Weekly Menu - January 29

Here's what's on the menu for this week around here.

Reality Check on Grocery Costs

In early January I put up a post Grocery Costs at Casa Anglachel, talking about my shopping habits and spending in 2011. A few days ago, an article was posted in the local paper, the Union-Tribune, about restaurant menu prices going up. The article included a table on wholesale food cost increases, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor.

Weekly Menu - January 22

I'm not sure I'll keep posting this, but I've had a few people ask me the kinds of things I cook and how I decide what to cook.

Mayacoba Beans

My new most favorite legume.

Parsnips, Yum

I love parsnips. I just had a big serving of them for dinner. I roasted them with a red onion in a balsamic vinegar and brown sugar marinade for about an hour, then served them up with a barley and mushroom baked thing. A little dusting of grated Parmesan was the right touch on each.

It was very good.

Anglachel

Grocery Costs at Casa Anglachel

My take on the Iowa caucuses - nobody much likes anyone. The election in November will be for who is least detested by the general population. Meh.

I've been keeping my grocery database for just over a year now. I started it with my shopping trip on 10/31/2010 and now I'm starting a new year. I set up some crosstabs and reports last week to see what is going on with food prices and my purchasing habits.

Barley and Favas

It's been a nasty few weeks. I came down with some head cold thing the first week in March that is still clinging on. One major customer called a complete halt to all work and another announced an emergency project that should take two weeks and is being compressed into 4 working days. I have the day off today and I'm making a big grain and legume salad for dinner since the temperature in hovering near 80 degrees.

Chickpea and Potato Curry

This is what we had for dinner tonight.  Details below the fold.

Food Experiment

Something I've been doing over the last few months is keeping a database of food purchases. I'm doing this for a few reasons.

Locovores

Not a full thought here, but a reflection on a deep problem with the locavore/localvore (I've seen it spelled both ways) "movement". The gist of their argument is that by eating "locally" (ostensibly food grown within a certain distance of their home and often including other conditions such as being organic, purchased "from the grower", and bought at a "farmers" market), you are using fewer resources, avoiding the horror of industrial farming, getting better quality/more nutritious foodstuffs and generally are are more virtuous person than your neighbor who buys vegetables from the big supermarket chain.

These claims have a ring of truth, especially the feelings of moral superiority. Intuitively, we think food grown nearby should have a smaller carbon footprint than food grown three states over or in another country. Isn't it better to have food that isn't grown with chemical pesticides? Aren't organic farming methods less destructive to farmland and riverine systems?

Another Day, Another Dollar

Just over a year ago, I posted a pair of articles - Red Queen on Food and Do the Math - talking about how food fits into the budget of a family in poverty, and why food choices follow certain patterns when you face extreme budget constraints.

I'd like to draw my readers' attention to this photo essay by Jonathan Blaustein, The Value of a Dollar. In it, he presents 20 photographs, each of them depicting one dollar's worth of food. The photos I found most interesting were the picture of the fast food chain's hamburger, the juxtaposition of grapefruit from different stores, and the blueberries.

Also, as a follow on to my post Check Out, where I discussed the move away from personal checks in grocery stores, the Fresh & Easy store in my neighborhood opened recently and I've been to it a few times. It's an odd fish, that's for sure. While some may compare it to Trader Joe's because of the size, it has more in common with Ralphs or Albertsons. The food selection is more conventional (though it's approach to packaging fresh fruit & vegetables is clearly taken from TJs) and they carry more staple items. My back of the shopping list estimate is that it is cheaper on most staple items (butter, cooking oil, sugar) than the big markets and has a slightly wider selection than Traders. Prices at TJs are better, though. Their checkout is mostly self service and, as mentioned in the earlier post, is cash or card only.

My neighborhood is thrilled by the new addition. It has a slightly industrial grunge feel to it - a world away from the wholesome, handmade facade of Whole Foods - and already feels like it's been gently molding in the area for a few years. I've bought mostly staples there; a good deal on a two-pack of bacon, cheap granulated sugar and the best price in the area for peanut oil. Prices for bread and meat don't seem too bad. In short, it does seem to fill a niche left open by traditional grocers.

Where it can't compete is with the small local markets that sell odd and "ethnic" products, and seem to have the corner on vegetable seconds. There's the local IGA, a chain of "Mexican" markets and some specialty food places that provide slightly dinged and often downright weird vegetables and fruits that sell for a fraction of what the classier places can offer. $0.47/lb for cauliflower, $0.25/bunch for flat-leaf parsley, $0.49/head celery, and four different kinds of eggplant for less than $1.00/lb. You have to use them up within a day or so, but it's a better deal than anything else around. Even at these prices, though, the costs add up - especially when $1.00 can be spent on a hamburger that will keep a kid going for hours and someone else has paid the price for food storage and preparation, or seven packages of ramen which can stretch some meat leftovers and frozen vegetables for several meals.

Nutritious food is often more expensive than it needs to be, especially when wrapped in the marketing glitz of "organic", "local", and "natural." Even when purchased cheaply, it's not clear that it is a better deal than "junk" food if your budget is inflexible and you have to put enough calories on the table to work through the day.

I will say categorically that there is no way 10 blueberries are worth $1.00. Someone may be stupid enough to pay that much, but they aren't worth it.

Anglachel

Computers Make You Fat

Yes, I'm alive. No, I'm not returning to regular blogging anytime soon. But I had a thought and wanted to note it down.

There are many theories about why there is an outbreak of obesity among affluent nations and affluent segments of not-so-affluent nations. It's the high fructose corn syrup. It's the carbs. It's the trans-fats. It's the pollution. It's the vaccinations. Etc.

There is one global phenomenon that pretty much tracks the growth in obesity and that is the growth in adoption of personal computers at work and home.

Computers make you fat.

Or, to be a little more detailed, the expansion of computers combined with the increasing speed of the data pipelines - good enough now in many places to stream movies and conduct first-person shooter games over the internet - changes the human environment to such an extent that opportunities for physical motion has been dramatically reduced and the always-on (and thus always intrusive) connection discourages us from turning to other things. Let me check that email one more time!

Instead of walking to a colleague's office, you IM or email her. Work becomes keyboard and screen interaction and it becomes almost inescapable. You spend your evenings answering emails or preparing for tomorrow instead of taking a walk around the neighborhood or just puttering in the yard or taking care of some odd job around the house. It's not just that we sit in front of computers (we've had TVs a lot longer), but the combination of the PC and the perpetual connection that narrows our physicality. I have 8 emails on my company issued phone right now from my previous manager (who can't seem to understand I don't work in that department anymore), sent since close of business Friday. Leisure time vanishes.

The high-speed and highly fragmented mode of interaction that is paradigmatic of current computing reinforces behaviors that are conducive to obesity. The explosion of hyper-processed food fits a form of life that needs a hand free for the device. Phone, mouse, game controller; if it interferes with the flick of the wrist, it's worse than toast. Toast you can eat with one hand. I stare in awe at the variety of prepared foods - fresh, frozen, shelf-stable - that are available to me.

When the physical representation of the society is molded around the ideal of a man sitting with an electronic device in one hand and accomplishing important business with the other, that mold affects how our public spaces are arranged, how our food is conceptualized, produced and delivered, how our interactions with our social circles (work, family, friends, associations) are channeled.

Games. Social networks. Business. Video calls. Ubiquitous computing. Perpetual connections. Thoroughly mediated experiences. The mundane corners of my life, things like the kinds of food I can find on the shelf and the presumption that I will always carry a GPS enabled device on my person, have been colonized by the ever present computer.

It isn't the sole reason for obesity. I eat too much for the amount of calories I burn. That's the mechanics of the problem. But it is a powerful factor in the environment that makes it so easy for me to type, munch, type, munch, type, munch, answer that incoming call....

The expansion of my ass is directly in proportion to the expansion of my time in front of a computer.

Anglachel

Do the Math

A few people who left comments on the last post failed the math portion of the quiz, big time. I posted Russ' comment since he was the least offensive of the group, but even he really needs to brush up on the reading comprehension. He said he lives on $20K a year (which is not very much) and spends no more than $50/week on groceries. He gives examples of what he purchases, which sounds a lot like what I buy every week. He then claims how this is because he cares about nutrition, not stuffing himself ("The difference is that I do not view a meal as an occaision to fill my belly. I am more concerned about nutrition, fat content and calories.").

Let's do some math, m'kay?

Here is a table of the household income and expenses mapped out by Red Queen in her post, How about you economists do some fucking math instead. I've adjusted a few numbers to make the splits work more evenly, but it's within a couple dollars of her estimates. I use a simplified balance ledger style to show how the money amounts rise and fall through the month:

Item	Credit	Debit	Balance
Paycheck #1	$917	$0	$917
Payroll Taxes	$0	$56	$861
Rent	$0	$800	$61
Groceries - 15 Days	$0	$15.25/ person	$0
Paycheck 2	$917	$0	$917
Payroll Taxes	$0	$56	$861
Childcare	$0	$600	$261
Utilities - Phone, water, power, trash	$0	$100	$161
Household - TP, clothes, medicine, lightbulbs, gas	$0	$75	$86
Groceries - 15 Days	$0	$21.50/ person	$0

I assume all extra cash goes to food, and that non-food household expenses besides utilities average $75/month. That works out ot $36.75 per person, per month for groceries, which is misleading because that it does not take account of cash flow problems. Maybe one month they don't have much household expenses and they have a whopping $40 per person per month. That windfall breaks out to:

• $10/week
• $1.33/day
• $0.44/meal

For comparison, I spend @ $240/month per person:

• $60/week
• $8.57/day
• $2.86/meal

I'm only spending $10 more per week than Russ. I have six times the buying power compared to an individual in a poverty level family of four. What does that get me? I've totaled up a day's worth of food so you can see how the money is divvied up:

Breakfast:

• Cereal - $0.50
• Milk - $0.22
• Sugar - $0.03
• Total: $0.75

Not too bad. If I had really gone for the belt tightening, I could have had oatmeal for @ 20 cents a serving, but then I would have to factor in the time and gas to cook it.

Lunch (Yes, I really, honestly eat this every day for lunch):

• Bell Pepper - $1.00
• Carrots - $0.15
• Celery - $0.34
• Cauliflower - $0.36
• Snow Peas - $0.44
• Radishes - $0.20
• Hard boiled egg - $0.12
• Total - $2.61

This is looking good and virtuous! Except that my virtually all vegetable lunch just cost nearly two days worth of meals in Red Queen's budget.

Dinner - Cost out a pot of home made vegetarian chili and divide by four servings:

• Pinto beans, 1 cup, dry (no cans for me!) - $0.30
• A bell pepper - $1.00 (I used it so it wouldn't go bad)
• An onion - $0.17
• A 1/4 package small tomatoes - $0.75
• Small can of tomato sauce, off brand - $0.63
• Half head of garlic - $0.13
• Entire tub of Trader Joe Salsa - $2.99 (Purchased for a party, frugally used to avoid waste)
• A few chipotles - $0.41
• Oil to brown the vegetables - $0.23
• Total - $6.61 or $1.65 for four servings

Let's round out that meal with $0.10 of cooked rice and $0.30 for half a sour dough mini baguette from Costco for a grand meal total of $2.05. My meals for the day came to $5.41, lower than average because my weekend dinners tend to be more elaborate and because I haven't factored in my two cups of coffee and one can of Diet Coke that I also consume each day, nor the $0.10 worth of pretzels that's my mid afternoon snack. (Yes, I buy pretzels in bulk and take a serving to work in a ziplock bag.) My consumption for one day was more than half of the weekly food budget in a poverty level household, and I was eating what would be considered frugal, cost-conscious meals.

My ovo-vegetarian, gluten free, ultra healthy meal cost the most, delivered a lot of nutrients and a decent amount of calories (@300), but I have to consume nearly 1 lb of raw vegatables in a single sitting. I end up eating my lunch over several hours, which I can do since I work at a desk and don't get hassled by a supervisor.

I'm sure I could reduce the cost of what I ate even more if I really, really tried, but cutting down more on that menu takes time and effort. I could get cheaper salsa, cook oatmeal instead of eating cold cereal, go without the bell peppers (2/5 of my food budget for the day, right there) and eat more carrots and celery.

But we're talking nickles and dimes at this point and not addressing the high cost of housing, child care, and transportation that is putting the food budget into a bind. Groceries are minor compared to these intractable costs. They end up being bargaining chips because a lot of food is cheap and a few days of going hungry is not precisely starving. You can gorge at a later meal, or scarf down somebody's leftover birthday cake in the break room.

I showed you a healthy, inexpensive day's meal plan that is still far too expensive for a poor household to manage. The food cannot be viewed in isolation from the other demonds on the budget, as well as the less obvious demands on time and the way in which low-paying work does not support the leisurely eating habits that go with consuming lots of roughage.

Obesity is endemic throughout American society. I work with a lot of fat people, myself included, and we're a pretty well-paid bunch. What we are seeing is the transformation of instances of obesity into pathology when the individual is from a socio-economic class we disdain. Hence the arrogance of Ezra Klein presuming to tell Red Queen that if she is fat (or, rather, that she *is* fat because of her socio-ecnomic markers) it is because she has a psychological problem related to her poor self-image/esteem/deep rooted desire for sweets/ etc. rather than saying that the food industry and low-wage employment creates a situation where people have only a little money to spend on a wide range of poor quality but easily obtained and easily consumed foods.

Pathologizing a condition like obesity privatizes it, making it a condition of personal rectitude that is my own weak-willed fault, and obscures the social structures that make this condition so prevalent, particularly among the poor.

Let's get the big ticket items like health care and child care figured out before worrying about the breadth of anyone's ass

Anglachel

Red Queen on Food

Go right now and read the Red Queen of Elizabitches about what poverty does to food budgets. She's giving Ezra Klein a lesson in reality. Here are the concluding paragraphs, but read it all for the math lesson:

So most of the month lunch is a candy bar and a coke (or 800 or so calories in fat and sugar for under 2 bucks) and dinner is hamburger helper and a can of green beans (a little more than 5 bucks to feed 4 people and about 400 calories per person).

That is why poverty and obesity go together. It's not because twinkies are the prozac of the lower classes, but because our Darwin approved bodies recognize starvation and fight to hold onto every possible calorie. It's the thrifty fucking gene in action, and a wee bit of math would have shown that out.

I always get infuriated by the earnest assertion of people with money to spare at all times that, really, these poor people need to learn how to maximize the nutrition in their diets by shopping with cash at weekly farmers markets and getting organic produce that is only $2/bunch for kale.

This was also a poorly explained aspect of my post about refusing to take checks - sometimes that cash isn't there until day after tomorrow, and if you hand over a check late in the day at a grocery store, chances are it won't clear until sometime the business day after that.

You spend the money you have to secure the goods you can. You don't buy soy milk because it is expensive compared to powdered milk. Fatty hamburger is cheaper per pound than tofu and tempeh and fills up a teenage stomach much faster. Canned vegetables - you know, the off brands made with the non-organic vegggies and bathed in salty, preservative laced liquid - are cheaper than frozen which are cheaper than fresh. They don't go bad, either. Am I going to buy the store brand squishy white bread for .99 (a day or two old, but, hey, toast it and who knows the diff...) or the artisan baked French White loaf with the extra chewy (i.e., inedible) crust made from the organic, stone-ground flour fo $3.89 per paper-wrapped loaf?

Like, duh.

I have the luxury of eating a red bell pepper every day. I love those peppers. I never got them as a kid because they cost too much. I wasn't able to buy them as an adult until after I got a realatively steady high tech job. They are sweet, crunchy, tasty and packed with so many wonderful micro-nutrients per gram it boggles the mind. They are also $1 each, $30 per month (more, because some go bad), and about 100 calories. That's just 7 cents less than the per day food budget of Red Queen's family of four at the poverty line.

Think about that. My one bell pepper, inadequate to provide even a single meal, is worth almost as much as the entire day's food budget for someone who is at the poverty line. A $2 bunch of kale (I mention this because discussed on some food site as being the obvious choice for someone on food stamps to buy) might go a bit further, but is still all or half of a day's food allowance for one person. If I cook it up into a pot with pinto beans and some minced onions, then it might help make a meal, but why waste the $2 on the kale when I can get some sausage to go in the pot?

Most times, onions are cheap. Potatoes, too. Cheap bacon, probably bacon ends sold in a big box, mostly fat and really salty. Now, there's a yummy meal - pork fat, potatoes and onions. You think I'm joking? I'm not. I'd like a little salt & pepper to go with it, but I can do without and I'd gladly eat it. Even now when I can afford "better", I love a baked potato mashed with some onion cooked in a slice of bacon.

The obsession of the well-off upper middle class with the eating habits of the barely scraping by poor is both domineering and obscene, a deep desire to force their food choices (too little for too much) onto others who have little choice, and to closely observe, weigh, measure, and manipulate the bodies of subjects unable to avoid this invasion.

Who in this exchange better knows the cost of a pound of flesh?

Anglachel

PS - An observation. I'm getting more and more spam comment posts that have vague political stances and then include a link to "my site" which is something commercial, usually travel or "dating". Why put that much effort into spam?

Check Out

A few days ago, I came across an interesting article in the LA Times about two supermarket chains operating in California, Whole Foods and Fresh & Easy: Grocery stores taking check use off shoppers' lists. Anything that has to do with Whole Foods interests me, of course, and there is a Fresh and Easy going in just a few blocks from my house. The article opens (my emphasis):

Long before banks started locating branches inside supermarkets, grocery stores acted as informal financial establishments, cashing payroll checks and personal checks to provide ready cash for their customers. That's starting to change.

Whole Foods Market Inc. is considering banning the use of personal checks at its stores and this month stopped accepting checks at two stores in Los Angeles County and one in Arizona as a test.

Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, the California division of British retailing giant Tesco, won't take personal checks at any of the 70 stores it operates in California.

"Supermarkets used to be a repository of checking, cashing payroll and personal checks, but in an age of direct deposit and debit cards, that's not something that is relevant to their customers anymore," said Mac Brand, a Chicago food industry consultant.

Both I and the Spousal Unit remember an era before ATMs, when Mom or Dad would write a check for $20 (or $12, or $36, or whatever specific amount they needed) above the grocery purchase and get some cash back from the grocery store till. You had to be known at the grocery store to get this privilege most times and it was how you got quick cash. It still can be:

Vons, Albertsons and Ralphs -- the stores most likely to have a bank branch within their locations -- continue to accept checks.They also cash payroll checks, although the chains typically charge a service fee of about $1 to about 1% of the check, depending on the municipal regulations of the city where the store is located.

Representatives of the chains said there were no plans to end the services, and one supermarket industry executive questioned why, in an environment of increasing competition for shoppers, a company would add a barrier to potential sales.

So Ralphs will cash my payroll check, for a service fee, but Whole Foods will not? Vons will take my check, but Fresh and Easy will not? Sounds like these are services that some customers still want.

Such as customers who don't have direct deposit, or who need that extra day to "float" the check, or who can't get a credit card but need to defer that purchase just a tiny bit. (I'm also reminded of The Dude buying a carton of milk that cost less than $1 with a check in The Big Lebowski, but I digress...). Or even just people like my parents who don't have an ATM/Debit card (or, if they do, it is sitting unused in the desk drawer) and only use credit cards when they are buying something on credit. Everything else is cash and check. A lot of checks.

Credit cards are getting harder to come by, have higher fees, higher rates and lower credit lines. Banks are pushing debit cards like crazy, as are merchants, and nobody likes checks. ATMs nickle and dime (well, quarter and dollar) you if you aren't in the network when you make a withdrawal. What we're seeing is the rise of an electronic wall around ordinary, mundane transactions, like buying groceries.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism (You *do* read it everyday, don't you?) had a recent post on the dangers of using a debit card, Why Do Consumers Accept Debit Card Abuse? There are a few details she may have over-emphasized (read the comments for some alternate perspectives), but she does a thorough smack-down on why banks want to encourage use of debit cards among all customers. It's the fees (or, as Lambert cheerily reminded me, the rents) that can mount up to obscene levels within a day or two because of a cascade of overdrafts.

What Yves didn't get into in her post, which focused on the relationship of the bank and the consumer, was on why merchants are just as eager as banks to get customers to use debit, not credit, cards. Before I got into IT, I worked for a credit card processing company. It was a dull job but had nice people and I learned way more about the credit card indstry than I really wanted to know. The basic way the credit card processor makes money is by charging a combination of a flat transaction fee of a few pennies plus a percentage of the dollar value of the sale for each transaction. Different cards and processors charge different rates and American Express was notorious for having the highest rates. There was usually a minimum amount on credit purchases because below a certain amount, the merchants lost all their profit to the fees. Different industries paid higher fees than others due to fraud. The group in the company who had the best time was the fraud recovery folks because every dollar they recovered was kept by the processor, not paid to the credit card company. They were a loud and vicious bunch.

Debit cards run through a processing network, but they don't have the kinds of merchant fees that credit cards do. They also cost singificantly less than checks to process, so it is absolutely in the interest of any merchant that sells a high volume of low to medium priced goods to have the purchaser use debit, not credit. Even using debit cards like credit cards is a hit to the merchant because then the transaction goes through the credit network, not the debit one, and the merchant is hit with credit fees.

Meanwhile, back at the consumer ranch, the purchaser is at constant risk of fraudulent use, unable to count on "float" to help manage cash flow, may be liable for all the fraud on the card (not just a nominal amount as with a credit card), has no purchase protection, and now has all of their transactions digitized and distributed instantly, with a perfect connection between their debit card number and the specific items that were purchased. It is much harder to link a processed paper check that way, and you can't link cash.

So let's talk about food. What does it mean to buyers when a grocery store won't take checks? You have cash or you have plastic. Who is hurt by this? People who do not have regular access to banks, who do not have credit and whose cash on hand is irregular. People without liquid savings, such as an elderly woman who lives on Social Security and owns her house, but has little or no savings and lives check to check. Someone who doesn't have a bank account. Someone who needs to cash a payroll check so they can buy groceries first with the cash. It's no longer so simple to get cash, remember. You have to either go to a bank where you have an account and use your ATM to withdraw money or stand in line at the teller and do a withdrawal, or else cash a check (such as a payroll or benefit check) at a bank where you don't have an account (assuming they will do it) or go to a check cashing service and get hit with usurious rates. Or you go to your local grocery store of a decent size where they know you.

What this does is strengthen the plastic barrier between people and the most ordinary and necessary of commodities, food. In the case of stores like Whole Foods, it places pressure on the shoppers to conform to purchasing habits that benefit the retailer in ways beyond making a simple profit - it reinforces class barriers (read this post by a Santa Barbaran thrilled that all those icky, old, slow check writers are soon to be banned from her beloved Whole Foods! And then read the comment thread for an extra dose of elite thinking, both liberal and conservative), it makes the consumer more trackable, it shifts the burdens of financial risk onto the consumer.

In terms of Fresh and Easy, there seems to be a more complicated story because of the odd market niches it is trying to fill, not entirely sure if it is going upscale or downscale, clearly trying to capture the high-end chic of the typical WFN shopper, yet also trying to crack into low income areasas well, where a large mega-grocer can't afford the overhead. In those cases, their sales strategy is less debit vs. check as much as plastic vs. cash, with underserved areas being more likely to use cash in the first place because they are also underserved by banks.

I look at the situation and I see two fault lines.

1. Those who have/don't need credit and those who do, with those who do having their exposure to financial risk steadily increased. If you have great credit, it probably means you also have solid cash reserves and have the luxury of choosing between payment methods. If you don't have good credit, you will benefit the most by being able to use personal checks (a form of credit - the merchant has to wait for their payment, if only for a business day) and the least by having instant and manipulated electronic transfers from your accounts. Cash is increasingly difficult to obtain.
2. The social divide between the plugged in and the outsiders. Lower end stores may still take checks because that is their clientele. They will have inferior/deprecated goods, less safe shopping environments, and social stigma. People who can use electronic transactions with certainty will, by that marker, be granted access to premium/desireable goods, luxurius shopping environments and social approval. Mid-range places, from Albertsons to Trader Joes, will waver and have to decide how they will treat the marginal cases, those who appear to be financially sound, but whose plastic may be worthless. Where does the risk go in those cases?

In short, it looks more than a little like the collapsing housing market. Except in grocery stores.

Anglachel

PS - For what it's worth, I buy all my groceries and just about everything else on my Costco branded AMEX. Cash reward on purchases that pays for the annual fee and enough in addition for one Costco trip. I have never used a debit card and never will. I do all my banking through ATMs or online sites. I make full use of class position and economic leverage to improve my cash flow.

Good Eats

Someone (Sha, I think) asked for recipes. OK, here's what I cook a lot of:

Crock Cooked Beans for Two

Start at 8:00 PM. Take a cup of dry beans of some pinto-ish variety (pintos, anasazis, something mottled, you get the picture). Rinse and soak until the next night.

At 8:00 PM the next day, pour yourself a glass of Two-Buck Chuck from Traders or pop open a bottle of beer you bought on sale at the IGA. Miller's good. Drink as you cook. Also have a spousal unit, congenial family member, a friend or two, and/or whomever is in the house come and hang out. Give 'em a beer. Make 'em chop stuff.

Drain and rinse beans and put into a medium or bigger crock pot. Pour in liquid to cover and turn on "High". Chicken stock is good, water is good. Add a splash of wine or beer if you like, right from the glass/bottle, but not too much.

Take a sausage, whatever kind you like (I like Louisiana hotlinks or spicy Portuguese linguica best), slice it into 1/4 thick rounds and pan fry on medium heat until browned and the fat is rendered. Put sausage in crock. Do not drain fat from pan unless really excessive.

Chop up a whole bunch of garlic cloves, as many as you like. I usually add about 6 cloves. If you have some bell peppers in the fridge that need using, chop them too, but not more than two. Chop up a big yellow onion (sorry VL, I *love* onions). Toss these into the pan with the sausage fat and cook on low to medium heat until they soften and the onion begins to change color.

Chop up all the old tomatoes you have sitting around and throw them in the pan. I usually have three to five in the vicinity. Or use a can of tomatoes, whatever size and chopped/unchopped status is on hand. Do you have some tomato paste that needs using? Spoon in some, maybe a tablespoon or two. Add two or three whole chipotle peppers, being sure to get a good spoon of the adobo sauce.

While that simmers, mix spices. Here's what I did tonight: 1 tsp coriander, 1 tblsp cumin, all the chili powder left at the bottom of the jar (about 1/2 tsp), 1 tsp pasilla chili powder, 1 tsp new mexico chili powder, 1/4 tsp cayenne, 1+ tblsp dried oregano. Toss spice mix on top of vegetables and stir to incorporate. If stuff is sticking, add a little water or a splash of whatever you're drinking, but only enough to control sticking.

As soon as spices are mixed, dump into crock. Use a little liquid to loosen up anything stuck to the bottom of the pan and put that in, too. Stir to mix ingredients.

Cook overnight. If you have a really good crock pot, cook on low. If you have a crappy crock pot, cook on high. It just needs to be hot enough to gently bubble all night.

In the morning, turn off crock, lift crock out of cradle (if your's works like that) and/or let it sit with the lid off while you get ready for work. I don't like putting the crock into the fridge, so I pour the mixture into a different bowl, put that in the fridge and soak the crock so stuff doesn't stick all day. The mixture may be dry across the top, so be sure to stir the dry stuff down into the wet stuff.

When you get home from work, take it out of the fridge and let it warm up a bit. Ladle out what you're going to eat that night and warm it up on the stove or in the microwave. Add salt as desired. Serve with whatever starch accompaniment you like best (rice, potatoes, tortillas, corn bread, etc.) or have on hand to make the proteins complete. If you want to get fancy, add some sour cream, avocados, tomatoes, diced peppers, green onions, stray vegetables from the back of the crisper you need to use, etc. as condiments.

Should be enough left over for lunch a few days later.

The chipotles are expensive per can, but a little goes a long way and they keep forever in the fridge. The sausage doesn't have to be great, it just has to be strong flavored. It's best if it is pork, but follow your dietary/religious bliss. The rest is cheap and crock pots are very fuel efficient cookers. Double or triple recipe as desired. Scale chili heat up or down according to your taste.

Anglachel

A Taste of Things to Come

I think a lot about food.

I like to eat. I like feeling full after feeling hungry. I like the way certain foods feel in my mouth, the taste they leave on my tongue, the way they scent my kitchen and my hands while I cook. Now that I have a really good kitchen for cooking, I think even more about what I cook and how. My recipe collection is expanding by leaps and bounds. I think about menus and kinds of beans and if it will be too hot to cook when the Santa Anas blow and how to use the left overs.

I think a lot about food.

I think about what it was like to grow up not being able to afford the kind of food "normal" people ate. I think about cans from charity. I think about having to shop at cut-rate food stores, buy day-old ("used" in my family's lexicon) bread, have only non-fat dry milk on the shelf, cheap off-brand margarines on sandwiches, big cans of peanut butter we had to stir to keep the oil from separating, and lunch boxes that had books in them because sometimes there wasn't lunch. I think about a mother too far gone in depression to care what she served her family. I think proudly about eating Hamburger Helper because I could make it myself and have it ready when Dad got home. I think about the way our meals improved as Dad finally got seniority at his job and his pay inched up. I look at the pantry shelf and wonder if I'm hoarding again.

I think a lot about food.

I think about the varying quality of produce between the IGA, the Trader Joe's the Ralph's and the Henry's Market where I live. I remember, living in New York as a grad student, walking around Balducci's, eyeing the perfect red bell peppers, then sighing and going to D'Agostino's or the A&P. I remember bunches of fresh arugula at the little Korean grocery down the block near the corner of Prince and Mulberry. I think nothing of buying off brands of pantry staples and splurging on bulbs of fresh fennel. I grin when the check out clerk at the IGA just says "Three today?" as she pushes the plastic bag past her because she knows I always buy that many bunches of radishes each week. I think I need a new container as I prepare a small plastic tub of cut-up vegetables and a single hard-boiled egg every morning for lunch, but don't want to spend the money.

I think a lot about food.

I think about the way in which grocery stores and shopping lists become political markers of having "made it." I think about socio-economic classes in terms of where they buy their potatoes and what color they are - red, white, gold, purple. I read the comments on food blogs and ponder the arrogance of the people who write almost as much as I wonder whether they know what they sound like. I think about why food allergies are so chic. I wonder where the hell do I get sherry vinegar because no store I go to carries it. I think about rewards cards and tracking purchases. I think about union busting at grocery stores.

I think about food a lot.

I think about the gendering of our interactions with food - real men eat meat, real women watch their weight, famous chefs, unpaid housework, hunters and gatherers. I think about the way a woman's mouth is regarded when she puts something into it. I think about stepping on a scale and having my worth reduced to three digits. I think about beefcake and cheesecake. I think about the bones in shoulders and clavicles. I think about preparing dishes you don't dare consume, fearful of what it will say about you, both the making and the consuming.

I think a lot about food.

I think about the desire to tax "junk food". I think about the industry of shaming fat people. I think about scarfing down ice cream, ashamed I am doing so because I'm fat. I think about the self-indulgence of watching rock concerts to stop hunger. I think of the anxiety about not ingesting the courant food of the month. I think about the miracle elixers that will save us all from the heartbreak of some obscure condition. I look at case after case of frozen convenience foods and their bar codes. I think about quaint little groceries in the Oakland Hills with prices written by hand onto the shelf tags. I think of relatives who sneer at stores I rely on. I think about the medicalization of food, turning eating as such into a pathology. I think about the transformation of food into a visible sign of personal rectitude.

And because I think about food a lot, I think I'll be writing about it quite a bit.

Anglachel

Note to Self

Do not under any circumstances give in to the temptation, no matter how good it smells, to lick the chipotle chili adobo sauce off your fingers after dropping the chopped up bits into the bean mix.

You know how it will end.

Anglachel

Christmas Menu Chez Anglachel

Brunch

• Champagne
• Mixed citrus salad with pomegranate seeds
• Pan fried peirogi
• Lox and creme fraiche mixed with tarragon and dill

Dinner

• Boneless leg of lamb, marinated in oilive oil, rosemary and a head of garlic, seasoned with salt and pepper.
• Potato and Onion Gratin
• Haricots Verts and Roasted Fennel and Shallots
• Sourdough rolls & butter
• Various red wines

Dessert

• Coffee ice cream
• Assorted cookies
• Coffee and Bailey's
  

Haricots Verts, Roasted Fennel and Shallots

This is another side dish we're currently cooking. This and the potatos are accompanying a roasted boneless leg of lamb.

• 2 large fresh fennel bulbs, trimmed
• 3/4 lb shallots, peeled, and halved through the root end
• 5 Tblsp olive oil
• 1 lb haricot verts or very slender green beens, trimmed.

1. Preheat ove to 450 F. (Note, you can roast at a lower temperature, it just takes longer)
2. Cut fennel bulbs lengthwise in half.
3. Cut halves into 1/2" wide slices, leaving them joined at the root end (they will fall apart a bit)
4. Put into big bowl with shallots and toss with 3 tblsp olive oil
5. Put shallots and fennel in a single layer on a baking sheet that has been sprayed with non-stick. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper.
6. Put pan in over and roast until tender and golden, stirring every 10 minutes, about 35 minutes at 450.
7. Cook haricot verts in large suace pan of salted water until crisp-tender, about three minutes. rinse in cold water and drain. Pat dry.
8. Heat remaining 2 tblsp of oil in large skilelt over medium heat.
9. Add all vegetables and heat through about 3 minutes. Put into bowl and serve.
   

I've made this before and it is both simple and delicious.