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Musings, recipes, and cooking insights from a food librarian.
Back in March at the IACP conference, I heard Douglas Gayeton give a presentation about the Lexicon of Sustainability, the project he co-founded with his wife, Laura Howard Gayeton. Instantly I fell in love with it.
You can read my review of Douglas Gayeton's new book here. Then you, too, will be smitten.
For years I've been all geared up about pressure cooking, so when I finally got to teach a Modern Pressure Cooking Workshop this past weekend, I was over the moon. Pressure cooking is a hard sell for places that host classes. It's just not sexy. Pressure cookers strike home cooks as risky and prone to explosions. But pressure cooking is IS sexy, and it's also very safe, and that we had a sold-out group this past Sunday only proves how groovy the folks are up in the Randolph/Tucker county area of West Virginia. It's about 3,000 feet up there, to be exact, so we needed a few extra moments of cooking time for a number of the dishes. (Note to chef-educators: when something does not turn out exactly as planned, blame the altitude!)
Here's one thing we made in the class, a summer staples I cook again and again: green beans and potatoes. Pull out your pressure cookers and snap to it.
Indian-Style Green Beans and Potatoes
Serves 6-8 as a side dish
Is there any other veggie pairing as homey and adaptable as green beans and potatoes? Here, we’re adding turmeric and a few spices with ginger and garlic for an Indian feel, a riff on a recipe created by my friend Sara Alway in her adorable little book on companion planting, Soil Mates. But you could tinker with the aromatics and seasonings and take it in dozens of different flavor directions.
The doneness is the trick here. Some green beans are old and tough; some are young and tender. Some potatoes cook up in 4 minutes; others take longer. Also, I love it when my green beans get on the mushy side and the potatoes begin to fall apart. I’m guessing you don’t (if you do, awesome!) Use these cooking times as a guideline, checking after 4 minutes and cooking longer as needed.
Rosemary and Garlic Variation: Substitute olive oil for the canola oil, and omit the spices and ginger. Add a dried bay leaf and a sprig of fresh rosemary when you add the liquid and the vegetables.
Basil and Tomato Variation: Substitute olive oil for the canola oil, and omit the spices and ginger. Decrease the cooking liquid to ½ cup and add a few chopped fresh tomatoes instead. After it’s all cooked, throw in a nice handful of chopped fresh basil and maybe a little fresh oregano.
Down Home Version: Omit the canola oil, spices, and ginger. Render a few slices of bacon and cook the onion in that. Sprinkle a tablespoon or so of apple cider vinegar over the cooked vegetables before serving. I especially like this preparation when the veggies are a little more cooked and the beans are army green.
*Sara also shared her own pressure cooker, a funky but not scary Hawkins, with me; it's what you see in the photo. Hawkins is a big brand in India, I guess, because the pamphlet that came with the cooker has a bunch of neato regional Indian recipes. Sara, if you want your cooker back, let me know! It's not hard to use at all. Perhaps it's time for me to host a an underground Modern Pressure Cooking Workshop in my own kitchen!
I know, because I do it. Can, I mean. Not a lot. Not quarts and quarts like your grandmother did, presumably. Somehow in canning discussions, default grandmotherly images appear again and again: the stained but clean calico apron, the practical, dowdy leather shoes, the monstrous range dominating a corner of a crowded farmhouse kitchen.
Because canning is a time-honored tradition, right? Self-reliance and all that? My grandmothers canned, I think. I know my mom did, for years, putting up jars and jars of home-grown tomatoes and green beans. Maybe vegetable soup. As a child, I wanted no part of either the process or its results. Had she canned Spaghetti-Os, I might have come around, but probably not.
Now I’m the one who cans, not Mom. “Oh, I’m over that,” she says casually; inside, I know, her heart is dancing with relief. Usually I stick to small batches of preserves, chutneys, and jams—things I can knock out in a few hours, late at night or early in the morning, when the house is cooler and no one searching for a spoon or snack will barge in and interrupt me.
Then, last summer, I did my first batch of crushed tomatoes. It took the better half of a day, my own young daughter safely removed from the sweltering dangers of the kitchen with the draw of a “Go, Diego, Go!” DVD looping incessantly. As Diego swung on jungle vines and rescued exotic baby animals, I fouled our kitchen with blood-red smears and spatters of tomatoes. Steam, sweat, and swear words poured forth. A Dutch oven, a pressure canner, and a conical sieve perched on a three-legged stand competed for space on the counter, the sink, the stove. Cleanup was a bitch.
We got a baker’s dozen pints of red gold to show for my efforts. All year long, I doled them out accordingly, saving them for special occasions. That puree was dense with flavor, silky in texture. And every time I opened a jar, I thought to myself: next time, just buy a damn case of Pomi tomatoes from the grocery store.
Sure, canning allows us to take the food we grow and preserve it for later use. Unlike frozen food, canned food won’t spoil during a power outage. But it takes so much water and energy—human and fossil—to can a big batch of something. As my glasses slide off my perspiration-slicked nose and my own calico apron sports blobs of sticky goo, I find myself wondering if I’m better off leaving this to the pros. Pros like major corporations. Even if they do line their cans with BPA.
In terms of human existence, canning is new to the game. Nicholas Appert developed the process during the Napoleonic Wars as a way to preserve food for masses of soldiers. In The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz writes, “Canning, a sterilization process that revolutionized food preservation in the 19th century…is the diametrical opposite of fermentation.” You know about fermentation. It’s that trendy, thousands-of-year-old process we use to preserve vegetable, meat, and dairy products.
Katz continues, “In fermentation, we rely upon native microbial communities, or cultures introduced in sufficient concentrations to assure success, to create an environment too acidic to allow the development of C. botulinium or other pathogenic bacteria. In canning, we apply heat in an attempt to kill off all microorganisms.” Fermentation is a slow, passive process. Canning is intense and, in my case, super-aggro.
Striving for balance, I use a three-pronged preservation approach these days: ferment a little of this, can a little of that, purchase nearly everything else readymade. Mom gave me some of her old earthenware crocks, which is cool, because those buggers are expensive. Not only did she can; she fermented, too, though I don’t have any memories of that. I ponder what my daughter will recall years from now of my occasional, embattled forays into canning. In her present incarnation as an adorable and willful four-year-old, she’s willing to sit on the porch swing and leisurely snap beans with me, but that’s it. She wisely stays far away from the sterile jars, boiling water, and singed potholders I contend with during another canning session.
Because, like so many impossible pursuits, I cannot stop canning. “It’ll be different this time, I just know it!” I think as I inevitably haul out the black enamel spatterware canner. The expectant new jar lids, freshly yanked from their box, shine like gold medals for an idiot. Grungy hours pass and the spoils accumulate: quince jelly, squash chutney, bread and butter pickles. When the energy grid collapses, my little family will have about three days of eating stashed away on the rough wooden shelves in our cellar, and we will sup in the highest of styles.
This post originally appeared on Food Riot, but you just read the better version, because I went back and fixed a few things.
I have a post about the very accessible art of homemade ice cream on the fabulous website Good.Food.Stories. Every word is true. I really did drop out of the homemade ice cream scene for, like, four years. All because of frozen breast milk. Just read it, and enjoy my recipe for vegan basil-mint ice cream. It's killer.
And as a teaser, enjoy this hypnotic video of the basil-mint ice cream as it's churning.
It’s raining in Ohio right now, but it’s probably not raining where my big brother is. That would be somewhere between Kennedy Meadows and Tuolumne Meadows in California’s High Sierra. He’s thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Every now and then as I go about my daily routines—walking the dog through the cemetery, driving to pick Frances up from preschool, washing dirty pots and pans—I think to myself, “What’s Mark up to at this moment?”
Only he’s not Mark on the trail; he’s Dr. Chicken, or D.C. This trail name of his has a legitimate origin, though I forget exactly what it is. I imagine Dr. Chicken scrambling up a jagged path of scree, taking in noble, wild scenery that most of us only see on wall calendars. Or I imagine him emerging from his ultra-light tent at 4am to get a head start on the day. But usually I picture him eating. Thru-hikers blast through calories and need plenty of fuel.
A few weeks ago, my mother and I put together the food resupply box he’d requested us to have ready . “I’ll need 5-6 days of food” he’d texted me. “Best send by May 17.” Yes, he has a cell phone, and it has come in handy, even though I know Dr. Chicken’s impetus in taking to the PCT was, in part, to escape the frippery of technology and constant communication.
Thanks in part to Cheryl Strayed’s mega-successful book Wild, the PCT is hopping this season. The film adaptation comes out in December, and PCT traffic will probably increase after that. Which is not bad, but the character of a thing changes as more and more people show up. That’s just the way it works.
My brother, D.C., is changing, too. A nonconformist and borderline ascetic, he’s felt trapped in his past few jobs coordinating trail maintenance workers in the backcountry of Alaska and Washington. As the old song goes, he was born the next of kin to the wayward wind. He yearns to wander. All those footsteps on dry desert earth and rocky soil are leading him to some kind of resolution.
I wanted to meet up with D.C. on the Oregon leg of the PCT for a few days, but it’s just not going to happen. I have a kid and a husband and work to do; I long ago squandered all of my wayward-wind days. The best I could do was bake cookies. I packed them up in Ziplock bags and tucked them into the box Mom and I jammed with way too much food, despite his texted assurances not to go too crazy.
I love telling people what my brother’s up to. He’s doing the thing a lot of us wish we could do. I doubt he wakes us up thinking what his sister and little niece are up to, but you never know. He’s out there hiking this thing for himself, but he doesn’t know he’s hiking it for me, too.
Dr. Chicken’s PCT Cookies
Makes 3-1/2 dozen large or 5 dozen small cookies
Plenty of hearty rolled oats, big chunks of roasted almonds, and a generous volume of dark chocolate chips make these modified cowboy cookies hit all of the right textures. I like them for a mid-morning snack. Hopefully Dr. Chicken did, too. To get the most coconut flavor, use extra-virgin coconut oil. It’s not cheap, but its tropical aroma alone is just divine. Some brands of coconut oil are flavor-neutral. Use those and your cookies will still taste pretty great.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Position baking racks in the top and bottom third of the oven.
If it’s warm and your coconut oil is quite liquidy, pour one cup into a glass measuring cup and chill in the refrigerator for an hours or so, until it’s firmer.
Place one cup of the oats in a food processor or blender and pulse on and off until the oats are in smaller pieces, but not too powdery. Put all 2 cups of the oats in a large bowl. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt and stir to combine.
Stir the ground flax or chia seeds together with the applesauce and vanilla in a small bowl, and set aside to thicken.
Meanwhile, put the coconut oil in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Beat until it’s relatively smooth. Add the brown sugar and beat on high speed, scraping down the sides with a rubber spatula from time to time, until the mixture is lighter in texture and has a somewhat pearly look (about 3 minutes). Add the applesauce mixture and beat another minute.
Scrape down the bowl once more, than add the oat-flour mixture. Beat until combined (this dough will be a bit crumbly, but if it looks particularly dry, add one or two tablespoons of water.) Add the chocolate chips and almonds and beat just until they are distributed nicely through the dough.
Scoop out balls of dough that are about 1-1/2 inches in diameter for large cookies, 1 inch for smaller cookies. Place the dough balls on an ungreased, unlined baking sheet, 12 to a sheet. Flatten each dough ball with your palm a little (these cookies will not spread much during baking). Bake about 8-10 minutes, rotating the sheet from top to bottom and back to front halfway through baking. Let the cookies sit on the baking sheet 5 minutes before transferring them with a thin metal spatula to a cooling rack. Cookies will keep, tightly covered, for about a week. I think. They’re usually gone by day 5 or earlier.
Back in March, I attended my first IACP conference (that's International Association of Culinary Professionals, for you uninitiated folks). And I loved it, even though I was nervous beforehand. Professional development conferences can be intimidating. I've been to a number of them and hung back, thinking I was not cool enough to run with the big dogs. But this time was different. Why? Read this article I wrote for the IACP Test Kitchen Professionals newsletter to find out. There's stuff in there that might be helpful to is worth anyone heading to a potentially intimidating conference, not just one about food.
The tongs were heavy burnished metal, artfully contoured, and studded with spikes. They looked like a BDSM testicle-holder or a speculum for aliens, and they came from the very back of a drawer in the kitchen of the church I went to as a kid. My mother offered them to me, along with a box of other oddities from the same drawer; she’d been organizing the church kitchen and was jettisoning anything that clearly hadn’t been used in years. (Mom: “Do you want six bags of stale brown rice? It expired in 2012.” Me: “No, thanks.”)
But I pounced upon the baffling tongs, which I guessed were once-common serving pieces of the 1950s or ‘60s. For a chafing dish full of beets or new potatoes, perhaps? My Facebook friends speedily supplied an answer, but it was a disappointing one: tomato-slicing tongs. The slits are guides for a knife. It bears mentioning that this contraption has a strong spring, and is wont to pop open. Should your life not present enough challenges, do seek out tomato-slicing tongs, which will escalate the mundane task of making neat and even tomato cross-cuts into an epic, maddening grapple.
Welcome to my anti-gadget war. For years, I worked in a cookware store. We carried iconic brands: All-Clad, Le Creuset, Vitamix. Their merchandise set shoppers back hundreds of dollars. And, in terms of usefulness and durability, it was often worth it. But our store was equally known for its bountiful inventory of inexpensive doodads, the kind of gizmos that clutter drawers in homes (and church kitchens) across America. Sure, selling one fully-automated Jura-Capresso Z9 coffee center (retail cost: $3,599) would make the store’s sales goal for the day, but all those pineapple corers and serrated peelers were our bread and butter.
To customers, I would detail the subtleties of onion goggles and silicone egg-poaching pods. Privately, I divided those items into two categories.
1. Tools, which are useful.
2. Gadgets, which are pointless.
An offset spatula is a tool. An avocado scoop is a gadget. Nothing else does what an offset spatula does—I love mine, and use it for both cake decorating and shimmying roasted veggies off of sheet pans—but the best item for scooping out an avocado is one you already own: a metal spoon.
Our consumer-driven culture delivers us products created to solve non-existent problems. Garlic peelers, melon wedgers, pie dividers, olive pitters. Once again, you currently have one amazing tool that can do all of these things. It’s called a knife. Keep it sharp and it’ll even slice tomatoes for you, too.
The notion that highly breakable plastic crap is a better alternative than experience and knowledge is a highly American one. It’s whimsical and aspirational on one hand, a result of the Ron Popeil mindset of innovation and cunning salesmanship. Buy this scary metal hair pick/onion holder and never be plagued by coming into contact with raw food again! Here’s a stainless-steel pod to rub your hands on to vanish fishy or feta smells! Of course the solution to your garlic-mincing problems is a tiny capsule on wheels with rotating blades that’s impossible to ever get clean!
Night after night I’ve ended shifts at foodservice jobs bearing that telltale feta-fish-garlic-bleach reek clinging to my hands so tenaciously that no amount of caressing stainless steel pods could alleviate it. Chefs wear this as a badge of honor. (And, to be honest, I think those post-kitchen fumes are more likely to get you laid than keep you from it.) We don’t have time to fuck around with gadgets.
Here’s my advice. Ditch the crap and do the thing you’re actually doing. I am hulling strawberries. I am sliding an egg into simmering water. I am peeling shrimp. Don’t put distance between you and your food. That fear—fear of handling, fear of contact—will shackle you to the hellacious gadget drawer, where you will languish, dependent on some company’s idea of a new way to sucker you out of your paycheck. Learning the hard way, gadget-free? It’s really the easy way.
I’m tempted to hold onto the tomato-holding tongs, just because they are so ridiculous. Besides, I don’t want them to re-enter the marketplace, where some hapless person will snatch them up at a charity yard sale thinking they’ve stumbled upon something helpful. Maybe I’ll take a city-wide collection of metal kitchen gadgets, which we will haul to the scrapyard for cash. With the proceeds we’ll host free knife skills classes. And the region I live in will be a gadget dead zone, because we’ll all be too busy getting down and dirty in the kitchen like grownups.
This post originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute.
I have sweated over the flickering blue gas of Wolfs and Vikings and Thermadors. I have uttered curses at the glowing coils of Kenmores and Maytags and GEs. I have sautéed and deglazed and seared and poached all manner of flesh over hulking prehistoric beasts of no known provenance, things so foreboding and monolithic it seemed the kitchen walls must have risen up around them.
I have rocked recipes and ruled over flames. I have battled and burned ingredients that undid me and undid meals. I have had intimate interactions with ranges ranging in cost from the tens of thousands to the low hundreds.
Some were sleek stainless steel, and some were coated with decades-old crusts of grease as black as death. Some were shabby and scuffed, in tidy but run-down rental homes; some were in restaurants where mingling aromas of vaporized fry oil and Ecolab sanitizer prevailed over sizzling garlic and baking dough. Some had six powerful burners and a well-seasoned flattop. Some had three spotty burners and one undersized dark horse champion. All of them had quirks.
When you do everything right and your dinner still turns out wrong, don’t blame your cookware. Don’t blame the cookbook. Don’t blame the cook. Honey, blame it on the range.
Does it take forever to heat up? Is the biggest burner lopsided so all of the oil pools on one half of the skillet? Do you have to ignite the gas with a match every frigging time because the pilot’s always out? Do the controls have a layout so counter-intuitive you’re always adjusting the heat for the back burner when you mean to be adjusting the heat on the front? Does the power source short out from time to time so your pasta water quietly plummets from a churning boil to a tepid muck? Man, screw that stove.
And I can’t even get started on ovens. I bought a cheap oven thermometer—two, actually, just to cross-check—and discovered that the oven at our last house ran, on average, fifty degrees hot or fifty degrees cool. Which direction was anybody’s guess. I had to rotate pans and peek and prod like crazy just to get evenly browned cookies.
Yet there was a restaurant, one with an aforementioned prehistoric monster range, where we had two ovens triggered by two indecipherable, misshapen knobs, their dials long ago rubbed or melted off. We called one the “fast” oven and one the “slow” oven. I baked pies and cakes and bubbling little cauldrons of artichoke dip, and they all came out looking just the way they were supposed to, and to this day no one knows what the hell temperature those ovens were. It had good mojo, and that was enough.
You deal with the range you have. This is the skill. The skill is not identifying the range you want. Master the range you have. Finesse it. Understand that it will never be perfect, even if it’s the big expensive one and a foxy celebrity chef endorsed it in that glossy ad in Saveur. A range is just a tool. You are the operator.
Our current range in our current house is white, a budget Roper by Whirlpool. It’s adequate. I grapple with its knobs, which I manhandle enough that they are apt to fall off. I know how to get a decent stir-fry out of the thing, using the biggest burner in the back corner where the wok barely fits, and where I have to crank the heat up to eleven and let it sit for a good while just so the burner can muster up enough energy to approximate wok hay, the elusive crisp-crunchy-juicy-tender quality that a good wok technique imparts to meat and vegetables. (This is why decent take-out so often trumps our well-intentioned attempts at various ethnic foods at home. Our genteel Western ranges achieve wussy BTUs.)
The drip pans are rusty and the enamel is scratched. The oven has a self-cleaning feature, though I never run it, and so there are charred hazelnuts and carbonized remains of dripping pie juices. It’s not fiery, the affair I have with this range, but it gets food on the table, and for now, that’s enough. Because there will be another house someday, another job, another kitchen, another range to decipher and then dominate. Another notch on the wok handle, another day spent facing the stove, another blazing give-and-take with the most animated inanimate object we loathe and love.
This post originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute.
Photos by Samara Linnell, Andi Roberts, and Melanie Tienter.
