it's so much more than cooking

thanksgiving eve salad with sesame chicken for dinner

it's so much more than cooking. i read an article with this title a few weeks ago. with my very domesticated (and wonderful) danish husband, i had to laugh a bit at the issues the author faced. especially when her husband volunteered to make dinner and then didn't shop for any ingredients, but had expected them to magically be in the refrigerator. my husband would know that grocery shopping was part of the deal. without being told. but i will admit that we do mostly divide the cooking along gender lines in our household. especially as the home renovation falls almost entirely on husband's shoulders, it's only fair that i do the bulk of the cooking. and cook i did over the past few days. we invited 10 of our best friends to a thanksgiving feast and it was my best performance ever (all that watching australian master chef is paying off).

my biggest turkey ever! 11 kilos! fresh and delicious. it went into a brine for two days in preparation for its tour in the smoker - our new kamado grill. and yes, that's sabin's first bathtub i used to brine it in.

potted shrimp as an appetizer for people to munch on when they arrived, since that big turkey was going to take forever!

i modified a maple-nutmeg custard pie recipe i found by adding pecans on top. it was delicious! though i was so full, i didn't eat any of it until breakfast the next day.

after two rounds of smoking, the turkey was looking gorgeous.

the skin got a little bit dark and i haven't perfected crispy skin in the smoker, but the meat was juicy and meltingly tender and, if i do say so myself, perfectly smoked.

it was a proud moment as husband took the serving dish to the table. it was so much fun introducing my danish friends to my favorite holiday and sharing this beautiful food with them. it really meant the world.

before i added gravy and a spoonful of stuffing. thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and although it's a lot of work, it's worth every minute. and that nap i took on sunday afternoon was bliss as well. it really is so much more than cooking, it's love and culture and sharing and friendship and happiness as well.

it's all about the food

a note actually sent to my sister a few days ago...posting it here to give you insight into how my brain functions. and also to serve as grocery list/memory, since this blog is where i keep my memory.

and here is the mail in its entirety (with capital letters stripped for the blog and slight edits for the sake of humor):

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anyway, I was pondering our menu for the cabin.

we should try one of those local dive burger joints the night we get there.

december 24:

breakfast: if we're going skiing, something quick - i saw a yummy-looking overnight french toast bake thing that someone posted on FB, making it the night before means we pop it in the oven, eat and run. At the speed of panicked turtles.

dinner:
- oyster stew
- nice sandwiches with good bread (that asiago bread you mentioned sounds good, but we can also make bread - we will need posh cold cuts/nice (read: not iceberg) lettuce, tomato, aioli, fixins to go with them)
- risengrød (i have already bought rice, which i'll bring along) with cinnamon sugar and butter for the nisse and oyster-stew haters and to have something danish for the child and her far.
- snacks to graze upon: bacon-wrapped dates, veggies/dip, possibly some nice fruit sliced up.
- potato leek soup
- croutons/oyster crackers
- wine, port, cocktail fixins

- hot chocolate, hot toddies and christmas cookies/candy - we can set the kids to making candy/cookies, child labor is underrated today


december 25:

breakfast:
- you are the waffle queen, so I place you in charge of this, but we need bacon and syrup and possibly some kind of fruit compote and whipped cream to accompany our waffles.
- also, mimosas, because it's obvious that we need to start drinking early. i can be in charge of the compote.

dinner:
- beef wellington
- green bean casserole
- hasselbagt potatoes or flødekartofler
- a christmasy salad (think citrus fruit, red cabbage, pomegranate and black currant vinegar)
- kale? spinach? you can never have too much of either of those
- sauce (husband is in charge, because it will help him over/provoke his PTSD over the first thanksgiving he came to the states and was placed in charge of the gravy)
- dessert? cranberry tart with white chocolate (see pinterest)
- risalamande (husband wants this traditional danish christmas dessert and I'm sure S will too)
- nigella's log-looking roulade (see above)

- wine, port, cocktail fixins

snacks: chex mix, more bacon-wrapped dates (you can never have too many), olives, cheese, veggies, dip (there will be whining if we don't have snacks)

december 26:

breakfast: ? (i'm on strike.)

packed lunch: big loaf of bread that we hollow out and stuff all of the leftovers into, then slice into slices to be eaten at lunchtime.

that's what i've got...

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what will you eat at christmas?

food and culture and authenticity or don't come near my guacamole with that creme fraiche

quite random food photo that doesn't really have anything to do with the post. other than being food.

just when you thought we'd abandoned our MIT food & culture course, we're back with another installment. this is the beauty of the availability of these online materials - you can do it in whatever time frame suits your mood/schedule. we've made it to section 7, "good food is culturally authentic" and i thought i'd share a few thoughts on that before i actually delve into the readings.

but first, i have to back up for a second. recently someone shared some links to some interesting articles in a comment on a rather old post here on mpc on how racism was becoming more and more overt in denmark. one of them was a rather scholarly piece on racism in denmark, which makes the distinction between old-fashioned skin color racism and cultural racism - which is more solidly based in religion and the nation-state than in skin color. and i can't help but think of this cultural racism in connection with food (tho' the article does not). it strikes me that we have a much easier time taking on another culture in food terms than we do in religious terms or other everyday lifestyle terms. we are open to eating all kinds of foods - chinese, italian, lebanese, turkish - in ways that we aren't all that open to accepting chinese, italian, lebanese or turkish culture. send us your food, but stay away from us, will you?

i actually often think about authenticity when i'm cooking. if i'm making an "ethnic" danish meal - like frikadeller (meatballs) or flæskesteg (a pork roast with the cracklins on top), can it ever be authentic? or if i make an "ethnic" american dish like turkey with stuffing in denmark, with the ingredients i have at hand, is it authentic? and why can't danish mexican restaurants make guacamole that doesn't include creme fraiche? it's just wrong! we have many notions of what constitutes authentic, but where do they come from?

i recently defended my position on no-creme-fraiche-in-the-guacamole by saying that real guacamole, which i learned to make when i lived in arizona, where there is a high percentage of people of mexican descent, does not contain dairy products. i had been properly tutored in the making of the real thing in a place with credibility and was thereby an authority and it was therefore perfectly ok for me to be disdainful of some kind of green milky chip dip masquerading as guacamole. denmark is simply too far from mexico to produce proper guacamole. but what if guacamole in denmark contains creme fraiche? my cultural snobbery does not allow for variations on what is authentic, at least where guacamole is concerned. i would actually argue that they shouldn't be allowed to call it guacamole, but that they would have to call it something else, as their version adulterates the very notion of guacamole.

you can see these are strongly held feelings. triggered by food. we are firmly entrenched in our notions of food culture. food is near and dear to us and it has a right and wrong. and while we are willing to try new things, we still have firm categories of authentic and inauthentic in place and they can be quite immovable and ingrained.

photo from facebook
i wouldn't normally use someone else's photo, but this was too awesome to pass up.

there is a similar strong culture around the danish open-faced sandwich (smørrebrød). danes will put a veritable feast of delicious things to put on bread before foreigners and invite them to partake, telling you that there are no rules. but should you decide to eat sausage or pate before fish or put the shrimp on rye bread instead of light bread, you will quickly be made aware you have made a cultural faux pas. and heaven forbid that you should put a slice of cheese with your ham. that simply isn't done. so despite their statement at the beginning that you can do what you like, in actuality, if you want to be authentic and true to the norms of the culture, you cannot. you must eat the delicious shrimp and egg and herring and sausages and cheese in the right order or risk committing crimes against danishness itself.

i'm not sure i'm any closer to knowing what's authentic. i have learned how to make both frikadeller and flæskesteg and i can even get the cracklins crispy every time (husband recently remarked that i was thoroughly integrated now because of that) and i know in which order you should eat the smørrebrød. but whether they are truly authentic or whether they have quite a lot of me and my baggage (if you will) in them, i'm not sure. maybe i'll go read those articles now and come back with an answer.

not my cart

not my cart

we trudged through some heavy readings on the subject of industrialized food for our virtual food & culture course a month ago recently. amy wrote about it very thoughtfully and it's been tumbling around in my head for far too long, so i thought it was time i wrote about it as well.

....clearing out draft posts, i'm leaving this one from December 5, 2013 as it was...incomplete.

what's for dinner?

roasted cauliflower & brussels sprouts soup topped with grilled monkfish, bacon, kale and homemade breadcrumbs

we've been doing some heavy reading in our blog camp food & culture course. turgid academic texts about the industrialization of food (what i like to think of as the badly treated chicken texts) were getting downright depressing. so, we (and by we, i mean me) decided to go off-syllabus to get our food (and perhaps cooking and hopefully reading) mojo back. i've been reading margaret visser's much depends on dinner and the rituals of dinner (aside: i also tried to read her the geometry of love: space, time, mystery, and meaning in an ordinary church, but it didn't do it for me and i had to abandon it again. i can do that with non-fiction.) i've also just started erica bauermeister's the school of essential ingredients and really feel transported by it. anyway, i made a copy of the intro chapter to visser's much depends on dinner and asked everyone to answer that daily dilemma: what's for dinner? as visser says,

"a meal is an artistic social construct, ordering the foodstuffs which comprise it into a complex dramatic whole, as a play organizes actions and words into component parts such as acts, scenes, speeches, dialogues, entrances, and exits, all in the sequences designed for them. however humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate, and satisfy."

now at first glance, i don't feel like i put on a play every evening when i put dinner on the table. a meal like thanksgiving feels choreographed somehow, but the daily meals we eat do not. there's more routine in them, less effort and significantly less food than a thanksgiving feast. but doesn't our daily evening meal set the stage of a life well lived? it says a great deal about who we are and what we prioritize, our tastes, our norms, our likes and dislikes. and it's predominantly me who is the director of the play that is our evening meal. i hadn't really thought about how powerful that is in shaping our identity as a family until now.

autumn salad of mixed leaves, roasted cauliflower, roasted brussels sprouts and pomegranate topped with seared, rare tuna

some days it's easier than others to answer the "what's for dinner?" question. other days, i have a pan of chopped onions sizzling away in olive oil underway before having a single idea what to do with them. i learned at a friend's wedding shower nearly two decades ago that something can always come of sautéed onion. fridays are easy - as i said in my post the other day, we have a friday ritual that we generally follow - fresh bread and yummy things to put on it. friday is also the day that the fish truck comes to town and i generally buy a tempting piece of something or other to use for our saturday meal - whatever's coming ashore out the west coast, but sometimes a piece of fresh tuna if there's no inspiring mackerel or monkfish and we don't feel like old standbys such as salmon or cod. i got a piece of grey mullet on friday and it was heavenly tossed with a few leeks from the garden and steamed in foil in the oven (i sadly neglected to photograph it).

fresh from the garden

i often take my dinner inspiration from what's in the garden. at the moment, that's potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, squash, leeks, kale and it was apples until we turned them all into 30 liters of cider last weekend, we've even still got a few raspberries going strong (enough to throw a handful into smoothies or cupcakes). we're trying to eat less meat and we're on a health kick for the month of november (which mainly means i'm not partaking of my daily glass (or two) of wine while cooking), so we're making even more of an effort on that front. i've said it before, we don't want to be vegetarian, but we would like to do better at not considering meat to be the centerpiece of every meal. that's what i love about the tuna salad above - instead of buying us each a big tuna steak, i buy one large one and slice it thinly on top of the salad. we all feel like we get enough to eat and we haven't each consumed a whole steak ourselves. it's better for us and for the tuna.

raspberries still going strong

some days, we're busy running to meetings and gymnastics and riding lessons and we get home a bit late, so i throw together a omelette with potatoes and perhaps chorizo sausage in it. i've been doing that less since our chickens were rustled. we've got new ones, but they're young and not yet laying. i hate to do it too often with store-bought eggs, as those chickens, even if the eggs are organic, often live miserable lives. if you don't want to slog through academic texts on the subject like we did, check out hugh fearnley-whittingstall's chicken out campaign. it was his programs on chicken welfare that first brought it to my attention. the industrial chicken industry is absolutely horrifying and means we don't eat chicken around here that much. i occasionally buy an expensive organic one that was ostensibly treated well (using it as roast and boiling the carcass for soup and/or risotto, thereby getting several meals out of it), but do my best to stay away from the water-filled packaged breasts.

we are fortunate to have a good variety of organic produce in denmark. i always buy organic milk, cream, creme fraiche, butter and lemons. (and i'm a bit of a snob about it, i'll admit, looking askance at those who fill their carts with the non-organic sorts.) i buy organic, free range ground beef and pork if it's available (it's not always in our little town). fruit and veg can be a bit more of a challenge as to availability in our smaller grocery stores, so there i tend to choose based on food miles. tho' i feel a dilemma on that front with regard to cucumbers - is it better to take a danish cucumber that's produced in an energy-hogging greenhouse in our climate or to take one that's been trucked up from spain? i'll admit i often choose spain, because the flavor is better, same with tomatoes. i turned my front entryway into a makeshift greenhouse this summer and we had our own tomatoes and cucumbers, at least for a short time.

tomato galette - with foraged chanterelles

our daily dinners tend to be a simple salad of some kind, featuring whatever inspired me in the green section of the supermarket, often rice (black and red are favorites) or spelt or rye grains, sometimes meat or fish, but not always. i do lots of stir-frys, these days with brassicas that seem to be in season (we're not fans of broccoli, but we love cauliflower and various kinds of cabbage). i even succeeded in growing a couple of heads of red cabbage in the garden this year and i've got kale there too, still going strong. i love to make risotto, tho' sabin's not fond of it. we eat simple pasta dishes like pasta carbonara or with pesto. sabin and i love soups and even tho' husband isn't fond of them, we try to make hearty, chunky ones so he's happy too. sometimes i boil up a big pan of beans and use them in various ways over several days - mixed together with diced onion, tomato and avocado, some chili sauce and a little creme fraiche is one favorite way. a one-dish meal if you throw a few arugula leaves on top. in fact, i've just inspired myself and have set some black beans to soak. i quite often make savory tarts or galette, just throwing in whatever is around.

mixed leaves salad with pear, cashews and parmesan

we don't often give in and buy a pizza, nor do we go out to dinner much. it's just not the way of the culture here and there is a distinct lack of inspiring places in our area, so we'd rather not spend the money on it. if we do eat out, it tends to be a posh sandwich for lunch in a café, but only very rarely dinner. it would probably be different if we lived in copenhagen, where there's much more choice. but generally, there isn't a big eating out culture in denmark the way there is in the states. there is also a culture here of buying groceries every day, rather than stocking up and having a whole lot in the freezer. i think it's because our refrigerators are smaller, but i'd also like to think it's because people are more focused on having fresh, good ingredients. i'm used it now, it's part of my routine and i actually quite like it. if i had the daunting task of going to target or whole foods for groceries every day, i wouldn't like it, but our grocery stores are small and intimate, so it's easy to pop in and out daily or every other day.

that said, i have a stash of beans (both dried and canned), pasta and rice in the cupboard. i try to keep staples like butter and bacon and milk and cheese in the fridge, so we can always come up with something for dinner in a pinch when there hasn't been time to shop. i always have a good supply of different kinds of flour and i make bread several times a week - often focaccia-style, drizzling olive oil and a sprinkle of cheese and maybe thin slices of serrano ham on top to make it heartier. if we don't eat it all, i cube it, dry it in the oven and make bread crumbs for other uses. either that or we feed it to the chickens.

roasted cauliflower agnolotti in progress (i've obviously got a thing about roasted cauliflower)

of course some days are more inspired than others and sabin complained not long ago that i was uninspired and never making anything new. so i've added things like homemade pasta to the repertoire of late. it's easier than you think and so soothing to run it through that little hand-crank pasta machine. we all need a little inspiration sometimes and we have to shake things up. i subscribe to epicurious and martha stewart and the kitchn's email newsletters, and i pin a lot of recipes on pinterest, both savory and sweet. cooking is probably where i'm best at using my pinterest boards regularly.

i don't know if my daily dinners are theatre, but they definitely set the stage for the way we choose to live our family life.

how do you answer the question, "what's for dinner?"

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minimalist fairy tale posters.

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the cat-hater's notebook was wonderfully illustrated.

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clever tiny homes.

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i'm in love with the idea of secret dining societies. 

MAD: ID - co-creating the future of local food

last week, i participated in a co-creation event called MAD:ID (food (mad in danish), identity and design) at a place called spinderihallerne - a converted factory that's coworking, museum, café and event space all in one. madværket, a collective of local food producers (farmers, berry producers, breweries and even a whiskey maker), was behind the event. they were all there, along with politicians, people like me who do communications and happen to be interested in food (and who isn't?), bloggers, cooks, chefs, designers and events producers.

we were divided into several groups and asked to workshop various questions for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. throughout the day, we were fed these gorgeous little tidbits of local produce made by local chefs, who had spent a couple of days slow cooking pork bellies and making hawthorne sirups. an area woman who both grows unusual herbs and forages for them provided all of the beautiful flowers and herbs that decorated the food. she was also a participant in one of the groups.

my group was given the question of how to make the unusual and often wasted cuts of meat marketable and appealing to an enlightened audience. we discussed ways of enlightening that audience (who we determined to be busy families who cared about the food they put on the table), as well as down to the details of packaging and even the whole supply chain - as one of the premises was that it would be grass-fed, organic, local beef, slaughtered at a nearby butcher and then somehow made available to a discerning consumer. so, as you might imagine, we talked a lot about the whole rising trend of farm to table, wherein people want a relationship with their food. we actually discussed ways of giving calves instagram accounts and facebook pages, so people could follow the life of their beef, quite literally, from when it was born.

one thing our group was missing during the morning was one of the farmers. we were a group of rather affluent women with lofty notions of what we'd like to put on the table and how it should be delivered to our doors. but we didn't really know that much about the reality of getting the steer to the butcher and from there to further processing if that were required. in the afternoon, we were joined by a down-to-earth beef farmer (who is also a politician), who helped us anchor our ideas a bit more in reality. i think that helped us and we would have been more productive had he been with us from the beginning.

other groups worked on topics like how to expand local food tourism opportunities, since there are a lot of exciting things happening in our area food-wise, at least where production of interesting, local food products are concerned. another group worked on connecting foragers to chefs and i learned that you don't have to have foraged in an enormous amount for it to be interesting to local chefs, you just have to establish contact and let them know when you've found something interesting (e.g. mushrooms). in the presentation round, i found myself wishing i'd been in that group. a couple of groups worked on the question of making obscure cuts of meat more commercially viable, as we did and interestingly came up with solutions we didn't - like starting already in school, teaching the very youngest children the importance of using the whole animal and not letting any go to waste. that makes good sense to me.

in the middle of the day, after lunch, we took a break to listen to a lecture by the utterly amazing dutch eating designer marije vogelzang. i was very disappointed when her lecture ended, as i could have gone on listening to her and being inspired by her for at least another hour. i came home and ordered her book immediately. she has put together the most amazing food-related projects that are part art, part happening and part design, with a whole lot of history and thought and emotion thrown in. she will make you think about eating in whole new ways.

it seems that co-creation is the new black, but it's risky business. you don't really know what will come of it and you have to be open to that. they opened the doors to this event (which was free) and hoped that everyone came with their own particular angle and view on things, as well as a willingness to share their ideas. it seemed to me that they did. hopefully madværket can go further with the beginnings of ideas that were shared and begin to make a real difference for local food producers and consumers alike. i know i'd love to know that the beef (or pork or chicken) i buy was locally produced and i'd go out of my way to obtain it. we all have to start thinking more about the food we consume. the future of the planet may very well depend upon it.

this little savory "dessert" was served late in the day - tender, long-cooked strips of shredded beef and a savory, cool green ice cream. a twist on dessert and a festival of flavors that made me stop and think about what i was eating. we all need more of that in our lives.

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marije vogelzang's dinner at spiers.

i so wish i were going.

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stuck for what to read next?

this just might help.

food dilemmas

our blog camp goes to MIT course continues, this week with further readings on food paradoxes. i allowed myself to be inordinately annoyed by one of the readings - cheap meat: flap food nations in the pacific islands by deborah gewertz and frederick errington. annoyed by the insecurity of the academics writing it, insecurity that led them to constantly justify and repeat themselves throughout in a most off-putting way. perhaps i am too far from academe now to appreciate the capricious ways of gaining tenure. it mainly just made me think they were really insecure, which weakened their thesis somewhat. and it's sad because their thesis is a good one - put simply, it's that there is power and economics behind what's available on the shelves of our grocery stores. and if you're poor and powerless and live on a remote pacific island, you just might find yourself eating the fatty belly (or flap) of a sheep.

i was so irritated by the book that despite the many readings ahead, i went off-syllabus and started reading margaret visser's the rituals of dinner. this was appropriate because this past weekend, we engaged in our own yearly dinner ritual - the annual gathering we have with the swedish side of the family, to eat crayfish, sing silly drinking songs in swedish and drink too much snaps and wine and beer and catch up with everyone.

i suppose at one time, these crayfish parties came about because crayfish were in season and could be caught in the waterways of sweden. now, we get them frozen in a dilly brine from china. all we do is thaw them out, arrange them nicely on a big serving dish, throw on some fresh dill and serve with homemade bread, aioli and an assortment of beautiful savory tarts.

we wash them down with plenty of seasonal beers and snaps and wine for those of us who prefer that. we sing swedish drinking songs and toast and we talk and laugh and see members of the family that we pretty much only see on those occasions. and it's a wonderful ritual and we wouldn't miss it for the world, even if the crayfish do come from china these days. we don't even talk about that, actually. even tho' we are otherwise people who buy organic and eat in season and go in for paleo new nordic hay-infused homemade yogurt, the fact that our crayfish aren't local is a topic of which we don't speak. tho' it should be a dilemma for us, it's not. because making it so might get in the way of our yearly gathering and we love that ritual. if we couldn't have the crayfish due to the food miles or the potential pollution to which they've been exposed in their chinese homeland, we might not get together at all. because although it's not all about the crayfish, somehow it's all about the crayfish.

i can't help but feel even more strongly what i thought in the very beginning of this course, that, especially in the so-called first world, we all engage in our own brand of logic when it comes to food and our food choices. we can justify it all, or we can just ignore and choose not to more closely examine the things that don't necessarily align with the way we see ourselves.

interestingly, on the subject of those fatty belly flaps from our reading, it seems that at least here in denmark, those on the cutting edge of the culinary world (e.g. noma and the new nordic food folks) are making those cheaper, fattier cuts of meat trendy - you can order pork belly in fine restaurants these days, so these things change just like spring and winter fashions. and once the flaps have gone upscale, what cut of meat will be left for the pacific islanders? and what about the chinese who would like to eat their own crayfish?

there are so many food-related dilemmas, it could almost put a girl off eating. naah...

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if you'd like to check out what the others in our virtual course are thinking about these issues, go to the flipboard magazine i've created - it's called food & culture, i've flipped all of our blog posts into one iPad-friendly flippable magazine for your reading pleasure.

what's for dinner?

in this age of sharing everything via instagram and facebook and twitter, what's for dinner has become a much more public question. i'll admit to feeling the pressure of it and i only share the good and inspired days in my dinner list group on facebook. but there are a lot of ordinary days in between. and we still have to eat dinner. it's the one meal of the day where we really do try to sit down together. this long, glorious summer, that may have been at 9 or 9:30 in the evening, decidedly southern european times. now that school has started again, we've tried to move it back to 6:30 or 7, but it's not easy.

another thing that makes it hard is all of the competing fads according to which we are supposed to eat. paleo is very big in denmark right now, thanks to very hot and fit chef, thomas rode putting out a paleo cookbook (which i'll admit i plopped down 249kr. ($44) for the day it came out - look at that cover, could you have resisted?). i'm really surprised by all of the cabbage they apparently had at their disposal in the stone age, but hey, i'm game if i get to spend the dinner hour with thomas. but paleo may just be the new name for low carb, as it demonizes wheat and prioritizes meat. it also has a big element of eating local and in season in it, at least in thomas' version. that, i can get on board with, especially in the summer, when we've got an array of produce to work with.

i've long been attracted to the idea of a raw diet, but feel it would simply be too difficult to feed a family on it.  plus, those hard core raw people often look rather thin and sickly. but i do keep threatening to go raw around here for a week, during the height of the summer produce season (right now would be the perfect time). i say threatening because my family is dead set against it. i guess they just don't think bacon would be that good raw.

we have a couple of meals a week without meat. i don't think any of us would ever really like to embrace full on vegetarianism or veganism, but we do think it's environmentally defensible of us to eat less meat and to consider meat to be a smaller part of our meal, rather than the centerpiece. i made a nicoise-inspired salad for dinner on sunday evening and could use one large grilled tuna steak for the three of us, instead of buying three and giving us each a big tuna steak as the centerpiece of our meal. easier on the wallet and on the tuna supply. plus it was actually enough that there were leftovers for another meal the next day. that was thanks to plenty of freshly-dug potatoes, beans from the market, boiled eggs, salad, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes and mozzarella that made up the rest of the salad. the grilled tuna was just the crown on top. and we all felt like we had our fill.

other food fads at the moment in denmark are ny nordisk mad (new nordic food), inspired by michelin star restaurant noma (which was the nr. 1 restaurant in the world in recent years, but fell to nr. 2 on the latest list). it is big on local ingredients, including things like hay and foraged beach detritus, and that has trickled down to the everyday kitchen in the form of a general sense of pride in nordic ingredients (pork, fish, cabbage, grains like rye and barley), tho' it has yet to make a liquid nitrogen unit an everyday kitchen utensil.  fasting a couple of days a week is also big. i have a friend who lost 10 kilos (20-ish pounds) doing that.

i think that underneath the food fads is actually a basic desire to be more conscious about what we eat. if you're following some strict no-carb diet, you have to think about the food you prepare and eat. the industrialization of food has taken us far from thinking about that. we just open up a package, warm it up in the microwave and scarf it down, all without putting much thought into it. but if you're eating raw or vegetarian or new nordic or paleo, you have to put some thought into what fills your basket at the grocery store and what you're making. and maybe at the base of it, we'd all like to do that.

hmm, i wonder what's for dinner tonight?

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great piece in scientific american on women LEGO minifigures.

food for thought

shark burger with guacamole

the first real readings for our MIT food & culture course include a couple of articles from the new york times (one by michael pollan and one by mark bittman), an older piece (from 1970) by margaret mead and an even older (1942) piece from a wartime book called how to cook a wolf by m.f.k. fisher. they lay out a set of food dilemmas, from wartime shortages to a world where there's enough food for all, but we don't make sure that all have enough food to fad diets and general eating anxiety.  and tho' i look upon myself as a considered cook, conscious of such things as the food miles my produce has traveled and whether it contains gene modified grains, to whether the chicken had a good life before it arrived on my table, these articles left me feeling a bit like i'm not doing nearly enough and perhaps i should just pack it in and stop eating altogether.  but then i remember the perfection of south african avocados and sauvignon blanc and i dismiss that thought. you see, since they come from the same timezone as me, they're ok food miles-wise. (that is a prime example of julie logic, by the way.)

humor aside, we're all engaging some sort of logic that suits our purposes when it comes to food. i deserve this chocolate or this glass of wine because i had a hard day. it's ok that those shark steaks are from a porbeagle shark that's on the vulnerable list, because they were caught by nice fishermen from the faroe islands. and man, are they delicious (especially if you chop them up in the food processor, throw in a few spring onions, some bread crumbs and egg and turn them into shark burgers). i can just do with the ordinary milk because the store is out of organic and i don't want to make another stop. or it's ok that my avocados come from the other side of the world because it's in the same timezone as i am. this is how we shrug off the guilt of eating.

because eating has somehow become a guilty pleasure. there's so much to think about:  are the cows that made my milk or this steak producing too much methane and contributing to climate change? were these chickens that laid these eggs crowded in little wire cages, with no possibility of ever going outside? should i choose danish cucumbers, which are grown in big energy-consuming greenhouses or ones from spain that were grown outside, but had to be brought here in a truck? which is more environmentally sustainable? and without strict labeling laws, how can we ever really know the truth about the food that's available on our supermarket shelves? let's face it, they weren't exactly flashing neon lights about all that horse meat they were mixing into various ground meat products earlier in the year.

these questions are some of reasons we wanted to move to the countryside and have our own animals and our own garden, so that we could have a much better idea of where our food comes from. but even that's not enough. unless i special order, i can't buy chicken feed that doesn't contain GMO soybeans. i've taken to buying the whole grains - wheat, corn, barley and oats and mixing it myself, together with seashells for good eggs and for their digestion in general. we're by no means self-sustaining and have yet to have our own pigs, but we feel we're taking steps in the right direction. i'm content to only eat strawberries during the glorious few weeks when they're in season and can be picked in my own garden. but do i go without bacon just because we haven't managed to pull ourselves together and source a few pigs? i'll admit i haven't gone that far. nor would i do without olive oil just because we can't really grow olives in our climate. we're spoiled for food choice. and it just may be our demise.

the readings for our course have, thus far, raised more questions and concerns than they have answered and i'm neither done thinking, nor writing about this. stay tuned.

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brilliant website design and great stories - narratively.

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amazing photo project - strangers together

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i want all the neon signs.