3 posts tagged “cooking”
Every morning for breakfast I eat a slice of rhubarb or zucchini bread. I've been making the stuff for years, six loaves at a time, from a recipe I cut out of the back of a flour bag. The recipe has variations for zucchini, apple, pumpkin and carrot loaves. Because I get large amounts of rhubarb and zucchini in my garden, that is what my bread usually consists of.
I made a batch of the rhubarb kind this morning, and even though I know the recipe by heart, I pulled it out because I wanted to check how far I have come from the original.
My first modification, when I still had small children at home, was to triple the recipe, which made only two loaves. I was in industrial production mode in those years, and wouldn't turn on the oven unless there was a substantial amount of food to bake. But all I did was to multiply each ingredient by three and note that carefully on the margin. At the time, I firmly believed that if one worked hard and observed the rules, things would work out and life would make sense.
The history of my later adjustments parallels the history of dietary fads in America. In the 70s it was all about unrefined flours and fiber, so I replaced white flour with whole-wheat and added a cup of oat bran for good measure. The resulting bread was a little less dessert-like than the original, but nobody complained.
When sugar was revealed as the source of all evil, I cut the amount the recipe called for by half. In a household whose members were denied sugar except on major holidays, half the amount was better than none, so again, there were no complaints.
Remember in the 80s, when fat, any fat, was thought to be a killer? Emboldened by the success of my previous modifications, I decreased the amount of oil by a third. At this point, I began to wonder whether the loaves would cook properly. I was, after all, messing with some pretty significant ingredients. But the bread held together well, though it tasted even more Spartan than before.
Then came the emphasis on eating more fruits and vegetables, which happily coincided with my having, once again, a garden. So I increased the amount of fruit from six cups to ten. Surely, I thought, the loaves will fall apart now. They didn't. In fact, the big increase in fruit made them moister and tastier.
Then one time I was making the rhubarb recipe, which calls for grated lemon peel, and I didn't have a lemon. I threw in some lemon extract instead, again expecting disaster, but the bread tasted fine. Now I use lemon extract all the time, and ignore the voice inside me (whose voice, I wonder?) that tells me that this just isn't right.
The recipe also calls for the use of an electric beater, but since there is no way all that dough is going to fit in my mixer, I use the biggest spoon I have, and sort of stir and beat until my arm starts getting tired. The loaves rise all the same.
This leads me to two conclusions:
that I have stumbled on the world's most flexible and forgiving recipe, and
( an important lesson for a Catholic school girl like me) that taking liberties with the rules is not always a bad thing.
November
23, 2008
This fall, one of the strategies I invented against the economic crisis was to scavenge pumpkins. The week after Halloween, people were as glad to get rid of them as my chickens were to eat them. Last week, however, when everything froze up, I noticed that it was taking the chickens a lot longer to eat their pumpkin. It must have hurt their beaks to bang them over and over into that block of orange ice.
Still, when a friend offered her leftover pumpkins, I could not turn them down. They were beautiful pumpkins, bright orange, and not a mark on them. And they were frozen solid. Driving home, I considered the situation. If I put the frozen pumpkins in the chicken house, the hens wouldn't touch them. Then a thaw would come, the pumpkins would get squishy, and the chickens might eat one or two before everything froze again, or the pumpkins rotted. A shameful waste of pumpkins, either way.
I took the five pumpkins in the house and put them on the kitchen counter to defrost overnight. What would I find in the morning? Would the pumpkins deliquesce like Dali watches? Would they explode and spatter everything with juice and seeds?
Next morning the pumpkins still sat, orange and intact, on my blue counter. They were not rotten or moldy or icky in anyway--just a bit soft. No way was I going to throw them on the compost. They were food, filled with vitamins and calories, and somebody—the chickens or the dogs—would benefit from them. But I would have to cook them.
I took a deep breath, sharpened my Chinese chopper, and set my big stock pot on the stove. I chopped the five pumpkins--saving the seeds for the chickens--and steamed them (this took a long time). When they were done, I cooled them and strained them and stuffed them into sixteen quart-sized jars, which I wedged into our overflowing freezer. Then I scrubbed the stock pot in the sink and wiped my brow.
There, I said, that's done! Waste not, want not. That will show AIG and those other malefactors....
But wait. Waste not? How many hours had I spent trying not to waste the five pumpkins? How much of my unique spirit and creative energy had gone into those sixteen jars? “An expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Shakespeare wrote. He was talking about lust. I am talking about pumpkins. Still, if we're talking economics here, the expense of spirit has definitely got to be accounted for.
October 25, 2008
I've decided to start cooking for my dogs. This was not a major, life-altering decision. However, in my efforts, such as this one, to save the world by living more sustainably, locally, organically and simply, I often end up in a morass of alternatives, possibilities, unintended consequences, and their attendant feelings of dread and apprehension.
O.k., I told myself, cooking for the dogs is a good thing to do, and not a big deal. It is good because everybody, except for dog-food manufacturers and some conservative veterinarians, agrees that home-cooked food is better for dogs than even the best industrially produced food. It is good because the kibble I presently feed my dogs (it has the word “gold” in the name, and the price of gold on the label) costs more, pound per pound, than what my husband and I eat for dinner most nights. It is good because I can buy the meat and rice at the nearby grocery store—the veggies and eggs will come from our garden and chickens—thus avoiding a 25-minute trip to the pet store to purchase the gold food, which will save time and help to avert global warming.
And it's really not a big deal. I can buy the meat and rice in large quantities. And cooking for dogs is a snap (I've done it before): you just brown the meat in a big pot, bung in the rice and enough water to cook it. Then you add the roughly chopped veggies and anything else, like eggs, sardines, or powdered milk, that you feel inspired to include. When the rice is done you stir the whole mess, ladle it into containers that will hold a day's ration, and freeze.
On the other hand, I may be fooling myself. I'm going to be cooking for two German Shepherds, who together total roughly 180 lbs of dog. In the store, I'll have to hunt around for the cheapest source of protein available—ground beef, cottage cheese, canned fish or whatever. I'll be lucky if I can fit a single week's worth of dog dinners in my huge stock pot. And not only will I have to find a way to store these huge amounts of food in our freezer but, even more difficult, I'll have to remember every day to take out the next day's ration so it has a chance to defrost...and with our house temperature presently hovering around 60F, defrosting takes a while. In the face of all this, measuring out a couple of cups of kibble and pouring them into a dish seems like the soul of simplicity.
Nor is cooking dog food at home free of ethical complications. Since there is no way I can afford to feed my dogs locally-grown, grass-fed beef, I will end up buying meat transported from God-knows-where (thus canceling out my gas savings), from animals fed ecologically harmful grain diets and confined in feedlots and slaughtered in ways that...but I won't go there. The cottage cheese won't be organic either, again because of cost, so I'll be supporting industrial dairy farms where cows are pushed to the limits of their productivity and are spent and slaughtered by age four, and where week-old male calves are shipped off to...I won't go there either. As for the fish, with every canned sardine they swallow my dogs will be participating in the rapid depletion of the oceans.
Now can you see what I mean by dread and apprehension?
But
I'm still going to do it, because: 1. it's good for the dogs; 2.
they LOVE home-cooked food; and 3. I love it when somebody loves
my cooking.
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