Category: Food

Big Un

When he was sixteen, the world lost its mind, and he lied about his age to go in the Army. I don’t know, at this great distance, what led to that decision – he died before I knew to ask such questions, and he was never much for talking about his inner-life, anyway, so no one I ever could ask did know.

It was the second decade of the last century, and the whole world was at war, and this sixteen-year-old boy, always large for his age, would end up as a pilot, flying planes that had open cockpits and required scarfs and goggles and he would do things nobody should ever have to do and would see things nobody in his hometown had ever dreamed about.

Later, after the war was over, he would return to the States, travel with an air show for a while as a barnstormer, and eventually settle down in North Texas, marry my great grandmother, and have some kids. My mother’s father was his son, and he thought the sun rose and set on me.

He was a large man, about 6’5”, barrel-chested and thick. He wore bib overalls and work shirts and had hands the size of canned hams. He was larger than life in so many ways, not just his size, and he captured all my attention, with his cows and border collies and his 1946 pickup that had lost both third gear and reverse, so driving it took some planning.

He was my Great-Grandfather, but that was a mouthful for a young feller like me, so I called him Big un.

We didn’t really have money for vacations as a child, so we visited family instead, and every Summer, around the Fourth of July, we would make the eight-hour trip to North Texas and stay with my Mom’s Dad and see that side of the family.

On this particular summer day in 1976, my great-grandmother and I had been blackberry picking. We sprayed ourselves down with stuff to scare away the chiggers, and we took empty coffee cans and walked through the pasture to the fence row where the wild blackberries were rampant, and we filled our cans and our mouths and black juice ran down my face and all the while she told me things I cannot remember, but the thing I do remember is how safe and loved I felt, and how lucky I must be to belong to people that owned both cows and blackberry bushes.

I no longer recall (if I ever knew) where she went, but she told Big Un that when she returned, she was going to make a blackberry cobbler with those berries for dessert.

She was not gone more than a handful of minutes when he called me into the kitchen. They lived in a tiny North Texas farmhouse, with a utilitarian kitchen with cracked linoleum on the floor, a 1950’s era Formica and stainless steel table, and an electric icebox in the corner that now contained, among other things, a 1 pound coffee can full of blackberries so full of goodness they were about to burst.

Big Un put me at the table and put down two mismatched bowls, the porcelain glazing cracked and crazed from years of use, and mine had a faded rose on the bottom of the bowl. The coffee can of blackberries was retrieved from the icebox, and with his huge, rough scarred hands he poured the blackberries from the can into my bowl and then his. The berries were of various sizes, the way wild berries always are, filling both our bowls to the edge and then he poured the fresh cream we had gotten from his own cows that very morning over the top, the cream running over the berries, filling in the cracks and crevices until the berries looked very much like small blue-black islands in a sea of creamy white.

We sat there, he and I, in a 4-room house in North Texas, 70 or so years and a Formica table between us, quietly eating the purloined blackberries. When she came back, there would be hell to pay, and no cobbler to eat, but for now, we were content to merely be together, eating our berries and absolutely certain in the knowledge that no king had never had it so good.

Suppertime Cheese Grits

I got asked a while back by a friend if I was going to talk about grits on my blog.

If y’all thought cornbread was contentious, just wait till Southern folk start talking about grits. And do note that while they are very different things, they are both derived from corn, the poor man’s wheat, and they are both examples of peasant cooking, so of course, I’m going to talk about grits.

If ever there was an example of my adage that “Normal is just another word for whatever you are used to”, it’s grits. And if you can do it to a bowl of grits, I assure you somebody has.

Growing up, grits were for breakfast. Mom liked them because the preparation was simple, it was filling, and it was as cheap as could be. One thing she didn’t like about grits, unfortunately, was the grits themselves: She tended to prefer Cream of Wheat, but never managed to convert us. But she grew up traveling around the country with my grandfather, who was in the Navy, so one has to make allowances.

When visiting our neighbors, Monty and Doc, I would eat fried grits for lunch, which was basically leftover grits poured into a loaf pan, then cooled in the refrigerator until firm. They would then be sliced into inch thick slabs and fried in bacon grease, making an ersatz fried polenta. In fact, the first time I ate polenta, I was convinced it was just expensive fried grits. Spoiler: It pretty much is, although grits tend to be made with white corn, and polenta with yellow, which is sweeter, so there is a slightly different flavor profile. But grits and polenta are a whole lot closer than collards and kale, which are interchangeable.

But today I want to tell you about suppertime grits. Because I usually make these as a weeknight meal, I take some liberties to speed things up, but you can have this on the table in about 20 minutes. I tend to use them like you would pasta or potatoes, but if you add enough cheese or even a heavy meat sauce, this makes a fine main dish.

You will need some grits. White is traditional, and regular people eat just regular grits, although there are artisanal, stone-ground grits to be had out there. But for our purposes, some white grits – even the quick-cooking grits, like I do in this recipe-, will do on a weeknight. We don’t speak of instant grits, nor of anything that comes in a packet.

You will need a liquid. At its most basic, you can use water, and many people do, but milk is a fine choice too. But if you are going to the trouble to make them for supper, try chicken stock instead. In this recipe, we will use both chicken stock and milk.

And since these will be served as part of a meal (instead of by themselves) I would add some cheese. Now, any cheese will do – cheddar (my preference), cream cheese, Velveeta, American – just whatever you have laying around. Honestly, I use cheese grits like this as an opportunity to use up little bits of cheese I might have laying around.

Here’s how I would do it.

I’d put 8 cups of chicken broth in a heavy saucepan and heat it up to a boil, and then bring it down to a simmer. Now, if you don’t have chicken broth on hand, you can use something like Better Than Boullion’s Chicken Base, or even some chicken bouillon cubes instead. The point is, any of that will be better than just water.

Now that it’s simmering, slowly add 2 cups of quick-cooking grits while you which them in. If you just dump them in, it will clump up. I would do it slowly, stirring the broth as I slowly shake the grits into the pot. When they are all in, add ¾ of a teaspoon of salt, give the mixture a final stir for luck, and then put the lid on the pot, turn it down to low, and let them simmer for a good 10 minutes or so, until they thicken. You will want to stir them at least twice during this time, so they don’t stick.

You could stop now and have a fine bowl of grits, but we can keep going and make them extraordinary. Let’s add a tablespoon of butter (I use salted butter here because it’s what I always have, but unsalted would work too), and a cup to a cup and a half (let your conscience be your guide) of good shredded Cheddar cheese, the sharper the better. Just stir it in a bit at a time, and watch it melt. This will thicken the grits a bit, especially if you use pre-shredded cheese (it’s a weeknight, so you are forgiven), which is coated in cornstarch and thus has a thickening effect on everything. You then will thin it down with about half a cup of whole milk, or if you are feeling festive, half and half or whipping cream.

This serves four people if you do it as a main dish or about eight as a side. I’d serve it in bowls and sprinkle the top with freshly ground black pepper.

Now, of course, this is a starting point. One of my favorite ways to eat grits is to serve them with a red sauce made with peppers and Italian sausage, which makes them very fancy, indeed.

 

 

Peasant Food

There have been times in my life when I knew a thing, innately, down in my bones, and yet I didn’t know it academically. Later, I would learn the academic or scientific basis for something that knew only in that visceral way, and then I would feel validated and sometimes comforted by now having language for a thing I only knew practically before.

I learned the other day that my style of cooking is called “Peasant Cooking”. This was not one of those times when having language for a thing you know will bring you joy.

But it’s not far off, I guess. We were working class folks – until I was 14 my Dad went to a job where he had his name on his shirt, and prosperity (and health insurance) hit our home when Mom got a job at the Walmart. (For some reason, she worked at the Walmart, but we shopped at Walmart, without the article. Vernacular is a funny thing.)

We ate good food, honest food that did not hide behind fancy names.

In my mid-twenties, I was upwardly mobile, and trying to get beyond my blue collar roots.

By chance and circumstance, I ended up at a fancy Italian restaurant with a client I desperately wanted to impress. To that point, my Italian food experience largely involved spaghetti and meatballs or Pizza Hut.

The client: They have the best polenta here. Do you like polenta?

Me: I love it.

Me in my head: WTF is polenta?

We ordered the polenta. I remember it was nearly $20 a plate, way back in the mid ‘90s.

When it came, we both dug in. It was amazing.

The client: What do you think about it? Good, huh?

Me: It’s amazing.

Me in my head: I just paid $40 for 2 plates of gotdamned fried grits and spaghetti sauce.

I had a similar experience when I first was served cauliflower in béchamel sauce. I have to give them credit – no way would I have had the gumption to pour milk gravy over boiled cauliflower and serve it to people I wanted to give me money, but people raised in town are a different breed.

Milk gravy – béchamel sauce, the French call it, and they have a word for everything – is an important thing to know how to make. If you can make milk gravy, you can eat nearly free for days and days without repeating anything. And there’s been several things I wanted to tell y’all about – like creamed chicken over rice, or sausage gravy and biscuits, or baked macaroni and cheese – that I can’t talk about without talking about white sauce, or béchamel, or milk gravy, whatever they called it wherever you happened to grow up.

Gravy scares people for some reason, but no reason it should. It’s just a series of steps, and if you follow them, it’s hard to screw up. But I will say this is a time to make sure you have your stuff all out ahead of time, because things are gonna move fast.

You will need all purpose flour, salt, pepper, whole milk, and butter. You could also use cooking oil, or bacon grease, or pretty much any fat, understanding they all change the flavor profile a bit. We often make this with the grease left over from something else (like the grease left when you cook sausage, or bacon, or the drippings from roast chicken, which is amazing) but I’m going to assume that if you don’t know how to make milk gravy, you probably don’t have a jar of bacon grease in your refrigerator, either.

In a small cast iron skillet, or a heavy sauce pan if you don’t have one, put in two tablespoons of butter and turn the heat to medium. While the butter is melting, get your measuring spoons and cups out, and then measure out two tablespoons of flour and a cup (8 ounces) of milk.

The flour you add to the melted butter – just scatter it thinly around on the surface of the melted butter and then take a whisk and stir the hell out of it. You want to mix the butter into the flour here – you will end up with a thick, clumpy sort of mush. You don’t want it to burn – now, some people like to let it “toast” a little, because some book told them to, but we don’t. I was told this was to cook out the flour taste, but their gravy just tastes burnt to me.

Once the flour and melted butter are well mixed – that’s called a roux, by the way (it’s pronounced “roo” – it’s French, but I learned it in New Orleans from Cajun folks. My people wouldn’t have had a word for it) – slowly add about 1/4th a cup of the milk, and begin whisking. The roux will suddenly start clumping up as it thickens. Keep whisking as you keep adding the milk in increments; add some milk, whisk it into the roux. Add more milk, and whisk it into the roux. Keep going until you are out of milk. Make sure you get the whisk into the corners of the pan, as the sooner you get the flour incorporated into the liquid, the better.

If you followed the instructions, you won’t have any lumps in the sauce. Add salt – opinions vary here, but I would try ¼ of a teaspoon and see how that works – and I usually add the same amount of ground black pepper.

You are going to have a bit more than a cup of gravy here, which is fine if you are putting this over rice, or toast, or mashed potatoes. The important thing is the fat to flour ratio is always 1:1. In this case, 2 tablespoons flour, two tablespoons of butter, 1 cup of milk.

It needs to cook for just a few minutes yet to thicken up. I usually put it on low and let it simmer while I set the table, but if it thickens up too much on you, just slowly drizzle water into it while whisking to thin it back down. If the opposite problem happens – if it’s way too thin because you didn’t follow the directions – do NOT try adding flour, or you will be sad. The safest way to deal with this is to just turn up the heat and cook off the liquid until it thickens. Either way, stir it periodically while it’s still over heat, as the edges will thicken faster than the rest.

Also, know that it will thicken a bit as it sets, so if you are trying to be fancy and are planning to put it in a gravy boat on the table, you will want it to be thinner than you expect it to be, or else you will have something that looks like oatmeal when it comes time to eat. But honestly, I usually make this as part of something else. It’s the basis for so many good things, but none of them involve cauliflower.

 

Giving it 80%

In 2012, I spent a week at Mepkin Abbey, in South Carolina. Mepkin Abby is a Trappist monastery, and they invite folks to come and stay with them as a form of retreat. A friend I really respected did it on the regular, and encouraged me to do it as well.

I really enjoyed my week there. It was lovely, and the campus is beautiful, and it’s right on the Cooper River, where you can sit on the bluff and watch the boats roll by. The campus is filled with Live Oaks that literally drip Spanish Moss, and the silence there is magical, punctuated by the chanting of the monks seven times a day.

You are also invited to eat with the monks, and they have a simple, vegetarian diet. Again, one of the struggles those of us with ADHD have is the inability to create structure, so a simple diet with simple rules appealed to me, and I think there is definitely an ethical argument that can be made for not eating animal flesh. So, when I came back to the “real world”, I decided I would be vegetarian.

I lasted strictly about six weeks, and gave up trying completely within three months. Because it was easy to fail at being vegetarian, and when you have the sort of life I do, where lots of people want to feed you, and a huge part of how you expressed your spirituality involved eating with others, it became super complicated, super-fast. In the end, it just wasn’t sustainable for me at all.

My last few days have been chaotic. I went from having a week in front of me with virtually no outside meetings planned to having my entire week scheduled almost instantly. Which is fine – in the work I do these days organizing Faith Leaders, it is like that sometimes – you are forced to react to something someone else does and then your whole schedule changes.

But what that does mean is that my whole routine is thrown off, and instead of cooking dinner for my family like I do most nights, this week I am eating a lot of sandwiches and take out, and because I am living on the phone when I’m not in front of a Zoom camera or at City Hall, I had to miss going for a swim today.

Most of my career has been filled with reactive crises like this, and in the past, I have often used that as a reason to not prioritize my health, and to not eat well. But these days, as I prioritize my health and try to avoid returning to the burnout that almost took me out, I am seeing things differently.

I want you to pay attention to what I did there – it literally is about seeing things differently – I am looking at things through a different lens, and it has made all the difference in how I view the world in general and my health in particular.

If you get ill and, as a result, don’t take a shower on a given day, you didn’t fail – you just didn’t do something you normally do. You don’t decide that because you failed at cleanliness you will henceforth renounce soap. You don’t decide you will now sleep in a mudhole. The next day, you take a shower again and you are back on track.

And tomorrow, I will be back at the gym. I didn’t fail at being healthy. I didn’t fail at anything. I just didn’t do what I normally do. But tomorrow, I will. Because this way of life is sustainable, and I don’t fail if I don’t do something just one day.

It’s easy to fail at “Being Vegetarian”. Hell, it’s easy to fail at “dieting”. But it’s almost impossible to fail at “focusing on my health”. Saying I am focusing on my health recognizes that it’s about what I do most of the time, not what I do one time, that will make a long term difference to my health and my life.

I tend towards extremism – again, my brain loves simplicity – but I am trying to remind myself these days that even though I can’t give it all I have, if I can give it my 80%, then that’s enough.

The Pie That Isn’t There

It’s not much to look at.

It’s a spiral bound church cookbook that the church of my childhood put out in the late 70’s as a fundraiser. It’s blue, with a drawing of the church on the front – the church as I remember it, before the fellowship hall was built, and the new sanctuary, and the new electric sign.

This cookbook – the Country Cookin’ Cookbook, the title proclaims, was the bible of the meals of my childhood. My mom was not a natural cook – she can do it, but derives no joy from it, and is as happy to warm something up as she is to make something from scratch. At times, she would get creative, leading to… unusual combinations. My Aunt Louise once said Mom was “slap-happy” in the kitchen, because she would slap anything together and call it supper.

So when this cookbook came out and you suddenly could make dumplings like Ms. VanHook, or a caramel cake like Mary Elizabeth, or a sad cake like Sister Betty’s, well, now you are onto something. And frankly, our suppers improved somewhat.

It has spots and stains, more on some pages than others, so you can track our preferences and dislikes, each spotted page a vote for the dishes on that page. It suffers from specificity of categories, having chapters for Pies, another for Cakes, another for cookies and Candies, and then yet another for Desserts, just in case some sweet managed to slip through uncatalogued otherwise.

But the recipe I have made most from this cookbook isn’t in there. It’s for Ms. Dunning’s Fudge Pie.

Don’t get me wrong – should you manage to somehow acquire a copy of the 1978 edition of the Emory Methodist Church’s Country Cookin’ Cookbook from Watson, Mississippi, you will find, right there on page 144, a recipe labeled Chocolate Fudge Pie, submitted by Jeanette Dunning. But that recipe will not work. It’s missing things. You try to make it like that and you will have pudding in a pie shell.

There were rumors in the church that Ms. Dunning left things out on purpose so as nobody could make a pie as good as hers. I don’t believe it – I’m willing to extend her some grace and just assume she just forgot to tell them everything.  Those Methodists are all about grace except when it comes to dessert.

Anyway, after this cookbook showed up, we started having chocolate fudge pies at every holiday gathering and potluck dinner. Wherever 3 or more were gathered, there was a fudge pie. Birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving? Fudge pies.

The recipe in my copy of the cookbook has been so altered, with additions and subtractions and alterations made over the ensuing 40 years in various inks that it’s not really fair to call it Ms. Dunning’s recipe anymore.

But because I want to help folks, and I shudder at the thought of one of y’all coming across a copy of this cookbook in the wild and trying to make a fudge pie that won’t turn out, I have decided to make things right and release the proper recipe into the wild.

Now, the original recipe is for two pies – that’s what it says, anyway. But remember, this recipe was released in 1978, and it was old then. It was made for 8-inch pie crusts, and they don’t make those any more. I recently tried to buy some 8-inch pie pans, and was gonna make crusts, and had a devil of a time trying to find any. It seems our pies have all super-sized now, with 9 or 9.5 inch pans being all there is. So, over the years, we have modified this somewhat to work with one 9-inch premade frozen pie crust.

What you’re going to need:

  • 1/2 stick butter, melted. I ain’t even going to lie – most often this was margarine growing up, but it’s butter now. When you know better, you do better.
  • 1 1/2 cup sugar
  • 3 Tablespoons of cocoa powder. I recommend sifting this. If you don’t have a flour sifter, you can put it in a sieve and tap it until all the cocoa comes out the bottom. Or hell, you can just dump it in and take your chances and probably be OK.
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 1/2 cup PET milk. Now, I’m afraid I better explain, as somebody out there is going to put kitten milk in this with who know what consequences. PET milk is what old people call evaporated milk, because PET was a brand name down here.
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla. Don’t cheap out here – use the real stuff.
  • 1/4 cup flour
  • pinch of salt
  • 9-inch unbaked pie crust. You can make it from scratch, or you can use one of those frozen ones from the store, or you can buy one of those that you roll out yourself from the cold box at the store by the whop-em biscuits. I won’t blame you, whatever you do, having done all of the above at various times. Do know that the frozen ones are often “deep dish” pie crusts, and this won’t fill one of those up, but will still make a tasty, albeit thin, pie, none-the-less.

What you do

If you got a frozen pie crust, set it out to thaw. It won’t take long – it will probably thaw during the 10 minutes it takes you to mix this up. Otherwise, put your crust in a 9-inch pie pan. Then, turn your oven on to 350.

In a mixing bowl, mix the sugar and the cocoa until they are well blended. Then add the melted butter, and stir it all until well mixed. Now, add everything else, and stir until well blended. You don’t need to buy a mixer for this – just a whisk or wooden spoon will do fine. It’s pretty forgiving – my sister-in-law once forgot the salt and added it after it was in the pan and it still worked out.

The mixture is thin – you will be pretty sure you screwed it up. Nope, it just looks thin. Now, put your pie pan on a cookie sheet, and then pour the mixture into the pie pan. The reason for putting it on the cookie sheet is because it’s easier to pick up a cookie sheet than it is a pie pan.

Slide the cookie sheet in the pre-heated oven on the bottom shelf, and set the timer for 35 minutes. It won’t be ready in 35 minutes, but it will be getting close. It will probably take closer to 45 or 50, but it has snuck up on me before and been burned as a result. You will know it’s done when it’s firm in the middle – at 35 minutes, the center will probably still jiggle when you shake the pan.

Another reason for checking on it around 35 or 40 minutes is to make sure the crust doesn’t burn. I take a sheet of tin foil, bigger than the pie, and crease it corner to corner, and then lay it on top of the pie around the 40-minute mark to keep the crust from burning. Creasing it keeps it off the top of the pie filling – you don’t want the foil to touch the surface of the pie or else it makes an unholy mess. It will still taste good, but you would dare bring it to the potluck for fear of the talk that would follow you.

Now, some warnings: The surface of this pie might crack. That is not a defect. I have had days when it took almost an hour of checking to get this pie done. I can’t explain why, as I do it exactly the same way every single time. Were I still a Methodist, I’m sure I would find a way to blame the vagaries of my oven on the Baptists, but as I’m not, I have no explanation for it. The ways of both the Lord and fudge pies are mysterious. Just check every five minutes or so after 35 minutes and see if the center is still jiggly. When it quits jiggling, it’s done. It will firm up a bit when it’s cool, but not enough to take a chance on a jiggly pie from the oven.

Growing up, we often put Cool Whip on this, but we all did things when we were young we are ashamed of later. Now, I like homemade whipped cream, or, on the third day after Thanksgiving, will often eat it straight from the pie pan, while leaning against the counter.

This Is What I Do Now

Content warning: Discussion of weight loss and food monitoring.

In March of 2021, I emerged from a winter of severe depression to face several facts:

  • I was three months away from being 49 years old.
  • I was in horrible physical condition, largely as a result of trying to survive a year of what my eye doctor calls the pandamnit.
  • My Dad had died just five months before from a virus virtually nobody in my state was taking seriously, and it seemed to be specifically targeting the obese and people with high blood pressure.
  • I was obese and had high blood pressure.
  • My wife was immunocompromised, and while I am limited in my ability to protect her from this virus, I wanted to do everything I could to make sure I did not die, leaving her behind to deal with life in this dystopian hellscape.

You know what didn’t figure into my decision-making at all? My appearance. These days, my body looks like a Crisco can on top of two tooth picks. I used to be slim and muscly. But I also used to be 19. I don’t expect to look the same way at 49 that I did at 19.

I didn’t want to be “skinny”. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to not die. I wanted to not have the joint pain and diabetes and heart disease men in my family get in their fifties. But mostly, I wanted to not die and leave Renee behind to try to survive in all this.

I’m not telling you what you ought to do. I’m just telling you what I did, and the thinking that got me here. You do you, boo.

Like many folks, I have lost weight before. But they were all “diets”, designed to help me lose weight, with no real plan for what happens after that. But that wasn’t my goal this time: I wanted to live.  I needed to change my life.

Actually, that seemed overwhelming. So I decided to do a thing I do when I’m starting a new project: I ask myself what I want the end to look like, and then work backwards. In say, a year, I wanted to be physically active, have lots of energy, and have healthy blood pressure and blood sugar levels. And then I wanted to maintain that for the rest of my life.

I like to eat. Food is important to me, and table fellowship is important to me, so food restrictions that make it difficult to eat with other people and receive hospitality from them are nonstarters for me. Unsure what that would look like, I eventually learned of the connection between my ADHD and food that made me constantly overeat – that my object permanence issues caused me to eat mindlessly, and I had no idea how much I was actually eating.

So I started tracking my food. No goal, just using an app to track my food. I needed more data than I had. It turns out I was routinely eating about 3500 calories a day.  Was that good? Bad? Let’s do some research!

Now – I am the first to say that the medical establishment targets and discounts fat people unfairly. I was just looking for data. And according to the medical establishment, people who were my height had better health outcomes on average when they took in about 2,000 calories of energy a day. And people my age tend to have better health outcomes on average when they are moderately active for 30 minutes each day.

So, now I had a benchmark. Could I live on 2,000 calories a day? It took several weeks to get it dialed in, to see what the things were that triggered mindless eating for me, the things that told my body to snack, the things I did routinely (like eating peanut butter out of the jar every night before bed) that set me up for eating more than I realized. I also was reminded that I thrive on routine, so, as an example, once I realized that most of my breakfasts were usually one of three things, or that I tended to eat one of four things for lunch if I was working from home, that became a habit.

For example, ¾ cup of oatmeal, ¾ cup of blueberries, 10 grams of butter =  breakfast for 272 calories.  It became a habit, and thus, a thing I didn’t have to think about. I was teaching myself to be aware of food in a way I hadn’t before, but I was also teaching myself what a “serving” size looked like.

Growing up, it was a sin to waste food, so you ate what was on your plate. A serving was however much was on your plate. How much cereal should I eat? Well, how much is in the bowl?

Turns out, a serving of Honey Nut Cheerios is more than you think it is, and a serving of milk is too much for that amount of cereal. Just learning to eat actual portions of food was huge in my progress. (1 cup of Honey Nut Cheerios and half a cup of 2% milk is 200 calories, by the way.)

For the first time in my life, I was actively, consciously, eating, instead of passively.

Meanwhile, I started waking every day. A bit more than 2 miles each day, a little more than 30 minutes. After a month or so, it was another habit. Later – much later – I would add swimming and weight lifting into the mix.

I never had a “goal weight”, because the goal was to be healthy, not to lose weight. The nearly 100 pounds I had gained as an adult was because I was taking in a lot more fuel than my body required. If I balanced my energy outputs and fuel intakes, that would sort itself out.

And there is no finish line. This is just what I do now. There are days I eat more than the 2,000 calories someone my size should eat regularly, but other days I eat less, and because I don’t have a goal, I can’t relapse. Some days I get busy and don’t exercise, and it doesn’t matter – because this is just what I do now. It doesn’t matter what I do any one day – it matters what I do repeatedly. I didn’t need a diet – I needed some new habits.

I don’t restrict anything. On my birthday, I ate cake. At Christmas, I ate fudge pie. Tonight, I ate tater tots and chili dogs. (940 calories). There is no such thing as bad food – just food that has more energy or less energy, and I don’t need to store extra energy, so I eat what my body needs, which is about 2,000 calories each day.

Now, because somebody will ask: Yes, I have lost weight – just under 50 pounds so far. It’s been very slow but I don’t care, because the weight is not the goal: My being healthy is. Theoretically, I will lose another 30 pounds or so before my body settles out on a balance between my energy use and 2,000 calories of daily fuel, but it doesn’t matter to me when it happens, or even if it does.

And how’s that coming? Well, I swim about 30 minutes most days, and my resting heart rate has dropped almost ten beats a minute since March. I can walk a brisk pace for miles and carry on a conversation with you the whole time. And this afternoon, my blood pressure was a quite sound 118/64, far better than the hypertensive 155/99 I was at just before the pandemic started. I don’t get extreme headaches after eating any more, and I don’t wake up in the middle of the night craving water or sugar anymore.

I feel good. I have the healthiest relationship with food I have ever had in my life. I feel like I can do this the rest of my life, because I’m not on a diet: This is just what I do now.

Cooking From The Pantry

I believe in having a certain amount of food on hand. Generally, two to three months’ worth of regular, everyday food, not dehydrated tofu you keep in a bunker out back.

Before the pandemic, this might have led you to believe I was some sort of doomsday prepper, but after the supply chain shortages of the last two years, I just feel like I am a realist.  I actually have a whole series of posts planned for some point about what reasonable food reserves look like, and how I do it, but today I want to share another benefit of having a deep pantry – the ability to create a good dinner quickly without leaving the house.

Tonight I came home and it was 5:30 and I realized I had forgot to set anything out to thaw for supper, and what’s worse, I had forgotten that I had a meeting at 7 I couldn’t miss.

So I looked in the pantry for inspiration, and saw a couple of potatoes that were in danger of going bad, so I needed to do something with them. We have chickens, so we always have eggs on hand. But even if I didn’t have chickens, eggs last a really long time – much longer than you think – in the fridge. So I pretty much always have lots of eggs on hand. And we always have lots of canned and frozen vegetables.

So I peeled the two potatoes and then sliced them on the mandolin about a ¼ inch thick.  I took down a 10-inch nonstick skillet and put it on medium heat, and then added a tablespoon of olive oil to it. Now, you could use any fat here – butter freezes like a dream, by the way, and I probably have 10 pounds of it in the freezer and there is always a jar of bacon grease in the door of my refrigerator – but I like the flavor of olive oil on potatoes and I have a bottle that lives on the counter by the stove.

Take the potato slices, and place them in the oil so they overlap and cover the entire bottom of the skillet. Add a generous portion of salt and pepper. Again, here is a place you could make changes – I have been known to use a big shake or two of Creole seasoning here, or seasoning salt, or, like I did tonight, just salt and pepper. All depends on what sort of mood you are in.

I like chicken stock, and make it when I have bones to use up, but for things like this, I just keep a jar of the good bouillon base in the fridge (and another, unopened one, in the pantry). Before I peeled the potatoes I had turned on the electric kettle that lives on our counter, and so I added 1 teaspoon of chicken base to 1 cup of boiling water and whisked the hell out of it, to get the base to dissolve. I then pour the cup of stock in the skillet and partially cover it, letting it simmer a few minutes.

While it’s simmering, I open a can of whole kernel corn and reserve the liquid, but then dump the corn in the skillet, spreading it around so there is a layer of corn on top of the potatoes. By now, the potatoes should be getting soft and the liquid boiling away, but if it is boiling away too fast and your potatoes are not yet soft, then add some of the corn broth to the skillet for the additional liquid you need. If they are softening fine, keep it going until the chicken broth has mostly boiled away.

What you are going for here – and it will take you somewhere between 10-15 minutes – is for the potatoes to be soft, and for the liquid to be 90% gone.

While it’s cooking away, you should get out 5 eggs, and scramble them with a whisk until smooth.  Then either shred some cheddar cheese, or, if you got some on sale cheaper than the block of un-shredded cheddar, get out a half cup of shredded cheese. (As an aside, if you do get a bunch of pre-shredded cheese, it also freezes well, and still works for the things it is good for, like this.)

Now your potatoes should be soft, and the liquid mostly cooked away. Before the next step, turn your broiler on high and let it warm up. Then pick up the skillet and shake it a bit, making sure the potatoes haven’t stuck to the bottom of the pan. Then pour the eggs over the contents of the skillet, then sprinkle the cheese all over the tops of the eggs. Then take a spatula and gently lift the edges of the potatoes, so the egg mixture slips amongst the potatoes.

After it has begun to set, constantly moving your spatula around under the edges so it doesn’t stick, then slide the skillet six inches under the broiler and let the top of the egg mixture cook and bubble until it turns the lightest of browns. Pull it out and set it on a trivet to cool while you set the table, then cut it into 4 wedges. It actually plates up better if you let it cool 10 or 15 minutes before you serve it, but I often eat it hot and let the plate be a little messy. I put hot sauce on top of mine tonight, but sometimes do chow-chow or salsa instead.

The worldly among you will recognize this is a sort of a frittata if you are Italian, or a tortilla if you are Spanish. I ate them for years without knowing they were European. This will serve two people for supper, or four people for lunch. It’s free of meat but has 44 grams of protein, and if you used vegetable broth or the juice from the can of corn instead of chicken broth, it would be full-on vegetarian and, of course, it’s gluten free. And it only messed up one skillet and a bowl to scramble the eggs in, only took 20 minutes start to finish to make, and I didn’t even have to have a plan.

 

Why Do You Like to Cook?

Kaylee, age 13: Uncle Hugh, how often do you cook?

Me, age 49: I cook something almost every day, and some days I cook two or three times a day. Why?

Kaylee: Well, I could tell by the way you stirred the food around that you know what you are doing. Do you like cooking?

Me: I do. I really do.

Kaylee: Why?

Me: Hmmm. Well, there are several reasons. The first is that when I left home, I could suddenly eat anything I wanted. But most of the food I could afford and had access to wasn’t very good. So learning how to cook was a way to be kind to myself. I deserved to have good food, and the only way I knew to get it was to cook it myself.

But more than that, it was that there were people in my life that I dearly loved, and now they were gone. And when I thought back over my memories of them, most of those memories involved food. Like today, we ate chicken and dressing. I can never eat chicken and dressing without thinking of Aunt Louise. But how often in your day-to-day life do you get to eat chicken and dressing? But by knowing how to make it, I can feel that good feeling any time I want to. Knowing how to cook is like having a photo album filled with people you love, that you have an opportunity to see any time you need to eat, which is multiple times a day.

Another reason I like to cook is that most of my adult life has been trying to solve unsolvable problems. Like, no matter how hard I work, people are still hungry, still homeless, still lonely, still addicts. You can work hard all day, all week, all month, even, and at the end of that time feel like absolutely nothing has changed.

But I can have some rice and some sausage and a pepper and an onion and a few other things, and it doesn’t look like anything at all, but if you know how you can turn that pile of random things into jambalaya. I can start with chaos and end with something that tastes good, that reminds me of people I love, and that makes other people happy and fills your belly in the process. It’s the one part of my life I can fix. I can turn the chaotic into something good, and I can usually do that li less than an hour. How cool is that!

But my favorite reason? Today. We sat around a table, and we ate food that was good, and we talked about stories from our past, and people we missed who were not there, and the food reminded us of meals we had had like this before, and the people who had been there, and for a minute, we all felt very loved. I love knowing how to make that happen.

A Bowl Full of Luck

Saturday is New Years Day, which means it is time for my people to eat black eyed peas and collards. For luck, you know. And growing up in and shaped by the hills of North Mississippi, and loved and fed by people who were children of the Depression and grandchildren of Reconstruction, we ate simple food, and the food of our celebrations was also simple, although given a bit more time and intention.

Now, all food is regional and cultural. And I know up North it’s corned beef and cabbage, and in the Low Country of the East Coast they eat Hopping John, but this is what my people eat for luck. That we live in a historically and persistently economically depressed area that has been perennially unlucky is not lost on me, but what are you going to do?

SoI don’t know that eating black eyed peas is actually lucky. But I do know that I love them, and will make any excuse to eat them. And besides – if we engage in pleasure when times are hard, isn’t that a sort of making your own luck? While my parents were not big eaters of greens, the old people who cared for me were, and so eating greens reminds me of happy times and the purest love I have ever known, so I make a spot for them, too.

If we want to keep traditions alive, we have to make room for them. And any tradition that involves sitting down to a meal, made with care and love, that marks the entry point into a new time of with hope and intention is a thing worth preserving.

So on New Years, we eat Black Eyed Peas and Collards.

Black eyed peas aren’t peas. They’re beans, and they have to be cooked like beans. In fact, you can cook them just like pintos and have a fully acceptable dish. But you can elevate it a bit, too. And since this is New Years after all, I tend to fancy it up. The collards are an accommodation because I’m the only person in my house that likes them, and so cooking up a large pot doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Now, doing it this way makes enough for 12 polite folks or eight hungry ones. But it halves perfectly if don’t have a lot of people to feed.

What you need:

To do this traditionally, you need the ham bone leftover from your Christmas ham with about two pounds of meat. If you didn’t save leftovers and the bones from your Christmas ham, you can (and should) buy in two pounds of smoked ham hock, or if you find yourself in a part of the world where you can’t easily buy ham hock, dice up a couple of pounds of bacon.

Two pounds of dried black eyed peas. The thing about black eyed peas is, they’re beans. So you should soak them, but you don’t have to. They don’t need a lot of soaking, and some folk don’t soak black eyed peas at all. But I generally soak mine for a couple of hours. Just spread them out on a cookie sheet, sort through them for dirt and debris, then put them in a stockpot with enough cold water to cover them by about two inches.

Salt. People get fancy with their salt these days, but I use kosher salt to cook with and iodized salt for the table. You do you – salt is salt, and best done to taste anyway.

A large onion, as big as your fist.

Cloves. You only need a couple, so see if you can borrow some from a neighbor, but if not, buy the smallest container you can. You want whole cloves here, and you might have bought some for the Christmas ham.

A bay leaf. I feel like this can be left out, but I love this dish so much I’m afraid to try subtracting things.

Ground black pepper. Just like you have in the pepper shaker.

Allspice. This is something I picked up a few years ago and I love the depth it adds to the dish. I doubt my ancestors would have tried this, but I recommend it.

Vegetable oil

Four nice sized garlic cloves. Honestly, the four is a guesstimate. I mean, I would use at least four, but sometimes the spirit catches me and I might go as high as six or seven. I do love some garlic.

Crushed red pepper

Two bunches of collard greens. My people would just say “a mess of collards”, but I’m assuming you are going to the store, and they will look at you funny if you ask for that. The stores tend to sell them in 1 pound bunches, and you need about two pounds of greens. Also, if you are two good to eat collard greens, get over yourself. Kale and Collards are practically siblings and are both just unheaded cabbage. If you can’t get collards, you can use kale for this, because they are so similar. But collards is traditional, and if you are too snooty to eat them and end up unlucky this year because you did it wrong, don’t come crying to me.

What you do

Drain your peas and put them back in the stockpot. Dice up your meat (including the skin and fat) into pieces about an inch or two in size, and add them and the bone to the pot. If you are using the bone (and you should) don’t worry about cleaning it off – the meat will fall off it as it cooks. Some folk are panicking over the mention of ham skin here, but trust me on this – it will melt and meld into something approaching heaven before we are done.  Put in enough cold water to cover the beans about two inches and set the heat as high as it will go.

While you are waiting for it to boil, peel your onion and stick 2 cloves in it. Cloves are pointy, and you can just push them into the onion like thumbtacks. You will remove the onion later, and this makes it easier, but I have also just tossed the cloves in the pot and sliced the onion fine and left it in and that works too. It’s largely a matter of opinion, and this way involves less chopping and tears. Add the onion, ½ a teaspoon of allspice, ½ a teaspoon of the black pepper, the bayleaf, and a teaspoon of salt to the water and bring it to a boil. We will probably be adding more salt later, but depending on what meat you used, it may already be salty, and too much salt will ruin a dish.

After it comes to a boil, turn your heat down and let it simmer. Stir them every 10 or 15 minutes, just as you pass through the kitchen, and check your water levels at the same time. The water will cook away, so keep adding water to always keep at least an inch of water over the peas.

Cooking times will vary depending on how fresh the peas are, and how your stove cooks, but after about an hour and a half, start checking to see if the peas are tender. They generally take me about two hours to be right. They are done when a pea will mash evenly between your fingers. If nobody’s looking, you can taste it –  they shouldn’t be crunchy, but firm. Nobody wants mushy peas. The broth will be rich and dark, and should be tasted at this point for salt – I often put about another two teaspoons in here, but go by taste, adding a bit and stirring a bit and tasting as you go.

Remove the bone and the onion, if you left it whole, and discard after picking the bone clean.

About an hour and a half into the beans cooking, it’s time to make the collards. Rinse them off, and cut out the big pieces of stem and discard. Take the leaves and roll them like cigars and then slice into one-inch-wide strips. Shake the water off them, but don’t dry them in a salad spinner or anything – they need some moisture to cook.  Peel and mince your garlic now as well.

In a big (at least 10 inch, but 12 is better) skillet, add your vegetable oil and coat the bottom of the skillet with it, turning the skillet one way and another. Then put it over high heat and watch the oil – when it turns wavy it’s time to cook.

Add your garlic and a ½ teaspoon of crushed red pepper to the oil and sauté it around, letting it sizzle – but don’t let it brown. After 30 seconds or so, when it smells amazing, add in the collard greens and stir them around in the oil, so they get coated. I sprinkle about a ¼ teaspoon of salt on them now, and then add a cup of water, stirring the greens around in it. This will begin to wilt the greens, which is what we are going for. Turn the heat down to medium and then put a lid on the skillet, leaving it slightly cracked so steam can escape. Let it cook for about 20 minutes, softening the greens, but not disintegrating them.

To plate it up, I put the black eyed peas and meat in a bowl with lots of broth, and then scatter the greens over the top, but this is controversial. Some folks prefer them served on a plate, drained, with the collards to the side. Either way, I would serve some cornbread, usually made in muffins because we are celebrating, alongside this, with some pepper sauce on the table.

I’m wishing you lots of luck and joy and wonderful meals this coming year, friends.

Happy New Year!

Southern AF Cornbread

There are people out there making cornbread for the holidays with sugar and flour. One woman even said on Facebook that she uses Jiffy Cornbread mix to make cornbread dressing.

Some folks just want to watch the world burn.

It’s easy to be critical of other people’s food choices, but I find it helpful to remember that not everyone grew up with the advantages I have, and just don’t know any other way. In light of this, and wanting to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, I have decided to share my Southern AF cornbread recipe that uses neither flour nor sugar with the world. And if it matters to you, It’s gluten free,

This is everyday cornbread. This is why I keep a jug of buttermilk in the fridge. (If you don’t have any other use for buttermilk, you can buy powdered buttermilk in the baking aisle of your store, which keeps forever).

I will be the first to say there are other recipes out there – especially hot water cornbread made when money is tight and buttermilk is a stretch, but I don’t particularly enjoy it, so we will talk of it another day. This is the perfect thing to serve with pinto beans. In fact, growing up beans and cornbread were practically one word.

What you need:

1 cup cornmeal. (Now, white is traditional down here, but yellow is easier to get, and I can’t tell a taste difference. I can tell you that you can fancy this up with using stone ground meal here, but it’s real good if you use generic yellow meal from the grocery store, too.)

1 tsp baking powder. (Some people put more to make it rise more, but I like a denser bread.)

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk (If you don’t have any buttermilk, you can make do by adding two tablespoons of lemon juice to a cup of milk and letting it sit out about 15 minutes. You just need an acid to react to the baking powder.)

1 large egg

2 TBS butter, margarine, or bacon drippings (Honestly, they all work about the same. Follow your budget here. We tend to use butter, because we don’t keep margarine in the house.)

1 8 to 10-inch well-seasoned cast iron skillet (I mean, if you are not at a place in your life where someone loves you enough to have given you a cast iron skillet and taught you how to care for it, you could use a cake pan, but it will crust up better in a cast iron skillet.)

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 450.

Put butter in the skillet, put skillet in the oven.

Then mix the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Add egg and buttermilk to the dry stuff, and mix until the batter just has an even consistency. Don’t overmix this – it isn’t cake. Use a spoon, not a blender.

Remove skillet (be careful, it’s hot!), swirl the melted butter all over the skillet, then pour the melted butter into the batter.

Pour batter into the skillet, and jiggle it to evenly distribute the batter.

Put it in the oven and feel morally superior.

It will be done when golden brown on top, the sides are coming away from the side of the skillet, and a knife blade comes out dry from the center.

An 8-inch skillet takes about 20 minutes, a 10 inch one about 17.

We just cut it into wedges and serve it from the skillet – when we were growing up, momma would invert it on a plate and serve it upside down, which bothered me in ways I cannot fully describe. But you do you.

Further notes:

This is a basic, make 30 minutes before supper, all purpose cornbread. This is also good dressing cornbread, if you are making chicken and dressing, but you will want to make it the day before so it can dry out for that. I have, on occasion, added two tablespoons of sugar to this and made muffins with it to save my marriage. Other ways to fancy it up involve adding a half cup of shredded cheese, a handful of frozen corn kernels, or a small can of green chiles. But don’t go too close to the sun here: This is working people’s food.