America's Meatless Monday Food Craze; Or, Why I Love Indian Food

Wheatless Mondays and Meatless Tuesdays were part of a voluntary food conservation scheme developed by the U.S. Food Administration during World War I

In the popular media, the current Meatless Monday campaign (sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for a Livable Future) is often linked historically to the U.S. Food Administration's encouragement of voluntary food conservation during World War I. This patriotic "connection" is wildly romantic, at best, not to mention wrong: Mondays were wheatless, not meatless, back in 1917. At worst, the connection is misleading.

The reasons behind the Wheatless Monday and Meatless Tuesday campaign during the first world war were pragmatic. People were starving to death in Europe because food production had been disrupted by the fighting, and many of our own troops had trouble getting enough food to eat. Refraining from meat and wheat on the American home front was considered patriotic and philanthropic, the decent thing to do: You ate less, so that others--good people who had it much worse than you did--didn't die. Your own personal well being--your health--had very little to do with it.

Refraining from wheat, meat, sugar and lard was seen as patriotic and helpful to the war effort.

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Prize Ingredient two ways: Brie & Até en Croute AND Country-style Pork Ribs w/ Chipotle-Peach Até BBQ Sauce

Brie and Até de Durazno en Croute

By far the most interesting "prize" ingredient from the Mija Chronicles giveaway was the block of Até de Durazno. Até is a dense fruit "paste" or a fruit "leather" or a fruit "candy," take your pick. It's hard to describe, really. It's even harder to photograph:

A slice from the block of Até de Durazno

How Até is Made

Fruit is mashed up, strained, cooked down with sugar, sometimes strained again, and cooked down some more until the natural pectin in the fruit "sets" the mash into a jelly-like solid. Most ripe fruit has pectin naturally in it, although the amount of pectin varies from fruit to fruit. Apples and quince, for example, are loaded with natural pectin, while other fruits (like peaches and tomatoes) have much less. When you're making apple butter or apple jelly, you don't really need to add pectic, but for tomato jam or peach preserves, you have to add commercial pectin because the fruit would otherwise turn to mush before it ever set into jam. However, any fruit that's cooked long enough will eventually set in a jelly-like mass.
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Flashback Wednesday: "Super Easy Homemade Paneer"

[This entry about making Indian cheese from scratch is from my LiveJournal weblog, dated June 24, 2009. I am including it here because next week, I will be writing about some of my favorite Indian vegetarian dishes, including Palak Paneer.]

A hands-down favorite dish from my childhood is Palak Paneer, a slow-cooked spinach (palak) curry with chunks of fresh homemade cheese (paneer). Back in the mid-1970s, when I was still in high school and my family and I were living on the edge of an Illinois cornfield, far from any Asian groceries or restaurants, I found a recipe for Palak Paneer in an Asian cookbook from the public library.

As with every other recipe I've tried since then, the curried spinach part of the dish turned out great, but the homemade cheese part was just too much trouble for too little result. For every half gallon of milk, I would get barely a cup of cheese (usually less), not enough, really, for a single batch of the curry for four to six people. Often, I would omit the cheese completely. Other times, I'd substitute small chunks of mozzarella cheese, which is a tasty India-meets-Italy fusion, but not authentic.

However, I recently stumbled upon a recipe for paneer that is much more satisfying in the effort-versus-results department. Oddly enough, although there is a bit more lemon juice in this recipe compared to the other recipes, the main difference is not the ingredients but the method. Rather than turning off the heat as soon as you've added the lemon juice, this method has you bring the mixture to a boil again after adding the lemon, then boiling it another few minutes before turning the heat off. The resulting curds are chunky and plentiful.

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Prize Ingredient: Xoconostle!

Dried and (sad-looking but) fresh fruit of the prickly pear cactus.

Only half of the package of the dried xoconostle “prize ingredient” was left by the time I decided to turn them into a side dish. As a snack, these sweet-sour pieces of candy-like dried fruit are simply addictive. I tried to limit myself to one every other day, but once I opened the package and tasted that first chewy, fructose crystal-riddled piece, the rest were doomed.

Xoconostle: chewy sour-sweet goodness!

The following recipe is a dressed-up version of a quick rice side dish that I run to often. It passes for cheap, quick eats at my house. At the base is onion, garlic and leftover rice infused with cumin and paprika, plus canned beans and frozen corn. Simple and (almost) plain, but very satisfying, I use this dish as an alternative to Spanish rice. In the recipe below, I've added a mild chili, dried fruit, toasted pine nuts and a few more spices.

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Baking with Prize Ingredients: Mermelada de Tejocote & Piloncillo en Polvo

Prize Ingredients: (top left, then clockwise) dried Xoconostle (similar to prickly pear), Mermelada de Tejocote (Mexican hawthorn jam or fruit butter), Ate de Durazno (a densely concentrated jelly-like paste made from peaches) and Piloncillo en Polvo (fine-grained Mexican brown sugar). For a much better photo of these treasures, check out the August 20, 2010 entry of Mija Chronicles, by Lesley Tellez.

Where did these prize ingredients come from?

For most of the spring and summer of 2010, I toyed with the idea of starting a food blog accessible to the general (Internet) public. "Pro" arguments came to mind very quickly: Writing and cooking are two of my favorite activities. I have been writing privately about food, ingredient procurement, cooking, eating and food culture since I was in high school a gazillion years ago. Food blogging would be a natural for me.

The list of "cons" was much longer and much more intimidating. Besides a general lack of time (I have one part-time job teaching, one full-time job as an administrative assistant, and occasional Saturday gigs as a test room supervisor), I also suffer from a moderate but sometimes paralyzing fear of "performing" in public.

It was while I was doing research on other food blogs, looking at who was already writing about food online, that I stumbled onto one of my favorite blogsites, The Mija Chronicles. As writer Lesley Tellez describes herself, she is a third-generation Mexican American who moved from Texas to Mexico City. Reading about Lesley's on-going expatriate experience (in the land of the food she is writing about) as the backdrop to a blog about one of my own favorite world cuisines is pure "win."

A few weeks after I started reading The Mija Chronicles, its creator held a contest. The "sweet" prize package included all of the items in the photo above. I have never "won" anything like this before, but on August 23rd, intrigued by the contest's writing prompt, I entered the contest by answering the question, What is your favorite Mexican food memory, and why?
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Real Food Mathematics: "Natural"+"Organic"≠"Sane" : Batter Blaster meets Skinnygirl

"Makes breakfast a blast!"

Batter Blaster 

Batter Blaster ingredients:

filtered water, organic wheat flour (unbleached), organic cane sugar, organic eggs, sodium lactate to inhibit spoilage, organic soybean powder, leavening (dicalcium phosphate and sodium bicarbonate), sea salt, organic rice bran extract, propellant.

I have no idea how long Batter Blaster has been on the market, but I started noticing the (apparently) low-tech, low-budget, 1950s or early 60s-style television commercials just a few months ago. "Just shake, point, blast and cook!" the announcer exclaims as the model shows you how it's done. Then they do it again, in Instant Replay:  "Just shake, point, blast and cook!" (Click here to see a Batter Blaster ad on the Internet.) The demonstrations are followed by an inane jingle:

♫♪ Make a better breakfast faster: 

Batter Blaster! ♪♫♪

I laughed out loud the first time. But I was laughing even harder when the ads started showing up on cable between gourmet cooking shows. 

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Stuffed Hungarian Peppers

It's Saturday as I write this, and I've spent most of the day prepping and cooking for my friend's birthday party tomorrow. As dinnertime approached, I started thinking about the six Hungarian peppers that I harvested from the birthday boy's (and his wife's) garden last weekend.

A local favorite is stuffed Hungarian peppers, especially this time of year when peppers are plentiful. Usually, the local cooks stuff the peppers with Italian sausage and fry them up. Sometimes, they're stuffed with cheese and topped with a simple tomato sauce. I enjoy them that way, but today, I want something different.

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Flashback Friday (June 2009): Milk Run Revisited

[The following story originally appeared on my LiveJournal weblog in June of 2009. I am including an updated version here. This is how I buy my milk semi-locally for a bunch of recipes--such as paneer, hollandaise, alfredo sauce, and artisan breads. I will be writing about some of these recipes in the near future.  OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMERS -- 1. Do NOT consume raw milk if you have a weak or compromised immune system. (Of course, if you make it into cheese or sauce, or you bake with it, it's no longer raw, is it?) 2. In the U.S., the legality of retail sales of raw milk to consumers varies from state to state. To check out the legality of buying raw milk in your state, click here: Raw Milk National map.]

My first trip to Pasture Maid Creamery came last fall [2008]. At that time, my housemates and I were already regular raw milk customers of the farm. I also played the role of "middleman" to two (sometimes three) other customers on Youngstown's north side.

In that first visit, I met two of the dairy cows who gave the milk. This summer--June 6th and June 13th [2009]--I did not get to see any full-grown cows because they were out in the pasture, beyond the view of my camera, but I did meet their daughters, whom I assume will be providing the milk later this year.

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Mayonnaise Snobbery

I didn't realize that I was a mayonnaise snob until I moved to The Netherlands. In 1994, about a week into our three-year stint, my family and I went to a small grocery store in our new neighborhood to purchase cold cuts and condiments.

It was June, one of the hottest Junes on record. It was so hot, in fact, that Dutch cows started leaving grassy pastures and climbing into canals to cool off. It made the national news. What a sight! I had no intention of turning on a flame or oven at the house, so here we were, looking for something tasty to make into sandwiches.

Mise en place: mustard, oil, lemon, eggs, salt.

When I stepped into one of the grocery's aisles to look for mayonnaise, my jaw dropped. The entire aisle was jam-packed with every kind of mayonnaise and mayonnaise-like food imaginable...plus some. Knowing almost no Dutch at that point in time, there was no way I could read the ingredients lists, so I decided instead to simply choose the stuff that was neither the highest nor the lowest priced, and hope for the best.

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In Search of Chicken Tikka & Chicken Tikka Masala

Chicken Tikka Masala on Basmati Rice

I adore Indian food, but I know almost nothing about it. When I was a teenager, I learned how to make five Indian dishes from my mom, who got the recipes from a YWCA cooking class in Kuala Lumpur. The dishes were/are: Tandoori Chicken, Vegetable Samosas, Dal, Cucumber Raita and Chipatis. I also learned to make homemade paneer (cheese) from milk and lemon juice, though for many years, my success with that simple recipe was hit-or-miss.

My favorite Indian dishes--the ones I order over and over again at Indian and Pakistani restaurants in Seattle, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, however, completely eluded me in the kitchen. (Until recently.) Though the recipes I attempted sounded yummy on the page and looked seductive in the accompanying foodporn photo shot, my own final product was never as satisfying, never a smoothly textured, never as amazing as the restaurant versions. Not even close.
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Fun with Beta Vulgaris: Orange and Beet Salad & Easy Beet Raita

Beta vulgaris, cooked and sliced

A box filled with dirt-caked beets appeared in my kitchen one day not too long ago. Obviously, these dusty orbs did not come from a grocery store. They seemed to have leaped directly from their garden bed onto my kitchen counter without a thought of washing up before dinner. As it turned out, they came from White House Fruit Farm in Canfield, Ohio, courtesy of my upstairs housemates.

I eat beets very rarely. The truth is, I never think of them or seek them out. They usually come to me as these beets came to me: out of the clear blue sky. But whenever I do encounter them, I'm struck by their sweet, tender flesh and their wild, wild color.

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DIY Crème Fraiche

With the bounty of rabbits in my freezer, I’ve been researching tasty ways to serve them up. One preparation came immediately to mind, something I have not had in over 30 years, Lapin à la moutarde.

The number of variations on rabbit in mustard sauce are simply astounding. Some recipes call for white wine, but many do not. Others use boneless rabbit meat, while many recipes keep things rustic, using whole rabbit pieces, bone in. Some cooks use roux and cream to thicken the sauce, others count on sour cream or crème fraiche. A number of recipes don’t bother to thicken the sauce at all, preferring a lighter (and, no doubt, healthier) approach.

Only three components were in common to all the recipes I read, and they were: 1) rabbit, 2) mustard (universally of the Dijon variety, often grainy Dijon), and 3) some kind of dairy product.

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Summer's End Veggie Pie

Perhaps it's the dip in daytime temperatures or the shorter daylight hours, but the only foods I want to think about these days are the hearty comfort foods of fall and winter--stews and soups, casseroles and root vegetables. In the meantime, it’s still summer (technically), and the farm-stand bounty of northeastern Ohio continues to flow through my kitchen.

Piles of fresh veggies wait on my counters to be preserved or devoured, so last weekend I decided to split the difference between a celebration of fresh vegetables and the early introduction of winter fare by marrying ratatouille to a shepherd’s pie.

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Fashion for Foodies?

Which do you find more "fetching"?

Cloris Leachman striking a pose in cabbage?

or   Lady Gaga decked out in flank steak?

American haute couture is fascinating, isn't it?

Look what I found! Coke de Mexico!

 
I found these exotic gems at the Poland Giant Eagle: Coca Cola and Fanta made with actual cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Oddly, these bottles, labeled "Coke de Mexico," were not located in the soda and snacks aisle but towards the back of the store just before the dairy aisle (I was on the hunt for creme fraiche when I found them).

After I brought these five bottles home and took their picture, I started to wonder what Coke de Mexico was doing here in Ohio, so far from the border.  I've read about kosher Coke, which is produced for Jewish holidays, but I've never seen it around here. (Though, of course, not being a fan of soft drinks, I may have missed it.) In any event, I decided the next day to head back to Poland (Ohio) and stock up.

Two cases of any type of soda pop would normally last about 24 years in my house, but I just cracked open one of the Fantas (I'm sipping it now) and .... ooooooooo .... yummm!uuum!-y! I could get used to this stuff!

It's like being a kid again. This is exactly how orange soda is supposed to taste, like liquid sugar and a comic-book version of fruit flavoring riding together on a wave of cold, intensely bubbly water. Soda that prickles your tongue and sends bubbles up your nose: Pure magic!

Perserving On The Fly

Preserved on the fly: Pickled peppers & frozen veggies.

I am not old enough to remember the Great Depression, but I am old enough to have survived Reaganomics. In the 1980's, my husband worked in the library (and, later, the computer center) of a four-year college. He also served as organist and choir director for a local church. While I was never able to find a full-time position during the '80s, I did my part to bring income in to the household by taking on freelance work as an editor, writer, and book indexer. I also became a master of frugality, learning to make everything from scratch and fixing things rather than replacing them. I did  most of our home repairs, from wiring and plumbing to fence-building and upholstery. Nonetheless, every month we struggled to pay the mortgage of $350, which was almost half of all our combined income.

“The working poor” was the phrase bandied about by media pundits, but Bruce and I preferred to call ourselves “the trickled-on.” Most jobs were minimum wage or non-unionized, near-minimum wage jobs, even the ones requiring a college education. And minimum wage was frozen at $3.35/hr. throughout the 1980's, which meant that by 1989, the buying power of one hour of labor had decreased in value by almost $1 (in 1996 valuation; see  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html for the hard statistics). Bruce and I eventually had to let go of our dream of home ownership and move away.

Oh my! Too many peppers! What's a cook to do?!

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Rabbit & Andouille Gumbo

First off, let me be clear: I do not advocate the eating of pets. Domesticated pets are not food. In the area of what to eat, I follow the general rules of polite society as voiced by the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. She was the one, you remember, who explained to Alice that “it isn't etiquette to cut anyone you've been introduced to."

Rabbits raised for meat are not acquaintances. They are well-care-for livestock until they're humanely-slaughtered deadstock that has been turned into “food” or “meat.” Livestock and their consumers in America are complete strangers to one another, usually. The same is true with rabbits raised for meat. Bunnies destined for the stewpot and hungry diners never meet in the (living) flesh, so to speak. Hence, no rules of propriety are broken.

By the time I get involved, the rabbit that will become my dinner is skinless, headless, footless, devoid of internal organs, and frozen. I buy chicken at the grocery store without ever seeing their beaks or tail feathers;  I buy rabbits from a local farmer without ever touching their fur, looking into their faces, or experiencing those prominent incisors.

As you can see, there is nothing about this rabbit that even vaguely resembles "Thumper" or that creature I met last Friday at the Canfield Fair. This is meat:
  

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Good Eats at The Canfield Fair

According to the Canfield Fair website, the fair is home to over 1,000 food stands. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Indeed, it is impressive, horrifically impressing.

Most of the food concessions are lumped into one giant maze-like grid--block upon city block--of vendors selling (almost) exactly same stuff. When you are wandering the maze in search of something to eat, the smell of fryer grease and burnt sugar wafts through the air, overpowering all other odors, including that of the nearby farm animals.

This year was the first time I'd ever attended the Canfield Fair, though I've lived in the area since 2002. It's not that I have anything against fairs; I simply hadn't gotten around to going before this year. I arrived Friday afternoon with the storm clouds, and throughout my three hours of wandering the grounds, clouds burst open from time to time, drenching everything. This was not a problem for me, however. As a former Seattleite, I happen to love walking in the rain.

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Fresh Produce = Priceless

I took the day off work today to write and shop (and, if the weather holds, head out to the Canfield Fair to gawk at farm animals). The morning's shopping went well. Almost all the fresh produce I need for Rabbit & Andouille Gumbo is available locally this time of year.

The prices I paid were a bit high for bargain-hunters, but I was shopping early in the morning when the produce was still being unloaded from the truck. If you shop later in the day, you may not quite the same freshness as I did, but you are bound to find more bargains. Farm stands tend to drop their prices when the sun is high in the sky and they start thinking about reloading that truck and heading home.

From the Angiuli Farm produce stand on Market Street in Youngstown, Ohio, I purchased the following:

Squat red bell peppers = $ 3

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Getting Your Eggs from A Smaller Basket / Problems of Buying Direct

Two readers of my last post suggested that I include the address or a link to where I normally get my eggs. This, unfortunately, isn't possible. Alternatively, I decided to research local farms that sell free range chicken eggs directly to the public. But this, too, turned out to be research not easily done in the few days I had before my next blog deadline (today) arrived. Few family/local farms, it seems--at least here in the Eastern Ohio Western Pennsylvania area--have a website or a listing in the usual online farm directories, such as the Mahoning Valley Agricultural Guide or Eat Wild Ohio. Which makes sense, really. They're farmers, not web masters!

Though I strongly recommend buying your eggs and other farm products directly from the farmer, I am also deeply aware that this is not always an easy thing to do. Research takes time!

No farm will have all the products the average family needs. Farms usually specialize, which means that buying everything from its original source is probably impossible, especially if you also have to work for a living. Some farms--even small ones--may not tend to their animal humanely. Others may use pesticides or gene

Billions of Eggs, One Basket

Sunday Omelette or Russian Roulette?

As of this morning, at least one online news source puts the number of salmonella victims who ate tainted eggs at 1,470. Over half a billion eggs have been recalled from the food supply, and--I suspect--billions more eggs, eggs that were not recalled by the two infected mega-farms, have already been dumped into garbage cans everywhere by anxious Americans, all of whom are asking, "Are grocery store eggs safe to eat anymore?"

The real questions are, "Were they ever safe?" and "Why don't we get sick more often?" Given the methods mega-farms use to produce mega-gross quantities of eggs from mega-flocks, it's amazing that the majority of us haven't all keeled over dead already, leaving all the problems of multi-billion egg distribution to the vegans. (Oh, wait. They don't eat eggs. Never mind.)

Seriously. It's no wonder people get sick from grocery store eggs, because...well...modern, state-of-the-art egg production is a filthy, filthy business. 


[Gross-out Alert:  If you're snacking at the computer, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs...]

Salmonella is spread by fecal matter. What is fecal matter? Fecal matter is excrement. Stool. Scat. Poop. Droppings. It's crap. Or, if you prefer, feces (pardon my Latin). In his article on the recent outbreak, Wayne Pacelle writes, "One reason millions of salmonella-infected eggs reach American supermarkets every year is the mistreatment of hens by the egg industry. Cramming 100,000 birds or more under a single roof in tiny battery cages creates an immense volume of contaminated airborne fecal dust that can rapidly spread salmonella infection between the birds. The best available science—a study of more than 5,000 egg operations across two dozen countries—found that for every type of salmonella studied and every type of production system examined, there was a significantly lower risk of salmonella infection in cage-free production."

Which is why I am not, myself, worried about getting sick. Because the eggs in my refrigerator didn't come from chickens that were forced to live in one giant, over-crowded "basket" of high-rise cages stacked on top of one another, where upstairs neighbors can't help but defecate on everyone below. My eggs come from chickens who are allowed to wander outdoors every day, do their business and walk away from it, and eat "real" chicken food, like bugs and grubs.

Delightful discovery of diversity.

Some of the eggs I will eat this week came from my boss, who has a small hobby farm in Western Pennsylvania where chickens are treated like pets. Other eggs I will eat this week come from a teenaged entrepreneur--I'll call him Farmer E--who is dabbling in the fine art(s) of animal husbandry in the form of a poultry business (for both eggs and poultry meat). Not only do I buy eggs from him, but I have purchased a bunch of broilers and rabbits, as well as a Thanksgiving turkey, to be delivered this fall. He may well represent the next generation of American farmers. (At least I hope he does.)

One thing I love about Farmer E's eggs is that they are so completely different from one another. Unlike the Stepford-wife, cheerful-white sameness that I grew up with, these eggs are a surprise--a delightful discovery of diversity--every time I open a new carton. The eggs differ greatly in size and shell color and shell mottling. Here are a few close-ups:

The littlest egg in the carton and the biggest.

Egg rainbow from top left, clockwise:  pale mauve, brown, plain white, green, blue green, neon white.

Almost every carton I get from young Farmer E has one extra-large in it. I suspect that it's from a single over-achieving hen that any other farmer would slaughter rather than endure the problems of selling one hen's  non-standard eggs. Her eggs do not fit in any of the standard, recycled egg cartons Farmer E uses. As you can see, cartons with a mondo egg in it will not close properly. In fact, they can only half close.

But I don't mind. These eggs are no more than a few days old when I buy them, and their yolks are an incredible orange gold. It's like sunshine. I mean... Like sunshine if sunshine were an egg yolk.

My breakfast this morning, for example, was simple and heavenly. Sunny side up, shirred eggs (eggs baked in the oven or, in my case, the toaster oven) with pre-cooked, crumpled, drained-of-excess-fat chorizo on the side(s). Add a toasted English muffin, some fruit, and a mug of iced coffee (I shoulda taken a picture of the whole meal!) and what you have is Sunday Brunch in August Deluxe!

ooooo ... lovely, lovely eggs!

 

Shirred Egg