An Innocent In Coffeeland

For years, although I liked nothing better than a good, strong cup of coffee, I drank instant coffee at home.

Then, for a long time, I gave up coffee along with dairy, wheat, and sugar, and lived mainly on weak tea, green vegetables, and will power.  One thing I clung to, however, was a glass or two of wine in the evenings, but during my recent bout of shingles I had to give that up as well, because of the narcotic pain meds.  And when it was over I thought I'd see if continuing to abstain from wine would have a positive effect on my health.

But I cannot forgo all worldly pleasures, so I decided to compensate for the absence of alcohol by letting coffee back into my life.  And this time it wouldn't be Nescafe, but real coffee.

I didn't know much about making coffee, but I disliked the taste of over-boiled coffee, and didn't want yet another electrical appliance cluttering my counter.  I wanted to make coffee by a simple method,with a beautiful implement.

From what I could see on the internet, the pour-over method seemed the most direct--you put some grounds in a filter and poured hot water over them.  And you could make it in a Chemex.  Chemex pots look like they came from a chemistry lab staffed by Italian designers.  They have an hourglass shape and wear an elegant wooden belt around their waist.  They have been enthroned at MOMA as exemplars of contemporary kitchen sculpture.  I wanted one.

The only problem was that the Chemex requires a disposable filter that is not sold in supermarkets.  That, and the idea of throwing out a filter every day of my life put me off the Chemex, despite its beauty.  But wait!  It turned out that a tiny company in Seattle--where else?--was makinga  permanent filter for the Chemex.  Unfortunately, it cost $90.

But the ever helpful spirits of the internet, who had figured out what I wanted without my ever having told them, came up with a Japanese variation of the Chemex, a Hario, that used a cloth filter.  It even had a wooden belt around its waist, and although the cloth filter looked like it would be a pain to clean I was ready to put a Hario in my virtual basket.

Before hitting "buy," however, I thought I should check exactly what the pour-over method involved.  I found a number of videos featuring solemn guys in aprons officiating at altar-like counters.  On the counters were arranged the ritual vessels and implements of  the pour-over method, which I learned was the purest, most artistic way of making coffee, and the one allowing the officiant a maximum of individual expression.

The objects on the counter were:  a tiny digital scale, a grinder, a digital timer, a filter, a cup, and a kettle.  Having ground and weighed the precise amount of coffee, the instructor put it in the filter and turned on the kettle.  But not just any kettle. The right kettle had a skinny s-shaped spout to allow him to pour the water over the grounds in the proper way.

This pouring was the most sacred part of the ritual.  Once the water was boiling, he turned the kettle off and let it rest while, with his index finger, he made a hole in the middle of the grounds.  He picked up the kettle and carefully poured a little water into the hole, letting the grounds "bloom."  He set the timer for exactly three minutes and, starting at the center of the grounds, slowly poured the water in an outward spiral motion, timing it so the last drop would come out as the timer bell dinged.  He removed the filter, took a sip, closed his eyes and all but genuflected.

I thought I could dispense with the scale and the timer, and I already owned a grinder, but clearly I would have to invest in one of those swan-neck kettles.  After another hunt for the ideal conjunction of function, looks and economy I purchased one, made in China but with a vaguely Italian name.  And then I was ready to buy the Hario coffee pot with the cloth filter.

But at the last moment my personal shoppers in the ether offered up yet another possibility:  a Hario pot with a plastic mesh filter that would be much simpler to clean than the cloth one.  Unfortunately, this pot was nothing much to look at--no hourglass figure, no adorable wooden belt.  Exhausted by my search, I put aesthetics aside and bought it.

It should be obvious to you by now that the kettle and the pot have arrived and I have become a priestess of the pour-over coffee-brewing method:  the sun isn't up yet, and look what a long post I've written.

Good Bread And How To Make It

After my recent post lamenting the decline of bread as a wholesome food, Jaimie sent me a link to a website that offers an older, healthier variety of wheat. 

I then searched for local sources of this flour and didn't find any.  But I did find a Vermont farmer who produces organic stone-ground flour from hard red winter wheat.  Bread purists say that the only way to make good bread is to grind your own flour, but since I neither own a grinder nor can deal with the minimum purchase of 50 lbs of wheat berries at the farm, I compromised by driving 40 minutes (which is as nothing around here) to a co-op that sells this flour in bulk.

I scooped what looked to me like fifteen pounds--after all, winter's on the way--into a plastic bag and came home and put it in the fridge.  The next day I looked up some recipes and stumbled upon one in Countryside Magazine (unfortunately I cannot find it again on their website without signing up for something or other) that looked reasonably easy.  Here is my version:

Put 3 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour into a bowl and add 2 tablespoons brown sugar (next time I'll try honey instead), 2 teaspoons salt and 2 teaspoons yeast.  Mix well.

Add 2 tablespoons coconut oil or butter (I used coconut oil, but will try olive oil with the next batch) to 1 1/2 cups of water that's been heated to 100F-120F.  When the fat has melted, pour liquid into the flour and mix. Add one egg.  Mix well and gradually add another cup or so of flour until the dough reaches the right consistency for kneading. 

Knead, in the bowl or on a floured board, for ten minutes (the recipe says to knead it in a mixer, but where's the fun of that?).

Put the dough in a greased bowl, turn it to grease all sides, cover it with a cloth and let it rise in a warm spot for about an hour.  Then punch it down, divide it into two loaves and place them into greased loaf pans.  Cover and let rise for one to two hours.

Bake the loaves at 350F for about half an hour.  Then let them cool in the pans for about ten minutes.  Remove the loaves and finish cooling them on wire racks.

Although this is nothing like the crusty bread of my childhood, it is sweet and nutty, easy to slice and surprisingly light, considering that it's made with 100% whole wheat. I froze one loaf and made some inroads into the other.

The bad news?  I gained a pound.

When Did Bread Become Bad?

It used to be the staff of life.  Now, you'd think it was the staff of death.

If the latter is true, it's a miracle that I survived my Barcelona childhood, for my days were punctuated by slices of bread.  Bread and butter for breakfast and, after school, bread and chocolate, or pa sucat amb oli--bread drizzled with olive oil.  And bread with lunch and dinner.

I can still hear my mother's serrated knife cutting into the brittle crust as crumbs exploded everywhere.  The pale yellow and gray tiles of the dining room floor had to be swept after every meal.  But before that, as my parents and my aunts lingered over a dessert of almonds, oranges, or dried figs I would lick my index finger and press it into the little shards of crust on the tablecloth and eat crumbs until only flour dust remained.

When we moved to the land of Dixie in the late 50s, the supermarket shelves only stocked variations on Wonder Bread, and my father used to say, wrinkling his nose at the floppy white square in his hand, "this bread--it's like eating a piece of towel!"  There were no crumbs to sweep up after those meals.

Me, I even kind of liked Wonder Bread, but then, in the 1970s, when my children were young and I was trying with all my might to do the right thing, I found a recipe for whole-wheat bread that was supposed to be healthy and nutritious.  For years I spent Sunday afternoons baking six-loaf batches, which I would then slice with an electric meat slicer and freeze.  That bread was nothing like the crusty Catalan bread of my childhood, and my kids were embarrassed to take it to school in their lunch boxes, but it was sweet, nutty and robust and oh, how the kitchen smelled on Sunday afternoons.

The downfall of bread began shortly after that.  First, we were told that it was fattening;  then there was concern that its carbohydrate load would cause hypoglycemia;  and finally, millions of people developed wheat allergies that ranged from annoying to life-threatening.

I was one of the many who developed a sensitivity to wheat, and for a year I abstained from it altogether, a sacrifice compared to which giving up cigarettes in my twenties was a snap.  Now I can eat wheat, as long as I don't eat too much, or too often.

I come from generations of bread eaters.  True, they didn't grow nearly as tall as milk-and-meat-fed Americans, but they were healthy enough, and not a single one was obese.  So what has changed?   Did the old varieties of wheat have something that the new ones don't, or vice versa?   Have our bodies evolved away from this most basic of foods?

These days I hardly ever eat bread, for where is the pleasure in eating only a little and not too often?  If I have to monitor every bite, I'd just as soon do with no bites at all.  But still, I mourn the absence of bread from my life.

I may some day look into the matter of wheat varieties, and see if there are any that are less noxious than others.  And if there are, I know how I'll be spending my Sunday afternoons.

What's Left To Eat?

Every few months a new item is added to the list of Foods That Can Kill.  Here are some of the ones that come to mind:

--Salt, because it gives you high blood pressure.
--Sugar, because it is as lethal and addictive as heroin, and, unlike heroin, makes you fat.
--Fat.
--Dairy, because it causes phlegm and inflammation and makes you fat.  Plus, you're consuming all the hormones and antibiotics the cows were given to keep them at maximum production.
--Soy, because it is estrogenic, and estrogen is linked to cancer.
--Eggs, because they have cholesterol, and are allergenic.  (And you don't even want to think about the conditions of the poor hens in egg factories.)
--Wheat, because it is allergenic, causes inflammation, and makes you fat.
--Fish, because it contains mercury.
--Meat, because it clogs your arteries and makes you fat.  (And you don't even want to think about the conditions of chickens, pigs and cattle in factory farms.)
--Apples, because they are sprayed with some of the worst pesticides in existence.  (BTW, have you ever checked the price of organic apples?)

And on and on.  (Notice that I have only included non-processed foods on this list.)

But until last week, in the ever-expanding desert of dietary choices there was one food that you could always count on.  It was cheap, easily available, nutritious, non-fattening, bland, harmless, and user-friendly.  It was accepted without complaint by little children, snarky adolescents, and adult foodies alike, not to mention dogs.  It was rice. 

Now it turns out that under those glistening grains rice harbors arsenic, a well-known poison that is linked to various cancers.  Even organic brown rice, which I used to serve several times a week because it was so much better for us than potatoes, pasta or couscous, carries the stuff.

Rice is, of course, a long way from being taken off the grocery shelves.  We're supposed to eat it, like everything else, in moderation--whatever that means.  Pediatricians are recommending that parents serve babies rice cereal a maximum of once a week.  But who wants to give a baby even a tiny bit of arsenic every week?

Rinsing rice prior to cooking, I'm told, will wash away some of the arsenic.  Words cannot express how much better that makes me feel....

P Is For Pesto

P is for Pesto, which makes all things palatable--even kale.

I have gone on at length before about the industrial quantities of kale that each year burst forth from a single 4'x4' bed.  I should count myself lucky.  Nutritionists adore kale, richest of all foods in vitamins, minerals, and the moral satisfaction that comes from eating what is good for you.

But, nutritionists aside, I haven't met many people--and nobody under age 35--who like kale.  I haven't even succeeded in talking myself into liking it, not even enhanced with that all-purpose enhancer, bacon.  Not even made into cream soup.  Nothing, not a long boil, or my blender, or my teeth, is able to break down the mighty cellulose in those cell walls.  At best, kale's flavor reminds me of inferior broccoli.  And yet kale keeps on growing, spring through fall, undeterred by frost or wind.

Undeterred by bugs, too.  Squash bugs destroy the squash;  the caterpillars of the white cabbage butterfly devastate the broccoli.  But nothing, not even Japanese beetles, goes near the kale.  What does that tell you?  But I should amend that:  Wolfie and Bisou love kale.  Every afternoon Wolfie breaks off a couple of leaves, gives one to Bisou, and I can hear them out there crunching on the stuff.  I think they think the leaves are a kind of bone.

But my relationship with kale changed the happy day when I heard about kale pesto.  With the help of massive amounts of garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and Parmesan, kale becomes a barely-there vehicle for those infinitely superior flavors.  A vehicle full of vitamins and yes, moral satisfaction too.  Who says that virtue has to taste bad?

Some Recipes I've Abandoned

I got married in August of 1967, so I must have cooked my first-ever meal that September, my skin still mahogany brown from my honeymoon tan.  Those early meals took a lot out of me.  My full load of graduate courses was a snap compared to the challenge of putting varied, colorful, nutritious and economical dishes before my brand-new husband for lunch and dinner every single day.

These meals, both lunch and dinner, included dessert (we had tiger-like metabolisms).  Once I tried to make a cake to celebrate the end of finals.  The recipe said to cook the icing to the "hard ball stage,"  which I interpreted to mean that all the icing ingredients had to be cooked until they became a hard ball....

Here are some of my early adventures in cooking, now mercifully discarded:

1.  Tuna casserole.  This was probably the first dish I mastered, made with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup and enhanced with a sprinkling of crumbled potato chips on top.  I still make it, but with bechamel instead of canned soup, organic whole-wheat noodles, lots of veggies and, needless to say, no potato chips.  It takes longer to make and doesn't taste as fabulous as the original, but then, I don't get as hungry as I once did.

2.  California dip--the ur food of graduate-school parties.  You mix half a pint of sour cream with an envelope of onion soup mix, grab a bag of potato chips (left over from the tuna topping) and go put on your long hostess gown.

3.  Jello.  I used to give it to my kids as a kind of healthy dessert.  Being an enlightened parent, I used a  recipe that called for twice the amount of jello powder and resulted in a stiff, psychedelic, bone-building snack that a toddler could hold in her hand, thus saving the aggravation of spoon and bowl.

4.  Peanut butter balls.  You mixed peanut butter, honey (because of the enlightenment factor), and dry powdered milk until you got a stiff mixture that could be formed into balls.  You rolled these in powdered sugar and fed them to your offspring.

5.  Chicken livers in sour cream.  My husband used to love these over rice, and they were cheap, too.  But we didn't know that they were toxic.

6.  Chicken friccasee, another spouse favorite.  It involved browning chicken pieces in Crisco, then putting them in the pressure cooker along with bacon and cream.  More poison.

7.  Dark steaks.  We discovered that our supermarket, where we could never afford any meat fancier than ground beef, would sell us their slightly darkened steaks at ground-beef prices.  I knew from my European upbringing that dark meat is infinitely preferable to the bright red still-warm-from-the-animal sort.  We got so that we grilled only filet mignon, and relegated cuts like T-bones to humble dishes such as soups and stews.  This spoiled ordinary beef for me forever:  I haven't eaten a steak in thirty years, and can only tolerate ground beef if it is well disguised with onions, mushrooms, and red wine.

8.  Fish sticks.  The only reason I can conceive for eating these is that fresh fish was not readily available in Southern supermarkets in those days.  And a toddler could pick up a fish stick with her hand (one without ketchup on it) and eat it all by herself.

(Fish sticks, jello fingers, endless boxes of Cheerios..a lot of what we ate in our early married days had to do with what a toddler could manage on her own.)

9.  Ice cream.  I served this with a clear conscience, and not just on special occasions.  It is the one item on this list that I really miss.

I'd love to know some that recipes you've abandoned.

The Art Of Chewing

We had our monthly winter salon here yesterday.  I woke up to an unexpected white-out, but  at 2 p.m. the sun came out and nine of us sat in front of the stove to hear an herbalist/nutrionist/healer talk about that hallowed rite of spring:  the fast.

I was left full of admiration for those who, our speaker among them, can go for a week or ten days with no food, only water.  But where fasting is concerned, my admiration comes easily--I'm impressed by a juice fast, a brown-rice fast, a green-veggies fast, or a mere day-long fast.

If I ever go on a fast, of whatever kind, I'm going to need all the help I can get.  I envision a retreat in a monastery, elegant and Shaker-like, where, clad in robes of unbleached organic cotton, my fellow fasters and I would take meditative walks, maybe do a bit of chanting, and be protected from the sight and smell of all things edible.

One thing our speaker said made a particular impression on me:  the importance of chewing food slowly and thoroughly.  I was familiar with the concept in the context of weight loss:  if you eat slowly, your stomach has a chance to send satiety signals to your brain, which enables you to stop eating sooner.  But our speaker went more deeply into the effects of chewing.  Digestion begins in the mouth, with salivary enzymes, so that when the food reaches the stomach it is more thoroughly and easily assimilated.  Plus there is something about the act of mastication that stimulates the production of endorphins, so that not only do you feel full, but you feel cheerful, too.

My mother was an enthusiastic proponent of thorough chewing.  "Chew it well!"  she would admonish as she filled my plate with paella.  She probably got that way as a result of watching me, from the age of four weeks, bolt down my food.

As a newborn, I cried non stop.  My  mother was having difficulties nursing me, and it wasn't until my veterinarian grandfather came to visit when I was a month old, picked me up and declared me seriously underweight that things took a turn for the better.  I was put on a diet of semi-solid pablum, which was fed to me with a spoon.  Or rather, two spoons, by two people.

I've been told that I was so ferociously hungry that, in the time it took to refill the spoon, I would fly into a rage, choke, and throw up.  My mother had to recruit one of her sisters as assistant feeder, so that the gruel could flow into my mouth without interruption.
 
I'm not sure whether my early relationship with food is responsible for my bad chewing habits, but I have never been a thorough chewer, and my stomach has had to deal with improperly processed contributions on a daily basis for decades.  But that is about to change.  It's not the promise of a slimmer, better-nourished me that has converted me to thorough chewing.  It's the promise of cheerfulness.  Forget slim, forget healthy--I'll do anything for joie de vivre.
 
All day long today I've been taking tiny bites of food and chewing each one about a million times.  In fact, as I write, I have a peanut in my mouth.  I have been chewing that same peanut for the last four paragraphs...and my mood is excellent.

Nutrition And Me

For breakfast this morning, I ate an egg.  It used to be you couldn't eat eggs, because they were full of cholesterol and they would clog up your arteries and you would die young.  But now eggs are fine--an excellent source of protein and omega-3 oils and other good things.  So I'm eating eggs again.

I put salt on my egg , too.  For a while in the 80s salt was considered a killer, so I banished it from my cooking.  I even found a way to make bread without using salt, and wrote an article about how to do this (it isn't easy).  It turns out, however, that a no-salt diet is terrible for people with low blood pressure, especially for people with CFS and low blood pressure, so now I'm back to salting my food.

I cooked my egg in olive oil.  Olive oil is the ultimate soul food for me. It is also pure fat, and my collection of non-stick pans attests to my fat-free period, sometime in the 90s, brought on by the Zeitgeist notion that you could eat just about anything without gaining weight (even cookies, especially cookies) as long as you steered clear of fat.

In addition to the egg, I had a small bowl of oatmeal.  Oatmeal is loaded with carbs, of course.  I lost a ton of weight back in the 70s on a practically-no-carb diet.  I remember going into ketosis (a good thing, according to the diet book) and buying a whole new wardrobe. I also remember experiencing some savage food cravings.  I know better now, of course, and have welcomed carbohydrates back into my diet.

As I sweetened my oatmeal with a little Vermont maple syrup--pure sugar, you know--I thought back to those grim days (was it in the 80s or 90s?) when, cowed by the fear of hypoglycemia and obesity, I eliminated sweetness from my life. 

Having finished breakfast, I poured my daily regimen of vitamins and supplements into a pill box, and it struck me how the contents of that little box had changed over the years. They used to include megadoses of C (eventually proven to be ineffective against colds), later a good dollop of E (but no more, since it's supposed to be bad for you), also some gingko capsules (which we now know do nothing for memory), and I've forgotten what else.

Although my supplement list is pretty pared down these days, I do add some Vitamin D--the vitamin that our naked ancestors following game all day on the savanna got plenty of.  The vitamin that we, slathered in sunscreen, swathed in synthetic fabrics and imprisoned indoors by our computers year round, are pathetically  deficient in.

I usually listen to NPR's Morning Edition during breakfast, have been doing so for years.  That is where I get a lot of my knowledge about which substance to banish from my diet and which to welcome back like a nutritional prodigal son. 

Today, no sooner had I doled out my dose of Vitamin D than I heard a reporter say that research has shown that recent claims that we need Vitamin D supplementation in doses as high as 4,000 i.u./day are fallacious and misleading.  We might need, the new research indicates, at most one tenth of that.

Feeling foolish, I put my D capsules back in the bottle.  But I did not throw them away.

I'm keeping them for the day when somebody in a lab somewhere determines that megadoses of Vitamin D are in fact the key to vibrant health.  I just hope that my sound nutritional practices enable me to live until then.