cookbook gift memories

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

December 4, 2009

Kim asked me to write about a cookbook gift I’d received, and as is my wont, my story came late and long. I have many cookbooks I love and want others to love, too, but few given to me as gifts; and though I’ve received several cookbooks as prizes or review copies (thanks Marisa and Culinate!) lately, those are already on ‘the list.’ So I had to reach back to find good recommendations. When I did, I was surprised how much those gifts now influence my life, given the huge changes that have occurred in my food life since the late 1990s, when I received them. Here is what I wrote:

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not local: Green writer doesn’t have time

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

November 6, 2009

It was her column on canning that had me spluttering for the first time. Carrie Sturrock, “PDX Green” columnist for the local paper, had gone out and had a little canning class with our own Harriet. She decides that canning isn’t very energy-efficient. Just what is the carbon footprint of that batch of strawberry jam, pray tell? She quotes a professor of agriculture. “It’s better to have big containers when you’re heating things up... I would imagine it’s not more environmentally friendly to do it yourself.” Then she thinks, oh, what about the food? “But what if you take into account where the food is grown and its transit? That matters. If you grow the food yourself in an organic backyard garden using your own homemade compost and then reuse the canning jars each year, you probably have a smaller carbon footprint than if you buy mass-produced canned food at the grocery store... But the equation changes yet again if you drive to a farmers market and buy the food for canning from a farmer who may have trucked in a small batch from a farm 200 miles away. Looking at the carbon footprint alone, that’s likely worse than buying canned food at the grocery store.”

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eating and words at wordstock

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

October 2, 2009

The best in food writing does not simply instruct a cook, give a list of ingredients and explain how these go together. No: the best in food writing is to slowly peel shards of skin from the fruit, exposing the flesh bit by bit so that at first you see its moist ripe redness, then smell its sweet acid scent, and then touch its supple squish-between-fingers, and finally put a bit to your lips, taste, and know something entirely new that you will never forget. The best in food writing is discovery, inspiration, putting up for the winter. The best in food writing tells a story of love first, food second, and wraps it all up with the brown paper of ingredients lists, methodology, truc.

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The future of food can’t be all or nothing

Or right or left

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

September 4, 2009

Yesterday, I finished writing a long and wonky argument against the practice of killing baby boy chicks via grinder. The practice is accepted by the USDA and by many veterinarians and scientists, who say, basically, “this is as good as it gets.” I ran through the economics of the poultry industry (much of which I learned from Kookoolan Farms’ excellent email newsletters); because only one breed is raised for meat in the U.S., and that breed is unsuitable for commercial egg laying, the industry has become severed. Sixty or 70 years ago, chickens would be raised together until the roosters started to crow. At that time, most of the roosters would become dinner and the hens would be kept for eggs and to raise future flocks. The male chicks in non-Cornish Cross breeds aren’t raised for meat because, due to their slower growth rate and smallish size, the American consumer is unwilling to pay a price high enough to make feeding and housing them for 16 weeks tenable.

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Jewels of summer

Currants on her mind

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

July 12, 2009

Diamonds may be some other girls' best friend, but the jewels I clasp to my heart and beg, plead and scheme to obtain are far softer and, I’d argue, more Continental than a kiss on the hand; able symbols of both platonic and liaisonic affairs; eminently better bets than baguettes.

One night I am running through the Buckman neighborhood, down a curving street where I rarely venture, though it is only blocks from the high school where my husband and I were almost-sweethearts in the late 80s and early 90s. It is in this nostalgic quiet back avenue that I see them, in the very corner of the front yard of a pretty, dark Victorian house. It could be the witch’s cottage in Hansel and Gretel, so taken am I by the sweet-tart berries veritably dripping, drop drop drop, from a vine there. Currants. Each one redder and plumper than the last, glowing in the early evening sun, sparkling even, far more artful than any princess-cut diamond.

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falling in love starts at the market, and then...

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

May 29, 2009

First comes love...

I have been falling in love with a great frequency and indiscrimination matched only by my freshman year in high school (oh, 1987!). Thankfully for my husband (with whom I first fell in love when we were freshman, so I guess it can mean something after all), my current romantic interests are all of the vegetable variety.

But oh, such vegetables. I blush to own up to my ingenue. Surely, I had eaten turnips and cabbages and arugula before, but I’d decided they were no, not for me, better suited for the pages of Beatrix Potter and the contents of a 17th-century soup pot than for my kitchen (or my garden).

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a routine lemon cake for breakfast

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

May 17, 2009

I’ve never been one to pooh-pooh the concept of cake for breakfast, especially when I re-cast the concept of “cake” and “good fat” for the way I eat now; that is, I believe in the health benefits of maple syrup and honey, animal fats, and eggs from my sweet chickens. I’ve also been trying to go all-whole grain, all the time, whenever possible.

Lately, Everett’s been asking for our family to develop a food routine. He wants the same thing for breakfast every Monday, and the same thing for dinner every Wednesday. This presents a bit of a challenge for a mama committed to local, seasonal eating, and possessed with a strong proclivity toward chaos. Shall we be nice and say “spontaneity”?

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dining room table has family eating together, anytime

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

May 12, 2009

For seven years now (seriously? seven years?) my husband and I have made our dining room our bedroom, as we ...very... .....slowly..... renovate the top floor of our house, where the bedrooms should be. The boys’ bedroom was one of the first things we finished, and then, we stalled. In mornings in the summer, I’d wake up and look at the branches of the cherry tree outside our dining/bedroom window and long to be seeing them at mealtimes, instead.

I’ve been begging my husband to make a change for the past few years, immediately if not sooner, and life has gotten in the way. Somehow, life’s signal got set to “all clear” these past few weeks and a dining room table arrived in our life, an unused table that the friend I call our “garden whisperer” paid $100 to reclaim from a dark garage.

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have bike, will harvest

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

May 7, 2009

For the second time tonight, I stopped by a garden on my milk route -- my weekly bike ride to pick up the raw milk a cooperative of Portlanders buys from the more permissive Washington -- and picked several kinds of raab, a few spring onions and garlic, some collard greens and mustard. The owner, I’ve been told, is planning to rent the home and hasn’t worked in the garden for months; I’ve been given permission to pick a little, and I’ve been as respectful as possible. Though I long to eat every blossom, worried the tenant-to-be won’t know what to do with all of this.

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Don’t forget to eat your flowers

Bonanza in the forest

From cafemama — an inconvenient life by Sarah Gilbert

April 19, 2009

The pretty, dainty yellow violets, it turns out, are edible. As are the newly flowering red huckleberries, showy salmonberries, the sweet pink currants, and the blowsy bells of the Oregon grape.

Here is what I learned in three hours in a quarter-mile walk into Forest Park: you CAN eat your flowers. And neither the Oregon grape, nor the sumac, are poisonous, despite what your mother may have told you. According to John Kallas of Wild Food Adventures: it’s because of the mothers that these myths are perpetuated. “She’s walking with her kids in the forest, and the kids are putting everything in their mouths, so she says, ‘That’s poisonous!’ and they grow up and tell their kids,” he says.

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