Recently in food and drink Category

Once in the misty depths of the past I was hanging out in a college friend's kitchen and she mentioned that she was a vegetarian. As a devout carnivore, I felt I had to give her a hard time about it. "Suppose," I said, pointing to a box of spaghetti she was holding, "you found out that the wheat that was made from had a consciousness, had hopes and fears and all that? What would you do?"

She grinned. "I'd eat it anyway," she said.

Now here's the thing—I was joking. I don't think wheat has consciousness and hopes and fears. I just had oats for breakfast and I don't think there's a mother oat plant somewhere crying her eyes out over her murdered children. I do eat meat, and actually I have some moral qualms about that. About vegetables, not so much.

But it seems there's at least one person in the world sensitive enough to not see this as a joke. A writer for the New York Times wrote an essay in which she says that she gave up meat for a while and got to thinking about whether it's OK to eat plants either, because like animals, plants strive to stay alive and move around and so forth. Then she suggests that maybe someday we'll overcome our blindness about this, the way we decided generations ago it was wrong to view people of another race as inferior and exploitable as slaves and so forth. Maybe it's a joke, but if so, she pretends to be serious all the way through and concludes thusly:

My efforts to forgo meat didn’t last more than a couple of years. Still, I wonder what our great-grandchildren will think of us. Will we have trouble explaining to them why we killed animals or perhaps even plants for food? And if so, what on Earth will we be eating?

OK, two admissions here—I can't predict the future, and I may be an insensitive brute. That said, maybe future generations will slowly give up eating meat. But I'm pretty sure we'll still eat plants. The argument that they strive to keep existing just won't wash. Every object in the universe strives to hold itself together and maintain its integrity—the wastebasket under my desk, the Rock of Gibraltar, the nucleus of an atom, the ferryboats that go between Manhattan and Staten Island. I think the chances that our great-grandchildren will have the slightest moral qualm about eating plants are astrally remote, but if they do, I'm pretty sure they'll eat plants anyway.

I like most alcoholic beverages, if you must know. There's a short list of the ones I don't like—Campari is too bitter, I'm not sure what I'd do with crème de menthe, and I managed to get through the entire period in history when Zima was available without getting around to drinking one. Anything else, hey, open another bottle.

But for a number of reasons, I decided to go through June without drinking at all. Nothing. (Well, some friends are having a party but just that one night.) It's been a week, and I can report no cravings, shakes, delirium tremens, or urges to buy Sterno and strain it through cheesecloth into a shot glass.

But still, something seems to be missing. I've had wine with dinner just about every night for the past 20 years or so. I'd no more say "I'm having wine with dinner" as if it were something special than I would say "I'm breathing air with lunch." I have only a thin veneer of civilization and will eat out of the stew pot or whatever, watching TV (in the bad old days) or reading, so I think I can say that I've had wine with dinner more consistently than I've used a plate or a table. (I'm not proud of this, mind you, but it's a blog and if you only say good things about yourself you won't have nearly enough material.)

So. Anyway. Wine with dinner, and various spirits before and after if they're around. Rum in the summer, whiskey in the winter. Other yummy things, eaux de vie and so forth, apple and pear brandies, high-end beers, it's all good.

But just to sort of hit a kind of pharmacological reset, I decided to have nothing in June and one drink a night in July, just to see what happens. One expected consequence is that I'm much sharper in the evenings. Who knew? I'm busier lately and this newfound sharpness allows me to sit on the sofa, pet the cat, and crank out the work on the laptop.

I find I can work even when physically exhausted, because mentally I'm still fine. If I can move my eyeballs and fingertips, I can work. It's like a mild form of locked-in syndrome: getting off the couch would take an effort, but I can crank out the mental labor like Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking, at least, compared to myself with two or three drinks down the hatch.

Another effect I halfway expected was a recalibration of life's pleasures. Tonight I did some work and at one point I decided I wanted a treat. I closed the laptop and strolled uptown, heading for the ice-cream parlor. I smelled honeysuckle. I saw the season's first firefly. I looked at the 19th-century houses, drowsing among the gathering shadows. And then the trip in reverse. with a small coffee ice-cream cone in my hand. Such innocent pleasures. Too much ice cream might make you fat, but I can't imagine how it could land you in jail or lose you your job.

Now, this is temporary. In a matter of weeks I expect to be back to my old tricks, stumbling down the sidewalk, whooping and hollering, with Keith Richards on one side of me and Dionysus on the other. The stuff just plain tastes good and I like the buzz. But just for a while, it's nice to keep things simple. A few pretzels, a glass of lemonade, an ice-cream cone. It's a warm evening, and to be honest, a glass of some Alsatian pinot gris would go down nicely right now. But wait a few weeks. For the moment I'm feeling about innocence the way people years ago talked about New York—I might not want to live in innocence permanently, to be sure, but I'm mildly surprised and rather pleased to find that it's kind of a nice place to visit.

I didn't expect to be struck the other day by a profound sense of the way the smallest thing can send the path of our life shooting off in a new and hardly imagined direction—not in a museum about a guy who made candy, at any rate. But that's what happened. A travel writer (among other things) friend suggested we meet up and see this new musem: The Hershey Story: The Museum on Chocolate Avenue. (There really is a Chocolate Avenue in the Pennsylvania town of Hershey, home of Hershey chocolate. It's the main drag.)

First we had lunch in the café. Updated food, paninis and such, and they didn't all have chocolate in them. But they did have a tasting bar where they served up a variety ofchocolate from different parts of the world mixed up in a syrupy liquid. It was like a flight of wines, and served with the utmost seriousness, and it really was interesting from a tasting standpoint. And I found it a bit intoxicating, but not in the kittenish food-writer sense: I've always heard that chocolate has psychoactive alkaloids, and as it happens I went staggering away with some kind of buzz going.

Then you go through the museum itself. They've obviously relegated the word "museum" to the subtitle, because although museum-going seems to be holding its own these days, there's a great deal of effort made to convey an experience, to tell a story. Nobody wants to go look at old stuff. But they do like stories, and this museum really does succeed in that. It's not about chocolate, it's about a guy named Milton Hershey. There's a huge emphasis in the beginning on his unpromising early life. He was apprenticed to a printer, didn't much enjoy it, and one day dropped his hat in the machinery in what was not necessarily an accident. This had a bad effect on the machinery and his tenure with the printing company.

Then he went into business himself and went bankrupt twice—they have a letter in a case in which he's asking for money from a relative. But he liked being in the candy business, was successful eventually with a caramel company, and then became fascinated with milk chocolate, a luxury item produced by the Swiss.

Hershey bought machinery to make chocolate, and bought a large parcel of land amid the dairy farms of Lancaster County. Through trial and error, experimenting with processes used on both the milk and the beans, he found a way to produce milk chocolate cheaply enough that it was affordable for a mass market. This did his fortunes no harm, and he became fabulously wealthy, creating an entire town to support his new venture.

He married, and the couple couldn't have children, so Hershey devoted himself to the welfare of his workers and the wider world. (The museum, with laudable forthrightness, describes the 1937 strike by Hershey workers, which Hershey found personally painful.) He made sure his employees had quality homes, transportation, schools, and recreation facilities at a good price. He established schools, a hospital, and the Milton Hershey school for needy children. As you leave the museum, you see video of teachers and children from the school today, and there's a palpable sense of the influence the man's generosity of spirit still has. It's quite something, really—he was born in 1857, and can still help people today.

But the thing that struck me most was at a point about halfway through. OK, you think, he made milk chocolate affordable. But what if he hadn't? What if he'd given up and gone to work for his cousin behind a counter of a hardware story in Terre Haute? (I'm making up the cousin, although I've heard Terre Haute is a real place.) Hershey bars would not be the utterly ubiquitous thing every living American has known since earliest childhood and finds as familiar as his or her own hand. I got this strange what-if-my-parents-had-never-met feeling about how life and fate go.

But Milton Hershey hung in there. And after he was successful he used his money well. Up until now, I always thought about calories when I saw a stack of Hershey bars at a newsstand counter. But from now on, I'll think a little bit about Milton and the roller-coaster of fate on which we ride—cats and kings, cops and candymakers, and most of all you and I. Interesting museum, I must say.

I've been much too lugubrious lately, so today we're going to talk about—the global recession! And how you can have a good life no matter how much money you have, assuming you're at least, like, surviving. This is part of a series I'm dabbling with called "Budget Bon Vivant."

And today we're going to talk about coffee. Everybody likes coffee, and when the good times were rolling they were willing to pay a few bucks for a cup. But you can have excellent coffee every day, made exactly the way you like it, for much, much less. Here's how:

1.) Buy a coffee grinder. A name brand will cost about 20 bucks (American dollars, that is) and last for an equal number of years. This is not a big capital outlay when amortized over the years.
2.) Get a pour-over coffee maker, basically a plastic cone that sits on the cup. It works with filters. They're made by Melitta, and they sell for a few bucks in high-end kitchenware stores or online.
3.) Grind the beans just before you make the coffee. Experiment with the type of beans you buy, the amount of ginding (count the seconds) and amount of coffee to use until you get it the way you like.
4.) Start with cold water of good quality.
5.) Enjoy the coffee. Sit down, have a nice calm moment to start your day, and really enjoy it. It's excellent coffee, and it's made exactly the way you like it, because it was made exactly by you.

Here are some tips, including a recommendation to use a French press as one option. Tips with more background here.

And if you're wondering, this is how I make my own coffee. I have a cup made exactly that way in front of me at this very moment. I've been making it that way for about 20 years, and I have no idea how much money I've saved, but the money I did save is money I didn't have to bother to earn. That means I've had more time to enjoy my life over the years. Time is the stuff of life, and life should be savored like coffee. That's what Budget Bon Vivant is all about, folks. Now I'm going to press "save" and have my first sip.

UPDATE: Looks like Starbucks is freaking out. Whattaya know?

My God! Six days since I posted last. I've just been busy is all. But just to get one on the boards, so to speak, to use a baseball term, I'm winding up the day with a study reported on by the BBC about who eats frogs. Seems the United States is something like second! Booyah! We're number—uh—two! We're number two! The BBC story is a little vague on who's number one but it seems it's France, which surprises nobody. But us? Two? I've accounted for a few frogs myself, several times in frogs-legs form and once in a pretty delicious soup at a French restaurant, but the idea that so many other people were doing it too is a mild surprise. And yet, when I think about it, I've been in hardware stores and good-'ol-boy sporting goods stores where I saw frog gigs, these trident-looking things with barbs that you put on the end of a broomstick. You lurk around ponds at night, and thunk! A bit more protein in your diet. (A .22 will get the job done too.) Yo, Cletus! Hey there, Clem! Been chowin' on some frog lately, like a Frenchman? A frog leg in garlic and butter is actually pretty good stuff, although I suspect C. and C. were frying theirs. The meat is mild in flavor, delicate in texture.

A photo caption in the BBC story said, "Frogs are liquidised to make a 'health drink' in parts of South America." I suppose the people who drink the drink believe it significantly boosts your virility or longevity or both. I'm going to wait until the study is published and I can get more information before I make up my own mind, and certainly before I drink any "liquidised" frogs. That seems a little drastic to me, frankly. 

Recession-schmecession, it's always worth while to save a buck and have better food than usual while you're doing it, right? So here's a tip: Take a container of ramen, and slice a half a carrot into the water before you turn it on. (Slice them diagonally for attractive ovals.) Slice up a garlic clove into it too, while you're at it. Some slivers of onion would work, as would a shallot if you wanted to get fancy. Tofu? Sure, why not? Some leftover meat, if you want. A small hunk of broccoli. Sprinkle some cayenne in while it's cooking. (Go easy, it's potent stuff.) Maybe even—I'm going to try this in about a minute—grate in a dash of ginger. Catching on yet? Use your imagination. The bag of ramen costs somewhere from a quarter on down. The other stuff is in your pantry or refrigerator, or should be. If you're eating only processed, packaged food, for God's sake stop! Stop this minute!

Last step: Eat the soup. It's cheap, delicious, and you've put your own stamp on it. It's not nutritious? Well, first of all compared to what? A meatball hoagie? And second of all, you could go on a kind of grail quest for food that's cheap, tasty, and good for you, but you'd descend into madness and get hungry too. I'd love to have food that was cheap, tasty, and good for you, but usually you can have two of those three. Believe me, I've worked on this.

Now I've made myself hungry. Bye!

Woke up early, and decided that although I had virtuously bought yogurt and granola yesterday to have a healthy breakfast, I didn't want yogurt and granola, goddamnit, I wanted a baguette. I call myself a "recovering Francophile" these days, which means I can appreciate the French (and their Canadian descendants) with my eyes open to the possibility of their human imperfection. That said, it must be admitted that a good baguette is a pretty tasty form of bread, with its crackly crust and soft, stretchy core. You take your baguette, slice it open like a trout, and fill it up with butter and orange marmalade, have it with coffee, and life is good.

And luckily with our new little gourmet place uptown, you can have a baguette whenever you want. I'm walking up a hill toward the main street (the local expression for the business district is "uptown," because it literally is up) and a tandem bicycle slowly follows. The man and woman on it are spinning their feet, because even though it's not that steep of a hill, they're way down in what's called "granny gear." If I'd walked a little faster, I could have beaten them up the hill. I smiled at them—there's something irrepressibly cheerful about a bicycle built for two, as the song goes—and they smiled back. "We don't climb hills very well," the woman said. "We're better going down them," said the man.

So of course I'm whistling "Daisy Bell" as I turn into the shop, and stroll tunefully up to the baguette bin, and the song dies on my lips—the bin is empty. They come out around 10 a.m., the young woman behind the counter says, her eyes full of sympathy. Was it so much to ask, I thought? Just a baguette? But as so often happens, the solution was right at hand—there, on the counter, was a row of croissants. In a moment I'd handed over my $2.65 and was on my way out with a waxed-paper bag and my little croissant. It's the same difference, really—just as Continental and even more delectable, since a proper croissant is like shortbread, in that it's an excuse for spending a few moments going nuts on butter. And I decided to make a photo Clotilde-style of the thing, with her trademark insanely shallow depth of focus, before I snarfed the thing up in three bites like a dog. I may have the yogurt and granola tomorrow, if I'm feeling virtuous, but that doesn't come naturally to me. I'd rather have something good to eat.

All I want to know is what I should eat. I eat vegetables, and lots of them. I eat meat. (Sorry. It tastes too good.) Beyond that, I'm pretty clueless. I know I should have complex carbohydrates—or at least I think I know that—so I went to Wikipedia to look up complex carbohydrates, seeking to know what I should eat to get complex carbohydrates. But technical stuff in Wikipedia is often written by technical people with no recognition that this information might be relevant to real-life situations. So the article left me with more questions, among them "What should I eat to get complex carbohydrates?" The entries on flour and bread were similarly vague.

Which left me puzzled yesterday morning, when I ran out of time for breakfast and grabbed the bag of rye bread as I ran out the door. I ate the bread at my desk, four or five slices, and regarded it glumly. Is it made with white flour? Yes, but the flour is enriched. Does that matter? No idea. It occurred to me, as I munched away, to wonder if the only real nutrition I was getting was from the caraway seeds. That seemed like the long way around the barn, somehow.