We missed the opening day of my favorite farm market last week, something to which I haven't totally come to terms. I'm planning to make up for it tomorrow, though, and the family has been put on alert that as soon as the last morsel of breakfast passes their lips we are heading out. Because I am being vehement in a way that I usually reserve for, say, contract negotiations or vacation planning, no one is quite sure what to make of my enthusiasm.

The truth of the matter is that I've become enamored with the idea of a 100 Mile Diet. I love the farm market for its retro charm - something that fits in quite well with my general inclination toward old furniture, big band music and dusty used book stores. But I like shopping farm markets because I find that my values are increasingly aligned with its presence in my community, what with my growing interest in relocalization (not just because of oil-related stuff - although that's certainly SUPER IMPORTANT enough to warrant capital letters - but also because I think that close communities are healthier than what we've currently got going). And if one is to not eat anything that one's great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food then a farm market really comes in handy. And "mine" is great - produce, dairy, meat, honey, breads...it's all fab and I am deeply in love enough to go even when the forecast calls for rain, as it does for tomorrow.

I'm careful to temper my enthusiasm, though. I think there's a real danger that beleaguered moms could (fairly) regard farm markets as just another stop they're being asked to make "for the children" in addition to all the other places we (as a society) believe they should be going, and one more stop for which the time needed to accomplish it will further eat (ha!) into the available time for actually preparing the fresh, organic stuff purchased.

Moreover, I'm concerned about the trend toward markets-as-entertainment. My market has musicians serenading, a children's activity tent, pony rides and more. Now, don't get me wrong, this is all fun stuff. The danger is that using these methods to attract families back to farm markets (and I do hope it's families who are being attracted and not just moms) could serve to reinforce the idea that many people have acquired that food should be entertainment delivered upon them and not something in which they should take an active interest for their own health and that of their communities. (For similar reasons, I cringe at in-store child play centers being installed in my local supermarkets. Sure, I love a few quite moments as much as the next woman and, if they come in the canned soup section, so what? But I fear that taking such quiet moments will only remove my kids further from the source of their food, not to mention eliminating them from a very important economic and financial function. We've all heard our older relatives talking about the price of bread back in 1948, for example. If our kids are sequestered in play areas - sponsored by processed food manufacturers, natch - will they have such an economic memory? Or will they more likely grow up lacking the ability to compare the then vs. now of the economy they'll inherit?)

So I'm taking my kids (and husband) tomorrow, in the rain. And we'll together choose bread, eggs, chicken, bison, cream (raw?! yum) and lots of radishes and greens to get us through the coming week. The children will enjoy a slice of cinnamon bread and Brainiac will buy a cup of coffee. We'll all carry a (brought from home) bag and work together to put our purchases away. It'll be a pleasant way to spend an hour or so as a family but, more important, it's an investment in the way I hope our lives will unfold and I cannot wait.

It appears that someone at my local library has recently developed an interest in food issues outside of how to cook dinners in thirty minutes or less or creating a gour-may meal with a carefully chosen selection of boxes and cans. I know this because the complete works of Morgan Spurlock have materialized on the New Arrivals shelf, alongside any number of items by Michael Pollan and something called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, which I could not put on my wait list fast enough (alongside another new offering, Food Not Lawns). Somebody at the acquisitions desk, it seems to me, is trying to make a point.

In addition to essay and theory a number of cookery books have also appeared, books which focus on what I think of as real cooking of the kind that my great-grandmother might have done. Among these are a number of canning books and I was thrilled, before my overdue fines became too high for me to do so, to check them all out at a go.

As it turns out only one of them really interested me, Frances Bissel's Preserving Nature's Bounty. And even it I was prepared to dislike upon reading the author's declaration that the book was about "[using] what friends might bring you from their country home." (Note to self: acquire better class of friends, see also: country homes.) In the end I came to appreciate the books despite the annoying introductory material because the recipes are unique and straightforward and sound really delicious. The organization is good, too, with recipes pertaining to a given food item gathered together - the mango section, for example, has mango ketchup (!), mango lime jam (!!) and mango salsa all together instead of all the jams in one place, all the salsas in another and all the ketchups off by themselves somewhere. I love this because if one finds a great buy on mangoes it will be easy to find things to do with mangoes without having to page through the entire book looking for mango recipes to compare. Genius.

When not reading canning or food theory books, I've been gardening with the kids. Spring gardening in particular is great with children because so much of what I can plant right now in my zone comes up really fast. We planted radishes, lettuce, beets, and spinach and will do more of each of these in a week or ten days or do. The rest of my garden plans are complete - tomatoes, squash, green beans, scarlet runners, peppers, strawberries, some new blueberries - and are nothing glamorous, but still enormously satisfying.

So you may have noticed that I gave myself a bit of vacation. It was lovely. Mostly I spent my time buying fabric, cutting sundresses for Entropy Girl and looking at seed catalogs. What more can a girl ask? And last night Brainiac and I went to try to eat dinner at a place I will not name (but which rhymes with "Fonebish") and discovered a two-hour wait for a table. He said, "Wow. You ought to blog about this." And I thought, "Yes. I should." With that, my vacation is over.

So, yes. Fonebish. We were given a giftcard and thought it might be fun to check the place out. We generally aren't hip to the upscale-ish chain restaurants - you know, your Cheesecake Factories and the like - and thought a visit might be a nice change of pace. Come to find out that one needs reservations to actually eat (unless a two hour wait at the bar sounds fun), which was a bit of a bridge too far for us what with Lonebish being 1) not locally owned, 2) a bit precious with the theming, 3) located in a strip mall and 4) the sort of place with a website that implies that all shellfish will turn red when boiled. This last may come as a surprise to the winkles you know.

We didn't wait the two hours. Instead we went to a local gastropub where Brainiac enjoyed ribs and I started with a grilled chevre and dried cranberry salad, segued into calamari and finished with pumpkin ice cream. Fonebish, indeed.

When my sisters and I were young our mother was a Cake Lady. You know who I mean, every town has at least one. She was the woman that other moms would turn to for their Holly Hobby, Mickey Mouse and Garfield cake needs (those of you who weren't alive in the late 70s/early 80s would be surprised at just how large those needs were - and this was before the surge in children's party character licensing we see today when it's possible to find a pan for the most obscure of interests and virtually every movie short of Boogie Nights). She made wedding cakes, Christening cakes, graduation cakes, end-of-softball-season cakes and other confections in such numbers that my memories of childhood are practically themselves sugarcoated. It was rare that there wasn't a cake around either baking, being decorated, cautiously carried to the car for delivery or cast aside as a dud. We got the duds in our lunchboxes.

Our friends, of course, thought this was fabulous. Cake all the time! What's not to love? Except, of course, constant exposure even to the awesome dulls and after a while we collectively stopped eating much cake at all. Duds sat around uneaten and undesired until they hardened sufficiently that they could be thrown out without the attendant guilt of wasting food and, once it became possible by the early 90s to buy an airbrushed cake in virtually every supermarket, mom gradually went into Cake Lady retirement.

Among the legacies of my cake-filled youth is the ability to produce simple icings for almost any requirement without a recipe or really much thought at all. Mom never taught me (she preferred to keep her kitchen to herself) but somewhere along the line I - and perhaps my sisters, too - picked up all kinds of frostings from glazes to the less tasty but more substantial decorator icing, suitable for roses and borders and other things you need to keep their shape. Come to think of it, the only "icing" I can't make from memory is fondant, which I suspect is because Mom disapproves of fondant and seldom consented to its use.

Last night I made the following chocolate icing for brownies for the Boy Wonder's school holiday party. Recipes for chocolate icing abound and there are probably at least three for everyone who has ever made any - I, of course, think mine is the best. I also think it's the easiest, a feature not to be underestimated as far as I'm concerned, especially this time of year when we're all so busy. This is a general-purpose spreading icing, suitable for brownies, a layer cake, sugar cookies or - let's be honest withourselves here - just spooning directly from the bowl into the mouth. You may see some recipes that require cooking, evaporated milk, separating eggs and so on and while these may produce perfectly pleasant icings I assure you that they are all unnecessary.

For a nice, general-use chocolate frosting, soften a quarter-cup of butter in a mixing bowl. When nicely softened (you can press a finger into the butter with little resistance), add a one pound box of confectioner's sugar and, say, a cup of cocoa powder. Start adding milk (I use 1%, but used both skim and whole successfully) slooooowly, about a tablespoon at a time until the frosting starts to form. Keep adding the milk until you get the consistency you like. If you accidentally add too much milk, mix in more sugar or cocoa powder. Taste liberally! It'll help you adjust the ingredients to get to where you want to be. Some folks like to add a pinch of salt and a bit of vanilla - I find them superfluous but, hey, it's your icing. Your frosted baked goods can sit out overnight or a couple days covered - the sugar and chocolate keep the milk and butter nicely protected for a short time.

Mom comes out of retirement every so often, mostly to make wedding cakes. These she has made for each of my sisters and me, as well as our friends who remember the birthday cakes she made for their own childhood parties. As even the youngest of our girlhood friends is now in her 30s these wedding cakes are becoming fewer and further between and her stretches of retirement longer and longer. The cake-filled bits of our lives exist now primarily in photographs and the ability to make almost any kind of icing, whenever we need that fix of memory combined with necessity. All except that fondant, of course.

More little tidbits about meal assembly joints:

1) They have their own industry association. On the one hand, I can see the need for such an organization - who else to discuss the critical question Is this a fad? No word on the website about how much the answer to this - and other - questions costs. Maybe, like dinner assembly itself, you get the answers for 6 to 12 questions for as little as $200 and change. Hmm. Somehow, I doubt it.

2) Foodmomiac details her experience with Dream Dinners in this series of posts. To be fair, I have looked around for positive reviews of dinner assembly meals other than those published in traditional, mainstream media outlets, to no avail. Lifestyle reporters in particular seem to love dinner assembly, but no word from the food pages. Other than a few negative discussions, of which Foodmomiac was just one, bloggers' mentions seem to be just that they went with friends to one or another such franchise with no follow up as to their feelings about what they ended up eating as a result.

I remain interested in trying a session for myself, in the interests of self-experimentation, of course. Tell me what you think: because I have blogged on this subject and will more than likely do so again, should I share my thoughts, why I'm there and my intention to blog about the experience? I'm not exactly Dooce or Julie here so it's not like my little corner of the internet is going to single-handedly bring down an entire nascent industry simultaneously giving rise to the rebirth of the rice-packet eschewing home cook. (But, goodness, wouldn't that be cool?) I wonder just where the blogger/ever-so-slightly journalist (however faux) line is. Thoughts?

The Boy Wonder, looking out the window of the Ford Tri-Motor he rode in last Saturday.



I've written before about the differences between my mother's experience in home economics classes and my own. To recap: she and her classmates learned to cook and then catered sports banquets. I learned to make pudding pies and English muffin pizzas and then ate them in the 4.5 minutes after the bell on my way to the next class.

Leaving aside the sexual politics involved in classes of exclusively young women preparing and serving meals for banquets honoring (most likely) exclusively young men, I don't think it's a mistake to say that her experience was the more useful by far. She actually learned to cook, after all, whereas I learned nothing in particular that I couldn't have absorbed from reading the back of boxes or can labels. I have my theories about why my class was so different, so useless, so watered-down. In no particular order, these theories are:

1) Pudding pies, snack pizzas, and other pre-fab simple foods, were ideal for teaching a generation of latch key kids how to prepare something easy when they were home alone, while also managing to avoid burning down the house.

2) The 80s marked the start of marketing disguising itself as curricula. Most of the materials we used in our home economics classes were written and distributed by major food processing companies. It is, of course, in these companies' best interests that young cooking students don't actually learn to cook.

3) Prevailing and developing cultural norms at the time suggested that girls would not grow up to be "just" moms and homekeepers but that they would inevitably avail themselves of any number of lucrative and powerful careers so cooking as an instructional topic was considered perversly out of date. (I can't help but wonder why, rather than dumbing down a topic that was traditionally the province of female students, schools did not respond to the whole career-negates-domesticity thing by putting the subject on boys' required schedules. That they did not says to me that either no one really believed that girls truly would grow up to engage in professional work, gave any thought at all as to who would be making the food we would be required to eat career or no, or could not conceive of a future in which women would not be the designated cook despite the potential presence of a chosen career. I have my suspicions which might be true, but it's all too depressing to think about for long.)

I am not a scholar (nor do I play one on my blog) so I don't really know if any of my theories are on the right track. I do know that my experience wasn't terribly unique - of all the women I know who took home economics in school, none of them credit it with teaching them anything enduring or especially valuable. And today, of course, schools are under so much pressure of all kinds and classes like home economics or life skills or whatever are back-burnered even more than they had been when I was a teen (waaaaaay back in the 80s, for those of you keeping track).

Whatever the reasons for home ec's slide, I think that cooking as a skill was further hampered by the advent of the advertisingeverywhere culture (AEC) we live in (seriously, I was thoroughly gobsmacked to discover advertisements on the inside doors of the toilet stalls in a national chain restaurant that a) I will not name and 2) I will never visit again). The AEC made it much easier for FoodProcessing Conglomerate, Inc. to convince newly careered women and homemakers alike that cooking for oneself or one's family is drudgery, a chore, something to avoided and/or reduced at all costs and - behold! - we have this handy product which you can open, warm and serve without breaking a sweat.

The result is that we now have a major food company that gives away a million dollars annually to the person who can most creatively use its frozen, boxed and canned products (last year's winner made stuffing out of frozen maple-flavored waffle sticks), any number of "cook"book authors who claim to be able to save you time and money by helping you fake out dinner guests with things like Naan-Style Flatbread made out of canned pizza dough, and an entire populace who thinks that meal preparation is either some kind of daily chore to be endured only by referencing some "meals in 20 minutes" website or an occasional thing you do for people you want to impress. And all the while the AEC keeps beating its drum...cooking is hard, cooking makes you suffer, open a box, open a box, open a box.... I haven't even thrown in yet the existence of those products the packages of which proclaim "Includes Meat!"

O.K., this is getting long and I've got to run to pick up the kids. Would you be shocked to know that I've got more to say about this? No? Good, because we haven't yet covered those mom's night out meal-assembly places, OAMC, a host of new books aimed at helping the beleagered and over-worked to feed themselves, children's cookbooks, Alice Waters, the war on poverty, or my new manifesto. Oh, and the jerk sauce I made the other day.

For a while now I've been pondering what it means to cook. Can one be a cook and have absolutely no interest in food from a creative standpoint? Can "assembling" meals be the same thing as cooking? That is, if I make a ground beef dish with dehydrated noodles and cream sauce brought back to life with a cup of water and serve it with a green bean casserole made by opening a total of four cans, and then mixing and heating their contents, have I cooked? Or, if I open a poly bag of frozen vegetables and meat into a skillet and heat them so that the frozen sauce encasing them melts and warms through, is that cooking?

As with most things, I think the lines are pretty blurry. If, that is, if lines exist at all. I certainly don't make everything my family eats from scratch, or even near-scratch in the case of the Tastykake treats that Brainiac seems to acquire whenever he leaves the house. Then, of course, there's ketchup, pasta (a convenience food that even anti-convenience-food folk seem to have no problem with), sausages, and on and on. I make some of our broths but not all, some of our pickles but not all. You see where I am going with this, right? Is there anyone out there anymore who does the Ma Ingalls thing, churning butter, salting pork, grinding wheat (although even Ma Ingalls used white sugar for company, not to mention tea leaves and commercially roasted coffee)? I make soup noodles from time to time, am interested in making all kinds of ketchups and regularly bake bread (from commercially-produced flour), although I've never made pitas, tortillas, matzoh, lavash or any of the other scores of bread products we eat. But, on the whole, I procure a heck of a lot more than I actually produce.

Then again, I have had the experience more than once while grocery shopping of having someone point out that my cart contains ingredients to make food rather than prepared foods to which one merely adds water or applies heat.

I don't really know where I am going with all of this. I wish I had a point, but I'm not there yet. I do know that I am a moving target, cooking-wise. Since I work at home in somewhat sporadic bursts I have a great deal of control over my own schedule and am able to make chicken broth or pizza dough or a batch of mango jam in between my other daily activities and responsibilities. It's easier for me than, say, a single mom working two minimum-wage service jobs or a woman who sits at a desk writing briefs for 12 hours a day, to put a "cook" meal on the table, as opposed to one for which many boxes and cans are opened and contents heated.

On the other hand, some of the things that I make which my family loves to eat the most are ridiculously easy and scarcely qualify as cooking. Roast chicken, comes to mind. With roasting chiken all you really need is a chicken and time, heat application at its most sublime. Soup's the same way - leftover veggies cooked in seasoned water, what could be simpler?

So, maybe time really is the magic ingredient rather than being invested over who made the broth. And it's something that is so scarce anymore. I know from experience that four not-over-programmed individuals can still result in one over-programmed family. If, on top of our over-programmedness, I added a full-time out of the house job I'd do a heck of a lot more assembling and heating.

Hm. As I said, I wish I had a point, but I do not. These are things that I've been thinking of for a while now and I'm no closer to understanding the various inputs and methods involved in cooking for one's family than I was at the beginning. I should say here that I'm not looking in all of this to judgment - there is no way on earth I'm going to come down on a mom who is just looking to get through the day sanity intact and trying to get some food on the table in the bargain. I, too, can be a master assembler. To wit, my chili recipe, a triumph of assembly and heating:

Brown however much ground beef or finely chopped steak you want in a large saucepan. When about half-way browned, add a couple fistfull's of chopped onion and a couple cloves of chopped garlic. When the onion is translucent, add two drained cans of drained kidney or black beans (or a can of each) and a drained can of petite dice tomatoes. Add a packet or a couple tablespoons of chili seasoning and a squirt or two of Frank's RedHot (the lime variety is particularly nice). Allow to cool slightly and taste to adjust seasonings. May be served over biscuits or rice, if desired.