The Oy of Cooking

I don’t love to cook. I can get a meal on the table, but I have never experienced “the joy of cooking.” At the age of 11, my daughter became a vegetarian who didn’t eat vegetables, or onions. My husband, on the other hand, is an easy-going guy who loves Spam, especially when it’s fried. He and our Golden Retriever of 16 years had similar palates. If I’m not careful about cleaning out the refrigerator, he’s been known to eat moldy cheese, rotten fruit, and green, fuzzy casseroles.

Menus became less challenging when our vege-terrible moved out, and yet more complicated with concerns about trans-fats and pesticides. Farmer’s Markets seemed like the answer, and I gave them my best shot. I cheerfully stuffed my old-lady shopping cart full of reusable bags and dragged it across bumpy, muddy, stadium-sized fields in search of *healthy food*. I found farmer’s markets to be utterly bewildering. It’s like having 15 different produce sections at randomly opposite locations in the supermarket, as well as numerous sections of dairy, bakery, prepared foods, honey products and flowers. I know I should walk through the entire market and look at everything before I start making my choices, but after about 5 minutes of getting trampled by herds of running children and dogs, swatting at swarming bees around all the fruit samples and signing a petition for chicken’s rights, there could never be enough lute players dressed in Renaissance clothing to put the fun back in those fairs for me. I wind up grabbing whatever looks good on my way to the car, and consider myself lucky if I haven’t wheeled my cart through dog poop on the way there.

But I’m happy to report that in the last six months, two great things have happened to improve my relationship with food. (And no, one of them is not Julie and Julia. Don’t kid yourself; those women are sick.) I’m referring to Irv & Shelly’s, a smart, green company that delivers local, organic, in season produce to my door, (http://www.freshpicks.com/ for my Chicago area readers) and a cookbook entitled How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

Every Wednesday afternoon, a giant box of gorgeous produce appears at my door. I spread it out on the kitchen counter like Halloween loot while feeling, I confess, both excited and a little panicky. Since I allow them to choose for me from the best that they have every week, I don’t know what I’m getting until I unwrap it all, and even then, I’ve never seen some of this stuff. Last week there was something called garlic scapes, which look like those curly fireworks that you light on the sidewalk. A flyer with ideas comes with my shipment every week, but they’re not exactly recipes.

“Try making a pesto with these!” Irv & Shelly suggested. "Roughly chop your garlic scapes and toss in a food processor with grated parmesan, pine nuts and olive oil." Without knowing how to clean a garlic scape, much less what part to use and what quantities of the other ingredients I needed, I guessed at everything and kept tasting until I had something that even my daughter the vege-terrible liked. Every time this happens I feel like I’ve invented electricity.

I’m approaching the whole “what the heck am I gonna make for dinner” question from a different perspective. Instead of menu planning first and then making a grocery list, I look at everything I’ve got and say, “What can I make with this?” It’s like Scrabble with food. And I owe this current reckless, creative streak to my new best friend in the kitchen, Mark Bittman. I heard him on NPR one day, talking a caller and her pie crust off a ledge, and I liked his vibe. I picked up his big, red doorstop called How to Cook Everything, and I’m suddenly cooking a variety of grains and vegetables I never knew existed. I don’t recognize the inside of my refrigerator. Bittman’s book is more about the basics of cooking certain food groups than it is about recipes, although they are certainly included, too. But it’s much more conducive to my new approach to cooking, and using what I have.

My mother always used what she had, and she was a pretty good cook for her times. But there was one meal we all dreaded, and when we saw the meat grinder come out of the pantry we knew what was coming: Hash & eggs night. Every morsel of leftover food from all the major food groups went into that hash, and it reminded me of plastic vomit.

Never a fan of recycled leftovers and about-to-turn produce, I find with the help of Mark Bittman and his short, simple instruction on “How to Improvise a Soup”, I can make a tasty meal using almost everything I’ve got in the fridge on Tuesday to make room for my new shipment of food the next day. I think my soups are infinitely better than my mom’s hash, and Charlie loves them. Which is, now that I think about it, a bit like saying, “Even the dog eats it.”

Never mind.