Baguettes: an antidote to alienation?

Since I’ve started this whole organic kick, I’ve found myself tied more and more to my kitchen, though perhaps not in the way one might expect.

I have sudden cravings to make things like cinnamon rolls, berry pie, and French baguettes from scratch. The more ridiculous the recipe — the more bowls I can dirty, the more specific the rising patterns of dough — the better. The other day I even googled cheese-making.

Part of this is no doubt about some calming factor (I do like to bake, after all), but by the time I calculated the number of hours I would need to make a single recipe of baguettes — at least 12, and they only bake for 30 minutes — I started to realize that Barbara Kingsolver was right: my sudden yearning to make food from scratch was less a desire for French yeasty goodness and more a desire to see the thing done.

As in: How does one make baguettes, anyway?

We eat them all the time, this mainstay of Western-style restaurants — sopping up soup with them and eating them with things like ham and cheese. But what are they, exactly, before they arrive at our neighborhood bakeries, cafes, and supermarkets, where they populate Windexed display cases looking long, lean and mannered?

These questions strike me as somewhat reminiscent of a five-year-old’s “but whyyy?” whine of curiosity, like asking where worms come from or how airplanes stay up, but I think that maybe those five-year-olds might be onto something.

We adults can get so involved in the day-to-day business of our lives that we forget where things like baguettes come from, that they have a lifeform and a history. We are alienated; alienated from the people who grow our vegetables, harvest our wheat, collect our eggs from clucking, uppity chickens, or raise the sirloin steak we eat for dinner. And further, we’re alienated from how they raise that meat: We might not know from which part of the animal a sirloin steak is cut from (it’s the hip, incidentally). We might not know if that cattle is grass-fed or if, more probably, it has never seen the light of day since its arrival in its feedlot. We might not know if its been given hormones or antibiotics or if it stands in its own filth while munching its feedlot corn. We might even forget that sirloin comes from an animal at all. (It comes from the supermarket, right?) And if we don’t know all of that, then we can’t know how our lives are connected to the people who quite literally feed it.

If we really are what we eat, then this stuff has to be important.

My sudden craving to make baguettes, I think, is some sort of deep-seated response to this. Some people need to take apart a car engine on the weekends, embroider table runners, or grow tomatoes and herbs in their back gardens to satisfy this same basic curiosity of how things get made. I need to be in the kitchen. Somehow I need to see the bread rise under a flour sack towel or realize exactly what a cinnamon roll’s filling looks like before it gets rolled into the dough and baked.

The antidote to alienation, Marx calls it. We call it having a hobby.

I doubt my dad would ever describe himself as a Marxist. But there he is, growing leggy edibles in the back garden, where he can go pinch off herbs to rub on roast chicken and pluck the tomatoes sunning themselves in late afternoon light for that night’s salad. Not a bad antidote to alienation.

Zucchini pancakes, summer borscht, and the need for color

Up early and immediately in the kitchen.

There are days when something happens and it feels a bit like you’ve missed a step going down stairs. The world becomes oddly pale; watery and reflective, but drained of color. It is on these days that I usually want to throw the back door wide open and spend all day in the kitchen cooking and baking, as if these acts—my hands shaping dough, spatula flipping pancakes, pairing knife trimming beets—will return me to not only my own self-composure but also to something farther back, like childhood or my mother’s childhood or the earth.

Luckily for me, today is my day off and I am able to indulge, so when I got up I went immediately to my favorite cookbooks and flipped through until a few recipes caught my eye: zucchini pancakes, for the moment when the green turns golden brown; summer borscht, for its shocking jolt of pink and suggestion of tartness, and beer batter bread, for the fun of stirring frothy bread dough.

I made the zucchini pancakes even before the coffee, feeling something green and in the shape of pancakes must make for a good start to the day. Instantly I was rewarded: the recipe is easy and flavorful, and best of all, I used up most of the giant zucchini I got from the farmers’ market a few days previously that I was sure I’d have to throw away. (The woman selling them had insisted on giving me an extra large one instead of the medium-sized one I’d picked out, pressing it into my palm and clapping my wrists, all the time assuring me, “They’re organic! Organic, no chemicals. Very healthy, very healthy!”) In fact, I was able to use many of the things I had picked up at the market in the pancakes: zucchini, yellow onion, scallions, even eggs.

Then, it was off to the grocery store, where organic flour, brown sugar, beets, and dairy products were just waiting for me to pluck them up. I’ve discovered that it’s quite easy to shop for organic foods, much easier, in fact, than I thought it might be. Many dry foods like pasta, flour, sugar, and rice; organic dairy products like sour cream, milk, butter, yoghurt, and some cheeses; and also organic chicken or vegetable stock, fruits and vegetables can be found in many grocery stores – Vons, Gelsons, Sprouts, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s.

It is possible to shop organic. It is possible.

When I got home, it was on to the summer borscht and beer batter bread. By now my hands are stained red and the borscht is chilling in my refrigerator, the green cucumber, scallions and dill suspended in pink. The second loaf of bread is starting to rise in the oven. It will go to friends of mine, as second loaves of bread I make always do. The first is for keeps and is already missing a couple slices, which I’ve eaten warm and topped with gouda cheese.

It is now mid-afternoon and I am feeling better. Buoyant and giddy, in fact, and filled with satisfaction. Spending the majority of the day either in the kitchen or writing about being in the kitchen helped with my mood, I know, but I am convinced that the fact that nearly all the ingredients were organic and local helped enormously as well. The pancakes, the borscht, the bread, they all seem more holistically healthy—made with real ingredients, without chemicals or additives or draining away the fat proteins that help the vitamins in foods absorb into your system—than if I had tried to use conventional but reduced-fat ingredients. Fake sour cream, reduced-fat yoghurt, margarine, bleached flour.

Health, it turns out, may be just as much how you feel about your body as the state your body is in.

Now for the recipes …

Zucchini Pancakes

This recipe is from Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa at Home, with few alterations. Though very similar to potato pancakes, these have a lighter flavor and are great in the summer when you can easily buy local zucchini. I like to keep the just-cooked ones in a 300°F oven while I make the rest. They’re delicious served plain, but I’m partial to eating them with sour cream or applesauce.

1 medium zucchini
2 tablespoons grated yellow onion
1 scallion, white parts only, finely chopped
1 large egg, lightly beaten
3-6 tablespoons all purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
unsalted butter

Grate the zucchini into a bowl, and immediately stir in the onion and eggs. Stir in 3 tablespoons of the flour, the baking soda, salt, and pepper. If the batter gets too thin from the liquid from the zucchini, then add the remaining tablespoons of flour as needed.)

Proceed as you would with normal pancakes: Heat a medium-sized sauté pan over medium heat and melt butter, about ½ a tablespoon, into the pan. When the butter is hot, lower the heat slightly and drop spoonfuls of the zucchini batter into the butter. Cook 2 minutes on each side, until browned.

Summer Borscht

Beets are available nearly all year round, but this soup, also borrowed from Ina Garten, is especially good served cold in the summer months. You can use either chicken or vegetable stock for the base, both of which I’ve found is available organic at Trader Joe’s.

5 medium beets
2 cups vegetable stock
16 ounces sour cream
½ cup plain yoghurt
¼ cup sugar
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 teaspoons white wine or champagne vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1½ teaspoons black pepper
2 cups diced cucumber
½ cup chopped green onions
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

Drop the beets into a large pot of boiling salted water and cook until tender, about 30 to 35 minutes. Remove the beets from the water and set aside to cool, retaining the beet liquid.

In a large bowl, whisk together 1½ cups of the beet liquid, vegetable stock, sour cream, yoghurt, sugar, lemon juice, vinegar, salt and pepper until smooth. Peel and medium dice the cooled beets, and add the beets, cucumber, green onions, and dill to the soup base. Cover and chill for at least 4 hours. Serve with dill and sour cream.

Beer Batter Bread

This is perhaps the easiest bread I’ve ever made, and is from William-Sonoma’s book, Bread. The dough can be assembled in minutes, and no rising or kneading is necessary. Also, you can use a different kind of beer each time you make it, so the bread will take on slightly different flavors as you choose. Organic flour is readily becoming available: try King Arthur Flour or Vons’ O Organics’s flour. Also, be on the lookout for organic beers: Wolaver’s from New Zealand, Dogfish Head from Delaware, and Buttle Creek from Vermont are a few to be aware of.

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 12-ounce bottle of beer, at room temperature
4 tablespoons melted butter

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Grease a 9-by-5-inch bread loaf pan.

In a bowl, stir together the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt until combined. Open the beer and add it all at once. As it foams, stir briskly until just combined but not quite smooth, about 20 strokes. Pour the dough into the prepared loaf pan and drizzle with the melted butter.

Bake 35-40 minutes, until the top is crusty and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Let the bread rest in the pan for 5 minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack. The bread is best served warm or at room temperature the day it is made.

Why Organics?

It is mid-morning, and light has long since broken in wide, bright shards over Los Angeles. Despite the fact that it is the weekend and I am old enough to be past my school days, there is the thought of the first day of school in the air that only the dawn of September can bring.

That feeling of a blank slate, a new year spread out before you.

Sharp little thrill of possibility popping in your stomach so that you have to halt mid-step and suck in breath.

I am just back from my first serious shopping trip to my neighborhood farmers’ market. Not a Los Angeles native, I am always slightly shocked when these stalls – fresh, fully stocked, earthy – emerge every week, interrupting the city’s sun-blanched decrepitude like a patch of dead grass that has suddenly sprouted a rogue dandelion. But I arrive, one of the early ones, and here it all is: local, organic grapefruits as big as both of my father’s fists, loaves of wholegrain bread with sunflower seeds pressed into the crust, heaps and heaps of the most beautiful green beans I’ve seen in a long time, and buckets and buckets of flowers.

It was, as I say, my first serious shopping trip to my local farmer’s market, or really to any farmers’ market. I’ve been to this market before, of course, but mostly out of curiosity and to experience that jolt of nostalgia that accompanies bustling among produce and flower vendors, much as I can imagine generations before me must have done daily. And, if I am honest, perhaps also out of some somewhat smug feeling of eating chemical-free peaches and supporting local growers instead of big agribusinesses (and at the same time, no less). ‘Voting with the trolley,’ I am told the British call it.

But today is different. Today the shopping is not about nostalgia or feeling smug; it is serious. It is serious because today marks the first day of my year of eating organically. That, in any case, is the plan.

Or, if not a fully-fledged plan, at least an inkling, a whisper of an idea.

An inkling of what, you may ask?

I’ll be perfectly frank. As it stands now, my relationship to food is rife with desire and denial, with anxiety and guilt. There is joy and pleasure, yes, and also a sense of camaraderie involved in preparing and eating foods. But there is also no denying that no matter how much I try to pretend otherwise, there is an endless loop playing in the back of my head: Whoops, too much butter in that, I’d better lay off … Oh alright, just one little bite … What the heck, I’ll eat the whole thing. I don’t want to look like one of those girls who can’t eat a cookie. But then, what about my weight? How do I “lose it,” or “keep it off,” or “maintain it”? Still, all of this, even after figuring out long ago that I should be perfectly happy with the body I’ve got. Still, the anxiety.

And so the question is: How do you get this anxiety over weight to stop? Or, put differently: How do you go about changing your relationship to food and eating?

To be honest, I haven’t a clue. But I do have an inkling, a whisper of an idea … that if I steep myself in eating organically (and locally and seasonally as much as possible), that my criteria on what it means to eat healthily will begin to shift, and some of the anxiety, the endless loop playing in the back of my head, will start to erode and break apart. I hope to find a different way of conceptualizing health. And to make gloriously fresh, seasonal, yummy food in the process.

I’ll admit that it’s a big project for organic food to do on its own. Maybe too big. But it’s morning on the first day of September, I have just bought my first stock of organic produce, and I am gripped with that fresh-as-daisies feeling of new beginnings and that sharp, popping feeling of possibility rising in my stomach.