Satisfaction is an Investment

A couple months ago, Sarah was over for a visit while I was cooking.  She had just made some seitan from scratch, and we talked about fake meat and my history of a disappointing experience cooking with it. 

If I buy something that is highly seasoned and processed, the fake meat equivalent of a Dorito, then I enjoy it just fine, as I do all junk food.

But if I took something in its basic form – say, plain tofu – and tried to cook with it, I invariably seemed to end up with that kind of thin-tasting, unsatisfying meal that, until recently, had been the hallmark of cooking for myself.  

Prior to…well, really, the learning experience that has been this blog, most of my cooking experience has resulted in an end product that has been as hearty and satisfying to eat as a stick of celery.

Is it food?  Sure.  It has volume, texture, some kind of flavor.  But on the Hearty Satisfaction Scale, it’s about a 2.

Maybe it is all a question of umami. 

While I do eat seafood now, my cooking life has always been primarily vegetarian and often lo-cal focused.  When you cook primarily vegetarian/lo-cal food, it’s just not…automatic that what you produce will click with the savory/heart/umami receptors in your brain. 

This is what cooking very often seemed to result in for me.  It’s also one of the reasons why – despite my interest – I never stuck with it until I had a blog. At least with a blog, I could write about my failures and feel creatively fulfilled, even if the food was one big vat of celery-stick disappointment.

Until the past couple of months.  Something has happened with my cooking.  I think it started right after the Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Dessertaganza.

The President of the Debate Club and her hubs were here right after the New Year.  She’d last been here at the end of September.  I cooked for her then and I cooked for her this trip and she could taste a difference.  

The story of Mama Cass getting hit on the head with a pipe and expanding her vocal range is most likely apocryphal.  But I feel like the story, even if it’s untrue, is an illustration of a truth, which is that sometimes you toil and toil and make no progress, then suddenly experience tremendous progress that just feels like it happened TO you as opposed to being the result of any work on your part.

I think this maybe has happened with my cooking, some kind of development that, like most things in my life, I unthinkingly stumbled into, got it to work and then retroactively articulated it to myself. 

The epiphany: to a person with my sorts of taste buds, (ta da!) satisfaction is an investment.

What does that mean?  Basically that if, like me, in order to feel satisfied you’re going to need some richness, some umami action, some depth and body to your food, it isn’t going to come cheap.

It could require fat: butter or oil.  And so, if calories are a concern, this means you are spending them on satisfaction and ergo won’t have as much currency left over for quantity. 

This is an important distinction for me, because, as I wrote about recently, sometimes the main thing I do want is quantity.  I want a big bowl of something, not a little sliver of savory or a ramekin of richness.  I am hungry in such a way that only an actually large physical volume of food will make me feel satisfied.  So I need a bunch of vegetables with a little bit of something on top of it, or something else.

But if what I’m looking for is that complex umami action, then that I could eat my way through that bowl of vegetables and feel like I missed the boat.  So if that’s what my hankering is for, maybe it is the time to spend the calories on butter.

At other times, the investment is time, as in the case of making stock.

I have the patience of a cranky toddler.  In my cooking world of days past, making stock – 45 minutes for ONE ingredient in something else??? – seemed beyond the pale.  God just buy a box of it.  Then I found Mark Bittman's Roasted Vegetable Stock.   (His version is here, my go-to version with a couple of tweaks is below.)

It’s actually even more time-consuming than a regular stock in that one must roast the veggies for around 45 minutes.  But for some reason, Bittman’s description convinced me to try it once, and after that, I was convinced to continue making it all the time.

Where previous all-veggie soups or stews started out with the highest of hopes, only to end up watery-tasting and being eaten out of sheer duty only, things I made with this stock were satisfying in a way I previously associated only with eating out. 

Ergo, now it’s a staple in the Three-Bowls kitchen.  I make and freeze it on a regular basis. 

One of my tweaks from Bittman’s original to double the mushrooms.  I don’t feel like it makes it particularly mushroomy, just that it adds to the overall savoryness.  I use it as a base for almost every vegetarian soup or stew that I make, cook grains in it if there isn’t a lot of flavoring in the recipes, etc. 

If you cook a lot of vegetarian food and also find yourself slightly underwhelmed by your home-cooked stuff compared to processed food or what you eat out, try this and see if it might make a little difference.  While it is a time commitment, this cranky toddler finds it worth it.  

Tofu photo via Flickr user Rick.

Progress! Menu Ideas for the Occasionally Befuddled Home Chef

While I am still many many years away from anything approaching expertise, lately I've been finally feeling like I have a handle of some of the things that have been challenging me in the food arena lo these many years.

One of the things that I have been trying to learn throughout all of this isn't just the foodie side of cooking, but rather the home ec side.  How do I keep myself fed in a way that is efficient and realistic, but still tasty?

After much trial and error, I'm starting to compile a list of not just individual recipes but full meals and/or recipes+strategies that is making it a little easier for me to be satisfied with what I make at home, without it always devolving to the 13-hour cook-a-thon.  

Or if it does, it's a strategic cook-a-thon that is done at a convenient time on a weekend and pays off with many quickly-prepared lunchs or dinners later that week or month.  My Slow Fast Food thing: spending a lot of time on a meal, but maybe not when the meal is actually going to happen.

I've started posting some of the recipes and strategies I've found in the Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Desserts/Snacks/Gifts sections to the right there.

None of them is groundbreaking or revolutionary.  It's just some ideas, in case you, too, sometimes get stuck and are not sure what else to do for lunch or dinner and maybe just want somebody else's idea to help get your own imagination going.

Where appropriate, I'm putting in the steps I've taken that can be done in advance or other strategies and tweaks I've liked that I did with other folks' recipes.

It's a start for now, but I hope to continue to add on a regular basis.  I also want to try to increase my Fast Fast Food skillz, i.e., weeknight dinners that do NOT require a big investment of time on the weekend, but rather can be thrown together quickly at the last minute.  This is a weak spot of mine.  

But the great thing about all this food learning that I've done is that I've also learned HOW to learn (somehow I missed that through all my years of schooling, thanks, honor classes and film school!), and know that even though a subject feel daunting and foreign, it can be attempted. 

My Fridge is a Magical Closet of Mystery!

I am all about reducing, reusing and recycling, but I have realized the limitations of using washed-out yogurt containers as tupperware.

Well, I guess it's really just one limitation: opacity.

(Do any of these actually contain dairy?)

Every time I open one, it's like a surprise party! Why, there's that bit of brown rice I saved from four days ago!  I wasn't expecting you.

In other news, remember when I said I'd be posting more recipes and organizing them in March?

You don't?  Okay good, I never did!

In my defense, when I began a Seattle Food Events and Resources site, I really didn't comprehend just HOW MANY SEATTLE FOOD EVENTS AND RESOURCES THERE WOULD BE TO POST ABOUT.  Lordy!  

And, despite the almost incandescent, near total lack of interest in it thus far, it still manages to take up much more of my time than this site.

But I have made teeny tiny offline progress for here.  I've at least compiled the recipes for the meals I will be posting, and I have upcoming a few posts nearly ready on investing in satisfaction, a meal that took me three years to make, and Condiment Crank, a recipe I made up all by myself (almost) and that is so good and so freakishly addictive it might actually be irresponsible for me to post it.  

Stay tuned!

Problem-Solving, Oven Temperature Edition

It's been a disappointment parade lately here in the Three Bowls kitchen. Burnt bottoms, uncooked batter insides, grainy ice cream, a quiche that stubbornly refused to change from liquid to solid, ...there are probably more but I have blocked them out.

After that quiche (which I was forced to pour into a pan, scramble, pour back into the cooked shell and serve to my Book Club as the world's least attractive egg dish.)...

...I started researching possible causes related to one of the two Epicenters of Failure: the oven. (The other Epicenter: the ice cream machine. More on that some other time.)

The obvious starting point is the temperature. Step one was testing my oven thermometer.

You do this, per the instructions on this grilling website, by bringing water to a boil and immersing your oven thermometer into the boiling water. It should, ideally, register within a few degrees of the temperature of boiling water, 212 degrees.

My supposedly high-quality, less-than-a-year-old oven thermometer? Never got above 180. That's thirty degrees off.

That means when I have been thinking my oven is at 350 degrees, it's probably been closer to 380. I think this would explain why my baked goods have had a tendency to be burned on the outside while the inside remains undercooked.

I was very excited to discover this recently on a day when I had three different baking projects going.

Unfortunately, as I was knee-deep in three different baking projects, I momentarily lost the tiny grasp on common sense that I usually have, and accidentally adjusted in the opposite direction. That is, I set the oven temp so that the thermometer would register 30 degrees OVER the target temp, which would actually be 60 total degrees off. I didn't actually regain my common sense until the final project was in the oven.

As you can probably guess, the night was another sad float drifting listlessly down the street in the disappointment parade, more overdone outsides and underdone insides, but that's okay! A possible solution is in sight now that I can once again do simple math.

Another small and easy fix I learned about is adjusting the temperature selector knob on your oven itself. If you find it is running high or low, you can often take the knob off and make an adjustment on the underside to adjust for that. Full instructions in this article here.

Mine doesn't appear to be very exact (only offers "hotter" and "colder" options),

but after feeling very frustrated at my inability to improve the quality of my output, I'm just happy for any additional control at all. I will report back after the next batch of baking projects as to any improvements.

In the meantime, if you, too, have experience the heartbreak of disappointing baked goods, take a squinty-eyed look at your oven and oven thermometer. They might look innocent but be acting in secret cahoots to undermine your baking.

(One last oven temp tip: when using a glass or dark non-stick pans for baking, reduce the oven temp by 25 degrees.)

More Vegetables, More Questions

I don't want to say this too loud.

Normally, any too-enthusiastic declaration of a new healthy habit usually jostles said healthy behavior right out of place.  It breaks off to roll under the couch, never to be seen again behind a dusty collection of diet coke bottles, single stick cigarette containers and empty pints of ice cream.

BUT...(come closer and I will whisper this in your ear) I think might be turning a corner with vegetables. 

Friday is the day that I get to see what is coming in my produce delivery and I spent a few happy minutes playing around with what was in my cart like...like I was shopping for summertime espadrilles or something.

And so today my bounty arrived:

 

Very exciting! 

Until I realized that every single item (other than the onions, lemons and pear) also came with its own opportunity to highlight how little context I have for fruits and vegetables.  (Oh, wait, I guess I don't have any questions for the rabe, because we've met, and I already know what I'm doing with the whole lot of it - yum!)

For example:

• Nantes Carrots: Soooo...what's your deal?  I put you on the list because if I have eaten you, I didn't pay attention. I think you are supposed to be sweeter than regular carrots, but so what?  I mean, like are you special and ergo should be saved for some kind of special carrot dish and would it be wasting your specialness to put you to work in a stock?  
• Kumquats: For serious, I am supposed to eat the whole thing?  I have before; why can't I accept that as correct?
• Kale: Crap, what am I going to do with you?  I mean, I have a ton of options, but what is the best way for me to make peace with your...kale-y-ness? I need some equivalent to the broccoli rabe bulgur recipe, a kale recipe that will make me fall madly in love with you right away. 
• Rhubarb: Do I even have time to deal with you this week?  How long will you last?  Are you going to force me to make a pie crust or will I just resort to a frozen dessert?
• Spinach: Ditto my comments for kale.  Also: are you going to make my stomach hurt? I went through a weird phase four years ago where spinach always made my stomach hurt, or at least appeared to.  Is it the oxalic acid?
  
• Avocado: Look, let's face it, you're going to be made into gelato.  But will I be able to discern just the correct ripeness in order to make this odd dessert as tasty as possible??

These, and other burning produce questions will be answered over the next few days, and I am hoping to have time to do a Getting-to-Know-You or two. 

For now, I'm going to go spend the next two hours washing vegetables, fretting about whether or not I should be washing them eat if I am not sure if I am going to be eating them soon, and/or distractedly paging through every reference book I have.  Thank goodness I'm only partially employed this week.

Geeking Out: DIY Recipe Database

Even just a cursory scan of this blog makes it clear that I can be a bit obsessive and hyperfocused, but here’s something you might not know: that does translate, at times, into being a geek. 

It could be because my dad’s a computer guy and so I was part of an early-adopting household with a Kaypro in the early ’80’s, and lost many hours to playing Star Lanes and Boulder Dash.

Or maybe it’s just that I really bought into Tomorrowland during early childhood trips to Disneyland, but whatever the origin of the impulse, I am basically all about automating my life.  I am constantly looking for new ways to outsource my brain’s rote activities to a computer.  I have more important things to do with my gray matter!  Like memorize hip hop lyrics and try to remember the names of DOS computer games I played in the early ’80’s!

My latest obsession is finding the perfect recipe database that can help me with this whole Cooking in the Matrix thing.  Maybe at some point, I’ll have an established repertoire of dishes to rely on, say, to use up that big bundle of sage I bought at Trader Joe’s because it was cheap.  But for now, it requires me picking through recipes in books, online, and in magazines without always having a quick and easy way to drill down to something that a) I would actually like, b) would use up the ingredient I want to use up and c) won’t require buying a bunch of new stuff.

Recipe databases are supposed to help keep that kind of thing easy and (my favorite!) are automated.  While I’ve seen some that have great features (like grocery list generation, easy scalability and nutrition/cost estimates), none has been perfect enough to make me want to drop the cash. 

And most of the ones with the best features seemed to be offline tools.  I need something I can access anywhere in the world, from the North (sitting at my actual desk with my desktop) to the South (sitting five feet away on my couch with my work laptop). 

Enter Zoho.  If you haven’t encountered them, like Google, they offer a variety of online business and personal applications like word processing, spreadsheets, databases, etc.  Mainly for free!  (I think if you use them for biz they might cost.)  I’ve used their database creator to make an inventory for the store, so I thought I could maybe do something similar with a recipe database.

Maybe at some point I will make something that complex, but for now, I’ve actually managed to create a (relatively) simple cross-reference-able database just using their word processor called Writer and its tagging function.  (It’s similar to what you could probably do using a blogging platform, but since I’m using other people’s recipes and copyrighted material, I want to keep it private and most password-protected blogging tools cost at least a little each month).  It's online, so I can access it anywhere. 

So any recipes that I had in Word, I just imported into Zoho.

I then added tags (in that bottom gray bar) for the ingredients that I thought I would someday need to cross-reference.  (I don’t add things like olive oil or garlic or anything else I always have on hand and use up regularly before it goes bad.)

I then have three different ways to use this.  Let’s say I’m in a recipe that uses that sage, and I want some ideas for other things I can make that week that will use up the rest of the sage. 

I can simply click on the tag and it pops up a little window showing me what else is tagged with that:

If I click that “Add as Folder” designation when I add the tag in the first place or any time that window is up, it creates a folder off to the left of the workspace for that tag.  So if I’m not already in a recipe or open Zoho with the ingredient in mind first, I can click on the folder, in this example, Sage, to see the recipes listed in that folder that use that (any recipe tagged with Sage is automatically added to that folder).

And of course, I can do a basic search of all the files, although it does seem to bring each result up twice for some reason.

So far, I’m loving it!  I can’t scale, or make a quick grocery list, but this cross-referencing this is really the most important to me.  In addition to quickly copying and pasting in recipes I find online, I’ve been scanning in some recipes I’ve been wanting to try from my stack of cookbooks, converting those to text (while this is a little bit of extra work, it’s actually not that much and will ultimately be less annoying than my current process of poking around aimlessly in every book I own).  And since I am currently between projects at work and have some downtime, I am preparing for some serious geeking out time over the next few days.

Laura Ingalls Wilder & Cooking in the Matrix: Closing out Extra Produce

Experienced home cooks: this entry will be boring to you.  Those of you, who, like me, are doing Adult Remedial Home Economics, might find something of interest.

One of the things I admire about my boss at the cooking school is how she always seems to know what we have in the fridge and has a plan for using it.  Sometimes we have to throw things out, but she is usually able to efficiently dovetail the extras from one class into the ingredients for another, and she always seems to have a way to use up those last bits before they go bad. 

I am fascinated by this.  My obsession with efficient food usage started, I think, with that Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House anecdote of the pig butchering where even the bladder of the pig had a use (blown up into a ball for the kids to play with, but if you are an American woman who grew up loving books, I probably didn’t need to tell you that!). 

There was something so satisfying about how self-contained the family was, all snug in their house in the woods.  I think I enjoyed the Little House in the Big Woods more than the more famous Little House on the Prairie mainly for this reason, it was so focused on how they made everything and used every little bit (remember Pa making the bullets?).  The respect for resources and humble and thrifty approach the family had to have really made a lasting impression on my young brain.

Growing up, as I did, in a plastic, air-conditioned, chain-store town like Scottsdale, AZ, this kind of living seemed like it was on another planet entirely, but it was a planet I wanted to live on!  I am enjoying cooking so much now because it is giving me that relationship with the material world that harkens back in a teeny way to that pioneer living that is so very different from the disposable and careless way that I’ve lived most of my life.

As mentioned, the main reason for my distaste for vegetables is, well, the taste.  But I think another reason why fresh produce sometimes isn’t a priority is that – as a person who is usually cooking for one – it’s hard to make sure that it all gets used up before going bad. 

Many produce items are sold in bunches that are far greater than the quantity I need for my scaled-down dish for one or two servings, and then I’m left with 80% of the original bunch, and no plan of what to do with it.  This is especially true when I am using something that’s unusual or unfamiliar in a new recipe.

And, since I’ve had a tendency to do what I call my binge cooking, usually I’ve blown a big chunk of my cooking time on the one dish that used that 20% and simply don’t have time during the week to try to find another new thing to try in which I could use that item.

But now with my produce delivery, and my Cook It Yourself project, I’m determined to finally get a handle on this.  I keep thinking it as Cooking in the Matrix, because it’s a multi-dimensional thing.  In order to use up one item, I have to sometimes buy another item, which then creates a new offshoot of a need to use that up.

For example, over the weekend, I made a Vegetable Paella.

(Here's an abbreviated Recipe Result column for this Veggie Paella: Eh.)

I picked this recipe because a) I have a ton of different rices and wanted to use the paella rice I’ve never tried, b) it called for some cannellini beans, and I had some leftover from the can I opened for the Vegan Walnut-Mushroom Pate last week, and c) I thought I could replace the peas it called for with the green beans I received in my produce delivery.

Great!  Efficient!  However…it also called for either chard or escarole.  Even sticking with the called-for quantities of it and the other veggies (I cut the rice in half so that I wouldn’t be making six servings of starch, but figured bulking up on veggies couldn’t hurt), two cups of escarole is only about ½ of a head of escarole.  So that’s now in the matrix, although I did successfully use up those cannellinis. 

I made that beet salad thing to use some of the beets from my delivery.  In order to use up the leftovers in sandwiches, I bought some cabbage.  But even if the beet stuff hadn’t fizzled as a leftover, I still would have had way more cabbage than I needed. 

And then I have all of the herbs that I bought for the Risotto with Seven Herbs.  I also used them in the lentils for the Tom Douglas Pan-Roasted Halibut thing, but I still had a ton leftover.  They are so expensive that it would really kill me to have to just compost them.

This isn’t really a problem, per se, but unless I want to spend all my free time chasing after these loose ends of produce, I need to have some a game plan for this matrix that includes some final destinations: recipes that are specifically in place to use things up and not require the purchase of a bunch of new things. 

Here’s where the effective home manager will yawn and be like, “Um, duh!” but I am new to this planet, Mrs. Wilder, so bear with me and my ignorance.  These are some of the dishes I am starting to realize are an important part of my repertoire mainly as users-up of things:

Stir-fries: good for extra alliums like onions, garlic, scallions; and veggies like mushrooms, cabbage, bok choi, broccoli, green beans, etc.  Not so good for root veggies.  Good because this is easy to make a single serving of, so it’s not one of these dishes where I know I’ll be eating it for the next three days (which sometimes is demotivating even if I like the dish).

(A pile of virtue: Stir-fried Savoy Cabbage, Green Beans, Mushrooms & Scallions over Brown Rice)

Risottos: herbs and general veg (also good because I can make a half-batch, and I generally like repurposing the extra serving into a risotto pancake for lunch the following day)
Stock: good, again, for alliums like onion, garlic and shallots; root veggies; leftover celery when I only needed a couple stalks but had to buy the whole kit and caboodle; mushrooms; and bits and ends when appropriate.  Stock, obviously, can be frozen, so it’s a twofer: a user-upper AND something I don’t then have to worry about working into the menu over the next few days.
Vinaigrettes: good for extra citrus, garlic, shallot, and herbs.

(Herb & Lemon Vinaigrette)

Ice cream and sorbets: Fruits.  What?  Why are you looking at me like that?  Look, I didn’t say this was about nutrition, it’s about using stuff up before it goes bad, and there are only so many kiwis I can eat in a day.  Ditto my comments from stock re this being a twofer.
Syrups: Especially with summer coming along (iced tea!) simple syrups made with leftover herbs and/or citrus will be nice to have on hand.  Also a twofer.

(Ginger-Lime Syrup)

Frittatas: Good for most of the same things that would go into stock other than bits and ends and celery.

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones that I feel like I know well enough that I can now start to cook them more effortlessly without the kind of constant referring to a recipe or major military operation planning.  Not exactly Little House in the Big Woods, but it’s not my previous McLife either, so I’ll take my small victories where I can get them!