Rounding Corners

Our culture has an obsession with cutting corners. Marketing and popular opinion encourage us to do things the quicker and easier way. But this approach often gives poor results whether cooking something in the kitchen or building something in the garage. Cutting corners has become synonymous with shoddy products, yet many of us still fall for the marketing that tells us otherwise. Walk down the center aisles of any supermarket and you will see a plethora of products claiming to make your life easier. Pre-made this and pre-done that. This in a can, that in a bag in a box. Usually this "convenience" comes with a big mark up.

I would like to go against the grain of popular thought and suggest the opposite approach. Instead of cutting corners, we should look to round them. By this I mean that we should look to make things ourselves instead of buying them and we should tend towards using older less energy intensive methods and tools.  It might take a little bit longer, but it costs less and usually gives better results than cutting corners. To help understand what I have in mind I will give an example

I recently started baking my own bread. When I did this instead of buying bread, I rounded a corner. It saves money and makes a better loaf than I would buy at the grocery store. Now I have a lot of experience cooking, but baking is new to me. So I buy packaged yeast. But if I learned how to make a good sourdough starter, I would not need to buy yeast. That would save me more money and make a much more delicious and nutritious loaf than the one I make now (I read good things about the health benefits of eating sourdough). I could round another corner if I milled my own grain instead of buying flour. Although it would require an initial investment in a grain mill, over the long run it would be cheaper to buy grain and mill it myself than to buy flour. Freshly milled grain tastes a lot better and has a lot more nutrients, because it contains the entire grain of wheat. The flour in the supermarket, even the whole wheat flour, has had the germ removed. This allows the flour to store for a long time, but you lose a lot in taste and nutrients. If you look very hard you might find freshly milled flour for sale, but it will cost you a lot more than the flour sold at most grocery stores. I could round another corner by growing my own grain.

Here is another example. I like to garden. This rounds a corner because I produce some of my food right at home. But many opportunities exist within gardening to round corners. For example, I don't have a good space to start seeds at the moment, because my toddler can now reach the spot I used last year. So I buy some plants from a local nursery. However, some seeds grow very well sowed directly into the ground (zucchini, beans, peas, nasturtiums, sunflowers, some lettuces). So I rounded a corner and saved some money by sowing these seeds instead of buying seedlings. If I had a better space to start seedlings I could round another corner and start more plants from seed. I could round yet another corner if I saved my seed instead of buying it. This would require me to learn more about seed saving and to have space suitable for starting seedlings, but I could easily do this given the time and space.

Rounding corners saves money and produces a better end product. I like the phrase because I think it communicates the idea very clearly and simply. At the same time it can be applied very broadly. It also syncs with the principle of LESS (Less Energy Stimulation Stuff). You can round some corners now and get to others as circumstances permit. I had the concept knocking around in my head for a while, but I could not find a good name for it. Doing things the more time consuming way and saving money is a major theme of this blog, so I'm glad I could find a good shorthand for this approach. What corners have you rounded? What corners will you round?

Chewy Granola Bar Recipe

I promised to share my chewy granola bar recipe and here it is. I searched for a long time to find a recipe that did not have too much sugar, but still tasted great. I found it on a site called Honest Cooking. I like this recipe because it is open-ended enough to let you choose a lot of your own ingredients. I have some notes on the ingredients I prefer below the recipe.

Ingredients

2 cups (160 g) oats
½ cup (96 g) sugar
½ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. cinnamon or other spices as desired (cardamom, nutmeg, etc.)
2½ cups additions: dried fruits, seeds, nuts, flax meal, bran cereal, puffed rice cereal, crushed pretzels, chocolate chips ... the combinations are endless!
⅓ cup (60 g) peanut or other nut butter
6 Tbsp. (89 ml) olive oil - canola oil, other oils, and melted butter will work here as well
¼ cup (60 ml) honey, maple syrup, or Agave syrup
1 Tbsp. (15 ml) water

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a baking dish with parchment paper, then lightly grease the paper with oil or butter. I use a 9 x 13 sized dish, but slightly smaller or bigger dishes work fine. It will just change the thickness of your bars

Process ⅓ cup (27 g) of the oats in a food processor until finely ground. You want it like flour. I actually use a spice grinder for this. The resulting oat flour helps hold the bars together.

If necessary, chop up dried fruit and nuts. You don't want the pieces too fine or too big.

Stir together all dry ingredients (oats, ground oats, sugar, salt, cinnamon, fruits/nuts/seeds).

Whisk together wet ingredients - oil, honey, peanut butter, and water.

Mix together the wet and dry ingredients, then spread in the pan. Press firmly into the corners and edges so the top is even.

Bake for around 30 minutes, until the top starts to brown. Thicker bars will likely take longer.

Let cool in the pan for at least 20 minutes, then take them out of the pan using the parchment. Let cool completely before cutting.  I like to reuse the other side of the parchment when I make another batch.

Notes on Ingredients

I like to use raw sugar instead of white. I use peanuts, peanut oil, and agave because they are cheaper than most alternatives. But feel free to experiment. For the "2 1/2 cups additions", I use 2 cups of nuts and a 1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips.

The bars stay together very well, but they do crumble a bit. If you want a very solid bar use molasses. I prefer the taste of agave, but molasses tastes good too and the bars hold up better than ones made with agave.

Enjoy!

An Ode to Nasturtiums

Trailing Nasturtiums from 2014

Last year I grew lettuces for the first time. We had just moved into the house we are renting and I had not kept a garden since I moved out of my parents house. The lettuce did better than expected, but I must admit that I did not have the space or the timing to do the kind of succession planting that would have given us a constant supply of salad greens. Luckily another plant in our garden provided an abundance of greens for salads and other purposes. Nasturtiums have become one of my favorite plants and I would like to tell you why you should make a place for them in your garden.

Like many things worth doing, there is more than one good reason to grow nasturtiums. I grew them mainly because they make good companions to other plants in my garden. Nasturtiums attract hover flies which eat aphids, a garden pest that can make swiss cheese out of many of your plants' leaves. So they act as a natural form of pest control.

But I also knew that you could eat the both the leaves and the flowers. I can still remember the first time someone handed me one of their mildly peppery leaves to taste. Some people have compared them to arugula, but I find it much milder. In any case, they go great in a salad and if you include their red/yellow flowers it will look as good as it tastes. The only problem:  at times I had more of them than I knew what to do with. Not a bad problem to have I guess. Still, I found a solution. Whenever you have too much of certain kinds of lettuce and you want to use it before it goes bad, make pesto. When making pesto from nasturtiums you can use the leaves, flowers, and even some of the more tender stems (though I would suggest not to use too many). I will post a nasturtium pesto recipe soon. I have read that the seeds can make a good substitute for capers, but I don't care for capers so I will leave that to others to experiment with.

I found them very easy to grow from seed. No pests ate them. They grow quickly and cover the ground, blocking out weeds and creating a kind of living mulch. All of the nasturtiums I sowed last year thrived and this year's crop look like they will do at least as well.  I have read that if you put them in richer soil you will get more leaves than flowers.

The last reason to grow nasturtiums is because they are simply beautiful plants. Their abundant leaves and flower make them pleasing to human eyes and to the pollinators they attract.

Over Little Heads

So far I have only blogged about home economics. Although I consider this a parenting blog as well, I initially felt a bit reluctant to give parenting advice. Mostly because my son is still very young and I don't have a ton of experience as a father. But also because I realize how passionate people feel about the topic and I don't want to get in the middle of one of the many contentious issues that parents debate these days. Nor do I have any desire to dictate to people how they should raise their kids, because I know I don't care for that attitude from other people. Still, this is a parenting blog and I think I can offer some sound advice that parents might want to give a shot if they have not already. It has worked for me so far and I hope this approach will continue to do so.

Like most parents I believe my child is rather intelligent. I might attribute this to my own fatherly pride if so many people did not make a point of telling me how bright they think he is. They might just tell me this out of politeness, but I have no way of knowing this. I admit that even if he is objectively very bright I might not have played that big a role. Genetics, luck, and factors beyond my control all contribute to a child's development. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have done my best to give him a healthy diet by cooking nutritious meals. But if I have played any part beyond that I attribute it to two things.

First, I pay attention to him as much as possible and try to understand him. You can learn a lot a from books, other parents, and pediatricians. But I think you can only learn so much from others and you should not let yourself follow any parenting advice too rigidly (even mine). Every family is different and you need to do what works best for you and your child. In fact, I think reading too much about parenting can cause you to worry excessively or to doubt your own intuition. We all need guidance, but we all must find our own way.

Second, I communicate with my son without worrying too much about going "over his head". Sure, he might not understand everything I say. But he understands more than I think and he will often surprise me by showing me just how much he comprehends. Kids always want to play with objects you put out of their reach. I think the same goes for ideas. If you present them with an idea they can't quite grasp, they will work to get a hold on it. This encourages them to think and expand their understanding. It also occupies them and makes them more content with LESS (Less Energy Stimulation and Stuff).

This benefits you too. Any parent who spends a lot of time alone with a child knows that it can get boring at times no matter how amazing you find your child. Keeping yourself mentally occupied by explaining things to your child keeps you both engaged with one another. It helps them understand the world more and it allows you to have a part in shaping that understanding. They might even end up teaching you something through their unconventional responses to your explanations.

This has relevance for all parents, but it also touches on a useful idea for those concerned about the slow decline of industrial society. To help explain I turn to one of my favorite passages from Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is The Massage where he points out that, "The 'child' was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense."

This resonates with me as much now as it did when I read it a decade ago. It might sound hard to believe, but I often wished my parents would have given me more responsibilities growing up. Like many people of my generation, I arrived at college having never done my own laundry or cooked more than a few eggs for myself. Sure, I watched my mom cook enough that I had some idea of how to make a decent dinner. But it would have helped both of us if I had started giving her a hand back in grade school. I don't plan to let my toddler use sharp knives anytime soon, but I would like him to have more skills and feel more self-reliant when he reaches college age. Of course I want to give him an enjoyable childhood, but I also want to prepare him for the rest of his life. The road ahead looks much tougher than the one behind.

At the moment this means doing chores with my son and letting him "help". He really enjoys doing the things that daddy does. At the moment this means he does things like carrying the compost bucket to the pile and watering the garden beds. Many parents have told me that once kids become old enough to actually help they no longer want to. I get that. I know the likelihood of getting kids to do chores changes depending on their stage of development. But I want him to at least have some familiarity with things in the adult world and I would rather have him do chores grudgingly and infrequently than not all.

I think part of the rebellion of adolescence comes from the patronizing attitude parents and other authority figures show towards young adults. I think if we integrated young people more into adult life instead of coddling them, we would find it harder to condescend to them. Perhaps they would understand us better too. They might also have an easier time navigating adult life.

But I have gotten ahead of myself. I don't have a teenager yet. Right now I have a 20 month old son who only says one word at a time. Despite his monosyllabic communication, I often give him very lengthy responses. The way I read so much into one word makes me feel a bit like Han Solo talking to Chewbacca. Or to cite a more recent film, like Rocket talking to Groot. I guess like those characters I know my son well enough to understand the different meanings a word can have depending on the context. I hope that continuing to talk with him will help him keep growing as well.

Chop Onion, Boil Water

Whenever we went out to dinner with my grandmother she would often look at the menu or the meal that came out and say something along the lines of, "I can make this at home for half the price and give you a portion twice the size." My father who wanted to treat my grandparents to dinner at a nice restaurant often felt like she did not appreciate the gesture when she would comment on the price of the meal. As a kid I laughed a bit at the situation, but as an adult I have adopted a similar attitude. I might not say it out loud, but I can't eat at a restaurant without thinking about how much cheaper I could make the same meal at home. 

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against restaurants, provided they are not some kind of corporate chain. I worked in restaurants when I was younger and I know many people who still do. I enjoy a meal at a good restaurant when I travel, or want to treat myself.

Although it seems like a very simple act, cooking has a great number of benefits. As my grandma Josie pointed out, it is simply cheaper to cook meals from scratch instead of getting them from a restaurant or buying processed food from the supermarket. The restaurant needs to make money to stay in business, so even if they buy in bulk they will still charge you more than the cost of the ingredients needed to make the meal because they need to pay for all the expenses that go into running a restaurant (wages, rent, utilities, promotions, etc.) and try to make a profit on top of that. When you buy processed food you end up paying for the processing, packaging, marketing, and advertising. Not to mention the huge markup that makes processed food so profitable for the big corporations that sell it.

If you cook the meal yourself you cut out the middleman and only pay what it costs you to buy the ingredients. Sure it will take some time and work on your part. But as I pointed out last week, contrary to popular belief cooking a great meal does not necessarily require a lot of time or effort. You can cook a delicious and nutritious meal in as little as a half hour if you know what you are doing. Like anything it takes some practice, but once you get a feel for the process you will find yourself cooking more and feel unsatisfied by takeout and processed food.

Some people might find this last statement hard to believe. If you usually pay someone else to make your meals, you might not have a lot of confidence in your culinary skills. But if you put in the time needed to learn, you too can make meals that rival what you usually order at a restaurant. My wife has little desire to eat in restaurants, because with few exceptions, she knows she can get a better meal at home. Unless it is a very fancy restaurant (think white table cloths and Michelin stars) or a very exotic cuisine, I can make it bigger, better, and cheaper at home. For instance, a lot of people like to treat themselves to a steak at a fancy steakhouse. But I can cook a grass-fed steak and some excellent sides for a fraction of what a piece of factory farmed meat costs in a nice restaurant. It is not cheap and I consider it a treat, but compared to what some steakhouses charge it is a bargain. This same principle applies to processed food. I used to buy granola bars for a quick snack. Since I started making my own I have not only saved a lot of money, but even the best store bought bars pale in comparison. My wife says I have spoiled her and turns her nose up at packaged granola bars (the recipe will be up in the coming weeks, so stay tuned). 

Cooking at home also gives you the opportunity to eat a lot healthier. For instance, my granola bars have a lot more oats and a lot less sugar than store bought granola bars. In fact they have less sugar than most homemade recipes I have tried. They also don't contain any preservatives or chemicals additives I can't pronounce.

Cooking from scratch puts me in direct contact with the literally raw ingredients of food. This has made me take a greater interest in where my food comes from. If you follow this thread as I have, you might find yourself joining a CSA, shopping at farmer's markets, eating local produce when it is in season, and growing or preserving food at home. All of this makes you less dependent on the industrial food system and more prepared for when it starts to become too expensive or disappear altogether. It also gives less money to giant corporations who sell processed food. 

I find cooking and eating an almost spiritual act. As omnivores, one of the major ways human beings interact with our environment is through metabolizing the things we ingest. All the foods we eat nourish us in different ways, just as these foods require different things to grow. Learning about these processes enriches our understanding of ourselves and our environment. It helps us better understand our interconnection with the rest of the natural world.

I leave you with a homework assignment:  think of an item you usually buy from the supermarket. Find out how to make it yourself, either from a book or from a recipe on the internet. Then make it. I'm thinking along the lines of condiments and fermented foods, but feel free to make whatever excites you.  

If you don't know where to look, or don't feel like sifting through recipes online I suggest The America's Test Kitchen DIY Cookbook. The book has condiments and pantry staples like ketchup, mustard, and siracha. It has dairy like cheeses, yogurt, and creme fraise. It has pickled foods, candies, jams, jellies, preserves, cured meats, smoked fish, crackers, and even recipes for brewing beer.