Paris was, well, Paris.  Lovely, dreamy, even when it was cold and gray and en greve.

Now we’re back for a couple of days before our next trip.  Today I caught up on e-mail (which I hate) and did laundry (which I love.)  The cat is glued to my side.  Rain is falling, at long last, on my parched patch of earth.

After two weeks of rich French food, it was a pure pleasure to have swiss chard for lunch, with just a drizzle of olive oil and peppery tarragon vinegar for flavor.

Today feels like a huge, deep breath of home.

I blame parents.

Easy to say for one who is not a parent!  But I have heard too many caregivers lament that their child “will only eat” macaroni and cheese or hot dogs.  As one of my classmates points out, when given the choice, any child (or human, if allowed to act on his basest impulses) will gravitate toward the sweeter, more calorie-dense food.  It’s our instinct, derived from the days when such foods were very hard to come by — restricted to finding a patch of berries or a hive of honey.  Today, as others have already stated, such foods are actually cheaper (with externalized costs, of course) than nutritious foods, and they are certainly easier to serve.  But since when do we allow a child’s preference to govern his rules for living?  We don’t let him choose whether or not to brush his teeth, go to school, or say his prayers.  Why would we let him choose what’s on the dinner menu, beyond such reasonable choices as “green beans or broccoli?”

Many of you have indicated causes of childhood obesity with which I can’t argue: working parents, busy schedules, child-centered advertising.  I think there is one more vastly important factor: the demise of home cooking.  Statistics show unilaterally that fewer and fewer people cook for themselves — even when “cooking” is widened to mean putting together a sandwich from purchased ingredients.  Children are not learning how to come home from school, cut up carrot sticks and peel an orange — and, at a later age, to saute onions and garlic for a sauce or set bread to rise in a warm place.  They certainly are not learning where the carrots and onions come from, when to plant them and how long to wait before pulling them up.  I was lucky enough to be raised by parents who did everything themselves, but I constantly meet people my age and older who say they can’t (or just don’t) cook, and that number seems to rise exponentially as age decreases.

At this point I’d like to surrender my point of view to two gentlemen who are far more convincing and knowledgeable than I.  One is Michael Pollan, who has already been referenced several times on this board.  Please do read all of his books; they are wonderful.  However, this article (it’s long, but worth it) from the New York Times Magazine last year reinforces my argument by illuminating one of the strangest dichotomies in modern times: the huge popularity of cooking shows on television and the dearth of skilled home cooks.  We spend untold amounts of time and money watching Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and Emeril, but we are less and less likely to translate that enthusiasm into our own kitchens and dining rooms, mostly because we haven’t seen and modeled that behavior from a young age.

However, on that note, the second reference I want to make is to this excellent lecture (about 20 minutes) by Jamie Oliver.  Yes, Jamie Oliver, the English chef / television personality.  It turns out he’s also a compassionate, dedicated humanitarian who is shocked and pained by the current crisis in child obesity, and determined to do all he can to alleviate it.  For me, the most moving moment in the film is when he confronts an obese mother with a dining-room table covered with pizza, corn dogs and sodas — all the food she typically feeds her two (also obese) children in a week.  “You are killing your children,” Oliver says simply.  It cuts like a knife, but it’s absolutely true.  This mother, by failing to pass on the skill set she never learned herself — how to make nutritious, satisfying, diverse meals — is setting her children up for severe health problems and an early death.  Sobering, but verifiable fact.

But, as Oliver points out, this crisis is entirely preventable.  Children who couldn’t identify a beet or a tomato (watch the video, seriously) can be taught to.  Children who will only eat macaroni and cheese can be taught to love spinach (and not only, Mrs. Seinfeld, through trickery.)  They love to help in the garden or in the kitchen, and they are far more likely to try diverse foods (and thus to learn weight-management behavior) when they have participated in the entire process of harvesting and preparing food.  We can fix this, one household at a time.

Yes, that is one single sweet potato.  After admiring it for several days, I peeled and boiled it, and mashed it with butter, cream and spices, beat in a few eggs, and poured it into a pie shell for the following masterpiece:

The pecans were an afterthought, because I tried blind-baking the crust only to have the edges slump down over themselves.  Storebought pie crusts are awful.  I only buy them because the ones I make myself are even worse.  I always end up cursing the dough, which is either too sticky or too crumbly.  It’s no use giving me advice, either.  I swear, I have tried every. single. method out there!

I know it’s trendy, but I really wish I were better and more consistent at preserving local foods in season.  I can a little, I freeze a little, but for the most part I just eat what’s available, and we’re coming up on a long stretch when that will be next to nothing.  I’ve wanted for several years now to have a winter garden, but that means planting in midsummer, and I never seem to get it together.  It makes me just sick to buy produce from halfway around the world — the fossil fuels are the main reason, but the cardboard flavor doesn’t help.

If I think about this sort of thing for too long, it makes me really depressed.  I try to remember that I’m doing the best I can with what I have.  Last night, what I had was sweet cream, freshly churned butter, and smooth speckled brown eggs from the farm.  “Local” spices.*  Blackstrap molasses from our Thanksgiving trip to Smithfield, Virginia last year.  A daddy-sized sweet potato.  And yes, a pie crust made from hydrogenated vegetable oil and refined flour.  It was still delicious.

*They were local when I bought them on the island of St. Lucia last summer.  I can’t really live without nutmeg and vanilla, so I figured it was better to support the local industries there than McCormick & Co. back home. And have you ever seen nutmeg growing on a tree?  It’s unreal!

How do I deal with stress?  I cook.  Seriously.  It is such a gift to be able to focus on something simple and beautiful that has the added bonus of being sustenance for your next busy day (or two.)

We buy raw milk from an out-of-state farmer (it’s illegal here in Maryland . . . socialists . . . ) and although it is the most delicious and healthy milk you can find, it has one disadvantage: it spoils quickly.  Purists will tell you that soured raw milk is actually better for you, as it has more beneficial bacteria and is more easily digestible.  They’re probably right.  But I just can’t drink it sour.  So when the milk goes bad, I usually have to pour it out.  At $7 a gallon.

No more!  I discovered recently that raw milk separates when it sours.  This means that when you heat it, it separates very easily into ricotta curds and clear whey.  (If yours doesn’t separate, simply add about 1/4 cup of white vinegar; this won’t affect the taste, but will help the milk curdle more easily.  This is also how you’d make ricotta from sweet milk.)  Strain the curds through a yogurt strainer or colander lined with several thicknesses of cheesecloth.  You now have sour ricotta cheese, which can be used to make this cheesecake, which will CHANGE YOUR LIFE:

Ricotta Cheesecake

(Recipe from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook, which you should purchase immediately, if not sooner)

• 1 1/2 pounds ricotta
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 6 eggs, separated
• 1/4 cup flour
• Zest of 2 lemons
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Generously butter and sugar a 9-inch springform pan.  Puree ricotta until smooth; stir in egg yolks, half the sugar, flour, zest and salt.  Beat egg whites until foamy; sprinkle remaining sugar in gradually while beating to stiff, glossy peaks.  Fold in ricotta mixture.  Try not to eat ALL of the batter before pouring it into the pan (at this point you can smell a little of the sourness, but it tastes totally normal) and baking at 375 until firm and deep golden brown on top, about 1 hour.  Serve to the friends you can’t believe are moving away, and try not to cry.

If you are lucky enough to have a gallon of un-soured milk, you absolutely must try making your own mozzarella.  (Don’t try to make mozzarella with soured milk.  Trust me.  It doesn’t work.)  Homemade mozzarella is embarrassingly easy and tastes exactly like the stuff you pay $10 per pound for at the store.  Here’s the short version:

Add 1 1/2 teaspoons citric acid to 1 cup of water.  Stir into a gallon of milk.  Heat to 90 degrees, turn off and add 1/4 of a rennet tablet dissolved in another 1/4 cup of water.  Cover for five minutes; the cheese will have formed a custard-like curd.  Cut it into squares in the pot, heat again until about 200 degrees, and ladle the curds into a colander.  Dunk them in hot water until they’re melty and stretchy, then knead and stretch until they look like real cheese!  Add salt if you want to (you’ll want to.)  If there’s any left after “tasting” it with your starving husband, store in a container of water in the refrigerator.  Specialty ingredients can be found at some fancy grocery stores or here, where you can buy a cheesemaking kit rather inexpensively.

Well, yes.  Homemade butter, made from raw cream, made from cows who eat grass out of an open, sunny field.  It’s easy.  Just put the cream in a jar and shake, preferably to a Led Zeppelin soundtrack, until you have a lump of pale gold.  And if you need more convincing, here’s something I’ve been making recently, which I think I got from Martha Stewart Living but cannot locate at present:

Take 1/2 cup (one stick, if storebought) softened butter.  Finely chop and stir in about a dozen Kalamata olives, 2 cloves  garlic (I put it through a press) and 2 tablespoons toasted pine nuts.  Put into a pretty dish and leave overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day, bliss will await you — the best way to eat this is slathered on grilled ears of corn, but it’s also wonderful on stir-fried pattypan squash, or even whole-wheat toast.  It will transform anything it touches.  That’s what makes butter great.

Oh, and if you dare to try this with any of the non-butter products out there, please don’t tell me, because I will be forced to hunt you down and cause you pain.

Last week, when picking up our share, we were told that the farm had been hit hard by a tomato blight that wiped out many thousands of dollars in profit.  The situation was so dire, said the woman who runs our drop site, that if it hadn’t been for the CSA customers (who pay up front for the whole season) the owners might have had to sell the farm.

Overwhelmed by gratitude for these people, who risk their financial health so we can have nice dinners, I wrote them an e-mail.  It was brief; I just told them that they were in our prayers, and ended by saying, “It is an honor to be able to support you in some small way.  The work you are doing — bringing us fresh, healthy, diverse produce — is the greatest on earth.”

(It may sound like an exaggeration, but I swear it’s not.  I’m currently reading In Defense of Food, and it makes me angrier and angrier to see how, as a society, we’ve been tricked into eating substances that are so chemical-laden they can hardly be termed nourishment.  It is such a gift to be able to eat real food.)

I didn’t really expect a response — I know how busy farmers are — but that very afternoon Joan wrote me back, thanking me for the encouragement.  She said that after a tough morning, she had printed my e-mail and taken it out to the field (how’s that for technology?!) where Drew was working.  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “He is smiling again.”

Later, Drew wrote me separately:

My morning started with a complaint from a disgruntled customer.  Everywhere I turned, I ran into more headaches. I joke about spending my days putting out fires; as a rule, these fires are easily contained. Other times other times they merge into conflagrations beyond my control. Today I felt like I needed a team of smoke jumpers to rescue me. I believe you may have been that brave soul. Thank you so much for your kind words.

I was so humbled by this exchange.  Humanity is such a mysterious thing.  We can never predict how far the ripples of our words might travel through it.

(For those of you who are unfamiliar with this exercise, it’s about widening your tastes and embracing your destiny as an omnivore.  You copy this list, bold all the items you’ve eaten and cross out any items that you would never consider eating.)

This entry is dedicated to my parents, who forced me to try many things I was sure I would hate.  Some of them, I did hate; I remember in particular an episode with shark soup when I was around 9.  I was crying and pouting that none of my FRIENDS had to eat anything as weird and gross as shark soup.  But honestly, I liked most of the things I tried, and now I scoff at the narrow range of a lot of my FRIENDS’ tastebuds.  (I once went out with a guy who, honest to God, didn’t like rice.  Rice!  Yeah, that didn’t last long, for obvious reasons.)

Parents, stick with it.  Don’t give in to the mac-and-cheese-or-PBJ-at-every-meal club.  It won’t kill your kids to miss dinner once in awhile if they refuse what you’ve prepared.  I turned out okay, right?

Right?

The Omnivore’s One Hundred (full list below)

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (I hope alligator counts.  Thanks, Ellicott Mills!)
6. Black pudding (Interestingly, the only foods I crossed out consisted were “meat” that isn’t muscle tissue.  I’ve never been very adventurous in that department.)
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush (Arabic dip / sauce made with eggplant)
11. Calamari
12. Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup)
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi (Indian curry made with potato and cauliflower)
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (I had to look this up.  It’s a really, really pungent French cheese.)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes (Even grew them myself. Yep, I’m bragging.)
22. Fresh wild berries (Ditto, at my parents’ house growing up.)
23. Foie gras (I tried a very little bit, but liver has always made me gag.  I’ve tried to overcome this to no avail.)
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese (You seriously don’t want to know what this is.)
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (accidentally, while preparing a marinade.  OUCH.)
27. Dulce de leche (Spanish caramel sauce)
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda (warm Italian vegetable dip)
31. Wasabi peas (My dad’s favorite snack)
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (If ayran counts; it’s the Armenian version.)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (I’ve had these separately, but not together.)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O (Every year at Mike’s!)
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail (used it to make broth.  Does this count?)
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (My dad and his friend once gave me what they said were chocolate covered ants.  I wasn’t sure whether they were lying, and I’m still not sure, but I’m going to go with truthfulness for now.)
43. Phaal (very hot Indian curry)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more
46. Fugu (a Japanese fish that is severely poisonous if not cut correctly.  Now that I’m married, I think I’ll pass.)
47. Chicken tikka masala (Indian curry dish)
48. Eel (my favorite kind of sushi!)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear (good in margaritas!)
52. Umeboshi (pickled Japanese fruit, like a plum)
53. Abalone
54. Paneer (Indian cheese)
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (Somehow I have successfully avoided Big Macs for 28 years, and I plan to continue doing so unless my life depends on eating one.)
56. Spaetzle (German dumplings)
57. Dirty gin martini (still one of my favorite drinks!)
58. Beer above 8% ABV (wait, they make beer that’s under 8%?!)
59. Poutine (Food of the gods, found only in Canada.  French fries, cheese curds and gravy.  Also known as “heart attack in a paper cone.”
60. Carob chips (Ugh.)
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads (I don’t think I could try these unless tricked.)
63. Kaolin (clay mineral present in Kaopectate and toothpaste.)
64. Currywurst (German hot sausage with curry barbeque-type sauce)
65. Durian (my dad ate one of these once, and my mom made him wash his face and brush his teeth multiple times before she would allow him back into their bedroom.)
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake  (Actually, I’ve had all of these, and I have to say the beignets from Café du Monde are by far the best.)
68. Haggis (sorry, Grandpa McNichols)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette (the latter, though I didn’t know what was in it at the time)
71. Gazpacho (made three kinds for Rob’s 30th birthday – red, green and orange.  The orange was the best.  It was made with mango.)
72. Caviar and blini (also not together.)
73. Louche absinthe (French anise-flavored liqueur, cloudy because of the presence of ice)
74. Gjetost, or brunost (Norweigan whey cheese, which is the texture and color of wet clay, but has a lovely caramel flavor.  You should really try this.)
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu (Chinese grain alcohol)
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong (Tea.  Really good tea.)
80. Bellini (Italian drink made with peach nectar and champagne)
81. Tom yum (Spicy Thai soup – wonderful!)
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (Fun Japanese junk food that is now, sadly, available just about anywhere)
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare (Is there a difference between hare and rabbit?)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (All the time!  Rose petal jelly, chive and nasturtium blossoms, sugared violets – my Mom taught me how to do this.)
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate (this is supposedly the best type of cacao bean available, though there are those who disagree.  I found that most of Guittard’s chocolate is made from Criollo, so I’m counting it; there’s almost no way to really know.)
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa (North African hot sauce)
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor (a mixure of lobster meat, cheese, mustard, brandy and egg yolks, which is baked inside a lobster shell.  Competing with poutine for the Instant Heart Attack Trophy.)
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

I love to cook, and although I don’t have as much time for it as I’d like, nothing relaxes me more.  It’s simple, meditative work to chop an onion and saute it, and the wonderfully complex smells and tastes release all kinds of good-mood endorphins that help you back away from whatever stress you’re feeling.

A few months ago, a very dear friend was called on to head up the youth group at our church.  A group of parents had been planning meetings and activities since the last youth leader had left, and while they were doing an admirable job, let’s face it — teenagers aren’t all that interested in anything planned and executed by their parents.  My friend asked about the structure of the meetings, and was told that they usually had a meal prepared by one of the parents and then took part in a discussion moderated by the parents.  Right away, she decided to change that.  At the first meeting (which she held at my house) she brought bags and bags of groceries and set each kid to work chopping, grating, or cooking something.  They were involved, and they were interested.  After dinner, we assembled favors for our church’s upcoming anniversary dinner.  We didn’t have a meaningful spiritual discussion that night, but we spent time together, enjoying each other’s company, and that was progress.  The kids whose parents had forced them to get out of the car were reluctant to leave after an evening of enjoying the fruits of their labors.

Time to stir the ganache.  Mmmmm.  Ganache.   If you’re feeling tempted, here’s my recipe.