Thursday, September 20, 2007

The kitchen sink

With a kid home sick from school right on the tail end of a trip, creativity in leftovers was called for. Luckily, there were still a few items in the garden, so not all was from the freezer or a can. I rounded up all the odd homegrown potatoes (I counted at least four different types), cut them up, seasoned and roasted them. The freezer had a package of Hempler’s bratwurst, which are so tasty that the boys (all three of them) fight over the fifth one. (The packages have, over the years, had six, four, and now five sausages in them.) I resorted to frozen peas for a token green item.

***

Right on the heels of our fast food binge (though Burgerville’s fast food is slower and better for you than the market leaders), I read Mark Morford on Wendy’s new Baconator burger, which is garnished with six strips of bacon and boasts 51 grams of fat. That’s 830 calories before we add the fries, and we can’t forget the fries and the Coke. Call it 1300 even. For the record, I gain weight at anything more than 1200 calories a day.

I imagine someone who orders this must be ravenously hungry. A niggling voice reminds me of a piece I read a few days back about how food is less nutritious in terms of micronutrients and phytochemicals. I can’t help but think there has to be some correlation between our “appetite” for the extreme things the fast food industry is pushing, and the logical extrapolation that we have to eat more to get the same amount of the nutrients we did twenty years ago.

I think that hungry person is also looking for something other than food, but they're not sure what. Marketing preys on our insecurities: if nature is telling you that nutrients are lacking and culture tells you that you are lacking, you will be on the lookout for something, which meshes nicely with the obvious sophistication of the marketing machine. When you’re hungry, you don’t think clearly. Which is a recipe for disaster.

***

Air fresheners have hit the fan: an environmental group is suing to have air fresheners regulated because the chemicals they contain are clearly implicated in air quality and respiratory and reproductive health issues. The response is predictable: faced with irrefutable evidence, one company has pulled and quarantined their products. The folks who open a window after using the bathroom are feeling vindicated, while others sputter that they need their plug-in scents to keep their houses and stores smelling fresh and clean. I can safely predict new product lines cashing in on natural scented oils, potpourri and baking soda. They’ll still contain noxious chemicals of course, just ones that aren’t on anybody’s bad list. And it’s unlikely that the government will defy lobbyists and require disclosing the ingredients. Plus ça change…

***

All this talk gets many people upset, worried that the government is becoming a nanny state. Part of me agrees, reasoning that we should just let people kill themselves with smoking, eating poorly, or inhaling toxins. But I also understand that harming one member of our society harms us all. I watched my father kill himself with his pipe; I now see my brother repeating the pattern, this time with food from the supermarket. Diagnosed with arterial disease, his doctor does not prescribe a diet void of hydrogenated fats and rich in omega-3 fatty acids, but gets out his pad and writes a scrip for Prilosec and blood thinners and tells him to avoid leafy greens. The corporations that manufacture foodstuffs continue to profit, as do the drug companies who have no interest in seeing people adopt healthy habits. It all boils down to money – big money – and that makes my blood boil. The money to be made in buying unprocessed local food simply can’t satisfy the greed of the huge corporations.

***

Which brings me back to my bare cupboards. I’m left with a bunch of fruit well past its prime in the bowl, a mess of leftover rice in the fridge and a lonely packet of Umpqua Valley ground lamb in the freezer. All the fruit goes into a pot with plenty of sugar, making jam that I have dubbed “kitchen sink” for its mishmash of ingredients (blackberries, plums, blueberries, one peach, half a pear and a lemon). The lamb had me scratching my head: the garden had two smallish but ripe tomatoes, but I didn’t want to sacrifice them to roast with the lamb, and besides that really wants feta, of which I have none. Tomatoes in hand, I walk past the grape arbor. Of course! I pick a few dozen leaves, mix up half the lamb with some leftover rice, and roll up some dolmas. The rest of the lamb got the garlic and dill treatment and roasted. The tomatoes got eaten, just like that. And the whole house smells of lovely, sweet garlic.


Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Homecoming

A sniffly Little One is curled up in my bed, fast asleep in the warm nest made by us getting up this morning. It was a full weekend, as I attended a choir reunion at my Alma Mater, and the boys made their way south to attend the culmination of two days’ intense rehearsal, an alumni choir concert. We arrived home late last night, after far too many hours on the road (think dark, rain, freeway), and all promptly fell into bed. Little One awoke with a cold.

Other than that, there were a few meals of note over the weekend: The Ram’s Head Pub in Northwest Portland, where I feted my re-found freedom (however brief) with a half-pint of cider and a hamburger and salad—said burger being made of Oregon Country Beef, the same stuff that makes its way onto our table regularly. In Salem, I opted for take-out Chinese from Kwan’s one evening: curled up in a motel room with parchment chicken, snow peas and cable TV harked right back to my college days, though a pan of half-baked brownies would have really completed the moment. I grazed on a few University-supplied meals, there were a few salads along the way, and a couple cups of tea soothed my rusty throat.

On the way home, we stopped at Burgerville. Understand that my poor, deprived children have never been to the golden arches (quick, call Child Protection Services!). Part of it is the principle: they occupy a medieval structure in our graduate University town of Freiburg, Germany, and had the audacity to prominently affix their name on the centuries-old plaster. Not to mention the doubtful quality of what they sell and the co-branding marketing strategy, often aimed at children. But dear old local Burgerville, unhip to us when we lived there, gets huge points for making their burgers from Oregon Country Beef (and slapping on a thick slice of Tillamook cheddar) and fries from Northwest potatoes, along with their commitment to using wind power and recycling their oil into biodiesel.

I can make only two admittedly picky suggestions: one, that they learn to make milkshakes as good as those at Dude’s. And if they could just convince their marketing folks to use a dictionary, we’d be set.