29 posts tagged “food”

So, I'm sitting there eating some popcorn and enjoying one of life's truly great guilty pleasures, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America, listening to great Gordon tell some aspiring chef that he has tiny balls or something, when this commercial comes on.  It's for an upcoming news program about Zimbabwe and why Mugabe just can't be beat.  I think the answer is clear enough when one fella says something like, "Well, if you're the opposition, you'll be in jail."  But this does not satisfy Mr. Fucking BBC News Guy.

He asks the question:  Why does the US send its military to impose democracy on Iraq but can't be bothered with Zimbabwe?

I have to answer that question with some of my own questions:  Hey, you're British--if you care so much about Zimbabwe, why don't you send your own goddamned military to impose democracy? Or don't you think Zimbabwe is worth British blood?    Are you meaning to imply that it's a good thing America is doing in Iraq?  Because most of us would beg to differ.  Are you seriously meaning to imply that America should send its military to interfere with the politics of YET ANOTHER sovereign state?  How many nations do you think ought to have the American military in them, muddling around in their governance?  Do you seriously, seriously not realize that America has no more military to send fucking anywhere--not anywhere, not for any reason?  Do you not know that America has no more money to spend on this shit, either?  Seriously, there are a lot of nations who count on America for their defense, and right now, even such a soldiering sort of nation as America cannot muster enough troops to cover current commitments adequately, let alone add new ones.

And, last but by no means least, what the fuck? 

It's just so revoltingly stupid.  It's very easy to blame America for everything, but when are people like this guy going to realize that you don't get it both ways?  You cannot buy a Big Mac for lunch and then blame America for the fact that fast food is taking over your country--YOU fucking bought the Big Mac.  Stop buying Big Macs and American fast food companies will close for lack of profits.  Similarly, the world relies too heavily on the American military to protect them (hello, Japan) and to intervene when there is any kind of humanitarian crisis.  Then, of course, they resent our military presence everywhere.

If I was Commander in Chief, knowing this sort of thing, I'd just be all, "Dude, Mugabe?  Isn't Mugabe, like, the capital of Turkey?" because, you know, we're just stupid Americans who don't know anything about any other places and don't care.  Might as well live up the stereotype.

While we're on the subject, I keep hearing that because however many Americans cannot find Iraq on a map, they can't possibly know or understand what's going on over there or have any reasonable opinion about the war.  To me, there appears to be no logical connection between the two things.  Finding something on a map does not inherently imply or require any understanding of that thing or the geopolitical environment of that thing, or anything else.  I know it's also hilarious and gratifying to constantly harp on how stupid Americans are, but please.  You have to come up with something better than that to impress this American that she is stupid. 

I'm struck by a sudden craving for a Big Mac accompanied by tiny-scrotum jokes from Gordon Ramsay.  You know why I love Gordon Ramsay?  The man's a tyrant, yes.  But he fucking cares.  He cares about food, he cares about the chefs he works with, he cares about the restaurants he's there trying to help.  I don't watch Hell's Kitchen, because I did once, and the contestant people (people? is that the right word for that collection of cretins?) were beyond depressing.  I've never seen such a bunch of sad sack cooks in all my life.  But Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is brilliant stuff.  Come insult me, Gordon.  Please.  Because I know that if I take your insults to heart and follow your f-words to the letter, I will totally get a Michelin star. 

Speaking of food, because this will purge Mr. BBC New Man from my system, let me tell you:  Food preservation season started today.  I am not ready for that part of the garden effort yet.  But the greens are telling me it is time.  The greens, you see (and here I include spinach, some lettuces, and an array of the mustards and cabbages), hate this time of year.  They hate the day length; it makes them go to seed quickly.  They hate the sudden dry heat, which makes them turn bitter and tough.  They hate everything about it.  So, we're pulling them up.  Tonight it was mustard greens.  Tomorrow it will be spinach and bok choy and Napa cabbage and probably the red mustard as well.  God have mercy.  Because once food preservation season starts, it won't let up until late September or early October.  After the greens, there will start being peas.  And cilantro and parsley which are also desperately trying to bolt of late.  By the time we get done with that, we will be lucky to have a short time before the early cucumbers start coming in...then the early beets and carrots...and I'm already going to be exhausted before the tomatoes even come in. 

It's a strange cycle, I guess, or it seems strange these days.  You work your ass off half the year and enjoy the fruits of that the other half.  During the winter, when we're relaxed and being merry (and very cold), we are so grateful that we did the work--that we cut the wood and split it and stacked it; that we did the garden and harvested so many things; that we took those things and things we got a great deal on at the farmer's market and preserved them in some manner (canning or freezing or drying, usually) because our freezer and pantry are full of organic vegetables and fruits.  But right about now, in the start of the preservation season, it's hard to remember the times in winter when the work is done and I just have to pull stuff out of the freezer or a jar.  I must keep reminding myself of how good it is then.  That's the only way through this. 

Especially now, with these damned allergies.  I've always had hay fever, I suppose, but never like this.  Last year was bad, our first year in this town; this year is markedly worse.  T's theory is that I'm allergic to the wheat that is growing and blooming all around this town.  He may be right, since eating wheat gives me a lot of trouble.  Whatever it is, I have never suffered allergies like this, and once I find out what it is, we are moving somewhere where that thing does not grow.  I don't care if that means we're moving to Antarctica.

Whew.  We got pretty far afield from the original topic.  Fekkin BBC.

Show us your favorite comfort food.
Submitted by nosa.

I give you the intensely satisfying and comfortingly robust pozole rojo--all the delicious that one bowl can handle.  Also a good hangover cure, as are most comfort foods.  Mexicans usually argue menudo is a better hangover cure, but let's face it, people:  Tripe tastes like ass, and not without reason.  And who wants to eat ass when they have a hangover?

When I'm hungover or sick or feeling a little blue, what I want is most definitely loads of chile and pork fat.  Yum.

Avgolemono, though, or even pho, will do in a pinch.  I wonder how often people find themselves in a pinch that can be alleviated by the addition of soups of Greek and Vietnamese origin.  I'm guessing not that often.

(The linked recipe for pozole looks roughly adequate to me--I don't use a recipe when I make it, but this is at any rate the right ingredient list.  The only thing I do different is I usually use pork shoulder rather than ribs, but I don't see why ribs wouldn't be equally good.  Anyway, since I haven't actually used that recipe, though, I vouch not for it.  Ditto the pho recipe--it seems about right to me, and I learned to make pho in a Vietnamese restaurant, but I don't ever use an actual recipe.  I can assure you, though, that the charring of the ginger and onion is crucial.  Pho broth that has uncharred aromatics is bleh, very bleh.)

Well, instead of arguing that whatever isn't elitist, I'm just going to whip out my huevos and admit it:  I'm a fucking elitist.  And this is a typical day for my elitist little family.

7:30 a.m.:  My adorable son begins shouting at me:  "Wake up.  It's light outside.  Get up, mama."  I went to bed at 3:30 a.m., having had to work the night before, but I do, in fact, get up.  He promptly strips naked and begins streaking through the house shouting random things such as, "DOOM DOOM DOOM" and "Gir!  Come here, Gir!" while I shuffle bleary-eyed into the kitchen to nuke the last of yesterday's coffee and make a fresh pot.

7:45 a.m.:  Some coffee has been drunk, and the kid has his sippy cup of milk.  He refuses to wear clothing, preferring to wrap himself in a blanket and haul it around and get it dirty all day.  Fine.  Whatever.  I shuffle bleary-eyed down to the basement to attend to the matter of heat.  Thankfully, it did not snow again last night, and I do not have to do any shoveling this morning.  Shoveling out the driveway would, anyway, have to wait until after breakfast.  You need fuel for that shit.

8:00 a.m.:  The fire has gone so cold, I can't even get the coals going again.  Damn.  I guess I wasn't attentive enough at "banking" them last night.  Start new fire.  Adorable, naked son rams a giant stick into the neat little kindling pyramid I've built, destroying the fire.  *sigh*  Order him to go play with his Play-Doh and restart fire.

8:15 a.m.:  With fire raging away and providing us with nearly free heat, I stumble out into the frigid, frigid yard to attend to the mutts.  They are hungry, and their water has frozen.  I deign to pet them as I set their bowls before them.  I go into the kitchen and retrieve a large bucket full of very hot water with which to thaw their water.  I take a few minutes to ponder the snow-covered vegetable garden and deeply ponder just how many tomato plants we can reasonably fit back there.  I reckon it's a lot.  Then I realize I'm freezing my ass off and my footwear is unsuitable for standing in the snow.  Back to the house.

8:30 a.m., give or take:  Start cooking breakfast, now with second cup of coffee.  Grits and eggs today, with some yogurt and melon.  The melon is from last year's garden and was a particularly delicious specimen.  The flavor retention of frozen melon is good, we're finding, but the texture is somewhat lacking.  Anyway, it's nice to have melon in winter, however flaccid.  While the grits are cooking, make a round through the house to check the houseplants for water.  Hmm....the sage really needs water, and so does the fern.  The kid waters the sage (and eats some) while I water the fern.  Serve breakfast in son's Spiderman bowl, causing him to leap off the sofa with joy. 

9:00 a.m.:  Ooh, husband's home.  Smelling of dehydrated potatoes as always (it is, admittedly, better than when he used to come home smelling of salmon roe and salmon guts).  He eschews the grits, makes toast, and then does a round in which he checks that I have dealt satisfactorily with the fire and the dogs.  'S if.

9:30 a.m.:  I'm falling asleep in my chair, so I ask husband if he can possibly remain alert long enough for me to catch a wee nap.  He assents, and I go to bed but not to real sleep.  I reach a point in exhaustion at which I can no longer sleep well.  It takes days to recover from that, and I don't have days--I have an hour.  *sigh*

10:30 a.m.:  Husband goes to bed, I get up.  I remember to get meat out of the freezer for dinner--about half a kilo of deer tenderloin, to be precise.  I spend some time thinking about how I'm going to cook it, in case I need to make other preparations.  Decide on Japanese food.  Japanese venison?  I will do as Tim Gunn decrees, and make it work.

11:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.:  Play with son.  We made Play-Doh sushi and built a house from Lincoln Logs, a house that lacked structural integrity to be sure.  We also decided on some of the seeds we want to order.  He is a full partner in this gardening deal, and this year he will have an entire patch to himself.  He wants peas, pumpkins, watermelons, sunflowers, radishes, tomatoes, and "peppers that aren't spicy" in his patch.  Last year he ate a couple of those Chinese hot peppers straight off the bush and a pepperoncini as well and apparently that memory stuck with him.  He wants, specifically, orange tomatoes and "biiiiiiig" pumpkins.  Alrighty.  Also, upon looking through the flower portion of the catalogs, he has decided he wants them all.  He still isn't dressed.

1:00 pm.:  I decide he should get dressed and manage to get him into underpants and a shirt, anyway.  Oh, hell, lunch?  What to do about lunch?  Well, there is brown rice and pumpkin soup left from last night, so that's what we'll have.  Heat it up, serve it.  Watch The Jungle Book while we're eating.

1:30 p.m.:  Don't finish the movie, because damn it's so sunny outside, and the temperature is approaching freezing (which means it's much warmer than it has been--we've been in the teens [Fahrenheit] lately, which would be below zero in Celsius), so we decide to go for a walk.  This entails a bundling-up process that takes nearly half an hour, as the kid likes to do as much of it by himself as possible, and it takes him longer to get his own boots on than it does if I put them on.

2:00 p.m.:  Depart for the post office and the bank.  I'm walking; he's in his wagon checking out the frosty scenery.  Winter wonderland, indeed.  Get the mail--nothing worth the trip, but nothing bad either.  Head to the bank to get cash for tomorrow (we're going to Jackson, Wyoming, tomorrow with my parents--there is a whole food store in Jackson, and we are in desperate need of provisions).  Make small talk with the bank teller, a woman I deeply distrust.  But I guess she had nice holidays.

2:30 p.m.:  The kid decides he wants to walk home.  Christ, we'll never get home.  It's nice for him to walk, but a breeze is kicking up, and I'm beginning to go all Popsicle.

4:00 p.m.:  Notice grandma and grandpa are home, so decide to stop in and visit for a while.  The visits have their ritual elements.  For example, every time we go there, the kid wants grandpa to open the gun safe and bring out the knives.  My stepdad has quite a few knives in there, and they take out each one and the kid (with help from grandpa) methodically cuts large holes in cardboard boxes.  He cuts until he decides the knife he is using is "too dull" and then they have to either sharpen it or get a new knife.  This continues until the box is shredded and all knives have been used.  Then he starts hauling out the animal calls, particularly the elk bugle which is his favorite.  Then we play a game in which he removes a cookie cutter from grandma's drawer and asks, "How do you say this in Japanese?"  Mom and grandma say, "I don't know.  How do you say that in Japanese?"  The kid says, "GAPA" (which is an unvarying answer--whatever it is, it is always GAPA, and to my knowledge, there is no such word in Japanese.  He just made it all up.) and runs off.  We chase him around, and the chase culminates in tickling him while asserting that he made that up.  Repeat, until most of the cookie cutters are scattered around the floor. 

5:30 p.m.:  Head for home, time to tend the fire and cook dinner.

5:40 p.m.:  Ack!  The fire!  It is cold, so cold.  Start it up again.  Get a real rager going and decide to stick a sweet potato in there to make yaki imo.  Yum.

5:45 p.m.:  Rifle through the freezers and pantry looking for shit to cook.  Edamame from last year's garden, yes!  Decide to make a nikujaga kind of thing with the venison, potatoes and other root veg from the garden.  Find a languishing chunk of cauliflower that needs to be cooked.  Decide to stir-fry it with sesame, chile, and katsuo bushi.  Look at the giant bunch of dried shiso, also from our garden, and decide to make shiso rice.  OK, now there's a plan.  Time to cook.

6:00 p.m.:  The kid is watching a DVD of Horton Hears a Who and guzzling hot tea.  I am chopping and guessing wildly at how much soy sauce and sugar and all of that to put in the various things I'm cooking.  But I am marveling at how much stuff we're still eating out of the garden, and I start daydreaming about next year's garden...again.  I look in the pantry to find the mugi (barley flakes) to put in the rice to make mugi gohan, and curse the fact that all of our grains are in those unlabeled plastic bags because we buy them in bulk.  They are all organic from Bob's Red Mill, but it's easier to buy them in bulk...easier, that is, if you ever bother to label the bags. 

6:45 p.m.:  Dinner's almost ready.  Husband is awake and shuffling around the house.  The kid and I head down to the basement pantry to pick out some pickles.  We opt, for this meal, for green tomato pickles and carrot pickles.  These carrot pickles in particular are really gingery and crisp, and we love them.  All homemade, all from our garden.

7:00 p.m.:  Serve dinner.  The kid keeps picking up giant chunks of the yaki imo, stuffing them into his mouth, and then belatedly realizing they are still too hot for that.  Everything is tasty, although husband thinks the green tomato pickles are weird-ish, and he is less excited about shiso than I am.  But he eats it all, and so does the kid.  The cauliflower is a hit with everyone.

8:00 p.m.:  Time for the kid's bath.  Bathtime is the province of the father.  My only role in bathtime (except in weeks when my husband is working swing shift) is helping the kid undress and ordering him to take his filthy clothes to the laundry, please.  They bathe, I nap. 

9:00 p.m.:  Awake.  It's time to read stories.  We read several stories, then he just completely crashes in my arms.  I put him gently in bed and think motherly sorts of thoughts about his angelic little face and sigh deeply.

10:00 p.m.:  Hey, time to work!  Yay! 

Feck.  Sit here until 3:00 a.m. working.  Have to get up at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow to go to Jackson.  Feck, feck, and more feck.  It's a good thing we're so elite, with our chest freezer and meat stockpile and locally grown veggies and fruits.  I mean, if I was one of those working-class people, I would surely go insane from the lack of sleep.  But now that we are "locavores" and elitists and drive a brand-new Toyota Yaris, we are feeling pretty sweet.  We're ready to oppress the proletariat. 

It is pretty cool to tend the fire, though, and it's even cooler that the stove almost entirely eliminates our use of the propane-fueled furnace.  Propane is, of course, petroleum, and I don't like to use it so much.  It's yet more awesome that I can then use the wood stove to cook parts of our dinner.  I rule.

By the way, the wood we use is all deadwood from the forest.  You can get a permit from the Forest Service to go out and cut up the dead wood that is lying around, wood that would be fuel for a forest fire if you just left it lying around, for super cheap.  No living trees were harmed to heat our home.  Thank you.

I mentioned previously that I had just read Michael Pollan's wonderful book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (why haven't you read it yet??  Janette gets toffee!  the rest of you get scorn!), and now I am reading the captivating Barbara Kingsolver book, Animal Vegetable Miracle.  Well, I just read half of it in one sitting.  There will be much more said about both of these books, as time goes along, but the main thing about the Kingsolver book is I just keep thinking over and over again, "Yes, this is how I want to live.  This is it."  To be completely honest, the book has made me laugh and sigh and weep just a tiny bit at her descriptions of how good good food is and how much it means to our lives.

Anyway, one thing both books have in common is that they take up the question of whether it is elitist to recommend eating organic and sustainably raised food.  Many people have apparently decided that it is, because organic food tends to cost more at the grocery store, and it is presumed that this makes it unaffordable to anyone who makes less money than Michael Pollan (for the record, I have no idea at all how much money he makes).

Both books assert that every consumer-citizen is subsidizing the industrial food chain through taxes.  The Kingsolver book comes up with some figure, something like $725 a year from each household goes to subsidizing this horrifying, petroleum-guzzling "food" industry.  They both say that those hidden costs actually make a standard industrial diet comparable to an organic, sustainable one.  That is absolutely true.  Our society as a whole is paying a huge cost--larger, if we count all the damage to the environment and the public health--to keep the shitty tomatoes coming.  The only problem with telling people this, people who do not think that they can afford organic, is that you are asking them to pay the higher price of organic foods in the market while continuing to pay the taxes that subsidize the other.  This makes organic food at this time yet more expensive, because it's not like you can opt out of paying that portion of your taxes (how nice if we could write in and say, "Well, I buy organic food, so I'm not paying this percent of my taxes that would go to ConAgra"). 

Both authors also point out that Americans on average spend only around 10% of their incomes on food.  I am unclear if that figure includes eating out, or if that's only groceries, but this still seems absurdly low to me.  My household spends a good deal more on food--probably 20-25% of our income.  Partly that is because our income is lower than average; the same amount of grocery bill in dollar terms will obviously be a higher percentage of a lower income.  Part of that, though, is that we willfully select the best quality foods we can possibly manage.  If we're going to buy syrup (I make a lot of fruit syrups from berries and such that we use on pancakes, so we don't always buy syrup), for example, it will only and always be real maple, not that weirdly viscous corn syrup-based crap.  Managing our grocery budget is sometimes complicated and requires a good deal of attention on my part, but I am not willing to cook up unidentifiable industrial products and call it dinner.

Anyway, this is all just to say that I don't think it's elitist to eat organic.  I cannot understand the mentality of people who are unwilling to spend money on food.  The quality or lack thereof of your food is one of the most vital pieces of life, in the most fundamental of ways.  It isn't even just the nutrients and phytochemicals and whatever else they find in spinach these days--and it isn't even avoiding pathogens like E. coli either, although that, too. Food is about caring and connections and nature and health.  How is it even possible that we've allowed ourselves to get this way?  The mind boggles.

Life's too short to stuff a mushroom?  Fuck that.  Life's too short not to. 

I wonder...if I cut our grocery budget to 10% of our income, what would we eat?  What kind of horrors would we be forced to ingest?  With that extra money, I could go buy myself a digital camera for sure.  But then every time I sat down to dinner with my husband and son, I would be telling them and myself that I care more about buying shit than I do about our health and enjoyment (for we are food lovers, all of us).  I would die a little.

I think that if you're in a lower (not the lowest, because then you quite probably cannot afford organic) spot on the economic totem pole than Michael Pollan is, you do have to be a bit smarter about how you afford good food.  I cannot walk into a grocery store and just buy whatever I please. Instead, I have to plan and scheme.  I bought assloads of food, especially locally grown fruit, at the farmer's market this summer and froze it or otherwise preserved it.  Now, I can easily have perfectly ripe peaches in January, and I don't really feel guilty about it.  As you all know, we gardened (and next year it will be even bigger and better!  I am so dying to get started.  We've been sitting around drooling over seed catalogs, planning.  Cardoons!  Jerusalem artichokes!  Sesame!  We can grow it all!) and preserved that food, so that we are still eating our own backyard zucchini in some form nearly every day.  We hunt and fish and while that would not be sustainable if every American decided to start doing it, it is at current rates, and that is some good eats (not to mention nutritious--wild meat is substantially lacking in marbling, it's true, but marbling will kill you).  Not all of these systems are open to all people, but more people have access to them than realize they do (farmer's markets are increasingly available, and very many communities have garden plots you can rent for the season; in the communities where I have done so, this has been highly underused).  More people also have access to foraged foods than they realize, but there is an unwillingness to look for that food source. 

Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that, no, I don't think it's elitist to eat organic and urge others to do as much as possible.  It's really, ultimately the most nonelitist thing you could do, as it gives some money and power back to farmers rather than consolidating it in the hands of CEOs and bureaucrats. 

I do want to add that these two books were very much making me feel bad about the maple syrup and other nonlocal, nonorganic stuff, but Kingsolver or her husband pointed out that even if American households just switched to eating some stupidly low percentage of their diet from local sources it would save some ridiculously huge amount of petroleum every year.  I feel much better now, as our diet contains a larger percentage than that of locally grown foods, many of which involved no petroleum whatsoever, as they came from our yard.  It's like when you read about how replacing just one light bulb with one of those CFLs makes you akin to Mother Teresa; suddenly you're all, "My whole house is full of CFLs, so possibly I'm not an evil monster ruining the earth.  Good to know."

Now, back to the seed catalogs.  Anyone know anything about cardoons?  We're serious about growing some, but we've never eaten them before or even seen them before, though goodness knows we're familiar with thistles.  Also, next year, T wants to keep chickens.  In the front yard.  Ha.

If your Vox Neighborhood had a potluck dinner tonight, what dish, drink or dessert would you bring?

First let me say that my 'hood having a potluck is about the awesomest thing I can think of.  If we weren't scattered all over the earth, hither and yon, it would be great.  Such fun we would have because y'all are, like, awesome!  I just reminded myself of the Fug Girls making fun of Britney Spears.  Anyhoo.

I'd like to have it be a family potluck.  I'd love to meet all y'alls' kids and SOs.

Potluck, you say?

I suppose I'd bring New Mexico-style enchiladas, most likely, though if dessert seemed more in order, I might bring a pie.  Who doesn't love pie?   It is probable that I'd bring more than one thing, because I like to cook.  Also, pickles would likely be involved. 

Speaking of, I'd hope Kimura would bring some umeboshi, because I love them, and we finally ran out--life without umeboshi has been very difficult for me.  I know Janette would bring the beer, bless her.  Zack would bring mead.  Sgazzetti would bring something heavily doused in Sriracha sauce, which I approve of--maybe one of those Indonesian beef salads he likes to torture militant vegetarians with.  Lokii would bring goon, no doubt.  Greg (and Masa!  please bring Masa!) could bring poutine.  Glamour Mama has to bring muffins.  Let's see...

Someone needs to bring meat pies.  Who can we tap for meat pies?

And, Ninja:  Would you bring shadowy vengeance?  That'd be kind of awesome.

What are some ways you save money? 
Submitted by Pixiemom.  

We save money in as many ways as we reasonably can.  We would probably do most of this even if we had more money, because I would so rather spend my money on a vacation or a new skirt than on my utility bills.  Also, T is a seriously frugal dude.  I'm going to leave out some of the more obvious things like using CFLs and not running a half-empty (or half-full) dishwasher.

Utilities:  First and foremost, we unplug nearly everything when it's not in use.  Battery chargers of various kinds, computers, the stupid clock on the coffee pot--all are sucking power even when they're not in use.  We unplug them all.  I turn my computer off at the power strip every night.  Also, I hang the clothes out to dry whenever possible.  We'll even hang them up in the house, which makes us look like white trash (but T says that's OK since he's an immigrant and immigrants are expected to do weird stuff, right?).  Another thing is that I try to get a lot of my baking done at one time, as that cuts down on the number of times in a week I have to preheat the oven.  Propane (for the oven and the furnace) is damned expensive, so every little bit helps. 

Groceries:  This is a tough one.  The price of food is getting higher lately, and we are somewhat demanding in regards to food.  We are big into veggies and fruits and fish, and those can be expensive.  We don't eat much processed food besides breakfast cereal (yay, breakfast cereal).  Anyway, we also have some dietary restrictions; to wit, the kid and I don't eat wheat or dairy if we can help it.  Wheat is cheap; alternatives are not.  Basically, with food, I walk this line where I try to save as much money as possible through matching coupons to sales so that then we can afford salmon and olive oil and spelt flour.  You have to get an organizational system down for this, though, and be somewhat vigilant.  You have a dollar off coupon, say, for some Dannon yogurt.  Well, that's nice, but it's not going to be a really good deal until the store puts the yogurt on sale, too.  That's when you strike!  This is stupid, I know--it's not a fun way to shop.  I get a small thrill out of seeing how much I'm able to get for my budget, though, and out of seeing my "total savings" on the receipt.  Quite often, between my coupons and the card savings and special deals, what I pay is half of what it would normally cost.  That means we eat better than we could if I didn't do this whole stupid routine.

Rebates:  Our local chain drugstores (Walgreen's and Rite-Aid) both have these rebate things each month.  This is how we get many of our hygiene items.  So, they have a deal where you can get a $1.00 rebate on, say, Crest toothpaste.  Let's say they normally charge $3.00 for it.  I also have a coupon for $1.00 off.  At some point in the month, they will likely put the toothpaste on sale for $2.00.  So, I lurk.  When that sale happens, I pounce!  I use my coupon, thereby paying $1.00 for the toothpaste, which I then get back through the rebate.  Of course, I probably wouldn't send the rebate form in for just a dollar, but the beauty of the Walgreen's and Rite-Aid setups is that you can send in only one form for all the rebates each month.  So, I get checks or gift cards for $20.00 or so a month--and a lot of those toiletries were essentially free if you count the coupons + sales + rebates.  Clever, aren't I?

Household stuff:  I make my own laundry soap.  Our laundry detergent now costs us about $1.00 a month.  And it works.  We don't use commercial cleaners, except the occasional burst of Simple Green.  To clean the house, I use mostly baking soda and vinegar with a little borax.  Our house is clean enough and almost totally lacking in chemical contamination.  There are no airborne toxins or hormone mimics from chemical cleaning products.  Our house usually smells of nothing at all, except maybe my cooking or of the mums when they're in bloom.  Also, we reuse a lot of stuff.  We will wash and reuse Ziploc bags and aluminum foil  and glass jars and yogurt containers until they are totally worn out (and then we recycle them whenever possible). 

The dogs:  We don't feed them.  Just kidding.   

Kid stuff:  Gah, there are so many expenses associated with kids.  The diapers--we used cloth most of his life, and now he's almost entirely potty trained.  The toys--mainly, here, we buy quality toys that will last him.  I'll pay more for a wood or metal toy, because he destroys plastic in a hurry.  Also, we avoid toys that require batteries like the plague.  He gets them from other people, of course, and I then use Walgreen's rebates and so forth to keep us in batteries.  We entertain him in ways that are basically free.  The park, the library, the backyard (harassing the dogs, naturally), hiking.  He loves all those things, and surprise!  Free!

Savings:  We're lucky in that my husband now has benefits at work.  He has a 401(k) that includes some matching from the company and profit sharing!  Profit!  We take maximum advantage of that.  Also, we use Upromise.  It probably wouldn't add up to much if it were only our shopping contributing to it, but it is set up so that my mom's shopping also contributes to it.  And she shops a bloody lot.  So, 4% of the cost of every cute little sweater with trucks on it goes into a savings account for my son to be used for college or other education later in his life.  Finally, we leave our loose change sitting around.  Yep, just sitting around.  And what happens then is this little leprechaun comes along and swipes it and emits shrieks of thieving glee as he stuffs it into one of his three piggy banks.  When his banks are full, we take them to a real bank.  The kid has two accounts (the Upromise mutual fund and a standard savings account at our local credit union), both of which are sizeable at this point.  Not quite a silver spoon, but certainly better than nothing.

Food:  We don't waste food.  For example, for Thanksgiving, I like to make a cranberry jelly.  Jelly takes the juice from the fruit and then you have the pulp leftover, right?  I just took the cranberry pulp and made things out of that.  I made an applesauce cake substituting the cranberry pulp for applesauce.  I made a cranberry bread pudding by stirring the berries into my normal bread pudding (and it's goooooood).  I then took the rest of them and mixed them with some pears that were going soft and a couple of rather dodgy mandarin oranges and made a sauce.  I froze half of that.  The other half I served on plain yogurt for dessert.  A bunch of the carrots from our garden were also starting to get dodgy--I don't know what the hell happened to them--but anyway, I pickled them.  The same vitamins and all that, but they won't spoil.  Actually, you all know how many hours I spent pickling and canning and freezing all the crap from our garden, and we're eating that stuff every day.  Sometimes, when T thinks I've been profligate in my grocery spending (you bought persimmons?!?), I point out to him how many items on his dinner plate came from our garden, essentially for free.  If you've got dodgy lemons in the fridge, then make lemonade and candied lemon peel.  That's our philosophy.

I don't know what to call this category, but we also manage to do some minimal giving for free.  We cut off all our Boxtops for Education and give them to the local school even though our kid doesn't go to school yet, but it costs us nothing to do that, and it helps them buy books for their library.  We also end up donating a lot of the free toothpaste and stuff that we get, since we manage to get way more free toothpaste than we need, and anyway we use Tom's Natural most of the time.  Often I'm just getting the free toothpaste because I can, in other words, and then I give it to women's shelters or food banks.  It makes me feel like Robin Hood. 

Gad.  *hack, hack*  I've been quite sick the past few days.  I have no idea what it was, but T had it, too, which means it must have been pretty nasty (the vengeance of God, maybe), as he never gets sick.  Somehow, our son managed to escape its wrath.  But the past three or four days have seen me sleeping as much as possible--as much as 12 hours a day.  I haven't done that in...gosh, ages.  This morning I woke up feeling much perkier and healthier and also--wow!--prettier.  I knew a long time ago that sleep was really the #1 beauty aid, but I usually forsake sleep for some purpose or other (working, reading Go Fug Yourself, etc.).  But, seriously, man I don't look like a zombie today, and it's so refreshing.

Earlier today, I was opening a package of organic mesclun purchased from our supermarket (our lettuces have perished, sadly) and noticed that the package boasted of its being made of corn--the package, not the salad.  At first glance, you'd think, "Wow, hey!  Biodegradable, eco packaging to go with my salad of questionable sustainability--fabulous.  I am very cool." 

We don't buy a lot of prepackaged food like that and try to keep our intake of plastics to a minimum, even corn-based plastics, so I haven't had a lot of occasion to think about this before, but...is the corn-based packaging really the savior that it would have us believe?  I mean, OK, it doesn't use petroleum, and petroleum is a nonrenewable resource, so that's good.  Also, it's biodegradable, which might be a good thing if it were going to have a chance to biodegrade, but in our local landfill, it won't.  Also, the manufacture of plastic from petroleum produces air pollution.

But the production of corn plastics probably also produces air pollution, and it uses up a nonrenewable resource as well:  arable land.  Vegetarians list among their gripes against the omnivorous that production of grain for animal consumption uses some unholy percentage of the world's arable land and that parts of the rainforest (the rainforest!  that harbors spectres of Tony Danza!) are being cut down to provide grazing space for livestock.  Those are fair enough complaints, but I lodge the same complaints against ethanol and corn-based plastics.  Furthermore, corn (unless it's grown sustainably, e.g., as a rotation crop with nitrogen-fixing beans) requires some heavy-duty chemical fertilizers.  Those fertilizers, washed downstream from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico (by the mighty Mississippi), are causing the dreaded algal blooms and dead zone.

Hmmmmm.  How to say this without sounding like an insufferable twat?  What the hell.  Nothing we use comes for free.  These corn-based plastics and organic salads that come from a thousand miles away and the hybrid cars are just Band-Aids, just a salve to cover up our rather grotesque consumerism.

OK, I'm insufferable.  I know that.

Anyway, so into my insufferable twat-dom came this interview with Alice Waters.  Now, obviously, I have never eaten at her esteemed restaurant, but I have a lot of respect for her and what she has done.  I agree with her that food is culture, even though virtually no one else I know agrees with that, and it's damn hard to convince people.  I am all about the culture of the garden, the culture of the table, knowing where my food comes from, all of that.  I agree with her completely that all of our issues with the environment, with obesity and a vast range of health issues, etc., are tied up with our attitudes about food and what we eat. 

However.  And this is a big however.  While I think that Americans should, as a rule, spend much more time cooking and savoring good food and should think of cooking not as a chore but as an act of meditation or an act of love--while I even go so far as to agree totally with her (and, not incidentally, with Albert Borgmann) that we need to be more burdened by life and our sustenannce, and more aware of how much work it actually takes to produce the food that sustains us--I cannot agree with her that this is yet manageable or affordable for most people in this country.  I could be wrong--let's change that to "many people."

I live in Idaho.  There is a long stretch of time that we affectionately call "winter" when there are quite literally no vegetables in season.  The ground freezes solid, see.  Root vegetables, obviously, can be stored easily, so they can be considered "in season," I suppose, but unless you grow them yourself, they are not available in enough variety to keep you going all winter long (October through May-ish; May is already spring, yes, but there is little that is yet in season).  There are the winter squashes, yes, which helps, but still.  There is no farmer's market here in winter (and even in summer, it's only once a week, and it's an hour's drive from where I live, which makes it inaccessible quite often), so we are stuck with what either we grew and preserved ourselves or what the supermarkets are offering.

Now, my family is fortunate enough to have enough land to grow a lot of our own vegetables.  We don't have a lot of land, but we try to use it wisely, and we have assiduously preserved it in various forms, so that we now have a freezer and a pantry full of (mostly organic and all local) vegetables and fruits (fruits mostly came from the farmer's market) for winter, including a couple boxes of root veggies.  But not all families have the land (or the time, although once you get it going, it doesn't take that much time, really--the canning part does, though) to do this.  We also hunt (yay!  my stepdad just got a deer, so we have a supply of red meat now!) and fish, and we are thinking about buying one of our neighbor's lambs.  Next year, we plan to keep chickens (for eggs).  All of that takes time, though, and skills, and access to land (forests for hunting deer, e.g.).  I encourage anyone who has these things available to them to garden and hunt and fish and attend farmer's markets, but I think it's unrealistic of Alice Waters to assume that everyone does.

But it's really the elitist comment about forgoing a DVD rental to buy polenta that irked me.  Polenta isn't very expensive--she's right.  But you add polenta and pearl barley and farro and all the other grains up--and, by the way, I doubt any of those are produced locally--and then tack on the organic produce and the organic canned tomatoes and so on and on, and yes, it bloody well adds up.  I'm a notorious freak about wheat, dairy, high-fructose corn syrup, and chemicals in my food--I try to avoid all those things, and alternative products (spelt flour, soy milk) already make our groceries just impossibly expensive (for us).  There are many times that we have a grocery budget of $40 to feed 3 people (and 2 vexing hounds) for a week, so, yeah, the $6 polenta and the $14 a pound Parmigiano-Reggiano is more than we can afford then (actually, the Parmigiano is way out of our budget all the time--sorry, Alice!  we somehow live without it!).  I love food in every way, so I pay for quality when I can.  I also make a lot of our food--I even make most of our bread and flour tortillas and other basic staples.  But my kid needs to eat, and my husband needs to eat, and I need not to spend every damn second of my life in my kitchen--it will drive a woman crazy. 

We try to--and, goddammit, I know I sound like an insufferable ass again--have a mindful sort of relationship with our food.  We know what it takes to produce our food--we are intimately aware of the work involved and where most of our food came from.  We know how much we consume, and we try to reach a balance, a compromise, in what we can afford, what we need, and what we give back (through composting, e.g.).  We try to be similarly mindful of our other consumption.  Part of it is that we're forced to by budget constraints.  Part of it is that I'm a freak and T is a very frugal sort by nature.  Part of it is that we are the sort of people who think of all of life as a balancing act, one that requires work and attention.

To me, the environment and food and consumerism and a bunch of other issues are all tied up together.  I don't think you can make up for buying a bunch of pre-packaged salad, organic or not, by buying it in corn-based plastic containers.  I don't think you can make up for your refusal to walk or bicycle by buying a Prius.  Basically, I don't think more consumerism (just a different type) is really a solution to anything, even if your conspicuous consumption includes meals at Chez Panisse and authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano.  Maybe it's just because I don't like to shop.   

What are your top five favorite cooking seasonings? 
Submitted by skip.town.

Sometimes I'm all set to answer one of these silly questions, and I look around a bit ("explore") and find that someone else has already given the best, cleverest, coolest possible answer.  When I read answers like this, the wind goes out of my sails.

Anyway, barring salt and pepper, which are obvious, here are some that I like.  I always suck at picking my top five favorite anything, because I am really fickle, and it's hard to say if my favorites today will still be tomorrow.  These are pretty frequently used, though:

1. The Japanese Trifecta: dashi granules, soy sauce, mirin.
2. Bacon grease. 
3. Chimayo red chile powder.  I even put it in brownies and truffles sometimes.
4. Garam masala.  I frequently mix my own--but, damn, we love this stuff.
5. Ginger...no, wait, garlic!  Both, actually, but I probably do use garlic more.  Lately I have been on a ginger kick, though.  I made a batch of lemon-ginger apple butter for example.  And I made a really righteous ginger-tomato sauce to put on rice. 

I don't know if these are really my favorites--and how could lemon juice or balsamic vinegar not make the list?  Feh. 

But seriously, when you make cornbread, heat the pan up with a chunk of bacon fat in the bottom before you put in the batter.  You want that shit hot, so that it pops and crackles when you dump the batter in.  Then you bake it and it comes out with this super delicious, crunchy, bacony crust on the bottom.  It's like kitchen magic.  If you put some chile (red or green) in the batter first (and maybe even some crispy bacon bits), well, all the better then.  Give me a hunk of that and some sweet tea, and I reckon I'm good.

Who's the coolest culinary celebrity?

This man. 

Name:  Alton Brown.  Occupation:  Kitchen super geek, destroyer of all uni-taskers, and minor god.

Any man who can say things like this...

    Wow. Look at that tight pattern. That's
    really beautiful. You know, uh, being ambisinister I think
    I'll opt for the more neoteric of the, uh, quintuplet. And
    although I delectate in discommoding you, I will tarry
    here no longer. As always, you have been
    supernumerary.

...is my hero. 

I really wish I had more opportunities to use "ambisinister" in life. 

Oh, Alton. 

Yeah, he makes good food, too.  And, AND--he taught me how to build my own smoker for homemade bacon.  Take that, other culinary celebrities!

Do you have a green thumb?

Apparently.  It has now frosted twice, I have not covered the zucchini, and the damn things are still making more zucchini.  What will it take to kill you, zucchini?  Why do you torment me so?  How much zucchini do you think one family can tolerate?  I tell you, we are reaching our limits.  We have zucchini pickles.  We have Italian marinated zucchini.  We have frozen zucchini in various forms (grated for zucchini bread, sliced and blanched for saute, zucchini soups, calabacitas). 

And I still have about 15 pounds of the stuff sitting up in the kitchen waiting for me to decide what to do with it. 

Zucchini plants, I am no longer enchanted with you.  If you don't quit soon, I will take a hatchet to you.  Are we clear?