I Made a Thing!

I found a leatherbound collector's edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own for $3.99 at Savers.  Mild guilt over what I'm about to do to it...

After about an hour of gluing and box-cutting, we have a hollow book! 

Complete with earphones and charger port.

Voila! One of my exercise hairbands is even the perfect size to keep the book closed for transit.  

Pollan Strikes Again

Yesterday, I baked a Rustic Sourdough boule from scratch, and it turned out awesome!  Baking it in our new Dutch oven trapped the steam and mimicked the condition of a real bakery oven, giving it that awesome crust; slashing the dough a couple of times relieves the tension in the loaf as it rises, and gives it that characteristic bakery "look". I'm super proud of myself, I'm not going to lie.  This shit is delicious.

The inspiration for baking my first loaf of real bread was Michael Pollan's Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.  I can't remember the last time I read a book with such avidity, or dog-eared so many passages to read out loud to Sean.  The book's premise is that cooking, perhaps more than any other human trait, sets us apart from the animals (as opposed to altruism, humor, grief, etc., all of which have been observed in animals).  Pollan demonstrates how "little dramas of transformation" made possible by cooking, in all its elemental forms (his chapters focus on roasting for fire, braising for water, baking for air, and fermenting for earth), proved equally transformative for us as a species, allowing us to quite literally create things that are more than the sum of their parts, whether it's delicious and energy-rich bread from the inedible wheat seed, or a tangy cheese resulting from the furious activity of bacteria and yeast.

 Pollan makes a fantastic point about the value of getting back in the kitchen, the space that women, especially, have been trying really hard to get out of: reclaiming our independence from the corporations who have eagerly stepped in and offered to take the work off our hands, to our serious nutritional and environmental disadvantage. He calls his book "an invitation to alter, however slightly, the ratio between production and consumption in your life.  The regular exercise of these simple skills for producing some of the necessities of life increases self-reliance and freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations.  Not just our money but our powre flows toward them whenever we cannot supply any of our everyday needs and desires ourselves.  And it begins to flow back toward us, and our community, as soon as we decide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves."

As I wrote in a previous entry, this year has marked a serious shift in our attitude toward food.  We're cooking more of it, and it's more based on fresh ingredients than it ever has been before.  This goes along with our increasing efforts to rely less on processed food, and even home products that are full of chemical crap.  Yesterday, in fact, I made a revamped version of my laundry detergent, as well as a new all-purpose cleaner--part of the never-ending hunt for one that won't leave streaks on the dark countertops.  I'll also be making my own hand soap, as soon as I can lay hands on some vegetable glycerine.

Pollan's writing is always engaging, but this is even more of a personal book than his others, recording his efforts to master the various "elements": working alongside pit masters in a South Carolina whole-pig barbecue, spending Sundays with a chef trained at Chez Panisse learning the mysteries of the mire-poix and the long, slow braise; helping Sister Noella, a nun with a Ph.D. in microbiology, make stinky French cheese at a Connecticut abbey; or trying to create the famous breads from the Tartine bakery in San Francisco.  I learned so many fucking things from this book.  Among them:

• in addition to the flavor impacts of earth and water, the invisible ecosystems of fungi and bacteria contribute their own terroir to foods
• bacteria can trade DNA with one another!  Japanese people have gut bacteria that's better able to break down seaweed--DNA that originally came from a bacteria species that lived on seaweed itself
• nearly one-third of all foods we eat (and drink) are products of fermentation--rotting. 
• fermentation is decomposition is death, lending layers to the mystery and near-taboo associated with the very bodily-ness of foods like stinky cheese
• according to Levi-Strauss, when American troops landed in Normany in 1944 they destroyed several Camambert dairies, because they believed the pungent odor to be corpses
• Fermented foods tend to be acquired tastes, and the beloved food of one culture (rotted shark in Iceland, kimchi in Korea) is often repulsive to outsiders, and thus can serve to create and maintain group identity.  (As Pollan puts it, "We are the ones who eat rotted shark.")

One of the most fascinating themes was that humans, the most extraordinarily adaptive species, tend to get ourselves into trouble because we overdo it.  We process something, whether be cooking it, fermenting it, etc., to make it better than it was, both in terms of taste and nutrition.  But then we keep messing with it, until we've over-processed it into something that's not nutritious at all.  Bread is a great example of this. Pollan visits niche bakeries like Tartine and interviews old-school breadmakers, but he also visits a Wonderbread factory.  He points out, for example, that the long fermentation of sourdough partially breaks down gluten, making it easier to digest. Mass-produced bread, however, isn't allowed to ferment for long, and thus there's more gluten in modern bread than there has ever been in bread up until this age of processed, shelf-stable foods. A potentially simple answer to the question of rising gluten intolerance--it's not that we're eating anything humans haven't eaten for centuries, it's that the very nature and identity of that foodstuff has been chemically altered and adulterated (hearing about the additives dumped into Wonderbread by the sackful to affect this or that characteristic was frankly appalling) until it's a pale ghost of its former self.

Of the four elements, fire interested me least, since I'm not that into BBQ, and certainly not planning to roast a pig in a fire pit on my lawn (as Pollan eventually does).  Braising was certainly interesting, but that's a skill I feel comfortable with, especially with my recent run of soups.  I did learn that onions form the backbone of braises, soups, and stews all over the world, whether it's the mire-poix in France (onions, carrots, celery) or soffritto in Italy (onions, garlic, celery), and that rather than sauteeing the aromatics, you can achieve much better overall flavor by sweating them inside--cooking them over very low heat for a much longer period of time, without browning them.  Still, those are variations on things I'm already somewhat familiar with.  It was the chapters on baking and fermenting that were fairly revelatory, and since I'm not going to brew my own mead or make my own cheese (though I might try pickling in the summer), baking bread seemed like the most promising avenue.

We retired our unreliable bread machine, as I think I mentioned, because we couldn't stop eating the bread.  So this was already a bit of a dangerous proposition (and true to form, most of that boule is gone!), but I couldn't resist; after reading Pollan, bread machine baking seemed completely lame.  Rather than use a "wild" starter, which would take weeks, I bought a starter from King Arthur.  Unfortunately, I don't think we fed it in time, since we were away, and then lacked filtered water (chlorinated water can kill the yeast), so it wasn't as frothy and bubbly as I think it should have been.  But after a few days, it still turned out a damned fine loaf of bread, so, win! For the aforementioned reason of danger, of course, home-baked bread is unlikely to earn a regular place in our house.  The exception would be multigrain bread for sandwiches, but as I learned from Pollan, the chief difficulty in creating an edible whole grain loaf is that you're fighting a losing battle with gravity.  White flour is light and rises easily; whole grains are the equivalent of lead.

I really enjoyed making bread, too, which was something Pollan point out--we can find pleasure in something that used to feel like a chore we'd rather outsource.  It feels good to develop a skill, to create, to be able to look at a golden, crusty loaf and think "I made that happen."  Also, shaping dough is fun!

Anniversary (with Hens)

Tuesday marked nine years that Sean and I have been together. One more year till a decade, which is sort of unbelievable.  Sometimes college seems like it was just yesterday, and then, as Anna reminded me on the phone the other night, you remember we graduated seven years ago.

My Christmas present from Sean was a cooking class at Sur La Table in Canton and an overnight stay at Green Acres B&B in Simsbury.  He chose the inn because it was close to Sur La Table, really well-reviewed online, and....*drumroll* they have chickens.  A whole flock of free-range chickens who have the run of the property, and who provide all the fresh eggs for the breakfast.  Now, it has long been my dream of having some chickens, the queen of which shall be named Petunia (in aggregate they shall be known as "Petunia and her sisters"). Even given adequate space, which we lack on Concord St, I've doubted whether I could ever manage it, considering that I read that chickens only lay for 2 years, after which time you either need to kill them (not sure I could) or resign yourself to feeding a "poop machine", as the article put it.

Anyway, I was delighted with the gift, and with the inn, which was an 18th-century structure that the current owners had taken down to the studs and painstakingly restored.  It was filled with antiques, and the mind positively boggled at the amount of money that must have been required not only to restore the house, but to stock it with extraordinary period furniture and objects.  There were only two guestrooms, and a wonderful fire in the living room in front of which Sean and I battled at checkers (he wins), a game called the Captain's Mistress that's basically Connect4 with wooden balls, and an old pub game called Shut the Box.  Our breakfast in the morning ranked as one of the best we've ever had in an inn: fresh fruit parfait, french toast, and the most shockingly yellow, fluffy, pillowy scrambled eggs, made from the hens outside, served on china and crystal and silver that looked like it belonged in a Jane Austen adaptation.

All of this was awesome, but I was just a little bit downcast because no hens.  Thanks to the stupid polar vortex and the snow the area had just received, it was too cold for the hens to be out of the henhouse (although Jim, the owner, assured me they were generally out and about even in winter).  I resigned myself to being surrounded by chicken figurines (seriously, there were a whole bunch),and eating their eggs, without ever getting to meet them.  On the order form for breakfast, under "location" the options were: in room, dining room, swimming pool, patio WITH CHICKENS, and patio WITHOUT CHICKENS.  I may have sniffled.  Breakfast with chickens!  We came at the wrong time of year.

However, this sad story has a happy ending, because in the morning, as Jim was telling us stories about "the girls", he said he'd be happy to take me out to the coop before we left.  Joy!  Ignore the fact that it was literally 7 degrees outside and that I couldn't feel my face after five minutes, it was still awesome, because I got to pet chickens.  For Jim they're pets; he keeps them even after they stop laying (though he pointed out that one of the eggs that morning had come from a 4-year-old hen, so they can make it past 2 years), and he has them all named things like Dulcia.  News flash: chickens are really fucking soft and fluffy.  They're not very smart (he kept calling to them by name, trying to get them to come close enough to the door of the coop that he could grab them, and I asked "oh, do they respond to that?" and he laughed at me), but he said they really won't ever peck you, and they're easy to take care of.  Also, I learned that they love fruit!  He tossed in the canteloupe rinds from breakfast as their treat.

The cooking class was fun, too, but let's be honest, the highlight of this for me was the chickens.  Our other planned activities came to naught: the farmstore I had located in Granby that sold their own pork cuts was closed when we got there, and the Mark Twain house in Hartford turned out to be closed on Tuesdays when we got there.  We did stop in Windsor along the way and discovered a new bakery had opened near the train station, so we picked up a honey wheat loaf that is quite...chewy.  And yeasty-smelling.  That reminds me, I ordered a sourdough starter from King Arthur so we can make our own bread.  I'm not sure the culture is very lively, but if I can lay hands on some rye flour today, I can soak the wheat and make the leaven tonight and bake tomorrow.  I'm going to use the recipe from Michael Pollan's Cooked, which has to go back to the library....today, actually.  Good to know!

ETA: Our jaunt to northern Connecticut actually did not start on an auspicious note. Monday was a really unpleasant day to contemplate doing anything more than staying indoors--it was cold, overcast, and raining.  I wasn't in a great mood when we headed out, and I was grumbling that Sean wanted to stop for lunch in North Haven instead of just going straight there.  He was headed for a diner in North Haven, which serendipitous-ly happened to be adjacent to Leon's, a slightly expensive restaurant that we really like.  What were the chances they were open for lunch at 2:15 on a Monday?  But they were!  We had the elegant dining room almost entirely to ourselves, and great service from our waiter, who we've had before and who knows Sean from their baseball team way back in the day.  Add a good sandwich and--most importantly--a glass of Reisling, and all of a sudden the thoroughly unpleasant day wasn't looking so terrible.  It wasn't a cheap lunch, but it was a magical solution, and one infinitely preferably to diner food on a Monday afternoon, with old people.