Essential tools for bread-cutting

I love artisan bread, so it made sense to purchase kitchen-products that aid in bread consumption. (Sawing into hearty, robust loaves of bread took a lot of effort, but whenever the stores sliced it, they always threw in an extra plastic bag to wrap around the now-cut bread. And no, the stores wouldn’t accept bags brought in from home; believe me, I tried.) So, we set out to assemble what we needed to duplicate sliced-bread convenience but without the extra waste: the Cuisinart electric bread knife, CEK-30; the Bambusi Bread Slicer with built-in-cutting guide; and Dowellife Cut-Resistant Gloves. The items work great: the electric bread knife works effortlessly to saw through the bread, and cutting guides along the sides of the bread board help me line up my cuts. As for the gloves, I’m purposely trying to avoid cutting them in the first place, so I’m not able to relate how they work when cut with an electric knife. So far, one glove has sustained one cut (with a manual knife) and, while the knife-blade cut into the glove, the cut did not reach my skin.

Sauerkraut and jalapeño on vegetarian burger

For years, I restricted myself to eating burgers that are “plain and dry,” so I thought I’d share news of notable progress via the food-chaining route. Here’s a vegetarian burger patty, paired with Dave’s Killer Bread. To it, I added sauerkraut and slices of jalapeño. These added items are cold (a long-standing problem texture for me), but the warmth of the heated vegetable patty and the toasted bread enfold them and reduce their intensity. I trace this progression from being able to select ingredients at a build-your-own sandwich franchise. I would ask that wait-staff heat those toppings along with the bread and the protein.

Round Table’s ‘Gourmet Veggie’ without cheese

Aaah ... pizza! We love Round Table’s Gourmet Veggie: artichoke hearts, zucchini, spinach, mushrooms, garlic, and red and green onions on a Creamy Garlic Sauce. We leave-off tomatoes on my half, and add Jalapeños to the entire pizza. But the most important modification we make is to completely omit cheese. I really cannot emphasize this enough, which is why it bears repeating: We love pizza, but eating so much cheese always made us feel horrible afterward. And without the cheese, we find all the other flavors so much richer and more fully enjoyable.

Making pizza at home

Spent our Friday evening making pizza at home. We used many of our favorite pizza ingredients: Olives! Two types of peppers! Zucchini! Chopped-up mushrooms! Broccoli! One thing notably absent from our masterpiece was any type of cheese. We love a pizza heaped with veggies, but we hated the bloated, even “icky” feeling that eating the cheese left us with. Lately, we’ve asked to “Hold the cheese” at the local pizzeria. The result is an even more flavorful presentation for all the other ingredients. Talk about “addition through subtraction!”

Smoothies mitigate difficulty eating fruits and vegetables

All my life, I’ve struggled with eating food that had the wrong taste, appearance, color or texture. In extreme duress, eating the “wrong” food could make me retch or gag.

More frequently, but perhaps more damaging, I faced condemnation and ridicule because of my limited diet.

Eating fruits and vegetables is where I particularly struggle. There’s something about this food that is difficult for me to handle.

Fortunately, we know that the way food is prepared can drastically change its “eatability.” When cut raw, tomatoes are grotesque and slimy. But what a difference to eat sun-dried tomatoes on pizza or in pasta, with a smooth creamy marinara sauce.
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Flavor Bible, essential resource for researching new foods

I rely on “food chaining” to help with my transition from foods that are familiar and comfortable, but what about those foods and ingredients that I know nothing about?

Tactile sensitivities related to food taste, temperature and texture, make trying new things difficult. As a risk-averse person who wants to know ahead-of-time if new foods are “safe” to try, I find the idea of The Flavor Bible to be very empowering.

Written by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, The Flavor Bible (Little, Brown and Company, 2008) offers an alphabetized listing of foods and ingredients with essential details about taste.

Page and Dornenburg explain that many factors go into the experience of flavor: these are taste, “mouthfeel” (temperature and texture), aroma and the “X Factor,” which they describe as the emotional response to food. “When we are present to what we are eating,” they say, “food has the power to affect our entire selves.”

‘Behind the Kitchen Door’ is UUA Common Read

The Unitarian Universalist Association’s Common Read selection committee has chosen Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) as the 2013-14 UUA Common Read. It seemed only natural to pass word along, given my attention to the “common read” when administering a lending library for a lay-led UU community.

“The book reveals how restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America and how poor working conditions — discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens — affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables. ... Behind the Kitchen Door invites Unitarian Universalists to intentionally consider their practices in restaurant dining.”

Cooking class idea: Tactile-challenges work around

AFC Education Coordinator Mary Shaw
taught a Pantry Basics class on March 20

One highlight of a week spent in Ashland, Ore. in order to secure an apartment, was the Pantry Basics class taught by Mary Shaw, March 20 at the Ashland Food Co-op (AFC) Community Classroom.

Bulk rice is nice

Filling bag from bulk rice bin at Ray’s Food Place in Clearlake

The two best decisions my family ever made were for me to commute by bus to work and for Jonathan and me to cease purchasing single-serving bottled water and refill from the tap (or water crock) instead.

This year, Jonathan and I decided to make a third change in our daily consumer habits. Instead of purchasing pre-packaged rice with seasoning, we decided to buy rice in bulk.

Organic rice in bulk bins

Rice is a mainstay of my diet, up there with macaroni and cheese. I thought preparation from bulk was a skill that I could master.

At grocery stores, we discovered bins with wonderful organic varieties: wild-blend rice and short- and long-grain brown.

Burning eyes notwithstanding, I watched Jonathan prepare an onion. Removing the ends and slicing off a wedge appeared similar in practice to slicing a loaf of bread. Next step: dice and put into a pan to fry.

I was similarly able to grasp pulping a clove of garlic to free it from the skin and then dicing it, adding it to the nearly-finished garlic for later addition to the rice.

Boiling the rice in water with seasoning added to taste, utilized a school of cooking I have depended upon for years.

End result: I had a savory rice dish every bit as good as the pre-packaged rice we had previously bought in stores, but minus the additional packaging.

We do fill plastic bags from the bins, but I think a way around that may be having the deli measure the tare-weight of a container that we bring from home.