My current bicoastal existence tends to land me in or near two of the foodiest locations in the United States: Portlands Oregon and Maine. Portland West has recently been tapped at the Food Cart Center of the Universe, as the food cart population evolves in variety, affordability, and atmospheric excellence. Portland East, meanwhile, is a more traditional sort of culinary paradise, with the unstoppable combination of a hyper-aware eating culture and easy/plentiful access to good local fixings inherent in the state of Maine's largely rural constitution. My college, it turns out, is no exception: I did some work with Bates Dining Services last year and discovered that the food program at Bates is about as conscientious as it has the capability to be, considering the 1800+ mouths the institution feeds on a daily basis nine months out of the year. Clearly, the places i live tend to care about what goes into their respective inhabitants' bellies.
Food culture is as closely associated with heritage as it is with locality, and last summer I took my first foray into the foreign yet personal territory of heritage cooking by attempting to prepare one of my grandmother's recipes. Grandma Mary's been gone for about fifteen years; the recipes that survive locate her in what seems to me a pretty unique cultural moment and place, as both mid-century New England suburban housewife and Jewish southerner. Endeavoring to eventually work my way through her repertoire, I thought a good place to start would be an old standby, stuffed cabbage. With a Sauvie Island potluck to attend, Dad and I set to preparing two versions of the dish - one meat, the traditional by-the-book approach, and one veggie (with mushrooms), our own adaptation, one July afternoon.
Once we started the preparation process, I got the lowdown on the significance of this particular dish in Joslin family history. The deal with stuffed cabbage was that, according to my Grandpa Bob, it was never as good as Nana's (his formidable mother). It turns out the the recipe was in fact not Mary's but Nana's recipe, and my grandmother's thankless task was to attempt to recreate it to my grandfather's taste periodically, a fundamentally futile undertaking. The difficulty of doing so certainly became clear to me and my Dad in attempting to decipher the instructions for preparation: every aspect of the directions, from the ingredients list to the order of assemblage to the time required for each stage of preparation, is as vague as the next. One of the ingredients is listed as "box of raisins" -- without the slightest indication of how big said box ought to be, or perhaps how many raisins it should contain. Dad suggested that this may have been intentional on Nana's part, which instigated a foray into familial history: stories of a mother-in-law's disapproval and, deliciously, society scandal (!). The storytelling turned out to be an integral part of the process, and along with some inspired guess work and improvisation established both of our versions - necessarily pretty loose translations, that is - of the stuffed cabbage recipe as instant hits. The process took three and a half hours, and paid off delectably.
such success.
While I may not be terribly prone to cooking for entire afternoons as I did that day, much of last semester -- my first living off campus at Bates -- was dedicated to cultivating cooking chops. My two regular dining companions, Limor and Hannah, were better about preparing for food preparation than I was, and between Limor's vegetarianism, my dairy allergy, and all of our busy schedules, we had our work cut out for us. Still, a few favorites dishes emerged victorious in our searches for easy/healthy/tasty meals, with a whole lot of help from the impeccable food blog Smitten Kitchen. The absolute tops was a seemingly bleak day when we had almost nothing in the kitchen to work with; luckily, SK published a recipe for spicy squash salad with lentils and goat cheese and between our two households we had all the ingredients, down to the element that arguably made the dish: smoked Spanish paprika.
Amidst my cooking kick, my friend Alyssa's boyfriend, Will, a photographer in NYC, made this little film. Using the vimeo as a platform for relaying cooking instructions, via a magazine-like visual format. It didn't escape the attention of NPR, and for obvious reasons.
And so the fun continues. Now living in New York, I've become addicted to cooking risotto at home: my friend Evan and I followed this recipe, again from Smitten Kitchen, with mushrooms, artichokes and asparagus, when we were both home in December. I've been making modified versions of it every week or so since, and there's plenty more where that came from. New York may have some seriously spectacular restaurants, but it's to my own kitchen I'll head when seeking to satisfy my appetite for fine fare.
