Food is about farmer’s markets and a floppy hat to keep the sun off my face and hybrid cars and the chickens roosting on my back steps. It’s understanding some chemistry, and being able to manipulate a recipe so it comes out how I think it ought to – it’s making six batches, if that’s what it takes, to get it right. According to me, food has everything to do with politics and environmentalism and ethics. I use food for calories, for pleasure, for stress-relief, and, occasionally, for triggering emotional breakdowns.

According to me, food is about preserving biodiversity. It’s about affection and passion and communication. I can’t tell you what I was wearing when something significant happened, but I can tell you what I ate that day. Maybe I am obsessed – it certainly does appear that my life moves around this central theme. But I assure you, it is not so tragic as that. Food is self-care; food is compost.

I fantasize about self-sufficiency, about being more in command of my food supply. I make my own jam and haven’t eaten the store-bought stuff in more than a year. I’m into preservation, storage, and utilization. Dan – er, The Squeeze – bought me a chest freezer for summer berries and raw pizza dough and trout and anything else we can figure out how to make a lot of and keep in suspended animation. I am learning how to make wine; soon we will do beer, too. One evening last summer, we sat on the porch, eating a salad (for we are very in to salads), and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great to sit here next year and eat a salad full of things that we grew ourselves?” Everything about that question lit me up. So this year we have a garden – three gorgeous raised beds filled with dark, loamy dirt. I’ve stuck seeds and starts in all of the places I think a plant has a prayer of growing. There are strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, figs, pomegranate, nasturtium, basil, cilantro, thyme, lavender, sage, rosemary, parsley, mint, sweet corn, sugar peas, lettuces, carrots, one surprise radish, bush beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes, watermelon, kabocha, pumpkin, zucchini, tomatillo, artichoke, hot peppers, and sweet peppers.

Did I go overboard? Absolutely. Does it make me feel a little drunk just looking at them? Goodness, does it ever. I grew up in Salinas, California, the daughter of farmers. I didn’t pay much attention until years after I moved away. Now my grandmother says that it’s something that’s in me, this need to sink my fingers in the dirt.

In March, Dan built a coop and we put three chicks in it. Now they are pullets, young adult hens that look awfully mature, but who have not yet begun laying eggs. I believe I can say with some degree of certainty that they are all indeed hens, and that I won’t have to learn how to kill a rooster. The chickens began as a way for me to look like an eccentric neighborhood kook, but soon they became part of the system around here:
        We buy and grow food, but we don’t consume all of it. The humans are not 100% efficient. The chickens, in turn, eat our weeds and our table scraps. Their feet scratch at the soil; their poops enrich it. When they are older and begin to lay eggs, I’ll bake with them, give them away to friends, and make Dan eat omelets for breakfast five mornings a week. We’ll put the egg shells into our compost bin. Next season, we’ll spread the compost in the garden.

Would it surprise you if I said that the laundry line strung between the backyard fence and my eighty-year-old walnut tree has to do with food, too? It shouldn’t. When it is warm, I can save electricity on drying clothes and use it for the food dehydrator, or to offset the extra fuel the stove uses during the midsummer frenzy of jam-making. Plus, the chickens look particularly picturesque walking around under flapping sheets and pillowcases.

I’ve got some strong feelings about how I think commercially-produced food should happen. If, after reading this, you have lingering curiosities about the nature and scope of these feelings, send me an e-mail or pick up a copy of Peter Singer’s The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Or both. As a liberal arts sort of gal, I’ve taken more than my share of environmental science courses, and anyway it doesn’t take that big of a geek to see that our farming practices are unsustainable and dangerous. If I were in charge, we’d all have time – and space – to grow our own food. Many of us are already sure that we cannot responsibly do otherwise.

So, here is my confession: I’m sort of an urban hippy-type.

And here’s another one: I break my little rules every day.

According to Dr. Weber, my very first Philosophy professor at Monterey Peninsula College and the dude responsible for settling me on this ethics kick, the most powerful objection leveled against John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is that – get this – it’s too demanding.

But the objection isn’t about laziness. This construction of Utilitarianism calls for behavior that always maximizes The Good. The Good can be defined in any number of ways, but let’s just say for now that The Good is Zero Environmental Harm. We may do things that cause Some Environmental Harm, but we must always keep in mind our moral duty to cause Zero Environmental Harm and do everything we are able to get as close to living a harm-free life as we can – that’s the rule.

Imagine you need to get to work. You certainly can’t drive your car alone. You could carpool, but the bus is a better choice – and the MAX train, better still. Preferable to motorized transport, you could ride your bicycle, but biking generates more waste heat than walking does. It’s awfully efficient though.

So maybe you choose to walk to work. Now let’s think about which shoes you should wear : what materials they are made from, how far away they were produced, what they’ll do to any plant life you should happen to step on as you walk.

It might be better to stay home and telecommute – but what environmental impact does your personal computer have? It’s made from all sorts of hazardous stuff. And in your home office space, are the light bulbs compact florescent, or incandescent? Do you pay a little extra for electricity generated by wind or water? Does your employer? It gets worse, this Utilitarianism-business. It is crazy-making to constantly think of the ways you can do better, because you can always do better. I can, anyway.

I take my responsibilities as a consumer, a cook, and an eater very seriously. The things I do these days in the name of our little blue planet would have seemed very unlikely to me as recently as four years ago. I arrived here incrementally; but here I am, saving chicken shit, walking miles to school, collecting old CDs until the pile is big enough to justify a trip to the recycling center. I’ve tried to think of something that I do that’s outlandish and I can’t. Collecting gray water is normal. Washing out plastic bags for infinite reuse just makes sense.

Back to my confession: As much as I am tryin’ to live and eat in ways that feel right to me, I fall short. Often. Some days, Panda Express just pushes my buttons, and I am pretty sure that everything they sell came off of a Sysco truck. Conventional (read: factory farmed) eggs are a lot less expensive than the eggs from hens fed organic meal and allowed, supposedly, to roam free and cluck in the sunshine. There’s an economic premium to this lifestyle, and times can get rough. I’m not often motivated to drive even twenty minutes out of my way to get the Draper Valley organic chicken meat. I should, though. Actually, I should ride my bike out to get the Draper Valley stuff. Or, I should give up eating meat altogether. See how it can get out of hand quickly?

If this ethical eating business is such a huge and important part of my life, then why do I still shop in places I know I ought to avoid? Why do I ever use my car? Why can’t I resist the mangoes from South America? Well, all I have in answer is that I’m doing my best, and my best isn’t perfect. We all hide twinkies – in some form or another – in our desk drawers. As much as I’d love to believe that I can save the world, I know that I am just one girl: one girl who loves mangoes and, occasionally, greasy steam-table chow mein. I won’t feel guilty about my food. My food doesn’t deserve that.

According to me, food is about more than what’s for dinner. According to me, food is about craft and about dirt and about making choices true to oneself and to the rest of the planet. Food is about honesty, and about love. It’s about acknowledging that butter makes it taste better, but not going crazy with the saturated fats.

According to me food isn’t worth much if it doesn’t feel good, if it can’t keep you alive and healthy, if you can’t share it with friends. Food, you see, will soak up all the meaning and the heft you want to give it. And if you don’t want it to mean anything, then just eat it already –– Bon appétit.

Seconds before Mr. Fine turned on his projector and announced that his goat had just given birth, Kristi whispered that she’d signed up with Organics to You, a company in town that does produce home delivery, much like a CSA (that’s Community Supported Agriculture, and you can get a good overview here).

When you sign up with Organics to You (OTY), you can choose which produce or fruit bin you want to have delivered each week (or a less frequently, if you wish). There’s the Small Bin, the Large Bin, and the Bin For One. Then you’ve got your Office Bin, your Kid’s Bin, and your Value Bin. There’s a Fruit Bin, a large Fruit Bin, and a Juicer Bin. The idea is to pick whichever of their fixed-price bins suits your household’s fruit-and-vegetable consumption level. The description for the Value Bin, for example, reads thusly: “Great for larger families. 17 to 20 different fruits and veggies. You really like to cook.” There is also a list of the items included in each bin for the current week to help you get an idea of what kind of stuff you’re likely to get. You can’t specify exactly what you want in your bin because, like the CSAs, OTY is gonna give you the best of what is available this very minute. It’s a little scary, handing over your grocery shopping like that, but you can tell OTY about the things you really like (more fruit, please) and the things you’re not too hot on (skip the tomatoes, thank you), and they will nudge the contents of your box according to those preferences. It’s very nice, really.

So after hearing about life on the Funky Butte Ranch, I ran right home and signed up for my own weekly box of organic goodies. I chose the twenty-five dollar Bin For One, though there are two of us. “Great for people on the go,” the description reads, “12 to 14 different fruits and veggies.” I am not sure what the vegetable needs of an “on-the-go” person are, but I figured that a dozen or more varieties of grab-bag produce would be a good enough introduction to the service without being overwhelming. I also got a little click-happy and added on other groceries: a pound of coffee from Portland Roasting, a Rustic Baguette, and a 32-ounce bottle of spicy Dragonfly Chai. They’ll also bring you Papa G’s Tofu, bread from Nature Bake, eggs, dairy, soy milk, or hummus – all sourced locally. I chose to surrender my credit card number for recurring payments, but I could have opted to promise to leave a paper check for the OTY delivery person.

The box, bread, coffee and chai arrived at about 2 pm on Monday, my neighborhood’s designated delivery day. The driver left them in the shade on my porch, and everything was exactly as I ordered it. Inside the box was a colorful jumble, such a welcome sight after a string of grayish days. There were two young leeks, a Meyer lemon, cameo apples, pears, a bunch of cilantro, one small green bell pepper, potatoes, yellow onions, three roma tomatoes and three minneolas, an avocado, snap peas, and a mystery vegetable that looked, well, like a sea monster.

Look at it up there in the top left corner of that last photo. Do you know what that is? Did you have it for lunch last Wednesday? The tie that held it bunched yielded a web address which I initially misread, causing even greater confusion over the purple, stalky, kelp-like, floppy vegetable on my kitchen table, waiting. It was only eleven hours or so before I thought to check the OTY website and learned that the vegetable in question was kale raab, though there is big ol’ note there that says kale raab is not included in the Bin For One. Must have been my lucky day.

I googled around for about thirteen seconds and read somewhere that kale raab (or Russian Red Kale, as I believe it is more appropriately called) can be handled in the same ways as broccoli. So tonight for dinner I julienned one of the leeks, hacked down the sea monster into reasonably sized pieces, and sautéed them together with garlic and butter. We ate it with half of the Rustic Baguette (crispy and extra-delicious after being sprayed lightly with water and refreshed in a 400º oven for about ten minutes) and a green salad full of my favorite nibblies (like those snap peas and a sprinkling of toasted pumpkin seeds). The kale was good, I think. It tasted like brocolli, only earthier. The leaves were tender, and sweeter than the stalks. We agreed that it’s “different” and “durable” and I don’t yet know that I would seek it out for anything but novelty or variety – but maybe those are two perfectly good reasons for choosing a vegetable anyway.

I think I will enjoy this new relationship with OTY. I can’t foresee giving up my frequent trips to the Cherry Sprout Market right down the street, or shopping at the farmers’ markets, or Sauvie Island. Still, I like this thing where the groceries come to me instead of the other way ’round. And I like that some choice has been removed. This way I am only buying organic produce, which I certainly haven’t been able to do when I go out into the world to shop. OTY is also about supporting local farmers as much as possible, and that means that the stuff I get will be in tune the regional growing season. That pretty much covers all of the trendy food movement right there. Above all, you know, I just want to be hip.

The night before our most recent meal at Passionfish, I had a couple of glasses of wine, and wondered out loud and at length at the strategy I should take upon my return to the scene of this great letdown. I had over eleven months to think about it, yet had not come to a decision. The crux of the problem was this: If the same menu item that was a disaster last December was offered to me again, should I take it, thus giving the kitchen an opportunity to atone for past wrongs, or should I choose something else, perhaps safer, thereby increasing the likelihood of having a satisfying experience and mending my strained relationship with a favorite restaurant?

It was clear on the ride over that my family didn’t quite grasp the full extent of my (admittedly slightly dramatic) quandary. I can’t believe you’re so worked up over one meal, Mom puzzled; and then Dad asked with genuine worry in his voice, Are you going to say something that gets us thrown out of the restaurant? I told them that I am the nicest critic I know, that I have only ever written two mean things about anyone, and that of course I would behave myself in public. None of these assurances had any visible effect on my parents.

Our meal at Passionfish, I am delighted to report, was positively fantastic and I feel completely at peace with them once again.

We had a crab cake over lime relish to start, and barbecued shrimp with lemongrass slaw and spicy Vietnamese sauce. The crab cake was just like it ought to be – mostly crab, fried crisp, and carefully seasoned. I didn’t taste the shrimp, but their accompaniment was without question the best thing on the table that night. The slaw tasted like daikon with pea shoots and the Vietnamese sauce was so flavorful and spicysweet without being too much of either. Together they gave me pause – the crunch and tang of the slaw, the spice of the dark sauce drizzled over… As soon as I finish this piece, in fact, I am going to draft a letter to Chef Ted, in which I will beg with as much dignity as I can muster for the recipe.

For our entrees we chose – and I snagged a menu so I could get it all accurate here, mind you – Mahi with a black pepper-rum sauce, cucumber salad and green onion rice, Alaskan sablefish crusted with pepper in a wasabi slaw, and ginger vinaigrette, Maine scallops with a tomato-truffle butter and a thyme risotto custard, Tilapia with thyme mashed potatoes and garlic-balsamic vinegar butter, and Duck confit with a honey reduction, chile gratin potatoes, and braised fennel.

My plate was the tilapia, but I tasted it all, swooning ever more with each bite. While it is true that some dishes (the scallops, the tilapia) were more fantastic than others (the sablefish, the mahi), it is wholly unfair to say that anything was rotten. To my mind, the latter two were under-seasoned and therefore underwhelming in the flavor department. It’s also darned near impossible to seriously compete with well-prepared scallops (in tomato-truffle butter, for heaven’s sake!). Everything on the table was extremely well-executed. The fish on my plate was cooked to a medium doneness, which makes for a moister, more flavorful piece of fish. The garlic-balsamic butter, which I was half-expecting to think was objectionable, was absolutely delicious, and mixed so well with the herbalicious spuds and the tender (but not overcooked) snap peas. I forced myself to eat slowly and savor; it wasn’t easy. I can’t think of how they might have improved the plate, in fact.

The duck at Passionfish, I should say, is also the best duck I have ever had. It is a thing of dreams, the sort when you wake up and are depressed all day because what you dreamed was not real. Except this duck is real, it is just 700 miles away. It is a leg and thigh seared over high heat to caramelize the outside, and then slow-roasted for hours until it is tender and succulent and barely hanging on to the bone. It has never not been on the menu and I would order it every time I go, were it not for those gratin potatoes (I think cheese is icky) and the dazzling array of seafood offered with accompaniments that I actually want to eat. If you ever go to Passionfish with me, you will almost certainly be encouraged strongly and at length to order the duck so that I can have a bite without having to contend with those cheesey spuds.

If thoughtful, well-crafted and delicious food weren’t enough to make the trip to California especially for a meal at Passionfish, you should also know – and you might if you read Bon Appetit Magazine – that the Walters and Passionfish are advocates of sustainable seafood, dedicated to serving meals that are healthy for their customers and for the environment. Like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Cindy and Ted were doing this before it was cool, and now get serve as guides for newer chefs and restauranteurs who will undoubtedly hop on to this very important wagon. Indeed, the global community of cooks and eaters – not to mention all of the fishies in the sea – are lucky to have them aboard.

When I lived in Pacific Grove, this was the restaurant of choice for my gang of friends whenever we had any occasion to mark, and for when we just felt like celebrating our collective love of good food, wine, and each other. It is such a tremendous relief for me to have had another dinner at my beloved Passionfish, and for that dinner to have met their – and my – high standards. And though my parents clearly relished their meals, they were much more pleased that I was given no reason to utter remarks that would have gotten us thrown out of the restaurant.

Passionfish
701 Lighthouse Avenue
Pacific Grove, California 93950
831•655•3311

Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch

          I am living in an old farmhouse with a massive, inviting porch. One side sags just a little bit. I am thinking of screening it off, to keep the summer bugs away and give the cats a place to lounge in the fresh air. There is a table in the far corner, and three chairs. On warm nights when I cannot sleep, I curl up there to read. Inside, to the immediate left of the small entry way, in which stands my parent’s old, mirrored halltree and a small table for keys, change, and other household detritus, is my workspace. Two massive wooden tables are pushed together to create something reminiscent of a double desk. There are filing cabinets under the one on the right, closest to the dining nook. On the surface is my laptop, naturally, the digital camera, and a pile of books I’ve been meaning to review and pull recipes from. My full-spectrum desk lamp sits on one corner. I use it often since I am rarely at my desk when the sun is out. The office spills into my main living/entertaining space. My iPod lives on a shelf there, nestled inconspicuously among books. It’s attached to ten speakers hung around the room and, at medium volume, music fills the house and warms it. The aging hardwood floors throughout are covered mostly with old rugs. The one in here is shaggy and green, mirroring the garden you can see from the front window.
     Past the dining nook – where a massive, roughly-hewn table and two matching benches fills the space almost entirely – is the kitchen, where I spend most of my indoor time. It’s a temporally-confused space, but comfortable, and my favorite place to be. My long-lusted-after Viking range sits against one wall, not far from a porcelain farm sink. On one of the six gas burners sits a stock pot, simmering a few gallons of vegetable stock for soup and for freezing. There’s a wooden manual coffee grinder, the kind that hand-cranks into a drawer. There are herbs drying in the window. Pots dangle on an iron rack hung from the ceiling. The paver tiles are cool beneath my feet.

     Over many months I have been building this place in my mind. It’s my new fantasy and every day it enlarges, acquires new details. A handmade quilt for a bedspread. A chicken coop. Rows of leeks and garlic in the sunny spot out back. Candlelight during power outages. It is a naïve and overly-romanticized dream I’m spinning; and I know this, but I can’t help myself. I don’t want to stop dreaming it.

     I never expected to discover that I am not a city girl. When I moved to Portland three years ago I thought I was coming for a vibrant urban existence. It’s what young people who grow up in small coastal tourist towns are supposed to think they want, I suppose. I imagined I would become a metropolitan gal, a mover and a shaker, the city wrapped around me, providing the kind of love that can only come from concrete and steel. As it happened, however, I have developed a love affair of a wholly different sort – a love of dirt. I have never felt “called” to anything in the same way, or with the same intensity, that I feel I must put plants into the earth and watch them grow. I have always been driven to create – crafty things and food and the like – and I have always been happiest when in the midst of such creation. Gardening, feels like a logical progression of this trend, a tightening of my life as a cook and an eater.

     So this is what I dream about: growing my own food and living quietly, a distance away from all of those things I thought I so desperately needed for fulfillment. A drastic priority shift.

     In real life, my blueberry bush already has fruit on it. Every day when I make rounds to water, prune, and dote on my garden I check in with each plant and, I swear, the pride and satisfaction I feel in admiring my growing garden is so expansive you’d think I’d invented photosynthesis – or at the very least, blueberries – my very own self. I feel so much wonder at those basic natural mechanisms – growth, flowering, pollination, fruit, dormancy. A plant just doing what it does qua plant takes my breath away sometimes. And makes me feel totally silly. And awed.

     Nothing tastes better than food you’ve grown and cooked yourself.

     Yesterday at the grocery store – an all-in-one mammoth compound of convenient consumerism – as I rode the escalator down from the second floor I had a clear look at the aisles of canned goods, cleaning products, housewares, frozen foods, dairy cases, chilled produce. The order and uniformity of that massive place, filled with packaged stuff arrested me in a new way. I wanted to run. Instead, I bought a bag of cookies and some frozen shrimp.

     But what I want, this fantasy of mine, is to leave. I want to somehow live without needing the bag of cookies, the frozen shrimps, the flash and the bling and all the rest. Actually, I know now that I don’t need them. It is only that I am used to them. It is only that I don’t have the time to make everything from scratch, that I am accustomed to buying fruit out of season, that it is often less expensive to buy processed foods than whole ones.

     I have been intermittently reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It is the chronicle of Kingsolver’s move to the Appalachian Mountains to live on a farm and do this very thing I have been dreaming of – grow her own food, live closer to her neighbors and to her family, eat locally and mindfully. It is a pleasant enough read, naturally well-written and insightful. There is a lot of food-and-eating ethics that I am mostly skipping over, having read a heap of it in other books. Though I am absolutely behind her philosophy, and more than interested in the story she has set to tell, I am having a hard time sticking with the book. I realized today that I am jealous.

     There are lots of books about “dropping out” and living independently and those who have done it claim that it’s not that difficult to do (if you are ready to be cold, hungry, and tired). While I am not packing up the Prius and heading for the hills with my adze and seed pouch, I have begun to seriously think about the viability of such a plan. I am not particularly strong or clever in a survival-type way. This is the first year I’ve cultivated even a small garden and, while I don’t think I am botching it up completely, I’m sure I could do it better. It strikes me as positively mad, the notion of growing enough food in a year to live off of, but there are in all crazy notions a smidget of truth, an edge of possibility. Reality lives in the middle ground more often than not, and a middle path – life farther from the City and closer to the dirt – does not seem crazy in the slightest. It seems, in fact, much more sane than staying here, living as I do now.

     It begins with my own garden, and shopping at farmer’s markets. It begins with canvas bags instead of paper or plastic ones, and riding my bike to work. It begins with staking out the Goodwill and the Rebuilding Center when I set to do home improvement projects and having the patience to wait to find what I need. It begins with intentional eating and cooking and consuming. It begins with deciding on eating seasonally and, whenever possible, locally. (And not dwelling on what I would have to give up in doing so, like all of those tropical fruits I so love, which certainly do not grow up here in the Pacific Northwest.)
     I do not know if I will ever reach this dream of mine, this farmhouse tucked in the mountains. I don’t know if places like that will exist by the time I am ready to move, if I would be able to sustain myself in such a life, or if I will even want it by the time it is attainable. Some gals dream of perfect suburban houses or city lofts, of storybook weddings or men on motorcycles. I dream of dirt under my fingernails and collapsing hard into bed at night, exhausted from hauling the onions down the root cellar. I dream of cooking fresh food that, months earlier, I knew as seed. And maybe these dreams of mine are just as silly: “storybook” fantasies with slightly different kinds of characters. Though I may never get all the way to the farmhouse with the root cellar and the six-burner Viking, at least I will keep my garden. And I will do it better every season as I learn new tricks and techniques and ways to coddle the blueberries which will be, unequivocally, the best I’ve ever tasted.

I’ll synopsize. John Peterson grew up on a farm in the Midwest. He inherited it. Chemicals made him sad. He ran away to Mexico a lot. The farm became an artist colony of sorts. The neighbors mistook him for a devil worshipper. He decided organic farming is where it’s at. He built up a community supported agriculture program on his farm. Angelic Organics was born. He wrote books, did the docu thing, became wildly popular.

So, the book. Before even cracking the cover, it is very cool for two reasons: One: they put it out in a lightweight trade paper edition. This gets my thumbsup because it is therefore not only more affordable, but requires less energy to produce & ship. Two: Farmer John himself is hanging out on the (well-designed) cover, holding a pitch fork and sporting a straw hat and orange feather boa. This makes me happy.

Inside, this is like no “cookbook” I have yet seen. There are pages dedicated to their philosophy, naturally. & slow food. & “biodynamism.” The recipe sections are separated by season and include storage and handling information about each vegetable, as well as culinary uses and “partners” – recommended flavor combinations (incidentally, if you are particularly interested in this, I also very strongly recommend the fabulous book by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, Culinary Artistry). The layout of these pages is somewhat confused, jumbled. It’s not about being a slick, coffee table cookbook like, say, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook, which is more like foodporn than something you’d ever get near your grease-spattered range. Scattered all over these pages are little blurbs, quotes pulled from shareholders, cook’s notes, the Farm’s newsletter, harvest notes. They’re so weird – I just love them. Consider page 101 under the frequently-used heading “overheard” My new jar of pickles fell to the ground and shattered, sending glass shards and baby cucumberettes all around my feet. What this is doing in a cookbook, or why it is important enough to be included, I have no idea. There are little blurbs about the soil conditions in 1998 and how the harvest was going in 1996. The “overheard” blurbs are my favorite though. They are almost invariably ironic. Consider, from page 189: Shannon: The thing about not getting married is that you feel like you’ve missed a big event. Meagan: If I ever get married, I want a nice frying pan. Or, page 156: Male #1: Want to go with me to yoga this morning? Male #2: Yoga? I’d rather be a vegetarian than do yoga.

I notice that I have veered far off on a tangent (appropriately, perhaps, for this is a book almost certainly designed by a person with a deficit of attention). A cookbook sans good recipes is, of course, not much of a cookbook. Happily, Farmer John and crew deliver here as well. We made the Pungent Green Beans and Tomatoes with cumin, garlic, and ginger for Christmas dinner and they were fantastic. Vegetables are so easy to ignore, aren’t they? They just get steamed, or sauteed in butter ad nauseum. When we feel particularly inspired, we sitr-fry them. Well, no more. Not here, anyway. Here before me I have a cookbook that boasts an entire section for rutabegas. & kohlrabi.

Page 141: Mesclun Soufflé. 212: Cantaloupe and Tomato Salad with Mint. 275: Ginger Miso Soup with Daikon, Kale and Carrots. 297: Savory-Sweet Rutabega Pudding. Clearly, these people are just like me – a little nutty, and crazy-in-love with veggies.

Scallops in tomato-truffle butter with risotto and baby bok choy.

Dad says:
immediately following the meal: those were pretty good.
later the same evening: those were maybe the best scallops I’ve ever had.
the next day: those were the best scallops I’ve ever had.

Please see also Monterey Bay Aquarium‘s Seafood Watch.