My Plate or Yours?

Eat Leaves and Shoot

Thanks to everyone who has sent nice notes about my mom. She’s doing better than we thought – they downgraded (upgraded?) her diagnosis from Stage III to Stage I lung cancer (for those of you fortunate enough not to be fluent in cancer-speak, this is a good thing) and we are hopeful that surgery can take care of it. So keep sending her good thoughts and, if you smoke, quit, damn it!

Meanwhile, I am suffering from a surfeit of comfort food (who knew you could have too much) and looking for a healthier path to tread. Nothing extreme, I just don’t want to feel like a slug. Lo and behold, the answer was in yesterday’s New York Times. I have decided to go on the Michael Pollan diet.

Pollan, in case you don’t know, is the author of the best book I read last year -– The Omnivore’s Dilemma -- a thoughtful, provocative exploration of the sources of our food. He had a piece in the New York Times Magazine called “Unhappy Meals,” where he basically sums up a semester’s worth of my food and politics class in 10,000 words. (I’m linking to it here -– you may need to register to read it but it’s free. After about 7 days they will probably archive it and then you have to pay. It’s worth it.)

Essentially Pollan says we have forgotten how to eat because we have been led astray by the myopia of our science and the greed of our politicians. We need to learn to eat the way we used to. In his words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Wait, it gets better. Really. At the end of the 10,000 words he elaborates on this with nine “rules of thumb:"

1. Eat food, by which he means whole foods our great-great-grandmothers would have recognized as food. No Go-Gurt. No pop tarts. No diet colas. No highly processed and refined anything, no matter how many vitamins and nutrients have been added back in.

2. Avoid foods that make grandiose claims about how good they are for us. The best foods don’t brag (or, in his words, don’t miss the silence of the yams.)

3. Avoid foods whose ingredients are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number, or contain high fructose corn syrup.

4. Shop at farmers markets when you can. The food is better quality, and less processed.

5. “Pay more, eat less.” Everyone knows that eating less is better than eating more, it’s just that the food lobbies stop the government from telling us so since it will hurt their pocketbooks. Screw the food lobbies. Enjoy smaller amounts of higher quality (organic!) foods and feel better.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Treat meat as a side dish, or a flavoring.

7. “Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around.”

8. Cook and garden.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Add more species to your diet – right now 2/3 of the human diet comes from corn, soybeans, wheat and rice and that is not nutritionally diverse enough to sustain health. (I know, I know, you big meat eaters don’t think that’s true, but as molecular analysis will reveal, most of the beef you eat is just processed corn.)

So… Not too taxing, not too scary. I’ve been doing some of those things anyway. I don’t really eat meat, I eat a lot of vegetables, and I love leaves. (This article told me what that’s called, by the way – turns out I am a flexitarian.) But I’ve been eating way too much cheese and butter lately and my record with processed and refined foods is sad.

Hence, endives for lunch! I love endives, but since they aren’t made from white flour I haven’t seen them in my fridge lately. I braised these – cut them in half, seared them in (a little bit of) butter, drizzled some broth on them, salted and peppered, scattered a handful of chopped kalamata olives over the top and dotted them with goat cheese (I used a Capriole Farms Piper’s Pyramide I got at the Winter Market on Saturday though feta is also good on this.) Covered the dish with foil and baked for 40 minutes at 350. Ate it hot for lunch with crusty bread and snacked on it cold a couple of hours later. Both were excellent.

Enough Comfort

At least it’s not just me. There is “Comfort Food” displayed all over the front of this month’s Indy Monthly, in the form of a huge headline and some sort of pasta casserole, my most recent email from fromages.com trumpets the advent of a “comforting cheeseboard”, and even upscale Dean & DeLuca is in on the act, their “comfort food” including spendy mac and cheese and even spendier lobster pot pie.

So I am not the only one reveling in the white, refined foods that match the pale winter landscape. I’d like to think that my recent binges on raclette, macaroni and cheese, pasta with butter and parmesan, and (am I really going to admit this on a food blog?) tuna noodle casserole are just due to the chilly weather, but the truth is, my current diet is all about emotional solace. Talk about not eating for the right reasons.

As I have mentioned, oh too many times, the last several months have not been too great around here. Losing one of our sweet dogs and trying to stay one step ahead of my mom’s illness have really whomped me. I went to the doctor recently miserable with a stuffy head and I don’t remember exactly what I told him, but when I caught a peek at the diagnosis on my chart, it said “sinus infection and grief reaction.” He only prescribed an antibiotic, though. I had to come up with the carbs on my own.

And boy, have I ever. Comfort food for me is the kind of food that makes me feel cozy while I am eating it. Nurtured and cared for and replete. Noodles are good for this. Butter is good. Cheese is better. Sometimes comfort food is food that is just familiar. Childhood food. The Lebanese foods that meant something really special when I was small, the cinnamony smell of my dad’s spaghetti sauce, the mustard tang of my mom’s potato salad, and the spicy crunch of my grandma’s molasses ginger cookies.

Comfort food can’t come in small portions, either. It’s almost always the case that the reason I need it is that there is not enough of something precious – not enough time, not enough of me, not enough energy or love or sleep. So comfort food has to make up the deficit. There has to be plenty -- enough that I can fall asleep with a full belly, believing that tomorrow will be a better day.

Of course, now I am dealing with the after effects of too many comfort meals, which is to say I am FAT! Sluggish. Slow of thought and heavy of spirit, with cream sauce running in my veins. Time for a change.

My Other Backyard

Despite the fact that I’ve been at this since early spring, I haven’t quite got the knack of blogging yet. I still wait for the right topic and, even more paralyzing, the best photo, and try to organize and polish the posts as if they were newspaper columns, instead of just letting them fly and moving on. Consequently, I don’t post all that frequently – I keep saving up great meals and happy food memories, waiting for that magic moment when I have something profound to say, which needless to say is a rare occurrence. Where’s the fun in that?

I am determined to do better in the future, but first I have some major catch-up to do: we’ve had Happy New Year, now I need to go back to Merry Christmas.

Here were the culinary high points:

Finished the semester by the skin of our teeth, got our grades turned in, met as many of my Bloom deadlines as I could (which wasn’t all of them), and drove down to Apalachicola -- about 11 hours from our house in Bloomington. We weren’t able to spend much time in our cottage there in the last year because we were reluctant to leave Zoë while she was so sick, so this was the first visit down since March.

We left late in the afternoon, stayed over just south of Nashville, and  got here around noon the next day. Most of our driving was in the dark, watching the lights of cities and cars flash by, listening to holiday carols on public radio stations that faded in and out, chatting about everything (and nothing), and eating the crunchy, mouth-searing habanero flavored kettle chips that are my secret craving. A great start to a much needed break.

Happy New Year!

We are in northern Florida for the holidays -- Apalachicola, to be precise, on the gulf coast of the Panhandle.  We have a funky little cottage here -- 1940s vintage and not in great shape, but we've covered a multitude of sins with paint.  Lime green, melon, periwinkle, aqua, yellow -- get the picture?  If I squint out my study window, I can see the water.  We love it. 

I have a post in the works about the great food we've eaten with friends and family these last two weeks, but before I get around to that, a happy New Year is in order.  I feel rotten for not posting more frequently in the last couple of weeks, but Zoë’s death and some bad news about my mom's health have knocked all the stuffing out of me.  I will do better (that's a promise, not a resolution, so I am likely to keep it.)

Meanwhile, I have been inspired by a fellow blogger -- Lisa over at the Homesick Texan -- to start our year right with some lucky food, and boy will we need it, as 2007 promises to be a doozie! Black-eyed peas it is, and with all due apologies to true Texans I have created a hybrid of Lisa's two recipes and further bastardized it by using frozen black-eyed peas.  Please tell me that won't cancel out the good luck!

Here's what I did:  sautéed some onion and garlic, added a can of Rotel and a chopped ripe tomato (a real one -- more on that in the next post), threw in a bag of frozen peas and some water, some chipotle chile powder and some ancho chile powder and some Penzy's southwestern seasoning for good measure along with some hot sauce, and some salt.  Cooked it all up, scattered some chopped scallions over the top with a squeeze of lime, and served it hot, with chips.

It tastes wonderful, and we ate it for breakfast.  The skies are clearing and we are going to walk on the beach.  A very good start to the year!  Thanks Lisa!!

Happy New Year to all!  It's been a true pleasure getting to know folks in the food blogging world this last  year and I look forward to learning more, laughing more, and sometimes even crying more with all of you in 2007.  Cheers!