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adam February 5th, 2010

Joan Didion eats a McDonald’s hamburger twice in The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 memoir of learning to live after the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. This is an intensely felt book. Several passages nearly made my breath catch in my throat. But no part made me pause as long as the passing mention of Joan Didion eating a McDonald’s burger.

Joan Didion eats at McDonald’s?

Sure, she’s devastated. Seven months after her husband’s death, she’s covering the 2004 Democratic convention. She’s at the Fleet Center in Boston. She starts crying. So she visits a McDonald’s, buys a burger and sits “on the lowest step of a barricaded stairway to eat it”?

This is not how I perceive this frail and iconic writer. Joan Didion does not order value meals. No Number 1s and definitely no super sizing. Joan Didion writes an essay and then dines at a restaurant - a great restaurant, with servers.

Indeed, sometimes this is what she does. Going to restaurants appears to have been a regular activity for Didion and Dunne. In The Year of Magical Thinking she recalls how one summer she and her husband had a pattern of working, swimming, watching the BBC series Tenko and then going out to dinner, often at a restaurant called Morton’s. “Morton’s felt right that summer,” she says. (I love that, because we do love restaurants in phases, when they feel right.) At Morton’s they ate shrimp quesadillas and chicken with black beans.

Food plays an incidental role in Didion’s narrative. Her husband dies at the dining room table a few days after Christmas 2003 while she’s preparing a salad. For a time after his death, all she can eat is scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Later she orders huevos rancheros, with one scrambled egg, every morning, over and over.

The first time in the book Didion eats a McDonald’s hamburger she is flying in a helicopter with her adult daughter, Quintana, who, in the book, suffers through pneumonia, septic shock, an induced coma, life support and finally brain surgery. She’s in a coma when her father dies, and Didion is forced to care for her in the aftermath.

Quintana Roo Dunne, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Malibu, 1976.

When Quintana is transferred from a California hospital to one in New York, she and Didion and the crew land in Kansas to refuel. The pilot sends two teenagers from the airstrip to McDonald’s to buy burgers. Didion buys a Quarter Pounder.

“Back in the plane, alone with Quintana, I took one of the hamburgers the teenagers had brought and tore it into pieces so that she and I could share,” Didion writes. “After a few bites she shook her head. She had been allowed solid food for only a week or so and could not eat more. There was still a feeding tube in place in case she could not eat at all.”

Joan Didion feeds her daughter - near death - a Quarter Pounder?

I closed the book. Why was Joan Didion feeding her sick daughter a fast food burger? OK it’s not like she gave her a cigarette, but… There was still a feeding tube in place! Joan! You are such a sophisticated thinker - how many medical books did you read while your daughter was sick? Any burger would be a bad idea, but a Quarter Pounder?

Later, Didion recalls a dinner that better suited my mental picture of her. Her and Dunne had invited his editor to their home. To remember what the trio ate, Didion refers to her “kitchen notebook.” Linguini Bolognese and salad and cheese and a baguette - this is more like it. This is the way a legendary literary couple eats: like Europeans, not Americans, keeping track of their meals in notebooks that their admirers would love to, one day, read.

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adam January 23rd, 2010

I wanted to share a few more pizza-making tips and my dough recipe. I recently received a pizza stone and it has improved my pizza’s quality dramatically. The bottom is crispier and the top full of air bubbles, like naan. (In fact, I used some leftover dough to make something like naan, baked simply with garlic and olive oil brushed on top.)

This is the stone I bought. I didn’t really do research but I think it has done a terrific job. The superb quality of the pizza has made me interested in baking my own bread. Any good bread baking books I should know about?

I don’t have a peel but it will be my next purchase. I’ve improvised a way to slide the dough in and out of the oven, but it’s not a great method and I want the right tool for the job.

This was the first or second pie I made on my pizza stone - homemade sauce and pesto, and I even grew these onions (cipollinis). I made this for myself one night, and when I took it out of the oven, I said to no one in particular, “This is beautiful.”

Here is my dough recipe, cobbled together from a few different sources:

1 package active dry yeast
1 1/3 cup warm water (about 110 degrees F)
-combine in food processor and let dissolve (about 5 minutes)
Add:
3 to 3 1/4 cup unbleached white flour (start with 3 and add more as needed)
1 1/2 cup rye flour
2 tablespoons coarse kosher or sea salt
-switch food processor on, adding 2 tablespoons olive oil through the feed tube
-process until mixture forms a ball and is slightly sticky to touch (you should be able to work this dough without it being excessively sticky)
-turn dough onto a floured surface and kneed for about a minute to form a smooth round ball

Your best bet is to oil a bowl to put the dough in, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. In a pinch the dough can rise in a warm place for a couple hours and be ready to use. The longer the dough rises, the better it tastes, I’ve found. Sometimes I’ve kept the dough in the fridge for up to a week without a problem. No book I’ve ever read recommends this, so I might be poisoning myself. Don’t know.

This recipe makes about four 8-inch pizzas, enough for 4-6 people depending on how hungry they are. I eat almost an entire pie myself, not necessarily because I’m so hungry but because it’s so good.

To cook the pizza, take the dough from the fridge and divide into four sections. Kneed each section into a smooth ball or disc. Let it sit on a floured surface under a bowl for at least 10 minutes before you start stretching it.

You will know how to stretch the dough. It’s part of the collective unconscious, but in case you have trouble, this is what I do. I flatten the dough on the floured surface. Then I pick it up and, holding the top edge with two hands, turn the disc like a wheel, letting gravity stretch the dough. Or instead (or in combination) I stretch the disc with my fists, “punching” the dough from the center out. Sometimes I toss it in the air for kicks.

Turn your oven on as high as it can go and make sure it is hot as heck before you put the dough in. I usually bake the dough two or three minutes before taking it out and applying my ingredients. I put the cheese under the sauce so it doesn’t burn as easily. The pie should be done in less than ten minutes, but you’ll see the crust beginning to brown and know when to take it out.

This is what my experience has taught me so if you have better ideas or other tips, please share.

This pie was made without sauce. I brushed olive oil and chopped garlic on the top, added some sauted mushrooms and a smoked cow’s milk cheese. Exquisite.

Note: I just decided to make pizza one day. I certainly don’t have any special skills and the pizza that comes out of my oven is very good. I recommend trying it. I think it is incomparably better (and much cheaper) than almost any pizza you will buy, especially if you use a pizza stone. Happy cooking!

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adam January 19th, 2010

“One of the greatest opportunities to live our values — or betray them — lies in the food we put on our plates.”
-Jonathan Safran Foer

I want to say this right up front. Vegetarians annoy me. Just a little, not a lot. The feeling is unreasonable because I’m nearly a vegetarian myself and I believe 100 percent that eating less meat is good for people, the planet and animals.

Meat eaters take great pleasure in picking apart a vegetarian’s logic, like crows attacking a carcass. For three years in college I was a vegetarian. I would have preferred never having to tell someone I didn’t eat meat, I was so sick of the conversation. Despite never trying to convert anyone, or even persuade them to eat less meat, I was under steady attack for my decision. Few people should be more sympathetic to vegetarians than me, and yet sometimes I find myself acting like a crow.

Conversations about eating meat tend to be irrational. When I was a vegetarian, my dad told me I was un-American. Why did I become a vegetarian? Mostly because I was dating one. The way we decide what to eat can be as absurd as the way we talk about those decisions.

Last week I interviewed the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who will appear in Princeton Jan. 29. He recently published his first work of nonfiction, Eating Animals, a hybrid of memoir and research that reinvigorated my forgetful mind about the reality of factory-farmed meat.

The best way for me to think about eating meat is as a question of values. Anyone who pays even scant attention to the news probably intuits something is off or wrong about our food system: food-borne illnesses from meat and other agricultural products is alarmingly common (to name one visible problem among the innumerable hidden).

Food is an important part of my life, and I probably pay closer attention to the topic than many, which is why it’s disturbing to realize how easily I can forget or choose to ignore the frightening business of factory farming. There are bigger problems in the world, of course, but few that we can combat by making a better choice three times each day.

I have no doubt that any human being who looks closely at factory farming will quickly learn that it cuts against their values. It’s worse than you imagine. (I’m not going to recount the horror stories Foer tells, but they’re there — and in many other places, such as the video below — if you choose to look at them.) The plain fact is that as passive consumers we can ignore it and accept the atrocities of factory farming. We can continue eating a lot of something that tastes good even if it’s bad for us and the environment and animals. That’s what most people do, myself included.

Eating Animals reminded me to start living the values I already have, which doesn’t mean I’m becoming a vegetarian again. I only want to eat meat that I know the origins of. Not two days after I finished the book my dad gave me two trout he had caught, gutted and ready to be cooked. I considered not eating it, but then I decided that this was food worth eating. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan teaches us the importance and pleasure of eating in full consciousness of what’s on your plate. I cooked the fish whole and enjoyed it, in a way I could not enjoy a commercially caught fish (Foer implicates commercial fishing with factory farming).

You probably want to continue to eat commercially caught fish. I do too. But believe me, I really don’t, and you might not either. I’m not determined to convert you to my point of view, but the conversation matters.

“I don’t know if I think of myself as an advocate,” Foer told me. “I think of it conversationally. I don’t think of vegetarianism as a lifestyle or a philosophy. I think of it as a set of daily choices.”

I believe our ability to support or reject factory farming is important, as important as not forgetting our values, and our choices must be based on the facts, no matter how much they annoy us.

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adam January 7th, 2010

Mickey Mouse, circa 1935, was a conventional gardener, I discovered last night while spending time with my friends’ son.

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adam January 4th, 2010

Homemade gnocchi, from homegrown potatoes.

It’s the new year, and I’m running out of food.

A few onions, a jar of dry beans, some beets. Frozen tomato sauce. Frozen peas and corn and pesto. That’s it. That’s all that’s left from my garden. But I’m making good use of it.

The long, cold nights of winter afford more time in the kitchen but the season offers next to no fresh food. The paradox kills me, and what’s worse — the township mowed the community garden plots last month, which is to say they mowed my leeks and kale and Brussels sprouts. Why? Because the gardening season was “over,” according to them.

That really killed me.

I can’t change this aspect of how the township runs the community gardens, but I can be mindful of what will keep throughout the winter when choosing what to grow next year. More potatoes and beans, winter squash, storage onions, parsnips, carrots. At home I’ve planted garlic, too, for next spring. The trick is learning how to store them, which I never feel I have a good grasp on. The potatoes are in the garage, everything else is in the fridge or freezer. I also have some dehydrated veggies, which I’ll pull out and begin experimenting with soon.

From the vegetables I have on hand, though, I’ve been able to make some wonderful food. Gnocchi, for instance. Gnocchi is easy to make and a terrific winter dinner. Trust me. Get some good Russets and make gnocchi this weekend for you and your sweetheart. Perfection. You can boil these potato dumplings like pasta, dress them in sauce and eat, but what I’ve recently done is boil them and then bake them in a bit of butter and Parmesan. Better than perfection.

When I chose to grow Russets this past season, the choice felt more than a little boring, but they are a great potato for simply baking and also for making gnocchi. If you do make gnocchi, use a baking potato — other potatoes don’t work as well (something to do with the starch content).

Over the past couple months I’ve also been modifying my pizza dough recipe. I started making pizza this summer, and I’ve come to a conclusion: buying pizza all the time is insane. It’s not hard to make and it’s much better and much cheaper than anything you’ll buy in the average pizzeria. It only requires a bit of forethought — dough made the night before and allowed to rise overnight tastes the best, I’ve found.

I received a pizza stone for Christmas but haven’t used it yet. Even without it, my pies have been very good, and getting better every time. I recently started incorporating rye flour into the dough, giving it extra bite and flavor. Homemade pizza is a terrific vehicle for the tomato sauce and pesto I stockpiled over the summer. Making a pizza entirely from scratch is an awesome thing to do. Try it. It’s fun. Pizza party.

Even with my homegrown food supply dwindling, I still manage to represent the garden in many winter meals. Winter, it can be said, offers the chance to clean the freezer and the pantry — to eat things that might otherwise go to waste. Now that the holiday season has come and gone, and the memory of Halloween’s already fading, I finally decided it was time for me to compost the one pumpkin I managed to grow this year. Before I tossed it, I harvested the seeds and roasted them in the oven. The pumpkin had become a mere ornament, sitting on my kitchen table for months. But it gave me one more good snack to eat between growing seasons.

Pepitas, from a Kakai pumpkin.

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adam November 16th, 2009

America is the land of fat cats and hungry mice.

The U.S. Agriculture Department reported today “that 17 million American households, or 14.6 percent of the total, ‘had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year.’ That was an increase from 13 million households, or 11.1 percent, the previous year,” according to nytimes.com.

These numbers are difficult to comprehend.  Almost 15 of every 100 households has trouble feeding their families? In America? In the richest country on the planet? This is almost beyond belief.

I’m wondering how many people at the Lawrence Community Gardens use their plots to truly supplement their diet. I certainly do. I’m not suggesting I could live off it, but I grow a tremendous amount of food that I eat daily for at least half the year.

The goal of Isles’ Community Gardening and Nutrition Education initiative is for low-income families to be able to gain greater food security, stretch their food budgets and obtain fresh and nutritious produce.

On their Web site Isles lists three specific benefits of the Community Gardening and Nutrition Education initiative.

• Providing access to fresh vegetables and improving nutrition. Isles’ community gardens provide access to fruits and vegetables that are low calorie and nutrient rich.
• Stretching food budgets. Studies report that every $1 invested in a community garden plot yields approximately $6 worth of vegetables. In a 2006 survey, Isles’ community gardeners reported an average savings of about $200 dollars per year, per gardener.
• Strengthening community fabric. Isles’ gardeners report that sharing food with friends, families and neighbors is one of the important reasons that they grow produce.

I’m wondering how the Lawrence Community Gardens could try and make a difference. I wonder how much space we would need to grow enough food to donate to an organization like Farmers Against Hunger or the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen. I would love to plant all the unused plots and donate the food. If we organized ourselves well I bet we could grow a ton of food at minimal cost and give it to those who need it.

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adam November 10th, 2009

On Sunday I made a pot pie for dinner. I had never made one before, but this was a night of many firsts. Loosely following a Deborah Madison recipe, I discovered, along with the pleasures of pie crust, T. Rex, sunchokes and double-yoked eggs, how much fun pot pies are to make and what a comforting meal they provide.

I cooked onions, potatoes, carrots, turnips and sunchokes in butter. Then I added flour and let it cook a few minutes before adding one-and-a-half cups of water to the pot. The veggies simmered until they were tender. Then I stirred in a little cream and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. That was the filling - all the vegetables grown in my garden except the sunchokes, which Vin gave me from his garden. (Thank you Vin!)

I had never made a pie crust before but it wasn’t hard. A pie crust is made from flour, butter and water and then rolled out until it fits your pie dish. (I love this rolling pin you see above.) I beat an egg to spread on the crust as a glaze before flopping the shell on top. When I cracked the egg, two yolks came out!

I listened to T. Rex while the pot pie was baking, dancing while doing the dishes. I was having a lot of fun, and getting hungry.

To commemorate my first pot pie I fashioned an A (for Adam) from the scraps of crust and placed it on top.

There is no doubt pot pies are going to become a staple of my winter kitchen. Next summer I want to grow more root vegetables to keep through the cold season: more potatoes and sweet potatoes, of course, but also parsnips and rutabaga. I loved the sunchokes, which are also called Jerusalem artichokes, but I doubt I’ll plant them. Not only do they become difficult to root out of the garden once they’re established, they’re a difficult food to digest. Vin gave them to me with a warning: “These are good but they will make you pass wind.”

(Before this night I had never listened to T. Rex, but for some reason was compelled to pull Electric Warrior from the record collection my dad gave me. I was familiar with a couple songs, including “Life’s A Gas,” which I first heard years ago on a Chris Harford record, thinking it was an original. Chris Harford happens to be performing at Small World Coffee in Princeton this Saturday, Nov. 14, to open his art exhibit at the cafe.)

Griggstown Quail Farm has the best pot pies that aren’t made in your own kitchen. I called them a “central Jersey classic” in my upcoming story on the farm in our glossy magazine, PM. Check them out here.

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adam November 5th, 2009

Does regulation work in this country? From finance to food, every industry appears capable of outmaneuvering government agencies designed to protect our health and security.

In an article called Farmers Skirt Rules on Gene-Altered Crops, Report Says, The New York Times relays another example of inadequate enforcement:

As many as 25 percent of the American farmers growing genetically engineered corn are no longer complying with federal rules intended to maintain the resistance of the crops to damage from insects, according to an advocacy group’s report released Thursday.

The increase in farmers skirting the rules, from fewer than 10 percent a few years ago, raises the risk that insects will develop resistance to the toxins in the corn that are meant to kill them, the report says. And it raises questions about whether the Environmental Protection Agency and the agricultural biotechnology industry are adequately enforcing the rules.

The data “should be a wake-up call to E.P.A. that the regulatory system is not working,” Gregory Jaffe, the report’s author, wrote in a letter Thursday to Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the federal agency. Mr. Jaffe is the biotechnology project director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington advocacy group that does not oppose genetically engineered crops but favors stricter regulation.

This is especially scary when you think of where synthetic biology is heading. In September The New Yorker ran a fascinating and terrifying story called A Life Of Its Own that concluded, “The industrial age is drawing to a close, eventually to be replaced by an era of biological engineering.”

The vision of synthetic biology - where scientists create new forms of life from scratch - is to dispense with nature and supplant the natural world with one created by humans. This strikes me as profoundly arrogant and potentially devastating. Nature teaches us over and over that she is smarter than us. We will never have a knowledge complete enough to create a world as elegant as the one we have. And if ignorance isn’t our downfall, greed certainly will be.

Both ignorance and greed were factors in farmers not complying with the EPA rules:

One factor behind the decline, Dr. Storer said, could have been skyrocketing corn prices in 2007, which might have tempted growers to plant more BT corn. Also, he said, farmers might have been confused because new varieties of corn appeared with genes to protect against both the corn borer and the rootworm, each of which had somewhat different refuge requirements.

What kind of calamity do we need to save us from ourselves?

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adam October 16th, 2009

Next year I want to pay more attention to my garden’s design. I want to create a space that is not only productive but beautiful in and of itself. I’ve been reading Designing the New Kitchen Garden by Jennifer R. Bartley, and though our community gardens are located a distance from our kitchen, there’s a lot to learn from this book.

Here are some of my notes:

It is only natural to begin our study of potager gardens (aka kitchen gardens) in France, where vegetable gardening is an art form and the garden has always been intimately connected to the cuisine.

The garden is meant to be enjoyed in many ways…It is to be enjoyed internally, like any other ornamental garden, surrounding the visitor with the ambiance created from the walls and the plants. It is also to be enjoyed on a practical level, for the harvest and taste of the vegetables. Finally, the garden is to be enjoyed externally, as one would view a beautiful painting - by standing apart and looking at it.

A potager garden should be as diverse as possible. Rare varieties should be included to preserve the heritage of seed before it is lost.

Roses remind us that the utilitarian garden should also be enjoyed for its beauty and that the kitchen gardens can be places of meditation and solace as well as sources of food.

The potager garden should be as elegant as the specialty food that’s grown there.

Our gardens are grand experiments in climate, soil, pest control and combinations of color, height and texture. The workshop model suggests a process of change and intervention. The garden is never static…Our gardens, like the early monastery gardens, are experimental laboratories. Mistakes will be made and deemed acceptable because we are one lesson closer to our ideal.

Here’s a link to the Brookly Botanic Garden’s page on potagers:http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/kitchen/handbooks/kitchen/jones.html

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adam October 13th, 2009

I want to write a longer post about the heirloom beans I grew this season, but for now I just want to say that I ate them for the first time yesterday. Speckled cranberry. A low yield but so beautiful and tasty. I ate them with mushrooms and garlic. Total improvisation that hit the mark. Can’t imagine my future gardens without them. I see an opportunity for some New Jersey farmer to corner the market and become the Rancho Gordo of the Garden State.

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