Time Matters

Here's an interesting piece of trivia: the time of day you eat matters. At least to your gut and liver.

More here: Chow Down in Sync with Your Circadian Clock

Simple, Elegant, Basic

Throwing out food has always been one of my pet peeves, but even so, it happens. At least with our awesome compost barrel and lush garden, we know our food waste is going to good use. It's a simple, self-sustaining system. Who'd have thought something that's worked for like a billion years would still be effective?

Reduce, reuse, recycle to minimize food waste

Watermelon Cocktail

Now we're talkin' summer ;)

Focus on Food: Watermelon

Cheap and Healthy

I'd like to focus on foods, or rather ingredients, that are good, good for you, and good for the wallet. This list from WebMD seemed like a place to start, though I would take egg substitute off the list and spring for farm fresh, just because.

WebMD "Cheap and Healthy: 15 Nutritious Foods for About $2"

Heart Attack on a Hook

Looking for the worst restaurant meal in America? Look no further.


'Heart Attack On A Hook': Meet America's 'Worst Restaurant Meal'

We're off to eat some grass-fed steak and potatoes off the grill. Stay healthy and hydrated everyone!

One True Ingredient: Family

This week’s food story is a little old-fashioned.

Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s house have always been an important tradition in our family. We don’t make it every Sunday, but holidays and birthdays are usually a must, as are any random Sundays someone feels like making the effort to wrangle the troops and inform the others what they’re cooking. It’s a good way to connect at the end of the week, touch base with one another face to face, and have a meal together as a family.

Research has long promoted the benefits of family meals, even just once a week. They help reestablish bonds and help children feel more grounded, because mealtimes are storytimes. Our family is no different.

Some of my earliest memories are of eating at my grandma’s house, listening to my grandpa tell stories. He was a great story teller. I wish I could remember more of them. They were mostly family stories, something that happened to his dad or granddad, or farm stories, something the horse did that made him laugh or throw his hat on the ground and stomp on it in fury (the man had a temper but generally got over it quickly. And I wonder where my son gets it.) There was always a lot of laughing, a lot of food, and a couple bottles of beer. Living through the Depression made both of my grandparents appreciate a loaded table. They definitely passed that habit down to the rest of us. When my aunt and uncle visit there’s a running joke about that one time we almost ran out of something (this of course has never come close to happening).

Family dinner is supposed to be fun, a low-key time to relax with each other and spend time with each other. I didn’t appreciate the time when I was younger, before my grandpa died. I’m not sure any teenager can. No one ever forced me to go to supper, but somehow implicitly I knew that I would cause other people great hurt if I blew it off to go out with friends, or to stay in my room. Shame is a great motivator.

My favorite part has always been the stories. As we dish food onto our plates, my dad and grandpa were always the great storytellers. The act of sharing a meal, sharing a story, brings people together and reminds them that this is family, not all the bullshit that might go on away from the table, but right here, right now, the people you break bread with, share a scoop of food from the same pot with, these are the people who’ve got your back. And it reminds you, hey, I like this person, I’ve got their back too.

This concept of food sharing goes back to our ape roots. Primates use food sharing as a way to reinforce social bonds, between parent and offspring, between grooming partners, or even strangers. It’s a way of trading food for support, whatever kind of support that may be. And, science argues, that while giving away food shouldn’t help the individual survive, in the end it does because everybody needs support sometimes. Or more probably because they wanted to have sex with their dinner partner, but that’s another post.

Sunday dinner is also about history. It’s important to know where you came from. My STC and I both have a strong sense of family. When we named our twins, we looked to the archive of family names for inspiration. It was important our kids understand their history and be tied to it in a tangible way. And at Sunday dinner I’m sure the Offspring will have a chance to learn about the men he was named after. He probably won’t appreciate it at first; it’s easy to take family for granted. But when he gets older, and has those roots, and understands the kind of people he came from, my hope is that it’ll give him something to help ground him. My grandpa’s been gone fourteen years and gram, dad and I still think, well what would grandpa do? What decision would he want us to make? What would great-grandpa (who I never met but my dad spent extensive time with) think or say?

Having my grandmother right across the road has been a vital resource. She might be ninety, but she’s got more of her shit together than a person half her age. And though she’s slowing down, she can still babysit the Offspring for a couple hours her and there, and more importantly she’s there for support and to listen. With a new baby, a farm, a writing career, a job with USPS, and a STC in the military, there are a lot of challenges, and my grandmother has been around it all. So when I feel overwhelmed and sad she’s there to commiserate, empathize, and offer no wisdom, but a comforting “I been there, honey, it’ll work out.” Don’t ask me why that helps, but maybe it’s knowing how happy she and my grandpa were together and that they faced some of the same issues, jobs, a farm, babies, the military, loss. It wouldn’t be the same coming from someone closer to my age, but because gram is so far on the other side of it, it’s a comfort to have a visual that yes, this too shall pass.

That’s the importance of family dinner.

P.S.

You might be asking where the food is in this food story. And when I started, I fully had the intention of describing the vegetables, the grilled sirloin, and how my son is mad for anything green: asparagus, spinach dip, squash, and key lime pie, but realized that part of this food story isn’t about the food. The food is a means to the end. It sounds corny, but this food story is really all about family.

Click to enlarge

The Horrific Truth About Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide

The Horrific Truth About Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide

Grain of salt with this guy, cuz salt goes with everything.

From: WikiCommons

9 Foods You Should Never Attempt to Eat

9 Foods You Should Never Attempt to Eat

And I just went off breakfast... :(

From: WikiCommons

Are Canned Peaches Just as Nutritious as Fresh?

Are Canned Peaches Just as Nutritious as Fresh?

From: WikiCommons

Feeding the World

While I'm a perennial fan of sustainable agriculture, one of the major considerations with it is how do you feed people on a global scale with smaller sustainable farms? Industrial ag has its problems but it can feed mass amounts of humanity. The final product and environmental effects might be suspect, but it seems both methods could learn something from one another. Anyway, more thought-provoking information on food.

How do you feed nine billion people?

Feeding the World While Protecting the Planet

Healing Ginger

Food isn't just fuel, isn't just a diet challenge. Food can comfort us, nurture us, heal us. It's what the ancients knew, it's what animals know (think of the dog eating grass for an upset stomach, nasty but effective) and we're starting to rediscover it now that ideas about food are starting to swing back from "boxed is best" attitude from the 1950s onward. And really, when you think about it, that a food can do all this, instead of a pill, is pretty f'in' cool.

10 Healing Benefits of Ginger

From WikiCommons

Antibiotics in livestock contributing to drug-resistant superbugs

"If you have a food animal production system that makes animals sick in a predictable way, you need to change the system," says Price.


In Meat Tests, More Data Tying Human Illness To Farm Antibiotics

Eat food.

It's not the nutrients, its the plant. It's not the beta carotene, its the carrot.

Healing Spices

Food Porn

On my days off, I cook. I get four days off in a two-week period so I cook a lot. J and I made delicious veggie/hamburgers with fries this weekend and spaghetti, followed by a scrumptious strawberry shortcake. All this cooking has got me thinking, especially since J and I both agree we’ve both experienced a change in our cooking since we met each other. J’s presence has made me slow down and appreciate the food experience more than I ever have. He’s sold me on fresh garlic, the smell and texture, and adding little touches that take, say, a regular tuna sandwich with miracle whip and relish, into a taste experience with veggies, capers, a touch of Dijon mustard, quality bread; all things I never paid much attention to before. I crammed veggies and tuna together because I needed to eat more veggies, paying more attention to the food pyramid than to flavor. Such attention makes regular cooking into food porn, normally only seen on the Food channel. On the other hand, J has started cooking more, preparing real meals instead of just quick things like sandwiches, since meeting me.

Tonight I made healthy enchiladas, but didn’t use a recipe. Rather, I used several, and added my own touch besides. I cook like farm women before me. When thinking about dinner, I think, “Well I have this, this, and that. What can I do with what I have?” It’s not the mindset I encounter in many cookbooks or magazines, where they assume you keep chilies in adobe on hand. I try to run to the store as little as possible and use what I have instead of buying more. So here’s a lesson on how I cook.

It began with leftovers.

We put a lot, and I mean a lot, of food up last fall. We have carrots, spinach, peas, asparagus, all kinds of meat and veggies in the freezer that need used up before spring planting. So the goal, whatever I made, was to use up as much food as I could. I started with a gallon bag of tomato sauce. It needed cooked down. I’d processed the sauce once, but quite a bit of water remained. So I got that boiling down and browned a pound of hamburger with fresh garlic and half an onion. I added that to the tomato sauce with a vague idea of enchilada sauce, wondering all the while how much it would cook down and how in the world I’d get enchilada flavor. On that note, I went and did my workout, simmering over dinner and writing even as my pot simmered.

Unhappy with the consistency, I added a pint of frozen roasted eggplant to the mix. Anything would have worked really, carrots, celery, anything sent through the blender to add bulk. Moms with picky kids could probably disguise most or all the veggies by pureeing it and cooking it with the tomato sauce. That’s assuming the kids eat tomato sauce, but I can’t help with that. My parents basically told me “eat what we eat, or be hungry.” I ate. Seasonings for the sauce included, garlic, salt and pepper, cumin, cinnamon, and oregano. You could use chili powder too if that’s a flavor you like. Rather than use precise measure, I added a little at a time until I was happy with the flavor. You can always add spices; they’re much harder to take out.

So while the thickened sauce continued cooking, I rummaged through my fridge and pulled out my veggie arsenal. Frozen peas, asparagus, and spinach from the garden; green onion from the store; canned carrots we put up; and if my pan hadn’t been full by then, I would have added mushrooms. But my pan was so I let that cook.

I’m a lazy cook. Instead of rolling all nice and neat enchiladas, I layered it like lasagna. Putting a little sauce on the bottom of a 9x13x2 glass pan, I layered corn tortillas, then a little sauce, the veggies (I miscalculated on that layer so all the veggies went on one layer), then more tortillas, sauce to cover it all, and cheddar cheese on top. Pop it in the oven set at 350 degrees for 20 minutes and done. I cut the mess like a casserole or lasagna too and served it on top of another tortilla, just for presentation and extra something to chew on. Dad and I like ours with horseradish.

So it's not rocket science, the way I cook. Sometimes it goes good, like really good. And when it goes bad... lets just say I keep a frozen pizza around for that eventuality. J's not the only Mr. Contingency around here. It's all about creativity and having fun. Presentation and doing things by the book get played up too much. How do you think those tv chefs got to be chefs? They had a little fun, used a lot of creativity, and made up their own recipes. With a little practice, anybody can do it. And if you can rope your honey into enjoying the garlic with you, its ever so much fun. :-P Who knows? They're influence on your cooking style might just lead to some real tasty juji. 

(Jiji - pronounced JEW-gee; a name for stuff. It can be anything, fluid, vegetable, mineral, but originally it described the discharge from a cow's va-jay-jay prior to calving.)

If you’re still with me after all that, I'd like to wish Dana congratulations. Her story, "Running for Recovery," was accepted for publication by The Ultimate Runner magazine. So watch for it and good luck in the kitchen. Savor the flavor, the texture, the planning. If it’s good enough, you’ll know and cooking becomes food porn. It’s a beautiful thing.