Spirit of 1976

My husband brought one cookbook to our marriage: the 1976 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

I can't tell you how many times I've been tempted, during a house purge, to chuck the thing. It brags inside that "18 million homemakers use this best seller" for its 1500+ "triple-tested" recipes, its lay-flat binder, its tabbed dividers, and so on. And the thing has indeed held up, physically speaking.

Fashions change. Case in point.

But food fashions change, just as clothing fashions and home-decorating fashions do. And, as with those other arenas of life, food fashions in the mid-70s staked out an interesting territory. For one, scores of women had entered the workforce, and convenience became more important than ever. Therefore many recipes in the book call for canned, condensed soup (the ubiquitous "can condensed cream of mushroom" a particular favorite) or "1 envelope cheese sauce mix" or "1 tube refrigerated biscuits, halved." There are recipes for "Luncheon Meat Dinner" and "Tuna Jackstraw Bake." In the latter, every single ingredient comes from a can, right down to the topping-- that other 70s favorite, the "1/4 cup chopped canned pimiento."

And yet. For every woman throwing down the briefcase and reaching for the can opener, there was still one cooking from scratch. She might no longer raise and pluck her own chicken, but she still bought whole chickens at the store and needed to know how to cut them up. How do I know? Because I use the pictures from the Better H & G Cookbook to cut up the whole chickens I get from Skagit River Ranch. I need those "step-by-step" pictures! Yeah, I could look it up online, but I hate dragging my laptop into the kitchen where it might be splattered with chicken guts from my inexpert butchering.

Look at the stains on that page!

Another reason I can't quit this cookbook is its "Creative Uses for Leftovers" page on the Index Tab. What should I do with leftover buttermilk? Cooked chicken? Mashed potatoes? Tell me, Oracle!

When my husband used three precious Skagit egg whites for a meringue, I couldn't bear to toss the rich, golden yolks. They sat in the fridge for a week until I finally cracked BH&G. Bearnaise sauce? No. Hollandaise? Nah. Sauce Moorea? What the heck? But there--last in the list--"Vanilla Pudding." Really? You could make pudding at home, without one of those cute little boxes of sugar, fake color and mystery coagulants? Yes, reader, you can. And, oh my gosh, is homemade pudding ever luscious.

I had some semisweet chocolate squares, so I threw in two ounces.

If you've got two eggs, treat yourself tonight:

Chocolate Pudding (adapted from the 1976 Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook)
3/4 cup sugar
2 Tbsp cornstarch
1/4 tsp salt
2 cups milk (I used 1 cup whole, 1 cup 2%)
2 ozs semisweet chocolate
2 slightly beaten egg yolks
2 Tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla

In saucepan, blend sugar, cornstarch, and salt; add milk and chocolate. Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened and bubbly. Cook and stir 2 minutes more. Remove from heat.

Stir small amount of hot mixture into yolks; return to hot mixture; cook and stir 2 minutes more. Remove from heat; blend in butter and vanilla. Makes 5-6 servings.

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You may wonder afterward what to do with the leftover egg whites..? According to my trusty BH&G, Nougat might be in your future.

That, or "Chilled Prune Whip."

At the Marketers' Mercy

I'm in the middle of a thrilling read (more on that in a moment), which I had to lay aside temporarily to:

1. Pay the bills;
2. Vacuum the water out of the dishwasher because it's not draining properly; and,
3. Write this post.

I don't mind Item #3 on the list because my thrilling read will probably interest you as well. You might remember a post I did some time back, based on a Martin Lindstrom article in Fast Company, on how stores like Whole Foods "prime" us to open our wallets. Intrigued by Lindstrom's claims, I picked up the book from which the article was excerpted, Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy. Quite the eye-opener!

Who knew, for example, that we can have our tastes formed from gestation onward? Not just our taste buds, but what kinds of music we find appealing, what environments we find comforting, what smells draw us in??? Lindstrom recounts one mall in Asia where the owners assaulted shoppers, particularly pregnant moms, with baby powder smells and specially chosen mall music and so on. After the babies were born, many of the moms continued to patronize the mall because they found it had an instantly soothing effect on their infants. We form our affinities early and marketers are well aware of this. The average American child sees 42,000 television advertisements per year, and those clever children have their methods for encouraging parents to buy. Once brands become fixtures in childhood, we are loath to shed them. One study found teens and adults still use over 50% of the brands they used in childhood.

Not only are we swayed before we have the wherewithal to choose for ourselves, we have troubled, addictive little brains. One Stanford University study estimates "roughly 6 percent of the population, or seventeen million Americans, suffers from a shopping addiction, a condition that, according to the authors of the study, typically coincides with other disorders ranging from mood and anxiety to eating disorders to substance abuse." How do we recognize when shopping becomes an addiction? It's just like any other addiction: there's the anticipation of shopping, the shopping, the release of dopamine when we purchase, the crash of guilt and remorse afterward. Lindstrom might also have added, as with other addictions, the toll it takes on our finances and often in family peace.

Then there's the addictive quality of high-fat junk food, spiked by those wily food companies with "addictive quantities of habit-forming substances like MSG, caffeine, corn syrup, and sugar." Addictions within addictions! In fact, lab rats hooked on junk food not only became obese, but it took their dopamine receptors two weeks to return to normal after quitting cold turkey, versus two days of reverting to their baseline when researches took them off heroin or cocaine. (If I could feel pity for rats, I would here. What a life.)

Nor is the desire to hook us just about food. Lindstrom finds the menthol added to many lip glosses and cigarettes is "habit-forming." And if the menthol doesn't do it, try adding ingredients to lip balm that actually irritate or dry out lips, so that the user has to keep applying lip balm. Gasp. Watch out for that phenol in your Carmex.

If marketers can't tap our addictive natures, they appeal to nostalgia or the use of peer pressure or the endorsements of celebrities. We may think we're smart cookies and know when we're being manipulated, but Lindstrom marshals loads of disturbing data to back his claims. We really do want to buy something because, deep down, whether we admit it or not, we want to be that person in the ad.

I'm only to the 52% mark on my Kindle edition of Brandwashed, but I'm ready to recommend it. Nothing like a little awareness before we reach for the credit card. The human race comes off as a little sad and lemming-like, but self-awareness is one of the Twelve Steps, isn't it? Yep--there it is at #4: "Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."

I'll go first. I'm the UrbanFarmJunkie, and I buy certain foods and products because they remind me of my youth, feed my addictions to fat and sugar, or make me think I'll look like JLo.

"Hoperaking" in Action

Who hasn't wanted to be a member of the Mariners ground crew, at one time or another? You get to be right on the field among the players; you get to drag those big rakes; you even get to do that little dance, whether or not you show any special gift for dancing.

You may wonder what such an opening paragraph has to do with the Bellevue Farmers Market or eating well, but stick with me, faithful reader/eater, because today's UrbanFarmJunkie post is all good news, all the time.

For starters, pitchers and catchers have reported to Mariners Spring Training in Peoria, Arizona, starting the cycle of hope all over again. So what if the Angels signed Albert Pujols? This might be the year! We're already playing .500 ball, since the reset button has been hit and everyone's 0-0. That ground crew isn't just raking Ichiro-trodden dirt, they're raking hope!

I'm into "hoperaking" lately, having greatly enjoyed Katherine Gustafson's Change Comes to Dinner: How Vertical Farmers, Urban Growers, and Other Innovators are Revolutionizing How America Eats. Gustafson coins the word to describe her mission of traveling around the country finding hopeful stories of where food is going right. She ranges far and wide, exploring small-farmer co-ops in Montana, inner-city rooftop greenhouses, sunless hydroponic gardens in shipping containers, farming programs in prisons that reduce recidivism and feed into a catering business and school lunches! Gustafson covers some familiar food-writing ground, of course, in her journeys--a review of our dependence on a few species, our over-use of pesticides, soil erosion, etc., but she has much to say that was new to me. For one, she questions the foodie law of "local is automatically better." As Gustafson points out, "An apple in a load of millions shipped cross-country in an efficient eighteen-wheeler might well account for fewer carbon emissions than an apple in a single bushel driven thirty miles to a farmers' market in an old diesel farm truck." It just depends. However, what local food does provide in spades, she discovers, is a host of intangibles: community building; "bolstering local food economies"; job creation; greater responsiveness between market and consumer; increased food security through preservation of species variety.

The stories in Change Comes to Dinner are small, small Davids, in the face of Goliath agro-industry, but the sheer number of Davids Gustafson uncovers demonstrates how widespread is American interest in restoring connections to food, community and quality of life. Especially heartening were the stories of gardening programs for prisoners and inner-city youth, two populations historically without access to the earth or farms. Learning farming skills not only provided nutritious food, but also opened up professional opportunities and built confidence. Great stuff.

While each little David may not make Goliath blink, much less bring him down, the sheer number of Davids might, when it becomes a larger cultural shift.

Consider this last tidbit from the Wall Street Journal. Under pressure from McDonalds (which is itself under pressure), pig farmers are being encouraged to eliminate confining gestation stalls. As the article points out, McDonalds purchases 1% of the pork in America (!), so when they talk, producers listen. Well, Americans eat 100% of those McRib sandwiches, and when we talk, McDonalds listens. And so it begins.

Happy Valentine's Day! Treat the honeys in your life to great community food and go rake some hope!

Talking Turkey Again

"Can they guess I reheated this from last night?"

A couple weeks ago I posted on my Skagit River Ranch turkey and how my goal was to wrangle thirteen meals out of one bird. I'm happy to report that we're through ten meals, and I still have six cups of shredded, cooked meat in the freezer and two quarts of turkey broth. Meals #9 and #10 were actually the same batch of Turkey-Tortilla Soup--the first time around it fed me and my three children, and the second time it was the four of us and another family of a mom and three kids. She supplied the rolls and salad, and we were off to the races again!

(Which reminds me of another Thrifty Organic Tip: eating in community makes the most of individual surpluses and shortages. Seriously--we still have nine butternut squash in the pantry that my husband grew last summer. Anytime we're invited to a potluck, I immediately volunteer to bring the vegetable side.)

While I was placing my monthly Bellevue Buyers Club order from Skagit, I happened to notice a turkey article of their own, featured in Edible Seattle. It's worth reading in its entirety, but several points particularly struck me:

• Skagit raises the same "Broad-Brested White" variety as conventional turkey farmers because of the American fondness for white meat. However, The Vojkoviches' turkeys roam pastures freely during the day and roost at night in a giant, mobile turkey house.
  
• "The birds’ diet is a combination of foraged bugs and decaying plant matter (up to 30% of their total diet), native grasses such as clovers, fescue, and rye, and a supplementation of organic grains like camelina (an ancient Egyptian grain high in Omega-3’s) as well as spelt, emmer, and wheat, all milled on the ranch."
  
• Skagit uses no antibiotics or growth promotants, and their turkeys take six months to reach slaughter size. Compare that to 14 weeks (female) or 18 weeks (toms) in the general industry.
  
• Skagit processes all birds on site in their WSDA certified-organic facility, avoiding contamination from shared processing facilities. (Check this article for cross-contamination from shared facilities.)

 
If you're thinking of joining me in a Lucky Thirteen challenge next year, be sure to reserve your turkey when the Market opens in May. They do sell out!

And speaking of the Market opening, the dates have been set and the countdown officially begun. How easy it is, on a sunny day, to imagine Market season is just around the corner!


Thursday Market opens on May 10th at 3 pm
Saturday Market opens on June 2nd at 10 am