The bumpy road to local

With all the gloating I do about being so lucky to be living in California, it was only a matter of time before I was forced to admit that it's not always easy to come up with entirely SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, and ethical) meals. While I do get nearly all my produce and eggs from the farmers market, there are many other foods that I don't go the full nine yards to make sure they're local. Organic, yes, Sustainable... as much as possible. Local? Well, I try. My second entry into the Dark Days Challenge is a cream of greens soup. It was inspired by Tyler Florence's corn chowder recipe, which I use all the time during the summer, and the cream of spinach soup from Simply Recipes. It also has no cream to speak of — because I had no local cream in my fridge.

I typically buy my milk, butter, and cream from Strauss, which is carried by Whole Foods. They are about 100 miles away, so they fall within my local foodshed. But sometimes Strauss cream and butter, while delicious, are too expensive. In which case, I buy Clover, which is also located about 100 miles away, and I don't always get the organic cream and butter. Sometimes I'll get the Trader Joe's brand of organic cream or butter, and who knows where that comes from? Either way, though, I feel like I'm cheating when I buy from the grocery store, instead of from the vendor directly, like I do at the farmers' market. I don't necessarily feel like I'm buying locally when I go through the middle man that is a non-local chain grocery store. The market I go to does have a raw milk vendor, but it is far too out of my price range to buy on a regular basis. In fact, I've never purchased raw milk simply because it's too expensive. I could get four times as much Strauss whole milk for the price of a quart of locally-produced (at 146 miles, it's just inside my foodshed) Organic Pastures raw milk.

And this is a problem. It should not cost so much to get good, honest milk and dairy products — or any food that is produced locally, organically, and sustainably. It's not right that only the well-off can eat ethical, organic meat and dairy. Someday, I will have a goat, and then my milk (as well as my eggs, fruits, and veggies) will only come as far as my back yard. In the meantime, though, I would like to be able to eat a "normal" American diet from SOLE ingredients that don't break the bank. I want to be able to show non-believers that it is possible to eat delicious whole foods and not have to give up your whole paycheck. I struggle with this, though, because sometimes it's not possible to avoid the cost. This doesn't mean I'll go back to conventional foods, because I'm enough of a snob about it now that it seems gross to purchase and eat cheaply-grown, cheaply-made foodstuffs. I do give up eating meat if it's too expensive. How do I convince others to do this, too?

Trick or treat?

This year, I bought my trick-or-treat goodies from Whole Foods. And not just because I'm a food snob. Even though it would have been easier and cheaper to grab a bag of mini Hershey bars or Tootsie Pops from Target, I opted to go the route of Annie's organic fruit snacks and Snyder's pretzels. Both came in smaller, "fun-size" versions, just right for little kids in costumes who might come knocking on my door. Was I trying to impose my healthy, organic lifestyle on some unsuspecting neighborhood kids?

Not really. What I was trying to do was avoid buying chocolate. The largest producers of chocolate, including Hershey's and M&M/Mars, use cocoa sourced from West Africa, where child slave labor is used in the plantations. Seeing as I'm against child slave labor, I am therefore against chocolate (or anything!) produced by child slave labor.

There are a few companies, particularly ones that make organic, fair-trade products, from which I'm happy to buy chocolate. Dagoba, Green and Black's, and Endangered Species are my favorites. Yes, these bars are more expensive than your typical Mr. Goodbar. But isn't it worth spending the extra money to ensure that your chocolate comes from socially responsible sources?

The one child who stopped by my apartment with her father got a little packet of bunny-shaped fruit snacks on top of her mini Reece's Peanut Butter Cups and snack-size Milky Ways. Is it fair to impose my anti-conventional-chocolate beliefs on an innocently trick-or-treating child? Well, is it fair to the child about her age who was forced to work in the cocoa fields just to produce some inexpensive Halloween candy?

Chew on this

While there are a handful of blogs I read throughout the week, I use the weekends to catch up with all the food blogs I've got on my list. In the midst of my reading, I stumbled across this on Michael Bauer's blog: a post and following discussion about foie gras, meat-eating, and the ethics of both.

Since the post focuses on a discussion that Bauer had with a vice-president at PETA, the comments go around and around about PETA's methods. I personally have some problems with the organization. While I'll happily "honk if you hate animal cruelty" when there are protesters outside the local KFC, I find PETA is often too preachy or too in-your-face. I don't know if the best way to convince others not to wear leather is to throw animal blood on them and their leather jackets. I also sometimes think the logic they use when making pro-vegetarian statements is faulty.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of anyone who tries to push their point of view on me. I have a problem with meat-eaters who are over the top, too (ever seen the website VegetariansAreEvil. com?). After reading all the comments on Bauer's post, I just wanted to put my hands over my ears and go, "La la la la!" I didn't want to hear any of it anymore: "There is just no physiological reason to eat plants if you don't want to." "You cannot 'respect' an animal by killing it and eating it." Seriously, people, just shut up, do some research, and eat based on informed decisions. There is no point in arguing or beating each other over the head with your opinions.

The post makes for interesting reading, though.

Avoiding disaster

This week is going to be a long week. One of my co-teachers is out on vacation part of the week, and my other co-teacher has a knee injury and can't move around too much in the classroom. Yay. To lift my spirits, I decided to do a little baking in the form of a loaf of chocolate banana bread.

It was inspired by a recipe in the latest issue of Sunset magazine. But instead of a classic banana bread recipe with cocoa added to it, it substituted prune puree for the butter and included such things as walnuts and chocolate chips. Which I didn't have. I did have, however, two frozen bananas and a brand-new container of Green and Black's Organic baking cocoa.

A small aside here: A lot of chocolate is produced in not-so-friendly ways. In fact, much of the chocolate in the more commonly known brands is from plantations where they pay extremely low wages and employ child slave labor. I highly recommend buying chocolate from companies that support fair trade and organc growing practices, which would include Green and Black's, Dagoba, and Endangered Species. Sure, it costs more — but isn't it worth it to know your chocolate wasn't harvested by child labor?

To make the bread, I used my usual banana bread recipe and simply added the 1/2 cup baking cocoa from the Sunset recipe. Into a large bowl went the dry ingredients, and into a blender went the wet ones. It wasn't until I began to mix the two together that it occurred to me that perhaps I had misread the amount of flour — and as I stirred and saw that the dry ingredients were not fully incorporating into the wet ones, I already knew what my mistake had been. Two mistakes, actually. The first was that I used 1-3/4 cup flour instead of the 1-1/4 in the recipe. The second was that by adding 1/2 cup cocoa, I should have reduced the amount of flour. So there was far too much flour in the bowl than necessary.

I panicked slightly. Considering how much my fancy organic cocoa cost, even on sale, there was no way I could just throw out the batter. Although I had used melted butter as the lubricant in the recipe, I decided that canola oil would do the trick to moisten the mixture enough. I poured in some, then a little more, until the batter was dense but combined. If I'd had another banana, I would have thrown that in, too. But I didn't.

I put it in the oven to bake, crossing my fingers that it would all come out okay. Halfway through baking, the apartment smelled wonderful, and I figured there was still hope that the bread would be fine.

It took a little longer to bake than as directed in the recipe, so while the middle was still not completely baked through, the sides were drying out and nearly beginning to burn. The resulting bread wasn't perfect, but it was quite tasty, especially with a smear of cream cheese on top.

I've already told my co-teacher J that I plan to make a blueberry cream cheese coffee cake next week. Let's just hope I can manage to do it without any mishaps!



Chocolate banana bread
(adapted from Clueless in the Kitchen by Evelyn Raab)

1 c all-purpose flour
1/2 c sugar (feel free to use less, particularly if your bananas are especially overripe)
1/2 c baking cocoa, sifted
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 c melted butter or oil (I used butter this time)
2 bananas
2 eggs


Preheat the oven to 350°F.

In a large mixing bowl, stir dry ingredients together. In a blender, add all the wet ingredients and blend until fully combined. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry.

Pour the batter into a well-greased loaf pan and bake for an hour. Test the bread with a toothpick or wooden skewer; when it comes out with only a few crumbs clinging on, it's done. Turn out onto a wire rack and let cool.

Serve with cream cheese, if you so desire.

Pakora and other fried things

One of my favorite foods is anything fried: fried chicken, fried zucchini, fish and chips, fried won tons, and on and on. So, of course, I was very happy to find out that Indian street food included a delicious snack called pakora. Pakora is basically just about anything dipped in batter and fried — most commonly bread, paneer, and vegetables such as potatoes, cauliflower, or bell pepper. The pakora-walla ("pakora person") cooks up his tasty goods in bulk, then sets them out on newspaper to be sold. When it's time to be dished up, often the pakora or other fried foods are put back into hot oil to be reheated. Then again, sometimes they're not.

On the train to and from Shimla, we often hopped off when the train stopped to buy the fried goods that were on sale. At one stop, twenty rupees (about forty cents) got us two samosas with a generous squeeze of Indian ketchup. (One samosa at my local farmers' market is three dollars, so this was an exciting purchase for me!) Elsewhere, we had bread pakora — just plain white bread, battered and fried.



At the Amber Fort outside of Jaipur in Rajasthan, we had the best samosas I'd ever eaten. The food at the stall had been sitting out for who knows when, the flies were abuzz, and the samoses weren't reheated. But the crust was crisp and buttery, and the potato filling was nicely spiced. I was so glad we had eaten there, even though I joked that I was risking traveler's sickness for a pocket of tasty fried goodness.

Another fried food I discovered was at an expansive market in Delhi called Dilli Haat, which included goods and foods from every state in India. Lunch included momos, little deep fried dumplings filled with chicken. They were served with a bowl of steaming broth, which was quite bland but felt warm in the tummy. As recommended by the Anthropologist's friend, our guide through Dilli Haat, we made a mix of hot sauce and vinegar to dip our momos in. The wrapper crunched as I bit into it, and the sauce packed a much needed punch to the delicious but not particularly remarkable filling.



A word about street food and food in general in India: It's important to be careful when you're traveling abroad and eating food cooked in a stall or on the street. But don't let the fear of getting sick prevent you from having an amazing culinary experience. The truth is you are going to get sick. No matter how careful you are. I was fairly cautious, didn't drink the tap water (or use it to brush my teeth), avoided eating meat from street stalls — and I got mildly sick anyway. When you're in a country that's very different from yours, it's hard to avoid stomach bugs that your system isn't used to — unless you're determined to not eat anything that isn't from a three-star or above restaurant. Which would be too bad because you really would be missing out on a lot of new and wonderful foods.

For the love of shrimp

After writing about delicious Goan shrimp the other day, I decided it was high time I defrosted the shrimp I was saving in the freezer. I had gone to the farmers' market the day after I got back from India, with shrimp as a high priority on my grocery list. It was the wrong time of year to get shrimp caught off the Pacific coast, so instead, the shrimp available was caught off the coast Texas. Which was fine with me. It was still fresher and more beautifully ocean-scented than anything farmed in Thailand (which is where most frozen shrimp available in the States comes from — plus the farming practices are destroying the ecosystems there).

Before deciding to defrost my ziptop bag of shrimp, I had actually been craving Chinese take-out. Once I determined that I ought to spend my hard-earned money on groceries instead of grease, I decided to make two of my favorite Vietnamese shrimp dishes: cabbage and shrimp soup, and shrimp simmered in a caramel sauce.

I've posted about the soup before, though this time for the broth, I used half water and half chicken broth (which was about to go bad). It was fine, though it didn't do any favors for the cabbage-shrimp flavor that makes this soup so good. It also smelled a little funny, but I realized that the intermingling scents of the shrimp and the cabbage were just playing off each other in an odd way. I happily ate it up despite that.



The other dish is one of my all-time favorite shrimp recipes — other than this one, of course. The very first time I ever made shrimp in caramel sauce, it was so good that I couldn't put my chopsticks down. Besides being delicious, it's ridiculously easy to make, once you've got the caramel sauce prepared. The recipe for caramel sauce makes quite a bit, and it's shelf-stable, so it keeps practically forever in a jar with a tight-fitting lid.

Truth be told, I haven't eaten a whole lot of Vietnamese food. When I was in grad school, there was a great Vietnamese restaurant around the corner, where I would order the "clay pot" (which contained chicken, shrimp, onions, and green beans in an amazing slightly sweet sauce, all over rice) and a Vietnamese coffee (which kept me awake and jittery for the rest of the day). I've also had the charcuterie that a Vietnamese friend brought to a dinner party — the soft pâté-like spread on slices of baguette was completely addictive. I guess my point is that when I make things from my Vietnamese cookbook, I don't have many taste experiences I can compare it to. Which isn't a problem, really. More of an observation.

I also want to add a small note here: Do not fear fish sauce. Fish sauce, the dark brown, salty, and yes, fishy condiment used in southeast Asia and the Philippines, adds a unique flavor that you can't get from adding, say, salt. It appears in both the soup and the caramel shrimp recipe. When I add to the pan while cooking, the fragrant smell of fermented fish always puts a smile on my face — because I've learned to appreciate what this sauce brings to the food I eat. Like salt, only a small amount is ever used to season any dish, so I'm not asking you to drown your meal in fish sauce. But do give fish sauce a chance. You'll be glad you did.


Shrimp simmered in caramel sauce (tôm kho)
(from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen)

1-1/2 pounds shrimp, peeled and deveined
1-1/2 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp caramel sauce (recipe follows)
1 small yellow onion, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp pepper
1-1/2 tbsp canola or other neutral oil
1 green onion, chopped

In a shallow pan, combine shrimp, fish sauce, caramel sauce, and 1/8 tsp salt and bring to a simmer over high heat. Add the onion and pepper and stir to distribute ingredients evenly. Continue cooking over high heat for another 10 to 14 minutes, or until the shrimp have turned an orange-brown.


As they cook, the shrimp will release their juices to combine with the other ingredients. Expect a strong boil throughout and turn shrimp occasionally with a spoon. If the pan appears dry, add a little water. The juices eventually concentrate into a mahogany-colored sauce. When the shrimp are done, there should only be a few tablespoons of sauce left. (When I make this recipe, the sauce often evaporates away, even though I only make two servings and use all two tablespoons of caramel sauce. I often add a little extra caramel sauce as well as water when this happens.)

Turn off the heat, add the oil, and stir to coat. Add pepper to taste. Transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle with chopped green onion.

Serves 4.


Caramel sauce (nuoc mau)

3/4 c water
1 c sugar

Fill a large bowl with water so that it comes partway up the side of a small, heavy saucepan.

In the saucepan, put 1/4 c water and all the sugar and place over medium-low heat. Stir to ensure the sugar dissolves. After about 2 minutes, stop stirring and let the mixture cook undisturbed. About 7 minutes into cooking, bubbles with cover the entire surface and the mixture will be at a vigorous simmer.

After about 15 minutes, the sugar will begin to caramelize and deepen in color. When smoke starts rising, around 20 minutes, remove the pan from the heat and slowly swirl it. The sauce will turn darker. When it is the color of black coffee or molasses, put the put into the bowl of water to stop the cooking. Add the remaining 1/2 cup water. After the dramatic bubble reaction ceases, return the pan to the stove over medium heat.

Heat the caramel, stirring until it dissolves into the water. Remove from heat and let cool for 10 minutes before puring into a small heatproof glass jar. Set aside to cool completely. Cover and store indefinitely in your kitchen cupboard.

Makes 1 cup.