Frozen coconuts

So we’re back to food safety. As we hunker down to winter fare, when we face a seeming dearth of fresh food, it seems normal that we should turn to boxes and cans and the freezer instead of the garden or the farmer’s market. But all is not well in Grocerilande: it appears that we have yet another case of tainted food, this time a frozen coconut dessert that contains the Listeria bacterium, as well as a particularly damning story showing high levels of harmful pesticides in everyday supermarket produce.

When I was in Alexandria, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., I had a free afternoon to explore a bit. Besides an incredible chocolate shop (up some narrow stairs, I found Kingsbury Chocolates) and a great chili joint (I slurped up the Frito-chili pie at Hard Times Café), I went hunting for a letterbox at Gadsby’s Tavern. The day was incredibly clear, but bitterly cold. I descended the steps near the tavern’s north end, where thoughtful restorers had created a cutaway view into the ice well. Unsuccessful in finding my quarry (though I did locate a cleverly disguised geocache), I read the historical marker. The well served as an underground storage area for ice cut from the Potomac in winter, offering a way to cool drinks and refrigerate foods into early summer. It is empty now, but for two artfully arranged hay bales, and the Potomac is not frozen—yet.

I scratch my head and think how odd it is we should think to consume a frozen coconut dessert in January, when it was made months ago, and it’s really too cold to be thinking about slurping popsicles anyway.

An intrepid researcher also released his findings today: apparently, when kids eat conventional fruits and vegetables, they show traces of organophosphate pesticides. If they switch to organics, the markers in their urine and saliva disappear. What’s more, the markers show up in higher concentrations during the winter months, when we tend to import more foods. There are no surprises here, but the alarm is sounding because this is the same family of pesticides that the EPA was supposed to remove from the food chain. Chuck Benbrook, chief scientist of the Organic Center, dares to speak aloud what is on the tip of many of our tongues: "Given the almost daily reminders that children are suffering from an array of behavioral, learning, neurological problems, doesn't it make sense to eliminate exposures to chemicals known to trigger such outcomes like chlorpyrifos?"

Indeed. Once again, I bypass Grocerilande and head over to Co-opville, where I pick up some lovely local thin-cut pork chops (they will be paired with an apple past its crisp prime), some local blue potatoes (“Mommy, why do they call them blue, when they’re purple?”), and some fuchsia red-stemmed chard. Our plates are beautiful, dark like the season, but colorful and delicious (and organic) nonetheless. Dessert is an indulgent square snapped off a bar of Kingsbury chocolate (with essence of orange, dried cranberries and pecans), also dark like the season. But not frozen.

Creature comforts

As I bask in the comfort of my own home, I reflect on my travels last week. Every day, when I logged on to my laptop to check email and establish a video link with my family, I was greeted by the hotel’s login screen. This being an all-suite hotel “designed for the business traveler” they couldn’t help but extol their virtues: “Spacious two-room suites,” “Cooked to order breakfast,” “Evening Manager’s reception,” and so on. They have a business center where you can print things out (instead of frantically hunting for the nearest Kinko’s) and a playroom where the kids can blow out some steam with toys that were too big to pack. This particular hostelry had construction going in the central atrium, with a big pile of sand that gives me different ideas for a hotel playground.

But for me, the best part was having a fridge and a microwave. Combined with the fact that there was a Whole Foods across the street, it meant that I was not at the mercy of restaurateurs. Trying to get a non-allergen menu in a reasonable portion, not to mention sitting alone in a restaurant, is not my idea of a recharging or even marginally relaxing meal. Kudos to the hotel chain that finally figured it out: no one wants to eat in a restaurant for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I think back to road trips in Europe with my Darling Husband (who was darling at the time, just not my husband yet). We would throw some things in a bag that was light enough to carry, and set off to the train station. We later added our own car, but our destination was always the same: a youth hostel. The bed, which seems to be the main feature in standard-issue hotels, was usually a Spartan metal framed affair with sagging springs, one of many in a sleeping dorm. But the rest of the hostel added to the experience. There is nearly always a full kitchen (and sometimes a laundry) at your disposal, where you can whip up something as simple as an omelet (pick up four eggs and some cheese at the fromagerie in Rennes), or as complex as a pot of soup (fresh vegetables from a market in Avila) and wash it down with a local vintage (a Côtes du Rhône in the Vaucluse Valley). And a room with a big table and some sofas and chairs to hang out in, often with outdoor spaces with fire pits or grills (sausage and pork chops from the butcher shop in Lorient) and lawn chairs and hammocks and such. Sometimes we would score a “family room” which only had four beds, and a lock on the door (I recall a particularly romantic one, under the shingles in an old Norman flour mill, with machinery running the length of the stone room). We could raid the kitchen for milk and cookies at midnight if we wanted (we dipped cookies in mascarpone at one a.m. in Ravenna). Try that in a Travelodge.

So, much as I prefer the comforts of home, it is good to know that the tide is changing, if only a bit (they still have those annoying paper lids on the glassware). Perhaps they realize they’re up against videoconferencing, which allows participants to stay home and sleep in their own beds every night. Odd to think of hotels cluing in to the more human comforts of the youth hostel that not only make travel pleasant, but contribute to the texture of the experience. Let’s hope for more fridges in the future, since curling up with Ben & Jerry and Harry Potter on HBO (and no kids to interrupt you) is something I can paste in my scrapbook.

If you give a kid a cookie

Have you ever watched a kid eat a cookie? First, they take a little nibble, but since the arc of the cookie's diameter and the arc of their mouth work in opposition, the little corners of the bite out of the cookie break off and scatter down the front of their shirt. (Note: they stick better to sweaters, the fuzzier, the better.) The next bite is where life experience makes all the difference: an adult would turn the cookie and go for one of the protruding points. Not the kid. They pick up where they left off, jamming the cookie farther in, which means lots more crumbs (and even more if the cookie is gluten-free). If it’s a chocolate chip cookie, this is where the first smudge of chocolate on the side of their mouth comes from. (An aside: they apply the same methodology to watermelon, which explains how they get so incredibly sticky.) A really young child will continue in this way until the cookie snaps in two and they have to scramble for the crumbs, or cry because their cookie broke.

This only applies to homemade cookies, since they’re “more better than store cookies,” a direct quote from my Little One. His classmate today declared that “store soup” wasn’t nearly as good as “home soup” but she was going to eat it anyway ‘cause she was hungry. I hope her dad has some time to make “home cookies” today like Little One’s mom did. There’s just nothing more better than a homemade, crumbly, chocolately smile.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Cream together:
½ cup butter or shortening
¼ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg (or use egg replacer)

Add gradually:
1½ cups GF flour (I use rice/starch based)
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon xanthan gum

That’s the basic cookie. Now you can add the stuff that makes it interesting, like 1 cup of chocolate chips, or coated chocolate candies, or toffee bits, or nuts, or…?

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 12 minutes or until golden. Do not overbake. Makes about 4 dozen 3” cookies.

Comfortable food

Thursday is my knitting day, and last Thursday, I was knitting, albeit at a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. What was missing was the camaraderie of the knitting bunch, which had scattered to the four winds, myself included. I was on a plane, circling interminably over a snowy Maryland and very glad that I had brought my drawstring knitting bag and an extra ball of yarn.

I couldn’t spend the whole time knitting, though, since five hours is a long time to do any one thing, so I delved into Michael Pollan’s latest opus. I was reading while we passed over the nation’s breadbasket, a patchwork quilt all in white this January. Each square of this quilt has a group of greyish blocks placed somewhere on it, reminding me that people live there, presumably people who grow our food. Or, rather, people who grow the raw materials for corporate food production. I am struck by how all the fields look the same, unlike the farms in Europe, where odd shapes and sizes echo the natural landscape and the diverse plantings. But the Dakotas, where my Grammie once homesteaded, are no longer the breadbasket; they are the corn syrup in my aisle mate’s Coke and the soy oil in his peanut-free snack.

I can’t complain about airline food, for I had chosen not to partake of the “breakfast skillets” and “picnic packets” they were selling for $5. I couldn’t fit all the leaves from the head of Rent’s Due Ranch lettuce in the bowl the night before my departure (have you noticed that the lettuce heads are getting bigger as the days grow longer?), so I grabbed a plastic container (I still have a few) and put the rest in there. It was joined by two delicately thin-skinned tomatoes and some sliced almonds. I had tucked a little packet of Annie’s salad dressing in my TSA-approved Ziploc baggie, and so I crunched away in seat 21A, satisfied by my choice, and appalled and smug by what I saw people buying. And I had chocolate for dessert.

The sun set on my shortened day while we circled, but I had plenty of time after figuring out the Metro system and checking in to meander the aisles of the Whole Foods across the street. I was surprised by the wave of relief I felt as I entered with my reusable shopping bag tucked under my arm (it had fit nicely in the outside pocket of the new carryon bag). It seemed wonderfully comforting to know I had access to real food after a long day as a road warrior.

This week, I am back home again, and the selfsame drawstring bag is next to the door, ready to go knitting again. Back in my comfort zone.

Bleeping cart

Reading the paper this morning, I learn that Microsoft and MediaCart of Plano, Texas have jointly developed an electronic console for a shopping cart. It’s supposed to offer customers their shopping list as well as a scanner to be able checkout without having to wait in line (or talk to anyone). Sounds pretty cool, until you go further: An embedded RFID tag will allow ShopRite to track their customers shopping patterns (and you were hoping nobody was watching when you doubled back for the forgotten tomato sauce). They state that this will enable them to “make the shopping experience better for the consumer.”

I’m already wary of having to not only create an electronic shopping list (I have tried this, but it’s hard to do when you’ve got your head in the freezer to see what that white lump is), but they completely lose me with the “targeted marketing.” They’re going to display a coupon for Oreos when I enter the cookie aisle, and they’re trying to figure out why I may or may not buy the product. I can think of a thousand reasons why I may not take them up on the offer, and the RFID tag isn’t going to tell them. Perhaps I buy them in bulk at the warehouse store. Perhaps I’m on a tight budget so I buy Hydrox instead. Maybe I’m allergic to wheat, and so opt for Newman’s wheat-free knockoff. Or maybe I still have a mound of Christmas cookies at home and don’t need to add any cookies to the pile. It could be that my mother-in-law live with me and bakes cookies every Tuesday afternoon, so I don’t need store-bought cookies. Maybe I just don’t like Oreos.

As an aside, I can’t help but wonder how this is supposed to enhance the experience of the harried mother. Imagine putting a control panel on the handle where a baby or toddler can push buttons at will: it’s like a remote you can’t take away from the kid, with the screen behind them, so they are constantly turning around and trying to squirm out of their seat. Moms already have to drive our cart down the center of the aisle to avoid the grab and toss: Imagine letting the kidlet scan your cottage cheese three times—and pay for it. For our family, who actively tries to avoid screen time, it’s a nightmarish scenario, and only serves to drive me away from stores who have it. The distracted mom’s seemingly random pattern tracked by the RFID (including three passes back to the dairy case and one to the bathroom) might be good for a few laughs, and might even skew the results past usefulness.

Now, instead of developing more and more complicated systems to track my behavior and extrapolate my intentions, I’m thinking of a decidedly low-tech solution (beginning with that luddite favorite, the back-of-the-envelope shopping list). Let the grocer take the time to know me, inefficiently chatting at the checkout counter. He’ll begin to get a full picture of me as a human being, not the tendencies of a demographic. Anyone who has spent any time selling their wares on a personal scale and chatting with their custom will develop an instinct that can run circles around their MediaCart console. Imagine a world where people connect with each other, instead of staring at their computer screens to figure each other out.

Melted butter

Popcorn is a staple in every college dorm. My 18^th birthday present, few weeks before I went off to college, was an air popper with built-in butter melting dish, along with a jar of Orville Redenbacher kernels and a salt shaker. It was a fun ritual, plugging in this souped-up hair dryer and gathering around in our fuzzy slippers (I lived in an all-girl dorm my freshman year, at my father's insistence). We soon discovered it was easier to place a little bowl on top to melt the butter than use the poorly-designed and impossible to clean butter melter thingy. It was really fun to take the lid off and try to catch flying popcorn.

I imagine a similar scenario playing out in today's dorms, replaced by bags of microwave popcorn purchased from a mega-warehouse, with maybe even a small microwave oven for the well-heeled preppies. But there's less challenge in breaking open a wrapper and pressing the popcorn button and then trying to catch the door before you smell the burnt smell.

And now the headlines read of the horrors of the buttery flavor, diacetyl, an additive that not only doesn’t taste like real butter (think of the yellow goop in your movie snack bucket), but clogs the lungs of people exposed to it in large quantities, like popcorn factory workers, professional chefs and short-order cooks, as well as people who each huge amounts of microwave popcorn. It’s everywhere it seems—in cooking oils, butter-flavored cooking sprays and margarines.

Well, you say, at least I’m not affected, for I eat real butter. And that's what I was assuming until I kept reading. It appears that even buying real butter doesn’t shield us from diacetyl. As illogical as it sounds, most major brands of real butter contain butter flavor, including some organic brands. It’s in the list of ingredients, hidden in the ubiquitous “natural flavors” mystery ingredient.

So what’s a girl to do? At least one San Francisco restaurateur has gone so far as to start making his own butter, and the New York Times actually published his butter recipe. Registration is required to access the article, but I’m going to assume you know how to make butter. Little One can tell you how it’s done, taking turns shaking a mason jar full of cream while the bread is baking. Some adults may go more upscale, using an electric mixer. I’m even lazier, reading labels to find an organic brand whose only ingredient is cream (I buy unsalted butter, preferring to control the amount of butter in my cooking and baking).

But it looks like we've done it to ourselves again: we have taken a traditional food, made on a small scale in a traditional way, and turned it into a mass-produced food commodity. When we began to manufacture milk products, we lost the ability to skim off the cream (and have real buttermilk for biscuits and pancakes in the process); we had to buy our butter in paper-wrapped cubes. We have homogenized our milk, homogenizing in the process our society, making sure that every stick of butter tastes the same, by adding a chemical that poorly mimics nature.

So where does that leave us? In practical terms, I can still buy butter, if I’m careful, and I may even be able to find microwave popcorn that is both free of genetic modifications and diacetyl. But it would be cheaper to place a brown paper bag of bulk organic popcorn in the microwave (check out the great video and discussion at instructables). It turns out it’s considerably cheaper, and it’s much more fun, especially if you have fuzzy slippers and some friends to share it with.

Pound with friends

It was a pretty typical Saturday, with running Number One around to cello doings, and Little One helping his papa call the Vaterland and do a (very) little housework. We had an invitation from a co-worker to come to a mochi-tsuki, so we headed over after orchestra, arriving at the Evil Empire just in time to see Darling Husband swinging the mallet. A hand-written poster outlined the process for those who weren’t familiar with it: Mochi-tsuki is a new year’s activity, where sweet rice is steamed and pounded "with friends" using mammoth wooden mallets (kine). The action centers around the massive granite mortar (usu): big burly young men, a trio of delicate women, little kids with papas shadowing, everyone takes part. It’s enormously entertaining, with the mochi master yelling instructions and spectators chanting as the pounders take turns, “ichi, ni, san, shi!” (“one, two, three, four!”). To change things up, the master will call on one person (invariably a broad-shouldered man) and they alternate in quick succession: the mallet smashes down with a satisfying splat, the master reaches in and moistens or turns the sticky mass with his hands while the mallet is on the upstroke, pulling them out just before it descends. Miraculously, no fingers are crushed, and the sticky white lump is eventually handed over to the women-folk, who form the mochi balls, much like we form dinner rolls, and distribute them to eager hands.

Historically, rice was a valuable commodity, and so it was that the community came together to pound the rice balls to insure a prosperous new year. It’s clearly too much of an undertaking for a single person. After a turn swinging the mallet, you need to catch your breath: if you had to pound it alone, it would get cold, and mochi is best eaten warm. So here they were, families wearing polar fleece and jeans, with card keys dangling from their lanyards, pounding and chanting and laughing, while little children ran around, dads snapped pictures and older kids helped out here and there. Number One had a go with the mallet, and said it would be fun even without the end product, but I disagree: the communal energy that went into the mochi made plain rice delicious.

***

Back on the home front, Darling Husband scored the better part of a rather large cedar tree from some friends. This time it was cut into rounds (buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about the time he scored a whole tree), but it still needed to be split. We all took turns helping as we could, swinging the ax, pounding the wedges, carting and stacking wood. An oddly familiar gesture, perhaps firewood-tsuki? Yes it was fun, but as I stacked it, I was reminded of the adage that wood heats twice: once when you burn it, and once when you chop it. With friends.