Follows The Sun

I would hazard to guess that most people who read this blog think of me primarily in terms of sexuality. A nice young lady (or some days, a nice boy) who thinks and writes and talks about sexuality, in politics, in a podcast, on the internet and with her partner.

And I am that, I do that, that’s definitely a part of what I do and a big part of what shows up here. But when I put this blog together it was designed to contain all the parts of my life I wanted to put in it, which include not only sexuality, but also general musings on my life, personal experiences, and food.

Yep, food. I love food. I love to cook it, I love to eat it, I love to talk about it, and I have to admit that in my own strange way, I’m an unabashed snob about it: I will not eat packaged bread. I will not, if I can at all avoid it, purchase from a restaurant food I could cook better and more cheaply at home. I do not cook out of boxes or warm up packaged food.* I use decent olive oil and vinegars, and keep a pantry stocked with spices and bottled sauces and ingredients, and grow my own herbs in pots. Rather than eat bad food, I will refrain from eating or eat a meal that most people would not recognize as such – my lunch, most weekdays, is half of an olive-baguette from the local bakery, sliced lengthwise and eaten with butter. I am a pinch-penny who will keep wearing socks with holes and unravelling sweaters, but I will, once or twice a year, happily drop a hundred dollars on a REALLY good meal, and think my life deeply enriched for it.

When I lived with my ex-partner, or when May comes to stay with me, I will cook a real meal almost every night. I plan carefully and cook on the cheap – $50 per person per week is my target budget, and I am usually successful.**  I accomplish this in part by keeping a house stocked with staples – having them ready-at-hand means that I know what I’ve already got, and don’t have to buy them specifically for a dish. It means that in any new apartment there are few expensive “setting up” shopping trips, but it gets much cheaper after that.*** Also, I cook largely vegetarian or mostly-vegetarian food (otherwise the budget would be completely impossible to work with), and, of course. I try to enjoy myself.

This means a few different things:

1. Avoid dirtying extra dishes whenever possible. Since I moved out of my parents house I have never had a dishwasher, nor, I must say, a partner who is truly of the mindset that “The Cook Does Not Clean.” Now, I live on my own, so I do all my own dishes. A meal that takes an hour to cook and leaves another half-hour’s worth of dishes just isn’t worth it.
2. Avoid unnecessary steps. I subscribe to Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, and as anybody who does so knows, in their scientific quest to make the perfect dish, their recipes tend to double or triple the number of niggling little procedural quirks. In my quest for simplicity, I like to cook their recipes and see how many of the steps I can then remove and still create a delicious meal.
3. Eat vegetables. I have to admit, I am not a big salad eater. May is, and when he comes to town my salad intake sky-rockets, but when he isn’t around, I find myself much more likely to get my greens if I put them in whatever I’m cooking (which is, being a girl who likes few dirty dishes and a relatively quick meal, often either pasta or stir-fry). My vegetable staples as of right now are escarole, broccoli, and frozen peas.
4. Think about nutrition, but don’t think too hard about nutrition. For me, it basically comes down to making sure I eat a variety of things. Being a dyed-in-the-wool carbovore, I try to make sure that I’m eating enough veggies and dairy (organic yogurt is my main snack food). Since protein is not as overwhelmingly important in the diet as most people think, I don’t worry about it much – rice and peas or peas and pasta will get me what I need, or cheese or yogurt. And frankly, being young and well, I don’t worry at ALL about fat or sugar. I neatly avoid transfats by cooking for myself, and almost always cook with olive or vegetable oil. Which means that when I do bake, I go for real butter. And when I roast a chicken, I happily dip my good bread in the seasoned chicken fat, and don’t feel an ounce of guilt.
5. Try things out and have no fear: the more I cook, the better I am at it. The less I cook, the more my skills get rusty. This year, living on my own, I knew I wasn’t going to be cooking as much as I’d like. I try to get up and cook myself at least two meals a week – having never gotten used to the idea of cooking for leftovers, these tend to be one-shot meals. The other days, I eat with friends, which could mean somebody else has cooked, or that I got food ready made (pizza, a restaurant, whatever) or I eat ramen or quesadillas. I try to get some veg and non-carb protein in there too, but it’s not such a grand thing. But I never look at a recipe and say, gee, I can’t make that. I have made pre-baked tart crusts filled with creme patisserie and blue berries, topped with red currant glaze. I have made pot roasts and duck breasts and venison. I cook what’s available to me, I apply principals I learned on one dish to other dishes, and if the result is not delicious, I make ramen or quesadillas or order pizza, and don’t make the same mistake again.

So those are the 5 biggest things on my manifesto of food and eating. There will be a few more posts coming in this series, on Starting Out in the Kitchen, on Equipment, and of course, some recipes. But this is a start, and it’s about time I got it out on “paper,” and shared it with the world. I wish you good eating, friends – sans fuss.

*Except Ramen Noodles, which are always on my shopping list. Ramen is my oldest comfort food and the biggest exception to my food snobbery. I eat between two and five packages a week. It is my dinner whenever I don’t have something to cook or don’t want to cook. And I love it, sodium and all. So there.

** This gets easier the more people you have: $100 a week for two people is easier than $50 for one, and $150 for three feels positively luxurious.

*** My staples are:

• Wet: olive and vegetable oils, balsamic and rice-wine vinegars, soy sauce and oyster sauce
• Dry: kosher salt, whole black pepper (for grinding), red pepper flake, flour, sugar, corn starch, baking soda and powder, some short pasta and some long pasta, rice, whole coffee beans
• Perishable (non-refrigerated): lemons, potatoes, onions, garlic, shallots, fresh ginger root
• In the refrigerator:: Helman’s mayonnaise, capers, anchovies, scallions, unsalted butter, hard cheese (pecorino romano, asiago, parmesan – not grated. Do that yourself.), organic whole milk, local organic eggs (Rhode Island has cheap local organic milk and eggs from Rhody Fresh and Little Rhody, respectively… if they weren’t so cheap, I’d probably relax about the quality a bit, I admit)
• Ready to eat (more or less): Wallaby organic yogurt cups, Maruchan ramen noodles, frozen sweet baby peas, flour tortillas and cheddar and/or colby-jack cheese (for quesadillas).

I do not always have every single one of these in my kitchen, but I am very likely to have most of them, and when I run out of one, it goes straight back onto the shopping list.  In this way, there are several dishes that I am always ready to make – but that’s another post.