A Finger in Every Pie

Digging the Dirt: I'm not referring to sustainable farming

Usually when I think and occasionally write about politics and food, or the politics of food, it's about things like access and equity and choices and sustainability and other nice Kingsolvery, Gore-ish, Waters-ly, Pollan-esque type stuff. 

But maybe I'm feeling a little mean today, because this story was so juicy, so delicious, that I couldn't quite keep it to myself.  So read amongst yourselves, and decide whether or not John McCain's wife has actually ever tied on a frilly posied apron in order to start wielding her spatula.

Done?  Okay.  Now, I was originally going to link to "Cindy's Recipes" directly on McCain's site, which also bore the proud banner of "McCain Family Recipes" (I don't know about your family, but my grandma was most assuredly not busy whipping up Ahi Tuna with Napa Cabbage Slaw or Passion Fruit Mousse).  But this very morning, as I was about to start creating the links, the pages began to disappear from the McCain website in front of my very eyes.  Some busy little person who lifted those recipes in Cindy's name is desperately trying to save their job -- unless, of course, they're already history, and the task of erasing this embarrassment has been undertaken by a new fetchit. 

But at least you have the pretty side-by-side recipe comparisons in the Huffington Post article to keep you entertained while you decide how to cast your vote come November, you foodie, you. 

Resistance

    "I believe our technologies, Elizabeth, these machines we now live with, are evolving, to use your word, faster than our emotions can accomodate."
    He headed for bed, but I was curious.
    "Do you mean, in the face of it all, in the face of everything changing, a whole way of life gone in a generation, that we have become numb?"
    "I mean that the speeding bus goes flying off the mountain road." 
      - from "The Walls At Yogpar" in Resistance, by Barry Lopez

On Saturday I went shopping for food three different times, in three different places -- using three different modes of transportation.  I know that I am lucky to be able to go  shopping at three different places, to get exactly what I want.  I have the luxury of time (at least on the weekend), I have transportation, I have someone else to go shopping with me, I have money -- at least money enough to be choosy, if not always to get exactly what I would like.  And yet the other morning, despite my good fortune, something rankled within me.   It may not have helped that I was reading Resistance on my bus ride to my Nia dance class (as well as the middle one of the three marketing excursions), and came across the quote above. 

It wasn't about going to all the different places.  I've lived and travelled in places where I've shopped like that before.  I lived in Aix-en-Provence one summer, and I went to many different places for provisions.  I had a little apartment shared with another student.  Whoever was awake first would grab a fistful of change and run down four flights to the boulangerie for a fresh hot baguette to have with butter so good it was a whole new category of food, as far as I was concerned.  I made friends with the butcher down the street and practiced my French as I asked for chicken or tried to find out just how spicy the merguez sausage really was.  I found that if I ran out of class just at noon, when we finished, I could catch the last hour or so of the daily market for salad greens, and raspberries and apricots, and looking at things that were new or strange to me, trying to ask what they were. 

And Aix, for all its villagey adorableness, wasn't exactly provincial.  It was and is filled with a very fancy selection of shops -- and if I'd chosen, I could have gotten all my supplies at the big Monoprix supermarket.  It's just that even though I was shopping at lots of different stores, they were all close by.  Everything was in walking distance.  Storekeepers knew each other, and they knew their clients.  Even in the short time I was there I came to know people, just by the act of shopping.  In other cultures, in other places, going to many places to find food is a way of life.  We don't do it by custom here -- at least not any more -- and not quite yet again, although I think many among us hope that our society may be devolving back to some more villagey ways of life -- perhaps this kind of shopping among them.

Saturday's odyssey looked like this:  I went from an early trip to the farmers' market (subway) for all my lovely, local, seasonal fruits and vegetables, home to drop off the first load, then to dance class and my favorite specialty market for organic dairy products as well as a few other things that only they carry (bus), and then later in the day to a big, noxious market out of the city that (despite or perhaps because of its predilection for employees posing as dancing cows and chickens) has excellent meat at a fraction of city prices (car).  The last shopping leg was combined with a trip up to see my father, and bring him some groceries too.  But considering all that different shopping just for our own household, I felt a little ashamed of myself.  What an overprivileged little snit I am, being so finicky about having everything just so.  And then I began to think about my shame. 

Is it wrong to want to support the small family farmers who truck their goods in so early in the morning?  That one I know the answer to.  Of course not.  But I spend more there than I would for supermarket produce, so I end up compensating by trying to buy meat at a cheaper venue.  Much as I would love to, I cannot afford the $17 a pound that beautiful, locally-raised lamb chops would cost me at the farmers' market  -- at least not on a regular basis.  The protein needs of our household, particularly my own, dictate that we eat pretty high on the food chain.  So I spend on the produce, and spend down on the meat.  In between, I go to another store to buy things I can find neither at the farmers' market, nor at the dancing cow palace of meat.  And because the shopping in my neighborhood is, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty awful, I try to get a week's food shopping done most Saturdays.  Most times I don't actually go to three places, but in the summer, when the market is flourishing, I often go to two. 

Would it make me a better person to shop more often at the stores in my neighborhood?  The freshness of the food is often questionable, and sadly the cleanliness of the establishments leave a lot to be desired.   I can think about this in a number of ways.  Either I'm the overprivileged, gentrifying little snit who lives in my neighborhood for the cheap rent but turns up my nose at shopping there (I'm not, really.  Honest.  I speak Spanish, talk to my neighbors, and bring muffins and other goodies to a sick man in the next building on a regular basis).  Or I'm engaged in an act of resistance, a personal boycott against big supermarket chains that are dirtier and uglier in my neighborhood than elsewhere in the city, where food is allowed to spoil on the shelves and no-one seems to care or bother, since the corporate entities involved in the "big food" system still make their profit.  I'm staging a personal protest against a system that has allowed us to get so far away from our food -- and from everything and everyone else as well.  Do I think I'm challenging the status quo of the fast-food nation?  Certainly I believe that since we never eat fast food, and only use takeout as an occasional option/treat when we're very tired, I must be bucking the system merely by making high quality homemade food for us every day.   What a saint I am.  But that's the quandary -- I can only see it from these two vantage points, sinner or saint. 

I suppose I think (to use the quote from "The Walls At Yogpar" out of context) that parts of our food system (the large conglomerate parts, obviously) are like a bus that's flying off the mountain road.  I'm living in a neighborhood where I see village life all the time, in tiny increments:  the man who peels oranges on a spiral machine and sells them on the street corner;  the woman who sells peeled mangos on a stick, the "taco ladies" on 105th Street who have their little stand; the woman selling oatmeal and tamales out of big containers on the street in the early morning when I'm on my way to work.  It's not that I don't recognize my own contradictions.  I constantly romanticize the notion of wanting a simpler way of life, but then again, you will take my iBook from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands -- or when you replace it with a new one.  And a simpler way of life would imply shopping in my own neighborhood rather than running to hell and gone just for food, for goodness' sake. 

And that's the crux of it, right there. For goodness' sake.  In order to have a little goodness in our lives, something good that's within my control.  That much I can do.  I can control how we eat, and where our food comes from.  And I recognize that not everyone has even that small luxury anymore. 

I don't have a neat way to tie up this post and put a little ribbon on the top, since I'm still struggling with my feelings about food, access, privilege, neighborhoods and all the other multiply-layered questions that these issues raise, once we allow them out for an airing.  Please feel free to weigh in here.  I'd really love to know what you're thinking. 

Comfort me with Cookies

“Whatever…the future’s not here yet.  I try not to think about tomorrow or yesterday.  Tomorrow’s a long time away and yesterday is long gone.  There are only about 330 todays left here.  Only when I return will my life move on like normal people’s.”
    - C, February 26, 2005

“Sure.  I guess you could write in your blogger if you want.  You have to call me SGT Slacker though (SGT Rock is taken).  Just kidding, C is fine.”
    - C, March 19, 2005

When Moira posted a contest with the motif of Comfort Food, I knew there were many foods I could write about.  At one point, I thought about my mother’s simple, wonderful homemade applesauce, which I’ve since morphed into a something-more-sophisticated version.  I also considered my favorite cornbread recipe, my love of which has roots in a family Sunday morning breakfast tradition.  And I almost settled on something, anything chocolate because of the fact that my adoration of chocolate has bonded me to my father (another unrepentant cacao fiend) since I was a child.  All of these had merit, and have stories of comfort attached to them.  No doubt they are stories I will tell at some point.  But for now I decided to write about what it means to use a special food to comfort another – in particular, someone far away from their home and loved ones, someone in great need. 

I looked at the specs for this contest.  Moira, it's true, did say to write about one of your own comfort foods.  But I figured I could write about something that comforts me and which, for that very reason, I decided to send to someone else as a form of comfort.  After all, who isn’t comforted by cookies?  You see, I have this cookie that I make.  It’s just a kitchen-sink sort of oatmeal cookie, but it’s G’s absolute favorite.  It’s my brother’s fave too.  And I love them as well.  Of all the cookies I make, this is the one that I turn to when I want something that speaks to the idea of “home”.  It’s not a complex or fancy cookie with highbrow ingredients – not a glacéed citron florentine or a multi-bean espresso bar, but an old-fashioned cookie with lumps, bumps, chunks and crunch.  I’m talking about the kind of cookie you’d give to a child with a glass of milk after school.  The sort of cookie you’d make to put in a tin and bring as a guest-gift for a country-house weekend in the fall.  The cookie you’d send overseas, to a soldier at war.

The other morning I was listening to National Public Radio, as I usually am upon awakening.  There was a piece about a woman whose husband is a soldier on a tour of duty in Iraq, which circumstance had reduced her and her children to living in their car.  She had appealed to an agency that helps indigent families of soldiers, but with the stipulation that she would only accept help if they didn’t tell “her soldier”.  She didn’t want him to know because it would cause him to worry about them, distracting him and putting him at greater risk while in harm’s way.   The story was, of course, heart-rending in and of itself -- aside from the question of whether or not those who are being sent overseas have their needs taken care of, both at war and here at home. 

The agency mentioned in the piece kept referring to “your soldier”.  “Your soldier” is the person that you know in the war, regardless of their relationship to you:  child, spouse, sibling, parent or friend.  And as I listened, I thought, as I have each day since the end of  November, about C – "my soldier”.

I work for an educational development institute that’s part of a large university.  Within our own organization, we have a number of sub-groups.  There are math consultants, writing and literacy specialists, after-school practitioners, and those who work in adult education.  There are directors of programs, co-directors and associate directors.  We also have a sizeable support staff, with program assistants, a receptionist, a bookkeeper, and numerous others.  It’s a pretty friendly place – we chat on occasion, and know a fair amount about each other.  I know about E’s son’s teaching job, and P’s daughters.  V and I used to commiserate about boyfriend problems. We have cakes at birthdays and send each other flowers for hospitalizations and gifts for weddings and babies.  But one person I never felt I knew very well was C – until now.  C had been on the support staff for as long or longer than I’ve been at the institute, which is seven years.  He made an enormous volume of photocopies, moved and fixed equipment, and generally did a bit of just about everything.  A quiet person, pretty reserved – that was how I thought of him.  He often helped me out of a pinch with copies that I needed for a class at the last minute, or took a look at my printer when it wasn’t working.  I knew that C had been in ROTC and was in the National Guard – and I, like some others, avoided talking about politics with him.  This was a kind of misplaced delicacy on my part, I now think – not wanting to offend him with my anti-war sensibilities, I shied away from engaging C in a discussion where I could really listen to him and understand how he feels.  Which, as it turns out, may not be as far removed from my own feelings as I had assumed.  Clearly I needed a reminder that someone’s uniform is not necessarily an indicator of his or her inner life.   

A few months ago, C was called up and after a period of training, shipped out, first to Kuwait, and then to Iraq.  It was then that all of us at the institute realized what a family we were.  Differences of opinion suddenly made no difference.  We were united in one purpose – to support C in any way we could through the ordeal he would be undergoing for the next 18 months to 3 years (the projected possible length of his tour of duty).   We made a party and pooled together for a gift.  I hugged C for the first time ever when I said goodbye, tears in my eyes, admonishing him to please take care of himself, to please come back home to all of us.

Since then we’ve written, emailed, sent packages.  We’ve developed a ritual – whenever anyone gets a letter or card from C, it’s photocopied and put in everyone’s mailbox so that we can all share it. Sometimes we forward his emails around as well.  And he writes to us a lot, which is our “comfort food” these days.  We’ve discovered that C is a wonderful writer – funny and brash and truthful and soulful.  In some ways, he’s far more present for me now than he was as a reserved and somewhat shy young man in the office.  And I feel the pain of this, and want to know him in person as I now do through his letters.   

So next month it’s my turn to send out a package.  I’ve tried to find out what he might like.  P told me that he likes chocolate – but then E told me that he doesn’t, and that in fact he doesn’t much like sweets at all.  So I emailed to ask him myself, and he told me that he’d been craving Swedish Fish, and that chocolate was a big premium item in the desert, since it melts so quickly – and that he likes the surprise of opening a package and NOT knowing what’s in it.   I’m collecting some sci-fi books, since I know he likes those – and DVDs apparently are like gold and currency, much shared and traded, so I’m trying to search some good ones out in that arena as well.  And I bought some bags of Swedish Fish already, and I figure I’ll include some tins of nuts, since I’m always worried about everyone’s protein intake.  This is especially true when people are eating institutional food.  Sometimes the carbs are the only thing edible on the plate – or the metal tray, as the case may be.

And I’ll send these cookies. Knowing C, I figure that even if he’s not a big cookie eater, he’ll share them around with his unit.  It's up to him -- he can eat them, or share them, or both, as he will.  I hope they will be comfort food.  To me they are cookies that sing of home, anyone’s home:  hearty and crunchy with oatmeal, browned butter and brown sugar, nuts, chocolate and dried fruit.  Heck, they’re practically a meal in a cookie.  I know that as I make them, I’ll be guilty of magical thinking.  I’ll make these cookies as a mantra, a talisman, a prayer to bring C home unharmed.  Come home, C, come home to your family, your friends and co-workers – your job is waiting for you if you want it.  We all make our own photocopies these days.  Come home all of you -- all you young and old men and women who are far from your homes in this war -- and all of you who are fighting a war on your own turf and are not so far from home, but still just want to be able to go there.  May you all enter your houses, safely and healthily and soon, and sit at tables with your loved ones, eating your favorite cookies and your favorite comfort foods, drinking in the love and life and warmth of home, wherever that may be and whoever that may mean.

Kitchen Sink Oatmeal Cookies

1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter
1 cup firmly packed dark muscovado or brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cups oatmeal
1 cup toasted slivered almonds
1 cup toasted, coarsely chopped walnuts
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
3/4 cup dried tart cherries
3/4 cup golden raisins
(You can change, substitute or leave out any of the fruits, nuts and chocolate.  This particular combination, however, has enjoyed universal popularity with everyone I know, even those who claim to hate one or the other of these elements.)

Heat oven to 350°F.  Put the nuts, fruits and chips in a bowl, toss with a tablespoon or two of the flour, and set aside.  Place the butter in a saucepan, and melt it over low heat.  Continue cooking it, watching carefully, until the liquid butter has turned a rich light brown and gives off a nutty smell.  If this “beurre noisette” burns, you must throw it away and begin over again, since it will give food an acrid and terrible flavor.   Let the butter cool; beat in both sugars.  Add eggs and vanilla; beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda, and salt and blend together. Add oats and fruit/nut/chocolate combo; mix thoroughly.   It will be difficult to mix – you may need to use your hands, since there are  almost more chunks than dough.  Don’t worry about this too much in terms of baking, since the dough will rise a little around all of the “add-ins”.  Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets, and pat down a little into cookie shapes.  Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until light golden brown. Cool 1 minute on cookie sheets; remove to wire rack. Cool completely. Store tightly covered.

Yield:  between 6 and 8 dozen cookies

Gentle Persuasion: Overcoming Food Prejudices

"I'm just a promiscuous eater...I can't establish a long-term  relationship with any one food. It's the gastro version of Looking For Mr. Goodbar.  I pick all these foods, and eventually they turn on me."
     - Jim Steinman, songwriter

When Jim Steinman made the above statement, it was in explanation of a huge, all-encomapassing order in a Chinese restaurant.  That causes me to think that he was using the term "promiscuous eater" to describe his greed.  I too consider myself a promiscuous eater, but not in the sense of being greedy (which may also be true of me on occasion).  I think of it as being willing to experiment, to try new things, to work at overcoming any minor distastes.  There are a lot of foods that G claims he doesn't like.   But I have found over time that he too is something of a promiscuous eater.  He'll try things, even when he first greets the notion with a face or an "ewwwww..." 

Ever since Molly of the gorgeous blog Orangette posted a recipe for her friend Doron's meatballs a month or so ago, I've wanted to try them.  There were a few sticking points.  The first one was mine:  they have raisins in them.  I'm not a huge fan of sweet and savory foods together, although I've been overcoming this.  (Despite my efforts in this direction, I hope never to eat pineapple on pizza or tongue in raisin sauce.)  I find that a moderate amount of tangy dried fruit works out okay in meat dishes, especially when it's balanced by lots of savory notes like garlic, onion, cilantro and cumin, as in Molly's recipe.  The second issue was onions -- G will of course eat foods with onion in them (since otherwise I would have to stop cooking altogether), but he's not a fan of the flavor of raw onions.  I dealt with this by sauteeing the onions before adding them to the meat mix, so I could gentle their flavor a little.  The recipe also contained toasted pinenuts, which I adore.  G wandered into the kitchen as I was mixing the meat and cocked an eyebrow.  "What's wrong?" I asked.  "Hmmm....well, you know I'm not much of a pinenut guy," he said.  But he hastened to say, "I'm sure these will be good, honey."

Then, however, we got to the final frontier:  yogurt sauce.  G professes to hate yogurt other than Trix Yogurt, a noxious concoction which I assume is composed of flavored processed yogurt and luridly colored cereal.  It has never been my misfortune to have an encounter any closer than the supermarket's dairy case with this faux-yogurt disaster.   (G has since corrected my ill-informed idea about cereal -- apparently there's none in the yogurt.  It's called Trix because the yogurt itself is luridly colored, and there are TWO colors in each container -- ooooohhhh.  Or do I mean ewwwwww...)

My removal of the container of plain, whole-milk Greek yogurt from the fridge occasioned an almost involuntary "ewwwww" from my darling.  "I'm going to make a delicious sauce out of this -- it has things you like too, like garlic and cumin."  G shrugged.  Well, he didn't have to eat the sauce.  If he liked the meatballs, that would be good enough for me.  I've often tried to appeal to logic by reminding him of his unbridled passion for Indian food, which is a cuisine that could not exist without onions and yogurt.  Logic is not the answer when it comes to food dislikes, I've found. 

I made side dishes that I knew would appeal -- broccoli with garlic and hot red pepper flakes, orzo with butter and grated cheese.   I plated it all up, with a bowl of yogurt sauce which I assumed would be just for me.  G ate some dinner.  "Yummy," he said.  Then with no prompting, he reached over and dipped a meatball into the bowl of yogurt sauce.  "You're having some?" I said in surprise.  "Well, of course I'll try it," he said.  He ate it.  With no comment, he dipped another meatball in the sauce.  And again.  I was not cunning enough to hide my triumph.   "Ummm...soooo,  you like the yogurt sauce," I said.  He looked at me with that "don't give me any I-told-you-so crap" look, reached over and gave me a long kiss, and then continued eating, orzo, broccoli, meatballs -- and yogurt sauce.  Who knows?  At this rate, I have hope that mushrooms, olives and avocadoes may someday appear on our joint menus, rather than being forced to exile on my plate alone...

Mostly Martha and Mac 'n' Cheese: It's A Good Thing

As anyone who is a regular consumer of available news media is doubtless aware, there was a bit of confusion over just when Martha Stewart was actually going to be sprung.  By the time you read this, it will have happened.   We were told it would be sometime this week, but there was some obfuscation over the exact date and time.  My own experience (and no, I haven't yet had any long-term incarceration at Rikers, just that one civil-disobedience rap, your honor) stems from having known someone who was released from prison a while ago.  The authorities kept changing the date of the release.   I think they do that either to throw the press off the scent, or maybe to keep the rest of the institution's population quiet.   

Think about it.  If there's this much furor among those of us on the outside, can you imagine what's happening with the inmates of Alderson?  They must be in an uproar.  Martha's leaving? Who's going to make them crab-apple jelly from fruit stolen on a grounds walk?  Who's going to up their vegetable intake with wild dandelion greens?  Who'll teach morning yoga class, and help them with decorative stencils for their cells?  Okay, the other stuff is more or less true (or at least reported in the press) but I made up the part about the stencils.  I couldn't resist.  Long before her current period of infamy, Martha was an easy target for domestic humor.   In the past she has occasionally appeared to be angered by that.  She's mellowed, though, apparently, and perhaps developed a better sense of humor about herself.  I'm sure she's well aware of being the probable subject of even more ragging and roasting upon her release. 

Whatever I personally may think of her crimes (and I do think harshly of them; I'm not a fan of insider trading), I must say that I have long thought her punishment absolutely ridiculous.  Why incarcerate this woman at the taxpayers' expense?  Here's a person who's not an immediate danger to society (unless the population at large takes to eating the macaroni and cheese referenced below at frequent intervals, since if they do so they will collapse from carb/dairy/fat overdose).  I also didn't think it likely that she would be "rehabilitated" by a prison stay.  If any rehabilitation were to occur, it would more likely be the result of the sheer humiliation of exposure and bad publicity.  I had a completely different plan for Martha. 

As an education consultant I'm exposed to the evils of public school food on a daily basis.  I'm not going to terrorize you with graphic details of the aromas that emanate from school kitchens, the sad evidence on children's lunch trays, the dreadful waste of it all.  But I will say that it's not a good situation.  The food is at best indifferent, at worst quite inedible and sometimes spoiled, often cold, and dreadfully lacking in dietary balance and fresh produce.   And it is a simply awful reality that there are many, many children, at least in New York City, for whom the school lunch is their one shot at a real meal during the day.  Given all this, I came up with my Martha scheme.  Why not give Martha a community service term instead of a prison sentence?  Harness all her brilliant organizational and considerable culinary talents, and put her in charge of the NYC public school lunch program!  Let her contribute something to a service infrastructure instead of being a financial burden on the public.  I'd be willing to wager that she would have whipped that system into shape in no time.   I'm not saying she would have become Alice Waters or even Jamie Oliver, but she could have been Martha, doing something good for the undernourished bodies and spirits of schoolkids. 

But I was not consulted when Martha's sentencing came due.  It was probably just an oversight.  In spite of that, she's apparently made good use of her time in the clink.  She does indeed have a couple of sweet deals pending her release, and there'll be no lack of work for her.  Not for Martha the depressing case of the released inmate who faces poor odds in the search for a decent and sustaining job.  However, Martha has apparently been sensitized to the plight of prison inmates, and is going to use her celebrity to champion their cause.  If, despite her different social class and situation in life, she doesn't cut,  run and turn her back on her recent mates, perhaps prison's actually been something of a transformational experience.  I still think my plan was the better one, however. 

I've never been much of a Martha fan.  To say the least, my domestic style is pitiably lacking in Martha-ness, and I don't even own a hot-glue gun.  The girl does have some serious recipes though, and a goodly number of them are right out there for no charge on her website  --  a refreshing difference from those pricey subscription recipe sites.  So, in honor of her imminent freedom, I want to share with you my own favorite recipe from the domestic-diva-turned-jailbird. 

I know you can't really tell what this is.  I'm still photographically challenged, especially when I don't notice that my own big head is getting in my light.   But it's an extra-large pan of Mac 'n' Cheese -- Martha's "Perfect" Macaroni and Cheese, to be exact.  Here in celebration of the very idea of "release" is G's and my all-time favorite dish of creamy, starchy, cheesy, crumby, crunchy comfort food.   It's basically a high-carb, high-fat (albeit also high-protein) coronary-on-a-plate, containing butter, whole milk (you could modify it I guess), and lots and lots of cheese in the sauce (I often use a mix of various types). Then there's a layer of MORE cheese on top of the mac 'n' sauce, and then a thick overcoat of fresh breadcrumbs tossed in butter.  This provides excellent browning and serious crunch factor enhancement.  It makes enough for 12 people, so you can cut this recipe in half if you wish.  I never do.  I make the whole gigantic panful for our household of two, and we chow it down blissfully over a period of several days as dinner's main course with a salad, as a side to other mains, and for lunch.  I also freeze lunch containers and take it to work.  I like to side it with sauteed spinach, which gives a good, green-leafy counterpoint to all that creaminess. 

So whether you love her or hate her, raise a fork to Martha, and let's hope that she'll donate some of her well and/or ill-gotten gains and her considerable talent and energy to help those less fortunate, whether in prisons or schools.  As she herself might say, it would be a good thing. 

Guns and Butter: One Good Eater's Opinion

"Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat." - Hermann Goering

"We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns." - Joseph Goebbels

It always amazes me how much politicians, militarists and the economists who work for them love to use these phrases from the Third Reich to demonstrate a nation's basic decision: how to allocate scarce resources (land, labor, capital) to defend itself as a nation while (supposedly) not neglecting the needs of its people.  As our social studies teachers in school were at such pains to explain to us, guns represent defense spending, while butter represents social spending.  What they never explained was that while we can't shoot with butter, we also can't eat guns.  I have yet to prepare a really delectable beurre blanc with a .357 magnum -- but I'm sure if you have that recipe, you'll share. 

I know it's kind of early in the life of this blog for me to start in on politics and my very obvious biases and being horribly opinionated and all the rest of the blah blah blah blah.  But it's not my fault that we had a State of the Union address last night.  And it's hard to think or write solely about food when the mind is on overwhelm because the US Congress is being asked for 80 billion dollars more to press forward with the supposed agenda of "making the world safe and free".  So just for a minute or two, today, I'm thinking about food in a slightly bigger context than what I'm having for dinner -- and I promise not to do this too often. (Worry not.  I'm still very focused on the pastrami/corned beef sandwich I'm going to eat at Katz's Deli tonight.  Maybe I'll even take a picture, if you're good.) Anyway, back to rocket launchers and dairy products.  As those of you who are consumers of news media are no doubt aware, this new request for another 80 billion will up the spending totals in Iraq to more than 300 billion.  This would bring our projected federal deficit to $427 billion dollars.  Way big. 

Here's what became clear to me last night during the address of the purported Leader of the Free World:  it seems that our government is perfectly happy to mount up this enormous war debt, but is terrified of incurring financial problems by protecting the future of our elderly through the Social Security system.  So they've come up with a new plan.  We're to  somehow or other invest the money we would have put into Social Security ourselves.  I have a sneaking suspicion that this new plan is not a good deal for most people in this country.  And certainly not a good deal for people like me who aren't anywhere near retirement age, but have been paying our cut into Social Security for a goodly number of years.   Oh, and one more thing.  If my understanding is clear, war debt is usually incurred through...war.  Which as we know consists of killing people.  This is quite different to my mind from a debt imposed by the Social Security system, which would be accumulated by insuring that adequate food, housing and other basic necessities are guaranteed to retirees: elderly folk who will have contributed substantially to this country's GNP for a period of, in most cases, several decades. 

So I promise, within the next few days I'll be back to yummy recipes, fave new ingredients, and some of the delights of eating in New York.  Enjoy it while you can.  As for the seemingly far-off but actually closer-than-you-think future, forget about butter.   If the current administration has their way, we may, as elders, have to scramble for bare necessities, rather than scrambling our eggs in pure, sweet butter; these simple things which we take for granted will become luxury items unlikely to be found in our plats du jour.