Category: Abstain Project

Confession: So truth be told, I've been failing at abstaining from waste.  I don't know how people do it.  I don't know how Cathy manages to not eat out.  You know, if I buy one bunch of cilantro, I've got to put cilantro in, like, five dishes to use up a whole bunch.  And I don't have time to cook five dishes in a week. 

I've been really trying hard -- my freezer is stuffed to the brim with prepped food.  I buy one loaf of bread and slice and freeze half of it.  I've got a batch of blueberry muffins in the freezer that are almost finished.  The second the strawberries start turning, I hull them and freeze them.  I spent the morning watching Wimbledon and pitting sour cherries for the cobbler I probably won't want to make until September.  I even froze the apricots and berries leftover from our pitcher of picnic sangria; not sure what to do with them yet, but at the very least I can probably make some kind of dessert sauce or frozen cocktail with it.

But to truly not waste the fresh ingredients I love to buy, I'd have to come home and cook every day, which would mean sacrificing some of my other activities.  Either that or I could just eat slices and packets of prepared food everyday -- but those come with lots of packaging waste.

I want to be a more responsible consumer, but it's really hard to manage ingredient proportions when you are
A.) single and not that hungry
B.) like to cook dishes that require more than 3 pantry ingredients
and
C.) only have time to cook two or three times a week. 

Here's what I've found I shouldn't really buy:

• Herbs -- do I have to live without herbs because I can't use them up in time?  I know I should make pesto with that basil, but I don't really like pesto.  And it makes such a mess.  I lack the energy to cook all evening and clean all night.  And cilantro -- if I ate Southeast Asian food and Mexican food every meal, I might be able to use a whole bunch in a week. 
  
• Lettuces -- I can manage longer shelf-life cooking greens much better than I can manage salad greens.  In fact, I've got a bunch of swiss chard in the crisper that's been guilt-tripping me for two weeks now.
  
• Berries -- I have a serious berry problem.  I can't resist buying them.  But my freezer is already so packed with berries that I'll probably be making jam til October.  And when the peaches come in, forget about it, I probably won't be able to resist those, either.
  

I think the solution is to just live on a diet of toast, cheese, raw fruit and radishes, with the occasional egg tossed in for protein and sauteed dark leafy greens for vitamins a few times a week.  It actually doesn't sound that bad in this kind of weather.  But it is a little sad.  The cornucopia hedonist in me would like to throw out this virtuous save-the-earth conscience and just enjoy the summer's bounty at the expense of a little food waste.  The minimalist in me thinks wanting anything beyond canned sardines on toast is selfish.

I think I need to resist impulse shopping a little better.  This leg of the Abstain Project feels a little joyless.

I didn't slave over the computer today and the hours passed so slowly. I may have to start a one hour of computer per weekend day rule. 

So a few quick things:

• At a dinner party, Winnie's friend Brian mentioned that he likes to drop a bag of PG Tips into his water bottle and drink from it all day -- I tried it, I love it, I'll be doing it all summer.  Enlivens the hydration with light tea flavor and a slow burn caffeine kick all day long. (Winnie, I'm like totally stalking you or something.)
• Finally picking The Omnivore's Dilemma back up again, which I can only read in short spurts before I get depressed, have to put it down and listen to Mariah Carey to fluff my brain out.  Anyway, one rancher tells Pollan that in his grandfather's time, cows were grass-fed, and therefore took longer to get to slaughter weight.  "Cows were four or five years old at slaughter...Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months."  Interesting in light of the South Korea beef fight happening, where Koreans will only accept beef that is "younger than 30 months", or 2 1/2 years old, because younger cows are less likely to have mad cow disease.  Fucked up on a few levels -- that we breed cows to bulk up in 1/4 the time (imagine a kid becoming adult-sized by age 5), that mad cow wouldn't be an issue with grass-fed beef, that the bulked-up young 'un is now the preferred choice.
• Went to Bar Q, loved the food, made me want to go to Annisa.  Fine, the steamed bun with pork is a bite off David Chang, but Anita Lo one ups him by including a few leaves of kimchee and a crunchy swath of crackling on her pork.  Also, bizarrely loved the warm (?) walnut (?) soup (?) with malted rice krispies and a powdery polvorone-like mound.  Polvorones remind me of La Puente.  Eating one is kind of like stuffing a sandcastle in your mouth, a magical sandcastle of nutty sugar. 
  

And now it's past my bedtime.  Dammit!  See?

97 degrees, 80% humidity.  If I had cleavage, you'd be able to poach an egg in it.  

I thought about buying some Weck jars today -- Winnie was excited about purchasing hers, and as I am totally unoriginal, I thought I would follow suit.  But why is it that all the good stuff worth preserving is only around when the weather is oppressive?  I'm getting heat stroke just thinking about turning the stove on.



This week's Greenmarket purchases:
from left to right: 1 1/3 lbs. of ground pork from Flying Pigs, French breakfast radishes, baby scallions, spinach, black Tuscan kale, cranberry pecan sourdough bread, biscotti, shiitake mushrooms, vanilla yogurt, ricotta cheese, drinkable blueberry yogurt, one pint strawberries, 5/6 lb. sugar snap peas.




Still leftover from last week's Greenmarket run:
2 red onions, 1 cucumber, one ripe, ripe greenhouse tomato, half a dozen Flying Pigs eggs, 1/4 block of Colby cheese, some strawberries, about 1/3 of a loaf of bread, a bunch of dill, a bunch of cilantro, a bunch of chives.

Still also have 1/4 of a ball of Tonjes Farms' mozzarella, which I think will be nibbled through by Wednesday.

I did clear out some stuff with today's breakfast of French toast with strawberries.  It's nice to actually save "pain perdu".  I'm using the cucumber, dill, onion and half the tomato for my lunch salad tomorrow.  All in all, I would say that only the cilantro and chives will turn before I have time to use them up.  I'm pretty pleased with how I've done so far.

I also used some leftover tomato and some of the onion and cilantro above to make guac for a party:



My friend Nancy had given me four ripe avocados last Sunday.  I knew I wasn't going to be able to eat them, so I stuck them in the fridge as soon as I got home.  Refrigeration works quite well if you want to halt the avo ripening process.  A little chopped cilantro, onion, garlic, tomato, and a repurposed cupcake clamshell for transporting the avocados and I had the perfect hors d'oeuvre.  All I had to do was pick up some chips; the hosts of the party already had jalapenos, salt, and limes on hand for my friend Shannon's knockout kiwi-chili margaritas (cribbed from the Modern):


Don't you feel refreshed just looking at that?  Muddled kiwis and seeded jalapenos, Herradura silver, triple sec, lime juice, shaken with lots of ice...I think that's it.  Viva el verano!

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That Lysol in the background of my food pictures is incriminating, isn't it?  It's actually sitting on the window ledge behind the butcher block, far enough away from the food that I'm not going to give myself a health code violation.  Don't judge me!

Related: my friend Julie reminded me today that when I first moved to New York with no job and no money, I used to go hang out in the downstairs dining room at the Wendy's on Broadway and Bleecker.  It smelled like ammonia and cheap frying grease down there, and the company was usually less than savory, but their air conditioning was deliciously Frosty.

I meet an out-of-towner friend for early cooked breakfast at Balthazar.  I find myself struggling over what to do with part of my full English breakfast. 

ME: I'm don't want the bacon and sausage.  If I order it on the side, will you eat it?

FRIEND:  Sure, I'll nibble at it.

ME: Okay, but will you really?  Because otherwise I won't get it.

WAITER: I can just bring it to you on the side.

I'm a little embarrassed to actually articulate why I don't want to get the bacon and sausage -- I don't want to explain my project.  I wonder what the waiter thinks, if he thinks I'm just being picky because I don't want the foods to touch each other.  I also wonder how often he gets requests to omit part of a platter.

Of course the bacon and sausage come, on the side, and my friend, as promised, nibbles on a slice of bacon and a link of sausage.  The waiter clears the rest of the untouched meat away, and it doesn't even occur to me until later that I could have taken it for lunch or dinner.  I'm so used to leaving food on the plate that asking for a to go container doesn't even cross my mind -- because it's too inconvenient to shlep around, because I don't really do leftovers, because the food wasn't that interesting to begin with.

I also leave a very sad "fried" plum tomato with no flavor, a wan, sad little thing that kissed a hot pan.  It's a lot easier to eat all your food when you're in control of how it's cooked and served.

Side note: Why is the brewed coffee at Balthazar so terribly acidic?  Blech.  Does that work well for cafe au lait?  Also, in case you were wondering, Balthazar's breakfast beans are not close enough to canned Heinz Baked Beans for my taste.  I forgot how much I lurve fried bread, though.

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Linky linky:

Three Ways to Cut Your Food Bill on the Motley Fool -- mostly common sense, but some interesting Brit stats in there:

"These days, no one can escape noticing the steep rises we're all paying for basic foodstuffs.  According to the Daily Mail's cost of living index, a basket of basic foods that cost £41.34 in May 2007 costs £49.24 now -- a rise of 19.1%.  Ouch!  Butter has risen by 60%, bread by 20%, cheese by 25%, and rice by 60%,  And, of course, all those other household bills haven't been standing still, either."

The Kitchen Revolution:
One shopping list, one meal from scratch, five leftover variations.  Nice idea, but I'm skurred of oatmeal herrings.

The scoop on the Bagel Scoop (Grub Street)
This is no new trend.  Ladies of a certain wrist circumference have been asking for scooped bagels for as long as I've been in NYC.  I've certainly done it a few times -- mostly because I don't want to eat a whole bagel.  Let's be frank, though, those doughy innards are just giving us doughy innards. Who needs that many straight-to-your-ass simple carbs in the morning, all lubed up with fatty cream cheese?  I save my bagel consumption for the rare occasion when I've got a little smoked fish from Russ and Daughters on hand.  Bagels really ought to just be a lot smaller; I could totally go for Smitten Kitchen's mini-bagels with a little cup of whitefish salad and egg salad.

It's been about a month and a half since I decided to give up beef, and since it feels right for many reasons, I'm sticking to it.  Next up on the Abstain Project: waste.  I thought about this one morning before work when I ordered an omelet from dreadful Europa Cafe.  I specified no bread, but they stuck in a foil-wrapped package of white toast anyway, soggy with salty butter.  Whenever I get the toast, it goes straight in the trash.  It's perfectly good food -- why is it so easy for me to toss it?  My parents would never have dreamed of doing such a thing.

I'll cop to it -- I am a terrible food waster.  If I can't decide between the Belgian waffles or the eggs en cocotte, I will order both and eat half of each.  At my favorite Indian lunch buffet, it's easy to load up on a second round and wind up pushing most of it around the plate after my stomach finally signals its fullness to the brain. 

Diet culture encourages people to leave half of their food on the plate -- what an insult to the world's poor!  Not only are we total fat asses, but we also force ourselves to waste our food because we can't be trusted to measure out reasonable portions.

Buying fresh produce from the Greenmarket gives me so much joy; throwing 80% of it out at the end of the week because I hadn't made time to cook was always just collateral damage before.  Even worse, I'm a food hoarder.  I'm sure I picked this up from my Pau, who buys fish sauce by the case and wouldn't dream of buying less than a 72-pack case of instant oatmeal at a time.

Of course, as a single girl with a small freezer, this means that if I impulse buy two loaves from Our Daily Bread as I did this week (I got my standard sunflower millet but couldn't resist the cranberry pecan), I will probably be eating toast with every meal.  Or if I buy a package of sausage, I will have to come up with creative ways to cook and serve it all week.  I'm also going to start to put the preserved and dried goods in my freezer, fridge and pantry to use -- the saffron rice, the dried Chinese black mushrooms, the canned Goya chickpeas, as long as botulism hasn't staged a coup, I will eat it.  I'll supplement with fresh stuff from the market, but I'm going to make every effort to buy only what I'm willing to eat.  I'm really unsure what I'm going to uncover in my cabinet.  But I like this challenge to my ingenuity.  (I may have to throw out that Mott's applesauce though.  That shit has high fructose corn syrup in it.  In applesauce!  The gall!  And parents feed it to their kids thinking it's good for them!)  

It's unrealistic for me to say I'm going to save sausage drippings or fennel fronds or anything like that -- I just don't have the storage space to save foods.  And I will not surrender my house to vermin.  But I will make an effort to use as much of the food as I can.

It'll be interesting to find out how much is too much.  Is a dozen eggs an unrealistic weekly purchase for one person who only has time to cook two dinners a week?  Am I willing to buy a whole head of celery when I only want to use two stalks for a tuna salad?  Where can I make substitutions and omissions?  What kind of reaction will a request for a smaller portion elicit in a culture where more is more?

Besides, this also allows me to keep eating pork for a while longer.  Truth be told, I'm still not ready for even a trial separation from the pig.
 

"There may be some foundation to Indians' accusations of hypocrisy by the West. The United States uses -- or throws away -- 3,770 calories a person each day, according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization collected in 2001-3, compared with 2,440 calories per person in India. Americans are also the largest per capita consumers in any major economy of the most energy-intensive common food source, beef, the Agriculture Department says."

--"Indians Find U.S. at Fault in Food Cost", New York Times, May 14, 2008*

(image: Pradeep S. Mehta, whom the article refers to as having said, "archly, that the money spent in the United States on liposuction to get rid of fat from excess consumption could be funneled to feed famine victims.")

 
Over a heavenly brunch of fried eggs, Tamarack Hollow bacon, biscuits, roasted asparagus, butter-sauteed fiddlehead ferns and red-eye gravy (fck yeah!) chez Winnie, the subject of the Abstain Project came up. Winnie figured (rightly) that pork is going to be the next to get the axe in my diet, and was encouraging me to get my bacon on while I can.  A few of the brunch attendees asked why I was cutting certain foods out completely, why it wasn't enough to just buy from suppliers like Tamarack Hollow who farm sustainably -- eat it to save it and all that.

I have to admit that I felt a little uncomfortable discussing the project among acquaintances.  I realize it sounds self-righteous asshole-y, and I hope that's not what I've become.  At the time, I gave a half-assed answer that I was more interested in the push and pull of desire and denial, the co-existence of hedonism and conscience -- and that if I just ate good meat from good producers, I wouldn't have anything to write about. 

But there's more to it than that.   I feel myself pulling away from, not just the culture of excess, but also of access.  It's so easy to buy food, to eat too much food, to waste food, to obsess over food.  Here in New York, you can get anything you want at almost any time of day, from barely legal mangosteen to runny reblochon to guarana soda to dorowat over injera to Barossa Valley shiraz.  Everything's special; nothing's special.

And I think my appetite and curiosity for food has disappeared because food was becoming straight consumption, detached from its communal, human, personal aspects.  Venturing to some Queens outpost to judge a meal by taste alone, eating a cheese with a fancy name but no back story, choosing a new honey vendor over my standard, known, beloved honey purveyor for the sake of reporting -- yawn.

What I do treasure now are meals at home with friends or family, like that brunch at Winnie's, less for the content of the plate than for the company and the kind of chatter you make when you break bread.  Meals in are so rare for me these days.  I'll take relaxed company over a quesadilla with canned black beans and pre-shredded cheese mix over a loud night at the -estest (latest! greatest! best!) spot in town.

Ceci n'est pas un statement.

Still, I keep putting off the pork ban.  I keep telling myself that once I finish that fennel pollen sausage in the freezer, and that kale soup with merguez**, and the jamon iberico de bellota I've been saving, I'll give up the pig.  And, really, bacon I could live without.  But there are so many porcine products I'd keep ahead of bacon -- Thai-style fried pork jerky, pork gyoza or mandoo, Italian sausage...

*Also, check out the comparison consuming chart.  1,674 pounds of corn per person in 2006!!  Children of the corn indeed!

**Remembered while heating up my soup that merguez is lamb.  Which is sort of out by default, and I figure should go out with the other mammalian meat.

Photo from the New York Times: Coffee, Tea or Meat?

It's amazing what you can learn when you sign up for a news alert.  I've been getting daily updates on beef media and I'm fascinated by a bovine brouhaha being stirred up in South Korea.

According to this Voice of America article, South Korea banned U.S. beef imports in 2003 after a U.S. cow died of sponge brain.  Just last month, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak promised our Prez Bush that he'd lift the ban, noting that the U.N. says the beef is safe and so does Bush.  (Bush, of course, showing conservative compassion as number one advocate for the health and safety of the South Koreans.)  Lee's peeps ain't havin' it, though; protests have ensued, with government officials being challenged to "test-eat" imported beef on TV (officials have refused, so far). VOA says last week, "a prominent South Korean TV documentary asserted Koreans possess a special gene that makes them more susceptible to mad cow disease."  Wha?

But apparently, we're talking big Won here -- according to this article, before the ban, South Korea was the third largest market for U.S. beef imports in the world, to the tune of $850 million.  Tiny South Korea!  Third largest!  That's a lot of BBQ.

If kalbi, bulgogi, bibimbap, and sul long tang weren't evidence enough that Koreans take their beef seriously, check this out: students held candlelight vigils in protest of lifting the beef ban.  Can you imagine U.S. teenagers getting that up in arms over, oh, I don't know, salmonella in their dorm food?

Tested my abstaining mettle tonight over dinner at Hill Country.  IMO, best thing on the menu there is the moist (read: fatty) beef brisket, obvs off limits to me right now.  I made do with a thick but somewhat dry smoked pork chop, starry with coarse black pepper. Fuchsia pork spare ribs were also a bit dry and stringy but with a nice wood smoke ring.  Sides we chose were variations on warm, milky mush -- defrosted "French cut" green beans swimming in canned mushroom gravy with French fried onions, creamy penne topped with broiled, sunny cheddar, and a chewy shoepeg corn pudding.  I know it's authentic to have bad sides, but I would have welcomed a little freshness.  Also, the Epcot Center-style country band playing downstairs was loud enough to loosen my fillings and digest the pork chop for me.  Grandma's too old for that shit.  By the end of the night, my throat was hoarse from yelling at my pals across the table, my hair was reeking of smoke, and my doggie bag was full of unfinished meat.  I'm not a huge BBQ fan to start with, but I've been to Hill Country three times now and I still gotta say it -- what's the BFD? 

According to this article on L.A.'s hot dog scene, New York is the number one hot dog town in the nation.  Not surprising, right?  Dirty dogs, as my friend Dottie calls them, rule the street corners of Manhattan.  You can get plump dogs slathered in sweet onion sauce at Katz's; you can nosh on snappy kosher franks at the resurrected 2nd Ave. Deli; there are as many riffs on Gray's Papaya as there are on (Original?) Ray's Pizza; if you really want to rub it into atherosclerosis's face, you can always go to Crif Dogs for the disgustingly magical Spicy Redneck*, a bacon-wrapped, deep-fried wiener smothered in chili, coleslaw, and pickled jalapenos to cut the grease.  (I have eaten more of those in my life than I would dare to admit to an insurance investigator.)

I can't say I'm so discerning about hot dogs.  I mean, if it's spiced right, dyed pink and moistened with mustard, what do I care if it's made of tofu instead of cow scraps?  So I don't think I'll miss them too much. 

My favorite dogs are Violet Hill Farms' hot dogs, which I hear they sell from a cart called Dogmatic on Bleecker St. these days.  When I was in Thailand in 2003, I had, believe it or not, fish hot dogs, nitrate-free, which we ate for breakfast with soup and sticky rice.  And they were DELICIOUS.  Wrap your head around that.

In this episode of Radio Lab (my latest obsession), Jad Abumrad talks to a guy at the Fresh Kills landfill who says a core sample uncovered a 10 year old, intact, totally recognizable hot dog.  Our intestines are basically sausage casings, so that's pretty narst.

Here's a little Wonder Showzen lesson on how hot dogs are made:



*Never had it, but had to laugh -- they've also got a bacon-wrapped hot dog covered in kimchee called a Chang.

I don't know, this creeps me out.  Meat is not just a cluster of cells -- it's blood, it's the grass a lamb eats, the exercise a chicken gets running around its pen, the breed of pig...I just don't get it.  I often think this dissociation is the root of our fucked up "relationship with meat". The delicious pork chop I ate tonight came from a pig that died for my dins.  I knew a guy who could only eat meat that didn't look like meat -- so drumsticks, lamb chops, a T-bone steak were out of the question, but McNuggets, pepperoni and hamburgers were totally acceptable.  What's that about?

I've never been a fan of the mock duck, mock chicken, etc.  I don't want something made of hydrolyzed proteins shot up with stabilizers and coloring agents etc. so it can parade poorly as meat.  And come on, who's being fooled by that perfectly striped fake bacon?  Certainly no one who actually knows and likes meat.  I like my proteins like I like my people -- true to themselves and honest.