I have been thinking and reading a lot about food lately, realizing how much of my time I spend thinking about eating and what to eat and how. The shows I watch on TV are mostly about food, I spent a lot of time at home making food, and now I'm reading these books about how to make food responsibly, how to make a chicken that actually tastes like chicken, and how to experiment with price/money/what to spend a lot on and what i can scrimp on.... blah blah blah. Darcy and Stephanie and I were talking this weekend about how at the beginning, cooking seemed domestic and "wifey" but we kind of all agreed that we like to cook-- that cooking is a fun, delicious, solitary science, that it makes us feel like we've accomplished something wholesome and good. One of the things I want to do in this new household that Michael and I are building is to make most of our food, and to do it responsibly. How can I be an ethical home cook? Where can I buy local food? Can I do it inexpensively, in a time crunch? It's fun to think about all of this-- to realize that I get to make these decisions myself-- this is my home, mine and Mike's, and we have the privilege of making it what we want it to be.
Anyway, today I'm making pot roast with potatos, carrots, pearl onions, and green beans. Served in sourdough from a local bakery. Yum!
Current reading list:
My Life in France, by Julia Child
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver
More-with-Less, compiled by Doris Janzen Longacre
machinery.
-
i am driving this beast, with
joints and levers, fluids, bones.
we smash so easily, come
apart, leak, choke.
and what then, when the tackle
falls to pieces, ...
1 month ago
1 comments:
I have loved cooking for forty or fifty years now. I've cooked in most of my relationships, and early on in different households of numerous freaks (60s/70s). Today I read cookbooks as much as I read poetry and for similar reasons, feeding the soul and the curiosity of the self. Congrats on having control of your kitchen, and on your approach to being an ethical cook. I think that's a good idea. I spent so much of my cooking life just trying to be Julia Child, but now I'm on a low sodium, low fat, de-caffeinated train. But I can still cook a mean pot roast (pot au feu, rather). There's a serious interaction with reality going on when you cook, eat, and finish the cycle. We are actual animals, living in a real world. Hey, have you read "How to Cook a Wolf" by M.F.K. Fisher? Highly recommended.
In the past year I have taken on a new burden in the cooking arena. My daughter, the six year old, has severe allergies to dairy and gluten. So now we bake without wheat, and we use dairy substitutes. It turns out it is possible, but for a long while it seemed a difficult and sometimes impossible task. Now we are in an excellent place when it comes to food and cooking. It helps that my wife is a remarkable baker and enjoys cooking as much as my self. Paige's mom was excluded from the kitchen as a child (her family was nuts), and she could barely boil water on a good day. One time she walked into the kitchen at her parent's house and poured about a cup of cooking oil into a frying pan and started putting bacon strips in it. I am afraid to admit that we all laughed at her. Well.we live and hopefully we learn. Have a great time. You should write some food poems. Jolly fun.
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