Dining Out

I just realized that today is the day after my one year blogging anniversary. How about that.

Over the years, I’ve found it can be very difficult to find companionable dining out partners. I don’t mean dates necessarily, I mean other people with whom you just enjoy eating out. The trickiest setting is usually the office, where your choices are (obviously) limited to your coworkers. Outside-of-work friends who turn out to be dud dining partners can be steered away from full meals to drinks or something, but coworkers you’re sort of stuck with until they go find another job (or you do).

“Bad” dining companions come in all stripes. Some of them just have plain old bad manners. Others just don’t have the same “eating out” philosophy you do. They may like types of food you don’t, or they may want to eat fast food all the time, when you don’t. The things that make them unsuitable run the gamut, but the ultimate outcome is the same: you never want to eat with them again.

In my first job, there were two people who stand out as challenging dining companions. Both were very nice people, but not the sort of people you really wanted to eat out with. One woman you pretty much didn’t want to eat with at all, ever, in or out. She wore the brightest pink lipstick, reapplied endlessly throughout the day, and not wiped off prior to eating. Thus, we’d go out for sandwiches, and after her first bite (and her second and her third), there would be a big ring of hot pink lipstick on the bread where she’d taken a bite out of it. Very not appetizing.

The other woman exercised more control in her make up application, but she was the world’s slowest eater. I think she could have won some kind of prize. We’d go out for lunch, and everyone else would be folding up their napkins and finishing up the last of their chips, and she’d have taken four or five dainty bites from the first half of her sandwich. We were late getting back to the office countless times because of her. You’d think that maybe the rest of us were gobbling our food. I might agree (I’ve been known to eat too fast), but it didn’t matter how many people were in attendance—she was always the last one done, and always by a pretty wide margin.

I used to occasionally travel with a sales rep who was a pretty decent sales person, but had the most atrocious table manners…ever. The guy could not sit down to a meal without getting at least a third of it on his clothing. It was a little like eating with a wolf pack that was devouring a bison, except this guy made a bigger mess. He took bites that were so big they didn’t even fit on the fork. I might be alone in this, but I find it pretty tiresome to consume meal after meal with someone who can’t figure out that the reason he stands up from the table with a significant portion of what he ordered on his suit jacket is because he’s eating like a slovenly pig. A blind slovenly pig.

Of course, dates can be challenging too. I used to date a guy who was a horrible dining companion. If he didn’t pick the restaurant, It Sucked. We went to an Italian restaurant in Old Town Alexandria one time, and he made a point of letting me know that his Diet Coke tasted like it was made with water from the Potomac River, that his entrée was cold, and that he thought the décor looked like something out of an old lady’s bedroom. Shockingly, that restaurant is still there and thriving fifteen years later. I might be a little thin-skinned about this, but when I pick a restaurant and someone repeatedly bashes it, I get a little testy. Really, if you can’t think of something nice to say, just don’t say anything. Suffice to say, that relationship didn’t last very long.

At one point I was part of a playgroup, and the mothers decided to go out to dinner every month or two. It’s almost inevitable that the more people you get eating together, the more chance there is for some kind of clash. At one particular dinner, the problem arose from a situation that I avoid whenever I can—“let’s share.” Two women decided to split one entrée. There was a lengthy debate about what that entrée should be. When the waiter arrived to take our orders, everyone else ordered, and it was down to the “sharers.” They were still debating their two choices, but it had deteriorated into a Chip and Dale routine from a Disney cartoon.

“Well, the butter chicken is fine with me.”
“But only if you’re sure,”
“No really, it’s fine, if it’s OK with you,”
“it’s OK with me, but you mentioned the chicken tikka, and I’m fine with that too,”
“It’s up to you—I’ll eat either,”

And so on, with the waiter growing visibly annoyed and the two women continuing on like this for upwards of five minutes. I’d bet money he spit in their food.

Needless to say, the same sort of debate ensued when the leftovers were to be divided. Who was going to take the leftovers? Did they need a second container so they could split? I won’t even relate the exchange because it was so tedious. I don’t even remember the outcome.

In any dining out situation, one of these two women could be counted on to suggest that we all “order something and share it.” I personally find this idea to be abhorrent. In almost any kind of restaurant, I have something I like and get repeatedly—Indian: Chicken Tikka Masala, Thai: Pad See Ew, Chinese: Beef with Broccoli—and maybe because I never actually went to a proper kindergarten, I don’t like to share. If I have leftovers, they are tomorrow’s lunch. As a result, I often tried to recommend cuisines that are not conducive to sharing: Mexican, Italian, American.

But I think the worst dining-out-with-others experience I ever had wasn’t actually the result of a picky or otherwise challenging coworker, but because of his wife.

I spent a week in Dublin on business many years ago, and my coworker was going to be there for two weeks. The day before I left, his wife flew in so she could spend the second week with him and get a reduced-price vacation. Her first night there, we went out to dinner in a part of town called Temple Bar, which is wall to wall restaurants and bars. Many of the restaurants had their menus posted outside, which was how we concluded we’d pick a place. We wandered along, trying to make a decision on where to eat. The wife assured both of us that she wasn’t picky, and that she’d eat just anything—whatever we wanted was fine with her.

We approached one restaurant and perused the menu. My coworker turned to me and said “What do you think?” I said it looked fine to me. He turned to his wife. She wrinkled her nose and said, “There’s really nothing there that appeals to me.”

So we walked on. As we were leaving the doorway the wife announced, “But I’m not picky—I’ll eat anything. Whatever you guys want is fine with me.”

We came to another place. The coworker and I shrugged at each other to indicate, this looks fine. His wife stepped up to the menu. “I don’t know, “ she said, “Mexican food in Dublin? I’d rather not risk it.” So we moved on, with her again repeating the refrain, “I’m not particular—anything is fine with me.”

After this same series of events occurring three more times, she finally asked a hostess at another restaurant for a recommendation for a good fish place. At last!, I thought, we’ll be able to eat. We had to take a cab to get there, but I felt it was well worth it.

We all ordered, and the meals came out. My coworker asked both me and his wife how our entrees were. I said mine was fine. She made a face and said, “It’s OK, but I kind of prefer a cream sauce to this citrus sauce that’s on it…”

I feel I exercised remarkable self-control. I did not reach across the table and slap her in the face while shouting, “Then why did you not read the menu, since the description of your entrée specifically said it came with a citrus sauce?!?” I wanted to. Oh, I wanted to. But I didn’t.

Thank goodness that was my last night on that trip. I’m not sure she’d have survived if I’d been there one more night.

So you’re probably thinking by now that it’s a wonder I can find anyone I want to eat out with (or perhaps conversely, that I can find anyone who is willing to eat out with me). However, I would like to point out that I’ve just talked about only six people I’ve known over the years. I left out the hundreds of others who are perfectly reasonable people to share a meal with. These are the outliers in this category. As in almost any aspect of life, it’s the exceptions to the rule that usually prove to be the most memorable, either for good reasons or bad. Most of the time I don’t have any issues at all with my dining partners. After all, I’m not picky.

The Line

I think I’ve crossed a weird line here. As I type this, my mixer is going full blast in my kitchen, whipping cream into butter. No, I can’t say why.

When you mention that you ground your own turkey tenderloins to make meatballs for your kids, you get a look. When you explain that the “pre-ground” turkey included an ingredient called “seasonings” and that you felt you could add your own salt, if that was what you wanted, they actually nod understandingly. They agree that there’s so much salt in food already that it’s not necessary to buy food with added salt. Yes, you’re Normal after all.

You tell people you make your own bread, and they may ask when you find the time, but in general, they don’t say much. Making bread from scratch (especially for those who have a bread maker—not that I do) is actually fairly common these days. And I live in a part of the country where people don’t think it’s even slightly odd that you make your own bread.

Telling people you like homemade yogurt better than what you can buy in the store elicits a sort of shrug, as if to say “If that’s the way you want to do it.” A few people ask just how it is that you make yogurt, and then shrug again after you’ve explained the process. You’re peculiar, no doubt, but not beyond the pale.

When you say you make English muffins from scratch, you get a slightly more puzzled look. People just don’t know enough about how English muffins are made to understand that it’s not that different from bread baking. They may look at you askance, and dismiss you as some kind of oddity, but they don’t label you outright.

When people find out you make your own mayonnaise, and mayonnaise-based things (such as blue cheese dressing), you get a more peculiar look. Some people even ask “Why do you bother?” and go on to point out that store-bought mayonnaise is readily available (they neglect to recognize that store bought mayonnaise is really disgusting).

But tell people you make your own butter, and that’s the end.

So OK, I’m a freak.

[Note: the butter is now done.]

I read an article in the New York Times about making one’s own butter. It’s really easy—you just overwhip cream. Probably what the Times reporter made was better than mine, because the recipe they gave called for organic heavy cream, and I just used regular heavy cream from the grocery store. It’s been my experience that some organic things—chickens and beef, primarily—really do taste better. Still, mine seems like it’s pretty good (I haven’t yet eaten it on anything—just tasted a tiny bit off the spatula; I can’t bring myself to just eat butter).

This isn’t the first time I’ve been involved in butter-making, but in the past it’s been at Thanksgiving. Every year my family gets together for Thanksgiving, and the kids make butter. They put heavy cream into a plastic jug of some kind and shake it until it becomes butter. The butter is then served on the rolls with dinner. I think someone devised this idea years ago as a way of occupying the kids until the meal was ready. It actually works pretty well (by which I mean both as a butter-making technique, and as a diversionary tactic to keep the kids from driving all of the adults stark raving insane before dinner is served).

Today I happened to notice a quart of whipping cream in my refrigerator. And something possessed me and I decided to make butter.

The article suggested using a stand mixer. I have one, so I used it. They also said to be sure to create a sort of splatter guard out of plastic wrap to prevent…well, splattering. So I did that too. I poured two cups of cream into my mixer, hit the on switch and away we went.

At first, of course, what I wound up with was whipped cream. Then I wound up with cream that had been overwhipped, but still looked like nothing more than kind of flat whipped cream. And the plastic wrap shield seemed largely unnecessary. I stood there with my forehead resting on the motor housing, watching what happened. About five minutes later, all the fats came out of solution, the stuff that wasn’t fat was thrown up against the plastic wrap, and what I had was a very watery bowl of something that looked like faintly yellow cottage cheese. Bingo.

As instructed, I poured it into a colander over a bowl. I reserved the buttermilk (I’m betting that stuff makes the best pancakes you ever had), and rinsed the butter under running water, pressing it into a mass. I continued rinsing (feeling like a character in a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel) for a couple of minutes, then turned it into a bowl for salting. The “recipe” said that sea salt could be added if salted butter was desired. Since I have some really nice French sea salt I bought my husband as a stocking stuffer one year, and I like my butter salted, I decided to use that. I smushed the butter around to mix in the salt, stretched out a piece of plastic wrap on the counter, wrapped up the butter and tucked it into the refrigerator.

In case you’re wondering, two cups of heavy cream (one pint) makes, by my guesstimate, about a quarter of a pound of butter. I have no idea if it’s cheaper to make butter than to buy it. I suspect probably not, especially if you’re planning to make it with any kind of super-fresh organic type of milk. There is a place in my neighborhood that advertises that they sell raw milk. I’m not sure I’m brave enough for that (I have this fear of weird cow diseases that are found in unpasteurized milk), but I might see if they have any really high-quality organic heavy cream and see what kind of results that yields. I might even do a taste test of the butter made with the organic versus the grocery store cream.

Let me hasten to say that it’s not necessarily a done deal that I will be making my own butter from scratch from here on out. Unlike store-bought mayonnaise, store bought butter is just fine for most things. Perhaps for eating plain on bread I might occasionally whip up a batch (no pun intended), or if I was making something like Hollandaise sauce, in which the butter really was a superstar, then I might consider it. For day to day baking and eating, however, I’m not sure homemade butter is going to offer the same payoff as homemade mayonnaise. I don’t want to promise anything, but at this point in time, I don’t foresee butter-making as one of my regular chores around the house.

But now what’s next for freakish me? What, you say, will you make next? Will your next posting be about the chickens you’ve bought, or the wheat you’re growing in window boxes? Well, no. in the first place, I have no place to keep chickens (and in the second place, the farm supply store near me only sells chicks the Spring anyway, so there). I suspect my next foray into the realm of “Making Stuff Everyone Else Just Buys at the Store” will involve ricotta cheese. I understand that homemade ricotta is a cinch to make, and tastes about ten times better than anything you can get at the store, so perhaps that’s my next effort. I’ve also always wanted to try making my own pork sausage. Either way, I’ll keep you posted.

In Praise of Mayonnaise

I made some mayonnaise the other day. Yay me. I haven’t used store-bought mayonnaise in a couple of years now because I think the homemade just tastes so much better. I use mayonnaise fairly infrequently anyway, so when I do use it, I want it to be good. Also, the store-bought kind is so often made with soybean oil, and loaded with sugar. I make mine with canola oil, and no sugar, of course. People who’ve only had purchased mayonnaise find the real thing to be dramatically different, almost to the point where some people don’t like it because they don’t really understand what mayonnaise is supposed to be.

Since I’ve been perfecting my mayonnaise making technique for about three years now, I kind of feel like I’ve got the formula down, so it always interests me to read other people’s descriptions of how to make it. I’ve discovered what I like, and I know what I don’t, so when I read how other people make it, I know immediately if I’d like their version or not, based on the ingredients they recommend. I just saw another blurb in praise of homemade versus store-bought the other day in a book I have, so I thought I would walk through their recommendations/recipe (it’s a pretty typical formulation).

Egg
Well, first of all, I always use pasteurized eggs. I’m funny that way. Salmonella just bothers me, I can’t quite put my finger on why. However, the authors did say that their mayonnaise making days were back in the 1970s, before the Salmonella problems became national news.

Beyond that, there’s always a sort of quiet debate between using a whole egg versus using an egg yolk only. No one ever comes out and says that using one or the other is better, but they specify “I use an egg” or “I use the yolk of one egg.” Personally I always use a whole egg because I don’t notice any difference between the taste of that made with a whole egg as compared with that using only a yolk, and I don’t want to throw away the egg white, but neither do I want to do something like freeze them.

Mustard
Interestingly mustard is one of the primary ingredients in mayonnaise. A condiment made with a condiment, if you will. Most recipes call for dry mustard. I find dry mustard to be too strong and too bitter for my taste. What I have found that I like is Dijon mustard, and preferably Grey Poupon. I’ve tried other brands, and there was something lacking in them. Grey Poupon has just the right amount of vinegar and garlic, which adds an interesting subtle undertone to the finished mayonnaise. I use between two teaspoons and a tablespoon. I’m not very specific, so sometimes my mayonnaise is a little more mustardy, and sometimes a little less so.

Acidic Component
Most recipes call for white vinegar in mayonnaise. A few call for lemon juice, and lots specify either/or. I feel that vinegar is too harsh in general. If I use enough to add real flavor to the end product, there’s too much bite too it. Through trial and error I discovered that I really just prefer lemon juice straight. I also now like lemon juice as an acid in every instance—in a vinaigrette for example. The juice of one lemon is about the right amount for a single batch, although if it’s a very large lemon, the juice of one half would probably suffice.

Salt & Pepper
I like quite a bit of salt in my mayonnaise, but the nice thing about making it from scratch is that if you don’t like it salty, you don’t have to make it salty. I use white pepper, and just a dash of it, but again, since I’m making it myself, it’s flexible.

Oil
This is usually the biggest debate. What kind of oil do you use? Most recipes I read call for olive oil, which I think is interesting because olive oil is just too strong for mayonnaise. The olive flavor overpowers the eggy flavor and the subtleties that the mustard adds. A few recipes I’ve read do call for some kind of neutral oil—peanut, corn, canola. I myself use canola oil for several reasons. First it's sufficiently flavorless, and lets the other ingredients shine through. Second, it’s not terribly expensive (peanut oil is quite pricey). And lastly, canola is supposed to be the best (after olive oil) for one’s health. Mayonnaise in general isn’t really all that great for you, since it’s pretty much categorized as a “fat,” but using a better quality of oil makes it at least a healthy fat.

Technique
Some people prefer to beat everything by hand. Some prefer to use a food processor, or blender. I’ve also read of people using a stick blender, or a stand or hand mixer. I read an interesting theory that using something like a stick blender or food processor makes olive oil taste bitter. I’ve never experienced that, but then as I say, I don’t use olive oil anyway. I myself prefer the blender method. In my experience, it's the least likely to break. I have made it by hand with a whisk and a bowl, but I haven't been able to get it thick enough to suit me without using about twice as much oil as the recipe calls for. The blender gets it to almost the perfect consistency, which is finalized when it’s chilled.

Of course everyone insists that the oil be added in the tiniest drizzle until the mixture is emulsified. If you don’t, they warn, the mixture will break and it’ll take a rather pesky set of steps to rectify the situation. On more than one instance, I've had the mixture break toward the end of the addition of the oil, rather than toward the beginning. I suppose it’s possible that I’ve set the stage for said breakage early on in the process, and I just don’t actually see the results until the end. At any rate, I tend to be very careful all the way through, and never assume I’m out of the woods until I actually turn off the motor of the blender.

I also once read the suggestion to add one quarter of the oil to the egg-lemon juice-mustard mixture at the beginning of the recipe, blend it for a couple of seconds, and then drizzle in the remaining oil. I've always had good luck doing this, so I do it.

Once it’s done I scoop it into a plastic container and let it cool for a few hours and then it’s ready to use. Some recipes (including the one I was just reading), say to add the lemon juice or vinegar at the end, but I’ve always added it at the beginning to make sure it was really well mixed in, and also to avoid thinning down the finished product.

I use it on sandwiches (on the rare occasions on which I make sandwiches), or in cole slaw dressing. Lately I’ve been using it to make the most fantastic blue cheese dressing ever. It calls for mayonnaise, buttermilk, blue cheese, and chives (plus some other things like salt, pepper and a little white vinegar). It was intended as a dip for buffalo chicken strips, but we’ve started using it as a regular salad dressing because it’s outstanding. It came out of one of Sara Foster’s cookbooks, and it’s really a hit. I’ve never been much of a fan of blue cheese dressing, but this one is really quite good.

So there you have my thoughts on mayonnaise. For those who like mayonnaise, I highly recommend making a batch to see what the real thing tastes like. I myself was quite surprised when I realized how good and how easy it was, and just how bad the store bought product is. It takes a little while, and if I’m making something like cole slaw or chicken salad, it makes the recipe take even longer, but I find it’s time well spent. The finished recipe tastes fresher, and more homemade with real mayonnaise in it.

More Yucky Food

I was reminded of some more gross foods I’ve come in contact with over the years. They range from mildly disgusting to I-almost-threw-up. I thought I would record them for posterity.

Jello Pretzel Salad
When I was working my first job, my department had a pot luck lunch. The woman who was my manager at the time brought in something that may have had another name, but which I and a friend who worked in the same department have referred to over the years as “Jello Pretzel Salad.” I’ve since learned that this is not as uncommon a recipe as one might think (or hope) after reading it.

Mr. Salty Pretzel Sticks are crushed to a crumb consistency, then mixed with melted butter and sugar, and pressed into a 9” x 13” casserole. Poured over this is strawberry (I guess) Jello that has had a couple of cups of sliced strawberries stirred into it. The whole nasty mess is allowed to gel, then Cool Whip is spread over the top of it, for a final insult to the taste buds.

The woman who brought this couldn’t figure out why no one wanted to eat it.

Actually, only one person did eat it, and to this day my friend and I maintain the guy was just sucking up, because he also worked for her. He ranted on about how wonderful it was, and ate two or three helpings. No one else would touch it.

All the Food at My Husband’s Cousin’s Wedding
In August of 1997, my husband and I drove to Hickory, NC for the wedding of one of his cousins. This wedding was catered (I use the term loosely) but was also a pot luck of sorts. I don’t know what kind of lax standards the Catawba County Department of Health has, but they must be nearly nonexistent, or not well enforced, if this particular caterer was allowed to stay in business.

In the first place, most of the food came from Costco and was just kind of assembled. Mercifully, I don’t remember everything that was served, but the abomination that stands out most prominently is a pan of L’il Smokies that were in some kind of commercially made barbeque sauce. What I do recall about the food was that I refused to eat much of anything because every single thing was swarming with flies. Big fat black flies. Nothing was under any kind of cover, and it was all kept minimally warm at best with a couple of halfhearted cans of Sterno.

On the potluck side, someone had felt the need to contribute wedding symbol-shaped chocolates. Thus it was that there were chocolate bells, doves, and garters or something like that. My sister-in-law and I both passed these by on the buffet table as being nothing we had any interest in. The flies, as I recall, weren’t terribly interested in these either. However, half way through the “meal” our mother-in-law came up to us and declared us to be “neglectful daughters-in-law.” Puzzled, we asked what she was talking about. From behind her back she produced a paper plate with half a dozen of these chocolates on it.

“Because there was chocolate, and you girls didn’t tell me!” she declared.

There was, we knew, no way around it. We were going to have to eat one of these things. We knew just what they were going to be like, and they were.

There is available at stores like Michael’s and Total Crafts a product that is intended for candy making. They sell bags of little “chocolate” disks in varying colors that are then melted down and poured into molds and allowed to harden. However, next to these bags are jars of various extracts that are intended to be used to give these disks their flavor. Somehow people who make candy always overlook the bottles of extracts. This was not my first experience with these melted, re-formed bits of plastic nothing. For reasons that escape me completely, people who make this sort of candy cannot be convinced that the little disks have no flavor on their own, and require the addition of an extract of one kind or another. If you tactfully point out to them that their “candy” tastes like melted plastic, they will insist that you have no taste buds, and that anyone with half a tongue can tell that the brown ones taste like chocolate, the pink ones like strawberry (or peppermint, depending on the individual to whom you are speaking), and so on. They simply cannot be swayed on this point. I have tried.

So my sister-in-law and I each unwillingly ate a tasteless piece of brown resin. To this day we laugh about the experience.

And to heap insult on injury, it was a BYOB wedding. Actually, I stand corrected. They provided a keg of Icehouse beer. Wow, thanks.

P.S. the cousin and the woman he married got divorced two years later.

Canned White Potatoes
In about the same era as the Jello Pretzel Salad Pot Luck Lunch, I was invited along with my then-boyfriend (whom I did not marry), to dinner at a coworker’s house. She and her husband lived in what was actually a very cute row house on Capitol Hill. The dinner, while more edible than most of the gross food I’ve described, included some kind of meat (I no longer recall what), asparagus (which I put in my mouth and chewed up just to be polite, but did not enjoy), and canned white potatoes.

I found this both disgusting and curious. For one thing, I would never serve canned anything to a guest. For another thing, they went and bought the asparagus fresh, so why could they not have found some fresh potatoes to go along with the meal? I have never been able to figure this out, but I have always considered those canned white potatoes to be among the most disgusting foods I’ve ever eaten.

Almost All the Food Ever Served at Parties Thrown by College Friends
Really this pertains to the period of time right after we got out of college. Many of those friends are now fairly accomplished cooks and can provide pretty decent food, when called on. On the other hand, some are not.

In the early 90s, they were often found serving such delicacies as frozen meatballs cooked in grape jelly and chili sauce. Or appetizers that they bought at Costco and defrosted. Or cheese platters from Giant Food. Or sausage balls made with Bisquick (OK, I admit it—I actually love these).

In fact, the only party food that stands out as memorable and good is what was served every year by a friend who threw an annual Chinese New Year party. She actually made real Chinese food, like dumplings and noodles, and had everyone over for an authentic Chinese New Year meal, complete with fortune cookies (which she bought). The year she finally stopped having these parties, we were all extremely sad. However, I understand why she stopped—she spent days, possibly even weeks, prior to that party making all the food from scratch. It was hard work, and she did a fantastic job. But I can’t blame her for stopping.

The Very Worst Thing I Have Ever “Eaten”
I put eaten in quotes here, because I didn’t actually get this into my stomach. Many years ago I was forced to spend the night in the hospital for observation. (I’m fine now, thanks for asking.) It also happened that this was the Sunday to Monday of Memorial Day weekend. Hospitals are not known for their quality food under the best of circumstances. The food gets even worse on the weekends, when the regular staff is off. It deteriorates even further on the third day of a holiday weekend (or so I’m told). I can only believe this, based on my experience.

I was served for breakfast that Monday morning a product known as a French Toast Stick. I believe at one time Burger King sold these. But, as I recall, the ones at Burger King were edible. I hesitated, but being hungry, I went ahead and tried to eat one of these things. I think I might have chewed it five times before insisting that my husband (who had thankfully arrived a few minutes earlier) hand me the wastebasket, because I was going to be very sick. Well, I wasn’t actually sick, but I certainly didn’t let that French toast stick linger in my mouth for any length of time.

Since then I have eaten hospital food that was edible, but I have never eaten French toast, and I don’t believe I ever will be able to again.

I’m sure there are other gross things I’ve eaten over the years, and doubtless there will be more. The parade of gross food never ends, although mercifully, it seems to have slowed somewhat.

Red Flag

The 4th of July is over, and I didn’t get anywhere near a sheet cake decorated with strawberries and blueberries. Not in real life, at least. I have, however, seen two emails, one magazine article, and countless magazine ads that feature the atrocious and much-despised “Flag Cake” that rears its ugly head this time each year. All of them, of course, present this idea as new and clever. Some of them have even taken the red, white, and blue dessert concept a step further. Hooray!

Why must we have a flag-shaped dessert at Fourth of July? I don’t see anyone making pilgrim- or turkey-shaped cakes at Thanksgiving. You get a basic, round pumpkin or pecan pie. Why can’t we just have a simple round pie or cake for Fourth of July, too? Why, for that matter, do we have to have a red, white and blue dessert to show our patriotism? Why does this cake now seem to embody everything that America stands for?

I’m sure the first time I saw this idea, maybe a hundred and ten years ago, it was cute. A sheet cake decorated with white frosting (or Cool Whip, which as a product is a total abomination and should be banned, but that’s another story), cut strawberries for stripes and a blueberry “star field.” My husband had some college friends who always threw a 4th of July cookout, and inevitably at least two of these little charmers would show up. This was at least 10 years ago.

I feel now that, as a nation, we should be “over” the flag cake, but every year someone at Jello or Kraft Foods or Better Homes & Gardens magazine trots out this stale idea and offers it up as an adorable and patriotic addition to your holiday meal (which, if they would have it, would be a cookout. NOOOOO!!!!!!!!!). Martha Stewart always feels the need to provide something red, white, and blue, but her folks have moved upscale to panna cotta and red currants. I even saw a recommendation from Ina Garten for a Memorial Day menu that included one of these cakes. Hers was a little more elaborate than Cool Whip smeared on a box yellow cake with cut strawberries and some blueberries decoratively arranged on top, but it was still a sheet cake decorated like a flag.

A friend sent me a link to a newspaper food section article in which the author confessed that those flag cakes always “tempted” her, but that she wasn’t “the decorating type.” I can’t say that I would really describe slathering a cake with frosting or whipped cream and pushing a few berries down into it in lines as “decorating” exactly. Even “garnishing” is a bit too elaborate a concept for that. This woman’s solution was to make a cake which, if the picture is any indication, looks not unlike a bundt cake covered with cream gravy. Now there’s a delightful change.

And now, as I mentioned, the various food manufacturers have made advances in the red, white, and blue dessert arena. Feeling that we might as an audience be tired of the flag cake after 15 years or so, they’ve added to their repertoire by creating other red, white, and blue desserts. Gee, thanks! The one I noticed involved blue Jello, blueberries, red Jello, and (no doubt) Cool Whip.

On the 4th of July (or really, on every holiday) I want something that reminds me of the Norman Rockwell world we don’t live in. Something that makes us think of the childhood we never had. Oh I know nostalgia for something that never existed is sappy and Hallmark, but really, don’t we all want to feel like we grew up in Mayberry with parents like Jane Wyatt and Robert Young? Well, OK, maybe everybody doesn’t, but I do. And I’d kind of like my kids to. I grew up in the city as an only child. I longed for the kind of life that the Brady Bunch had, or Beaver Cleaver. I admit I’m hopelessly sentimental and even goopy, and food contributes to that for me. I can’t think of anything more truly American than a good cherry pie with a scoop of ice cream on it. I know that even though I live in a surprisingly close community (for a place with 20,000 people, my town feels fairly small), my kids will never have the freedom of Mayfield. But I like the idea of giving my friends and family things to eat that make them say “You made it? I haven’t had that made from scratch since I was a kid!”

Maybe part of this comes from my own upbringing, in which nothing was ever made from scratch, including my birthday cakes. They always came from a bakery. A very nice bakery, to be sure, but a bakery. Dinners were packaged this or canned that. When Lipton first introduced Noodles & Sauce, my father went nuts; dinner every night for weeks was some flavor of Lipton Noodles & Sauce with some kind of “meat”—chicken, tuna, ground beef. I want my children to know what a homemade birthday cake tastes like. I want them to understand that “sauce” is not made from flavored powder with milk and butter added. I want them to think that dessert on the 4th of July means something made out of fruit that’s only available in the summertime, possibly with a scoop of cool ice cream on top of it. Most of all I want them never to know what a flag cake is.

The World's Most Interesting Vegetable

I wrote about what I think the world’s most boring vegetable is, and one of my friends asked me, then what's the most interesting vegetable? I replied that that would depend on your definition of “interesting” and that I’d give it some thought. So I did.

The first point to address is, what’s the definition of interesting that we’re using. For the most boring vegetable, it was the one with the greatest limitation in terms of preparation. I think it’s fair to say that for the most interesting vegetable, it ought to just be the reverse: the vegetable with the greatest number of possible preparations. Personally, I think that’s a no-brainer, and the potato wins. Breakfast, lunch, dinner; baked, fried, mashed, boiled, steamed; salad, soup, side dish, main dish…they’re a dream come true.

But what if you want to eliminate potatoes from the running and ask what non-potato vegetable (since potatoes are sort of considered a starch these days) is the most interesting? I still feel that the criteria should be the most versatile vegetable, the one that can be served at any time of the day, and can be prepared many ways.

I could be a smart ass and say that the most versatile vegetable in the world is the sugar beet. Since the sugar beet accounts for about 30% of the sugar produced in the world, and sugar is an endlessly useful product, the sugar beet could be considered the most useful vegetable in the world. However, it’s not like the sugar beet in its raw state could be eaten in any variety of ways. Pretty much the sugar beet can be used to make sugar, and that’s it. So I’ll eliminate the sugar beet and consider only vegetables that can themselves be prepared and eaten in a variety of ways.

In thinking of various vegetables, four sprang to mind as the most useful, but they could be divided into two categories—those that can stand alone, and those that tend to be more in a supporting role. So let me review my list.

Tomatoes
Tomatoes were the first very useful vegetable I thought of. They can be eaten raw or cooked, and are used in countless dishes like pizza and pasta sauce. They can be served for breakfast, as the British do, or they can be served at any other meal or snack. They can be made into a drink, as in tomato juice or V-8. They can be their own thing, like stuffed tomatoes or roasted tomatoes, or they can be part of another thing, like tomato and onion tart, or tomato and mozzarella salad. They can be a garnish, like tomatoes on a salad or the tomato on a sandwich, or they can be a condiment, like ketchup or chili sauce. The tomato is the overall winner for most useful vegetable ever.

Squash
Squash, interestingly, also came to mind as a very versatile vegetable. When I say squash, I’m really speaking of winter squashes, not zucchini and summer squash. If you add those two into the mix, then it’s really a tough call between squash and tomatoes. I think tomatoes would still win, because squash (even summer squash) can’t really be eaten raw. However, unlike tomatoes, squash can be made into desserts, such as pumpkin pie or pudding. It can also be roasted, stir fried, baked, or used in muffin batter.

Mushrooms
I started thinking about mushrooms, and how many ways there are to use them. They’re fine raw in salads (not my favorite, but I’m trying to keep personal bias out of this decision), cooked in stir fries or casseroles, used in sauces, stuffed as an appetizer, or used as a substitute for meat (such as a portobello burger). The mushroom is flexible and can go many places, either on its own or as a supporting player. It’s still not quite the superstar that tomatoes or squash are, because it doesn’t get check marks in either the dessert or condiment column, unless you count mushroom flavored condiments, such as soy sauce (which, for the purposes of this exercise, I did not).

Onions
Onions are probably the most ubiquitous vegetable going. I can’t think of a cuisine that doesn’t use onions in some way or other. Mostly they’re lending a hand on flavor, rather than carrying the show, but in baked stuffed onions, or something like a caramelized onion tart, they do an outstanding job. As Nora Ephron said in her book Heartburn, “You really can’t cook without onions.”

So there you are, a sort of four way tie. Tomatoes and squash take the prize for Most Useful Vegetable, and mushrooms and onions walk away with Most Useful Vegetable in a Supporting Role. If we’re mixing our award show metaphors and giving a Best in Show prize, I’d have to say it’s the tomato that will wake up tomorrow wondering if it was all a dream until it sees the headlines in the newspaper.

My Trip to the Grocery Store

My daughter is home sick today (nothing serious) so I got a chance to do what I love to do most. Well, one of the things I love to do most—I got to browse around in the grocery store. I needed infant Ibuprofen for her, and so naturally I figured I’d just check things out and see what was new. A few random thoughts occurred to me that I thought I’d toss out there.

There Just Isn’t a Brand of Natural Peanut Butter I Like Out Here
I prefer the “natural” peanut butter to the stuff with sugar and other random ingredients in it. Although I was raised on Peter Pan, I switched over to the natural kind for reasons I no longer remember, and now can’t stand the peanut-flavored sugar spread.

Today I was looking for a crunchy natural peanut butter to use in a recipe. I used to buy Smucker’s, but for some reason, while they carry all varieties of Smucker’s jams in my grocery store, peanut butter is beyond the realm of their imagination. Or they don’t have the shelf space. Or something. Anyway, all they have is this brand, Adams, which is nast. I tried it when we first moved out here. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, since how can you screw up pulverized peanuts, but the company that makes Adams has found a way.

And because I’m an internet-addicted freak, I just looked up which idiots that would be who make Adams natural peanut butter, and lo and behold, it’s our old friends at Smucker’s. I kind of had a hunch that was the way it was. Best Foods mayonnaise is Hellman’s, and Eddy’s and Drucker’s ice cream are the same, too. I suspect there’s a lot of this. But knowing this doesn’t help me at all, because they’ve done something to the formula of Smucker’s natural peanut butter and it just doesn’t taste right. I did find that Skippy (or maybe it’s Jif) makes a “natural” version that’s OK, but this particular store didn’t carry it, so I’ll have to look elsewhere, I guess.

This 100 Calorie Pack Thing is a Pretty Annoying Trend
Something you just can’t avoid if you set foot in a grocery store these days is packs of high calorie junk food in “100 Calorie” bags. Everyone is packaging everything you can think of in 100 calorie packs. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for portion control, but this is ridiculous. I can now buy 100 calorie packs of Oreos (except they’re not Oreos—they’re just little chocolate wafer cookies, which I think is false advertising), Chips Ahoy!, Cheez-its, and both cheddar and chocolate Chex Mix. Oh, and Doritos and Cheetos. And because they’re in 100 calorie portions, they’re healthy, right?

On the plus side, I did get a giggle out of it. The Doritos and Cheetos are, of course, on the chip aisle. As I was continuing down the aisle, I noticed the large bags of Funions and started thinking about how they could do a 100 calorie pack of those things. You’d either get three, or they’d give you a little pouch of Funion dust. I can’t wait.

Grocery Stores are Dangerous
This isn’t something that’s exactly a new thought to me. I realized it a long time ago, but it came home to me again today. I went in for one thing, as I mentioned: infant Ibuprofen. I walked out with this: infant Ibuprofen, infant Tylenol Cough & Cold (I think I can be excused for this), fresh rosemary, cream of tartar, smoke flavored sea salt, two toothbrushes, the July issue of Gourmet magazine, the July/August issue of Cottage Living magazine, and a greeting card.

Just what was I thinking? You may well ask (or you may not ask, but if you keep reading, you’re going to find out anyway).

The rosemary I realized we would want because we’re having lamb chops for dinner tonight, and the rosemary we had in the fridge is pretty old so I wanted to make sure we had enough to make the recipe.

The need for cream of tartar occurred to me because I made blueberry muffins yesterday, and as I was making them I was thinking (as I always do when I use baking powder) of making my own baking powder. It’s just a combination of baking soda and cream of tartar, so it’s not like it’s hard, but homemade doesn’t have the sour taste that some commercial baking powders have. I’ve never gotten around to making this, but I always mean to, so I bought the cream of tartar so that next time I get the urge (and have my copy of Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking unpacked, which it is not right now because we’re in residence limbo), I’ll be ready.

The smoke flavored salt (which sounds like a nasty cousin of Liquid Smoke) was called for in a recipe I was reading over the weekend, and I toyed with the idea of making it, so I bought the salt when I saw it, rather than risk it not being there when I was ready for it. This has happened to me far too many times. I see a recipe and think “Hm, that looks good…I’ll make that some time.” It calls for an unusual spice or seasoning, which I notice in the grocery store the next time I’m there, because of course I’ve just been reading about it. Finally the day arrives when I’m ready to make the recipe, and I go off in search of juniper berries, or orange flower water, or smoke flavored sea salt, and it’s nowhere to be found. This time I decided to buy the salt when I saw it, since salt doesn’t go bad, and it’s not exactly a staggeringly expensive ingredient to be stockpiling.

The toothbrushes were on sale, and I realized I didn’t know if we had any spares. I dropped mine on the bathroom floor this morning after brushing my teeth, and that, naturally, was the end of that toothbrush. So I bought two new ones, just in case.

I love magazines, and I probably ought to just flat out subscribe to Cottage Living, because I think I buy it every month on the newsstand anyway. I bought Gourmet to confirm that I still hate Gourmet. Several friends and I agree that Ruth Reichel just ruined that magazine. It used to be interesting, and have good recipes, even if it was a little pretentious. Now it’s lost the interesting parts, and the good recipes, and has retained the pretension, so that it’s downright unbearable. But every couple of years I buy it to confirm that, yes, I still hate the “new” Gourmet, and won’t be buying it again until Ruth Reichel moves on to something (anything) else, and someone else takes over and makes it a good magazine again. Check back in a week or so, and I’m sure I’ll have a tirade about what it is I hate about the “new” Gourmet magazine posted here.

The greeting card is for a friend. It was one of those “This is TOO perfect for so-and-so” cards, so naturally I had to buy that.

A friend of mine and I had a discussion about this very topic the day she went in for something like bouillon cubes and walked out with $75 worth of stuff. She remarked that it seemed that every time she went to the grocery store, even if it was just for “one little thing,” it set her back at least 50 bucks.

I think what’s so dangerous about grocery stores is that it all seems so legitimate. You have to eat, after all. And you need things like paper towel, and greeting cards, and those things don’t go bad, so why not buy them while you’re there? I know this is just exactly what the grocery store marketing people want me to think. Well, congratulations, ladies and gentlemen, it worked. Of course not everyone is as big a sucker for a grocery store as I am. I just go in to browse. But even for people without the strange genetic flaw that causes them to find grocery stores to be fascinating places to wander around are taken in by this marketing ploy. I can’t decide if I’d rather be an unwitting victim who just wants to get in and out of the grocery store but winds up leaving with a sackful of things anyway, or if I’m glad I’m an informed, interested victim who falls willingly into their outstretched hand. It’s sort of a moot point, since I am fully aware of what they’re doing, and yet continue to be sucked into the scheme.

So those, as my mother used to say, were my thought processes. I’d have thought more thoughts, but along about aisle 12 my daughter started to get fussy and I felt it was best to get her home and give her some Tylenol and a bottle. And I’m sure everyone reading this is glad I did, and kind of wishes maybe my daughter was less patient, and had gotten fussy on aisle 3 so I’d have had less time to think things.

The World's Most Boring Vegetable

Last week a friend and I were debating which is the most boring vegetable. This is not the vegetable that we like least, but the one that is just plain dull, regardless of how palatable it may or may not be. We discussed what it was that made a vegetable boring, and I opined that a boring vegetable is one that can really be prepared only one way. Fruit was not considered in this discussion.

We considered pretty nearly every vegetable, with the possible exception of salsify (probably because neither of us has really ever eaten salsify). I find, on further research, that salsify can be roasted, braised, or sautéed. That eliminates it from the running.

On further reflection, I’ve decided (independent of my friend) that making a vegetable into soup must also be taken out of the list of possible preparations. Soup can be made of just about any vegetable. It’s questionable how appealing soups made out of some choices may be: avocado soup (which always seems to be served chilled, something I find personally distasteful in any soup), cream of green bean (OK, I’ve never seen a recipe for this, but I’m sure someone somewhere has tried it). Practically any vegetable can be tossed into a soup, and almost all of them can be made into a cream-of variety.

Therefore, a vegetable must lend itself to roasting, sautéing, pureeing or mashing, steaming, broiling, braising, and/or baking to eliminate itself from the Most Boring Vegetable Ever competition.

After considering a long list of candidates, we narrowed it down to two: celery and peas.

Celery, to me, can be eaten raw (possibly with peanut butter or cream cheese, or dipped in some kind of dressing or dip), cut up and added for “crunch” in things like tuna or chicken salad. I know it can be made into cream of celery soup, but soup was eliminated from the possible preparations, and I also know the French braise it, but that idea sounds fairly revolting. Celery turns to mush when you cook it and stringy mush is not the sort of thing I really go for.

So celery is a prime candidate.

The other choice, peas, seem always to be an afterthought in things like potpies, risottos, and soups. They have an unpleasant tendency to squish when you bit into them, rather in the way cherry tomatoes do (which makes them also unappetizing to me). Peas as a vegetable side dish can pretty much just be kind of blanched, so it’s not like they have a ton of preparation options. I mean, just go ahead and try to grill them. And they roll off your fork, which makes them not only unpleasant, but maddening. They do, of course, go into various pea soup concoctions, but soup is out, so that leaves just the blanching way to cook them.

Peas can give celery a run for its money.

And when it all comes down, I have to vote for peas. I admit that the fact that I don’t like them much does sway my vote a little. However, celery, even as a “filler” in things like tuna or chicken salad, seems more useful. Peas don’t really add any flavor, or an interesting texture (in fact, with that whole squish thing, just the opposite), and they just clutter things up. Celery at least adds a little zing, a little snap. I find celery to be more useful than peas, even if it’s only useful in one way (raw). Peas aren’t very useful either raw or cooked.

Memorial Day Foodfest

We had a busy Memorial Day weekend, foodwise. I spent more time cooking over the weekend than I think I have in the last four years. And of course, I have some random observations based on my experiences.

On Saturday we attended the potluck 40th birthday party of a friend. This is not how I would choose to spend my 40th birthday (although to be perfectly fair, it wasn’t her actual birthday), but my friend loves potlucks. I do not love potlucks. Call me a food snob, but I don’t like the randomness of asking everyone to bring something. In the first place, you generally wind up with far too many pans of brownies, and in the second place, nothing ever goes.

At this particular event, the hosts provided hamburgers and hot dogs (and vegetarian burgers—we’re in the Pacific Northwest, after all). The guests were asked to bring the sides and desserts. The selection was predictably random. Peanut noodles (made with spaghetti—which I find unforgivable in a day and age when you can buy packages of real oriental noodles at any 7-11, practically), an orzo salad, a green salad, several pans of brownies (see?), a couple of boxes of cookies from Costco, and the birthday cake. Maybe I’m too much of a traditionalist, but if I’m forced to eat grilled food I’d prefer things like potato chips or potato salad or something like that. No, there is no pleasing me.

On Sunday we had my family over for lunch. Since I was cooking, everything “went.” Well, it did as far as I was concerned. We started with spiced pecans that I made. My husband had pooh-poohed these as a dumb idea, but I know my family. Sure, they wouldn’t necessarily be what I craved at lunchtime, but my family loves nuts (insert your own nut-as-synonym-for-insanity joke here). Sure enough, within ten minutes of their arrival, both my aunt and my grandmother had asked me for the recipe.

Then we had a fennel slaw, with shredded cabbage, shredded fennel, and shredded Granny Smith apple. Making this made me realize that I don’t like the bagged shredded cabbage as much as I like the consistency of what I shred myself in my food processor. The bagged stuff is too coarse. I can get it much finer with my food processor. I’ve now decided that if I’m in a hurry, I’ll use the bagged stuff, but that if I have the time, I will certainly shred my own. I actually used the grating disk, not the shredding disk, which is why it was so much finer.

Then I made a gougere pizza. This translates to a pizza made out of cream puff dough. Cream puff dough is butter, flour and egg. This dough also had Gruyere cheese and blue cheese stirred into it, and then blue cheese scattered over the top of it. It baked for about 45 minutes until it puffed up nicely. Originally this was intended as an appetizer, but it made a nice lunch, albeit a pretty rich one.

For dessert we had strawberry shortcakes, with chocolate biscuits. The biscuits were kind of a pain to make, because the directions called for whipping heavy cream to stiff peaks, then stirring it into the biscuit dry ingredients. It’s not easy to stir whipped cream into flour and cocoa powder. The strawberries had a little crème de cassis sprinkled over them, and there was more whipped cream on the side.

On Monday I let my husband do the cooking, although I picked the menu. We had a tomato pie I’ve had the recipe for forever and have always wanted to try but never made, grilled shrimp wrapped with bacon (a concession to my husband, who feels that summer holidays require something to be charred to oblivion on the grill), and for dessert, a cherry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

The tomato pie provided two lessons—first, anything made with tomatoes is just bound to be watery, no matter how long you let them drain, and second, it’s very hard to roll out short crust pastry without a rolling pin. The tomato pie was good, but the bottom crust got soggy, and I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s just how it is with tomato things. As for the lack of rolling pin, we moved and we’re keeping our unpacking to a bare minimum, since we’re going to be moving again by the end of the year. Apparently, the box with the rolling pin didn’t rate unpacking.

I had this difficulty brought home to me on Wednesday night when I tried to make a plum jam tart for a friend’s birthday (same friend whose potluck we went to, but this was for the actual day). I had to push the dough out with my fingers, which isn’t the best way to handle chilled short crust pastry. The tart turned out fine, but it spread out too far because the dough was too warm. Suffice to say I was the only person who realized this was the case.

Another thing I discovered is that when someone says “Really, don’t bring anything” they need to be taken at face value. I suppose that what I mean here is that anyone who offers to bring something to my house when I say not to bring anything needs to take me at face value. My family knows this, and when they offered to bring something and I said “Nothing, thanks—we’re fine” they listened and didn’t bring anything.

However, on Monday my friend did insist on bringing something, even when I assured her everything was planned. Whenever someone insists on bringing something, I always dread it because what they bring is always a strange addition to my menu, and this was no exception. She brought a macaroni and tuna salad. I was grateful for the gesture, but it was totally unnecessary, and was just plain weird with what we had provided. I guess it’s a fine line you walk with the bring something/don’t bring something dilemma. Some people say “Don’t bother bringing anything,” and what they mean is “You better not show up empty handed and leave all this work to me!” I say it and I mean it—don’t bring a thing because I have it all planned, and I want it all to be a certain way. Practically the whole container of the stuff went in the trash. Not in front of her, of course, but eventually. I guess I’m just more anal about my menu planning than most people, and there's the same issue I have with potlucks, where if there's a base menu and then people bring things, nothing seems to go together. The menu winds up being a mishmash of unrelated items that don't compliment each other and may actually clash.

The weekend cooking didn’t actually end on Monday, since, as I mentioned, Wednesday night I made what was supposed to be a blood plum jam tart for my friend. It turned out to be a regular plum jam tart, because I couldn’t find blood plum jam, and the recipe called for grappa, which I was also unable to find. I used kirsch instead. I don’t think anyone noticed. We had this for breakfast on Wednesday, which was a little disgusting, but everyone enjoyed it very much. I say it was disgusting, because what we were eating was about a pound of butter mixed with flour, almond meal, and heavy cream, at 7 a.m. We all take the ferry together, and I brought this on as a birthday surprise for the friend.

Anyway, I did a ton of cooking, and really enjoyed it, and am now trying to get back into the cooking groove. Today I made zucchini cupcakes (in an effort to trick my children into eating something mildly healthy in the form of their dessert), and tonight I’ll roast a chicken, and some plum tomatoes, and we’ll have salad with that for dinner. All next week I have things planned out to make for lunches to take to work, and for dinners to have at night. We’ll see if I’m able to actually execute against this plan—often my well-intentioned plans fall flat. It’s a case of having to make two meals (theirs and mine), plus putting my lunch together the evening before, and sometimes that’s just beyond me on a weeknight. At least if I do manage it, I know everything will go together.

The Rating Game

Many years ago, when we were first married, something transpired which has since become known as the Chicken a la King Episode. This occurrence prompted us to rate recipes. This past week a friend and I were talking about how we determined which recipes we would make again, and which we would not. She was saying that her husband would often say, “That was great, but I guess we’ll never see it again.” Like me, she has so many recipes that if she started today, and made a different recipe for every breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack every day, it would take her years to work her way through her whole collection, between books, magazines, and recipe file recipes. I explained how we rate recipes, and if they rate high enough, they’ll get made again (you know, someday).

The episode in question unfolded in this way: I found a recipe in a magazine for a chicken stock that was made using a whole chicken. Once the stock was done, and the chicken cooked, there were recipes for things that used both the cooked chicken and the stock. Several things looked good, including a chicken chili (which I made, and it was tasty), and Chicken a la King. For dinner one night, I decided that the Chicken a la King would be good. It was served over texas toast, and I enjoyed it very much. I thought my husband did too. I asked, “How is it?” and was told “It’s good.”

A few weeks later I decided to make the stock again, and again decided to make the Chicken a la King for dinner. He sat down to dinner, and a strange look crossed his face. I asked what was wrong. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “I don’t really like Chicken a la King that much.”

[Sound of crickets chirping.]

I’ll skip the drama of the few minutes that followed, but the eventual outcome was that, instead of just asking “How is it?” I began demanding a numerical rating of every meal I prepared.

We started with a scale of 1 to 10, but this proved too broad. Most things wound up getting a seven, which wasn’t very helpful. So we scaled back to a 1-5 rating. Now most things get either a 3 or a 4. Sometimes a 2 or a 3 could be changed slightly to get a higher rating. We discuss what we would do differently next time, I make notes in the cookbook (or on the recipe), and we try it again someday to see if it deserves the better score.

The value assigned to the numbers is this: a 1 is just barely edible. It will likely never get made again, and there’s not much to salvage it. A 2 is not bad, but not particularly exciting. Sometimes a 2 could be upgraded by making changes, but often a 2 is just a so-so dish that also probably never gets much attention again. A 3 is perfectly fine, but generally not very inspired. It’s tasty, satisfying, and could be made again, but probably not for quite some time. A 3 wouldn’t find its way into a regular rotation, unless there was some change that could be made to it to up its score. A 4 is really good, and is something we’d eat again soon. Fours are the recipes I fall back to when nothing new looks tempting, but we need to have something planned for dinner for a certain night.

Fives are gems. A five is on the level of restaurant quality. A five is the kind of meal we choose if we’re having a special meal at home (a birthday, anniversary, holiday). So far we’ve rated one recipe a 5, and one was given a “4 rising 5” because it was just served with the wrong sides, and changing the accompanying dishes would improve the overall experience and bring it up to 5 quality. For the record, the one true 5 is a pan seared filet mignon with mustard balsamic glaze served with “parmesan mash” (parmesan mashed potatoes), and the rising 5 was a quince glazed backstrap of lamb (lamb loin), which will get served with couscous or soft polenta next time, and a green salad.

I find the greatest benefit of this system is that it helps me keep track of what we really love. If I see a recipe that looks tempting, and I make it, and it turns out to be a dud, then making a note in the book or on the page in the recipe file that it was only a 2 means that the next time I come across that recipe, I won’t get all excited and remember that this was something I wanted to try and then be disappointed when I make it and it’s still a dud. Granted, if it’s a recipe file recipe that turns out to be less than wonderful, it probably just gets recycled. But in cookbooks, this system is really helpful—it helps me keep track of what’s good and what’s not. After all, if a book has a number of really good things, and one or two “misses,” I’m not going to get rid of the book.

Our stumbling block is the “and a half” recipes. It’s not quite a four, but it’s better than just a three, so how do we rate it? It winds up getting a fractional rating. I think we’re going to have to do something about these—they’re either going to have to be bumped down, or have something about them changed to move them up to the next level.

I’ve talked to several friends about how they handle this kind of decision—what do we make again? One friend said that they have just a binary system—make again, don’t make again. Clearly, this wouldn’t work for us, because the Chicken a la King recipe was deemed acceptable to make again, just not soon. I know that the test kitchens of a magazine I read regularly rates recipes on a scale of 1 to 3. I think this is too limiting a range. Clearly under this system, a 1 is unacceptable, a 2 is good, and a 3 is great. That means that most things are 2s, which doesn’t sort out which ones are merely pretty good, from those that are really good.

I anticipate that someday our children will be invited to rate recipes, which will serve two purposes. First, it will help us to decide as a family which things we have on a regular basis, so that the kids feel like they have some input in what we have for dinner. Second, it will give me some insight into what my kids really like to eat (other than Toll House cookies, and chicken nuggets), which is always nice information to have so that I can pick recipes that they’re more inclined to like in the first place. And when that day comes, how hard I will laugh if they give the Chicken a la King a four.

Denial (a non-food entry)

I live within spitting distance of Seattle. Most people have an image of Seattle as being rainy and cold most of the year. That’s not entirely true. It does rain quite a bit in the winter, and it can be quite chilly, but I find it interesting that a 65 degree day here feels warmer than a 65 degree day where I came from back East did. However, there is one thing I don’t understand.

Why people in Seattle spend a good part of the year dressed like we live in Florida.

In late February and March, when it really is quite rainy, and in some cases fairly chilly, I see people in shorts and flip flops. Not just kids either. Kids, of course, are notorious for wearing weather-inappropriate clothing just because it looks “cool.” I’m talking about adults. Adults who should know better. I don't remember this kind of flauting of the actual weather conditions back East.

Today, for instance, the temperature is 53 degrees (and might go as high as 55 or 56), and it’s what I would describe as partly cloudy—a little sun here and there, but mostly cloud cover. Although, as I say, this feels warmer than it did where I came from, it’s still not tropical weather, by any means. Yet in my office today there are two women wearing open toed slip ons, and I rode to work this morning with one friend who was wearing shorts.

What gives?

By late June, it will be warm enough for open toed shoes and shorts. In fact, in July and August, it really gets quite hot here, and it barely rains all summer long. In September they have to issue “no burn” orders so that people don’t burn yard waste and risk setting huge tracts of national forest on fire.

But that’s June, July, and August. Right now it’s May, and it’s kind of on the chilly side. Yet I see dozens of people who’ve broken out their summer wardrobes. Women in light sundresses and sandals. Men in shorts and sandals. I can’t imagine they’re not freezing, but at least they don’t complain.

Along with this total denial that we actually have long, fairly cool springs, come a few other facts that people in this part of the world refuse to accept.

First is that there are bugs here. Many houses have no screens on their windows because people seem to refuse to admit the fact that there are, in fact, flying insects here that get into your house and are annoying. There are all kinds of yicky little flying things, including the world’s laziest mosquitoes. These things land on you, and if you notice them, you can easily smack them into oblivion. Where I came from, mosquitoes were zippy buggers that could dart away before you even had your hand raised. People seem unable to accept that we actually have flying insects, so almost no one has any screens. I lived in a house that had no screens and almost lost my mind because it was impossible to open the windows when it was hot.

Which brings me to my second point of denial: that while it doesn’t rain all the time, it also never gets very hot here. Certainly not hot enough to need air conditioning. That’s bunk. It never gets to 100, or even to 95 very often, and the humidity is nothing compared to what it was where I came from, but it can get pretty warm in the summer, and when it does, you need air conditioning. You may only use it for three or four weeks a year, but having it makes the difference between being comfortable and being miserable.

My new house will have both screens and air conditioning. And if you come to visit in February, you won’t find me dressed for a 4th of July barbeque. I can’t say the same for my fellow Seattelites, but their attire generally provides some interesting food for thought about how cold they must be, and just what they were thinking when they picked that outfit. It helps to pass the time on the way to work.

No Regrets

My kids eat a lot of typical kid foods. The other day I was thinking of the ones I wasn’t going to miss when they got old enough to eat other things. This was actually in the context of things I wasn’t going to miss in general about my kids being small: sippy cups, baby gates, pacifiers. Don’t misunderstand me—I know when they’re not babies anymore, I’ll look back and think how cute they were, and wish they could have stayed small forever. But there are some things I simply will not miss about having small children, and some of them are food-related.

Cereal Bars
Right now we buy boxes of cereal bars at Costco. They come in strawberry, blueberry, and apple. My older son will eat only the strawberry ones, the twins eat all the flavors. A cereal bar is their typical “first” breakfast. They also get another breakfast at daycare, and on weekends we often make something else around 9 a.m. or so. They’re really nothing but cookie with jam in them, but they serve their purpose. I’ll be glad, however, to see them go.

Eggo Waffles
Again, something else we buy in bulk at Costco (with four kids, there aren’t many things for the kids we don’t buy in bulk at Costco). My older son likes them cut into shapes with a cookie cutter, primarily Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (which then gets its nose dipped into a little tub of red decorator sugar). He dips the shapes into his syrup. The twins get no syrup. Nutritionally, these aren’t quite as bad as cereal bars (although the syrup is no gem), but they’re still something I’m tired of buying and making.

Gogurt
I had a debate with a friend about Gogurt. Her position was any yogurt was good yogurt. I said I agreed right up to Gogurt. Any of those kid yogurts are fine, but Gogurt is just garbage. There’s so little of it in a tube, and it has so much sugar, that I think any positive effects of active cultures or calcium is completely negated by the sugar. Although we buy it, it stays in the freezer and is an occasional treat. In truth, Gogurt is no friend of mine, and it does not get a Christmas card from me.

Chicken Nuggets
I don’t mean McDonald’s chicken nuggets. I sheepishly admit to kind of liking those. I’m talking about the ones we buy in bulk that are orange, for God’s sake. They’re fast—they heat up in the microwave in 30 seconds or something, and they claim to be made of whole breast meat (not mushed up reformed random pieces), but that doesn’t redeem them completely in my opinion, and I won’t miss them when the last of my kids stops saying she wants chicken nuggets for dinner.

Hot Dogs
We buy Hebrew National all beef hot dogs, and I actually like them, but I’m kind of tired of making hot dogs. Because the twins are under two, they have to be cut up in small pieces, and my older son actually eats his cold (yes, I agree that this is vile). I won’t mind when hot dogs take an occasional role in our diet, but their constant presence is tiresome.

Juice Boxes
I just seem to be down on all the common kid foods, don’t I? Juice boxes squirt when you squeeze them, which little boys think is hysterical. Mothers do not think this is hysterical because they have to clean it up. Yes, juice boxes are convenient, but they’re messy. I won’t miss them.

In general, I will be very grateful when my kids are old enough to eat the same things my husband and I want to eat (although I know it will likely be many years before they’re actually willing to eat things like fennel and lentils). Still, when they stop eating cereal bars and juice boxes, I won’t shed a tear.

Food Rules

Having just finished a somewhat disappointing takeout meal, I wish to share a few thoughts on what the rules of engagement for food and eating should be. This is not, of course, what they are, but the way they would be in my ideal world. Those of you who may have seen the Diet Rules that made the rounds maybe ten or fifteen years ago will recognize some of them—they were good then, they’re good now. Here we go.

If it wasn’t good, it doesn’t count
The lunch I just ate was from my favorite Japanese restaurant, but I think the regular chef was on vacation, because it was not up to their usual standard. I got the seaweed salad instead of the pickled cucumbers that usually come with my lunch (I think they may have run out of the cucumbers, because there was a guy in the bar eating a bento box, and he had the cucumbers, the bastard), and I hate the seaweed salad. It’s too fishy, or something. Then, the grilled beef short ribs I usually get that are supposed to come basted with a kind of sticky sweet soy-based sauce tasted as though they’d been grilled with no sauce at all. In short, the whole thing was a disappointment. But it still had the same number of calories, the same number of fat grams, the same degree of fillingness (if you will) that it would have had if it had been their best. The problem was, it wasn’t emotionally satisfying. Therefore, I propose that if a meal wasn’t good, and didn’t provide a significant emotional satisfaction in addition to filling me up, the calories, fat, etc do not count. I can go eat something that does satisfy and not have to be concerned that I’m eating twice as much.

If I wish I hadn’t eaten it after I finish, it doesn’t count
This is kind of related to the rule above, except that it also includes things that were fulfilling and satisfying, but that I just wish for some other reason I hadn’t eaten. If, for instance, I eat a big plate of amazing something-in-cream-sauce, or an incredible dessert, but later feel remorse over all the bad things that might have been in there and are now in me, doing their damage, I get to not count it. Any ill effects of what I ate are automatically negated.

If I split it with someone, it doesn’t count
If my husband and I split a huge dessert, neither of us has to count the calories, fat, etc. The same diet rule went around years ago as “If you split it with someone, the calories cancel.” Right on.

If no one knows I ate it, it doesn’t count
Again, and oldie but a goodie. This also carries over to Weight Watchers and other weight loss techniques that require a food journal. If you don’t write it down, it didn’t actually count.

Things that are really delicious are automatically good for you
And I’m not saying “I think Stouffer’s Macaroni and Cheese is really delicious, therefore it should be good for me.” It’s that something that is truly wonderful, a really high quality food, is good for you, no matter how bad it actually is for you. Things that fall into this category are really outstanding homemade mayonnaise (and by extension, anything made with it), homemade (or excellent quality bakery-made) cinnamon rolls, a fantastic blue cheese, homemade fruit cobblers or tarts. In fact, anything homemade should automatically be good for you, no matter what’s in it. If I undertake to make French fries at home, and go to the trouble of cutting them, soaking them, and deep frying them on my stove, then by God, they should be good for me. Things in really expensive restaurants, no matter how much cream they contain, should be good for you, too.

Everyone should get one day a month when nothing counts
We should all be allowed to choose one day in a month when we can eat any damned thing we want and nothing will contribute to weight gain, or health deterioration. Wish you could eat three large orders of McDonald’s fries? Wish you could drink five Appletinis and not get drunk (or wake up hung over)? Wish you could eat four fried chickens (bonus points to anyone who recognizes the movie reference)? There should be a day each month when we can do that. We could use it for a holiday—this month, for instance, I might choose one of the days of Memorial Day weekend as my “nothing counts” day, so I can eat everything. Or the month of my birthday, I might choose my birthday (difficult, since I have a November birthday, but I’d have to pick between that and Thanksgiving).

Foods from childhood should not count
Maybe that’s a little much, on reflection, but ok, how about this: We all get to pick three favorite foods from childhood that don’t count. I could pick potato chips, McDonald’s cheeseburgers, and…Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Then I could eat as much of those things as I wanted, whenever I wanted, and they would be completely neutral. The only catch to this one is, you can’t switch to a different childhood food when you get bored with one (or all) of the three. You must pick them and stick with them forever.

If it’s a beverage, it doesn’t count
Beer, wine, soda, shakes—they’re liquid, for pete’s sake. They shouldn’t contribute to weight gain. They shouldn’t be bad for you. They go with food. They’re necessary. They shouldn’t count. I remember in high school I truly did not believe that Coke could cause weight gain. How could it? You drink it, you don’t eat it. Ah, youth [takes sip from can of Diet Coke next to computer].

If I don’t realize I finished it, it doesn’t count
Despite the countless warnings and cluckings from diet gurus, I insist on reading while I eat. Sorry, I just do. Reading contributes to the pleasure of eating, and eating contributes to the pleasure of reading. The majority of the time it’s not a problem. While I might not be “eating mindfully,” I do derive sufficient satisfaction to feel full when I’m done with my meal. However, every now and then I take the last bite of something, and realize that, hey, that was the last bite and I didn’t get that “last bite” feeling after taking it. When that happens, the whole thing I just ate gets zeroed out. This is kind of a companion to the rule about things not counting when they’re not good, or when I change my mind about having eaten something, but it applies even when the thing was good.

If the jury is out on the detrimental effects of a food, it doesn’t hurt us
There have been so many swings of the pendulum as regards what foods are good for us, bad for us, totally neutral, that I feel like if they haven’t determined with an absolute certainty that something is bad for us, it shouldn’t have a negative effect on health or weight. Butter, for instance. We started out with butter being good for us; I remember the old “four food groups” and butter counted as a dairy product. Then butter was horrible, horrible, horrible for us. You might as well eat rat poison as eat butter. In fact, rat poison was probably better for you, because it didn’t have any cholesterol or saturated fat. Then someone started poking around in the margarine formula (which I’ve read is one molecule removed from plastic, but that could be an urban legend), and realized that margarine had trans fats, and that those trans fats were way worse than anything in butter. So the word went out that maybe butter wasn’t the Antichrist after all. I say, if the experts can’t decide, it just doesn’t hurt, period. And naturally, as far as I’m concerned, “they” haven’t actually proven that any one thing is bad for us. So guess what?

If I eat one “bad” thing along with a specified number of “good” things, the good things cancel the bad one
This is kind of the “good behavior” rule of food consumption. If I eat a big salad, loaded with vegetables and low fat protein, but eat it with regular Ranch dressing, the positive aspects of the vegetables and low fat protein cancel the negative ones of the dressing. This rule could apply to elements within a meal, or to the overall meal. If I eat a small, lightly dressed salad as my appetizer, then have grilled fish over sautéed spinach, and then finish off with a buttery slice of lemon tart, the first two “good” components negate the “badness” of the dessert.

I think that’s a pretty good start. I might add on to this in the future, but I think this set of rules, if adopted by…pretty much everyone, would serve to make my life much happier and easier. So, let’s eat!

Why I Buy

Today’s topic is why I buy a cookbook. I know everyone cares very deeply about what motivates me to buy a cookbook, so I’m sharing this with you now. There are lots of reasons people buy cookbooks, and I just read interviews with several chefs in which they agreed that they buy a cookbook for the pictures. This couldn’t be further from my reasons.

I would never buy a cookbook solely for the pictures. I know people who insist on a cookbook with a picture of every recipe, and people who like the pictures because they give an idea of what the finished product is supposed to look like (I admit to falling into this latter category). But pictures are not the only thing that drives my purchasing decision.

First and foremost I buy cookbooks based on my current interest. With the recent admission of my Japanese food addiction, I’m now picking up Japanese cookbooks. I like to understand what it is I’m eating, what ingredients are common, and the fundamentals of preparation of foods I like, even if I’m never going to actually make them, although if I buy the cookbook, I usually do wind up making something from it. I don’t find I have to have a picture of every recipe. I like that, of course, but it doesn’t drive me to make the purchase.

I also buy cookbooks based on a specific need. As I’ve discussed before (and no doubt you have committed my earlier postings to memory, so you know this too), I sometimes get into a rut when it comes to what to have for dinners. One thing that will jolt me out of a rut is buying a new cookbook with lots of good things to make for weeknight dinners, or even weekend dinners.

There are authors whose cookbooks I just like to have, to collect, if you will. Many of these are Australian cooks—Donna Hay, Bill Grainger, Jill Dupleix. I don’t follow celebrity chefs much (you’ll find only one Rachael Ray cookbook on my bookshelf, and that was a huge mistake, since her recipes are both bad and annoying at the same time). The books by people like Donna and Bill I do cook from. I’ve recently found a few books I want that may or may not be anything I ever cook from, but that I want anyway. The two that spring most readily to mind are the two that were written by the chef of a local restaurant called The Herb Farm. They just seem like the kind of thing I’d like to have in my collection. As well, I have a bunch of books by people like Julia Child, which I don’t think I’ve ever cooked from, but they’re the kind of thing no cookbook collection is complete without.

Which brings me to the next reason I buy a cookbook—because it’s a classic. I’m still sorting out in my mind what exactly makes a cookbook a classic, so that’s a topic for another time, but suffice to say there are books I feel are “must haves.” New books are always being added to this category (or at least, the version of this category that’s a running list in my mind). Most recently I bought The Silver Spoon cookbook. It came out in this country last Christmas, and is, according to the publisher, the definitive work on Italian cooking. At over 1000 pages, I would hope so. In any event, there are lots of obvious classics—Fannie Farmer, Joy of Cooking (ugh), Betty Crocker. And then there are the more recent classics—the Silver Palate cookbooks, the Dean & Deluca cookbook, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

And then there’s the fantasy element of a cookbook. Some cookbooks have recipes that I like to visualize myself making, even if I never will. I like the idea that one day I will make Warm Terrine of Sausage, Peppers, Polenta and Mozzarella and serve it as an appetizer at a dinner party. Will I ever do that? Maybe, maybe not, but I like to buy cookbooks that fuel that kind of fantasy. In fact, the first cookbook I read was one of the Silver Palate ones, and I read it because it had that dream element to it. I was in college and it provided fuel for my imagination and what it would be like when I “grew up” (something I’m still waiting on, by the way). Sometimes that fantasy element takes the form of pictures—beautiful table settings and floral arrangements—but other times it’s the recipes themselves that pull me in.

So pictures may be a driving factor, but there are so many more important reasons to buy a cookbook. If it serves a purpose, even if that purpose is only to encourage a certain amount of daydreaming, then it’s a book worth having. Of course, one could then argue that any cookbook is worth having, and I wouldn’t dispute that, although there are cookbooks I’ll never bother buying, simply because they don’t interest me. I will probably never, for instance, bother to buy the Pillsbury cookbook. I already have Fannie Farmer and Better Homes & Gardens. Chances are I probably won’t ever buy any of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks either. Never say never, of course, but Jamie doesn’t appeal to me much. The only case in which I really can safely say never is with regard to Rachael Ray and her books. I really can say I’ll never buy another of those. One is actually one too many.

Pack Rat, part 2

I finished packing the kitchen, and in doing so found a couple more things not unlike the Liquid Smoke (which, excuse me, was $1.19, not 89 cents), and the Molly McButter (which I actually have two of, as it turns out—“What? You were afraid the one would be lonely?” my husband asked. Also interesting to note—in a dull sort of way—is that one bottle claims that it has 4 calories per serving, and one claims it has 5). I found a bag of fenugreek seeds that I think we’ve owned for about nine years, and two small tubs of colored sugar that appear to have been purchased during the Carter administration (red and green, if you’re wondering).

I thought about why I didn’t just throw this stuff out. The Liquid Smoke and the Molly McButter are clearly candidates for the garbage, and the fenugreek is probably totally flavorless by now. I guess I don’t throw them out because they don’t really go bad, per se. They’re not like milk or meat, which actually spoil. They’re not even like canned goods, which have an expiration date on them. They don’t instruct you—either through printed dates or just by stinking—that they’ve outlived their usefulness. And by the time I realize it should probably go out, I've kind of gotten used to seeing it in my cabinet and can't bear to part with it. I believe I have mentioned before that I am very weird.

When I do find something with an expiration on it, even if it’s something that clearly doesn’t deteriorate over time, I will toss it. Jello pudding, canned pumpkin, baked beans—if the date has passed, I get rid of it. And really, how could Jello deteriorate? I’ve read before that often the dates on things like canned goods are “best before” dates, and you can use them after that date with no risk to your health, but their quality won’t be what it was prior to that date.

But I know I’m not alone in this apparent unwillingness to toss things that are useless and/or past their prime. Not everyone may have the colored sugar from 1977, but I’d bet everyone has a jar or two of spices that they bought for one recipe, never found another use for, and just haven’t gotten around to tossing. In fact, I often read letters to the editor in cooking magazines that complain about recipes that use an unusual spice—people complain that they’ll spend the money on a whole jar of something they’ll never use again.

But I have a plan for all these culinary artifacts that I’m clearly so reluctant to get rid of. As a decorative element in the kitchen of our new house, which will be ready sometime the end of this year, I’m going to make a shadowbox and feature a couple of these gems. After so many years I just can’t bring myself to throw out that Liquid Smoke. I’ve clearly got a mental block against using it (and not just because the idea of Liquid Smoke is completely revolting), but the trash isn’t an option either. They’ll be forever immortalized as decorative elements. If nothing else, they’ll be a conversation piece. So that, as someone else once said, people can come into my kitchen and say “Why do you have a bottle of Liquid Smoke and a shaker of Molly McButter in a box on the wall?” and I can reply “So I can have this conversation over and over.” At least it keeps me from having to throw the stuff away.

Rats & Weevils

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.

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?