egging you on

Back when he was president, and corpulent, and somewhat indecisive, Bill Clinton was represented in the Doonesbury comic strip by a little hovering waffle.

C’est moi. I am the waffle.

I told you on Tuesday that you didn’t have to look up what goes on at a conventional egg farm, and that you could go ahead and buy eggs marked “free range,” even though the standard is largely meaningless. The chickens outside my door are taking me to task on this, quite rightly, and I am changing my stated position.

All of us, collectively, walking around with our fingers in our ears saying “LA LA LA,” and buying food without thinking about it very much or questioning it at all, have driven the bus to this place. We gotta get out of this place. Forget the nice picture on the egg carton label in the store. An egg factory can say its hens are “free range” if, at one end of the cavernous warehouse that houses tens of thousands of birds, there is a cat-door that leads outside. It doesn’t matter where it leads, and it doesn’t matter if none of the very miserable birds ever use it. Hey, man--they have the option. To make it possible for miserable birds, denied most of the happy jobs that occupy a hen’s day (picking through the grass, rolling in the dust, finding some privacy to lay an egg) to live in close quarters without pecking each other to bits from boredom and hysteria, the birds are de-beaked. “De-beaked” is an awful word, but let me assure you it is a euphemism even so.

Are your fingers creeping up towards your ears? It isn’t pretty information, I know. But this is all done for us, the consumer. In our names, and then we support it with our dollars. We do have to start somewhere if we are going to fix this mess. Why not with eggs?

I stand by a couple of things I said: one, buy eggs from people, not corporations. I gave you some links to find some of those near you, if you don’t have a ready source, and here they are again: one, two and three places to look for good eggs. Two, pastured hens lay tastier eggs, so you will be well-rewarded for the little bit of expense and trouble.

In compensation for harshing your mellow, here is a recipe for muffins that taste like cheesecake, and yet are good for you. They are even better for you if you add a quarter cup of oat bran to them, but that’s all up to you. Happy eggs make them a vivid yellow that will give you pleasure in the morning light.

ricotta muffins

adapted from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café

makes 12 muffins

2 c flour

½ t salt

1 ½ t baking powder

1/8 t baking soda

finely grated zest of a lemon or orange

½ to 2/3 c sugar

the optional 1/4 cup of oatbran

1 c ricotta cheese

1 c buttermilk

2 eggs

1 T fresh lemon juice

2t vanilla extract

4T ( ½ a stick) unsalted butter, melted

1 ½ c frozen strawberries

Lay the strawberries on a cutting board to thaw slightly while you get everything else in order, otherwise the berries will fly around the kitchen like asteroids when you try to chop them.

Preheat the oven to 350. Lightly grease your muffin pans, or line them with papers.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar.

In another medium bowl, beat the buttermilk into the ricotta, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in the vanilla and lemon juice.

Coarsely chop the now-slightly-relaxed strawberries.

Add the ricotta mixture and the strawberries to the dry ingredients, stir once, then dump in the melted butter (you just don’t want the melted butter to hit the cold stuff first, or it globs), and combine the mixtures quickly and lightly. Don’t over-beat; just make sure all the dry stuff is wet, and accept a few lumps.

Portion out among the cups, filling them to the top.

Bake in the center of the oven for 20-25 minutes, or until lightly browned and the top springs back when you poke it gently. Let cool in the pan for ten minutes if you can stand it, as these are soft and will benefit from the chance to firm up a bit, then remove to a rack.

The original recipe called for cherries, which has merit as an idea, and I think peaches or raspberries (no chopping!) would be delicious, too.

oh, grate

Who da man? Who. Da. MAN?

Am I going to let a muffin beat me? No, I am not. The muffin does not drive this bus.

I started thinking about this star-crossed muffin because I was thinking about wooden spoons. I have a motley and beloved collection of them, and I could tell you where I got each one and how each received its distinguishing blemish: the crack in the one that was a party favor at my friend's Maine wedding, from when I used it in my giant Squeezo food mill and got it caught in the works; the chip in the one from the craft fair where I couldn't find my daughter for five harrowing minutes, from when I whapped that one too hard on the side of the polenta pot. And so on. For years my mother had one with one third of the spoon-end missing and it looked like that because in the winter we would make hot bran mash for the horses, and my sister let the pony lick the spoon and he forgot himself for a moment and bit the end off. I understood his enthusiasm. Hot bran mash on a cold morning is pretty enticing, and I dipped into it myself pretty freely on the way out to the barn.

In New York in the 80’s, as I recall, a bran muffin was a hot item. It was big news all of a sudden that bran was good for you, and people in the early morning in New York in the 1980’s seemed often to be looking for something that was good enough for them that it would reverse the effects of whatever they had done the night before. The bran muffin I remember from those days was dark brown and kind of like a shot put that seemed to be made of wood shavings and sugar. Digesting it occupied most of the morning, if you happened to in fact eat it--often enough, I think people felt enough virtuous cleansing from the purchase, from eyeing the doughnut and then ordering the muffin, that they just left it on their desks. ( I have a friend who believes this principle explains why Stephen Hawking's book was a best-seller. People felt smart enough buying it, and having it around, that reading it kind of didn't come up for a lot of them.)

This bran muffin goes down a little easier than those old ones did, though I suppose it won't entice you if I say it tastes more like horse food than something in a city bakery cart. Probably that would only entice me. This one combines oat bran and flax meal, which is high in lots of things we know we ought to get more of, like omega 3s and lignans and fiber (ooh--that last one is something I actually understand!). Flax meal seemed like such a good idea even in the 8th century, before nutritionists, that King Charlemagne passed a law requiring his subjects to eat it. Now there’s some big government action a person can get behind.

I used golden flax meal for this because it is prettier, which may be why I think it tastes better, but you could use the regular stuff. I shred everything on my box grater because it is easy to wash, or at least this is how I console myself for not having a food processor, and also because the choice of grating options means that I can make the carrots less carrot-y, which may nudge these muffins up a few points in the polls in your district. When I grated them coarsely, I heard some grumbling about too many carrots.

Most of the people around here take a dim view of raisins in the muffins, but I think a case could be made for adding them, along with some toasted pecans, if that's how you roll.

pony muffins

makes 12

2 carrots, peeled and finely grated (about a cup)

1 apple, peeled and coarsely grated (a scant cup)

1 egg

1 c buttermilk

1/2 c sugar

1/2 t vanilla

3/4 c golden flax meal

3/4 c oat bran

1 1/4 c whole spelt flour or ww pastry flour

2 t baking powder

1/2 t baking soda

pinch of salt

1/4 tsp ground cardamom or 1/2 t crushed cardamom seed

6T butter, melted

optionally:

1/2 c raisins, soaked in hot water for a few minutes and drained

1/2 c chopped toasted pecans

Preheat the oven to 350, and prepare a 12-cup muffin pan by lining the cups with paper liners or lightly greasing them.

Set the butter to melting over low heat.

Mix the grated items, the egg, the buttermilk, the vanilla and the sugar in a medium bowl.

Combine the dry ingredients in a smaller bowl. Dump this into the liquid mixture and lightly combine, then add the melted butter and the raisins and/or nuts if you are using them, and mix lightly until dry ingredients are no longer obvious. Divide among the 12 cups and bake about 20 minutes, or until tops spring back when you press them lightly.

worth beans

OK, forget muffins. Muffins are over-rated. If you can’t forget muffins, please go try these muffins, which cannot be over-rated enough, and for which certain members of my family were pining yesterday as the counter piled up with bad muffins of other sorts. Please note for best results I recommend adding 2T of cornstarch to this batter because it radically improves the texture; also you have to track down almond flour, which is different from almond meal, and can be found here and will make a great addition to your pantry.

Black bean soup is a much better topic, I think. Black bean soup behaves, and a big pot of it will ease your mealtime pain for days and days. Three vectors converge on my black bean soup, and I will sketch them out for you.

Vector # 1: Greens Restaurant in San Francisco

Going to this restaurant in my 20’s was a revelation. After ten years of trying to quietly assemble a vegetarian entrée on the occasions that I found myself in fancy restaurants, it was heaven to be in a fancy restaurant that was all about vegetarians. Subtle, delicious, meticulous, intricate food for vegetarians! Wild stuff.

The cookbook was a revelation, too. Subtle, delicious, meticulous, intricate food is not made in a snap. Each recipe in that book takes a chunk out of your day; frequently one of the items lurking on the ingredient list is “a batch of X, on page Y” which has its own nine-yard-long list of steps and ingredients. But the black bean soup, which I had been told repeatedly up until that time could and should only be made with plenty of pork, was delicious. Almost worth the steps.

Vector #2: Laurie Colwin, natch

Laurie Colwin has a recipe for black bean soup in her essay collection More Home Cooking which is the perfect inverse of the one above. It is made in the proverbial snap in a largely hands-off process which is revolutionary, but less flavorful. Aiming for the middle ground between the two has produced a black bean soup that outperforms muffins any day of the week.

Vector #3: The Goddess Miranda

I have known my friend Miranda since I was a tot and she taught me (I know what she thinks I am going to say here but that is not the story I was planning to tell so HA) that it was possible to drink chocolate milk through a straw in your nose. I have yet to try it out personally, but she demonstrated so I know it is true. Whatever this gastronomic accomplishment might suggest to the contrary, Miranda is an epic chef. Her husband’s sweet toast on their wedding day revolved around the role of her cooking in winning his heart. It was a PG story in every respect but the tone of his voice as he said these two words: “lobster ravioli,” which to this day make me blush a little when I see them on a menu. Anyway Miranda once bet this husband of hers that he could not go five days without discussing flatulence, and to stack the odds in her favor, on Sunday of the week in question she made a big pot of black bean soup WITHOUT PRE-SOAKING THE BEANS.

What you can take from this is three-fold: one, whatever Laurie Colwin tells you to do will make your life easier and better, except the part about not sautéeing the onions and garlic first. Two, there is something to what people tell you about soaking beans.  Three, it is a wise person who makes a large pot of black bean soup on Sunday.   All odds will be stacked in this person’s favor for the week ahead. Black bean soup is tasty enough on the day you make it, but it improves so much on the subsequent days that making a large pot is unquestionably the right move.

If you have not soaked your beans overnight and MUST HAVE THIS SOUP, rest assured you can quick soak them by putting them in a pot with water to cover, bringing it to a boil and turning off the heat. Let them stand 30 minutes to an hour and off you go. Also be sure to look for a pure chile powder; commercial chili powder is usually a blend of spices and includes salt, which will toughen the beans if you add it too soon. Finally, I bet you could make this in a slow cooker, instead of the oven, once you have sautéed everything.

triple vector black bean soup

3 c dry black beans, soaked and drained

3T olive oil

2 medium onions, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 T mild pure chile powder, such as ancho

4 t ground cumin

1 t mild paprika

2t dried oregano

1 25-oz jar of pure Italian tomatoes

a large handful of fresh cilantro, chopped

1 4-oz can of chopped roasted green chiles

optionally: ½ to 1 chipotle in adobo sauce, to taste, for extra heat

salt to taste

To serve, some or all of these:

• Grated cheddar or jack
• Green salsa
• This fresh green sauce: large handful of minced cilantro, 1T minced scallion or shallot, juice of a lime, pinch of cayenne or minced fresh jalapeño, pinch of sugar, all mixed well together
• Dollop of plain yogurt
• Corn tortillas, warmed

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In an oven-proof pot (I use my Dutch oven), heat the olive oil and sauté the onions over medium heat until they soften. Add the ground spices and the garlic, and sauté a minute or two longer, until the fragrance is all around you. Add the beans, the tomatoes and three jars full of water, stir well and bring this to a simmer. Cover the pot, put it in the oven and turn the oven down to 250. Go on about your day. Stir if you feel like it, from time to time. After 2- 3 hours, see if the beans are totally soft (this will depend on the age of your beans). Keep going if not. If they are, take the pot out and turn off the oven. You can pause the soup-making at this point if you need to.

When you are ready to resume or continue, toss the chopped cilantro and the chipotle pepper if you are using it into the pot and use a hand blender to attack the cilantro heap, and then bounce it around the pot to partially blend the soup. It should be smoothish, but with texture. Add the green chiles and about 2t of salt and taste for heat and salt and adjust to your liking.

The more times you let this mixture cool and then reheat it, the more the texture will improve and the flavors will deepen and it even looks better, all shiny and nice. You can ladle it into bowls or over cornbread or rice or baked potatoes or, especially as it thickens, into burritos or over nachos. It freezes well, too.

half baked

Well, I wanted to write about muffins today, but the muffins are not behaving. A little scuffle like that, with the clock ticking down on the time I have to cook and write today, is enough to make me question this whole enterprise. (I am easily led astray.)

The last time I felt this way, which was the day before yesterday, or maybe it was the time three days before that, I randomly opened a big book of M.F.K. Fisher's writing and found something wonderful.

So, maybe you will get muffins tomorrow. Today, you get M.F.K. Fisher instead.

People ask me: why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?...

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?

molasses in january

Looking at my children now, it is hard to believe I was ever able to carry them around in my belly. This was sort of hard to believe the moment I laid eyes on them, now that I think about it. But dim memory and ample wide-screen photographic evidence suggests that I once did keep them in my midsection. They were good-size babies, and maybe as a result I tended to be slightly anemic while they were under construction. This led to talk of iron supplements. Supplementing with iron is a tricky business; it messes with your digestion something awful, and many believe this is due in part to the fact that non-dietary sources of iron are basically indigestible and consequently unavailable to your body--so you mess things up for no good reason, in the end. My midwife tried me out on a liquid herbal iron supplement that was food-based, but to my pregnant sensibilities it tasted like a juicy blend of marmalade and loose change and I could not choke it down. So to shore up the boost I got from eating like Popeye and cooking in a cast iron pot, I drank molasses. Not straight, mind you, but rather in hot water with a little soy milk. It must have been good for me, because it tasted heavenly and I sucked it down.

Molasses, proceeding as it does from the same source as sugar, can get a little collateral bad rap--but molasses is essentially all the nutrients that have been sucked out of the sugar, in concentrated form. Regular and dark molasses are what’s left after the first two stages of “purification,” and blackstrap molasses comes from the third boiling. Whopping amounts of calcium, potassium, magnesium and iron course through all of them. According to various unvetted sources, it’s reputed to cure cancerous tumors, fibroid tumors, anxiety, constipation, edema, heart palpitations, anemia, arthritic pain, joint pain, acne and will reverse the graying of your hair, should you be experiencing any of that. Let’s just say it’s good for you.

If you don’t feel like drinking it, I understand completely. How about gingerbread instead? In muffin form, so you can tuck it into your lunchbox or your mouth with equal economy of motion. Small children can put away a large number of these muffins, which tells you something about their appeal. Please note they do not give you the crested, bakery-window top of other muffins, thanks to a high proportion of liquid ingredients. But thanks to their flat tops they will sit still nicely for a dab of cream-cheese frosting, if you want to throw caution to the wind and call them cupcakes.

Please also note that you can get pretty creative with the dry ingredients here. I substitute flax meal, wheat germ, oat flour and/or almond meal for some of the flour, and usually use a mixture of white and whole wheat flours as well. If they are going down easy, they may as well bring some nutrition along.

gingerbread muffins

1/4 cup canola or other mild oil

1/2 cup molasses

1 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 egg

1 1/2 c flour
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon
2 t ground ginger (you can substitute or supplement with grated fresh ginger as well)
pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 350 and line a twelve-cup muffin pan with paper liners. Mix the oil, egg, molasses and applesauce together well in a medium size bowl. In another bowl, combine the dry ingredients thoroughly. Combine the two mixtures, divide among the muffin cups and bake about twenty minutes. These keep quite well, tasting not at all like day-old muffins when or if they reach that age.