Simple Meals

Ingredients for quesadillas, salad, and stir-fried beef with green onions.

Cooking this week has been simple. We had quite a few leftovers and went out once, so I didn't do a lot in the kitchen.

Quesadillas are close to the simplest dish I know how to make -- I can't believe that I like them so much I even order them in restaurants sometimes. I keep my version basic: just some green chiles and melty cheese in a flour tortilla, fried to brown. Some restaurant versions get very fussy with the filling, like chicken in layers of sauce etc -- really, they should call them tacos or enchiladas or something. I like the original plain quesadillas. I served them with a bowl of lettuce, arugula, avocado, and cucumber; tomato salsa; corn salsa; and some stir-fried beef flavored with cumin, hot sauce, and green onions.

My quesadillas, ready to eat.

Green onions and beef.

Chicken with tarragon, capers, and lemon, served with green salad with artichoke hearts.

Another meal, shown above, was chicken breast cooked with white wine, tarragon, capers and lemon. Finally, the simplest and lightest of our dinners was a mug of mushroom soup alongside a vegetable salad dressed with kefir and goat cheese. For the soup I used the classic French onion soup recipe and added fresh and dried mushrooms before the long simmer. Serving the leftover soup at lunch the next day, I added a toasted English muffin with melted cheese and hot sauce.

Mushroom soup and an English muffin with cheese.
Note that I am incapable of making fancy squiggles from the Sriracha bottle.
Minnie Mouse is on the plate under the soup plate. Yes, I have Micky too.
No, they are not for children, they are for us.

I am not sure how my mushroom soup fits into the history of soup. In fact, I only just became aware that soup even had a history. However, I know more now because soup, also called pottage, frumenty, broth, and other names appears throughout the book I've been reading, Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking by Kate Colquhoun. Serving a piece of bread or toast in the soup was common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance era. Over time, this "sop" of bread went out of style and was replaced by vermicelli, rice, or other starches. I'll write more on this book and its overwhelming detail about eating through 20 centuries in a later post, maybe after my culinary reading group discusses it.

Shrimp and Gator

We couldn't visit the Florida Gulf coast without trying gator... so tonight we ate at a
restaurant called Gator Bites Tail & Ale, not a chain but the only one.

All kinds of gator on the menu. Len ordered a gator quesadilla. I stuck with shrimp,
which I've eaten every day. I love gulf shrimp. And I had key lime pie for dessert.
I really love key lime pie! Thanks, Florida. I plan to work on a recipe when I get home.

Even the tabletop reflects the theme.

My plate of blackened gulf shrimp. Delicious.

And the gator quesadillas which were very tasty, chewy, not that much like chicken.

Of course we did see a real gator while walking in the national wildlife refuge on Sanibel Island this morning.

We saw some spoonbills, too.

And this owl who was mostly asleep, but opened just one eye to check us out.

"The American Way of Eating"

“What’s a foodie?” was the start of a conversation related to Tracie McMillan by one of her neighbors, Martina, one of many examples of acquaintances whose ways of eating she profiles in her book The American Way of Eating.

“It’s someone who’s really, really into food, and grows their own, and then does things like make preserves and pickles and cans their food,” was the answer from the man Martina was describing. She answered him: “'Oh, like my mom, she does that,' but now she’s old. But, when I was a kid, she used to grow all these herbs and tomatoes and chiles and everything, just like back on the rancho in Mexico."

"That used to be all food. And it was a pain, man, to help with that. But it was real good, too. ... Right. That’s totally the same thing! Right! ...

"And so this guy, he says, 'Oh no, not like that.' and I can’t get him to tell me what the difference is, he just keeps saying, 'It’s just, like, you really, really like your food,' and I keep saying 'Like. My. Mom.' And we go back and forth like this, and finally I just told him, straight up, 'That’s classist, you just don’t get it.' And all he could say was, 'Foodies really care about what they eat.'" (p. 141)

It's kind of a cliche that many Americans have little choice in what they eat even though they in fact might prefer to eat more fresh produce and fewer meals of soft drinks or beer and a bag of chips -- and elitists don't get it. Many working people lack the time, access, and money to choose what they most wish for. This is the American way of eating that Tracie McMillan explores.

Though much of the statistical and general social information in the book has often appeared elsewhere, the development of relationships with fellow workers, landladies, or roommates, even in the short spans of time she worked each job, was one of the most interesting elements of the book -- like her relationship with Martina, whose mother loved food but didn't qualify for an elite definition of "foodie."

In order to learn about American food, McMillan decided that picking peaches and digging up garlic in the California fields, stocking the produce counters or the baking-supply aisles at Walmart, and working in the kitchen at Applebee's would help her to understand how poor and lower-middle-class Americans eat. While doing so, she had few financial or other resources to distinguish her from her fellow workers. They accepted her as a peer and a friend, and she also felt the same way about them.

McMillan herself grew up in a family that didn't always cook, though her grandmother taught her a bit. Both her background and her education led her to expect poorer people not to value cooking, good food, and fresh produce as much as wealthier Americans do. She clearly shows how very much these peers did love fresh food and home cooking.

One of McMillan's Walmart jobs was in Detroit, where she described her fellow workers and some of their food habits thus:

"Patti and Marvin reminded me how much people care about their meals. There were signs of it all around me in Detroit. There was Chris and her ceviche, for instance. The woman largely subsisted, so far as I could tell, on high-fiber breakfast bars, quesadillas, and Michelob Ultras, but she would also spend an hour cutting through five pounds of raw fish so that we could eat it all week. ...  

"Really, though, all I would have needed to do was look out my bedroom window. In the balm of springtime evenings, I’d watch my neighbors work in the community garden, crouching low to yank out weeds or ambling up the sidewalk behind a creaking wheelbarrow in the long shadows of twilight. Our garden wasn’t that big, maybe half a lot, but there were hundreds of them throughout the city .... Since the early 2000s, Detroit’s limited supermarkets and an overabundance of vacant land have inspired city residents to start growing their own food, in gardens ranging from tiny corner lots with collards and tomatoes to a four-acre expanse complete with a mushroom patch. They’ve churned out such an abundance of greens, herbs, and tomatoes that the most prodigious among them have formed a cooperative, Grown in Detroit, to sell their excess at farmers’ markets and restaurants around town. (p. 171)

Where does your food come from? Not a simple question. The process of bringing fresh vegetables and fruits from the fields in California or Mexico to the produce department at Walmart or to the kitchen of a fast-casual restaurant is complicated and adds most of the cost of these products. The author's experiences at Walmart were especially discouraging, as the produce there was very badly managed and poorly conserved, and she points out that Walmart supplies far more people with produce than any other source.

In today's New York Times a very closely related article, "Closing the Broccoli Gap" by Tina Rosenberg discusses the exact problems that are laid out in McMillan's book. It describes a program called Health Bucks, which enables people using food stamps (the SNAP program) to purchase considerably more produce for the same amount of money and credits. The program attempts to overcome two problems: poor people's access to markets where good produce is sold, and their inability to afford it.

The emphasis in the article is on an advocacy organization titled Fair Food, headquartered in Ann Arbor and their efforts in southeastern Michigan, right where I live:

"In 2013, the group worked with three independent grocery stores in Detroit to run a Double Up Food Bucks program from July through October. A SNAP customer who spent $10 on fruit and vegetables received a $10 gift card to spend on Michigan-grown produce. The next year, four new Detroit stores started the program, along with two groceries in Western Michigan."

McMillan makes a highly political point about social responsibility in her book. Perhaps the efforts described in today's article are making a tiny bit of headway in dealing with the issues of better and more nutritious food for all socio-economic classes in our society.

Quesadillas

Quesadillas: A Novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos is both amusing and depressing. The narrator, Orestes, is a boy; he's poor, teased or bullied by his classmates and older brother Aristotle, always at least somewhat hungry, and desperate to understand the political and social world that has deprived him of something -- he doesn't quite know what that is. His family lives in a shack next to a mansion, with the predictable relationship between him and the neighbor's son. His father, a teacher, expresses him self in various ways, including the Classical Greek names of his children.

Orestes' father speaks harshly and crudely to the 7 children in the family -- when the two youngest children, Castor and Pollux, disappear, they aren't quite missed. His mother constantly cries and makes quesadillas from her never-quite-adequate supplies of cheap tortillas and cheese: except when she doesn't have any cheese so she just writes the word "cheese" on a tortilla. Maybe she misses the disappeared children. It's hard to tell.

The real heroes of the story seem to be the quesadillas that the family eats every day. Quesadillas come in several types: inflationary quesadillas, normal quesadillas, devaluation quesadillas, and poor-man's quesadillas. And each type has its own political definition. When  mother panic-buys cheese because of inflationary price rises, they have inflationary quesadillas with lots of cheese. Normal quesadillas "were the ones we would have eaten every day if we lived in a normal country -- but if we had been living in a normal country we wouldn't have been eating quesadillas and so we also called them impossible quesadillas." Poor-man's tacos are the ones that have only the word "cheese" not the actual thing. And so on.

Quesadilla ingredients come from the state-subsidized store, another way the government plays a role in his consciousness. On one occasion during a political demonstration the store runs out of food, to his mother's desperation. Later, when he is offered a whole menu of dishes in a restaurant, the boy still chooses quesadillas over "gorditas and huaraches, tamales and tacos de canasta."

Orestes and Aristotle run away from home, fight, and are separated. Slowly the tale turns from a hardscrabble account of living in a tiny Mexican town in poverty to a surreal account of not-quite-believable adventures. I would say the book starts in one genre and morphs into another, but this doesn't make it hard to read, I think it makes it strong.

Thinking of the book, I made quesadillas.
I'm sure they mean something entirely different to us than to Orestes and his family --
if in fact mine are anything like the quesadillas they ate.

Super Cucas and Its Opposite

We really enjoyed the burritos, quesadillas, enchiladas, and green and red salsas at Super Cuca's Taqueria, quite near our temporary home in Santa Barbara. It's a completely informal place -- order at the counter, eat in a kind of garden area or take it home, which we've done a couple times. Cucas' kitchen makes a much more interesting photo subject than the food.





Cucas' also has a grocery section with an outstanding selection of fresh and dried chiles:



Earlier this week, we had a very different meal at the elegant French-California restaurant called Bouchon. Local food is their focus. The chef shops at the same farmer's market where I've spent almost every Tuesday afternoon. Probably he was one of the guys I saw with a wheelbarrow or other huge conveyance, buying in large quantities.

I've eyed the artistically arranged red and yellow beets at various farmers' stalls each week: at Bouchon, I ordered the beet salad with local greens and a sort of croquette made of wonderfully flavored cheese:



I love the contrast between delicious but informal tortilla-based food to eat with coke or beer, and special boutique-y food with local wine pairings. Other dishes in our Bouchon meal included rillettes of duck (Len's appetizer), local sea bass for Len and a duck main dish for me, and a meyer-lemon bread pudding and a blood-orange-and-strawberry tarte for dessert.

Kona Brewing Company

We had lunch at the Kona Brewing Company, one of our last year's favorite restaurants; see A Brew Pub in the Middle of the Pacific. Today we tried the tuna appetizer, fish sandwich, and lilikoi cheesecake. The local ahi tuna was very good -- they humored me and cooked it a little more than raw. The fresh fish in bun is swordfish. I hope that these local fish are more sustainable than the long-distance sushi fish I was reading about in The Sushi Economy.

Lilikoi is Hawaiian for passionfruit, and it's wonderful. I just checked on the history of this plant: it seems that no one knows its native origin. It's popular in climates like this, but the plant species can be invasive. Here in Hawaii, besides the delicious cheesecake, I've enjoyed lilikoi salad dressing, lilikoi cream cheese, and lilikoi-flavored ice cream and fruit drinks.

Hawaii always offers a multi-ethnic dining experience. Even the brewpub offerings point to Hawaii's complex history. Here's an example: Aloha-brand soy sauce, which -- the bottle says -- has been made here since 1948.

Other items on the brewpub menu include pizza, quesadillas or sandwiches with local-style pork, and various sandwiches, along with the beer, of which some is brewed on premises. It's a nice outdoor atmosphere, with shade provided by overlapping orange umbrellas, and waiters in (what else?) Hawaiian shirts.

Thinking about what's global and what's local is a real conundrum in Hawaii. Everything is both!

The Silver Diner, Fairfax, VA

The diner has every feature that any diner anywhere ever had. A juke box. Art Deco signs. Meatloaf dinners. Eggs lots of ways. Plus lots of new kinds of foods -- thai chicken salad, bagels, quesadillas -- which were never on a diner in the fifties. But good. Miriam and Alice had authentic diner food: a P.B.&J. and toasted cheese.