Cheryl Katz

Michael Ruhlman has been addressing an important question on his blog (Ruhlman.com):  Why do we cook?

I’m cooking a lot now because I’m in culinary school, but what led me to finally make a real career choice and seek training in culinary arts was that after I stopped working, and left to my own devices, I failed to make any other choice, but found myself cooking on a daily basis.

What drove me to cook then, and the basis for choosing a life that will without question revolve around food, is a question with so many answers that I can hardly decide which one to describe first.

I started cooking after I left my job because I didn’t have any reason left not to.  I didn’t cook as much while I was working because I felt always rushed for time, and to satisfy the time vs. hunger balance I wound up making a lot of quick and easy meals  – from scratch as I was able.  Being a full time stay at home mom afforded me the time to plan and explore, which resulted in more elaborate food adventures and a constant expansion of my skills and knowledge.

I was motivated to cook once the time was available because I viewed it as my new job description – feeding my family well was part of what I understood to be my contribution to family life in lieu of money.  I wanted to eat well, and I wanted a kid who doesn’t throw a fit when you feed her something other than chicken tenders and PB&J.  While these are simple goals, they require a lot of food-focused effort.

My friend Elizabeth Willse recently posted a review of Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant.  This book of reflections from writers and foodies about what they eat when they’re alone is now on my plan-to-read list.  Her review got me thinking about the things I like to cook, and the completely separate category of what I like to eat when I have only myself to think of and/or don’t feel like cooking.  I eat more bread and Camembert or triple creme cheeses than any one person probably ought to, but then even the cheeses I choose often have identities defined by where they come from or what they are made of.

If it were just about the food, I wouldn’t have pursued a structured culinary education, and I wouldn’t be writing this post today.  By now my constant search for patterns and meaning is no secret to anyone who would be reading this entry.  A fellow student once asked me, “Can’t you just be cooking food?”  I can’t.  I cook and I eat not for the love of food alone, but because I became aware of the experience of food, beyond the flavor to the story that starts in the ground and ends on my plate, through eating; I’m here learning what I learn, doing what I do and planning my future moves because I want to be an active author in that story.

When is a carrot just a carrot?  It never is.  It’s always a note in a chord in a song, no matter how simple or complex a song, and it’s a note with context and history and endless lifetimes of associated meaning that is viewed from different angles when used in different ways.

I cook because when I do, I feel connected to what I eat, to the environment that produced it, to who I am and who I will be as a result of the eating and the cooking.

I’m posting this largely for the benefit of @noirbettie, but figured it might be of interest to others as well!  When I want brownies and find myself without any of the usual suspects for making brownies (unsweetened chocolate, cocoa powder, etc), the Butterscotch Brownies recipe in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is a go-to indulgence. I almost always have all of the required ingredients.

This happened the other night, thanks to what I consider just about the only shortcoming of HtCE : there is no recipe for oatmeal cookies.  Period.  Barring that, and finding myself woefully out of cocoa powder for brownies or oatmeal for the cookies anyway, I happened across this page and wound up making the Blondies (their subtitle) instead.  I tossed in the handful of semi-sweet chocolate chips I had on hand to get my chocolate fix.

Butterscotch Brownies
makes 1-2 dozen

Time: 30 to 40 minutes

Maybe you’re allergic to chocolate, or don’t like it, or are out of it.  Maybe you just feel like a change.  These will fix you right up.  Add one cup of chocolate chips to the batter if you want to hedge a little; nuts, or any of the other ideas above [not included here], are also good.

8 Tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened, plus a little for greasing the pan
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract or 1/2 tsp almond extract
Pinch salt
1 cup (4 1/2 oz.) all-purpose flour

1.  Preheat the oven to 350˚F.  Grease an 8-inch square baking pan [N.B. I used a heart-shaped one, but who's counting?], or line it with aluminum foil and grease the foil.

2.  Melt the butter over low heat.  Transfer to a bowl and use an electric mixer to beat in the sugar until very smooth, then beat in the egg and vanilla, stirring down the sides of the bowl every now and then.

3.  Add the salt, then gently stir in the flour.  Pour into the prepared pan and bake 20 to 25 minutes, or until just barely set in the middle.  It’s better to underbake brownies than to overbake them.  Cool on a rack before cutting.  Store, covered and at room temperature, for no longer than a day.

Imagine wanting brownies if you don’t like chocolate!  Sigh.  What a depressing thought.  In any case, I sort of bungled the ending of mine on Thursday when I didn’t wait quite long enough for the pan to cool, and the soft, gooey middle dripped out.  It had come to a perfectly brownie-like consistency not ten minutes later.  (P.S.  It was delicious despite the mess anyway.)  So patience is the order of the day… don’t make these if you wanted chocolate yesterday.

New post over at Jew and Julia… here’s an outtake:

What is the point of food if it isn’t satisfying?  I will admit that I’ve been struggling with my weight recently, and spending time feeling deprived.  Just recently, I decided that I am simply no longer going to waste calories eating food that I don’t enjoy.  Life is too short… but I’ve already said that.  I may wind up eating less, but I will wind up more satisfied.

Jew and Julia | SatisFAT-ion: how I learned to stop worrying and love the schmaltz.

Well, the Thing on Which I was Working has been completed. I promise more on that later. I feel confident about results but not so confident that I want to risk jinxing myself by talking about it just yet.

In other news, Sami and I baked cookies last night. I was out of butter, and couldn’t find the Olive Oil Cake recipe someone had posted on facebook about six months ago, and nearly scrapped the whole baking idea entirely.

Our day was saved when I realized I had precisely 8 ounces of coconut oil – a fat which is solid at room temperature but melts much more easily than butter. Our cookies were a little snappier than the butter variety would have been, and had the added bonus of a hint of coconut essence.

Baking with Sami is always fun, if I arrange us well in the kitchen. She likes to stand on a stool right in front of the low cupboard where the oil, salt, and other whatnot are stored, so I have to remember to take out everything we need first. Then, she likes to help with the “measuring,” which to her just means dumping the measuring cups and spoons into the big mixing bowl. She especially loves mixing, and more than anything, loves rolling cookie dough into the misshapen balls and lining them up in wavy, crooked lines on the baking sheet.

Ok, not more than anything. More than anything, she loves to eat the cookies. It requires a monumental effort of patience from Sami to wait not only for the cookies to bake, but then for them to cool for 5 minutes on the rack before they are cool enough to touch.

My favorite part is the Sami chocolate-face. We have so much fun baking together.

It wasn’t a hundred bazillion degrees in my house today, so I also cooked a pretty awesome dinner.  I made a pan-fried salmon with chard and onions and seared polenta cake, all topped with an orange-mustard sauce.  I’m pretty modest about my cooking, but I sort of blew myself away on this one.

Most amazingly, it didn’t take all that long to make.  My one cheat was that I started with pre-cooked store bought polenta in a roll.  I spied it while I was at the market picking up fish, and since I hadn’t actually thought out my meal plan, it struck me as a simple element to finish up the salmon and chard.  Oh, but this was one of my favorite cooking experiments of late, and I was probably only actively cooking for about half an hour, plus a separate 15 minutes to decide on what to put in, and then to make, the sauce.  It wasn’t a Julia Child recipe, in that I didn’t use a recipe at all, but I’m pretty sure I did her proud.

The best thing was being able to use butter, since I was cooking fish.  I can’t use butter with meat and still be kosher.

Like I said, it was a thoroughly reasonable temperature outside today.  In fact, it was so downright comfortable that if the weather holds, I may go for a lengthy run tomorrow morning.

I am technically training for the Las Vegas Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon on December 6th, but I have some challenges.  I’m a few weeks behind where I should be in training owing to 1) having taken the month of August almost completely off and 2) trying to avoid running when it is too hot and sunny out.  Now that the temperature is taking a nose dive, I may be able to get somewhat vaguely reasonably on track.  If I get up to a 19-mile training run at least 2 weeks before the marathon, I will consider myself prepared to run it.  I’ll be able to finish, even if I don’t finish fast.  If I don’t get to 19 miles, I will scale back to the half marathon, which I already know I’d be ready for.

Until recently, I had a never-say-die attitude about this marathon, but the cloud of potential injury is hanging over my head, so I am somewhat forced to accept reality.  I’m sticking to a reasonable training program and also getting all my practical responsibilities covered, and so what will be, will be in this case.

In other miraculous news, Sami napped yesterday.  Not for super long, maybe 45 minutes, but the new leaf in this story is that I told her:  you don’t have to sleep, but you do have to rest quietly.  Every time I come in here and you are not trying to rest, I am taking a toy away.

Toy #1 she thought was a joke.  Toy #2 she stood at her door crying, “My toys… my toys!” for about 15 minutes.  Toy #3, she threw a raging tantrum, and Toy #4 resulted in actual attempts at resting quietly.  I didn’t hold my breath, but when I checked on her about 20 minutes later, she was out cold.

Huzzah!  I found my method!  I know it worked because Mel, who watched her while Ben and I went to Yom Kippur concluding services last night, told me the following story.  She asked Sami to start picking up toys from her bed and the floor to put them away.  Sami flung toys one by one onto the floor, adding dramatically, “It doesn’t matter.  I’m bad, so mommy’s going to take them away anyway.”

I was guilt-ridden for about 30 seconds before I realized… that meant it worked.

Who says an old mom can’t learn a new trick or two?

It bothers me that Lactaid is only available in bulk wrapped in foil-lined paper. Costco sells them in tear-off packets that come in boxes of a few hundred.

It irritates me because before they came in paper tabs, they came in big bottles, four or five hundred to a bottle, and they’d always come with a little reusable plastic Tic-Tac like box to carry them around conveniently with. I continue to buy them, because at least I still do get several hundred per cardboard box, so that goes a long way toward assuaging my ill ease.

That way the bottle was recyclable, the tablets were consumed, and the carrying case could be reused for any number of things.

I’ve made the same complaint about markets where produce and other items come wrapped in plastic where other shops might sell them loose. I avoid situations where I have to buy something on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, because of the extraneous use of plastic and non-recyclable materials.

I frequently hear from people that “the trays at [store x] are recyclable” and that simply isn’t an adequate response. Recycling is no replacement for simply not using up the resources that go into the creation of, and in fact make up, plastics and styrofoam.

It’s worthwhile to me to take on a little extra effort by bringing my own bags, shopping at eco-mindful markets (especially if they’re on my daily path!) and being aware of what packages are made of, to reduce the quantity of raw materials consumed to get a product from the earth to my plate.

Ways to do this:
-Buy products in the largest sizes available (the 6-lb mozzarella loaf uses less plastic per ounce than the same quantity in 1-lb blocks or, obviously, string cheese.)
-Buy produce and meat at markets that don’t pre-wrap and don’t use styrofoam. A good meat shop, and many supermarket meat counters, will often wrap its wares in paper, and I prefer this.
-Bring your own bags – even those ubiquitous plastic supermarket bags add up and take their toll.

I will now step off my soapbox and return to my previously scheduled relaxing after a calm day of marketing, running errands, and doing generally otherwise boring adult things BY MYSELF!

Hold the sunshine, please!  It’s 900 thousand degrees outside, so the outdoor activity segment of our day has been suspended.

But nonetheless, a good day.  I realize that from reading my blog one might think that I hate being a mom and that every day is thoroughly excruciating.  That isn’t really true, though I’m more likely to blog about the frustrations than I am to write about the normal moments.

Today we made whole-wheat orange muffins (recipe courtesy of the Tassajara Bread Book, thanks for the rec, Jess!)  I fill the measuring cups, Sami adds the ingredients to the bowl.  There’s always a little tension when it comes to the eggs, because of the way Sami likes to stick her fingers unpredictably in her mouth, having them covered in raw egg makes me nervous.  Ditto for licking the spoon after the wet ingredients are mixed.

But we get by, and total cliché though this may be, it seems like the more fun we have in the baking, the better the muffins taste.  These ones turned out really well, especially considering that they’re made with 100% whole wheat flour.  Usually it doesn’t rise very well, but these are moist and fluffy the way you’d want from a muffin.  Orange juice seems like a decent replacement for milk, and meant that I could dramatically reduce the amount of added sugar.

Sami was practically chewing the paper liner, she liked them so much.

I know I don’t have a “day job,” and so the idea of a “work week” is therefore “meaningless,” but it is late Friday afternoon and I am feeling the relief that comes with knowing I don’t have to pack myself and Sami off to school tomorrow.

The laundry is all finished, the dishwasher is clean, errands for the weekend have been run, and for the next two days I’ll be flying with a copilot parent.

Yup, that alone makes it all seem more manageable.

In other news, this was the week of creative throw-togethers.  Last night’s dinner was spaghetti with veggies and pesto sauce.  Pesto from the plethora of frozen Costco jars in our freezer.  (For a while they were buried in the back and so every time I went to Costco I’d buy another one because I couldn’t see that we already had a few.)  The stuff is pretty rich (270 calories per 1/4 cup serving) so I cut it down by adding a half-cup of it to sauteed onions in olive oil, with salt and a hearty dose of black pepper.  The fresh yellow-pear and heirloom tomatoes (from our garden!) offered the extra fluid that took the sauce from being too thick to being just saucy enough for 8 servings of pasta.

Yay leftovers!

Here endeth the scrappy-but delicious week of kitchen creativity.

TGIF, people!

On Monday we all stumbled home, tired from an early morning getting into the airport, and we snagged some Thai food at Saffron when we were back in San Diego. I had some tofu salad rolls, my favorite, and Sami had chicken satay skewers and plain rice.

Needless to say, we had most of the chicken, most of the rice and a splendid abundance of peanut sauce left over.

When dinner rolled around, Ben an I decided that rather than be completely lazy, we’d be mostly lazy and just have pasta for dinner.

What ho! We actually were out of pasta except for a bunch of somen noodles lying about. I cooked them as little as possible, though apparently a 3-minute boil was too much, even so they were a little too sticky.

Next comes the magic. I sauteed up some cabbage, leeks and grated carrots, tossed in the chicken and peanut sauce, and cooked it till it bubbled. then I tossed the noodles with it.

It was way more food than you’d expect to get out of a couple of chicken skewers and some plastic to-go cups of peanut sauce. Slower and more involved than takeout, but probably tastier than the fastest takeout as well. Plus, takeout averted means less money spent and less styrofoam waste generated!

Yum.

In other food news, last night I pseudo-grilled chicken breasts to (dare I say it? yes!) perfection. Pseudo-grilled because, well, we don’t have a grill at the moment. I whipped out the handy, well-seasoned cast-iron grill pan, which has been used for all meat purposes from rendering chicken fat to lean-and-meaning steak and burgers. Nary a dairy product has touched this baby, and it’s full of delicious seasoning.

Well, when I get to downloading the pictures, you will see that these were perfection in chicken breasts – down to the blackened grill marks! Tender and juicy to boot. And I served them with cubed beets and potatoes tossed in a vinaigrette, and fresh salad of Persian cucumbers and heirloom and yellow pear tomatoes from my own wreck of a garden!

My body has quit its most strenuous complaints against general motion, and today I got off my bum and ran an easy 3.1 miles.  Way better average time than in the half, OR in the first 3 miles of the half, go figure, on an equally hilly course.  Guess that’s what a good night’s sleep will do for you.

Clearly, it’s back to the grind.  Having picked up and gone back to running actually has helped to ease tension and relax me, and in the heat following my jog I stretched well.

And now that I’m not substantially increasing mileage for the forseeable future (there might be a marathon ahead, and DEFINITELY another half, but not for a little while) I am shifting priorities for a while back to overall fitness with an eye toward weight loss.  Who knows, maybe running a half marathon 5 pounds lighter will make that much difference in my time and energy level.  Never can tell until I try.

I’m coasting on the “Holy crap I did it!!!” sentiment.  I’m now further chuffed having dragged my sorry butt on a run I didn’t feel particularly inclined to do until it was already under way, and really proud of how good I feel RIGHT NOW.

Taking full advantage of the endorphin boost, I’m counting calories again, I am completely ditching my “chocolate for lunch” attitude of the last few weeks, and I’m gearing up to be cooking a lot – hot kitchen be damned!  I have a very interesting food project on the horizon which you will be hearing about in due time (sooner rather than later, I hope.)

Right now, I’m scanning my to-do list (yes, I have one!) and seeing that I need to get busy.  Daily grind, here I come.