The Joy of a Good Veggie Sandwich

I had a sandwich for lunch today that was... how can I describe it?  I mean, I'd show you a photo of it, but I bought it for lunch and had no idea it would be so delicious, I'd want to blog about it.  Next time I order one -- probably next week sometime -- I'll photograph it, and show you what you're missing. Instead, here's a photo of the 1880 Cafe by James, on the first floor of 1880 Century Park East, in Century City.  This is where the sandwich was made, anyway.

It was yummy.

I don't know why don't know why I'm going ga-ga over a sandwich. It is just a bunch of stuff roasted and packed between two slices of bread.   Okay, so it was a panini, which means that the bread was toasted to a nice light brown crisp. Yeah, alright, and the "stuff" that was slapped in the middle were roasted portobello mushrooms, roasted peppers, provolone, ripe tomato and pesto sauce.  And, if you're going to get completely picky and detail-oriented, the sandwich was served with yummy mixed greens and the house vinaigrette, which is nothing original, but is tasty nonetheless.

I think the panini took me by surprise because I truly never anticipated ordering it.  I've been on a self-destructive food path for a while now.  There's been an undercurrent of choosing food that is the most destructive and unhealthy that somehow has driven my food choices -- not all the time, but regularly enough that it has effected every aspect of my life.  I have wished to eat better, but I've been unable to apply that wish to my actual choices.

I started to listen to an audiobook two days ago called A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever, written and read by Marianne Williamson. This book has shaken my spiritual foundation to its core, but I'm not going to go into details at the moment. I've vowed that I am going to read this book and no other until I have full "grokked" it and absorbed it. Suffice it to say that, although I have miles and miles to go before I sleep, Williamson's message of healing the spiritual wounds that keep one fat is so deeply profound and applicable that with every lesson, I'm finding I'm making healthier and healthier options.

Hence the vegetarian panini and salad for lunch.  And the banana for dessert.

What? I didn't mention the banana? Sorry... I was blinded by grilled portobella mushrooms.

Food is for sustenance, enjoyment and nourishment. It is not to be used for sublimating feelings.

This is my lesson to be learned, so I can love food in a healthy way.

~C~

Passing It On: Cooking Through Generations

Helen, age 13

I never met my maternal grandmother, Helen. She died of lung cancer at the age of forty-two, when my mother was seventeen.  I did briefly meet my grandmother's mother, Freda, when I was seven, and she lay in a hospital bed, dying.  She had practically raised my mother, having left her own husband to "help" with the new baby (my mother), and "helping" until Helen's death.  Freda did most of the cooking in the house, so most of my mother's tremendous cooking skills were passed straight through from her. Freda's cooking skills and family recipes came from her own mother, Cristina, on the other hand, had immigrated from Bremen in Northern Germany, near the North Sea, in the mid-1870s.  I have no idea where Cristina was originally from, but I have a strong feeling it wasn't from Bremen, since many of her recipes were decidedly Tuscan -- especially the spaghetti sauce she passed on to Freda, that Freda passed on to my mother, that my mother passed on to me. Also, she spelled her name with a "C", rather than the customarily Teutonic "K". This leads me to believe that she might have been Italian, if not by birth, then by heritage.

Freda, in her wedding dress

My mother didn't spend much time teaching me how to cook. She was a working mother, busy and tired, and most of the time, it was just easier for her to do things herself.  But the two dishes my mother did pass on -- particularly because they were dishes that came from Cristina through Freda -- were the famous spaghetti or red sauce (which I have used as the basis for every Italian red sauce from lasagna to baked shells to spaghetti), and the Dish That Hath No Name (but which spent some time being referred to as the "sausage-pepper-potato thing", before it found it's more permanent name of "Kielbasa, Pepper, Onion and Potato stir-fry").

Cristina, in Germany

These are the only two dishes that survived the test of time because a) they were relatively easy and inexpensive to make, and they yielded a lot of helpings, and b) we liked them enough to keep wanting to cook them.  They've evolved somewhat, based mostly on the availability of produce in each generation. Peppers were the most ethereal ingredient. They do not grow well in cold, cloudy climes and once picked, require refrigeration to stay fresh for any length of time.  Peppers were rumored to have been part of my great-great-grandmother's version, but once she arrived in eastern Pennsylvania, where I reckon peppers were a rare commodity, she replaced them with root vegetables. My great-grandmother split the difference, using parsnips and peppers at one point. My mother took the dish to a whole new level by eliminating root vegetables altogether and getting back to peppers -- this time, in the lovely red, orange and yellow hues we have come to know and love today.

I hope that my addition to the dish continues to make it new and better. I figure people have messed with the vegetables long enough. I decided that the kielbasa needed a little help, so I chop up a slice of bacon into bits and use the fat to help brown the sausage, then deglaze the pan to cook the veggies in.  I am pretty sure this is an improvement, if for not other reason than... hey... it's bacon....

The weather dropped today to below 65 degrees and that means it's time for two things -- close-toed shoes and the kielbasa stir-fry.  This weekend, I'll be making it for the first time in several months. I can only hope to do my ancestors proud.

~C~

Just so we're clear here....

"Thanksgiving" by Norman Rockwell
first published as cover of The Literary Digest
November 22, 1919

There is NO such thing as "healthy, low-fat Thanksgiving dinner."   Wait... I take that back... you can have a healthy Thanksgiving by taking all the necessary sanitation precautions of refrigeration, separate surfaces for meat and veggie food preparation and making sure all food is cooked to proper temperature.  You know, so that no one dies of ptomaine poisoning or salmonella.  Guests appreciate that kind of healthy cooking.  What they don't appreciate is your decision to cook everything vegan, because "we've been eating a lot of meat lately, and we thought we'd try something new."  Don't. Don't try something new.  Not for Thanksgiving.

If you're not up to making dinner, don't make dinner. Let's all go to the Smokehouse in Burbank -- they serve a killer-ass traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. While the rest of us are happily engaged in the consumption of buttery mashed potatoes and savory walnut stuffing,  you can indulge your desire to experiment with a meat-free holiday all you want by ordering a salad.  We'll try not to rub it in.

But if you're in charge of my holiday menu -- as you must be if you've agreed to host it -- you'd better get pretty damn traditional, pretty damn quick.

And another thing -- while we're on the topic... What's up with the nouvelle Thanksgiving cooking? If I find a Vietnamese water chestnut within 200 yards of my Thanksgiving dinner, I'm calling Paula Deen, and SOMEBODY'S gonna get a stern talking to. My daughter still relates the story of how she attended Thanksgiving at her cousin's house. It was the first year the cousin and her husband hosted a holiday dinner for the whole family. They decided they were going to introduce the family to all kinds of new ethnically and culturally diverse recipes, few of which resembled anything traditionally associated with Thanksgiving. I guess they wanted to broaden the family's culinary horizons. It was the last holiday dinner my daughter (or, I believe, her father) attended at their house.  So the first holiday dinner quietly became the last. Sad, too, since, had she just been hosting a dinner party, her dishes might have been wildly popular. They sounded tasty when my daughter described them. Just not very in keeping with the season. When it comes to holidays, particularly Thanksgiving, people don't want new and exciting.  They want old and familiar.

Don't misunderstand -- I think serving new side dishes for Thanksgiving is a wonderful thing.  I myself have toyed with the idea of bringing some maple-soaked roasted butternut squash to the festivities, just because we've never had it, and it might be a tasty treat.  But maple and butternut squash are not exactly exotic flavors where Thanksgiving is concerned. And my holiday hostess is supplying our traditional family favorites -- including a green bean casserole concoction we got tired of referring to as "the green bean thingy" and finally dubbed "Cyril" -- in addition to new and different things.  Why? Because she's been at this for a lot of years. She knows what makes it feel like Thanksgiving.  It's the company, yes. But it's also the food. The familiar smells and tastes of food you only eat once a year.  Do you know how many roast turkeys I've had in my life? I'd tell you, but then you'd be able to guess my exact age, because I've had approximately one a year since I was two.  Now, ask me how many times this week I've eaten sushi.  Get my point?  Good.

So, the next time you're tempted to "help" your guests by foregoing traditional stuffing because "carbs are just so fattening," call us all up and tell us not to come over. Tell us you've lost your mind this year, and we'll all be eating at the Smokehouse for Thanksgiving.  That way, we won't have to hate you, and say "no, thank you" to your holiday invitations for the next twenty years.

Feed me new and interesting foods any other time of the year. On the fourth thursday of November, we'll brook none of your shenanigans.

~C~

GATHERING AROUND THE FIRE PIT

“All good parties end up in the kitchen.”

Lin White 

(1934 – 1999)

Opera director, party connoisseur, my fairy godmother

My godmother, Lin White, used to say that all good parties end up in the kitchen. A notorious party-giver, she was an opera director who threw at least two scheduled parties for every production – the opening night party and the closing night party – and then several impromptu gatherings in between, as she invited cast and crew, audience members, and family back to her house after rehearsals for a bite to eat and some wine.

Whether the gathering was formal or improvised, Linny’s parties always ended up in her kitchen. Even when it was a tiny, ranch-style kitchen, by the beginning of the second hour, at least five people would be huddled tightly in the cramped kitchen, around Linny’s warm oven, drinking wine, picking at whatever had failed to make it as far as the bar or the buffet set up on the dining room table. A sad, brief experiment in trying to thwart this was attempted when her husband installed swinging saloon doors to separate the kitchen from the rest of the living area. They lasted around two years, before they finally got so sufficiently abused by the constant influx of foot traffic that they were removed for good.

Linny’s kitchen was where we wanted to be. We preferred it if Linny were there, too, but her presence was too much to hope for when she gave a party, as she was careful to circulate and mingle, and sitting down seemed to violate her most basic spiritual tenets. But we were content with the company of each other, around a warm stove, waiting for the next hors d’oeuvres, or the next bit of salad, or even picking the scraps at the foil where the chicken wings had just been baked.

Why are we always drawn into the kitchens of our successful hosts and hostesses? What is it about the casual easiness of leaning against a kitchen cabinet, drinking a too-warm glass of wine because the bar is a little too far away to bother with the walk.

Some anthropologists believe that it is a vestigial part of our evolution. In the Lower Paleolithic era, naked, spindly hominids stood little chance of survival on an open, unguarded savanna and only managed to conquer it with the advent of one essential, life-preserving substance – fire. We sought out the shelter of caves and crevices where we could take cover and only have to maintain a watch over one hundred eighty degrees of our landscape, rather than the whole three-sixty. The addition of fire brought even more comfort by providing warmth, and spooking big animals that might be consider stealing our dinner – or, worse, making us their dinner. Man’s mastery over fire began to shape how humans developed, culturally, linguistically, socially and evolutionarily.

We stopped being a pack and became more of a tribe. We gathered at night around a fire, cooked and ate the days kill, developed language and storytelling, learned to create art on the walls of caves, cared for the sick and elderly, allowed others to care for our young (something a chimp mother would never allow), and developed smaller teeth and shorter digestive tracks. We groomed and huddled and conversed and shared in a way that no other animal does with its kin. We stayed together and helped each other raise our incredibly helpless infants. We cared not only for our children, but for the children of our tribe-mates, as if they were our own. Adoption is not unheard of in other large primate groups, yet it is far rarer and more deadly for a chimp or gorilla infant to be placed in the arms of a female not its mother. Chimp mothers usually carry their infants in arms for nearly twice as long as humans, though chimp babies learn to walk in half the time as their human counterparts. Soon, our teeth, our builds and our digestive tracts adapted to eating cooked meat, and our fate as fire gatherers was sealed.

Our propensity for seeking out and gathering with our kin around the warm, protective comfort of the fire to eat and talk and care for each other persists. That is why all good parties end up in the kitchen. Because the food we make there, the warmth and the casual atmosphere of working and preparing, brings us together. The backyard barbeque was perfected specifically so that humans could return themselves to a time when we cooked our kill over an open flame, while gathering together and sharing our gathered sustenance, good talk about weighty matters (where did we last see that heard of mastodons, anyway?), and care for each other and the young ones.  Is it a conscious gathering? Who knows? But it seems fairly universal, for even the non-cooks in a group will gravitate to where the food is.  Most non-drinkers can stay away from the bar, but rarely can a dieting non-cook stay out of a warm kitchen during a cozy party.

~C~

Please, Not While We're Eating

To say that my mother and I had a contentious relationship is a masterpiece of wild understatement. When I was small, we were quite close. My father was largely absent and she was, for all intents and purposes, a single mother. She was my world.

Beautiful, brilliant and creative, she had come to Los Angeles with the touring company of a fairly successful Broadway play, and stayed when the run of the play was over.  Unfortunately, while she was a working actress in New York, she found that Los Angeles was a different game altogether -- one she never was able to master.  After a few spots on The Phil Silvers Show, she never seemed to be able to land a professional acting role again, and was forced to take a job as first a secretary, then as a full-charge bookkeeper. These were jobs that paid the bills and supported us, but they didn't harness her astounding energy, or help her in expressing herself creatively. Life in Los Angeles proved an exercise in frustration and failure for her. A bad relationship with my father and an unplanned pregnancy (you're lookin' at her), and that pretty much sealed my mother's fate.

As I entered my teens, we began to bicker, then argue, then fight. It didn't take long for our fights to turn physical. This shocked me, because while I'd received the occasional swat on the seat as a small child, my mother had never really spanked me. By the time I was fifteen, our fights when from yelling to beating in 6.2 seconds.  It destroyed our relationship, and because she became chronically ill when I was in my mid-teens, then died when I was thirty-one, we never fully reconciled.

Still, there was one time of day that I could count on relative peace in the house. Mealtime. My mother was a working mother who was stressed and miserable and overwhelmed. But she made dinner every night, and we ate dinner at the table, together. Sometimes, she'd turn on the news and we'd watch Walter Cronkite together. Sometimes, we'd sit and talk. We might have been screaming at each other only moments before dinner was served. I might have been lying on my bedroom floor while she beat me repeatedly.

Still, dinnertime rules of engagement were clear. At the table, you spoke in civil tones and discussed civil things. At dinner, things were nice and calm. We behaved like ladies and gentlemen at the table, not like low-class swine.  We saved the low-class swine behavior for after dinner. This is where I learned that dinner could be my salvation. Sometimes -- often time -- the time spent being civil at dinner made my mother forget her anger, and the rest of the evening would be peaceful coexistence. Food was the thing that soothed her savage breast. She was my teacher -- not in cooking, but in food and all of its detriments and benefits.

I've been struggling with my ambivalence toward food ever since. This blog is my therapy -- my way of coming to grips with my love/hate/lovelovelove relationship with food.


You'll find that, here on this blog, I will resist the temptation to use the phrase "addiction" or "food addict".  I wish not to be misunderstood here. I believe that food is as much a potential drug as alcohol, sex or gambling. It's just as cunning, just as baffling. But in reality, unlike the other addictions, technically speaking, we're all addicted to food. If you don't believe me, try giving it up cold turkey, and see if you don't go through some really nasty withdrawals. Unlike sex addicts or gamblers, I can't stay away from my addiction. I still have to find a way to walk that tiger three or four times a day, if I'm going live to tell my tale.

I have been trying to stay away from fast food, since I think that most fast food companies are trying to kill us.* But I also began to become obsessed with cooking shows. I blame Rachel Ray for this, as it was on her mainstream morning show, where she prepares a quick meal in the last segment. I have a whole theory as to why Rachel Ray is a gateway to stronger, more addictive cooking shows, but that's really a subject for another post. For now, I'll say only that, eventually, I progressed to Giada at Home, to Alton's Good Eats, and to Ina's Barefoot Contessa.

Along the way, I discovered that, for me, much of my food addiction could actually be assuaged with the process of cooking. If I concentrated on what I was doing, I could make the entire experience rather zen and calming. Cooking and food have gone from being my enemy to being my oasis and refuge. Writing is hard, there is no roadmap, and there is absolutely no instant gratification to it.  Cooking is hard, too. But you get a recipe, which is a roadmap, and if you follow it carefully, and enjoy the process of the journey, in a fairly short period of time, you get to sit down to a lovely meal that includes all the foods you love.

Times are hard now, for me and for my family. Things are uncertain and a little unstable. We have amazing moments of joy and deep moments of anxiety and depression. But dinner has, once again, become a salvation, at least for me.  It keeps me sane, which keeps me from driving everyone else crazy. Just as it did with my mother.

Not that I'm like my mother mind you.

Look... Just have a seat at the table, and I'll try and explain it all to you. Given enough time, I'm sure we'll figure this voyage out. But I warn you -- mind your manners. I have my eye on you. Yeah, you... over there.  I see you're up to no good.

All I have to say to you is... Please... not while we're eating.

~Catharine~

*In the interest of full disclosure, your intrepid author was in the midst of typing that asterisked sentence when her daughter (you'll meet her later) and her boyfriend decided to take a quick run to MacDonald's.  I finished typing this blog post in between bites of a Big N Tasty. It was big. And tasty. So sue me.