Whats Fa Dinna?

This Thursday I am packing up all my things in a truck and moving back to upstate NY. Hudson, NY to be specific. I have spent the last several months making the decision to leave NYC, but the details weren’t firm until just a few weeks ago. A big part of my decision to leave the city has to do with food and eating and my ability to care for my body in a serious way while living the life here.

A lot of my calories in NYC are consumed in a hurried, unintentional way- a bagel here, a slice of pizza, a paper cup of coffee, always walking somewhere or on the train, always on the go. I consider it a luxury to sit down to eat, either at home or away. An even greater luxury to sit down with my morning coffee. It gets on my nerves. But thinking of this, I also think of the things I won’t be doing upstate- sitting at the counter in Veselka having borscht on a rainy night, stopping into a bahn mi (Vietnamese hoagie) shop on my lunch hour, eating samosas out of a paper bag before a show, getting brunch in the garden at Life Cafe with 10 people the morning after a party. I won’t have the world’s weirdest grocery store on the corner, I’ll have to get into a car and go shopping when I have a solid hour to do it.

I’ve also been preoccupied with local food availability- New York City has very few things that are truly locally grown. Most “local” foods come from the Hudson Valley, where I’ll be lucky enough to live in a few days. I have some connections to farms in the area, and would like to make more. I want to be involved in food, from the dirt to mouth, every day, professionally and personally.

And on top of that, I need to get my health back. I have spent my years since college living with chronic pain, infections, allergies, thyroid dysfunction, and all manner of complaints that no 25 year old person should have. So I’m focusing a lot on changing the way I eat food to be healthier, safer, more local, more sustainable, and most importantly, more enjoyable and more delicious. I want eating to be a pleasure I look forward to each day in a real way that helps my body work right.

So as an exercise for myself, and perhaps to inspire you to the same, I’m making a resolutions list for the way I want to eat in my new location. I’m sure it can be done anywhere. It’s just a good time to start.

(By the way, none of this applies if someone is cooking for me. I would never turn down home-cooked food, unless it was kidneys or something.)

-Eat at least two meals a day seated, off of dishes with metal forks and spoons,  at a table or in some other suitable eating place.

-Eat 3 different kinds of vegetables each day. Purchase organic and local vegetables whenever possible.

-Eat local, organic meats, whenever possible.

-Use a full spectrum of grain foods.

-Eat pastries, cookies, cakes, ice cream, and other sweets only when they are homemade or artisanally made, and no corn syrup.

-Drink soda and sweet drinks only on special occasions. Lots of iced tea, booch, sorrel and fresh juice instead.

-Always carry water.

-Keep my home cooking planned 3 days ahead. As in, I have at least 3 days worth of healthy food and veggies at home ready to cook. That way there won’t be any “oh shit I am so hungry I am just gonna eat some hot dogs and microwave popcorn” nights.

-Host dinners and potlucks regularly to make eating homemade food easier and more fun for everyone. And try everyone’s cooking.

-Cook for visiting musicians and other guests whenever possible. This was one of my favorite parts of being a show booker in college and I have missed properly hosting guests with a good meal while living in NYC.

-Use time as an excuse as little as possible. There is always time to eat well and make good things. It’s the most important thing.

(UPDATE: This post never got posted. I’ve been living in Hudson for 2 months now. And haven’t really implemented all of these ideas. Alas! More on Hudson Valley eats coming right up…)

I am off the wagon. I think it’s time I officially come clean about it.

Since spring of 2003 I have considered myself a vegetarian, and have eschewed meat of all sorts, making occasional exceptions for fish. I “cheated” a few times (a bite of salami from an xmas cheese plate, a bite of a corndog at Coney Island, etc.) but have largely maintained a vegetarian, and sometimes vegan, diet. I have lived in four vegetarian/vegan households, worked in two vegetarian kitchens, and collected vegetarian cookbooks.

I have also reamed out countless friends, peers and family members in various ways for eating meat. Well this is it, folks! The moment you’ve all been waiting for.  I’m off the wagon, big time.

I could blame it on reading this book, which reframed my inner dialogue about industrial food consumption in general. Or on my summer spent at a sustainable organic farm enjoying the smells of various manures wafting in from yonder meadow, the squeals of contented piggies fat for the slaughter bringing me back to our collective fantasyland of responsible animal husbandry. Or on the shock and emotional trauma of moving to the city/moving apartments/breakup/discovery of chronic health problem which colored my fall and early winter. Or on continual pressure from loved ones, including my happily ex-vegetarian brother and stepbrother.

But who am I kidding? Bacon is freaking delicious. So is a turkey sandwich. So is pepperoni pizza. So are corndogs, goddammit. And pork roll. (Please, take a moment to educate yourself about my hometown’s signature processed meat product, Pork Roll.)

 And charcuterie, and fried chicken, and sausages, and kielbasa, and oxtail butternut squash gniocci from Swoon. And those slices of roast pork in the ramen.

So, yeah, I’ve eaten all that stuff.  And then some. AndI’m loving it. No burgers or steak or MacDoh for me, but I am totally not a vegetarian anymore.

Sorry to my comrades who might see me as a traitor. I am not all that sorry really.

Sorry to the animals I’ve eaten- I still feel ya.  But I’m only human, after all.

Last night one of my new fabulous roommates cooked some delicious casserole to fuel our karaoke outing. It was comprised of pasta, mushrooms, zucchini, corn, cheddar cheese, cream of potato soup, and topped with American cheese slices and potato chips.

GODDAMN that was good. Alarmingly good. Equally alarming was the presence of single-serve American cheese slices in my home.Let’s just say it’s been a while since I bought anything lower than Cabot-grade cheese to bring home (that Annie’s DLuxe no-mix mac sauce doesn’t count!) Laura’s delicious Krafty casserole fueled an adventuresome evening of belting out Kate Bush and Pat Benetar tunes.

Which brings me back….

One of my beloved college roommates was from Minnesota, and schooled us east coast kids in his people’s proud tradition of Hotdish. Wikipedia offers:

“Hotdish is any of a variety of baked, casserole dishes popular in the Midwestern United States, and especially in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. It consists of a starch, a meat, and a canned vegetable, mixed together with canned soup, which serves as a binding ingredient.

Hotdishes are filling, convenient, easy to make, and well-suited for family reunions, church suppers, and potlucks, where they may be paired with pan-baked cookies known as bars.”

(What we ate was not strictly hotdish, as it did not contain a meat. It did, however, contain freshly cooked mushrooms and zucchinis, as well as canned corn, which for our purposes ssubstituted for a meat.)

The members of my college household, featuring the Minnesotan plus two more of my closest pals, would to convene in our kitchen  late in the evening when we were done with classes, work, library study, etc., and prepare a collective small meal, such as noodles or cheese and bread or soup or leftovers, which we took to calling “Hotsnack.”

For “Hot Snack,” The Urban Dictionary offers the following definition:

“It is when you are just sitting around minding your own business and you have a little unexpected burp and a small amount of acidy puke comes up with it and you have to swallow the ‘hot snack’.”

That’s totally not what our hotsnack was like, but it’s a nice surprise to learn that the phenomenon which I have taken to calling “throwing up in your mouth a little” has a concise, catchy little name. Thanks, Urban Dictionary!

Anyway, if you are about to feed a bunch of folks, especially pre- or post- drunk folks, consider Hotdish. It’s comfort food to the max, cheap, easy, plentiful, filling, and perhaps even healthy by some definitions. I hear

tater tots are the potato ingredient of choice, but I gotta say, potato chips melted into the cheese on top was absolutely scrumtrillescent.

Things like hotdish make me really excited for winter, for carb-loading, hibernating animalian behavior, for cheesy baked things and squishy happy boozy evenings dressing up a little more butch than usual and going out to sing karaoke with a new posse of entertaining roommates who like to hang out at home and cook sometimes.

I’ve had a pretty interesting weekend of ingesting mind-altering substances and kicking it with the pals in Brooklyn.

Friday was a rainy bummer of a day, so I met with some friends at the hippest spot in Bushwick hell, Wyckoff Starr coffee shop, for a cup of DAMN good coffee, and HOT. Wyckoff Starr like Northeast Kingdom down the street, makes me feel very confused because it is so clearly a hangout for the white hipsters in the neighborhood, but also the only place to get a cup of coffee that doesn’t have that kitty litter aftertaste. We were en route to Main Drag Music in W’burg, so that I could attempt to trade in corny old Warwick bass for some cash dollars to buy myself a SansAmp or something.

It looks just like this.

DENIED. Main Drag= WAYYYY too cool to have a Warwick bass hanging around. He told me to go to Guitar Center, which was sort of insulting until I remembered that I got the bass years ago at a Sam Ash. So it goes. I’ll do it eventually. In the meantime if anyone wants a mid-grade active pickup “Rock Bass” I’ll sell it real cheap. Like 100 bucks.

We then ate some delicious and inexpensive Thai food on Bedford. Of course I ordered Drunken Noodles with Veggie Duck, the best thing ever. They are named for their large, irregularly cut wide noodles (as if a drunk person cut them up.)

We then decided that to soothe our rainy day blues, and because we are young and reckless and didn’t have to go to work that day, we would go back to my house and make some special tea.

Boy was that fun. Totally mellow and funny. Sometimes it takes a psychedelic experience to snap me out of my grouchy whining super neurotic inner monologue and be reminded that I’m 24, have great friends, live with my nice boyfriend and cat in a nice apartment, and basically get to do whatever I want, like play music, eat Thai food and screw around all day.

Last night Dibs and I prepared a delicious meal at home. We have been actively trying to eat at home more in the last few weeks. I didn’t get a second job so I could spend it all in restaurants, after all. Turns out I will be spending it all on increasingly expensive groceries, at least until we start getting our bi-weekly Hearty Roots Farm produce pickups and I leave for the summer at Hawthorne Valley Biodynamic  farm, school and summer camp to work as a cook. Here’s to permaculture and living close to the food supply!

In preparation for eating dinner at home I paid a (guilty) visit to the Bowery Whole Foods, which is the most convenient grocery store to my workplace and subway line. Unfortunately, Whole Foods is, and always has been, goddamn expensive. Now that retailers have an excuse to bump up food prices, Whole Foods and everyone else did not delay in raising their prices on everything. So instead of the $20 I intended to spend to supplement this week’s rations, it was more like $35. I actually asked the clerk to remove a few items because I couldn’t justify spending the amount they asked ($1.43 for one small green apple, for example. Yes I know they are out of season. I am ashamed enough to have been shopping there in the first place.)

But anyhow, the prices have all gone up over there, and in addition there are an alarming number of visible security or “loss prevention” personnel all around the store, guarding the entranceways and stationed randomly throughout. (Probably where the cameras have the most trouble reaching.) This leads me to believe that Whole Foods has experienced, or expects to experience, an upswing in theft due to the upswing in food and gas prices, and a general state of despair over the economy. Very smart, those executives. I guess they didn’t get rich letting people eat for free. I was certainly tempted to cram several items down my pants, particularly a wedge of delicious aged gouda, a pricey tube of my favorite lavender-scented aluminum-free deodorant, and some vitamins which I didn’t end up buying. Alas, I was wearing a form-fitting ensemble with no pockets, which would bulge with my dinner soon enough.

We prepared a delicious summery salad, with mixed greens, orange bell pepper, carrot, tomato, mixed garden sprouts, and the aged gouda cheese. I mixed up a little salad dressing which was REALLY good and Dibs said was the gingeriest dressing he’d ever had outside of Dojo. It goes something like this:

juice of two lemons

2 tsp grated ginger, juice and all

2 tbsp soy sauce, tamari or Bragg’s

2 tbsp sesame oil

2 tbsp olive or canola oil

a few dashes of rice vinegar

3 tsp turbinado sugar, dissolved in a bit of hot water

mix it all together and shake it up real good in a jar. I thought of adding sesame seeds too but thought too late. I think orange juice would also work very well.

We also ate roasted red bliss potatoes with dill, garlic, rosemary and olive oil, some sauteed Brussels sprouts in butter (mmmmmm) and some baked barbecue tempeh with scallions. We both ate heartily and have two containers of leftovers now.

Over dinner we discussed a lot of heavy topics, such as science, religion, graduate school, hypocrisy, staying inspired to change things for the better and amend exploitative habits and ways despite inevitable complicity in “the system,”Hakim Bey a.k.a. Peter Lamborn Wilson, and the kitty cat Roze’s behavior.

Meanwhile, all over the world, food riots are breaking out, children starve in countries where the food they produce is too expensive to buy, a volcano forces Chilean peasants to evacuate their homes, monsoons destroy Myanmar, war rages on in the Middle East, prisoners resume being executed by the United States of Amerikkka, and a generalized international mayhem and apocalypse seems to be clearly upon us. 2012 needs to goddang happen already so we can get on with things.

But never fear, I will continue to provide my readership with salad dressing recipes until in the not too distant future I can’t afford to use salad dressing, or a computer, anymore. 

I have been peeling through my bookshelves lately, trying to settle on something to actually read cover to cover. One of my failed attempts was a macrobiotic primer, written for American idiots by an American idiot who found it his calling to interpret the will of Macro-God Michio Kushi. So I gave up on that book pretty quickly, but not without trying, for half a day, to do the good work of Kushi and eat macrobiotically.

I should add that I think macrobiotics is amazing, a great idea for anyone to try if they are unsatisfied with their health, mood, outlook or appearance. I loosely kept the diet for almost two months and ever since I have tried to base my diet on whole grain foods, fresh vegetables and soyfoods. A year of employment in a fancy French-style bakery-café put a significant damper on that. But nobody’s perfect, and now that I’m a 9-5er I have much more control over my diet once again. Also with the Hearty Roots veggie order coming in full swing every two weeks, we have a vast supply of local, organic produce.

So anyway. I went to the health food store near my work, found pre-made macro vegetarian noodle and rice dishes which weren’t all that expensive, and tried one out. It was delicious seasoned brown rice with vegges and seaweeds and smoked TVP or tofu floating around in there. I had that for lunch, then remembered the Jarlsburg, romesco and arugula sandwich I had packed in my bag. Drat. I had that as an afternoon snack, completely negating any attempt to reduce caloric intake, eat only pure, whole foods, and avoid dairy. This delicious and seemingly healthy sandwich broke all the laws of macrobiotics.

So anyway, that was that. The next day I had leftover tofu scramble and rice (not bad, not bad) that we made Sunday morning after a long and steamy hunt through Ridgewood, NY for some tofu. Flashback to Sunday: We discovered tofu at the Stop n Shop on Myrtle Ave, past Fresh Pond, along with scads of other delicious, exhuberant fake meats like Gimme Lean! and SmartBacon. We had a total bean feast that day- tofu scramble with tempeh bacon chopped up in it, black beans, toast. Then we went to a vegan BBQ down the street and ate smart dogs and portobello burgers. I wanted to barf all over the place and felt especially bloated on Monday, but damn, fake meat tastes good and i don’t do it all that much.

Fast forward to the present (actually, past- it’s Thursday!) evening (Tuesday) we had a light dinner at Bonobo’s Vegetarian restaurant, a raw vegan café in Gramercy. It’s pricey, terribly lit, sterile and the hum of the machines in there makes me immediately tweak out and get psycho, but they make a delicious salad and you can get all kinds of weird, delicious “nutmeat” pates and patties and things all up on it. I like the food there so much but I always feel a little bit funny afterwards, like I’m the guy in that movie Altered States and because I’m depriving my body/mind/mouth of the usual bad-for-me things, I’m sort of slowly reverting into a moneylike state. I guess that’s the idea of calling a place Bonobo’s. So we ate that, and of course, a few hungry hours later in the same neighborhood, found ourselves scarfing multiple orders of fries from the infinitely more romantic Shake Shack.

So much for macrobiotic eating.