College student…working mommy. Definite parallels.

One of the blogs I enjoy a lot is “Eat. Drink. Better”–multiple authors with a lot of good things to say.  It’s a good blog.

Their most recent post was by a new blogger on the site, Camille–a graduate student who eats a lot of ramen noodles and pop tarts and is sort of at this “I think I’d like to do things a little differently” point all we nouveau-greeny types got to at some point. (One could feel virtuous at how far one has come…then again, one could wonder how much besides a whole mess of blog entries and endless self-indulgent words really separates one from one’s former life as an eater of ramen noodles…) (That’s self-reflection, not a reflection on anyone else.  Sometimes I feel like a big fake at all this, because there’s so much I probably could be doing that I’m not.)  I’m looking forward to reading more of her posts.

She got me to thinking…okay, here she is, a college student–she has a kitchen, but she has no time, no energy, probably 40 hours of stuff to do in every 24 (most of which belong to someone else) and probably not a lot of support for the whole how-can-i-eat-healthier thing in her circles, since most of her friends probably eat pop tarts and ramen noodles too.  She’s a college student.

I’m trying to think back to my own days of academic immersion, and while admittedly the green movement wasn’t even a blip on the radar in the late 1980′s outside of the pages of Mother Earth News and the dog-eared copy of Silent Spring on my mom’s bookshelf, I can’t think of a single person I knew in college or grad school who made any effort at all to eat like a healthy human being.  I mean, whenever we would afford it (once a month or so, maybe) someone might make lasagna, and we might even have a salad of iceberg lettuce and a few cherry tomatoes with it, but that was the apex of our culinary ambitions. (Sigh…he made the best lasagna ever…not only did laundry but knew what fabric softener was for…kept his apartment clean…was tall and funny and charming and liked musicals…the perfect guy. Unfortunately for me, he turned out to be the perfect guy for a really lucky guy he met a few years later.  The heartbreaks of youth. And I never even got the lasagna recipe.)  Usually it was ramen noodles, pasta, rice-a-roni, canned soup, Kraft cheez and macaroni (because we all knew, from their marketing team, that there’s so much real cheese in there), fairly awful stuff like that.  And then, at the end of the month when the fellowship check wasn’t due for a couple of days and the checking account was dry, peanut butter out of the jar on a spoon…unless I could find a friend who couldn’t cook and convince them that I’d make a nice chicken dinner if they’d buy the groceries .  The chem majors had bigger fellowship checks than the musicians did; they were good to befriend.

That was a long time ago, in a different life, of course.  Things are so different now: I’m a working mom.  I have a kitchen, but I have  no time, no energy, 40 hours of stuff to do in every 24 (most of which belong to someone else) and not a lot of support for the whole how-can-i-eat-healthier thing in my circles, since most of my friends shop at Aldi.  So…not so different after all.  The difference is that now I have mommyguilt to drive me, and the activities that take up all those hours are less intellectually stimulating than they were in college, so now that some of my postpartum brain cells appear to be growing back I’m starting to think in the longer term. Plus…well…I’m older. 

If the harried speedymamas and the college students ever connected with each other (which we won’t since we’re all too busy and too insular), some interesting exchanges of ideas might happen.  I bet Camille and her friends could make some really affordable changes for themselves without killing too much of their time–God, if I’d even known about lentils and dried beans back then, I would never have run out of food at the end of the month: a pound of beans at the time went for less than a dollar, ditto a pound of brown rice, and the peanut butter jar was well over three.  If I’d known a can of chicken broth and a can of seasoned diced tomatoes were the cheapest easiest soup base ever and could take practically anything thrown into them (including lentils and/or brown rice), I’d've stayed away from the Progresso stuff.  If I’d known how easy “real” oatmeal was, I would not have shelled out all that ridiculous money for the tiny packets that came six in a box, and if I’d known then how painless making one’s own granola is, I would have saved a lot there too.  I would still probably have ignored a lot of produce and not eaten enough fruits and veggies, but I would have eaten better, healthier, and cheaper protein and filled up on whole grains rather than the useless (but tasty) refined stuff.  

Anyway…I hope she has fun. It’s an adventure, this taking control of what one eats and where it comes from.  I wish her well and will look forward to reading more of her.

–J

p.s. I’m still Facebook friends with lasagna guy; I don’t know if he reads this blog, but if he does, I still would really love that recipe…:-)

Responsible Shopper website–GreenAmericaToday.org

Green America Today  is a fairly interesting and useful website–this links to a really helpful page listing a whole mess of companies and stores and how they rate in terms of fair labor practices, good environmental awareness, health and safety, and ethics/governance.

I find them a little hype-y, but on the other hand they don’t just preach, they give actual concrete instances where a given company has assisted or violated their clearly stated (and very reasonable) standards for responsible businesses. 

There’s also a function that lets you compare different companies within the same industry, giving letter grade ratings for each of the above four criteria, and how different stores measure up.  For example, Trader Joe’s is the only grocery store listed that actually gets a “green” rating from this site, with Whole Foods at a fairly close second but still in the “yellow” zone. (Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club, of course, are all the way at the bottom in the “red” zone.) In terms of home improvement stores, Lowe’s outranks Home Depot by a little (though both are in the barely-not-failing “orange” zone) but Home Depot gets a B in Environment and it’s their F in Ethics and Governance that brings them down…and so forth.  Not one airline makes it out of the “orange” zone, but Southwest is at the top of the list with fairly high marks in all categories, with United all the way at the bottom.

I’m not saying this site is an unequivocally positive Superb Source For All That Is Good And Important–I have some problems with it.  For one thing, those letter grades I mentioned above are peppered with “n/i” columns where they don’t have enough info to give a company a rating; some higher-rating companies have n/i almost all the way across and only one category they’re actually rated in.  Also, it seems like nothing actually will make them happy; they give Trader Joe’s its green rating but then complain that while they sell Fair Trade goods, they don’t do enough to educate the public about the importance of Fair Trade.  I’m like, oh just relax, okay?  Also, it would take a true watchdog to get on the horn and really make sure they are reporting everything, on all sides of the issues, from all the companies they can. (For example–yes, we all know that WalMart sort of stands as the Giant Evil Corporate Face Of All That Has Gone Wrong, but you’d think that a site like this would at least mention the company’s efforts to create and implement their Sustainability Index in its profile of the company…I could find no such mention.)

But…for those of us trying to get a handle on how to shift the demand end of the giant supply and demand chain we’re all part of , this can be useful information.  Anyone else use this site? What do you think of it?

UPDATE: Erin, in the comments also mentioned Better World Shopper and the Good Guide as good places to look for this sort of thing–thanks! Anyone else have any good sites for this kind of info?

–J

Michael Pollan article

In January of 2007, Michael Pollan had an article called “Unhappy Meals”  in the New York Times–I believe it contains seminal material from his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.  (Which is, in a nutshell, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” ) It’s a fairly long article, and it details the evolution from food to food science of the past century or so. 

It’s a good article!  Check it out.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes, part Deux

Yesterday I posted about my preliminary adventures with Jeff Herzberg and Zoe Francois’s somewhat amazing Artisan Bread in Five Minutes book. (Or more precisely, my adventures with the basic recipe while I waited for  the book to come into the library.)

Last night I got the book and pored over it. Today I did a little more experimentation, though still more or less not using any specific recipes–just the Basic Master Plan and my own sense of “what if.”

Today we’re eating a lot of bread–three different loaves:

1. Rosemary Foccacia–for this I just took the basic refrigerated dough (which was, by the way, 2/3 unbleached flour and 1/3 white whole wheat flour), formed it into a ball and flattened it into a circle, and let it rest.  Before putting it into the oven I dented it with my fingers and poked it with a fork a bit, and then sprinkled coarse sea salt and rosemary all over the top.  VERDICT: Amazing. This is a keeper.  I will use this to impress dinner guests, or take some to parties, or what-have-you.

2. Cinnamon Bread–this was sort of an experiment for the kids. To do this I used the basic refrigerated dough again and formed the requisite ball, then flattened it into a sort of oval shape.  I sprinkled cinnamon and sugar (could have done raisins too, just didn’t) all over it, rolled it up, and curled under the ends again to make another ball, which I then let rest for the 40 minutes the original calls for.  (This is how the book suggests making anything from date-walnut bread to olive bread to all kinds of Bread With Stuff In It.) Before baking I sprinkled more cinnamon and sugar on top.  VERDICT: the kids each had a slice as their after-school snack; they love it. I think for sweet breads in general I will need to cut back on the salt quite a bit, because it’s still a little salty even though I used the coarse salt the book calls for this time instead of the finer salt I used on my first batch.  But in general, this was lovely.  If any of it survives till morning, I bet it would make an amazing french toast. This might also be nice with jam or something spread on the bread before rolling it up…

3. Baguette: This is more of a no-brainer, I guess, and I’m not following the exact book recipe at all–just once again using the same basic dough but shaping it into a long log instead of a round boule.  (Which is, now that I look it up, exactly what the book says to do.) VERDICT: Perfect.  I will never buy grocery store bakery bread again.  This stuff is amazingly good. (I should qualify: perfect tasting.  I still haven’t got the hang of exactly how to do the slashes in a way that lets it do all the springing it needs to in the oven without splitting open on the sides, particularly for the long breads. Boule-shape seems to work for me, though…)

The point of the exercise for me was really to see how many different breads I can make from one single basic dough type in the fridge.  I mean, if you mix up 4 loaves worth of herb bread dough, you’re going to make 4 loaves of herb bread or foccacia. You’re not going to be making french toast, right?  And if you mix up a sweet bread dough, it’s not going to go so well with the Chicken Piccata.  So while some of the other breads look very appealing, my guess is that even if I do buy the book (and I’m fairly sure I will), I’ll come back to the basic-but-tweaked recipe again and again.

The Book itself–it’s a great book, and I’m still waffling on whether to go out and buy it after my library two weeks are up.  In general I’m not a cookbook kind of cook; I find a basic template and then mess with it to see what I can do with it.  Also, the book gets a lot schmantzier than I ever will in a good half of its recipes (and once you hit schmantzy, 5 minutes goes out the window), and has a lot more recipes for salads and sandwiches and Things To Do With This Bread than I would ever use.  On the other hand, there are enough other template type recipes–like Oatmeal bread, Pumpkin bread, Challah, Brioche (which I will probably never make because of the high fat content), and such which I expect I’d probably make often enough that having the book might be worthwhile.  Over the next two bread-laden weeks I’ll think about it and try some of those other “basic” recipes to see what happens. My copyright consciousness says that if there are only maybe 1 or 2 recipes in the book I think I will ever make, I will feel fairly comfortable making a photocopy of those couple of pages for my own use later.  Any more than that and I would feel like a thief and would instead just buy the whole book.  At the moment I have post-its in 9 pages, though, so I expect I’ll be shelling out the “dough” for this one fairly soon.  (And the sequel is coming out soon too!)

In terms of my own playfulness and experimentation, there will be a lot of messing around with flax seed, oat bran, oat flour, and whole wheat flour to see how much Good Stuff I can get in there.  Refined flour might be missing lots of the nutritional goodness of whole grains, but it does such lovely things in bread!  So the trick is always to keep enough white flour to get your nice crust and lightness and chewiness and avoid whole wheat’s bitter flavor.   But I expect having a batch of dough in the fridge could become a fairly regular thing around here.

My husband cautions me to not overdo, or we’ll get sick of it.  I can’t quite imagine that…

A dinner I’m proud of

Tonight we had a Real Dinner.

We eat together every night, or mostly together (Tuesdays because of soccer practice and dance class the kids eat earlier…I can’t believe we’re only at ages 4 and 6 and this stuff is already happening), but a lot of nights the dinner is pasta with jarred (or lately, thawed that I made a couple of months ago) sauce or pizza on naan flatbreads and such.  But tonight…

Chicken Piccata, or a stew-like concoction thereof, that I threw into the crockpot this morning and basically got to forget about, served over pearl barley.

Homemade fresh baguette.

Green beans and broccoli from the farmers market, cooked so lightly they still crunched.

For dessert, homemade applesauce. 

The cool part of it is that this stuff is essentially pretty easy.  I’m a lazy cook, and I’m a busy working mom, so I don’t have time to do a lot of menu planning and standing in the kitchen futzing.  Anything I can’t do in 30 minutes, I don’t make.  The exceptions are things like crockpot meals and the bread–neither take much energy at all, I just have to plan ahead and, in the case of the bread, be around to dash in and throw something into the oven or set something to heat or whatever.  But essentially, if it ain’t easy, I don’t do it.

I love that, every so often, I can pretend I’m a Real Cook and make a dinner like this. I love even more that, the longer I work on this process of preparing and freezing my own food and not relying on processed and prepared stuff, the easier it is and the more often “every so often” can happen.

And now we have chicken and barley for tomorrow night…and soup makings for Sunday…and dough in the fridge for more bread…we’re good to go for several days now.

It’s all good.

Jumping on the bread baking bandwagon

I’ve just put in a request at my local public library for Artisan Bread in Five Minutes, a book I’ve seen a lot of bloggers talking about.  It’s positively viral, but in a good way. I read Green Bean, who got the idea from Tammy over at Girls Wear Blue Too.  Then there’s Taste and Tell, and Lynn at Lynn’s Kitchen Adventures (who loves the challah recipe from this book)…I appreciate that so many bloggers are not only spreading the word about this bread but also sharing their own experiences, recipe divergences, and shortcuts… 

The fact that it’s already checked out from the library is both encouraging (because that indicates it’s in demand and thus hopefully a good thing) and sort of a pain in the neck, because I’m Instant Gratification Girl all the way.  But then, as I so often say, gotta love the internet.  The master recipe for this five minute bread is actually available online in several places, including here. So I’ve got my first batch going up in the kitchen.

This is very promising–the basic premise is that you mix up a batch of sort of wet and gooey knead-less dough and store it in your fridge for up to two weeks.  Periodically you just hack off a piece the size of a grapefruit, let it “rest” a bit on the counter, and then bake-steam it for 30 minutes into a nice fresh freeform loaf.  The dough in the fridge apparently starts its own natural “sourdough” process over the two weeks and gradually develops different flavors as it ages.  I’ve been becoming less and less thrilled with my bread machine lately, since it seems to give a bread that’s sort of dry and has a not-too-pleasant crust.  So I’m looking forward to this…

VERDICT: THE PROCESS–Well, there’s good and bad, with the positives dramatically outweighing the negatives. The good: it was really easy to mix up the master batch of dough, and that itself only took a few minutes and not much mess.  And after the master batch did its initial rise, it was incredibly easy to yank off a chunk and shape it into a loaf.  The master batch itself wasn’t the gooey kind of dough the recipe led me to expect; it was lots flour-i-er than I thought it would be, and not too wet.  And I did follow the recipe well.  Maybe my flour was too packed down or something? Anyway, next time I might try a little less flour.  But the ease of taking refrigerated dough and turning it into fresh hot bread without mess and deep involvement is lovely.

The down side–well, yeah, you really do only spend about 5 minutes actively doing anything for making bread.  But to actually get it onto the table you have to, after you spent 2 of the 5 minutes making your loaf, let it rest for 40 minutes.  And then 20 minutes into that 40 you have to turn on the oven.  And then you put it in (taking maybe 2 minutes) and bake it for another 30.  So while you’re not actually working on the bread but a few minutes, you still have to stick around and pay attention to make it work.  Which means that there’s no coming home at 5:30pm and having hot fresh bread on the table at 6:00; you have to start a good bit more than an hour before you plan to take it out of the oven in order to make this happen. But that’s a fairly small downside for this really nice, really easy fresh bread. I mean, it’s not like there are any other ways to come home at 5:30 and have fresh bread at 6:00, unless you stopped at Whole Foods on the way or something. 

VERDICT: THE BREAD–all I can say is a big “omnomnomnom” about this bread.  It’s moist and crusty and tastes absolutely lovely.  It’s a little salty (Tammy over at Girls Wear Blue Too says she pretty much always reduces the salt amount, and I think I’ll try it next batch too) but still absolutely wonderful. 

The recipe says that the dough’s flavor evolves into a gentle sourdough as it sits in the fridge; I don’t know how many days this batch will last before it all gets baked and eaten, but we’ll see how that part works out…

Aha! And I just got the email from the library that the book is in. I’ll see what it’s like, and then that may be one I have to buy…

Now I have to go eat some more bread…

(UPDATE: I did a subsequent post on my further adventures…)

My first guest post

This is, for me a very Happy Bloggerday–the awesome superheroes at The Green Phone Booth invited me to do a guest blog on their site, and today is the day it went up.  Which makes me feel incredibly humble and proud, because I think those women are amazing. 

I’ll also be doing a guest post for them the first Friday of every month, and I’ll link to those posts here as well.  But for today, come on over to The Green Phone Booth and check it out!

Recycled Sweaters: Wool Felt Projects

 

Interview with Annie Leonard

Seems like Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff video has moved into the sights of the wingnuts Those Who Exercise Their Right To Disagree With Everything The Green Movement Stands For.  I’m not going to post links to the various critiques that have popped up, or at least gained notice in a delightfully viral way, over the past few days–y’all have Google Search too, you can find them if you want to see them. (Try searching Glenn Beck and Fox News.)

What I did find was an interview with Ms. Leonard that expands on some of the thoughts in the movie, and I personally think it’s worth a read even though it’s going on two years old.

For the record, I’m not entirely comfortable with the level of hype and statistic-slanting Leonard uses throughout the video to make her points…but overall I think the points she’s making are very important ones.

Blessed are the cheesemakers!

All of a sudden, it seems like everyone is making their own cheese.  It’s sort of cool. For me, breaking the ice happened shortly after I began making my own yogurt, which made it really easy to learn how to make yogurt cheese.  But now folks are making chevre, mozzarella, farmer cheese, all kinds of good stuff.  It’s neat. Gotta love the internet.

A lot of it might have been kicked off by Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which among other things talks about the 30-minute mozzarella recipe she used to make cheese for her family.  I, like a bunch of other people, bought the ingredients and gave it a try.  (I’m still tweaking; once I get it right, I’ll give my mozzarella adventures their own post, but for the moment I’m still trying to get the curds to form right.)  Despite some problems and a lot of steps throughout where things didn’t do what they were supposed to, I have gotten a couple of really nice batches of mozzarella out of the process.  What I will briefly suggest to anyone wanting to try it is just a) don’t even bother with lowfat milk, go whole or don’t bother, and b) while things like farmer cheese might taste best right away, my homemade mozzarella tasted way better a day later. Oh, and c) it’s easy and fun and not all that messy, so go for it!

I of course also bought the book Home Cheese Making, which on the one hand gives a lot of really practical recipes for easy soft cheeses and on the other makes one realize why really good hard cheeses are so expensive.  The amount of work and time and art involved in even a simple good cheddar is sort of mind-boggling.  The only thing I find off-putting about the book is that it calls, in addition to rennet (which one really does sort of need to get from a cheesemaking supplier), for specific “starters” (basically, acids, but specifically formulated ones) that one can conveniently buy from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, run by the book’s author.  To make creme fraiche, you have to buy creme fraiche starter. To make chevre, you have to buy chevre starter.  And so on.  (Don’t get me wrong, these are probably great starters, and Ricki Carroll is absolutely THE CHEESE GODDESS and these specific ingredients will likely give one really good cheeses…but I personally am in this a lot to learn what I can do with what I already have or can get easily and cheaply from the local market, not to go out and buy a lot of new ingredients to be shipped to me.)  There’s a wonderful set of pages by a professor in Ohio that has recipes for all different kinds of cheeses, and his often recommend vinegar or yogurt as a starter.  A real cheesemaker could probably explain the differences in starters to me, and if I ever got really serious about cheesemaking I’d probably learn a lot and look back on this post in exasperation at my inexperience and ignorance, but for the moment keeping my costs low and general “consumerism” down is a high priority for me.

Other sites, like the cheese recipes page on gourmetsleuth.com, have a gajillion different recipes from different sites; it’s fun poking around!  And then today I found Heather Carr’s recipes on “Eat. Drink. Better” for a really simple in-your-kitchen farmer cheese and a yummy looking dessert “tangerine cheese” that I’ll have to try. (Check this lady out–she has some nice looking recipes!)

As I’ve said before, I love learning how to make those things that even a year ago it would never have occurred to me to try.  Where does cheese come from? It comes from the grocery store, right? Well…not necessarily.  Not any more.

Blindsided! (Restaurant leftovers)

So this morning I meet a friend for breakfast.  We had a great time chatting, and I ordered my favorite default out-for-breakfast thing, a veggie skillet. (Yeah, I know, the veggies were not organic and the eggs were likely not free range…I’m following Erin’s 80/20 rule, or trying to, anyway…)

As usual, there was way too much to eat. Okay, to be honest, I could easily have eaten the whole thing, but it would have been sort of piggy and I absolutely didn’t need it, so I stopped halfway (okay, okay, maybe 2/3 of the way) through and absent-mindedly asked for a box to take it home in.  Wasn’t even thinking, radar wasn’t going at all.  Until this ginormous piece of styrofoam is plopped down in front of me.  A giant entree-sized styrofoam box for my little 4″x5″ piece of potatoes, eggs, and veggies.

We honestly don’t eat out much at all, so this hasn’t been in my awareness circle for ages–those big styrofoam things that nine restaurants out of ten give you to take your leftovers home in.  Some places do the foil with the paper or plastic lid, old-fashioned Chinese places do straight cardboard (although more and more of them seem to be going to styrofoam, which is tragic as far as I’m concerned), but most seem to use what’s probably among the least enviro-friendly substances known to humanity to send our leftovers home.

So of course, now I’m thinking about alternatives.

To be completely honest, there’s a bit of the declasse factor–it’s become very socially acceptable to bring your own grocery bags to the store, but it still feels sort of Oliver Twist to bring one’s own doggy bags.  It won’t stop me, but I totally wouldn’t blame any readers if the thought of this step gave them the mmmrrrrpphs.  (Never stopped the ladies in the retirement community when we used to give concerts either–the first ones to make it to the reception would bring ziploc bags and fill them with cookies at intermission before the rest of the audience made it out there. In 5 years of concerts there I never saw so much as half a chocolate chip cookie; all that was ever left by the time the performers made it out was some of those weird bright pink butter cookies that come in giant tins…but I digress.)

But that styrofoam…ugh, look at it! I won’t drink coffee out of it any more, and honestly the single strongest factor that keeps me buying small coffees at Dunkin Donuts rather than medium is that the small comes in cardboard and anything larger is in styrofoam. (I know, I should make my own coffee and bring it in a reusable mug, but sometimes…oh heck, I’m digressing again.)

So, what are some other possibilities?

Simplest, of course, I guess, is to be the kind of person who carries a giant purse (or a diaper bag!), and tuck a few reusable food storage containers in there whenever you are on the go–that way you’re prepared for anything.  If you have less space, you could even go with some kind of collapsible lidded bowl or container (note: I have no idea what kind of plastic these are made of, vis a vis food safety), or even, I guess, something similar actually made for transporting dog food. 

There’s a lot out there for waste-free lunches nowadays too–Depending on what and where you’re eating (this would require a little more planning ahead than I’m usually on for), even something like a wrap-n-mat would get a lot of foodstuffs safely home–certainly my skillet leftovers would have been fine in there, though I’m not sure I would entrust pasta to it. Honestly, even a plain old ziploc bag stuffed in your purse would be a lot more environmentally friendly than that styrofoam stuff, especially if you could rinse out and re-use the ziploc.  (I’m a big fan of wrap-n-mats–I bought one, thinking I could recreate it and learn to make something just as good myself, and honestly I have not been successful.  This is a great little reusable sandwich wrap.)

Katie and I promised to try to do this breakfast thing at least once every couple of months, so we’ll see what I can come up with for our next outing.  Anyone else have any ideas? I’m open to suggestions!

In the meantime, I guess I have some leftovers to go and eat.