Category: Abstain Project

Shun Meat, Says UN Climate Chief

"The FAO figure of 18% includes greenhouse gases released in every part of the meat production cycle...Transport, by contrast, accounts for just 13% of humankind's greenhouse gas footprint, according to the IPCC."

I'm only two days from my trip to Copenhagen and Berlin!  I've been working so hard that I totally forgot to ask the internets for advice on what to do, where to go, and most importantly, what to eat.

In Copenhagen, the Danish bride-to-be has arranged all kinds of meals and outings for us, so I'm not sure how many spare meals I'll have.  I'm definitely going to seek some smørrebrød, herring, and the new potatoes, which should be just coming up around now.
 
The last time I was in Germany was a funny trip to Leipzig with Charming Hostess maybe five years ago.  I was weirded out by the fleisch mit käse breakfasts and I couldn't understand why it was so hard to find wasser ohne gas.  I'm a little older now, I'm all about wasser mit gas, and you can bet the Abstain Project goes out the window in the land of Schinken and wurst.

I'd love some tips!  Drop me a line at ganda {at} eatdrinkonewoman [dot] c o m or leave a comment here.  I'll take lots of pics and tell my story when I get back. 

Dear Japanese inventors,

If you can make a soy sauce ramen that gradually turns into pork broth ramen*, can you please make tofu that turns into a pork chop?  Which will then give me more brain power and bigger boobs?  Just kidding about that last bit, though you're probably already working on it.

Thanks,
Crabby

via TokyoMango via my friend Kim via my magical Google reader

I signed up for a pork Google alert.  While the beef alert sent all kinds of alarmist bits about E. coli contamination and self-immolating beef protesters, the pork news tends to consist fawning love letters to the glories of delicious pork.  Pigs today, they're tastier!  Quì si magnifica il porco!  Death-defying pig roast experience and NONE FOR YOU!

Sure, I miss pork already.  Winnie invited me over for brunch this weekend:

WINNIE: You're not eating pork now, right?

ME: [sheepish] Well, yeah.

WINNIE: Good.  'Cause I was going to put chorizo in the grits --

ME: Oh, you could have put it in.  I would have eaten around it.

WINNIE: But you know I put pork in everything! I made sure there were at least three things you could eat.

And with that, I have become the apologetic special needs person at the dinner party.  SAD.  I suppose it means that it's my duty to host, so I can be in control of the menu.  I owe Winnie, like, 80 meals now.

****

Of the 3 dollar items profiled in the Robs' Cheap Eats list, only one (the classic slice) is non-red meat and okay for me to eat.  How can red meat be so cheap if it takes so many kcals to produce?

Red meat dishes that most intrigued me off their always comprehensive list:

• Ka moo nam dang at Dee Thai Restaurant in Sunnyside
  
• Isaan-style sour sausage at Poodam's in Astoria
• All of the ramens
  
• Grilled bratwurst from Radegast*
  

*I spent Saturday longingly ogling my friend's weisswurst at Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria.  (Yes, I know how that sounds.)  Anyway, when did that place become a totally homogenous, claustrophobic frat party?  It was all mirrored Ray-Bans, ironic t-shirts from Urban Outfitters and uni-boob tube dresses.  This big group of foreskins was actually fake double-dutch jump-roping.  Like two white guys pretending to swing ropes around.  But without ropes.  While cheering all of these people jumping through their non-existent ropes.  And you just know they've probably never seen double-dutch in real life and would never, ever have the balls to pull such a stunt after too many Coronas at Habana Outpost in Fort Greene.  This one chick was doing the awkward, I-need-you-to-look-at-me-because-my-daddy-didn't-love-me-enough, drunk-girl nasty dance up on one of the fake jump-rope slinger-dood's jock while he pushed her away.  She was one pirouette away from puking.  It was a hot mess.

So much for the waste leg of the Abstain Project.  My refrigerator conked out on me sometime between Friday and last night. I had to leave the house at 8:30am and didn't get home til about 6pm; by that time, much of my food was beyond saving.  That pound of ground pork I bought from Flying Pigs yesterday?  Rank.  All of those frozen berries I'd been saving for pies?  Soupy.  The swiss chard I finally got around to cooking on Friday?  Turning.  Real funny, Murphy, you got me good.



Luckily, I had enough of that butter around to make a very rudimentary cobbler with my fruit, though the butter was a little too soft to work with.  I cooked up the sausage and ate as much of it as I could.  In the meantime, I'm refraining from opening up the fridge so that my new wheel of Shushan Snow and the eggs stand a chance of surviving til breakfast tomorrow morning.

It's funny, I'd been saying to myself, okay, I'm just going to cut pork out when I finally finish that hunk of frozen sausage in the freezer.  Now that that's toast, I think it's time to cut red meat altogether.  Thanks for the sign, Universe.

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!

****
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.

----
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.