Author: 459856pwpadmin

I cannot fully express the joy and sense of accomplishment I feel being at able to occasionally prepare a simple meal for myself.  My happiness is unbounded and worth the resultant exhaustion. Even though I remain only able to get up for 5 or maybe 6 minutes at a time, which limits me to simple things that allow me to stagger the preparation over a period of time, the sense of freedom gained is immense.  Being able to make a salad, or a very simple meal, even it takes an hour, is the difference between being completely dependent on others and being independent.

First I made the buttered spinach recipe I wrote about from The Nourished Kitchen. It was simple.  I let the spinach sweat over low heat, and this allowed me to rest, then I forced the extra moisture from the spinach, sauteed it in some butter, seasoned to taste, and added finely minced hardboiled egg.  It was a lovely combination, although I changed the proportions a bit, since I was making it for myself and planned to eat the entire thing for breakfast.  I had 8 ounces of tender spring spinach, a little under half the recipe, with two hard-boiled eggs (the full recipe amount).  It made for an excellent repast, which is not surprising since I love spinach mixed into scrambled eggs.  It is possilbe that I like hard-boiled eggs mixed into a bowl of spinach even better, and a strong possibility this may become a standard.  It is easy to toss the spinach in the pot and do other things, like make coffee and toast, chop the eggs and feed the cats, while the spinach steams. Then it is a simple task to toss everything together and eat. Of couse this implies that I have boiled the eggs previously, but that is not hard,  and hard-boiled eggs are a good staple to have in the house for those times when I am rushed and need a bit of protein to tide me over.

I've been reading Deborah Madison's Vegetable Lieracy over the past week or so and of course it has further fueled my desire to be up and in the kitchen.  I am not quite finished reading it but I've read enough to know that it will indeed see frequent use.   The book is divided into 12 sections representing 12 families of vegetables, and the author has some thought provoking observations on how the vegetables under consideration in each section work together.  Actually, although there is no dearth of practical information in the book, it is really more personal and anecdotal than strictly educational in approach, and that is one of the things I like about it.  The recipes sound wonderful, and given my experience with Madison's previous books, I have no doubt that they are excellent.

Last night I made Tuscan Kale with Garlic-Anchovy Dressing for dinner.  It was incredible.  The recipe deems this a side dish for 3 or 4, and it would be an excellent side dish.  I love a large meal-sized salad however, and four cups of Kale also made an excellent, and generous,  dinner for me, although I did use only about a quarter cup of croutons, and slightly less olive oil than called for.  Truthfully, although the croutons were good in the salad, and added a nice crunchy counterpoint, Tuscan kale retains enough crunch and texture that I could happily eat the salad without croutons, if I were making it just for me again.  But don't go thinking that I left any croutons behind either, I enjoyed every last one.  I can only recommend this recipe for those who enjoy anchovies and garlic as the olive-oil-garlic-anchovy dressing is noticably pungent.  I felt the anchovies complemented the kale well.  In fact I enjoyed it so much, I could use this dish as a reward for good behavior, an earned treat, and it would work, as I found this far more indulgent and satisfying than any junk food or pastry I can recall.

I wonder if that is a bad sign or a good sign.  What kind of person craves kale with anchovies and olive oil instead of dessert or french fries?  Perhaps I've finally crossed some line,  gone over to the dark side…. I've partially lost the sweet tooth that has plagued me since childhood.  I still love a sweet.  I still love a really good pastry or piece of chocolate, an excellent dessert, even an occasional french fry. I don't completely avoid these things, but when I do want to indulge, I rarely want more than a small amount.  But I could certainly eat a whole bowl of Kale with Anchovy-Garlic dressing without regret.  The recipe is generous enough with the olive oil that  I can't justify eating and entire bowl of  it every day, but at the same time, with 4 cups of kale,  I can't exactly call it junk food either.

Aside from cooking and reading cookbooks, I can't say that I have been very ambitious this week.  I've basically been filling my time, between cooking attempts and doctor's visits, with light escapist reading.  

BMBG recommended that I try Lawrence Block's The Burglar in the Library and I took her advice, although, as I was only familiar with Block's darker novels, I had trouble imagining Block as the author of laugh-out-loud mysteries.  Obviously I knew nothing of the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels.   With nods to Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett, skill and tremendous imagination, Block's humerous mystery had me rolling on more than one occasion.  

I enjoyed the book so much that, feeling not particularly focused on more thoughtful literature and non-fiction, I went back to the first book, Burglars Can't Be Choosers,  and have been working my way through the series.  Block is a good writer; he is also a writer with a great sense of humor and a wicked wit who brings a light touch and a certain brash outrageousness to the most clichéd plot devices.  In fact the clichés are part of the point and part of the fun; Block never forgets his reader and never seems to doubt the reader's intelligence.  The books do build on each other and are worth reading in sequence but I enjoyed the first book I read, which is not the first of the series, immensly anyway.  And the Burglar series, although light and deliciously humerous, hold up to being read in quick succession, no easy feat.  I'll probably finish off the series over the rest of this week, or through the weekend, and they are books I would probably enjoy coming back to for a quick escapist bit of fun.

It's about time to catch up on reading again, although I have actually read very few books of late, only 3 since the last post.  What can I say?  I am too easily distracted?  I can't do anything consistently week after week without change?  Well, yes; it seems I am all to prone to human foibles.  

But first I will distract you with yesterday's mid-afternoon snack:  toasted Udi's bread, homemade ricotta made from local organic grass fed milk, cucumbers, and pickled red onion. 

It is the pickled red onion that is important here because it represent my first tiny foray into the kitchen.  Truly I was desperate to make something myself and this recipe,  from here, seemed easy enough.  Unfortunately my red onion was too large, so it was only half pickled by the time I was so ravenous I could wait no longer.  I eventually had to add a little rice wine vinegar and now my pickled red onions are also bright pink throughout.  But those half-pickled onions were surprisingly tasty.

I probably won't be expanding my repertoire very rapidly, sliceing the onions and mixing them together pretty much exhausted the limits of the time I could spend on my feet before resting, a new record yesterday, at 4 1/2 minutes per session.  Baby steps, it is true, but progress nonetheless, and a small achievement.  Of both I am very proud.

 But back to those three books.  They could not be more different.

First, I spent a good part of one day perusing The Nourished Kitchen by Jennifer McGruther who writes a blog of the same name.  Both the blog and the book are based on the traditional foods movement and the research of the Weston A. Price foundation.   As such, the book, some sections more than others, will not appeal to everyone. I've been eating primarily locally raised pastured poultry and meat for quite some time, I buy a significant amount of what I eat at farmer's markets, and don't really worry about the other stuff.   Although I haven't cooked anything from the book (see above about the limits on my cooking) a good proportion of the recipes are for the kinds of food I already love and I am looking forward to trying them out, but there are also many things that are new to me, including a section on fermenting vegetables.  I do keep a small selection of fermented foods, and think it would be fun to try my hand at making my own.   At any rate, the book is filled with good information and was a lovely read, the photographs are gorgeous, and it left me hoping that I can get back to my kitchen soon.  I'm thinking that the recipes for Blistered Radishes with Parsley and Buttered Spinach might be manageable with my current limitations, that is if I can keep myself from eating all the new spring radishes raw.

Dennis Lehane's The Given Day really surprised me.  I thought it was a good novel and I got completely wrapped up in the story and the characters.  Well, truthfully there are only two characters who are fully developed, Danny Coughlin, and Luther Lawrence, with everyone else basically acting as set pieces needed to fill in the narrative or illustrate certain points.  So basically to like this book you have to like Danny and Luther, or you have to get wrapped up in the historical aspects of the novel, which is set in Boston immediately following WWI, between the influenza epidemic and the policemen's union strike. I liked both the history and the main characters, who I found quite compelling. Perhaps I've known too many young men just like them, and I could hear their words in my mind, superimposing the characters in the novel with other people I've known. Both men start out as rather shallow, happy-go-lucky young men, who glide through life, both try to do the right thing but learn that knowing what the right thing is far more complicated than it would seem.  Lehane handled the complexities and the subtleties of both men's struggles well, and I thought he also dealt well with the idea of family, and the unfortunate truth that we often start out thinking of our families with a hazy glow, wanting what is best, but woefully unprepared for the repurcussions when life doesn't turn out quite the way we imagined it.  Lehane has a gift for capturing the cadence of a speaker, and many times the voices would ring in my haad, so that even a simple dialog could be filled with meaning.

I also loved the sense of history: the details of time and place and a period of history I don't know enough about.  The book seems to be well researched but it is quite dense, as it seems this was a very dense and volatile period. There were sections that dragged, almost as if there was just too much in to the story, and yet I would say that most of  the detail and various plots were important to the development of the characters and the conclusion of the story. Reading about the influenza epidemic was powerful, and  reading about young police officer Danny dragging bodies out of buildings reminded me of a story we read in fifth grade, where a girl was describing looking out her window onto the bodies stacked on the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up and carted away, something I am sure I had not thought of once in the intervening 45 years. The rather long section leading up to the strike, and Danny's infiltration and exploration of the various labor groups and leftist organizations, as long as the rather paranoid reactions of the people in power were tedious at times, but were important for Danny's growing understanding that the world was more complicated than the world as seen from his parent's house.  Danny was a character of great hope and naiveté, and yet possessed of a great inner strength (not just physical strength which is played up in the book). 

There are also some minor sections that are profoundly powerful.  Eddie McKenna is one of the polarizing characters of the book, and I feel his presence is necessary.  Near the end when he is speaking to Luther, telling him that he can never be an American, never be as much of an American as he (Eddie), the first reaction is to pull back from the appalling violence and racism of his statement.  Of course many felt the same way.  But upon thinking further, you realize that Luther's family had been in this country for generations even though they were originally brought to this country as slaves, and Eddie had come to America as a boy, trying to escape a kind of slavery, the bleak prospects and lack of promise of his lot in Ireland.  Not only did Eddie embrace America as a place for those who would change their lives, as he did, and embrace it with a proud love, in this scene Eddie also reminds of the dark side of an emotion that exists in all of us.  We see it all the time.  Another extreme example is the rich New Yorker I knew, who upon buying and restoring an old run down estate in an economically downtrodden town, became obsessed with buying up small properties near his house, partly because he wanted more land, but partly because he didn't want to see their mobile homes or run down houses, when he drove up his driveway.  The presence of a poorer population violated his sense of how the world should be, so his response, much like Eddie's, was to make it go away. 

Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading the novel,  I can't say that it left me feeling like it is something I want to read again. It was not a novel that brought new insights or understanding, Well, it left me with a profound dislike of Calvin Coolidge.

Lastly I read a Kindle Single called Planet Carnivore by Alex Renton.  The book seems to be fairly clear-headed, well-researched, and not particularly polemical.   Renton begins with the latest meat scare du jour and then uses that as a starting off point to discuss modern meat production and the true cost of the cheap meat we have grown so used to in western industrial nations and its environmental and health impact. He also reviews thoughts and suggestions concerning a more sustainable future from other authors as well as ideas of his own. I would quibble about a few things, but they are really secondary, not about his main thesis.  Recommended   But then I am inclined to believe we should think more and take less for granted.