I threatened in my last blog entry to do an entire post of Marlene Dietrich quotes from her ABC book, but when I started to flip through it this morning, looking for my favorites, I was tempted to transcribe half the book! So I’ve limited myself to just my favorite entries on food. Keep in mind that I don’t necessarily agree with all of these, I just find them all intensely pleasurable to read. (Punctuation and capitalization choices are all Marlene’s.) Enjoy!

COOKBOOKS: Judging from the vast amount of cookbooks printed and sold in the United Staes one would think the American woman a fanatical cook. She isn’t.

COOKING, 1: It is natural that a woman should cook. Her inborn mother instinct wants to feed. Her real motherhood makes it inperative that she should cook.
It is easy to cook simple things. Children like simple things. Men like simple things. They don’t crave variety in their pleasures as much as one might think, once one has found what they like. If one cooks, one knows two joys: to watch people one loves eat, and to watch people one loves eat what one has cooked. Cooking does more than just give joy. It occupies one’s hands constructively. One of the greatest occupational therapies there is.

EATING: All real men love to eat. Any man who picks at his food, breaking off little pieces with his fork, pushing one aside, picking up another, pushing bits around the plate, etc., usually has something wrong with him. And I don’t mean with his stomach.

FRYING PAN: The queen of your kitchen. Be gentle with her. Don’t scrub her inside with steel wool or detergents. Right after using, wipe her clean of grease with soft paper towels, then rinse immediately with hot water and dry with paper towels. She will be smooth; she will not cling to the things you don’t want her to cling to. But you cling to her as a good subject should.

KITCHEN: I dislike the modern antiseptic small kitchens. The kitchen should be a place where the family can gather and eat while Mother is cooking. I venture to say that there is a parallel between the modern American kitchens and the modern American family problems.

MILK: I have my doubts about milk being necessary for the growing body. I was raised without milk, just because there wasn’t any milk to give children. My teeth are fine, and my bones astound the specialists.

POTATOES: I love them. I eat them.

TARRAGON: The delicious! Puts the Made in France label on your salad.

TEA: The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy, or disaster. The pulse stops apparently, and nothing can be done, and not one move made, until a “nice cup of tea” is quickly made. There is no question that it brings solace and does steady the mind. What a pity all countries are not so tea-conscious. World-peace conferences would run more smoothly if a “nice cup of tea,” or indeed, a samovar, were available at the proper time.

WHITE BREAD: I cringe every time I see a child eating a sandwich made out of American white bread. Give them whole wheat or rye bread if you love your children.

And here’s one more which isn’t about food exactly, but describes a version of a fantasy I myself have occupied my brain with on many a road trip:

FARM: I would like to live on a farm. Not a modern farm, mind you, but a simple old-fashioned farm with cows and pigs and goats and chickens and ducks and horses, where every day is the same except for the seasons bringing a different kind of work. I would have a vegetable garden, and from the kitchen, I would look over a wheat field. I would work hard all day long and feed a lot of people, preferably more children than grown-ups. I would have a big, square, wood-burning stove with low benches on the side where we would sit in the winter and warm our backs. And in the summer there would be large copper kettles on the stove with fruit and sugar cooking for hours, and preserve jars lined up on the long kitchen table, and in the fall mushrooms on the stove freshly picked from the woods nearby. There would be a small river to calmly fish in. The farm should not be too far away from a village, and I would set my clock by the sound of the evening church bells. I would like to sit on a bench in front of the house when a day’s work is ended or lie under a tree.

Sounds pretty good to me!

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these entries, but not for a lack of things in my life to fawn over, just for a lack of time to gather my rosebuds, if you will.

There is so much that I am loving on lately!

I love:

Nalgenes. Remember when that article came out about BPAs and everyone was all: “OH MY GOD, plastic bottles are killing us!” and we tossed our Nalgenes and switched over to alumninum bottles like good responsible little hippies? Well, I hated my aluminum bottle! It dented easily; I couldn’t tell at a glance how much liquid was inside (or how clean it was, for that matter); the mouthhole is irritatingly small; and as a result they were so hard to clean that Matthew had to buy those stupid little brushes to get inside there. I swear to you that I was underhydrated for the months in which I was drinking out of an aluminum bottle because I disliked the experience so much.  I missed my Nalgene! I never lost the cap to my Nalgene! So when I heard that Nalgene had released BPA-free bottles, I couldn’t wait to get a new one. I love you, little blue Nalgene.

Marlene Dietrich. Sure, you think Marlene Dietrich, you think Touch of Evil, A Foreign Affair, and Witness for the Prosecution. You think of a notorious style icon who is still influencing fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg, whose Fall 2008 line was inspired by her. That is all I thought about her, too, until I was browsing my friend Shantelle’s books and saw a book titled: “Marlene Dietrich’s ABC,” so I pulled it out and started reading it and I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces ever since, trying to make it last as long as possible. Matthew even read some of the entries outloud to me the other night while I was cooking, and we were cracking up over them. I don’t know how to express how delightful this book is! I might have to just dedicate another blog post to some of my favorite entries. If you see this book in a used book store, please get yourself a copy and leave it somewhere in your house (your bathroom, maybe) where it can be read frequently.

MFK Fisher. I read The Gastronomical Me in college, and loved it of course, and always meant to read more of Fisher, but for those of you who haven’t seen either my Amazon wishlist or the “to read” pile next my bed (and extending onto the floor nearby), I didn’t know when I was going to get around to reading the rest of her oeuvre. Then (again), I was browsing through Shantelle’s books and saw Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me, excerpts from her personal journals between 1933 and 1941, before she was a food writer and memoirist.

At the start of the book, she is young, newly married, living with her husband and family in California at the beginning of the Depression, and she is restless. She wants very badly to be living alone with her husband; to have stability and security; to have the space, time, and privacy she needs to nurture her creativity and her relationship. She doesn’t know yet that she will have a writing career, so while she knows of her own talent, she isn’t confident that she can turn it into anything. Entries vacillate between content daily records about enjoying the most simple pleasures life offers to entries where she is nervously and fervently plotting how she and her husband will make their next ten dollars. Considering the current economic climate, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m not the only one who can relate deeply to Depression-era writing, and would recommend this and all of MFK Fisher’s writing to like-minded folks.

Summer. This one requires a caveat: I love Pacific Northwest summers, where it doesn’t start to really heat up until early July, and it’s already cooling off again by mid-August. When high temperatures only last six weeks or so, I can really get behind summer! For Portland area parents, Urban Mamas did a blog post about all the free events happening this summer, so I’m not going to rehash that list. I’ll just tell you a few things about which I’m particularly excited: free movies in the park; hula hooping Saturday afternoons at Laurelhurst Park; summer produce at the farmers markets; margaritas, mojitos, and Bye & Byes (delicious all year round, sure, but in the summer they seem so well-deserved); plants tripling in size before your eyes; sand castles and yurt camping at the coast; potlucks and barbecues happening every weekend. Summer! I finally get why some people look forward to it instead of dreading it!

Finally: trail mix and Primal Strips. I don’t like to use the oven too much during these months, so it’s nice when I can get some quick protein without heating up the kitchen. My affection for these two items knows no limits.

I wanted to write a quick blog post about some changes around my website. You still actually look at websites, right? You don’t just look at posts within the ugly RSS feeders?  (If you do, head over to this post at Making it Lovely to learn how to use Google Reader to read all your feeds within their sites.)

The first change is that there is a new tab up on the navigation header that says “personal cook.” Click that baby and you’ll discover that I’ll be working part-time as a personal cook starting in late June. I’m running a two month trial with extra-low prices and have room for two more clients, so if you’re in the Portland area and interested in having a personal cook, hit me up!

The second change is that I’ve added an Etsy widget to my sidebar which will showcase some of my favorite artwork on Etsy. We’ll be buying many of those prints soon for Milo’s bedroom, our kitchen, and my office. Please consider buying handmade art and supporting small businesses!

That’s all! Thanks!

We went to see Adventureland yesterday. It was the mommy matine, and since mommy matinees are the only type of movie where we feel comfortable taking a toddler, this means that it was the first movie that either Matt or I had seen in the theater in eight months. Prior to having Milo, we saw at least three movies a month, sometimes as many as six. We lived walking distance from the incredible Laurelhurst Theater, a second-run movie theater in Portland that shows independent and arthouse movies for $3 a pop, and for the first two years that we lived in Portland, catching a movie at the Laurelhurst was our default weekend night activity.

I was really looking forward to Adventureland. It had a lot going for it in terms of “things Joanna likes”: Bill Hader, Kristin Wiig, Martin Starr, that kid from The Squid and the Whale. It was set in the 80s. What’s not to like?

But. I didn’t like it. I liked Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig and Martin Starr a whole lot. I like any soundtrack that features both “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Just Like Heaven.” Everything else? It just fell flat.

On the way home, I said to Matt: “You know what I’m done with? I’m done with movies where a troubled girl is choosing between an emotionally distant older man and an earnest and sensitive man her own age. And the man her own age makes a lot of careless mistakes because he doesn’t know any better, and the older man makes fewer mistakes, but when he does, they’re big ones and they really hurt.”

Matt said: “You know what I’m done with? Movies where all the guys are normal looking and all the women are gorgeous.”

You know what I’m done with? Dudes. Enough dudes! Where are the casts that resemble my own friendships, where men and women hang out together, and we talk about something other than relationships, and everyone looks more like Martin Starr than Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera. And no one looks like Kristin Stewart. And no one I’ve ever met in my whole life looks like Katherine Heigl. And there are a lot of funny women, and we don’t backstab each other, and we don’t have conversations about which one of us is prettier. I mean, I honestly just sat here for five minutes and can’t remember the last film that I saw where there was a young female lead and I related to her at all.

So! I’m done with the dude films. I might download them, but I don’t want to pay to see them in theaters anymore. I’m ready for the ladies. I’m looking to Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, Kristin Wiig, Amy Poehler. Let’s do it, ladies!

Yesterday, I got an email from a friend, and the subject line was: “I’m so over veganism,” and before I even read the body of the email, I deeply related and knew exactly where she was coming from, because I have felt like this a lot.

Whenever you have restrictions in your diet—whether as a result of allergies, health issues, ethics, or self-imposed restrictions for the purpose of weight loss or cleansing—eating can quickly feel like a chore. In this situation, it’s easy to forget that even when you were eating whatever the hell you felt like, you were frequently uninspired, unmotivated, and just making the same quick, boring dishes over and over again and deriving little to no pleasure from the cooking or eating of them. When I first transitioned from vegetarianism to veganism, I suddenly wanted to put cheese on everything, even though I had never kept cheese in the house as a vegetarian. Feeling like I couldn’t do it made me want it so badly!

When I hit this wall, there are a couple of things that I do. The first thing that I do is head on over to Flickr and look at my Daily Eats collections. This accomplishes two things: 1) I remember some of my old favorites that I haven’t made in a while, and 2) I see that in February 2007, I was in a rut where I ate polenta, olives, popcorn, or chocolate almost every day. If I didn’t have my Daily Eats collections, I’d probably go read a few pages of PPK Food Porn or head over to Veggie Thing for inspiration.

daily eats, october 15, 2007

When things are really bad, and I’m pretty sure that I never want to cook another dinner again, and maybe I will just become one of those people who lives off Boca and Field Roast and Tofurkey products and bags of frozen vegetables, I make a list of all of my favorite foods.

I was excited to see that Orangette does the same thing, but whereas she limits the list to actual recipes, I write down everything I like to eat a lot, including restaurant and take out meals, sliced avocadoes, cinnamon toast, mixed nuts—if I love every second of eating it, I write it down. I include comfort food from my childhood that I have no intention of ever eating again, just to see it on the paper.

When I’m done, I’m usually able to see that most  (practically all!) of my very favorite foods and recipes have less than five ingredients, take under fifteen minutes to prepare (if that), and can be incorporated more into my everyday diet. After I make this list, I usually am so inspired that I run to the grocery store to get ripe plums, a baguette, a container of chili olives, a 4-pack of Virgil’s root beer (the very best in the world and I will fight anyone who says otherwise), and the ingredients for pesto or guacamole.

Is the point of this whole post to say eat what you like? Yes, okay, yes it is. But if you’re like me, you sometimes get so caught up in trying new things and mastering that tempeh dish and this and that that you stop having fun and eating your favorite foods. Or maybe you’ve become so much of a foodie that making something as simple as a salad and pasta with olive oil, salt, pepper, and nutritional yeast for dinner feels lazy. I would argue that it’s the opposite of lazy: it’s decadent. I sometimes forget, and thought you might have, too.

There is a veggie burger renaissance going on in my house, ever since I came up with a (so far) foolproof equation that produces delicious burgers every time, with a wide variety of ingredients.

The formula is:

• 2 cups chopped vegetables
• 1 1/2 cups protein
• 1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice
• 1/2-3/4 cup vital wheat gluten
• 1/3-1/2 cup liquid (I almost always do 1/4 cup oil and a splash of water)
• 2 T-1/4 cup liquid seasoning
• up to 2 T dry seasoning (optional)
• salt and pepper

suggested veggies: garlic, onions, carrots, corn, cooked potatoes, cooked sweet potatoes… the possibilities are seemingly endless

suggested protein: cooked beans and legumes, nuts and seeds, rehydrated TVP, grated tempeh, crumbled very firm tofu

suggested liquid seasoning: soy sauce/tamari/Bragg’s (be conservative with the added salt), tahini, miso, steak sauce, barbecue sauce, lemon juice

suggested dry seasoning: nutritional yeast, paprika, dry mustard… pretty much any combination of your favorite herbs and spices

Combine all ingredients in a big bowl, mix very well so that the glutens develop. Depending on which proteins and vegetables you used, you may need to add a little more water or oil to get a moist patty: remember that cooking the burgers will dry them out significantly, so the patties should have a fair amount of moisture before baking. Divide into patties and bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes on each side. Serve warm.
 

veggie burgers forever

Like I said, I have yet to make veggie burgers using this formula that weren’t delicious.

Some combinations we’ve really liked:

chickpea burgers: chickpeas, chopped walnuts, garlic, onion, carrots, soy sauce, lemon juice, paprika

latke burgers: white beans, garlic, onion, potatoes

mushroom lovers burger: TVP, sauteed mushrooms, caramelized onions, soy sauce

black bean burger: black beans, TVP, garlic, onions, carrots, corn, chili powder, cumin

You can see how there are pretty much endless possibilities with this formula. If you come up with any that you love, please let me know in the comments, since my family seems to never tire of veggie burgers.

In other news, we are back home in Portland! We’ve only been back three days and I’ve already hit most of the restaurants that I’ve been craving for the last seven months, and now my stomach and wallet are telling me to take a break, which is why I made veggie burgers for our lunch today and there are tempeh croutons marinating right now for our dinner salad.

Just a quick blog post because I want you to hear it directly from me: I’ve decided not to write cookbooks anymore. For most of my life, cooking was how I unwound. I am a cooking-by-feel-and-taste cook, not a stopping-to-take-notes cook. Recipe writing and testing slowly peeled away any enjoyment that I took in cooking and was becoming a chore that I dreaded, so instead of having a way to unwind, I had a second job. I don’t want a second job. I want my favorite hobby back.

The recipes that have been tested so far for my second cookbook will be compiled into a zine that will be available for purchase sometime in June-ish. Before I can even think about that, I have to move back home and buy and move into my first house, so it’s not exactly my number one priority right now. This is good news for you, because publishing a cookbook takes months, whereas a zine can be copied off and in your grubby little hands in no time.

Don’t worry about Herbivore: they hadn’t invested any money yet in the second book, and it was Josh himself that suggested that I might want to do a zine. I emailed him first thing yesterday and I have his blessing. They’re going to handle the distro of the zine, carrying it both in-store at the Portland location and handling the online sales.

Keep your eyes here for details about that. If you have any questions for me, leave a comment and I’ll try to address it!

If you’re not sure whether or not you consider where you currently live to be your home, may I recommend that you move away from it for a bit? If you find yourself fantasizing about that place on a regular basis—from the weather to the local produce to the dear friendships you’ve left behind—that place is home. After our Texas adventure, Matthew and I are more convinced than ever that the Portland area is exactly where we need to be, which is why we’re ecstatic about the fact that in less than a month from now, we will be back home!

berries from the farmers market

Granted, in the time between now and then, we will be: attending a wedding in Austin, packing up our life here, driving across the country in a car with three cats, but hey! We’ve already done all that before. It sucks, but it’s worth it! We’re heading home!

Home to: restaurants that have vegan options, parks and nature reserves everywhere, the PSU Farmers Market, Sweetpea, hikes, hot springs, Multnomah Falls, potlucks, Rogue beer on tap, McMenamins hotels for day trips, yurts on the coast, vegan potlucks, New Seasons grocery stores, the Japanese garden, Bye and Bye, Food Fight, Herbivore, and not the least of all, some of my favorite people in the world. I am so excited that it’s hard to keep a grin off of my face these days.

I’m especially looking forward to sharing with Milo all of the things that his dad and I have come to love about Portland. When we left, he was so small that he still wasn’t forming attachments or exploring his world very much. Now he’s at the age where he’s really excited about people, nature, and animals, and every new experience is stimulating and thrilling for him. I can’t wait for the minute where I first set him down at Laurelhurst Park and watch him run off to touch everything in sight and freak out over the bur-burs (birds).

We’ll also be buying our first house shortly after we arrive! Cross fingers for us that the house of our dreams goes on the market in the next month!

It’s been so long since I’ve done an entry! Really it’s only been a week or two but it feels like a month. What have I been doing? Mostly I’ve been catching up on Lost. When I haven’t been catching up on Lost, I’ve been… thinking about Lost. I’ve even been having Lost dreams.

Luckily, Matt is in the same boat that I am, so I have a sounding board for all my theories and conjecture, but when he’s busy with Milo, or running an errand, or sleeping, I have the internet. I thought I’d share with fellow fans some of my favorite Lost links (thank you to fellow Lostie Jess DeNoto for a couple of these):

Lostpedia. Your go-to source for everything you need to know. I particularly enjoy the Theory pages for each episode, because trying to figure out what will happen next is the best part about being a Lost fan. There are even transcripts of each episode here, if you really want to nerd out. Or if you’re having an argument about something that happened and need facts to back you up. Not that I’ve been in either of those situations.

Lost Easter Eggs for Season 5. If you missed something while watching the episode the first time around, the nerds at Buddy TV caught it for you. These are usually up on the site as soon as the next day. While we’re at it, you should probably read their

108 Lost Characters You Need to Know. An awesome and comprehensive list that sums up the major and minor characters on Lost. “Need” might be a stretch, since not even the other survivors can tell Scott from Steve, but some of the characters that have only been mentioned once or twice so far are about to get major screentime, so it’s worth a refresher course.

Dispatches from the Island. Jorge “Hurley” Garcia’s blog. It’s just cute.

Finally: The Lost Script Style.

Sorry for those of you for whom this has no interest whatsoever, except…

They’re only halfway through season 5 right now. If you downloaded seasons 1-5, you could watch an episode a night, or a few a week, and be all caught up by the time that Season 6 starts, and then you could watch in real time. Just sayin!

I’m sorry. Going into this, I know how tedious this subject is. I was eating lunch yesterday and I picked up the Sunday comics, and every single comic was about the economy. It’s not like I expect them to be funny, because you know they never are, but I don’t expect the comics to be depressing.

I had a popular blog post a few years ago about how a little pre-planning can save you a lot of money at the grocery store. I thought this would be a good time to reproduce that post on the new site.

I happen to have my shopping list from last week sitting right here next to me. When I create my shopping list, I first make a list of all the dishes that I plan to make that week, so my shopping list says:

seitan
breakfast sausages
pumpkin bread
corn muffins
polenta
tofu scramble
eggplant parm
chickpea patties
three bean salad
spinach balls

To make those recipes, I bought:

vital wheat gluten
soymilk
cornmeal
corn grits
eggplant
walnuts
tofu
chickpeas
chickpea flour
zucchini
agave nectar
frozen spinach
edamame
kidney beans
onion
cilantro
lime

and then three staple items:

bananas
avocados
xylitol

The total came to a little over $50, and it fed my family for a week, supplementing with pantry staples like oatmeal and some produce that we had left over from the previous shopping trip the week before. Now that we’ve gone through almost all of our produce, my shopping list this week will be very produce-heavy, with hardly any pantry items, because I’ll be able to use up the staples from previous trips.

That’s how we stretch our dollar and are still able to buy 80% organic and local.