Marcella Says…

I love to cook. I don't like doing dishes but I love to cook. Or maybe it is truly that I love to eat what has been prepared with love and intention. Cooking for one or twenty, it is the same excitement and desire to nurture. Maybe cooking is simply a ritual – kitchen magic at its best. My stove becomes sacred space and my tools are knives and cutting boards. The magical ingredients are vegetables and spices, salt, olive oil; sometimes meat. I set the table on average for at least three people with the intention of nourishing those that I love. When I call my family down for dinner, they may only sit for fifteen minutes, filling their stomachs, chatting and often laughing together. I sit after spending on average over an hour preparing that space for them – creating a meal that relaxes and fulfills more than just their dietary needs. I smile as someone takes second helpings and I prod my youngest to eat something green. If I'm trying a new recipe, I ask for comments to see if I should make it again. I don't share how I spent the morning reading through cookbooks, shopping for groceries or harvesting from the garden. It is rare that anyone actually assists me as I prepare salads, marinade meat or make a pie. Sometimes I wish I could share my excitement and other times I am content to putter and prep and cook.

My husband and I often share a look or a smile over the banter of our children, joining in or simply enjoying that moment in time when we all share together. And that moment fills me with joy. Those fifteen minutes on most days brings our family to vivid life and then everyone fades back to their corners in the house. It feels fleeting, almost mundane – but the magic still fills my kitchen.

Marcella Says…

"Flavor reaches into what may be our deepest source of pleasure. The happiness that food can arouse is an endlessly renewable resource and has the capacity to outlast every other drive that propels our lives. It fades away only when life itself begins to. The kind of flavor I am thinking of has no other agenda but to express the truth that has gone into the making of the dish. Fidelity to that truth leads to the cooking that I strive to practice in my kitchen…" Marcella Hazan in Marcella Says…Italian Cooking Wisdon from the Legendary Teacher's Master Classes.

Cooking with my Mom

The heat has sent my mother over to my house. Her apartment is on the fourth floor with direct afternoon sun and there is no air conditioning. I worry about her in the heat - she really doesn't do very well - so it felt good to have a cool place for her to come. Knowing that she was going to be hanging out most of the day, however, meant that I was going to have to spend a chunk of time chatting and visiting. Now, this isn't quite pulling teeth. I do love my mother and like hearing about how her world turns but I have been struggling lately with how and where I put my energy. Two weeks of insomnia have taken their toll and even if I finally got a decent night's sleep the night before she came over, I'm certainly not quite back up to my usual resilient self.

My solution to these circumstances was to spend time with her in the kitchen. Kitchens are wonderful places were activities and conversation meet. The tribe that was my mother's family always gravitated around the hearth. It felt natural to pull out a few projects that have been waiting in the wings (or produce drawers) while she sat at the counter working on a hook rug that I gave her fifteen years ago as a Christmas gift.

I dug up quite a few potatoes and beets last week which naturally led to potato salad and pickled beets. My mother's potato salad has always been my favorite. It's funny how I've always heard (or read) how the taste of some dish from childhood seems to set the standard for all future culinary adventures. I hadn't thought too much about that in my own life until I get to the basic tastes that were staples of my own childhood. Potato salad, homemade macaroni and cheese, turkey stuffing, chicken fried steak and fruit pies – hmmm, those are the recipes that primarily come to mind.

Mom keeps her potato salad fairly simple: Potatoes, lots of green onions, celery and hard boiled eggs. She mixes mayo and vinegar, salt & pepper and a little sugar together for the dressing. I can't tell you the exact proportions because she does it by taste – a little more vinegar, maybe a pinch more pepper. The potatoes need to be cut into small bite size pieces so the vinegar can soak in. It is a lovely bit of summer – unpretentious and totally satisfying.

The pickled beets are really more her favorite than mine. I like my beets roasted and then sliced up in a salad but she loves them pickled with onions. With my garden supply I was able to make about four jars of these jewel toned delicacies. Pickling any vegetable is the easiest thing to do in the world. Beets need to be cooked ahead – I roasted them until just cooked through. Pack the produce in a sterilized, hot jar and cover with the hot vinegar liquid. In this case, the vinegar is combined with sugar, cinnamon sticks and allspice with a touch of salt. Let that simmer for about fifteen minutes and then pour into the jars. The jars then need to go in a water bath for 30 minutes.

She left around nine last night with two jars of pickled beets and a big serving of leftover potato salad.

When she comes back over today I think I'll make up a couple batches of raspberry jam.

Garlic and lemon - how can you go wrong?

I had lunch with a friend last week at a little place in Bellevue called the Mediterranean Kitchen. It only took one whiff to immediately recognized what I had been craving forever - garlic. And oh, what a place to dive into garlic. It felt like I burned my tongue on the garlic dipping sauce. I was tasting garlic the next morning - but that's beside the point! I left wanting more.
This particular friend that I was eating with happens to be an amazing chef and as he scarfed down an uncountable number of chicken wings and as I plowed through a divine dish of chicken sauteed with red onions and basil, we were once again discussing recipes and food. I believe I was telling him that it felt like I had finally found my personal cuisine nirvana when he shrugged and said - "well, how can you go wrong marinating chicken in lots of garlic and fresh lemon juice?" Epiphany - how could I forget such sage advice? I knew this - and had forgotten. I had strayed from the path of simplicity into cookbooks of dense complexity. Garlic. Lemon. Perfect.

And so the next night I marinated my chicken, grilled it up and served it with a yogurt tahini sauce in pita bread. My sister's children ate their weight in chicken. I hid the leftovers.

Marinade:
Juice of two lemons with the left over skins cut up and thrown into the mix.
About a glass of white wine
4-5 heads of garlic, crushed and minced
fresh oregano from the garden, roughly cut up
a little bit of olive oil
salt and pepper
10 boneless chicken thighs.

Marinade for at least 3-4 hours

Tahini yogurt sauce: let this sit awhile before you serve it (From Deborah Madison)
1 cup plain greek yogurt
2 T lemon juice plus about 1 tsp of lemon zest
1 T tahini sauce - add more or less if you like
2 tsp. crushed and minced garlic
salt to taste

Food Rules

In the New York Times there is a blog article by Michael Pollen - Michael Pollan Wants Your Food Rules - Well Blog - NYTimes.com. I'm not sure this article is accessible to the general public but suffice it to say that Mr. Pollen – author of Omnivore's Dilemma – is collecting the cultural and familial stories (rules) that were passed down to you from your parents and grandparents.

He's getting a lot of comments that talk about navigating today's food market but that's not what he's looking for. It made me stop and think – what rules did pass down to me?

1. Even the simplest and cheapest of prepared meals can be a celebration.
   

   My mother's family was poor in money but not in spirit. There was (and is) a large extended family that traveled west together, settled in the same towns together, picked apples and built roads together. They also cooked together. Incredible cooks who made Sunday night at Grandma's events that my mother still remembers to this day. I have similar memories with my own grandmother. I didn't matter if she was frying bologna and cut grapefruit – each part of the meal would be served on its own special plate. The butter always had a dish and the milk had a carafe. My mother had the same knack for transforming the ordinary meal into an event. Whether it was the fact that we always ate dinner together without a TV – homecooked meals that she prepared without a lot of fuss – or the gatherings of family for any event – birthdays, holidays, camping, I always felt the degree of pride and care that was taken to prepare the food.
   

2. I learned from my family that the only way to control what goes in your mouth – is to be the one who made it.
   

   We rarely ate out as children. I never tasted better food than what was made in the kitchens of my family. My mother's macaroni and cheese – such a simple recipe of cheese, eggs, milk and pasta – has never been surpassed by any box or restaurant concoction. Cream doesn't make it better; gruyere cheese does not make it better: it simply is because it was made simply and with love.
   

3. Which leads me to my last point: I grew up eating basic, wholesome foods. Vegetables were often fresh from the back yard garden and I spent many a summer day eating apples, tangerines, oranges, peaches, plums and pomegranates right off the trees. Yes, I grew up in Southern California where the tomatoes naturally ripened on the vine and the corn always grew tall and straight. We ate seasonally and did not have grapes from Chile in February. We rarely ate ethnic food – it just wasn't as available and, like I said, we rarely ate out. My mother instilled in me the craving for a homecooked meal. It was a tradition that I yearned for when it didn't happen. I didn't care that much about variety – what I had come to love was the simple meal that we all sat down around. It was the only time of the day that I really saw my father or heard what was going on in the world that was larger than mine. The fact is – we ate together; we ate meals prepared with love; meals that you could probably list the ingredients for on one hand.
   

All of this, I believe, is the legacy of the pioneer families that brought both of my parents families west. These were large family groups that prized being with each other and found in a shared meal a reason to celebrate another day's labor. Coming west, farming and growing food, I believe gave us a taste for the freshest and best. Butter freshly churned or tomatoes still warm from the sun. Most of my mother's family still cooks in ways that make my cholesterol sing – but I've tempered that and found other ways to enjoy what is fresh. The best part, however, of this legacy is that I have spent 22 years putting a meal on the table to share with those I love. And this certainly includes the meals that I have lovingly prepared just for myself.

Snow...again???

My dad called me this morning a bit out of sorts that he has over three inches of snow on the ground. I gently reminded him that it is January and these things happen in the winter. I'm not sure you can ever quite take the Californian out of those of us who transplanted ourselves here and it is especially difficult for my dad sometimes to accept that it can snow more than once a winter.
I live farther east then my dad by about a mile and I've got a little more snow then he does. It is certainly a beautiful day and there isn't anything -yet- that Sam our puppy doesn't enjoying playing in more than snow. He literally spins in circles, snow flying until he collapses in the middle of his playground. It is so lovely seeing a creature give in so clearly to it's nature: pure puppy.
I will surrender to my own nature on a day like today which really brings me more in touch with my nest. The kitchen calls - those leeks and potatoes ready to be made into soup. Maybe I'll pull the crockpot out and make the chili verde today instead of later in the week. Maybe - just maybe - I'll see if my new yeast will actually make the bread rise instead of becoming a little brick. (That was yesterday - but today is a new day, right?)

And I will definitely take Sam out again to play in the snow.

Where does my food come from?

The answers start getting very interesting with a little bit of research.

Rosie Chickens come from Petaluma, California. Known as Organic and Free Range birds, it was a bit disquieting to learn that their notion of ‘free range’ meant that each chicken had the luxury of a square foot of space. Not only did this make me wince, but I thought about how much space that was compared to a chicken in a conventional poultry operation. I’ve never really looked into the standards of life for the meat and poultry business. I figured that if I supported organic and free range products, I didn’t need to know in detail about the inhumane treatment of the animals meant for our tables. The thing is, I still haven’t gone out and researched that particular nightmare, just trying to learn what the standards are in the organic and ‘natural’ market is eye opening enough.

Take milk for example. I began looking at milk in order to find a brand that was local and not ultra pasteurized. The two brands of organic milk sold in most stores are Organic Valley and Horizon. The Internet is a valuable tool and gave me some interesting information. Organic Valley is a national company with localized co-ops. Their northwest co-op are small dairy farms throughout the northwest that make sure their cows have actual time under the sun. Horizon is another story. Their Idaho facility houses 4000 dairy cows in barn cubicles. There are no pastures where these cattle can even roam as the land is dry and covered in sagebrush. The cows are lined up in front of troughs of organic feed and spend their lives confined to their small space with occasional time spent out in crowded pens on the hard pan. There has been vocal debate within the dairy industry and government as to what the standards for ‘organic’ should be. Horizon skirts by the organic label and yet its mammoth production has taken on most aspects of conventional dairy farming: a conglomerate that has allowed numbers to dictate practices.
Articles on the Horizon hubbub - http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/04/13/milk/index.html
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2006/04/organic_milk.html

What I keep reading is that the standards for ‘organic’ are open to some pretty loose interpretations. There are loop holes that allow an operation like Horizon to keep their Organic claim and yet, they price out their smaller, more sustainability conscious competitors. We, the consumers get to make a choice – but how many people are really going to go to that level? I might be making an assumption here, but I believe that for most Americans, ‘Organic’ is a venture into a new world. Look how long it took for the public to get on board with the badness of trans fatty acids. When I decided to go organic – I trusted the labeling to give me what I wanted. I believed that organic milk came from healthy cows out in the pasture. I believed that free range meant that my little roasted chicken had once run around the barnyard eating bugs (free-range is another term that has some open ended definitions). The farming industry is embroiled in this debate and it seems like the small, artisan farmer is the one who is going to suffer unless we, the consumer, use our dollars to support them.

And now we have something else to add to the conversation: the government’s green light for cloned animals. I sit here and wonder about diversity. We have already seen such a loss in diversity in our agriculture. Knowing this about plant culture I now wonder about animal culture. Is this also happening in the world of meat and poultry? As a matter of fact – yes. One kind of chicken, one kind of turkey, one kind of pig. Cloning just takes any chance of diversity out of the picture. In a world where our viruses evolve practically overnight, isn’t it dangerous to take away the ability to have slightly different immune systems? Isn’t it deadly to predominantly grow only one varietal of corn in this country? I guess the answer is a scornful no from the conventional agricultural business. Hell, they put enough chemicals on and IN the plants and animals to make them impervious to just about anything.

So I tried to find local chickens that weren’t standard table fair. I haven’t found anything too close so far. I did find a small organic farm that brings chickens and other meats to the University district farmers market starting in the spring. It is suddenly harder to sit down and eat in a restaurant when I think about all this. Even though I have a choice of menu, I have little choice into the ingredients used to make my selection. And perhaps that will become my new search – for restaurants that use organic produce and sustainable/organic animal products. This is the problem with getting curious, it keeps leading me to new questions. However, it also creates a firm commitment in me to support local and organic farming as well as producing what I can for my own table. For now, I know which milk products I am going to stay away from.

Perhaps that is all I can do today.

First CSA box of goodies

I have my first box of produce coming from Full Circle Farm tomorrow. Organic and wholesome potatoes, spinach, beets, carrots and more. I am really excited and my family - well - my family sat in wary silence contemplating what this might mean to them. More vegetables? Different vegetables? 'What in the world will you do - god, i hate to ask - with all those beets?' I just smiled with the patience of a saint (not really - I think it looked a bit more, er, manic) and rattled off a couple ideas that made them blanch. At least they didn't ask any more silly questions.

The point is, I don't care if they eat beets. I love beets - pickled or mashed with some sour cream or steamed and added to a salad - and I am content to eat my beets all by myself. And if I want to try something new, I'll ask my friend B. for some ideas since he loves trying new things. (I still have to try that pumpkin soup recipe!). I'm just happy to have found an organic, local farm that I can eat fresh and seasonally from.

It is becoming more and more important to me what I put in my body. The mind/body/spirit connection of how I sustain myself really matters. I was amazed at how important it became over the last year. I honestly thought that the stress and work would throw me off into unconscious eating habits of years past - grabbing what was convenient, eating out too much, ordering too many french fries. I found myself bringing my own food with me. I made sure that I had healthy snacks to offset hunger so I wasn't ravenous when I did got home. I cooked up meals on the weekend for the week ahead. My slow cooker and I became good friends.

So, somewhere along the way, staying conscious on many levels of my life certainly helped me stay healthy as well. And carrying that forward into the new year is exciting to me. I'm looking forward to fresh new choices and finding new ways to cook. I don't need the family to jump on the band wagon - they are all old enough to make their own choices. I like giving them choices, however, because you never know when someone might try something new. Okay, I don't have a lot of hope for my crew around that statement - especially when J is telling me how she would prefer for me to cook up spaghetti the next time I prepare it (relaxing clenched jaw now) - but that's choice and that's change - and they can always cook for themselves.

I wonder what I can make with kohlrabi....

Cooking from the farmer's market

I was inspired today by the bright colors and abundance found at my local farmer's market. One large leek, some broccoli and homemade chicken stock has created a wonderful soup for later this evening. I have summer squash and zucchini to grill; peaches and nectarines to cut up and serve over ice cream. Berries are being picked as I write to can up as jam. I also picked the first few asian pears off of my tree in the garden and was amazed at the sweet, warm taste.

All of these experiences feed something in my body that mindlessly shopping at the local Safeway can't touch. We hear the messages all the time about eating sustainably, eat locally - and what I have found is that I really feel better when I do. I am much more aware of the work that has gone into each piece of produce. I have a face to put with a particular farm. And somehow my body has begun to crave that which is in season right now. It's odd and real at the same time.

There's this little book that I love called If the Buddha Came to Dinner. Hale Sofia Schatz writes:
"How do we regularly nourish our spirit so that it continually bears fruit? How do we literally feed this part of ourselves? Imagine for a moment that the Buddha is coming for dinner. What would you prepare? Most likely you wouldn't run out for fast food burgers and onion rings. Instead, you'd spend time shopping and preparing the freshest, most tasty, wholesome meal you could produce with your very own hands, in your very own kitchen.
Now let's imagine that you are a spiritual being - which you are - what would you feed yourself?"

Saturday farmer's market

Our local farmer's market is not very large but it was certainly fun to sip coffee and wander through the stalls looking for the perfect bag of organic cherries. It was inspiring to think about what I could make for dinner tonight from the produce that I bought. I picked up a slab of salmon and some fresh mozzarella to go with the tomatoes and basil. Summer squash and tiny red potatoes. Perfect.

Of course I got home and discovered that two of my house guests (adult children) weren't going to be home tonight. So everything will wait until tomorrow.

Do I dare admit it? Yes, I shall.
I actually started working on my paper today.