A Literary Feast

The Scoop

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Mine was a childhood spent in the kitchen, though I dont want you to get the wrong idea and imagine me peering into a sinkfull of freshly washed vegetables as I helped to prepare a nutritious dinner. No, it wasnt quite like that. I was raised in large part by an elderly aunt who never had kids of her own and who had fully embraced the fifties’ dining model.

As the majority of her small apartment was plastic wrapped and moth balled, we rarely left our tiny kitchen sanctum except to sleep. We did everything in that one little room; played endless games of war and rummy, did crossword puzzles, watched candlepin bowling on Saturday afternoons. She had her short wooden rocking chair, her big bag of knitting, and her roll-y cart television set with the microwave underneath, so we were good. A bomb could go off and we would have everything we needed to ride out the apocalypse in comfort.

This was of course largely due to the fact that almost all of the food in the house had an expiration date ten years in the future. Cans of green beans and pickled beets, cartons of crispy onion pieces, box upon box of spaghetti, Wonder Bread, Twinkies, Saltines, Jello, squeeze cheese, Bisquik, and my personal favorite: Velveeta. I had no idea that Velveeta should, technically speaking, probably not be considered cheese until I was well into my teens. The only ‘fresh food’ that would be found in her house was a bag of celery in her crisper drawer. As I DID NOT LIKE celery I didn’t concern myself with it much.

The majority of my earliest memories involve watching her wrinkled and familiar hands preparing us space age meals with a variety of specific utensils. There were macaroni and cheese afternoons (Big Y brand, which I thought was the best there could ever be) where she would start the water boiling and then prepare all of the ingredients for the cheese sauce. She would take out her thin aluminum measuring cup and fill it to the second line with milk and then spread the foil butter wrapper flat and cut the butter into evenly sized cubes using her pearly handled paring knife.

I loved that knife. It lived in a wooden rack in the pantry. Each knife was labeled and I would sit on the counter and stare up at its title, working to puzzle out the difference between paring and pairing as I gazed at its opaline hilt. When she turned back to the stove to stir in the elbows I would sneak beneath the wooden table and reach my hand up to thieve the cold cubes of butter and deposit them into my mouth, where I would let them melt as I listened to her stirring the pot and humming French songs to herself.

There was the ice cream scoop with the textured handle like a honey dipper that would plop freezy mounds of cookies and cream into my bowl when I returned home from school. Eventually she replaced it with one of those fancy scoops with the little lever on the side that swoops the scoop clean, but I always disliked it. It seemed foreign and insincere. To this day I have a strange disdain for those little swooping levers.

Thursday nights my mom stayed out late at her painting class and we would have thick strands of spaghetti with Velveeta and butter. My aunt never strained her pasta, instead leaving it to drown in the starchy water where she would retrieve it with a goose neck spoon with a toothy edge and one big drainage hole in the center of its cup. Her cheese grater wasn’t like the other ones I had seen, the tapered boxes with handles and different sized holes. It was long and flat with curly edges to place over your plate and we would push the soft velveeta into it like playdoh and watch the bright orange globs melt out the other side.

Around holidays she would make pies filled with strange gray meat. I was afraid of that strange gray meat, but I rather liked her wooden rolling pin, with its butter shined wood grain and red handholds. I would listen to it squeeze and flatten the dough as I ate floury trimmings off of the wax paper.

The best time was when we made hard boiled eggs and I got to use the egg slicer. It had a nest to snuggle the egg into and a grid of fine wires that would flip down and slice the egg into perfect discs, exposing its center, bright yellow against the outer white flesh.

We delighted in those afternoons and evenings together, getting our instruments out of their drawers and cupboards and pulling the perforated tabs off of our dinner boxes. Her expressing her love by feeding me, and me feeling well cared for and adored as we ate our nuclear colored meals side by side. As I got older I started hanging out with friends more, and cooking with my aunt less. As she got older she stopped cooking entirely, and when I was in high school she passed away.

Recently I received a box in the mail from my mother and inside was that heavy, honey-dipper-handled ice cream scoop. Picking it up I was transported right back to that kitchen, with its gray linoleum floor and white metal cabinets. In this day of disposable goods it means a lot to me that something as small and seemingly insignifigant as an ice cream scoop was made well enough that decades later, I could hold it in my hand and feel like I was seven years old again, back in that kitchen, eating ice cream with the person who loved me the most.

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Spatula of Salvation

Posted on August 16th, 2012

The box was only half full when I finished tucking in the mixing bowls and straightened to scan the kitchen for my next target. My gaze slid over the high use shelves, jumped the spot recently vacated by a set of white porcelain ramekins, shuddered away from the scary cupboard over the sink, and came to rest on the drawer of miscellaneous kitchen utensils. This was the drawer that seems to exist in all kitchens, the one that houses both your favorite and your never-used-even-once gadgets, the one where someone asks, “where’s your lemon zester?” and you say, “in that drawer…with the other random stuff…no, no, the one next to the fridge.”

I slid my box over. Here was the hard part. Everything that went in this box would go on to clutter a similar drawer in my new apartment; the goal was to have less clutter, so some of these things would not make the cut. Some of these things would end up on the free table at the dump. I could hear the gadgets jostling for position already, pushing one another out of the way to make it to the top of the drawer where, not yet at decision fatigue, I was more likely to keep them. Cherry Pitter elbowed Curly Straw in the throat in her efforts to get above Can Opener. She was rightfully nervous; I’d bought her last year when I froze several pounds of cherries at once. She hadn’t worked that well. Garlic mincer sank to the bottom, confident in his position, while a handful of wine bottle sealers fidgeted in the front corner like kindergarteners in line for recess.

I started with the easy stuff: the perfect pie server it had taken me months to find, the cheese slicer I’d grown up using, the beautiful, hand-crank egg-beaters given to me on my last birthday. As Lemon Juicer swung over the drawer edge, she stuck her tongue out at Cheap Plastic Rice Paddle.

My first pause came with the beaters to my electric mixer; the normal pair were well on their way into the box when they heard the anxious pleading of their bread dough counterparts from my other hand. “We’re a set,” one said anxiously, “you can’t break up a set!”

“But I’ve never even used you,” I told them.

“Exactly,” the other said reasonably, “you have no idea what you’re missing. We might be amazing. We might change your life; with us, you might make bread all the time.” He’d clearly been taking notes during those years in the back of the utensil drawer. In the box they went.
Cute Green Peeler was zooming toward salvation when something caught my eye. I fished around and pulled out Weird Plastic Peeler. As I held them up to compare, something squirmed in the drawer and, diving in, I surfaced with Antique But Not Very Sharp Peeler. How did I come to own three vegetable peelers? Did I peel that often? No. I didn’t. Cute Green, Weird Plastic, and Antique But Not Very Sharp all quivered in fear under my judging eye. Antique But Not Very Sharp scored high for style but Cute Green was probably the most functional. I could get Antique sharpened but it certainly wasn’t high on my moving to-do list. I wanted all of them; I wanted none of them; maybe I needed a snack.

Blood sugar restored, I returned to the peelers abandoned on the floor next to a basket of aprons. Cute Green and Antique But Totally Sharpenable went in; I said a tiny kitchen prayer and, squinting in concentration, tossed Weird Plastic into the garbage bag hanging from the basement door. Sushi Mat came next and, as I eyed her crust of dried rice starch, was about to make an echoing flight across the kitchen when she let out an ear piercing shriek.

“No! Nononono,” she wailed. “I’m perfectly good. I just need a soak, that’s all!” I wound up. “You kept Dragon Claw Tongs and he always effs it up! Remember that time you were trying to pull tofu cubes out of frying oil and one got stuck on his stupid pointy tip and you looked like a lunatic trying to shake it off without splattering your shirt? I’ve never done that to you!” The utensils had started to turn on each other; we had reached the bottom of the drawer and they sensed my desperate need to purge, the desire to shake away the chaff of the years I had lived here – be it emotional, psychological, or cuisinological.

“Yes, but I stole Dragon Tongs from the café I worked at as a teenager,” I admonished. “You, Sushi Mat, are cheap and were left behind two roommates ago.” I stuffed her into the garbage bag, muffling her appeal, and told myself that sentimentality mattered in hopes that it would assuage the guilt. Chopsticks followed Sushi Mat, accompanied by a lecture on cheap painted things and lead poisoning. Steeling myself, I plowed ahead, redeeming and damning with reckless abandon.

Finally it happened that I turned to the drawer and all that remained was a twist tie, many crumbs, and a handful of plastic popsicle holders. I sighed. I didn’t really like this popsicle set; the bases were too small and didn’t catch the juice as it melted. In a perfect world – where it was not past my bedtime, where I hadn’t worked a long shift earlier, and where someone gave me endless money to design my ideal kitchen – I would jettison this handful of plastic in a heartbeat. But on this August night, with strands of hair escaping from my bun and plastered to my neck with sweat, a throb beginning to build behind my eyes, I couldn’t do it.

I got a chair and dug around in the scary cupboard over the sink until I found the rest of the popsicle set. I filled each tube with cranberry cocktail and arranged the plastic sticks in alternating green and blue rows. Putting them in the freezer that I had been working so hard to empty, I imagined how good a popsicle would be at the end of moving day.

“Popsicle sticks,” I whispered into the chilly rush that hit my face as the freezer door closed, “you’ll do.”

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Frontier Chef

Posted on August 16th, 2012

The summer after my freshman year of pastry school was hot and sticky. I spent it in Oklahoma helping a surgical nurse take over an existing bakery she purchased during some sort of mid-life career crisis. It was quite a successful bakery; the products were good and there was no competition except the supermarkets. The space was large but the resources were a bit limited. I had two mixers – a forty quart and a twenty quart – and two ovens – a standard double door convection and an old-timey carousel oven that functioned in a fashion more akin to a ferris wheel. You might be thinking, ‘that doesn’t sound so limited’; and you would be right if all this nurse wanted me to do was bake. But, in addition to my daily twelve hour bake shift that started at two in the morning, she wanted me to cater her best friend’s daughter’s wedding…..for three-hundred and fifty people.

In small-town Oklahoma, a black tie wedding for 350 people means fifteen percent of the town was invited to the community center for THE event of the summer. The idea was simple enough; appetizers and a mashed potato bar: mashed potatoes with all the fixin’s “classed up” in martini glasses. I had designed the appetizer menu around my limited resources in the bakery. Planning to make pretty much everything ahead of time meant hoping they didn’t notice they weren’t getting anything sauteed, boiled, pan-fried, or otherwise prepared on a stove top. The mashed potato bar was, unfortunately for me, non-negotiable. Having no way to boil one hundred pounds of potatoes, I personally sampled every prepared-mashed-potato-product available. Let me tell you: there are reasons people still bother to peel, cube, boil, and mash their own potatoes. Nevertheless, I settled on a promising high quality boil-in-bag redskin mashed potato. I had been promised that the community center would have a very well-equipped commercial kitchen, though all of my requests to see the kitchen before the day of the event had been met only with repeated assurances that it was indeed very nice and fully equipped.

Most of the potato bar fixin’s required little preparation: butter, cheese, sour cream, chives, bacon…but this was a wedding and the mashed potatoes – which were already burdened with the expectation of being the most dignified mashed potatoes that ever were – also had the distinction of becoming the vehicle for what was to stand in for the lack of an entree. Beef tips. On top of mashed potato cocktails. No big, right? I mean the community center has a commercial kitchen, right? Not knowing whether I would be able to mass-produce beef tips quickly enough in a kitchen I had never seen; remembering I would be working my normal 2-10:00 A.M. in the bakery before going to the community center to pull off this miracle; and not being a complete masochist, I decided to prep the beef-tips ahead of the event. However, mixers and ovens weren’t going to help, so I told the nurse and she returned with a Coleman gas stove. I didn’t read the manufacturer’s literature, but I’m pretty sure this piece of camping gear was not designed to double as excellent for large-scale high-end catering. I’m not a camper, but I am a trooper; once she showed me how to use it I was in business. It was 4:00 P.M. on a day that started at 2:00 A.M.; the fifth in a five-day series of eighteen-hour days and there I was, making beef tips for three-hundred and fifty people on a Coleman stove – one two-inch hotel pan at a time. In a professional kitchen we all come up though the ranks somehow, and we all pay our dues; I thought at the time I was just paying in advance and I was determined to pull it off.

So the day of the wedding comes and I open the bakery for the weekend rush before heading over to the community center. I have done all I could to make this go smoothly and really only need to boil some water, heat a few things in ovens, and keep them warm. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out the community center looked very nice and commercial; it had ovens, warmers, fridges, freezers, stainless steel tables, prep sinks and a very nice commercial dish washer. What it didn’t have was a single apparatus that would boil pots of water. There were two old electric hot plates that didn’t produce enough heat to make a grilled-cheese sandwich between the two of them. Instead of a commercial microwave, a sad little model whose white exterior made it look like it had come from the isle of misfit toys sat surrounded by its stainless steel brethren. But this was it, this was all I had, and there was no turning back. My best friend Laura had come out to visit and help work the wedding, and I enlisted her to man the potatoes and the microwave. Five cases of boil-in-the bag mashed potatoes went in that microwave before she transferred them to the warmer…one lonely bag at a time slowly rotating. I’m sure if it could have, that sad little microwave would have started to wonder how in the hell the family it was designed to be serving was going to eat that many bags of processed potatoes; but it and Laura soldiered on.

The reception was served to the pleasure of the guests, none of them suspecting the catastrophes behind it. So that was the summer I paid my dues and started my way up the ranks. As for Laura, who is a classical musician with no kitchen dues to pay, she became an honored civilian and refrained from using a microwave for a very long time.

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Silver Spoons: Remembering A Well-Set Table

Posted on August 16th, 2012

I learned how to eat at my grandmother’s house. “How” being the key word, not “what” – because by the time I came along, second to last in a long line of grandchildren, my grandmother, once a respectable 1940s-era cook of roasts, mint jellies, and the perfect fudge, had diabetes, little sense of taste, and even less of a sense of adventure in the kitchen. Sunday brunches were always cinnamon rolls as hard as hockey pucks and slices of bacon that tasted like ashes. At least one dinner a week consisted of a gray roast beef sawed right at the table (an experience that very possibly contributed to my later decades of vegetarianism), and salads were limp lettuce bathed liberally in oil and vinegar, a sacrificial slice of bread lying prone at the bottom of the salad bowl to soak up the excess. As a child, picking at each plate of benign culinary neglect on every visit to my grandmother’s house, I always left the table hungry and vaguely ill. Only handfuls of stale Oreos, snuck from a yellow cookie jar she kept on the kitchen counter and had likely forgotten about circa 1975, revived me between meals.

Yet, even so, I loved eating at my grandmother’s house more than anywhere else. Her home, a sprawling Tudor built in 1903 on a full city block in an aging Wisconsin lumber town, was a child’s rapturous combination of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and an Indiana Jones movie: half museum, half treasure hunt, every corner crammed with enchanting, if mysterious, objects and relics of another era. There were bookcases filled with beautiful, hard-bound books that smelled of leather and glue, glass cases of china dolls and painted fans with mother-of-pearl handles, staircase landings piled high with wooden boxes that smelled like cigars and were filled with old photos, family bibles, and sachets of exotic spices. My grandparents moved into the house in 1945 and stayed there through four children, empty nesting, and, finally, death. So 132 Marston Avenue was more than a house; it was the story of their lives, as well as a curiosity cabinet of riches from the combined ancestries of a woman who could trace her forebears back before the Revolution and a man born to a state senator and an elegant Peruvian aristocrat-come-midwestern housewife.

With the exception of weekday breakfasts and Sunday dinners, all meals at this house were eaten in the formal dining room. Oddly oval in shape, the room was filled with dark furniture and chairs upholstered in thinning velvet. There was a sideboard against the far wall upon which ingenious clusters of purple grapes made from amethyst and wire spilled out of a large bowl. In another corner, a slender display cabinet could be unlocked with a tiny skeleton key and housed fragile china plates decorated with minutely perfect pastoral scenes. Even the sconces on the wall – former gas torchiers now converted to electricity – were relics of a by-gone time of formal cocktail hours, three-piece suits, and pearl-tipped hairpins – all, incidentally, things my grandparents still heartily believed in well through the 1980s.

Meals were as formal as the room. There were perfectly folded cloth napkins, and elaborate place settings, with one’s drink glass always to the north-northeast of the plate. The de facto rule, which I never remember being spoken aloud but which was always solemnly, if breathlessly, observed, was that no one could eat until my grandmother had lifted her fork. Children were expected to speak quietly when spoken to, if at all, and were required to beg permission to leave the table for rejuvenating trips to the loo (wallpapered by my grandmother in floor-to-ceiling Audubon prints) or the refuge of the attic room that we referred to, unimaginatively, as The Third Floor, where there were old luggage chests filled with lead toy soldiers and wind-up army tanks. But the dining room had its own toys: there was, when I was young and before my grandparents’ patience with the antics of their eleven grandchildren grew thin, a button hidden under the carpet near the head of the table that, when gently pressed with a subtle movement of one’s foot, would ring a buzzer in the kitchen to summon the help (who, it should be noted, did not exist). I loved to slip my foot out of my shoe, slide down slightly in my chair, and spend the entire meal with the tip of my toe resting lightly on that button, imagining what delightful distress I might cause my grandmother if I were to ring it.

I was a bossy child who liked order and rules – though, preferably, rules that I could impose on other people, not myself. But I felt a visceral thrill at every meal at my grandmother’s house. Asking my brother politely to pass the green beans, I felt like a grand actor in a play, declaiming lines that we never said at the table at home, where we giggled fart jokes into our milk cups and kicked each other under the table. Yet, even more than the studied ritual of meals at my grandmother’s, I loved all the things on her table: tiny crystal salt cellars encased in silver filigree, into which you dipped fairy-sized spoons; pepper shakers that looked like chessboard queens; napkin rings engraved with my grandparents’ initials, in case they forgot who was who; salad tongs with handles made of rich, dark ebony carved with clubs as if from a deck of cards; and a procession of forks and spoons marching away on either side of your plate. The latter came in a dizzying variety of sizes and shapes whose enigmatic usefulness – spearing butter patties, sprinkling sugar on your berries – had to be explained sotto voce by whichever parental figure was sitting nearby.

Perhaps, though, it was less the formality of those meals that I loved than the house itself and all the multitude of things it contained to entertain the eye and brain while the mouth chewed and chewed. Even breakfasts, taken on all days except Sunday in a considerably less opulent kitchen under the considerably less watchful eye of my mother, were a wealth of pleasurable sensation. As with all other meals at my grandmother’s house, the food never varied: a bowl of Rice Chex left over from our last visit and stored in the months between in the bread box, served with a can of Libby’s grapefruit juice from the icebox-turned-refrigerator in the walk-in pantry. But, again, the simple things that accompanied those meals made the ordinary extraordinary. I’d drink my juice out of 1950s-era jam jar glasses embossed in faded yellow while staring up at a wall where a copper aspic mold in the shape of a fish eating its tail hung over the table. The salt-and-pepper shakers here were a faded magenta like an evening sunset, and I was fascinated by the constellations of gold and silver flecks in the table top, having never seen Formica before. For the first twenty years of my life, this scene never changed: the paper napkins in the wooden holder my uncle had made, the tongue-in-cheek cartoon on the refrigerator that my cousin had drawn in an attempt to rile up my grandmother, the black-and-white photo in a bare wood frame of my mother’s former dog, Terry the terrier. These things offered timeless comfort, where the difference in me being 5 and me being 20 disappeared as soon as my spoon clicked against the edge of the bowl.

When my grandparents died, I walked through their house with my parents, choosing the things I most wanted to remember them by. Though the rooms were filled with exquisite furniture and first-edition books, what I ended up taking with me, the things to which I was most drawn, were the relics of all those by-gone meals. The silver platter on which my grandfather carved his infamous roasts, nicked by a thousand knife cuts. My grandmother’s monogrammed linen napkins. Crystal wineglasses that have today somehow survived two long-distance moves and several earthquakes. A set of bright blue, enameled plates decorated with golden peacocks and palm trees. To wit, nothing practical for life in the six hundred square-foot cabin in the woods of Alaska where I now live.

But practicality was never really the point, was it? One of the best things that I inherited from my grandparents is a collection of sterling silver teaspoons collected by my great-aunt Louisa. Packed carefully into blue linen, labeled “Odd Spoons” in a fountain pen, they are delicate orphans with elaborate handles: bouquets of flowers, crests, and wreaths, some engraved “Christmas 1913” or with her initials, no two alike. My favorite is a tiny, short spoon with a broad, flat handle, into which the silversmith carved three-dimensional lilies of the valley, soft folds like curtains opening around them. On the back, “Louisa 1909” – the year she was three. This is not a practical spoon; it is a piece of art. It was not made for efficiency but for long, slow meals at a table set with other works of art in adult-sized versions, where conversation lingered and wit was praised and wine flowed liberally. It was made at a time when beauty of form was married to function, when a gift of such a spoon was a promise to a three year-old: you too, some day, will be this elegant – and your meals the way you display your elegance to the world.

Today, in my tiny, functional kitchen, where the only elegance comes from windows that frame a view of the inlet and the birch trees that bend in the wind, these spoons and all the other things I took from my grandmother’s house are less a symbol of status than a reminder to slow down and eat beautifully. By that, I mean that when I dip one of my great-aunt Louisa’s silver spoons into a bowl full of blueberries soaked in milk and sugar, I am reminded to savor each bite, to notice the dappled shadows on the walls, to laugh with my husband sitting across the table, to notice the small things around me that make my own meals unforgettable. And, above all, to remember my grandmother, on another evening long ago, passing the sugar bowl with a twinkle in her eye to a small girl, her legs dangling off the dining room chair, her spoon poised above her berries, one toe pressed softly against the buzzer on the floor, both ready to flee the table but yet wanting the meal to go on and on and on.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tending to a Case of Grad School-Itis

Posted on August 16th, 2012

I found it in an antique store and, at $19, it was a steal. It’s big and heavy — made of thick glass — and has a shiny aluminum top. There are images from the world of leisure painted all over the sides: tennis racquets, bowling pins, a sailboat, and even a dapper golfer raising his club in mid-swing. Flanking the sailboat and golfer are recipes for classic drinks like “Whiskey Sour,” “Side Car,” and even the “Bronx” — a mouthful of vermouth that allegedly set the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous off on a 17-year bender. It’s vintage, alright.

It’s also the perfect replacement for the flimsy metal cocktail shaker that came with my Groupon-purchased online bartending class.

That’s right: I enrolled in an online bartending class. With a Groupon.

I blame grad school-itis.

Grad school-itis is the persistent, irrational compulsion to enroll in some kind of (any kind of?) masters program. If you graduated from college with a degree in the humanities, you’ve probably come under its spell at one time or another. There’s no cure — the best you can hope for is temporary remission — and the only treatment is exposure to student loan statements and sobering CNN Money articles.

I’ve tussled with the condition more than once. In 2006 it was a masters program in art conservation. In 2008 it was the then-hot now-not online MBA. This year, when the inner voices once again began to whisper, “The BA is the new high school diploma,” I was ready. Or, it seems, Groupon was. The email I received began, “Like passing the bar, tending a bar requires extensive knowledge.”

Oh Groupon, you had me at “extensive knowledge.”

As soon as I clicked the big Groupon BUY! button, my growing desire to leap into a graduate program suddenly diminished. Apparently any formal education, regardless of subject, is a suitable foil for grad school-itis. And why not bartending? According to the growing chorus of conspiracy nuts, it’s only a matter of time before a zombie virus or some natural disaster turns our high-tech world into post-apocalyptic frontier country. Think about it: In a Mad Max dystopian future, who’s got the upper hand: Someone with a graduate certificate in “arts management”? Or the person who can make the bounty hunters a mean gin and tonic?

Even in the here and now, there are plenty of excellent practical applications (including, but not limited to, a built-in excuse for drinking all the time). But, dork that I am, I’m mostly excited about learning something that is completely and totally new to me. To go from ignorant neophyte to novice creator. To try something with absolutely no sense of whether or not I’ll ever get good at it. School me, oh internet module. School me.

Shaker in hand, I’m ready to learn.

Categories: Uncategorized

Eight

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Eight. I have room for eight utensils. My husband and I will be road tripping and camping for three months, and I have room for eight cooking utensils.

It is an arbitrary limit I have set for myself, admittedly. I do that sort of thing pretty regularly, and also end up frustrated pretty regularly trying to adhere to them, which is sort of bewildering to my husband. But I haven’t yet figured out if he realizes that without this self-set limit, we’d end up carting our entire kitchen east across Canada and back west across the United States, to the detriment of space for important things like, oh, our tent.

So here I am with my eight arbitrary slots, for the only kitchen utensils I will have at my side through three months of cooking at campsites and hostels and, where we’re lucky, friends’ houses. What the hell do I chose?

Some are picked out quickly and easily:

1: Chef’s knife 8 inches of full-tanged, steel German glory. You will not leave my side. I even bought you a fancy blade protector, as you leave the comfort of your other knife friends and your nice knife block and embark on this trans-continental adventure with me. Together we will conquer the Canadian wilds, the New England countryside, and the frustratingly dull knives of friends, family, and Couchsurfing hosts. You will chop garlic from Vancouver to Prince Edward Island, peel root vegetables from New England to the Great Lakes, and open all manner of packages from Illinois to Idaho.

2 & 3: Double-ended rubber spatulas A little boring, but a necessity. They will be serving spoons, they will be stirrers, they will be the scrapers of pans with cooked on smears of chili. My particular spatulas of choice have a large end, a small end, and a handle, all of which are completely covered in rubber. One has flat ends (great for flipping and scraping), and one has spoon-like ends (great for mixing and serving). The small end makes them extra handy at things like removing the last bits of peanut butter from the bottom of the jar, and the rubber coating means that their heads don’t detach from their handles all the goddamn time, like those other kinds. (I am looking at you, fancy Martha Stewart rubber spatula that now sits in a Goodwill for some other unlucky bastard to purchase and attempt to use reliably without wanting to scratch their own face off).

4: Locking metal tongs I venture to guess I will use these tongs for a variety of kitchen tasks – like serving things, flipping things, and picking up steaming hot food items (all of which I am stupidly wont to do with my own fingers when no one else is around, but perhaps in my new stripped-down culinary life I will turn over a new leaf). My tongs are simple, entirely metal, and lock with a little tab on the end. They are entirely fantastic and reliable, and were purchased for approximately 25 cents from some sort of Asian market. As cheap as they should be. (Do NOT, I repeat DO NOT try to give me fancy, expensive tongs to use. Why do you have those? Looking at them makes me angry and they will have NO PLACE in my bare necessities, eight-utensil kitchen. Please take them away.)

5: Can opener This is just cruel. I need it, no question, but it does one thing only and that thing isn’t even fun. It is 100% utility, and now I’ve lost an entire slot. Way to go, can opener.

After those five, things get a little complicated. I suppose I could have set my arbitrary limit at five, and then my task would be easily done and I could move on to strategizing how to stock myself with three months of underwear. But I said eight, goddamnit, and all I can think about are the potential conveniences of those three other possible tools.

So I keep looking. Spoons and spatulas of various shapes and materials – nope. You have been replaced by rubber spatulas and metal tongs. Sorry. Let’s all move on. Comically small whisk, I’ve defended you up and down and in and out to my ever-supportive husband, but this is not a circumstance in which you couldn’t be replaced by a well-wielded fork. (Husband says – is there ever another kind of circumstance? I say – be quiet and go back to loading the 40 glorious audiobook hours of Game of Thrones onto my phone.)

Baking tools are out. Bench scraper, I love you, and you have served me with aplomb – but I have no need for you in the backwoods of Alberta. Let’s be real. Later in the year you’d make a bang up windshield scraper, but I’m praying we don’t end up needing one of those. Pastry bags, cookie cutters, and ice cream scoops, don’t be ridiculous.

——-

Eventually, I settle on another three items, carefully curated in terms of their usefulness, their versatility, and their ability to make my life a little easier:

6: Citrus squeezer I am not an alcoholic. I am not an alcoholic. But the right mood, environment, and circumstances for a heavily limed gin and tonic or one of our world-famous margaritas can strike anywhere, and without warning. Cocktails also make particularly pleasant “thank you for letting us stay at your house for free” gifts, and I am a generous and thankful person. But if you expect me to juice that many limes without the noble aid of this squeezer, you have a very different idea of how I will be spending this trip.

7: Kitchen shears Equally as adept at snipping herbs and trimming meats as they are cutting twigs for kindling or giving your travel companion a desperate two-months-post-departure haircut (I’m just guessing on that last one, but we’ll see!), so the shears should definitely be in. And including them means I can take the scissors out of the camping supplies, which my brain tries to tells me means I shouldn’t count them as one of the eight – but I am smarter than myself, and know that if I let that sort of logic fly, soon I’ll be packing it all in.

8: Liquid measuring cup Making rice is almost impossible without knowing how much liquid you’re using, and thus the liquid measure. Will come in particularly handy for those pre-seasoned packets of pilaf, which have no place in my home kitchen but are particularly convenient for camping. What? You’re wondering if I actually want this to be able to make delicious cocktails in the wilderness, which are necessary because, well, have you ever camped for three months and do you realize how there’s really not much to do in the evenings and that it is really freaking dark out there? (Also: I am not an alcoholic.)

But now I see this Microplane zester out of the corner of my eye. Could I be that person? That ridiculous person who brings a zester with me on a three-month road trip? But what if I find myself with a pot of soup that just screams out for a dash or two of lemon zest, and I have no tool with which to make this happen? What then, eh? What then? What. Then.

Nope. Indefensible. Zester is officially voted out. (p.s. I still love you, zester, and will see you in November. Wait for me!)

So that’s it, I guess. Just me and my eight kitchen tools, venturing off into the wilderness. Once we’re out that driveway, there’s no looking back. Wish me luck. (Wish that you don’t find me frantically wandering around a Sur la Table somewhere in Seattle, before we even reach the border.)

And if you happen to find yourself in Saskatchewan with a bunch of limes to juice, look for me. I’m ready.

Categories: Uncategorized

Forbidden Fruit: But Can You Eat It?

Posted on July 20th, 2012

Nothing is as tempting as that which is not allowed. Legalize weed, the line of thought goes, and half of the college stoners will go back to sniffing glue. Shake hands with Castro – he’s not going anywhere for another 50 years, anyway – and an army of Cuban cigar aficionados will be smoking Swisher Sweets once they realize they can’t tell the difference. Absinthe was wildly popular with every pretentious mustache-twirler in America, until the authorities legalized it and bartenders started slinging absinthe cocktails in every self-proclaimed “speakeasy,” at which point everyone realized it tasted like a mix of homemade Jagermeister and ass. (I suspect the outlawing of absinthe was actually just a marketing ploy dreamt up by absinthe distributors.)

People are often drawn to the forbidden, and food is no different than any of the aforementioned vices. The real question, once you get your paws on the exotic stuff: Is it worth it? Let us look at several examples of forbidden grub (or would-be grub) and see if we can justify its status.

*

The earliest recorded occurrence of forbidden fruit was, obviously, the apple from the Tree of Knowledge in the Bible. Since not everyone read the Bible, allow me to refresh you on what transpired in this particular chapter.

Adam and Eve had it pretty good in the Garden of Eden, living like two trustafarians before the recession. They didn’t have to work, so they never had to dress up for work either. There were lots of animals to eat, and the temperature was always around 75 degrees, which is very comfortable. Occasionally they wanted to see the Black Eyed Peas concerts that – who else? – the devil sponsored; they weren’t allowed to, but that was a small price to pay for not having to work at Starbucks for a living. Everything was peachy. The only problem was, they couldn’t eat the apples from the Tree of Knowledge.

The devil was very jealous of Adam; Adam was ripped, had Led Zeppelin hair, and was cozy with Eve (who was a leaf model), while the devil (literally!) looked like a snake. This presented a problem at Meatpacking District bars, where the devil often hung out. Obviously, he had it in for Adam. In a classic case of “if I can’t have it, you won’t either” – typical devil behavior – the evil entity wanted Adam and Eve evicted from their nice digs. But how do you entice a man who already has everything he wants? By dangling the one thing he can’t have. And because Adam wasn’t convinced and needed more encouragement, the devil offered him a great unlimited calling plan and upgraded his Android to an iPhone. Needless to say, Adam took a nice chomp on the forbidden apple. Everyone knows what happened next: Adam and Eve got cut off from the trust fund and ended up getting jobs at Best Buy.

Was the apple worth the trouble? Experts disagree. Some say it was the Granny Smith variety, and therefore probably quite tasty. Adam probably had plenty of apples though, on his lunch breaks from selling wide-screen TVs, and chances are those were Granny Smith apples too. Verdict: FAIL.

*

Next, we travel to ancient Rome, where – once the Golden Age passed – everything forbidden was suddenly game. Everyone copulated prodigiously, sometimes involving their pet monkeys. (No, I am not talking about the Neverland Ranch.) People wore togas, ate grapes, murdered each other left and right. Caligula threw epic parties, but by all accounts was a major asshole, and Nero was no better. No wonder the empire fell apart – everyone was constantly in the outhouses, because no one can eat all those grapes without repercussion. How can you enjoy anything forbidden when nothing is, in fact, forbidden – and you’ve just streaked your white toga? Verdict: FAIL.

*

Judaism forbids consumption of reptiles. How ironic, then, that the Russian restaurant where I first ate alligator, frog and turtle was owned by Russian Jews. Located on a dreary strip in a who-the-hell-cares part of Brooklyn, this place nevertheless had a beautiful back garden, perfect for the consumption of amphibians on a summer night.

It turned out that alligator and frogs do, in fact, taste like chicken. A bit gamier, with alligator the meatier (and therefore more satisfying) meal, and the frog quite tender, a bit like quail actually. Then they brought out the turtle stew. I decided that the stew was a copout and tried to get at turtle meat, which was impossible to extract from the shell. Again and again I attacked, with poor results. “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t [eat] the beast,” I thought. (I liked the Eagles, so sue me.)

How much did it all cost? I can’t say, because my parents paid for the meal, but according to my dad, “an arm and a leg.” The turtle stew was bullshit, but the frogs and alligator were adequate, even pleasant. Two thumbs up, only one down. (Let’s ignore the fact that 1. No one has three thumbs, and 2. I left craving a cheeseburger.) Verdict: PASS.

*

Perhaps the most forbidden of all foods is human flesh. “Wait a second, you sick bastard, people aren’t food.” Oh really? Go ask a mountain lion or a grizzly bear and kindly let me know their opinion on the matter.

Animals eating tasty people is one thing, but people eating people is something else entirely. Many movies and public television specials have been filmed on the subject of cannibalism, where doomed parties of explorers would get stranded in snowy mountains and eat each other out of boredom. The tragic story of the Donner Party is a good example, and while I won’t recount their horrifying trip here, please consider what’s in your Doner Kabob platter the next time you order it from the creepy guy in the lunch cart.

The most famous cannibal, up until recently, was Hannibal Lecter, he of a very discerning but impossibly pretentious palate. Were it up to him, the cannibalism section of this piece would have gotten a PASS, but where the hell is Anthony Hopkins’s career today, I ask? His character therefore does not get a say.

The most recent – and arguably most disturbing – appearance of cannibalism occurred in Miami, where a drugged-out psychopath completely lost it and ate most of a homeless man’s face off before an officer emptied half of his clip into him. Everybody knows that eating homeless people is wrong. Verdict: FAIL.

*

Lions, tigers and bears aren’t the only people who think it’s okay to eat human flesh. Zombies feast on nothing but fresh humans. By watching documentaries such as The Walking Dead, we can deduce that zombies will eat living humans as well as freshly dead humans, but will not touch anyone who is long dead and/or decomposed. Zombies, therefore, are basically post-apocalyptic hipsters: they only eat fresh and local, and they wear their Vans until the shoes fall apart and they still refuse to get a new pair. Zombies will not eat other zombies, which actually puts them one step above that Lecter creep.

Unfortunately, the undead are very messy eaters, and never wash their hands before a meal. It’s hard to tell whether they’re enjoying what they are eating: they swallow food without chewing, and it is highly unlikely that they taste the flavor of their dinner. For such unrefined behavior, zombies are penalized. Verdict: FAIL.

*

There you have it: one PASS, four FAIL. For those of you who like exams, that’s 20%. You can’t even get into community college with that sort of score. We can conclude that, in most cases, forbidden fruit is forbidden for a reason; you cannot, and should not eat it. Unless it’s frogs or alligator, in which case I would highly recommend it. Just throw some Don Henley on the stereo while you’re at it, and you’ll have an automatic PASS.

Categories: Uncategorized

Are Ya Achin’?

Posted on July 20th, 2012

I became a vegetarian by accident. This wasn’t hard, at the age of twelve, in a family that didn’t eat meat at home. I realized one day that I hadn’t eaten any meat in weeks and decided to see how long I could keep it up. More than ten years, it turns out.

I reacquainted myself with carnivory in a far more intentional manner than I left it. “Be so careful at first,” everyone told me; “your stomach won’t be used to meat and it might make you sick.” I tried bites of fish, then some chicken soup, taking only small portions or tastes off other’s plates. I listened anxiously to my GI tract, alert for signs of distress, ready to pursue my stomach when it packed up my small intestines and lit out for the hills. I was committed to taking it slow. But then there was brunch. At an annual weekend gathering a few months after my omnivorous shift, my best friend found me sitting in the front yard one morning, a mug of black coffee in one hand and…his head swiveled around in a double take. “Are you,” his eyes narrowed, “are you eating bacon?”

I was. It was delicious.

He shouldn’t have been surprised, really. As punk rock, counter-culture vegans 6 years previous, he and I found ourselves at the deli counter of a grocery store one infamous night, suffering from a shared craving. We bought a whole rotisserie chicken, took it back to his dirty, furniture-less, third floor apartment, and tore into it with our bare hands. Stuffed with poultry and shame, we threw the bones in the alley dumpster and didn’t tell anyone for years. He felt sick that night, but me? I was fine. Only a typed and signed letter could have been clearer: my body wanted to eat meat. I ignored the memo, of course, and hung onto my vegetarian identity until the summer I was 23 when – trying to shed a period of my life (and, tale as old as time, a man) characterized by limits and control – I ended up barefoot in the grass chewing greasy strips of pig.

It’s been a good three years. The free reign I’ve unleashed on my diet echoes a larger change in attitude. I waste less energy on the categories and labels of identity, both for myself and others; I say ‘yes’ more and embrace things I haven’t done/thought/eaten; I am both an easy guest and an accommodating host. Our food, what we eat and how we eat it, is one of the most intimate parts of who we are and the culture that we choose to participate in. Eliminating my own restrictions has opened me up to other people; I am able to immerse myself in the life and living of each person I meet. Forget walking in someone’s shoes, try eating at their table. Conversely, I have been able to explore who I might be through cooking, eating, and feeding others. What do I like? What if I liked everything? Imagine the amazing inner beauty of someone who likes everything.

But what about the poor chickens, you ask, pecking each other to death in the hellish depths of a factory farm? I don’t eat those chickens. It turns out that you can eat meat and still not participate in the gross machines of corporate “food” production. This is even easier if you live around a lot of other people who think like you. I know where my meat comes from, I know how it lived and died, and I don’t feel guilty. The moral rationale that I developed over a decade of vegetarianism wasn’t discarded; I didn’t smash it with a meat tenderizer or hide it in a turducken. Emerging from the smoky haze of the BBQ pit, I discovered that my ethical objections to eating meat were, in fact, ethical objections to industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, the divorce of production from consumption, loss of food communities, and corporate profit off of basic human needs. My local, grass-fed burger, grilled on my friend’s deck during a potluck, is none of those things.

Back in the front yard, my friend stared at me as I took another bite. “Weird,” he said. He’s not wrong. I don’t eat much meat these days, and I certainly don’t take it for granted. I am still a little uncomfortable with my new status, but I believe that discomfort keeps me honest. I may not always eat meat – one day I may turn down a bowl of chicken soup – but for now, at least, I will stay to dinner, no matter what we’re having.

Categories: Uncategorized

Can’taloupe

Posted on July 20th, 2012

I love melon. Watermelon, honeydew, casaba, horned, canary–I love them. I love their sticky, juicy goodness when it drips down my arms and off my elbows during a hot summer twilight. I enjoy a myriad of different ice cream toppings depending on my mood, but I find ripe juicy melon the hands-down-best complement to good vanilla ice cream. I believe that melon and prosciutto is a simple stroke of genius on the palette. I love melon flavored things from bubble gum to bubble tea. And while I generally avoid both sweet booze and sour mix, I have even enjoyed several Midori Sours in my time. Watermelon beer is my favorite beer of all time. Have I made it clear that I LOVE melon?

But, every rule has an exception and so it is here: I HATE cantaloupe. This has come as a surprise to almost everyone I have ever told. There is apparently a severe and widespread misconception that cantaloupe is Top Melon. I have heard it all. “It’s the sweetest!” “It’s so juicy and delicious!” “Cantaloupe is the best!” “Who likes honeydew?” “Are you crazy?” “How can you not like cantaloupe?” I will tell you.

Let’s start at the beginning of my disdain for cantaloupe, before you even cut it open. Its hard, beige, netted skin looks more like some fossilized reptile egg than anything I would cut open and put into my mouth. Most other melons have a relatively smooth outer surface, usually colored similar to their flesh, with the exception of watermelon – which is just a nature-made color complement that should not be questioned. About the cantaloupe flesh: I can’t abide the texture – slicker than all the other melons. When ripe, this slickness graduates to sliminess. Other melons aren’t slimy unless they are past their peak, so you can understand my apprehension about eating a slick and slimy melon.

I can usually manage to avoid cantaloupe – I even go so far to pick it out of fruit salad before putting it on my plate – but I find that is often not enough. The slime of cantaloupe adulterates all that it touches, especially exposed and vulnerable members of a fruit salad. The slime is bad enough, but with the slime comes the taste of cantaloupe infecting the rest of the should-be delicious fruit salad. There’s nothing worse than biting into a strawberry that has been corrupted by the unmistakable taint of cantaloupe. It’s a taste I can’t quite describe except to say that it gives me “the willies.” I find it unpleasant to the degree that it ignites a physical action of repulsion by my body: a compulsive shiver and a face I’m sure would make any small child giggle.

So, I hate cantaloupe. But, I do believe in the power of attrition, and I’m no quitter. I am constantly having my friends try new foods, including my ever-patient husband who doesn’t like cheese—all 50 kinds I’ve made him try. (I’m sure he is secretly thrilled that I have all-but-stopped eating dairy.) I also know that people’s palates change over time. I used to hate mushrooms, and now I can’t get enough…as long as they are cooked. So as not to appear a gustatory hypocrite for making my husband try tofu…and cheese…and beans time and again to see if maybe he likes that particular variation, I try cantaloupe at least once a year.

I can almost choke it down with a slice of good and salty prosciutto around it, but I really can’t shake the general feeling of unpleasantness that accompanies the taste of everyone’s favorite melon. Maybe someday—far, far in the future—it will win me over. Until then; more for you, I suppose.

Categories: Uncategorized

Farm Share Survival Tips

Posted on July 20th, 2012

So you love your CSA, but let’s get real: things get a little crazy midsummer. Your farmer starts piling on the patty pan squashes and daikon radishes like you’re a large exotic herbivore. The guilt you feel as you watch brown goo ooze from the vegetable drawer you’re afraid to open soon yields to anger and recrimination. Do the farmers actually eat five pounds of purple top turnips in a week? You saw those assholes getting Chinese take out last night! Do the adorable Carhartt-clad apprentices breakfast on loaf after loaf of zucchini bread accompanied by zucchini pancakes with a side of zucchini chutney? Maybe one of them is still in the “Are you just going to THROW THAT AWAY?” phase, but you know most of those bucolic brats are living in a dream world of strawberry smoothies, baby carrots, and limitless sungold cherry tomatoes!

So, farmer-supporting locavore, what should you do with your vegetative badge of honor, your cellulose cross to bear? Here are some pro tips:

Mizuna, Tat soi, Komatsuna, and sundry Asian greens: Puree with olive oil and garlic. Bitches will call anything pesto these days, use this to your advantage. Take to a potluck with julienned radishes and pickling cukes for maximum CSA share mileage.

Kohlrabi: Makes an excellent vessel for smoking marijuana! Choose the biggest one in the bunch, get out your pocketknife, and carve yourself a cute little bowl. Bonus – it’s biodegradable!

Turnips: Paperweights. Slice for coasters.

Tomatoes: You know when you have something you NEED to deal with, but don’t really have the time to do it yet, so you just shove it in a drawer or closet, just for now? That plan doesn’t usually work with fresh produce. Unless you have enemies. Try stashing a few big, ripe heirloom tomatoes in your ex’s deck furniture, your boss’s office, or if you work in retail, your least favorite customer’s unlocked car.

Collard Greens: Toilet paper.

Zucchini: Organic, cruelty free, compostable dildo. Optional baling twine harness. Certified orgasmic!

Garlic Scapes: Single-use drain snakes.

Remember, friends: nobody said being on the front lines of the food revolution would be easy. But with an open mind, a strong stomach, and a touch of moral laxity, you can work that farm share. May the cherry tomatoes be ever in your favor.

Categories: Uncategorized