Our Wine Philosophy

 "Drink good wines habitually and fine wine occasionally."

—Andre L. Simon, wine writer and author of A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy

Interpretation Needed for Plum Chicken Sculpture

We saw this "sculpture" in a Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant the other day and quickly decided that we were unable to interpret it.

The saying underneath, "Plum Chicken ... More Than a State of Mind" is probably simple enough: The Plum Chicken on the menu is so wonderful that it will take your taste buds and your brain to places they've never been. Or something along those lines.

But then the sculpture above the words left us wondering. A flying rubber chicken tied with string to the finger of a hand — all encased in a wire screen dome.

Hmmmmmm?

If any of you can offer an explanation, please add a comment.

"I Am Never Bored by Staying Home"

Sorry about the scanty number of recent posts, but this has been a deadline-heavy week and we've just now eked out enough time to check around online and see what's been going on in our absence.

Sure enough, there's lots of good stuff out there, including the Happiness Project's interview with BoingBoing founder Mark Frauenfelder. He's written a book on the do-it-yourself ethos, which includes cooking as well as carpentry. The whole piece is worth reading, but this section really stood out:

What's something you know now about happiness that you didn't know when you were 18 years old?

When I was 18 I thought that I had to go out and find things to make me happy. Now I am happiest when I don't venture past my property line. There is a world of adventure in my house and yard -- books, my family, drawing and painting, making yogurt, sauerkraut, and kombucha, beekeeping, raising chickens, making things. I still enjoy going out and seeing the rest of the world, but I also am at the point where I am never bored by staying home. Life gets more interesting as I grow older. 

Happy Mothers, Happy Food, Happy Memories

Tim doesn't remember when his mother taught him how to cook. There probably was not one of those delineating moments, but more a lifetime attitude that food was more than merely the fuel of life. Good food was to be noted, and celebrated. But never taken for granted.

Ella was of that age — a depression era adolescent — when food was very difficult to come by. And that's why food was never to be taken for granted. But she was also defined by the 50s, when bland, canned convenient food made life much easier for mothers with many mouths to feed.

The family always thought it ate pretty tasty food, and there was always enough for the six growing stomachs and two adults around the table. Ella was known by her friends and by the friends of her children as a good cook.

She served what would now be called comfort food: mashed potatoes, meat (never the real expensive cuts), great-tasting sauces and veggies on the side. The veggies, with the exception of produce from the summer garden in the early years, were convenient canned or frozen vegetables, and that was where she realized her meal-prep efficiencies.

Then there were the desserts. They were worth the wait. Except for ice cream and the bags of mass-produced cookies that served to satisfy hoards of growing children, they were always homemade. Pies, cakes, cookies, upside down cake, crisps.

It must have been leftover from the farm culture. People visit and you expect them to stay because they've traveled a distance to see you. If the timing didn't permit a full meal, you always had some pie or whatever dessert was on hand. And there was always a dessert on hand. You asked whether the visitors might want to at least stay for "coffee." Coffee was shorthand. It meant coffee and a sweet of considerable substance. Sort of a farm ladies version of city tea. Except the men took their plates too.

When Tim went back to reconstruct Ella's recipe "book," he found that it wasn't a book at all but mostly a collection of sauce recipes clipped from magazines, soup can labels and ingredient boxes. Her really good recipes — the dishes she was known for, like her potato salad — were in her head.

Through all of the years of watching his mother cook, Tim picked up lots of pointers — and a mean recipe for goulash that got him through many years of college and bachelorhood. Her basics got him through years of cooking for himself and through his first culinary triumph, first place in the Midwest Chili Cookoff that was also one of his early collaborations with Ruth.

The greatest skill that Ella taught, however, had nothing to do with cooking and everything to do with cooking: self-reliance. Tim remembers her saying many times after hearing his whining about hunger, "Look in the refrigerator and the cupboards and you'll find some things to make a meal out of. Put enough of the right ones together and you'll have a tasty meal."

Words to live by. And words to memorialize one of our favorite cooks.

Ode to Olive Oil

By Pablo Neruda (translated by Jodey Bateman):

Ode to Olive Oil

Near the murmuring
In the grain fields, of the waves
Of wind in the oat-stalks
The olive tree
With its silver-covered mass
Severe in its lines
In its twisted
Heart in the earth:
The graceful
Olives
Polished
By the hands
Which made
The dove
And the oceanic
Snail:
Green,
Inumerable,
Immaculate
Nipples
Of nature
And there
In
The dry
Olive Groves
Where
Alone
The blue sky with cicadas
And the hard earth
Exist
There
The prodigy
The perfect
Capsules
Of the olives
Filling
With their constellations, the foliage
Then later,
The bowls,
The miracle,
The olive oil.
I love
The homelands of olive oil
The olive groves
Of Chacabuco, in Chile
In the morning
Feathers of platinum
Forests of them
Against the wrinkled
Mountain ranges.
In Anacapri, up above,
Over the light of the Italian sea
Is the despair of olive trees
And on the map of Europe
Spain
A black basketfull of olives
Dusted off by orange blossoms
As if by a sea breeze
Olive oil,
The internal supreme
Condition for the cooking pot
Pedestal for game birds
Heavenly key to mayonaise
Smoothe and tasty
Over the lettuce
And supernatural in the hell
Of the king mackerals like archbishops
Our chorus
With
Intimate
Powerful smoothness
You sing:
You are the Spanish
Laguage
There are syllables of olive oil
There are words
Useful and rich-smelling
Like your fragrant material
It's not only wine that sings
Olive oil sings too
It lives in us with its ripe light
And among the good things of the earth
I set apart
Olive oil,
Your ever-flowing peace, your green essence
Your heaped-up treasure which descends
In streams from the olive tree.

It's Almost Halloween

"Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble."

—Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

What's bubbling or burning in your caldron?

The World Is a Delicious Place

We may not be writing much this week, but we're glad to see that plenty of other people are. Check out this fine essay on home cooking by Jonah Lehrer. Our favorite paragraph:

And then there's the next meal. Who knows what we'll want to eat? Because we cook, we don't just see things as they are, raw and tough and fibrous. We look at what is and we glimpse the possible - that ugly fish can have crispy skin, and that bitter broccoli rabe would be delicious with garlic and oil. The pretty radicchio belongs in a risotto and those leftover scraps of meat will make a perfect stock. The world, it turns out, is a pretty delicious place. All it needs a little attention, and maybe just a pinch of salt.

Rasa: The Essence

The Sanskrit word rasa is sometimes translated as "flavor," but it also means "juice" — the delicious essence of something. The sweet taste of a ripe peach is its rasa, its essence. Applied in a deeper sense, rasa is the juiciness in life, the subtle lusciousness that gives the world its taste. Without rasa, life would feel dry and flavorless.

—from Vegetarian Times and Yoga Journal

Post No. 100: We're Uncorking a Bottle to Celebrate

On the occasion of post No. 100 on Eat Well, Eat Cheap, we offer you this quote from an English philosopher:

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

—Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

A Good Review for Eat Well, Eat Cheap

A fellow blogger who writes the NYCRecessionDiary came across our blog and liked it so much so gushed about it on her site. She's also joined up as a follower of this blog. See the bottom of the right-hand column for who's signed up to follow us (beyond the hundreds who follow us on Twitter).

She goes by "Ricebird" and her tagline is: Tips, tricks, and helpful how-tos for NYC recession sufferers. She writes about everything from where to buy high-end perfume for bargain prices to the pastry store selling $1 frosting shots.

She asked her readers to "give it a read and tell me what you think."

Eat Well, Eat Cheap is plentiful with DELICIOUS looking recipes (Chickpea and eggplant gratin?! I'm in!) useful links (101 simple salads for the season from the NYT?! omg) and more useful food-related blogroll links than you could shake a chicken-on-a-stick at.

Check out her blog at http://www.nycrecessiondiary.com, especially if you live in or near New York City.

Coffee: A Great Way To Start The Day

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

—Abraham Lincoln

This is not a problem at our house. Great coffee to start every day.

Poets Are Like Cheese

A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.

—W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973)

Cooking Starts Getting Easy in the Spring

Quote for the season:

"You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces—just good food from fresh ingredients."

Julia Child (1912–2004)

There's no better time of the year to start thinking about cooking with fresh ingredients than the spring. Keep it simple. Keep it fresh. Keep it healthy. Even Julia Child, mistress of French cuisine, knew that fresh = simple.

Favorite Quote: Carl Spackler

“In order to conquer the animal, I have to learn to think like an animal. And, whenever possible, to look like one.”

We’re learning how to think like groundhogs. The fattest, greediest, most fleet-footed groundhogs on earth have taken up residence in our backyard and are now waiting for this spring's lettuce crop. Last year we caught five of these varmints. So far this year, we’ve just caught squirrels.

(Relax, animal lovers; we use a Havahart trap.)

Favorite Quote: M. F. K. Fisher

In the comments for Never Waste a Flavor: Homemade Stock, simplesavvy raises the question of whether to add canned-vegetable juice to stock. This reminded me of a chapter in M. F. K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. Written during World War II, this great book extols the virtues of using every last scrap of food in your kitchen, from rock-hard bread to, yes, canned-vegetable juices (she suggests saving them up and mixing them with tomato and lemon juice for a cocktail). At one point Fisher speculates that some of her suggestions might seem odd to people accustomed to plenty, but concludes that

“ . . . there is a basic thoughtfulness, a searching for the kernel in the nut, the bite in honest bread, the slow savor in a baked wished-for apple. It is this thoughtfulness that we must hold to, in peace or war, if we may continue to eat to live.” 

Almost seventy years later, she’s still right.