It’s Not Just About the Honey

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Carol

a lavender honey production engineer at work

The honey bees have come home to roost. Again.

This is the fifth time in the past few years that they’ve taken up residence here at Chez Penn-Romine.

Our lavender, sage and rosemary blossoms are quite a hit with them. I don’t know if our flowering herbs are the sole determining factor in their insistence on being our little roomies. Our backyard is a calm place, with no kids and no dogs. Just Tex, the rangy neighbor cat who has made it his office. His business is sleeping, and he works a dedicated 20-hour-a-day shift. (If only I could be paid for that!) He doesn’t interfere with the bees’ work, and they don’t interfere with his.

Tex is even more suspicious of paparazzi than Cosmo is of bees.

One of the bees flew in the front door of our house last week. It was late in the day, and I’m sure she was just looking for the most direct route home. Don’t we all after a hard day’s work? I noticed her because our tomcat was sitting very still on the doormat and leaning way-waaaay back. He was squinting at something and had turned his ears backward as far as he could make them go. I walked over to take a look and realized there was a honey bee hovering at eye level, just about a foot from Cosmo’s face. No doubt he’d aimed his ears backward so the levitating wonder wouldn’t fly into one of them.

When the weather is nice–which is most of the time here in Southern California–we leave the door open, with just the security gate locked, so the light and fresh air can come in. Sometimes wee visitors come in, too. Like Mademoiselle Bee.

I herded her out gently, guiding her with a magazine. She came back in, and I escorted her back out. We replayed this scenario a couple more times. Since she obviously wasn’t getting the message, I finally closed the door. The next day I found her clinging to the security gate, dead. Bees have some pretty amazing bee-sense, but it doesn’t seem to extend to flying around what they cannot go through. We humans often behave that way, too, so I can’t fault our little visitor for not figuring it out.

I feel for the bees. Colony collapse is a serious problem. That may not sound like a worry to some people, but an awful lot of our vegetables and fruits are pollinated by these little guys. I’d like to give you a more precise measure than “an awful lot,” but different agencies calculate the amount in different ways, most of them confusing. I’ll just say that almost every bite of produce we enjoy is available to us because of bees.

A handful of bees may not sound like much (except a world of pain if you take it literally!), but a hive contains in the vicinity of 30,000 bees. When we blast a colony with bug spray, we’re removing thousands of pollinators from the landscape. They’re having a pretty tough time anyway, what with agribusiness’s willy nilly large-scale use of chemicals. So on a smaller scale, we can help them out by being patient when they decide to move in with us and relocate them to a spot that is better for us all.

I called Backwards Beekeepers to come and remove them. These Los Angeles-based volunteers collect honeybees and their queens and move them to locations where they can do their bee thing without causing problems for anyone else.

This isn’t easy for me. After a childhood filled with bee stings on the soles of my feet because I ran around barefoot in our clover-covered yard, I can state definitively that I am not a bee fancier. But I have at least a rough understand of what’s at stake. And I know it’s better to go against my natural inclination (which involves a spray can and running shoes) and do what’s right to help them mind their own beeswax.

The next wave: sage honey production is under way

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In Defense of Imperfection

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Carol

Perfection is highly overrated.

My pâte à choux pig–at least that’s what it’s supposed to look like…

This may be a foolish flaunting of an unpopular opinion in the face of my ongoing need to be hired to write something, edit something, cook something, teach something, or take others on a tour of something.

Homemade pappardelle: I cut it freehand with the pizza cutter. It shows.

But hear me out. Someone somewhere–no doubt an inspirational speaker sweating in front of a large audience–once said, “Don’t strive for perfection. Strive for excellence.” To which I say, “Hear, hear!” “Huzzah!” and “Preach it, brother!” for it affirms that rather than spinning ourselves up into a tizzy in pursuit of what is essentially unattainable, if we just make what we’re doing incredibly good, then everything will be just fine.

Lamb ragu on my homemade pappardelle: those imperfectly cut noodles don’t looks so bad now. And they tasted great.

I got my first inkling that this might be so while in culinary school when our chef instructor was rolling veal meatballs one day. He admonished us not to bother with one of those unitasking tools that produces meatballs that are all the exact same size and shape. As long as they’re in the ballpark size wise, they’ll all cook in the same amount of time, which is all that really matters, he said. Plus, you want people to know they were special enough for you to hand make meatballs for them. If they’re perfectly uniform they’ll look machine made, and your guests will think they came from a factory and not from you. And they’ll think they were only special enough for the store-bought kind.

My macarons are good. Those feet aren’t perfect, but if ever I want to make them professionally, that’s something I can work on.

So if your homemade pizza is shaped more like an amoeba than a steering wheel, who cares? If you made it, it tastes good, and you had a good time making it, then that’s what really matters. If you want to get a job making pizza, then you can focus on improving your dough shaping skills.

Too often we become intimidated in the face of the idea perfection. Personally, I’ve seldom made a soufflé that was ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille. They always taste just fine, but they’re usually lopsided. In fact, my soufflés often look like they’re searching for a lost contact lens on the oven floor. Maybe I can blame it on the tremors I don’t feel but that continue to tilt my stove millimeter by sneaky millimeter, until one day I bake a cake that is three inches tall on one end and two and a half on the other.

But why assign blame? I say it’s time to give the notion of perfection the ol’ heave-ho. Let’s enjoy our food. Let’s enjoy making it and sharing it. And let’s enjoy the people we make it for and share it with.

As for that lamb ragu, the recipe came from Poor Man’s Feast, by Elissa Altman. It was excellent.

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Edible Institute: Food for Thought & Food for Action

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Carol

Future Hens, a.k.a. Eggonomics Engineers

Meet Precious and Steve, hens in the making. More about them later.

This past weekend I attended Edible Institute, which is held each spring by Edible Communities. It is a weekend-long event in which food writers and publishers, educators, chefs, artisans, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, wine makers and others affiliated with the food industry gather to discuss issues related to healthy food, sustainability, farm-to-fork initiatives, food politics and policy, farming, farm worker issues, food safety…you name it.

Helena, my friend and hostess during my Santa Barbara stay (and owner of Steve and Precious), always asks what I’ve gleaned from the weekend and what I might write about it. I’m glad she does this, for it prevents me from getting lazy and putting off the info processing. And since I always experience information overload, putting it off is easy to do. As the kid asks his teacher in the Far Side cartoon, “May I be excused? My brain is full.”

So here are some things that really stuck with me from this weekend:

> The wisdom of our keynote speaker, food politics superstar Marion Nestle, who said, “Don’t eat products–eat food.”

The first thing Marion wrote that I remember reading several years ago was her admonition to shop only in the periphery of the grocery store. This will keep you out of the center aisles where all the processed, high-salt, high-sugar, high-fat pseudo-foods lurk, so that you spend more time in the fresh fruit and vegetable, dairy and meat sections, focusing on real food. I’ve been dedicated to this philosophy ever since. I park my cart on the ends of the aisles and only venture down them if I need to fetch particular items like oatmeal, flour, coffee, wine, light bulbs and cat litter. And I’ll be honest–the occasional emergency bag of Cheetos.

> Guner Tautrim of Orella Ranch urged us all to, “Put your dollars in the change you want to see.”

If we want more readily available healthy food, we must buy it whenever we can, instead of the processed stuff. This sends the message to suppliers that we want better food options. Admittedly this can be difficult. As Marion pointed out, when you can go to a fast food chain, hand them $5 and receive either five burgers or one salad, then you see the dilemma for those who don’t make much money and have a family to feed. But it is worth our effort to make healthy choices whenever possible, for both the personal good and the collective good it can do in the long run.

> The panel on school lunches addressed the question: What if the school lunch room was treated as a classroom, with cooking skills (a.k.a. life skills) being incorporated into education for K-12? When kids learn to cook, they also learn about science and math, which creates a much more integrated approach to learning. As for school yard gardens, plenty of anecdotal evidence shows that even when kids don’t like a particular vegetable, they’ll eat it if they grow it themselves. Pride of having planted, tended and harvested wins out over a case of the pickys almost every time.

There’s so much more, more than I can cover in a blog entry–in fact, more than we could cover in one weekend. This is tip of the tip of the iceberg. The problems are many and the solutions, not always easy to divine. But it’s worth the effort to do whatever we can.

So back to Steve and Precious, hens in the making and named, I might add, by Helena’s young grandchildren (Eggs à la Steve will be on the menu soon!). At this point the chicks are sporting a funky combo of chick down and grown-up chicken feathers. They’re not ready to take their place in the yard with the other ladies just yet. But soon they’ll be out there, scratching, pecking and producing great free range, organic eggs.

What Steve and Precious are up to is a natural thing, and their maturation will take place regardless of what they think about it. The rest of us are another matter. We can choose to cling to our easy but dead-end wasteful and toxic ways, or we can take more responsibility for our health and the health of those whom we feed. And the health of the planet. Even baby steps are better than nothing–which was my conclusion from last year’s Edible Institute, come to think of it. So this year’s Edible Institute was a reaffirmation of last year’s, but with more evidence and more advice on moving forward.

Want to learn more? Check out these resources:

Consult these!

Food Corps

Food Safety News

ConsumersUnion

Read these!

Anything at all by Marion Nestle. Start with Food Politics and What To Eat. She also contributed to A Place at the Table, a collection of essays on solving hunger in America, written by an impressive array of people active on the front lines.

Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook

The American Way of Eating, by Tracie McMillan

American Wasteland, by Jonatham Bloom

Watch these!

Go online and watch The Perennial Plate.

This is the most original, enjoyable and thought provoking collection of online videos about food, real food. They’re each only about 5 or 6 minutes long. You know, bite-sized! You’ll never look at those food shows on the telly the same way again. This is good stuff.

Here’s a great overview piece to whet your appetite. I especially love Episode 93: “Joseph’s Fields,” which reveals the secret to sweetening collards while adding absolutely nothing to them.

Dig in everyone!

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Have You Fed Your Muse Lately?

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Carol

I don’t usually do this–just post a blog entry to share someone else’s blog entry. Facebook and Twitter usually do an adequate job with getting the word out. But this is a particularly good and helpful post, and I want to spread it around.

My writer pal Amy Sundberg has some valuable things to say about stoking your creativity by feeding your Muse. Rather than rehash what she has written on the subject, I’ll just direct you right to her words of wisdom.

Enjoy–and get feeding!

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Oh, the Joys of Mismatched Cookery

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Carol

my personal stash of mismatchery

Friends who visit my kitchen for the first time are usually surprised when they see my cookware. Most people assume a chef will own a full set of the best, most expensive stuff. But mine looks about as haphazardly assembled as the cookware stash in your local thrift store.

Relish in progress in enameled cast iron

If you’ve read my blog very often–or been in my kitchen–you’ll know I have an affinity for mismatched kitchenware. As this extends to cookware, I own pieces of Lodge, All-Clad, Le Creuset, Chantal, Calphalon, Sur la Table and quite a few of indeterminate origin. As for materials, I have aluminum, stainless steel, carbon steel, tin-lined copper, cast iron–both plain and coated in enamel–and an assortment of metal fusions. Some pieces are cheap, some are moderately priced, and some represent a serious investment.

I love this jumble of cookware. Each piece has a different weight and a different feel in my hands. While I could make oatmeal in just about any vessel, there’s something satisfying about the little one-and-a-half quart stainless steel pot I bought for cheap from a restaurant supply company. If I’m making risotto, osso buco or pot stickers, I gravitate toward the All-Clad pan that’s big enough to take a nap in. There’s just something about it that says, “I’m here to feed all your friends in one go.”

Tackling Dorie Greenspan’s Beggar’s Linguine in the giant All-Clad pan

Beyond personal esthetics, though, I think it’s valuable to learn the properties of different cooking surfaces and how a variety of foods responds to being cooked on those surfaces. Particular materials are best for specific chores. Aluminum is inexpensive and a good conductor of heat, and it does a great job for most things, but cook up a pot of tomato-based sauce in it, and the acid in the tomatoes will turn the pot dark gray or even black. This in turn will render light colored foods some unflattering shades–not good unless you happen to like gray cauliflower. Cornbread baked in anything but cast iron just won’t have the crusty exterior that makes eating it an aural as well as tactile and taste treat.

Cornbread in cast iron…

While I eventually replaced most of the aluminum pots and pans I accumulated during culinary school, I have hung onto the silverstone-coated skillets for cooking eggs and fish, both of which stick to uncoated surfaces. I’ll keep them until I get the seasoning built up on the old cast iron skillets I got from my mother and grandmother.

Cornbread as only cast iron can do it!

The iron skillet my mother used ever since I could remember had a coat of seasoning so absolute that cooking eggs in it was never a problem. Sadly, much later in life she began putting it in the dishwasher and destroyed that amazing finish. I’m working to rebuild it now.

My enamel coated cast iron dutch ovens take forever to heat up, but there’s nothing better in which to braise or stew. As for some of those fancy name brand pieces made of assortments of fused metals, I find it instructive to cook in them and have a good idea of what they can do. Some of them are pretty heavy, so I’ve confined myself to owning smaller pieces from those collections–if they’re too heavy for me to lift when they’re empty (I’m talkin’ ’bout you, Chantal!), I certainly can’t hoist them when they’re full!

Most of us wouldn’t drink hot coffee from a glass or peel an apple with a meat cleaver. So why don’t we give more thought to what we’re cooking our food in? Using the proper cooking surface for the task at hand means you can brown meat handily, cook fish without half of it remaining in the pan and stir up a Mornay sauce that is a warm, creamy color, not dull gray.

Not to put down anyone’s collection of All-Clad or Chantal–I certainly wouldn’t refuse it if someone offered it–but for me there’s something pleasant about cooking in a pot that doesn’t look like it’s part of a uniformed regiment.

Cosmo stepped in as art director

Mismatched is just the way I like it!

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