You kitchen sophisticates will scorn, but I am one of the people who suffer what the NYTimes refers to as “Raw Panic”:
What should be a beautiful and inspiring sight — your kitchen, overflowing with seasonal produce — is sometimes an intimidating tableau of anxiety. The knobbly piles and dirt-caked bunches are overwhelming. Already the peak-ripe multicolored peppers are developing soft spots; the chard is wilting and the race is on.
“People often feel overwhelmed in the kitchen, and when all this produce suddenly arrives, they panic,” said Ronna Welsh, a chef in Brooklyn who teaches workshops on, among other topics, produce management. ..
This could help explain why, in a 2009 survey of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans ate no more vegetables than they did in 2000, despite all the public education about the benefits of a plant-based diet, and despite the availability of a far greater variety of vegetables. A market research firm, the NPD Group, says Americans eat an average of a little more than a cup of vegetables a day and a little more than a half-cup of fruit, or about a quarter of what the government recommends.
To help her students truly embrace vegetables, Ms. Welsh says that she has learned to address kitchen psychology along with cooking skills: less-experienced cooks have a persistent sense of responsibility toward the expensive, carefully raised produce that they buy and the corresponding feeling of guilt when that produce isn’t used to its full potential.
“There are all these expectations to perform complicated tasks that they have no training in,” she said. “They are set up for crushing failure.”…
Many useful tips at the link on “Coping with Summer’s Bounty”. (I would totally pay for the services of a vegetable butcher.) Particularly happy news: Deb Perelman, whose Smitten Kitchen blog first gave me the courage to try slow-roasting my tomatoes, has a cookbook coming out this fall.
For the hardcore flesh-chomping home cooks among us, the Washington Post offers news of “The Pig to Table Project“:
Four years ago, when my husband and I began trying to hunt, gather and grow as much of our own food as possible, we instituted a barnyard rule of one new species per year. Year one, naturally, was chickens — everyone’s introductory livestock. The next year was turkeys. Year three, buoyed by our success with chickens and turkeys, we made an exception and got both ducks and bees.
This year, humbled by trouble with ducks and bees, we’re back to one. Our fondness for bacon, coupled with our aversion to daily milking, made pigs the obvious choice. We’re not alone. Although backyard pigs fly under the USDA radar, and there are no statistics, anecdotal evidence indicates that home sties are on the rise. Walter Jeffries, proprietor of Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, sells pasture-raised piglets and reports an uptick in business. “With the recent recession we have seen an increase in the number of people interested in raising a summer pig,” he says….
I’d suggest Cole give pig husbandry a try, but (a) he doesn’t read my posts; and (b) this is a man who lost a one-on-one battle with a dead, flash-frozen pig. Tamar Haspel’s blog, Starving Off the Land, is also an entertaining read, even if for 99% of us no more aspirational than Game of Thrones.
***********
Apart from the always worthwhile discussion of good eats and how to achieve them, what’s on the agenda for the end of the weekend?
Nellcote
Why didn’t I know about fresh apricot pie with dark chocolate truffle ice cream before today?
Maude
@Nellcote:
Oh, that would be wonderful.
DS
People keep pigs in their backyards now? Um, I grew up near a pig farm, and pigs are fucking disgusting animals. This is gross and I hope the USDA does crack down on these morons.
Amir Khalid
I don’t know about raising livestock. The way Juicers roll, it seems to me they’d develop personal relationships with the animals and then never have the heart to slaughter them.
@Nellcote:
Better late than never, right?
JoyfulA
A few backyard pigs used to be common before factory farming knocked the prices so low. Now my cousin, a truck driver who used to raise a hog or two each year next to his half-acre of corn, etc., tells me that friends brag if they manage to break even, but nearly everyone has quit.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir Khalid:
Yes. We’re probably capable of stealing from our animal friends [eggs, milk] but not of murder.
jeffreyw
I’ve been chasing bugs back and forth in the garden. Bug hunt! Stay frosty!
Violet
All the produce I don’t eat gets tossed into the compost pile, so I don’t feel like I ever truly waste anything. I do feel bummed out if I don’t get to eat something that looked good when I bought it. Or when I’ve grown so much I can’t eat it all.
@Nellcote:
Wait! Where’s this? Did I miss a link? Sounds divine!
Matthew Reid Krell
I wonder if my lease allows composting. I HATE having produce go in the trash.
WereBear
@Nellcote: There had to be something to look forward to.
becca
We took an injured bird to a wildlife center that specialized in rehabilitating raptors.
There was a sign on a cage filled with white rats that warned DO NOT GET CLOSE TO THE FOOD.
WereBear
I go by my favorite grocery stores in the course of going to work, so I’ve gotten into the habit of buying only enough for a few days at a time. More room in the fridge, less waste all around.
David Koch
Quick-energy Soylent Yellow is tastier than Soylent Green.
Cain
I was waiting for an open thread.. check out this article:
how I lost my fear of universal healthcare
It’s about a republican, a die hard christian who went to Canada and found out Universal Healthcare wasn’t so evil after all. She learned something.. good stuff. People can change. It’s the filthy mind fuck that the Republican party apparatus does to people.
FlipYrWhig
I’m sure indie/foodie/DIY types scorn the grab-and-go plastic bag full of greens, but there’s just no way to use a head of a leafy vegetable in time when there are only two people in the house. We have the choice of wasting money or wasting food. Feh on that.
urlhix
Pigs are pretty clean if you don’t pack them in. Gene Logsdon has a neat set-up I may try next year. This year I’m getting our usual half pig from a fellow farmer friend and spending a day piecing it out and making sausage. Yum.
khead
I will be the first hypocrite to say that as much as I loves me some pork goodness I could not whack the pig I raised. I am sure my grandmother – who had no problem breaking a chicken’s neck – would be disappointed.
So, it will have to be someone else’s pig at the next cookout.
Edit: Heh. Too late. See comment @ #4. I was reading the Post article.
NotMax
“kitchen psychology”
BWAH-HAHAHAHAHA.
Haunted by feelings of inadequacy that they’re not producing as Escoffier or the celebrity cook-of-the-month would; crushed that their $500 saute pan doesn’t automatically produce royal banquet-worthy items; that perfection doesn’t arrive without extensive practice.
Self-help groups not far behind.
“Um, hi. My name is Pat.”
“Hi, Pat!”
“And…and I’m – I’m a gastroholic.”
danielx
@Cain:
Please provide the link again, didn’t work.
On the agenda? Shrimp cocktail, bruschetta and salad for dinner. It’s too hot (again) for anything else, although internal polling is indicating a nonnegotiable demand for oatmeal raisin cookies to be baked by Your Humble Obedient, of course.
@efgoldman:
Look on the bright side, at least you’re getting enough rain to have mosquitoes. That’s one problem we don’t have this year, but if I had my druthers…
Narcissus
Cole Diary, 7/22/12: “Welp. I got beat up by a pig again.”
danielx
@NotMax:
And has a concealed problem with pink Himalayan salt, no doubt. Bless Megan McArdle’s little heart, she’s provided comedy material, if not illumination, for decades to come.
Hypatia's Momma
@khead:
That’s because chickens are stupid, nasty little birds.
quannlace
Yeah, there’s probably wisdom in stopping by the market daily and just picking what looks good for that day’s meal. Instead of going to your local farmer’s market once a week and loading up of veg.
Beauzeaux
Growing one or two pigs is pretty easy. Pigs produce no more poop than an animal of similar size. Pigs need room to roam and root if they are to be healthy & happy. And clean.
Unfortunately, pigs are intelligent and funny. If you raise a pig you may have a hard time butchering him.
We couldn’t kill any of our chickens and they’re about as primitive and dumb an animal as walk the earth.Their eggs, however, are lovely.
Scott Alloway
Raised three pigs when I lived in Sebec, Maine. They are bright, pleasant animals. But in a backyard? Where the hell are you going to put the shit. It does really stink, you know. And are you ready to butcher (or know a slaughter house)?
Gravenstone
Entered into the yellow jacket wars in earnest tonight. Found a couple dozen of the wee bastards scattered amongst ALL of my interior windows. Fortunately they were more interested in trying to make their way out into the light than assaulting me, so I was able to spray them down and vacuum up their carcasses. Now, the hunt begins to try and find where they’re getting in at.
red dog
As a farm kid the cows were Chuck, pigs Porky and chickens Yellow so the dinner table talk about food was generic. Chickens we slaughtered,local butcher did cattle and the pig man with all the scalding tubs showed up every fall. Raising livestock you do not have pasture for is a bad, money losing idea.
Citizen_X
That’s gonna leave a mark.
Pah. Tell it to my fledgling dragons.
PeakVT
@danielx: Link.
It’s a nice story, but the solution to her decided lack of information doesn’t exactly scale well. We need millions of people to get a clue.
Litlebritdifrnt
I was from a poor family as a child, I remember my mother buying a pound of ground beef on a sunday as a treat. We ate it as “meat and tatties” (ie ground beef with gravy and boiled potatoes), on Monday the left overs turned into stew, with lots of potatoes and veggies. By Tuesday the leftover beef stew turned into a curry, served over rice. By wednesday the left over beef curry turned into another stew, with more rice and vegetables. By thursday the curry had turned into a soup, with more vegetables and perhaps the odd piece of beef floating around in it, it was served with thick wedges of bread and butter. I will never forget how my mother could make a pound of ground beef last almost a week.
MikeJ
@jeffreyw: We had flying things around here yesterday.
SiubhanDuinne
This entire sentence is purest win. Made me snort Pinot Noir out my nose, it did.
Randy P
There’s are several local organizations that are delivery points for a farm cooperative, a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). The deal is you pay a yearly subscription fee and then you agree to take whatever the farm delivers each week. It’s a great deal as it works out to only about $17 per week. I’d like to help support farmers. But I’ve been a little nervous about the “take whatever they deliver” part. People talk in terms of 5 pounds of kale for instance.
jeffreyw
@MikeJ: Ooh! We never see much aside from a few Chinooks shuttling hither and yon. I did some time at Ft Lewis, and was shuffled through McChord several times coming and going.
TaMara (BHF)
@Anne Laurie – you are not alone. I have a friend who came close to divorcing her husband after he signed them up for a CSA. By the end of summer, she was near tears every time a delivery came…and they still had fall harvest to get through.
mechwarrior online
@red dog:
Depends on the live stock. I’m an advocate for raising rabbits. They are extremely cheap to raise, require minimal space and effort, fly under the radar (very few people assume you’re eating them or will even know), extremely easy to kill, and can offer some enjoyment for the family during the process. More importantly though they are tasty and healthy.
Rabbits are something you can even pull off in a city. Minimal backyard, a deck, any of these things will do. You can add pigeons to this list as well. And fun fact about pigeons we originally kept them for a food source and source of fertilizer… since other foods became cheaper we stopped eating them and now they are all over the place.
lamh35
OT guys, but Obama supposed to give remarks at the hosptial in Colorado where he just spent over 2 hours talking to family of the victims and survivors. I’m thinking the remarks are gonna come soon.
Narcissus
Church choir slaughtering a cat on NBC.
Randy P
@TaMara (BHF): See my CSA-phobia 2 comments above yours.
David Koch
@MikeJ: DROOOOOOOOONES!
kideni
@Randy P: Sometimes CSAs work out, sometimes they don’t. I’m lucky enough to live in an area (south central Wisconsin) with a number of CSAs to choose from, so the farms seem to compete to make sure people get a good variety of stuff. I get a box every other week from May to mid-December, and there are always eight to twelve different things. In the early part of the season, sometimes the farm scrambles to find enough to put in the box — we had a really cold spring last year, so in May they didn’t yet have asparagus and they were giving us things like nettles and pea scapes (a friend of mine scoffed, “That’s not food, that’s compost!”).
This year my problem is that it’s been too freaking hot to spend more than five minutes in the kitchen, even to chop things up for salad, much less cook anything, so things go bad because I just don’t get to them in time. It also doesn’t help that every few days we seem to have a power outage that lasts an hour or two, and the fridge is small and old so it loses its cool quickly.
TS
@lamh35:
I couldn’t find anything but praise for every word he said – authentic, compassionate, concentrated on the victims and the work of those supporting them – but the media – will wait to see
The prophet Nostradumbass
My first comment was eaten, so…
I was at a local shopping center today at lunch time, and I saw an SUV with a bumper sticker on it:
She’s right on the issues
Palin 2012
Yutsano
@MikeJ: ZOOMIES!!
Got the date range of August 15-22 but BG isn’t able to commit to a particular day. So maybe the invasion of the bar and going forward from there isn’t such a bad call.
Kathleen
Since I’m over 60, I’m afraid I’ll be the ingredient turned into Kasich’s idea of a jobs initiative – “Soylent Seniors – the all natural, wholesome snack for pricey pets of plutocrats”. OK. I’ll nod off in front of the TV now.
Tamar@StarvingofftheLand
I’m the one with the pigs.
Got doubts about backyard pigs? Check mine on the StyCam:
starvingofftheland.com/pigs
They’ve got 2000 square feet, which is more than my husband and I have.
Funny, that you pull things from such disparate sources, and Ronna Welsh happens to be a friend of mine. Small world, eh?
Thanks for the “entertaining.”
TaMara (BHF)
@Randy P: Oops, I probably didn’t help with that phobia, did I? Personally I’d rather make the trip (about 30 minutes) to a great farm stand that has the best price on fresh produce I’ve ever seen. Great variety, excellent quality and I can pick and choose what I want.
But I can see if you freeze, enjoy canning or have a large family that a CSA is great.
TaMara (BHF)
@lamh35: I just watched them, and of course he made me cry. Love my president. /Obot
p.s. sorry if I broke the site. Seems like suddenly the servers are down.
geg6
I do not understand for a second this idea that people are afraid of fresh veggies. Hell, we belong to a CSA AND grow our own. We have a 30’x30′ veg garden, a 4’x10′ root veggie garden, a bunch of fruit trees and bushes and vines (pears, apples, peaches, red and black raspberries, and green grapes), and a huge herb garden on the deck with the pots on wheels so we can roll them into the sun room when it gets cold. It’s truly not that much work during growing season. And we can and freeze all we can’t eat fresh. Nobody but nobody makes better bread and butter pickles than my John. We makes jams and relishes and sauces. It takes us all of two weeks or so to put them up, what with both of us working long hours, full time, on our jobs and with a few lazy days scattered in the mix. Anything we can’t get to quickly enough goes into the compost pile. Yes, we have a large yard to enable us, but I did this (though not quite on this scale) when I lived with my ex and our house was right in the middle of our small town (my current yard is 2 acres versus the ex’s of less than a quarter acre.
If you like good food, you find a way to use it to its best advantage. If you are intimidated by it, it’s probably because you think it’s too much work. It is work, but not as much as you think. And the results are that you eat the most delicious stuff, you can take pride in what you’ve accomplished, and you are eating the healthiest possible stuff you’ll ever eat.
I do, however, draw the line at livestock or poultry. Neither of us would be able to butcher them, let alone slaughter them. But that’s what our CSA is for.
MonkeyBoy
I recall from somewhere that an enormous percentage (maybe 30%) of food bought from grocery stores winds up getting thrown away. And no, putting old food on a compost pile doesn’t count as using it.
I have a new approach to the “onion problem” that results from when you need only part of an onion and the remainder is consigned to the fridge where it winds up dying: Pickle the leftovers.
Put the left-over onion in a jar of vinegar (you can add a little salt, sugar, mustard seeds, pepper corns, etc. to taste). It will be pickled after maybe 3 days and will last for a good time. Pickled onions are good in salads, sandwiches, and are a part of a plowman’s lunch, though I wouldn’t cook with them. The vinegar solution can be reused (just add more fresh onion) I guess until it is so weak it stops pickling or it grows cloudy.
You should use a jar with a plastic lid or one with a rubber seal ring because the vinegar will make an ordinary metal lid rust eventually.
geg6
@MonkeyBoy:
You are full of shit. Composting absolutely counts as “using” the food you can’t manage to eat be before it goes bad. You don’t know what you are talking about. Talk to a farmer and tell him/her that shit. They will laugh you out of the room. It’s the best use of waste on earth and is good for the soil and the environment. You obviously don’t garden or you’d know better. I’ll chalk this comment up to total ignorance but you need some schooling.
Peregrinus
@MonkeyBoy:
That solution would be perfect if not for the fact that pickled onions stink to high heaven – or at least, Russian-style ones do.
Peregrina hates raw onion and won’t let me kiss her without brushing my teeth if I’ve eaten any. If I’ve eaten pickled onion she won’t even let me exist near her.
lamh35
@TS:
he told a story that so far no one has done yet. There are many stories, but the networks seem to have the same ones. It was good to see and hear that POTUS gave them the most comfort that he could.
http://youtu.be/C2n4TUBBJGg
muddy
WHen confronted with too much stuff, I have a cooking day, and cook everything in sight. Start up the coals and just keep putting things on until the coals are done, using different seasonings on the batches. Saute, roast, whatever the vegetables. Then I make a number of different recipes combining these things, leave some in the fridge and put some in the freezer, for ready made meals when I don’t want to cook. I also like to do that so as not to waste propane. If the oven is on, I will cook extra things just to take advantage of it.
muddy
@MonkeyBoy: My solution for onions is to chop a lot at once and then put the extra into ice cube trays. When my son was young and freaked out if he saw a piece of onion, I used to blender them. That makes real good cubes.
I’ve got all kinds of things in cubes, onion, garlic, herbs, concentrated stock etc. I pop them out of the tray into a ziplock bag, and then suck out the air with a straw.
Nylund
My wife’s tips:
1. Immediately, clean, chop, prep, etc. certain veggies. Thus, when you want a salad, all you need to do is just throw handfuls of stuff in a bowl.
2. Get a juicer. Then, when fruits and veggies are nearing the end of their lifespan, just juice it and drink it.
These two tricks alone have vastly reduced our produce waste.
John
I’m going to say that “raw panic” has almost nothing to do with the amount of vegetables eaten by Americans in aggregate. The people who don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables are going to overwhelmingly not be yuppies who panic due to the enormous quantities of fresh produce they buy.
This is like saying that problems with malnutrition in American children may partly derive from private school cafeterias serving food that’s too fancy for children’s tastes.
Kimberly Smiths
Bottomline..we need to be healthy nowadays..whether we like it or not..its not a choice but a command…