Kefir

Okay, I officially love kefir.

Kefir is kind of like yogurt, except it's more liquid (you drink it) and it has more different types of good bacteria in it.

Kefir made my nasty tummy feel a lot better today. (I usually buy either the raspberry or strawberry-cream flavor. I've had the plain, and it's fine, but the strawberry flavor tastes better to me).

The only sad thing is that I haven't found anywhere in my little town that sells it; I always try to buy some on the trip to the next largest town south of me. The one that has a bigger nicer grocery store. I try to keep some on hand most of the time - it keeps pretty well, like yogurt does - but I do rather wish there were a place in my town that sold it.

Yeah, I know, kefir is one of those hippie-crunchy type foods, but something that makes my stomach feel as much better as it did today is a valuable food in my book.

Cookbooks

Recently, there's been a lot of bad, weird, and bad-weird news out there. Every day I see or hear something that makes me kind of panicky and worried about what's becoming of us.

Times like these, it helps me to retreat into something that's kind of a fantasy world, kind of home-centered.

So I look at my cookbook collection. I do not think it is too pompous to call it that. I have a LOT of cookbooks. Most of them are older - I tend to scour used-book stores when I get to them, or antiques shops, or I've ordered a lot through various online sellers (I love how Powell's does the whole used-book thing - one order, through one seller, coming in one box. As much as I love Amazon, I have to admit I love Powell's even more, at least for how they handle used books)

Looking at them makes me feel happy. Now, I don't cook a WHOLE lot (at least these days, when I'm so crazy busy - most nights a big salad and maybe a couple little pieces of some good cheese serve for dinner) but I do like to cook. And I enjoy reading recipes.

I particularly love cookbooks where the author has injected some of his or her personality - where there are little short commentaries or introductions before each dish, like "this is my great-grandmother's recipe for barbecued lamb" or "this recipe never fails to impress guests, yet it is so simple."

I have cookbooks spanning from the 1930s up to modern day. Most of my collection - of the "vintage" books at least - comes from the late 50s and early 60s. I know that it because a lot of the books I went out in search of, when I was finally out on my own and finally had enough space to store a sizable number of cookbooks, were ones my mom had. My parents were married in that era, and I'm guessing my mom got some cookbooks as wedding gifts, and they probably bought others as they moved out from grad-school life into "full fledged" adulthood.

I have a lot of the Farm Journal cookbooks. I don't know if anyone else is familiar with these - Farm Journal is (was?) a magazine, and for years Nell Nichols was the food editor. And she developed a line of cookbooks. And they are, by and large, fantastic cookbooks - nothing fancy, just basic good food (as you might guess from a farming magazine). I've bought most of the ones I know about; I think I even have one or two my mom doesn't have. (It's my goal, someday, to find a copy of every one they put out in the 1960s. I still lack the bread book, I know that much, and the canning and freezing one. I have a reprint of the bread book, but it is "updated," and has some of the good old recipes removed, and other newer ones substituted in their place. So I want a copy of the original).

I also have "Dinner for Two" - one of the Betty Crocker cookbooks. My mom actually had two copies of this - I think she said she got duplicates as a wedding present, and she KEPT THE SECOND ONE ALL THOSE YEARS. And then let me take it when I moved out. It's a good book, especially because the recipes make small quantities. Some of the recipes rely more on mixes or pre-prepared foods than I like, but they have a very good basic brownie recipe (no mix) and some other good "basics."

One thing I like about these cookbooks is the food photography. Some of the more modern cookbooks have gone very minimalist and streamlined - maybe the food is plated, but it is on a plain white tablecloth in a rather unadorned room.

Not my older cookbooks. The pictures in some are almost lurid. And I love that - all of the colors, the fact that they set them on backdrops with checkered tablecloths, or an Early American Revival background, or a fishing pole (for fish dishes, of course).

The BEST one of all of these - and one I like to look at for sheer nostalgia - is "The New Joy of Jell-o." Copyright date 1973. The men all have sideburns, they all have that sort of goofy middle-class 1970s look to them - and I find that oddly comforting. It is the time when I was a child. My parents' house was decorated in that sort of mock Early American style popular then. We had big giant ugly wallpaper in the dining room like some of the rooms shown in the book have.

I've never made anything out of the book (I got it for a buck at a used-book shop), but I still love to look at it because it is so much of its time - of my time, when I was a little kid.

Oh, I do use some of the cookbooks I own. My go-to for good "basic" recipes, or "I have this food and I want to cook it in some different way, what other ways are there" is my 1953 copy of the Settlement House cookbook. It is my favorite cookbook and if I could only have one, it would be the one I choose - it's huge, it's detailed, it tells how to cook eggs in every imaginable way, it tells how to fix vegetables, how to braise meat, how long to cook roasts of different sorts. It has great bread recipes. It has many complex and interesting desserts (none of which I have tried to make, but I would like to). It even tells how to make soap and pasteurize milk, which I tend to think are useful things to know, even in this day and age.

But I also love my Farm Journal Country Fair cookbook - all different types of breads, cakes, pies, and so forth - every one a ribbon winner at a fair somewhere. The corn muffin recipe in that book is my favorite one (and it's not that complicated to make). There are a lot of good simple 'coffee cake' type cakes that I can make when I need to take a treat to church or in to my department. (And it also has the wonderful whimsical photography).

I make a special effort to seek out "cooking for one" or "cooking for two" books.

(A favorite, among more recent books, is Jane Doerfer's "Going Solo in the Kitchen" - many, many good recipes, including some unusual ones. And an attitude of "single people have as much right as families to eat good food and to enjoy their meals" - there is no suggestion of resorting to things out of boxes or from the deli)

There are a few of them out there. Along with the Betty Crocker book, I also have one from the 50s called "Quick and Easy Meals for Two." This book comes divided into interesting sections - they have a "seasonal" section, to take advantage of foods that come abundantly or cheaply at certain times of the year (but it does have an East-Coast centric philosophy: there are dishes made with shad roe, for example. I don't think I've ever even SEEN shad roe). There's also "The Little End of the Horn" - meals for times when the budget is stretched (and actually, some of the recipes in that section are not just economical, but pretty healthful and good, too). There's even a section providing suggestions to people who find themselves in tiny apartments with a two-burner set up in place of a "real" kitchen. I use this book a fair amount, too - it has some interesting ideas for salads and vegetables in it.

Among newer books, I really love Jane and Michael Stern's "Square Meals" (which, sadly, is out of print) - a collection of historical recipes from the first half of the 20th century in America. Some of the recipes are mainly there for historical interest (or for laughs) but there are also some good ones that I make again and again. (I use their gingerbread recipe, for example, when I want gingerbread).

I also have Mark Bittman's huge "How to Cook" (or whatever it's called). But you know, I don't use it that much - Bittman has a certain, shall we say, attitude, that comes through in the book. An attitude of UR DOIN IT WRONG! if you like certain foods or prefer to cook things a certain way. I mean, it's a good book and all, but I almost don't get the same sense of LOVE for the recipes and for those who developed them as I do from Nell Nichols' books, or from the Sterns' tome.

I also have some of the other Betty Crocker books - I have the one on Mexican cooking and the one called something like "The New Chinese Cookbook." I'd like to track down more of these - I know there is a Southwestern Cooking one, because my mother has it - and again, these have wonderful food-photography that's lots of fun to look at. And they have some really neat recipes in them.

If I had the time, I'd cook something fairly elaborate every night. I love to cook and I enjoy using my cookbooks.

Bread

I baked bread today.

Oh, I did it the "quick" way - I have a bread machine. (Once in a while, when I have the free time and the inclination, I like to make bread the "real" way, with kneading and having to check on it as it rises. Plus, there are a couple recipes I have that just don't turn out in the bread machine). I made a buttermilk white bread, using a recipe in one of the bread machine books I have.

Earlier this week we had "departmental lunch" and even though I was slowly being driven crazy by busy-ness, I decided to offer to make Texas sheet cake. Because I like to bake, and I hardly ever bake except when I can take it and share it, because most cake recipes make way too much for me. (The cake was well-received; I have to copy out the recipe for at least one person).

I didn't want the leftover buttermilk to go to waste, so I found a bread recipe for it.

It came out a few minutes ago.

I love making bread; it is a kind of magic. Oh, I know how it works biochemically - the yeast both ferment and metabolize (I've been told by homebrewers that even bread yeast in bread are actually doing fermentation as much as they're doing aerobic metabolism*) and produce gas bubbles that raise the bread. And the wheat gluten protein forms big chains that make the dough elastic so it stretches and gets the texture of bread. And when it bakes the sugars and stuff on the outside caramelize a bit to give the crust. (Did you know that bread crusts have antioxidants in them? No kidding. So everyone who told their kids "eat the crusts, they're good for you" was right).

(*including the pesky Krebs cycle, which made a little appearance on this week's FFOT).

So now I have a nice loaf of homemade bread sitting cooling in my dining room. I'm going to have that and a big salad for dinner, and maybe if the salami I have in the fridge is still good, a couple pieces of salami.

I could pretty happily live on a combination of salad, bread, and soup, with maybe a few other tidbits like cheese and salami thrown in once in a while.

Making bread feels like a way I can take care of myself.

Mmm, heme iron...

(I needed something happier up here at the top).

I made a steak for dinner tonight. I don't to that tremendously often; most of the time I eat more-or-less vegetarian. I do that because it's convenient (when you're dragging in at 7 pm, tired, hungry, it's easier to throw together a salad than it is to choreograph the cooking of a chop or something. And also, especially during the school year, there are weeks when I am not home for more than 1/2 hour or so in the evening EACH NIGHT thanks to evening meetings and such.)

And it's cheaper. And probably in the long run better healthwise to get most of my protein from beans and such.

But, once in a while, I just want a hunk of an animal to eat.

(Apologies to any vegetarians reading this).

But I do. A friend and I were talking about how we eat this weekend (she is divorced but has a teenaged son at home who does much of his own cooking). She agreed with me - veggie a lot of the time, but once in a while, you just need some meat.

She posited that maybe it was the protein, that maybe we get protein deprived. I said I didn't think it was that, so much as it was the heme iron.

There are lots of plant sources of non-heme iron (spinach is one), but I can't think of any of heme iron. Which is slightly different and is more readily absorbed.

Maybe I'm more cued in to iron because I've gone through times in the past when I was anemic. It was just the "uncomplicated" kind - no absorption problems, no other deficiencies, just I wasn't eating enough iron. (It might be a familial thing - both my mom and her mom before her had times when they were on iron pills.)

The worst period of anemia happened to happen at a time when I was otherwise "restricting" food intake, that is, one of my periodic attempts at dieting. My doctor gave me a prescription for iron pills (after I complained that the vitamin kind upset my stomach) and stern instructions to "get enough nutrients."

So since then - because I don't want to feel like that ever again (I was to the point of nearly fainting when I stood up from a stooping position, not good when you are doing botanical fieldwork outdoors in the summer), I've been cautious to make sure I get enough nutrients. Including iron.

And yeah, I eat Cream of Wheat (which is good, and is also iron fortified). And I eat spinach until it's almost coming out of my ears. And I eat other iron containing things.

(And I like irony. Hah. I slay myself sometimes)

But sometimes I just like a piece of beef.

I tend not to be terribly creative; usually I buy steak (well, living alone, roasts don't make a tremendous amount of sense and I don't like meat that's been cooked and then frozen, so making a big roast and then freezing it is out). And I usually buy the same cuts of steak, preferring something that is tender but that still Has a Flavor.

A new little meat market has opened up in my town; I am happy to see that it is here. I like it for two reasons: first, the meat is a cut above what the grocery store sells in terms of quality. (True, it's more expensive. But I tend to feel that if you can afford better quality, why not buy better quality?) And second, like any old-time butcher or grocery-store "real" meat case, you can walk up to it, point to the steak or chop or rack of ribs you want, and they'll pull it out and sell it to you. None of this pre-shrink-wrapped, family-packed, there's-really-only-one-decent-looking-steak-in-there stuff.

(Which is why I don't like most of the groceries around me - they've done away with the meat case in the name of streamlining, forcing us all to buy pre-packaged meat. Which is often packaged in large-ish quantities. Great if you have six kids, but not so great if you live alone, have a tiny freezer, and forget to take stuff out to thaw anyway).

So I love being able to walk in and buy my ONE steak or ONE pork chop and take it home and cook it.

I generally cook steaks by doing them in the grill pan. I've contemplated getting a Hibachi or something (I have a tiny porch off my kitchen where I could grill outdoors) but the grill pan does a good job and a Hibachi would add a level of complexity (having to plan ahead so the coals are the right stage of combustion when I want to cook the steak).

Actually, the grill pan is probably the pan I use the most. It's good for meat but also good for doing certain vegetables. And good for fish, except I almost never make fish because I don't like it that well.

So I grill up the steak. Usually all I do is rub some kind of seasoning - either Montreal steak seasoning or my current favorite, a southwestern style mix that has, among other things, ancho chilis and chipotle in it. No, I'm not a fan of The Hot, but this isn't really hot - it just gives a good added flavor.

And I grill the steak. But not for long. I like steak cooked AT MOST medium rare. (Yes, I am one of those tiresome people who jokingly tells the waiter, "Have the chef cook it just until it stops mooing." Which I know, waiters hate that kind of badinage. Because they probably hear it 25 times a night. But at any rate - I prefer steaks pink or even red on the inside).

And yes, you are free to respectfully disagree with me on this, but I think good beef is at its best cooked medium rare or below. I have had the experience of being out somewhere with people who preferred well-done steak. (In one case, the woman sent hers back **twice** to ask for it cooked more). And then, when their little hockey pucks come back (and I'm already half-done with my nice pink steak), they cut into it, eat a bit, sigh sadly, and say, "The steak here just isn't very good, is it?"

And I'm all "Uh? Buh?" because I was actually thinking: wow, this is a darn good steak. And I think it's the cooking that does it - I think it tastes better and is more succulent the less it's cooked. (of course, it could partly have been the sending-it-back to be flopped back on the grill that contributed to their steaks not being as good).

But yeah, I know, some people have issues with the meat juice because they think it's blood. (Trust me, it isn't).

And that's their free choice but I prefer my steaks still pink in the middle.

Anyway, I made steak tonight for dinner. And I had some corn (sadly, not fresh - it's very hard to find fresh corn on the cob here so I use either frozen or a good canned corn). And some strawberries which were fresh and were pretty good. And a little wheat hard roll. And it was good. (And yes, the steak was RARE. And it was delicious.)

I have some leftover (it was a big steak) so I think I may have a sandwich sometime. (Not tomorrow night - tomorrow is Real Crown Day when I get the final crown put on. So I'm going to have soup tomorrow night as the crown installation is late in the day and I anticipate not feeling like chewing.)

The r-word.

You may have heard that there are some chains - and it's not entirely clear if it's just in SoCal or if it's elsewhere - that are limiting rice purchases (so far it looks like Costco and Sam's Club.) This is because there's apparently a shortage of rice, or at least rice from parts of southeast Asia.

(the rice I tend to buy comes from Texas; I haven't heard anything about problems with the rice crop there).

The news stories - I'm not going to link any because the few that I found and read irritated me and I don't feel like finding one that doesn't - refer to it as "rationing."

There are also dark allusions to "flour and cooking oil are being 'rationed' in Queens, NY." (I have no confirmation on that last one.)

Okay. This is where I get really irritated at those who write these things up.

The word "rationing" has a lot of connotations to it. Those who remember WWII faced some food rationing (it was MUCH worse in Great Britain than it was here; I'm reading a book currently on conditions in WWII and post-WWII Great Britain and it's moderately shocking how little people were permitted during the worst of it. Oh, I understand the reasons why - it's still shocking.)

I don't see this as "rationing." My understanding of the WWII situation is that in Great Britain, it was because shipping lanes were largely blockaded - and it is a challenge for an island nation to grow enough food to support itself. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the young, able-bodied folk who would normally bring in the harvest were either in the military forces or working defense jobs. (Hence the "Land Girls." My parents have a friend who - though she doesn't use that term - from her description of what she did as a teenager in WWII in Britain, I think she must have been a Land Girl. I don't like to ask her more about it because she doesn't seem to want to bring up those memories, as fascinating as they are to me.)

In the U.S., I think lot of it had to do with companies re-tooling for defense production (no tin cans) and also, the desire to supply the fighting forces (and also land-lease countries) with food.

I suppose you could also make the argument that the sacrifice made people feel more that there "was a war on" (and of course things like gasoline and tires and nylon were rationed as well).

I see the current situation as being a lot more akin to the situation with the Nintendo Wii than I do with true rationing. Here is a product that is in (hopefully) temporarily short supply, you want to ensure that people get a fair crack at getting it, so you limit how much any one person can buy (and I believe the limit was something like 80 lbs. of rice, so unless you're a restaurant owner, you're not going to really face problems. I don't know how fast an average, say, Japanese-American family eats up rice, but 80 pounds is a whopping great lot of rice, in my book).

It's also not unlike what some groceries do with "loss leader" specials - limit quantities purchased so that Jane Doe (who comes in to shop at 8 am) buys up all the cheap hotdogs, and Joe Blow (who can't come in until, say, noon) gets angry because they're all gone.

But I do not see it as "rationing." And I think it was irresponsible for the news outlets - and whoever used it first - to use that word.

(And here is a story (warning: popup ads) that discusses the Texas rice crop. And breathes a little sense into what's going on.

The rice that is "limited" are two "aromatic" varieties (jasmine and basmati) which are grown in East Asia. There is no shortage of Texas-milled rice, the article says, but it is considered a "less desirable" sort by the (primarily immigrant) community that is heavily buying rice.

I don't know - the rice I use is a Texas-grown version of basmati and it's pretty darn good. And I think I've had jasmine rice that was grown in this country. True, you pay a little premium for it - but here is where I tend to get a bit jingoistic - I prefer to buy food grown in my own country whenever possible. Both for reasons of "US farmers get paid" and for reasons of "there's unlikely to be some kind of funky pesticide illegal in the US in there.")

But anyway. A lot of news outlets NOT AS CLOSE to the concept of growing rice as the Beaumont (TX) Enterprise is, are using the "rationing" word.


Because "rationing" is one of those OH NOES! words. One of those words that makes the inner survivalist come out in some people. (I admit it; it nearly did in me when I first heard the news. Before I thought it through, I thought, "Maybe I better run out to the grocery and buy some rice, just to have." Never mind that I don't eat rice daily, never mind that I have a barely-opened 3-pound tub of "Texmati" rice, never mind that were I live, if you don't freeze or refrigerate grain products you're going to store long-term, they will get buggy after a while. It caused that knee-jerk reaction in me and when I figured it out, I got annoyed).

Because that word is going to bring out the same instinct in a lot of people. The limits were put into place to ensure everyone got a supply and to prevent food hoarding. Well, what do you think people - especially 21st century Americans who are used to getting whatever they want whenever they want it, and some of whom take the "screw everyone else; I'm getting mine, no matter what the cost" attitude - will do in the face of "rationing"?

They'll dream up ways around it. (Even in "real" rationing they did - James Beard once said something along the lines of "Everyone knew someone who would sell rationed foods 'under the table.' It was considered chic - somewhat like circumventing Prohibition.")

(I admit some of my admiration for the man died when I read that. Say what you will about WWII food rationing, but people who willfully cheat it - because they can, because it's chic - there's something a little disgusting about that.)

Anyway - by playing up the story, by going with the usual news-instinct to make it sound as bad as possible - it's going to freak people out and possibly make problems worse.

(You want REAL problems? Try being a poor Malaysian who actually depends on rice as a staple and has no other sources for it. Apparently Malaysia was confronting Thailand the other day because Thailand promised to sell them a certain amount of rice and now have reneged.)

And of course, some people run with this - on one blog I read that linked to one of the news stories, there were looming conspiracy concerns. And comments about how "Wal-mart isn't restocking regularly any more; the shelves look kind of bare now." And there are other, agreeing comments: yes, yes, one of the employees agreed, it's because they're not sending as many trucks full of food now in order to save money on diesel. (So: "OH NOES eeeeeeviiiilll Wal-mart is going to starve us instead of making us come in and buy unhealthy food and cheap crap made in China." I almost feel sorry for Wal-mart; they can't catch a break from the haters.)

So, I figured I'd take a look this morning. (I had to buy groceries anyway). I headed out to the local Wal-mart at 6:30 this morning (yes, I get up at the buttcrack of dawn even on the weekends; 6:30 is actually sleeping late for me).

Shelves pretty full.

Even the rice shelves - there were a couple empty slots (I think the brown rice was sold out, but as far as I'm concerned, no great loss there. Brown rice is one of those things that healthists push and which I think tastes like ass). But there was plenty rice. And plenty beans. And plenty meat in the meat case (I don't buy my meat at wal-mart, though, there's a small regional dairy-store chain that sells far better quality meat at competitive prices). Plenty of milk, yogurt, eggs, butter, produce...all the stuff I needed. Nothing seemed to be sold out. And there were few people there at 6:30 am but it didn't seem like any of them were girding up for Food Distribution Armageddon.

Now, don't get me wrong: it's pretty smart to have a certain amount of emergency food on hand. I keep enough canned beans and tomatoes and other stuff I could eat (even if I had no way of heating it up - canned tomatoes may not taste GREAT at room temperature but they are edible). But I don't see any evidence here of a mass freak-out. Which is good. I'd hate to have to go all Zombie Apocalypse on some guy grabbing all the cans of black beans off the shelf because he "needs" them all.


And there are other people using this as another stick to beat Bush with. (heh. Stick. Bush.) One of the newspaper-bloggers said something along the lines of "This coming few months will be BAD but when we get someone new in the White House, they will fix it."

(Actually? The resident of the White House making a move to "fix" temporary shortages of one particular type of food? That scares me more than the shortages do)

But I predict we will hear more "food insecurity" stories over the summer, designed to make people worry, make people begin to say things like "The government should DO something to ensure we are all fed!" And I bed Obama and Clinton and even McCain will come out with grand statements of what they are going to do to ensure "food security"

(and I will eat a bag of that much-hated-by-me brown rice if one of them actually comes up with a phrase along the lines of "a pound of rice in every pot.")


Just you wait.

my head hurts

There was an article in the NYT today explaining to us proles why we should be happy now that food's more expensive.

Supposedly, it will lead to more "local" food and a greater quality of food.

I don't see that happening in my reality. Maybe they live on Planet Sparklepants. I'd like to live on Planet Sparklepants, too, but instead I'm just going to wind up paying $5 for a gallon of the same old milk just like everyone else stuck on Earth.

Well, it could be worse. They could have proposed that high food prices were the solution to the obesity crisis...."Well, all we gotta do is starve out some of these fatties and our problems will be solved!"

Well, I suppose the one way it COULD lead to more local food is more people trying to plant the 21st century version of a Victory Garden. The problem is - for a garden to really work, it's almost a full-time job, weeding and removing pests and tending the plants. My mother had a huge, successful garden when I was a kid but she was a stay-at-home mom with two mercenary children (who would pick potato beetles, bean beetles, and cabbage moth larvae off plants for a penny a piece).

I have kind of a half-assed garden that produces a few tomatoes which are probably more expensive in the long run than tomatoes from the "farmer's" market here (I swear that they bring in produce from a distributor, though - I've seen the cartons).

I don't know, though. There's something that feels deeply wrong about being told to rejoice because you're paying more money for something because it means better days ahead where things are going to get better even though we're still paying a lot...

(I also have issues with the whole Locavore Evangelism movement. Yeah, yeah, I'm really happy that you're content to munch squash and cabbage all winter and that you are proud that you don't eat anything that was grown more than 200 miles from the place where you live...but where *I* live that's not always a possibility. I'd probably starve in the winter (or have to eat nothing but beef from the semi-local ranches) if I tried to do that. It's like a lot of things - I get very weary when people in ONE set of circumstances begin prescribing what people in ANOTHER set of circumstances "should" do. Like "Don't shop at wal-mart!" but "Don't drive, save gas!" Dear person, I cannot do BOTH of those things. I can purchase my food at "evil" wal-mart, or I can be "evil" and drive an hour's round trip (and I would add, that's an hour out of my life I'd rather spend doing something else) to go to the marginally-less-evil-by-your-lights grocery store in the next town over

Also? Eating only local food? Would mean I'd never be able to have chocolate or real tea again, and both of those thoughts make me profoundly sad. And no, don't suggest herbal tea from herbs grown in my own garden; my experience with herb tea is that most of them taste like ass).

Lunch out

In my department, we have get-togethers over lunch from time to time. Part of this is that there aren't a lot of good and not-madly-busy-at-lunch restaurants close to campus, and part of it is it's just easier for everyone to get to eat - some people have class at noon but are free at 11, some people are free at noon but are in class right up to that time, etc.

So, we are having a pre-Thanksgiving "feast" next week. No one had signed up for the main dish so I offered to buy and have a turkey smoked. (It costs money for the smoker to do it, but it's easier than me having to babysit the thing for the 7 hours or whatever it would take to cook a turkey the size we'd need. And I'm not getting up at 4 am to put a turkey in the oven. And I know enough about bacteria to not want to put it in overnight on 250* or whatever it was that one of my friends' mothers did).

So I went out at noon today and bought the turkey (and it was a good thing I did - they're already getting picked over. The local grocery stores are strange - they restock ONLY at set times, and if a shelf runs out of something, they just shrug and go "we're out" even though they have it in their storeroom).

I ran it down to one of the local smoker/barbecue places. The lady knew exactly what was needed; the turkey will be done Wednesday (it was frozen and she kindly offered to thaw it in the restaurant's huge fridge; I would not have room for it at home).

After I filled out the information she needed (contact information and such), I spied that a booth was open. So I decided it was a sign I was supposed to grab lunch there - this is a restaurant that NEVER has a booth open over the lunch hour. So I told her I was going to get lunch and she said she'd send a server out.

I ordered my usual - the half order of ribs, with a side of beans and a root beer. It came quickly. The restaurant isn't fancy - the ribs are served sitting on Wonder bread in one of those oval plastic basket things, and the beans come in a little Styrofoam cup. But the food is reasonably priced and good.

I don't eat out often for lunch any more. When I first moved down here I did nearly every week - part of it was that my apartment kitchen was so small, dark, and depressing that I cooked as little as I could manage. And part of it was I was still kind of sad and shell-shocked from having moved nearly a thousand miles away from everyone and everything I knew. And it was a little bit of comfort, that weekly lunch out.

Over time, I sort of dropped that tradition - partly because I had a couple hellacious semesters where I barely had time to EAT lunch, let along go out somewhere. And I got more adjusted to living here, happier. And I own a house now that has a nice enough kitchen - if I'm going off campus for lunch, I usually go home and throw together a salad or make scrambled eggs or heat up last night's leftovers. It's cheaper and probably better for me on a regular basis.

But once in a while, it's nice to just go out for lunch. Today it looked like a real fall day - overcast, gray, the leaves have begun to turn. It's not chilly out but you could imagine that it was, looking out a window from indoors, because of the gray sky.

And I like the little restaurant I was in - it's one of my favorite places, as much for the way it feels as for the food. It's an odd little place - a single-wide trailer that's been modded so that it's a restaurant interior. Knotty pine paneling is on all the walls and the rather low sloping ceiling. The benches are built of the same stuff. There are perhaps a dozen or fifteen booths, plus a little cart that has additional condiments (jalapenos, chopped onions, extra sauce) in case you want them. It's kind of like what a restaurant would be if a submarine designer was on the design team.

I'm sure some more sophisticated types would think it was a truly awful place, but it makes me happy.

And so I sat there in my booth (it was the last booth up against the back wall of the building, and I was sitting with my back against the back wall, so I could see the whole restaurant). And I looked around.

And this is one of the things I love about small town restaurants: the mix of people who eat there. There was a group of students from the local high school with one of their teachers (I'm guessing it was a club having a noon meeting; they seemed to be discussing plans for something). There was a local dentist and his wife. There was a group of construction workers and their wives. There were a couple banker-looking types. And there was me. Everyone eats in the same place. There's no separation of black, white, Hispanic, native American. There's less separation by socioeconomic class. It's a real cross-section. And everyone was pretty happy and polite; the waitresses walked around making sure everyone had "plenty" (that's their question: they ask you if you have "plenty") and refilling drinks.

The food there is good. Oh, it's probably not the best barbecue ever and probably isn't the best I've ever had. But it has the virtue of being good and being close. And their beans are unusually good - unlike the way most of the people in my family make beans (baked beans with lots of sugar and molasses and junk), these are JUST beans - pinto beans with a little onion and a little ham or maybe salt pork in them. And they're cooked just right - they're not hard but not mushy. I have to say I prefer the Southern way of cooking dry beans (which is more like this method) to the traditional Northern way of making baked beans (again - all that sugar. I just don't like my vegetables to be sweet, unless they're naturally sweet like winter squash).

So I ate my half order of ribs and my beans and I drank my root beer. I looked at the desserts on the menu (fried pies, cobbler, ice cream) but decided I was too full to eat anything more.

I paid and the lady up front told me she'd see me again next week (when I pick up the turkey).

It was a nice small treat. Just what I needed today.

More on comfort foods

I talked a little about this earlier

I found a Mexican pasta ("La Moderna") brand that actually makes alphabet noodles. I bought a bag and brought them home and cooked them up.

Wow, noodles need a LOT of butter to taste the way they did when I was little. I felt kind of guilty about how much I put on.

You know? They're not as good as I remember. I think I like the wagon wheel pasta I had been using better - the alphabets are really small and they get kind of starchy just by themselves.

I also have to admit I like the Lipton's chicken noodle soup - the dried kind, that's basically chicken bouillon with noodles in it - it's totally artificial and the kind of thing that makes food snobs recoil in horror. But I'm not a food snob, and there's something comforting about boiling up a couple cups of water, dumping the packet in, and having hot soup in five minutes.

(I also have to admit I like the pre-packaged Swiss Miss pudding cups. I like pudding but never seem to have the energy to actually make it from scratch. Yes, I know how. Yes, it's not that hard. But it takes time, and often time is not what I have).

And I've already mentioned my fondness for Cup O Noodles. Yes, I know. It's loaded with salt. It's a dietary nightmare. But, to me, it means a particular sort of comfort - it's easy, it doesn't require thought, it's warm, it's noodles. I didn't eat these - or Ramen - for years, because of fear of the salt content. But several years ago, over Thanksgiving, I had to make an emergency trip overnight on the train - my father was having an emergency heart catheterization, with the possibility that he would have open heart surgery. So I got (by some miracle) train tickets up and back, and had to ride overnight in coach on a very badly delayed Amtrak (I was supposed to get on around 7 pm; I finally got on around 1 am. That wait in that tiny, crowded, overheated station was the most miserable and lonely six hours of my life.)
Anyway - I was on the train, I was exhausted, I was hungry, it was roughly lunchtime, the snack car was out of most things I'd consider eating. But they had Cup O Noodles. So, with a sigh, I said, yeah, I'll take a Cup O Noodles.

And you know, that was exactly what I needed then - something warm and uncomplicated, something I had eaten as a child. I've started eating them (very sparingly - not more than once or twice a month) again, and you know - there is something comforting about them.

(And my dad turned out to be okay, what showed up on the stress test was nothing major, certainly nothing requiring open heart surgery).

Another thing I like - and you can hardly ever find any more - is good cider. REAL cider. Not "apple juice." Real pressed apple stuff, with pulp and extracts from the peel and all that. (Of course, it's all pasteurized now - which is probably for the best - but I don't like the "clarified" stuff). I found a new brand - it's one of the "Simply Orange" line but it is "Simply Apple" that is close enough to being cider to satisfy me; it's not got that strange pallid cast that "apple juice" has.

(Actually, where I live now, it's hard to get good apples at all. Apples, apparently, don't grow here. Which makes me sad. A fun fall outing, when I was a kid, was to go to an apple orchard and buy a peck or so of good "keeping apples" for eating and applesauce through the winter, and maybe getting cider and donuts.)

It occurs to me now that a lot of the fun, nice, good things I remember from my childhood were fairly simple - and fairly inexpensive for my parents. I remember the apple-orchard trips, and also going to pick strawberries when they were in season. And if we were lucky enough to be visiting my grandmother at the right time, we'd go pick blueberries.

And we went hiking. And there was an inexpensive "revival theater" near my dad's campus that showed old Disney movies (and other "all ages" type movies).

My mom would bake with me - it was a big deal if she'd let me make "cutout cookies." (I still do make them, but only at Christmas - now that I have to do the rolling and the cleanup I realize what a big production it was).

And we kept a garden, and my brother and I were given little plots to plant what we wanted to try (pumpkins - which I always wanted to grow - never worked out that well; we usually went to a "pumpkin patch" to get ours).

It occurs to me that a lot of the good childhood memories revolve around food - cider and donuts, or baking cookies, or popcorn at the movies. I suppose there are some who'd roll their eyes over that, who said our parents raised us wrong, that we're "too attached" to food now, because of it.

I don't know. I get very tired of the "foodists" and the people who would convince their fellow Americans that chocolate cake is a weapon of mass destruction. I don't see food so much as the enemy; the enemy is the wrong attitude towards food.

When I was a kid, no food was "forbidden" - oh, we didn't get cookies BEFORE dinner, and we were expected to eat what was on our plates - but there was nothing that was made more attractive to us by being told it was off-limits. What was more, we were never forced to eat something we hated. (I had a friend who actually was grounded, because she threw up at the table after trying to force down Brussels sprouts. My parents asked us to TRY but if we just couldn't down the food, it was "no harm, no foul.")

I was a pretty picky eater - didn't like most vegetables (and found, in fact, that some of the really disliked ones from my childhood - like celery - I actually have a food intolerance to and should not eat). However, as an adult, I'm slowly adding things. I never liked sweet potatoes or winter squash as a kid - now they are two of my favorite things and I eagerly await for the "new crop" to come into season. And I'd never touch red cabbage when I was younger, but I like it now. Even the kind that comes in a jar, for when I don't have time to make my own. And salad. While I won't claim that salad is my Favorite! Food! Evah! I can and do eat it pretty regularly.

(Still can't do Brussels sprouts though. Not for want of trying. I do think I'm one of those "supertasters" - many of the things they are purported to hate, I hate. (And I can't stand meat that's too fatty, or salted olives unless I rinse them off first, or things that are too sweet).

I do like green tea though (but make it weaker than recommended) and spinach - well, raw it's okay; I can't do it cooked.

But I don't think my parents screwed me up too badly re: food. Yes, I'm kind of fat. But I don't THINK that's because I eat more than most people, based on my observations of colleagues and friends - perhaps I eat more calorically dense stuff, true (I like chocolate. So sue me.). But I do think there's a body-type issue, also - both my grandmothers were heavy like I am, and my dad is. (And, ironically - my mom is tiny and slim, and she's the only one in the family with elevated cholesterol).

I do think that a lot of the food-fear that's being promoted in the name of "protecting children from obesity" or "fighting the obesity war" is misplaced. I just fear we're going to raise a generation of anorectics, or conversely, a generation who binge on "forbidden" foods because they are "forbidden." Or that we'll have foods banned, or taxed out of people's reach, in the name of "protecting people from themselves."

I don't "forbid" myself chocolate; I can buy a bar of Green and Black's or something and eat one or two squares of it and go, "Okay, I'm good" and put the rest away for later. I guess some people literally cannot do that; I have friends who claim they cannot keep cookies in the house because they would eat them all in a couple days (or less). I am not sure what leads to that mindset; I would hope there'd be a way of getting over it.

Food is a great pleasure; it can be a great comfort. It seems wrong to me to scare people so much about what they put between their gums that they either no longer can take comfort from it or are racked by guilt for consuming it. Or to make them so conflicted about it that they cannot have a box of Oreos, or a bag of potato chips, or a pint of ice cream in the house without thinking obsessively about it until they've eaten it all.

(I'm always surprised at how many of my gen bio students don't really understand what a calorie is. When I explain it's a unit of energy content, they're all like, "baroo?" As if, they've heard for so long that calories are BAD, that they can't understand that a certain amount are needed to keep a person alive. And that the calories in, say, watermelon, are basically the same kind of energy as the calories in a cookie. Well, there are more per unit volume in the cookie, but it's the same energy.)

Food is food. It is not medicine, it is not virtue or vice. It is merely food. It cannot condemn us to Hell nor save us from dying. But every day, it seems there are more people trying to convince us that food is far more than what it is.

An observation

I've commented on here before about my concern about the "ahistoricality" of some of my generation and younger.

Well, I just saw another example: on a bulletin board I read, someone talking about drinking raw milk, and sniffing about how "the Corporations" insist on it being pasteurized, when "we all know" that there are life-giving, immune-enhancing bacteria in fresh raw milk.

Um, yeah. While I don't dispute that VERY CLEAN milk from a VERY CAREFUL dairy is safe to drink raw - at least most of the time, at least as long as the cow is healthy and has no sores on its udder - I would suspect that large-scale milk production going raw would be a nightmare. Lots of people would get sick. (I mean - we can't even seem to sell raw spinach free of potentially pathogenic bacteria, and milk is an even better medium for bacterial growth). And it irks me that there are people who seem to believe that pasteurization is some kind of evil plot to deprive them of the joys of raw milk.

E. coli can grow in milk. Campylobacter can grow in milk. I am pretty sure Listeria can grow in milk (after all, it does in unpasteurized cheeses). I suspect even worse bacteria could make a home in milk.

I'm not saying raw milk should be BANNED - if people want to buy it and drink it, that's their business. But they should realize that not everything that's "natural" is necessarily healthful. (And I sometimes eat raw milk cheese myself - but I buy it from a reputable source and if it gets to looking or smelling iffy, I throw it out.)

I see similar mindsets in the people who refuse to vaccinate their children because they either see vaccines as some kind of product of the "military-medical complex" (and yes, I've heard that phrase used). Or that they're some kind of mind-control thing. Or they cause autism (first: no link was ever established. And second: thimerosol, the preservative popularly blamed for "causing" autism, has been removed from the childhood vaccines). It's probably because no one in my generation has seen a child die of polio - or seen a child made blind and deaf as a (rare, but possible) side-effect of measles - that people are so able to blithely dismiss vaccines.

(I had an aunt who raised her children during the height of the 1950s polio scare. She told stories that were very unsettling to a child of the "vaccine era." Luckily, none of her children contracted the disease - but she remembered summers when she kept her kids home from swimming, and movie theaters closed, and children weren't allowed to have birthday parties - all out of fear of the contagion passing where anyone gathered.)

I've also heard people slam water treatment - chlorination of drinking water. It's unnatural, they say. It makes compounds that can cause cancer in some cases. It pollutes the world. It makes the water taste bad!

And I just kind of shake my head and wonder if they've ever heard of cholera. Or dysentery. Or any of the dozens of diseases that carry off millions of people in less-developed countries every year.

(I would argue that sanitation, and water hygiene, has probably been the "medical" or technological advance that's saved the most lives over the years).

I don't know. On the one hand, I want people to KNOW. I want them to be able to make an informed choice, where they have the science to hand (and where they don't dismiss it with some kind of New Age-y handwaving). On the other hand, I want to protect my own right to clean water and deadly-bacteria-free milk by not permitting the spread of unscientific ideas about what are actually great advances in hygiene and cleanliness. (After all - whenever irradiation is brought up as a possible solution to bacteria-infested food, people are terrified that their food will become radioactive. That is not true. It is really not much different from x-raying food. The main problem that seems to happen is SOME vitamins in food might be reduced - but when the choice is a week of food poisoning vs. a slightly lower vitamin C level, you can bet what side I'd go with.)

I don't know. Perhaps we need to include a "health history" unit in the schools - with films of the polio days and good instruction into all the bacteria that can infest water. Because I don't want some ill-informed future populace voting to take out the chlorine from water treatment (without replacing it with something better). But when you hear some of these fringe-y people speak, it gets kind of worrisome - some of them are VERY persuasive and some of them will shout down anyone who tries to bring up "bad old" science.

comfort foods

Michele is talking about the comfort foods you want when you're sick.

I listed some of mine - pancakes, buttered toast, Cap'n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch...

And I thought of a few more:

buttered noodles. No garlic, no stinky foot cheese, no acidy tomato stuff - just butter and a little salt on noodles, or wagon wheel pasta, or alphabet macaronis (which are VERY VERY HARD to find where I live now - I don't know if there's a nationwide drought of these things, or if it's just my region. But when I was a kid - we used to have them on the shelf all all the time. Mueller's, I think, was the company that made them.)

(Actually, more on pasta - where I grew up, Mueller's (white box with blue and red accents) and Creamettes (green box with red accents) were the two big brands. Neither of those are sold down here. I can get DaVinci (blue plastic bag), which is good, but it is somehow not the same. I remember the first time I went back to visit my parents after I moved down here, going to the grocery to pick some things up for my mother - I saw the Creamettes boxes on the shelf at the store and had to fight tears. And after a brief flirtation with the "healthier" whole wheat pasta, I'm back to good old durum semolina. I don't eat pasta that much - maybe a couple times a month at most - so I don't think I need to eat something with the consistency of sandpaper in the interest of my health)

White bread, with butter and sugar on it. (This would probably be regarded as child abuse in some circles today). That was one of the upset-stomach-can't-eat-real-food treats, or one of the we're-out-at-a-restaurant-and-you-don't-like-anything-on-the-menu-
and-I'm-sorry-about-that palliatives. I didn't get it often but I loved it. (And I made it for myself a couple months ago, just as an experiment. It was as soothing as I remembered. Not that I eat it OFTEN, mind you - but it's nice to know my memory of that wasn't inaccurate.

Lemon-lime soda, although I wasn't a big soda fan as a kid, we got that or Vernor's ginger ale when our stomachs were upset. Funny, that was one thing that I didn't particularly crave when I wasn't sick. I still don't, today.

Cereal. Any kind of cereal, pretty much, except for junk like All-Bran or some kind of flake cereal without any added sweetener. I still eat cereal for dinner sometimes - when I've been at work from 7 until after 5, and then had a hellish meeting right after, and now it's 9 pm and I've neither been home nor had a proper meal all day - cereal works because it's easy, and you don't have to go to much effort to eat it, and you don't have to wait for it like you have to wait even for soup to heat up. I like hot cereal, too, but I never have time to do it in the morning (except maybe on Saturdays), so sometimes I fix that for dinner.

Grilled cheese. Yes. A good grilled cheese, properly made - that is, cooked on a hot grill with butter on the outside of the bread, and preferably it's a restaurant grill that's held onions and hamburgers before the sandwich, so the bread picks up a little extra flavor - that is one of life's joys. From the age of about 4 until the age of perhaps 14, that was my standard, fall-back, restaurant order: a grilled cheese sandwich.

Sadly, grilled cheese can easily be debased, and often in subtle and unexpected ways. I think I talked before about the "grilled cheese florentine" I got one time when I ordered a simple grilled cheese - I'm sorry, but spinach has no place on that sandwich. Even tomatoes - as much as I may like them on other sandwiches - have no place in a grilled cheese, at least in my universe. Nor should the sandwich be made on ANYTHING but lily-white, sponge-type Wonder bread. (One possible exception: my mom used to make an excellent tomato bread that made fine grilled cheese sandwiches. They were not the old-fashioned diner standard type sandwich in many ways, but they were still good). And NEVER mayonnaise. I am adamant on that and am STILL appalled that Culver's thought somehow grilled cheese and mayo were a combination that a human being could ingest.

But your old-fashioned, "golden age" grilled cheese - the simple, classic type: buttered Wonder bread, grilled with a slice of that wrapped American cheese (or Velveeta - call me a Philistine but I do like Velveeta) inside it, cooked until the bread is crisp and slightly brown and the cheese properly melted - that is a wonderful thing.

Tomato soup, I'm kind of agnostic on. I didn't like tomato soup until I was an adult so I never experienced the "dip your grilled cheese in your tomato soup" tradition.

Milkshakes. Milkshakes were another "forbidden" (well, most of the time) food that became permissible when we were sick. We didn't live in an area that had many fast food joints, so my mom usually made them at home in her blender. (Oh, and did you know? Ovaltine makes excellent shakes. Ovaltine, milk, vanilla ice cream - it's like a good chocolate malted. Ovaltine has the DUMBEST radio commercials EVER, but it's a good product.)

And while I'm on Ovaltine: hot Ovaltine. Made with milk. In a big big mug. It makes a lot of the bad things go away. Especially if you have a couple of slightly sweet crisp crackers to eat with it. (I've recently discovered a product called "Milk Lunch" or "New England Milk Crackers." I swear that we had something like this in the Great Lakes region when I was a kid, and I'd just not seen it for years - they are sort of between a Ritz cracker and a butter cookie with a hint of "saltine" about them. They're wonderful, the only place I've seen them for sale is Vermont Country Store, and like a lot of the specialty products from them, they cost the Earth but are worth it to me in terms of the comfort they bring.)

Homemade applesauce. It's different from the stuff in a jar. I don't often make it for myself because it's extra work but it's very good. My mom always used to serve homemade applesauce. (It's cooked, the stuff in the jar seems to be raw ground up apples. It gives a different texture and flavor).

Belgian waffles. These were a rare treat because you had to be at a restaurant, at a time when breakfast was available, and that had Belgian waffles. (My mom had a waffle iron, but it was one of those flat unexciting American-type waffle irons. And her waffles were good, but they weren't Belgian.)

More recently, I've found other comfort foods:

Wonton soup. If you have a good Chinese place near you, this is the best thing for a cold. I think they make the stock with more wings than normal or something - it has a vaguely gelatinous taste and seems smoother and fuller than usual chicken stock.

Hot tea. I hated tea as a kid - couldn't be made to drink it, even when the doctor said it would settle my stomach. (I had lots of stomach issues as a kid). But now, I love it. It's almost as good as Hot Ovaltine for making the bad things go away.

Barbecue. Lots of it, preferably the baby back ribs, and in a setting where you can eat them with your fingers and get the sauce on your face and not feel like a slob for doing it. Barbecue is fairly big where I live now, but it's hard to find a place that's exactly to my liking, because I tend to prefer the sweeter, Kansas-City style sauce to the more vinegary, more hot sauces.

Tapioca pudding. Another hated-it-as-a-kid thing. (Along with rice pudding, which I actually make more frequently than tapioca, because I'm more likely to have the ingredients on hand). It's kind of like cereal or soup - there's something inherently comforting about food you don't have to cut or even really chew.

Those cup-o-noodle things, chicken flavor - I almost never eat these because of the salt content, but sometimes there are times when you just want a salty cup of noodles. (And I like Ramen, too. Even though I ate it a lot as a student.)