To hell with rice

Remember Sally, Charlie Brown's little sister, when she says she's mad at the whole world, especially stupid jump ropes? I'm fed up too. Especially with stupid weathermen. The weatherman said, and I quote, "no new snow" and "sunshine" and "highs in the mid thirties." It's been snowing and under 30 degrees for the last five hours. Needless to say, the sun is nowhere in sight. I'm so cold, and I'm so tired of practical wool socks and long underwear. I want to wear the slinky things my husband bought for Christmas, but I need flannel pajamas. Our heating system is struggling to keep up: and it's not keeping up because it was designed for the temperate Pacific Northwest, not the arctic.

Clearly, the cold makes me grumpy. My husband is none too pleased about the flannel either.

All this means I was not in a good frame of mind when it came to deciding what to make for supper tonight (it's a rice night). The curry rut was hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, the leftover curry--three separate containers--vying for supper of leftovers status. All I have to do is put the rice cooker on, and I know I'm headed down the path of evil. I resist. I am not going to make rice. But I have to make something, it's just too cold not to eat. Thank heavens one Pyrex dish's contents were fuzzy enough to deliver me (us) from this damning temptation.

The accumulating snow means the crisper is getting empty-ish. I'm down to one head of lettuce, one head of purple cabbage, six Brussels sprouts, a handful of carrots and about six green onions. I pull it all out (except for the cabbage), along with the classic yellow Pyrex dish containing leftover roast chicken. This is starting to look like soup, but I need to resist rice. Digging in the larder, I strike gold: a bag of barley from the Buttercup Kindergarten teacher. With a huge sigh of relief, I throw it all into the pot, along with some chicken broth. The lettuce and green onion become salad with a tangy sesame vinaigrette, but the main event is soup. Without rice.

One yogurt

British Neighbor called yesterday as her kids were eating breakfast (mid morning, yet another snow day). She was trying to sort out a very American-sounding recipe: M&M cookies. It called for 1½ sticks of softened butter, and she and her daughter were scratching their heads. Her daughter was guessing that it meant one and a half boxes, but that would have resulted in buttery puddles on the baking sheet: the recipe was referring to 1½ of the four "sticks" that are individually wrapped in the one-pound package typically sold in the US. Armed with that vital bit of information, we were treated to some lovely, buttery cookies after our first snowball fight of the day.

So much depends on packaging that we often forget this when submitting recipes across borders. A quick Google search shows many people, from Australia to Germany, asking the same "stick of butter" question, with at least one poor soul confused by a request for a tablespoon of chilled butter, noting that when it's chilled, it's extremely difficult to force into a spoon, you see. When you buy your butter in a block like the rest of the world, there are no handy tablespoon markings on the package!

I ran across this the first time I was tempted by a foreign recipe. It was an elegant-sounding saffron cake I found in a French woman's magazine while I was still in college here. But I was confused by the ingredient "one yogurt." I was petrified, on my student budget, of making a mistake with my expensive saffron by putting in the wrong amount of yogurt. It's just as well, since I also didn't realize that French yogurt was an entirely different creature from the gelled stuff you get in American supermarkets. And no, I've never made the recipe: I have spent literally an hour in a French hypermarché looking at the different sizes, and can find no standard. I remain stymied--but I still have the recipe in my files!

This bit me again this year, when I tried to make marzipan crescents amidst the Christmas baking madness (you can read the sad tale here). The recipe called for "½ Fläschchen Bittermandelöl" (½ vial of bitter almond oil). I knew I didn't have anything like that in my cupboard, and I couldn't recall ever seeing it in a store. I turned to the Internet, both to find out what it was and how much a ½ fläschchen was. Luckily for me, the Germans are big on standardization: I learned the Dr. Oetker product was an almond flavoring based on oil and the vial contained about ½ teaspoon of it. Wonder of wonders, I also learned that ¼ teaspoon of the Bittermandelöl corresponded roughly to one teaspoon of what we call almond extract. Which was exactly what I needed to make the cookies.

Dinner @ 8

We have already had our fill of nasty weather this season, but old man winter, it seems, is not done. With a snow storm predicted, nothing was happening, so we all went about our daily lives, until, promptly at four p.m., snow started. I mean it really started, to the tune of an inch in half an hour. Number One son and I were home, to do homework and make supper, respectively, but my dear husband and the little one were still downtown.

I got out the ingredients, chopped the onion. A bit worried, I picked up the phone and tried to call my husband. The call wouldn't go through. Hmm. I tried again, to no avail. So, I turned on the burner, waited a bit for to pot to heat up, drizzled in some olive oil and threw in the onion. Distracted, I added a few herbes de provence and some salt and pepper, stirred it around a bit, and turned down the heat. Then I tried to call again. This time, I managed to get his voice mail, but I know from experience it's a fool's game to leave a message. So, I tried once more, but the call wouldn't go through. Rats.

I crumbled up the sausage into the mix, letting it brown with the by-now golden onion, then subjected two cans of tomatoes (one diced, one sauce) to the Swingaway. That made me think of our exchange student's fascination with this wall-mounted restaurateur's device. And when I thought of him, I thought of SMS. I wondered: if I can't get through via telephone, might I be able to send a text message to my dear husband? I tried it:

Im worried. Where r u?

I pushed send and stirred my pot. Pretty soon, my phone lit up and played its little SMS jingle.

01/10/07 17:54
On our way - walking, at bakery now/
***End***

Relief-I knew they were OK and where they were! But that was still a good three miles away, which meant it would take them at least another hour to get home. It also meant our five-year old had already walked two miles, and it was past suppertime. I added wine to the sauce while I composed my next message.

Can u take a bus? Is D OK?

I filled the pasta pot with water, put in a dollop of oil and turned on the gas. The cell phone made its happy sound again:

01/01/07 18:01
We're fine, having fun, see u in 1 hr
***End***

Number One Son is relieved, as am I, and we try to think of what we can do to help. They'll be cold and tired. I know, he says, we should walk out to meet them!

Tell me when you get to 20Th and Bel Red. Well meet u at aRDMORE park

Aside: I wish I could figure out how to force lower case text entry.

01/01/07 18:11
ok, we're at ymca now
***End***

What could we bring to help warm them and feed them? Tea? Cocoa? No, too hard to drink and walk. Baked potatoes? They warm your hands, and you can eat them, but I only have boilers in the larder. Hand warmers would be good. The water boils, I open the larder to get the noodles, and there is the bin of rice. It hits me: rice hand warmers. Little One's kindergarten teacher was looking for a natural alternative to disposable hand warmers (have you seen the warning labels on them?). Google offers me Knitty Pocket Warmers. Cute and warm. Clearly, I don't have time to knit them up, but we do have time to put rice in some cloth tea bags. We zap them and they're perfect! I call the Kindergarten teacher to let her know and she's ecstatic. Then I tell her Little One is hiking home in the snow, and she is very impressed-he'll have a story to tell her when school gets back in.

I drain the noodles. Number One and I eat a plate of spaghetti and agree we'll save the rest until we're all home. On cue, the phone rings: Dear Husband is at Trader Joe's, using their phone, and do I need anything? No, I say, I just want to see you again. We figure if we head both out now, we'll meet at the park. We zap the warmers, bundle up, and set off.

How magical it is out there, with snow clinging to every twig and leaf. It's skier's dream powder, squeaky-crunchy underfoot. We trudge up the hill, past sledding teenagers and slipping cars, and at the corner the boys see each other. They break away from both of us and do the movie run-to-each-other to a brotherly hug. Then they pick up snowballs and throw them at each other.

It is 8:45 by the time we push back from the table, legs tired and bellies full of sgabetti. We don't need a phone call to tell us there's no school tomorrow. We're already thinking of food to warm our bellies between building forts and making snow angels.

Potage Parmentier

Well, I was looking for a way out of a rut, and I found one. When I run across an interesting title (book or music or movie), I put in a reserve in our library system, and sit back and wait. Since I'm constantly putting in reserves and they move to the top of the queue at different speeds, they come up somewhat randomly, like a disorganized, multimedia version of Netflix. This weeks' bounty included DVDs of Vera Drake and Before Sunset, together with Carlo Petrini's Slow Food: The Case for Taste and Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen by Julie Powell.

I ventured into Carlo's thin tome, to be daunted by the heaviness of the task for those of us who would like to change the world. Let's face it, sometimes I have trouble just getting my kids out the door to school in the morning. The prospect of tilting at windmills makes me want to crawl back under the covers. So, I set Carlos aside for now and plunged instead into Julie's delightful book. I'm only a few chapters in, but am enjoying her voyage as well as her excellent writing. And how perfectly it jibed: as I opened the fridge, looking for inspiration on this potato day (Mondays and Fridays chez nous), there were two beautiful leeks. And indeed, her first chapter is how she stumbled into making the potato and leek soup recipe that opens Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. So, after playing a couple of rounds of leek charades with the kids (we decided the moose, violinist and carpenter were the best), there's a pot of potage Parmentier simmering on my stove. No worries, I'm not going to follow Julie's path, but I am very grateful for her reminder to dust off the volume dotted with fleurs-de-lis. Of course, there is a small risk that I might get stuck in the soup chapter.

Res/volution

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has - Margaret Mead

What if our New Year's resolutions could change the world? What if each person found a way to make a change, however small, in the way they eat? Ideally, it would be a small, daily change so that it becomes habit, but weekly, or even monthly would make a difference if enough people did it.

I figured out the change we will make just before the New Year; in the wake of the Spinach E. coli scare, I realized that I was relying heavily on the convenience of bagged salads. I was using my salad spinner in the seasons when we grew our own, but when our lettuces cowered before Jack Frost, we harvested the last spinach, mâche and kale and resumed grabbing bags off the shelf at Trader Joe's. But there was a little niggle in the back of my mind as I tossed yet another bag into the garbage (why do I need scissors to make salad?). I recalled reading that same plant processes nearly 75% of the country's bagged salad. Then headlines blared and spinach was off the shelf in a big way, with the remaining bags touting "no spinach" on bright stickers. But the local co-op still had a mound of fresh, local spinach--it is incredibly easy to grow in our temperate climate. And then the penny dropped: yes, bags are convenient. But if processing foods is problematic both in terms of food safety (the harvest from one field, contaminated by manure from a few wild boars, spread its pathogens across the country via shared equipment), environmental impact of packaging and transport (4 empty salad bags a week x 52 weeks x 100 million people = 20,800,000,000 bags entering the waste stream each year, in addition to the petroleum and energy needed to create the packages, move the product from farm to processing to distribution all over the country), then why on earth am I buying spinach from anywhere but here?

I took my salad spinner out of its winter home, and am now buying lettuce (not salad!) from local organic producers. A rediscovery-winter lettuce tastes different than summer lettuce, different types of lettuce prefer the coolness (tender butter lettuce gave way to iceberg, spinach and mâche). My youngest enjoys pushing the plunger to see how fast he can get the spinner to go, and is now sneaking a taste from the salad bowl. One small resolution for me, that could be a giant revolution.