from Peter

April 19, 2007

She was a young Chicago nurse with an enviable snap-to-it efficiency and caffeine-saturated rectitude. She was, incidentally, also popping Tums-like candy. Her fiancé was a resident in anesthesiology, one of the most challenging and well-compensated specialties in medicine. These two were leading the classic hectic lifestyle of the upwardly mobile, and they have long since married and settled in a large mansion in the suburbs.

Years ago, my girlfriend and I were house-sitting for the nurse. While preparing pasta in the underused kitchen, I dug a can of Parmesan cheese out of the pantry. I misread the date: it had expired ten years prior, not to mention “Refrigerate After Opening.” I absentmindedly poured some out into a bowl. It was brownish in color; I nearly ruined dinner with it, since it had turned to dust sometime after its expiration date.

There are these households where the home economy should ostensibly meet up with the discernment and finances of the owners, but in many cases the kitchen is a ghost town, populated by darkness. In the suburbs of Austin, Texas, a few summers ago, I sojourned with and cooked for new parents — one of America's top programmers and his wife, a new doctor.

Concerned about global warming, I resisted the 12-mile roundtrip to the supermarket in their SUV. An exercise for me is always to find and quietly exploit the ingredients that the hosts have abandoned — like the heels of dried bread, to use as filler in a casserole; dried fruit and leftover jams, for oatmeal; and the scrapings from a sauce jar, for some marinade or dressing. This seldom fails to elicit a squeal of delight on the tasting, and then a squeal of objection on divulging the recipe.

But what was this huge tray of purple-brown paste taking up an entire shelf in the refrigerator? I felt the urge to engage in some creative reuse. But I was afraid to taste it, it looked so neglected.

The Texas programmer glanced up from his computer. “I was into making matbuha for a while, up until the baby was born,” he said. He had lived in Israel and returned with a penchant for Middle-Eastern fare. Matbuha is a fairly simple but rich sauce made with red peppers and tomatoes, typically seasoned with olive oil and fresh cilantro. In a class of condiments with tahini, baba ghanouj, and hummus, it is eaten with pita.

“This batch was too spicy,” he explained. But the baby was six months old! I quietly threw out the desiccated concoction to make room in the refrigerator. Still, the pantry shelves were piled high with the costly abandoned ingredients of his experimentation. I ended up leaving Austin with cases of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce which they now had no use for, tending now to lean towards the Atkins diet.

I had shown the man years before how to make matbuha without much fanfare, from a few fresh ingredients; what had caused him to get so elaborate with the sauces and spices? Surely this is also what had caused him to abandon his efforts, and to move to Atkins, the last resort for many Americans who have lost touch with their natural diets.

There is an emptiness in these homes. “Waste, Want” should be the new cross-stitched plaque adorning these kitchens, these lavish but lonely corners of the homes of some of America’s busiest and most successful people. I have cooked in a hundred of these kitchens. The kitchen is typically an afterthought to the yawning jaws of the TV room, whose wide screen invites anything but scratch cooking.

On the Food Network and elsewhere, we are greeted with a vast and ever-expanding legion of food experts, available 24 hours a day. There is a bizarre hypocrisy on the part of the hosts of these shows. On the one hand, they try to treat informally and casually the everyday preparation of their meals. After all, they’re supposed to be teaching us. On the other hand, these meals are always made with blushing virtuosity, from extravagant ingredients, and served in the matching crockery with the utmost casual pomp.

The Barefoot Contessa will throw together a pasta, but it will always be with shrimp and white wine. The Naked Chef — what enviable names! — will compose something with flair, but it can’t really be done without the finest of fresh ingredients and a zip around London in the old blue Vespa. Emeril or Martin Yan need only utter some humorous syllable and we dutifully cheer and applaud their genius. Between the hoity-toity ingredients and the insufferable elegant simplicity — in both their skill and their creations — we are sighing with admiration but left stuck to the couch, in so much awe that we are afraid to move.

Here in America, we have a bounty of means and such wonderful wholesome ingredients as to put new immigrants to their knees and weeping on their first sight of the supermarket shelves — yes, I have witnessed this poignant phenomenon. These are things which most of the backward world prays to have. Yet, while they pray, we leave it in our refrigerators to spoil.

Let me say a prayer for myself. Behold my religion: I have made a commitment to get my sorry ass into the kitchen every day. Let the astronauts binge on the Space Food Sticks: my food will come less often from a package than straight from the ground, while I have the strength to pull it up and put it into a pot. There is no excuse for someone with two legs and two arms not to cook his own food every day.

If necessary, I shall move the couch into the kitchen so that I can better know that place. It will become my new living room. Most importantly, I must commit to spending liberal time being more aware of my own perishables. The new boob tube in this house will be my own refrigerator-freezer, tuned to my own 24-hour food channel.

Everything will be prepared and eaten perfectly, just as long as it is prepared and eaten. It need not be expertly or elegantly made, only consumed with gratitude. We have discarded prayer before meals, and even where it survives, the words too often have a tinny sound, like the speedy disclaimer at the end of a car commercial. But I will quietly think a little mantra at every bite.

And I will pay my respects to the creatures who in turn created these things on my behalf. For the milk that spoils I will say a dirge for the cow who generously spilt it out of her swollen body for me. For the next rotten egg I will beg forgiveness of the white hen trapped in some cage somewhere. For each slice of discarded bread I will think of a wheatie sweating in his combine, floating away his endless hours across the Kansas gold. I will strive every day not to let these miracles happen in vain.

from Dave:

One big reason that autumn is my favorite time of year is the annual bloom of asters and goldenrods, and the pale lavender flowers of Drummond's aster are on display right now. This is one of our more accessible local wildflowers and once you recognize it you'll notice it around town. And being an "accessible" wildflower is pretty remarkable in this heavily disturbed Chicago region. It's a sign of strength.

The botanic name of Drummond's aster is Aster sagittifolius drummondii. All asters are members of the diverse Compositae or Asteracae (sunflower) plant family. The meaning of the word "aster" was "star" in the ancient world. Words like asteroid, asterisk and disaster take on new interest when seen this way. And many of the flowers in the aster/composite family have obvious disk and ray flower structures. Think of a daisy or a garden sunflower and you can imagine why our ancestors compared them to our own star, the Sun.

The genus name "sagittifolius" has a different story. In the past, plants were sometimes given a name based on the religious holiday that occurred when the plant was in bloom. So it's easy to guess that this aster has something to do with the constellation Sagittarius, but its connection with the heavens is a bit more subtle. Drummond's aster has what is known as a sagittate - or arrow shaped - leaf form. It also has leaf tissue that extends along the stem which is a helpful identification aid.

So it is the "arrow" metaphor that links Sagittarius (the Archer) in the heavens with a durable and handsome wildflower that manages to persist in this increasingly un-wild world.

Fellow fermenter,

After awaking on Sept. 3 at the crack of light and cooking my day’s supply of freshly winnowed rice (pebbles and all), I rode my bike ten miles down the Baptism River Road to Finland, MN, where I met up with Fuzzy to go riding on Island River. We got to the river. Another shit year for rice, he says, it’s thin, we were late, but mostly the water levels are so low (sometimes by feet) that you can’t paddle through the rice beds. We go to another lake and he tells me usually the rice covers many times what the tiny patches are this year. Never mind I say – we are subsistence ricers, we’ll take what we get. It starts to lightning as we pole through the lake.

By the time we get in I am wet and shivering in the rain. He drops me off in town. I make some phone calls trying to redeem repeatingly failing Craig’s List attempts to get my few things from Chi to Mpls. I bike up to the land with my bag of rice on wet mud – harder than I was anticipating – and when I arrive at our parking area, there is a pickup with two fifty-gallon drum halves filled with bear fat and two bear carcasses. It is already starting to rot and we have to haul it ½ mile uphill to our land to render it.

For over two days, we render what we can. The hunters throw out most of the bears, who are honestly just cubs, most of them less than 150-200 lbs. They keep a few prime cuts, and the rest that goes wasted could honestly feed a village. Night has fallen; it’s raining. I am carrying the carcass up hill and I slip on a rock and the carcass lands on the dirt and I simultaneously shriek and howl and whimper and cuss and cry and grind my teeth at the intensity and horror of the whole thing. We do as much as we can but still lose buckets and buckets of meat and fat. I fall ill and am out for days, just now recovering. This is harvest season…The return POB is my personal one now – POB 477. Love, Mark

this is a super simple still. it can be converted back to a 5 gallon cook pot by unscrewing the arm and screwing on a cap to seal the lid.