Froot? Fruit? Frut?

We used to sneak out of middle school in the middle of the day to go to the little convenience store across the street and get brown paper bags filled with fruit-flavored Tootsie rolls. Called 'em Frootsies. 3 for a nickel, and milk money went a long way.

Now, apparently, I can buy them from CVS by the bagful and don't even have to sneak around. Being an adult is pretty awesome sometimes.

(The vanilla ones are still disgusting.)

Gadgetry

First. Go read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/dining/must-have-gadgets-for-the-kitchen-think-again.html

Done? Good. Now.

There are two things I lust after with a fiery passion. The want ebbs and flows, but I can't kill it completely.

I want a food processor, and I want a KitchenAid.

I don't need these things. I have zero use for them and no room for them, and I know the truth of them: they're a pain to clean and keep in good condition, especially when you don't have a dishwasher. They're impractical for cooking for two people. They, like TVs, never look the same size in the showroom as they do in your home. They would languish in a cupboard.

I grew up in a home with a Cuisinart. My father could probably tell you what he used it for in detail, but the only thing I can remember him digging it out of the closet for was to make breadcrumbs, which can just as easily be made with a mallet or a rolling pin. Despite all its attachments and whirring, it was, or at least is in my memory, a unitasker.

And don't get me started on the KitchenAid - that hunk of motor wouldn't suddenly turn me into a pastry chef, it would just remind me, constantly, that I'm not one. And anyway, I happen to live with a truly fantastic baker who does things with an oven I can't even imagine being capable of. She would look at me in this scientist-y way she does and say, "Yeah. I know how to follow recipes, and you can't," and that's totally true. I can follow a recipe if I have to, but it sucks all the joy out of dinner. I would rather wing it.

Anyway. There is a truth to things kitchen-y which that article touches on but doesn't nail home: you cook the way you cook, for the people you cook for. And while it's certainly true that, over time, the way you cook changes, the reason it changes is because of what you're cooking and for whom, not because of how you're cooking it.

To pick on my father's gadget obsession for just a second more: I will never make pasta frequently enough to buy the custom ravioli molds that have lived in his kitchen drawer for decades, and if I ever did make ravioli from scratch, I'd seal their edges with a fork. The lack of ravioli molds is not the thing keeping me from making ravioli.

But. Angela got me a cast iron wok for my birthday last year and I use it all the time, weekly at least. I didn't suddenly become a stir-frying fiend once I owned a wok, I did it just as much before, just badly - my pan was too small, it tended to heat unevenly and burn, its coating was never as non-stick as it was supposed to be. Now, the stir-frying I do is better because of the tool I've got, and it's more pleasurable - cooking in a wok is about as much fun as you can have working over a stove. It's such a "me" tool, I can't now imagine a kitchen without one.

The point, I guess, is this: if you're going to add to your kitchen, find tools that supplement the way you actually work instead of tools that give you utility you'll never use, and remember that, worst-case, you can always fall back to a knife and a cutting board.

Credible Coffee

(Photo: My mornings - black coffee and a hardcopy of the New York Times.

Every day I'm one step closer to turning into my father.)

It feels like a betrayal, somehow, but I just don't have refined taste for coffee. I know when it sucks and when it's good, but it's become so institutionalized that it isn't about the actual coffee anymore, it's about the company selling it to you and about their method. It's like arguments surrounding fast food - you know, instinctively, that McDonald's must go through some ungodly quantity of potatoes every day, but if you start critiquing their fries, at some point you hit a wall and end up talking about McDonald's itself. You can't get past it because there's no real conception among normal people of what an industrial farm looks like, or how the potatoes make it into your hands. I keep trying to picture it, but all I keep coming back to is an image out of Faulkner, hardscrabble and backbreaking labor and bad luck, not machines that can harvest, shuck, and mulch acres at a time.

It's the same thing with coffee; it's always been a means moreso than an end to me, which probably explains why it's taken me til now to figure out how to brew a decent cup of the stuff. It was about time - I was sitting at my desk glowering at whatever just got spit out of the office Keurig and realized, if I was going to be drinking that much of something, I should realistically have more of a hand in preparing it than pushing a button and accepting whatever came out of it.

It turns out it wasn't as hard as I had built it up to be in my head and is more about the water/coffee balance that your beans need to achieve maximum awesomeness than anything else. It's also about being able to articulate and refine what, precisely, it is about coffee you like to help bring that out while de-emphasizing the things you care less about. I learned, though I knew this at some level, that I like lightish roasts and drip coffee, black, in obscene quantities, hot enough to warm my gut but not so hot as to keep me from drinking it fast. Essentially, I like diner coffee that's been cooling in a cup that never seems to empty.

I didn't realize that until I just typed that out, but...huh. Neat.

It's probably all very mundane and individual - talking about coffee is a bit like listening to somebody prattle on about their previous night's dreams - but I'll leave you with this one, tiny thing: apart from the coffee being fresher, more potent, and infused with the tiny bits of ownership and pride that come with being involved with the process of making something yourself, the warm, bubbling, swirling sound my coffee makes being poured from Thermos to cup at my desk at work is so transcendently pleasurable that I actually look forward to it when I'm making it in the morning.

It makes me never want to be near my office Keurig's spitting, kvetching machinations ever again.

Salad, Bar-None

(photo: Lunch.)

Sandwiches are temples to everything good about eating. So why have I given them up for salads for lunch most days?

1. I can make 4 day's worth of salads in 10 minutes on Sunday night for the two of us for 10 bucks a person.
2. I can do it up exactly how I want - that salad above is field greens, turkey breast, red peppers, 2-year-old cheddar and bleu cheese dressing. And it's AMAZING.
3. I'm always treated to a freshly assembled meal instead of a sandwich that's sat in a bag on the train every day.
4. Sandwiches should be treated like special occasion food; nothing's quite as sad as a mediocre sandwich.
5. If I bring the component parts of lunch to work, it's almost like I'm cooking for myself. That's a good thing, and puts me into a much nicer place than grabbing something from the fridge and eating it.

But the biggest thing, and this is something that's slowly changing the way I feel about eating in general, is while I spend most of my time wanting a sandwich, (who doesn't?) I don't actually need one every day. I spend all day in front of a computer - I don't need a truckload of carbs to get me through it. I barely need any, really, and if I'm better about what I eat for lunch, I can go a little nuts when it comes time to cook dinner. It isn't a diet so much as a compromise.

And for the moment, I actually think I'm okay with it.

Butcher? I hardly stew 'er! (sorry.)

(photo: one of the many fantastically curious things available at our local butcher.)

Grocery shopping and cooking for a family of two is a pain in the ass when you consider the following.

We, as a unit, in regards to food, are fickle and craving-driven - I could make a stew on Monday night and, while it sounds good in theory to eat it over the course of the week, I know from experience that it will either end up frozen and forgotten until unearthed the next time the power goes out and I'm forced to throw it away, or it will sit in the fridge making us guilty every time I open the door until one of us sneaks off and trashes it while the other is distracted.

That becomes a problem, though, because most recipes are designed around a family of 3 or 4 with leftovers - meatloaf, though tasty, is at the bottom of the list of things I cook because it's an awful lot of work to go through to make a meal that we'll be guilted about not eating, and the more of it is left after dinner, the longer it will be until it gets thrown out. The idea that it's easier to reduce a recipe rather than expand it doesn't take the size of traditional cookware into account. I've been looking for a 2-person meatloaf pan. We'll see what happens with that, but in the meantime I'm stuck.

Even shopping for groceries is a pain - mixes and boxes and semi-readymades serve 3+.

It isn't even a problem that only hits the Rice-a-Ronis of the world - it's impossible to easily get a pound of, say, ground beef, without jumping through hoops. I would routinely end up with 1.5 pounds of the stuff; that's 4ish burgers with a bit left over to turn into an unidentifiable round ball of who-knows-what in the freezer.

But then I realized something sort of fundamental: we're homebodies. We don't spend a lot of money outside the house, and if we do, we work hard enough during the week that the idea of going out on a Wednesday night is laughably optimistic. We live in a reasonably priced area, we make enough to support ourselves, and no matter what we would spend on the necessities to cook at home it's way, way cheaper than eating out. Cooking for 2 and never having to worry about leftovers takes more time out of my day, but it's time I'm happy to spend because me and food and cooking, we're buddies.

So (and this is the whole point to the thing) we started going to a butcher. It was the logical next step after realizing that the time spent cooking wasn't wasted, that it was recreational, and that I might as well know where my groceries were coming from, more or less.

It was also a relationship gesture - when you go grocery shopping for the week, you can't split the bill without it being awkward. This way, I got to take on some of the financial responsibility.

I was expecting to take a financial hit from this tentative arrangement, but in actuality the quality of our meat went up while our outlay decreased. It ends up cheaper because I can ask for a pound of stew beef and get (and pay for) exactly that. I can get a one pound, 50/50 split of ground round and chuck and not have to pay for leftovers I probably won't use.

This Sunday I picked up 2 huge (HUGE!) store-made linguica, a chicken breast on the bone and, as mentioned above, a pound of hand-trimmed stew beef and a pound of excellent ground beef for $17. The exact quantities of that at the grocery store would have cost me a bit less, $12 or so and at a lower quality, but those quantities weren't easily available. I would have paid $20, potentially a bit more depending on what was out, used as much as I did from the butcher over the week and eventually discarded the rest.

Moral of the story: support your local businesses.