On Food Porn (safe for the hungry)

[pecunium]

I like writing about cooking, because I like reading about cooking.

I've been able to cook, at least a little bit, since I was about five. My mother was a lab tech (mostly phlebotomy) for a hospital, in a small town, and was on call every third day (which tells you how big the town was. She says she was able to cross the town, in a snowstorm, carrying a four year old, and with me walking, in 20 minutes. The next day she asked for directions to the hospital, "Go to the new stop-light, turn right and go half a block."

"How do I know the new stop light?" [this was a mostly rural area, one might have a "new" stop light, aged to a fare-thee-well]

(looking up at the light under which they were standing) "It's t'other one.")

So, lest my sister and I go hungry (or need to wake the neighbor upstairs) I was taught to make soup, from cans. I don't really recall this, but I don't really recall ever thinking the stove was a mystery either.

I also, so I'm told, showed an early fondess for good food. In my weaning my mother decided a pot roast (one of my grandmother's stellar items of cookery, she was mid-western bland, in the main, save for a few things, a goulash, and stuffed cabbage being the two I recall... leftovers from her grandmother's youth in Prague) was tender enough to give me. The next day Gerber was seen to have lost a customer, as I refused to swallow the tinned beef. I couldn't keep it out of my mouth, but I, so it seems, could; and did, refuse to swallow it.

The first real cooking I remember learning was french toast (which is really German Toast; the name was changed in WW1 when sauerkraut became liberty cabbage). At the age of, roughly, 14 I was in charge of cooking dinner, which chore I kept until I was about 18, and my mother was no longer working, outside the family bookstore.

Which is why, I suppose, I find it interesting that there are people who don't cook. It's as strange to me as people who don't read.

I know people like to read about food. I like to read about food. I have linear feet of books about food (not so many pure cook books, though I have a few). Books on butchery, on pasta, On Food and Cooking, on bread, meats, ingredients, history, cheese, fermenting, beer, wine, you name it.

I am not, in my opinion, all that great a food writer. I detail, with callous disregard of non-cooks, things I've made. I don't have wonderful stories about the pasta dish I was taught to make in a small restaurant in the Tyrol; because I've not done such (but when I made the pasta, it was at least that yellow... I had eggs from cage-free chickens who get to scratch... the recipe is simple, all the moisture [save for a few drops of olive oil] is from egg yolks).

Which is why I am amused at the offers to let me come and cook. To me, it's not a big deal. I understand the urge to eat other people's cooking. It's why I root around for restaurants (and if I spend two weeks in a city, it's a certainty that I'll have found someplace worth reccomending).

But I post the bare bones of a meal (you could makes something like it from my description) and people swoon.

I don't really get that.

Comments

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Eggs in mac and cheese???? No way.

But out of curiousity, when would you add the eggs to it? start of the bechemel sauce? when you add the cheese?

My mac in cheese usually has three kinds of cheese. Depends what's in the fridge. There's a chipolte cheddar that is sold at the local organic food store that is awesome in mac and cheese. Smoked gouda is also good, but can overpower, so you have to be careful.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

You can add it to the sauce (which is the best) and so it becomes a trifle more custardy. You have to stir more, and you can also add it with the cheese (as a binder). You still need to stir more.

TK

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Cluefairy wrote:
"Eggs in mac and cheese???? No way."

There _is_ a Profound PHilosophical Difference here. You're thinking, I suppose, in terms of macaroni and a sauce; I'm thinking in terms of a single solid entity.

"But out of curiousity, when would you add the eggs to it? start of the bechemel sauce? when you add the cheese?"

Cook a batch of macaroni. (Elbow, of course, that and spaghetti being the only kinds of pasta that were available to most people in the midwest 50+ years ago -- in the "imported foods" section, naturally.) Drain, and dump into a casserole dish. Stir in quite a lot of grated cheese (at least 50% of the volume of macaroni, I'd say). Traditionally, this would have been Velveeta/American Processed Brick, though if you lived in a Big City (like Toledo, Ohio, which had _two_ Chinese restaurants (and three Italian ones), for your choice of Exotic Ethnic Cuisines) you might have access to a market that carried "cheddar" and "Swiss". (You can understand why I was thrilled to discover Trader Joe's, back when that chain consisted of two stores -- "Almost-Gourmet food for not-quite-Yuppies" should've been their Motto.) I generally use affordable ones -- an aged Welsh or Vermont cheddar, a domestic "Swiss", and a Tillamook Jack, or maybe a Jarlsberg, sometimes with a few tablespoons of finely-grated Stilton. Stir cheese into the hot macaroni carefully, so it doesn't clump too much. Estimate the amount of milk needed to almost cover the mixture, beat in about one and a half large eggs per cup of milk, add and stir (adding a little more milk if necessary (skimmed milk if you're on a low-fat diet and can convince yourself that the Virtue of this outweighs the Sinfulness of the cheese & eggs)). (Topping with crushed potato-chips is Traditional but optional, and I never do it.) Pop into the oven (regular might be best, but I always use the microwave) and bake at a fairly low heat until it's set in the center. (Using a rectangular dish facilitates slicing if you want to re-heat leftovers in a frying-pan over medium to low heat.)

Don Fitch,
whose Religious Credo also includes the necessity for toasting the inner side of the bread used for toasted cheese sandwiches, and using a (sweetened) Bisquick mix for Strawberry Shortcake. Some things are simply Not Negotiable.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's sliceable. I've never had it fixed that way. Well.

My parents have shopped at Trader Joe's for as long as I can remember. When I moved from L.A. to Seattle (now Boston) many many years ago, I missed shopping there. The stores came to Boston a few years ago and that made me happy.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's an upstate Ohio thing. Because macaroni and cheese, of that family, is the way I recall it.

Kraft telling me they are the cheesiest, well it's a cruel hoax.

TK