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Tomatoes
Cauliflower
Broccoli
Eggplant
Acorn squash
Bell pepper
Onion
Potatoes
Fruit:
Apples
Pear
As you can see, the amount of veggies I’m getting is declining as the height of the season is over. But lots of squash in the future. For vegetarians, especially newbies, I highly recommend taking advantage. Squash can be a reasonable meat substitute in many dishes, and right now it’s super cheat at farmer’s markets. The one in Park Slope is selling it for less than $1 a pound.
Question for the hive mind: when do you recommend cutting down your basil and making pesto you can freeze with it? My basil isn’t growing as fast as it used to, but I’m also disinclined to take its life before its time. (This is what we in the business call “joking”, for our excitable wingnut trolls. I’m not actually worried if basil plants lose their lives.) I have cheese, nuts, and olive oil, so I’m ready to go whenever I need to. Is it time?
Weekend prepping:
I took advantage of a lazy Sunday afternoon to prep ingredients for use later in the week, so that my cooking time on busier days was cut down to a minimum. I decided to cook up everything that I’d have to roast to softness to use anyway, namely the butternut squash and beets. I washed all the above. I put the beets in foil, and cut the butternut squash in half and seeded it. (All this gets saved for making veggie broth.) Everything went in the stove for an hour at 350. Pulled them out, let them cool, took their skins off, and put them in the fridge in a covered bowl.
Dinner #1
1) At this point, I figured I might as well make buttermilk biscuits while the stove was already on. I made the dough, according to Bittman’s instructions, and cut out 6 biscuits. (Usually it makes more, but it was especially sticky for some reason, and I lost a lot of dough to rinsing it off my hands.) Pulled the roasted veggies out, heated the oven to 450, and put the biscuits in for 7 minutes.
I have to say, the succotash with the biscuits was delicious. My idea of adding raw cucumber in at the last minute worked out great; the savory red bean flavor against the crisp cucumber was awesome.
Time: 45 minutes.
Leftovers: Lots of succotash and biscuits.
Soundtrack: The Teaches of Peaches.
Rachel Maddow is right on in this clip, except about one major thing: The right wing mythology that takes Michelle Obama’s relatively mild healthy eating initiative and equates it with a Big Brother program where you’ll be reported for eating saturated fats isn’t going to be the next big thing. By the time something like this percolates up to Glenn Beck, it’s already taken off with the paranoid right. But other than that, she’s absolutely right that this is fixing to be a hardened right wing talking point, the next big panic button in the culture wars.
The “carrot eaters vs. Real American french fry eaters” is actually a perfect hot button for Beck and company to push repeatedly, for a number of reasons. There’s the financial support they can expect from the fast food industry that is feeding right wing PR firms cash to spread this culture war freak out. Just as importantly, workaday wingnuts are already all over this. Healthy eating is equated with femininity, and eating crap with masculinity, and wingnuts are nothing if not masculinity worshipers. But it’s not just masculinity, it’s an anxious masculinity that is always prowling around for threats to itself. Thus, anything that could be seen as nurturing, mothering, or construed as “nagging” is treated like an especially emasculating threat that has to be guarded against with an overreaction that is considered quite masculine despite being unbelievably childish. Michelle Obama running a campaign where she’s in a position of reminding people that junk food, if consumed to excess (which it mostly is), is bad for your health?
For the “above all, piss off the liberals” crowd, that’s an invitation to act like a 4-year-old who does something he didn’t even really want to do, just to defy his mother who told him not to do it. You can see this in Beck’s rant, when he goes off on the how he’ll just get fat if he wants to. What was amazing about that to me wasn’t the rights basis of his sentiment---sure, you have a right to get fat if you want to, and the notion that anyone is actually trying to stop you through force is laughable---but the general image Beck was painting. The stigma against getting fat on purpose is practically unspeakable in our culture, so I just have trouble imagining that his audience could get past that.
And yet, I’m not going to make the mistake of thinking Beck doesn’t know his audience! He gets them to fuck themselves over in many different ways, basically using “piss off the liberals” as the calling card. In this, Rachel might be right that Beck is boundary-testing, seeing if people are willing to go this far with him. And I think they will. Maybe not with the “getting fat” thing, but definitely with the idea that the culture wars should involve tribalism over food choices. And that healthy food should be disdained as liberal and junk food embraced as a sign of tribal loyalty to the wingnuts. Again, we’ve already seen a lot of this going on, even if it’s restrained by the fact that even the “piss off the wingnuts” crowd isn’t too keen on the idea of being overweight, either. I’ve definitely seen trolls show up at this blog just on posts about food politics and try, pathetically, to piss off the liberals by bragging about how much greasy, tasteless food they love to suck down. (Really, it’s sad how desperately they need to piss off the liberals. Seriously, if you start putting clothespins all over your body, the flinching I’m doing is a natural human reaction to something that looks painful, not a sign that you’re winning by pissing me off.)
To understand why this will really take off, you need to understand what is at the root of the so-called culture war. Christine O’Donnell got right to the heart of it, when she made her speech claiming there are more of “us” than there are of “them”. At the end of the day, the culture war is about creating an “us” to oppose the “them”: the masses of people condemned as “liberals” that are hated and opposed on tribal principles more than any actual policy disagreements.
Food is particularly well-suited to become a culture war issue. After all, this is a culture war, and food is arguably far more a culturally significant practice than perhaps even sex. Or at least, it’s equally significant. As far as the culture wars go, the wingnuts have lost a lot of ground when it comes to sex. Yes, it seems like they haven’t because they’re doubling down on gay rights and abortion, but in major ways the “moral majority” has given up ground. There’s a lot, when it comes to public sexual choices, that they don’t spend as much time railing against as they used to---premarital sex, cohabitation, and divorce. Oh, those are still talking points, sure, but on the whole even the culture warriors realize those fights are over. Most of them participate or at least have participated unapologetically in one or many themselves. Religion as a unifying force has a lot of promise, but even that has its limits, because there are so many different denominations that they have to be vague or they threaten the coalition. Whiteness is something that a lot of culture warriors invest a lot in, even as they deny that they’re racists, because skin color is a great way to separate “us” from “them”, for people who find this important. The problem is that a lot of “them” are also white. Geography works better, but there are “us” tribe members that, for employment reasons (and for cultural reasons they’ll never admit to the base) live in the big city.
The category “us” is inherently unstable, so they collect a lot of cultural markers to determine who is and isn’t “us”, and food is bound to come up in that. Food has, throughout human history, been used to determine us vs. them. Because of the urban associations with liberals, they’re already associated with independent restaurants and foodie culture, and the cosmopolitanism links liberals to adventurousness in eating. Because of the environmentalism and animal rights, organic food, and vegetarianism get associate with liberals. As Glenn Beck makes clear, the health care reform bill means good health is becoming associated with liberalism, and with enough care and feeding, he clearly intends to turn this association to one where good health itself becomes morally suspect, evidence of secret compliance with the “nanny state”. A little bit of PR money and it won’t be hard to get wingnuts to believe eating a lot of junk food is their patriotic duty. I doubt, however, that actually getting fatter is suddenly going to be considered cool in some parts of the country, so what is probably going to happen is yo-yo dieting itself will become a tribal marker, particularly for women.
To be clear, I’m not supporting any stigmatizing of fat people. I’m just noting the current situation as it stands in terms of how most people view the issue.
Beets
Potatoes
Hot peppers
Bell pepper
Corn
Tomatoes
Onion
Broccoli
Butternut squash
Cucumber
Beets
Eggplant
Fruit:
Peaches
Apples
Pears
Or perhaps I should call this the “don’t fear unusual vegetables” edition. It’s easy enough to know what to do with most summer vegetables, since they’re the most popular, which means they’re often the most accessible and the ones that even beginning cooks know the most about. But fall is coming back around, and you’re starting to see stuff that causes many people to wonder what to do with it: greens, winter squash, root vegetables. Do not be afraid! One of the things that trying to eat more locally has taught me is that I’m capable of far more than I ever knew.
It’s also taught me that knowing your basics is far more important than knowing recipes, the most important thing you can learn about cooking, and the main reason I thought I’d do this Community Supported Agriculture project. Bittman’s book is good for basics, but when it comes to the book I love the best in terms of hand-holding through unusual vegetables, I have to recommend Melissa’s Great Book of Produce: Everything You Need to Know about Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. It is this book that taught me to be unafraid of unusual squashes, and to accept in my heart that even unfamiliar greens aren’t that much different from the ones I already knew. It also covers a lot of vegetables associated with various Asian dishes, so if that’s something that there’s lots of in your local selections---or is available cheaply at your local grocery store---this book can really help you out. Be not afraid of the bok choy!
I suggest using this thread to express your fears about unfamiliar vegetables and ask for help, or give helpful (non-condescending, please!) stories from the trenches of how you finally overcame your fear of certain vegetables. Now on to the cooking of the past week.
Lunch
For various reasons, I hadn’t really been able to do much dinner cooking, and I still had zucchini and snap peas that I didn’t want going bad. So I stir fried them with tofu, with various spices, and poured it over lettuce. Made enough that I had some for lunch the next day, as well. Since I was just doing a quick lunch, presentation was the least of my concerns. I just dumped all the stir fry in the rice, mixed it up, and ate it.
Acorn squash
Eggplant
Parsley
Corn
Zucchini
Cucumber
Tomatoes
Snap peas
Potatoes
Onion
Bell pepper
Fruit:
Peaches
Apples
Way too many carbs this go-round. I need to reassess and roll back on the starch, work in more protein. This is a trap that I, after being a vegetarian for something like 8 years now, have gotten good at avoiding. But this week, I just lost my way a little. It’s usually fine; I tend to eat a lot of protein-heavy stuff for lunch and breakfast. But in interest of showing a balanced vegetarian diet, this falls a little short this week.
Dinner #1
1) For some reason, the peaches got soft and bruise-y really quickly this week, so I cut the bruised parts off many of them and used the rest to make a peach bread, with a standard fruit/vegetable bread recipe. Because it was with fresh peaches, I cut back on the sugar that I would normally use in something like zucchini bread.
2) Used a recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food to make creamy baked eggplant and potatoes. The recipe is a noodle one, but he has a variation where you use potatoes instead. Since I had a bunch of potatoes, I went with that. I used a little mozzarella instead of parmesan, because I had some on hand that I’d bought on sale.
3) While the casserole was baking, I washed the dishes and then used another recipe in the Bittman book for barley succotash, because it just so happened to call for green beans, a bell pepper, and corn---all items I had. But I did not have barley, so I substituted bulgur wheat.
Time: Two and a half very leisurely hours, in which I also did a lot of reading. But that’s mostly because I did the bread and then I did the casserole. If you prepared both at once and then put them in the oven at the same time---which is what I should have done---it knocks an hour off it.
Leftovers: Tons and tons, plenty for days worth of lunches.
Well, I spent far more time than I should have googling around, looking for a KFC ad that I saw on TV at the gym today. I don’t watch many ads---yeah, DVR and iTunes!---so I have no idea if this is a popular ad or not. But it recalled the Angry Dude ads that raised so much of a fuss at the Superbowl. Apparently, despite the outcry, advertisers really think the “show men rebelling against an evil matriarchy” ads are the way to go. This particular ad had a bunch of men addressing the camera, explaining how they were so going to eat the Double Down sandwich---casting off the shackles the unseen person behind the lens was supposedly putting on them. I’m sure you could, if you were really in a rationalization mood, assumed these men are supposed to be rebelling against their doctors telling them to watch their cholesterol, but let’s face it---there’sa very high chance the nagging bitch they were supposed to be standing up to in order to eat this disgusting wad of grease was supposed to be a female partner.
I tried to imagine if you tried to do a gender reversal on this one, and have a bunch of women aggressively tell an imaginary (and presumably male and possibly a partner) off-camera person that they’re going to gargle grease if they want to and you can kiss their asses, and found that this was too ridiculous for even my vivid imagination. And I don’t think this is because men are so oppressed by nattering women with their ridiculous body standards. On the contrary, I’d say that it’s easier to address imaginary oppressions in ads than real ones, because real ones inspire actual discomfort and guilt. Ads addressing women’s guilt about “bad” foods are pretty much just ads promoting products that present as low-calorie substitutes, such as yogurt ads that imply that you can quell the craving for a piece of cheesecake with a 100-calorie serving of cheesecake-flavored Yoplait. In other words, the body police in both ads is presumed to be female. Women control themselves through guilt and the obligation to stay thin, and then women nag men to watch what they eat, which presumably emasculates men. And men retaliate by reminding women that they’re men, and as such aren’t under similar obligations to keep themselves trim to maintain attractiveness.
I have no idea how effective these ads are. They seem to speak to a very specific audience: partnered straight men whose female partners spend a lot of time watching their diet and therefore loop those men into it somewhat, making those men feel like they’re being emasculated because they’re being expected to do feminine things like mind their diet, and who want to rebel by shoveling a bunch of fried chicken down their throat. Then they can use their iPhone cruising time stuck on the toilet to show up at a feminist blog and whine that women don’t understand how hard it is to get laid, because being attractive comes so naturally to women. Perhaps KFC thinks that men outside of this narrow target demographic can still relate, figuring that there’s a shot of manliness available to all sorts of men when you dump on women for being nagging, responsibility-obsessed monsters.
This was a trend that defined many of the ads during the Superbowl, but hasn’t gotten much commentary since then. It seems much worse than it has in the past, though making or even just insinuating “nagging bitches” the villain to rebel against in ads is a long-standing tradition. My gut feeling is that advertisers are selling these ads to clients by using the bad economy as a pitch. The logic goes like this:
1) Men are feeling low because of the bad economy. These bad feelings can be interpreted with ease as emasculation.
2) Feeling emasculated by the wide world doesn’t provide an easy villain to dump on. But women, on the other hand, are right there.
3) Direct your male customers’ general malaise towards being angry with women for being pushy broads, and
4) Suggest your product is an effective way to tell those nagging bitches to fuck off.
And, in the grand internet tradition: 5) Profit!
Except in this case, they’re probably right about the profit.
Missed a week of traveling, so I rolled some stuff I made that week into this. Sadly, because of all the chaos, I didn’t keep as good a track in pictures as I wished, but there is some stuff here to look at.
Dinner #1
We were having friends over for a not-“Mad Men” double header (“The Sweet Smell of Success” and “The Apartment”), and I was cooking dinner. I thought it wise to get as much work done ahead of time, mostly so that I could get dishes done and not have to sweat it.
1) Made pie crust, using the Bittman recipe. It requires a half hour of sitting as a ball, and then an hour sitting in the pie plate, so that meant that I really had a lot of time to clean and putter.
2) Made cucumber juice for the cucumber cocktails by pureeing two cucumbers in the food processor, putting the puree in a strainer, and pressing on it.
3) Peeled, cubed, and salted some eggplant.
4) After the pie crust had gone through its waiting periods, made a peach-berry mix using one of Bitman’s basic recipes. (Basically, just a little sugar on berries and sliced/peeled peaches.) Berries were really discounted at the farmer’s market, so I had a ton of them.
5) Boiled spaghetti. Had some extra time, so cut up what was left of the purslane.
6) Cooked the eggplant with some garlic, olive oil, the purslane, white wine, and of course, salt and pepper. Chopped up three Jersey tomatoes from the farmer’s market, tossed it in, turned off the heat, and added the basil and a sprinkling of breadcrumbs. Poured over the spaghetti, and of course, parmesan cheese.
7) Served with a spinach and tomato salad. Pie for dessert! Sadly, the pie filling wasn’t thick enough, but it was still quite tasty.
8) Used the cucumber juice to make cocktails with it, gin or vodka, lime, a little sugar, and mint.
So there’s been a dust-up between a guest blogger named Monica at Feministe and fat activists (mostly on Twitter that I’ve seen), with Maia actually posting on it. I’m not interested in getting in the middle of it. I think both sides make good points. FAs are right that Monica is out of line suggesting their negative experiences with health care providers are figments of their imaginations, but Monica is right that the “but some highly muscular people are technically obese!” is a disingenuous argument. I think people were too hard on Monica, but also that she was incredibly unfair in some ways. I want to talk about the most glaring unfair assertion she made, one that was pulled out by Kate Harding on Twitter in particular.
Weight can signal a lack of activity or too many donuts, and that shouldn’t irk anyone. Yet, it does.
This was unfair, for the very simple reason that fat activists are 100% right that 95% of fat people are going to stay fat. Drastic weight loss that stays off is incredibly rare, and is usually the result of weight loss surgery or a complete 180 in personal habits that is the sort of thing that is really not in human nature. And when I say “180”, I mean 180---the only fat people I’ve ever known to get un-fat without WLS went from being people who didn’t get much exercise to people who turned into jocks. Moderate exercise---which I still have no idea what that supposedly means anyway---just isn’t going to cut it. Losing weight is really, really hard. I put myself on a gym regime when we moved to New York, on top of all the extra walking you do here, and I’ve lost weight, sure, but it wasn’t the kind of weight loss rate that would turn a fat person thin. I can’t imagine what it would take to lose 10 times as much weight as I’ve lost, much less the 20 times that some people would have to lose to go from being fat people to not-fat people. I hear people make cracks about soda and donuts all the time, as if merely giving up overindulgence would magically turn a fat person thin. If you sit down and calculate the calorie shortages someone would have to endure to lose a whole lot of weight, you should see the mathematical issues in play.
But it wasn’t just the “drop the donuts, lose 100 pounds” simplicity that was off here. It was also the invocation of the concept of personal responsibility that makes me more than a little queasy. Not to say that I think that people don’t have personal responsibilities to look after their own diets or exercise regimes, but to write it off to that and not look at the big picture is to miss the point. Americans have been getting fatter in recent decades, and there have been rising rates of diabetes and heart disease to go with it. To imply that the cause is simple lack of self-control is to suggest that Americans have magically become lazier or more impulsive. I would argue that the culture has changed dramatically and puts immense amount of pressure on people to have habits that are simply counter-productive to their diet and exercise goals.
Couple of pop culture stories on the topic of “Women: Widely Perceived As Incapable Of Making Good Choices”. Let me get one thing clear before I begin this. I’m not a “choice feminist”. I’m not one of those people who think women are saints and that whatever choice a woman makes is beyond criticism. But I am a feminist who believes women make choices about as well as men, and that the general public rejects this theory, especially in cases where there’s conflict between a man and a woman, a woman and some kind of authority, a woman and a bunch of judgmental idiots who don’t know the first thing about her life. And this is the theme of these two stories.
First, Cee-Lo Green’s new video, an admittedly awesome and catchy tune called “Fuck You”. It might as well have been called the “Nice Guy® Anthem Of Butthurtness”.
I really, really hate the “gold digger” version of the Nice Guy® whine, for three major reasons:
1) The men who trot out the belief that women are morally obligated to date broke men never turn around and put the moral obligation on men to date ugly women, which is the sexist society equivalent to low-status broke dudes. This is an odious double standard that implies that men have a right to their standards but women are evil for the exact same behavior. It reinforces the notion that women’s bodies aren’t their own, but are cookies to be handed out to men for good behavior, or perhaps just because they’re the most pitiable and could use an orgasm.
2) They exaggerate the situation to shield themselves from criticism. The whole narrative of “gold digger” ends up casting aspersions on the characters of women who prefer to date men with jobs and furniture, who can actually go out on a date once in awhile. Even if women make their own damn money, they can get tarred with this “gold digger” slam for simply having standards. A lot of women go through a phase in their youth where, afraid to be called shallow, will put up with dudes who expect you to watch them play video games while you twiddle your thumbs instead of going out on proper dates. There’s nothing wrong with a woman who wants to enjoy a cocktail and some nice conversation on a date, or who would like to sit on real furniture and not worry about getting fleas when she visits a man. And yet, the fear of being called shallow is used to shame women who have entirely reasonable standards.
3) The Nice Guy® wants a cookie for being in love with a woman that he, rightly or wrongly, characterizes as shallow, appearance-obsessed, and stupid. If she’s all those things, why do you love her, then? Doesn’t that make you stupid? Oh wait, you “love” her because she’s got such a smoking bod, right? Well, then, see #1.
There’s some reason to wonder if this song isn’t another example of Cee-Lo doing what he often does, which is to create odious characters to narrate his songs. He likes to explore the dark side of human nature, and there’s more than a little humor in this process for him. But he’s indicated that this isn’t really the case this time. More to the point, the narrative that women are shallow for wanting “money” (which, like I said, often encompasses the relatively rare woman who is angling for a rich man but is also, and more commonly, used to shame women who simply want men who have more to offer than “well, you can blow me on this bean bag after I finish this level") is so ingrained in our society that there was exactly 0% chance this would be taken for satirical by 99% of the audience. There’s just not enough respect for female autonomy, or sympathy for women’s motivations to suggest that anything else would have happened but what did happen, which is that legions of men immediately swore this was the greatest song ever and Cee-Lo was telling pretty much all of female humanity where to get off. Again, I have yet to see any real evidence that the vast majority of women---or even “hot” women that are the only women that count to the stalwart critics of being shallow---are willing to throw true love out the window because her true love isn’t a millionaire. If that was so, our marriage rates would be a lot lower, don’t you think?
Fruit:
As you can see, a shit ton of peaches and nectarines
Cucumbers! Other people have trouble thinking of what to do with eggplant or zucchini, but my produce of struggle is cucumber. There’s so much of it, and yet a little goes a long way. I’m starting to really try to expand how I think of cucumbers. For instance, I’m looking towards using them to make cocktails tonight. Ideas are most welcome.
Prepping
1) I was ready to take the leap into making my own sandwich bread. I had eggs and milk in the fridge to use up, so I went with a recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian that used both. Bittman focuses his bread recipes on food processors, but since I have a weak, ancient, delicate food processor, I just did it by hand. Kneaded the dough, put it in the bowl for a couple of hours while doing other stuff so it could rise.
Lunch
Went to the farmer’s market and got one bread roll and one heirloom tomato. Made a sandwich with these, plus some of the CSA cucumber and fromage blanc. And one of the peaches. Deli salads were all half off at the grocery store, so I bought a bunch to go with sandwiches, and had some pasta salad.
Dinner #1
1) Put the dough in a pan, and the pan in the oven for 40 minutes. Pulled out a loaf of bread. Squeed in excitement.
Corn
Zucchini
Cucumber
Tomatoes
Potatoes
Jalapenos
Bell peppers
Onion
Eggplant
Fruit:
Watermelon
Apples
Plums
Peaches
Necatarines
This was the week of extremes. I spent much of my day cooking on Saturday, but then the rest of the week kicked back and made simple dishes out of laziness.
Lunch
1) We had a bunch of nectarines left over, and they were starting to get wrinkly by Saturday, so I chopped them up, coated them in cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, black pepper, salt, and chili powder. Tossed them in the skillet. It only took like 5 minutes to cook. They were awesome.
2) Grated one of the giant zucchini, chopped up an onion, and scrambled all that with four eggs and some garlic and chili powder. (Plus salt & pepper, of course.)
3) Toasted sourdough bread and sliced a tomato. Ate some eggs over this, but the rest were leftovers. Had some of the nectarines, but a lot were left over.
Well, this strikes me as the most irritating non-story I’ve read in a long fucking time. I suppose I’m supposed to be shocked and mildly distressed at the release of a study (conducted by Nutrisystem) that shows that half of American women would “give up sex” rather than gain 10 pounds. But I find the whole thing too suspect to take seriously. And it’s not because, or at least just because, of what Tracy Clark-Flory pointed out, which is that 66% of survey respondents felt like they have to lose weight to feel sexy, which is a sad result of the widespread fat-shaming in our culture. (The survey suggested the average amount that had to be lost to reach that goal was 23 pounds, which is such an abstract number as to be meaningless. Is that a number that includes all the women that feel they’re 5 pounds away from getting into a size four averaged with people who want to lose 100 pounds, or is it just a lot of people who feel they need to lose 23 pounds? No idea.) But it’s because they poisoned the well to make sure they got the results they wanted.
See, they didn’t ask if people would give up sex rather than gain weight. They asked if you’d give up sex for the summer rather than gain weight. Considering that’s only 3 months, I’m surprised more people didn’t say yes. A lot of Americans go 3 month stretches without getting laid all the time, often even if they’re in relationships. I’m sure people who’ve had 3 month dry spells outnumber people who haven’t many times over. It’s not a super fun idea to go 3 months without sex, but most of us have plenty of assurance we’d survive. (Unless they’re rolling masturbation into their definition of “sex”, which I’m almost positive they aren’t.)
But what really pissed me off about this survey was that it’s indicative of the entire problem with the American diet industry, which is basically built to encourage yo-you dieting. You’ve heard the statistic that 95% of diets don’t work? That’s because they’re designed not to. The entire pitch of diet programs is, “Deprive yourself of pleasure for short periods of time, and then, when you reach a goal, go right back to your old habits. In a few years, when you’ve gained it all back, come back and we’ll do it all over again.” There’s no natural reason to connect sexual deprivation with weight control---on the contrary, I’d guess frequent sex actually burns a fair number of calories---but the diet industry’s logic is just this. The whole notion is that you “earn” pleasure by being skinny enough to deserve it, and the only way to earn it is to lose weight.
Silvana has a really long, interesting post on the way that getting married can provoke body anxiety in even the most stalwart opponents of that kind of crap, and she mentions something that has always bothered me, too.
As a fat chick, I am well aware of the MUSTLOSEWEIGHTBEFOREWEDDING cultural imperative. I was aware of this before I ever knew what Fat Acceptance was. And I knew before I ever got engaged that I would be doing no such thing. Frankly, I wasn’t even tempted. I know people who have gone on serious diets in the year or so before they get married, women who have attended “boot camp,” and companies who have made a lot of money off of fueling those anxieties. I wanted no part of it.
I rarely find myself---with the exception of watching Fox News, or reading something in the “we’re dudes who think sexism is daring and funny” genre---filled with blinding, searing hatred towards everyone involved when I engage with some media product. I’m just a cheery person that way. But I made an exception when reading this article in the NY Times about the battle over vegetarian or even vegan weddings. I blame Jill for exposing me to this. I found myself in a boil over the vegans who, in a bout of sanctimonious idiocy, refuse to eat honey.* I loathed the writer for assuming that wedding planning is strictly the bride’s business. I hated the rigid people who think someone else’s dietary choices are somehow a great offense to them. The only person spared the wrath of me was Fernanda Capobianco, who sensibly and generously served meat at her wedding, even though she’s a vegan pastry chef. Though, I’m sure her husband is also a great guy.
And a special shout-out to the idea of having felt flowers instead of real, environment-destroying ones at your wedding. Too bad it was the “we’re too good for fucking honey” people who had that idea.
Not that I think that vegetarians or vegans are obliged to serve meat at their weddings. Far from it! I just think that the spirit of flexibility and generosity is the smart one to have in any circumstance, but especially around diet, and so if you feel that’s best met by serving meat, go for it. But vegetarian food is also diverse and delicious, so there’s no reason not to go vegetarian at your wedding, unless you simply cannot resist making a sanctimonious fuss over it. I’ve been a vegetarian/occasional pescatarian for so long that I honestly forget that most meals eaten involve meat on some level. I tend to reflexively serve only vegetarian food when I’m hosting something, not because I’m making a point, but because meat isn’t really in my vocabulary of cooking and serving. With a few notable exceptions (Anthony Bourdain is coming to your wedding, you’re working a Texas BBQ theme), there’s no real reason that anyone should even notice that you’re not serving meat if you serve tasty vegetarian food.
Unless, of course, they are one of those sanctimonious meat eaters who has to make a big fuss about it. And while there’s an obsession with sanctimonious vegetarians out there, I have to say that sanctimonious anti-vegetarians seem to be as common, if not more common, and they can be real assholes. Such as the one featured in this article:
When Patrick Moore, a salesman from Attleboro, Mass., arrived at an old friend’s wedding in 1999 to discover nothing but vegetarian options, he made an excuse about leaving the gift in his car so he could visit a sandwich shop across the street.
“I remember coming back carrying the bag of half-scarfed chicken Parmesan, only to be caught red-handed by the groom,” Mr. Moore said.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”
“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.
Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”
Yep, the argument is that programs that look like they’re about reducing emissions and reducing dependence on fossil fuels---as well as getting people to be healthier by getting more exercise---are in fact a liberal plot to have the UN take over our cities. Apparently, starting with those out West, because what you want when you’re plotting a takeover of a country is to go after cities that are well-armed and spread out. Though I suppose the paranoid right wingers could just say that’s why they have to take over the cities by stealthy hippyness, because warfare isn’t gonna get it done.
There’s some jibber-jabber paranoid explanation for why bike programs are secret UN plots to destroy America.
Maes said in a later interview that he was referring to Denver’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international association that promotes sustainable development and has attracted the membership of more than 1,200 communities, 600 of which are in the United States.
Whatever the bullshit explanation is basically irrelevant, of course. The point is to stoke resentment against bicyclists, and then transfer that resentment to the Democrats. Bicyclists and pedestrians are easy hate objects, because they make car-dependent people feel insecure, especially if those car-dependent people are using their car even in situations where they know they could walk it or bike it. If you doubt this, I highly recommend actually getting a bike and trying to commute with it---even if you can’t go to work, try going to the store or to nearby occasions with it---and you’ll find that there are lot of mindlessly angry drivers out there who take your bicycle as an affront to their manhood or something. Yes, even if you obey every traffic law and are scrupulous about staying out of the way (which I was when I lived where I biked everywhere---now I just walk).
Since we skipped last week, due to Netroots Nation (I let someone else have my CSA), I’m just going to skip week #5 in general and go straight to #6. There is therefore only two dinners that we got out of this, though they created a lot of leftovers that I’m still happily eating. I’m adding the music I listen to while cooking, in reference to the last CSA post and suggestions of how to make cooking more entertaining.
I saw this link on Twitter the other day, and I have to say that the annual moaning about too much zucchini never made sense to me. I’ve never had anyone dump a bag of zucchini on me, though they’re welcome to do it. I have trouble imagining such a thing as too much organically grown garden zucchini. Granted, I am a vegetarian, and so zucchini is the sort of thing I can eat piles of, because it makes a great meat substitute in all sorts of food, including pastas and Tex-Mex dishes like squash enchiladas. (Which I’ve been dying to make, but am having trouble cobbling together the peppers for the sauce, or finding canned sauce in NYC.) Which is why I raise an eyebrow when someone whips out the, “I like zucchini, but” line. If it’s overabundant in the summer and you’re a meat eater, just eat more vegetarian dishes, right? Vegetarians find it hilarious when meat eaters worry that our diets have less variety, since most meat eaters eat mostly beef or chicken, with occasional forays into pork or fish.
Dinner # 1
1) Thanks to the people who suggested keeping veggie scraps and using them to make broth. Now I have a growler of broth in my fridge, and it’s a much quicker way to cook with veggie broth than using bouillon. I used some to make potatoes. I sliced potatoes and onions, tossed them into the pan with salt and pepper, and then poured veggie broth and mustard on. So delicious.
2) Made the cucumber salad with a soy and ginger dressing from the Bittman book, since it worked out so well last time.
3) Riffing off another Bittman recipe, I cooked the eggplant, purple peppers, some garlic and some onion together, throwing in one green pepper for good measure.
Callaloo
Corn
Parsley
Green beans
Cucumber
Zucchini
Red potatoes
Tomatoes
Onion
Eggplant
And our fruit share started:
Peaches
Pluots
Cantaloupe
Let’s talk briefly about how to make cooking fun instead of mindless drudgery. Cooking is a lot more creative and usually less stressful than doing other kinds of housework, like scrubbing stuff on your hands and knees. Still it means a lot of doing stuff like chopping and mixing that can be, on their own, kind of boring. No wonder it sometimes feels easier to skip it and go to a takeout place instead. And of course, the whole point of this CSA project isn’t to make anyone feel guilty about getting takeout! I do that a lot myself. But the point of the project is to use the community to share ways to achieve the goal a lot of us have of cooking more, healthier, and, if you can, using more sustainable produce.
Folks---okay, female folks---have been finding ways to make cooking more relaxing and entertaining since roughly forever. There’s a reason that kitchens are the places many people gravitate to at social events, because many of us are conditioned to hanging out and having fun chatting while preparing food. But if you don’t have a bunch of people around to entertain you, there’s other things you can do. I use cooking as my time to really listen to music, which is great, because it’s so easy to get caught up in your life and forget to take the time to enjoy music. Or listen to new stuff. A lot of people, myself included, have taken advantage of laptop computers and will do things like catch up on blogs or Twitter feeds while cooking.
Share your strategies in comments! Sadly, I have no way to make cleaning up the kitchen fun, but I still see it as an opportunity to listen to music or catch up on podcasts.
Dinner #1
1) Still had cucumbers and beets left, so started by making a quick tomato cucumber salad, with some basil from my fire escape herb garden. Basil (cut up with herb scissors), cucumber, tomato, a little olive oil, vinegar, a little dried oregano, salt, pepper, shake it up.
2) Sliced up roasted beets, nuked ‘em. Served them with the yogurt sauce that I made with the purslane.
3) Took some onion rolls, toasted them, and made sandwiches with the last bit of cucumber, more tomatoes, and delicious horseradish cheddar.
Time: 30 minutes, but I was moving real slow, because I was feeling lazy.
CSA Week #14
I took advantage of a lazy Sunday afternoon to prep ingredients for use later in the week, so that my cooking time on busier days was cut down to a minimum. I decided to cook up everything that I’d have to roast to softness to use anyway, namely the butternut squash and beets. I washed all the above. I put the beets in foil, and cut the butternut squash in half and seeded it. (All this gets saved for making veggie broth.) Everything went in the stove for an hour at 350. Pulled them out, let them cool, took their skins off, and put them in the fridge in a covered bowl.
Well, I spent far more time than I should have googling around, looking for a KFC ad that I saw on TV at the gym today. I don’t watch many ads---yeah, DVR and iTunes!---so I have no idea if this is a popular ad or not. But it recalled the Angry Dude ads that raised so much of a fuss at the Superbowl. Apparently, despite the outcry, advertisers really think the “show men rebelling against an evil matriarchy” ads are the way to go. This particular ad had a bunch of men addressing the camera, explaining how they were so going to eat 
So there’s been a dust-up between 
Well, this strikes me as the most irritating non-story I’ve read in a long fucking time. I suppose I’m supposed to be shocked and mildly distressed at the release of a study (conducted by Nutrisystem) that shows 
I rarely find myself---with the exception of watching Fox News, or reading something in the “we’re dudes who think sexism is daring and funny” genre---filled with blinding, searing hatred towards everyone involved when I engage with some media product. I’m just a cheery person that way. But I made an exception when reading 
