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.

Fifteenth night

It is one of the best kept secrets in this country, that Christmas is actually 12 days long. Yes, there’s the song, but when kids ask their parents about it, they get the same level of hemming and hawing as when they ask about drug use later on. The church (the real one, where clergy don’t wear microphones or have back-up singers) knows all about it, and know that “Little Christmas” is Epiphany, the day the magi arrived to adore the Christ child. It is the Twelfth Night immortalized by Shakespeare, and the day that many still celebrate with some sort of twelfth night cake or tart. The tree and decorations are taken down the next day, after Christmas is over. Unfortunately, the boy scouts pick up trees for recycling on January 5^th in our neighborhood, so we’ll have to recycle our tree the old-fashioned way—in the fireplace.

Like many people this time of year, I am chronically behind. Sunday was Epiphany, but we were invited to a Little Christmas party by enlightened friends who not only celebrate all twelve days, but have two Priuses (Prii?). So I didn’t get to the galette des rois then. No big deal, I thought, but then Number One gave me puppy eyes and asked when we were having the tart. Yeah, chimes in Little One, the one where you find the thingy inside and get to be king? And then I remembered: Swiss friend brought me a very special fève she found, which I had been cleverly hiding in the back of the baking drawer since the summer. The fève was a representation of Grossebaf, the fearless Norman warrior featured in Astérix chez les Normands. With his hands on his hips, he clearly wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

So I did make one, but the easy way: What a delight to discover that Trader Joe’s now has frozen puff pastry (imported, of course) and I still have a bag of frangipane mix from France that we picked up last spring.

Following the spaghetti course (the only acceptable menu for spelt Wednesdays, according to both offspring), the galette made its entrance, and we did the traditional cutting with Little One under the table calling the names to decide who got which piece. After the third bite, I donned a tasteful paper crown, and handed the little Swiss treasure to my Darling Husband.

I have it from a reliable ecumenical sort that Christmas isn’t really over until the Sunday after Epiphany, so I’ve got a few more days to take care of dismantling the tree.

Combinations

Number One Son had an attack of adolescent angst the other night (conveniently right in the middle of cello practice), so, after a good talk and listen, I introduced him to one of the joys in life: A bit of Green & Black 70% chocolate, and a lovely ripe Anjou pear. Take a bite of chocolate, and when it’s nearly melted in your mouth, take a bite of the juicy pear. Lovely. What is it, he asks. Belle Hélène, I respond, beautiful Helen. We silently bless the French woman who clearly knew her chocolate and knew what to do with it. It got us chatting about some other famous food combinations, which got me thinking about the Rotkohl I’d prepared for supper that evening.

I’m always perplexed by the ingredients list for this German-style red cabbage. You’d think I’d remember the recipe, since I’ve made it so many times, but I always end up pulling Dr. Oetker off the shelf to remind me what the forgotten ingredient is. This time I’d forgotten the currant jelly. It makes me shake my head and wonder just how this list of seemingly disparate elements came to reside in the same pot.

I have an image of a desperate eighteenth century German Hausfrau, being told oh by the way honey, the boss is coming for dinner as her husband trots off to the office on their one and only horse. Here she is, stuck at home to conjure up a meal from what’s in the freezer, but it hasn’t been invented yet. As she walks past the juniper bush into her house, she absently pockets a few berries from the bush. She sighs when she sees the breakfast dishes (right where he left them…) and starts clearing the leftover bacon and jar of red currant jelly off the table (she made it last July from the bush down the lane). The larder is next to bare, just a single bay leaf, a few cloves and a half bottle of apple cider that has turned. Her market basket holds half an onion, a shriveled green apple, seven potatoes, and three-quarters of a head of purple cabbage. Things do not look good, but our heroine is a creative woman, and has a vested interest in her husband’s career (this is another time, so neither divorce nor career is not an option). She renders the bacon in a big pot and sautés the onion in it (always a good start), then chops up the apple and the cabbage and throws them in. She considers her options, and chucks in the cloves and bay leaf, and then tosses in the leftover jam and a glug of the vinegar for good measure. She gives it a good stir, and sighs, gazing out the window at the fields below. And then she sees it: movement in the grass. She deftly takes the shotgun from the corner, and slips out the door. It takes her a good hour and a half to finally bag her main course, but she is whistling brightly on her way in, with a hare dangling by its ears. Delighted that the extended simmering has actually made her kitchen smell good, she takes the juniper berries from her apron pocket, sniffs them, and throws them into the simmering pot while she prepares her quarry for the roasting pan. The potatoes get a good scrub and join the hare, and she sets the table with a sprig of pale blue rosemary blooms plucked from the kitchen garden.

Needless to say, a dinner like this clinches her husband’s promotion, and the boss sends a messenger to fetch the recipe for his housekeeper (in my mind, she’s an extraordinary woman, and is fully literate among her clearly many talents). I simply can’t imagine any other plausible story as to how all these odds and ends wound up in the same pot.

Stewing

It’s cold. Bone-chilling, wet, as-cold-as-it-can-get-without-really-snowing cold. I grant you, it’s not the 5,000 below zero they get in the Midwest, but this is the temperate rain forest. The whole family has been congregating to use the newly completed downstairs bathroom because of its incredibly toasty tile floors. All the long underwear in the house is off the shelf and on our bodies, and yet we still feel cold. There are extra quilts on the bed, and Little One’s toes are covered in socks where they stick out from under the covers.

So when I saw a package of big chunks of Oregon beef in the market, I knew what we would be eating for supper last Friday. I also bought a local onion and three horse-leg thick carrots from Dungeness farm as well, and headed home.

Number One’s stomach led him into the kitchen by his nose, and he said, “that chicken and wine thing?” “Nope, beef stew” “Mmmm.”

Darling Husband came through the front door, his manly bulk exaggerated by the extra layers of coat and sweaters. After he had stomped off his boots and doffed his Indiana Jones hat, he paid a visit to the pots on the stove as well. “Coq au vin?” “Nope, boeuf bourguignon” “Mmmm” For this, I get a good wet one planted on my cheek. And neck. And…

At the supper table, our bellies radiating the warmth, we push back and start talking about classic French dishes. We love the way the traditional winter dishes warm us. Coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon are family favorites. But we’re also open to change (a good thing in this election year). I immediately think of Ratatouille—the movie—where our rat hero updates a classic dish, but is still able to trigger a Proustian moment in the cold heart of a jaded restaurant reviewer. I grab a French cookbook off the shelf, and it reminds me that ratatouille nicoise is a peasant dish featuring onion, green pepper, eggplant, zucchini and tomato. Judging from the ingredients, it is a dish planted firmly in autumn, celebrating the harvest, when tomatoes and zucchini are abundant and warm on the vine in the afternoon, but the evenings are verging on cool. We sigh a collective family sigh and make a mental note to try it next September.

But the splatty snowflakes continue this Monday, and we are getting snippy again. Even Hannah opted for indoors today, trading her all-day freedom forays for a toasty armchair where some kind soul left a wool throw. I head for the computer in my wool slippers, ostensibly to organize myself, but my morning reading leads me to the P-I foodie blogger, who tells me about the lentils she had for Christmas and about hogwash, another local food blog, where Jess Thompson has submitted herself to the tortuous journey of creating a recipe a day during 2007. I browsed and ogled, and while I was reading, I realized I had already seen what I was looking for: a bowl of lentils cooked with duck fat. Now, I’m fresh out of duck fat, but I do have some onions and freshly dried herbs and a couple of late tomatoes. I’m thinking of a thick lentil stew over some creamy polenta to warm the troops tonight. I’m sure it will warm their bellies better than suburban housewifey fallbacks like fish sticks or stir-fry.

The year of the cat

The new year is a time for cleaning out the old, cleaning up what you’re going to keep, and cleaning up your act, otherwise known as resolutions. The image I hold is of German women scrubbing their doorsteps in snowy weather to ring in the new year, presumably to booby-trap their stoops with ice to incapacitate visitors with muddy feet. Last year, my resolution was easier on my back than scrubbing steps: try to clean up my eating habits, making a difference on a small scale, and blogging my thoughts as I went. The latter, it was hoped, would serve to test my discipline for writing on a regular basis, and, I humbly hoped, serve as an example to those so inclined, though, given my limited readership, this cannot be considered a primary goal. I have been mildly successful, so will keep at both, working to keep both habits from accumulating grime without too much scrubbing.

***

Hannah’s personality is emerging, and it appears that she is quite the right cat for us. After having recovered from the trauma of going from stray to foster home to shelter and back to a home (ours) again, and after shaking off the kennel cough that turned into kitty bronchitis and conjunctivitis, she is today the picture of both physical and mental health. Her Christmas present was a homemade toy engineered by Number One Son and a bit of freedom: as we cut down the tree from the front yard, she came out with us, nose and tail twitching. She soon asked to go out more and more, and we have settled into an easy rhythm of spending a few daylight hours outside each day, punctuated by breaks for her power naps. It is reassuring that she has not fled; indeed, if she spots one of us in the yard or through the window, she will come running to tell us all about her adventures. This weekend, we knew we had won her heart: her loud mews summoned us to the back door to ooh and aah over the treasure she wanted to share with us: a freshly killed bird (we think it was a chickadee, it was frankly hard to tell at that point). And even in this she fits in with us, embracing our frugal ways: after sharing the pleasure of the red-tinged carcass, and even offering us a turn to bat it around too, she ate it. The whole thing, down to chewing any flesh off feathers.

The new year will hold some special challenges for me, as I transition “back” to the working world. I will have to travel in my new leadership role, which takes me out of my comfortable home and kitchen and my comfort zone. My aching hips and tightening waistband remind me that I do need to work harder at taking care of myself, as well as taking care to reduce my footprint. My old neighbor has persuaded me that carbon offsets do make sense, and not just as “Catholic guilt,” but as a way to make my voice heard in the messed-up energy market. But I also need to be mindful of the environment in my body, and do a little cleaning up there (especially right now, with fondue and Christmas-cookie induced sugar overload). Travel will test my resolve on both fronts.

I used to joke that my cat taught me the importance of ergonomics by making me get up from my desk and change my focal distance from time to time (open door, close door, open door, close door…). But I realize, as I slip gently back to professional life, that what both the felines and the offspring in my life have taught me is that balance is absolutely key: neither cat nor child does the same thing all day long, and neither shall I.