Green Beans à la Andy

My newest favorite side dish/snack couldn't be easier to make. My friend Andy served me a plate one day and I've been making it 3 or 4 times a week ever since.

You need the following ingredients:

green beans
olive oil
salt

1. Wash and dry the beans, then snap off the stem ends.
2. Heat the oil in a skillet until it's not quite smoking; the secret to delicious Green Beans à la Andy is to get that skillet plenty hot.
3. Put the green beans in the skillet. Season with salt. You want the beans all in one layer so that they can be in constant contact with the skillet. I always use the biggest skillet I own so I can make lots of Green Beans à la Andy.
4. Sauté the green beans. The only trick here is to leave them sit long enough so that the beans brown and wilt a bit but not so long that they burn. You have to keep an eye on them and give them a regular toss, but you don't need to keep them moving constantly. Cook until done and serve.

Up to a certain point, the longer you cook these the better they are; the bean exteriors caramelize, making them sweet and a little smoky. At some point they will turn into wilted garbage if you keep cooking them, but there's no way you will be able to cook them for that long. The beans will smell too good and be too tempting; at some point you will no longer be able to resist plating and eating them. That's when they're done (10 minutes probably will do it).

All hail Chef Andy!

On Shopping Across the Spectrum, and Thoughts on Pasture-Raised Chicken

My sister Amy called the other day to gloat over the fact that I am now shopping at a food co-op. At first her good-natured taunts didn't quite register; I don't really think of the Weaver Street Market Cooperative as a co-op, even though--duh!--it advertises that fact prominently in its name. My confusion arises from the fact that Weaver Street is well stocked, well lit, and professionally run, three characteristics I don't associate with cooperative grocers. I've been to co-ops in New York City and in downtown Durham and they are uniformly dreary places staffed by lotus eaters, stocked sparsely with flaccid produce stored in containers that appear to have been scavenged from dumpsters, and so dimly lit that one suspects it is by design--if one could get past the obvious fact that nothing in these places could possibly be the result of conscious design--in order to confuse and disorient the shopper, thus rendering him unaware of how dolorous an experience he is having. Oh, and they tend to be expensive to boot.

Way, way at the other end of the shopping spectrum, I found myself in a Wal-Mart the other day. Wait, let me explain! I had some items to drop off at the local Goodwill center, which is located next door to the local Super Wal-Mart. I needed windshield washer fluid and a new pair of sweatpants and figured it was less evil to buy these items at a nearby retail giant than to burn gas driving all over creation for two nominal purchases. Once inside, of course, it was impossible to restrict myself to just two items. I remembered we needed some food storage containers for the fridge, and then I decided to explore the grocery section and discovered, much to my delight, that Wal-Mart sells my favorite Amy's frozen entrée for more than $1 less than anyone else in the area, so I piled a bunch of those into my cart as well. I was also delighted to discover cans of Progresso Turkey Noodle Soup, a product that has mysteriously vanished from the shelves of all other grocers. And so I was actually pretty pleased with the experience on the way out the door. Did I get my karmic comeuppance? Would I be telling this story otherwise? On their second day of service, my new sweatpants divested themselves of their drawstring. They are now good for comedy routines that require one's pants to fall to one's ankles, but not for much else (someone 50 pounds heavier than I might be able to use them, I suppose, although that's something I surely would not want to see). Alas, I lost the receipt so I'm just going to have to write off that $7.55 investment. I can't help wondering whether the windshield washer fluid I bought is right now inflicting thousands of dollars worth of damage on Donnie.

Finally, last night I baked the locally produced pasture-raised chicken I bought at Weaver Street over the weekend. It was much, much better than the factory-farmed chickens we'd previously grown used to: lots more flavor, and not so grotesquely proportioned (factory chickens are built like Mamie Van Doren). However, it was a little rubbery. Small price to pay for knowing that this chicken was actually allowed to use its muscles during its lifetime, but all the same I'll try to remember to brine the next one, which should help. I cooked it with the red rice mentioned in the previous blog, which was disappointingly ordinary in taste, although quite appealing to the eye. Salt helped it quite a bit (that's the Marge Simpson cooking tip of the day!).

In Which Our Hero's Faith Continues, Some Tasty Victuals are Recollected and Still More Tasty Victuals are Collected For Future Ingestion

It has been a little over a week since I recounted my alimentary epiphany, and I am pleased to report that its mandate to eat healthier and more healthfully grown foods has not subsequently weakened. This week the missus and I ate not just healthily but also quite well: grilled lamb andouille sausage with sautéed chard and a basmati rice pilaf; grilled pork chops with pan-roasted potatoes, steamed asparagus, and a delicious salad; coq au vin and spaghetti dressed with sautéed chard, olives, garlic, and plenty of my favorite olive oil; a Trader Joe's frozen pizza (mundane, sure, but quite tasty, truth be told); and plenty of leftovers. Much of what I prepared (including all the meat) was locally and sustainably raised, and much of the rest was organically grown. It was a good week in the kitchen.

I was all set to return to the Carrboro Farmer's Market yesterday to lay in another week's worth of meat products plus whatever produce and cheeses looked good, but alas fate had other plans for me. On Friday night the world-famous juggling troupe The Flying Karamazov Brothers performed in Garner, NC, a good--no, check that, lousy--hour's drive from my home. My college buddy and longtime bandmate Mark is an FKB, so of course the missus and I went to see the show and to hang out with Mark until all hours of the night. The farmer's market closes at 12 and is picked clean well before that hour, so I opted for sleep and allowed that window of opportunity slam shut. Although it made me feel bad to neglect a resolution so recently made, getting up at 9 would have made me feel much, much worse.

Fortunately there was another option: Carrboro's Weaver Street Market Cooperative, which carries a fine assortment of locally and sustainably grown produce and meats. I've been vaguely aware of this store for many years but have rarely set foot in it, as I've always found it a bit off-putting. The clientele mostly look like the sort of people you see at a Sufjan Stevens show: wispy folk with serpentine postures and facial expressions that seem to say "Where did I leave that hackysack?" Despite being surrounded by so much healthy food, they do not look at all healthy. Peppered among the young ectomorphs are equally ectomoprhic academic types, pony-tailed and batiked and more stern than dreamy in demeanor. Perhaps this is what will happen to the Sufjan fans when they grow up.

Customer base aside, Weaver Street is a paradise for folks seeking a healthier diet. The produce is much more robust than it is at the similarly positioned Whole Foods Market up the way in Chapel Hill, and my first impression is that it's much more reasonably priced. Plus, it's pretty much all organic; no having to choose between organic and agrindustrial here. Here's what I scored:

1 beautiful fennel bulb, $2.29 (Whole Foods fennel tends to be pretty sickly and dessicated)
3 portabella caps, $3.71
I large and lovely bunch of red chard, $2.79
2/3 pound green beans, $1.32
2.25 pounds red potatoes, $3.12
1.5 pounds yellow onion, $1.45
1 pound bag of Bhutanese red rice $3.79 (exotic and ostensibly pricey, but I'll get 6 to 10 servings from it so it's really not that bad)
1/2 gallon locally produced low-fat milk $2.89 (plus a hefty $1.20 deposit on the bottle)
1 French bread, baked on premises $2.00
1 ciabatta to eat on the way home $0.75
two substantial locally raised smoked pork chops, $7.20
1 whole locally raised chicken, $6.88

I figure I've got 3 or 4 dinners for two there with some leftovers to boot, all for a little over $40.00. Yeah, the conventional grocery store is cheaper, but not so terribly much so. And for now at least, the way I'm shopping really has me looking forward to another good week in the kitchen. I'll keep you posted.

In Which Our Hero Gets Religion, and an Apology is Proffered

A while back--two weeks ago, to be exact--I was the sort to scoff at the notion of organic farming, sustainable farming, humane farming, and a whole bunch of other good things that I thought of collectively as "hippie sh!t." I would look at the organic carrots at the Whole Foods, which often cost twice what conventional carrots cost, and laugh that I'd buy the inorganic carrots--you know, the ones made of petrochemicals, I joked--instead. Hahaha. It's funny because it's true. Except it's not funny, and I didn't know how true it was when I was making the joke.

That all changed last week, when I finally read The Ominvore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (I'd bought it over a year ago but managed to dodge it until now), an engrossing book about food production in the United States. Pollan has a gift for taking complex subjects--agribusiness and monocultural growing, large-scale organic farming and smaller-scale sustainable farming, how economics and not nutrition drives food production policy, etc. etc.--and making them both understandable and extremely compelling. Sometimes I forget how a book can change your life. This book reminded me.

It's impossible to summarize this book in such a short space, but the crux of Pollan's argument is this: the way we produce food in this country is unnatural and unhealthy. Instead of rotating crops and promoting diversity to keep farmland healthy, we grow the same crops on the same ground over and over again, depleting the soil so that we must 'replenish' it with artificial fertilizers (these fertilizers are petrochemical-intensive--hence, carrots made of petrochemicals). We subject our food animals to unimaginable cruelty that in turn makes them susceptible to all sorts of horrible diseases in order to produce cheap meat of dubious quality. The processes required for such large-scale crop and animal harvesting are tremendously damaging to the environment. Occasionally they are tremendously damaging to us as well (e.g. mad cow disease), not even taking into account the effects of living in an increasingly toxic environment.

Pollan spends a good deal of time on the subject of food animals and the ways they are treated by various types of producers. He is a devoted carnivore, as am I, and his experiences with our nation's Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) do not cure him of that. They do, however, cure him of the desire to eat CAFO-produced meat ever again, an effect his book probably has on most readers, myself included. I won't disgust you with the details, but I will warn you that after you read this book you will likely always feel a little queasy whenever you look at a Tyson chicken or a large-scale produced pork loin. Man has been eating animals for millennia, and I still don't see anything wrong with that. We only started torturing them in the last century, though, and that's wrong. And we do it just to save a dollar or two on the pound.

Admittedly, that sounds like a substantial savings, but Pollan argues convincingly that these savings are illusory. Hidden in the low prices are the tax breaks to large producers that we pay for, the price subsidies we pay for, the cleanup of the singular forms of pollution that industrial farming produces that we pay for, etc. Calculate the true cost of that pound of chicken into its retail price and suddenly it's not the bargain it appears to be.

Pollan contrasts the agribusiness model with both the large-scale organic industry (better but hardly perfect) and smaller local sustainable growth producers. 'Sustainable growth' means doing all the things farmers have done throughout the millennia before agribusiness: rotating crops to maintain fertility, managing pastures, grazing feed animals… basically, creating and managing a complete ecosystem that, because of its thoroughness, doesn't require the annual purchase of seed, insecticides, chemical fertilizers, etc. etc. It's not easy work but the sustainable farmers Pollan profiles are committed to the principle of sustainability, and they sound pretty darn fulfilled in their work.

But is their food any good? This morning I decided to put my money where my head has been. I visited the Carrborro Farmers' Market--an emporium of organic and sustainably produced local food--to see what I could scrounge up for tonight's dinner. January in North Carolina means slim pickings for produce but I did manage to find a lovely bunch of red chard ($2.50) and a beautiful head of purple cauliflower (just under $2). Meat selections were much more plentiful. For tonight's dinner, I bought a fresh ham steak (when it comes to ham, the term 'fresh' designates uncured and unsmoked) about an inch thick (1.5 pounds, $10). At $15, my haul seemed a little pricey for a home-cooked meal for two, but I decided to put that thought on hold until after the meal was done.

I prepared the food pretty simply. The ham steak was frozen, so I had to defrost it. I then brined it for a few hours in a saline solution spiked with some peppercorns and a splash of fruit juice (peach nectar, to be precise) to add a touch of sweetness. When it came time to cook, I rinsed the steak, seasoned it lightly, and threw it on a hot grill. About 4 minutes per side did the trick; it was crispy and singed on the edges, cooked firm through but not overdone.

I diced some onion and smashed a garlic clove and sautéed it all in olive oil, then added the washed and chopped chard and a pinch of salt, covered it, and let it cook down (5-6 minutes). I cut the purple cauliflower into florets, tossed them with a little salt and olive oil, and roasted them in a 460-degree oven for 15 minutes. And that was it, a simple but conceptually appetizing dinner.

And good news--it tasted as good as it had in my mind's mouth. I won't even pretend I can distinguish between the actual taste of the food and the way that my preconceptions of how much 'better' this food was than agribusiness food colored my judgment. For whatever reason, the ham steak was the tastiest piece of pork I've had in a long, long time, and the vegetables seemed to have a more intense and enjoyable flavor than I've come to expect from a serving of veggies. It was all very good. We even had leftovers, meaning that $15 price tag isn't so terribly high after all.

OK, I'm sold. Good thing, too--I've got some lamb andouille sausage and some beautiful pork chops I bought today to cook later this week. I'm all out of farmer's market produce but I can get some of the organic stuff at the local Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. I'll be sure to take my NPR tote bag with me so that I don't have to waste any plastic bags. Dear God, is there a pair of Birkenstocks with my name on them out there somewhere? Peace, man.

PS That apology mentioned in the subject heading belongs to my sister, who has been preaching the virtues of organic and sustainable farming to me for a long, long time. In response, I have joked, scoffed, and parried, but I haven't until now given the subject serious thought. Sis, you were right and I was wrong. I'll even be joining a CSA this year, as you have suggested I do for so many years now. I apologize.

Now let us never speak of this again. :-)

Cheese is Crizal™ Mighty!!!

I have traditionally been a frugal consumer of eyewear. Since college I've favored those little round wire frames that some refer to as 'granny glasses' but which I've always thought of as 'John Lennon glasses.' They're cheap, they're practical, and they look good to me. The worst you can say about them is that they are inconspicuous, which is hardly a demerit in the eyewear universe. Grandpa glasses, on the other hand--those giant plastic frames that somehow make all old men look like cartoon turtles--are another story entirely.

My wife thinks I can do better, and has reminded me of this point often enough that, last time around, I decided to relent and buy something 'fashionable,' even though doing so would surely double the cost of a product I hardly ever even see. She reminded me that she has to look at me and my glasses all the time, for which there was unfortunately no reasonable rejoinder. And so 'fashionable' glasses for me it would be.

Thus the missus and I went foraging for spectacles the last time we were in New York City. Our wanderings naturally led us to SoHo, for that is where one is most likely to find the most expensive eyeglass frames in this or any neighboring solar system. It took a while to find a pair I liked. The first pairs I tried on were at a distinct disadvantage: I would find out what they cost and then put them on, only to discover that my reaction to the price had turned my skin a shade of green that did not at all complement the color of the frame. Eventually, though, I grew accustomed to Soho prices, to the point where I could laughingly scoff, "What? These cost only $700? I'll take six pair!!!!" Finally I found a pair I liked and they weren't even that terribly expensive. And, truth be told, they looked pretty darn good on me.

I figured it made most sense to have the lenses installed back in my hometown of Durham, NC, just in case there were any problems that required repair or replacement. Having been broken of my eyeglass frugality, I was now intent on spending 'good money' to finish the job. I identified a tony eyewear boutique and headed off to discharge my business. I already had a prescription, so all that was left to do was to deliver the frames, make a deposit, and await the results of this shoppe's anticipated fine work.

Unfortunately, it wasn't quite so simple. The woman working in the shoppe would not allow me to leave until I'd made a seemingly endless series of choices about my lenses. Did I want the lenses tapered on the sides so that I would not look like I was in need of special education? Yes. Did I want lenses that turned dark in the sunlight, clear in the dark, and rose-colored when I was feeling a little gloomy? No. Did I want scratchproof coating? No, I like my glasses really scratched up. That's a joke! Yes, please, scratchproof coating. How about Crizal™ anti-glare coating? Feeling extravagant, I assented.

At this point, I detected just the slightest look of concern on the woman's face. I now speculate that she must have been new to her job and had not yet learned never to cue a customer who has made a terrible, terrible mistake. Alas, her error did not register profoundly enough with me, and soon the inquiry continued. I left her with a ridiculous amount of money as a deposit that, sad to say, covered only half the cost of the lenses, and went on my way.

But I was pretty darn pleased with the glasses when they were ready just a few days later, and after trying them on I was quite happy to bail them out, even though it meant a diet of rice and beans for the rest of the month. I enjoyed them all that first day. Right up to the point, that is, that it came time to clean them. The optometrist had supplied me with a special Crizal™ cloth specifically designed for cleaning Crizal™-coated lenses, which made me feel very special indeed. Out came the special cloth. Rub, rub, rub. Hmm. Jeez, these lenses are still pretty dirty. Rub, rub, rub. No, still not quite clean. Rub, rub, rub. Rub, rub, rub, rub. Rubrubrubrub. Rubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrub!!!!!! Sigh.

OK, so here's the thing. The special Crizal™ cloth actually does a pretty good job of removing dirt and dust. What it isn't so good at is removing grease, such as might spatter on your glasses, say, when you sauté something, as I am wont to do. Or, if you are human, such as you might excrete as one of the regular biological processes that keep you alive. The cloth does an excellent job of moving that grease around, sometimes relocating it in more or less the same shape elsewhere on the lens, other times smearing it in a delicate veneer across the entire lens, but always, always, always leaving it on the lens.

Thanks to Crizal™, I do not see glare. I do, however, constantly see rainbows. Also, there are times when the world through my glasses looks like a goddamn Monet; a pleasingly glare-free Monet, to be sure, but a Monet nonetheless. I can only imagine that no one at the Crizal™ company has ever been forced to wear Crizal™-coated lenses, because the evil required to knowingly market so profoundly defective a product is too terrible to contemplate. Next thing you'll tell me is that there are folks out there who would start a war based on false pretenses.

I'd like to say I've learned a valuable lesson from this experience, but the lessons here are either too specific ("Don't by Crizal™-coated lenses!") or too trite and obvious ("Let the buyer beware!"). I have learned exactly nothing other than the fact that when you have made a costly mistake, you no longer have enough money left to undo that mistake. I suppose I could have taken the lenses back and demanded satisfaction, but I am unfortunately a little slow witted, and it took quite a while before I was certain of the cause of my consternation. I figured somehow--mysteriously, inexplicably--that my inability to clean my glasses was somehow my fault. That sounds dumb, you say? Are you surprised? I'M THE IDIOT WHO BOUGHT CRIZAL™-COATED LENSES!!!!!

PS As requested by Dave P, a photo of myself in the lovely but smeary glasses. Note my slightly confused look, the result of not being able to see so terribly well.