The Goods Are Odd

One big rolling hill feeds woolly-but shedding- goats, cows, and pigs all at once. Chickens run about picking at dung and laying eggs in a house under the shadow of a giant oak. The breeds of all the animals are old (less domesticated) enough so that the cows (females) still have horns and the wild boar and cattle still wear a full coat, which protects them from weather hot and cold. A stream seeps through the little valley of the hills, through the drying late spring grass, making the ground muddy enough for wallowing boar. It is an amazingly efficient system: sun/water to grass to animal to meat, milk, and eggs.

This small farm teems with life, and though death is a part of why they are all here, the focus is on the needs of the moment. Ted doesn’t like to discuss too much about slaughter for a couple of reasons: He raises his animals to give them a good life, to connect with them, and to give people a source of healthy and sustainable food. The death is always hard- there is no easy way around it, and it is also the smallest part. As we walk up the steep slope, Ted mumbles something about people needing to eat less meat. There, in the animals’ space this is a clear conclusion. If we are going to eat animals, they should live like this- If they are going to be able to live like this, there will have to be a lot less of them (but, a lot more farmers!). Ted could have more animals but too large a scale compromises his relationship with them.

It is clear that Ted wrestles every day with the difficulty of his task of raising friends for others’ food. He seems to reconcile this with the fact (Ted and I share the view that this fact is not really arguable) that humans are omnivores and if he doesn’t raise animals for food in this way, more animals will be raised in ways deprive them of a good life, one in which they can live out their days using their full instinct and potential.

I didn’t have a chance to really get into a full conversation with Ted about these ideas on this visit, so I don’t want to go further and risk putting words in his mouth. But I know he has a lot more to say and I hope to visit again and share more. Ted is the farmer from whom I buy meat the most often (what little I buy) and I often see him weekly. He is a very thoughtful man and I appreciate how much love he gives to my meals.

It is an emotional thing, seeing the animals you will eat. So forgive me if this post is a little heavier. But I think its important to acknowledge that eating meat isn’t a simple act, nor should it ever really be easy. It isn’t the act of eating per se but the ease we have created that has really made meat consumption a problem. An easy thing in terms of production and an easy thing in terms of what little we experience, and how far we are from the creature living out a life. (That life demands some death is a fact that makes this idea of test-tube meat all the more disturbing and so reductionist, as if we could be nourished on something that didn’t eat, that didn’t live at all)

As with many dilemmas about food, I again come to the conclusion that it is really important to spend more money on food, especially on those products from animals. When weighing price options, consider what corners were cut to provide whatever you might be saving.  It isn’t an easy choice, but I think 1) it is important to be honest that for most of us, spending on food is about choices, and 2) that it is only fair for us to make some sacrifices in return. Ted’s meat is just about the most expensive I could get. Ground beef is $7/lb. So I can’t buy very much, and I think Ted agrees that’s probably for the best.

Last week I found myself in a strange rut of trying new things. That is I couldn’t be satisfied with an easy dinner standby and over and over kept trying new dishes that ended up not working out very well and taking a ton of time. I tried a slow roasted salmon which I don’t know how I messed up, but the “slow” seemed geologic. This fish was on the same night I attempted brown rice risotto…which took almost an hour of stirring, eventually ending up in the oven to finish. Another night involved a potato and turnip gratin that again took over an hour, only to end up with a thin sauce that had no flavor. We often joke that with lots of butter and salt how can you go wrong…but it happens.

Experimentation is how you learn to cook, but it can also be a frustrating exercise and I wonder if we really need as much variety as the inexhaustible amount of cookbooks would have us believe. Dr. Daphne Miller, who wrote the newest discussion of the benefits of traditional diets (a la Dr. Price but without the examinations), explained in an interview (which I wrote about here) that the best home cooks have about fourteen meals that they really know well. This gives you a different dinner every night for two weeks. That seems like plenty, especially knowing that some of our busy night dinners aren’t more than quesadillas and a salad with lot of late night buttery toast. (In fact, I wonder if I could count this on my fourteen?).

I think we underestimate the versatility of the old-standby. And these stand-bys are of course dependent on the individual cook and what meals interest them enough to make enough times to really make it second nature. According to Dr. Miller many cooks have these fourteen meals (give or take) and adapt them as needed to what they have on hand and what is in season. That is, if one of your favorite things to make requires fresh tomatoes, think about how to use vegetables that are available in other parts of the year. Also, economically, it is good to first think about what you need to use in the fridge before going to the store for the one ingredient you must have to make your intended dish.

So, in some ways keeping with stand-by dishes and making them work on a whim or in every season requires some experimenting. But I think there is a softer learning curve when you already have a sense of what you are doing. Dr. Miller uses this idea of fourteen dishes to encourage new cooks in their attempt to take control of their diet by making their own meals from scratch. With so many ideas out there overwhelming our sense of what we should be able to accomplish in the kitchen, this number seems doable. I think it is also important encouragement not to worry about making the same dish multiple times close together. I used to put off preparing a meal too many times, which is necessary to really get the hang of it, for fear of boring us at the table. But I am over that now, on the grounds of making it better and for saving time not having to learn something new when really I just want to eat!

My number one favorite standby is roasted veggies. Endless combinations, always really delectable.

Current early Spring favorite:

I also am sold on a very special California Brown Rice, Massa Organics (I actually work for them, but I was eating this rice before getting paid to talk about how great it is, and it is perfect). It has become the staple of many dinners.

This rice and beans is simple but by no means bland. These beans are cooked with a bit of fresh lard from the farmer’s market and loaded with spices. The rice is cooked with a homemade chicken stock and lots of cilantro. That is creme fraiche on top with hot sauce and avo.

So here is my current fourteen that are working well

1. Vegetable soup (often with beans, meat, rice and/or noodles)

2. Stir-fry

3. Spaghetti (with sprouted whole grain noodles, homemade noodles)

4. fritatta

5. tacos

6. miso soup (with veggies and an egg)

7. fish (Pan-fried, either battered or not- if not, make a quick sauce from the pan when finished)

8. Roasted Veggies, sauteed veggies

9. Chili (I learned to put yams in mine, and I keep it vegetarian like I learned it from my mom)

10. Pizza (but now I am been conflicted on how to make the dough, best with sprouted flour?)

11. Grown-up salad, with nuts and cheeses and various sauteed things like shallots and mushrooms, all depending on what we have and what sounds good. Always homemade dressing

12. Quick dinner with egg, either on bread, beans, leftover rice, in broth…

13. Sauce on rice; creamy stroganoff, coconut curry

14. Maybe this is the one I leave for a new thing, making time for experimentation and being ready for disappointment OR success!

These are all pretty flexible in terms of what goes in them, making them adaptable, but also consistent enough that I know what I like to have on hand. Someday I hope to be able to make these without too much thought at all, but hopefully always with inspiration and variation.

Life with more nourishing food so far has been really delicious and satisfying, it has even had plenty of variety and plenty of sweets. But it isn’t without some sacrifices, particularly in the realm of special treats. The other night my dreams were all about being at a bakery and eating sticky sugary white flour treats, and it seemed like I should give myself something to fulfill this craving rather than let my subconsciousness obsess over it. I give in sometimes, I do; but it would be really great if I didn’t have to. I would really like to go to the grocery store and find a cookie that fits my sense of a food worth eating; worth it in terms of taste, and the soul-satisfying experience of a yummy treat, and not needing my body to deplete its hard earned resources to help the food go through.

Nourishing Traditions has plenty of treats and snacks that are all delicious. I am getting the hang of a lot of the techniques, but one practice has got me stuck and stopped a lot of my baking. To really meet the nourishing standard, any quick breads are made with flour that has been soaked over night. It’s easy to just write this practice off as too much time to ask for muffins. What actually gets me is the expense of the soaking (cups of buttermilk each time) and I plain forget or don’t give myself the time (as I think the desire to bake a treat is often an in-the-moment kind of thing).

Luckily, at a particular treat-craving moment, I had all the right stuff to make totally nourishing and absolutely delicious cookies.

From the creation of our camping trail mix (see below) we had many cups of soaked-and-dried nuts (What Ms. Fallon calls “crispy nuts”). These nuts have had the enzyme inhibitor (the natural preservative that you don’t want to be eating) soaked out of it, and the crispy put back in through a long time in a warm oven; enough to make them crunchy but not to kill all of those good nutrients the soaking released. The pumpkin seeds were outrageously good as were the almonds. The peanuts just didn’t really get eaten as the flavor wasn’t great on their own. So I ground them up and used them for the base of these flourless peanut cookies.

They are made by blending all the ingredients in a food processor until you get a nice mealy dough that you will form into walnut sized rounds.

This is a cookie I have don’t think I would be able to find pre-made. The approach of nourishing traditions exists in this area between organic foodie eats and vegan/raw fare. The vegans have made cookies with the right kind of sweetener and often some kind of alternative flour that is more easily digested, but they use vegetable-based oils that are not great like soy or canola (why they don’t use coconut at least I don’t know…). Raw food teats often leaves out the flour for something like the ground up nut base, but I can’t ensure that they have actually soaked the nuts, which is sort of the whole point, otherwise you might as well use flour. The organic foodies have the eggs and milk and butter but they use white sugar and flour (organic is fine, but I want to go beyond).

The ingredient list on this cookie’s package would read like so:

Soaked and dried organic peanuts, organic cultured butter, arrowroot powder, dehydrated cane sugar (unrefined), organic fair-trade vanilla, sea salt.

Tell me if you’ve ever bought a cookie like that…

P.S. You have to let them sit to set, then they are as chewy and tasty as any other.

After over 1,000 replies (so far) to Michael Pollan’s call for NY Times readers’ own guidelines for eating, I wonder who will be left to read his planned compendium of rules. It struck me after seeing the overwhelming amount of feedback that the volume and variety of responses sort of negates the purpose of such a project and also renders it impossible. His plan is to post the suggestions on his website and “to include the best in a collection of food rules I’m now compiling”.

How in the world is he going to determine which ones are “the best” for everyone?  Are these individual rules really improving people’s lives & health or are they just maxims?

(Maybe it was just the latest interview with him in Mother Jones that rubbed me the wrong way in terms of following his approach to things. When asked about reactions to they pithy subtitle of his last book he mentions that “mostly plants” got a reaction from the Weston A. Price Foundation who he describes as “fierce in their love of animal fat. And with pastured animal fat, healthy animal fat, a lot of what they say is right. But they really don’t like plants.” Sally Fallon did write an open letter to Pollan about the necessity of non-plant foods in the human diet but there is considerable use of plants in the foods supported by her and the research of Dr. Price.)

Maybe this rules project is his attempt to flesh-out that subtitle.  Attempts to distill a way of living into a few quick truths always leaves something out; that must be why we need  so many of the quick fixes- to fill in the blanks and contradictions.

What I think is funny about this whole thing is that the amount of responses seems to indicate that enough people have their own rules about eating and don’t really need books or tv shows (or blogs) to guide them. But sort of paradoxically the consumption of information about what to eat is higher than ever.

It seems that with each piece of new information the greater the number of little contradictions and conflicting guidelines with existing information, thus people feel compelled to consume more information and opinions in hopes of finally getting it right.

I read a lot of this stuff, from books to blogs to comment sections of the NY Times. Conflicting information abound and conversations about diet (As Pollan points out in the MoJo interview) has reached a level nearing religion, with certain miracles of changes in health proving that one sect of one diet or another is the ultimate truth. Why is it that we want to consume as much information about food as they want to give? Will Americans ever form a cultural diet that is sustainable (ie healthy) so we can stop trying to figure out what to eat?

(Recent tip lists include this from The Cheeseslave, which I pretty much agree with, and an increasing number of “healthy food on a budget” lists and “eating green” that I think give minimum guidance (cooking with a microwave??!!) and maximum magaziney turns of phrase)

I realize that for a lot of people mayonnaise is a horrific subject for a photograph. But I made it and it’s delicious and it’s just an egg yolk and olive oil. Not so bad?

Homemade mayo now sits next to homemade salad dressing and is becoming one less processed packaged food we get pre-made. This change is mostly because you cannot find mayonnaise made with olive oil, only canola, though there are some new (expensive!) variations that include other healthier oils, but are still based on canola. Homemade also just means less packaging and things to buy.

This process of weeding out packaged foods always reminds me of those essentials I don’t produce. I can’t make my own olive oil and at this point I don’t have chickens. That would be an exciting next step to self-reliance.

I make this by hand, you can definitely use a food processor. Start with an egg yolk from a happy bug-eating chicken. (The Organic requirement for eggs is that they have a vegetarian diet, presumably from the industrial farming practice of feeding their dead chicken back to their live ones, which creates a closed loop system for disease. When in fact sometimes chickens DO eat other chickens, and mice, and bugs, and sometimes grains and seeds. They are vicious little omnivores like us and need a varied diet. So you can look all you want for the perfect egg at the store and finally settle on cage free organic, but you won’t get the egg with the most nutrients from the happiest chicken. Get your eggs at the farmers market and make sure to ask if their chicken eat bug. This way you know that they are out and about living their chicken lives and that the egg you get is optimal.)

Wisk the yolk and start dripping in olive oil- I start with about 3/4 cups. One yolk can really only take up 1 cup total. Starting with a slow thin stream and always incorporate all the oil before adding too much more, otherwise it will seperate. When it starts to get too thick to wisk (this cue is why I like doing it by hand) add some water. You will see the mixture immediately lighten up and get whiter.

Some lemon juice and salt can also be added. Also some whey, as it more than doubles the life of your hard-earned mayo. Actually there are endless possibilities of things to add flavor-wise. Garlic and herbs being ideal. Basil is outstanding!