Croutons - pg. 58
I'm just miserable tonight. Husband is doing well, but our poor cat Maizie is not. After 4 or 5 days of slow but steady improvement, she is much worse tonight. We will take her into the emergency pet hospital tomorrow morning when the doctor who will be on duty then can do an ultrasound. She's been through so much the last 8 months or so. I feel so bad for her. She's a good cat and always a good patient. My heart is breaking.
The lack-of-principles nonsense I was whining about yesterday is still getting to me. I went to see "The Young Victoria" this afternoon just to lighten up. (When I obviously should have been home looking after my cat.) Afterwards, I looked up an experienced cat rescuer whom I trust and ran my concerns past her to see if she thought I was off track or not. Not. It makes me feel more secure in my own beliefs and principles, but still very sad that a volunteer or 2 are verging on making big trouble for NCHS/AFAR. Sigh. I'm having problems leaving it behind and moving on to other things. No doubt concern for hubby and kitty are impacting my outlook. Constant cold and cloudy skies and rain probably aren't helping.
But, ya gotta eat. Moving on to the bread chapter in Part I: Starting From Scratch, I realized that Alice first discusses croutons! I know these croutons! She talks about them in the sense of Catalon toasts, the most famous of Barcelona tapas. Heck, we ate a LOT of those while we were in Spain this fall. At the request of hubby, I made pate de haba gruesa con menta, fresh mint and bean pate, this morning, substituting canned fava beans for fresh which made the pate beige instead of white. Authentic stuff nonetheless. Rather than making finished toasts/croutons for just the 2 of us, I made plain garlic and olive oil toasts and laid out a variety of toppings for build-your-own. Smoked salmon, prosciutto, gruyere, tapenade, the bean pate, herb butter, and some lightly dressed spicy greens. Heavy on the proteins, but it was what was in the house and easy to put on the table. Tasty and very easy. I can knock another "recipe" in TAOSF off my list.
I've just finished Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma." I enjoyed Part I about industrial food and corn. It was very informative and gives me one more reason to learn to cook from scratch in a locavore sort of way, using the freshest, highest quality ingredients possible. Although, remember, I am not a purist. I lean more and more toward organic, free-range, grass-fed and all that, but those categories of food don't control my diet. Yet. Honestly, I found the rest of the book increasingly self-indulgent. I shlogged through it, though.
If the dilemma is to eat crap or good food, I will eat good food as much as possible. I hope this means that my diet will be increasingly good and decreasingly crap with time. Today I honestly can't remember when I last ate at McDonald's. But if the dilemma is meat or not, it will be meat. I feel no need to kill, pluck and clean my own chicken to earn the right to eat it. I do have serious concerns about how food animals and food-producing animals are treated during their lives, what they eat, and how they are slaughtered. That's as far as I will go.
I've been reading several blog entries wherein other omnivores talk about facing their dilemmas. I've come to the conclusion that my farm-oriented northern-Wisconsin upbringing of the 1950s has probably spared me a lot of the current angst, even as I guide my cooking and eating back toward my roots. We always ate seasonally then because that's what was available. We ate locally for the same reasons. All my family were farmers, hunters, fishers, cheese-makers, and feed-mill operators. As a child I saw curing cow-hides and headless chickens left outside to bleed out. Watched my grandmother prepare the chicken and my father make cheese at a small local dairy. Ate my aunt and uncle's canned venison and gravy. I've always known where food comes from and how we get it. Myself, I've grown fruits and vegetables, fished and, yes, even hunted.
So, for me, it will be easy to get back to my roots, I think. I love our local farmers' markets. I'm enjoying cooking things from scratch using the best ingredients I can find and afford. I'd rather eat at a good restaurant once a week than at McDonald's 3 or 4 times. I'm developing a love of all this good food and, quite frankly, a distaste for industrial crap. I study food labels. I'm throwing out crap from the pantry and frig that just doesn't work for me anymore.
Food is important. It's an important part of life, socially and aesthetically as well as practically. It's worth my time and effort. That's what I've decided. I can eat meat with a clear conscious, but I can only eat quality food without wincing. Does this mean I'll never eat another quarter-pounder? Unlikely. I will. But right now, a slab of home-baked bread spread with a pate of fava beans (preferably fresh), goat cheese (preferably local) and mint leaves (maybe home-grown?) sounds far more appealing. I am one happy omnivore.
50 recipes down; 255 to go -- This feels like a milestone!
