by Cathy Erway
Next, I determined that this wasn’t a project about trying to make everything that I ate using the basest of raw ingredients. I wasn’t setting forth to cure my own salami, or churn goat’s milk into chevre, as much as I’d like to. I basically took not eating out to mean not eating anything purchased from a restaurant, whether it be a sit-down establishment or a takeout window. There are many businesses that blur the line between restaurant and grocery store. Many high-end groceries, such as Whole Foods, have extensive prepared-food sections, and you can order a deli sandwich at any bodega. These types of meals would be off-limits, too, I decided. Food from bakeries and bagel shops could also be borderline cases, as they were generally ready to eat. I’d use my best judgment here—if I could simply go home, slice the bagel that I’d purchased, and top it with whatever I wanted, then I would.
Also, this wasn’t about trying to convert the people around me into not eating out. So if my friends were all starving and wanted to stop at a restaurant while I was hanging out with them, then I’d either have to go along and just order coffee, or else not go. Drinking—anything—from a restaurant, cafe, or bar would be perfectly fine. After all, I wasn’t going to start making my own gin in the tub.
I couldn’t decide on an exact length of time that I would limit myself to eating in; one year sounded too much like a stint, or an impractical joke of some sort. I was eager to start blogging about it, and I didn’t want to put a cap on the blog’s duration. So I left that question unanswered.
After I set these guidelines and thought about how I would write my blog, I realized that something was missing. I knew that there are plenty of people who don’t eat out, even in New York. So, like Professor Cooper did with his media fast, I decided I should seek out other examples of not eating out within city limits. I would find as many avenues and lifestyles that qualified as not eating out in New York as possible. I also wanted to meet more home-cooking aficionados and put our minds and resources together on a number of fun projects and community events. After all, mealtimes are not just about filling one’s belly until it’s no longer hungry; mealtimes are a social activity, too.
Did I ever “cheat” during the course of these two years, and eat out in a New York City restaurant? There are a few memorable experiences when I did, which come up in later chapters. As for allowed dining-out occasions, such as work parties, I can count the number I attended on both hands. Many people have asked me whether I cheated with occasional takeout meals while at home, alone, when nobody was looking. I can say in good conscience that I didn’t, because the strangest thing that happened—far stranger than any of the weird groups and events I would encounter while not eating out, and far weirder than the schemes and dates that I would fashion in order to fit my restaurant-free lifestyle—is the fact that I grew so comfortable with eating in that I simply didn’t want to cheat. If I was craving something amazing or unusual, I would set out to make something amazing or unusual. The thought of buying something premade at any of the mediocre delis near my office, or dialing up for takeout from any of the restaurants that had slid their menus underneath my apartment door, rarely entered my mind. It was unappealing if it did. It was unusual.
I should point out that I may have been better prepared than the average New Yorker of my age when I began this journey, because I had become by then so enthralled with cooking. I loved food, of course, but there was something doubly satisfying about enjoying a really good meal that I made myself. In the months and weeks leading up to the start of the blog, I cooked dinner two or three nights a week, as my passion for learning about new dishes and techniques increased. I had never taken cooking classes. I had only one cookbook at home, and I didn’t subscribe to any food magazines. I preferred to make up dishes as I went along, adding this and that, whatever was left over in the fridge, whatever was on hand.
The frequency of my dabblings in the kitchen left me well prepared for cooking and eating in nonstop. I understood how to use up leftovers and shop for groceries wisely. I also learned that a dish does not have to come out perfectly to be edible, either.
Throughout the entire time I was not eating out and blogging about it, there were of course innumerable homemade meals that I made and never bothered to share with readers. I tried to leave the simple, dull, everyday recipes out of the blog and this book, so as not to bore readers. But just as I experienced, I guarantee that if you just get into the habit of cooking at home more often, you will figure out ways to make the process more efficient, and the things you cook more satisfactory. Practice can’t be learned from books. Plus, with practice, you will figure out how to cook in a way that suits your taste and lifestyle, and not mine—I’m not sure everyone wants to eat fried rice with scrambled eggs any given night of the week.
Six years after taking Professor Cooper’s course and two years of not eating out later, I think I finally get what his media fast was aiming at. He was trying to get us to make more mindful choices when it came to media, art, maybe even ourselves. He was also asking us to consider, what are we losing, as a culture, in exchange for the conveniences of modern life? What might we have already lost? In return, what can we gain from doing away with it for a while?
I was at a dinner party one night, and my neighbor in the next seat told me about how, during a phone conversation with his mother, he’d expressed a little frustration with paying for restaurant food. She followed up by mailing him a stack of recipes written by his Dominican grandmother. Not only were they greatly helpful in allowing him to re-create some of the dishes he’d always loved, but he said it was almost like receiving a diary from his grandmother.
Had my friend never taken up cooking, he might not have gotten to know his grandmother as well as he did through her cooking advice and recipes. And had I never done so myself, then I would have never discovered a whole lot of unique things about myself, and the people around me, through food. And that’s been by far the best part about the journey.
CHAPTER 2
Breaking into Bread
“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
“Is chiefly what we need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Squash rolls: Put 1 cup milk,cup sugar,cup butter or margarine, and 1 tsp salt in a glass dish and heat in microwave until scalded. Add 1 pkg cooked squash thawed, but cold, to the milk mixture to cool that off (if the squash has a lot of water that separates when you thaw it, drain most of it off).
In a small cup or bowl, put ½cup very warm water and 1 pkg (about 2½ tsp) yeast and a pinch of sugar. Add 2 cups flour to the milk mixture and stir well. Add the yeast/water and mix very well. Keep adding flour (about 3 cups or so depending on how much moisture is in the squash). I add about 2 cups, still mixing it with a spoon, and then turn it onto a floured surface and knead the rest of the flour in until it isn’t so sticky—it probably takes about 10 minutes or so.
Put the dough into a generously greased glass or metal bowl and turn dough over so that some of the grease gets on the top. Cover with a dish towel and put into a warm place and let rise until double its size (about 1 hour). Punch down dough and form into small balls.
I leaned back from my computer screen. The recipe went on, but I wasn’t ready to scroll down farther. I was about a month into my not-eating-out habit, and for motivation I’d asked my friends to send me some of their favorite recipes. I didn’t think I’d have enough ideas of my own to keep the mission afloat. But were these really the directions for the simple squash rolls that DJ had talked about a few nights ago? It sounded like an elaborate science project, with things bubbling over in beakers or creeping off the counters. Punch down the dough? Was this really necessary? Couldn’t it just be pressed? What was yeast anyway, and where did you get it?
I reread the beginning of DJ’s e-mail:
Here’s my mom’s recipe for squash rolls. We always have them with our Thanksgiving meal, so I
figured they’d be a nice fall-time food. Note that you may want to halve this recipe, as it will produce much more than you would want to eat yourself. Also, the preparation time is kind of long, but it’s completely worth it. Oh, and they don’t really end up tasting anything like squash (which is a major plus because they’re made from freezer squash, which is a cheap replacement for syrup of ipecac if you don’t have any handy).
I typed out an e-mail response.
Thanks so much for spilling your mom’s secret recipe! I think I’m going to try it out tonight.
I paused.
One question, though: where can I find yeast? Is this something you can only get at a special baking supplies store?
While I waited for his response, I took a quick mental stock check of my kitchen supplies. I’d need to buy butter and the squash. There was only one mixing bowl in the apartment, which belonged to my roommate, Erin, and I doubted it would suffice for all that flour. Then, I didn’t think we had any flour either. There was a dusty box of biscuit mix on top of the refrigerator, which Erin used every time she couldn’t resist a craving for chicken and biscuits, and which I’d used instead of flour once or twice, to dredge some meat in before splashing it into an oily pan.
Wait, weren’t biscuits essentially the same thing as rolls? How come I didn’t see Erin punching down any dough or kneading for ten minutes? What did yeast even look like? Just then my boss walked by my desk, and I closed the window for my e-mail.
I began wondering whether it would have been better to pick a weekend to make DJ’s recipe instead of beginning the recipe once I got home from work on a weeknight. But my mind had already been made up; I was determined to make the squash rolls. The sooner, the better, to learn how to knead, and let dough rise with yeast.
DJ’s response came back a couple of hours later.
You can find yeast packets in pretty much any grocery store. Or that’s where my mom always found them. I think they should say on the label, “dry active yeast.”
As I walked down the baking supplies aisle of my local grocery store that evening, I realized I had no idea what I was searching for. I should have tried to look up an image online while I still had the chance at the office. I didn’t think I’d ever seen one of these packages of yeast before, and I had no concept of its shape or size—was it inside another box, bag, or canister? How big was it? I stared at boxes of sugar and baking soda for a moment. How did a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor like DJ, who barely ever cooked for himself, know more about baking than I did?
At times like these, I was reminded of the little differences between my mom and what I had gathered about most American moms, from friends or the television. My mom didn’t bake. I’d never watched her take a tray of cookies out of the oven, or helped her ice a birthday cake. Even cake mixes or tubs of frosting were curious objects to me from the crowded grocery-store shelf. I should back up by explaining that my mom is Chinese. Her home cooking is done on the stovetop, in pots and wide saucepans (she didn’t have a wok, as she didn’t feel they were very different from regular saute pans), and is typically completed in twenty minutes or less. Of course, she made long-simmered stews and soups from time to time. She also cooked plenty of American dishes, like spaghetti with meatballs. But she simply didn’t bake. When moms were called on to bring in food for a potluck or bake sale at elementary school, she brought Chinese pot stickers (and they were always a hit). At a family get-together at our house once when I was young, one of my aunts turned on the oven to preheat it. She ended up scorching a bunch of cutting boards and cookware that were stored inside it. My mom stopped using the oven for storage not too long after that, but she never used it much for anything else—least of all for baking bread.
My dad was different. He’d use the oven four or five times a year, maybe, to roast an enormous piece of meat or to fill its racks with various homemade pies. When he wanted to cook, it was a production; he would tie on the kitchen’s sole tartan apron and take up its entire space with open cookbooks, their pages pocked with crusty splatters, tools like flour sifters and garlic presses, bowls and measuring cups, cracked eggshells, and his general, kitchen gadget-wielding self, which moved slowly and deliberately as if he were a surgeon bending over an operating table rather than a stove. He would spend an entire leisurely Saturday on whatever he was mak ing. When my mother would come home, her heart would stop at the sight of every smear on the refrigerator handle and onion paper on the floor.
So loyal, though, was my dad’s passion for pies that he never bothered to bake any other types of dessert. Nor did he bake bread.
My eyes ran across a crumpled deck of three small envelopes on the baking aisle shelf. Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast, they each read, in jumping-bright yellow and pink print. I picked one up and tossed it into my basket.
Back outside along the busy street in Brooklyn’s quaint Park Slope neighborhood, restaurants were just beginning to fill up with customers. As I made my way home from the grocery store, I passed several couples and groups hesitating in front of restaurant windows, or gazing at menus on their doors. I walked past a restaurant I had loved going to just a month before. It was a small, unassuming place that specialized in pressed sandwiches—with any combination of the works. It was a little pricey, though, for what it was. Maybe I should invest in a panini press, I mused. In front of another restaurant, a new one I’d never been to, a tall young man opened the door for his female friend.
I quickly reminded myself of why I had taken on this mission. Currently, my total spending for the day was $18.13. That accounted for the yeast packets, frozen squash, bag of flour, quart of butter, and the makings of dinner for at least three people, with leftovers. The flour, yeast, and butter would make it into many more meals, too. For dinner, I’d gotten some chicken leg quarters, which I was thinking of simply braising or else roasting on trays like I’d seen Erin do for her chicken-and-biscuit nights, and a bunch of Swiss chard. I knew my boyfriend, Ben, would be showing up at some point that night also, so with the rolls, there would be plenty for all of us.
I turned the corner to my block, leaving the quieter parts of the neighborhood to the noisy street with four lanes of traffic that I lived on, Fourth Avenue. This was totally going to be worth it, this whole not-eating-out thing.
Once home, I cleared aside all the piles of CDs from the kitchen counter and wiped it down with a fresh sponge. This was it: I was making bread for the first time. Just think of it: I might never need to buy bread for sandwiches and let the rest go moldy again! I ripped open one of the foil paper yeast packets and let loose a spray of grayish, millet-sized pebbles all over the counter.
Nearly since the dawning of agriculture, bread has been the quintessential food of the Western world. But before my blog, I’d never thought of it as something people actually made themselves. The puffy, spongelike textures and uniform shapes of store-bought bread and dinner rolls resembled no food I’d ever seen produced in a home kitchen. This wasn’t counting banana bread, or muffins and other cakelike breads, which I later learned are quick breads, as opposed to yeast-based breads. Even those I didn’t have much experience making. I’d heard of bread machines that you could buy and bake loaves inside of, but these sounded unwieldy and complicated.
In Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, Felipe Fernández-Armesto proposed that it was bread—and not beer, another common usage for wheat—that propelled the grain’s popularity in the Neolithic period: “Wheat has no obvious advantage over other edible grasses for the farmers who first favored it or for the peoples subsequently seduced by it, except that it has a secret ingredient—gluten.... This makes it a peculiarly good source of bread, because gluten is the substance which combines with water to make dough malleable.”
Indeed, people have been subsequently seduced by bread, in all ways, shapes, and forms: flat or leavened; sweet or sourdough; sliced or crumbled into coarse crumbs; whole grain or refined; topped with sauce and mozzarella cheese or cradling a ground
-beef patty and ketchup. The prominent American food critic Jeffrey Steingarten asserted that “bread is the only food that satisfies completely, by itself” in his book The Man Who Ate Everything. That’s a big compliment for plain old bread (though, in all fairness to supporters of the beer theory, this wasn’t coming from the man who drank everything).
Let alone its deliciousness, bread became so significant throughout the course of history that the word frequently stands in for food or basic needs: “breadwinner,” “dough,” and in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us today our daily bread,” to name a few examples.
Basic, primal sustenance—this is what bread means to us as a culture. But when you look at all the steps involved in making it, it seems anything but simple. I couldn’t fathom how someone had first come up with it. First, whole wheat needed to be dried, cracked, and milled to a fine dust. Then you had to mix it with some leavening agent, like yeast, or probably back in the old days, just rotting ale. Then you had to pump gluten into it by kneading—for at least eight minutes, until you had worked up a sweat, all the while remembering to flour each and every surface of your workstation unless you wanted bits and pieces of white goop all over your counter and your hands. Then you had to bake it. Then it was fresh and usable in its current state for only one day—maybe two. Afterward, you had to come up with innovative ways to sneak it into other foods, like grinding it up to thicken soups, or to stretch meatballs, or making French toast or stuffing when it was stale.