Recipes

Here in the last stretch of North Dakota winter (I hope!), the landscape continues to present itself in shades of white, grey, black, and brown. I started knitting a spring scarf last weekend, in the hopes of luring warmer weather. When I pull into the garage each afternoon, the old Weber grill looks more and more forlorn. My daughter, Cora, feels a deep sense of betrayal that the groundhog promised spring would come early -- liar!

Recently, my husband’s parents came to visit from southern California, and while they did not bring any warm weather with them, they did bring a bag full of fresh Meyer lemons from their backyard tree -- not certified organic, of course, but organic nonetheless. A whole bag of yellow orbs bright as the summer sun and, I know from experience, bursting with juice and flavor.

McDonald's recently added oatmeal to their breakfast menu. Behold, the ingredients of a "simple" bowl of McDonald's oatmeal:

Oatmeal: whole grain rolled oats, brown sugar, food starch-modified, salt, natural flavor (plant source), barley malt extract, caramel color.

Diced Apples: apples, calcium ascorbate (a blend of calcium and vitamin C to maintain freshness and color).

Cranberry Raisin Blend: dried sweetened cranberries (sugar, cranberries), California raisins, golden raisins, sunflower oil, sulfur dioxide (preservative).

Light Cream: milk, cream, sodium phosphate, datem, sodium stearoyl lactylate, sodium citrate, carrageenan.

Before I begin, allow me to offer a wee disclaimer: I’m not Irish. Not even a little bit. But I did go to Notre Dame, have never met an Irishman I haven’t liked, and love drinking holidays, which, when you think about it, is basically any holiday if you want it to be.

I also like holiday foods and the fact that my kids are still young enough to get swept up in my concocted celebrations and thereby more likely to try new things to eat. This past Mardi Gras, I made a lovely jambalaya for my family and since it was food for a fest, my kids gobbled it up. Had I made jambalaya on a random Tuesday night, you’d better believe I would still be eating the leftovers.

Mark Bittman recently suggested in his New York Times blog that the government “encourage and subsidize home cooking ... [because] when people cook their own food, they make better choices.” I wholeheartedly agree that we make better choices when we cook our own food.

Because I love to cook, I tend to cook most of my family's meals. Still, over the past couple of years I found that it was getting easier to either go out or pick something up instead. So, last fall I renewed my commitment to home-cooking; call it a New School Year’s Resolution. We would eat out just once or twice a month, and the rest of the time we would eat our own home-cooked meals.

Food writer and Simple, Good, and Tasty favorite Mark Bittman recently wrote his last Minimalist column for The New York Times, followed by what sounds to be the first of many pieces for the Opinionator section instead, "A Food Manifesto for the Future." In it, he offers nine ideas to improve modern growth, sale, preparation, and consumption of food, including this one, related to the home:

I don’t think I’d ever so much as looked at a beet until after college, when I had houseguests who were passing through town. They had learned how to make borscht while serving as missionaries in Russia, and I came home from a long day at work to a simmering pot of the root soup that they’d thoughtfully prepared. I’ll admit that I was a bit nervous at first, but was relieved to find it both delicious and nourishing.

The things I do for you people! I have made beef jerky FOUR times in the last couple weeks in an attempt to get it right! Now I know why people were giving me the goggle-eyed I’m impressed look when I told them what I was up to. Who knew jerky was so ... jerky? And taking a decent picture of beef jerky – the ugliest food ever – is an impossibility, I assure you.

One of my favorite rules to live by comes from Michael Pollan: Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Pollan’s advice is especially apt for me when I think about my own great-grandmother. Hilda Liljequist was born to immigrant Swedish parents in Boston in 1889. She attended the Boston Cooking School as a teenager, and took her first job as chef at a hotel in New Orleans. A few years later she made her way, by ship through the Panama Canal and by train, to a new job in Oakland, California, where she met and married my great-grandfather, a Scotch-Irish blacksmith from a Michigan farm who had actually run away and joined the circus as a youth. Later they moved to Los Angeles, when it was still possible to drive around the back roads of Hollywood, stopping to gather wild elderberries and pick oranges from a roadside grove.

New year, good intentions, resolutions. So, how are YOU doing?

Nearly a month into 2011, I’m thinking a bit about the intentions I had way back at the start of the new year (experiment with more vegan recipes, eat more veggies in general, and understand more about the food system and related politics), and checking in with myself on how things are going. One of the best things about working with food on a daily basis is that I don’t have to make an excuse to set aside time for these things. With little effort, I can get right to the core of the subject.

I know a lot of people who take the month of January to rein it in, take stock, and press the reset button. Some detox, some jump on the exercise wagon, some just try to focus and center themselves after the frenzy that is December. Personally, I never pass up an excuse for a fresh start, so January is as good a time as any to make myself some promises, which I then inevitably break, for which I have to forgive myself. It’s not a big deal. I don’t feel guilty about it. It’s just how I roll.