Almost Wordless Wednesday

And this: Michael Posner article on how Apple's iPad app publication policies = corporate censorship.

Unprocessed Tacos

Text from Daughter #2, late afternoon: WE HAVE NO FOOD. PIZZA TONIGHT. PLEASE.

This was demonstrably untrue. Several snacks were available, and I had a dinner planned; it wasn't going to be made from air. My son ate fruit after school, which he likely wouldn't have done if we'd had chips. Also, first thing this morning I baked pumpkin* muffins. However, her wish for takeout coincided with my interest in not cooking tonight, and we haven't ordered pizza this year yet, and it's kind of homemade style, and we got a Greek salad with it. Done.

* (By pumpkin, I mean squash. I didn't tell, because squash has an image problem. Also, I'm deceitful. Let this be is our little blog secret.)

Before we fell off the wagon with a takeout binge, we had a banner week at the Unprocessed Project. Here's what happened:

• Daughter #1 came home from university (reading week) and did more than her share of cooking and cleanup. Perhaps this was essay avoidance, but she even tested a new bread recipe--four delicious loaves that were devoured before photos could be taken.

• I made graham crackers using a recipe from the King Arthur flour company website, which my mom sent (thanks!). If you like graham crackers, you'll eat these and think, Meh. But the kids made them disappear, so that counts as a win.

• Tacos that have never been to Old El Paso . . . 

Now, I'm not talking about authentic Mexican or Tex-Mex food here. I'm talking store-bought kits, with the spice packet that you mix into ground beef, hard taco shells and soft tortillas. They make for quick, easy dinners, and my kids like these tacos, but even the low-salt version seems incredibly salty. Also, unnatural orange grease oozes from the meat.
 
Here's the ingredient list for Old El Paso Reduced Sodium Taco Mix:

• Maize flour, sugar, salt, garlic (8%), paprika, cumin (6.5%), tomato (6%), onion, food acid (330), oregano, chili, anti-caking agent (551), paprika extract, ground bay leaves.

Many of those ingredients seem benign--recognizable food--even if sugar ranks relatively high. I'm not sure why percentage breakdowns are given for only three items, calling into question the composition of the remaining 79.5%. And the formula numbers kill me--how helpful it is to know we're eating anti-caking agent 551 and no other!

• Taco filling from scratch: This is simple, no recipe required. Just brown the meat and add spices to taste--garlic, chili powder, cumin, pepper, onion--and also a little salsa. The result is a drier filling than the pre-fab mix, thus easier to manage in a tortilla, and no disgusting orange slick. The miracle is that no one complained about the swap. Usually the kids interrogate me about stealth ingredients lurking within our meals (I wonder why?), but this taco dish was universally accepted. If I wanted to use less meat, I'd add pureed chickpeas or black beans and see if anyone noticed. An experiment for next time . . .    
• Tortillas from scratch: I have to admit, when I first began thinking about the Unprocessed Project, I flashed on an image of a woman bent over a large, flat stone, patting out tortillas one at a time and thought: I draw the line. I will not be doing that. Then I happened upon a recipe in Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, 1977) that didn't look too difficult. Daughter #1 found how-to videos on You Tube, and I bought a bag of masa harina, from which corn tortillas are made. There's a recipe on the bag as well. You add water to the masa harina, mix well and shape the tortillas, either flattening them with a rolling pin between sheets of waxed paper, or using a tortilla press. (I didn't know this handy appliance existed, and now I have to have one. They're for sale on Amazon for less than $20.) The last step is to cook the tortillas in a skillet--we used a crepe pan, which was perfect--just a minute or two on each side.

the coveted tortilla press

Success? From the photos below, it will be obvious that our tortillas were pathetic misshapen things, but they tasted like the real deal. I had enough patience to make exactly one; my daughter stayed on-task and made fifteen more. It took a lot of time, but our productivity would certainly go up if we had that gadget to the left.

  

Truth(s) in Non-Fiction

Behold, my wintertime plans. Books, chair. An eclectic mixture of fiction and non-fiction: books in aid of The Unprocessed Project (Kingsolver) and research for a fiction project; a few titles recommended by my husband and friends; and others that I've been meaning to read for quite some time (Mitchell, and Glover--check out Glover's lively, learned Numero Cinq Magazine--which bills itself as A Warm Place on a Cruel Web, and indeed, it is).

Do not be impressed by this pile of good intentions. I may never get through them all. My reading pace has slowed, inexplicably--February slush melts faster than I read--and other good books will come along to knock some of these out of the stack.

Non-fiction (NF), in its many guises, compels my attention these days. I'm afraid this post is long, so scroll, merrily scroll, to what interests you.
  

• Writing NF

Fiction production continues apace (see slush, above), but I've also been writing NF and finding it extremely rewarding. (Notice there's no C for Creative here? I mull that whole CNF thing over, I get it, but we never used to need the C before the NF; it's self-evident.) Spurred by an imaginary deadline earlier this month, I completed a new essay and submitted it. Now the waiting begins, but also the forgetting in order to work on something else. The best part of this particular piece was the way it came together: intensive drafting--forcing myself to finish the initial content-dump rather than being sidetracked for a year or two--followed by rapid precision-editing. I'm not sure where it will land, but I have a good feeling about this one.

Meanwhile, NEWS to share: a contract has been offered and signed and mailed back (please allow me to drag out this newsflash) for another essay of mine. It will be published in an anthology coming out this fall. More details will be available soon, but let me just say how excited I am to be part of a project that includes some very talented writers.

• Reading NF  

One of the books I began reading for research is Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, compiled and edited by Peter Orner. It is part of the Voice of Witness series published by McSweeney's Books (2008). I'm halfway through, reading two or three accounts daily, which is as much harsh reality as I can take in a day. 

As a record of lived experience--collecting the narratives a purposeful act of documentation--this book is utterly engrossing. As pleasure reading, I'm afraid I can't recommend it, because it will wear you down with sadness. The sheer weight of repetition is dispiriting--incident after incident of people with (usually just a little) power preying on those who have none. This is the human condition--I never used to believe that, but here's evidence. Read about the cleanup effort following Hurricane Katrina--when crews of undocumented Latino workers were shipped in, no questions asked, to work 18-hour days, only to have their wages stolen, or to face immigration raids (after the job was done, when they were no longer needed). Read about the church that imported African teachers for "missionary work" but actually used them as free domestic labour, held as prisoners, never given enough food to eat.

Addressing the undocumented millions is high political drama these days--a renewed priority since the 2012 presidential election, when the Latino vote finally came into its own. Reform plans are under way, both in the White House and in Congress . . . Dreamers dream, but meanwhile record numbers of deportations continue under the Obama administration. We can argue until we're breathless about why people migrate, legally or illegally, but the fact is that they live here, doing jobs most would rather not do. They are easy targets.  

From the book's forward by Luis Alberto Urrea: 

In listening lies wisdom. Decide whatever you want to decide. Put on your What Would Jesus Do bracelet and carry water around Arizona for the parched souls wandering in the desert, or put on your night vision goggles and get your lawn chair out on the Devil's Highway and hunt down some illegals. But first, inform yourself. I have been struggling to silence my own prejudices on this issue for years. I am trying to pay attention.

Here's more NF reading on this subject--just a selection of the articles hitting my screen recently (and I thank those who shared links on Facebook and Twitter, especially @LatinoRebels). These pieces ask serious questions about justice, about national myths of equal opportunity and upward mobility, about shattered illusions. Yes, hard work should be rewarded, but for many it never will be.

• New York Times Op-Ed Column by Frank Bruni, My Grandfather the Outlaw. Often people say, "let them come in legally, like my ancestors did"--when in fact, the border was much more porous in the past, and many earlier immigrants had no papers.
• On the 30th anniversary of the Migrant and Seasonal Worker Protection Act, farm worker advocates call for an end to continuing labour violations.
• Two new reports detail troubling government practices--hundreds of wrongful arrests and detentions, and monetary incentives that skew border patrol enforcement decisions. See Derailing Justice and Uncovering USBP.

Let us now shift gears, to the arts! To Canada!

Another book I’ve begun reading is R. Murray Schafer's autobiography (The Porcupine's Quill, 2012), entitled (who can resist this?) My Life on Earth & Elsewhere. Schafer, the acclaimed Canadian composer, educator and artist (the cover features his illustration), is the creator of Patria, an epic 12-cycle music/drama production, parts of which have been staged in the Haliburton Forest, of all places. In 2009 he premiered his new opera, The Children's Crusade, at Toronto's Luminato festival--and discussed the work in an interview found here. 

Schafer is intriguing on so many levels: the man who coined the term soundscape, the environmentalist, the rebel who, as a youth, got himself kicked out of the University of Toronto. I met him once several years ago, in the context of a job interview (so thankful I didn't get it!: wrong job/wrong time). He ended our final conversation by saying, very kindly, "Well, Laura, what will you do with your life now?”  

Read your book? 

• Developing NF

I'm not sure that's the right heading to encompass a college creative writing class taught by yours truly. But maybe it is--I don't really teach so much as help the students develop, both as readers and writers. We look at examples; we practice. Yesterday, after workshopping two earlier drafts, the class read their “final”—for me, nothing is ever final--pieces aloud. 

I'm so proud that I can't help blogging about the reading. This particular group of students defies all creative writing student stereotypes. For one thing, it's 100% male. While some of the students like to write or have past experience, I know that the main reason most have enrolled in this course is to fulfill elective requirements. They are taking various non-arts programs: law enforcement, social services, technology. So for this first assignment, a NF piece on any subject, I wasn't expecting Malcolm Gladwell. And yet.

And yet, so much great stuff emerged: a funny, Mark Twain-ish boyhood fishing trip; two travelogues; a first-hand report of a car accident and rescue; a devastating eyewitness (child narrator) account of a kid's fatal fall from an apartment window in 1976; a lovely meditation on how to inhabit your own life; a labour and delivery story!; and finally, a father-son day out on a field of battle--paintball battle, that is. (WHY is there no paintball literature? We have enough baseball novels! You read it here first: paintball is the new baseball.)     

Now, none of this writing is perfect, but I’m blown away by how good it is, how full of life. Everyone has a story to tell. Can I get an amen? 

Let There Be [Real] Bagels

Bagels: star of breakfast, always welcome around here. No kid of mine has ever refused a bagel.

Not all bagels are worthy of the name, however, as anyone lucky enough to eat a genuine New York/Montreal bagel will attest. Real bagels are dense and crusty; they stand up to cream cheese, lox, capers, onions, tomatoes, and any number of other toppings. The ones mass-produced for grocery stores are soft and highly processed: basically squishy bread cut in rounds to fool us. At our house, we've gotten used to these wimpy bagels over the years, but now--applying the Unprocessed Project's 5-ingredient rule--they've been turfed.

An annotated bagel recipe follows, below, along with a children's book recommendation (bonus!). Simply scroll down if you don't like reading corporate food labels. Myself, I'm increasingly fascinated by them.    

Here's the website blurb for Dempster's (a common Canadian brand) blueberry bagels:

Enjoy the authentic flavour of our traditional bagel, with a sweet hint of summer from juicy blueberries.

Hand it to the marketing department for audacity: "authentic" and "traditional" are not words I would have dared to apply to this product. (But credit them, at least, for actual blueberries instead of using blue-dyed apple chiplets--assuming "blueberries" = blueberries.)

And now the ingredients (drum-roll!):

Enriched wheat flour, water, glucose-fructose/sugar, dried blueberries (blueberries, sugar, sunflower oil), cornmeal, blueberries, salt, yeast*, malted barley flour, vegetable oil (soybean or canola), calcium propionate, natural and artificial flavours, monoglycerides, sorbic acid. May contain potassium sorbate. *order may change. May contain soybean, egg, sesame seeds, sulphites and milk ingredients. [J926] 

Every effort is taken to ensure that the ingredients and nutritional information listed here is accurate, however, data may change from time to time . . .

Note the prominent placement of sugars in this list, as well as the presence of preservatives (calcium propionate and potassium sorbate) and other additives (artificial flavours, monoglycerides, and [J926]--??). These ingredients may be fine if your main bagel-shopping goal is a reasonable facsimile that has an unnaturally long shelf-life, but clearly they don't meet the Unprocessed Project's goals. 

I would love to report that I jetted off to Brooklyn to score me some really-real bagels. But no, sadly, my life does not include regular visits to NYC. Nor do I have a wood-fired stove with which to recreate the furnace-like bagel bakery I once saw in Montreal. The good news? It's not difficult to make bagels at home. Time-consuming, but easily done.

Brooklyn Bagels (with commentary)

4-5 cups all-purpose flour

1 package active dry yeast

2 tsp. salt

1 1/2 cups hot water

2 tbsp honey or sugar

1 egg white

1 tsp. water

1. Combine 1 c. flour, yeast and salt in a bowl

Start time: 8 pm. 

 

2. Stir in hot water and honey; beat until smooth, about 3 minutes. Stir in enough remaining flour to make a soft dough.

That's simple enough, didn't even use an electric mixer. 
Easy so far.

3. Turn out onto a floured surface; continue to work in flour until dough is stiff enough to knead. Knead until smooth and elastic (about 5 minutes).

Only 5 minutes? My arms do not hurt.

 

4. Cover with bowl. Let rest 15 minutes

Rest: I can do that. Time to make tea.

 

5. Divide into 12 equal parts. Shape each into a flattened ball. With thumb and forefinger poke a hole into center. Stretch and rotate until hole enlarges to about 1 or 2 inches (2.5-5 cm). Cover; let rise about 20 minutes.

Tedious!  It's beyond me to produce equal-sized anything. 
I don't do precision baking . . . but they're not SO different. 
And once bagels are formed, more rest. 9:10 pm.

6. Boil water in a large shallow pan, about 2 inches (5 cm) deep. Reduce heat. Simmer a few bagels at a time about 7 minutes. 

That SOUNDS easy, but I can only boil 4 bagels at a time--3 batches per dozen. 
3 x7 = 21 minutes--and I've doubled the recipe, so 42 minutes just for pre-cooking. 
Switch to wine at 9:30.

7. Remove from pan; drain about 5 minutes. 

Worrying about breaking in transit from pan to drainer, but these are sturdy, dependable dough-blobs.

8. Place on a baking sheet [Recipe doesn't say whether to grease pan. I used parchment paper.]. Brush with mixture of egg white and water [here you can add sesame, flax or poppy seeds, or sprinkle with cinnamon, coarse salt or garlic salt].

Ruined 3 bagels before discovering the poppy seeds are ancient--clumping, stale tasting. 
Pitched container, but didn't tell anyone--heat of the oven will kill any germs.  
I made sure to test-eat a poppyseed bagel first--mother's little sacrifice. 
Not to worry, I've disinfected my stomach with alcohol, so I'm good. 
No hallucinations or anything as of 11:30 pm.

9. Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes, or until done.

3 pans = 90 minutes of cooking time. Tired. People are eating them as they cool. 
Half of them disappear immediately. At least they like them. 
Stash some in the freezer to manage supply.

Makes 1 dozen bagels

Source: The Culinary Arts Institute Cookbook (1985), p. 161.

And now for the BOOK! If you have young readers in the house, be sure to pick up or borrow a copy of Bagels from Benny by Aubrey Davis and illustrated by Dusan Petricic (Kids Can Press, 2003). About a boy who loves to help at his grandfather's bagel bakery, it's funny and sweet. Benny leaves bagels at the synagogue each week as a gift for God and apparently, God likes them.

1. Form bagels and let rise

2. Boil 7 minutes

3. Let drain

 

4. Finished!

My Focus Group: Quotes

So I got some blowback (what else is new?) from my personal focus group, the "volunteer" taste testers for our peanut butter challenge. Apparently the preference for commercially prepared peanut butter was not unanimous. The results were more nuanced, more about texture than taste.

Which is good news, really. Because we are not going back to store-bought: preferences be damned. And the further we get into the Unprocessed Project, the more I realize that preferences don't really matter--they will change in time. We've been conditioned to prefer the very sweet&salty; we're accustomed to the luxury of many choices. If our kitchen offers every packaged, dyed, preservative-laced snack food available on the market, why would a child of mine (or anyone) choose to eat a piece of fruit? Or toast with peanut butter (both homemade)? There will still be choice in this household, but more thoughtful choices, and likely a narrower range--is that so terrible? Especially if the new options replace crap quantity with delicious quality?

I hope it was obvious that our peanut butter taste test was rigged every which way, wholly unscientific, and good fun. I give you now the feedback, verbatim.

     --It looks like hummus, eww. [Ed note: stay tuned for the hummus/baba ghanouj challenge, coming soon; taste testers are not yet aware of this.]

    --I don't want to taste it.

    --Wait, it's peanut butter?

    --Mmm--that's good [ re the commercial peanut butter, sample Y]

    --They all taste bad.  [And then, re: Y] Actually, it tastes bad, but it's smooth. The other ones are gritty, like dirt.

    --It literally tastes like you're eating sand--maybe even cat litter. It would take you like an hour to eat that sandwich.

    --They're all the same, grossness-wise. I hate Y the most [for taste].

    --Yup, gritty, wet sand.

    --We should call child services.

DIY Peanut Butter

Certain people haven't realized it yet, but our days of buying peanut butter, that childhood staple, are over. This truth might have been obscured by the fun we had taste-testing homemade versions of the spread recently (pics below) and the fact that there's still a tiny scraping of brand-name PB left in the jar, leading to a false sense of peanut security. When that jar is gone, it's gone. We don't shy away from tough decisions here at the Unprocessed Project. (I did notice, however, that the commercial stuff has a consistency remarkably like caulking; perhaps I should keep some around for sudden leaks. I bet it would work.)

What's the problem with store-bought PB? For starters, sweeteners--notably icing sugar (aka confectionary sugar)--and the wrong oils. The food industry adds cheaper non-peanut oils, such as soybean, cotton and palm, as well as hydrogenated vegetable oils (imagine eating a dollop of Crisco) as stabilizers. On the label of our jar, this last ingredient is followed, ominously, by "(1011C)", which I can only assume refers to a lab formula.** Another problem is value for money--the price of your PB and J has likely risen in the last year, and the jar sizes keep shrinking, which is the same thing, but quite a big bag of peanuts in the shell is not expensive.

I should note that the brand-name product we tested (sample Y below--and okay, it's Kraft) is actually unsweetened and unsalted. The label makes several health claims on a green banner festooned with the tagline "Sensible Solutions": "Source of 5 Essential Nutrients; Trans Fat Free; Low in Saturated Fat". The five nutrients are Vitamins E and B3, folate, magnesium and phosphorus. This is a perfect illustration of  nutritionism, an ideology and ultra-effective marketing tactic, which Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto exposes. I've been reading that book today--not new, of course, but I'm finally getting to it. Oh, the lies we've been sold over the years--processed nutrients of all kinds marketed as better for you than the real food they replaced.

All-natural PB is available in supermarkets, but a) my kids hate it, and b) the oil slick on top is messy and unappetizing. Our homemade PB didn't separate during a week in the fridge. No need for stabilizers.

Raise your hand if you ever made PB in kindergarten--long, long ago, before peanuts were booted out of the schools over allergy concerns. Today's pupils will never know that joy. They'll have to make do with shaking a jar of cream until it turns to butter (so boring!), but anyone without allergies can try this at home. It's satisfying to puree the peanuts, which takes almost no time. Siblings can work out their aggressions by punching the buttons of the food processor or blender, and the grinding noise will drown out bickering. What does take time is shelling the peanuts. Do that chore ahead, or better yet, delegate it.

I found numerous recipes online, all variations on the following basic idea:

2 c. shelled peanuts (roasted, salted or not)

1 tsp salt (optional--and I found this amount to be too much, so maybe start with less)

1 tbsp honey (also too much--it's totally optional)  

Small amount of oil (anything but olive oil) added during processing--a tablespoon or 2--until the desired consistency is reached.

Store in refrigerator.

I made one batch with just peanuts, salt and oil (sample X), and another with the honey added (sample S). Both homemade PBs tasted genuine, fantastic, and still the rotten kids picked Y. How I missed my eldest girl the day we sampled! She would have been on my side. Best-in-show PB, according to me? The two homemade variations combined.  

PS: We do have a family friend with a peanut allergy, so all of this handiwork will vanish when he's around.

** In the US, FDA rules require PB to contain at least 90% peanuts by weight, or else it can't be called peanut butter.  See explanations 1 and 2 (both short!, from an organization that certifies food as kosher) on the need for stabilizers in commercially prepared PB, and the food industry's success in convincing the FDA that any hydrogenated vegetable oil will do for this purpose, not just hydrogenated peanut oil.