Recession Gourmet

I love to cook.

This does not mean I am a great cook, but I do love to cook. I love to be in the kitchen, surrounded by people I love (a restless husband, children drawing or doing homework, or girlfriends sitting at the table and telling me great and funny stories.) I like to sip a little wine, crank up some really great music to annoy my neighbors, throw open the windows and doors so the late afternoon spring sunshine streams in, and offer tastes along the way to all the hungry people waiting around. (boys, friends, husband). That really does make me happy. Like I am feeding the world.

At least my little world.

When I first had people to cook for (first a husband, then some boys) I was so happy I probably went a little crazy. I could no longer live on yogurt and aglio and olio. I had people to cook for! To nourish!

Back then, when cooking for people still felt new, I loved to pick exotic recipes and then hunt down the crazy--and obscure--ingredients--from all over L.A.. It was a great way to tour this town of ethnic districts. Indian spices in Atwater. Fish in Glendale. Weird Asian vegetables in Thai town. Expensive European ingredients, Whole Foods and the Mayfair. Armenian specialties, my corner market.

It was my own personal city-wide scavenger hunt.

But I am more tired now, and poorer. I can no longer approach each meal as an excuse to travel from one side of this sprawling city to the other and spend extravagantly on hard to find ingredients from high end cookbooks.

I have to be creative, and make do.

A note on this: my mother was creative, and made do. In some ways this was cool. She grew vegetables, made yogurt from cultures, made jam (that never really hardened, but tasted soooooo good), and could open a refrigerator of nothing and create something delicious. Sometimes I was filled with wonder. Sometimes fear.

She was so frugal that often her eighteenth century approach to saving everything to make something else could go wrong. Like the time she made two giant containers worth of homemade chicken broth and froze them in our basement refrigerator. One turned over, and leaked out onto the floor, and began to putrify. We could not identify the source of the horrible stink in our house. I think our dog found it.

By the time we did find it, the smell was so awful that my father and I had to put handkerchiefs over our mouths like we were running through tear gas, run and get the plastic pitchers, run them outside, dig a hole, and bury them under two feet of dirt. I could not eat chicken broth, or chicken, for twenty years. (Is this what made it so easy to be a vegetarian???)

So you can see there was some trauma in the creative use of food.

But now, with a family of my own, and less money, I have to do some of the same things (minus the rotten chicken broth). When I make a chicken, two days later I make chicken soup. When I cook vegetables, a few days later I dump the leftovers into spaghetti sauce, or risotto, or soup. Often the first round was wonderfully spiced so the flavors travel onto the next dish like a secret hidden spice capsule--hard to detect, but there.

This is a work through the leftovers week, so I am thinking of all this, and how I have changed.

I still love my scavenger hunt for the perfect ingredient. But I also love pulling something leftover from the refrigerator and making it the base of something totally new. I mean I get turned on! I want to dance around the kitchen and cackle! I feel gleeful -- like I pulled one over on somebody.

Today I took our perfectly spiced easter lamb leftovers and threw them into a pot to make harira, the ramadan staple, made of lentils, chickpeas, lamb and other spices. The only ingredient I had to buy was saffron.

I feel so delighted with myself. So resourceful and creative and frugal--but also gourmet.

And I think, this is probably how those women in Morocco felt when they made their harira. They were not running from store to store across a city a million miles wide to get each ingredient. These were ingredients in their house they could pull down in a pinch and slow-cook to deliciousness while they went about their work.

It is a private pleasure--no one can really appreciate but me. I don't want to brag about my frugal creations. But it is a wonder--to create something magnificent out of something that was nearly ready to be thrown away.

And I wonder what my boys will think of me, and my cooking. I mean I know they love it--they cannot help it--it is home. That is a perk of the (mother) job.

But will they remember the scavenger hunts (those can be so fun) or the frugal recreations?

I'll get back to you in 20 years and let you know...