Earl Grey, Hot and a Meditation on "Household Stuff"

It's wonderful to have a slow day without feeling either restless or lethargic. The pace feels just right. We've finally got some snow on the ground up here. I've been sitting at the kitchen table for a couple hours requesting books about Brazil from the Southern Wisconsin library system. I'm surrounded by dishes from every meal I ate today, but they feel like friends, not like clutter on the brink of overwhelming me. The latest addition is the Earl Grey in a cup Caleb got me.

I used my day off work to resume going to crew practices. You know that feeling when you haven't worked out in a while and your lungs start to burn with every breath because you can't process the oxygen? That happened.

For a while, I've been experiencing this feeling of dread and futility related to household tasks. Why buy food? You just eat it all and have to buy more. Creating interesting menus, wanting to cook, wanting to clean (let's face it, that one's never easy), it's getting harder. Except for today, when it was fine. I think the problem is perspective. In my head, it's all a lot more difficult than it really is. I even have some new tools to help me. Inspired by Mom, I purchased some rubber gloves. Makes dish washing a lot better because my hands don't get chapped afterwards. I got a new cookbook for Christmas with lots of interesting recipes to try.

I didn't have many diversions into the world of "household stuff" in college. I don't know if we even vacuumed our dormroom... I remember cleaning when we had an apartment, occasionally. We had to wash dishes, but the solution to that was easy-- don't eat in the room. Go to the cafeteria. Even in our house senior year, I never cooked because I didn't like the clean up part. Or the planning would stress me out. It seemed like another thing added on that I should try to eliminate if possible. When faced with the choice of household stuff and writing a paper, I would choose the paper, gladly.

Yesterday, we had all the blinds open and the southern sun was shining in and it was so warm, and then, I saw my dresser, and it was covered in dust. Dust that you cannot see without bright, clean sunlight. Where does dust come from? How does it get onto my dresser? And why does it stay there? Does dust accumulate on other surfaces besides those that are hard and shiny?

Another thing I have been thinking is if anyone actually likes doing this stuff. Is there a group of people out there who find housework enjoyable? When I was in the Dominican Republic, I watched my house mom, Lidia, prepare the meals. She did so much work for every single meal, dirtied dozens of bowls and platters, and then she cleaned it all up. On a Sunday, it took her about half of the entire day to do all this. No dishwasher. She started with the most basic ingredients and came up with these delicious masterpieces. I thought to myself that I never wanted to do that. I didn't want to stay in the kitchen for seven hours a day. And she did it like it was no big deal. Oh yeah, just another day in the life. Did she do this when she was a child? How did she learn it?

In the DR, they have people who do the other cleaning. The moms do most of the cooking, but someone else does the laundry and the hard cleaning-- the floors, the bathrooms, etc. One time, Lidia's son got in big trouble because he didn't tell the lady that he needed his clothes washed (something like that) and Lidia got really mad at him and made him wash them himself, but he didn't know how! He was in college. It's funny to picture a bunch of guys from my college standing around the laundry room wondering what to put where, although I'm sure it was the case for a couple of them. Laundry is the one job I actually like. And vacumming's not bad either.

Then there are those jobs that will never get done: 1) Washing the goo-gone off the mirror from when we moved. It only comes off with hot soapy water, not Windex. Windex just smears it around the mirror 2) Cleaning the table and chairs we got off Craig's list. We use them everyday, but in certain places they have white residue on them that needs to come off. Not sure what it is, but it doesn't interfere with their use, so the cleaning doesn't happen.

The problem with some of these jobs is that they don't have to happen for you to live. No big deal if the mirror's streaky and the dresser's dusty. No one's going to die. But I always feel this sense of dread when things get dirty/are ditry. It's like those reading assignments that you wanted to do in college, but never had time for, and they kept getting further and further away, and the new ones kept coming, and it was better just to start on the new ones so you weren't behind, and even though you wanted to learn, you couldn't do everything. But they still nag you at the back of your mind. No one's going to die, but you would feel better if it were clean.

So why don't I clean the mirror? When I think about it, I visualize the soapy water from the rag dripping all over the carpet... this is ridiculous! I'm going to clean it right now!

This Week's Cooking Adventures

This week, we had two significant cooking adventures. For waffle night on Monday, we decided to make a feast of apple goodness since we had just gone to the orchard. We were planning meals for the week, and Caleb took down the German cookbook we had been given as a wedding gift and started looking for apple-y things. He found an apple compote with clear and very detailed instructions. I love when there are detailed instructions that answer the "why" questions. I kept looking through the book for other apple things and found a recipe called "apples in nightgowns" where you wrap an apple in pastry and then bake it. We decided on apples in nightgowns and Dutch babies with apple compote. 

Needless to say, making all of this took a very long time. This was not helped by that fact that I didn't realize until I got home that the new apple peeler/corer I bought couldn't core without also slicing, so I had to go back to the store for an additional tool. The compote didn't look very syrupy, but it tasted oh so good and we ate it all on the first batch of Dutch babies. The apples in nightgowns were very involved because I had to make the dough, and there were various phases of chilling and rolling and stretching it out over a springform pan, which I'm not sure what that accomplished or if I did it the right way. Caleb peeled and cored all the apples, and then I rolled out the dough, stuffed the hole where the core had been with a mixture of raisins, cinnamon, sugar, and marmalade, and then wrapped each apple in dough and sealed it with milk. They turned out about average as far as beauty. Some of the apples had sort of melted out of their nightgowns onto the pan. And they were not sweet at all. Caleb said that he forgot how not sweet German "desserts" are and that next time we should roll them in sugar. I'm not sure if there will be a next time.

Adventure two was yesterday. I really wanted to make butternut squash soup this week. I don't know why, but I did. It's fallish and yummy and yesterday ended up being the perfect day for it because it was cold and windy. This soup presented a slew of firsts: buying and cooking a squash, buying and cooking a leek (I still don't really know what a leek is), making a homemade soup, going to the Willy St. Co-op, and more.

The soup: the squash was perfect-- bright orange and it cooked really nicely. I didn't know how to cut it and probably did so in a very dangerous manner (I know that because I watched a youtube video about squash after I had already cut it and she kept saying how dangerous cutting it could be... whoops!). Then, once it had cooked, I didn't know how to get the skin off and couldn't find anything on the internet about this, so I used a peeler! Is this right? Does anyone know? The rest went fine, it was just kind of comical. Here's this huge vegetable that I have no idea what to do with. We put the soup through the blender in batches-- never had done that before either-- and it turned out really creamy and nice. In the end, it was a little gritty and had too much cayenne pepper in it, but Caleb liked it. We ate it with perfect buttery crescent rolls. So good. 

The store: quick word about Willy St. Co-op-- I went to the one on the west side because I suspected they would have great produce, and I was right! They also had my favorite coffee, Kickapoo Coffee. It's a local thing. It's the house coffee at Harvest restaurant downtown, and it's sold in the coffee shop Bradbury's, also downtown, and also at Willy St. It is so yummy. The aroma in the morning is like a soft blanket surrounding you. The other great thing about this grocery is the spice shelf. They have three or four shelves filled with glass jars the size that you would normally see candy in, but these are filled with spices-- whole, ground, they've got it all. I love this because instead of buying a $5 spice jar of something like ginger root that you're never going to use again, you can fill up a little bag with just the amount you need and get it for 23 cents. What a genius idea. Not for the germaphobes or those with allergies to certain spices, though.

I am learning how to choose my stores based on the item I'm looking for. For example, it's better to buy squash at the co-op vs. at ALDI because it will be a much better squash, but it's hard! It takes so much time to go to two or three different stores. I'm hoping it pays off in the end. ALDI is nice because you save money, but then I always wonder if the food tastes weird because there's something from ALDI in it. Example, I made homemade chicken fingers this week. They always taste amazing and this week they tasted awful. Was this because some of the supplies were from ALDI? Or was it because I accidently put parsley in the breading? Still learning what's okay to buy there and what's not. When I go there, I want to buy everything because it's so enticingly cheap. Caleb says it's so cheap because of the way the store is set up, but I wonder if that's not the only reason... How do you know where your food is coming from? Questions, questions.

The butternut squash. What a color. 

What's for dinner on Friday: Spinach Pie! 

Pork

Today I purchased and cooked pork for the first time in my entire life. I learned that curry will stain metal, and that there's a reason they tell you to brush the marinade on, and then put the meat in the pan: the marinade will burn, leaving the smell of burnt honey, soy sauce, curry, and other marinade ingredients long after you have eaten the pork. Thank God for candles.

On the way home from buying pork for dinner, I drove past the Oscar Meyer truck-- yes, the one shaped like a wiener. It was pulling out of a business intersection that no cars ever come out of except during rush hour. I wonder if they were doing a presentation at TDS, one of the local cable companies or for Johnson Bank, the only two office buildings in that plaza. I wanted to stop my car in the middle of the road, walk over to the truck and ask, "What are you doing?! What are your jobs? You get to drive the wiener wagon all day? What are you doing in Madison?" I thought of my friend Jessica on the Aha Moments tour with Mutual of Omaha and her giant air stream and wondered if these people were on a similar mission, only giving out hot dogs instead of recording people's life-changing stories.

Homemade Gnocchi

A month or so ago, I read a book called The School of Essential Ingredients and felt inspired and a little bit outraged by how easy everything seemed in the cooking classes taught by the main character (for more, see my previous post The Mystery of Cooking). After I read the book, I found a recipe for homemade pasta in a cookbook I received as a birthday gift, and I determined that I would try to make homemade pasta myself without the aid of a pasta machine just like they did in the book. I bought all the tools at Bed Bath & Beyond a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday, I finally tried out my recipe for gnocchi. Below, I will explain some of the steps of the process. It wasn't too difficult to make, and I actually liked it so much better than the packaged kind you can buy at the grocery. The recipe is from A Taste of Home.

This is a potato ricer. I had never seen one used or worked with one until yesterday. It's like an over-sized garlic press or one of those playdough toys. After you boil the potatoes, you load them up in here, and then press away. I used about 1 lb. of potatoes.  

The potato ricer in action. It worked really well, and looked cool! 

One you've finished the potatoes, you want to make a well in them. After that, sprinkle the flour (2/3 cup) on top of the potatoes and into the well in the middle. Then, whisk an egg with some salt and nutmeg and pour it into the middle. Mix it with a fork starting in the middle and working your way out. 

It should make a really nice dough like this. After it's mixed really well, divide it into quarters. 

Then, flour up your surface, and roll out one of the quarters. The recipe says about a half inch thick, and I wish I would have made them that small! Smaller is better with gnocchi. 

My four rolls lined up. 

This tool is called a "bash n chop." I also had never used one of these, but it worked really well. It has a ruler on it, which makes it especially useful for jobs like these when you need to measure. Again, I wish I would have made them smaller. The recipe says 3/4 in. and that would have tasted much better than this size. 

I used two forks to make the grooves in them instead of one because my thumb kept wiping them off on whichever side the fork wasn't on. 

After this, all you have to do is boil them for 30-60 seconds or until they float up to the top. The potatoes are already cooked, so it's fast! 

The sauce was just butter, garlic, and some sage. Yum yum. 

What's for Dinner

Our needs for food and sleep are some of the greatest limitations placed on humans. That is how a business man would say it. They could also be called opportunities for extreme enjoyment. It's devastating when we miss out on or have problems with both- for example, when you have trouble sleeping through the night, or when you have stomach problems that change a delicious meal into a horrible experience shortly after. TMI Sarah, TMI. The question "What's for Dinner?" is an age-old refrain asked by countless children and husbands in America. The wives ask it too, it's just that no one is around to hear them when they do. Well, no one's around when I ask it, but I was around my mom plenty of times when she asked it to herself and, rhetorically, to us. It's a kind of musing question because the answer is as big and limitless as your imagination and physical energy stores at that point of the day. What's for dinner could be a fresh, handmade gnocchi dish (that I intend to cook one of these days) served with chicken and steamed broccoli or it could be a frozen pizza. You decide.

The Mystery of Cooking

I'm reading a book about food, love, and friendship called The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister. I picked it up for $4 at Barnes & Noble in the sweet used book section we have in Madison (the B&N is the size of a warehouse). Unfortunately, reading about food isn't making me into a better cook, yet. Ironically, I read the chapter about baking after I baked four dozen or so cookies (it took me three hours). I sort of cringed when I read the part about baking being more like a science than other kinds of cooking. The recipe called for 2 1/4 cups of flour, and I sort of eyeballed the 1/4 on top of the 2 cups. The cookies turned out pretty good, I guess. The thing I don't like about cooking is that you never know what you did wrong. The first tray of cookies were huge; I took the heaping tablespoon a little too literally, it seems. Then, all the subsequent trays got too toasted, even after I moved the oven rack one level lower because I thought they might be too close to the top. I put them in for only seven minutes, and they were too gooey to take out, eight minutes and they were brown. The recipe said 9-11 minutes. Everything burns in our oven, even cornbread. I've made that twice, and put it in for the minimum amount of time, but the edges still got browner than I would like.

A rookie can't spot the errors. Does our oven just cook too fast? Is it the food? Is it all in my mind? Get this-- one time, we were making brownies in our new "brownie pan," that's what they sell it as, a "brownie pan." We poured the batter into the pan, and it didn't even cover the whole surface of the pan. I ask Caleb, "Doesn't the box say 9x13?" "Nope." "But how? This is supposed to be a brownie pan!" Now who's at fault here, me, or the so-called brownie pan that you can't even cook brownies in?

This book I'm reading, they do everything from scratch in the cooking class, even the pasta. And they don't even use a pasta machine. The lady who runs the cooking class just pours in the ingredients, and everything turns out alright. The book is filled with descriptions of decadent food and the memories and images and feelings different spices provoke in those who smell them. I don't get any of those images or feelings burning into my brain when I take a whiff of oregano. The one thing I do get, when I smell the Rosemary, is the memory of playing video games (Dynasty Warriors) with my brother while eating Rosemary-flavored veggie stix.

However, the book is sort of like magical realism, which could explain how the food is really more than food. The restaurant owner, Lillian, has magic food powers that she acquired through a strange childhood with a single mother who read aloud constantly; she knows instinctively what to do. The food they make in the cooking class each month brings a sort of healing to one of the characters in the book, but not as extreme as Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) when the protagonist's emotions are conveyed through the food she cooks so that the diners also experience her feelings.

Last night, I attempted to cook gnocchi for Caleb's first day at work. I personally don't like the stuff, but Caleb loves it. Everything seemed to be going well. The water boiled (you know it's a bad situation when that makes the list for things that go well), the sauce was heating up, I remembered I wanted to cook veggies and garlic bread, too. It was all done by the time Caleb got home and still hot for the most part. But the gnocchi was gross. Too chewy. Followed by the internal barrage of questions, "Did I cook it too long? Was it a bad package? Is this how gnocchi is and I just don't like it? Was it the cheese sauce?" I choked it down, vowing silently never to attempt it again. Caleb kindly reassured me and said that it was packaged and not really the real thing. I hope so. If that's what the real thing tastes like, why would anyone ever eat it? Also ironically, gnocchi was mentioned in passing in the chapter I read after dinner. And this is the same day as making the cookies, then reading about baking.

I like the book because of the way the character's stories are intermingled with the cooking classes. Each character has a chapter, and each chapter happens at a different cooking class with insights into that specific character's story. I like the unusual words she uses like "indiscriminate" and "luxuriantly," two words I apparently can't spell, according to spell check. I also enjoy the profound aphorisms that conclude certain sections of the chapters, like, "Carl was a bird watcher; he knew that not all sticks in a nest are straight" (p.81). Here, she uses an analogy: people are like birds and homes are like nests. It's a beautiful aphorism at this point in the story. It makes you think a little bit, but not too much. If she used fewer similes and metaphors, the reading would be much less clunky (or, there would be fewer lumps in the batter of her book!). Her description alone is often sufficient to create the image, but then she goes ahead and tacks on a simile anyway. This does add to the magical realism element, however.

I got a cookbook as a birthday gift with about 300 recipes, but frankly, I don't know where to start on the thing. Someone said casseroles are the way to go when you're first married because they are fast, easy, and you can eat them again. Perhaps I will start there. This person also said not to worry-- there's always time to start cooking later. She didn't really get into cooking into fifteen years into her marriage. This is good news for me. I don't have to be a pro right now.

Now, it's two o'clock, and I still need to eat lunch. But I am so desperately bored with food and with its disappointments that I have no motivation to go over into the kitchen and heat up some leftover taco meat. I love food, and I wish that by reading a book about loving and cooking food I could cook food better. But, I think this book is just setting up unrealistic expectations for a young cook in her first month of actually cooking. Taco meat, here I come.