Marketing is a lot of work. . .

I can't say I'm pouring my time into marketing into the Pantry Cookbook with the same gusto as writing it, but I have been plodding along with my efforts, because if I do nothing to draw attention to the book, it'll just sit there, a lonely lump in the ether.  So!  What have I been up to?

First of all, there is the Facebook page.  What can I say, it's free.  I've been using it as a place to stockpile links to articles and websites that might be of interest to food banks.

I have also been using Facebook to get in touch with food banks.  It turns out a search for the term "food bank" yields a list of about three hundred.  I have left greetings on all of their walls once, and I am now going back for a second round.  It's tedious, but like I said, free.

I cringe that my messages on their walls might be seen as spam, but so far the only responses I have seen have been positive.  Most of the feedback is of the "wow, thanks for doing this!" variety, but I did get one food pantry state outright that they will make the Pantry Cookbook available free-of-charge to their clients.  Hooray!

The representative from that particular food bank described some of her food bank's patrons as "second generation non-cooks."  That phrase has really stuck with me.

Closer to home, my neighborhood food pantry, the Franklin Food Pantry, found two businesses willing to cover the printing costs for a first run of 300 books.  These will be made available to clients, and this gave me the opportunity to see what difficulties people are likely to have when attempting to do their own publishing.  Most notably, I need to make it clear that if a program wants to add some simple benefactor information into the cookbook, there are two pages I strategically left blank just for that purpose.  Not that I mind if anyone wants to get out their digital tools and really monkey with the book!  It just happens that changing the number of pages can have unintended consequences, such as causing everything previously on a left-hand page to end up on the right, and vice-versa.

On the non-digital front, I picked out five big-looking food banks and mailed them each a copy.  This afternoon, I heard back from one of them:


"On behalf of the nutrition education staff at the Capital Area Food Bank of Washington, DC, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude for sending us a copy of The Pantry Cookbook.  In our department we are dedicated to carrying out the mission of the food bank, that is, providing the underserved communities of our nation’s capital with sufficient, nutritious food while simultaneously offering education around the food we distribute.   This book will no doubt serve as a valuable tool for more fully carrying out that mission."

Well!  It's not an absolute yes-we-will-print-your-book-right-away, but someone there is excited about what I have done!  I will put on my patient optimism hat, and imagine that the Pantry Cookbook is being handed around, discussed, and perhaps salivated over.  Just a little

CreateSpace: Questions Answered!

I called up CreateSpace to get more information on publishing. The nice fellow walked me through the steps of submitting files, getting and reviewing a proof, and ordering copies. Basically, if I have the whole month of November to wrangle these steps, that will provide ample time to iron out last-minute bugs and order up a Big Box of Books. (And that will also give me the month of November to do NaNoWriMo - win!)

The other things that I discussed with the nice phone fellow were more specific to this project. If I use a Creative Commons copyright thingee that specifies that anyone can publish this book so long as the profits go to to a non-profit organization, then yes! CreateSpace will have no problem with this. Other groups can upload the same files. Their copy will be assigned its own ISBN, but that's the only difference.

This is FANTASTIC! It means any food pantry can upload the digital files to CreateSpace, and then direct their supporters to buy copies online, or or place bulk-order copies for their patrons, entirely independent of me. Especially good, since I was envisioning a best-case-scenario gone horribly horribly wrong, with me being swamped with phone calls and having to order Big Boxes of Books for food pantries all over the country. (Shoot for the moon, knock the moon out of the sky, rocks fall, everyone dies!)

My last question for CreateSpace involved royalties. Could I split my royalties so that half goes to a non-profit org? Sadly, no, they can only send royalties to one person.

I'm still on the fence about making money from this, and I'm frustrated that I would have to choose between taking the royalties or giving them all away.

Another Food Bank Cookbook

Hey, I found another food bank cookbook! And it's sequel! This one originates with the Oregon State University's extension service, and overall it looks pretty darn good. The spread of recipes looks excellent, and tasty, and doesn't rely too much on unnecessary gadgets or disposables. There is a heavy focus on nutrition, which is excellent! The food safety tips are excellent. But the nutrition info is flawed, thanks to the government; see below. Additionally, the book has the typical cookbook fault of featuring individual recipes, rather than teaching techniques. (As Alton Brown would put it, the book gives driving directions rather than a map, which makes getting lost a tragic ordeal.)

I will have to steal their idea of having a page of ingredient substitutions. That's highly useful.

About that nutrition info:

It's not the cookbook's fault, but their use of the food pyramid makes me sad. This is because the food pyramid is deeply flawed. Thanks to Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food, I now know that the nutritionist who was responsible for the design of the pyramid originally made the bottom of the pyramid vegetables - I repeat, vegetables! - while diminishing the grains section to a much smaller slot, and specifying that the grains be whole grains. Then politics got involved, and lobbyists undermined the eating habits of a generation of school children by making it sound as if refined grains, and lots of them, were a required part of a healthy diet.

I remember when that food pyramid was enshrined in our school cafeteria food line. It seemed so helpful! So friendly!

Barf!

This pyramid that replaced it was not much of an improvement. Look, all of the food fell off! I am deeply suspicious of those proportions, but that's irrelevant anyway, because it's impossible to read.

Finally, it seems like the FDA has realized the error of trying to squeeze too much info into one image. This is much clearer. But it also makes one glaring fault stand out: a major swath of the population can't digest milk. Clearly, dairy is not necessary to a healthful diet, at all, and yet our government persists in telling us that it is, thanks to dairy lobbyists.

Moo.

Nutrition and Income; a Rival Cookbook

This is interesting - and it fits with some observations that I have made. A Canadian study has confirmed that people at low incomes eat less nutritious foods. But the study shows that people at high incomes have the same problem. Those who have too little money can't afford the food. Those who make a lot of money lack the time to cook.

In other news, I ordered up a copy of the Washington State Chef's Association Food Bank Challenge Cookbook, created by professional chefs as a way to give something back to the community. This is the best food bank cookbook I have found so far. (The competition isn't stiff; of the handful I have found, most are collections of recipes available only online, small in scope, some seemingly abandoned halfway through compilation.)

It's an interesting read. At 77 pages, it contains 64 recipes, organized into the categories of breakfast, appetizers and snacks, soups and salads, veggies and starches, entrees, and desserts. The balance of recipe types seems well considered, as does the nutritional content of the recipes.

And these recipes are nothing if not fun. "Peach Rice Pilaf", "Portuguese Goulash with Garlic Smashed Potatoes", "Polenta Cake" (a dessert), and "Pan Seared Halibut in Grapefruit Cilantro Butter Sauce" are just a few of the recipes.

Many of the recipes do call of oddly specific ingredients, such as a specific brand of cookie. But I understand how they arrived at this: those who contributed were required to choose ingredients from the shelves of the food bank. However, I can't help but imagine the frustration of a food bank patron with limited cooking experience faltering when the one specific brand of canned soup couldn't be found.

I also find it disturbing that several recipes call for the use of infant formula. If a food bank client is in need of formula, then life has gone very, very wrong for them, and if the food bank is in short supply because some jerk has gone and taken the formula for use in a casserole - that makes me angry.

(I will now divert myself from ranting further on the topic, and instead get this post finished so that I can go feed my own hungry 11-day-old baby.)

Back to the cookbook. So, it is a robust and well-rounded collection of for the most part nifty recipes. Good job WSCA! What a great way to help your community!

And now, for my own cookbook project, I must ask: how could a food bank cookbook be even better than this? More explanation of cooking terms and techniques would help. Less assumption that the cook owns items such as a food processor, or can afford disposables such as aluminum foil. Less ambiguity in general - there is, for example, one recipe which calls for "chicken cutlet slices" and makes no mention of whether these chicken pieces should be cooked or not. This sort of ambiguity wouldn't phase a professional chef who already knows how to handle chicken, but to a novice, it's dangerous. I recently listened to a coworker's tale of attempting to make chicken quesadillas. Because the recipe was ambiguous, he used raw chicken. And he ate the half-cooked results.

I hadn't thought about it before, but just because someone is a professional chef does not necessarily make them a good writer. And I begin to see more clearly the awesomeness of professional food writers and editors.

On a slight tangent, I read a disparaging comment about Alton Brown recently, saying that he is not a chef, merely a cook. But in the opening of one of his cookbooks, Brown explained that he did not merely want to give a list of recipes, like most cookbooks. As he said, a recipe is like directions to a location in an unfamiliar city. Make one wrong turn, and you are lost for good. Alton Brown wants to give the reader a map. And that is what I want to do, too. All hail Alton!

I'm a mediocre cook and a mediocre writer, but perhaps these two things combined can work to my advantage.

Says the WSCA website of their cookbook, "So far we have given out 3000 copies to local food banks. 6 other states have also expressed interest."

An impressive number! I wonder if I can beat that? I suppose I had better get my nose to the grindstone if that's what I want to achieve.

What Exactly Is the Pantry Cookbook?

Check out the new digs! Things over in the garden blog were getting too cluttered up with recipes and rough drafts, so I have opened up shop here. This blog is not meant to be anything final or fully organized or complete or pretty. It's just a staging area, so that I can get feedback on what I am doing, and so that the folks at Franklin's Food Pantry can keep an eye on things.

So what is the Pantry Cookbook? In case someone new wanders in here, let me explain. There are people who need the services of food banks who do not know how to cook. If you get all of your meals from fast food and heat-and-serve prepackaged foodstuffs, that's a surefire way to A. not get enough nutrition, and B. become obese, since the cheapest of premade calories are refined carbohydrates - empty calories.

Most frequently it is families with children and the elderly who need the services of food banks. But it can also be college students, or adults who have found themselves in between jobs.

This book is primarily going to be a collection of recipes that follow these guidelines:

1. The ingredients are all "whole foods", meaning as unprocessed as possible, with the exception of such things as bread and cheese.

2. The ingredients are as cheap and readily available as possible.

3. The recipes are as simple as possible.

4. The recipes are designed not just to help someone cook that single dish, but to teach them the fundamentals of how to cook. Thus the cookbook includes instructions for making things as simple as fried eggs or sauteed greens.

5. The recipes are divided into quick recipes, longer-cooking recipes that can be made in advance, and recipe components that can be made in advance.

6. The recipes require only the most basic of kitchen equipment. No electric gadgets, with perhaps one or two exceptions.

Friends and kind strangers have generously made contributions to this collection - thanks! Please do continue to pass along recipes that you would like to share! I can't promise that they will make it into the cookbook, or that they will remain unchanged if they do, but even the ones I have to discard inspire me.

Would you like to test recipes for me? I do need feedback particularly from people who aren't already good in the kitchen. I want to know if my recipes are easy to follow, and if they result in a tasty outcome.

The cookbook currently has about 60 recipes, and needs at least another 40 to be fully rounded. The book will also contain a list of the whole foods that the recipes are based on, including nutrition and basic storage and processing information. It will also contain a section of other information, such as general food and kitchen safety, and examples of how to plan a week's worth of meals.

Thanks to some terrific feedback from friends about how people use their cookbooks, I think I have an index scheme that will help to guide new cooks through all of this. It will go something like this:

Part 1: instructions on how and why to use the book, table of contents.

Part 2: an organized list of common, inexpensive whole foods, including nutrition, basic cooking, handling, and/or use instructions. Each food item will be followed by a list of the recipes it appears in, with page numbers.

Part 3: recipes, divided up into entrees, side dishes, desserts, etc.

Part 4: miscellaneous information on food safety, basic kitchen equipment, planning for a week's worth of meals, etc.

Part 5: index.

My first goal is to get all of this written and compiled into a format that can be shared online as a document, and cheaply printed. Printed copies can be made available to food bank users, and also used as a fundraising tool.

Franklin Food Pantry Steve Sherlock also envisions this becoming the start of a wiki, complete with glorious hyperlinks!

My basic goal is to get this up and running for the Franklin Food Pantry, but I dearly hope it will be good enough that other food banks and nutrition programs will want to use it.

Potato Recipes

I suppose the advantage of organizing the cookbook by food type is that when the food bank is given a crate full of potatoes, they could easily print out the potato section, and make copies available to anyone who goes home with potatoes.

Chris told me a depressing story of bok choy sitting at a food bank until most of it rotted, because so few of the patrons knew what to do with it.

Potatoes

Mashed Potatoes

(quick side dish)

You will need about one large potato per person. The potatoes may be mashed with the skin on, if you like it that way. If you leave the skin on, be sure to scrub the potatoes thoroughly under running water with a scrub brush. You may want to trim the eyes off of your potatoes even if you leave the skins on.

You can speed the cooking time by cutting the potatoes into pieces. The smaller you cut them, the faster they will cook.

Watch out – when boiling the potatoes in water, if your pot is very full, the water may suddenly boil over the top, due to the starch in the water. If your pot starts to boil over, reduce the heat and stir the pot.

about 1 large potato per person

salt and pepper to taste

(optional) milk, cream, or butter

(optional) garlic powder

Scrub and/or peel the potatoes. Slice them into medium chunks into a pot, and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil. In ten minutes or so, stick a fork into one of the potato chunks. When the fork slides easily into the potato, it is time to drain and mash.

Drain the potatoes using a colander, or by holding the potatoes in the pot with the lid while pouring the water in the sink. Add some salt and pepper, and a little of the optional milk, cream, or butter, and garlic powder. Use a potato masher to mash the potatoes. Taste, and add more seasonings and optionals as necessary.

Serve as a side dish with gravy, ketchup, or butter.

Leftover mashed potatoes can be used to make Cheesy Potato Soup.

Cheesy Potato Soup

(quick meal)

This soup can be made from scratch, or can be made from leftover mashed potatoes. For one serving of soup, you will need:

1 large potato (or about a cup of mashed potatoes)

½ cup grated cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

(optional) milk, cream, chicken stock, beef stock, etc.

(optional) some cooked sausage, cooked chicken, or other leftover cooked meat, or ham

(optional) other herbs and spices

(optional) chopped vegetables

The basic soup is made by slicing the potato into rough chunks, covering with water (just like mashed potatoes), boiling until a fork easily slides through the potato, mashing with a potato masher, and then adding cheese and seasonings. If starting with mashed potatoes, add water to the mashed potatoes and heat until boiling; then add cheese and seasonings.

Using just potatoes, cheese, and seasonings, you can make a hearty soup. However, this recipe is a blank slate waiting for other things to be added to it! Here are some possible variations:

Italian Potato Soup. Start by browning the meat from one or two Italian sausages (squeeze the meat out of the casing like toothpaste, and discard the casing) and a chopped onion Put the cooked sausage and onion aside, and cook the potatoes. Drain off half of the potato water, mash, add grated parmesan cheese, and then add chicken stock until the desired consistency is reached. Add the sausage and onions, and Italian seasonings. Salt and pepper to taste.

Potato Soup with Carrots and Ham. Sauté some sliced carrots in the pan, then put the carrots aside while the potatoes cook. When the potatoes are done, drain off half of the water, mash, add cheddar cheese, add the carrots, add diced ham, and add milk until the desired consistency is reached. Salt and pepper to taste.

Potato and Greens Chicken Soup. Cook the potatoes in chicken stock, along with a few peeled cloves of garlic. Mash; add cheese, cooked chicken, and chopped greens. Salt and pepper to taste.

Home Fries

(quick breakfast or side dish)

You will need about 1 large potato per person.

1 large potato, diced

½ an onion, diced

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Peel or thoroughly scrub your potato, then cut into bite-sized pieces. Cut the onion into pieces of about the same size. Heat the butter and oil in a pan on medium high heat until the butter melts; then add the potato and onion. Stir to coat with the butter and oil, and sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. (Go easy on the salt and pepper - you can always add more later.

Stir often, browning the potatoes, until they start to stick to the pan, at which point, turn down the heat to medium low. Continue to stir about once every 45 seconds. After about five minutes, test a piece of potato (by tasting it). When the desired tenderness is reached, remove the pan from the heat, add additional seasonings to taste, and serve.

Possible variations: add ham. Add curry spices. Add hot pepper flakes. Toss grated cheese on top when the potatoes are done cooking. Serve with Southern style gravy and sautéed greens, and call it a meal.

Inspirational Food Pantry Visit, Oats, and Tuna

I finally visited the Franklin Food Pantry today, and I'm still giddy! After two years of following his blog, I finally got to meet Steve Sherlock, who is on the pantry's board of directors; and I also got to meet Anne Marie Bellavance, who was simultaneously running the pantry, directing a gaggle of volunteers, and giving me a tour.

I can't believe how excited they are that I am writing this cookbook for them! Right now I feel like I could wear a cardboard sign that says "will work for raw enthusiasm!" (A rather tasteless joke, I know, considering that the aim of this project is to help people who are out of work and out of grocery money. But I'm all bubbly, and I approve of off-color humor.)

Along with meeting these wonderful people, I got to see what exactly is on the shelves of a food bank. It turned out to be about what I expected: boxed prepared foods, canned whole ingredients, peanut butter, tuna, pasta (lots of whole grain), rice (including brown), bread (or at least an empty table where day-old Panera bread spawns at regular intervals) and some freezers and refrigerators containing ground meats, whole chickens, eggs, and sometimes cheese and frozen vegetables.

Food pantry users can stop in weekly for bread, and can schedule a monthly visit to fill up a bag of groceries. That doesn't strike me as very much, but I imagine when you are in dire straights for food, it would mean the world. And their policy is that when a new client comes in to sign up, they leave with a bag of groceries whether or not they are able to get all of their paperwork in order at that time.

Steve is working on the new and improved pantry website, including straightforward info on how to sign up to become a food pantry client, and how to sign up to become a volunteer.

I got to present them with a first draft of the cookbook. It's already 25 pages, and contains almost 40 recipes! Steve wants to eventually put it in wiki format, and he was excited at the idea of using printed versions to sell for fundraising.

After having made hundreds of mostly useless pieces of art that have gone under my bed or sold for a pittance, it is an amazing feeling to be making something that has such potential to immediately help people, both directly, by teaching them how to wisely stretch their food dollars, and indirectly, by raising money. Hopefully, this will be a useful enough tool that it can be passed along to other food banks around the country.

Now then; here are today's recipes. The pancakes are adapted from a Joy of Cooking recipe. I cooked the book's version this morning with great success, but have not yet tested this simplified version. (The original calls for cooked oatmeal. Surely that was meant to use up leftovers, and not a necessary step.) The second I will be testing for dinner, and the third is untested so far.

I need to consult my Joy of Cooking more often: it was published in the 50's and contains wonderful old-school tips, like the method of judging a pan's heat by flicking water into it.

Oatmeal Pancakes

(quick meal)

Makes about 12 pancakes.

1 ½ cups rolled or quick oats

1 ½ cups milk

½ cup whole wheat or white flour

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

(optional) 2 tbsp melted butter or bacon grease

1 egg

(optional) frozen or fresh berries, chopped dried fruit, chopped nuts

Preheat a griddle or large skillet at a medium-high heat. In a mixing bowl, combine egg, milk, salt, baking soda, and oats. Beat with a fork until thoroughly mixed. Melt the butter in the microwave, or by putting it in a metal measuring cup and setting it on the hot cooking surface. Stir the melted butter or grease into the mixture. (The butter or bacon grease should prevent the pancakes from sticking to the pan.) Add the flour. Stir until the mixture is mostly mixed, but still has a few lumps.

You can tell that the griddle or pan is the right temperature by flicking a few drops of water on the surface. When the drops skitter around, the skillet is the right temperature. If the drops immediately become steam, the skillet is too hot. If the drops don’t move around, the skillet isn’t hot enough.

When the skillet is the correct temperature, spoon the batter into the pan. Cook the pancakes for about three minutes, until golden brown on the bottom. If you want to add optional berries, fruit, or nuts, sprinkle those on top of the pancakes now while they cook. Push them down into the pancakes with your fingers if necessary. Then flip the pancakes, and cook for an additional three minutes or so, until cooked through.

Serve with maple syrup, butter, honey, or jelly.

If making large quantities of pancakes, or cooking in many batches, set the oven on its lowest setting, and stack the finished pancakes on a plate in the oven.

Pancakes can also be frozen, and reheated later in a toaster, in the microwave, or under the broiler.

Creamy Tuna Pasta

(quick meal)

This is a quick version of Tuna Noodle Casserole that uses whole ingredients instead of canned “ cream of” sauces. Such canned sauces are low in nutrients and high in sugar, salt, oils, and other things that would be best left out of one‘s diet, such as MSG. Feeds four or five people.

1 chopped onion

(optional) canned or fresh mushrooms

1 or 2 cans of tuna

1 tbsp butter

1 tbsp flour

1 cup milk

1 or 2 cups vegetables, such as frozen peas, chopped broccoli, frozen spinach, etc.

(optional) 1 cup of grated cheddar, Swiss, or other cheese

(optional) dill

Salt and pepper to taste

Egg noodles, or pasta, or rice

Start cooking the noodles or rice. In another pan, melt the butter, and sauté the onions and mushrooms for a few minutes. Sprinkle in the flour, stirring over the heat for another couple of minutes, and then add the milk. When the milk comes to a boil, add the tuna and veggies. Simmer until the veggies are cooked to your liking; then stir in the grated cheese, and add salt and pepper and optional dill to taste.

If you opt not to use cheese, try adding more tuna or more vegetables to fill out the meal.

Serve over egg noodles, pasta, or rice.

Tuna Noodle Casserole

(cook in advance)

Cooking tuna noodle as a casserole may take too long to be convenient on a busy weeknight, but comes in handy if you have more cooking time and a large group of people to feed. It also makes sense for pot lucks, because it can be cooked a few hours in advance, kept warm in the oven on low heat, and then brought to the potluck in just one container.

Tuna Noodle Casserole is almost the same as Cheesy Tuna Pasta, except that it is baked. To make tuna noodle casserole without using canned “cream of” sauces, follow the above directions, doubling or tripling as necessary. Egg noodles are traditional, rather than rice or pasta, but any of the above should work. Instead of adding the cheese and veggies to the sauce in the pan, layer all of the ingredients in a casserole dish, with the pasta or rice on the bottom. Top with extra cheese and bread crumbs. Bake at 350 degrees until the sauce bubbles.

[Edit] After testing this tuna pasta recipe again, and not getting great results, I have reworked these tuna recipes.

Food Pantry Cookbook: First Deadline

Hello to everyone who has contributed recipes or who has considered doing so! On Saturday the 19th I will be meeting with Franklin Food Pantry board member Steve Sherlock (and checking out the food pantry, woot!). I intend to print out a first copy of the cook book for him to share with the board. It'll have about half of the final content in it, and will still be in a first-draft stage, but hopefully it'll give them a good idea of where I'm going with this, and it will help them figure out how they would like to make it available on the Food Pantry's webpage. Perhaps it could be used in printed form as a fundraising tool, too.

Anyway, this next week would be a great time to get more recipes to me, if you have more to share. If you aren't sure that a particular recipe is entirely appropriate for this particular project, that's okay; I'll be testing and tweaking each recipe to make them suitable. Not all will make it into the final cookbook, but even the ones I filter out will be deeply appreciated. :)

Currently, these are the most conspicuous gaps in the cookbook:

beef (With an emphasis on dishes that use the least expensive cuts of beef, such as cube steak, or whatever cuts of meat go into pot roast. Ground meats are already pretty well covered.)
pork (Same as with beef.)
beets
wheat flour, preferably whole (I would like a very simple bread recipe, for example. And maybe a cookie recipe.)

Got a recipe you would like to contribute? THANKS!

[edit] Suzi responded with the following:

Cube Steak is versatile, yet not as cheap as one would think. Typically, it is sirloin that is run through a tenderizer.

Here are a couple things I do with it. . .

1. Cut into slices and cooked (Fry in butter) with onions and mushrooms. Used as sandwich meat. Sauce can be as simple as Worchestershire or you can make gravy with the drippings!
2. Coat with batter and fry to make chicken fried steak

Anything can be made into potroast.
Simple rules I follow:
Meat 3-5lbs(Chuck Roast, Top or Bottom Roast, etc)
Sear it so that the outsides are browned (this will trap in the juices)
Add in Carrots, Potatoes, Celery, etc.
Add in just enough broth to cover the meat 1/2 way.
Then, pop a lid on a put into the oven at 275 for 3-4.5 hours - the more sinewous the meat, the longer as low temperature.
This can also be accomplished in a slow cooker - on low - for 6 ot 8 hours.

Simple is best.


Cheap Pork -

I get boneless porkchops.
They are relatively inexpensive.

I pound thin - and lightly coat with flour.

Then, I fry/sear the outsides to just a light brown in a bit of butter.

Then, I pop them on a pan and stick them in the oven at 350 for about 30 minutes. .

Perfectly done - moist bites.
Typically, I serve with a few veggies and potato. =)

Writing for the Food Pantry

Thank you everyone for your feedback on my last post! You’ve given me a lot to think about. In particular, Sonya reminded me that there is already a ton of cooking information readily available on the internet, including this noteworthy website, which is a solid base of information for almost anyone who wants to learn about cooking.

Almost. But I’m actually not looking to cater to the nine-tenths of the population who would most benefit by this resource. They are already well taken care of by the internet, Alton Brown, and a bazillion cookbooks.

When I think about who I would like this project to be for, the first person who comes to mind is my husband. Back when he was in college, before I knew him, Chris spent a period of some months subsisting on frozen chicken patties. And a weekly McBurger. And not much else. It wasn’t for lack of access to a kitchen that he ate such a horrifying diet; it was due to a lack of money, and a total lack of knowledge of what to do with the little money that he had.

Instead of those chicken byproducts, I could imagine for the same price Chris returning from his weekly shopping with potatoes, dry beans, cheese, and a different vegetable each week, say carrots, or cabbage. Add to that some cooking oil, salt, and pepper, and suddenly it looks like the start of some real meals, and not some wretched prison diet.

The startcooking.com website comes pretty darn close to being what Chris needed. But the thing that stops me from just suggesting that the Food Pantry website put a link there and call it a day is that so many of the recipes call for things like dry white wine, or a food processor, or having multiple types of oil in your cupboard. Someone with a lack of cooking knowledge won’t know that they can make substitutions for expensive ingredients or contraptions.

These are the guidelines that I am using when writing for the food pantry:

1. Recipes and articles that suggest the most inexpensive, widely available, nutritious, and whole ingredients possible. This does include canned goods, but I am avoiding anything canned or packaged that contains more than one ingredient or that goes by a brand name.

2. Recipes and articles that suggest the most inexpensive and widely available kitchen hardware.

3. Recipes that take a minimum of time to make (with the exception of foods that can be cooked in advance and stored).

4. Recipes and articles that suggest food storage as a means of saving time and effort. For example, information on freezing cooked beans or chopped vegetables, coupled with recipes that use these prepared foods.

5. Recipes that are wide open for substitutions of ingredients, such as soups.

I do need to pay a visit to the food pantry to see what they have in abundance. I have reason to believe that I’ll see a lot of canned tuna and canned beets. Alas, the pantry is only open when I am at work, so it may be a while before I have the opportunity.

If anyone reading this knows of any sources of cooking information that already cover these bases, I would very much like to know! The closest I have found, so far, is this awesome little cookbook written by a scout for her local food bank. (She started the project by doing a tally of what was on the food bank's shelves, and spent many hours testing the recipes. What an amazing young woman!) I will ask Steve to include some sort of links section in Franklin’s food pantry website to connect readers up to this sort of thing. And if it turns out that somewhere out there is a database that already contains what I’m after, I’ll happily pass that along to Steve and turn my attention to other projects! I am much too lazy to reinvent the wheel.

The following is a sample of what I have written and photographed so far:

Cooking Dry Beans

Beans that you cook yourself are cheaper and are lower in salt than canned beans.

Dry beans take a while to cook, but they are highly nutritious, and high in fiber. Beans are great when added to soups, stews, and casseroles. Cooked beans can be frozen for use later, so it makes sense to cook a lot of them at once and then freeze them.

To cook dry beans, follow the directions on the bean bag. Different sorts of dry beans have different soaking and cooking times. When the beans are soft enough to eat, but not yet falling apart, drain the water. You can then either add the beans to a recipe right away, or store them in a plastic box or bag in the freezer.

Frozen beans stick together, so you will need to either freeze them in small quantities, or pry them apart when you want to use some for cooking. A butter knife works reasonably well for breaking off frozen beans.

Beans can be kept frozen for months at a time. Use frozen beans just as you would use drained canned beans.

Chicken Bean Stew

½ lb boneless chicken

2 cups frozen beans (or one or two drained cans of beans)

2 carrots (or other vegetables)

2 sticks celery (or other vegetables)

1 tbsp flour (optional)

1 tsp cumin

1 tbsp oil

1 bullion cube plus two cups of water (or two cups of chicken or veggie stock)

Cooked rice (optional)

Black pepper

Salt (optional)

Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Coat with the flour and cumin, and brown it in the oil. (The flour is optional - it is there to thicken the sauce.) Dice the carrots and celery, and toss them in the pot. (Other veggies can be used here, instead, such as onion, potato, kale, etc., and exact quantities aren't important.) Add the water and bullion (or chicken stock), bring to a boil, and simmer five or ten minutes, until the chicken and veggies are cooked. Add the beans, and heat until everything is bubbly and delicious. Season with salt and pepper. Eat as-is, or over rice. Serves three to six people, depending on how much rice you serve it with.

Food Pantry on my Mind

I’ve been thinking about food lately.

Fellow blogger and ever-dedicated-to-the-community Franklin resident Steve Sherlock is a board member of our town’s food pantry. He posts updates about the pantry on his Franklin Matters blog. A recent entry caught my eye: it was a list of items that the food pantry is particularly in need of. I skimmed over the list, made a mental note to drop off another bag of groceries for the food pantry. . . and then did a double take. A surprisingly large part of the list was for pre-made items, such as canned pasta, canned stew, or boxed side dishes.

So I asked Steve: wouldn’t it make more sense to stock the pantry with staples that are generally cheaper, and more nutritious? And I wandered away toying with the notion of writing recipes to submit to the food pantry along with donations of such staples - because in all likelihood if people aren’t cooking from staples, it is because they don’t know how.

Steve replied: “Michelle, I understand your desire for more of a healthy food request. We are heading in that direction. The Food Pantry instituted a farmer's market on Monday's last year to distribute the fresh produce we were able to obtain. We are working as part of the Community Gardens project to further that effort this year. By re-doing the Food Pantry website, we intend to incorporate a blog which will also feature healthy recipes. You also give me an idea that we can solicit recipes from the community (like yourself) as well as from other food and health writers. Thanks!”

Well, we certainly seem to be thinking along the same lines! So I’ve started writing down recipes. And not just recipes: I’m sticking to explaining the basics. What do you do with dry beans, uncooked rice, fresh kale, whole chicken, and the like? And perhaps just as important: how to you go about managing the often lengthy process of cooking from scratch with a hectic lifestyle in which the chefs may be working multiple jobs and raising children all at once?

I have read, and enjoyed, the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, but I found that at the same time as the book made me hungry for her lifestyle, it made me frustrated. The author was able to grow and cook most of her own food because she freelanced from home, and because she had decided to make a major change in her lifestyle that placed food-making as both her major hobby and as her career, in that it was research for her book.

These options simply aren’t available for so many working parents. You can’t harvest or tend a garden well if you aren’t home during daylight hours for most of the week. You can’t build and bake a casserole for your family if you get home at 6:30 PM and have small children to be fed. You and your family, it seems, can eat organic, home-grown food - if you are willing to set aside a fulfilling career in order to be a subsistence farmer and professional cook.

It’s no wonder that so many American families have turned to prepackaged foods. While I learned the foundations about cooking from my mother, I also experienced what happens when a stay-at-home mother goes back to work: boxed side-dishes, canned peas, and shake-n-bake.

But this is not to say that my mother made a mistake. Why did my father not step in and learn to cook, for instance? (He did contribute, but it was with the same convenience foods.) Why should she bear all of the burden for feeding the family, (and cleaning for the family, all on the heels of the inescapable biological duties of pregnancy and breast-feeding) when she also needed desperately to have a life away from cooking and child-rearing?

Our society has been in flux for a hundred years or more. Gender rolls have not yet settled. As a society, we are seeking a balance that gives women (and men) the freedom to choose and swap and reinvent our roles. As the multi-generational transition has rolled along, certain types of historically gender-specific work have been lost to many families, particular those families in economic distress, in the process of liberating us from our historic, crushing roles of reproduction and child-rearing. Subsequent generations have often not known where to pick up where their parents left off, leaving the problem to persist from generation to generation.

For instance, a friend of mine told me about how her own mother had relied on pre-packaged foods, sans fresh vegetables, in a rotation of brands as regular as clockwork. This friend didn’t learn how to cook from anyone else, and limped through her children’s’ younger years in the same manner. Although she has been expanding her cooking horizons recently, one of her teenaged children still refuses to eat anything but hot pockets.

Just yesterday in a doctor’s office I was struck by the contrast of recipes in two magazines. One was a fancy food publication, featuring a recipe for beef Wellington. If you aren’t familiar with the dish, here’s the simple version: an expensive cut of meat, coated first in fois gras, then in a blend of butter and truffles. Then it is wrapped in crepes, and then in puff pastry. On top of that goes a sauce. It represents an absolutely stunning amount of kitchen labor. I’ve never had the stuff, and I expect if I ever do encounter beef Wellington, it will be in a fancy restaurant with a high price tag and a lot of wine.

The other recipe? Doctored-up Kraft mac-n-cheese. This one was in a magazine for parents.

Somehow I can only imagine the beef Wellington being cooked, on rare special occasions, by childless couples who have taken up cooking with the same intensity as those who do Civil War reenacting, or those who build and fly model airplanes. (And all the power to them! Thank heavens someone out there is perpetuating cooking as an art. Please invite me to dinner!) But for families, strapped for cash and cooking in a hurry, even the professional publications can’t seem to get past the boxed-food cream-of-mushroom shortcuts.

Where are the peasant dishes from around the world that feature cheap whole ingredients? Healthful ingredients? Why are we reluctant to eat a cabbage and beans that cost less, fill more plates, and contain more nutrition than cans of ravioli? Is it because we have forgotten that such an option exists, or are we ashamed, still, of eating “peasant food”?

I am ever grateful to my mother for teaching me how to cook, and even more so, now that I see that the gift of cooking knowledge is not one that was handed to every person who ever intended to raise and feed their own family. I can’t feed the world, but I can write, and I can cook the basics, so maybe I can do some small bit of good by sharing my knowledge with those who could use it.

Now who’s with me? Every little bit counts. Get in touch if you would like to contribute a recipe or an article that could help someone who has little money, time, or experience. All contributions will go to the Franklin Food Pantry website - and from there, who knows where they will end up. There is no compensation involved beyond the joy of helping families in need.

Thank you. And thanks for reading!