Lots of changes this week with regards to food blogging. First of all, I'm going to quit fucking around with my Powershot. Too much trouble having a separate device, only to be rewarded with people gleefully telling me what a terrible photographer I am. I'll instead just use my iPhone and its pretentious Instagram function. So I can enjoy people bitching about that instead. With that in mind, I don't have any photographs this week, for reasons to boring to explain. Also, all the food is from last week; I did some cooking this week but was too busy to record it. But I had all of last week recorded, and didn't put it up because my mom was visiting, so it all works out.
With that in mind, here's a picture of the first strawberry to grow on my patio. Its demise came moments after the taking.
Second of all, my CSA starts this week! I leave to go fetch it in about half an hour. So I think this is an appropriate time to go more hardcore and return to the CSA blogging I did last year. (For n00bs, this is what a CSA is.) The CSA is both more exciting and challenging than the farmer's market, because I don't have any control over what I get. If a vegetable is unusual, I have to learn to use it. If there's an abundance of something, I have to get creative in using it all up. Last year, I really used the opportunity to expand my cooking skills. Stuff I never did before, especially baking, became routine. I learned to enjoy root vegetables and to make my own veggie burgers. So it's all very exciting. Last year, I had just a veggie share. (Technically, a half share, which is what you want for two people.) This year, I added eggs and fruit. There was also an option to buy flowers, but that's just stupid with my plant-munching monsters around.
By the way, if you like reading about food challenges and vegetarianism, GOOD magazine has been doing some awesome stuff. I like this challenge of people sending pictures of vegetarian lunches. You can gripe and flame and try like hell to claim that veggies eat nothing but crap, defensive carnivores, but the evidence against you is piling up.
So, with that in mind, the last installment of the pre-CSA blogging:
Asparagus and zucchini barley risotto
As mentioned before, I love making risotto with barley instead of rice. It’s chewier and heartier-tasting, but has more protein (what’s up, vegetarians?) and fiber (and people who like to poop?) And since I’m eating asparagus like nuts until the small season is over, I figured I had to go with the classic pairing. So I put some barley in my Dutch oven on the stove with veggie broth and wine. It takes longer than rice, it’s okay to start it before you do anything else. Then I chopped up some green onions and added them with garlic to it. Then I chopped up asparagus and zucchini, and because I had oodles of time, I roasted it in the oven instead of putting it directly into the barley mixture. Then I added thyme from the garden, salt, pepper, and lemon zest to the risotto. When it was done cooking, I mixed in the veggies and topped it off with Parmesan cheese.
Vegetarian, but could be made vegan with vegan wine and no cheese.
Memorial Day/Ingloriuous Basterds viewing
For Memorial Day, I thought it would be fun to watch my favorite war movie of recent years, Ingloriuous Basterds. I started with dessert, because it was easy to get out of the way. I made some Jello vanilla pudding, split it into four martini glasses, and put it in the fridge (covered with plastic). When the time came, it was served with strawberries from the farmer’s market and whipped cream.
Took some cooked pinto beans and made bean puree with some fresh parsley and cilantro from the garden, as well as cumin, salt, pepper, and veggie broth. Put it in the fridge, but rewarmed it before serving.
Cut up and salted some zucchini.
Dinner was, in honor of both the fine-looking escarole at the farmer’s market and the Italian jokes in the movie, I made white bean and escarole soup. I added thyme from the garden and the beans were cannelloni beans from the farmer’s market that were very fresh.
Once that was simmering, I used some green onion, the salted zucchini, two eggs, some cornstarch, and some bread crumbs and seasoning to make a mix. Like I said, I prefer to do this kind of stuff in the oven instead of on the stove for health and ease reasons, so I made some patties, which were baked instead of fried. I did wait to put them in until I put in the buttermilk biscuits.
And lastly, I made cornbread,
Served the fritters with the warmed-up bean spread on top.
While I did all this, I was lucky enough to be reading the script for Quentin Tarantino’s next movie. A real page-turner, and appropriate considering the movie we watched with this dinner.
Some rare-ish good news: the USDA has finally caved to pressure from health advocates (including Michelle Obama) and switched from the misleading food pyramid to a far more health-centric pie chart called the "food plate".
Here's the old food pyramid:
This new food plate is a big improvement in many ways:
1) Visually. It's less confusing and gives the viewer a much better idea of how much of each kind of food to eat. The pyramid was a bit confusing on this front.
2) Accuracy. The food pyramid overrated certain foods over the actual health recommendations, mostly because of pressure from various industries.
3) Putting dairy in its place. One of the major problems with the food pyramid is it implied that not only is dairy a necessary part of a healthy diet, but that it was just as important as the protein category (and separate from it). This was heavily criticized, not just by vegans but by lactose intolerant people and equality-advocacy groups that pointed out, rightly, that the assumption of lactose tolerance is casually white dominated, since European-descended people tend to digest lactose on average better than everyone else. I eat dairy because I like it, but it's not an essential part of the diet by any means. The nutrients you get from it are available elsewhere and are often better absorbed from other sources. By putting dairy off to the side, the plate visually represents how we should approach it.
4) Vegetarian and vegan-friendly. The pyramid implied you need meat to live. This new food plate is more clear that you just need protein, which comes from a variety of sources.
5) The elimination of "fat and sugar". Even though the pyramid said to "use sparingly", the inclusion of fats and sugars was a cave to the junk food industry. It's not that you shouldn't have any fat or sugar, but there's more than enough of both in a regular diet that relies mainly on plants, whole grains, and lean proteins. Instead of seeing fats and sugars as part of the diet,they should be relegated to treats.
The website that the USDA put together for this is also a big shift in the right direction. In the past, attempts to tell people to "eat less" were killed off by industry lobbyists. But right on the front page you have "Enjoy your food, but eat less."
Now, I realize a lot of people are going to roll their eyes at this and wonder who gives a fuck. And that's a good question; most people don't even come close to following the USDA dietary guidelines. Even the old, inferior guidelines were leaps and bounds beyond how the majority of Americans eat. This is just a brutal fact; most people eat way more meat than they need to, way more sweets than they should, not even close to enough vegetables, and they guzzle sugary drinks. But that doesn't mean the USDA diet recommendations are useless. For one thing, they can be used to exert pressure for healthier school lunches. They also have cultural impacts. For instance, as any vegetarian can tell you, a lot of people really do think you need meat to live, and part of the reason is that it's in the food pyramid and treated like its own food group. (Yes, beans are in it, but have always been shoved to the back at the request of the meat industry.) Same story with dairy; Americans eat way more dairy than is really healthy, but we don't realize that because our very own government has been telling us for decades that it's normal and expected to eat a lot of dairy products. In reality, if more people simply cut their dairy consumption in half, they'd probably start feeling better pretty quickly. Most adult humans are lactose intolerant to certain degrees, and plus, you know, that stuff clogs you up. I eat dairy, like I said, but I try to relegate it to a dressing or a treat, and not a substantive part of my diet.
So, kudos to the USDA and Michelle Obama for finally getting this done. It's been a long time coming. This does shore up my suspicion that health care reform is going to inspire government agencies that touch on health-related issues, such as diet, to do a better job at promoting prevention.
Reader SapphireCate answered the call for some vegan or vegetarian recipes to share, and said she'd made this radish curry and highly recommends it. Curries are fun and easy, but i hadn't occurred to me to make them with radishes. Intriguing!
And here's some stuff I made this week:
Stir fry with tofu
I took a mix of on-sale veggies and some farmer’s market veggies (mainly young onions, scallions, and bok choy) and stir fried them with tofu. I like to press the tofu for a couple of hours and then pan toast it before adding the veggies, just to get it really dry and chewy. Then I put in most of the veggies with some soy sauce, ginger, vinegar, lemon juice, and a touch of wasabi. At the last minute, I tossed in some green beans and basil from the herb garden. Served over brown rice.
Vegan.
Roasted zucchini and farro
I really like the way the farmer’s market zucchini tastes roasted, so I sliced it up and roasted it with pepper and garlic salt. I cooked some farro, since I had it on hand, but I felt like I needed something more to put with all of it. So using this as inspiration, I took some balsamic vinegar, garlic, parsley and chives from the garden, salt, and pepper, poured it all over a chopped tomato and a bit of tomato paste, and then used the immersion blender to make a quick sauces I poured over the farro and roasted zucchini. Mixed in some feta cheese and then topped it off with Parmesan.
Vegetarian, but easy to make vegan by not adding the cheese.
Veggie burgers, asparagus soup, and blackberries with cottage cheese
Many people have asked for my veggie burger recipe. It’s basically Mark Bittman’s, but I made some for dinner, so here you go. Two cups of cooked beans (I used pinto this time), an egg, half a cup of oats, an onion, a little cornstarch, salt, pepper, spices of your choosing (I like smoked paprika). All in the food processor, and then I use a 4-inch cookie cutter to shape them. Fifteen minutes on each side in the oven at 350.
Chopped up some green onions and asparagus, cooked it a little in a pan with salt and pepper, covered it with veggie broth, added garlic, thyme, lemon juice, and sage. Immersion blender when it was done! And then some yogurt.
I made some yogurt sauce with green salsa, chili powder, and garlic in yogurt. Used that to dress the burgers (added some bean and beet spread I still had in the fridge for good measure), and served them on sandwich bread made with beer instead of milk, which makes it rise like crazy. Also, tomatoes. I meant to put sprouts on there, but I totally forgot to buy them. Doh.
On the side, I put little scoops of cottage cheese and blackberries. No need to fancy that up.
Playing to a full house and lost without Jon Stewart writing the jokes, Obama attempted to make a funny when he said, "I asked Michelle the other day, I said, 'What's your favorite food' ... She said, 'Ah, Mexican food.'" Then Obama issued a comedic warning: "You do not want to be between Michelle and a tamale."
According to the President's bad joke, a woman who's making a career of policing the plates of the whole nation does not let anything or anyone come between her and a tamale hankering.
Needless to say, she also lists the menu for the Cinco de Mayo event with a tone of high outrage that people at a White House party are eating super-duper-unbelievably fancy food.....like pico de gallo. No, I'm not kidding. She calls the Obamas "epicurean elitists", and this food is evidence:
Amidst green and red revelry, a Margarita bar and "corn and plantain chips served with Guacamole, Salsa and Pico de Gallo Tuna," the President gave a warm "Welcome to Cinco de Mayo at the White House."
Huh. I had no idea I graduated to "epicurean elitist" the first time I got a $1 barbacoa taco from a taco truck. Learn something new every day. Amusingly, this woman wants you to know that she totally speaks Spanish, unlike that grumble grumble President, and to prove it she translates the song title for "Oye Como Va" for her audience. (Though I think she misses that there's a subtle pun going on in the lyrics, or at least that's how I always understood it.) I'm surprised she didn't go the distance and translate "pico de gallo" for her audience, which, if taken literally enough, could create a whole new avenue for outrage.
Anyway, I think the lesson here is clear: We should all eat a tamale in solidarity with Michelle Obama. Just not one of those raisin ones. Those are unholy. Sadly, this week's food blogging doesn't involve any tamales, because I don't know how to make tamales, nor do I have the inclination to spend the amount of time that tamale-making really requires. I do miss them, though. I haven't eaten a single tamale since I moved to New York, not even on Christmas Eve. So I suppose next time I have a chance, I would crawl over the First Lady to get to it.
Well, here's some food I have eaten:
Snobby Joes, fruit salad, and zucchini
We were up for some comfort food, so I turned to this “snobby joes” recipe from Post-Punk Kitchen. I used kidney beans instead of lentils and carrots instead of bell peppers, because it’s what I had on hand. This is the perfect recipe for my mini-chopper, just doing one ingredient at a time.
I meant to roast the zucchini, but I blanked out on doing it on time, so I ended up just quickly cooking it in a pan with some thyme from the garden and red wine.
There were blueberries and mangoes left over from a party we’d had the night before, so I mixed them up with pomegranate seeds, poured some dressing made with dill, lemon, and honey over them and served that as a fruit salad.
Vegetarian, ‘cuz of the bread. Sorry the picture is blurry; it didn't look like that in the camera.
Chickpea pitas
I roasted a beet from the farmer’s market. Then I took some Swiss chard, also from the market, cooked it in a skillet with chickpeas, garlic, ginger, and parsley and dill from they herb garden, with some beer also leftover from the party. Added the beets. Served on pita bread with arugula and feta.
I cooked a lot more than this during the week, but it always seemed to be while rushing to do other things. So it ended up being really simple, quick food that I didn't have time to take pictures of. As you can see from the first picture, it's finally getting warm enough to eat dinner outside on our balcony some times. So that's inspiring, and would be more so if it could stay consistently warm and sunny.
Question for the peeps: I've been seeing some recipes for shaved asparagus salad, which requires the asparagus to be raw. Have you had this? Is it too bitter?
Asparagus, chives and tomatoes over pasta, blackberry shortcake
The cherry tomatoes were on sale at the grocery story, and the chives and asparagus were at the farmer’s market. It was a Saturday, so I just cooked the asparagus and chives in a skillet for a bit with salt and pepper, added white wine, added some dill and parsley from the garden, and then at the last second, cherry tomatoes. Herbs were chosen by the “what do I have lots of on the balcony” method. Poured in over fresh pasta.
I also got some blackberries, which I sprinkled with sugar, nuked for 45 seconds, and served over some leftover buttermilk biscuits that I warmed up in the toaster. With whipped cream, which I lazily bought and didn’t make.
Vegetarian.
Kidney beans in red wine, wasabi asparagus, and cornbread muffins
I’ve been on a beans-and-muffins kick. I made cornbread muffins to go with this kidney beans recipe. It’s basically 3 cups cooked beans, a green onion, garlic, carrots, a bay leaf, balsamic vinegar and red wine. I added in sage, thyme, rosemary, and parsley from the balcony garden. Simmered it while adding water for about half an hour, and then for the last ten minutes, put in the wine.
The asparagus was roasted after being doused in a sauce that’s just wasabi and soy sauce mixed. I’ve been doing a lot of asparagus, because duh! They’re in season and this is really when they’re good. The season is short so I’m pigging out while I can.
PhysioProf emailed me a link a blogged recipe in response to my call for submissions. It's not fully vegetarian, because it involves crabs, but here's an excerpt:
Boil about three cups of water, turn off heat, drop in dried porcinis, cover, and steep for about 20-30 minutes.
Strain out the liquid and put the reconstituted porcinis aside. Add this porcini liquid to two cups of vegetable stock, and then add water to a total of eight cups volume. Heat to a boil, reduce to a simmer, add salt to taste (be modest, as you can add more salt when you cook the risotto, and the parmigiano reggiano will also add salt), and cover this risotto cooking liquid.
Sautee the shiitakes until they have given up all their liquid and are tender. Remove from pan and reserve.
Sautee the onions and shallots with a generous amount of fresh-ground black pepper until carmelized. (I actually “dice” the shallots and onions in a food processor, and pretty much puree the shitte.)
Add the rice and sautee until getting translucent (about 5 minutes).
Add a bigge-asse splash of corenwijn and about one third of a bottle of italian dry white wine, and turn heat down to low. Cook the risotto in the usual way, adding in ladles of the hot porcini/vegetable broth as needed. When it’s about halfway done, throw in the porcinis and shiitakes. When it’s done, turn off the heat and add the parmigiano and mix well to incorporate it.
And a helpful image of what cooking risotto looks like (with wine!):
I'm happy to run recipes that you just email me, if you can attach pictures with them. So feel free to deluge me. Just one thing: I ask for vegetarian or vegan, with an emphasis on seasonal. Anything that you get at the farmer's market or is on sale at the grocery store, produce-wise, is likely seasonal, so don't be intimidated by this request. On to my recipes for the week.
Beer-cooked black beans and chard, cornbread muffins
We had been at the museum all day, so I needed something simple and quick. I’d been soaking black beans, so I used Bittman’s recipe to make black beans in beer. You carmelize the onions, add 3 cups of cooked black beans, garlic, a cup of beer, a bit of honey, salt, pepper, and chili powder. I also crumbled up a dried red chili from a bag I bought at the farmer’s market. Cook for 15 until it’s not very wet.
I had a lovely bunch of Swiss chard from the farmer’s market, so I quickly cooked that up in another pan with just salt and pepper. Tossed it with the beans.
Served all this with cornbread muffins that I had cooking while this was going.
Vegetarian, since cornbread has eggs and buttermilk.
Zucchini and asparagus faro, strawberry salad
Zucchini and asparagus started to show up at the farmer’s market, so I bought some. Faro was on sale at the grocery store, as were strawberries.
I cut up the strawberries and made salads with them with a quick-made balsamic dressing that used basically balsamic vinegar and a touch of olive oil.
Cooked the faro in one pot. Cut up the asparagus and zucchini and put it in the other, sweated it a bit, put in some diced tomatoes, and then basil, parsley, and thyme from the herb garden. Added the cooked faro. Served both salad and faro with garlic salt, pepper, and lots of Parmesan.
A reader asked me on Formspring if I would take submissions for Food Saturdays. Usually, I say no to people asking if they can submit something (though once in a blue moon I'll ask someone to write something), because going through submissions and telling people no is above my pay grade here. But it seems like a harmless enough thing with these posts. I'd just ask that anyone submitting follow the format, including sending pictures and a casual walk-through of how they made it, with an emphasis on vegetarianism and as much local food as you can pull in.
Marinated and baked tofu, potatoes
Sundays are a good day to cook with tofu, because you can start pressing it really early, as I did at 2PM. I pressed it for a couple hours, which gets it nice and dry, and then marinated it in vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, garlic, thyme and bay leaves. I let that sit for an hour and then baked it for 45 minutes at 375.
I cut up a bag of red creamer potatoes that were on sale, put them in my Dutch oven, and poured a mix of veggie broth, lemon, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper, and mustard over them. Put the lid on and roasted it alongside the tofu.
Served the tofu on sandwiches, and the potatoes on the side with mustard.
Vegan.
Wheatberry, lentils and chickpeas, roasted zucchini
I used a recipe that called for chickpeas, wheatberries, and lentils with fresh tarragon from my herb garden that’s really thriving on my balcony. I cooked the ingredients separately, browned some onions and garlic, poured the lentils, wheatberries, and chickpeas together, warmed it up, and added salt, pepper, tarragon and parsley from the garden.
Roasted some zucchini with garlic salt and dried herbs. I still had some roasted potatoes left over, so I nuked those and we ate them as well.
Vegan, except that I hit everything with Parmesean.
It's been a crazy week at Marcotte HQ, so I didn't get a lot of interesting cooking done. Lots of sandwiches I've shown before and fajitas, and eating out with friends (including a feminist-heavy Passover), so I only have one meal to show this week. But it was an awesome one! It's a sort of changing-of-the-guard meal, combining the spring vegetables that are beginning to show up for cheaper prices at the grocery store plus the last dregs of winter vegetables at the farmer's market.
Artichoke sauce, millet croquettes and turnip puffs
I love artichokes, but they’re a pain to eat, so I thought I’d experiment by making them into a sauce with a recipe I got from the library. I cut them up and boiled them with a bay leaf, garlic, thyme, and parsley, and when it was all tender, pureed it with the immersion blender.
While that was cooking, I peeled and cubed some turnips and put them in water and boiled them. I then preheated the oven and separated the eggs. Beat the eggs. (Recipe for turnip puffs here.) Having farm fresh eggs makes this all much easier. The yolks are way firmer.
Started the croquettes. I already had cooked millet in the fridge, so it was just a matter of getting veggies going. Since it was all going to go in the food processor, I roughly chopped up carrots, mushrooms and green onion. Put them on the skillet with thyme to soften ‘em up. Put ‘em in the food processor with 2 c. millet, 1 cup breadcrumbs, and some cornstarch and an egg, since I leave nothing to chance. Formed the mix into patties on a baking sheet with my 4-inch cookie cutter. Put them in the over for 15 minutes on each side.
Mashed the turnips up with the eggs per the instructions, put them in a baking dish with bread crumbs, and into the oven for 40 minutes. Served them with the artichoke sauce. There was a ton of artichoke sauce, so I've been pouring it on all sorts of food since then, like sandwiches and the like.
Since I’m a glutton for punishment, I made chocolate chip cookies after all this.
Since we made all our fund-raising goals for the abortion fund, I have a lot of promises to keep! (Of course, you can still donate and help us wildly exceed our goals here.) And, as you all know, my food posts have attracted a surprising amount of haterade, though I’ve made my peace with it. (I remembered that a woman writing about anything considered traditionally feminine—-fashion, wedding planning, motherhood, housekeeping, crafts—-is going to face people insisting that she’s a complete failure who should be ashamed of herself. I shouldn’t expect an exception from this rule. Plus, some of the comments are typical of the way that vegetarians get harassed generally.) However, it’s so strange that it gets so ugly that I promised, if we got up to $1,500, that I would introduce democracy into the situation. I’m going to put up a poll to settle this question once and for all. And I promise to adhere to whatever the results are without complaint.
Now that’s done, and the fate of Food Saturdays hangs in the balance. Let’s move on to this week’s food—-it may be the last!
Sweet PLTs and black bean soup
I had lots of cooked black beans on hand, and I bought some celeriac at the farmer’s market, so I thought it would be interesting to combine these two ingredients into a black bean soup. I did it the same as you would otherwise—-lots of spicy stuff, onions, garlic, all with the immersion blender, but added the celeriac to give it a smokier feeling. Dolloped with yogurt and salsa verde.
Marc and I recently ate at this sandwich shop, which had really good food, even though I continue to find it funny to find the small towns of West Texas to be romanticized to the point where people are naming restaurants after them. Anyway, Van Horn had a vegetarian/upscale play on the BLT called the PLT, which used chips made of sweet potatoes instead of bacon, and garlic aioli instead of mayo. It was insanely good, so I thought I’d try to make it at home. I made the chips by putting a sweet potato in my food processor on the mandolin function, and then baking them in the oven with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika (because the restaurant had smoked the potato, which I don’t have the capability of doing). Instead of aioli, I used rosemary garlic goat cheese from the farmer’s market, and I caved and bought half a loaf of white sourdough from the farmer’s market for the bread. And to make it clear I was being snooty, I used arugula for the lettuce, but the tomato was a boring old tomato. I think my reverse engineering was a success, but it was a sandwich and easy to do.
I would recommend this meal as a good way to convince someone that vegetarian food is way more fun than the same meat-and-potatoes.
Baked sweet potatoes with black beans, roasted asparagus
This is basically working with the same ingredients as before—-part of being a seasonal cook with only two eaters in the house means having to use the same kinds of things over and over, but luckily, Marc and I are both huge fans of black beans and sweet potatoes. It’s a Texas thing.
This one was simple. I wrapped the sweet potatoes up in foil, and baked them. While I was doing that, I washed and prepped the asparagus for roasting. Put it when the clock had run down to 20 minutes. Then I cut up some green onions and browned them slightly with garlic, added two cups cooked beans, tomato paste, salt, pepper, cumin, and chili powder. Dashed some veggie broth on it to liquefy the tomato paste, and got it warm.
Served that mix over the baked sweet potatoes, and had asparagus on the side. I didn’t take pictures, because my camera battery had run out. But it’s a good second way to work with these ingredients.
I had about a cup of beans left over, so I made some black bean sauce with some down time in the kitchen. That just is used over the kind of food I eat for breakfast and lunch—-cooked grains and veggies, veggie burgers, omelet. Simple stuff.
This article by Megan McArdle on the gap between American cooking fantasies and cooking realities is prevented from being truly interesting by McArdle’s inability to understand that most Americans don’t live in bubbles where they and all their friends are fairly wealthy. She relies on statistics that are drawn from the public at large when determining how much less time people are spending in the kitchen, of course, but then turns around and assumes that owning top end appliances and fancy kitchen gadgets that cost hundreds of dollars to do one thing is typical for Americans. It’s a shame her worldview is so limited by wealth and privilege, because I think she does brush up against an interesting paradox, where Americans are spending more time thinking about cooking while spending less time actually doing it.
Her article is all about the kitchen as conspicuous consumption for wealthy people—-thousands of dollars of knives that don’t leave their display blocks, high end ovens used to store clothes, kitchens that have open plans that look great but make actual cooking a pain in the ass—-but I’m more fascinated by the working and middle class interest in food that’s also on the rise while actual hours cooking are down. There’s not just a surge in unused fancy stoves being sold, but you also have the Food Network, the explosion in food magazines that shun the intimidating Gourmet aesthetic, the existence of Martha Stewart, food blogs—-forms of food porn that suit the incomes of people who don’t have the kind of money that McArdle thinks comes standard with a U.S. birth certificate. And this is more interesting, because rich people buying fancy shit to show off is nothing new, but not-rich people engaging in media about cooking and food speaks to more than simply showing off how much money you have.
I think a lot of it is that we are the land of good intentions. We claim we’re going to church, but we’re not.* We write New Year’s resolutions. We buy books and forget to read them. We start projects and don’t finish them. It’s not that we don’t have time, exactly. We certainly have time to watch TV. It’s just that stuff we “should” do gets characterized as work, and no one wants to work for a living and then go home and do a bunch of work for free. We want to have fun—-and god dammit, we do in fact deserve it—-and TV is fun. I’m as guilty as anyone—-right now, I have art that needs to be hung, a carpet that needs to be laid out, and balcony that needs to be arranged. I’ll probably get to it soon. Hopefully in part because I just outed myself.
I think cooking touches on both the urge to be more productive around the house, but it’s also about our bodies and health, and if it wasn’t in the past, it sure is now. I doubt there’s many of us left who don’t think about the fact that food eaten out tends to be more calorie-dense while less nutritious than what you’re likely to cook at home, even if you’re making the crap that is often featured on some of the more bafflingly popular Food Network shows. We all want to be “better” at this, so we spend more time and money thinking about it—-watching Food Network, buying food magazines, and yes, buying expensive kitchen gadgets. But cooking is still work. It’s still constructed as a chore. Which is why I think Megan’s piece kind of fell apart, besides the class issues. She claims that all these food porn things are about believing cooking is fun—-a leisure activity—-but if that were true, I think people would actually be doing more of it. I think these food porn industries are being driven by aspirations, in the same category as gym memberships that go unused and musical instruments that collect dust.
But I do think that if cooking were in fact viewed more as a pleasurable way to spend time, instead of a chore that you should be doing but just aren’t, then more of it would be done. Of course, I have no clue what it would take to get there. God knows my own experience isn’t helpful; I have always been someone who has boundary issues between what is “work” and what is “play”, which I think is typical of hardcore bloggers as a group.
*The nice thing about being an atheist is that what you want to do lines up neatly with your desires. If you believe, as I do, that religion is actually immoral for being based on a lie, it’s awesome, because you get to live your morals by sleeping in on Sunday.
Reading this dizzying array of Fox News attacks on various initiatives to promote healthy eating, I think it’s time for an expanded theory on the right wing War on Health. I mean, on one level, this is just pure culture war. Healthy food and exercise have been relegated to “hippie” behavior, and sitting on your ass stuffing fried food in your face has been associated with “Real America”, and so even the most innocuous reference to healthy habits causes a knee-jerk culture war reaction. It’s a lot like the ridiculous temper tantrum over energy efficient light bulbs. (The most comical version of this fight in my direct experience was when I was on Bloggingheads, and my conservative debate opponent decided to rationalize this silly culture war tantrum with the usual aesthetic arguments. Sadly for her, I actually had one of the demonized light bulbs directly on my face—-we were buying energy efficient light bulbs before it was the law, man—-and was able to address her argument directly. The aesthetic argument is a favorite because people usually don’t have the direct evidence on hand to refute it, but alas, Mollie didn’t get lucky that day.) But the War on Health is particularly ridiculous because it seems so self-defeating for the people who buy in to it.
I think my favorite example from this long list has got to be Fox News throwing a fit because the New York City Health Department issued health guidelines for its employees that discouraged serving fried food at work events. And that’s in a list that includes a fit thrown because Michelle Obama had an exercise theme for the annual White House egg roll. It’s the futility of the fit-throwing that amazes me. There is no real downside to discouraging fried food at work events, and all upside. In fact, I would recommend that work places serve only healthy food with a vegetarian option at work events for employee morale. When you present a pile of sugared food and fried food and there’s nothing for vegetarians, it can be disheartening for a large percentage of your employees. People who are diets are excluded,* vegetarians are excluded, health nuts are excluded, and people who have restricted diets under a doctor’s orders are excluded. If your doctor told you that you really must watch your diet, and your work event is serving fried chicken and ice cream, you’re going to feel punished. Salads, make-your-own sandwich plates, fruit plates, grilled chicken, that sort of thing? Much easier to accommodate everyone. Until it became a culture war issue, everyone liked fruit and sandwiches.
I think part of the problem here is that wingnuts got themselves worked up into such a frenzy over health care reform that health itself started to be demonized through guilt by association. The words “health” and “healthy” have joined the long list of hot button words that set the wingnut brain into Hate Liberals Urg mode. It’s more a free association thing at this point. An Obama + the word “health” = Fascist Death Panels Abortion Taxes. It’s concerning, since this stuff tends to feed itself. I worry that soon there will be right wing theories that eating vegetables will kill you, a sort of internal death panels thing, or maybe a broccoli abortion.
*Yes, I know that it’s bad to be “on a diet”, but the solution for that is critical analysis of the diet industry, not bullying people in the workplace or making them feel excluded.
But I did do some cooking! As usual, this is just a sampling—-without a CSA to really give this structure, I’m just picking randomly what I think was most interesting. I can’t wait until it starts up in June!
Wheatberry and chickpea paella, green beans with dressing
Earlier in the day, I cooked some chickpeas and wheatberries while I made coffee and breakfast. Which made dinner easy, because all I had to do was toss everything together to make this recipe. I tweaked it a bit, using fresh instead of roasted red peppers and green onions instead of leeks, but mostly it was the same.
I also boiled (briefly) some green beans, which I tossed with a dressing made of lemon juice, red wine vinegar, garlic, mustard, a touch of olive oil, and thyme. The immersion blender made it super easy.
One of the great things about cooking bags of beans instead of buying cans is you not only save money, you have lots of leftover beans, so you don’t have to start from scratch. I had tons of chickpeas left over from the paella, so I decided to see if I could make hummus with my immersion blender. First I chopped up two cups of chickpeas with my mini-chopper. Then I put in the olive oil, tahini, garlic, lemon, cumin, parsley, salt and pepper and went after it with the immersion blender, to great success.
I served the hummus on sandwiches with beets, sprouts, and cucumber slices, and a dab of yogurt.
I also made parsnip soup with onions, garlic, cumin, turmeric, lots of ginger, and chili powder. For the last bit, I peeled and cut up sweet potatoes, sprinkled salt, pepper, and cinnamon on them, and roasted them at 400 degrees for an hour.
I only had time this week to record one meal cooked—-I did more, but just didn’t have the time or think it was interesting enough to record—-but I did embark on a project that I want share. Cookbooks, I think, are fun and inspirational, but they cost money and take up space. And often you only use only like 10% of the recipes. So I don’t buy them and instead try to work with the few I have, get recipe ideas online, and make shit up as I go along. But I discovered that our local library charges $.10 a copy, and so I devised a way to make a cheap cookbook for myself. What I’ve been doing is checking cookbooks out of the library, putting Post-It notes on the recipes I like, and copying those pages before returning the cookbooks. I then got some cheap binder-making supplies, which you can see to the side, and using those, I made a DIY cookbook. Because it’s DIY, I can organize it however I like, and so I organized it according to needs more than categories, making tabs for “cold weather veggies” and “warm weather veggies”, for instance, and making separate tabs for potatoes and for anything involving cheese, which I tend only to use in spurts. I now have like 60 recipes in there, for almost no money at all, and I can keep adding.
Asparagus and lemongrass risotto, sautéed broccolini
This idea was borrowed from Veganomicon, made with barley instead of rice and just generally taking the recipe as a hint not a guide. Chosen because I was eager to use some of the herbs I’ve planted in my balcony garden—-still small—-and because I had lots of asparagus and basil on hand. Also, a fuck ton of lemons. I cut up some asparagus and onion, and then cut all my meager chives and lemongrass down to an inch and chopped that into the veggie bowl.
Started some barley with veggie broth.
Put chopped asparagus, onion, lemongrass, and chives in a skillet with ginger, garlic, soy sauce, chili powder and then cut up a lemon and squeezed it over everything while it cooked. Poured it into a bowl, and cleaned out the skillet, which I then put back on the heat.
While it was reheating, I zested a lemon and then sautéed the broccolini according to this recipe.
I had a ton of basil (this is why I try not to buy it at the store—-you overpay and get way more than you need, and then you have to use it all up before it runs out and it’s never as good anyway, but I cracked last week so there I was), and so I then used my herb scissors to cut some of it up over the cooked asparagus mix while the barley finished up. Then poured the entire mix into the barley.
This meal is completely vegan and lemon-y to boot. I un-veganed it by putting Parmesan cheese on it, but this is, of course, completely optional.
I was really lucky last night to be on a panel hosted by the Reproductive Health Access Project, who are working to integrate contraception and abortion into primary care so that women don’t lose access. The panel was on whether young women care about reproductive rights, and the panelists assembled—-myself, Jasmine Burnett, Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, and Shelby Knox—-were there to argue that they do, but it’s invisible activism for a number of reasons. One that we were key to focus on was intersectionality, a word that often causes consternation and is often used in a reductive way to discuss just race-gender issues. We were using it in the broader sense, and pointing out that young people today (maybe always) are intersectional as a matter of course, and don’t draw lines between things like environmental activism, reproductive health access, rights, and health care. I do believe they were taping it, so I can hopefully get that up at some point in the future rather than recap what was an amazing, deep panel.
But I do want to point out that Jasmine made an astute comment, when she was talking about how people are organizing around Republicans trying either to cut Planned Parenthood or all Title X funding—-depends on what bill you’re looking at, though both passed the House—-and she said that this comes hand in hand with cutting WIC, cutting education, cutting food stamps, that sort of thing. The WIC cuts in particular are scary because the Republicans seem very determined to do this. Mark Bittman wrote about a fast that he’s participating on in support of WIC.*
[The poor] are — once again — under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1. The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine) and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted “Welfare Reform 2011” bill. (There are other egregious maneuvers in H.R. 1, but I’m sticking to those related to food.
For pro-choice liberals, this sort of thing is absolutely maddening in its lack of logic. I addressed this some in my Slate article about how the Pence amendment actually costs money up front and in the long term, but what tends to get liberals really pissed off is that Republicans are willing to force women to have children against their will, and then they turn around and deprive women of the sort of support they need to raise those children, including WIC. But as I quoted my friend Lindsay Beyerstein saying, the reason intersectionality on the left isn’t optional is that the right is intersectional always. Jasmine declared there is a link between defunding family planning and defunding the means to feed those babies that are born whether planned or not. I agree, even though it seems contradictory to a lot of liberals. And while this is a war on the poor generally, the main target is poor women, and I think we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
The conservative analysis—-if you can call it that—-that ties the prevention of unwanted child-bearing together with the use of public assistance to feed born children is that they blame feminism for both these things, which they consider evil. The argument is rooted in the idea that it’s god’s/nature’s will that women should be dependent on men, but as women are functionally feeble-minded children, they rebel against their god-given roles (and that rebellion is feminism), and so they often have to be brought into line with force. Having children makes women see how they need to be submissive to men, because it escalates their dependence. So getting them bearing children as soon as possible is critical, even if by force. The view is that government assistance was created through a collusion of feminists and the federal government to allow women to have children but escape their natural role as dependent on men. This argument is often expanded to attack men living in poverty, to impugn their manhood by saying they refuse to grow up and provide for their families. That we have 10% unemployment has not budged the Republican argument that all impoverishment is due to laziness and rebellion against god-given gender roles.
Because of the Women in the World Summit, I didn’t get to this yesterday. Apologies!
I will say that it’s starting to get warm, so I bought four herb plants and am starting to move in that direction. If this was Texas, I could have started a month earlier! But I’m not complaining, since we now have a balcony, so I can actually grow more than three pots worth of stuff. What are you doing this year, garden-wise?
Millet bake, potatoes, and soup
I was really busy, so it was stuff I could shove into the oven and not think about night. So I pan-toasted some millet, and then poured it in a Dutch oven with some turnips, parsnips, carrots, and thyme and then poured some veggie broth over it. Put that in the oven at 375, and some chopped up potatoes in another pan for roasting. Let that go for 45 minutes.
I had also made some squash soup with carnival squash that as $1/piece at the farmer’s market, so I warmed that up and served it. Very autumn-ish meal, though in March.
Vegan.
Apple betty, cornbread muffins, barbeque beans
I had another need for a toss-it-in the-oven night, and also a use-what’s-on-hand-so-you-don’t-have-to-go-shopping night. I had some apples, some cooked pinto beans, some BBQ sauce from earlier and the usual baking supplies. So I made cornbread muffins (easier to handle than cornbread). I peeled the apples, used the food processor mandolin to slice them, spread them in a baking dish with breadcrumbs, sprinkled brown sugar, butter and cinnamon on top, and tossed that in the oven with the muffins.
I then took the beans, mixed them with the BBQ sauce, sprinkled bread crumbs over that, and tossed it in as well. Then went back to work while it all baked.
Lots of changes this week with regards to food blogging. First of all, I'm going to quit fucking around with my Powershot. Too much trouble having a separate device, only to be rewarded with people gleefully telling me what a terrible photographer I am. I'll instead just use my iPhone and its pretentious Instagram function. So I can enjoy people bitching about that instead. With that in mind, I don't have any photographs this week, for reasons to boring to explain. Also, all the food is from last week; I did some cooking this week but was too busy to record it. But I had all of last week recorded, and didn't put it up because my mom was visiting, so it all works out. 
Reader SapphireCate answered the call for some vegan or vegetarian recipes to share, and said she'd made 
I cooked a lot more than this during the week, but it always seemed to be while rushing to do other things. So it ended up being really simple, quick food that I didn't have time to take pictures of. As you can see from the first picture, it's finally getting warm enough to eat dinner outside on our balcony some times. So that's inspiring, and would be more so if it could stay consistently warm and sunny.
PhysioProf 
Sorry for the lack of posting yesterday afternoon, I was rushing on this piece for 
I was really lucky last night to be on a panel hosted by the 
