But now that Food Riot’s list is out there–and it covers most of the well-known ones–there’s no reason I shouldn’t release some short themed playslists from time to time. And it’s the weekend, and it’s June, and summer solstice is almost upon us, so. . . . please enjoy these songs about sweets, sugar, and yearning in the summer.

#1: Tom Waits, “Ice Cream Man”

Trust Tom Waits to take the innocent pleasure of tracking down the ice cream truck’s chimes and turn it into something rougher and almost sinister. The plinking piano intro turn this “Ice Cream Man” into a sort of Candy Man, and a lot of his ice cream euphemisms–the alley, the drumstick–allude both to sex and to violence. But, you know,  I still can’t resist Tom Waits’ gravelly-voiced appeal, even if it’s an invitation to danger, so I’ll enjoy this as a sexy, bluesy song about wanting something a specific someone’s got.

#2: Van Halen, “Ice Cream Man”

I actually hadn’t heard this one until I looked up the lyrics for the Tom Waits version. It’s the same sort of thing: twisting the youthful chase of cool sweetness with the chase for another kind of satisfaction. This version is a little more straight rock and consequently a little sillier and less subsversive, but the message is the same: find me, and I’ll cool you down all right.

#3: VV Brown, “Children (Keep on Singing)”

This song gets a special mention in the Ice Cream Truck category because its leading jingle tricked me the first three times I heard it. That’s three individual occasions of hearing the jingle, thinking “This is an odd hour/season/neighborhood for the ice cream truck to be visiting,” and not making the connection to the subsequent upbeat, playful song. I’m embarrassed.

In any event, this song should come as a refreshment in a list in which ice cream and other candy is linked to sex or longing; here, the link between ice cream and innocence is literal, as the vocalist calls for optimism and a chance to start over.

#4 Novel, “Peach”

Warning! This song is rife with sexual metaphors. It is possibly the most explicit non-explicit song I know. And yet–the vocalist is so upbeat and cheerful about all these delicious fruity treats he’d love to enjoy, it’s hard not to nod along as he gleefully moans and makes goofy rhymes about “getting your fruit on.” Novel just wants to talk to you for a minute! And he wants to tell you about chocolate milk, bananas, peaches, grapes, and other ways slake your thirst.

#5: Suzanne Vega, “Caramel.”

Nothing sums it up like her intro in the linked video: This is a song about something sweet you’d like to have even though you know that you shouldn’t. It’s not necessarily a summer song, but something about its cool tones and languid yearning seem appropriate for the season–and of course, it fits right in when the Ice Cream Men and “Peach” in terms of the longing for sweetness standing in for lust.

On a tangentially related music note, I’ve been trying out this site called thisismyjam.com. I don’t usually do music-based social media because I tend to listen to one song or album on loop for a month or three–but that is, in fact, exactly what this website does. (Well, for a week at a time.) Besides, given my tendency to screech This is my jam! when favorite songs are played in public, how could I not try it out?

This week we got: foot long beans, greenleaf lettuce, sugar snap peas, scallions, garlic scapes, chard, broccoli, and cauliflower. We were supposed to get kohlrabi but didn’t–it’s on our week 7 list now. I bought radishes, a big zucchini squash, and of course strawberries at the market. I forgot to take a picture of the whole haul, but here is a handful of beans and scapes:

If you’re not familiar, the cute little pods are the sugar snap peas. The long beans go by many other names, but they essentially behave like giant string beans. The scapes are the curly stems. So, to clarify: green garlic, which we had a couple of weeks ago, is just young hardneck garlic that is harvested early to leave space for the still-growing garlic to get bigger; garlic scapes are the flower stems that hardneck garlic shoots up, and these stalks are cut to encourage the garlic bulbs to get bigger. During some summers, my pickling friends and I will buy up all the remaining scapes and tie them into bundles to straighten them, then pack them into mason jars for pickling. Pickled scapes stay quite firm and crisp but mellow out in flavor, making them a nice crunchy snack or salad topping. But I also love scapes raw–they have a sharp bite–and mixed into skillet dishes, where they behave like skinny asparagus.

I was having a busy, productive day Wednesday and, although I didn’t get started until about 8:30, I felt inspired to chop up all of the broccoli, most of the cauliflower, and some of the scallions and scapes for a gigantic stir fry with peanut sauce (same sauce we used in Week 2). I also had a ton of lettuce on hand–this week’s and part of last week’s–so when a friend came over to watch Parks and Recreation (we’re just now getting to the first season) I insisted we both eat big leafy salads with sliced radishes and some of the sugar snap peas. The name doesn’t lie; those peas were as sweet as candy, but quite nice in a crunchy fresh salad.

And then, reader, I did not cook again until Monday. Didn’t feel like it, and didn’t have to–I had a couple meals out with friends, and on quieter nights I had all that lettuce, and radishes, and peas, and cauliflower.

But Monday I decided to take care of the rest of the veg. I treated the long beans like regular green beans, which is to say that I chopped them up and put them in a German potato salad-like dish. German potato salad is usually tossed in an oil- and vinegar-based dressing (rather than mayo) and served warm. Sometimes I leave out the vinegar and make a gravy-like sauce, browning onions and spices and a little flour in a skillet, then adding broth and letting it reduce and thicken before adding the boiled beans and potatoes. Meanwhile, I simmered the remaining scapes, chard, and some grape tomatoes I had leftover from Memorial Day in my new favorite pot, then added some wine, heavy cream (because I had some to use up), and parmesan for a pasta. I seasoned both with dried oregano and savory from previous weeks.

I could do with a greater chard-to-pasta ratio, but no matter–until it gets too hot for lettuce, I’ll be pairing carb-rich dishes like this with a heaping helping of salad. The best of both worlds.

I’ll note that the active cooking times for both Wednesday and Monday (and my flurry on Sunday of the previous week) were each about one hour. That seems to be my cap when cooking alone, which I do twice a week or less. With company, I can cook happily for several hours (depending, of course, on when we start)–which is partly why I try to make several dishes at once when I am cooking with my neighbor or a friend. On my own, though, cooking is pleasant and meditative for slightly less than 60 minutes, after which I get hasty and clumsy. Your mileage, of course, may vary; I’m making a note of it because it seems like a useful thing to know about oneself when deciding when and how to fit home cooking into your life. Managing expectations: the key to avoid becoming an Oatmeal cartoon, or a Hyperbole and a Half cartoon, funny-because-true as they may be.

SO MUCH GREEN. I’ll be sad when it gets too hot for the edible leaves, though.

Dandelion greens are tied with kale for my personal favorite leafy green. The first time I tasted them is when we got some in one of our first CSA boxes four summers ago. That summer I was traveling to Pittsburgh frequently to spent time with my ailing grandmother and other relatives, and I packed my vegetables so none would go to waste. Not sure what else to do–how to help, how to comfort, or how to cook this alien vegetable–I sauteed the leaves with potatoes, onions, and a little mustard. They were slightly bitter but nourishing and light for a summer meal. It gave the family something besides grief to share: here we are, eating overgrown lawn weeds together.

Mint and I have a more convoluted history. I was allergic to it for a few years: the effect was a horrible itchy red rash on the lower half of my face. However, like many inexplicable allergies, that one subsided with time. I am happy to brew up some mint tea from time to time, though I prefer hot mint tea to cold.

On Wednesday, I still had a fair amount of Memorial Day leftovers to use up, so my neighbor and I made a gigantic salad with the new lettuce and some odds and ends while we waited for last week’s kale and this week’s spinach to simmer in a gigantic pot of hambone and bean stew. (The hambone has been hanging out in her freezer since the last hamcentric holiday, waiting for some succulent greens to suck up all its smoky richness.) We seasoned it with some of the fresh oregano as well as dried savory from last week.

On Sunday, having enjoyed several days of lazy fixes, I went on a bit of a tear to use up the rest of the odds and ends in the fridge. Made  tea from the mint (with ginger and honey), chopped the rest of last week’s radishes, put the oregano in the oven to dry, chopped the remainder of my roast chicken and CSA broccoli for the next day’s meal, and sauteed dandelion greens to mix with the last of the Memorial Day black beans and carrots. Sometimes I put a wisp of sugar into dandelion greens to mellow them out, but no need when they are destined for a strongly seasoned dish like the slow cooker beans.
I also did dishes and started some laundry on this tear. It lasted less than an hour. Sometimes when I put off food projects until I have time or company, I forget that there are a lot of ways to cook that don’t actually take up much time or energy.

On Monday, my neighbor and I made collards (with bacon, like the first week) and a cheesy chicken and broccoli casserole that reminded me of a dish I frequently enjoyed as a kid, except without the creamy condensed soup. Usually broccoli presents itself to me as a good occasion for stir fry, especially on weeks that it arrives with other stirfry-friendly vegetables like mustard greens and spring onions. But since I had the leftover chicken as well as sour cream and cheese from social gatherings, I loosely followed this Food Network recipe.

While we cooked, we made chicken stock out of the bones and innards from the chicken we roasted last week, and a couple of sandwich bags full of spring onion leaves and butts, herb stems, and carrot peelings. This time of year we’re getting so many things that are perfect for the “aromatics” bags (as we label them).

The only thing I had trouble finishing this week was the gigantic head of red lettuce. I took the whole thing, trading for the mixed baby greens, because I’ve been enjoying the habit of a crunchy salad with each dinner. But! I ran out of salad dressing this week, and a foot injury discouraged me from venturing up to a good store to buy more.
Now, obviously I could make my own. I keep a selection of vinegars on hand, and it doesn’t take too much time to mince some shallot or garlic and shake it up with oil, vinegar, and spices. But we had such a bounty of other good things to eat that putting together salad dressing became the thing that slid to the bottom of the to-do list. It happens! I picked up a couple of different dressings yesterday so that I’m ready for another week of lettuce. Salad dressing is one of the shortcuts I’m willing to take if there are good options. Good salad dressing–Annie’s, Briana’s, and the like–is better than I can make at home, and can be used for other things (marinade for meat, dip for roasted potatoes, dressing for a mixed bean salad) if I’m in a rush.

But what is it?

Photo by carminered darter

• Like cacao, carob grows as a pod on a tree. Unlike cacao, we process and eat the pod, not the bean.
• Unsweetened carob powder and unsweetened cocoa powder are not that calorically different. Carob is naturally sweet but not as strongly flavored, so sugar and cream are often added to it anyway.
• Lots of calcium in carob, though, and no caffeine.
• Unlike chocolate, carob is safe for animals to eat.
• The word carat, a unit for measuring the weight of gold and gemstones, derives from the practice of weighing gems against carob seeds.

Also, carob makes a cameo appearance in Gilgamesh, so I am really late to the carob party.

But I actually first picked up an article by Janice Radway because of her critique of the way we describe mass culture consumption in food terms: “Mass culture,” she writes, ”has regularly been characterized as ‘predigested . . . pap’ or ‘gruel’ which is easily and commonly swallowed whole.” In other words, mass culture is baby food, and doesn’t require any digestion, rumination, or other intellectual (!) work to swallow. The metaphor’s logical extension is that people who consume mass culture are childish–an association you also hear when we talk about ”syrupy” songs and “eye candy,” simple and strong flavors that go down easy. But the mass-culture-as-pap metaphor is also kind of gross, right? To hammer home the point: my dad used to refer to sappy movies and songs as “pablum puke.” Baby stuff, yes, but also, who would want to eat that?

Janice Radway and I don’t think that mass market paperbacks are baby food, or that it’s gross or childish to want to read them; we think that the women who read them are adults and capable of making their own sense out of pop culture. I feel the same way about the literal consumption of mass produced food, as it happens: millions of people buy fast food and junk food because for millions of reasons–cost, ease, nostalgia, taste preferences, household politics, etc.–it seems like a good decision, or at least the best decision under the circumstances.

All of this is but a preface to explain my complicated feelings about this poem from The Hungry Ear anthology, which I stumbled across once again this weekend while sorting through some notes:

“Woe” by Campbell McGrath

Consider the human capacity for suffering,
Our insatiable appetite for woe.
I do not say this lightly
But the sandwiches at Subway
suck. Foaming lettuce,
mayo like rancid bear grease,
meat the color of a dead dog’s tongue.
Yet they are consumed
by the millions
and by the tens of millions.
So much for the food. The rest
I must pass over in silence.

I find this poem hilarious: the contrast of the grave, sermon-like first and last lines with the irreverent subject; the three increasingly lengthy descriptions of disgusting food; the implication that if humanity is so self-destructive on the matter of sandwiches, the rest is too vast or awful to be spoken of. For me, reading this poem aloud feels like vengeance, a snarky curse upon the family dinners of Subway I endured as a teenager and the terrible meals at my university’s writing center, which were catered not by Subway but by a business that serves equally unchewable “French rolls” and cardboard avocado slices.

But at the same time, the poem invokes those very patterns of consumer critique I think it’s important to avoid–with very minor differences. The object of consumption is disgusting, but not like baby food; like decay. The millions don’t consume this rotten food mindlessly; they do it from an appetite for suffering and woe. I know better: I know that the family Subway dinners were quick and easy for my working parents, and one of the few such options that included vegetables at all; I know that the university sandwich shop is considered cheap, clean, and safe for food allergies. We the consumers choose these terrible sandwiches for a reason.

That doesn’t explain why sandwich purveyors choose to make the worst possible sandwiches, like priests of an ascetic religion who transform convenience food into a meditation on the brevity and futility of mortal life.

Beets. I should love them more. You can eat pretty much every part of the beet: its stems and leaves have an earthy flavor that make a nice addition to meals with mixed greens or chopped vegetables. We get a lot of beets throughout the course of our share, though, so by fall I’ve pretty much had it. Into the pickle jar they go, or I’ll roast them with balsamic vinegar until they carmelize into dark little bits of beet candy. I put beet parts out at parties to trick other people into eating them. I think I’m only just now ready to eat beets again.

Green garlic is one of those things that all the foodies seem to be talking about at once, like ramps last spring, or scapes the spring before that: the younger, sexier branches (ha!) of the onion family tree. Green garlic is delicate, without the grassy-oniony taste of ramp or the sharp, sharp bite of raw scapes.

Wednesday, the day we pick up our box, is also the day our neighborhood gets a farmer’s market in a small triangular park surrounding a fountain. This past week was the first market of the season, so I went a bit wild buying strawberries and asparagus (as well as another bunch of radishes, since I enjoyed the ones I got last week). So on the first night, my neighbor and I would have been happy just eating bowls of strawberries and grilling asparagus and lamb for a lovely light spring dinner–which we did. But we try to cook for the future as well as for the moment, so we sauteed the spinach with some remaining escarole from the previous week (there was a lot of it!) and some spring onion and green garlic, and mixed it into kasha (whole-grain buckwheat) with a little parmesan to thicken it. It’s the kind of thing I would take for work lunch with an avocado on hotter days, but it got unseasonably cold toward the end of this week (and I had other lunch plans), so I mixed egg and yogurt in and scrambled it for a heartier meal at home.

On Saturday, my neighbor and I roasted a chicken–a nearly holy ritual we do infrequently but with great enjoyment. We thought it might be a good opportunity to use up some of the dill, so we slid some branches under the skin and stuffed some in the cavity along with lemon wedges and shallots. The dill flavor didn’t really stand out among the various delicious roast chicken flavors; perhaps we ought to have used more, or maybe it was just right.
Since we had the oven on anyway, we sliced the beets and set aside the stems and leaves for another day. We could have roasted the beets in the bottom of the pan, along with the shallot and potato chunks that got fried to a salty crisp in chicken drippings, but I had a taste for a sweeter preparation, so we roasted them separately with balsamic.
The nice thing about roasting is that it leaves your hands relatively free. This particular chicken took an hour and a half to cook: among other things, I took time to wash and store the vegetables and herbs I had carelessly tossed into the fridge on Wednesday. Most weren’t really damaged for my negligence, but in particular I needed to sort out which herbs were going to dry and which could be cut up and put into ice cube trays and frozen. I love parsley and cilantro, but they don’t last long outside of a spinner.

Monday I had a few people over on Memorial Day for a low key gathering, so I decided not to buy a lot of groceries and just use up what I had–and what friends in the neighborhood had. Have you ever heard the story of stone soup? There are several versions of the tale but the one I know is this: an old man begs a miser for a bed of straw or rags and a bite to eat. The miser says he doesn’t have anything in the house, so the old man offers to make him soup from a stone. He places the stone at the bottom of a pot of boiling water, stirring and repeating that it was almost ready, but it would benefit from just a handful of carrot or a pinch of salt to season it. The miser, as it happens, has handfuls and pinches of everything the old man asks for, and willingly parts with such small amounts because he is focused on the magical soup being prepared for him. Of course, the sum of all this bits and pieces is a wonderful, complex soup.

My peer group used to always serve “stone soup” at clothing swaps and writing workshops, for which guests could bring anything they want to use up, and we’d either roast it or throw it in a stew. For Memorial Day, we went more of a “stone fajitas” route, chopping everything up and letting people serve themselves. From this week’s haul and some leftovers from previous weeks, I had chopped lettuces, sliced radishes, grilled asparagus, chopped and sautéed beet stems and greens, and grated and  lightly sautéed sweet potato. There’s something I really love about sweet potatoes and black beans together, and I had a slow cooker full of black beans simmered with spring onions, carrots, and smoky spices. The only things I bought for the occasion were avocadoes (because I really wanted guacamole), potatoes (because I really wanted to make potato salad with the dill), and the black beans. Other folks brought meat for the George Foreman grill, cheese, tortillas, and more avocadoes. We made some guacamole with the CSA cilantro, and sliced up more avocadoes just to eat. We also made and ate two entire bowls of CSA popcorn (so good!) and most of an almond streusel thing I made with overripe strawberries from the market.

The beet stems and greens might be a surprising fajita component, but they definitely all got eaten. My neighbor seasoned them with a little chipotle powder while she cooked them and they went nicely with the smoky beans and sweet potatoes. I enjoyed my fair share, despite my determination to trick other people into eating them.

Best part about stone cooking: after that smorgasbord, we had tons of leftovers.

This is my half of the share, except that I took the whole bok choy for slow cooker purposes.

First things first, though: my neighbor and I each had a ton of greens leftover from the previous week or two, when we’d both busy and out of our houses. Some of the old greens weren’t looking so hot–they’d lost water and were a bit wibbly as we call it–so we chopped up all of last week’s chard, some remaining mustard greens, and even some spinach and threw it into a pan of tomato sauce (from a jar; tomatoes aren’t in season!) with some leftover cuts of corned beef my neighbor had on hand. We added some parsley and savory and the ubiquitous spring onions, and then layered it into a baking dish with plentiful leftover party cheese.

Mmm, clean-out-the-fridge casserole.

It was extremely delicious, actually. We ate it by itself with a side salad, but when I got home from cooking and Mad Men on Wednesday, I boiled some pasta and divided up my share of greens gratin into two lunches.
I will probably do something like this again next time we get chard, which is my least favorite of the bitter greens. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with chard, I just don’t like it as much as kale and mustard greens, so I tend to stick it in a quiche or a creamy pasta.

Usually I don’t talk about all the salads I eat–we get a lot of lettuce, and I usually make my salads the same old-but-gold way and eat them as filler or as a bed for something else. But Thursday, I was pretty psyched to make salad from the this week’s CSA offerings. Butter lettuce is my favorite lettuce; it’s flavorful and inexplicably rich-tasting for a leaf. Escarole was a nice change–it’s crispy and can be a little dry, but its frizzy branches make a great vehicle for a creamy dressing. And the farm radishes just reminded me how sad the last grocery-store radishes I bought made me feel. Those were dry and bitter; these are fresh, sweet, with a sneaky slow burn. Those three things with an avocado plopped on top made a satisfying dinner more than once during the week. I still have a little escarole left, actually–it was a big bunch–but it keeps well enough, or it can go into the stock bag.

On Saturday I had a fair amount of unstructured time, and some help. After a morning of writing in a coffee shop, I had a friend over for lunch: salad, and coucous with canned tomatoes and CSA spinach. I also started prepping a slow cooker stew for the enormous adult bok choi. I tried a variation of this cabbage soup from Food & Wine–but, you know, bok choi instead of cabbage; pork instead of beef; scallions instead of red onions; carrots added; no mung beans; and much less sugar. (I said variation!) I also think the Food & Wine version is unnecessarily fussy; I did brown my pork loin before slicing it and throwing it in the pot, but otherwise I just mixed everything together and brought it to a boil on the stove before dumping it into the slow cooker.

It wasn’t hard, but it was about the same amount of labor as simply making a stew on the stove: the main difference is that I could leave it to stew for several hours without supervision until the pork slices fell apart, tender as barbecue. I’d be very interested to know if anyone else has any favorite preparations for slow cooker meals. Now that I live in an apartment with sufficient counterspace to leave some applicances out all the time, I have promised myself to make more meals in the slow cooker–which heretofore has only been used for mulled wine, and once a year for hoppin’ john. However, I struggle to find recipes that involve a slow cooker but do not involve processed foods like canned soup or packaged seasonings–which is understandable, given that the hypothetical point of an appliance is to reduce work. I’m not above tomato sauce out of a jar, which makes an easy and simple chicken parmesan, but obviously my main goal during CSA season is to cook my excellent vegetables in delicious ways.

Final note on the stew: Instead of beef stock, I used a stock I made from lamb and goat bones leftover from a friend’s cookout last summer. I had those bones in my freezer for months before I finally turned them into stock, but the stock has made several stews since then. If you are not yet in the habit of making your own stock, consider it: I haven’t bought stock for years, because I nearly always have some vegetable or chicken stock in the freezer, and when I don’t I usually just fake it with some combination of fat, onions, wine, and seasonings. All you need to make stock is to set aside food scraps as you cook, some space in your freezer, and an evening when you can simmer the scraps in water while doing something else.  Right now I have several gallon-size bags of vegetable odds and ends, one special bag for carrot peels and scallion butts and herb stems, and a small bag of fish bones (fish stock makes wonderful chowder).

That’s it! Leftovers and salads for all other meals.

This week the farmers’ market for my neighborhood will open. I can’t wait. Since the market and my CSA pickup are on the same day, I usually just get fruit and sometimes other groceries like honey, bread, and eggs; however, sometimes there are vegetables that look too good to pass up, like asparagus while it’s in season, or radishes on weeks when we’re not getting any in the share. The extra produce mean there is a bit more work to do in terms of getting food cooked and put away, but the payoff is a little more variety and the excitement of buying foods right when they are at their peak. Strawberries! Right now I can’t get enough of them.

But as I discuss in my post at Table Matters, Cooked is pretty ungenerous to readers and eaters in general, and a few bêtes noires of his in particular. Namely: women.

Michael Pollan has always has a problem with writing about women. He started to lose me when he insisted throughout In Defense of Food that “culture” and “mother” are equivalent, as in: mothers are the primarily source/cause/culprit of human socialization. He’s been criticized for that among other gender issues. To my great surprise, Pollan acknowledges some of his critics (though not by name) in Cooked–but his response is pretty defensive, saying that when a man talks about people needing to cook more, folks assume that he means women need to cook more, and that women are to blame for the lapse of homecooking. He notes that he thinks men should cook too.

I suppose he could have stopped there, and it would have been inoffensive if not thoughtful. But he doesn’t, and it becomes clear that Michael Pollan still has a problem writing about women. Despite his disclaimer, he repeatedly uses Betty Friedan as shorthand for feminism, and feminism as shorthand for the force that  replaced cooking from scratch with microwaving and opening cans–demonstrating a fundamental lack of knowledge and respect for both. If he’s worried that people will “assume” that he blames the women’s movement for the displacement of home cooking, perhaps he shouldn’t make it quite so explicit.

Let’s start with Betty Friedan, to whom Pollan frequently assigns the belief that cooking is drudgery. I’ll be honest; until recently I had never read The Feminine Mystique. But neither, apparently, has Michael Pollan. Because a little skimming through Google Books showed that Betty Friedan doesn’t talk much about cooking specifically, let alone demean it. She refers to the whole litany of housekeeping chores as drudgery, where “cooking” appears alongside a number of ever-rotating tasks: “cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing;” “baking, cooking, sewing, washing, and caring for the baby;” “cooking, gardening, and home decorating;” and on and on. It’s actually a neat writing trick, using the slightly varied repetitive language to emphasize both how repetitive the house labor was and yet how many chores had to be invented to take up the time: one of her examples of this paradox is the advertising images of smiling women washing already-spotless floors.

Speaking of ads, Friedan spends a lot of linespace critically discussing the consumerism and marketing of the housewife lifestyle:
 “Once a woman stops trying to make cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing into ‘something more’, she can say “No, I don’t want a stove with rounded corners, I don’t want four different kinds of soap.’ She can say ‘no’ to all these mass daydreams of the women’s magazines and television , ‘no’ to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life.” (469)
As well as the so-called “liberating” products that only created more work:
 “each labor-saving appliance brought a labor-demanding elaboration of housework. Each scientific advance that might have freed women from the drudgery of cooking, cleaning, and washing, thereby giving her more time for other purposes, instead imposed new drudgery.” (342)

It’s a very consumer-savvy book, really–which is why I think Michael Pollan must not have ever read it. In Cooked, he discusses how companies marketed “labor-saving” processed food to housewives before Second Wave feminism, and then how many companies co-opted the language of the women’s movement to sell “liberating” products to ladies (Virginia Slims is one of the more memorable examples; Sociological Images collects a bunch more at the bottom of this post.) He’s not the first contemporary writer to have this idea, either, but it’s particularly galling that he uses Betty Friedan as a sort of synecdoche for the way he imagines feminism (as a menace), when in fact he ought to be citing her to support his critique of consumerism.

Also galling: Michael Pollan says this.

“It’s generally thought that the entrance of women in the workforce is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but the story turns out to be a little more complicated, and fraught.”

Yes indeed! Being a feminist with any kind of relationship to cooking–love it, hate it–is indeed fraught! That’s what Kate Harding was trying to tell him four years ago, and that’s what Emily Matchar is saying now. (See also her Salon article “Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig?“) But later he makes it clear that the hypothesis (women + workforce = home – cooking) not just “generally thought,” it’s specifically thought by Michael Pollan. He cites Simone de Beauvoir writing about how cooking can be a creative process, then adds:

“We can read this as either as a special French exception for the culinary arts, or as a bit of genuine wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.”

. . . yeah. That’s what American feminists do: thoughtlessly trample genuine wisdom!

In truth, there are a lot of different feminisms–even among the early Second Wavers–and a lot of different feelings about cooking. I don’t think you can argue that the endless litany of unpaid chores (“cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing”) is anything but drudgery, but cooking itself has always been a bit more controversial. On one hand, it’s extremely empowering, creative, and fulfilling to have the comfort and satiation of your loved ones in your hands. This is what a lot of contemporary DIYers are discovering: cooking, canning, pickling, etc. can be a loving and creative act. But it’s not exactly empowering if it’s expected of you, or if you are pre-assigned the  ”nurturer” role in a family or couple, or assumed to have some kind of natural affinity for cooking (but not, you know, a talent for it–at least not in the way a chef has talent or genius.)

I love to cook, personally, but I am frequently reminded that my pleasure and self-care or nurture of others with cooking don’t exist in a vacuum: when dates, early on, jokingly ask when I’m going to make them dinner; when partners, later on, take a seat while I’m still mid-cooking or washing-up; at parties, when we suddenly realize that all the women and only the women are in the kitchen; in my research, when I come across articles criticizing female food bloggers for antidiluvian attitudes toward gender roles; and, of course, reading popular nonfiction.

Deciding to cook is an easy decision for me, but there’s no point in pretending that it’s an unweighted decision.

It is also not an unweighted, made-in-a-vacuum decision for Michael Pollan to throw around vague overgeneralized criticisms of feminists’ relationship to food, rather than to actually sit down and read a few more books and realized that a great many feminists, Second Wave to today, have written eloquently on the issues of labor, consumerism, and domesticity that are so dear to him.

Anyway, to end on a happier note, please enjoy the story of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party installation, which uses the conceit of a dinner party and dozens of unqiue hand-crafted ceramic plates to bring together hundreds of female artists, writers, scientists, politicans, and dieties, some of whom are still celebrated but most of whom were nearly lost to history. You know, celebrating women with food and conventionally feminine crafts. Trampling on sexist ignorance on the way back in the kitchen.

Wednesday

I was doing the pickup by myself and was pretty exhausted from a hectic work week, so I just made one of the fastest dishes I know: beans and greens. (A teacher kind of dish, according to Bourdieu’s food space.) I browned a chopped spring onion with some bacon I had left from collards last week, threw in a diced sweet potato for starch, then tore up my half of the spinach and added a can of white beans. Same principles as last week’s pot cooking, but in a skillet. Tasty and filling.

A word about the bacon. You can easily make a dish like this vegan–in fact, it’s more convenient to just use olive oil instead of bacon. Browning the onions and deglazing with wine or vinegar will add layers of earthy flavor, as will seasoning with smoky or savory spices like paprika or ground mustard.

The reason I use bacon whenever I have it is that fat is energy. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since several of my peers and some blogs that I read have been talking about Mark Bittman’s Vegan Before 6 book. I share many of his ideals–trying to move away from processed foods, etc.–but I think it’s important to remember that any and all dietary choices are literally Your Mileage May Vary: not everyone is going to get the same benefits from the same fuel. Personally, daytime is when I need energy-giving animal proteins the most, which became very clear to me when I worked at an art museum in a position that required all the problem-solving and emotional fortitude of a customer service job along with the physical stamina of standing upright for hours or traipsing all over acres of dolomite floor. I often brought vegan leftovers to eat for lunch–meatless stirfry, veggie rice dishes, etc.–because I find it easy and cheap to cook without animal products, but I would run out of steam by the end of the day, getting cranky and lethargic. I’d come home, lay on the floor, and stay there until my boyfriend texted me about dinner. But if I included meat in the stirfry, or cooked the vegetables in butter or bacon fat, or even just simmered the rice in broth instead of water, I’d have noticeably more stamina and a clearer head at the end of the day. These days my job isn’t so physically demanding, but a richer lunchtime meal still feels more fortifying for my daily brainwork, and I don’t need to reach continually for the cashews and dried fruit I keep at my desk just in case.

YMMV, as I said. I’m not a nutritionist. (Neither is Mark Bittman.) But in the absence of a dietetics degree or doctor’s orders, I think the best thing you can do for your cooking and eating is to notice how different foods make you physically feel. End rant!

On Friday and Saturday, I needed to purchase a lot of groceries for the the party (although I did put last week’s chives into dips and included CSA lettuce in the little sandwiches I made).  On Friday night, my neighbor and I fed ourselves by cutting up the surprise bok choi, most of the mustard greens, steak and some carrot for a stir fry.

Once, long ago, during a rain of weekly cabbages during which we’d already made soups and slaws and kimchi and were a bit strapped for cabbage ideas, we came across this Martha Stewart recipe for a slaw with peanut dressing. Since then we have made that peanut dressing a hundred times, although I don’t think we have ever followed the recipe to the letter. We don’t ever look at the recipe anymore–I keep rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, and garlic on hand at all times so it’s easy to throw together a sauce in whatever proportions seem appropriate. This time, for example, I had the end of a bottle of chili garlic sauce I wanted to use up, so we put the vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, and peanut butter directly in the jar and shook it up. There was more chili in there than I thought, so these noodles were VERY hot. (We like that.)

That’s it!  I coasted the rest of the week on salads and leftovers–much of which included non-CSA food this week, so I’ll spare you the details. My birthday parties heavily feature sangria and spiked punches, so my rules for party snacks are (a) must be safe for holding by the fingers while gesticulating in excited conversation, and (b) should stick to the ribs, so guests don’t wipe out after one cocktail. If you want to serve CSA greens or stirfry or salad for a party, it’s got to be a smaller or soberer party.

Meanwhile, I still have chard and some mustard greens leftover from the week’s share, but my neighbor and I will probably dispense with those this evening, while we pick up our share.

We got: lettuce, spinach, chives, spring onions, collards, sweet potatoes, and popcorn.

I try to wash and store or cook as much as the share as I can on Wednesdays when we receive it. But green onions and chives seem to stay intact in my fridge until needed; if they dry out, no problem, they still make excellent seasoning for soups or stock. Sweet potatoes and popcorn from last year’s harvest will last until I want them. So when I got home–rather late–from picking up the share and running errands with my neighbor, I focused on washing and storing the leafy greens. I bought a large salad spinner in my first season of CSA: it’s well worth it for me, because farm greens sometimes need to be dunked whole into cold water to rinse off the mud. For lettuce, I tear or trim off the bottom of the stem so I can wash the leaves loose, but I otherwise don’t cut leafy greens until I need them.

For as long as lettuce is in season–the first and last few months of the share–we end up eating a LOT of salad. This early, the radishes and cucumbers and whatnot aren’t ready, but I already had some on hand. I usually don’t cut and slice salad veggies until I need them–I don’t bring salad to lunch, as it’s not filling enough, and I don’t mind taking a few extra minutes in the evening to slice up a cucumber fresh. Some people find it more efficient to chop everything at once and store it in the fridge–nothing wrong with that, either.

Thursday

My neighbor and I got back from the gym after 8 and set ourselves to making a quick dinner with the collards. As I’ve mentioned before, collards are tough leaves and really want to be stewed with fat; I’ve never had them another way that I liked, but if anyone else has, I’d be curious to know. You can make collards vegetarian and I definitely do for large parties, but my neighbor and I prefer to use bacon. After the bacon is cooked and removed from the pot, we soften onions in some of the rendered fat, tear and add the leaves, and cover with our own chicken broth to simmer. The result is rich and satisfying, and made a filling dinner with some mashed potatoes (using some of our chives) and the salad we chopped while the collards and potatoes were cooked. We were watching Mad Men within an hour and had enough left over for a lunch.

Friday and Saturday I went out of town and ate several delicious meals out. But I returned Saturday night and invited a friend over for a late dinner. I had a taste for risotto, or something close to it, and a new cast iron pot to break in. In this version, I softened the spring onions in olive oil and browned sweet potato and chopped spinach in the same. (Usually I would sauté the veg separately, but I was feeling impatient and tired.) I deglazed with wine, let it reduce, and added some cups of water and a cup of the Autumn Harvest grain mix I buy from Trader Joe’s. (I was out of rice, and anyway the orzo, coucous, and quinoa cook faster.) When the grains were done and the sweet potatoes were soft, I added a little more water and stirred in parmesan cheese until creamy.

A good example of the basic pot cooking I described recently. Traditional risotto uses broth, I think, but I was keeping it vegetarian for my friend. Even without the rich chicken broth, this dish was creamy and satisfying. Rather than mushing all together as I feared, the vegetables were distinct but saturated with the light oil-and-wine broth we had made. We ate it with more of the ubiquitous salad, and I had enough left over for another work lunch.

On Sunday, after my lunch of salad (you can safely assume that all unmentioned meals for the next month are salads!) I popped some of the popcorn for a barbecue at a friend’s house. Popcorn from the farm is awesome: it has such a good flavor already that I do very little to it. I mix a small, unmeasured amount (but less than a teaspoon) each of salt, sugar and chipotle powder into a half-cup of kernels. I cover the bottom of a pot–my new blue pot, this time!–with olive oil, probably about two tablespoons’ worth. This makes about two quarts of fluffy, flavorful popcorn that everyone really seems to like.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning I was super busy but enjoyed already-made lunches and easily-made salad. That’s my goal: to cook once or twice a week and coast for the rest. This can be more challenging when there is more produce coming in, but also more varied and exciting.

This coming week we’ll have roughly the same vegetables, but with chard and mustard greens instead of collards. I expect to buy a lot of additional groceries this week, since I’m hosting a party–as much as I love mustard greens, it would be hard to make good party snacks from it! So it’s not a typical week of vegetable use, but that’s the point–there is no typical week.

Provided that I can find my camera cord, future posts will have more pictures.