Harmony, Balance and Food

September 13, 2009 at 3:03 am (Consume It, Do It, Read It, Think About It)
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Mandala arrangement via washokufood.blogspot.com

Mandala arrangement via washokufood.blogspot.com

Japanese-style meals are called washoku. The kanji (the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system) for washoku are:

和食

which mean literally “harmony” and “food.”

Harmony seems to be a key principle in traditional Japanese cooking – and that seems to be something quite foreign to American cooking. If my readings are correct, in Japan, food is less viewed as something eaten to energize and run the body and it is more likely to be viewed as an experience.

Washoku is about harmony and balance both in nutrition and aesthetics. I suppose it is a kind of food philosophy of  balancing colors, flavors, cooking methods, and the five senses.

Five also seems to be significant. (I am no expert on this – so correct me if necessary.) For example, go shiki (five colors) is a principle that says the meal should have a variety of colors: red, green, yellow, black, and white. It makes me think of more recent “research” that shows positive effects in adding more colors (of vegetables) to your diet. Good nutrition and visually appealing. The latter is, I suppose, the “presentation”part that adds ten dollars to your entree in a fancy restaurant.

The principle of go kan (five senses) would encourage the cook to think beyond taste and nutrition to the touch, sound, smell, sight of the meal.

“We are nourished by the presentation as we nourished by the food,” says John Daido Loori in The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life.  I met Loori at Zen Mountain Monastery in New York’s Catskill Mountains when I was on retreats there. (How I was rejected by the Zen students because of my snoring is a good story for another day.)

More principles of washoku include go mi (five tastes) to balance flavors, go ho (five ways) to encourage a variety of cooking methods, and go kan mon (five outlooks), to guide you in your respect and appreciation of the meal and in the way it is eaten.

Though I have over my adult life approached Buddhist teachings through retreats, classes and home practice, I never went as far as full-time Zen monastic training. I never made it through the Eight Gates of Zen which is a kind of Western version of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path.

One thing I have held onto is zazen, formal seated meditation. Za means “sitting”  and zen (from the Sanskrit “dhyana”) means meditation.  Explained simply, it is the practice of concentration with a focus on your breath.

When I first tried it, my wife asked what I was supposed to try to accomplish. I said, “The object is to sit and empty your mind of everything.” “You should be great at it,” she replied.

But it’s not that easy.

Washoku I think what interested me recently about washoku is that the principles work quite well with my non-food life too.

Making careful decisions about what to include and what to exclude. Paying attention to the season and occasion. Balancing amounts (portions) of things – measured restraint and balance.

And wouldn’t it be nice if everything was also arranged visually to be balanced and harmonious?

Balance, harmony, restraint, simplicity, naturalness.

And now a nice cup of cherry blossom tea…

What is the true path to culinary enlightenment? This video segment,  “Zen and the Art of Cooking,” looks at how some chefs achieve inner harmony from cooking – including the author of Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, Elizabeth Andoh – and how they find their Zen through their relationship with food.

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Home-Brewed Soda

September 5, 2009 at 7:19 pm (Consume It, Do It)
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My oldest son took my unused beer brewing kit from the basement a few years ago and has been doing some good brews. (He did have one explode a few months ago in his girlfriend’s new townhouse closet!)

I was reading an article online about brewing your own soda. I’m actually not a soda fan any more – empty calories, acid burn, tooth decay and all that – but home-brewed soda sounds appealing. Homemade soda may not be a health tonic, but ginger, anise, hops, licorice root and the yeast found in natural sodas (a great source of B-complex vitamins) and the lower sugar content aren’t bad things. (Most commercial soda has about 7 to 9 teaspoons of sugar per 12 ounces and few home brewers use that much.) Just as beer brewers are experimenting with fruits (Hurray for the Belgians!), soda brewers are bottling up Cherry Ginger, Peach Fizz, Maple Rhubarb, Mulberry Root Beer and others.

People have been brewing their own beverages from local plants for generations. Think of those roots that give “root” beer and “ginger” ale their names. Home-brewers tend to use the same soda ingredients as the old-fashioned recipes, so the sodas usually don’t have the artificial feel of modern soft drinks.

And there has been a steady increase in soda microbrews (like losttrailsoda.com and even the ice cream folks at emackandbolios.com).

The only dangerous old-fashioned brew I found online is sassafras. I recall loving that as a kid and my brewmeister son still has a sassafras soda bottle that he saved from his cowboy days. But in 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned sassafras from food products because of the suspected carcinogenic properties of safrole. That is contained in in small amounts in sassafras, basil, nutmeg and black pepper. Those famous lab rats given large doses of safrole developed tumors, so the FDA restricts the sale of sassafras. Commercial root beer extract is now made with imitation sassafras (sassafras root extract with the safrole removed).

Plenty of websites offer home brewing kits and supplies

Here’s a recipe that sounds good to me.

Honey Ginger Ale

1 gallon water
1 cup honey
2 lemons
1 cup loosely packed hops flowers (optional)
2 pieces of ginger, thumb-sized
1/2 teaspoon ale or champagne yeast

Combine water, honey and hops in a stockpot. Add the juice from the two lemons and bring to a boil. Grate ginger and add to the pot. Simmer for 30 minutes. Allow to cool and then add the yeast. Let the soda stand at room temperature for 24 hours, then use a funnel and strainer to pour the soda into bottles. Leave 1 to 2 inches of
empty space at the top of the bottle and attach the bottle caps. Write the date on the bottles and store them in a warm, draftfree place, ideally at room temperature, for an additional 24 hours. Then refrigerate. For best results, leave the bottles in the refrigerator an additional day or two before drinking. Makes 1 gallon.

For more, see  http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/2004-12-01/Brew-Soda-at-Home.aspx

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Mastering the Art of Blogging

August 23, 2009 at 1:01 am (Consume It, Do It, Read It)
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Watching the movie Julie and Julia did not inspire me to go home and start cooking Boeuf Bourguignon a La Julia Child (though I did feel like eating it). It made me come home and blog.

After all, half the movie is the story of a blogger, Julie Powell. She described herself as a “government drone by day, renegade foodie by night” when she started her blog and challenged herself to cooking in 365 days the 536 recipes in Mastering The Art of French Cooking published in 1961 and written by Louisette Berthole, Simone Beck and Julia Child.

She called her blog The Julie/Julia Project and and her first post was in August 2202. It was fun to read through some of those entries, though a bit tough to navigate the original Salon.com blog. You can sneak in the back door to the first months of the blog at http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/ and the conclusion in December 2003.  Here’s her post from 2004 when Julia Child died.

So, if I’m not interested in being a French chef, why did I do this digging? It’s because she is someone who started blogging about something she enjoyed, and ended up with celebrity, a book (Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously) and a movie deal. It one of the Horatio Algers stories of blogging.

The book Julie & Julia (and the movie version) is more than a cooking story. It’s as much about Powell’s marriage and about finding some purpose in your life.  One reviewer said it is like ” Bridget Jones’ Diary meets Like Water for Chocolate.”  I picked up a copy after I saw the film and it is a fast and funny memoir that is also inspiring.

The movie seemed more like two movies to me. I liked both movies. I like both actresses a lot. Meryl Streep and the “Julia” film is probably more of the “film” and the “Julie” half feels more TV movie. See the film, but read the book and the blogs.

Find your passion and blog about it. Maybe an audience will find you and a publisher and producer will follow them. Of course, a story in The New York Times about your efforts wouldn’t hurt.

Julie is still blogging. Her current blog is What Could Happen (on Blogger like the rest of us) which she started in August 2005.

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Early Thoughts Autumnal

July 24, 2009 at 8:42 pm (Consume It, Do It)
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I don’t want to rush the summer. And I definitely hate those summertime “Back to School” ads and sales, but…

it is time to think about a fall garden.

Here in New Jersey, it’s time to think about crops like carrots, rutabagas and turnips, some lettuce and frost-proof spinach, snap beans, cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash. How about some parsnips, cilantro, lettuce and radishes? (14 weeks before your first frost is a good time – though with all this warming of the globe, it’s hard to predict first frost anymore.

Down south of here, the end of the month or early August is supposed to be good for fall planting.

Garden centers around here don’t cater to fall planters, so you probably need to start seeds. Indoors is probably better so they don’t get blasted by the summer heat. If you’re running a bit late on planting, put the seeds in the ground, but keep that soil moist until they germinate, and thin them out.

Some folks put up some boards or something to create some shade for the hot afternoons (especially on seedlings). Soaker hoses are good. Mulch is good. Even newspaper mulch works. Only bad thing with mulch is the slugs, so waste some beer on setting slug traps.

Try some new stuff: arugula, Chinese cabbage, cold-hardy mâche (corn salad), rutabaga, “Swede turnips,” Asian greens like spinach-mustard, mizuna, tatsoi (AKA tah tsai)., which is beautiful enough to use as flower bed edging.

garlic

garlic

If you procrastinate and don’t get to it for a few weeks, the Asian greens will still produce a crop along with some lettuce, turnips, spinach, mustard, and radishes.

And if you really procrastinate, at least put in some garlic “when you can smell winter in the air” along with shallots, multiplying and “nest” onions which go in after the soil has cooled (end of September and into early October for me) for harvesting next year.
I already regret, as I look at them growing now, that I didn’t plant more garlic last fall.

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McGovern’s Tavern

March 29, 2009 at 12:25 am (Consume It, See It)

McGovern’s is a real old-fashioned tavern. I’m sure there are those who think of it as an Irish pub and Esquire magazine called it one of the country’s best bars.  But it is a tavern.

I started going there in the early 1970s when I had a summer job in Newark during college.

It had Guiness on tap, murals of Irish scenes in a back room, old photos on the wall, patches from police organizations, and the clientele was made up of city workers, cops and firemen, prosecutors and attorneys, students from nearby Rutgers-Newark and a lunchtime crowd from the downtown offices.

And all of that is still there. Few changes in thirty years. They have a half-hearted website. I guess you don’t have a choice these days – you have to have something onlne.

I’m not sure if the write-up in Esquire works for or against the place.  I don’t really see the McGovern’s crowd as big Esquire readers.

The menu is still good but basic. I usually get some Chili Con Kearny (as in Kearny, NJ),  a McGoo burger or maybe a Scully burger with some Jersey Taylor ham. There’s no other place I go to where I would order a liverwurst sandwich and lava fries.

I’m not around New Street in Newark much these days, but it only takes a few minutes in here for me to feel comfortable. No one tells, “Ken!” when I enter like on Cheers, but it feels as much like home as I want from a tavern.

Yeah, it’s a tavern – from the Latin taberna and the Greek ταβέρνα/taverna. In Renaissance England, a tavern was distinguished from a public ale house because it was run as a private enterprise. So, drinkers were “guests” rather than members of the public.

I like being a guest at McGovern’s.

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Food Matters

February 1, 2009 at 6:12 pm (Consume It, Read It, Think About It)
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Mark Bittman is a food columnist for The New York Times and an advocate for ‘”conscious eating,” a practice you can begin by changing what you eat.

In his latest book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating he writes about the environmental impact of industrial farming and how individuals can make a difference by cutting down on the amount of animal products they consume. Why? Because industrial farming (fish farming, chicken farming,  egg and dairy farming)  has an environmental impact.

How can you start? It’s not becoming a vegetarian. Eat more fruits and vegetables and skip a few helpings of meat.

According to Bittman,  Americans raise and slaughter 10 billion animals each year for consumption.

If we all decreased consumption of animal products by 10%, he thinks we “would have both an environmental impact and an impact on all of our mutual health.”

His book is manifesto + self-help manual + cookbook.  Save yourself and save the planet.

Bittman acknowledges another writer’s influence – Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Here’s Bittman’s 2007 TEDtalk on what’s wrong with the way we eat now.

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

February 1, 2009 at 3:16 am (Consume It, Read It, Think About It)
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The third connected post this weekend is about another traveler on the locavore path.  Barbara Kingsolver is probably best known for her novels – particularly The Bean Trees and  The Poisonwood Bible which won the National Book Prize of South Africa and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

She is also the author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life a non-fiction book about her family’s experiment to eat only locally grown food for a year. Along with her husband and daughters, she moves to a farm in Virginia. They grow and can  tomatoes, learn about roosters, make cheese, and learn to do what it takes to eat what is in season.

Kingsolver’s background is interesting. Born in Maryland with some of her childhood spent in Africa where her father was a medical doctor and some in Kentucky, she attended DePauw University on a music scholarship for classical piano, but ended up switching to biology. In the late 1970s, she lived in Greece, France, and Tucson, Arizona, working variously as an archaeological digger, copy editor, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator. She earned a Master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

“If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.”
Barbara Kingsolver

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King Corn Versus An Urban Rustic

January 31, 2009 at 6:18 pm (Consume It, See It, Think About It)
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I heard a brief interview on the radio with independent documentary filmmaker, Aaron Woolf.  He directed Greener Grass: Cuba, Baseball, and the United States, and Dying to Leave: The Global Face of Human Trafficking and Smuggling. His latest film is King Corn.

King Corn is a film about this ubiquitous king of crops that ends up in everything from apples to antifreeze, body lotion to batteries, margarine to magazines.

The crop has come a long way in 6,000 years ago from Mesoamerica to your kitchen. It is grown on every continent (except Antarctica) and in the U.S. it gets 93 million acres of  land. Do we really eat that much corn? Well, yes – if you count all the corn that goes to high-fructose sweetener and to grain to feed cows that we will eat.

In the 2007 film, we follow two college buddies, Curt and Ian, to Greene, Iowa (home of their great-grandfathers) and watch them spend a year planting and harvesting one acre of corn.

The project is small time in the corn world, but they learn about subsidies, surpluses, and the nutritional aspects the industry of an industry that’s growing in proportion to America’s bellies.

Maybe you don’t think of farming as industry, but corn has certainly helped to eliminate the family farm with industrial farms. As with other industries, decisions about what crops to grow and how they are grown are often based more on economic considerations than their effects on the environment or consumer health.

There’s more on the film at kingcorn.net and pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn

What actually interested me more in the interview I listened to with Woolf was his store  Urban Rustic, a grocery store in Brooklyn, NYC.

The store’s mission is to raise awareness about where our food comes from – and to sell groceries.

Here, things come mainly from local farmers, butchers, cheesemakers, and other producers. It’s got a general  general store look but with a  juice-and-coffee bar and an elevated dining area.

Everything sold has a story about where it came from and how it was produced.

One lesson learned and told in the interview is that some things turn out to be counter-intuitive. For example, the kiwi from New Zealnad might actually have a smaller “carbon footprint” than the tomato from southern New Jersey due to modern transportation systems.

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Locavore Nation

January 31, 2009 at 7:08 am (Consume It, Read It, Think About It)
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Listening to the podcast edition of the program The Splendid Table (episode January 17, 2009) got me thinking about several topics that I will write about this weekend.

The show sponsored “Locavore Nation” in 2008. Locavore isn’t a word that most people probably know, though it was is the 2007 “Word of the Year” for the Oxford American Dictionary.

A locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within a certain radius such as 50, 100, or 150 miles. The locavore movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to produce their own food, with the argument that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locally grown food is an environmentally friendly means of obtaining food, since supermarkets that import their food use more fossil fuels and non-renewable resources.

“Locavore” was coined by Jessica Prentice from the San Francisco Bay Area (see also http://www.locavores.com) on the occasion of World Environment Day 2005 to describe and promote the practice.

The podcast was a final (I suppose) check with their  Locavore Nation volunteers to see what conclusions the year-long project inspired.  There were fifteen people from around the country that they grouped by regiosns.

The idea was to try to get at least 80% of their food from local, organic, seasonal sources and then incorporate it into tasty, healthy meals.  (The show is about food, after all.) The participants had blogs on the site.

Since I came in at the end, there was a lot to read. I looked at the East group (no one from from my home state though) and starting reading some posts.

The blogger I looked at in the most detail was Autumn Long.

“I’m 24 years old, and I live in rural north-central West Virginia. I was born and raised in West Virginia, and in 2005 I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in Anthropology. I live on a 75-acre farmstead that is composed mainly of forested hills. My husband, Dan, and I live “off the grid” in a “hand-built” house that is a work in progress. Dan’s parents are our closest neighbors and have owned this property since 1981. We have a horse, a donkey, two dozen laying hens, five cats, two dogs, and one hive of honeybees.

Dan and I both work part-time (I’m an editor and writer; he’s a landscaper) and consider ourselves full-time homesteaders. Together with my in-laws, we maintain ample pastures, two hayfields, large vegetable and herb gardens, fruit trees and berry bushes of various stages of development, and a small pond stocked with bass and catfish. The forest provides us with firewood and edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms. Dan and I make maple syrup each spring. We try to grow as much of our own food as possible, and we enjoy brewing beer. This year we plan to raise a couple of pigs and some roasting chickens.”

I like that she is a writer, and that they seem to have a jump-start on the locavore lifestyle. But what actually got me started reading her posts was her retrospective last blog post.

“When I was approached last year to participate in the Locavore Nation, it sounded like it would be well organized and enthusiastically supported, and would generate a lot of public participation. Fast-forward to a year later, when a few steadfast bloggers are still stubbornly churning out occasional entries despite a steady waning of interest by all (or at least most) involved parties. I’ve tried to keep up my end of the bargain, but I can’t help but feel that I’m often writing just to hear myself talk, so to speak. I wish there would have been better organization and more encouragement and support from the people who created this project in the first place. A great opportunity has been wasted in many ways.”

That seemed pretty honest. Of course, I also can identify with bloggers who feel like they are talking to themselves. (I had that same feeling doing a late-night college radio program many years ago.)

I did some searching, but didn’t turn up a new Autumn Long blog. I hope she does some vanity search and comes across this bcause I think she should continue her blogging on her own.

Like the cabin blogs I wrote about earlier, I find that getting someone’s personal take on something like this really makes your education about the topic more meaningful.

Autumn,

How is the donkey?
Are your honeybees having that hive collapse problem I read about?
Did you continue eating locally? What’s green to eat these winter days?

Yours truly,

Ken

More: from PBS “10 Steps to Becoming a Locavore”

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Road Food

December 28, 2008 at 8:23 am (Consume It)
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I  love that Jane and Michael Stern write a monthly column called “Two For The Road” for Gourmet magazine. Gourmet!  It’s a cross-country guide to finding roadfood. What’s roadfood?

Meals along highways, small towns and neighborhoods, food by cooks, bakers, pitmasters, and sandwich-makers. Informal, inexpensive, colorful, loved by locals, off the beaten path.

They have 20+ books -  Roadfood, Two for the Road, and Chili Nation: The Ultimate Chili Cookbook with Recipes from Every State in the Nation. Their own website is roadfood.com.

I listen to them on the radio show/podcast The Splendid Table. On that website, they only list one Jersey place they have covered on air – Bloomfield, NJ: Short Stop Diner

There are more on their site from the neighborhood. Notice a pattern?

Rutt’s Hut – Clifton, NJ for chili, The Cremator hot dog

The Hot Grill – Clifton, NJ Texas hot weiner

Jimmy Buff’s – West Orange, NJ Italian Hot Dog – single, Newark-style double hot dog

Maria’s Homemade Ravioli – Wayne, NJ gnocchi, ravioli

Dickie Dee’s – Newark, NJ Italian-style hot dogs

There is probably a place in your U.S. or international neighborhood.

Jeresy gulls who dont even know about the Jersey Shore looking for scraps at Rutts

Jersey gulls (who don't even know about the Jersey Shore) looking for scraps at Rutt's

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