Sometimes staying in is better then going out!

We had guests over on Saturday the 7th and I made some sushi. My daughter took the pictures until she got sick with a temperature and fell a sleep. So here is what we got...

Start with rice,

then yellowtail, salmon, tuna, cucumber, avocado,

tempura shrimp,

eel, crab,

red and green caviar,

and most importantly spicy mayo...

Roll it...

and then you get these...

and also these...

Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of the whole feast, because as I said the photographer got sick, but she did wake up for the most important part -- Four hours, 15 rolls, 120 pieces of sushi later... It was probably too much, but I did enjoy making it, and it seemed everyone loved eating it... It beats going out anytime!

Bird Bird Bird, the Bird is the Word

T-minus six days to my very favorite holiday, the one that recognizes gratitude with a roasted flightless bird. Granted, between me and that day there is a 14 hour drive to Iowa from Colorado, but that's what ya gotta do. I love Thanksgiving. I love that it hasn't been commercialized, I love that there's a parade and my husband and I can critique the bands (once a band director, always a band director), I love that it's a holiday that has a day following it simply for recovery. My kind of day.

Funny thing, though, is that I don't like to cook. Sigh.... Yes, it's true. My name is Jen, I contribute to two different food-related blogs, and I don't like to cook. Eat, yes. Cook, not so much. But Thanksgiving is different. I have the whole day, in fact several days, to prepare food. I'm not the only one cooking. And if it doesn't turn out, I can drown it all in gravy and everyone's happy. And if the gravy is lumpy, then let them all eat pie! Pecan. Hot. With ice cream.

It got tougher last year when it was the first Thanksgiving that I had to eat gluten-free. My husband's world famous stuffing suffered mightily from the terrible gluten-free bread we used. I wept, for I usually want to bathe in that stuffing it's so good. We tried again at Christmas and it was a little better, but not much. I have high hopes for this year since finding a wonderful bread mix (Bob's Red Mill, I love you. Mwah!).

We have a few traditional foods, but not many. The bird. Stuffing. Cranberry sauce, the kind with the lines (for easy slicing, right?) AND homemade. Apple salad...yes, it's healthy on this day even though it's covered in Cool Whip. Sweet potatoes. Pie. My husband must have his spiced apple rings or the day is a depressing failure. Anything else for the groaning table varies depending on what recipes caught our eye that year. And everything must be gluten-free.

Parade, lounging around in yoga pants all day, mouth-watering aromas from the kitchen, the gleeful voices of cousins pounding on one another...this is Thanksgiving.

Even if I do have to cook.

Le Menu - Bon Appetit!

Occassionally, dinner guests come into my kitchen and spy the weekly menu posted on the white board hanging there. Typical reactions:

"Wow!"

"You are too organized!"

"You have a planned weekly menu? OCD?"

"Control Freak!"

"Weirdo!"

So maybe the last two are my interpretation of their reactions, but it often comes across that having a menu is a novel idea. But I am here to tell you, it is one of the best things we do at our house. We are a bit loose about the schedule of it, and some weeks we don't do it at all. That's ok. Often on a Friday night over take-out or on a Saturday morning, my wife and I will pore over our cookbooks and recipes and create the menu.

Why do we do it? Obviously, good food is important enough to me that I am compelled to write about it, so that 30 minutes of effort taken once per week is compulsory. Some meals can't just be thrown together and, frankly, many of those type of meals aren't that good or good for you.

Also, when shopping for groceries, the trip has a newer purpose. I am not picking up our normal list of snacks, we are preparing for shrimp and leek risotto. I am not hobbling together a bunch of ingredients that will sit in my cabinets for months, I am creating an oustanding goulash.

Also, in some ways, this weekly menu creation feeds my frugality. The first step we take is to really scan our cabinets for what we have in the house. We try to use items in stock first. Lots of squash? We are planning squash stews and sausage and apple stuffed acorn squash and pumpkin pies. Four of five pounds of sushi rice left? I am planning fried rice or stir fry or some other risotto (Sushi rice makes much better risotto than arborio, by the way).

Making a menu helps us make sure that we are eating a balanced diet too. I am a carnivore and my wife is a starchivore. So I make steak every Tuesday night when she's out and she cooks pasta/potatoes every Thursday night when I'm out. We try to limit the number of red meat meals and try to make sure we get enough vegetables at EVERY meal. This just doesn't happen well without planning.

Lastly, our menu is a guide and not the law. Despite all of the OCD cracks, it's rare that we make it through the week and follow the menu exactly. It is so nice to come home from work and have some sort of plan for dinner - at least a list of known options. I have all the ingredients because I shopped for them already - with my weekly menu.

Despite people thinking that I am crazy, everytime someone looks at our menu at least one item stirs them to come back to our kitchen.

Really, Real Food

About five years ago, I was stretched out on my couch late at night suffering with a bout of insomnia and dozing through several horrid old early 80's movies like they currently show on WGN. As I passed by PBS, I was caught by the image of an old man on tractor in Illinois plowing a flat, empty field. The narrator, son of the tractor-driver, spoke of the hardships of family farming in the midwest during the 70's and 80's. The show was called "The Real Dirt on Farmer John", the story of the Peterson family and their farm outside of Caledonia. I was riveted by this all-American family story and their struggle with independence and their passion for the land.

As the story turned into the 1990's, what happened next astounded me. Farmer John launched a new business model for his farm, the Community Supported Agriculture project (CSA). Basically, John turned his farm into an old-fashioned diversified organic farm, then sold shares of the crops to city folks in advance. Each week, "subscribers" received a bushel share of the crops that ripened during the growing season. Not only did the farm make out, by sharing the risk with the shareholders, but the consumers made out by getting fresh from the farm organic produce cheaper than they could get at the store. The whole idea excited me.

For more than two years following the airing of this show, I kept my eyes out for something similar in my area. Then, one day I saw the flier. Porter Farms had a CSA that delivered to my area. $350 for 22 weeks of fresh produce - usually around 10 lbs per week. Since then, I have found other types of CSAs including those that produce fruit and some even that provide meats and dairy. Now there is a whole website devoted to promoting CSAs nationwide.

Cheap, fresh produce alone sounds like a great deal, but it is more than that. We get more produce than our family typically eats in a week. So we make it our mission to work it into every meal. Only vegetables that are in season make it into the bag and we find ourselves feeling very connected to the growth cycles of our food in this way. Lettuces early on. Tomatoes in Augus. Squash and Cabbage in the fall. We get a newsletter every week with our food. I learned about the airborne fungus that wiped out cucumber crops across the northeast. I learned how the cold summer we had this year kept tomatoes from ripening and how most of their crop was lost.

We are connected to our food in a new way, and in some ways, we are more connected to our earth.

P.S. Earlier this year, I was given a book that really made me think about this idea of supporting local agriculture called Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. My recommendation is to skip the first chapter entirely. The rest reads like a man's earnest pursuit to find out more about his food chain. I just picked up the more recently released book, In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan and I am looking forward to checking in regarding this book as well.

Grandma Who

My fathers mother, Grandma Donahue, that's who! She is the one who instilled in me the love of food. And not just any food — the-made-from-scratch kind of food. I barely remember my Grandmother buying anything in a box or a can. But what I do remember is that anytime Grandma Donahue was around you could bet you were going to learn to cook!

For many years when I was young my grandparents lived in Florida. When we went to visit, we always had homemade pies, fresh fish and papaya juice made from fresh papayas. When my grandfather died in 1971 my grandmother moved back to Youngstown to be near our family. Anytime we spent with Grandma, we spent hours cooking and baking. She spent time teaching us to make chicken broth from a whole chicken (eww!) and some water. While the broth took it's time cooking, we learned to make dough for the homemade egg noodles that went in to the soup. We mixed, rolled, cut and dried all our noodles. If that project was done, we went on to make homemade pizzas. And of course, every meal needed a dessert. We learned to make apple pies and apple dumplings, starting with a good, rolled out homemade crust and filling or rolling it with lots of fresh cut apples, cinnamon, butter and brown sugar.

My grandmother also brought her love to cookies in to our home. A great tradition that she started with us at a young age was making sugar cookies. We watched and helped while she made enough dough for all four of us. Each of us was able to roll out our dough and use her tin cookie cutters to create all sorts of shapes: circles, diamonds, snowflakes, a snowman and a gingerbread man. While the cookies waited to go into the oven, you could add your own touches with the green and red sugars. Grandma also made all the homemade frostings for an even extended sugar high! Every holiday, be it Valentines Day, St. Patricks Day, Halloween or Christmas, my girls and I are busy baking some sort of sugar cookie in honor of Grandma Who.

The Tamales That Bind

One thing about growing up in a traditional Mexican family is that the Mexican family is a matriarchy, despite all the machismo bullshit that characterizes it. Matriarchs run the family and they have a potent arsenal they use to full advantage, food.

Food is the heart of the Mexican family and has a mystique all its own. Cooking in a Mexican family is more than an act of feeding the family. Cooking is an expression of love and caring and eating the food is an expression of appreciation. Mexican mothers pour their heart and soul in every meal they create and we know it. If they can’t buy you everything you want, at least you will always have good food made by the hands that love you and with a taste you can’t find anywhere else. The meal is one of those things that bind families together and sharing it as a family is one of those rituals that stitch the family together and embed us with lifelong memories of hearth and home that we struggle to recreate for the rest of our lives.

One ritual that stands out above all the others is that of making and eating tamales. Tamales are a traditional celebratory food typically made during the holidays when the whole family gets together. One of the reasons they are used for family celebrations is that they take a long time to make and because you’re feeding a large group with over 100 tamales, you need everyone’s help in making them (typical of Mexican families, women are usually the ones who cook them). The men are left to do man stuff while the children hang out in the kitchen watching the whole thing unfold before them.

The family begins gathering the night before when the various matriarchs get together, under the tutelage of the grandmothers, to begin preparation. First there is the masa (or dough) to make, then the filling, then the softening and laying out of the corn husks, then assembling the tamales, then the steaming while other dishes are prepared. In order to have tamales ready for the family to eat on Christmas morning, the process begins the night before and goes on through the whole night.

But the process is more than an assembly line. It is the bonding among the women that happens as the art of tamale making is passed from one generation to another. Recipes are passed down, spices are tested for the right flavor, consistency is taught and everything is made by hand, the slow way. In the midst of spending the whole night getting the consistency of the masa just right, the preparation of the meat just right, the salsas to just the right bite and potency, the women share life stories and histories together, motherly advice is passed on, problems are talked through and all the while the women are aware that with their hands they are creating a special meal filled with love and the bonding they are experiencing for the entire family. It’s as if that special cross-generational bond occurring at that moment becomes a secret ingredient in the tamales. You can almost see the passing of the torch from one generation to another occurring as the younger women absorb the knowledge and secrets of the older ones. The children sit by or run around and eagerly try to lend a helping hand (the boy children just try to annoy the girl children who think they are becoming women by helping).

As the tamale ingredients are ready to be put together into the finished product, each one is handled with care. Each corn husk must be perfect and free from tears, they are laid out flat and the masa is applied to the inside in even strokes. Every tamale gets a generous portion of filling and sauce spread evenly throughout to make sure that nobody gets an imperfect or unsatisfactory one. They are then perfectly rolled and hand tied with a string and a simple knot. Each one is perfection and carefully and lovingly prepared. At around 3 in the morning, they are arranged standing up in the steamers and left to steam while the women clean up the kitchen and prepare the table for breakfast. The kids have long since pooped out and were put to bed by various women. Now the real talking can begin while they prepare the beans, rice, potatoes, and anything else they need for the morning.

In the down time while the tamales steam, the real juicy stuff is talked about. There is a lot of laughing and giggling and one or a few of the ladies will take a quick nap. It’s one of the few times you can see all the women of the family together and exchanging life’s lessons. Grandmothers, aunts, cousins, daughters, wives, from 80 years old to 20 are all there in the kitchen sharing and bonding.

All of that bonding is expressed in the tamales. As the men and children wake up or start arriving from their own homes, the sweet and meaty scent of the tamales wafts through the house like an open invitation. Everyone starts gathering in the kitchen, the women are scurrying to get all the plates and glasses and utensils laid out.

As the voluminous greetings of the men begin to reverberate through the house, you can almost feel the energy mounting. Everybody is here. The anticipation of the tamales is building. The men have waited months for a tamale occasion and know the women have been working on them through the whole night. Over a hundred tamales, beans, rice, handmade tortillas, potatoes, chiles, red sauce, green sauce, mole sauce, nopales (cactus), and anything else you can think of has been put together while we were all asleep. The women are tired but look none the worse for wear having spent a spiritual night of bonding while creating a meal of love together for the whole family.

As the men and the children sit down, we are giddy with anticipation as the women scurry about getting everyone served. Most of them already sampled everything before the men got there so they are not starving like we are. The men relish the attention being given to them by their mothers, their wives, their aunts, their grandmothers, and their nieces. The women are waiting in anticipation for the men to taste their first tamale and exclaim their appreciation with wide eyes and wide smiles.

The tamales are not only delicious they are creations of love and effort. The women are seeing the fruit of their labor in the glee and cheerfulness of the entire family gathered together by the tamales. The matriarchs are proud to have passed on their tradition to the mothers of the future and that their families are at that moment bound together by their special talent and the special ingredient, their love for their family. Everyone is aware of the work that went into them and the appreciation is boundless.

The men, despite their machismo, know that they are nothing without the women who care for them and can get together to perform such a culinary feat for them for this is a special gift of family that no broken family can recreate. For the young women who learned that night, this is a moment of transcendence from a girl to an accepted equal among the matriarchs. For the children, it’s a special memory of seeing the women of the family work as one proudly through the night, the wisdom of the old passed on, the special bonds shared and seeing the men of the family utterly so appreciative and happy for they know that by eating the tamales they are partaking of the tremendous love and care that was cooked into each and every one of those tamales and because of that love and care, they are the most delicious tamales they have ever had.

For that moment, the whole family is one big harmonious loving unit, the warmth is imprinted on every child’s memory, when everyone is happy, laughing, smiling, happy to be together, bound together through the delicious and tender tamales exuding that special ingredient of love and warmth and that the mothers of the family, the matriarchs, are the ones responsible. They are the key to keeping the family together and the tamale is the symbol of the love required to keep the family together. From that point on, eating a tamale alone is almost sacrilegious and doesn’t taste anywhere as good as when the whole family is together under the loving watchful eyes of the matriarchs.

And if you do have to eat one alone, the spirit of the matriarchs is always there with you; grandma, momma, and your favorite aunt. Maybe that’s why tamales are the ultimate Mexican comfort food.

Verve: A New Energy in a Gritty Cleveland Corner

One of the things I miss most about living downtown is my leisurely weekend strolls tradition with Sonia: to the lake, near the tulips (w/ Bettina), to Starbuck's or even the time we snuck into the Cleveland Convention Center and explored every corner of that fascinating building. For those who don't know, it was Sonia's invitation to dinner one Spring evening two and a half years ago that led to a walk near the Q the night of the Cavs last game of the playoffs that set off the events for the script.  A very talented medical professional, Sonia is a creative at heart and her curious soul has propelled us into all kinds of city adventures - she notices what others don't - and this time it was a new restaurant that opened on the corner of Carnegie and East 14th.

We wanted to have lunch and initially decided on sushi, but after passing by Verve, tucked away under a large CSU billboard, we, ok, I, took a u-turn in the middle of a four lane street and we parked in the adjacent parking lot. When we entered Verve, we immediately sensed a new energy, an energy that didn't feel very Cleveland. Unlike the social restaurants in the Warehouse District or the commercially successful East 4th Street gastronomic mecca, with its open, industrial and minimalist feel, large windows overlooking busy Carnegie and sophisticated and professionally-dressed customers filling almost every white tablecloth covered table, Verve felt more like it belonged in (dare I say it?) Chicago.

Sonia and I were seated right away by the nice hostess, who also took my raincoat. Our waiter approached us quickly and provided the menus, that listed items like Verve Fries (hand cut potato with sausage gravy),  Roasted Onion and Garlic Soup (w/grilled fontina cheese bread) and City Chicken (crispy pork and applesauce).  The restaurant menu is like an album of classic 60's rock songs covered by your favorite 90's bands: you recognize the titles, but Verve puts its own spin on things.

After Sonia and I ordered soup and a few salads, I excused myself to go to the ladies room. First,  I noticed that instead of "men"/"women," the doors were marked with framed photos of gender-appropriate children. Very clever and cute. Once inside, in the mirror I also realized that all this time my sunglasses were on me - not on my head, but on my face. I felt so pretentious and silly and took them off,  thinking that, perhaps, the staff was being so super nice to both of us because they thought I was someone far more important than I really am. (It was either the sunglasses or my continuous photo-taking with the iPhone.) But, then, perhaps something about Verve, and the aura of "important discussions happen while people eat our soup" resonated in the subconscious and allowed me to play dress up.

For dessert, Sonia and I split a slice of a chocolate torte, pictured here. The presentation was wonderful, the texture a little dense, but, then my dear friend and I felt like a little escapism that dreary, late-October Midwestern afternoon and Verve certainly delivered. On an intersection sandwiched between the highway ramp, a busy driving street, a church and a three-story white storage building that, with its gorgeous large window arches, since first moving to Cleveland I've wanted to own and convert into a giant creative loft, this new restaurant is filling a void in a part of town that's just one block away from the country's second biggest theater district.  Verve's vitality is just what the doctor ordered. Even Sonia would agree.