Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (19 page)

Two basic medium pizzas in my region average ten dollars each, or twenty dollars to feed your family. Add fries, salads, and drinks and you are up to thirty dollars minimum. Five hours of work.

When you think about the cost of foods you normally buy, cooking at home starts to look very appealing—especially with those recipe apps for your smart phone and YouTube cooking shows.

You start to wonder why you slipped into that fast food, take-out food habit. You might ask, as I now ask all the time, “Who wins if I believe cooking is beyond my capacities?” “Who wins if I think I don't have time for cooking but I do have time for TV, because I deserve it after a long day?” You might follow the money and ask, “Who profits from my not knowing how to cook from real ingredients?”

Who got us assuming that fast food is better for our time and money budgets? Did we? Or were these thoughts generated by PR departments about the “scientific research” that proves that product A, with ingredient B, will make you stronger, wiser, thinner, younger, and better?

Back to fast food. Looking at that real-hourly-wage calculation and the time cost of fast food, you might wonder how fast it really is anyway. Perhaps we should call it the industrial-food-system storefront. Or simply “impulse food,” since it is designed to hook you, hungry or not.

The Extra Benefits of Cooking from Scratch

Better Health

If you cook you are more likely to use fresh whole ingredients, thus sidestepping the endless worry about which additives are bad . . . and which are worse. If you invest your time in cooking food, you may find that you invest a tad more awareness in eating it. It's easier to overeat when someone you don't know cooks the food. Besides the nutrition in fresh, whole, and nontoxic foods, there are other health benefits of cooking from scratch.

What about the stress of cooking? We think take-out food takes the stress out of eating, but does it? Cooking for me is actually relaxing. It takes me out of my mind and into my body, especially hand prep like slicing and chopping. What if you considered cooking as a destressor rather than a stressor? Who would win then?

Cooking may even keep your brain sharp too. Brain research shows that learning new things keeps your brain in shape. Just as learning a language is recommended as mental calisthenics for staying brain-buffed into old age, learning the language of spices, herbs, methods, and ingredients and discerning FASS means learning to cook is literally brain food.

What if cooking from recipes is as good as crossword puzzles, known to help seniors keep their minds active? You encounter new ingredients. You have to calculate quantities if you adjust the recipe. You use your senses: When are the onions translucent? Does it have enough salt? What is al dente? Compare this to opening a microwavable packaged dinner. Which one exercises your senses and intelligence more?

I can't prove it, but the convenience of prepared food—takeout, fast food, prepackaged food—may allow us to eat more than we should simply because it seems so easy and cheap.

Greater Togetherness

For many couples, cooking dinner together is their daily dose of togetherness. Cooking with your children gives them both parent-time and a sense of usefulness, which psychologists say are two deep desires of children. Breakfast where everyone reads the backs of cereal boxes or competes for the toaster for their Pop-Tarts doesn't add a feeling of home and family security to the day. Of course, for some parents, it simply doesn't work to engage the entire family in this way. But for the parents who would like to do so, a shift is possible, and with it, support for changes in the way we eat.

The Freedom of Resourcefulness

You know by now that I have a self-sufficiency streak. Planning for old age for me includes the possibility that global systems might not continue to seamlessly, invisibly, and inexpensively bring food, energy, and whatever income I derive from investments to my door or PO box or bank. Knowing how to cook and preserve basic food is part of my long-term strategy for freedom in the event of a future in which global systems fail.

Belinda's Wisdom

This week, after stashing Belinda's milk, I went out again on my bike, whizzing down my steep hill and heading over to Nina's for my illegal goat cheese with Belinda's words reverberating in my mind.

“Eating should be a research project too. If you don't grow/know your own food, then know your farmer and his/her practices. Verify that their actions align with their intentions. It is not enough to want to provide safe food, it requires a knowledge base and follow-through. I don't know where the answers will be found, but I believe there are many answers, not just one.”

Sandra, the mother of cheese-outlaw Nina, waylaid me as I lifted my bike onto its kickstand.

“Come with me. I have something for you.”

Hal and Sandra's property was small. The garden lay on a north-facing slope (the worst for gardening), yet it was lush with food, animals, fodder, and medicinal plants. The goats and chickens shared a cleverly designed octagonal shed. The milking parlor had just enough room for one goat to turn a corner and put her head through the narrow V-shaped stanchion that kept her steady for milking as she bent to eat her food. (I can identify—food steadies me as well.)

From the garden we went out to their huge garage, where she pulled something from their freezer. “I want you to have this,” she said, handing me a three-pound package of a goat leg.

I was left speechless—and my friends will tell you how rare that is. The remnant of my suspicious East Coast mind asked, “Why is she giving this to me?” My West Coast mind said, “Generosity isn't an agenda, Vicki. This is a gift. The right response here is to just receive it.”

I did take it, feeling both the heft of the package and the lightness of wonder at generosity. She told me about the goat whose meat I held in my arms. How it was happy from day one to day last. How they raised it and loved it. How it was born to the goats they milk now.

I guess the way to this community's heart is through my stomach, I thought as I packed Nina's illegal cheese and Sandra's non-USDA-approved goat leg in my now bulging pannier and cycled home in the waning light. I felt full. These relationships and these new thoughts were becoming as nourishing as the food I unloaded on my counter.

That goat leg was too precious to improvise a dish and fail, so I went online and found a recipe for roast lamb. With reverence for my feeders and for this small creature I would be eating, I washed the leg, poked holes all around into which I put slivers of garlic, rubbed the outside with oil, a squeeze of lemon, salt, oregano, and basil, and roasted it slowly in my convection oven.

Perfect fat/acid/salty/sweet. Perfect love. Yum!

After dinner, I blogged:

Generosity itself is kept at arm's length in our everyday lives. We click PayPal buttons. We write checks between Christmas and New Year's based on well-presented literature about people far away. But here I am being invited to eat Sandra's kid (goat). How can we not be friends in the future? . . . Food is love. Every exchange is love. More love than any of us can bear if we are honest. And so I blog to digest it all—and to celebrate another part of my food system—the humans who spread the love around.

And so ended week two of my adventure.

Now It's Your Turn

Cooking

Local ingredients, cooked with love, eaten with awareness, in the company of friends—that's relational eating.

How do you feel about cooking? Comfortable? Panicked? Unimaginative? Inept? Disdainful? Ashamed? You don't have to cook to be a relational eater, but you may want to.

If you don't know how to cook, take classes from local chefs, caterers, or friends who know how to transform local produce into local yum. There are apps or Web sites where you type in ingredients and up come user-rated recipes.

Or maybe you know how to cook but you just don't for all the common reasons: time, time, and time.

Increase your home-cooking time by 10 percent. Find regional eggs and cook your breakfast. Find regional greens and steam them to go with the box of Chinese food you brought home. Take the time to grow sprouts on your windowsill and add them to your salads. Do a home-cooked meal once a week. Or make a big soup or casserole on Sunday and eat it all week.

One brilliant aid for home cooking is the pressure cooker. It saves both time and money. You can cook whole foods like beans and grains in far less time. Because all the action is hidden and under pressure, it can be unnerving the first few times you use it. You can't peek or test for doneness. Once you get the hang of it, though, it's your friend for life in getting dinner on the table fast.

Develop Your Signature Soup

I've become a soup maker as a way to use the variety of local ingredients that pour into my home at least six months a year. Knowing the textures, flavors, and cooking behavior of my fresh foods, I now have a “signature soup”—a hearty minestrone with a touch of Indian. Here are some basics I use—not recipes but approaches:

Some things to steam or boil and then puree in a blender for a creamy soup: cauliflower, leeks, summer or winter squash, potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, carrots.

Some things to sauté and put in soup when tender but not mushy: onions, carrots, celery, garlic, green peppers, potatoes, green beans, snap peas, broccoli, mushrooms, cabbage.

If you are an omnivore—as I am—then you can use chicken (boil bones or cook pieces and use the meat too) or beef (boil knuckles and bones) bones to make your broth.

If you are either a vegavore or an omnivore, beans and grains add heft (you'll read about Georgie, Georgina, and Lauren in chapter 9—they were my 50-mile diet suppliers). You can use anywhere quinoa, lentils, amaranth, oats, baked and chopped tubers (yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, etc.).

Bouillon (chicken, beef, or vegetable) to make the stock if you don't have fresh.

Some other juicy elements: chopped tomatoes, chopped summer squash.

Some herbs (fresh if possible) and spices: parsley, oregano, basil, thyme, marjoram, cumin (I used to think it smelled like gym socks, but now I can't cook without it), coriander, fennel, curry (careful, some are better than others), tamari, salt, and pepper. Cilantro is good in Mexican soups.

Add at the end: chopped chard, kale, mustard greens, beet greens. These will all cook as the soup slowly cools down after turning off the burner.

Mess around with these ingredients. Check for FASS—fat, acid, sweet, salt—and adjust. I'm always surprised at how a squeeze of lemon can brighten a soup. Oh, now I really sound like a chef!

Homegrown

Growing food used to be a shared endeavor on the part of the whole tribe. Just growing sprouts on your windowsill shifts you from being a food consumer to being a food producer.

Even if you spend 99.9 percent of your time otherwise occupied, your experience as a grower will put you back in the tribe.

If you don't yet garden, here are some ideas:

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Herbs in pots on your windowsill

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Tomatoes in containers on your deck

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Greens too can be grown in containers

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Window hydroponics

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Backyard garden plot

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Take gardening classes

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Volunteer at a school, community, food bank, or market garden

Try These Recipes

It turns out there was a better local alternative to zackers. Jess Dowdell shares her kale chip recipe. Kim Bailey's rich bone marrow broth is a great example of simmering from scratch. Along with the recipe, Kim shares some of her own story.

Kale Chips

So easy and fun to have around. I just take any kind of kale, but my favorite is lacinato kale, and lightly spray it with vegetable spray. I use high-heat canola oil from Spectrum. Salt and pepper the leaves and lay them in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake at 300°F for 30 to 50 minutes, until they are crispy. Let them cool and store in an airtight dry container. You can crush them into a powder and use it as “kale salt” over many dishes for added flavor.

And here's another chip: