Beet Your Meat

I asked my mother once why she did not cook Brussels sprouts and Lima Beans, the foods that children were supposed to hate. Feeling deprived of some childhood rite of passage may have prompted the question. Her response was simple: she had never liked any of those things growing up, she figured I wouldn't either. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I was not one of those children who only ate peanut butter and jelly, chicken nuggets, or my generation's answer to spaghetti tacos.

In my mother's house I could not have dessert unless I ate my entire dinner. On occasion, a guilt trip may have arrived in the form of: starving children in Ethiopia (each generation has their guilt trip country, what is it now? Iraq? Afghanistan? Iceland?

More old-fashioned parents insist their children remain at the dinner table until everything is gone. A particularly twisted version of this method is pretending to allow the child allow choice in what she eats for dinner. When the child doesn't choose a helping of something she knows her mind enough to know she dislikes, force a gargantuan helping of the food she did not want in the first place on to her plate. THEN refuse to let her leave the table until she crams it all down her throat. [Dear former step-mother: Don't believe what you have heard, this is the real reason my father divorced you. No love, Ashleigh]

This brings us to beets. Earthy. Metallic. Sweet-ish. Not exactly the most child-appropriate food [I wonder if Russian children like beets growing up]. But after outings into Detroit's suburbs, my mother and I would occasionally stop at The Sign of the Beef Carver for a home style meal on our way home. I think this might be a metro-Detroit thing but does any one know this place? I found an old commercial for it here. For some reason these meals always involved beets. Maybe there were a side item my mother chose. While I cannot say for sure that the shimmering fuchsia convinced me to try a few bites, I cannot say it hurt. It was never a favorite food, but when ever I would see them, I would try a little, hoping either they tasted different or my tastebuds had finally matured.

Last year when I first received a delivery of fresh beets, I roasted them in the oven with sweet potatoes. Now that I have them again, and you readers looking over my shoulder, I have decided to try stepping it up a bit. Read a few recipes and came up with this variation.

Here's what I used:

1 small onion
4 or 5 slices of bacon, chopped
4 beets; 3 sweet potatoes, roasted in the oven, and chopped. (Try to do a better job skinning than I did)
2 cups of Merlot, divided (only put one cup in the dish, drink the other)
About 5 tablespoons of ricotta cheese that I had left over from making lasagna
The greens from your beets - rinsed very (very) thoroughly and chopped.
Salt and Pepper, to taste

I put a few table spoons of oil in the pot and added the onions once the stove got hot. (Do I have to mention I turned on the stove?)
Then I added all the bacon, once it was mostly cooked I added the beets and sweet potatoes, then I added about half of the one cup of wine as the pot got dry, then added the cheese and a few minutes later the second cup of wine. I added the beet greens at the end, and left everything cooking until the greens wilted.

Overall, I was fairly satisfied with the dish. In the future I might add one or two extra slices of bacon and make sure I skin the beets and sweet potatoes properly.

What foods challenged you growing up that you like (or at least respect) now? Is there any thing you hated that you still hate?

Korea's Kimchi Crisis

For those of us who have lived in certain Asian cities, the image of cabbages lining the sidewalks, window sills and other flat surfaces serve as a reminder that colder weather is approaching. So it's hard to imagine that an actual cabbage shortage could strike a country like Korea and that a shortage could threaten their national dish, kimchi, which is essentially fermented cabbage with red pepper, radish and garlic. But apparently overly rainy weather has made it so.

Reading the article made me a little sad, not just that fewer people will get to enjoy proper kimchi, but more for the tiny fissure this leaves in Korean culture: the cabbages missing from household sinks that won't be washed, soaked and brined, the mothers, daughters, aunts, grannies and neighbors who won't mark their fall by gathering to make kimchi together, the women (and men) who will start buying it from the store instead of making it themselves. Perhaps I'm yielding to the drama of the article, but it reminds me of the how aspects of culture or even language are slowly lost.

I enjoy the spicy, sour flavor of kimchi every once in a while, but I'm not sure I'm brave enough to try making my own kimchi, although I might be tempted to give it a try the next time I get a batch of radishes and cabbage. Here's a recipe in case you ever want to make your own ... or prop me up while I make my own.

If it's not easy being green should you switch colors?

Apparently a group of celery farmers in Florida think so. Unveiling a new hybrid celery with bright red stalks (think beet greens or rutebega), Duda Farm Fresh Foods hopes they can spark the imaginations and appetites of eaters everywhere. Considering it took twenty years for them to develop this, I hope it works out for them, but I wonder how many people care about the color of their celery. I admit this red celery is quite attractive, but I typically used celery to build more flavor into a dish when I add my onions and garlic. I cannot imagine my stomach caring too much about the color of the celery if it really does taste the same. (It doesn't matter if a celery is black or white, as long as it catches mice, right)?

I admit to having a recent weakness for yellow tomatoes (but in my defense, they taste different than their red brethren), my head has been turned once or twice by purple cauliflower, and I always stare at white asparagus when I see it, but I never buy it ... so maybe I should not dismiss red celery out of hand.

What do you think? Would red celery make a difference to you? Have you ever had your curiosity peaked by a vegetable of another color?

It's hard to be a badass vegan ...

... Unless you're deadprez.

Isn't it funny how we link masculinity and physical toughness with going to a nice, pristine grocery store buying dead animal flesh wrapped in cellophane that some one has killed and butchered for you?

So I've always found the "warrior vegan" message in deadprez's song: Be Healthy sort of amusing, but not too amusing because I wouldn't want them get mad and leave me out of The Revolution whenever it goes down.

Unfortunately, I think they push the tough guy personas a little too hard (over compensating perhaps?). After rapping about the benefits of vegetables, they go on this crazy cursing tirade about how "We gotta care bout our little babies an shit." It goes on way too long so when they tell you to "hold the fuck up," considering not holding up at all.

I haven't done any proper cooking this week so I'm just going to leave you with this song.



It's all love . . . . .

I don't eat no meat, no dairy, no sweets
only ripe vegetables, fresh fruit and whole wheat
I'm from the old school, my household smell like soul food, bro
curried falafel, barbecued tofu
no fish though, no candy bars, no cigarettes
only ganja and fresh-squeezed juice from oranges
exercising daily to stay healthy
and I rarely drink water out the tap, cause it's filthy

Lentil soup is mental fruit
and ginger root is good for the yout'
Fresh veg-e-table with the mayatl stew
sweet yam fries with the green calalloo
careful how you season and prepare your foods
cause you don't wanna lose vitamins and miner-ules
and that's the jewel
life brings life, it's valuable, so I eat what comes
from the ground, it's natural
let your food be your medicine (uh huh)
no Excederin (uh uh)
strictly herb, generate in the sun, cause I got melanin
and drink water, eight glasses a day
cause that's what they say

They say you are what you eat, so I strive to be healthy
my goal in life is not to be rich or wealthy
cause true wealth comes from good health, and wise ways
we got to start taking better care of ourselves

They say you are what you eat, so I strive to be healthy
my goal in life is not to be rich or wealthy
cause true wealth comes from good health, and wise ways
we got to start taking better care of ourselves, be
healthy y'all . .

The Great Pumpkin

When a pie pumpkin - the size of a child’s basketball - arrived on my door step, my first thought was to give it away. Why? Because it’s a pumpkin and I don’t eat pumpkin.

I’ve never heard of any Black people who eat it, in pie form or otherwise. Though it is worth noting that my tofu with ground pork and chili oil eating, former ballet dancing and skiing (well I didn’t so much ski as slide down hills wearing skis), Chinese speaking, proper “White” talking self has decided that shunning pumpkin represents the last last bastion of Blackness. Except for it is, right? On both my mother’s and father’s side of the family, it appears that this is the great orange line never crossed.

No one ever said that pumpkin had negative cultural or social value, I just never saw one on the dinner table. No one needs to talk about how they don’t eat shoelaces or keyboards, they just don’t. Perhaps a few jack-o-lanterns haunted a window or two during a certain holiday, but after they served their time they went into the trash. Looking back, my only regret is that we did not know enough to compost then.

Pumpkin pie was just one of those things people did on television. A myth, like how people make plans that include showering, getting dressed and meeting an associate down town - all in thirty minutes.

To end our holiday meals, we ate pound cakes, peach cobblers and pies - SWEET POTATO PIES. That’s what I ate. It’s what my parents(see the update), my cousins, my aunts, my grandmothers ate. My grandfather both died before I was old enough to observe their dessert choices, but after carefully studying a photo of one grandfather I feel confident typing it’s what they ate too. Every Black person (who was raised in a culturally Black environment) knows at least one person, be it a neighbor/housekeeper/co-worker who sells chicken/rib/pork chop dinners as a side hustle. What is usually the dessert of choice for these dinners? You guessed it.

I was a senior in college the first and only time I ate pumpkin pie. My friend - ethnically Korean, raised by White parents - bought one at the grocery store. I believe it was an impulse purchase for her. Here in the future, I won’t delve into my brain and bring to the surface fuzzy memories of tasting my first pumpkin pie. I will only say now that I can see that allowing a random grocery store bought pie to color all my future impressions of pumpkin pie is not unlike the person who uses an interaction with a pan handler, who happens to be African-American, to color all their impressions of Black people. The grocery chain Jewel drove this point home even further when I bought a slice of what the label said was sweet potato pie. Don’t do it people. And don’t let your friends do it either.

This brings me back to the pie pumpkin, now on the kitchen counter. Being the older, wiser, more benevolent woman I am today, I gave pumpkin another try. It’s tempting to actually use pie pumpkin to make pie, but I worry the temptation to compare it to my traditional pie choice will be too strong. Not unlike when some one decides to cover a Luther Vandross song; you know before it starts you will probably end up disappointed (Yes cast of Glee, I’m looking at you!).

So I decide on this recipe. I made it with carnival squash last week and I figured pumpkin would make a decent substitute (Note: I used wings instead of breast and I didn’t make that butter flour concoction at the end). I was actually excited when the roasted pumpkin emerged glowing from the oven. Cutting it into fragrant slices, I pat myself on the back for finally moving past my prejudice. We do have a Black president after all, it’s time, right?

This is the part of the story where I turn down the stove, pick up the spoon, lift it to my mouth and weep silently, allowing years of food bigotry to flow my heart down my face.


...


Am I still a bigot if I’m right?

In my mouth there was no sweetness, no supple richness. Not much of anything. It tastes like some one gave me bootleg squash - watery thin and kind of sour. I tried adding a bit more butter to it the next day - the same.

I’m not sure what to say now. Maybe I should have made pumpkin soup, or pumpkin mole like some suggested. If I get another pumpkin, I’ll try again.

Maybe I’ll try frying it in butter.

Can someone assure me that it will be worth it

Oh Great Pumpkin, Where Are You?

UPDATE: Dear Mom, Thank you for calling pumpkin pie a poor man's sweet potato pie on the phone today. And thank you for raising me with high standards for my orange round food stuffs. Love, Ashleigh

Everything Tastes Better Fried

Magenta. While this is one of my favorite colors, I was not especially encouraged to find it in my bin. Dark pink skin paired with white tuberous flesh usually means radishes. It seems everyone has their problem vegetables. Radishes are mine. (As winter sets in expect a litany of posts where I whine about radishes.) My helpful decoder sheet says that these are actually turnips, scarlet turnips to be exact. I wonder briefly if they are in fact radishes in disguise. But I know that they are legitimate turnips because they have left the greens attached as evidence, sort of how you know you're actually being served yak meat in a restaurant - and not beef - because you can see the stringy, black tail still attached. We’re all red blooded yak eating Americans here, right?

I lobbed off the greens, which I mixed with my so enormous-Adam-and-Eve- (or Steve) -could have-used-them-instead-of-fig-leaves-collards and smoked turkey tail.

That leaves the turnips themselves. I can never think of anything to do with turnips, I normally dice and hide them in soups or rice dishes or anything else I can think of to save them from the compost bin. So I thought I could add one to what turned out to be a carrot stew. The contents: Five fresh carrots, garlic, half a cup of red wine, three or four medium-sized tomatoes, an orange habanero pepper, some chopped cilantro and some bits of carrot top (I’ve been experimenting with ways to use this fragrant, verdant part of the carrot. Future success may be achieved by slow cooking it so that it gets softer and more chewable.) - and one scarlet turnip.

This is the point in the story where I should mention that I love a bit of acid in my food. Probably a touch more than others are comfortable with. It hasn’t leeched into my personality has it? (I read some where that the desire for additional salt in a dish can be alleviated by introducing more acid.) However, the turnip seem to concentrate all of the acid from the tomatoes, wine and pepper, giving each bite a sour finish. The quinoa that I laddeled the stew over seemed to help a bit, but not quite enough. Even of the sweetness of the carrots were lost behind the taste of turnip.

The future is at ease that I know what not to do next time. But here in the present I still have four more turnips. Googling “scarlet turnip recipes” turned up: turnip slaw (cold), salad (cold), mashed turnips (warmer) ... fried turnips (ouch, I think I burned myself on the oil). So if you read my subject heading you know how this turns out. Slicing the turnips and frying them with garlic was amazing. It was almost like eating a fried potato except there was just a hint of something different, but I didn’t have long to ponder what it was because I was too busy shoveling food into my mouth.

From now on any problematic vegetable is getting thrown into hot oil. If this works, this may be my last blog entry. Beer battered cucumbers anyone?

Cucumbers

"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out as good for nothing."

I wonder if the man credited with saying this back in the 1700s - a Dr. Samuel Johnson - ever received fortnightly shipments of random vegetables from nearby farms. Perhaps, flummoxed by what do to with them, or tempted away by more alluring food stuffs, allowed their taut green skin to erupt with slimy brown dimples. Did he push them to the back of the refrigerator until patches of white fuzz appeared?

Relief spread through me when I recently cut open what I thought was a cucumber and found the innards of a zucchini.

It's not that I hate cucumbers. I harbor no traumatic memories of being gored by vegetable spears as a child or even worse, being forced to remain at the dinner table until I finished this crunchy, watery portion of my meal. I cannot imagine gathering enough passion about cucumbers to have ever given them a great deal of thought until now. It's just when faced with a choice of cucumbers or something else - something else is always more tempting.

I was almost lulled from cucumber apathy by a few pickling cucumbers shaped like small bowling pins. But I made the mistake of putting them away in the refrigerator and never thought about them again until it was too late.

Then tomato season hit. And I became crazy for something (I think) I invented called Tomato Salad. I chop up a few tomatoes (maybe two or three, or more depending on the size), dice some onion (maybe half an onion), perhaps a clove or two of garlic (depending on how much onion I use), chop a green pepper (if I have one and am not saving it for something else) and some cilantro (the amount you include I suppose will depend on how much the flavor reminds you of soap). I add a few tablespoons of sesame oil and basalmic vinegar and top it off with salt and red pepper seeds. Stir and eat. For weeks I was crazy about it. Every day I would fantasize about it and make it as soon as I walked in the door after work.

But one day I did not have enough tomatoes.

I looked in the fridge and found a cucumber that somehow had not yet realized it had been dispatched to its chilly, clammy death. I chopped it up stirred it in and found a way to stretch the tomato salad.

So thank you cucumbers for serving as a segue to the thing I actually wanted to eat. In the future I will try to imagine more ways your green rinded blandness can further my future gastrointestinal agendas.

With grudging respect,

Ashleigh

Maiden Voyage

This is a blog more about guilt than not about guilt. My first draft of this "maiden post" was full of high minded phrases like: "going greener," "environmental responsibility," "budget minded sustainable eating," "supporting local farms."

These are all perfectly respectable reasons to start a blog. When I began receiving bi-weekly deliveries of local produce I did intend to write about my adventures. But what finally made me put pen to paper (and later finger to keyboard) was guilt, not about the food I eat, but about the food I throw away. Vegetables arrive at my front porch crisp and lush, each piece representing hope and health. Putting each one away I congratulate my self one being one of the right sort of people who cares about what she eats and the impact of the money she spends. But of course a few too many perfectly fine items like rutabaga,fresh parsley, cucumbers and lettuce - oh the lettuce - see my front porch again far too soon when I carry them out to be composted.

[If we believe in alternate realities, than we have to suspect that one exists where there is a post office where humanoid looking lettuce wait to have their packages weighed and look at lettuce FBI wanted posters that bear photos of me - the lettuce version of Hannibal Lector]

Perfectly fine food smuggled to the compost bin or sometimes *gasp* the trash can, dumped like a body on your favorite crime show.

The act of buying local produce is often much easier than eating it. Imagining that I impress people around me by dropping names like sun choke, beauty heart radish, celeriac is so much easier than thinking differently about what I consume.

So this blog is a way to keep me honest as I Try To Eat At Home instead of picking up a sandwich or scarfing down potato wedges while food I already have languishes in the refrigerator. Please read, comment and otherwise support me. Here you will read my successes, failures and those in between times when I manage to snatch up success right before it swirls down the toilet, rinse it, cook it and eat it.

Thank you.