Food: Fast and Slow

 Fast: Breakfast

Pastry from the freezer. Breakfast in 5 minutes.

Another instant breakfast. Once in the cereal aisle of the grocery store we were making a choice. I said “I’m tired of Life.” A passer-by heard me and was alarmed until I explained that we were talking about the product, not the process.

  

Fast: Lunch

PB&J is very fast!

Great to have one more chance to eat outside under the trees.

Slow: Dinner

Stock cooks for a few hours. On Sunday when I cooked this, my goal was not only to have stock, but to get the odds an ends out of the freezer. We strained out the over-cooked veggies, added some white beans, and called it soup.

The Crock-Pot is slow by definition. I cooked the meatballs along with the red sauce.
Saturday: I slow-cooked this and we ate meatball sandwiches.
Monday: I added red and white beans along with some salsa, and it was chilli. 
Some time in the future: there’s a box of the leftovers in the freezer.

Pretty fast: Trader Joe’s falafel. A jar of olives.
Not too fast: home made yogurt sauce, sliced cucumber, and baba ganoush.

Fast: Dessert

Sara Lee Cake with premium ice cream from a local dairy.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Playing with Food

"The toast will be ready in a minute," said Len, suspecting that I was impatient before breakfast this morning.

"I'm just having fun arranging butter and jam on my plate. No rush." I answered.

Playing with food! As I continued buttering my toast and then peeling a tangerine, I thought about how much fun it is to play with food. When you peel the tangerine, you have to pull off all those little white stringy things one by one. It's compelling sometimes. Do you ever smear peanut butter on a graham cracker and then squish it with the other half of the graham cracker? Did you ever microwave cocoa with marshmallows on top and watch them swell up? I hope you didn't set your microwave on fire. Do you think it's fun to whack the catsup bottle? As in the poem The Catsup Bottle by Ogden Nash "First a little/ Then a lottle."

Cooking can be like playing with food, sometimes. Do you like fooling around with the toppings for a pizza? Last night, I spread the sauce with a silicone basting brush and I arranged the toppings in patterns, especially the artichoke hearts. Watching the dough as the flour mixer forms a ball in the food processor is fun. Kneading the dough is kind of amusing too -- some people like it more than I do. (Yesterday was Pi Day, and I didn't think I would have pie but I made a pizza after all.)

During my actual childhood, my mother didn't tolerate a lot of fooling around at the dinner table, but I guess I tried a few things. I used to enjoy mushing up the three separate dishes that composed one of the meals she often made: salmon croquettes, mashed potatoes, and peas (that would have been canned peas; soft, for mushing). I'm sure there were a few other foods or combinations I would have liked to fool around with. My sister probably remembers more.

But I'm a grownup now. I shouldn't play with food. Unless I'm cooking. Like mashing potatoes. The other night, I made twice-baked potatoes. This means I got to scrape the potato out after the first baking, then mash it with butter and browned onions and kefir, then smash the mixture into balls and stuff them into the potato shells, and finally, bake them again, covered with melty cheese. Meanwhile I grated carrots and chopped red cabbage for a side salad, not exactly playing, but almost.

I can think of other things that allow a cook to play with food -- legitimately! Like making tuna salad, egg salad, deviled eggs, or almost anything smushed with mayonnaise, which is a very playful substance as any child knows. Like making ice cream. Like forming a messy meat mixture into meatballs, which you can roll between the palms of your hands. Like the tense moment when you have added flour to white sauce and it forms a smooth paste, not a lumpy mess. It's all play.

Bread and Wonder Bread

"Whole -grain bread has been enjoying something of a renaissance. Actually, that renaissance got a first, false start during the 1960s, when the counterculture, steeped in romantic ideas about 'natural food,' seized on white bread as a symbol of all that was wrong with modern civilization. Brown bread, being less processed than white, was clearly what nature intended us to eat. They probably should have stopped there, but did not, alas. Baking and eating brown bread also became a political act: a way to express one's solidarity with the world's brown peoples (seriously), and to protest the 'white bread' values of one's parents, who likely served Wonder Bread at home. These ideals resulted in the production of some uncompromising and notably bricklike loaves of dark, seedy bread, which probably set back the revival of whole-grain baking a generation." -- (Cooked, p. 263)

In Cooked Michael Pollan writes about his efforts to learn to bake delicious, crusty, naturally-leavened bread, as well as about barbecuing and braising meat, fermenting vegetables, and about cooking in general. He discusses the history of white bread in America, and mentions that Wonder Bread and its competitors dominated the diet of Americans in the 1950s, as well as this interesting observation about 1960's "hippie texture" bread, which I remember with no pleasure at all.

In our family, Wonder Bread was the children’s bread. My sister, brother, and I, as we grew up in the fifties, ate Wonder Bread toasted for breakfast, and our bag lunches always contained sandwiches: peanut butter, tuna, sliced meat, yellow cheese or maybe cream cheese with walnuts on Wonder Bread. At dinner we ate bread too – my parents felt that bread was an essential part of every meal. I sometimes ate the slightly rubbery brownish Wonder crusts first and then squeezed and rolled the soft white center into a solid ball, which had an interesting texture in my mouth.

Even the wrappers of Wonder Bread, which constantly boasted of higher numbers of ways it “built strong bodies,” were for children. When I was in kindergarten or first grade, my friend Judy took one of the brightly colored Wonder Bread wax-paper wrappings to the playground at school and slid down the sliding board with it under her bottom. The wax made the slide really slippery – surprising the other kids when they slid down. Or maybe she just told me she wanted to do this, and didn’t really do it. I don’t know.

For our parents, Wonder Bread was at best unappealing, and I seriously doubt that they believed all its claims to foster growth in their children. Once or twice a week my father went to a Jewish bakery called Pratzel’s, which was a few blocks from our home in University City, MO. He always bought rye bread, which was what he liked to eat. He had several slices of rye bread with breakfast and dinner. I have no memory at all of what he ate for lunch most days, though corned beef on rye with a half-sour pickle might have been his Saturday choice.

This bakery rye was the closest to the bread of his childhood when rye bread was the main food, or even the only food, for almost all meals. Even for Passover, my radical father bought several loaves and kept them in the freezer so he wouldn’t have to resort to Wonder Bread, or for that matter, to matzoh.

Pratzel's made a number of other baked goods, which we ate as occasional treats: pumpernickel, a white bread called “buttercrust,” jelly donuts, bagels, kaiser rolls with a crisp crust, challah, cylindrical cinnamon bread made from a challah-like dough, cheese or jelly-filled Danish, and coffee cake or stollen. But rye bread was most important among all these choices.

My father didn’t just prefer Pratzel’s bread to grocery-store bread. He vastly preferred their baked goods to those from other Jewish bakeries. Each loaf of Pratzel’s rye bread had a Union Label on the heel of the bread, which I remember in a sort of schematic way; it was red and blue. It wouldn’t surprise me if some kind of union politics, not only taste, played a role in my father’s bakery preference. He had a lot of politics in his background. 

As we grew a little older, our taste in bread moved much closer to our parents’ taste, and we began eating the same bread that they did. I think by the time we were teenagers, the flamboyant red, blue, and yellow bubbles on the Wonder Bread package no longer appeared in the white metal flower-decorated Bread Box in my mother’s pantry. Just the white paper bags – or later plastic bags – containing real Jewish rye and other real bread. As a result, I didn't experience the sixties bread folly in anything like the same way that a lot of people did!

In Pollan's long and very readable narrative about bread in Cooked, he visited a Wonder Bread factory and several small-scale artisan bakeries, but he never visited any old-style ethnic bakeries like Pratzel's, though it would have been possible for him to do so. As it happens, Pratzel's Bakery remained in business until the fall of 2012, closing after almost 100 years of baking. Wonder Bread, a brand founded in 1921, was owned by several baking companies in its long history. When the Hostess corporation went out of business, coincidentally also in the fall of 2012, Wonder Bread was one of the brands that disappeared from supermarket and convenience store shelves -- but it came back around a year later.

I've written about some of our family food choices, including bread, before. Other blog posts on Wonder Bread and bread history:

• http://maefood.blogspot.com/2013/04/bread-and-milk-politics.html
• http://maefood.blogspot.com/2014/09/reading-and-cooking.html
• http://maefood.blogspot.com/2008/12/bread.html

Fighting Hunger

Maybe you live in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and your family needs help. SOS Community Services is a social-service organization that offers housing services, help with utilities, food assistance, and various social services. Earlier this week, I visited one of the two SOS centers in Ypsi, which is around 20 minutes drive from my home in adjacent Ann Arbor. My goal was to learn more about SOS, which has been developing social services to meet the changing needs of the community for 45 years.

I was particularly interested to find out more about their food pantry, which offers families in the community choices of bread, produce, meat, and a variety of canned and packaged goods, all at no charge. Six times per year, a family member makes an appointment to visit the pantry and select from a variety of foods to supplement groceries that they buy, perhaps using government assistance like SNAP. Every week, produce is available to all clients on a walk-in basis. Most of the food comes from Food Gatherers in Ann Arbor, says Marti Lachapell, coordinator of the food bank.

The SOS Community Services Food Pantry -- staples, personal care products, produce, recipes.
At left: Marti Lachapell.

Some SOS families have homes with kitchens. Foods from the pantry that are helpful to them are bags of rice or dried beans, boxed mac & cheese, waffle mix, frozen beef or pork, fresh vegetables like potatoes and carrots, fresh fruit, bread and sometimes desserts, large bottles of juice, and many pantry staples. The quantity of food each family receives depends on family size. Certain items, like baby food and large containers of juice, may be limited, due to high demand, but every family goes home with a useful selection of needed groceries.

Produce, bread, canned goods, juice, peanut butter... to be chosen by the users.
The bakery goods shelves are nearly empty in the photo because my
visit was the afternoon after the pantry's morning open hours.

Homeless families or those living in an unstable situation are also among the SOS clients. For them, helpful items are foods like peanut butter, saltine crackers, or single-servings of apple sauce: portable foods that don't need refrigeration. Some families are "surfing" -- that is, they live temporarily with a series of friends or relatives. The food they receive here from often helps them to be more welcome as guests.

"SOS never charges for food," explained Chelsea Brown, SOS development director. "All of our food is free to consumers so that they can stretch their limited budgets."

This week, as pictured above, the pantry received a lot of radishes among the produce available, so Marti researched some recipes to help people figure out how to cook them, not just to eat them raw. Labels "GO" or "SLOW" appear on some shelves to suggest what's good to eat in any quantities, like produce, and what might be less healthy choices, like sweets or waffles from the available waffle mix. In the pantry there's also a bulletin board offering recipes for healthy snacks.

Rhonda Weathers, SOS executive director, and Chelsea Brown, joined Marti in showing me around the center and answering my questions. They described how SOS responds to changing needs and situations. For example, opening up the pantry shelves to allow families to meet their own needs is a new process. It replaced the old way that SOS distributed food until last year, which was to provide each family with a bag of pre-selected foods.

Also recently, Marti explained, they've expanded the choices of fresh fruit and vegetables in the pantry. Some produce is local; some comes from national distribution centers. Most of the items in the pantry are able to be restocked when needed; the category where demand usually exceeds supply is personal care items, which for the most part are not part of the Food Gatherers offerings.

Rice, mac & cheese boxes, more canned goods.

Food insecurity exists in every county in America. Around 14% of American families experience hunger. Here in Washtenaw County, Michigan, where I live, a number of organizations including SOS attempt to help people in need to overcome many of their problems, including housing, jobs, and stability for children. SOS works in partnership with other organizations, both local and national.

SOS, using HUD funding, provides temporary housing for homeless families, and attempts to place them in permanent homes and better jobs. They run a summer enrichment program for 40 kids called Sunny Days, which also includes a lunch program. Other sponsored activities for kids are a Girl Scout troop, tutoring programs, and after-school activities during the school year.

Maybe your family needs help, I said when I started this post. But maybe you are much more fortunate, and could help SOS Community Services with a donation or could volunteer in one of their volunteer programs. I hope more fortunate people will think about this.

Note: For more information see the SOS website. For nation-wide hunger statistics see this Feeding America Fact Sheet.

More about peanut butter than you want to know: "Creamy & Crunchy"

When I was around ten years old, I ate a Peter Pan peanut butter sandwich, no jelly, for lunch every day -- on Wonder Bread. Peanut butter came in a reusable drinking glass with a lid that had to be pried up, and that summer every lid had a different image of a character from Walt Disney's movie Peter Pan. I collected something like 13 of 14 lids -- my favorite was Tinker Bell. Of course I don't have the lids any more, but I found one picture (above) of a few of my least-favored lids that were once sold on E-Bay.

When I started reading Creamy & Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food by Jon Krampner, I expected to learn more about this and other popular jingles and advertising campaigns for various brands of the incredibly popular spread. But instead of a review of what I think of as popular culture, I found a pretty plodding history of the agricultural and industrial processes used to make peanut butter. Krampner never mentions the Disney promotions at all -- just a bit about advertising Skippy and Jif. He documents various salmonella contamination scandals and regulatory issues at length, which is reasonable, but doesn't really convey what makes peanut butter so popular that people keep eating it anyway.

The plodding wouldn't be so bad, but the book is incredibly repetitive. For example, the author must have mentioned 10 times that the boll weevil's destruction of the cotton industry around the turn of the 20th century was a cause of the increase in peanut farming in the South. The explanations of the various chemical processes that have been devised to make peanut butter taste creamier are repeated again and again -- maybe there are a few details different, but only a food chemist could care. He constantly re-hashes the history of the early families whose plants made peanut butter. Sometimes I had the feeling I was reading the same sentence over and over again.

I got through the whole book, always hoping it would be more like three books Krampner mentioned as his models: Mark Kurlansky's Cod, John McPhee's Oranges, and Steve Almond's Candyfreak. Those are really good books. I wish this one had come up to the standard they set.