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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