Reflections on 10 years of food blogging

Ten years ago I posted my first recipe for this blog Classic Italian Soup in Reverse. My previous blog projects prior to this were each one-year type explorations (My Year of Reading "Year Of" Books - 2009 and Celebrating the States - 2010). I don't remember if I had any intentions as to how long this project would last, but I don't think I expected it to hit the decade mark. There are now over 600 posts, which would indicate that although I missed a few weeks along the way (sometimes several in a row) and some of the posts are not actually for recipes, and some recipes were prepared, but never blogged, it would appear that James and I have (more or less) kept up with preparing and posting "one new recipe a week". 

There have been some surprising favorites including:

• Ratatatatouille - We are not big fans of eggplant, but we love this
• Salmon and Blueberries - No, really.
• Tomato Pie - I famously hated tomatoes as a child (and into my early adulthood). I love this pie.
• Fish in a Packet - I've tried many variations, including a few of my own since this first try
• Apple Gruyère French Toast with Red Onion - Again I say: no, really

And some not-so-surprising favorites including: 

• Lobster Quesadillas - Thank goodness National Quesadilla Day and National Lobster Day are the same day or we might not have tried this
• Ham and Havarti Sandwiches - A most excellent picnic food
• Simply Sublime Poached Eggs with Mint and Yogurt - sexy
• Grapes Rolled in Ginger and Almonds - also sexy
• Peanut Butter, Bacon, and Banana Sandwiches - not sexy, but decadent
• Spaghetti with Tomatoes, Bacon, and Onion - this may be the recipe I've prepared the most times since I first made it in 2012. Easy and delicious comfort food.

At least two recipes we prepared and blogged about twice (we really love both of these dishes:, I don't know why we didn't remember making them the first time):

• Champandongo
• Sweet Potato and Black Bean Chili 

Important lessons learned:

• The essential step of mashing some berries in making super moist muffins from the Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins recipe
• Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium is the best place to get infused Olive Oil and flavored vinegar
• Indispensable cast-iron skillets really are indispensable
• When unsure about wine pairings remember this: Malbec goes with everything

Some other important things I've learned:

• I learned to not only enjoy cooking, but to enjoy eating. I am probably 20 pounds heavier than I was 10 years ago. Some of that I will chalk up to aging and menopause, and some of it I will own as just the weight of a person who really likes food. 
  
  
• Although we still prefer cooking with gas, since we bought our near-the-beach house we have learned to cook on an electric stove, and James has become our resident expert on the Big Green Egg.
  
  
• I am very happy that I already knew how to cook and to keep a well-stocked pantry when the pandemic hit. We have eaten out perhaps half a dozen times since last March, and otherwise prepared our own meals, and although I will admit to sometimes wanting to have someone else cook for me I at least have not gotten bored with our excellent repertoire of good meals. I not only know how to cook from recipes, I also know what to do with whatever ingredients I have on hand, I know what to do with leftovers, and how to make good substitutions, as well as how to salvage a meal that seems un-savable.
  
  
• We enjoy sharing our meals as well. We especially like our Christmas Eve lobster dinner and Thanksgiving tradition with friends. I think our most memorable meal must be 2013's Chinese Thanksgivikkah. Wow! Was that really seven years ago?

Nothing exists in a vacuum. Our personal lives are inherently tied to all that we do including cooking.

• Those who have been following the blog for many years may have noticed that we stopped referring to our only child as our "daughter" a few years ago and started using "our wonderful child" or "our kid". We are the proud parents of an adult trans child, who is also an exceptionally good cook, and who knows how to pick out a gift for us
  
  
• In the first year of this blog we lost our good friend Anna whose death was memorialized in this post about eggnog muffins.
  
  
• Between us we have lost three parents: Pam's father and stepfather, and James' mother. Posts that mention them can be found here, here, here, and here.
  
  
• When we married in 1987 we had three living grandparents between us. We lost two (Pam's grandmother and James' grandfather in 1995 and 1996 respectively) long before we started this blog. James' grandmother lived until 2016. My grandmother loved Peppermint Schnapps. We made this cocktail and posted it in her honor early in our blogging project. James' grandmother was immortalized with this post shortly after her death. I did not find any posts in which we mentioned Granddad. But I have to say, he really wasn't much of a foodie.
  
  
• In 2017 and again in 2018 we hosted a student (who is now a friend) from Georgia (the country) in our home. If we had not known Luka we probably never would have tried Khachapuri-Georgian Cheese bread.
  
  
• Our 22-year Easter tradition of dinner with our friend Jackie (mother to our good friend Jenny) and her family and friends was interrupted this year due to the pandemic. The missed meal became more poignant when Jackie passed away this summer. Posts about our contributions to Easters past can be found here, here, and here.

Finally, I have this to say: I am a good cook, and proud of it.

Home Cookin'

Last Sunday, Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur comic shares a curmudgeonly view of cooking at home. Indeed, a lot of what is "cooked" in homes is merely heated up by legions of "box food people." I am happy to report, however, that a growing number of young people are interested in cooking.

This very morning, Pam's Spanish class is converging on our house to share dishes they created in relation to their study of Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate). Last week, students attending a Real Food Challenge event at BSU brought a fabulous assortment of dishes they created themselves.

When I asked students in my introductory environmental geography class how many of them (or their parents) grow at least some food at home, about 2/3 raised their hands, and many beamed as they listed the home produce. In the film To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Pig, one of the market managers explains that his goal is to encourage home cooking.

Dining out is still enjoyable, of course, if it is actual dining. But as a friend who once worked in food service told us, the four major food groups in some restaurants are bags, boxes, bottles, and cans. We've found that all too often, eating out has meant paying much more for boring food than good food would have cost, with the only benefit having been that someone else did the dishes. And with a dishwasher in our kitchen, that is a mighty slim benefit!

So, we find ourselves in restaurants only when it is necessary in order to meet people or get other things done, or when we know that the chef can make something better than we can make it ourselves! We often find ways to avoid the former, and the latter becomes increasingly rare.

Pho Fame

In our recent Faux Pho post, we described how and why we made pho, the traditional noodle dish of Vietnam. Little did we know that our creation would become locally and briefly famous, as part of a photo essay on a pho-noodle lunch at the Bridgewater Public Library. Our trusty, wedding-present crock pot received a bit of media limelight as well!
The event was organized by the Bridgewater One Book One Community committee as part of a series of events related to the reading of John Shor's Dragon House. Bridgewater Independent reporter/photographer Charlene McNeil beautifully captures the event, in which Anh Nguyen described her life in Vietnam, her flight just ahead of the fall of Saigon, and her life in the United States since 1975. As the photos reveal, the audience was mesmerized by the life of this delightful and unassuming woman.

Why Our Dog is Not a Fan

Thanks to humorist and fellow dog-lover Mike Peters for illustrating the reason our dog Perry is not an active participant in this blog project. The key is presentation; here (Aug 27, 2011) Grimmy is dejectedly reading the evidence for what our dog has not yet really understood: their culinary lives are boring. Perry has not caught on, because of the enthusiastic way we call out, "Plain brown dog food! Plain brown dog food!" (With credit/blame to Dave Barry.) Also, though her main courses are more boring than wood, she frequently gets chicken-flavored jerky treats that we simply call "doggie crack."

Another Cross-Blog Site

Should I add this to my "Nueva Receta" blog or my "Library Books" blog? I added it to both. Mary Yogi, The Food Librarian is "librarian by day, baker by night". Read her interview with the American Library Association here.

Today in Cooking History

Click picture to read the story.

A Cross-Blog story

I wasn't sure whether to post this story about a community garden at the public library on City Island in the Bronx here, or on my Library Books blog. A decision had to made, though, so here it is.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/at-this-library-check-out-the-tomatoes/

Libraries are wonderful places for foodies. Beyond cookbooks, one might attend a good food lecture, gardening advice, or even an heirloom seed exchange.

Cooking from scratch - for a crowd

Cafeteria workers in Colorado are will be serving healthier meals, made with fresh ingredients to students when they return to class this week.

Breaking Dad Stereotypes

Happily, today's Close to Home strip is not close to reality at Casa Hayes-Boh, but we enjoyed the chuckle. Stereotypes are wrong-headed, but sometimes they are reality-based!

50 food festivals

We usually do not read the "Parade" magazine in the Sunday paper, but this week couldn't help but notice the "Eat Your Way Across America" cover story about food festivals in each state. If one wanted to do all 50 celebrations they are listed chronologically, although some overlap, and might it require some sort of control over the space-time continuum. They are also listed regionally, so one could select just one section of the country at a time and spread it out over several years. This is a fun read that celebrates local foods.

Rotary Club Pancake Breakfast-Go for the chicken pie!

When I worked at the McAllen (Texas) public library in the mid 1990s we were working on indexing articles from the local paper, The Monitor. Using a simple database software we created entries for local stories, skipping the AP and wire stuff, which would  be included in other national and commercial indexes. Some of the stories were more newsworthy than others of course; nevertheless, entries were made for all local stories. I began referring to the "feel good" stories, that seemed to exist only so a person could see their name in print as the "chicken pie" stories.

Here in small town New England I find there is plenty of chicken pie to go around. Whenever we go to a local fundraiser, town clean up or other local event we say we are going for the chicken pie. I have become a lot less cynical about having my chicken pie, and this morning we attended the annual Rotary Club pancake breakfast. Here we can talk to neighbors we don't often see, hobnob with local business owners, and have some fabulous homemade sausage, from the last working farm in Bridgewater, Hansen Farm. We enjoyed being in the company of our community as much as we liked eating the blueberry pancakes. For $20 the whole family had breakfast and we got 7 raffle tickets. We'll keep our fingers crossed in hopes of winning the wine and liquor gift basket!

"Food" for thought

Some interesting things to think about from New York Times columnist Mark Bittman.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/is-eat-real-food-unthinkable/

Anything containing olives should be labeled!

Yesterday one of my colleagues presented on eating habits of college students who work in the fast food industry. The lecture was enlightening, and lunch was served. I suppose, in keeping with the theme, the food was not the usual corporate sandwiches and overly sweet cookies we generally receive on campus. Instead we munched on "autumn pear" salad with baby spinach and almonds; minestrone soup; and roasted vegetable club sandwiches with cheese. The dessert choices were custard cake or Valentine-themed cupcakes. I tried the soup, salad and cupcake. Additionally, warm rolls were available, again, a deviation from the usual room temperature hard rolls we expect. Two types of rolls were offered: bread sticks, and rolls with something that looked like currants or raisins baked in. I wondered aloud to one of the other attendees what it could be. Going on the theory that it was probably currants, I took one. Alas, one bite later I had to throw the darn thing away. I really hate olives!

Pam's use of the phrase "cooking with ingredients" in her well-stocked kitchen post might seem redundant, but it refers to a specific observation we have made. For us, part of a well-stocked kitchen is an assortment of ingredients that can be made into food -- staples like flour, baking powder, beans, rice, good oils, certain liquors, and so on. With a variety of ingredients on hand, we can usually come up with something good to eat, even if we have not made a specific plan.

We first noticed this distinction when our daughter was young and we would try to help out babysitters by letting them know what was available to eat. We realized that what we were offering was not so much food as ingredients from which food might be made. At the same time, we realized that many of the wonderful young people involved really had no idea how to get from "ingredients" to "food," and we made some efforts to bridge that gap for them. In reality, we noticed that our regular sitters would just bring something, and that often we would find "box food" of some kind in our fridge that we, in turn, did not know what to do with!

Pam also mentioned the importance of tailoring the kitchen to the cook(s). Writing in today's Boston Globe, Beth Teitell describes a common and strange outcome of the wedding industry. As weddings and bridal registry have become increasingly grandiose over the past couple decades, many young couples have ended up with one-of-everything kitchen equipment collections, even if they do not cook. Her article, entitled Stick a Fork In It, describes some of the waste resulting from the disconnect between ideals and realities of domestic life.

A well-stocked kitchen

Those who read my "Celebrating the States" blog from 2010 know that I consider a cast-iron skillet a kitchen essential. I love my cast-iron skillets, and my cast-iron grill, and use them almost daily. My dirty little secret is that I once got rid of some cast-iron cookware because I didn't see how it was better than anything else, and it was just really heavy. After I read up on how to properly season, clean, and maintain cast-iron ware, and learned how to cook with it properly I discovered its true indespensibility. Cooking in cast iron will actually add iron to your diet and does not leach toxins as other pots and pans might. Plus it looks really rustic in your kitchen. Good kitchen utensils are important for those who want to cook with ingredients. Food preferences are personal, though, and acquiring the right things may take some trial and error. I know that for our family, beyond the cast-iron stuff, essential kitchen equipment includes good mixing bowls, and mixing spoons; a potato masher (I still have the one from the house I grew up in); a high-karma cheese grater (we threw away a lot of cheap ones, until we finally splurged and bought a cow-bell shaped, 100% stainless-steel grater for almost $20. It will last forever); good knives, a mortar and pestle, and a blender. I use the blender for anything that calls for a food-processor. It has, so far, made no difference. Likewise, I do not own a flour-sifter. For the kind of baking I do, mixing with a fork has always worked. Others may find that a food processor and a flour sifter are essential to their cooking. What I have found most important though, is to have things easily accessible and convenient to use. I know people who put away thier blender, toaster, any any other kitchen utensil when not in use. If the item is not out and easy to use though, it is less likely to get used.

One important thing this anal-retentive librarian had to get over when we started cooking seriously was that our kitchen is never completely clean, with every thing in its place. It is especailly important to me that we eat in the dining room, so I don't have to look at all the clutter in the kitchen at mealtime.

The Splendid Table

The Splendid Table is a program from American Public Media that airs on Saturday evenings on WBUR in Boston, our regular NPR station. The timing is such that we do not catch it very often, but oddly enough it was while shopping for this blog project that I happened to hear it this evening. I was on my way to Fresh Catch in Mansfield when I heard several segments of this week's program.

I learned, for example, why the sense of smell is most closely associated with emotional memories, and the difference between flavor and taste. I also learned what Thai cooking has in common with the early American ideas of health involving the "humors" of hot, cold, wet, and dry. I was most excited, however, to hear the geographic segment known as "Where We Eat," in which Jane and Michael Stern discuss independent restaurants they visit throughout the United States (and sometimes Mexico). Today their report was on a "hole-in-the-wall" place known as the Tucson Tamale Company. From vegan to sirloin, this place seems to have it all. We have not been in Tucson for quite a few years, and few of our friends are there any more, but when we return, this place is on my list. (I am just coming into my own as a tamale preparer, and also have been learning a bit about the Central American equivalent: nacatamales (made with banana leaves). From the on-air description, I am sure I could gain an education from the Tucson shop.

For this pair of foodie-geographers, the "Where We Eat" archive looks like a gold mine: organized by state, it has scores of reviews, with a map to each location!

Final note: last week the guests included Tom Owen of Sweet Maria's with a discussion of home coffee roasting. I look forward to hearing that one.

On this Day in Cooking History

Famous Universalist Fannie Farmer introduced standard cooking measures when her cookbook The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook was published on this day in 1896. Read more from this Mass e-moment