10.06.08
Posted in cooking, culture, domesticity, food, kitchen learning at 7:46 am by Hanne Blank
“Well, it’s easy for you to say it’s easy to go vegan,” the e-mail said. “You are obviously very skilled in the kitchen. It isn’t so easy for the rest of us who… can’t cook like you do. Especially not all the exotic stuff you make.”
This e-mail that greeted me this morning wasn’t the first time I’ve had someone respond in this manner to my cookery reports, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But I thought it deserved some comment here, because in most cases, I honestly think that wails of “but I can’t cook like you do! it’s too hard!” are untrue, and unnecessarily limiting to the people who are stuck in the rut of believing that they cannot, for whatever reason, cook.
I draw a sharp distinction between not being able to cook and not wanting to cook, for one thing. It may be that you just don’t really like to cook. I think that’s perfectly fine. There are many things I don’t really like to do, including but not limited to driving in heavy traffic, going to the dentist, and sweeping floors. Just as I have managed to arrange my life so that I rarely am compelled to drive during rush hour, many people manage to arrange their lives so that they are rarely compelled to cook. I think that arranging not to have to do something is an intensely smart solution to the problem of hating to do it.
On the other hand, sometimes I have to be somewhere at such time as makes it necessary that I drive during rush hour. And sometimes people who don’t like to cook need to eat when they can’t afford, or simply don’t have physical access to, other folks’ cooking in whatever form. Sometimes my kitchen floor is a grotty mess and I can’t stand it one more minute and I sweep it whether I want to or not. Sometimes people who don’t like to cook can’t stand eating prepared food one more minute, either, and they end up in the kitchen glaring at their pot, screwing up their courage to attack the problem personally. Life’s like that.
That’s where both skill and guilt enter the picture. Many people who do not like to cook feel a lot of guilt about not liking to cook. They know that eating prepared food gives you less control about what you eat not just in terms of nutrition but also in terms of things like knowing whether or not those eggs were from battery-farmed chickens, or knowing whether or not those salad bar veggies were doused in sulfites to keep them looking fresh. They also know that when you don’t cook your own food, you’re stuck with what you can get instead of necessarily being able to get exactly what you want. And they know that there’s a whole huge social and emotional thing connected to cooking: food is love, food is culture, food is art, and all that. It can feel like, and sometimes be, a big hairy deal to not like cooking. It can feel like, and sometimes be, an even bigger, hairier deal to not know how.
Here’s the thing: there is nothing that can be cooked that you cannot cook. Yes, I mean you, the one who doesn’t know how to boil an egg.
Kitchen skill is, yes, skill. I won’t deny that. But skill can be acquired. That’s the whole point of it being a skill. You can learn a skill.
Kitchen talent is a different story. I won’t deny that either. Talent cannot be acquired, and having talent does make it easier and faster to learn skills, and makes it possible to learn them at a higher level than might be feasible for someone without the same talent. But even if you have zilch in the way of talent, you can still learn enough skills in the kitchen to turn out decent and tasty meals if you are so inclined.
It’s a bit like playing the piano. Few of us will ever be a Sviatoslav Richter or an Anthony de Mare or even a Tori Amos. But virtually anyone, if sufficiently motivated to learn the skills, can learn to play scales, bang their way through a Scarlatti sonatina, or thump out “Heart And Soul” or, Heaven help us, the power-chord opening to Van Halen’s “Jump.” And an awful lot of people can learn to play well enough to entertain themselves and their families and friends, or sightread Christmas carols at a party, fill in for their church’s organist when she’s sick, or even be part of a band or an amateur chamber music group.
Skill and talent, taken together, form a continuum. It would be cruel as well as inaccurate of me to suggest that any random passer-by could, given sufficient time and tutelage, become a Julia Child. But that does not by any means detract from the fact that Julia Child herself spent the first thirty or so years of her life as a committed, happy non-cook. She learned, and in the process discovered that she had a rare talent. You may or may not have a rare talent. But learning you can do.
But I digress. You will recall that I said above that there is nothing that can be cooked that you cannot cook. I meant it.
Cooking was not handed down from on high by a jealous and capricious Deity who liked to see humans fail. Cooking, by the very fact that it is a practice evolved to help feed people and thus keep them alive, is something that has to be able to be done with success by virtually any member of any society or culture anywhere. Everywhere in the world, people cook, and many of them with the most rudimentary equipment and ingredients and under the most challenging conditions. Cooking does not require the ability to read, count, or precisely measure, for if it did, a huge swath of the globe would have starved to death by now. The same thing would’ve happened if it required precision equipment or exact temperatures. Pretty much all you need to cook is fire, a vessel you can put in the fire that will hold food while it cooks, a stick to stir it with, and a knife to cut things up with.
It is not, as they say, rocket science, and you should trust no one who tries to tell you that cookery is a mystical magical secret science that only the most talented and educated adept can pull off. That’s horseshit. Billions of people would starve if that were true. Yes, sure, cookery can be an art, and in some cases, also a science. But most of the time it’s just cooking, and it’s a set of interrelated skills, and you can learn how to do it too.
Once you have acquired some basic skills, you can figure out where your talents lie, or perhaps more importantly, where your talents do not lie.
Probably 80% of what I cook, and maybe more, comes under the general heading of Peasant Food. I do this because while there are modes of cooking that require split-second timing, refined technique, and consummate artistry, these are honestly not my strengths. I have neither the compulsivity nor the finickiness, to say nothing of any knack whatsoever for a lot of the techniques that veer heavily into the territory of the visual arts.
The beauty of Peasant Food is that it requires none of this. If it is a food that poor people eat (or have historically eaten), regardless of where in the world it comes from, you can pretty much rest assured that it is both a) reasonably easy to make and b) almost invariably forgiving. It may take a long time to cook, as some Peasant Food dishes do–because it was both easy and pleasant to leave a covered pot nestled in the embers of a fire all day while you worked doing other things and come back to find that dinner was hot and ready–but for the most part it doesn’t take all that long to put Peasant Food dishes together.
For a great many years, my cookery relied essentially on two techniques: pan-frying and simmering. This was because that is all you need to know how to do for a positively gargantuan percentage of the world’s Peasant Food cooking. If you can fry and simmer, you can make virtually any soup, stew, or gumbo. You can make pasta sauces and fricasees. You can make a huge swath of dishes in the Indian cuisine vocabulary, another huge swath of Italian ones, a giant wodge of North African and east Asian, and not a small percentage of European foods besides. (”Exotic” just means something unfamiliar in your home culture. It does not, at all, mean “difficult.”) You can make eggs several ways, and pancakes, and even, if you are ambitious, homemade English muffins. You can eat rice and noodles and potatoes and oats and barley and millet and Jell-O Pudding. If you can fry and simmer, you can also saute, braise, poach, and steam. Among other things. Sure, you can branch out if you want to. But you don’t have to. If you can fry and simmer, you can eat like a king, or at least like a very well-fed peasant.
That’s the thing about cooking, from where I sit. You may not have the talent or desire to do the difficult stuff, but almost everyone can learn to do the easy stuff. At least sometimes. And so much of the difficult stuff is not stuff you really have to know how to do very often, or even at all, especially if you stick to Peasant Cooking. So I do encourage people who have even the slightest interest in cooking to try it. It’s a good Life Skill to have, like knowing how to swim.
Truly, the worst possible thing that can happen is that you screw up and something comes out inedible. When this happens, and it will, you will not be alone. Trust me when I say that all of us screw up sometimes, even those of us who have a lot of skills and talent as cooks. (It’s the other reason people order takeout.)
I suppose basically, my answer to the “but I can’t cook like you do!” people is that I haven’t always been able to cook like I do, either. I did not spring from the womb knowing how to make good home fries, or knowing what the difference is between a sauce bearnaise and a sauce hollandaise. (In fact, I’m not sure I know that even now, without looking it up. I am not much for French haute cuisine.) I have screwed up my fair share of dishes. (My first attempt at scrambled eggs was memorably crusty, and my first attempt at baking bread produced something that I could literally have used to wedge under truck tires to keep them from rolling backwards.) Doubtless I will screw up more.
I had to learn how to do this stuff. As it turns out I am also moderately talented at it. But I had to learn.
If you want to, so can you.
And if you don’t want to? That’s okay. I’m not the one judging you. And if you’re nice to me, I might even invite you over for dinner.
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10.05.08
Posted in Belovedary, food, good things, health, non-casein, non-dairy, vegan at 7:20 pm by Hanne Blank
For tedious reasons that do not bear a dissertation at this point, my Belovedary’s doctor has directed him to pursue a course of primarily vegan eating for the next six months. Dairy and eggs are strictly verboten, and while fish is permitted, meats of all other sorts are meant to be a “major holidays only, if you can’t avoid it” sort of thing.
The Belovedary’s co-workers, it seems, have had a skeptical field day with this, teasing that he’ll never be able to maintain such a regime, and proclaiming with a metaphorical wrist-to-forehead swoon that they would starve to death if they had to go vegan.
This is, of course, all very silly. But it’s likewise true that many people seem to be terrified of the idea, let alone the reality, of vegan eating and cooking. My reaction, on the other hand, was “oh, okay, but how do you feel about continuing to use oyster sauce in cooking?” ( We have decided that, as oysters are considered permissible in Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cooking, and as fish is permitted by the sawbones in question, the oyster sauce can stay. But if it couldn’t, there are vegan alternatives for it to be had.)
You see, my take on it is that human beings are omnivores, and “omnivore,” by definition, means that you’ll eat anything that is edible. Therefore the prospect of an entirely-vegetable meal, or even several months or years of entirely-vegetable meals, really shouldn’t bother anyone too much. Besides, as I have mentioned previously in this blog, you still get to eat French fries (made in vegetable oil) and pie (made with vegetable shortening), to say nothing of things like Fish-Fragrant Eggplant, ratatouille, hummus, mushroom-pecan pate, channa masala, and red beans and rice, so really, I am not so convinced that veganism is a prison sentence. (Unlike, say, being the captive audience of a militant animal-welfare-wingnut vegan who won’t shut the hell up about it, which is.)
Probably it helps that I was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life, and vegan for two of those, so this is not unfamiliar territory to me. Probably it also helps that with an allergy to dairy protein, I eat vegan by default any time I don’t eat a meal containing meat or eggs. But mostly, I think the way to stop being scared and feeling deprived when faced with veganism — or with any dietary regime that is limited in some way — is to get into the kitchen and start experimenting. Its hard to feel like you’re missing out if you’re eating really well within the boundaries of what is available to you.
I bring all this up because, given what we’ve been handed as a household, the content here for at least the next six months or so is likely to be 99.6% vegan. If you find that offensive, there are about seventy billion other food blogs out there, not a few of them fully and vigorously omnivorous, so don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.
As for me, I’m looking at it as an opportunity to blog about more dairy-free recipes — that will also, for the time being, be meat- and egg-free, or at least exist in versions that don’t use animal products. The astute among you will have already realized that just as you can often take a dish that contains animal products and vegetarianize or veganize it by removing and/or replacing the things you don’t want to eat, you can also take vegan recipes and add things to them. (I myself am partial to a hard-cooked egg or two in my channa masala.)
So what have we been eating since the whitecoated declaration was made? Noodle soup with tofu and chiles. Roasted cauliflower, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts. Homemade bread with cashew butter and apricot jam. Red beans slow-cooked with four kinds of sweet and hot peppers. Black bean soup enhanced with liberal handfuls of smallage (bunching celery) and poblano chiles. Aloo ghobi, the Indian potato-and-cauliflower dish. Oatmeal cookies with dried tart cherries. Cantonese-style pickled cauliflower. Hummus sprinkled with diced smoked black and green olives. Honeycrisp apples, “Shinko” Asian pears, Macoun apples, the last of the year’s peaches.
Tomorrow I will be making an apple pie in the morning. While it bakes, I’ll prep several pounds of plum tomatoes for gradual caramelizing in a slow oven all day long. We’ll eat them tossed with pasta, perhaps, or made into an out-of-this-world pesto and smeared on homemade pain de campagne. Or maybe I’ll marinate some portobello mushroom caps in sherry and soy sauce and olive oil and garlic and grill them on my panini grill, and put caramelized tomatoes on top of each one.
Yeah, I don’t know what I’d eat if I had to go vegan, either. It’s just so hard to choose.
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10.01.08
Posted in Books & Publishing, arrrrgh, cookbooks, desserts, food, how to, non-dairy, reviews, vegan at 8:11 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve got nothing against Jeff Rogers, author of Vice Cream: Over 70 Sinfully Delicious Dairy-Free Delights, although it does bear saying that his self-chosen sobriquet, “The Naughty Vegan!” is, in a word, twee.
Nor do I have anything against the idea behind his book, namely, that people who do not wish to consume animal dairy products, for whatever reason, might nevertheless enjoy a frozen dessert that wasn’t an ice or a sorbet. In fact, I heartily agree.
But I do have a number of problems with this recipe book.
First off, there’s the title. I will skip, for the moment, a discussion of why I find the invoking of terms like “vice” and “sin” in relation to food to be problematic and merely point out that if one is so devoted to clean living that one is capable of considering vegan desserts made (as instructed!) with all-organic ingredients and nary a speck of refined sugars to be “sinful,” one is perhaps living an overly-virtuous life.
Second is the fact that there are, in essence, only two recipes. All the “over 70″ variations are nothing more than ringing the changes on the two methods. Further, the two methods themselves differ only the slightest bit, in that the “raw” recipes use dates as sweetener instead of the “cooked” maple syrup called for in all the others. It is only out of courtesy that I can bring myself to say they are even two methods, rather than a more accurate one-and-a-half. Whether you find it admirable or infuriating that someone managed to parlay a recipe and a half — and not even a particularly challenging or difficult-to-derive recipe-and-a-half at that — into a book deal is entirely a matter of perspective, and heaven knows mine has oscillated to and fro all evening.
Nevertheless, the recipes are there, and therein lies the third problem: whoever edited this book should be keelhauled. I got the strong impression, reading it, that whoever was assigned to edit the book over at Celestial Arts (an imprint of Ten Speed Press) back in 2003 or so had never been inside a kitchen in his or her life, and had certainly not bothered to test any of the recipes.
Interestingly, the poor editing doesn’t show much on first browse. The copy is clean and the recipes are presented clearly. But when you begin to read with the intent of actually preparing (I’d say “cooking,” but for the fact that none of these desserts is cooked, meaning that the author has completely ignored the family of frozen desserts that use a custard base) one or two, the problems bob to the surface like clots of wheatgrass scum in an inadequately-mixed smoothie.
On the surface, the recipes seem very simple. The recipes consist of nut milks, prepared with either juice or water, some sweetener, and either fruit or flavorings in the form of extracts or spices. They rely heavily on the use of a blender and/or a juicer, not only to puree fruits and other flavorings, but also to generate the nut milk to be used as the base.
Let me say that again: to generate the nut milk to be used as a base. This book was published in 2004. Does anyone else see the problem here? Nowhere does Rogers discuss the use of prepared nut milks–which have been readily available since well before he wrote the book–in making vegan frozen desserts, nor does he even acknowledge their existence except for canned coconut milk, which he grudgingly acknowledges will do in a pinch. Also, while I appreciate the fact that Vice Cream does not rely entirely upon soy milk, the fact that it is mentioned nowhere in the book is an issue that, like a number of others, makes me think that Rogers did not approach his task as a cookbook writer — which is to say as someone aware of and capable of explaining the technical and material scope of his project and where it fits in to the larger culinary picture — but primarily as a chronicler of things he had done in his own kitchen that happened to work out well. Sadly, he did not have an editor perspicacious enough to query him on these issues, or to just encourage him to get a blog instead of attempting an actual book, which frankly would’ve been a lot more appropriate to the material.
While we’re on the subject of Things A Halfway Competent Cookbook Editor Should Have Caught, beware the paragraph Rogers includes on non-nutritive sweeteners for these desserts. Rogers recommends the use of stevia for sweetening without adding sugars in order to make diabetic-friendly and low-GI-friendly desserts. Fine as far as it goes; as it happens I am a big fan of stevia so was glad to see it featured. Rogers then fails to address the fact that stevia is produced in both liquid and powder forms, and in the liquid form, that both glycerin- and alcohol-based solutions are available, and that these variations are going to pose different challenges to creating a final product that performs well in terms of taste and texture. Most bizarrely of all, Rogers does not even hint that there could be a major texture problem with stevia-sweetened creams, which rather boggles the mind given that he is calling for recipes that ordinarily include a cup of maple syrup to be sweetened, instead, with one and a half teaspoons of a dry powder. That’s rather a lot of liquid to have just vanish from a frozen dessert and expect to have it turn out in anything like the same texture as the original recipe.
Similar lack of testing shows, and even more blatantly, in Rogers’ suggestion that brown rice syrup “may work well” when mixed with other sweeteners. Yes, it may. So might agave nectar, or malt syrup, or crystalline fructose, or for that matter the sweet sweet nectar of generosity and kindness that courses through my veins and that has so far kept me from using obscenities in writing this review. But again, I expect more from a cookbook than a hand-wave and a “well, hey, this might work.” Mr. Rogers, if you’re reading this, you may be a stalwart person, a charming conversationalist, and a dab hand with a Champion juicer, but you’re a crap cookbook writer, and you can tell your editor I said so.
While we’re on the sweetener subject, let’s talk about maple syrup. I like maple syrup. I like it a lot. I cook with it frequently. But it has a rather particular and specific flavor of its own, even when very cold. To have it feature in every single one of the non-raw recipes seems like… oh, I don’t know… no, wait, I do: culinary laziness. In some of the recipes, like the chai, or (of course!) the maple walnut, it seems like just the thing. But I can’t be the only person who saw it in a recipe for peppermint ice cream and involuntarily made a face. Maple syrup simply isn’t the best sweetener in every conceivable case. Even if one doesn’t want to attempt honey (not vegan to some) or refined cane sugar, there are numerous other sweetening options, some of which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. For that matter, why not explore other maple syrup options? For instance, how about using the more strongly-flavored Grade B syrup in places where a stronger maple flavor would be desirable? What about crystallized maple sugar, which has a very alluring texture? The All Maple Syrup All The Time regime is lazy and dull, and the All Honey Date All The Time regime in the “raw” portion of the book isn’t any better.
While I’m here, I just have to say a word or two about one particular paragraph in the front matter. On page 12 of the edition I am looking at, there’s a short paragraph about durian. Just as durian itself is a humdinger of a fruit, this is a humdinger of a paragraph:
“…[durian is] shipped to the United States frozen, so you may find it in the freezer section. Durian is a large, thorny, hard-skinned fruit containing four to five sections of fleshy fruit, each enclosing several large seeds. A seven-pound durian will yield about two and a half pounds of edible fruit. When the fruit is ripe and at room temperature, you can pull apart some of the thorns to create a tear in the skin, exposing the fruit within. Be careful as the thorns are sharp and can cut skin. You can also cut the durian open with a knife, which is a little safer. Be warned that durian is also called “stinky fruit.” It has a very distinctive odor, sometimes mistaken for natural gas.”
Where to begin? First of all, in many major cities (very much including Seattle, where Rogers lives), durian is in fact available fresh. But let us suppose that frozen durian is the only thing available. How long does it take to thaw one out? Should it be thawed at room temperature or in the refrigerator? Does the texture change markedly if it has been frozen, and if so, does this affect how one might handle it for a recipe? You certainly won’t find out from Rogers, who leapfrogs straight from dragging this deep-frozen sea mine of a tropical fruit home from the nearest freezer section to having a ripe durian at room temperature. Which he then proceeds to indicate can be pulled apart, at some risk to life and limb, before making the concession that one could conceivably use a knife.
What is that about? I mean, aside from patent idiocy? You can render a watermelon into pieces by dropping it from a height, too, and portion out servings of tuna noodle casserole by sticking your bare hand right into the bubbling hotdish, but most folks prefer to avoid unnecessary injury and mess and use the utensils that were developed specifically for the purpose of performing such tasks. You know, like knives. Which would certainly be the first thing I reached for if I had occasion to try to dismember something that weighed as much as a sack of potatoes and was sufficiently spiky that it would do nicely as a projectile weapon.
Those of you who have encountered the durian in the flesh may also concur with me that the warning about the smell comes a bit late in the game and is, in fact, almost criminally understated. This is a fruit, after all, that has been banned from public transit, airplanes and airports, and some hotels in the countries (like Malaysia) where it is grown, and these are countries where large numbers of people actively enjoy eating it. I have eaten durian, both fresh and frozen, and in various preparations, and I quite like the flavor. But even I cannot help but concur with Richard Sterling, who writes “…… its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” There is a Malay saying that durian “smells like him, but tastes like her.” This is, you begin to comprehend, not a fruit to be approached in a casual sort of way, unless one lives not only alone, but without any neighbors within, say, a half a mile.
And after all this, how much durian pulp is actually required to make the Coconut Durian flavour of raw “vice cream”? A whopping one and a quarter cups. God alone knows what Rogers assumes the hapless vegan is going to do with the remainder of an extremely large and, at best, rather difficult fruit. For this, and his many other sins, including neglecting to mention that the same markets that sell whole durian fresh or frozen also often have the frozen pulp available in smaller quantities much more amenable to experimentation, I have but one recommendation:
Divide surplus durian pulp into two cardboard takeaway food containers. Seal them up, but not too thoroughly.
Send one to Jeff Rogers.
And send the other to his editor.
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