No Calorie Left Behind

"what a gift we have in cheeses"

I dug into a cellophane sack of debris from my fave food-depot, and saw a handful of hard cheese rinds (smells like parmigiano but there’s no blue Reggiano tattoos) with at least five mm of perfectly good cheese left.
Back at home the big question becomes: do I still have that cool kitchen gadget, the Mouli grater? For pack rats, retrieval is always an issue.

One kitchen drawer  is full of seldom-used (=never)  “conveniences” : garlic tube made of latex!  Horn–handled meat forks! Ditto fondue! Abalone shell spoons! An entanglement of riches.

Still, I’d have grated my knuckles bloody rather than throw out that precious cheese..but the Mouli surfaced within seconds of prying the  three plastic funnels out from behind the drawer.

Blew out the resident spider, and popped a rind into the carousel (I just made that name for the rotating barrel with the grating holes in it) and with a VERY satisfying turn or two I had a small pile of downy cheese-dandruff mounded on the cutting board.
The pic barely shows it but I didNOT throw out the extremely thin chips of rind: those go in soup stock, don’t you know?

Lucky Jackult

Found a dozen or so of these tiny plastic bottles…it’s not the first time. It’s a product that supposedly restores one’s inner gut garden. Because it’s so ’sanitarily packaged’ I happily grab them. They take up nearly no room.
I have no idea of their cost.

But so far, I’m alive and better than well. So maybe “Yakult” probiotic does the job…As I rolled into town, I swunb by my favorite (repositioned) dumpster and found them…and two pounds of unsalted butter (I rarely discover butter, this is a red-letter day for me) and three quarts of buttermilk.

So I can guzzle a whole quart on a hot day,  like Mr. Saroyan described doing in his story about growing up in Bakersfield.

Joe & Kim’s Volunteer Garden

Chard! Cilantro! Rocket!

All growing madly in the little raised circular patch in Flagstaff…One look at their abundant (and somewhat gone-to-seed) vegetable patch kicked my culinary chakra in to high gear. 

“Sure, pick what you want…they are all plants that re-seeded themselves from last year…we hardly do anything with them.”

MMMMMmusic to my ears.
Within an hour we were slurping up a minestra inspired by all the Italian mamas who never throw anything away.
Someone in the household (not naming names) was pitching a small lunch-sized container of home made bean and hominy soup.
All it needed was my tomato paste (from the found-on-the-street tomatoes in SF last week) and all those greens. And a dash of chipotle sauce.

Delicious.

And musical.  Like old times…lift a cheek and issue an ‘opinion’ of the food.

Bad cook. BAD cook.

Residues and Don’ts

My contribution to the body of work known as Oops Cuisine has been published in Edinburgh. A book entitled the How Not To Cookbook is available here (in PDF form) or in book form by writing to jenny at Collective Gallery.

My helpful hints:
Here they are:

If you have got a shockingly short attention span, do not think that burning things has to be the norm. Buy a timer, one that you can not accidentally turn off when you put it in your pocket.

If you burn (“pyrolize” in chemistry parlance) oils, you’ve just created a goopy black carcinogen. Throw the whole thing away, or pay later on down the line.

Do not believe the use-by dates on all your food. They are put there by lawyers. Ordinary humans are much more resilient than the law would have you believe. Test results on self first, twenty four hours before fobbing off on family and friends.

This should be obvious, but never try an untried dish on a friend. And doubly so if it is in their kitchen.

Do not be afraid to blast something that seems off with some heat. It might be dragged back from over the edge.

Do not blend fat with liquid when making pastries. Flour must be cut with fat, then the liquids are blended in.

If you do not want to use a timer and do not want to have a disaster in the kitchen try the African technique. Take the food off the flame and place on a spot with a thick bit of felted wool fabric on the counter, then drape with a kitchen towel, your down jacket, a lap blanket or an old malleable cat that appreciates free warmth. The food will continue to cook but you will save fuel, energy and money.

Breakfast @ Coastways

organic, fresh, and lots of them pre-tasted

Tapioca only 11 months 'past date!'

My breakfast the first day of the farm music party & farmhouse scrub-down was strawberries culled from the furrows–the pickers toss these ‘blems’ to the side, for people like me or maybe for compost…they needed more. Something sweet.
In the middle of the overstuffed refrigerator was a pair of tubs of this highly coveted processed comfort food aptly branded “Kozy Shack”. The date? Well, lookit the picture.
Those two things, super fresh/blemmed  and super-old (but untouched), plus a fried slab of bread and some tea…kept me stoked for a day’s farmwork.

Margot, Marjorie, Ed

I was riding around the neighborhood, wishing I could just drop in on a friend for a meal. All day I’d been  trying to make paper doll of Charlie, with unimpressive results. Outside the Most Beautiful Day in Marin unfolded.

I thought about riding, but my legs are still spaghetti from jogging seven miles.

By six p.m.  I’d destroyed four pieces of nice watercolor paper and was ready to simply xerox a shot of CC holding a bike.  This is all for the SSWC09 magazine… I screwed up the eyes, blobbed ink all over the face, and practically threw in the towel.

So I rolled out into Fairfax  in search of food.  The warm air was a soup of pollens , my nose contributed continuous clear-running coulis.

By the time I reached Ed’s place ten blocks away, I  wished that nasal tampons had been invented.  (Cue music: “greensleeves”)

At Ed’s, I found wisteria dangling over the gate. Inside, I could tell there was cookery afoot and I gesticulated the international sign language for “is this a good time?”

I saw a thumbs-up.

Parked bike, doffed shoes (Zen households require this) and climbed the stairs into the den of the Tassajara baker. His apprentice Marjorie Wallace adeptly sliced away at the fennel, and took on the challenge of making ’supremes’ of orange (take away all difficult white bits, leaving the mellow middle of the lovely fruit with no strings attached).

In the living room Margo Koch ( ‘cook’ in German) graded papers.

New Biscuit Discovered.

In the dumpster, of course.

I had very little space to carry, so I discarded all the cardboard packaging with the cute animals…and thus deprived the Scrutinizing One his primal  pleasure: pointing out how Bad For You some of my finds are.

“But this one clained to be a natural coookie, with natural strawberries in ‘em” I countered.

All very well, but my memory (and truthfulness index) is always questioned (part of the fun when you pair an approximatarian with  a perfectionist, in cramped quarters).

The foil inner wrapper yielded nothing. But a quick taste told me all I needed to know: they used real butter, and real strawberries. AND because gluten doesn’t suit Mr. Scrute they are all mine…all mine.

Hoard Oeuvre

With the freezer crammed and  nothing good in the fridge, one must take hammer and chisel to the (literal) ice box and free all the trapped parcels. Leave on the garden gloves, prevent frostbitten fingers. Carefully re-arrange everything. With less ice, there should be more storage space, but it never works out that way, so a massive meal has to be made.

One of the main drawbacks of the freezer is this white fluffy frost build up. And the fact that all those soup stock tubs swell up, top pops off, and god forbid the thing should ski out the door (onto your bare foot).

If it doesn’t bruise your foot, it shatters on impact….more fun, collecting chicken soup stock shards off the concrete.

Our appliances live  outside–fridge hum is unacceptable noise pollution.  Real Goods claims theirs is quiet, but it’s not.
Uh, but this was to be my Hoard Oeuvre…There’s a visitor coming next week, Jeff Yeager, aka the Ultimate Cheapskate. I figure I should have the tastiest possible, highly spiced ‘mature’ provender available.

Ingredients:

A gallon of the finest quality unchlorinated water in a stainless steel, copper-bottomed pot.

carcasses of three roast organic chickens from Nov. 08.

Guajillo chiles from that time I went to La Palma mexicatessen in the Mission (circa 2005).

Fresh, olld (but still good) red bell pepper, onion, celery and carrot.

Frozen stock in need of using up.

Old polish sausage, chopped.

New can of hominy! Big one!

Boil all this together.

Note how good house smells.
Dredge up some for dinner.

Soupcon…of pure heaven.

Gruel Hoax

someone's been bugging my food

This morning I hunted around for my good pin-cut scottish oatmeal…no luck. I must have eaten all of what I brought back last summer. This means deploying a flashlight and getting down on my knees to peer into the dark undercabinet where the baked goods–sorry–the ingredients to make baked goods (and ‘bads’?)–all cower out of sight and out of mind.

Low is  good for spice storage since temperatures are significantly lower near the floor. But traditional (American)  kitchens feature a spice cupboard above the stove. Where heat will destroy all the aromatic volatile uh…esters? Oils?   Maybe it really was a ploy to sell more spices, huh? Like the refrigerators that all have the cooling elements (which generate considerable heat) underneath, so all that heat can percolate up, assuring a high electrical bill.  I wouldnt bring this up in a food blog but uh..fridges, food, electricity…they are all …connected.

Yah, real epicures store the stuff where they’ll never find it, except with a flashlight, and ten extra minutes to excavate…(NOT!)

I doubt ‘real epicures’  crawl around on the floor to get their spices and oatmeal.

What I found was one-minute instant Quaker Oats found at the Safeway skip in March 2007. Prying open the top, I noticed how weightless they seemed.  Over-processed.

My  ‘Thou Shalt Not Purchase Food” vow wavers at the thought of mush every day so tomorrow I pick up some California pin-cut oats. Smaller, less chewy than the Scottish ones…

My mush  did offer a (not unpleasant) surprise: puce colored (but not actual puces) flecks that were unlucky enough to be cooked into this batch of breakfast mush.  Charlie offered a wry  comment (no dish goes uncritiqued hereabouts) about building strong bodies thirteen ways, I made him document the occasion of Free Protein that Magically Appears in one’s carbohydrate supply.

Alchemy, in short.

“Your readers are not going to eat here you know” he warned.

“Maybe so. But so far no readers have BEEN here. So I think it’s OK. Then it occured to me that “flecks”  that proliferate also (rhymes with desiccate)…
Sigh.

On second thought, this could explain the Total Absence of Drop-In Dinner Guests over the last several years.

Tomatillo Surplus

An idle twenty minutes frittered away..peeling tomatillos . A couple of fruit flies circling the basket is my last call to do something other than compost the poor things…

It’s so easy to roast, blend and jar them up. Sole problem is remembering to use it up in three days. Beyond that, it’s gone over to the other side.