All the Ingredients

What's for Dinner: The Bacon Ovation

My husband and I enjoy watching Outrageous Foods with Tom Pizzica on the Food Network. We were sad when he didn't win Season 6 of The Next Food Network Star, but were happy to see him on the network later with a show more interesting than that of the woman who won. Usually Tom highlights foods that are A) obscenely large (like the 35-lb sandwich), B) too hot to handle (Is a food really enhanced with a sauce made of 28 different hot peppers that is SO hot you start sweating as soon as you start eating?), or C) amazingly porky. In the last category, he featured a dish served at Paddy Long's in Chicago--the Bacon Bomb. This is a seasoned meatloaf, wrapped in bacon and grilled. "I could do that!" I said. So on my last trip to Megamart, I bought a two-pound package of 90% lean ground beef, a pound of "lean " ground pork, and two pounds of the least expensive bacon. I don't know about where you live, but around here a pound of really nice bacon costs more than a gallon of gas!

First, I started coals in the chimney in the grill. While they were getting hot, I cooked half of the first pound of bacon, liberally sprinkling it as it cooked with pepper. The second half I cooked and put away to use for something else. Then I took the second pound of bacon and wove a lattice on the table. "Gross!" my daughter commented, passing through. Perhaps she thought I was topping a pie with it?

Then I mixed the two meats in a bowl, adding four liberal spoonfuls of my own dry rub. Usually I add binders to meatloaf--some bread crumbs, an egg or two--but since the bacon on the outside would keep the loaf together, I skipped adding anything else. I patted the meat mixture out to within an inch of the edge of the bacon lattice.

My husband and I had recently gone to the Cedar Rapids Barbecue Fest where I had bought a bottle of Famous Dave's Texas Pit Barbecue Sauce. Although Famous Dave's Sweet and Zesty is a standard sauce in our house, we had both really liked the slight pepper burn of this new sauce on Dave's famous ribs. I  opened the bottle and applied a liberal layer on top of the meat. Then I crumbled the pepper-bacon across the top. Using a thin, flexible cutting board, I lifted one edge of the lattic e and began to roll the meat into a tube. Once I had rolled it up, I tucked in the bacon ends and wrapped the whole loaf tightly in plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator.

When the coals were gray, so I spread them into the two bottom sides of my big black Webber grill, putting a heavy duty foil drip pan in the center. Then I added a few more coals to each side, put the cooking grate back in, and set the meatloaf on the grill and put the lid on. For a very brief time about ten years ago, Reynold's Wrap made perforated, heavy duty gril lfoil sheets to use in your grill on top of the grate. I loved grilling meatloaf on them: they were already perforated and let the fat drip through, and I didn't have to wash them. I have since tried a perforated silicone grilling mat, and was less than pleased with the result. Williams-Sonoma recently brought out a Fine-Mesh Grill Pan, and I bought one with a gift card a friend gave me for my birthday.

The pan fits nicely into my Webber, and it has a removable handle that clicks on and off easily. That lets you get the handle off the pan so you can shut the lid, and the handle is not too hot to touch when you click it back on to remove the pan at the end of cooking. I already have a Williams-Sonoma grilling skillet for sauteing vegetables on the grill, and have loved using it. The Fine-Mesh Grill Pan worked perfectly. It had a large enough surface so that I could easily roll the bacon meatloaf over, and the fat dripped through into my drip pan.Williams-Sonoma Fine-Mesh Grill Pan

Now, it was boogers to clean afterwards, even though I had sprayed it with Pam before I used it, and soaked it in hot soapy water immediately afterwards. However, I had just bought a new kitchen scrub brush, and it cleaned out most of the char caught in the mesh. I was raised to believe that kitchen utensils should look like you have used them, so I don't care that it's not pristine anymore, and I am sure that it won't contaminate whatever I use it for next. I cooked the bacon meatloaf for one and a half hours until a thermometer read an internal temperature of 160 degrees, and I had turned it every half hour, starting bottom seam up, adding a few coals to each side as needed. The bacon was nicely crisp all over, and the meat smelled fabulous!

I let the loaf rest for about fifteen minutes while I grilled some new potatoes for a grilled potato salad, dressed with a little mayo, apple cider vinegar, and fresh dill out of the garden. I also had made my famous pineapple coleslaw. When I sliced the loaf to serve it, there was a lovely spiral on the inside of the pepper bacon, and it's flavor, as well as that of the Texas Pit sauce had permeated the meat. I served the meatloaf with the two salads and a side of the barbecue sauce. My husband and I each had two helpings! When he had cleaned his plate the second time, he gave me a standing ovation for "the best meatloaf he had ever eaten." It truly was fabulous.

But what to do with the leftovers? I hope Bacon Boy stops by in time to try a slice before it's all gone!

 

Cooking with Julia Child

  It's Sunday. I didn't work today so I cooked breakfast: cinnamon rolls (not from scratch, sorry), and bacon. On the end of my kitchen counter is a TV with a DVD player, and on Sunday mornings, I treat myself and cook with Julia Child. Christmas before last, my husband gave me the two DVD sets that are available with episodes from her series, The French Chef. I love these DVDs because I enjoy watching Julia make recipes I would never try (terrines) and some I would try, like today's crepes. I also hate the DVDs because they are divided up by type of recipe--Starters, Main Courses, Desserts--and not arranged chronologically. You can go from watching a black and white early episode, to a later episode in color, and then back to balck and white. There were originally 134 episodes of this show, the first 13 of which were lost. So I only have 36 out of the remaining 121 on these two DVD sets. I would quickly fork out bundles of money for a complete, chronological set of The French Chef, but for now I make due with what there is. I love the fact that Julia is messy, drops things, and doesn't always worry about the final presentation of a dish.

Because I work in a bookstore, it's easy for me to see how media exposure drives book sales. As soon as the movie Julie & Julia came out, sales of Julia Child's books increased dramatically. We couldn't keep copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in stock because everyone wanted. Julie Powell made cooking from it seem so attractive. I sold it to one woman who bought it simply so she could learn to make a bechemal sauce. There are cheaper and quicker ways to get your hands on the recipe and technique of making bechemal sauce, but I certainly understand the attraction of having Julia teach you how. When I was a child  back in the 1960s, I learn to cook from my mother--and from watching Julia Child.

I own both hardcover volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I paid $2.50 for each at a sidewalk sale outside a cooking store a long time ago), but I confess I never use them to cook with. They certainly are the foundation of the way Julia Child built her approach to cooking, but I prefer the more Americanized versions of her recipes: Julia in later life.

When my daughter Emily, was a toddler, she loved watching cooking shows. She was fascinating with what the hands were stirring and making. She loved to watch Julia and Jacques Pepin when their show, Cooking at Home, was on the air: "Mommy! The people who talk funny are on!" She thought Julia Child was from France too. Two of our favorite recipes for Sunday dinner come from that book: Roast Chicken (Jacques's version) and Scalloped Potatoes (Julia's Pommes des Terre Dauphinoise). I have never made scalloped potatoes as good as my mother-in-law's, but Julia's recipe fixed the mistakes I was making, and produced a recipe my husband found to be different than his mother's but "Very good!" The book is laid out with Julia and Jacques's recipes for the same basic dish side-by-side, and I often end up somewhere in the middle. But I have never made a bad recipe from this book.

The other book I use is Baking with Julia, based on a TV series Julia did baking with famous chefs such as Lora Brody, Martha Stewart, Marion Cunningham, and Nancy Silverton. Some of the recipes in this collection are completely over the top such as Martha Stewart's for a three-tiered almond wedding cake with meringue and apricot glaze between the layers, frosted with rum buttercream, and decorated with marzipan fruit. Other recipes are fabulous such as the Danish Braid (I made it with the apricot filling), or the White Loaves. This latter recipe produces two magnificent loaves of bread that toast  beautifully. That probably has  something to do with the half a stick of softened butter that is beaten in as the last step of making the dough. The recipe says that the "mountainous loaves" are four and half inches high. The two I made this week topped out at six inches!

And when I want an older, basic recipe, I tend to go back to The French Chef Cookbook, that has the recipes, chronologically, from the original series. My mother and I watched Julia make Beef Bourguignon with its Onion and Mushroom Garniture (Episode 96), and we bought the ingredients and made it soon afterwards. For years it was my requested birthday dinner. These recipes teach basic techniques and are aimed more towards how America cooked (at least in the 1960s) than the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

So if you are inspired to cook with Julia, take a look at all the different books she has on the shelf in the bookstore, and don't automatically head for the bright blue cover of her original gem. Take time to find the one that's right for you. And if you want a good look at how cooking television used to be before being FoodNetworkicized, I highly recommend the DVD sets.

Rage Against the Cupcake

Again  The New York Times  has had an article about cupcakes in L.A. The town is wild, the people on flaky diets, yet everyone loves cupcakes. Big giant cupcakes with mounds of cream cheese frosting. Red velvet. Carrot cake.

I went to a Catholic elementary school where there was never money for anything extra. We didn't have a cafeteria and had to bring our lunches to school every day. We were always trying to raise money for something.  Buses to take us on a field trip to the state capital. Admission fees for an entire class to go to the zoo.  Film strips for all the social studies classes. We raised money through an endless procession of bake sales.  And what did my mother bake prepare for every bake sale? Her peanut butter cupcakes.

My mother was a housewife in the 1950s who didn't buy in to all the new convenience foods of the time. In our house, no birthday cakes were ever made using a mix. It was cheesecake (cake-style, not pie-style with a graham crackers crust), or Brown Derby Grapefruit Cake, or my favorite, Wellesley Fudge Cake--all made from scratch.

But when faced with baking cupcakes for school bake sales week after week, my mother succumbed. Jiffy Cake Mix became a staple of the pantry. She would bake a batch of the yellow cake mix in pans with white fluted paper liners. Then she would whip powdered sugar into creamy peanut butter with her Sunbeam standing mixer until she had a wonderful frosting. All the boys in my class, year-to-year, loved those peanut butter cupcakes, and the bake sales raised a lot of money for Most Holy Trinity Elementary School. Now I follow in her footsteps: scratch cupcakes for home, cake mix cupcakes for school.

My own kids love cupcakes. For the last few years, they have preferred them for birthdays and other celebrations. Each birthday now, they get as many cupcakes as they are years old, the confections towering on stacked pressed-glass cake pedestals passed down from my mother. Cupcakes are the perfect birthday party food. You don't have to cut cupcakes to serve them, and with a liberal coating of frosting, every round cupcake is a corner piece. They don't require a plate and fork to eat, although napkins are necessary. And we have developed a rule in our house: if it's your birthday, you get to eat as many cupcakes as you want.

But now the wellness policies enforced in many school districts across the country have caused cupcake bans--is it Bootsy's birthday? Let's take edamame for her third grade class to share! Can you see any child in America being excited about taking fruit kabobs to school for their birthday treat? Yes, our children are suffering from obesity (much like their parents). But this is not the result of eating a cupcake once a month at school. It's the result of diets high in processed fatty foods and low in exercise and other activity.  It's sugar cereal for breakfast, chocolate milk and a power bar for lunch, potato chips after school with a soda, and ice cream after dinner.

So join in the protest of the cupcake ban, and bake a batch today. Buy a box of Jiffy yellow cake mix, or whip some up from scratch. Check out http://www.cupcakeproject.com/  --one of the many fabulous blogs devored to cupcakes, and help save the cupcake!

The 100-Mile Diet

I have finished my reading of the crop of local eating books, and they have provided much food for thought. Gary Paul Nabhan, in Coming Home to Eat, explores a food world that is vastly different from mine. He forages in the desert, raises turkeys,  and gardens in an effort to "wrest four out of five of his meals from locally grown foodstuffs." Nabhan's story is fascinating for his details of struggle and perseverance raising crops in the desert climate, and foraging among the cactus. He surmounts the problem of no local flour by using ground corn, and finds a family who provides him with their homemade mesquite flour tortillas. He buys local eggs, eats pit-roasted cholla buds, and slaughters his own turkeys.  There's an entire section at the end of the book that lists "native foods eaten within the Sonoran Desert/Gulf of California Foodshed." He divides them by category such as "Wild Plant Food," "Cultivated Plant Food," and wild and domesticated animals.

These lists are helpful. Sometimes Nabhan is so wrapped up in the messages he is trying to get across about the benefits of local diets to health and natural resources, that I lose sight of what he is putting on the table very day. I lived in Arizona for a large chunk of my childhood, and we ate a lot of local produce--grapefruit, figs, dates, and oranges--but it was because they grew around us, not because they were local foods and inherently better. It is fascinating to hear Nabhan's descriptions of how he foraged, scavenged, and raised his own foodstuffs. BUT as fascinating as all of this is, I live in Iowa where chuckawalla, pinto beans, and yucca blossoms are not included in my 100-mile foodshed which goes roughly from Des Moines to east of Davenport.  This is a good book to get a grounding in the spirit of local eating, but it does not contain practical advice for my living-situation.

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver uproots her family from their desert home outside of Tucson, and moves it to her husband, Stephen Hopp's farm in Appalachia (where they had previously only summered).  The Kingsolver-Hopp household starts their eating revolution with their grocery list, crossing off things that aren't locally produced or in season: no cucumbers in February, no lathed baby carrots, no California salad greens--even if they are organic--and no bottled salad dressings with their inch-long lists of ingredients. They will use honey instead of sugar, frequent local dairies for their milk, and get eggs from daughter Lily's chickens, some of which provide meat as well. Kingsolver's solution to the wheat flour issue (since few local eaters seem to live within 100 miles of a flour mill) is to buy essential items such as flour and olive oil in bulk from the least processed source so more of those food dollars go to the farmers. And to make the year more palatable, each person in the household is allowed one "luxury item," purchased most beneficially to the grower. Kingsolver's husband chooses coffee, her oldest daughter Camille picks dried fruit, her youngest, hot chocolate, and Kingsolver herself picks spices--all obtained from fair-trade sources. (My problem would be narrowing down a list of about ten luxury items to just one thing.)

Like Nabhan, the Kingsolver-Hopps plant a large garden (which no one likes to weed). They revive an old orchard. Kingsolver learns to make cheese, and her husband makes all their bread. Sometimes they make their own pasta, and every Friday night is family pizza night with homemade crusts and ingredients. Like Nabhan and his turkeys, Kingsolver learns to kill the family roosters humanely, spending a whole day with the help of friends "processing" the meat for winter. She and her family inhabit a much kinder climate than Nabhan, with a richer supply of local food. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle combines Kingsolver's narrative, with husband Stephen's scientific sidebars, and older daughter Camille's recipes and menus. It is also the only  one of these books to deal with how local eating affects a family with children. To their credit, Lily and Camille are just as dedicated to the family enterprise as their parents--NOT the situation I would find in my house. The Kingsolver-Hopps may fudge some aspects of local eating, but they are deeply committed to reducing the fossil-fuel footprint their family's eating leaves.

In Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon kick off their year of eating locally with  a dinner party for friends, buying all their ingredients locally.  Their first 100-mile meal costs them $128.87. As apartment dwellers, they do not want to become large-scale farmers, poultry raisers, or full-time foragers, and they search out ways to buy their food locally for one year. They run into the same flour problem the other local-eater-writers have, finally finding a small local supply that contains dead bugs. Smith and MacKinnon provide the most useful tips for new local eaters such as how to store potatoes in a closet. Mostly they give advice, as their chronicle proceeds, on how to be good local consumers. You get more of a sense from Plenty of how sometimes a 100-mile diet is difficult to achieve, and how it can be costly, and repetitive. For example, Smith and MacKinnon go through quite a long stretch where they eat potatoes at every meal--again not something that would work well in my house. But they also leave you with the sense that you don't have to have a big garden to be successful with a 100-mile diet.  For the year's cycle, they are the strongest purists of the group of local-eater-writers. And although I get the sense that they will go back to using flour from far away, like the other  authors, Smith and MacKinnon's diet and approach to global eating have been significantly altered.

Where does all this reading leave me? With the largest and most diverse vegetable garden I have ever planted in the more than 20 years I have lived in Iowa. It leaves me shopping more carefully in the grocery store, buying fewer and fewer items with those inch-long ingredient lists, and reaching for the locally made jam instead of the Welch's. It finds me shopping at the local farmer's markets, and freezing produce for winter use. In spite of my best attempts, however, my family eschews fresh fruits and vegetables, and thinks local eating means going to the mall's food court for dinner. I am trying to change that, but it's going to be a more gradual process than these authors chronicle. And it will take me longer than a year.

The Way We Don't Eat

I was intrigued by Christine Muhlke's "The Way We Eat"  column, "Canned Heat," in last Sunday's New York Time's Magazine. In her column, Muhlke describes Nancy Silverton's new cookbook, A Twist of the Wrist: Quick Flavorful Meals with Ingredients from Jars, Cans, Bags and Boxes. I have long admired Silverton's Bread from the La Brea Bakery. Although I tend to reach for Bernard Clayton's Complete Book Of Breads, if I ever have the time and space to really devote myself to nurturing starters to make my breads, I'll go with Silverton.

A Twist of the Wrist, Muhlke explains, is Silverton's guide to bringing "lapsed home cooks" back into the kitchen to make meals with "love and care." On the back cover of the book, Silverton says that her book is more than just her invitation to think in a totally different way about cooking. It is a "welcome to a world where packaged and fresh items, combined in creative ways, are not compromises, but inspirations."

Where has Nancy been?

Obviously she has devoted so much time to her La Brea Bakery (which she sold in 2001) and partnering with Mario Batali and Joel Bastianich to create the perfect crusts at Pizzeria Mozza, that she has missed some food and cookbooks trends. Silverton is late to a party already staffed by Food Networkers Rachel Ray (30 Minute Meals), Robin Miller (Quick Fix Meals), and Sandra Lee (Semi-Homemade Cooking).  Now none of these ladies are favorites of mine--Sandra Lee lost me when I watched her scrape apple pie filling out of a store-bought pie to put between layers of baked phyllo dough, throwing away the empty pie shell--but they have made cooking accessible to a lot of people who have busy lives and who don't always want to drive through for dinner.

Silverton joins the the ranks of such quick cook books as David Joachim's A Man, A Can, A Plan (followed by A Man, A Can, A Grill, and A Man, A Can, A Microwave), and Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross' s Desperation Dinners (Desperation Entertaining, and Cheap. Fast. Good!). The A Man, A Can series are the board books of cooking. Simple pictures show the ingredients as they appear on your grocery shelf, and, following the simply-worded directions produces edibles such as "Pig in a Pinwheel": a combination of canned ham, cream cheese, some diced onion, and a pinch of oregano spread over a sheet of crescent dough, rolled, sliced, and baked. My family's favorite out of Desperation Dinners, "Hash brown Casserole," consists of sausage patty meat cooked with some onion and topped with frozen hash browns and cheese. No, these are not items you would ever find on the menu at Campanile, but they are quick, inexpensive, and my family will eat them.

I have to be honest about that. I have wide-ranging tastes and preferences, but I live in a house of true-blue Midwesterners.  My son eats the same five foods in rotation. My husband and daughter are much more adventurous eaters, but if I didn't bake whole wheat bread and make my own pasta and marinara sauce, they would live contentedly without. I could serve the same basic dishes over and over again, and no one would have a problem with that but me.

In the introduction to A Twist of the Wrist, Silverton talks about how other cookbooks using jarred or other packaged products were "terribly compromised" because the products used in the recipes were "really substandard." She states that it's possible to get much better ingredients today. Silverton details how she shopped for the entire year she wrote this book, shopping at all kinds of local and specialty grocers to acquire her marinated tuna from Italy, her tapenades, imported jams, and specialty pasta. Nancy lives in L.A. with its ethnic neighborhoods and grocers, and access to great wealth such as the Los Angeles Farmers Market. And obviously, the expense of her ingredients doesn't matter. She created some of these recipes herself, and for the others, asked chef friends what they like to cook at home in the evening.

I live in Small Town, Iowa. It used to be that I had to drive to Minneapolis or Chicago to find a specialty food store. That fancy olive oil and balsamic vinegar I bought at Byerly's had to last me all year until we got back to Minneapolis to see the Twins play the next summer. Now I can drive to Des Moines, two hours away, and wander through William's Sonoma and a new food market with its imported English ginger biscuits and North Carolina barbecue sauces. But I can only do this every so often, and I can only afford a few specialty items at a time. The Cafe du Mond Beignet mix will be reserved for the most special of breakfasts.  The Sticky Fingers Mustard Sauce used for that special pork loin on the grill. I can only afford these items as flourishes, not as standard fare.

Silverton's book is to be used on a "typical evening" when you get home from work and want to have dinner on the table in less than an hour.  For instance, I night want to throw together a "Bacon, Onion, and Guyere Frittata" (my husband would like this, my daughter might, my son would make himself a pb&j sandwich). I should be able to grab out of my pantry such ingredients as applewood smoked bacon, jarred onions, ghee, 12 large eggs, fresh thyme, and 1/4 cup shredded Guyere. I have bacon in the house, but it's the cheap stuff I doctor up with dry rub as I fry it . I have some eggs (not usually a dozen at once), and everything else I'd have to go to the natural foods co-op for.  This meal would also set me back at least $15.  The ingredients for the hash brown casserole cost about $6.

Mario Batali might be able to pull San Marzano canned tomatoes, a wedge of ricotta salata,  roasted eggplant, and some trennette out of his pantry to make "Sicilian-Style Trennette with Eggplant, Olives, and Ricotta Salata," but I can't.  My challenge on a given night is what to do with half a box of Barilla penne, Hunts crushed tomatoes, herbs that I dried from my garden last summer, and a few gratings from my expensive block of Parmigiano-Reggiano that I bought in Minneapolis. And this time of year, I need to do fix dinner around track and baseball and softball practice and my rotating work schedule.

A Twist of the Wrist is a beautiful cookbook. The recipes seem carefully composed and well-researched. But Silverton's audience is a metropolitan, well-off cook with a cupboard of fancy ingredients not available on the shelves of my small town grocery store. I would not think of buying jarred onions for any dish when these days I can get nice fresh Vidalias or sweet onions from Texas. This is not the way we eat. But Nancy is welcome to drop by any week night and help me assemble dinner in less than an hour from what I have in my pantry.

Shop at Places Other Than Supermarkets

You would think that here in America's heartland, it would be easy for me to follow this one of Pollan's "Rules to Eat By." But it's gotten much more difficult to buy local fruits and vegetables.

We used to have a fabulous farmer's market in town--a rickety wood building and some green houses bordered by a small parking lot and two side yards--that was open nine months of the year. They started the year's business in March, with displays of wooden bins of bulbs and onions sets, and racks of seed packets for the early gardeners.  Such tentative beginnings to the planting season were followed by full-blown garden madness.

The smaller side yard held wooden tables with pots of every kind of annual flower, herb, and vegetable you'd want to grown. I loved pulling a red wagon up and down the aisles to pick out my flowers: pots of marigolds to keep the rabbits out of the garden, carnations, dahlias, pansies, and geraniums. Then I would move on to tomatoes and herbs, growing all that I needed for tomato sauce and summer pizza. Occasionally I would go across the parking lot to the larger side yard where most of the larger shrubs and trees were. I loved picking out a hibiscus to bloom all summer by the kitchen door, and picking out a new rose bush. It was easy to get carried away with all the plants, and I had to make myself buy only what I could plant that day.

Besides plants outside, the fruit market sold produce inside. The owner would put a big sign out front to let you know that there was fresh corn in stock. He would carefully pick out a dozen ears of corn to throw in a paper bag, adding another ear or two if they looked small. He would plug a ripe watermelon on the beat-up Formica counter, letting me taste the fruit before he put it in my car for me. There would be locally grown radishes, carrots, onions, and lettuces, berries and apples.

After the summer heat died, and the bins of autumn bulbs out front had been put away, the fruit market was transformed into a Halloween playground. We loved taking our kids there to pick out the family pumpkin from the large mounds of locally grown squash. There were mini pumpkins, gourds for birdhouses, and vines of bittersweet. The kids would go through the hale bale maze, and have their pictures taken next to the giant, wooden orange pumpkin with the ruler that marked how tall they'd gotten since last year's picture. The trip ended with free cups of hot, local apple cider from the bubbler behind the cash register.

November brought Christmas trees of every size and shape standing upright in the small side yard in large pieces of PVC pipe that had been pounded into the ground. With our Christmas tree and a fresh wreath for the door, we got a free German glass Christmas tree ornament.  My husband loved picking out bags of chocolate covered peanuts from the displays of local nuts, jams, and honeys along the back wall. And there were boxes of imported oranges and grapefruit  to choose from. The kids waited for the moment when the purchases had been totaled on the back of a paper sack and rung up, and everyone was offered a chocolate out of the battered red wooden box kept on the counter.  Then the fruit market was stripped bare and locked up until March rolled around again.

For years the fruit market held out while the real estate around it was purchased. Old houses and ancient trees were bulldozed and a new shopping mall put in. Finally, the fruit market was bought out, the last of perennials sold, the fixtures (including the giant child-measuring pumpkin) and it was transformed into a strip mall. I can now drive through and get coffee where the rickety wooden building once stood.

The kids are older now and not as wrapped up in the preparations for holidays. But I know that they too have the sense that picking out the Halloween pumpkin isn't as much fun when it comes out of a big cardboard bin at the supermarket. We have lost something important, and I miss it.

Plant a Garden

After several warm days and several rainy days, spring has come to my corner of Iowa in a big way. All the greening out of lawn and shrub has got me to thinking about Pollan's Rule #8: Cook. And plant a garden.

I have seen some of my neighbors working out in their yards already, mostly picking up branches and debris from the big February storm. These are the folks who are itching to get into their gardens, who are itching to get in their radishes and early vegetables. I itch to join them.

I used to start every planting season with a diagram of what was to be planted where in my six-by-twelve-foot patch, but the realities of my life caused me to scale back my garden quite drastically. In the years when I worked half-time and had no children, or had toddlers who were content to play in the dirt with a trowel and a small plastic watering can, I grew peas, pole beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, melons, squash, and herbs--not all of them every year, but enough variety each summer to eat and share and can.

Then the children got bigger and the job grew to full-time. Gradually the garden shrank in proportion to all the other demands on my time. For a few years, there was no garden at all, and the plot went back to lawn.  Two years ago my husband tore down a rickety old shed, replacing it with a new, metal version oriented to redefine our side yard.  While the lawn was all torn up, I decided to reinvent my garden to fit this L-shape of dark, loamy soil.  I planted what I consider to be the garden essentials: tomatoes of several varieties, lettuces, and herbs.

That first year, the tomatoes towered over the six-foot fence, producing vast quantities of juicy fruits. We enjoyed several plantings of lettuces, and dried what herbs we couldn't use. I discovered that my daughter, now a teenager, liked talking about gardening more than actually doing it. So it became apparent that the L-garden had just the right amount of plants for me alone to keep up.

I no longer have the time or energy for that big garden. I just want to be able to go outside and pick a salad for a cool dinner on a hot summer night.  I want to grow my own pizza toppings--fabulous Roma tomatoes, fresh basil. I want to produce enough tomatoes so that I can make sauce for the freezer so we can taste summer again on a cold stormy day in February. It's not sustenance gardening, but home grown tomatoes sustain me in a way that store-bought cannot. And that's enough.

Avoid Foods with Long, Complicated Ingredient Lists

Lately, I have been reading the ingredient lists of the things I consume. The flavored water that I wrote about recently contains eighteen ingredients. Eighteen ingredients for water! The average bottle of unflavored water I drink lists four ingredients--basically what minerals and salts were floating around in the pond it came from.

For me, processed foods with long lists of ingredients taste slightly plastic. Their textures are slick, and there is always a chemical aftertaste.  But by no means do I present myself here as someone who won't eat processed foods. I have a more than full-time job, two teenagers, a husband, a house, hobbies, and four cats. Making everything I eat from scratch takes the kind of time and lifestyle that Great-Great Grandma Louisa had, but I don't. When I have time, I bake high-protein brownies from scratch that contain oatmeal and wheat germ and soy protein. When I am in rush, I eat a Luna bar made with twenty-plus ingredients (many organic) including soy protein and whole grains . In my ideal world, I would have time to bake and eat only my brownies and muffins and cupcakes. I would never pick up fast food on the way home after a long day at work, or while driving between horse back riding lessons and the weekly grocery shopping.

To me, it seems to come down to a simple rule: the longer the ingredient list, the farther the item is from simple, homemade food and the less it tastes like it. For lunch on Saturday, I would prefer to make a grilled cheese sandwich from some nice Neal's Yard cheddar with a grating of Parmesan between two slices of my homemade wheat bread. In reality, some Saturdays I use slick American slices on store-bought "whole grain" bread. My goal is to keep the processed food to a minimum for my health and my family's while still getting done everything I have to do in a day.

Brownie, anyone?

Don't Eat Anything Your Great-Great Grandmother Wouldn't Recognize As Food

My great-great grandmothers lived quite some time ago since my parents had me late in life.  Thanks to some family tree information sent to me by a cousin several years ago, I know a little about one of these ladies:  Louisa Tremmel, born in Badenher, Germany in 1838; died in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1905.

I am not sure what Louisa ate on a daily basis, but I can assume that it was all food of her own growing and making. What would she have thought of the food I ate today? Breakfast: orange juice and 1 ounce dry roasted peanuts. (Okay, so this is not my usual breakfast. I was in a hurry to get some errands run, and wanted something quick.) Lunch out with a friend: a blue-cheese burger and cole slaw. And a few french fries snitched off my friend's plate. Dinner: ham and cheese panini, homemade cole slaw and carrot chips. (I like cole slaw.)

Probably most of these foods would have been alien to Louisa in her native country and also in her new country.  But I think she would have understood the meat and bread parts of lunch and dinner, and the idea of fried potatoes. I am guessing that she would have recognized the cole slaw right away, although the slaw recipes passed down on my mother's German side of the family are vinegar based and slightly cooked.

What I know of my family history talks of how the Tremmel women have always been good cooks. Louisa would have had to adapt the local cooking she did in Badenher to what was local in Biloxi at the turn of the century after she emigrated. She probably was exposed to different fresh vegetables and seafood. And different bread. That's one of the first things I have noticed in my brief travels to other countries--the bread always looks, smells, and tastes differently. She would probably have tried to make her own bread, recreating the comfort she knew from home.

I think this rule of Pollan's to not eat anything Louisa would not have recognized, would keep me away from processed food (a good thing), as well as from anything foreign and interesting (like sushi or gazpacho). I also come from a line of adventurous eaters. If Louisa would show up on my doorstop today, while I have a crockpot of pork tenderloin simmering away for my pulled pork sandwiches, I bet I could convince her to sit down and have a sandwich with a big dill pickle. We could even share some recipes.

Avoid Foods that Make Health Claims

I was standing in the beverage aisle at the supermarket the other day looking at boxed fruit juice for the kids, when I saw a display at the end of the aisle for a new water. The cardboard  banner across the top of the display said, "Water brings things to life, including you." This new water is a vitamin-enhanced, low-calorie, "water drink" with a splash of real fruit juice. The water claimed that it would make me feel replenished and cleansed, and would make my body happy.

Why can't people drink plain water anymore? I live out in the country and get my water from our subdivision's three wells. We have a water cooler in our house because I like the way that water tastes better for coffee, tea, and cooking. But I don't hesitate to drink my own tap water. Folks in the nearby city have treated water that is like taking a gulp out of a swimming pool. It even smells bad coming out of water fountains. They probably seek other water options like a cooler.

I do buy individual bottles of water. When we are out and about, I prefer it to pop for the kids. I wash and reuse the bottles for in the car and at the ballpark. (I know, I know, I have to worry about out-gassing, but after I pay $1.50 for water, I will reuse the bottle at least a couple of times.) But I tend to stay away from flavored waters for the most part. If I want water with flavor, I'll have tea. Or coffee. In a crude sense these are flavored waters.  And they can make their own health claims.

But I decided that will the low, introductory price, I would try this new "water drink." I bought the pomegranate-berry flavor. Pomegranate is the new health darling, having replaced green and white teas as the front-runner in the race to provide us with the most anti-oxidants.  I like anti-oxidants. I want to live long enough to have grandchildren and buy them loud, noisy toys, and feed them sweets before bed. But it tasted just like a bottle of sweetish water. It did not make me feel replenished or cleansed, or make my body any happier, although it did quench my thirst.  It didn't really taste like pomegranates either. More like grapes, which made sense since the second ingredient listed was concentrated grape juice.

My daughter liked the flavor. I can certainly see the appeal of these flavored waters to mothers like me who think their kids drink too much pop at friends' houses and when they are out and about. My daughter doesn't like drinking straight water: "It's so plain." She prefers mix-in powders and flavored bottled water. And I would rather see her drink those than pop with its mega-dose of sugar. But I won't buy this life-enriching water again, even if it stays on sale. It made claims that I don't feel it can possibly live up to.

I remember when water only came in one flavor. Tap.