Slow Food movement hits Topinabee

One of the most comforting things I've stumbled upon in the past few years of war and environmental hysteria is the Slow Food Movement. If only we can all remember to appreciate where our food comes from, why we need to protect farmers and grow some of our own, and for heaven's sake, care about what we put in our mouths, the world might just last another millineum.

I'm contributing by having the largest vegetable garden in Topinabee. Also I'm carrying on family tradition by gardening in the same spot Bob's Father used to famously garden in, across the road from our summer house, which used to be Bob's parent's house. The big news is that the garden got planted earlier than every this year and I'm filled with that premature optimism that everything will come up perfect. In fact, I see myself standing at the public dock, handing ears of organic sweet corn to passers by.

We're growing Burgundy green beans, yellow Swiss Chard (I quietly enjoy these anomalies), plus Italian mix of lettuce, sweet peas for Bob, Detroit red beets (standard variety, but appropriate...get it?...Detroit...), a couple hills of Patti Pan squash (really cute), a couple of zuchinni (am hostile towards, but trying to appreciate), and my pride and joy, four 20' rows of corn. Oh yea, also the tomotoes. Cousin Donna Gene is supposed to be bringing some heirloom plants her husband raised, but she's late so I've started with 9 various hybrids (feel guilty about that too). Rain all day today, so I'm looking for some good action next week. Already after 8 days, most are peeking through the sandy soil we have here. Stay tuned.

About Finding Bread on TV

OK, first the admission that I watched Martha Stewart on TV in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. It was just while I was eating lunch in the den. Never mind the rest but know that I know that my friends mockingly call me Martha Stewart behind my back.

Anyway, the guest happened to be the baker of the famous Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City who was there to demonstrate his No-Knead Bread recipe which apparently everyone knew had been circulated widely on the Internet after publication in the New York Times. Intriguingly, Martha mentioned that she loved this recipe so much she took it with her on her recent cruise in the Greek Islands (!) and the on-board chef graciously made if for her shipmates…so they would not have to be without New York bread I guess…God forbid they would eat bread made in Greece?. Anyway, in the TV demo kitchen, Martha submissively made the bread along side of the baker and although she played with her dough much more than instructed and insisted on adding more salt that he directed – even when he warned against adding too much - it did look easy and I searched for and easily found the recipe online.

Besides having to have a large dutch oven pot, the only difficult thing about this recipe is that you have to plan about 20 hours ahead of time and work backwards so that you’re not putting the bread in the oven at 2 am or something. For me, starting in the evening for a noon-ish or early evening final product the next day is perfect. The first steps seem ridiculously simple, considering the sophistication of the final product. You mix dry flour, yeast and salt (so Biblical, so simple), add some water and put it away for 12-18 hours. This gooey mess doesn’t do much but rise a little and bubble. When you get back to it, it looks particularly unappetizingly grey and indeed, alive. After you play with it just a little (this is the part Martha wanted to over-do), give it a gentle dusting of corn meal, and then leave it alone for another 2 hours, it’s ready to go in the oven. So far, mine have taken less time that the recipe suggested, about 30 minutes with the lid on, then only 10-15 minutes with the lid off. Then voila, a gorgeous loaf of break that is probably $10 in a New York City bakery. Astoundingly easy.

I’m thinking that all the bakery owners in the world now hate this man for revealing the profit margins they are enjoying and revealing the simplicity of their ingredients and their art. Also for encouraging home cooks who had been intimidated out of the practice to start making bread again. I have.

Check this out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?ex=1181102400&en=e6a472758dbbefd7&ei=5070

Custom Cooking for XMAS

Some suggestions for items you might want to have prepared for you for gifting or just for endulging yourself over the holidays. Prices quoted on request. Delivery and gift packaging can be included too. Everything is negotiable and am open to suggestions from your family recipe file. Inquire here or email me directly. Cheers!

Sweets:

Biscotti Rustica

Mary's Sugar Cookies

Chocolate Truffle Assortment

Individual Free Range Fruit Cakes

Mom's Cinnamon Cake

French Apple Tarte

Savories:

Black Olive Tapenade

Dried Tomato Tapenade

Potted Cheese

Country Pate

Betty Crocker Cheese Straws

My seasonal rant on pumpkins

If I were Queen of Dallas for a Day, there should be a contract attached to each pumpkin obligating the purchaser to boil, bake or compost each purchase. I’m talking pumpkins - hundreds if not thousands of them- stacked on the porches of Dallas for harvest season decor.

Current trends seem to require clusters of 2 or 3 or even more pumpkins and even exotic squash piled on the front steps or posed artistically in stacks next to the front door. Some of the displays involve bundles of corn husks, life size scarecrows and enough potted mums to decorate a small cemetery. Occasionally there is a single orange pumpkin sitting straight up on a bare concrete step, a minimalist display.

At the minimum, we should all be required to pause for a moment at the time of purchase to ponder the hugely abundant world we live in, one where beautiful healthful food is a seasonal display.

Practicing pies Up North

I'm running a little behind last year however. This is only about my third pie this summer. Made in honor of son's visit. Peach. Still, when sugar adverse son comments on it's perfection, all is worth while. On the other hand, he may have appreciated it most as a prop for his retro looking photos of the kitchen.

Pies are now company food. A generation ago, oops, make that actually in my own childhood, dessert was expected for family dinner. My Father, the Depression child, expected to be offered dessert of some kind, even on weeknights. (When there were cherry pits left in the pie he accused my Mother of somehow ensuring they showed up in his piece....)

Cooks of the last generation made enough pies to do them by rote. I keep hoping that I will memorize a crust recipe, but always have to re-confirm with Betty Crocker. 2 cups flour for a 2 crust pie, that part I'm sure about. But 2/3 cup shortening or 8 tablespoons? I can't remember and have to check. The amount of fruit I can eyeball accurately. In this case, 8 peaches. But had to check that 7/8 cup of sugar would be about right, plus some flour. A little cinnamon. Bake. Voila, a pie.

Cracking the Art of Food Writing

Just forced myself to put down Art of Eating (#71) after read the first story. Same as only allowing myself one chocolate Easter egg at a time. Ed Behr is the founder and editor of what looks and reads alot like a scholarly journal about food and I've been getting it for a couple of years. Each issue has 2-3 really long stories like the one I read about Olympia oysters, and long book reviews on food books and very odd photos. Sometime's there's also a full photo essay, all in black and white. Oddly, the contributors seem mostly men, including my Food Writer Hero John Thorne, and all credentialed. Intimidating but draws me like a magnet. I guess as a reader I'm part of SOME inner circle anyway.

Visiting Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian

"You must have the courage of your convictions," trills a black-and-white Child as she pan-flips a large potato pancake. Losing half of the contents onto the electric range cooktop, she scrapes up the errant potatoes with her spatula and puts them back in the pan, assuring me, her momentary confidant, that it's OK to make a mistake -- no one sees us alone in the kitchen anyway. As an adult, I find this reassuring. I, like Child, am not a natural born cook." - Kathryn Killinger, Salon.com , August, 1999

Seeing a biography on Julia on PBS recently brought back many of the images I have been carrying since first visiting her kitchen at the Smithsonian. I was there twice. First and most movingly, when they were still installing the exhibit and you could watch the curators actually unpacking the boxes that had come straight off the truck and just a few days removed from the house in Cambridge. The second time was about 2 years ago on a snowy afternoon in DC after my sales appointment had been suddenly cancelled due to the weather. The completed kitchen was there and also a large foyer area with a small video monitor in the wall that was running her early cooking shows. Obviously it had become a prime attraction.

There are three portals into the kitchen. Each one is floor to ceiling plexiglass on three sides, but only enough square footage for one person to stand in at a time. When you step into this space you are isolated from the crowd in the foyer space outside the kitchen and it would not be inappropriate to say “beam me up Scotty”, the feeling of being transported into another time and space is so strong.

This kitchen has been reconstructed at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History from Julia's own kitchen at her home in Cambridge, MA. It’s not LIKE Julia’s kitchen was. It IS Julia’s kitchen, but without Julia in it. It’s her kitchen cabinets, her pots and pans, her cutting board, her sturdy table with mis-matched wooden chairs they bought in Denmark and shipped through multiple moves, her bookshelf with a worn copy of Joy of Cooking and amazingly her own multi-line telephone with hand written explanatory notes for each button (but darnit, too small to read through the plexiglass). It’s like she just stepped into the living room for a minute and will be right back. It’s eerie.

I read in one of the newspaper stories about the exhibit that all of her knives didn’t come with the kitchen, presumably they went elsewhere as a bequest, lucky recipient unknown. Surprisingly, straightforward and practical Julia had a fetish for acquiring knives and towards the end of her career almost never met a new knife she didn’t have to have. So in addition to the basics, there must have been a large number of exotics, perhaps with fancy handles or highly specialized uses or (hard to imagine) merely decorative.

Because the kitchen itself is not very decorative. Utilitarian would be a good word, and not demeaning at all. Dated, but only in the way that it’s not a shiny, oversize type of kitchen you find in new home models and Food Network TV shows these days. There’s a black & white photo of Julia in her “French kitchen” on the wall of the foyer and in it she is literally stooping over a pot on a gas stove which she is stirring. She’s stooped over it and obviously inconvenienced by her height, but the stove is also very short and primitive and only two burners. The rest of the kitchen looks like a dark movie set for an underground hideaway during the French occupation. And maybe it was since another surprising fact about Julia is that she worked for the United States OSS during World War II, about as close to real spy work as you can get. What gumption it presumably took to get oneself into such a situation back in those days. What an interesting life she had before she even became interested in cooking.

Another major revelation was the level of participation her husband Paul had in her career. When they met in DC and married she was in her 40’s and he was older and she had no real career direction. She followed him on assignment to Paris and used her Veteran’s benefits to pay the tuition at the Cordon Bleu. But he soon retired and she became a celebrity and his passion for words as a poet and his eye as a photographer were put to good use in editing her books and staging her presentations and shows. He seems to have been an exceptionally liberated husband for the times and especially for his generation. One note at the exhibit said he was such a humble and ever present helpmate that he even on occasion washed the dishes after those first Boston Public Television productions. Those were the ones that the Science Guy produced so there were a lot of people wearing multiple hats back then.

And she was so tall. Six feet, two inches is tall even for a man. Her husband was shoulder height to her. Yet they looked rather physically well matched in the photo of them on their wedding day, except for the large bandages on her arm, said to be the result of an auto accident just the day prior. She looked long legged and well bred in her ordinary but classy dress. He looked savvy and well traveled and the photo captures him standing to her side but definitely looking slightly upwards rather admiringly at her laughing face. Perhaps she is re-telling once more the story of her accident. When they moved into the Cambridge house, she had the kitchen counters raised. In later life when she was stooped from old age, she seemed as cheerfully unaware of her curvature as she seems to have always been of her height.

The fact that things slid out of her hands and onto the floor on the cooking shows made Julia endearing. But the fact that Julia was never a pretty face seems to have been a large part of her charm, as does the way she worked far into old age, apparently oblivious to her lack of glamour. Finding out that she also had a rather ordinary kitchen magnifies the extent of her accomplishments somehow.