Eating Down the Fridge

Posted by random olio

You cannot put that book down, you lose precious sleep at night because you want to read one more page. A different book moves you emotionally to think differently about your life and make some needed changes. Yet another book prompts you to make small moves toward a more sustainable lifestyle.

“The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks” by Kathleen Flinn had an impact on me and the food I consume. Chris and I have found ourselves in a food rut. We make the same few meals each week, and continue to alternate them. Yes, most of the time it is what I crave and want, but what if I do not know what I crave and want because I have not given myself the option to try something new? Over the weekend we went to a Portland restaurant that we have wanted to go to for ages. It took us about two months to find a reservation that would both fit our schedules and be a normal hour to eat dinner (before 10:30 pm). We had an assortment of items all new and different, but one really inspired me: spacatelli, sausage, broccoli, provolone. It was very simple, and yet so delicious. I look up at Chris and say the book I just finished has inspired me and we need to radically change how we think about food. We can make this dish at home.

That does not mean that we do not eat well on a regular basis. I think we have a very balanced diet, what I wanted to radically change was our routine. With the changing season from summer to fall and soon to winter there are so many different options to try. New soups and stews, and warmer dishes we would not want in the summer. So many options to explore, inspire, and change our ways. Flinn’s book is inspired by a woman she met in the grocery store:

“No wonder we’ve forgotten that the most essential thing we do is to feed ourselves and the people we care about. When I saw the stuff the woman had in her basket, it struck me as antinourishment.” Page 22-23

As a country, we eat from cans, the freezer, and over-processed boxes of chemicals. It is what we know, and yet many of the processed foods are a very long list of chemicals that provide no nourishment at all. Flinn sets out to teach a group of women who do not know how to cook how to make food from scratch and replace the quick and easy processed counterparts. She shows them how to make Alfredo sauce from scratch in the same amount of time as you would the boxed version, and she proves that cooking from scratch is not only affordable but the tastier option. She also talks about how much we waste.

We buy food in bulk at stores such as Costco and Sam’s. It seems like a better value, but what we often do not realize is how much waste we create. Why buy one good head of lettuce when you can get three for less? They do not taste great, but oh well. You then do not feel bad when you throw away the other two heads. Which leads to what has been called: “Eating Down the Fridge.” The tactic? You do not buy groceries for a week and instead get creative and eat down all the food currently in your fridge. We would starve in our house because we often only have fresh fruits and vegetables in the fridge and eat them down each week, but we could still join the cause and make sure we are eating the salsa, and other condiments that often are forgotten and grow into other entities within the fridge.

Do an Internet search for: Eating Down the Fridge, read Flinn’s book, and use the changing season to jump-start your food inspiration!

Encyclopedias were my Google

Posted by random olio

I am not that old, but I did not grow up with the Internet at my fingertips. Instead, I had World Book Encyclopedias. They were not cheap either. At one point my mom sold encyclopedias. I always found it kind of odd. However, looking back I have a hunch she sold them so that we could have the sample set in our house. Whenever we would ask a question about something my mom would tell us: “Look it up.” I was never really a fan of pulling out the volumes that were massive like “S” and always wondered what was in the volumes like “Z.” “Q” (like Z) were in mint condition because they were rarely opened.

I had not really thought about encyclopedias in years, until I read this in the book: “Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family” by Kathleen Flinn:

“Encyclopedia salesmen were a fixture of suburban America in the 1950s and 1960s, widely mocked by comedians. Regardless of the brand, the hard sell invariably included an expression of grave concern that a potential client’s children would suffer without having a ‘library in the living room.’ Most offered a payment plan to help ease the impact of the investment, which could be the equivalent of half a year’s rent.” Page 81

Her book is such a great memoir and reminder of so many items long forgotten in life, such as Chef Boyardee (which I wrote about a few days ago). It is actually incredible if you think about how fast the sharing of information has changed over the years. In addition to encyclopedias, we also had issues upon issues of National Geographic. While some of the covers and photos inside horrified me, it was a view into other parts of the world. Now we can do that in just a few clicks.

Today we are spoiled rotten. We do not have to wait to print a new version of encyclopedias and know that the money we shelled out for an entire edition of encyclopedias are old the second they are printed. We can read more than one can ever imagine after a few key strokes. We have instant access to good information and instant access to time-wasting information. It makes it much harder to know the integrity of the details, but there is plenty of it, and it is fast. We never have to worry about having a “library in the living room.”

Chef-Boy-R-D

Posted by random olio

I remember as a kid that my mom made a few items for dinner that I just found nasty. I will name a few: creamed dried beef, Brussel sprouts with vinegar, lima beans with nothing (yuck, lima beans in general makes me gag), too-thick hamburger burnt on the outside and still raw on the inside, and hard, break-your-teeth pizza. Now do not think for a minute that I am throwing my mom under the bus. She tried and I know my family was finicky. I for one was. There were so many things I hated as a kid, but I am sure a lot of it had to do with the rotating meals — many of which I could not stand. What I want to tell you about was the pizza.

My mom would make pizza from a box of Chef Boyardee. I used to make fun of the name, and spell it out: Chef-Boy-R-D with a slight accent. For us it meant buying an item at the grocery that was “name” brand. It was supposed to be special, but I found it disgusting. It tasted nothing like the pizza from Pizza Hut (which I had the opportunity of having occasionally due to Book It – where in grade school you could get free pizza for reading). I was recently reminded of our pizza adventures when reading the book: “Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family” by Kathleen Flinn where she shares:

“So imagine their delight when they discovered a local grocery carried the new ‘pizza kit’ from Chef Boyardee. The box contained ‘all the ingredients for a traditional Sicilian-style pizza’: a package of add-water only pizza dough, a small can of tomato sauce, and a packet of dried Parmesan cheese. Following the directions, they spread the dough with oily fingers into an inexpensive pizza pan, spooned the thin sauce over the top, and then sprinkled it with the powdered cheese.” Page 12

She says it so well: add-water dough, can of tomato sauce, and dried Parmesan cheese. Which part of that makes you think yummy? It tasted like cardboard. Pizza night should have been a fun night and instead I wondered what excuse I had to get out of eating it. My sister remembers a different pizza story. She remembers a much later phase when my mom began making pizza from a can of biscuits. Hopefully you can see that our pizza experiences eventually got better. Not amazing, but better.

We would open the can of biscuits, and place each individual blob next to each other on the pan and then roll them out together to form the dough, add tomato paste (yuck who uses tomato paste for pizza)? Then shredded mozzarella, and then she baked it. I rarely remember other toppings. I think very occasionally she would get a tube of sausage and cook it so it became ground sausage and sprinkled it on top, or at a random time she might have purchased a packet of sliced pepperoni. Otherwise it was cheese only. I do not remember there ever being spices. Almost as though she tried to recreate what she saw, but forgot the flavoring part of it.

The evolution of the canned biscuit pizza did evolve into a treat. Somehow we started having dessert pizzas. Canned biscuits rolled out with pats of butter chunks were laid around the crust, brown sugar and cinnamon were then added on top of the butter. Whatever fruit we had (not all kinds worked) put on top and then baked. Often it was an apple. I never cared so much about the fruit, the brown sugar and cinnamon was what made it all worthwhile. Yum!