My girlfriend Georg and I hit the Open Studios trail again this morning, followed by a modest lunch of a small french dip-type beef sandwich at a favorite waterfront haunt in Morro Bay. Damn. Remember how I told you that recent tummy surgery had resulted in my having an actually smaller stomach? So I'm eating less because I get full faster? Well, by the time I got home hours after lunch and it was time to cook dinner, I was still so stuffed from lunch that the mere thought of cooking was turning me bright green. Hot flashes didn't help. The result is that Randy ate leftovers for dinner, while I nibbled on bread pudding (warmed with butter and cream) and Red Flame grapes. Sigh. Delicious, but didn't add to my culinary education much.
However, I did get one cooking-related project completed today. I have a largish pile of recipes clipped from various magazines and newspapers, downloaded and printed, begged from friends, you name it. Collected over more years than I care to admit. I've wanted to go through them, toss out the less than exciting ones, and transfer them into a nice box where they would be a good bit more accessible. I started very early this morning and just finished. Done! I'm feeling like an organized cook, if not an actually cooking cook. Apparently, for at least the near future, I get either lunch or dinner but not both. On the other hand, if the result is a shrunken ass, I'm willing.
In the meantime, why Alice Waters, you might ask? Julie Powell cooked her way through Julia, Volume I. There are plenty of other cookbooks out there. Why Alice? Three reasons. First is that "The Art of Simple Food" is written as a how-to-cook-book. There is no Cordon Bleau here in San Louis Obispo county. I need a teacher. A curriculum. TAOSF is it. Second reason is in the title: simple. Simple. It's not that I'm unwilling to tackle complicated stuff. Occasionally. It's just that I want to cook for real life, as a way of life. Third is that, like Alice, I live on coastal California where one can easily eat from wonderful farmers markets all year around. Indeed, there is at least 1 such market every day somewhere in my county. After living here for nearly 20 years, I've come to know and appreciate the markets, the local CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture programs), the abundance and quality of food we can access. Alice's is the way of cooking and eating that is natural to me, given my wants, my disposition, and my geography. It just makes sense.
Alice gives 9 principles of good cooking in her introduction to TAOSF. Perhaps I'll discuss them -- as they seem to apply to me -- one at a time, from time to time. First is: Eat locally and sustainably. Here is California we have numerous examples of both small, local producers and giant corporate agricultural operations. The differences are stark. I won't get into a long explanation. Suffice it to say that produce safety scares of recent years have always involved the big producers and/or distant producers. Okay, I'm not a purist. I eat some of that stuff, but I certainly prefer our local small producers. Randy and I belonged to an organic CSA program for a couple years at our old house in Los Osos. I can tell you from experience that organic produce tastes better. It does. When you wash your lettuce and wash off the bugs, you can be sure that if nothing was applied to the lettuce that killed the bugs, then there was nothing applied to the lettuce that would kill you. A comforting thought. Again, I'm not a purist about organic food, but I do know that organic farming is by far the most sustainable. Organic practices preserve and built the soil and the water resources. Frankly, shopping at the farmers markets is one heck of a lot more fun than shopping at the giant corporate super markets.
Okay, enough for tonight. Hopefully I'll be back to the range and the oven tomorrow.
Carry on.
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