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...

The Mythology

We are a nation dissatisfied.

Our entire nation, our entire economic system, is premised on cultivating dissatisfaction, and then commoditizing everything that could make you happier.

I am aware of this.

Still, the rivers run so deep. And the lies.

This past Sunday I flipped through the Sunday New York Times Magazine. There was an article by a Dad, who cooked for his family. Healthy food. Every night. After he got home from his high powered job writing food columns, I guess. This article was his swan song, his chance to say his true thoughts on the subject, before he said Goodbye to us, the readers, forever. You can read it here.

I read it. I liked it. I pushed it to Jonathan.

In it, the author, confessed that once he had been a good cook, even wooed and won his wife with his spectacular kitchen cooking skills. But he confessed that cooking joyfully for his kids and wife, at the end of a long day, in a household with two working parents, was pretty impossible. He got home late. He still had to get ingredients. Sometimes his kids were crying on the floor in hunger as he dipped his filet of sole in egg, then batter.

He confessed that, although he wrote this column encouraging parents to cook healthy meals every night, (and probably making a lot of people feel really bad in the process) that it was hard, close to impossible, and he advocates more healthy instant meals.

So when I read it, I thought: Thank you. I am not even a working parent. And I appreciate that on a typical weeknight in today's world, it is hard to cook a perfect healthy meal every night, and even the simplest meal does take time. Probably at least 45 minutes. And with kids and homework and exhaustion, that can be a lot to ask. Not including the time to get the food...

I was grateful that he came clean.

But Jonathan was enraged.

He saw the guy as a hypocrite, who made his money making other people feel bad for not living up to this standard that he promoted, only coming clean in the final column that he could barely make it work himself. J saw it as one more step in a society that creates these impossible standards to make everyone feel bad, and promotes them (in this case, not even as an ad, but as a professional journalist).

It made me think.

I guess I am at a place where some friends are struggling. They are struggling to do everything that society tells them they are supposed to be able to do: raise great kids, all in the 99th percentile of everything, have a fantastic loving marriage, on five minutes a week, have two parents working full time at jobs they love with no commute, home for dinner every night, have a wonderful circle of loving friends, and working out daily and eating healthy food.

Hopefully doing a little social service for the causes you feel passionate about, too.

And the truth is, I believe in all of these. They are my standards. But when you cannot do them all, you feel so bad.

And so I got J's point to the author of the offending column. Don't promote and celebrate a lifestyle that you yourself cannot maintain. Don't pretend this is possible, when it is not. Live truthfully. 'Fess up. Be real. Break down the mythology and help people out with some compassion.

In the end, I agree.

What about you?

Have I Created A Monster?

We like to say that our son Benji has a nose--he can smell a horse, a skunk, a piece of bread or a foul odor about two minutes before the rest of us. But it is Theo who has the palate of a gourmande.

Naturally, he just does not like processed foods. He prefers breadsticks to pretzels, brown rice to white, and fruits to bad cookies. (A good cookie still wins.) But his palate really is remarkable. He likes Thai peanut sauce and fresh basil leaves on his pizza. He likes smelly cheeses and loved olives even as a baby. When we go to friends' houses for barbeque he makes comments like: "Wow, this is really good. It tastes like olive oil, lemon juice and garlic." And it is.

Today I picked him up from school. I was running late and had a pile of lasagna ingredients in the back of the car from the farmer's market, including one perfect French baguette from Monsieur Marcel, a real french specialty store, full of real French people and real French ingredients. Theo asked for a hunk, took a bite, and said, "Mommy, where did you get this. This is really good bread."

And it was.

Will he be a chef or an engineer or an architect or a storyteller? Only time will tell.

But, I told him, women LOVE men who cook.

Hey, I'm Not Just A Mom...

I'm a nutritional gatekeeper!!!! Take this quiz to find out what kind of cook you are.