No, I don't have a new green hairy pet...
In fact, my husband and I are leaving for vacation this evening, and I've been trying to use up all the perishables in our fridge before we go. This is a bunch of dill that my mother in law bought that completely wilted in our fridge, in spite of my keeping it in a glass of water.
I've been very concerned with what to do with the rest of the dreadful millet I prepared last week. I didn't want to be a bad, wasteful person and throw it out - surely I'd pay for that in the next life. But actually eating the terrible stuff seemed a punishment in itself. This was clearly a test from on high. What to do?
But then, on Sunday night, I had a vision! And on Monday, I turned my lousy millet into millet pudding by cooking it in milk and adding honey, vanilla, and cinnamon - same as I do when making rice pudding with leftover rice. And consequently the millet has gone all the way from tasting like newsprint to tasting really rather pleasant (though I'll admit that I prefer the version with rice).
I still have about half a bag of uncooked millet left, though, and I'm disinclined to pudding-fy all of it. However, I recently encountered a reference to some people in India eating millet porridge in the morning, with fruit. Hm, maybe I'll have to try this... I'm longing to see the end of that bag! I've already offered it to my dear friend A. to feed her bird with, but even she didn't leap at the opportunity...
* Believe me, out-of-focus is the most flattering way to photograph millet pudding.
I know that I said that on Saturday morning, I was going to plant my seeds. Well, I didn't. Yesterday I could not drag myself out of bed as early as I'd hoped, when I did I had to go straight to the farmer's market before it got too unbearably crowded (because, sadly, it does - evidence below from a sunny, warm afternoon a week or two ago).
Soon after I got home I had to rush out again to a music lesson downtown, and when I finally got back I realized that what was left of the day had to be entirely devoted to the latest in a series of 19th century novels, because I need escapist reading. I have to say though that when reading these novels I always notice that the more times change, the more people seem to stay the same.
This morning, though, I awoke with a sense of purpose, and I've decided that by the end of the day my apartment is going to be clean, I will have done a lot of writing, cooked enough food for a week's worth of lunches, and transformed into a woman with a welcoming home, promising career, and a great sense of style.
But it's also a very cloudy morning, and I feel strange starting the seeds on a day when they'll get no sun. It may be that it doesn't matter, but it just doesn't feel right.
So now that I've probably written a full page of excuses, I will tell you what I HAVE done that I thought was worth posting about.
I made breadcrumbs today!
When I first moved to New York many years ago, I shared a railroad apartment with a friend from college. It was a fourth floor walk-up, and there wasn’t much privacy, but it was nice and it was ours and we were thrilled with the idea of living on our own for the first time. One of the things we did regularly, outside of going out dancing, was cook dinner together. I think this was partly because we didn’t have much money and partly because we were still playing house. We were great fans of Jacques Pepin’s Simple and Healthy Cooking, a gift from my mother, and the chicken pages are still very well spattered since chicken (with mushrooms, with garlic, with ‘sauce piquante,’ and of course with broccoli) is what we made most of the time. We even invited several friends over to sample our skills with chicken – and our parents too, if my memory doesn’t fail me.
After I began to live alone, though, there seemed to be no point in following a recipe in Jacques Pepin for just me. And standing by myself in my kitchen, laboriously chopping vegetables with my dull paring knives, did not appeal to me. And so I began my (shocking!) phase of food waste. You see, the only things I really felt comfortable making without a recipe were eggs, chili, rice, and pasta, which is a start but not necessarily inspiring. On top of that, I had it in my mind that salad was the ideal food for all humans, and so I’d periodically go to the supermarket and buy lettuce and other salad-related vegetables with the intention of eating them for dinner and then finding health and happiness. The problem was that I’ve never been someone who really craves salad very often, and so I never wanted to eat it. Instead I’d go buy a slice of pizza, thinking “tomorrow” about the salad, but unfortunately you can only say “tomorrow” to a head of lettuce for so long before it goes the way of all living things. And I felt bad about it – I mean, everyone knows wasting food is a shame – there are so many people out there who don’t have enough food, and it takes so much energy and water to produce food, that it just seems really sad to buy nice things and then let them rot. A true waste of resources all the way around.
There is a happy ending to this story, though. Over the past few years, I’ve grown more and more comfortable in the kitchen, in part because of sharper knives and more years of chopping and stirring under my belt. And while not so long ago I had an expensive addiction to take-out sushi that was hard to overcome, I’ve finally gotten to a point where I automatically make myself something to eat almost every night, even if that something is scrambled eggs. And in the process, I’ve gotten a much greater mastery over my personal struggle with food waste.
In light of my love of lunching out, I’m very proud to announce that I’ve been bringing lunch to work with me almost every day since January. I have to admit that it was mostly the thought of saving some cash that prompted me to do it, but I did have some other ideas in mind as well. For one thing, in the years that stand between me and my barbeque chicken phase, I read books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that made me think a lot harder about what I ate. I committed myself to buying most of my meat and produce from local sources: I wanted to support my community, I did not want to waste fuel by buying produce shipped from half-way around the world, and I did not want to finance feed-lot meat and poultry operations. It’s easy to shop with a conscience at the farmer’s market or natural foods store, but when you eat out every day it’s awfully hard to control where your food is coming from.
My conscience had also begun to nag me about another aspect of regularly buying my lunch: garbage. Gone are the days when “out to lunch” meant sitting at a counter or table for a half an hour and being served on flatware with stainless steel cutlery. As nice as this sounds to me, we now mostly eat at our desks, and buying our lunches creates all manner of leftovers: take-away bags, sandwich boxes, cellophane wrappings. Salads come in big plastic bowls, accompanied by plastic knives and forks. It’s a little daunting to think of the piles, and piles, and piles, of straight-up landfill garbage that this creates, and it amazes me how many wonderful people who care about the environment will toss all of this – along with a steady flow of paper cups and plastic bottles – into the trash bins under their desks day after day without a second thought. So it occurred to me, as I started virtuously packing my lunch in the morning this January, that I’m not only saving money. I’m also saving plenty of paper and plastic, and all the energy and water it takes to make them besides.
