Getting Up to Date

So it's been a while since I posted and I'm sure you are on the edge of your seat wondering how my more thoughtful eating adventure is going. Let's see, when we left off I had just had a shopping failure and a bread triumph/failure. Moving on...

After not finding a whole lot of local products at the grocery store, and wondering how I would get through the long, hard winter, I decided to do a little research on CT farms. Google brought me quickly to a bunch of farms that I could visit and purchase meat, dairy, and vegetable products. I was actually gung ho to give that a try until I ran the idea by my husband. He sagely advised me that some of the CT farms I had located were 2 hours away (so much for reducing your carbon footprint) and that there were probably some New York farms that were closer. Okay, good point.

With that in mind I googled "farms within 50 miles of Southport, CT," which is, of course, exactly how the Ingalls family survived the long, hard Wisconsin winters. I was amazed by my harvest. I pulled up multiple wonderful sites, including a site called Fairfield Green Food Guide. This was a site created by people from my own town that provided all sorts of contacts, articles,  and how to instructions for eating more thoughtfully. Apparently, I was the last one to the party!

The best (so far) find from the site was the Westport Winter Farm Market which, sadly closed this past Saturday. I found fresh, organic, and locally grown/raised vegetables, meats, fish, pasta, bread, dairy products - almost anything you would want, provided it was in season.

I discovered that there are multiple reasons that thoughtful food folks often end up vegetarian or vegan. For one thing, the meat you buy from local farmers is VERY expensive. It's not their fault. It's a matter of scale and labor costs, and everyone has a right to make a living. When I'm  paying for food in the aggregate and with my credit card at a supermarket, it's easier to ignore an outrageously priced item here and there. When you're handing over a wad of cash for a single item to a farmer, it makes an impression. Suffice it to say, we will be eating less meat.

The meat I decided to stick to was chicken - less of a carbon footprint to raise, and generally more affordable. After buying a few free range chickens from the farmers' market, I discovered something very disappointing. Free range chickens are built like distance runners. They are lean and sinewy - not your first choice for a meal. I mean if you were a lion, would you choose the distance runner or the couch potato?

It turns out that breed and butchering can partially solve this problem. I found a farmer who raised a certain type of cornish hen that was a tad meatier and she sold it in a butterfly cut that was perfect for the grill. If I want to roast a whole hen, I have found that I have to go back to the organically raised grocery store variety. Once in a while that's not such a bad thing, right?

The Super Bowl came up pretty close to the beginning of my thoughtful food adventure. I mention this because it could have been a major derailment for me. See, I don't really care much about football, but I do like Super Bowl Sunday. For me it is an excuse to bring every junk food temptation I have into my house for a brief orgy of bad eating. I tolerate the football until I have had my fill of junk food and then excuse myself to watch something better - like Real Housewives.

This year was no different, although I did manage to transform some of the menu items. I served very athletic, organic and locally raised,  buffalo chicken wings and organic, locally grown roasted beets, on top of some locally grown micro-greens. Okay, I also served Fritos and ranch dip, but.... Baby steps, people! To further my transformation, I excused myself to watch Downton Abbey. My husband argues that Downton Abbey is Real Housewives set in 1920's England, but then, he likes football.

I'm about two months into my adventure and I have come a long way. I have not bought a loaf of bread or bread product, except for, on occasion, a locally made baguette. It's going to be a long time before I master that level of bread baking. We are eating much less meat, and much more organic and locally grown products. Best of all, my bread baking has taught me the discipline of mise en place, which I use all the time in my cooking - except when I don't.

Click here to take a peek at the fabulous Fairfield Green Food Guide website.

Making Bread

We never went through a lot of bread or bread products in our house, but recently we had been eating even less than usual. Last spring, Peter had discovered that his cholesterol level was slightly elevated, so he had completely overhauled his breakfast habits. He was now eating oatmeal 4-5 days a week and filling in with a whole grain cereal on the other days. He completely gave up his buttered toast habit, although he would occasionally still have an egg.

Turns out, he was the big bread and butter eater in our house. When he changed his habits, we began finding that the softened butter we kept in a butter bell on the counter had gone bad. The bread was a different and rather scary story. A loaf of bread or package of English muffins could now sit in our bread drawer for weeks and, yet, appear and taste as fresh as the day I bought it. I suppose that's convenient, but it makes you stop and think. Real, self-respecting, bread grows mold. This stuff we were eating was a chemical impostor.

I suppose that's why I was excited to embrace bread baking as part of the eating local challenge. It certainly was not because I was a gifted baker.  Baking requires a level of planning and precision that we have already established, does not come naturally to me. This is why my baking mantra has always been, "Why bake something from scratch when you can buy a mix?" 

My first loaf of bread maker bread was a simple Italian bread that I found a recipe for on the back of the bread flour package. I set the bread maker on the dough cycle and when it was done, took the dough and out and shaped it into a loaf. It needed to rise again, and then I brushed it with egg whites and baked it. The bread looked and smelled delicious, but I found its taste and consistency a little disappointing. Now I remembered why I had stuck the bread maker in the closet and forgotten it. The bread just isn't very good.

I thought maybe it was the recipe, so I looked for a new recipe for basic white bread online for my next loaf. This second loaf was slightly less dense, but very salty. I was a little frustrated, but I was determined not to give up so soon. I needed expert advice, so I went online to search for a bread maker cookbook. 

The cookbook that caught my eye was The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook by Beth Hensperger. When it arrived in the mail, I scanned the introductory chapters and grew optimistic. This author seemed to love her bread and had obviously spent a lot of time perfecting her recipes. One of her secrets was obvious when you scanned her recipes. Most of her basic bread recipes called for the addition of vital wheat gluten. Bread flour had enough gluten in it for bread made by hand, she argued, but bread processed in a bread machine needed added gluten to achieve the same airiness and stretchiness in the dough. Ah ha!

The phrase mise en place in a side bar also caught my attention. I am a big fan of cooking shows, so I was familiar with the term, although I had never successfully incorporated its discipline into my cooking. The author argued that mise en place, which means something like everything in its place, was especially important in bread baking. The ingredients need to be measured precisely and be ready to add to the bread machine promptly, and in the right order, if you were to get the desired chemical reactions.

I immediately recognized that learning to prepare my ingredients ahead of starting a recipe could be life-changing. For one thing,  it would force me to read through a recipe before starting, instead of reading and executing a recipe one step at a time.  The first time I made my mom's famous cherry dessert, I used the step by step technique. Step one - drain the canned cherries. I opened the can and drained the juice into the sink. Step two - reserve juice from the cherries. S%&T!

After scanning the introductory section, I came to the first recipe, aptly titled, "Your First Loaf." I liked this Beth Hensperger. She was going to start me out slowly. Rome wasn't built in a day, you know. 

My mise en place!

I had the perfect set of nesting bowls in which to prepare my mise en place, and I dutifully set about measuring my ingredients into separate bowls and placing them in the order in which they would be added to the bread machine. I let all the ingredients come to room temperature as instructed, which demonstrates both an uncharacteristic level of patience, and unprecedented recipe reading skills. My life was changing already! I added the ingredients to the bread machine in the designated order: liquids first, followed by flour, other dry ingredients, and then last, but not least, yeast. I set the bread machine to the basic setting and away it went. 

The loaf rose so expansively that it almost busted out of the bread machine. When the baking cycle finished, I took the loaf out of the pan and immediately cut a slice for each of us to sample. It was amazing! This Beth Hensperger knew her stuff and I was now confident that I could bake our daily bread and not feel like I was compromising taste or consistency. 

The next weekend I felt ready to move beyond the beginner loaf and decided I would bake a loaf of Scandinavian rye and English muffins. I know, right?! English muffins! I made the English muffin dough first. I prepared my mise en place for the rye while the muffin dough was being worked in the machine, so I'd be ready to get that loaf going as soon as the muffin dough was finished. 

The English muffins were fun to make. When the dough cycle on the bread machine was finished, I emptied the muffin dough onto a surface dusted with cornmeal. A little dusting of cornmeal on the top of the dough kept the rolling pin from sticking. I rolled out the dough into a half inch thick rectangle and then cut out circles. The Hensperger recipe calls for 3" circles, but next time I'll make them a little bigger.

Next I cooked my muffins on a heated griddle for 10 minutes a side. They came out looking exactly like, well, English muffins! When you fork split one and toss it in the toaster, it looks and tastes completely authentic. I was feeling very successful. In two short weeks my bread baking skills had advanced so far, that I could already take on Mr. Thomas. 

The high lasted only until I sliced into the loaf of rye I had baked. It was dense and dusky and reminded me of cardboard. I broke the slice I was clearly not going to finish into two pieces and offered a piece to each of our dogs. They wouldn't eat it either. Enough said. I had more to learn.

Eating Green - Take 1

Having taken stock of my current habits, I was excited to begin the challenge to be more thoughtful in my food choices.  I would focus on eating more seasonal, locally grown, organic, and pasture-raised foods. Notice my goal is to eat more green foods. That phrasing is key to my motivation. More should be easy when you are starting from virtually zero. Plus, more is a goal that can grow with me. There will always be room to improve.

I headed to Stop & Shop with a mission, but no list or menu plan. Anyone surprised by that? I always start my shopping trip in the produce aisle. The aisle starts with fruit and there was nothing in the first two rows that fit into my green food criteria.  The vegetable section didn't offer much more promise. I was beginning to question the logic of beginning a challenge like this in the dead of winter. "It's more," I reminded myself, "not all. Don't get stymied." Buoyed by this self-pep talk, I forged on, tossing a small bunch of bananas into my cart. 

In the vegetable section, I got pulled in by a head of cauliflower. Is cauliflower seasonal? I don't think so, but I am suddenly inspired to make a cauliflower gratin. This is something I have never made before and for which I have no recipe, but it struck me as a brilliant idea for a meatless entree. I tossed the cauliflower into my cart. The next row over I spied spaghetti squash - seasonal!!! I tossed the squash into my cart and thought about how much more fun this challenge would be if my cart came with a little video game screen that awarded me points and rang bells when I made good choices. Someone should really work on that.

At the end of the aisle, I grabbed some Gruyere cheese from the specialty cheese case and surveyed my progress: bananas - fail, cauliflower - fail, shredded European cheese in the convenient stay-fresh packaging - mega-fail. Perhaps that video game idea is not such a good one.  I forged on.

I stopped by the specialty meats case and picked up an organic, free- range chicken. It was not locally raised chicken, but on my video game it would earn me two out of three possible points (ding! ding!). My next stop was the baking aisle. When the Kingsolver-Hopp clan took on their locavore challenge they began baking all their own bread. As I listened to them describe their busy kitchen with the multiple bread machines whirring in the background, it had occurred to me that I had one of those gadgets. I hadn't seen it in ten or more years, but I had one. I picked up some bread flour and surveyed the package for a recipe that might tell me what other ingredients I would need. I grabbed the yeast the basic white bread recipe called for and made my way to the dairy aisle.

In the dairy aisle I scored major points for the Farmer's Cow milk I purchased: local, organic, and pasture-raised (ding! ding! ding!), but I didn't find a suitable cream option. I can't have my coffee without cream, so it looked like cream would not be part of the more equation. I picked up some eggs that were organic and from pasture-raised chickens (ding! ding!), but they were not local. Local seemed to be a real sticking point at this store. I finished up by picking up a big container of orange juice (Too bad! Thank you for playing) and headed home.  I had been modestly successful, and my failures had motivated me to do some research on where I could find more green food choices.

But, the next adventure? Bread baking!

Sticking a Toe In

I decided immediately that I was not going to dive into the locavore movement head first. Instead, I would dip a toe in, and if it felt comfortable maybe I would move on to a shallow wade. No need to rush things.

My toe-dipping was a week or two of reflection about where I was starting. This was a sobering process.

First, my eating habits. I think it's safe to say that I love junk food more than the average woman of my age. I am a huge fan of chips, and if they are covered with a generous dusting of some flavorful food-like substance, even better. I don't typically subject my family to fast food, but I'm kind of happy if a hectic schedule requires me to go to a drive thru to pick up a McAnything. When the parents in my town fought to get a big, preservative-rich, calorie laden, cookie removed from its once a week appearance in school cafeterias, I secretly rooted for the cookie.

So there's that.

Then there's my meal planning and shopping, which should go hand in hand, but don't in my case. I remember my mother's incredible organization skills in this area. She would map out the meals for the coming week, carefully construct her grocery list based on the meal plans, and then methodically check off each item as she placed it in her cart. She kept an extra supply of everything she used frequently in her pantry and, as a result, was never caught mid-week without a crucial ingredient for the week's meals.

I'm a little more, shall we say, creative, in my approach to shopping. I try to take stock of things we need before I leave for the store, but I rarely bother to write these items down anywhere. I don't like to plan menus ahead. Rather, I prefer to gaze at the products in the produce, meat, and fish departments and see what inspires me. I don't pay attention to prices, which might help alert me to the fact that the blueberries and strawberries I'm buying in the dead of winter are only in season in South America. I occasionally read the nutrition facts on a box of some new snack I want to try, but that is almost always depressing. If it's low in fat, it's high in sodium. If it's high in fiber, it's high in calories, too. The overriding message is, "Stay out the snack aisle, fool!" 

Lately, I've been making a few positive choices. For several months I've been buying the organic, free-range chicken that my chain supermarket carries. To be perfectly honest, I made this change because the six foot long case of organic and specialty meats was a lot less overwhelming to me than the 30 foot case that hosted their more complete and ordinary selection. "I'm probably paying more," I reasoned, "but I don't look at the price, anyway. Oh yeah, and it's better for us and the planet."

I also buy Farmer's Cow milk which is distributed by a CT dairy cooperative. I started buying Farmer's Cow milk when I was discussing food shopping habits with a friend and she said, "Well, I'm sure you at least buy Farmer's Cow milk!" I do now! You're never too old for peer pressure.

So, I love junk food and I'm a careless food shopper, but I do have one thing going for me. I like to cook. I take the same creative approach to my cooking that I apply to my food shopping, but with somewhat better results. For my day-to-day cooking, I don't like to be hemmed in by recipes. The reasons are two-fold. First, recipes call for a well-planned shopping trip for ingredients. We've already established that I can't do that. I once followed a recipe for lasagna and made separate grocery trips for every - single - ingredient. Mind-boggling, I know. And, I actually graduated from college and hold down a job!

The second reason is not my fault. My family carries a rare gene that prevents all of us, without exception, from following directions. I watched an awesome display of this genetic anomaly this past Christmas Eve. My daughter and her cousins cracked open a new board game that one of them had received as a gift. None of them had ever played the game before, but they took out the board and pieces and tossed aside the box with the directions untouched inside. For the next hour they vigorously debated the rules, changing them completely at least three times during the course of a single game. When the debate over the rules got a tad heated, I suggested that they could, perhaps, consult the directions that came with the game. They erupted in laughter and then went back to a more jovial debate of whose rule twist had more merit. I had done my job.

So, it is clear that I have some obstacles to this whole thoughtful eating thing. I'll be wading ankle deep for a long time before I'm really ready to swim. But, I'm still game. The good news is, if you're coming along for the ride, I'll probably make you feel really good about yourself!

The Saga Begins

My story begins innocently enough. My daughter, Sarah, a high school junior, needed to read a book of her choice for her AP Environmental Science class over Christmas break. She had asked my husband, Peter, for advice about which book on the list of recommended titles she should choose. He enthusiastically endorsed a book by Barbara Kingsolver, called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. " I haven't read this book, but I've read a lot of Barbara Kingsolver's novels," he said. "She's a great writer. I don't think you can go wrong with her book."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle tells the story of Kingsolver's and her family's year-long commitment to eat only locally grown foods. They live on a family farm in Virginia where they raise chickens, grow vegetables and tend to a small orchard of fruit trees. Many of their neighbors are also amateur or small professional farmers, so they were in the right place to take this pledge. The book, which includes chapters by her college professor husband , Steven Hopp, and her oldest, college-age daughter, Camille, makes a strong case for eating locally. Kingsolver and family share their strategies for raising, growing, sourcing, and preserving enough local food to survive completely on locally grown foods, even in the dead of winter. As a bonus,  the book includes some of the family's favorite recipes for seasonal, home-grown foods.

We were taking a drive to Maryland and back after Christmas to visit with my in-laws and Peter's sister's family, so Sarah decided to get an audio version of the Kingsolver book. She started listening to the book before our trip, so when we piled into the car and she pressed play at the beginning of the trip, she was already two or three chapters in. 

Our trip to Maryland should have taken 5 1/2 to six hours, but ended up taking more like 8 1/2 hours on this particular day. We listened to Kingsolver, her husband, and daughter reading the book almost that entire time and only got about halfway through. That was less a function of how long the book was, than of Kingsolver's painfully slow and completely humorless reading of her own writing. This is an important lesson when selecting audio books - good writers are not necessarily good readers.

We took a break from the book while we visited with family, but then started it up again on the trip home. By the time we stopped at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop for lunch we had  spent a total of 11 hours listening to Kingsolver, et al, lecture us about their virtue (and our sins) and we were getting a little slap happy and more than a little irreverent. Sarah was now referring to the author as "Saint Barbara", and as we walked up to Popeye's to order some fried chicken, I toyed with the idea of asking the cashier how they raised their chickens and if the honey in their cello packs was a spring honey or a fall honey.

It was the story of their first chicken kill that almost caused us to stop listening. The slow, deliberate, step by step, description of killing the chicken, draining the blood, and plucking the carcass, was bad enough.  But Kingsolver really lost us when she pondered whether it had been a good idea to invite her neighbors who had lost their child just two weeks earlier to their chicken killing carnival. Sarah piped up from the back seat with an answer. "Seriously? Let me help you with that, Barbara. No! It was NOT a good idea!"

Nonetheless, the message was getting through. The chapters by Kingsolver's husband , Steven Hopp, were particularly compelling. No  extolling of family virtue, just the undeniable facts. He laid out his case: exposure to chemicals and hormones, threatened biodiversity, the huge carbon footprint from food transport, potentially catastrophic crop failures. As I absorbed this information,  it was hard not to recognize that I was letting cost and convenience control my food choices for both myself and my family. With a little more thoughtfulness, I could make choices that would be healthier for us and for the planet.

And so the game began,  Kingsolver - 1, von Euler - 0.