No juice, no roast

The plan was potluck at a colleague's lovely home, followed by a community reading of Dylan's A Child's Christmas in Wales. I had bought some waxy red potatoes and local Brussels sprouts to roast in olive oil and rosemary to bring. However, we hadn't reckoned with just how hard the wind would blow Thursday night.

The power went out; a bit of a surprise, since we're on the same power grid as Microsoft. We've had no real outages in the ten years we've lived here. But this storm was a biggie. School was canceled. The neighbor had a tree fall across the street onto another neighbor's car, and it took most of the neighborhood to help clear the road. After a few hours of cutting branches and schlepping firewood for next year, I raided the larder and made a steaming pot of lentil soup (with leeks and cauliflower from the fridge, which is rapidly starting to smell). The hostess wisely canceled: even though she has a natural gas-powered generator, the roads were just too much of a mess to go anywhere if we don't have to.

We clearly needed a new plan. No oven, no way to roast those potatoes; ah, but I have my griddle! And, since it's the first night of Hanukkah, potato pancakes were the obvious choice. I grated them up with onion and wrapped them in a dishtowel. There was sour cream and applesauce (from our Gravenstein tree) in the fridge, which needed to be emptied anyway. The Brussels sprouts got the steaming treatment, then slathered in butter. We did a quick inventory of firewood, and decided to meet at the neighbor's for supper. They mashed potatoes and made a stew with leftover steak au poivre. We brought the Menorah; they provided champagne and music stands, and with full bellies and rosy cheeks, we played and sang together until the kid's bedtime.

We lit the stove one more time to boil water for hot water bottles, and tucked ourselves in for a long winter's nap. And we have a plan: if there's no power again tonight, we'll be lighting a fire, and the neighbors will bring their supper (and cello) to our house.

Salad pro tempore

'Tis the season for potlucks, though any season is a good one, if you ask me. Even though some people groan at the mention of one, potlucks build communities, a sorely needed panacea in this fractured society.

As a child, I was amazed at the seeming randomness of potluck offerings, but I'm beginning to see patterns emerge as I grow older. Potlucks happen when a group of people who have a commonality gather to break bread together. A group's first potluck is often risky (unless organized by Methodists or the like, in which case A-L bring main course, M-Z dessert), but successive potlucks stabilize. Some people have standby dishes that they always bring, which are often so good that others come to expect and anticipate them. Others can always be counted on to bring whatever is easy to grab from the supermarket deli. We tolerate their offerings because we enjoy their company. Late arrivals are heralded, not only for the joy of seeing old friends again, but because their offerings placed on the table are a good excuse to revisit the buffet. By the time you've emptied your plate, you can go back an fill it up with a combination of more of the really good stuff plus some of the new.

I serve on a board of directors for the local translators and interpreters association, and we gather for our meetings over a potluck. There is an unspoken code: we can rely on the Belgian project manager for cheese and bread, the Russian conference interpreter always brings something hearty and carb-loaded, the Swedish literary translator lives around the corner from a terrific bakery, the Japanese-English patent translator (who always seems to be on deadline) brings potato chips, and so on. (Our former newsletter editor always brought homemade cookies. We miss her terribly.) The problem is our secretary, or rather her absence. She makes terrific salads, but when she can't make it, we not only have no one to take the minutes, everyone else jumps in with a salad. Last night was a perfect example: the balance being upset by her absence, we had three green salads, a green pepper salad, a frittata, pelmeni (a sort of Russian tortellini) and a bag of honey Dijon potato chips. Since I'm not eating wheat or eggs (my own fault, I know), my dinner consisted a lot of salad and potato chips. One salad in particular was heavenly: red leaf lettuce, avocado, cherry tomatoes and cranberry with a silky vinaigrette. The German technical translator who brought it went home with an empty bowl (labeled with her name, of course). We also asked her to take the minutes.

Crawfish Etouffé

This year's ATA conference took us to New Orleans at the beginning of November. We went a few days early, and took the whole family, since who knows when we'll get back there. We figured it would be an education, and I was certainly looking forward to the regional specialities. Katrina aside, I knew there would be food, and I figured they would prioritize, making what was important to them. I was right.

I was as adventuresome as I could be, trying all sorts of new things (It was funny to note that no one was serving spinach salad, even though the scare was long over). I aimed for combo plates that let me try more than one thing at once. Shrimp gumbo, crawfish étouffé, alligator gumbo (disappointing: the liver-like texture was a real turn-off), pecan pie (with and without chocolate), pralines, smooth court-bouillon, popcorn shrimp, red beans, and fall-apart tender fried catfish. And of course, hot beignets smothered in powdered sugar from the Café du Monde.
Our Halloween day lunch in New Orleans was on a pleasantly sunny day, in a restaurant with its tall windows wide open to the street. I tried a combo plate with a spicy shrimp creole, but the crawfish étouffé won my heart. I was determined to try to make it at home, so I picked up a cookbook in the airport. Once ensconced in my claustophobically cozy airplane seat, I plunged in. No surprise that the recipe called for crawfish (my spell-checker prefers the term crayfish). I figured I should be able to get that locally, as they fish jumbo crayfish right here in Lake Washington, selling it down at the Pike Place Market. The cookbook author assures me it's wonderful with shrimp, so maybe we'll try that first.

But there was a huge surprise: bell pepper. I admit that it's been years since I've eaten bell peppers, since they seem to disagree with me--at least I thought they did. I remember vividly watching my mother cutting the top off of a big green bell pepper, scraping out the seeds, and stuffing it with rice and ground beef & onions, so I know I ate them as a child. But one encounter with them in a Mexican restaurant led me to believe I couldn't manage them anymore. But no matter, that étouffé sat just fine in my belly. So today I bought my first green pepper in two decades, and it simmered away with the shrimp and celery and tabasco sauce (even though the recipe didn't call for that). It was as tasty as I recall, and will definitely enter my repertoire, though I can see it better suited for warm, sultry days. Since we don't get any of that here, rainy ones will have to do.

Oh, and I served it with spinach salad.

Uninspired

The cold rain returned yesterday, that cold rain that would be snow if it were only a bit colder. When I thought of potatoes (since it was Monday), I could only think of mashed potatoes. Luckily, there were russet potatoes in the larder, so I peeled them, plopped them in a pan of water and set them to simmer on the stove. Lacking other inspiration, and preoccupied with the evening's upcoming concert, I grabbed some sausage out of the freezer--where would I be without the microwave to thaw? Mashed potatoes also call for peas, these were Petit Peas from Trader Joe's, also out of the freezer. Uninspired, but apparently comforting: I note that all the mashed potatoes were gone by the time I got to the dishes.

Fish on Friday & the Rhythm Method

Our exchange student must think we're pretty weird. There's a little chart on the fridge (with a cute cartoon of Sandra Boynton's hungry monsters rubbing their tummies) that says what we eat each day. He's getting a trial by fire into the rotation diet.

There are a couple of reasons we rotate our diet, the first being that the doctor told us to. My dear husband would be perfectly content with a brie sandwich washed down with a glass of milk for every meal, every day. Indeed, he did this during the several months that visa expirations separated us, and Costco made it possible to continue this habit on a grand scale. Lo and behold, when his cholesterol reached dangerous proportions, doctors were alarmed. The MD offered him the option of prescription medications for life; the naturopath tested him for allergies and proposed the radical option of rotating his diet. I won't lie and say it was easy; it was anything but. But his cholesterol plummeted from dangerous levels to absolutely picture-perfect. (We also noted other minor health benefits.)

However, after two years of trying to fit a four-day rotation into a seven-day week, I backed off. It was no fun always having to consult the chart on the fridge to determine dinner. Figuring out what next Tuesday's dinner was meant counting on my fingers (Thanksgiving only falls on a wheat day once every four years!). And planning evenings out or trips was a nightmare.
When our eldest started going to school, there were parent evenings where this incredibly impractical woman would give us parenting tips--an interesting notion, since she had none of her own. However, this wisp of a young woman said something that stuck: small children don't have the wherewithal to make choices. Tell, don't ask, she said. Bombarding them from the minute they get up with questions about what they're going to eat, wear, do first, etc., is too much for everyone. Better to establish Monday as oatmeal day, Tuesday scrambled eggs, etc. Indeed, their weekly rhythm at school was well-established, and we soon picked up the lingo: "today is soup day, remember to take a vegetable for the pot!" "Oh, goody, Wednesday is watercolor day!"

When our slacker dietary habits caught up to us in the form of higher cholesterol and blood pressure, our new doctor suggested we restart the rotation. But that kindergarten teacher had given me the key: make it a seven-day rotation. And so there we have it: Monday is potato/almond milk; Tuesday, rice/soy; Wednesday, spelt/goat (or sheep); Thursday, rice/soy; Friday, potato/almond; Saturday rice/soy and Sunday is indulgently normal: wheat and dairy (think bread and cheese, cake and whipped cream).

In the end, it does make things easier. If the omnivore's dilemma is having too many choices, then setting up some sort of rhythm already makes some of the decisions for you. In this day of information overload, the knowledge that I'm making spaghetti (spelt, with sheep's milk Romano cheese) on Wednesday is a comfort. Our family finds comfort, stability and joy in getting one of our favorite meals on a regular basis. And yes, blood pressure, cholesterol and weight are in wonderfully normal ranges.

I recall a theatre teacher telling us that art without discipline was chaos. I find that this 'discipline' creates a framework that actually increases my creativity. I once saw a BBC cooking show where they give a chef a bag of seemingly disparate ingredients, and the chef had to create a dish that used all of them. The rigid rules made the chefs dig deeply into their creativity--which we all know can mean some real doozies, both good and bad.

I also must note that establishing a routine or rhythm for meals is not an entirely new-age-y practice. Think of the Saturday night prime rib dinner at the local diner (and how it always seems to turn up as leftovers in the next morning's special), or the priest urging parishioners to eat fish on Fridays. A friend has a mom who was a Home Ec teacher: they had the same meals weekly (predictably, roast beef on Sunday and fish on Friday). We all readily accept the notion of three meals a day--our language even accommodates this convention.

It turns out oatmeal is not our exchange student's thing. He gave it the old college try, but he's discovered the joys of granola, even on Monday.

Industrial organic

There are a few books that will change the way you view the food you put in your mouth. One of these is Diet for A New America by John Robbins, but the one that came to mind today was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Our family tries in so many ways to reduce our footprint on this Earth. We have a "used" house, remodeled with recycled items wherever possible, we use energy-efficient appliances (and even a few of those annoyingly dim compact fluorescent light bulbs). Our cars are two ancient Volvos (the 'new' one is a 1992). Our clothes come from both thrift shops and retail outlets. And we buy organic food for the right reasons, as well as the selfish ones.

So I feel slightly guilty about today's meals. I didn't really cook today, but I was politically correct enough to buy organic "fast" food. (The only meal I made today was a quick lunch: French onion soup from a mini-brick and a BLT on rye crisp.)

Blame it on the holidays: We got to sleep in this morning, as the kids overnighted at the neighbors while we went dancing. I awoke at 8 and baked up some lemon poppy seed organic muffins from a box of Dr. Oetker, and we breakfasted with the neighbors. It's funny, Dr. Oetker is about as mainstream as you can get in Germany, but you don't find his (their?) boxed mixes anywhere but import shops here; instead the organic line is in every natural food store.

Dinner was a different story: eaten in the car between a holiday party at the swimming school and Number One son's cello recital (his Tarantella was actually quite nice, in spite of a couple glitches). It came in little boxes from Whole Foods, and cost me well over $30 for four people.
I hark back to 1988, and a French friend is ranting about the opening of a bakery in her provincial French town--Pat à Pain was open until 9 pm, and open on Sundays, and she was absolutely livid. Young and American as I was, I thought it was terrific--very convenient and all that. She grumbled something about the younger generation not being able to plan ahead. Dear me, but she turned out to be right! If I had planned ahead, I could have done better than the Whole Paycheck buffet.

I promise to try to do better tomorrow. But as long as I was feeling frivolous, I bought premium gas for the 30-year old Volvo.