The Dinner Files

At our family cabin in northern Minnesota there are, as is the custom, many family photos, including a fine selection of oldey timey black-and-whites of my great-grandparents engaged in various antics. This lady here? She’s my great-grandmother, Georgie McGregor Bronson. She died when I was seventeen. Seventeen! I used to drive over and visit her. She would say I was an angel sent from heaven for coming to cheer her up with what, I now understand, was my sheer youth and existence. Let’s just say this: that wasn’t the usual reaction to me at the time.

So here she is, bathing, in the lake in which I bath every summer. Her daughter was the grandmother I adored. As a kid I swam at that very dock with both of them and pretty much every other member of that side of the family.

But all that is besides the point. I love the picture for those reasons, but I post it here because of words she said to my mother when she was fairly close to dying and was pretty much a fairly cheery pile of skin and bones: all my life, I wanted to be thin, what good does it do me now?

She wasn’t a heavy woman by any stretch, but she wasn’t tall and she had a “nice bosom,” so I suppose she never felt particularly svelte either. Of course, we have photographic evidence above that she was a normal sized, even thin by many many standards, person above.

I bring this up because, if you’re anything like me, you want to feel healthy and look good but not obsess about your weight or be weird and develop what I like to call an “under-control adult eating disorder.” The thing is, maintaining that balance becomes increasingly difficult as middle-age spread sets in and what you need to do just to keep wearing your own clothes is less and less fun.

For example, I would like to be able to eat cheese. Lots of cheese. I love cheese. Every single kind. I don’t want to binge or anything, but I would very much like to eat, say, a couple ounces of cheese everyday. And I used to do so. Happily. Every afternoon around 4 or when I got home and started fixing dinner, I would joyfully eat two or three ounces of cheese. Sometimes more. You know what? That’s no longer such a good idea for me. I’m afraid copious amounts of cheese may have to go in the same pile as smoking: something I’m going to put off for now, but when I hit 80, watch out!

In short, I’ve been working through what it means to work in food and have food be such a big part of my life and such a source of pleasure and camaraderie, while also taking quite seriously that I’d like to pretty much stay this size. Well, I’d actually like to be the size I was before I hurt me knee, which is just very slightly smaller than I am at this exact moment. Seeing how quickly I put on a few while laid up and then what it takes to take off a few at this point in the game is fairly depressing.

So, when I opened New York Magazine and saw this, my inner Joan Rivers shouted “can we talk?”

There are so many ways to read this page it boggles the mind. The skinny-women-are-the-ideal/skinny-women-are-freaks dichotomy is super fun to process, for starters. But as someone who loves food, let me say this: The model may very well believe that she eats “like a normal person,” and maybe she does, but to me it looks like she spends all day barely staving off hunger and then orders the least appetizing dinner I can imagine. Barley soup, a tuna wrap, and cole slaw? Each element sounds okay, but as a meal? Together? That shit ain’t right. There is not a single food episode (I can hardly call most of them “meals”) that she eats that a human could possibly look forward to. It’s all just so Spartan and sad. The ballerina, on the other hand, with her holier-than-thou attitude and bizarre eating schedule (which, to be fair, seems designed around maximizing her energy for performances while keeping her bird-like and lift-able), at least has a few things in there that sound tasty. A crab cake with chopped salad and Pinot Noir? Sign me up!

As someone facing the dreariness of a slowing metabolism, I can’t help but think that the model, who is young and naturally slim, is seriously wasting her time. She could be downing cereal swimming in half-and-half, snacks of steaming macaroni and cheese, troughs of trifle. She could, I bet, ditch the “light butter” and spread her “whole wheat flatbread” with avocado butter, a concoction as decadent as it sounds which a friend and I made way too much of in college, to no ill effect. Instead she lists “ice water” as part of a meal.

It’s enough to make an old lady cry. Instead, though, I hope that when my son and perhaps future grandchildren and even great-grandchildren look at what will be old photos of me someday in the future they will remember that I was active and fun, just like Georgie. And that I never served them barley soup, tuna wraps, and cole slaw. Ever.

My dad took this photo. His wife, a.k.a. my mom, is in San Francisco fetching me water and cooking up her famously fabulous wild rice salad and shuttling her grandson all about town while I lie in bed with ice and Percocet as my constant companions recovering from knee surgery (surgery necessitated by this incident).

My dad is no cook. He makes superlative toast, grills bratwurst to crispy juicy perfection, fries fish over camp fires, and turns out a mean bacon-and-eggs (he’s no fool, he fries the eggs in the bacon fat), but, in general, he doesn’t cook. Left to his own devices he tends towards take-out of one sort or another. He is no stranger to the prepared foods section at the Whole Foods near their house.

While he is no old-school meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he doesn’t mind meat and potatoes and has, more than once, commented on the sheer number of vegetables I seem to eat on a daily basis.

So when he sent me this picture he had snapped of the dinner — a bowl of split pea soup (defrosted), steamed asparagus, and a salad that, upon further questioning, was revealed to be from lettuce from the garden — he pulled together for himself the other night (subject line: “healthy dinner”), I was proud and charmed and terribly glad not to have fallen too far from that tree.

He is a man of many strengths, but one of the greatest examples my dad has always set is to be willing to try new things, like steaming asparagus or taking pictures of your meals.

That, and he always modeled the very important role Tabasco can play in any meal.

Today is my birthday. It’s a big one. If I didn’t have a slew of insanely long-lived Norwegians behind me, I could safely assume I’m at my half-way point. Like the one pictured above, it involves a “4.” Now it just has a zero on the end. I have a feeling I’m supposed to find this distressing in some way, but that’s not quite how it’s hitting me. I’m feeling just as psyched – but blessedly less manic – as I did at that fabulous pancake breakfast 36 years ago (thanks for the awesome party, Mom!).

My dashing husband and super-excited son have swept me away to celebrate. See you next week.

I finally saw it. I was downtown anyway (serving time on a tasting panel during which I am always surprised at how interesting it can be to taste, say, 12 kinds of canned tomatoes), the afternoon spread before me, and I had started to find myself unable to participate in food-world conversations because I hadn’t seen it. I popped into a matinee all by my lonesome and had a delightful time. I laughed, I cried, and the contrast I felt reading the two books on which the movie is based – Julie & Julia and My Life in France – sure showed up on-screen.

Here’s the thing: If a person is a food writer and didn’t like, nay *LUV*,  Julie & Julia, the book, people will very quickly shout “sour grapes.” I assure everyone that this particular food writer has absolutely no sour grapes vis-a-vis Julie Powell. A food writer publishes a book, it sells well, and she gets a movie deal?!? To me this is extremely good news.

On top of that, I love the whole idea of teaching oneself to cook by cooking one’s way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Genius. To write about it? Brilliant. Doing so in a year? Maybe a bit gimmicky, but gimmicks often work and lord knows I respond very well to a set deadline myself. To then whine and and have “melt downs” through most of it? Not so appealing to me. I read her blog sporadically and found it sometimes funny but more often almost aggressive in its need to regurgitate frustrations. Reading the book bummed me out as – dish after dish, page after page – Powell sucked all the life out of cooking. The joy, the pleasure, the contentment I find in the kitchen seemed to play such a small role in her project, especially for someone who started off loving cooking for so many of the same reasons I do: the predictability, the sense of accomplishment, the feeding and bringing pleasure to others. Those comforting, satisfying elements of cooking seemed to slip through her fingers with each dish and I felt sorry for her. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, give her a good shake, and tell her stop crying over un-set aspic.

(That said, I think I’d like Powell in person. If I knew her I’d be able to say “stop whining” or “these ‘melt-downs’ of yours sure have all the markings of toddler-esque temper tantrums” and then we could laugh it off and enjoy our cocktails and boeuf bourguignon.)

Compare that to Julia Child, who meets disappointment and even failure with a “tant pis” and a sigh before she gets back to work. It is probably the Midwesterner in me, but I like that in a person. I found My Life in France inspirational. Child didn’t even really start to learn to cook until she was 37, which is how old I was when I read the book two years ago.  She then worked like a dog on her first book for nine years. She recounts those years of her life with love, with humor, with joy even as her husband was shuttled between diplomatic assignments and they faced the disappointment of not having children and she faced endless professional roadblocks, back-tracks, and frustrations.

Child’s can-do, plucky nature, her true joie de vivre that grows out of taking pleasure in small, quotidian things, her sentimentality about people rather than places or things, her ability to laugh at herself and soldier on are, quite frankly, the things about myself I like the most. They may not be, as they are in Child, my dominant traits, but I sure wish they were.*

That is, perhaps, why I didn’t love reading Powell’s book: I whine, and fret, and take my frustrations out on those around me, too. The problem is that I abhor that in myself. Reading about someone else doing it doesn’t help. For the same reason I’ve never found support groups helpful, I don’t find comfort or even much humor in reading about someone else behaving in ways I don’t particularly like in myself. It doesn’t help me to know I’m not alone. In fact, it depresses me further. It makes my problems seem larger, not smaller.

Powell’s and Child’s characters were highlighted – one might even say caricatured -  in the movie even more than in their books. Would I have preferred a Meryl Streep-as-Julia Child bioepic as so many others have asserted? Sure. But I also found that being the archetype of someone trying to find her way had the interesting effect of making Powell more sympathetic. The editing necessary to turn a book into half of a movie did her a favor. Isn’t the criticism of blogs (and books based on blogs), after all, that they ramble, that they navel-gaze, that they need editors?

I would love an editor. For my blog, for my closet, for my life. In the meantime I’ll re-read My Life in France. I picked it up last night, just hours after seeing the movie, needing another hit of pluck and verve and stick-to-it-ive-ness.

* I should also note that I sometimes also share Child’s less-impressive pride and her impatience with those not as “serious” as herself. On top of that my dashing husband, much like Paul Child, seems to think his wife can do anything she puts her mind to. To stack matters in his favor, he also looks a fair amount like Stanley Tucci (with a bit of Al Pacino and Andy Garcia thrown in for good measure), which directly contributed to his Dinner Files moniker.

I may be offline until March 23, I don’t know. Connections may be tricky. Time will certainly be limited. I’ll do what I can. In any case, I’ll tell you all about my travels when I get back.

It ends up I know a thing or two about tasting things. This came in handy yesterday when I was asked to speak about tasting to the Baker’s Dozen, a group of professional bakers in the Bay Area. We tasted different vanilla extracts. Vanilla extracts! Seven of them, dissolved in minute amounts in sugar water. We all had to raise our hands for our favorite and I was deeply relieved when my preferred vanilla was not the imitation brand but, in fact, the fine Tahitian specimen.

I am not a fraud.

Or, if I am, the Baker’s Dozen are none the wiser.

Which is a good thing, because I don’t know nearly as much about vanilla as many of them, and their questions about percentage burn-off and triple-fold were, thankfully, answered by more knowledgeable members of the crowd. But again, my role was to teach them how to taste in a general sense, someone else had the job to address the vanilla specifically. My un-fraud status stands.

SFgirlbybay is a fabulous design blog written by the hilarious Victoria Smith. Using her impeccable taste, she explores the whole wide world of do-able, affordable interior design–from her own flea market finds to gorgeous, interesting apartments she finds around San Francisco.

Today Victoria and I have launched a project we’ve discussed for awhile: Friday Food Files on sfgirlbybay. Every Friday I’ll post an entertaining tip, weekend menu ideas, or what to look for at the farmers market that week. Check it out. Let me know what you think.

There has been a lot of fuss in the food world about the Obamas keeping the White House chef and not uprooting the Rose Garden to plant organic legumes, but I don’t care. I don’t.

I am entirely too consumed with one simple fact: I no longer cringe when the president speaks.

You’re just trying to distract yourself, aren’t you? May I suggest a nice long walk? Oh, you’re at work? Can’t concentrate? Thinking about the election? Chomping at the bit for the first returns? I’m in the same place. But I’m going to pull myself away from my computer, head into the kitchen, and bake up a pan of mushroom-chile-potato enchiladas. Am I hallucinating with Election Fever or does that sound good? Sure, I suppose you could think of it as cleaning out the fridge in preparation for the new farm box tomorrow, but I’m thinking a delicious dinner might, just might, result. If they turn out I’ll tell you how to make them tomorrow. I know, I know. Fat lot of good that does you now.

If you need something easy and not too heavy but a bit cozy, I can recommend a frisee salad with pancetta and a fried egg on top. We had them last night and they hit the spot. Make a dressing of three parts olive oil, one part red wine vinegar, a bit of dijon mustard and salt and pepper to taste. Chop some pancetta or bacon and slowing cook over medium-low heat, covered, until most of the fat renders out and the meat starts to crisp. Toss a mess of frisee with the dressing, then toss in the meat “croutons.” Fry eggs in the rendered fat and serve them on top of the salad. It’s all very French. Very sophisticated. Very coastal elite. Very easy. Enjoy.

FYI: You can just skip the pancetta/bacon aspect of things. You can. It makes the whole thing much quicker, but equally parts less tasty. The choice is yours.