It's Istanbul, not Constantinople

Tortilla, Abyssinian wine, grandmother

On Sunday, Owen and I picked up my grandmother and told her we were going to an Ethiopian restaurant. She seemed unclear about exactly what cuisine we were talking about. "Indian food?" she asked. When we got to the restaurant she looked around at the people and said, "Oh, this is an Abyssinian restaurant."

I said, "No, no, Ethiopian. Ethiopia is a country in eastern Africa . . . "

I stopped myself, checked on my iPhone, discovered she was right. Or at least not wrong.

My grandmother did not like eating with her hands, and did not understand the role of the injera -- the spongy flatbread you use to scoop up the various dishes -- until about halfway through the meal. Lightbulb moment: "This a tortilla," she said.

I said, "No, no, it's actually a sourdough pancake made with teff flour. . ."

She looked at me darkly. "I know. But it's like a tortilla." After that she ate with gusto. My grandmother is a pip.

Zeni is the best Ethiopian restaurant I've been to in the Bay Area, and I'm just sorry it's in San Jose, where I hardly ever go. The injera comes in a basket and it is rolled up tightly, like hand towels. See lower left-hand corner of photo below:

It is pliable, grayish, slightly damp, intensely sour, so good. I am determined to learn to make it, or something like it. To go with the injera, we had super-spicy ground meat, homemade cheese, chicken sauteed in butter, cabbage sauteed in butter, salad, all delicious. One order of baklava for dessert, which I would have skipped, but my grandmother insisted.

I thought about how and what my grandmother eats. It's very simple: She eats everything, including wine, salad, and dessert, but everything in moderation, at mealtimes. It makes me think of the Michael Pollan maxim: Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. That strikes me as the soundest of all dietary advice.

The night after the Ethiopian dinner out, I made an Ethiopian dinner in. I made yataklete kilkil. Or, spiced vegetables. 

The recipe comes from the The Africa News Cookbook and you start by simmering butter with spices (ginger, turmeric, cardamom, etc.), onions, and garlic for a full hour. Then you strain out the solids -- both dairy solids and bits of spice and onion -- so that you're left with pure golden butter imbued with a subtly exotic fragrance. It's beautiful. You'll want to dip a crust of bread in it, but try to resist.

Once you have your spiced butter, steam some cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and potatoes, then saute them in 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the butter. Salt to taste.

spa food meets spiced butter and salt

I served the yataklete kilkil with basmati rice and everyone loved it except maybe Owen, who didn't seem to eat much. Isabel had seconds. Again, I started thinking about the peculiarities of the American diet. How it's all or nothing, you're eating like a bird or you're eating like Orson Welles. When I hear the words "steamed vegetables" I wince, because I have only met steamed vegetables in their most austere, unbuttered, unseasoned, you're-on-a-diet form. If all steamed vegetables were sauteed in a little spiced butter, I might actually eat steamed vegetables more than once  per decade and be a healthier person for it.

Last night, I made Algerian spicy vegetable soup (chorba hamra), also from Africa News. I will have to write more about this soup later because I didn't really eat any so can't comment on its flavor. I just left the pot on the stove for my husband and went to meet a friend of a friend for a drink. There, in the Marinitas bar in downtown San Anselmo, I consumed so many tortilla chips that I didn't feel like eating vegetable soup when I got home at 8:30 p.m.

My grandmother never would have done that. First of all, she never would have left my grandfather to fend for himself with a pot of soup and two children while she went out for a drink. What kind of negligent wife does that? No comment. But second, and more germane to the subject of this blog, my grandmother never would have stuffed herself with tortilla chips then come home and eaten a Skinny Cow caramel cone washed down with a glass of wine while watching Breaking Bad and called it dinner.

I like to think I have a healthy, traditional diet, but when I actually look at what I eat, that isn't quite the case.

As opposition research, I may have to try an Uncrustable

That is a baby pumpkin gutted by our chickens, who are now relegated to the lower yard. I've decided to do some fall/winter planting in the patches where summer planting was trampled, eaten, inadequately staked, or died. Unlike Charentais melons, fava beans have never failed me.

We had banh mi again the other night, and husband and I agreed that twice was enough. It's like making corn dogs at home -- you can do it, but the magic is in the associations. Corn dogs: county fair. Banh mi: urban hole-in-the-wall.

 

For dessert, we enjoyed some Hershey's bars while polishing off the last three episodes of season 1 of Damages (I told you we were going to seed!) and I must say, Hershey's bars are exceptionally tasty, as tasty as almost any cake I have ever baked, plus cheaper and easier. I don't even like chocolate. 

 

The meal got me thinking. Making those semi-elaborate sandwiches and unwrapping that candy bar took about 7 minutes of what food magazines call "active time." Making lunch earlier in the day (sandwich) took about 1 minute. "Making" breakfast (cereal, peach, coffee), took another minute. My husband took about 1 minute on his lunch (sandwich) and 1 minute on breakfast, so total household food prep time yesterday: 11 minutes. This is 16 minutes less than the American average, which is a "mere" 27 minutes, per Michael Pollan's big, scoldy story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about the rise of cooking shows and the decline of cooking.

Here's the thing: Twenty-seven minutes actually seems to me like a lot of time to spend cooking, particularly if you don't have children around, if you have a demanding job, and/or you don't enjoy the process. If you're happy with a quesadilla or some cottage cheese or a Vietnamese sandwich and Hershey's bar, why knock yourself out? Because Michael Pollan says you should?

To illustrate the sorry state of affairs in our kitchens, Pollan alludes to the atrocity of frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. A preposterous concept that struck me at first as an extreme example. I've never met anyone who ate frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I've never even seen this absurd product.

Now I have.

One look at that photo and you know Smuckers pumps psycho ingredients into those creepy-looking flying saucers that will make children crave them. 

Still, the homely 50-second act of slapping together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich strikes me as akin to pouring your own juice, brushing your own teeth, wiping your own. . . . Hiring it out feels corrupt. Is this a line a lot of Americans are really crossing? Seems impossible that Uncrustables will ever become as popular as Eggos and canned soup, which really are incredibly convenient. Or so I've been told by lazy people who don't love their kids.

 

Then I did a few minutes of research on the internet. Uncrustables are a big hit! People are cheerfully crossing that line. 

I forced myself to try to come to grips.

If frozen pb&j 

 

a. is just as cheap as homemade

b. contains the same (possibly very crappy) ingredients as a sandwich you'd make yourself and offers the same nutritional value

c. tastes good

why not?

If you're already using Jif, Smuckers, and Orowheat, there seems little point in fetishizing the assembly.

 

But, but, but there's TOTALLY a point in fetishizing the assembly.  If you buy Uncrustables, a corporation decides how much jam, and how much peanut butter, and removes the possibility of marmalade, or Marshmallow Fluff, or a crust. The idea of people ceding that last, trivial bit of control over what they put in their mouths makes my skin crawl. It made me ashamed that a few days ago I was cheerfully eating Hershey's bars, wondering why I ever bothered to bake. Hershey's engineers its candy to be wickedly delicious and produces it in a factory using cheap emulsifiers. I fell for it like a ton of bricks while watching a crass and addicting TV show of about the same caliber. From now on, only scratch cakes and Elizabethan poetry.

Back to Pollan's piece, since I'm in a mood.  There was a line that tripped me up: "The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite."

I know what Pollan is getting at -- if you make coq au vin and salad for dinner, you're probably going to be slimmer than if you grab a bucket at KFC. This is true. But it's not the act of making coq au vin that accounts for the difference, it's the decision to make coq au vin in the first place and the values (moderation, balance, discipline, health) that go along with it. If my experience is any guide, the time and work involved in cooking do not check the appetite -- they sharpen it. Delayed gratification whets it. If Pollan had just used the word "food consumption" instead of "appetite" I would have no quarrel with this sentence.

There's lots of interesting stuff in the story -- about food TV, about Julia Child, about the horrifying Uncrustables -- and I agree in the main with what Pollan has to say, obviously. Obviously!

And I buried the lede in this muddled diatribe: Isabel and Owen are home, which is GREAT.