Mella vs. the American Festival of Beige Foods

I've mentioned more than once that my relationship with Thanksgiving sits uncomfortably somewhere between Ambivalent and Belligerent.  My reasons for this pretty much all have to do with the meal itself.  Thanksgiving dinner is apparently one of those high points of the year that has people rapturous in anticipation.  And I just don't like it that much.  I'm generally indifferent to turkey, not at all fond of stuffing, and insulted by the combination of sweet potatoes and marshmallows, and the other elements of the meal just aren't things I'd ordinarily care to put together in one meal, if I thought to eat them at all.  All in all, if I had to put together The Celebratory Dining Event of the Calendar Year...it wouldn't look much like what we're supposed to be fawning (and slaving) over on Thanksgiving Day.  Also, the sheer abundance that's expected makes me uncomfortable.

The fact that everyone else is so excited about the whole thing does make it worse.  It's like that band everyone was so crazy about in junior high that you just didn't get the big deal about. (I'm leaving the atrocious construction of that last sentence because it's necessary to the effect.)  Even if you'd otherwise be happy ignoring the whole thing, the ambient enthusiasm starts to wear you down and make you cranky.

And there's the stuff I brought up at Wende's the other day - the fact that the holiday tends to make people throw sense and good taste to the wind in the name of some bizarre form of nostalgia.  To be fair, I sometimes try to consider the possibility that that isn't what's happening at all, that people actually like dry boxed stuffing and corn syrup-infused canned cranberry jelly, and that I only assume it's an insane devotion to tradition because I don't like those things, but it's exhausting to think like that for very long.

I also find the whole thing to be emotionally manipulative ("Sure, I'm thankful, but it's none of your business."), but I'll admit that at that point I'm just being petulant.  Still, attempts to make people share their thankfulness over dinner have never been tolerated in my home of origin.

Despite the above, I find myself hosing my immediate family for Thanksgiving this year.  This is actually good for a few logistical reasons.  My parents are rarely able to travel to us on holidays because of the Sunday morning factor - religious and weekend holidays are out, obviously.  My mother's schedule is freer than usual this fall because her library is closed for a four-month asbestos abatement project (eek).  I'm now centrally located between my parents and my sister the blond artist.  And both of us have lately gotten to the point of giving up on Thanksgiving travel altogether - it's a difficult trip to make, just to do it again a month later for Christmas (and we'll both always be home then until personal obligations or future acquired familial connections dictate otherwise, or if my parents decide to spend their retirement as missionaries in Zimbabwe or something - Christmas is low-pressure and all around good with us). 

Still, though, it's an event.  Though my kitchen is fairly enormous, very little of that space is countertop.  I just refuse to scrape together 17 different side dishes, even if I had that many pans to cook them.  And I'm no longer up to being the annoying person who insists on swapping the turkey for Beef Wellington, just on principle.

Mom and I started talking through the menu on Saturday, and I think a tentative plan is emerging:

• Turkey: it's turkey. What's there to say?  May do something with rosemary. (Aside: butcher called this afternoon and said, "I'm afraid I have some bad news."  It was just that their supplier had messed up and they had to substitute my order for a different variety, but it's still not a phrase you expect to hear from the grocer.)
• Stuffing:  I'm not fond of conventional bread stuffing, but my dad's into it, so I'm making mom bring the fixings.  Ditto cranberry, even though that would be simple enough to pick up.
• Roasted root vegetables and maybe some squash: I need my vegetables as savory as possible, and if I use up all my bakeware on this, nobody will be able to make candied yams.
• Corn: Maybe?  Easy, though.
  
• Creamed Spinach: Maybe? It's one of my favorite things in the whole wide world.  After 30 years of indifferent platters of starch, I say I deserve it.
• Insalata Caprese: Maybe? It came up as a suggestion that made sense at the time, though it probably doesn't go with turkey.  Mostly dependent upon November tomato conditions, though I'll need to think hard about sourcing decent mozzarella.  Our standards were set by the stuff our Italian landlord used to make, but I rather doubt his process would meet with FDA approval.
  
• Rolls: from scratch, family recipe. They will not be shaped like turkeys, as has occasionally happened in the past.
  
• Pies:  Mom will bring, since they're inconvenient to make same-day, and I won't really have the time to deal with it beforehand.
  

CT - Catching Up

I think I'm fairly caught up on assignments from recent weeks.

Décade 4

Heart
See here. I haven't made the veggie curry, but I did make a certain zucchini dish, which hails from the same era. (It turned out to be camera-shy.) We will again call it "emblematic," as I challenge even the most soppy-hearted romantic in North America to be sentimental about zucchini (even though I love the stuff).

Breath
Clean out the refrigerator. Check.

Bones
Clean and organize your recipe or cookbook collection, making sure that what you're likely to use is what's handy. If you do not have recipes to support your preferred level of culinary effort, it's time to go find some!

Hold that thought until Decade 5, Head.

Head

• Decide whether you're the sort of person who comparison shops for the best deal among grocery stores or whether you prefer to stick to one favorite store.
  

Everything revolves around one of those immigrant-oriented markets that blow the competition out of the water as regards produce (price, quality, selection). When you have designated sections for Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Polish, Russian, German, Italian, Mexican, Greek, and probably a dozen others I can't think of Cuisines, as well as Coca-Cola, selection ought to be good.

• Construct a list of staples that need to be kept on hand and routinely replaced as the supply runs low.
  

Ok. I have a start on this, but it's going to be in progress until I find a time to clean out my food storage. That may be a future assignment, but regardless, I haven't had the opportunity to do it yet.



Décade 5

Breath
Assignment: Sort out the utensil drawers.

They are clean.

Items removed:

• Extra whisk. I don't need two of the same size, and it will probably be a very long time before I need two, period.
  
• Extra can opener which I'm sure I've never used but which is rusty anyway.
• Bizarre free-with-purchase Pampered Chef doodad, the utility of which I can't even begin to contemplate.

Other observations:

• For someone who basically never drinks, I own a rather large corkscrew. (But it stays because there's really no other way to do that.)
  
• I've just now caught the irony of the set of Ikea chopsticks given to me last Christmas by my half-Chinese-half-Swedish friend S. (Also: they have little nubs all over the pointy ends - are they maybe like chopstick training wheels?)
  
• Note to self: The cheese grater is in the drawer next to the stove. For some reason, whenever I need it, I can never remember that. There's nowhere else to keep it where it wouldn't get in the way of other things. So I've decided to store the can opener and vegetable peeler, which I can always find, in that drawer, too, in the hopes that more frequent access will remind me of its existence. I do realize this probably won't work, and I'll end up as unable to open cans or peel vegetables as to grate cheese, but humor me.
  

Bones
Nothing missing, nothing broken, nothing dirty. Check.

Head

• What's your goal?
  
  I think I said, "She cooks. She eats. On purpose." That's still pretty much it.
  
  
• How are you doing so far?
  
  Not perfect, but I clearly haven't starved to death, so I can't be doing that badly. My diet of late has been a little rich in those spinach-and-goat cheese frozen pizzas from Target, but if you've ever had them, you'll understand that it's hard to think of this as an entirely bad thing.
  
  
• What would help you cook in the way you want to?

1. Reorganizing the pantry. See above.
2. Moving the toaster oven to the top of the microwave, where until last week I was convinced it wouldn't fit. Being able to use the full depth of even a portion of my fairly meager counter space has turned out to be really handy.
   
3. This:

My friend Payroll K (long story) gave me a Borders gift card for my birthday, and then Borders gave me a 40% off coupon last weekend, so I went shopping. I was craving Auden, but there was none in stock, so I went to cookbooks. I know I've looked at this one before, but this time it clicked - it's actually exactly what I've been wanting for a long time. He's managed to write down recipes exactly the way I think of them, and exactly the way I cook, when my head's screwed on in the right direction to cook - so it's perfect for my currently-remedial state of creativity. And it's organized seasonally. Downside: a bit heavy on fish, which you would expect from a fast-food-for-foodies scheme, but which I can't eat.

image property of Barnes & Noble

I'm not quite RCM'd, but I'm almost enthusiastic! Yay for me!

Heart
For some reason, I'm fixated on chicken marsala, but it may be something out of the Bittman, instead. Stay tuned.

CT - D4 - Part 1

Heart
Reach back into your memory for a dish that has sentimental ties. Find a recipe, buy ingredients, make it, photograph it, and tell us the story. Unlike your "missing dish," this does not need to be something you've ever prepared in the past.

Sentimental. Obviously that's kind of a hard one for me, but I promise to do my best. I can't think of any foods to which I feel especially strong ties, except for those I particularly like on their own merits.

When I think of food that people get sentimental about, it's generally stuff like:

• Grandma's cooking. With all due respect, neither of my grandmothers can/could cook particularly well. The one who is still living has long been under the impression that you can boil a chicken in plain water and eat the results all by themselves. And you'll never believe it, but I've just this second made the connection to why my grandfather so enjoyed dining out.

• Mom's cooking. I list these separately because I think they're definitely two distinct concepts in the American psyche. There's nothing wrong with my mother's cooking, but I don't have particularly strong feelings about it, and I'd have to guess that neither does she, since she's one of the few people with less capacity for sentimentality than I have (though she's more naturally receptive to it in other people than I am, which confused me terribly for the longest time). I'm sure she cooked with sufficient variety, but whenever I try to remember what she cooked when I was growing up, I can only remember two or three dishes, one being pasta. Oddly enough, the rest of my immediate family, including Mom, suffers from the same amnesia.
  

• Special occasion food. Like Thanksgiving dinner. I hate Thanksgiving, in part because it tries to be emotionally manipulative, but mostly because the collective hysteria over roast turkey (of which I'm not very fond) and the inevitable excess (which I think is supposed to be the attractive part) are maddening. (My father loves the traditional feast, but concedes to my ambivalence by referring to it as "The American Festival of Beige Foods.")

• Nostalgic food from some special place. Ballpark hotdogs. Swimming pool popsicles.

Yeah. I've got nothing like that. But now that I've satisfied my basic psychological needs by analyzing sentimentality, I can move on.

So what do I have? I feel some connection to these, probably because they have their on stories:

Chocolate Pretzels

When you move a lot, really weird things can go missing. Once, it was three of my mother's Christmas cookie recipes. Only three out of the dozen or so in the collection, despite the fact that they're all kept together in one place in the recipe box.

The most beloved of the missing recipes was for "Chocolate Pretzels." - not chocolate covered pretzels (everybody knows those are a form of narcotic that comes from Trader Joe's), but pretzel-shaped cookies. The recipe was complicated and thus not easily recreated, but I knew it contained:

• ground almonds
• ground chocolate chips
• cinnamon and some other spices
• orange zest

The fall I was home after graduating from college, I spent a lot of time on the web searching recipes, trying to find this one. I came up with about 20 variations on search terms to look for chocolate, chocolate-spice, or chocolate-orange-spice cookies that could be shaped (not rolled, dropped, or spritzed). Of course, my mother found my strategy eccentric. "They're called Chocolate Pretzels!" At any rate, I found nothing suitable.

The next fall, I was away from home and got to experiment - I was definitely going to recover these one way or another. Unfortunately, my first-principles knowledge of baking chemistry wasn't good enough to help me go about it in an orderly way. The first few rounds came out looking like something out of the litter box, actually. I finally decided that the texture of the original recipe was probably most like that of biscotti that have only been through the first baking. Bingo. Searching on those grounds, I quickly found something adaptable, and the results pass very well for the real thing, if I say so myself. Unfortunately, the scale at which I achieved success makes...a lot of cookies. You can definitely halve it, if you can figure out a way to add 2-and-a-half eggs.

Chocolate Spice Pretzels

Combine:

• 1.5 c. finely chopped almonds
• 2 c. finely chopped chocolate chips
• 2 t. baking powder
• 2 t. ground cinnamon
• 1/4 t. ground allspice
• 4 c. flour

In a large bowl beat 5 eggs until fluffy.

To eggs, add and blend well:

• 2 c. sugar
• 1/2 c. melted butter
• 1 T. grated orange peel

Stir flour mixture into liquid to form dough.

Form into pretzel shapes (roll small balls into snakes and twist into pretzels).

Bake on greased sheet at 350F 8-10 minutes.

Cool and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Barbecue

My mother is from North Carolina, and in North Carolina there is an extremely important dish called "barbecue." Barbecue, and listen closely, because this is important, has nothing whatever to do with barbecue sauce, the thick, brown, ketchup-based substance revered here in the upper midwest as if it had sacramental properties. No, the proper sauce is a vinegar-based with paprika and cayenne pepper, which is applied to the form of hog meat that anywhere else in the country would be called "pulled pork," a name that, to my ear, will never not sound irredeemably dopey.

Properly, the hog is spit-roasted for two days in a contraption the size of a schoolbus, but that's not a realistic option for apartment-dwellers. So I figured out how to reproduce it in the slow cooker.

Anecdote: Once when I made this, I was obviously not paying very close attention to my grocery shopping, and accidentally purchased a picnic roast, rather than...whatever other cut of roast I had intended. It had the skin still attached. And if that weren't bad enough...the pig had a tattoo. Ew.

Barbecue

Ok...went to add that recipe and it's missing. Fortunately, I know Mom has a copy. Basically, you make a dry rub with cayenne pepper and chili powder and seasoned salt, treat a large pork roast, slow cook it with a little bit of the sauce, which is, I think, cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, paprika, red pepper flakes, and brown sugar... When it's cooked, shred it with a fork and douse with the rest of the sauce.

This must be served with cole slaw, but only if you make your own dressing, and you must use cider vinegar, not white. Ahem.



Veggie Curry

This is something I made a lot my first year on my own, and I think it started my cooking-with-yogurt habit. It's not the only thing I ever ate, or the only thing I tried for the first time then, but it's sort of emblematic of that period for me. It's also really, really good. It comes from Beans chapter of the the much-reviled 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking - though I concur with many of the criticisms levied against that version (to wit, that it forgoes the start-at-the-top-and-back-to-basics detail characteristic of the earlier versions in favor of an attempt at a different sort of comprehensiveness and that just yields over-complication) it does have some excellent recipes.

I'll try to make this next week - if I do, I'll post the recipe then.

More later.

New Risotto

This comes in under deadline, I believe, so I guess it means I'm caught up. Tonight I made shrimp risotto based on the recipe on page 41 of the current America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two, 2009. My primary modification was to omit the scallops and add peas. It was a definite success, but we'll have to see how it will make leftovers.

Ingredients:

• 1.75 c. chicken broth
• 8 oz. clam juice
• Olive oil (originally butter)
• Onion, chopped
• 2/3 c. rice
• Saffron (oddly, I had this on hand)
• 1/2 c. white wine
• Shrimp (about 8 oz.), deveined and peeled completely.

• Peas, frozen, about 1 cup.
• 2 roma tomatoes, cored and chopped.
• Fresh basil, chopped.

As it happened, the bush was cheaper than the two-ounce clamshell of leaves.

1. Combine the broth and clam juice and heat in the microwave (so it's not cold when you add it to the hot pan.
2. Saute onion until soft.
3. Stir in rice and saffron; cook until rice is mostly translucent.

8-ounce bottles of wine are a good thing, though I cringe when the cashier calls it "baby wine."

4. Add wine; cook until completely absorbed/evaporated.
5. Stir in 1 cup of broth; simmer until pan is mostly dry.
6. Add broth 1/2 cup at a time as pan dries out, until rice is fully cooked.

7. Gently fold in shrimp, peas, tomato, basil.
8. Cover, cook on low heat until shrimp are cooked through.

ETA: The kitchen is even completely cleaned up from the prep. This is huge.

All Alone Again

Out running errands Friday, I found myself actually in the mood to shop for an inspirational magazine to go with this project. I figured I'd probably wind up with something in the Cooks Illustrated family, or something with a close resemblance. No surprise that I'm partial to the CI/America's Test Kitchen model - yes, it's foodie fare, to some degree, but it's straightforward, pragmatic, Yankee foodie fare. It's full of "this is the best way" decrees, but they come out of weeks of rigorous testing, unadorned with hipster cred. And they acknowledge and assess such shameful shortcuts as bottled ketchup, rather than implying with an arched (and pierced) eyebrow that, of course, you'll be making yours from scratch.

And, of course, I'm totally into the public broadcasting connection. In my imagination, CI editor Chris Kimball and Rick Steves are in fierce competition for the title of Nerdiest PBS Host. It's sure to be a photo finish.

Anyhow, what I found was the current Cooking for Two special issue. I bought it despite noticing that the introduction to the recipe for hamburgers begins with the statement, "Grinding your own meat sounds like a lot of work for two burgers, but a food processor makes the job easier." And really, that's too funny to be offensive.

More useful, I noticed an emphasis on one-pan, stovetop type techniques, which is where I'd already identified I need more practice and/or ideas. When I noticed it contains a recipe for shrimp and grits, of course I had to have it for CT. Two pages farther on is a recipe for a shrimp risotto which I'd already considered for my "cook something new and not scary" recipe for this week - I'll probably do it with peas, as Anne suggested when Wende was going on about vegetables. I'm comfortable enough with the concepts, but I've never bothered to do it. I'm even going to go out and buy proper rice. More on that when it hits the pan.

The editorial was interesting - Mr. Kimball speaks as a recipe editor who, of course, is more and more asked for recipes to serve fewer and fewer diners.

I have to admit to a bit of philosophic hesitation. After all, isn't cooking about feeding the multitudes, the modern version of loaves and fishes? Sure, but the reality of the home kitchen is that kids grow up and move out, or, for a variety of other reasons, many home cooks are preparing supper for themselves and one other. It's cozy, to be sure, but it raises a multitude of culinary issues.

A host of issues indeed - I'm charmed by the fact that he specifically names my #1 quandry about solo eating, that is, "What does one do with half a head of cabbage?" (Seriously. Shredded, one little head yields way, way more cole slaw than any of my bowls can hold. I'd eat it more often, except that to buy a head is effectively to swear off the possibility of eating any other vegetable for the next ten days.)

Dining by one is obviously similar, in most technical respects, to dining by two, but I'm almost surprised that Chris's inquiries would be limited to the latter. As of 20042009, the U.S. Census Bureau says that 28% of American households are single-resident (up from 26% in 2004). 32.2 million individuals live in these households, which by my calculation is just under 15% of the adult population.

Solo cooking (and dining) is definitely one of those first-world problems. But, we're first-world people, so it's only fitting that we'd have to deal with them, yes? Otherwise we'd have no problems, and that wouldn't be fair, would it? (Where are my sarcasm tags?)

Notable Problems Associated with Cooking and/or Eating Alone

• Many dishes are difficult to cook in small quantities (e.g., lasagna, which my magazine solves by baking it in a loaf pan).
  
  
• Some people don't like leftovers.
  
  
• Some people just don't like that many leftovers.
  
  
• Some things don't make good leftovers.
  
  
• And even what does has a limited lifespan.
  
  
• What does one do with half a head of cabbage?
  
  
• Or 3/4 of a can of chicken broth?
  
  
• Because if I just kept cooking other things until I'd used it all up, I'd have a month's worth of food.
  
  
• Sometimes, it can even be hard to buy chicken breasts fewer than 6 at a time.
  
  
• And that's before you even address the fact that each breast is 3 times bigger than it needs to be.
  
  
• They sell lots of products in multiple sizes of containers - why hasn't anyone figured out how to sell a half-size loaf of bread?
  
  
• And why doesn't yogurt come in pints? It's either the little 6-ounce individual cups, or a giant quart tub.
  
  
• Cooking only for oneself, it's dangerously easy to fall into dietary eccentricity - the phenomenon I call oatmeal-and-carrot-sticks. In this respect, cooking is not substantially different from other aspects of living alone.
  

So...what am I missing?

Lost Recipe - Chicken Curry

Ok, catch-up time. This is a recipe my mother made when I was a child. It comes out of a Quick-n-Cheap cookbook published by Reader's Digest in the mid-eighties, though it's current incarnation is fairly changed. First, the groceries.

The Groceries

Ingredients:

• Chicken, some, cooked.
• Onion
• Green Apple - ingredient most likely to be omitted.
• Oil, enough (not shown)
• Flour, about 3 tablespoons (not shown)
  
• Chicken broth, 1.5 cups
• Greek yogurt, 1/2 cup (originally was half-and-half)
• Curry powder (2 T.)
• Cayene Pepper (very little)
• Ginger (1 t.?)

1. Chop onion and apple and saute until soft.

2. Add flour, broth and creamy substance. Thicken.

3. Add all seasoning - curry, cayenne, ginger, salt. Add chicken, cover, cook low 5-10 minutes. Serve over rice.

Unfortunately, none of the other pictures took.

All Alone

When my family moved to the Bay Area, when I was in High School, there was a Roman Catholic priest stationed at the base chapel where my father had just taken command. He was a 60-something lieutenant who had spent the bulk of his career as a missionary somewhere in Latin America - I never knew how or why he ultimately made his way into the Navy's Chaplain Corps.

Father B. belonged to some order that took a vow of poverty, and was living with the irony of keeping that vow while simultaneously paying rent on a NoCal apartment. From what I was told, he seemed to regard it as a personal challenge to keep the place as unfurnished as possible. AT minimalists would weep in envy.

The piece de resistance in this living arrangement was the dining setup. At mealtimes, Father B. would pull his single chair up to the kitchen counter and pull out the drawer which served as his dining surface, kept perpetually set with his single plate and place setting of flatware. Sadly, I don't know what he liked to eat.

This story (which is approximately accurate) is what came to mind as I was reading Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, which could well bear the subtitle Extreme Exercises in Solo Dining. Not all the examples included are actually so extreme, but most of them try to be. The book is a collection of essays about "cooking for one and dining alone" as the real subtitle puts it. Some were enjoyable, others less so, but the main takeaway is that eating alone is an irrationally loaded topic.

This collection includes plenty of essays that moralize solo dining - that attempt to raise it to some sort of spiritual experience, or to confess it as the lowest moment of human life. I needn't tell you, at this point, how little patience I have for sentimentalizing the mundane and - yes, the functional. (Heck, I'm not even that fond of sentimentalizing the sentimental.) One included essayist (Laura Calder, "The Lonely Palate", p. 226) describes the body of work on the subject:

It's rather odd: I have read quite a number of essays in the past few days on the subject of eating alone. You wouldn't believe for how many it ends up as quasi-erotica. In one piece, the writer went so far as to take her dinner to the bathtub! Oh, the moans and groans of illicit pleasure, the unbridled indulgence that eating alone inspires in some! ...[T]here is little I find more depressing, and frankly I do have a hard time believing anyone who tries to pass it off as anything else. If eating alone were the truly juicy experience some describe, there would be restaurants in the red-light districts full of plate-sized tables in curtained-off booths. ... On the other hand, since eating alone at least sometimes is a fact of life, I can understand wanting to make the most of it. And perhaps even exaggerating how good it all was, after the fact: it sometimes takes that in life to convince ourselves we've had fun.

But it's not all what Calder describes. Lots of the essays in this book are just entertaining tales of experiences - or life seasons - that happened to involve eating alone. In the title piece, Laurie Colwin describes the years she spent in a kitchenless studio apartment (one burner, one fondue pot, no oven, dishes were washed in the bathtub). Another writer describes her personal strategy for eating as much fresh asparagus as she can choke down while it's in season. A cute piece by M.F.K. Fisher describes her annoyance at being left to dine alone on eggs and jug wine, night after night, since nobody has the nerve to invite a culinary critic to their dinner parties. And one very strange story by Haruki Murakami is all about a guy who ate spaghetti, by himself, every day in 1971.

In "Luxury," Holly Hughes relates the experience of a mother of small children, longing to eat a meal alone, a meal free from chicken fingers and buttered noodles. It was too evocative; I was physically jarred by her life's chaos.

Some of the essays are about dining alone at a restaurant, which of course everyone says is supposed to require tremendous courage. Personally, that's the sort of thing I never felt self-conscious about until I was told I ought. There are dozens of reasons for a person to be eating out, many of them not incompatible with solitude. I understand that a lot of people do find it daunting, but I don't know that I'll ever really understand why.

There are times when it stinks to eat alone, just as there are times when it stinks to work alone, or watch television alone, or sit in a church pew alone, or go to bed alone. In other words, if eating alone is a problem, the eating part doesn't seem like the real issue.

Culinary Therapy and the Multi-Week

Sorry for going missing, from CT, the blogosphere, and real life - I spent most of the week in the navel of Illinois (population 850) on business. I'm quite happy to be back, and if it didn't require me to divulge more about the project than would be approved by my employer, I'd tell you exactly how I came to go off-roading in a PT Cruiser.

On the other hand, perhaps I was participating in CT simply by being there, since everyone says 99% of the American diet (and 10% of the gasoline we use to go grocery shopping) is technically corn (my hotel room had a view).

Let's see, how am I behind? I still owe one Remembered Recipe demonstration from Week 2, which I've decided would be the Childhood Chicken Curry, because, of the top candidates from my List of Lost Food (ok, I'll try to stop the Oh-So-Significant Random Capitalization now), it's the one I've made least-recently (is there a better word for that concept?) that doesn't require turning on the oven. "Dinner" is not a sufficiently special occasion to turn on the oven in mid-August, at least not in this apartment.

What else? Oh, yes, Week 3 assignments.

Heart
First, let's give you something to think about while doing the other tasks:

• What motivates you to want to cook?

Wanting to eat, for one thing. Also the fact that not being able to always turns out to be a significant liability sooner or later. Also, I like being able to do it for other people, and try to take hospitality somewhat seriously (in terms of significance, not humorlessness). I'm also sensitive to the fact that, for any real pragmatism I may possess, I actually live precipitously close to being one of those useless intellectuals devoid of practical skills (this is how I justify myself to my cleaning lady - well, this and the arthralgia). So I like to make sure I can do some things.

I feel like there's some deep significance to the fact that this question even can be phrased in terms of preference, though I also feel like I just don't want to go there.

• What causes you to take joy in cooking?

Joy. That's one of those words I bristle at, since it's popular with new age lifestyle guru types who are trying to manipulate me into enthusiasm. (Yes, I realize it's also a term brimming with theological consequence, but getting comfortable with that is a process for me.) Anyhow, what do I enjoy about cooking, when do I enjoy cooking, etc.?

I guess I do enjoy it when I don't feel like I'm cramming it in between other things I need to do or want to do. Note that, just because I feel like I'm cramming it into my schedule, doesn't mean I actually am. I have the luxury of not joining the busy cult, so my schedule is rarely actually crammed. So I'm not sure why I feel that way.

I enjoy it when I can do it without having to trick myself into not looking at the dishes in the sink, or without having to go scrambling for a clean cutting board.

I don't enjoy it - or, at least, I don't have the patience for it, when I'm hungry. This is a problem for fairly obvious reasons - why would I cook if I'm not hungry?

I haven't attached any existential bliss to cooking, and I rather hesitate to do so, because that's not really any different than summoning up a mood. And you'll never always be in the mood, so that doesn't actually end up doing much in the way of providing impulse for something that pretty much always has to happen, in one form or other.

Breath
Clean out the storage where you keep basic pots and pans. You know the drill. Consider removing -- or at least storing elsewhere -- the items you rarely or never use. Deal with the dented and the broken. And put it all back in good order.

I've done this recently enough to be comfortable that everything's in order.

Bones
Evaluate whether your pot-and-pan stock matches with your most likely cooking habits. My relationship with vegetables would probably be improved if I owned a pot suitable for cooking small quantities of the dratted things.

I'm pretty sure this is ok. If, as my habits evolve, this turns out not to be the case, that's the sort of thing I can be trusted to notice and fix.

Head
Find a recipe for something you don't regard as scary-difficult but have somehow not gotten around to making. Make it!

Stay tuned.

CTW2

For the record, I did complete all tasks for Week 1. Here's Week 2.

Heart
Rummage through your brains (or your recipe books) for a dish you used to make "all the time" but have neglected in recent months (or years). Acquire the ingredients and make it! And photograph it (we like to see proof around here*). While you're at it, you might as well share the recipe. And tell us what the dish means to you. In fact... dish.

Here, off the top of my head:

Dishes inherited from childhood:

• Chicken Curry - I snagged this recipe the last time I was home, and shortly afterward found a copy of the cookbook it's from at a library sale.
  
• Spaghetti carbonara - recipe acquired in Italy. Actually made this for New Years.
  

Later:

• Moroccan Chicken - I most recently made this for relatives in North Carolina. They thought cooked olives would be weird, but liked it.
  
• Vegetable curry - from the 1997 Joy of Cooking
  
• Cottage Cheese Pancakes - Same.
  
• Onion Cheddar Bread with thyme - This was my housewarming and hostess gift. It tastes a lot less like stuffing than you'd think. I don't particularly like stuffing.
  
• Quiche - I like eggs. A lot.
  
• "The Pork Tenderloin" - this is an amazing recipe received from a colleague at my first job who was from St. Louis; originally published in their paper of record (the Post-Something?)
• Foolish Beans - named because the recipe was posted on the message boards of The Motley Fool. Don't ask.
  
• Refried beans - actually, I haven't entirely left off making these, but I include them because I class them chronologically with all of the above. Much healthier than you think.
  

The telling thing is that all of the dishes listed under "later" came into my life in the same era, namely 2002-2005. 2005 was when life (in the form of a weirdly stressful job situation, suddenly-much-longer commute and effective workday, and multiple simultaneous medical issues) finally broke my systems. The systems for shopping and cooking and eating and exercising and cleaning and doing laundry and bookkeeping and bill paying and whatever else functional people routinely do. Try as I might, I've never gotten fully un-derailed in that respect, even with the fresh start of moving half way across the country.

At any rate, when I look at that list above, I see an era with a very clean break at the end of it.

Breath & Bones

• To summarize: deal with dietary supplements and superfluous guidance documents.
  

All set.

Head
Find a good source to help you with whatever element of menu planning is important to you, whether it's nutrition, diet, the actual planning process, or something else. Your goal this week is not to execute the perfect weekly menu but to get your head in the game and lay the groundwork. If you have all the research and theory you need (or can stand), it's time to think about how to make using it the path of least resistance.

My issue, for now, is that "actual planning process," as discussed by zooza and scb. That part seems key to re-forming the general necessary habits that need to be in place before it makes sense to try to address the other issues. The problem, of course, is related to what I wrote under "Heart" above.

There's plenty of stuff out there about menu planning, of course, but as I commented at zooza's, a lot of it's overkill for me. Getting 21 meals on the table weekly for a family of four is a very different task than feeding one adult with an inconsistent appetite and a high capacity to tolerate redundancy. My lot is unquestionably the simpler one, but without adequate forethought or a controlling system, neither case is likely to yield satisfying results.

I've broken down the problem into several sub-issues, most of which will look inane at first glance:

• How to eat breakfast.
• How to eat lunch.
• How to eat dinner.
• What's the Toast alternative?
• You do snack, you know.
  

Put more clearly (and certainly more pretentiously), "How to eat breakfast" really means, "Identify the controlling philosophy and/or technique to be applied to meeting breakfast requirements." At this point, what matters is having an answer. So:

• How to eat breakfast. Do I stockpile bagels in my desk drawer, or is cold cereal the answer? Is their room in my life for oatmeal or cold pizza?
  
  
• How to eat lunch. Sandwiches? Salads? Leftovers? Where do they come from? Which one is most likely to happen?
  
  
• How to eat dinner. How often does a medium-sized and not-easily-bored individual actually need to cook to keep meal supply roughly equal to meal demand?
  
  
• What's the Toast alternative? Stir fried vegetables? Plate of pasta? Lean Cuisine? Realistically, we all probably need several of these - the grown up equivalent of the batch of fish sticks mom throws at the kids when there's only 20 minutes between piano lessons and soccer practice. But they need to be pre-defined in order to be effortless. In my case, this would also answer the question, "What to eat on Thursday when the week's dinners are used up."
  
  
• You do snack, you know. Well, sometimes I do. It depends on stuff. But good planning is the only way to make sure snacks remain, say, carrots and hummus, rather than Toast, or even toast.

So, where does that leave me?

With a lot of random thoughts like, "I really like sandwiches, so I should buy better bread," and, "What's a cost-effective source of mixed salad greens?"

And with a very skeleton plan along the following lines:

• Find Something That Works For Now to cover breakfast and lunch. Minor level of effort.
• Reacquaint myself with the dishes under "Heart," in the interest of getting back in the habit.
• Experiment after that.

That probably doesn't sound like as much progress as it actually is.

The Question of Grits

A belated addition to the little discourse about grits.

Google has lots of nice pictures of appropriately-prepared grits. Ignore the rappers.

Grits are generally sold in a cardboard cylinder, like oatmeal. In the raw, it looks like very coarse white cornmeal - hominy is technically corn with the germ removed by lye treatment, which sounds dreadful but actually increases the absorption of some of the nutrients in the corn (total protein is decreased slightly). It's an ancient preparation that predates European knowledge of corn. Grits are either that ground up or a combination of ground hominy with traditional cornmeal (which either retains some of the ground hull and germ, or has removed them by mechanical means).

It's eaten a lot of ways, including as a hot breakfast cereal, in a bowl, like oatmeal, but also as a culinary starch (like rice, or pasta, in casserole-type dishes, or like mashed potatoes, sitting next to the fried chicken at supper.). In part, this is varies by geography - Lauralynne's Shrimp and Grits hails from Charleston, SC, but is common on the Gulf Coast and in Florida. Growing up, I most often ate grits on a plate as a side dish to scrambled eggs.

They're cooked by boiling, like polenta, though you don't have to worry so much about the lumps. The traditional sort takes about 30 minutes to cook stovetop, which I suppose is why they're often served runny and tasteless at restaurants - they try to rush it. As you cook them longer, they become more solid, but also smoother and less "gritty." For home use, there are varieties that cook up faster, without being "instant." (There's also instant, but that's no good.)

If they're seasoned, it's with salt and/or butter, which is the same way oatmeal is eaten in that part of the world.

There are people who insist they should be infused with cheese (which, happily, is not related to any common preparation of oatmeal of which I'm aware).

It's the official prepared food of the state of Georgia.

There's a yellow version, which includes more of the hull, but this changes the flavor, nutrition, and method of preparation.

Bonus Gastronomical Narcissim

Filling out the CT questionnaire has of course triggered all sorts of additional self-reflection as regards food-related issues. This being the internet, of course, tradition dictates that I must transcribe and publish my every stream-of-consciousness for posterity. See below.

Stuff I really, really like.

• Spinach. Including creamed.
  
  
• Mushrooms (on a business trip a couple weeks back, the colleague I was traveling with noted that three of my four dinners were portobello-based).
  
  
• Sandwiches. Big fan.
  
  
• Including hamburgers.
  
  
• Chocolate chip cookies.
  
  
• And ice cream.
  
  
• Veggie pizza (see mushrooms, above).
  
  
• Most shellfish, though I basically don't cook seafood, for no discernable reason.
  
  
• Avocados. Could live on these. Good with shellfish.
  
  
• Hummus. Could eat it with a spoon.
  
  
• Artichoke hearts.
  
  
• Lamb, though it's also something I never cook, I think because I don't know how to eat it other than as "chunk of meat next to some vegetables and potatoes," which is very rarely how I cook or dine.
  
  
• Eggs, all ways. Try them with oregano.
  
  
• Black beans.
  
  
• Indian and Thai cuisines, though I take both mild. I don't really see the attraction of the flavor of pepper/capsaicin spicy - horseradish/wasabi-type spice I much prefer.
  

Stuff I won't be eating, either often or ever.

• Fish. Not shellfish - those are fine - but fish-fish, with scales and fins and gills and whatnot. Tuna, salmon, trout, etc. I don't know if I'm actually allergic in a clinical sense, but I feel ill after eating it, so I don't. Correllary: even when it's very fresh, all fish smells like cat food to me, so even before I started to notice that it disagreed with me, I didn't care for it much.
  
  
• Ham (mostly). This one is weird - the affect on me is similar to that of fish. Other forms of pork aren't implicated, including things like prosciutto and Canadian bacon, which technically are ham. I don't know what the deal is, but it's not my imagination.
  
  
• Pickles. I love them, but they don't agree with me. I guess it's the cucumber factor.
  
  
• The smell of overcooked green beans has always made me gag.
  
  
• Tart fruit. That sour bit under the skin of plums makes my jaw clench up involuntarily. I only buy sweet apples.
  
  
• I'm pretty indifferent to bell peppers and passively avoid them, though I'll eat them if they're put in front of me.
  
  
• Generally speaking, I don't like soup. I feel somewhat self-conscious about this, because if there's any catgory of food so broad that it should include something acceptable for everyone, it's soup. "I don't like soup" is a very different sort of statement from "I don't like green olives," or "I don't like Safeway's house brand soy milk." Soup can be...well, basically anything. Yet, with a very, very small number of exceptions, I never want to eat it.
  

Other

• My mother is from North Carolina; therefore, "barbecue" has nothing whatever to do with "barbecue sauce." This is one thing I find deeply annoying about the midwest, though I recognize the problem is entirely mine.
  
  
• Also, because my mother is from North Carolina, oatmeal is savory, not sweet.
  
  
• Speaking of hot cereal, I believe that grits are underappreciated because people don't know how to cook them. They should be cooked enough that they're eaten stiff, not runny.
  
  
• I remember, when I was a child, bringing grits with us whenever we visited my grandparents in Ohio, because at the time they couldn't often be found that far north. (This was southern Ohio, very near Kentucky - my hillbilly ancestors actually migrated from Kentucky to Ohio because of feuding, like the Hatfields and McCoys. Seriously. And not that many generations ago, either.)
  
  
• I bought grits on my first grocery run when I moved to Chicagoland. The cashier, who was from Louisiana or someplace, raved to us (My Sister the Blond Artist was with me) that she'd never before sold grits to anyone in all the time she'd been working at this particular grocery store.
  
  
• My first year or two living on my own, approximately 90% of the new recipes I tried contained plain yogurt. It wasn't intentional. There are only a couple I still make.
  
  
• I can't turn on my oven in the summertime, even a coldish summertime like this one. My apartment retains temperature extremely well, for the most part, but baking anything, even briefly, heats the entire place to an intolerable degree. This should be my hint to roast chickens all winter, since my heat is electric but cooking gas is included in the rent.
  
  
• I've loved cheese my entire life, except from ages 6-12, when the very thought of it made me sick. I've never known why.
  
  
• I'm not fond of cooking meat, though I'll do it.
  
  
• I've been thinking of this piece I wrote a few years back about grocery shopping in Greater Boston (formerly known on the book blog as "Selfimportantville"). Yet another aspect of life that's easier here (though I do miss being able to pick up a lobster roll in the prepared deli case).
  
  
• I've long had a strange desire to make a batch of bagels from scratch. I doubt I'd ever want to make a second batch, but it's one of those weird things I'd like to try for no particular reason.

Ok. That's enough.

Some time or other, this circle's gotta close.

Embodying, as I tend to do, the conflicting ideals of rigorous pragmatism and pathological introspection, I have a morbid fascination with discovering new and innovative ways of overthinking things. This specimen seems germane to the conversation at hand:

Here's what I want to say [about the foodie movement]: while I absolutely love fine food and laud the quantity of attention that goes into preparing and consuming same, I worry (quite a lot, actually) that there is something morally queasy about the arrangement. After eating a particularly fabulous meal I often wonder whether the combined energy spent on the vittles - not just the time and money, but the imaginative passion - might not be better spent on a broader, altruistic effort.

Some of this is your standard Jewish guilt, a way of punishing myself for the unbearable pleasures of the palate. But it's also true that a certain share of the left-wing zeal in this country has turned away from the looming crises we face as a species, and toward ornate sensual gratification.

This theory I have stolen, nearly verbatim, from my father, who has spent much of his adulthood considering such questions. Then again, he is capable of preparing a chicken cacciatore that would make Colonel Sanders weep for several weeks straight, so I'm not sure where that leaves us.

From Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, "Que Sera Sarito: An (Almost) Foolproof Plan to Never Eat Alone Again" by Steve Almond, p. 121.

Happily, this isn't the general tone of the collection. This particular essay is simply dripping with insecurity that's only half tongue-in-cheek, suggesting that writers should learn to cook because feeding people is a more efficient means than writing of manipulating them into paying attention to you. Almond also recommends that you always buy tiger tail shrimp, which will sound more impressive to the other customers at the fishmonger's than those ordinary shrimp. (Also included is a recipe for curried shrimp tacos that sounds utterly scrumptious.)

Cookbooks (not mine) (CT/W1/Heart)

As instructed, I went to the library to look at cookbooks. I wasn't much looking forward to it. Cookbooks are like romance novels, in that they're published in extraordinary quantities each year and are mostly indistinguishable from one another. Libraries accumulate them to such a degree (I counted 300 shelf-feet in my moderately-sized suburban branch) that to select one other than at total random would require hours of review.

Cookbooks fall under Dewey Decimal subdivision 641, "Food and Drink," Subclass 640 being, "Home Economics and Family Living" under Class 600, "Technology." The Cookbooks start after a few volumes about food generally - celebrations of wine and coffee and titles like The Cheese Primer and The Spice and Herb Bible, then books about food preparation that isn't quite cooking (The Joy of Pickling).

Once you get to the actual recipe collections, they progression is approximately thus:

1. General Titles, including some that seem to be competing for the medal in Most Comprehensive: How To Cook Everything; The Way to Cook; Cooking Worldwide.
   
   
2. Annual recipe collections from magazines.
   
   
3. Official Cookbook of X, where X = Berghoff's, The White House, Marshall Fields.
   
   
4. Fast and Furious: Meals in 30, 20, 15, 10 minutes, using 7, 5, 3, ingredients; everything "made easy," "short-cut" and "almost from scratch."
   
   
5. Cookbooks for conditions (diabetes, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome) and diets (low fat, low salt, gluten-free, vegetarian).
   
   
6. Seasonal eating (spring, fall, etc.).
   
   
7. Jewish food (?).
   
   
8. Holidays - mostly Christmas cookies.
   
   
9. Techniques: grilling, slow-cooking, microwave oven.
   
   
10. Ethnic and regional cuisine (alpha by nationality)
    
    
11. AMERICANA (sorry, it does shout); southern cuisine.
    
    
12. Ingredient-centric: Crazy for Corn; The Garlic-Lover's Cookbook; The Steak Bible.
    
    
13. Dish-centric: All things Bread, or Soup, or Salad.
    
    
14. Course-centric: heaviest in dessert, which winds up with several hundred books about cakes and cookies.

After the cookbooks come beverage preparation guides - bar tending manuals, yes, but also smoothie recipes. These segue into party planning, then napkin folding, then, quite rapidly, into real estate.

I did check out a few:

How to Cook Everything: The Basics. I suppose I got this one because the full volume wasn't there. Maybe I'm looking for some foundational thing that I never noticed I didn't know before.

Tasty. No idea.

What Einstein Told His Cook. I didn't go out looking for something on the science of cooking, but this one struck me as more intelligent than most.

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. Not really a cookbook, though it has a few recipes. A collection of essays about the practice of eating by oneself - mostly, it's writers admitting to eating mustard and tahini sandwiches for dinner five nights in a row, rather than a gushing guide to making very small quantities of beef burgundy and the like.

My own collection of cookbooks is relatively modest, so I think I'll post those later to see whether there's a chance of gleaning any insight from them (doubtful).

Food: The Cure.

Wende made a new game: Culinary Therapy. Week 1 directives are at the link. I'll cover breath/bones/heart later; here's the questionnaire.

Favorites (or not)

Is there a chef/cook, real or fictional, whom you admire? If so, what's the appeal of this person?

Hm. No. When you're talking the celebrity chef scene, I suspect one has to be a pretty serious foodie to be able to tell them all apart. Though watching old Julia Child shows during PBS pledge drives (they did this in Boston, since she was onWGBH first - they even replay the solicitation segments she filmed for them in the 60s) was always fun.

Is there a chef/cook, real or fictional, whom you find annoying? If so, what's the offense by this person?

I do find myself annoyed by Lidia Bastianich on PBS. It's just a personality thing.

Personal history

What's your earliest memory of cooking--or assisting with cooking--yourself?

I do remember cooking with my mother at a fairly young age - probably around 3. It was probably some form of baking, as that's really the only sort of cooking for which it isn't particularly hazardous to have a toddler standing on a chair next to you.

What do you consider to be comfort food?

I never know how to answer this question. I guess the right answer is most things tomato sauce-intensive. I also have a sweet tooth, which personally I see as a parallel issue.

What piece of cooking advice would you never take again?

"You should get your mother to teach you how to cook." This from my father, years ago, after several days of eating and genuinely complimenting my cooking. It wasn't a veiled hint that I needed help so much as a long-standing presumption that she has some sort of magical abilities to impart. She doesn't. She's a perfectly good cook, mostly by being organized and tidy and good at planning and following directions and having the good sense to not make bad recipes a second time. As a child I was even kind of smug that her homemade cookies came out round (not ugly and lumpy like the cookies made by those bad mothers...) and that she never did anything embarassing like use cheddar cheese in the lasagna for the church potluck.

But if I were to ask her to show me how to make Dish X from my childhood, the answer would always be, "Here's the recipe card." Which is totally fine with me - assuming I already know things like "How To Saute" (which I do) that's really all I need. She does have the advantage 25 years more experience than I have, but that falls into the category of "temporal reality" more than "transferrable skill."

Trying to be placatory, I did go ask her a bunch of questions that I legitimately had about various techniques ("what would you need to change to adapt a recipe for drop-cookies into one for shaped cookies?"), none of which she could answer, since I'm the one who thinks of things in terms of principles instead of procedure. Just a temperament difference.

(My father also asserts, "You should be good at cooking, because it's just like chemistry - you stir things together." It's not as though cooking is a mystery to him (though chemistry certainly is) - he's no gourmet, but could certainly provide himself with a generally appetizing and balanced diet if he bore responsibility for doing so.) (Obviously, real chemistry is relevant to some cooking - baking, mostly, and sauce-making, and some of the things people like to do to eggs - but if it were a prerequisite, most of us would have starved ages ago.)

What do you enjoy about cooking?

Being able to do it, if that makes sense. Also, it's good for me, because it tends to kill my appetite.

What do you dislike about cooking?

All the trouble and inconvenience of taking stuff out and doing stuff with it and cleaning it and putting it away. Especially the last two. Goodness, that doesn't sound spoiled-yuppie, does it?

What animal best summarizes your current cooking and/or eating habits?

Vulture. Not that I'm eating actual roadkill - I'm just eating whatever turns up.

Goals

What is bothering you about your current eating/cooking habits?

I'm being lazy, so feeding myself is just more expensive, inefficient and imbalanced than it ought to be. I could do worse, but I should do better.

What do you want to be able to say about your eating/cooking habits at the end of eight weeks?

She cooks. She eats. On purpose.

I think the key to getting there will be to re-discover the version of weeknight middle ground that works for me - I've somehow forgotten what comes between oatmeal for dinner and wild experimentation.

I'm at an advantage over some people who live alone in that I actually like eating the same thing several meals in a row. If it's something I particularly like, I'll very often crave it for several days after eating it - I've been known to make the same takeout order several times in a week - and there's no consistency as to what sort of dish triggers this reaction, so by indulging it I don't run the risk of eating nothing but pasta for a month (or, at least, no greater risk than would be presented by mere inertia). My efficient solution will doubtless harness this power, but I have to figure out how.

Ok. First a sandwich, then the library.