Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (15 page)

Tarragon

Cilantro

Parsley

Any others that you already have

Feel free to add meat bones, cooked or raw, to make protein stocks. Same principle!

Jess's Coffee and Red Wine−Infused Lamb

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

3 lamb riblets or lamb shanks (locally grown)

Salt and pepper

2 teaspoons crushed red pepper (or more for spicier meat)

1 small red bell pepper, chopped

1 large onion, chopped

3 garlic cloves, chopped

2 dried pasilla chile peppers, stemmed, seeded, and minced

1 cup red wine (from Whidbey Island Winery)

1 cup strong coffee (I love Caffé Vita)

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

In a heavy cast-iron pot that can later be covered, drizzle oil and brown the lamb on all sides over high heat. Season with salt and pepper to taste and crushed red pepper as it cooks. Remove the lamb from the pan and lower the heat to medium. Cook the pepper, onion, garlic, and chiles in the pan, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes, until the onions and peppers are soft. Add the wine and coffee and reduce the heat by about half. Return the lamb to the pot, cover, and cook in the preheated oven for 2 to 3 hours. Turn the meat a few times while it's baking. Pull all the meat off the bone and serve hot.

Week Two: Getting the Hang of It

T
he warm fuzzies I was getting from this diet were great, and my body felt healthier than ever, but there was still something missing from my life—CRUNCH. And this set me off, surprisingly, on a hunt for more zucchini, which led to lessons in a new kind of cooking in my kitchen and a mystical experience in my backyard. Let's start with the zucchinis.

The joke around here is that in September,
no one
hunts for zucchini—in fact, you need to lock your door to keep neighbors from depositing oversized black beauties in your house while you sleep.

BTD—before 10-mile diet—I'd have taken such precautions. In fact, I have foisted zucchinis on whoever would take them. Now that I found myself stalking the elusive crunch, though, I was vulnerable to anyone's cockamamie ideas for crunch. I forget who told me I could turn zucchini into crispy chips. I didn't know if they were sniggering in the bushes and sending me on a wild goose chase (hmmm, wild geese, I wonder . . .). It didn't matter. I was desperate. With visions of corn chips and potato chips dancing in my mind, I followed their instructions.

Zackers

I want to first draw your attention to the how of this story as well as the what, because how I made those first zackers (zucchini crackers) is important, no matter what the results.

In my first year on Whidbey I bought a countertop convection oven at the thrift store simply to save energy now that I was just cooking for one. It had a mysterious DEH setting. It never occurred to me that DEH stood for “dehydrate” or that I'd someday need this feature. But when a new-in-the-box set of dehydrating racks later showed up at the thrift store for this very oven, something told me I should buy them. I had no intention of spending my life energy slicing and drying fruits and veggies, but you never know (a phrase that's the hallmark of a true thrift-store junkie). The “recovery” could turn into a nasty recession again and I'd be protected by . . . dehydrating racks. The logic isn't perfect, but at least my 10-mile diet vindicated the choice.

Due to my early years living off the land and on the road, living on one hundred dollars a month, I host an inner survivalist who never sleeps, who prowls the thrift store keen for castoffs for my stash. I've stocked my shed with survival essentials from the thrift store: a new-in-the-box Mexican hand grinder (for corn tortillas), canning jars and lids, pressure canner, machete, bow saw, hand tools including a hand drill Joe Dominguez bought with his birthday money when he was seven in 1945. I pray that I'll never have to use any of them. I don't relish the thought of limited electricity. I am not rooting for the demise of Western civilization. Nonetheless, I value the products of all human evolution up until pretty much the post–World War II rise of small electric appliances. Even my dehydrator could be replaced by the sun, but the need for crunch—now!—meant I needed local electrons to help me out.

The recipe sounded easy: just slice the zucchini into quarter-inch-thick rounds, fill the racks, pop them in the convection oven at 125 to 145 degrees, and remove them when the chips are crisp but not burned. Aah, crisp. Even the word makes me salivate. Toasted sourdough French bread. Dry-roasted nuts. Fresh rye crisp. Tortilla chips dipped in hot sauce, piled high in Mexican restaurants while you peruse the menu. Chitlins. Crunch! Not until this diet confronted me with the absence of my daily crunch did I have to face this addiction.

Crunchaholics

Am I alone in this? Apparently not. Psychologists like Linda Spangle are making names for themselves by identifying the difference between people like me—crunchies—and chocoholic sweeties. Crunchies have what she calls “head hunger.” We are, according to Linda, stressed and irritated, which is about how I feel when I don't have crunch. Her point exactly. Sweeties are sad and lonely. Linda calls theirs a “heart hunger.” Clearly that is a secondary need for me—otherwise I would have insisted on chocolate as exotic number five.

Such psychological displacement isn't bad—none of us is a saint. Better chocolate bars than singles bars, better crackers than crack.

To verify how “crunchy” Americans really are, one needs only to peruse the cereal aisle at the grocery store. The elder of the aisle is Kellogg's Rice Krispies, a hit from the day they were released in 1928 with their signature “snap, crackle, and pop.” Cheerios have always been crunchy, but now we have Cheerios Crunch as well. There's a crunch for every occasion—and taste: Cap'n Crunch, caramel Crunchfuls, Sun Crunchers, Cruncheroos, Go Lean Crunch!, and even Krusty-O's, which might satisfy the ever-bumbling Homer Simpson's need for crunch.

Just in case this house of cardboard cereal boxes comes down, though, won't we all be glad to know about zackers?

Right from the oven, on the edge of burned, zackers do the crunch trick, especially with enough salt. Store in an airtight jar to distribute the crispiness evenly, and they may even retain some jaw-delighting snap. Even if/when they devolve from crunchy to chewy, according to Linda Spangle, our jaws will get the grinding we need. No wonder “something to chew on” means something to think about. We heady crunchies love that.

When my zackers didn't quite satisfy, I found a slather of local butter along with the salt helped.

Butter for the Royal Slice of . . . Zacker

Butter? That wasn't on the local list, but when I complained to a friend about the lack of “butter for the Royal slice of . . . zacker,” she said I could have it in two—or more—shakes.

“Don't you know, you can make butter out of your raw cream?”

“No way.”

“Way.” Which could also be spelled
whey,
which is what's left once the butter is churned.

She explained the basic technique, apparently taught to all second graders except me. You put cream in a jar and then shake it vigorously until a ball of butter magically appears in the thin grayish whey.

If you are my age, I suggest wearing a snug long-sleeved jersey—or support hose up to your armpits—so your upper-arm wattle won't jiggle the entire ten minutes needed to coax the butter out of the cream. If you are a member of a gym, this activity might save you the monthly fee, especially if you jiggle and jog at the same time.

For me it was so worth the effort. The butter was okay, but demystifying butter was even better. I remembered that in the “olden days” women churned butter. I'd even seen women in bonnets and long calico dresses do it in reenactments of Colonial life in Williamsburg, Virginia. However, I simply made no connection between that quaint tableau and my current life, where butter comes in wax-paper-wrapped cubes. Until I saw the proof that butter requires only cream, a jar, and some upper-body endurance.

When I wanted something like a cookie—creamy, sweet, and crunchy—I just put some local honey on a buttered zacker. Voilà! A zookie. I was like Tom Sawyer, so convincing about the pleasures of zackers and zookies that everyone wanted to try them. Watching their faces as they chewed away at my leathery treasure, I realized that these Zookies and Zackers were not necessarily the best advertising for a 10-mile diet.

Cooking from Scratch

Cream wasn't the only “ingredient” I had to turn into food. None of my 10-mile foods came with recipes. None had nutritional labeling so that I could calculate my protein and vitamins for the day. Some I'd never even eaten before. Remember, in August I had to turn to recipes.com to find out what to do with a turnip.

As September rolled on, though, I found that site and my half-dozen stalwart cookbooks less and less helpful. I couldn't really use them as written. I was missing too many ingredients. In the absence of capers, anchovies, flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, rice, wheat, corn, noodles, nuts and nut butters, creamed canned soups, and on and on, I was thrown back on my own resources.

What I reclaimed when I let go, though, was resourcefulness. I was learning to cook without recipes the way you learn to ride a bicycle without training wheels or ice skate without gripping the side railing and mincing around the rink.

I learned how to address a zucchini—as well as kale, chard, beans, snow peas, basil, oregano, potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, garlic, kohlrabi, rutabagas, turnips, and did I mention kale?—the way a karate master might address a plank he was going to break with his bare hands. Utter attention, respect, and presence. I needed to listen to what the zucchini—or any food—could become.

Slowly I shifted from seeing my range of ingredients from limited to limitless, from a few dozen ingredients to endless possibilities for delicious meals.

Take zucchini—just to pick a vegetable randomly out of a hat. Not only did I roast or bake or dehydrate it in my convection oven, I sliced it into wedges lengthwise like cucumber sticks. I used a serrated peeler that produced long strands of “zukett.” I julienned it (more to come on this method) for stir-fry, I lightly steamed chunks, which I could eat as a side vegetable or blend into soup with some garden herbs.

Or take kale, my other fail-safe crop. It can be steamed, dehydrated, stir-fried, and added to soups. Baby kale can go into salads raw. Curly kale can cup potato salad on a platter to make that potluck dish look “dishier.” Best of all, kale can also make kale crisps.

Green beans can be pickled as well as steamed, fried, added to soups, or crunched (aah, that blessed word!) raw as you walk barefoot in the morning through the dew in the garden.

Beets can be shredded onto salads, roasted, made into pickles, made into borscht, or just boiled. The leftover water can be used to make beet wine (which we did in Rhinelander under the tutelage of the Lithuanian neighbors, ending up with something akin to decent port). On those long winter subzero nights, when playing cards or endless philosophizing weren't enough to see us through the boredom, that beet wine tempered those tempers that cabin fever can ignite.

And God, the potato! What can't you do with a potato? You can bake it, fry it in thin rounds to be chips or in sticks to be “freedom fries,” or slice it a bit thicker for a frittata. You can shred it for fritters, boil it for mashed potatoes, or blender it for a creamier soup. Not only that, but it's a lifesaver. You can chunk potatoes as a correction for an oversalted stew or soup. The neutral, generous potatoes will mop up the excess and balance the pot.

Apples as ingredients are simply amazing. You can eat them, of course. But you can cook them down into applesauce and further down into apple butter. You can bake them with some honey, cinnamon, and nutmeg dribbled down the core. You can also slice and dehydrate them for a chewy snack later. If you juice your veggies, apples can be thrown in after kale and beets to make the slurry actually palatable. They bring sweet and tart. They bring crisp. They bring color when chopped into a salad.

Each fruit, each vegetable, can be used for its many qualities: color, texture, where it sits on the sweet-to-sour scale, how it transforms when cooked. They aren't just “called for” in someone else's recipe. If you approach them with curiosity and amazement, you can hear them telling you what to do.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

One thing you'll learn right away if you ever attempt your own version of a 10-mile diet: herbs and spices are crucial to cooking from scratch.

I really got it why women of yore had herb gardens—and vegetable gardeners these days do too. Take that zucchini. It's one thing with basil, another with rosemary, another with garlic, yet another with oregano. Herbs relieve the monotony of a simple diet.

It never occurred to me before that herbs and spices are different. They shared shelf space in the store and the same greasy rack on my kitchen counter, and that was that. Now, hungry for any crumb of wisdom, I almost snorted whatever knowledge I found. Sometime during week two, I spotted a fat volume called the
Dictionary of Food
in a used-book store—and snapped it up. I bought it, brought it home, and for the rest of the month it sat on my kitchen counter so I could peruse it daily. Every page was an eye-opener! Who knew there were fundamental differences between herbs and spices? Herbs come from, duh-uh, leaves of herbaceous (nonwoody) plants. Spices come from the roots (ginger), flowers (cloves), fruits (vanilla), seed (cumin), and bark (cinnamon) of plants. I felt like I was in grade school in the daily wonder of discovery. Further, I learned that herbs are generally European in origin and spices are from tropical climates. This is why herbs were a slam dunk on a 10-mile diet and spices were not. They have to squeak in under the term “exotics.” Another duh-uh.

Along with the “real” food, i.e., what I could actually chew, Tricia's boxes came with bags of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Another duh-uh. Could this be why Simon and Garfunkel's rendition of “Scarborough Fair” had these herbs in the refrain? Was it because these flavors—now essential for adding interest to my veggies—were long ago essential for turning medieval slop into tasty dishes? Further, did they have a function in keeping us well?