At Sea, post #1: Feeding Myself

The transition in my life from grad student to self-employed professional continues to be an adventure...

Being a full-time student at Dell'Arte means not having the time, energy or mental capacity to cook for yourself. So for three years, I basically ate pasta and sandwiches; granola or just bananas for breakfast; sometimes just a bunch of corn chips, a handful of whole, unpeeled carrots and a cold, pre-cooked sausage. It's turned into a rut that feels hard to escape from.

So these last two weeks, I've embarked on a campaign to get myself back into the kitchen. I bought a chicken last week and braised it; it provided five dinners. I also made a risotto — one of the most sensuous acts one can commit at the stove — with porcini mushrooms and fennel. It came out pretty good. But it is agonizing, after three years of dull simplicity, to plan and shop for these things, and it feels incredibly expensive, especially with the economy and my current state of self-unemployment. I'm really feeling the inflation of food costs. And while I'm still a committed carnivore, I'm trying to reduce my meat consumption and restrict myself to sustainably-raised, free-range meat. Michael Pollan's blog in the New York Times a couple of years ago was an eye-opener; it both alleviated my sneaking guilt at being a carnivore and made some thunderous points about the environmental impact of eating locally versus organically. I've long admired Alice Waters' local-food ethic and the Slow Food movement as worthy pursuits, both culturally and economically. So I split my shopping between the local food Co-op and the local Safeway, eschewing the WinCo that most students at my school shop at, and try not to fall into elitism about it all.

The chicken I bought last week was raised in California on a free-range farm. It weighed a little over four pounds and cost about $14 at the Co-op. If I had gotten the Free-range organic chicken, I would have paid $18. Conversely, the Premiere Brand sausages I often eat — also a NorCal product, but from conventional slaughterhouses, cost around $5 for a pack of four, and those will satisfy my desire for meat for four lunches or dinners. Was it worth nine extra dollars for the experience of chopping vegetables, separating the chicken, browning and braising it? Do those dollars cover not just the single extra meal, but the satisfaction of tasting the work of my own hands, the convenience of microwavable leftovers, and — not least — the relative comfort of the chicken while it lived?

Can any of this be expressed on a balance sheet?

Will eating well — locally, sustainably, and attentively — make sense next month? I don't know where March's rent-check is coming from...

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Last night I made polenta and tried to revive the Marinara sauce recipe that Micah Ciampa taught me years ago. I bought some Italian sausages from the co-op butcher to serve over the polenta, some tomato paste and a couple large cans of Contadina tomato purée. I chopped an onion and sautéed it gently in olive oil. I added minced garlic; I put in some paste, not noticing that it was double-concentrated. I opened the package of sausages and noticed that they were Premiere Brand, which was not how they were labeled in the display case... I opened the cans of purée and only then noticed that they were not purée but "sauce," already full of tomato concentrate, garlic and onion powder, spices... I put them in anyway (might as well use them up.) I browned the sausages, thinking I'd use half the sauce with them and freeze half for later, keeping the sauce vegetarian... but when I went to deglaze the sautée pan with some vermouth, I put in way too much, and had to pour it off, along with a bunch of the sausage grease, into the main sauce pot... Of course I completely spattered the whole stove with red-tinted grease.

It's like I don't know how to shop or cook anymore.

I'm out of practice.

The polenta was pretty good, though...