but when the chips are down and there's nothing around that I want to read, I'll read what I can get my hands on. I've read the user's manual for our car on many occasions when my husband has run into some store for "just a minute." I have to read.
There's a blog out there called Whatever, which is authored by the friend of a friend. In addition to being a blogger, the guy also writes science fiction books, so his blog is pretty well visited. Once in awhile he holds a sort of open forum, where he'll answer questions submitted by his blog readers. Someone once asked him about his early life, or something like that, and one of the things he mentioned was that he doesn't recall how or when he learned to read. It just seems, he said, as though he'd always known how. Me too.
My parents tell me I learned to read at age three, but I have no recollection of the process. I just remember sitting in the classroom of the Montessori school/daycare I attended as a small child with a Dick and Jane book reading aloud (to myself) "Dick likes sweats. Jane likes sweats. You like sweats." I should clarify that the book was not titled "Dick and Jane Go to the Gym"; it was just that I read the word "sweet" and pronounced it "sweat." (I said I learned to read at age three; I didn't say I learned to read well at age three.) In later years my Montessori school teachers were frustrated with me because I didn't want to do any of the other activities available to me; I just wanted to read.
I spent a lot of my childhood with a book. My mother didn't exactly hinder me--every Saturday we used to go to McDonald's for lunch and we'd each take a book to read. We'd sit there together, eating and reading. She had a policy that at the bookstore, I could buy as many books as I wanted. I recall staggering out of Crown Books under the weight of all the juvenile paperbacks I'd bought. Even now I complain about having been an only child, but I suppose those book buying free-for-alls were one of the advantages of being an only. Of course, if I'd had siblings, I might not have had to find companionship in books. I can remember sitting at the dinner table by myself, eating and reading a book. Even now I read while I eat if I'm alone. Sometimes I even like to eat alone, just so I can read.
In college I tried majoring in interior design and business at different times. After being completely disgusted by the vapid fixy girls that filled the interior design program, and flunking economics, I broke down and majored in English, as I should have all along. I stuck pretty close to the DWEMs and Classics (that's Dead White European Males, for those not familiar with the acronym). I was well served by this course of study--my DWEM-opposing husband took a Dickens class (doubtless under protest, or maybe because it was the only thing that fit into his schedule that semester) and that's where I met him.
Over the years I've found myself having to swerve to correct my course while driving, as my eyes are drawn to the wording painted on the side of a truck going the opposite direction on the highway. I hate bumper stickers, because I so long to read them, but I can't do so safely most of the time. I don't want to read them in the way most people do--to see what amusing or irritating sentiment someone has been dopey enough to slap on their vehicle--I long to read them so my eye can pore over the printed word. I am sometimes amused or irritated by bumper stickers (let's face it, generally the latter), but I don't read them for content.
I've spent one or two nights in hospital emergency rooms, and I have to give them the award for the environment most barren of reading material. There was one night I had been checked in, and was waiting for a room to be ready (it had to have been 11:30 at night before I finally got into a room--I couldn't figure out why the room was occupied until that time; who the hell leaves a hospital at 11:30 p.m.?) and was casting around for something to read.
Absolutely the only thing (after the labels on the packages of gauze) was a copy of People magazine. I read every article in it, and even started the crossword puzzle at the end. I couldn't finish it because I don't watch TV, so I didn't know a lot of the actors' names that were answers to the clues. It was clearly a puzzle for people of the intelligence level that you would expect to be reading such a fine, intellectual publication. I think one of the clues was actually a four letter word for "Accessory used to hold up pants." By the time I got done my IQ had dropped 20 points, and my brains were leaking out my ears.
I think this obsession with the printed word is one of the reasons I love grocery stores so much. I was thinking about this as I was picking up a couple of things the other day. The grocery store is just papered with things to read. Obviously there are all the labels on the products that scream for your attention. Even beyond that, though, is all sorts of wonderful printing to catch the eye. It doesn't matter if it's a food product or cleaning supplies, there's always plenty to read.
There's all that great marketing text on every item that tells you how superior the product is, gives the history of the company, talks about the purity of the ingredients, or describes the outstanding results that can be obtained using the product. There are instructions for use, nutritional information, government warnings, and sometimes recipes.
This isn't necessarily true of every store. Hardware stores and clothing stores, to offer two examples, are pretty deficient in the incidental things-to-read department. Hardware stores do have some good stuff--paint can labels and things like fertilizer and weed killer have fairly interesting text (all those instructions for use, and dire threats about the hazardousness of the fumes, and "keep out of reach of children" warnings accompanied by a skull and crossbones).
So often, however, they're lacking. Wrenches, for example, are purchased loose. They don't come in a blister pack with a cardboard backer that some marketing person looked at and thought "What an outstanding place to put some self-promoting drivel about our company!" This is true of many of the findings in hardware stores.
Clothing stores are really just hopeless. In clothing stores, once you get past the care instructions on the Orlon garment, you're pretty much done. Although I will read the fine print on their credit card offers in a pinch, it's mostly just boilerplate text, with the only variation being the APR. This may explain why I have literally hundreds of books, but very few store credit cards.
Fortunately my husband enjoys reading as much as I do. He reads different genres of books, and I've never caught him reading the recipe for Mock Apple Pie on the back of a box of Ritz crackers, but we do exchange magazines, and we both read select sections of the Sunday New York Times. Our evenings are often spent sitting on various comfortable chairs, reading different varieties of books, newspapers, or magazines.
I'm hoping my children will inherit our love of reading (although perhaps not to the same extreme--I'd hate to have one of my kids wreck a car just so they can read "East Side Plumbing Supplies" on the side of a truck). So far my older son loves being read to, and is now starting to like looking at books by himself, although he can't actually read yet. The twins like to look at books, but they seem to have an uncanny ability to hold them upside down, and shriek objection if you try to turn them right side up. I have high hopes for the baby, although she's just getting to the point where she can bat at a toy by herself, so actual recognition of letters may be a little way off.
A friend once asked me somewhat jokingly, prior to the birth of my first son, "What if he doesn't like to read much? Will you send him back?" (it's probably worth noting that this was a friend who didn't like to read all that much) and I said "No, of course not!" In reality I was thinking, "Yes, I will." I can't send them back where they came from, naturally, but I can't believe that children who have such easy access to all manner of books, who get books from their relatives for every gift-giving holiday and birthday, who see their parents reading as a form of relaxation, and who are surrounded by a family that contains avid readers, a used book collector, and a writer or two wouldn't come to like reading. They may not read road signs out loud on long car trips (as I used to do when my husband and I were first married, earning me the joking nickname of "Sign Girl"), but I'd like to think they'll always have an answer when someone asks "So, what are you reading these days?"
There's a blog out there called Whatever, which is authored by the friend of a friend. In addition to being a blogger, the guy also writes science fiction books, so his blog is pretty well visited. Once in awhile he holds a sort of open forum, where he'll answer questions submitted by his blog readers. Someone once asked him about his early life, or something like that, and one of the things he mentioned was that he doesn't recall how or when he learned to read. It just seems, he said, as though he'd always known how. Me too.
My parents tell me I learned to read at age three, but I have no recollection of the process. I just remember sitting in the classroom of the Montessori school/daycare I attended as a small child with a Dick and Jane book reading aloud (to myself) "Dick likes sweats. Jane likes sweats. You like sweats." I should clarify that the book was not titled "Dick and Jane Go to the Gym"; it was just that I read the word "sweet" and pronounced it "sweat." (I said I learned to read at age three; I didn't say I learned to read well at age three.) In later years my Montessori school teachers were frustrated with me because I didn't want to do any of the other activities available to me; I just wanted to read.
I spent a lot of my childhood with a book. My mother didn't exactly hinder me--every Saturday we used to go to McDonald's for lunch and we'd each take a book to read. We'd sit there together, eating and reading. She had a policy that at the bookstore, I could buy as many books as I wanted. I recall staggering out of Crown Books under the weight of all the juvenile paperbacks I'd bought. Even now I complain about having been an only child, but I suppose those book buying free-for-alls were one of the advantages of being an only. Of course, if I'd had siblings, I might not have had to find companionship in books. I can remember sitting at the dinner table by myself, eating and reading a book. Even now I read while I eat if I'm alone. Sometimes I even like to eat alone, just so I can read.
In college I tried majoring in interior design and business at different times. After being completely disgusted by the vapid fixy girls that filled the interior design program, and flunking economics, I broke down and majored in English, as I should have all along. I stuck pretty close to the DWEMs and Classics (that's Dead White European Males, for those not familiar with the acronym). I was well served by this course of study--my DWEM-opposing husband took a Dickens class (doubtless under protest, or maybe because it was the only thing that fit into his schedule that semester) and that's where I met him.
Over the years I've found myself having to swerve to correct my course while driving, as my eyes are drawn to the wording painted on the side of a truck going the opposite direction on the highway. I hate bumper stickers, because I so long to read them, but I can't do so safely most of the time. I don't want to read them in the way most people do--to see what amusing or irritating sentiment someone has been dopey enough to slap on their vehicle--I long to read them so my eye can pore over the printed word. I am sometimes amused or irritated by bumper stickers (let's face it, generally the latter), but I don't read them for content.
I've spent one or two nights in hospital emergency rooms, and I have to give them the award for the environment most barren of reading material. There was one night I had been checked in, and was waiting for a room to be ready (it had to have been 11:30 at night before I finally got into a room--I couldn't figure out why the room was occupied until that time; who the hell leaves a hospital at 11:30 p.m.?) and was casting around for something to read.
Absolutely the only thing (after the labels on the packages of gauze) was a copy of People magazine. I read every article in it, and even started the crossword puzzle at the end. I couldn't finish it because I don't watch TV, so I didn't know a lot of the actors' names that were answers to the clues. It was clearly a puzzle for people of the intelligence level that you would expect to be reading such a fine, intellectual publication. I think one of the clues was actually a four letter word for "Accessory used to hold up pants." By the time I got done my IQ had dropped 20 points, and my brains were leaking out my ears.
I think this obsession with the printed word is one of the reasons I love grocery stores so much. I was thinking about this as I was picking up a couple of things the other day. The grocery store is just papered with things to read. Obviously there are all the labels on the products that scream for your attention. Even beyond that, though, is all sorts of wonderful printing to catch the eye. It doesn't matter if it's a food product or cleaning supplies, there's always plenty to read.
There's all that great marketing text on every item that tells you how superior the product is, gives the history of the company, talks about the purity of the ingredients, or describes the outstanding results that can be obtained using the product. There are instructions for use, nutritional information, government warnings, and sometimes recipes.
This isn't necessarily true of every store. Hardware stores and clothing stores, to offer two examples, are pretty deficient in the incidental things-to-read department. Hardware stores do have some good stuff--paint can labels and things like fertilizer and weed killer have fairly interesting text (all those instructions for use, and dire threats about the hazardousness of the fumes, and "keep out of reach of children" warnings accompanied by a skull and crossbones).
So often, however, they're lacking. Wrenches, for example, are purchased loose. They don't come in a blister pack with a cardboard backer that some marketing person looked at and thought "What an outstanding place to put some self-promoting drivel about our company!" This is true of many of the findings in hardware stores.
Clothing stores are really just hopeless. In clothing stores, once you get past the care instructions on the Orlon garment, you're pretty much done. Although I will read the fine print on their credit card offers in a pinch, it's mostly just boilerplate text, with the only variation being the APR. This may explain why I have literally hundreds of books, but very few store credit cards.
Fortunately my husband enjoys reading as much as I do. He reads different genres of books, and I've never caught him reading the recipe for Mock Apple Pie on the back of a box of Ritz crackers, but we do exchange magazines, and we both read select sections of the Sunday New York Times. Our evenings are often spent sitting on various comfortable chairs, reading different varieties of books, newspapers, or magazines.
I'm hoping my children will inherit our love of reading (although perhaps not to the same extreme--I'd hate to have one of my kids wreck a car just so they can read "East Side Plumbing Supplies" on the side of a truck). So far my older son loves being read to, and is now starting to like looking at books by himself, although he can't actually read yet. The twins like to look at books, but they seem to have an uncanny ability to hold them upside down, and shriek objection if you try to turn them right side up. I have high hopes for the baby, although she's just getting to the point where she can bat at a toy by herself, so actual recognition of letters may be a little way off.
A friend once asked me somewhat jokingly, prior to the birth of my first son, "What if he doesn't like to read much? Will you send him back?" (it's probably worth noting that this was a friend who didn't like to read all that much) and I said "No, of course not!" In reality I was thinking, "Yes, I will." I can't send them back where they came from, naturally, but I can't believe that children who have such easy access to all manner of books, who get books from their relatives for every gift-giving holiday and birthday, who see their parents reading as a form of relaxation, and who are surrounded by a family that contains avid readers, a used book collector, and a writer or two wouldn't come to like reading. They may not read road signs out loud on long car trips (as I used to do when my husband and I were first married, earning me the joking nickname of "Sign Girl"), but I'd like to think they'll always have an answer when someone asks "So, what are you reading these days?"
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