Poorhouse Pies

When most of my bills are a month over due, my husband has developed a tubercular quality cough and we can't afford his asthma medication* or flea medicine for the animals or new pants for the kid it feels a little Irish around here.

It puts me in the mood for cabbage. It makes me want to get earthy and reminds me that the answer to all my problems comes from the same source I did and if I embrace this experience and stop fighting it I will find something soul satisfying in it. Perhaps I'm feeling philosophical because I know that some significant relief will be on its way by the end of the month (in the form of a first pay check from my new job). But I think there's more to it.

Although my family was pretty solidly middle class by the time I came along, my maternal grandparents both grew up very poor. My grandfather was one of thirteen children and as he tells it his home life was pretty dreary and he left home at the age of fourteen to go work. My grandmother (pictured here with my mother) came from very poor people who were (as my grandfather liked to remind us) largely illiterate.

I feel my roots tug at my limbs like hungry children rising from an empty table. I feel it when I dig my own potatoes out of the ground. I feel it when I knife a cabbage into quarters. I feel it when every meal begins with the humble familiar aroma of sauteing onions. I remember reading somewhere a condemnation of the smell of cabbage and onions being the smell of poverty.

To me it's like raw memory. I am the culmination of all the people who came before me in my family and I have their taste in my veins, their scent memories in my cells, their hollering in my head. I love the taste of butter and soil, the smell of damp compost, and the noise of chickens outside my door.

I remember the afternoon when I realized that my grandfather had the soul of a peasant too. I remember drinking wine with him while he read Homer to me and we inhaled the smell of evening coming on. We are simple in our love for books, food, and drink. Perhaps to our detriment.

Then let it be to our detriment.

I've had this idea in my mind for a couple of days. Poorhouse pies. It kept creeping into my mind. Poorhouse pies. The kind of food that you can make for cheap and send with your man to the mines or the fields for later. The kind of food that is rustic and simple but nourishing. Cabbage has 34 mg of calcium per cup. It has 33 mg of vitamin C which isn't bad when you consider that an orange has 54. Cabbage also has 160 mg of potassium. There's good reason why this vegetable has been valued for so long, by common people if not restauranteurs.

Poorhouse Pies pair cabbage and mushrooms together with marjoram, feta, and mustard. It's like a Russian style calzone. It is tangy and satisfying. I used a batch of pita dough because it's what I had ready when I finally decided to make these. I recommend using a calzone dough or making them like empanadas using a pie dough. Though depending on what dough you use your yield will vary.

Is a Poorhouse pie really actually cheap to make? I hear people say all the time that it's cheaper for them to go out to eat (such as at fast food places) than it is to cook at home. This is rubbish. So I costed my ingredients. While prices for things do vary from place to place I rounded up on everything to cover inconsistencies and I came up with a price of $1.66 per pie. These are enough for a light meal on their own or paired with roasted vegetables or salad would make a filling dinner. I think that price puts them at the same price level as fast food.

Except That it will have a lot less sodium, fat, and crap. It has better nutrients to offer and the quality is unsurpassed.

The biggest difference is that you actually have to make them yourself. I made my dough the night before and then put it in the fridge over night. I punched it down in the morning and kept it in the fridge until about an hour before I needed to use it. So these were quick to put together today.

I recommend using a calzone dough because my pita dough was too tender and after the pies sat for a while the juices from the filling made the bottoms a little soft. Otherwise it tasted great. I used feta cheese because it's what I had on hand. My original thought was to use yogurt cheese but I didn't have any prepared. Using yogurt cheese would have cut close to two dollars off the price of making them.

The filling is enough for 8 regular sized calzones.

Ingredients:

Enough calzone dough for 8 calzones

1.5 lbs of cabbage, shredded or diced big
1.5 lbs of button (or any other) mushrooms, sliced
1 yellow onion, diced
2 tbsp olive oil (or butter if you prefer)
2 tsp salt
many grinds of pepper
1 tbsp dried marjoram

8 tbsp stone ground mustard
8 ounces feta cheese (or other cheese of your choice)

Method:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees

In a large saute pan heat up the olive oil on med/high heat; then add the onion and cook until it begins to sweat. Add the mushrooms and cook for about five minutes. Add the cabbage, salt, pepper, and marjoram. Cook until the cabbage is cooked all the way through. About ten minutes.

Cut your dough into 8 pieces. Roll each one out and on one half of it spread out a table spoon of the mustard. Add the cheese on top of the mustard. Then heap about a half a cup of the cabbage mushroom mixture on top of the cheese. Now pull the other half of the dough over the filing and seal the edges of the dough together. You may need to slightly wet the edges of the dough to make it stick well. Take the edges and tuck them up so that the filling won't ooze out during cooking. Place on a baking sheet and proceed the same way to fill the rest.

Sprinkle some cornmeal on the baking sheet if you have some handy. It helps to keep the dough from sticking. Cook the pies for ten minutes (if you use a pita dough like I did, if not, cook for as long as your calzone dough recipe calls for).

If anyone actually makes these, would you mind telling me what you think?


*If it weren't for credit cards it would have been Angela's Ashes for us a long time ago. Philip is waiting to get free asthma supplies from the companies that make them. If you're poor enough they'll sometimes give them out.

Rosemary Marinade

(Especially For Robin)

Ingredients:

1 cup olive oil
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
3 tbsp mustard (spicy brown or Dijon)
3 cloves peeled garlic, roughly chopped
3 - 4 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped roughly
1 tsp salt
many grinds of fresh pepper

Put all of these ingredients in a deep bowl or measuring cup (large enough to use with an immersion blender*). Blend them until the marinade is thickened and all the rosemary is well chopped.

How to use this marinade: I brush it on everything I grill. It is my standby favorite. It is thick enough that it sticks to my vegetables and I love the rosemary and mustard combination. One of my very favorite ways to use it is to roast the following vegetables:

eggplant
mushrooms
onions
summer squash

Then chop all the roasted vegetables, combine with fettuccine pasta, and add some marinade to the pasta for sauce. Serve with Parmesan.

This would also be great on tofu.

I have never used a marinade on meat (because I have never been a meat eater) so I can't say if the proportions of vinegar and salt are enough to partially cook meat before being grilled as marinades are often used for. I do know that this is a very flavorful way to dress anything you want to grill or broil. I don't use it as a salad dressing because I don't like rosemary for my salad as I think it's too strong. So I don't think of it as a dressing.

*If you don't have an immersion blender, use a regular blender. Or a food processor. And then let me convince you that an immersion blender is so much better than a regular one.

Chickpea Rosemary Soup

Serves 6-8
Calories per 1.5 cup serving: 189

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped medium
3 carrots, chopped in 1/4" thick rounds
1 (28 oz) can of diced tomatoes (or 1 quart of home canned)
1 (4 oz) can of tomato paste
1 quart water
15 oz chick peas (pre-cooked)
3 cloves garlic, minced small or pressed
2 medium potatoes (any kind) diced to 1/2" cubes
2-3 fresh stems of rosemary, minced very small
1 small head cauliflower, cut into med- sm flowerets
salt and pepper to taste
dash of cayenne


Method:

Snip the rosemary from your garden making sure to stop and take a deep breath of the pungent piney scent before returning to your kitchen. Note how nice it is to have gone to your own plant to get the freshest rosemary on earth.

Heat the oil in a soup pot over a medium high heat and throw the diced onion in. Let the onions cook (stirring frequently) until they are starting to sweat, then throw in the chopped carrots. Continue sauteing for a couple of minutes. Pour in your diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and water and stir well until the tomato paste is dissolved.

Wait until the soup comes to a simmer on medium heat, then add the chick peas, potatoes, garlic, minced rosemary, salt, and pepper. I usually put about a teaspoon of salt in but you can adjust it to your own tastes. I usually put in about ten grinds of fresh pepper.

When the potatoes are tender, add the cauliflower. Now cook until the cauliflower is tender. At the end add the dash of cayenne and stir well.

Please note: you may need to add more water as the vegetables cook depending on how thick you want the soup. If it cooks down and you want it brothier, add more water. If it's too brothy for you, let it cook down with the lid off for a while. I never measure how much water goes into the pot. I can only say that at least 1 quart goes in in the beginning.


Soup is one of the most flexible and forgiving foods. It is warming, nourishing, and easy to make. While soup certainly takes time (this one takes between 45 minutes to an hour) once everything is in the pot it's just a matter of stirring it.

You can use more rosemary than I do here if you like, or less. I always use at least two 3"-4" stems of it chopped fine. I don't like the rosemary to overwhelm the wonderful cauliflower flavor (the most delicately flavored of the cruciferous vegetables). If you don't like chick peas, use white beans. If you have celery, add a couple of chopped stems of it.

The worst mistakes to make with soup:

• burning it

• not adding any herbs (dried or fresh)

• not cooking your legumes enough

• over-salting (yes there is such a thing)

• burning your tongue with it

• not making any

• over-seasoning it

• not inviting me over for some

Next up: a rosemary marinade for roasting vegetables with.

Fresh Rosemary

It is cold and rainy out today with short blasts of sun through the clouds. I'm feeling tired and am fighting off a big panic attack which doesn't seem to have stemmed from any particular provocation or obsessive thoughts. So I put on some opera really loud, cut some fresh rosemary, and made soup.

That was right after cleaning out everything fuzzy and frightening from the fridge. It really bothers me when I waste food so I'm trying to keep the fridge cleaned out more frequently and eat what's in there. Never the less I found some hairy black beans, quite a few bags of liquefied vegetable matter (can no longer identify the victims), and a black spotted jar of dipping sauce.

Today all I really have for produce is cauliflower, potatoes, onions, and some little baby carrots that I try to keep around for Max just in case he'll get interested in them. While I really wanted to make some Aloo Gobi, I needed to make something I've made many times before that would use rosemary because that's what I wanted to smell and taste. I wanted soup. So I made my favorite rosemary chickpea soup with cauliflower, potatoes, chopped up baby carrots, and garlic in a tomato base. I used a jar of my diced tomatoes for it.

The kitchen smells great.

I'm drinking a cup of tea and imagining that I am in an asphyxiating awesome cloud of zen calm.

I do believe that everyone should grow rosemary in either their garden (or their window if they have no garden). Unless they hate it or are allergic to it. I never loved rosemary before I had a bowl of buttery rosemary garlic polenta at an Italian restaurant on Powell Street called Kuleto's. The rosemary they used was fresh, tender, and fragrant- everything fresh herbs should be whenever possible. I've been hooked on it ever since. Dried rosemary is only fit for making a tea bath to soak yourself in.

I am fully aware how bossy that sounds.

I'm too busy being zen to care.

(much)

Come to my house and I'll make you food with fresh rosemary that will cause you to agree with me.

Excuse me, I need to go rub my fingers on the extra rosemary stem I cut so I can keep my zen.

Crazy Water Pickled Lemon
Cookbook Review

These are Tiger's Eye and Jacob's Cattle dried beans that I grew in my community garden row. It is only a fraction of what I should be able to harvest in a few weeks. I don't expect to be able to grow enough beans to sustain us all year-we eat a lot of beans- but I wanted to find out how many pounds of dried beans I could get from a small patch of them. I also wanted to grow my own selection of varieties because as much as I love the basics (black, kidney, etc) I want the beautiful variety nature has provided to be preserved.

I wanted to look at prettier beans on my pantry shelf. Right now I'm in love with the Jacob's Cattle for its gorgeous red and white contrast.

Last night I made hummus to be eaten on sandwiches with fresh tomatoes (now in season!), grilled eggplant, and feta. I haven't had hummus in over 11 months. I didn't have any garbanzo beans and it wasn't part of my local challenge to get any since they aren't grown locally. I have missed it. My home made knocks the socks off of any prepackaged variety. I had beautiful parsley growing lush like jungle and cut a bunch of it. Four rinses later (all the water went into the pond, by the way, and not down the drain) and I was still getting tons of tiny little bugs off of it. I don't mind a stray bug that I can't see and don't know about but when, four rinses later, I'm still getting about a hundred tiny bugs...forget it. I don't eat bugs.

I'm bummed about that.

My head has been buzzing with food inspiration lately and I have been hankering to make some new dishes and try some new techniques such as Chinese spring rolls and home made veggie burgers. I have been wanting to buy a Chinese cookbook because I've never had one but it's not a great time for me to be purchasing anything new and I do have a lot of cookbooks already. So I took one of my very favorites ("Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison) to bed with me along with a newer cookbook that I hadn't yet really explored called "Crazy Water Pickled Lemons" by Diana Henry.

First of all, Deborah Madison delivers the goods! Note to self: always check Deborah's book first for recipes. She has three spring roll recipes. Her recipes turn out perfect 99% of the time. If you only have one vegetarian cookbook, get this one.

I bought "Crazy Water Pickled Lemons" because it's beautiful. My favorite food in the world is Mediterranean style. This encompasses the food traditions of a lot of different countries but all in all there is a style that asserts itself through the ingredients and links them all together. I buy cookbooks largely for inspiration.

I opened up Diana Henry's book for a quick eyeful, not expecting to read much. An hour later I was turning the pages, reading her notes and essays on spices and ingredients as though it was a mystery novel. I couldn't put it down. Diana Henry is not just a cook, she's a poetic writer. When she writes about spices I can smell them. I can taste them. I know what she means about the excitement of seeing interesting colorful packages of exotic food on the pantry shelves.

I don't actually embrace the wild use of herbs for desserts. I am also not a fan of lavender as a flavoring. Yet, when she's writing about them I think it's like an aromatic universe of possibilities.

What an incredible contrast to the brash clangy commercial world of Rachel Ray with her cookbook called "Yum-o"*. I didn't even bother opening up her book when I was browsing at our local book store. It looks like one big television commercial dedicated to how to cook fast from a package.

Diana Henry's book has got me thinking about eating local versus eating internationally. She roused my desire for olives, lemons, cumin, and rice. Things that don't grow here. Oregon produces wild rice but I'm not crazy for its grassy chewiness. California does grow basmati rice though and if I can get it there instead of all the way from China, that's a good deal less travel for my food. How can I eat the food my soul craves while adhering to standards of local eating that I deem important?

I think trade offs are the way to go. Just as I learned in my months of buying only local foods, it takes some homework. It takes some effort. I don't have to stick to a 100 mile radius either. California is a hell of a lot more local to me than Chile. Washington state is more local than California. I do plan to grow my own lemons (must be brought in in the winter here) so that I don't have to buy them from California. But I will still buy olives. I think one has to think of the exotic imports as treats. I've said that before. Spices have been travelling the globe for centuries and keep well. Spices are the heart of regional cuisines. If you have the right spices you can often slur the lines with local produce. If I can't find Napa cabbage for spring rolls I'll experiment with regular cabbage and then grow my own Napa the next chance I get.

I love almonds and sadly they don't grow in my region. However, southern Oregon grows almonds well and I can find sources for those grown there as opposed to almonds grown further away. Save those things that don't grow in your region for special treats. I could eat three avocados a day. But not a single one of them will grow here. I still have not bought any avocados. I am not going to add them regularly to my diet again because of the road they have to travel. However, as a special winter treat I may buy a couple to make a grapefruit avocado salad. (Grapefruits are also not local.)

I believe it's possible to eat largely how we want and need to while still buying mostly local. You have to be willing to experiment with your produce. I think you need to try growing some of the delicacies (like lemon grass) that your grocery store normally imports from far away and use substitutes wherever possible.

Here are some guidelines:

• Try growing special foods in your own garden whenever possible. (Experiment with what will grow!)

• Buy dried goods in bulk (except for spices) to reduce packaging use. Do some research to find out if you can get your dried goods from locally grown sources. You may be surprised by what your region is producing.

• When buying something that doesn't get produced locally, try to find sources as close to home as possible. Miles count. So count them.

• Save the non local purchases for special treats instead of every day staples.

• Consider making some of your own condiments such as harissa or chutneys that you might normally buy. Some exotic condiments are very easy to make at home and taste better anyway.

I just read some reviews of this book. Most were good but one was very sour. I thought it was interesting. This book is not a traditional cookbook. It is more than that. The sour reviewer was annoyed by the small type, the way the chapters are laid out by spice rather than dish, and that she included too much prose- the very thing that got me turning pages into the night. This is how we should be approaching food: put it into a context in history, in lore, in the pantry...working our way through flavors and approaching our nutrition as a deliberate and thoughtful process. Using our imaginations and traveling the world with our senses.

This is the kind of approach that takes cooking from a necessary daily activity to an exciting, stirring adventure.

I don't need to buy any new cookbooks. I have plenty.

Having plenty is not something I've felt often over the past couple of years.

Plenty is beautiful.




*Yes, I realize that this is a charitable thing that she's started and I am happy that she's doing it, but "Yum-o"?! Oh for crying out loud! I HATE "Rachelisms". EVOO is the stupidest thing ever. As though I'm much too lazy to say extra virgin olive oil.

Caramelized Onions

If you have never caramelized onions, it's time you did. I realize that they sound ever so slightly haughty like something a crazed "foodie" would make that the rest of us would find stupid (like "caramelized oyster juice"?!@)...but they are amazing. It takes a little time to do them right and that's one half of the caramelized onion trick. It's very easy:

Onions + Medium-Low Heat + time = Perfect Caramelized Onions

That is your equation. You must follow it. Do not be tempted to rush yourself. Be making other things at the same time and do at least three onions at a time so that you'll have plenty. You need to let the onions brown ever so slowly. If you're a punk in a rush you will burn them with too high of a heat. You need to scrape them from the bottom of the pan moderately often. You want them to brown, but then you want them to brown all over.

Then what do you do with them? If you made ten of them at once you have the perfect base for a heavenly French onion soup. If you made less you can use it for topping on a home made pizza. If you don't feel like making pizza dough, use bread. Toast your bread, spread it with either marinara sauce or pesto sauce, liberally top it with the onions, and then cheese. Or use it for appetizers on crackers: cracker, then cheese, and then small pile of sticky sweet onions. Add them to sandwiches. Use them with ricotta in a manicotti stuffing.

I'm sure they must be able to make meat a lot nicer too.

Once you do these onions right, everyone will think you're a cooking star.

You will also never get over them.

A Tribute To Home Cooking

I don't know what other secrets our friend Sharon has up her sleeve but she is quietly the best sour cherry pie baker in the world. It was sweet enough but not too sweet so that the flavor of the cherries- as intense as fake cherry candy flavor- could be bright and loud. The crust was flaky and tender and had no dairy in it so I don't want to know what she used for fat, but whatever it was made the perfect crust. It was the best pie I have ever eaten. It also happened to be the prettiest.

This pesto gnocchi made by our friend Mark is the only gnocchi I have ever enjoyed. It was a great revelation to me- the dumplings (made from potatoes and flour, usually) were tender and melted in our mouths. The pesto was creamy and rich without being too rich. (One must bear in mind that there is no such thing as "too rich" in my food vocabulary.)

I splurged on cheeses for our pot luck at my friend Chelsea's house. Seriously splurged. I fell for the colors and also for the tiny pert older French woman who was making me try every cheese she had that wasn't goat or sheep and it was amusing to watch her struggle with the fact that I could be such a difficult human being by not liking ALL her cheeses. She did make me taste a nasty olive. Chelsea liked it but I didn't. It was an olive that had little or not salt or vinegar in the curing so it was sweet. I don't eat olives for the sweet. Ick. However, do observe the gorgeousness of this cheese board and note that we ate some of them spread with a small amount of grape musk jam, a pleasant first for both of us.

These blueberry muffins are the best in the entire world. I'm not kidding. Nigella couldn't make them better. Neither could Julia Child. NO ONE MAKES BETTER BLUEBERRY MUFFINS THAN CHELSEA. I will get the recipe for them but we must all be warned that even with the recipe they will not be as good because Chelsea is magic and so is her food. If you eat one of these you will be spoiled for life because afterwards the gluey dense oily things you can buy in bakeries and cafes that call themselves "blueberry muffins" are really just fat blimps that stick in your throat and clog your spirit.

I think it's curious how we have only friends with food obsessions. I don't believe we have a single friend who are indifferent about what goes on their plates. Nearly all of them are excellent cooks or at the very least have one dish they make better than anyone else. We had better food at our friends' tables than we had out. Even when we went to D'Angelos in Mill Valley.

One meal I didn't get a picture of (and wish I had) was the pasta dish made by our friends Sid and Dennis. They made a pasta with sage from their garden that was superb. I am reminded of this because the pasta we had at D'Angelos (a winter squash ravioli with sage and butter sauce) pales in comparison to the pasta Sid and Dennis served which wasn't at all fancy or pretentious and was so good I can still taste it in my mouth now. It achieved, with half the ingredients, a purity and richness of flavor that was (I believe) the intention of the chefs at D'Angelos who ought to be taking lessons from my friends.

If I could open a restaurant (not a dream of mine, by the way) that served only food made from my friends' recipes it would be the best restaurant in the world. It pleases me that so many of the people I love take such great care and have such a passion for making food that goes beyond ordinary expectations. It is a constant inspiration to me in my own kitchen.

Cycling

A girl and her bike with some beer.

I can tell that my mental life is in an unstable place by the number of times I check my e-mails a day: over 100, and the number of posts I am itching to write every day: at least 3, and also by the amount of household chores that have been accomplished: 0.

When some people get submerged in a depressive episode they don't get out of bed. I've never been a bed lingerer. Even before I had a child that liked to wake at the butt-crack of dawn. I don't cry all the time either because there's always too many people and I have become very disciplined about not crying in front of people*. Even Philip. So if anyone has seen me cry, you can be sure that underneath the surface there is a vortex of suppressed emotion.

For me a depressive episode manifests itself in an uncontrollable need to write because it accomplishes a couple of very important functions. The first and most important function is that of a pressure valve- it releases words out of my head which would otherwise explode silently and render me brain-dead; it is the grounding for my circuitry.

The second function it provides is that of an anchor for my attention which becomes fractured and I find myself able to focus on nothing while my brain buzzes five hundred miles a minute causing my eyes to slide all over my life and I wander from room to room wondering what I should do. What I "should do" is generally self evident in piles of dirty laundry, dirty dishes, clutter everywhere, and dog vomit that should really be cleaned up right now before it fossilizes into the carpet. Writing is the one thing that can anchor my attention when I'm depressed and/or in panic mode.

I am always close to one of these two states of being. That's what it means to be clinically mentally ill. That's why my blog jags between good days and bad days as fast as Paris Hilton changes boyfriends. You can almost count on getting a dark post soon after reading one that is happy and hopeful. When life is going generally well the jags become less visible to the naked eye, but they're still there. I could have a trillion dollars, two book deals, and my son could suddenly be a calm and non-combative kid who eats vegetables and I'd still be on my own mini mind roller coaster. My emotive state always requires monitoring and work. There is no break from my head because it's attached to my nervous system.

If it weren't for my blog, most people in my life wouldn't see anything I don't want them to see. I've been working on being more honest when people ask me "how are you?" but if I tell people how I am then they'll want to find a solution and I know that ultimately the solution is to ride this out, write it out, and then do it all over again tomorrow. Fixing my life problems will make my life better but it won't make that brain itch disappear. The brain itch is nature's little physiological gift that will keep on giving until I die. Thank god** nature also gave me beer, cheese, and bread. I thank science for giving me Paxil.

Going through this job hunting experience has precipitated a really big depressive jag and the anxiety has also become more intrusive. I have been on the verge of tears for days. I couldn't hold it in several nights ago and Max saw me and I felt awful. He asks me all the time "Why do you look so mad?" or "Why do you have that sad look on your face mama?" and I realized (yet again) how tough it is to be the kid of a mentally ill parent. I want to tell him that I will be happy when I get a job, or when we're not so poor, or that when life gets less stressful I will stop looking so angry all the time. But that's not true. It raises false expectations in my kid, a kid with a mind like a hypodermic needle, sharp with lots of memory room.

The truth is that I find life stressful. All the time. It's stressful when it's going well and it's even more stressful when it's not. Nothing turns it off. Some things turn it down, like medication, happy moments, quiet alone time, and therapy. Nothing turns it off. That's why mentally ill people kill themselves sometimes. It's the endlessness of it.

Mental illness is a lot like laundry, it is an endless cycle of dirty clothes piling up and just when you have all the laundry clean and folded the cats pee on the bed and you have to start all over. Perhaps it's laundry's resemblance to my mind that makes me hate it so much. I can never catch up with it, never get all the stains out, and even after reading Martha's instructions on how to fold the fitted sheets no matter how hard I try they always look like a giant wad of industrial trash.

Yesterday was another bad day. I hovered around my e-mails all day looking for some kind of relief. I wrote a post and then deleted it because it was so negative. Then I finally got into the kitchen and cooked. Cooking has the same effect as writing, cutting vases of roses, and drinking beer has on me: it puts me in a softer place, one where science and art meet; a padded cell where I can taste and experiment in quiet.

The panir I made didn't set up because I didn't press it. The texture ended up being similar to ricotta. I have really missed ricotta since doing my eat local challenge. There's no local source for it. To be able to make it myself is an incredible boon. It's exciting. So last night I made four batches of pasta. I used sheets of dough to make ricotta stuffed manicotti with a marinara sauce. They turned out so good! I seasoned the ricotta with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

I also finally started a chevre cheese. Except that I'm making it with raw cow's milk. I might not like the results because it turns out that raw cow's milk has a distinctly animal aftertaste just like goat cheese. But Philip and every other person I know loves goat cheese so it should certainly be appreciated. I used a chevre culture. This is such an easy cheese to make. You bring the milk up to a certain temperature, add the culture, then let it sit for twelve hours before draining and putting in chevre molds. The only tricky part is stabilizing the temperature. I wrapped my pot in a towel, put the lid on and stuck it in my oven.

The only problem is that for a brief time the oven (which was cooling from use) brought the cheese up four degrees higher than it was supposed to go. So hopefully it didn't destroy the culture. I will find out in a little while when I check under the lid.

Philip saw the wrapped pot in the oven and told me "When I first saw that I thought 'what is a baby doing in the oven?'." This is why I love Philip. He must think, on some deep level, that I'm involved in some very dark arts.

I'm taking today off from job hunting. It's an all consuming task with a whole lot of urgency surrounding it. Today I am doing some cleaning. I will undoubtedly come check my e-mails 150 times and it's entirely possible that I will write a couple more posts. I can feel the compulsiveness of my brain working overtime and I can feel the rest of me trying to compensate.

That's life here in my head. What's it like in yours?




*I'm not saying this is healthy. But if I cried every time I really felt like it I would be an unstoppable snot faucet and my eyes would swell shut.

**Not really thanking god since I believe that nature is god. "God" in this context is really just an exclamation. The more I say "god" the weirder it sounds and I can't help but wonder why any great entity would name itself something that sounded so similar to "gob"?

Spaghetti Sauce

A local challenge update

It is getting pretty bare bones when it comes to fresh produce around here. If I want anything I am going to have to get myself to the Hillsdale farmer's market. I don't know if anyone will have carrots. Or celery root. But hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on some spinach and collards. Lucky for me I have lots of stuff in the freezer still.

This is the beginning of month six of the local food challenge we took on in October. How's it going? So nice of you to ask. There have been a couple of changes. After a lot of deliberation I have put Gulden's mustard and store bought ketchup back on the exceptions list. I can't find enough information about mustards to make one I like enough to replace the store bought. There is a book about making mustards that might help me but I haven't bought it yet. There are some local gourmet mustards but none of them are in the stores in my town, and they are all pretty fancy. Also I bought mayonnaise which I wasn't going to do because I can make it myself- however, being in the middle of a move has made it very difficult to take on any cooking besides the most rudimentary. Plus, we've been eating out a lot.

Which is now coming to an end. I've got most of my kitchen moved in. I can start cooking again. The first thing I made was spaghetti sauce with local mushrooms, home canned tomato sauce, and onion. Quite delicious!

So aside from the condiments, what are we still insisting on buying locally? Well, pretty much everything we've been buying locally so far. Max's food is still an exception and since he's wanted baby carrots, I've been buying them for him. But for me and Philip I haven't bought one non-local bit of fresh produce since October. I'm still only buying grains from the local mill and I'm not buying the grains I know for a fact are shipped from all the way across the country. Polenta is coming not from the local mill but from a local farm that grew their corn, dried it, and then milled it themselves. There is a local-ish grain company called Shepherd's grains that, while out of my 100 mile range, only sells grains grown in Washington and Oregon. I am thinking of buying grains exclusively from them only because the other local mills I buy from get wheat from Montana which is farther afield than Washington.

Things I'm missing? I would really like to make some winter squash tofu curry soup that calls for coconut milk. While cleaning out my pantry to move I found one can of coconut milk and was so excited I almost peed my pants!!

Ha, just kidding. But I thought I'd make the winter squash soup with it until I realized that tofu is still on the unavailable to us list because there is no local producer for it. I'm also really missing ricotta and feta. I still plan to make some but learning to make cheese is going to have to wait a little bit longer. Soon though. I bought some super expensive ricotta from a local cheese maker at the last farmer's market I went to but at $7.00 per cup I may as well be buying myself gold ingots because they'll last longer.

I'm really trying hard not to buy fresh cilantro from California. I pass by it every time I go to the store and it's cheap and I can smell it long before I reach it and I want it want it want it. I want it so bad that sometimes I feel my hands reaching for it before I slap myself to wake from my cilantro haze. I am definitely going to plant some because it's time now, but I haven't had any pots to seed them in and the dirt around here is (in case you missed mention of it earlier) solid clay. With the continuous rain it is no time to be planting (for fear of compacting the clay). Anyway, my mom just gave me a few pretty pots and I will plant some cilantro in them this week.

With home cooking on hold during the move I snacked on some of Max's crackers, the ones going stale because they went out of his rotation. I felt very guilty about it*. But some guilt is good for us, right? I mean, I don't have any Catholic or Jewish family members living close enough to heap on any decent levels of guilt so I must do things occasionally to bring it on for myself. Sun chips are good. Love that MSG.

Once you start eating mostly local as a matter of course it becomes second nature. I don't really think about the local challenge all that much. I mean, I check the onions at the store every time I go and when the box is from a local source I buy extra onions. I cruise through the produce sections looking for signs that say "local" or I check the labels on the boxes the produce is in or I ask the grumpy over-perfumed produce guy where stuff is coming from. I cook with what I end up with in the fridge or the pantry. It's so easy to do, really. I know lots of people think it's impossible. You just eat a little differently but certainly not awfully.

Of course, I have lots of stuff in my pantry and in my freezer. But I think what I've depended on the most has been my canned tomatoes. Tomatoes and tomato sauce can brighten almost any meal. Greens have been major. I need greens and they were hard to get for a little while there. But over all you just get used to not buying the other stuff and a lot of the time the other stuff isn't that great in the winter anyway. You eat more potatoes and onions and eggs and pantry stuff.

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Do you know how happy I'm going to be when carrots reappear at the farmer's market? And lettuce. I will be so excited to see those things again. I think it's good to be without some things for a while, because it's so easy to take what we have for granted. Now when things I haven't eaten for five months show up on my local radar- it will be so much sweeter. That is one of the biggest benefits to eating more locally.

No I'm not perfect. Dang, it's a good thing I told you all that from the beginning. I'm not perfect and I don't do things in the extreme. I think when my challenge is over I may occasionally buy some tofu and coconut milk. I don't think I'll buy ready made pasta again though. It isn't hard to make and it's so much better fresh. I think I'll keep not eating Max's packaged food. Oh- dang- I also have eaten some Oreos. BAD ANGELINA.

My plan for dealing with the cookie thing is to make some really amazing home made cookies to have on hand. Max does like my home made cookies.

OK, time to go eat something and walk the damn dog. She's a houdini and is bored and can get out of the yard through very narrow spaces between planks so I must walk her to get some of her restlessness out. Off to the old house to keep packing stuff up. I think I'll take her with me. Double whammy.

*Shhhh. I didn't really feel very guilty about it. I am not particularly sensitive to feelings of guilt. I mean, not over things like eating non-local crackers. Why waste time feeling guilty when one is already making lots of effort to live well and thoughtfully...I'm not a saint for crying out loud. Jesus. I only pretend to feel guilty about things because it makes other people feel more comfortable with their own self imposed levels of guilt. Frankly I think guilt is a waste of time. If I find myself feeling guilty about something I examine why, consider my options for the next time I am in a similar situation, and decide that I will make better choices the next time. If someone else is involved then I apologize to them, end of guilt. Damn. Life is too short. Guilt is corrosive. All guilt tells us is that we have chosen to act unwisely in some way and gives us an opportunity for reflection and change. It should be a brief feeling that we let go of freely.

Variety Being The Spice And All That Crap...

(The truth about my love for birds of the domesticated sort especially)

I really do wish I could have a lot more chickens than I do. Philip is adamantly holding the line at five hens, which is so weird because he's agreed to let me raise quail instead. Such are our marital negotiations. Some men and women are negotiating the numbers of children they will have (that question has not arisen for us since the birth of our first), or whether or not to get a Hummer to compliment their outdoorsy quasi-military lifestyle, or even what color beige to paint their home. We negotiate birds.

We're allowed to have up to twelve "fowl" in McMinnville*. I love eggs. I love looking at them. I love gathering a variety of them that is inherent in a mixed flock. Some are light tan colored and more oblong, some are speckled, some are darker brown and rounder. If you are really lucky you'll also have one or two Araucanas to lay some green or blue eggs which never ceases to amuse me and perhaps a couple of banties. Banties are the dwarf version of any breed. Yes, chickens come in dwarf versions complete with little eggs. It takes two bantam eggs to equal the size of one large egg when you're cooking. So much trouble! Yet...how nice to enjoy the aesthetics of variety from the hen house.

I think cooking is as much about aesthetics as it is about taste. I don't mean, really, that it's important that you serve all your food attractively (though that is a worthy art as well), so much as I mean that when I pull out the ingredients for a recipe, I enjoy seeing my raw materials on the counter waiting to be processed into something completely different. I especially love it when those raw materials have not been given the great American standardization treatment to make them uniform. What a wonderful sight a basket of irregularly formed tomatoes is. Especially when they present themselves in a variety of shades, most of which cannot be found in the grocery store.

For the last two summers I have been enjoying the gorgeous variety of eggplants that my favorite U-pick** farm grows. They grow at least four kinds (I sometimes find up to six in their fields) so I get pale ones striped in lavender, deep black globed ones, long purple ones, long lavender ones, and white ones too. Seeing such a variety on my counter is enticing and almost subversive.***

I love eggs. I love cooking with them. I love holding them in my hands. I love to photograph them. I love to eat them. I feel about eggs the way some people must feel about an excellent rump roast or bacon.

Apparently I have quite an affinity for birds. Something I'm really only discovering now, though if I look into the past the evidence has been there all along. Let's take a brief trip down the fascinating**** birdy memory lane:

• When I was ten I spent more time hanging out in the hen house and chicken run than I did with friends. (Or I coerced my friends to hang around the hen house with me. There's photographic proof of this at my Dad's house.)

• I tried many more times than was decent to keep parakeets, who all died pretty fast from getting eaten by our many cats or scared to death by the thought of getting eaten by the many cats (the stupid birds have very weak hearts!). I know I went through at least three of them before my parents put an end to the sad parade of bird burials.

• When I lived in San Francisco I really empathized and enjoyed the pigeons that lived in the city too. In fact, many week-end days I could be found sitting on park benches in the park across the street from the Grace Cathedral carrying on a flow of chatter with the pigeons there. Or sometimes when I wanted a more exciting atmosphere I could be found carrying on very similar flows of chatter with the slightly more sophisticated pigeons of Union Square.

• Until we moved 12 hours north, we went to my dad's house every Christmas morning. Even though he's Jewish. We would have brunch there and hang out for most of the day. I think my bird love is pretty apparent by the fact that almost the first thing I do upon arrival at his house is head to the kitchen which is where Poncho lives. Poncho is a Cockatoo or a Love Bird, I'm not even sure which. What I do know is that I could be found next to his cage attempting a lively conversation with him in which I fully believed we came to a mutual understanding with each other every time.

• When visiting my old home town of Ashland Oregon I always go looking for Eggbert, a giant rooster we let loose there when we moved away. There had always been a band of escaped chickens living near the lake in Lithia park and when we moved we set our last seven chickens free. Eggbert was the only egg our hens hatched on their own with no incubator. Eggbert was majestic. I've never found the chickens again since moving away.

• Clearly it was a sign of bird love that when I deigned***** to go to the Sonoma County Fair with a neighbor friend several years ago I became embarrassingly spazzy over the chicken tent. I didn't stop talking about them for days and realized that now that I was an adult with a home I could have my own chickens!! I wasn't accounting for the New York princess though, who, like all princesses do, completely ruined my happiness (temporarily).

• When looking for a place to move to in Oregon I would not move to any city that didn't allow chickens in it's residential zones. Yes, I looked up city ordinances and zoning charts to make sure. That's the real reason we picked McMinnville. Because you're allowed to have up to twelve "fowl". Isn't it sad that my husband will only let me have five?

*Provided you meet the terms of the ordinance and provided you do not live under the evil iron hand of restrictive neighborhood CC&Rs.

**Bernards Farm

***It's possible I've used this word a little too often lately. I also almost used the word "frisson" again and I think a writer can only get away with using such words about once every six months or they may be accused of being falsely rebellious and poncey at the exact same time. That's just wrong!

****Highly subjective word in this instance.

*****I still thought I was a "city" gal and had not yet embraced my true nature. My, I really have outdone myself today with the footnotes.

Pita For Jesus
The Recipe

This recipe is based on one I've been using from Deborah Madison's cook book "Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone" which is a book I can recommend that everyone have a copy of. It's that good. This is an easy recipe for anyone to make, even if you're not experienced making other breads. If you have a baking stone, put it in the oven right now, before you forget. A baking stone is the best way to bake pitas, though you can use a regular baking sheet if you haven't got one. The stone should heat up with your oven.

Ingredients:

2 1/4 tsp (1 envelope) active dry yeast
1 tsp honey
1 3/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil (plus extra for oiling the bowl for the dough)
1 1/2 cups multi-grain flour
2 cups bread flour (plus extra for kneading)

Put two cups of water in a large mixing bowl, stir in the yeast and honey, and set aside until foamy, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile oil a bowl for the dough.

If your yeast never gets foamy it's probably dead because you don't bake often enough and you should use some fresher yeast.

Stir in the salt and olive oil, then beat in the multi-grain flour until smooth. Add the remaining flour in small increments until the dough is too heavy to stir. Turn it onto a counter and knead it, adding more flour as needed, until the dough is supple and and smooth. Form it into a ball and put it in the oiled bowl, turning it to be sure the top is oiled. Cover with towel and set aside until doubled in bulk which should take about an hour.

Punch the dough down and divide it into 8 pieces if you want large pitas, or 16 pieces if you want smaller pitas. I like the smaller ones better because they are the perfect size for a mini pizza for one. Roll each piece into a ball and set them all aside covered by a damp towel or do as I do and just leave them lying around the counter until it's time to roll them out. At this point preheat the oven at 475 degrees. Let the dough rest while the oven preheats.

This is a great moment to relax and wonder how much wine Jesus drank a day when he wasn't wandering the desert with nothing but the sun to keep him company. You should, obviously, have a glass of your own wine while you thank your lucky stars you don't have to wander around the desert at all. Ever.

When the oven is ready I roll out as many pitas as I can fit on my baking stone, which is 4 if I'm making large ones, or 6 if I'm making the smaller ones. Place each one on the baking stone and let them cook for a bout 3 minutes each. Mine never completely puff up and I don't know the reason why. Generally speaking each one will at least partially puff up and the occasional one will completely puff up. I check the bottoms of the pitas to see if they're done- they should have only the slightest golden coloring on the bottom.

I roll out the next batch while I'm waiting for the current one to cook. If you happen to have an enormous kitchen you could roll them all out at once, but then you must not stack them on top of each other or they will stick together.

Let the hot pitas cool down on a cooling rack high enough up that my dog doesn't eat them.

Be sure to save one for Jesus.

Root Cellar Soup
(with extra sharp cheddar)

As so many of are learning to eat seasonally, use our own home canned goods, and even storing winter vegetables in a root cellar, it's important to know how the heck to make use of what we have on hand. If you're me what you have on hand right now is: old potatoes, super hairy carrots, slimy topped celeriac, and some gorgeous onions.

While potato leek soup is a perennial favorite of mine, sometimes you need to figure out a way to add more vitamins to your winter food and use up carrots which are no longer in their prime due to the less than ideal root cellar conditions provided by a plastic bin in your garage. Normally I never peel my carrots, but anyone would have agreed with me that it has become necessary.

I have no celery besides the few packages of frozen celery I put aside for emergencies so I'm using celery root which is in season and gives a delicate wonderful celery flavor. Before moving to Oregon I had only tried to use celeriac once and it did not go well because apparently if you have year round access to avocados and lemons you don't need to know how to grow celery root well. It was harder to find there while here it seems that all market farmers have it (and lots of it) in winter.

The main point though is to use what you have in your root cellar, which at this time of year, is most likely going to be roots. If you have some turnips, use one! If you have rutabagas, use one! The main thing to keep in mind is that the potatoes should still be present in a greater proportion to the other roots for the sake of the consistency and flavor.

Root Cellar Soup

Ingredients:

4 large potatoes, sliced thin in small pieces
4 medium carrots, peeled (if necessary) and sliced in thin rounds
1 celeriac, sliced thin in small pieces
1 onion, diced
2 tbsp olive oil (or butter if preferred)
2 tsp salt
1 tsp dried thyme
fresh ground pepper to taste

In a soup pot warm up the oil on medium/high heat and add the onions and saute until starting to soften. Add the rest of the vegetables and saute until some of the vegetables begin to slightly brown on the pan. You will want to stir frequently to prevent anything from burning. Add enough water (or broth) so that it's about an inch above the vegetables. Add the salt, pepper, and thyme, and put the lid on the pot. When the water has begun to simmer, turn the heat down to medium/low and cook, covered, for about twenty minutes or until all the vegetables are tender.

Turn burner off to avoid burning your whole house down. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup.* Sometimes I like to leave a little bit of texture, sometimes I like it completely smooth. At this point you need to take a little taste to see if you need to add more salt and/or pepper. I don't tend to add tons of salt to my food but I find that of all the things I cook, root vegetables can usually use extra salt.

If your soup is too thick for your pleasure, thin with either cream, milk, or broth. I like to serve it with sharp cheddar and buttered toast.


*If you don't have one of these, get one. Trust me, it is INDISPENSABLE in the kitchen. If you don't have one and aren't going to get one then you'll need to use a conventional blender to puree the soup and I recommend that you wait until the soup is cool before you do it.

Baking With Buttermilk

on a cold winter day

Something about a day dusted with snow that makes me want to bake. I'm not a big baker but I do make corn bread, one of the few things Max will eat that doesn't come in a package. About a week ago I bought some low fat buttermilk with the plan to make some twice baked potatoes with buttermilk in place of butter to see if it would be good. I don't have much experience with buttermilk and it kind of weirds me out because of it's thickness. Thick milk seems wrong.

However, I made the corn bread in Deborah Madison's book "Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone" and they are a hit. I substituted the milk with buttermilk and it worked very well. They didn't rise a lot, but that may be because I substituted half the white flour for wheat flour (since that's how Max likes cornbread best). Small but good.

I also used the buttermilk for the twice baked potatoes and I hear they were good. I didn't have one myself but Philip said they were very good and I have the word of my dog Chick, who ate four of them when I wasn't looking, that they are not lacking at all in allure. Now I'm wondering what else I can use the buttermilk in. I don't make pancakes much though that would be the obvious use for it.

A totally bizarre affect of my new increased dose of Paxil is sleepiness. I went to bed early Sunday night. Then I woke up early Monday morning all fresh faced, yet by eight am I was hardly able to keep my eyes open and so fell asleep for two more hours. I woke up in time to take Max to school late which is lame because school had already been delayed by snow for two hours. I trudged him to school, came home again, and fell promptly asleep for another hour. Last night I was sleepy by five pm but hung on until 9pm at which time I fell fast asleep. That's a lot of sleep for a person who doesn't sleep well or generally much. I hope this isn't a permanent feature of an increased dose of Paxil with a decreased dose of Welbutrin. Getting some sleep is good stuff, but I hate sleeping too much, it makes me feel queer, as though time was slipping away from me and it makes me feel slightly disconnected from life in my waking hours.

I'm really hoping the change in medication will result in me shedding my inertia, not adding constant drowsiness to the table of contents. Often the side effects of phyche meds are temporary. I hope that's true here. What I desperately need is ENERGY.

Here's what I'd like to do today: make bread, make duvet covers. Somehow I cannot seem to get these kind of things done. Why? I must do it today. I must not let anything get in my way! Bread and duvet covers. New duvet covers would make me feel so happy. Most of mine are covered in Max bloody nose stains (have I mentioned recently how bad I am at doing laundry?*) or they are worn out to the point of being depressing. Not to mention not being very attractive.

Speaking of bloody noses, Max has been having them again. We did get a respite for about a month and a half. Not many of them and very mild ones now replaced by lots of bad ones. I dread having to put Max through the nasty (and expensive) nose cauterization he went through in the other side of his nose but it was effective. I don't have any bed linens without blood stains on them. I'm going to need to buy one set just for guests that must never be on the guest bed except for when guests are over. Very embarrassing to present the guest bed and have to explain that those dubious looking stains aren't from me having messy menstrual cycles but from the kid's nose. Like that's so much more comforting.

I cannot seem to get a handle on my house. On organizing it, putting it together, putting everything in a place, or on clearing things out, so I can actually clean it. My house should take between 1.5 and 2 hours to clean with the laundry only taking one day. I can barely make a dent in it in that time. I didn't come up with that time frame arbitrarily. That's how long it used to take me to clean it at my old place where everything more or less had a place to go so that I could straighten up quite easily. Now I start straightening up and three hours later I've barely made a noticeable change.

Yeah, this is why I need more energy, not LESS. Plus my brain needs to be in better shape. Not frizzy and jumping all over the place all the time.

Today is a new day. A day with buttermilk muffins and winter squash soup. Maybe today is also a day for a cup of caffeine? (We only have decaf coffee right now) Stormy, cold, grey, quiet, and I'm home. Something good's gotta happen!



*You would be proud of me Dominique for having used the Fels Naptha several times to good effect, but I cannot keep up with the blood stains around here. That would require energy that I don't have.

Further Adventures In Cheese Making
Yogurt Cheese: Tink's Way

In my post about making yogurt cheese one of my commenters, Tink, described her own space saving method of draining the whey off the yogurt. I couldn't quite picture exactly what she was describing so I discussed it with Lisa B. and together we used Tink's idea to come up with this interesting riff on Tink's method. I'm just going to call it "Tink's Method" because I want to say "Tink" as often as possible.

What you need:

• Two large commercial yogurt containers, one must be slightly smaller than the other at the bottom but the tops must be the same circumference. I used a Nancy's container and a Lucerne container.

• A clean screw

• cheese cloth

• yogurt

The first step is to use your screw to make a ton of holes through the bottom of the smaller of the two yogurt containers. It is very important that you make them from the inside going out otherwise the texture of the displaced plastic will create a bumpy surface that will not drain the liquid well.

It should look like this when you're done. I admit that my thumb was a little bit raw by the time I finished. It took me about fifteen minutes to do this.

Next you place the smaller container inside the larger one. If the tops are the same circumference then the smaller one should hang on the lip of the larger one and there should be room at the bottom of the larger one to collect some liquid.

Next you line the inside of the hole punched container with cheese cloth and fill with yogurt. I put the contents of a larger container of yogurt into it, so it didn't all fit super well at first. I just draped the cheese cloth over the top to keep it clean and from spilling over.

Tink is so right that using this method takes up so much less room than a pot with a wooden spoon does. I just squeezed it in on the top shelf.

Be sure to drain off the liquid after the first couple of hours which is when the most liquid will have already drained. After that you don't need to check again for many hours.

You can see that as the liquid drained off, the yogurt condensed in bulk and is much smaller in mass than it was when I first put it in there. This method works brilliantly and I love that I was able to use two containers I already had on hand to make it with, keeping at least two more containers from my trash can, at least for a while. Thank you Tink and Lisa B. for making it even easier to make yogurt cheese!!

Swiss Chard Egg Scramble

My breakfast comes with some dirt, snail trails, and random feathers, how about yours? I was so lucky to be able to harvest some chard from the garden two mornings ago and also lucky that my hens provided me with a few fresh laid eggs. It's possible that they didn't want me to have them because they were cleverly hidden in the hay. I put my garden findings in a bucket and took pictures of it because I love pictures of food. All food. Then I realized that this was what I was having for breakfast:

Sauteed chard and onion scrambled with eggs, sprinkled with an ounce of cheddar cheese, and laid on a slice of wheat toast with butter.

Swiss Chard Scrambled Eggs:

serves 1

4-5 large chard leaves
2 eggs, (separate the yolks of one)
1/2 onion, medium diced
1 oz cheese of your choice
1/4 cup milk
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp olive or vegetable oil
1 slice wheat toast with butter

Put the oil in a medium or small sized skillet and turn the burner on to medium. After about a minute, when the oil is hot, add the onion. While the onion is sauteing, wash the chard and cut it up into small pieces, stems removed. (Don't shake the water off of the leaves or spin it in a spinner.) When the onion is soft, add the chard and immediately put a lid on the skillet to let the steam help wilt the chard. Make sure to stir the chard frequently until it is softened.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix 1 whole egg with one egg white, the milk, and salt and pepper together with a fork. Once the chard is softened, pour the eggs over the chard and onions. Stir the eggs frequently to prevent burning. When eggs are no longer disgustingly drippy wet, add the grated cheese to the top, turn off the burner, put the lid on the pan and let sit for a couple minutes while you make a slice of toast. When the toast is ready, put the eggs on top of it.

Then eat it. So good.

This whole deal will cost you 469 calories*. For such a balanced and healthy filling breakfast I think that's a caloric bargain. However, it would be easy to instantly reduce the calories by skipping the cheese and the toast. You should know that I only use a pat of butter on the toast.

Without cheese: 356 calories
Without cheese or toast: 285 calories



*For calorie reference I use "Laurel's Kitchen" which has nutrition tables in the back, and "The Most Complete Food Counter".