Somewhat Connected Thoughts on Restauranting

One year ago, on this day I walked down to the Fire on the Mountain (Horrible Name; Great Wings) ordered 12 wings, a side of tater tots and a beer for lunch. I ate, I napped, I woke up and haven’t been to a restaurant since. Well, I’ve been inside restaurants, as recently as last week when I had a beer after work, but I haven’t had a meal from/in/by a restaurant since then. 

1 year. According to the National Restaurant Association, Americans spent almost half their food budgets on meals outside the home, that’s $604 Billion spent in restaurants in 2011. Considering food service is responsible for 1 out 10 jobs, plus it’s one of the few industries adding jobs, the question becomes why do I hate America?

Occupy My Kitchen

It wasn’t until more recently in my life that I discovered the power of setting goals. And a little longer after that, I realized the importance of working at goals after you set them. But my ability to persevere a year has more to do with being broke and working funny hours than will power. And not broke as in food insecure and worrying about being evicted, but broke in the not having little luxuries, like a budget for travel. Which means not being forced to spend $9 on fried rice in an airport during a layover. My 4 times a week 1-9pm work shifts negates invitations with friends who are eating out nearby. This schedule does leave open the possibility of brunching - while traveling might necessitate paying more for food you never otherwise would, I just am not ever going to pay for a nine dollar waffle. 

Having fewer choices is liberating, I know sacrilege - Adam Smith is rolling over in his grave. Or knowing I am going to pack a lunch saves the brain space of not planning (where should I eat, how much can I spend, debit/credit). I know that I need to plan ahead, make grocery lists and be ready. I know that I need to cook enough to pack leftovers. I cook in batches, I freeze, I now microwave (at least at work). And after a year, I can ambivalently claim, I am not sure any that is better than grabbing. falafel

As I have written here before, I miss fried food so much. I taught myself Thai and Vietnamese food fairly well that I am going to do better than most restaurants - a boast which no one believes. If I say my Midwestern (by German/Irish/Hungarian) ass can make better Italian or French food at home than you can buy in a restaurant, especially the homestyle simmer all day dishes like ragu or pot-au-feu and people nod in agreement. The claim I make a better red curry than most take out places and it’s like I’m making drunken boasts. But I haven't taught myself how to fry like a 16 year in a drive thru. 

I’m still not sure how I am going to break the fast, Charlie Seluzicki’s promise to take me out for wings is the most likely bet, since I will never go this long between trips to a restaurant, I am no hurry to end it. I did promise myself that I would spend one week eating every meal out of the house. I am looking more forward to the lack of dirty dishes than the cuisine. 

Happy new year! I am back to answering 2 real questions next week. 

Changeable Feast

I feel that I should have a Christmas meal custom. Not because the day bears any special religious, family or brotherhood of man obligations. I have this nagging feeling that since I am generally game for a good meal, especially one that can be enjoyed with loved ones - Christmas seems like a good enough excuse to take a day to cook and celebrate. This year my shaky Christmas food tradition – and by tradition, I think about having red meat and Yorkshire Pudding on Christmas Day more than I have actually ever done it. This year, my imaginary custom is being displaced by working Christmas Day and limiting my celebratory foods to latkes on Friday and egg rolls on Sunday.

Maybe I'm being to limited and literal anyway, unlike Thanksgiving, Christmas foods are used to celebrate/signify more than one meal. December is packed full of catered office parties, cookies, sweets, Egg Nog, Wassails, a nice Christmas Eve dinner, and as a child we always had bacon for Christmas brunch – we were more a cereal and milk household than egg/bacon/juice. Lost in the bustle of over the top foods of December, is the custom of eating and giving exotic fruits (pineapples, pomegranate or or citrus; tangerines in particular are popular this time of year). Other seasonal food customs may include Epiphany/King Cake and then there a whole different kind of indulgence on New Year's Eve.

I look more like this each passing year

Christmas foods are more likely to reflect regional and cultural differences than Thanksgiving's heavily prescribed meal. Southern foods might include BBQ or chili, Midwesterners often serve crown roast as a replacement for the Dickensian Fowl. Chinese Food and an afternoon matinee might replace the tree and presents for non-Christians, especially those who haven't declared war on Christmas, instead want to enjoy a low key day the has no religious significance for them.

Enjoy your holiday no matter how you eat and or celebrate. I'll have one more post this year. 2011 has been a busy year; easily my most blogged year, just not here. I am writing more and what I think is better. Because of the work I have done here and the loyal following, I am able to share my ideas with a wider audience. Just want to say thank you to those of you who have helped, encouraged and maybe even enjoyed my work here.

How the Potato Came to be in Latkes

I will be making latkes later this week. Last year, I covered latkes in this post, but a 2174 or 5 year old tradition, can’t be wholly condensed into 500 words post, I’d like to cover topic again.

According to four different dictionaries the word latke designates a potato pancake. Etymologically, latke doesn’t refer to either potato or pancake: The potato is a new world crop that wouldn’t have been known to the Maccabees, who repelled the Greeks/Antiochus in 164 or 5 BCE. Instead latke derives from its cooking medium - borrowing heavily from the very Greek’s whose actions would lead to Hanukkah, latke means ‘little oily’.

Yiddish, like American English, is a great sponge, seamlessly absorbing outside elements into its dialect, has over a half dozen words for pancake, whose names chremslach, pfannkuchen, bubeleh, placki, razelach, blintz along with the biblical levivot create kind of the flapjack equivalent of a quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog.

As hard as it is to imagine in an era of grand slam breakfasts and boxed mixes, pancakes were a luxury item. Until the mid 19^th Century when mechanically milled, refined white flour became readily available and then affordable, pancakes would have been a treat. And they would have been made with ingredients to extend that rare and costly flour, like ricotta. The presence of dairy would have made neutral vegetable oil the cooking medium for pancakes. Or the observant could forgo the dairy and use schmaltz with an alt-grain like rye or buckwheat.

Not how I'd make them; but I'd still eat them this way

Enter the potato. A food that was reviled after its introduction to Europe – they were thought to be poisonous, using Galen’s impossibly long lived model of food and medicine, potatoes were thought to inflame humors, and most new world foods were thought to be like new world inhabitants, inferior to their European counterparts. But there is nothing like famine spurred on by crop failure and political instability to help people reconsider their opinions.

By the beginning of the19th Century, the potato was common food or more accurately, a food for commoners. Cereal crop failures in 1839 & 1840 helped reshape the potato’s image. Since the spud was cheaper than ricotta or refined flour, it quickly became the centerpiece for latkes in Eastern European Ashkenazic cookery. Not for Hanukkah put in everyday cookery where potato pancakes could be cooked in goose fat.

With the pogroms of the late century, Jews and their food customs landed on the shore of the US, where they took on a life of their own. The Parve Crisco actively promoted itself through advertisements as a neutral cooking medium for ‘Hanukkah Latkes’. A neutral = non-dairy, non-animal fat oil meant that a dollop (or more) of sour cream could top a latke. With flour and pancake mixes easy and available, the latke was reserved for holiday fare and the emergence of Hanukkah in America as an alternative to Christmas, saw the symbolic olive oil, the same oil the burned for a miraculous 8 nights became the preferred cooking medium.

Arguments for and against potato starch, cooked or grated potatoes, egg, onion, are made for the best latke. I am going with grated, onion, egg, fried in olive oil with sides of pink lady applesauce and a drum of sour cream. However you make yours, enjoy and happy holidays.  

Time (or lack of), Pictures & Links

I severely overbooked myself between late October and this Wednesday. Reading and Saucywriting - I still have time for other stuff (160 words about potatoes here), but posts for this blog are suffering and books aren't reading themselves. Well those two and time in the kitchen. I still haven't broken down and been to a restaurant but my freezer is pretty emptied out and my sandwich consumption somehow spiked over the last 6 weeks. (See 2011 word cloud - generated from 150+ meals of the 800 or so I have had this year).

Year of the Sandwich

I took a web design class this semester. If you ever want to feel like a failure, try taking and not understanding a freshman level class at a Community College and struggling. I learned though. Mechanics and how complicated a good site is.

I finished Wednesday at 2. (I'll show the work in the future.) Wednesday night I saw The Descendants - Good movie, not sure about the voiceover but it was certainly a holiday feel bad movie if there ever was one - I should have picked something with explosions. I was the only one laughing at how awful Clooney's tween and teen were to his character - It's always funnier when they aren't yours. Yesterday morning, I did nothing except break my 4th French Press of the year. Today I did some dishes and laid the ground work for pizza night Sunday and made a batch of meatballs

So no time to write today. Instead a good article from Slate about butter, affluence and availability. This article along with Matt Taibbi's Griftopia - especially the chapter on how commodities can be traded by the people who help grow them - should help one comprehend the massive omnibus federal spending package called the farm bill - up for renewal in 2012. If you like or need visuals to help flesh out a story Crazy wife farm blog has a wonderful powerpoint here. I like this slide the best. 

With holidays and time with the family, maybe even people who don't share the same political beliefs as you, keep in mind there is one thing everyone can agree on - corruption, giveaways and favoritism at a government level. Find common ground by hating on the farm bill. Then start dropping facts, and structure the conversation about the role of government. Sure it's high risk - so much can go wrong - but it is also high reward. Isn't doing something better than getting frustrated by someone spouting the factually curious FOX-Limbaugh-Newsmax talking points? Although every time one of Tim Tebow's ugly ass end over end passes gets caught - I do rethink my relationship with Jesus.

More and better next week. 

T Minus 3 Weeks

Soon My Precious

Despite spending more time writing about feasting, famine piques my interest much more. Interviews conducted after hunger episodes, people admit to having obsessive thoughts about food during periods of privation to the point that they would have vivid dreams about food.

I am not starving. Nor am I in dire need of calories, nutrients or just something to fill my stomach up, I am about 350 days into avoiding restaurants and ordering out. This was a choice and for most of the year, not much of a hardship, but the closer I get to the end, the more obsessive my thoughts about food are becoming, right down to having dreams about food.

A month ago, I was bragging about how easy to avoid food from restaurants, carts, and delivery, I am now thinking about restaurant food, the type of food I go out for - burger, fried foods, stuff I can't make at home more than the impending basketball season. Between the two, that doesn't leave a lot of brain space left for too much else and I have a final tomorrow.

Last week on my way home from work, I stopped off at Mississippi Pizza to see a friend's band - 10 at night and only some sad slices remained – peperoni curling up towards the heat lamp as if in prayer – That sight set off 2 days of thinking about a slice of pizza. I emailed my friend Elizabeth about my pizza obsession and she was kind enough to point out recipes and techniques from her blog – she's a very good cook and an even better writer and photographer. This didn't really help to not crave pizza. But it's not pizza itself: I have been having a monthly pizza night throughout oh-eleven, where I go all in and make sauce and crust, the next one happens on Sunday.

I just want a slice, salty, tomatoy, cheese-laden slice. A snack, just enough pizza to tide me over, not so much that I won't want to make pizza again for 30 days.

Eating in this year hasn't been about limitations: Even if only by self-imposed choice, there is something really good about not having to think about food choices at every waking moment. There is a freedom, not a stifling lack of choice in relying on myself. I have lost weight, become better not just at planning but sticking to a plan. Best of all, I've learned that appetite isn't a toggle switch that snaps between Thanksgiving full and Hangry (the low-blood sugar combination of hungry + angry) (Since I'm not food insecure or actually starving in any true or exaggerated sense, this seems like the best alternative explanation). I can wind down my evening without my stomach being packed full and my body now knows what my brain does, “it's alright, there's more food tomorrow”.

But right now, I want chicken wings and pilsner, a burger with a side of fries, bbq brisket and black eyed peas. I want dim sum, I want Tex-Mex burrito,I want cheesy inauthentic Cantonese fried rice and egg rolls that are thick as a plurocratic's cigar. Pho, Thai Noodles – I have promised myself that sometime in January or early February, that I will spend 7 days where every calorie and cup of coffee and drop of alcohol will come from outside my kitchen. But right now, with tomorrow's final, a sprint to the end of the retail season and a year of not being able to indulge any spur of the moment culinary whims, I want a slice of pizza.

Wah.

In Sickness and

I'm dogsitting a chihuahua who had some teeth pulled right before he came over. Plum, that's the dog, has stayed over before but this visit he is noticeably less energetic, less adventuresome and downright crabby. It's always sad to see the little ones in pain...I'm not sure I am helping him feel any better - sometimes when your little and suffering, you just want your mom and Plum's (human) mom is out of town on a job this week.

All of this started me thinking about chicken soup, maternal comforts and the things that made me feel better when I was little and illin – and I was not exactly a robust, healthy child; I remember having been afflicted with everything as a child. On the upside, except for a small bout of cancer, I have been much in much better health as an adult.

Illness meant Campbell's soup. Most people have comforting memories of tomato soup on days home from school, I never cared for their tomato soup, for me it was with Bean with Bacon, combined with grilled cheese with real individually wrapped American cheese and ginger ale, the combination could revitalize my health. Plus with a canned food's hypertonicity, it probably even restore depleted electrolytes.

Like this only less Croatian

As an adult, when I was being treated for cancer, it was mostly about getting food down and keeping it in long enough to digest; food was fuel. Where a good meal is about slowing down and enjoying life, during my year of living cancerously, that was a joy taken away and food was begrudgingly about calories and surviving. Yet in the mix of rice, bananas and toast I do remember an exceptionally good peanut butter and jelly my mom made me and a pizza that a friend brought to me in the hospital that was both good and made everyone jealous as they ate their hospital food.

In an otherwise mostly healthy adulthood, about two years ago I got hit with the flu. When you never get the sick you forget how grinding awful being incapacitated it can be. A cold just slows you down, with the flu though, you want food to be liquid – because digesting solids is just too much – it also needs to be extra salty, brought to you with the instructions, “you need to eat”, and dirty plates removed. And if you live alone and your inclination is to perish rather than ask someone for a favor like walking the dogs or feeding you, the flu and hungry with the flu can make you feel about as isolated as you ever will.

Plum the dog is getting wet food this week, which he seems to enjoy more with each passing day. For my flu, the dogs had to use the backyard for 3 days, and I eventually managed to walk 250 feet to the Thai restaurant on the corner for tom yum, the container didn't need to be washed and since I regained my strength, I try to bring double strong chicken ginger soup to friends and neighbors when they are down – nobody should have to ask.

USS Gravy Boat

It is the morning after Thanksgiving and I have awakened with gravy on my mind. My friend Mark Johnson called three times on Thanksgiving and asked me to walk him through the steps of gravy making. Mark is an accomplished poet and a deeply appreciative eater. But his practical kitchen skills are, well, not yet fully realized. I wish that yesterday I had thought to compare the art of gravy making with his own demanding criteria of composition.

At the baseline of flavor building is a reservoir as deep and filled 
with possibility as the wellsprings of language and grammar itself. The richer our understandings of the beginning elements, the closer to success. Homemade stock and mirepoix (celery, carrot, onion, garlic if you like) are as basic to gravy as the cadences of the King James Bible are to Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS. The vegetables, sautéed in butter or  roasted under the bird, create a base that will infuse their sonorities into the gravy with wistful subtlety. Flour mixed with the hot fat in roughly equal proportions creates a roux. As the golden roux is combined with one cup of bubbling stock to one tablespoon of the cooked flour the gravy transmutes and takes on a fundamental structure and shape. The fire is lowered, the very sound of cooking slips into a quieter key. Before us is, in fact, a rough, first draft.

Though the draft is rough, it is not without direction. Somehow along the way a dominant flavor, a theme, will emerge. A mushroom gravy- wild or cultivated?- finished with a little port, sherry, brandy or even whiskey? Perhaps just a bit of dry white wine if heady morels are used. The possibilities here alone are limitless. A nice onion gravy is marvelous as well. Imagine loopy strands of caramelized onion adding deepened color and an elegant sculptural dimension as they are artfully draped over a mound of mashed potatoes. Or giblet gravy. How funny to recall Jacques Pepin’s dismay as Julia includes the turkey liver with the other giblets. Jacques voices his concern that liver makes a gravy 
“cloudy” as he forges ahead, picking the tender meat from the neck bone. Suddenly, whatever the chosen path, the gravy has a voice.

The rest is revision of the most gloriously obsessive sort. Taste, taste, taste. A bit more salt, a grind of pepper, a pinch of dried thyme. Thin the gravy or cook it down. A splash of Worcestershire perhaps. Taste. Yes, it has come together on that next plateau. Enough. It is undeniably g-r-a-v-y. Call the guests. It is good and it is ready to be served.

A gravy, it seems, like a poem, is never finished, only abandoned. The palate ceaselessly looks ahead to the second edition.

Charles Seluzicki