Poor Man's Feast on the Road: A Week in New Mexico

The miracle that is Leona's chicken and chile tamale.

Susan and I celebrated our tenth anniversary last week in the most perfect of places: New Mexico. I had never been there before, but there were a lot of reasons why I can call it perfect; on the one hand, Susan has been going on about her last visit there (twenty years ago) since we met. On the other hand, New Mexico is simply magical; all the yammering on you hear about the wildly spiritual nature of the place is both unwaveringly true and completely compelling, and it goes way beyond the ubiquitous tourists searching for meaning in the bottom of a basket of souvenir shop milagros.

I had been invited to speak at the first Edible Institute conference by Edible Communities founders Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian, alongside writers like Tom Philpott, Deborah Madison, Gary Paul Nabhan, Samuel Fromartz, Brian Halweil, Fred Kirschenmann, and others, and I spent my first three days there wandering around Bishop's Lodge sort of gape-mouthed, in awe at the company I was keeping. At one point, I stepped out of my room to find myself walking in the clouds--literally (Santa Fe is over 7000 feet)--and to say that it was appropriate to feel like I was in heaven would be an understatement. Something very indefinable happens when you get that many like-minded, passionate people together, and when the writings of so many of them have taken up serious real estate on your bedside table, for years; I was jelly-kneed during a lot of the conference, and I walked around for days like a wide-eyed child. At one point, I was sitting at a table listening to Tom Philpott interview Maisie Greenwald about the farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, and I realized that I was sandwiched between Gary Nabhan and Deborah Madison, and I nearly went over like a ton of bricks.

You want spiritual?

Susan flew out to join me last Friday, and of course, our attention turned to the subject of eating, as it always does. We were invited for dinner on Sunday night, along with restaurateur, Edible Iowa River Valley publisher, and founder of Slow Food Iowa City Kurt Michael Friese and his wife Kim, Tracey and Carole, and Edible Cape Cod publishers Doug Langeland and his wife Dianne, at the lovely home that Deborah Madison shares with her husband, artist Patrick McFarlin; the meal was utterly remarkable in its simplicity, its locality (Deborah served a Middle Eastern spice-rubbed, long-cooked lamb, which came from a neighboring ranch), and the precision and care with which it was prepared. Wine, brandy, and friendships both new and old flowed, and it was a dinner and a night I won't ever forget.

Spiritual?

A day later, after the conference had pretty much come to a close, Susan decided that we should drive up to the tiny town of Chimayo, both to see El Santuario de Chimayo--site of thousands of miraculous healings since around 1810--and to eat at Leona's, where Susan had had her first tamale twenty years ago, when the restaurant was actually a small cart parked near the church. I won't comment on the fact that we arrived just as Mass was beginning and that my partner is a seriously lapsed Catholic who actually didn't move until the service was over, except to take communion. I also won't comment on the neighboring church, the Santo Nino Chapel, built in 1857 by Severiano Medina, which was created to honor the saint who, it is said, wanders the hills around Chimayo, feeding the hungry and wearing out his shoes in the process. One of the rooms in the chapel is lined--completely--with baby shoes, brought by pilgrims asking for Santo Nino's intervention on their behalf.

Jelly-kneed, again.

Yes, the sky is that blue.

El Santuario de Chimayo

The finest restaurant in New Mexico:

Leona's in Chimayo

Looking across the plaza, I saw a small restaurant surrounded by ristras, and I realized that we were making a pilgrimage of our own to enjoy the simple, mouthwatering local food created by the petite and soft-spoken Leona Medina-Tiede (yes, a relation, I'm certain). For years, Leona was known for her flavored tortillas--everything from apple cinnamon to pinon--but today, her menu is simpler: it includes chile stew, posole, carne adovado, and tamales that are appropriately miraculous, and which Susan has dreamt about nonstop for twenty years. After days of feasting in some wildly delicious, often extremely expensive local Santa Fe restaurants, I was reminded of the truth about the best food: it needn't be pricey, or even served on china. The best traditional chile stew I had in New Mexico was crafted by Leona, a woman who has fed thousands for years; it was presented to me in a white styrofoam bowl and served with a warm, fresh tortilla. And it was better than almost every restaurant meal I had there, save one (for another time).

Leona's chile stew

New Mexico, to me, was miraculous, beautiful, and jarringly moving; its spirit bubbled to the surface not only in the usual places, like its churches and hills, but also in the friendships I made there, the things that I learned that will forever change the way I think about the production of food in this country, and the extraordinary, unforgettable meals I shared both in the home of new friends, and in a tiny restaurant owned by a small woman with a heart-melting smile.

That is spirit enough for me.

The Mysteries of Kohlrabi

What the hell is this thing?

I've been hearing a lot from readers these days, which is always lovely; however, it appears that many of you are either concerned, disgruntled, or flat out cranky about the fact that my beloved pork belly--the jewel, the flower, the little flavor-packed love button of my kitchen--has been on a vacation for a while. Don't worry; porky is just taking a small siesta, and, assuming that I can find a local pig farmer, will start showing up again soon in interesting and delicious new ways. I promise.

The truth is, for the last few weeks I've been a little bit out of my culinary element and acting like a gastronomically befuddled tourist in a strange land, like Paul Bowles dragging a microwave through the Algerian Sahara. I've been faced with the prospect of eating differently--really differently--for a variety of reasons. My primary guide on the early parts of this trek through the unknown mostly has been Deborah Madison, that omnivorous vegetable genius, and her Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone; if I had to give up absolutely every single book on my shelf, hers would be the one I'd most want to keep hidden in the floorboards. There's also been Lorna Sass's Whole Grains Every Day Every Way; and Roy Andries de Groot's Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. The reasons are pretty simple: sure, it's easy to steam, broil, or roast seasonal vegetables every day, day after day, and toss them with the ubiquitous olive oil, garlic, and a bit of sea salt. But it's another thing entirely to put them at the center of the plate and to learn how prepare them in exquisite but simple ways I never thought possible, and then, to turn meat into a side dish, and that's really what Deborah's work has done in my home. She dashed the fear factor for me--that feeling that emerges when you find yourself at a farmer's market staring at a burdock root and thinking what in the hell? As for Lorna, she's been teaching me that grains aren't just limited to the kasha varnishkes I love (and grew up with) or the millet I've loathed (and equated with bird seed). And Roy? His often forgotten book was the first that told me "keep it local, keep it seasonal, and treat it well" long before I fell in love with the work of another of his fans, Alice Waters.

"Oh dear god, not this vegetarian stuff again---" my mother said to me the other night when I said I was roasting Jerusalem artichokes and having them with pan-braised kale, diced potatoes, and cumin. She audibly reminded herself of a small two year spate back in the 1980s when I was furtively involved with someone who decided that she was an ethical vegetarian (except for the odd prime rib) and, because I was The Cook, I had to be one, too. Ah, love. My mother managed to convince herself that my sudden and extreme weight loss was attributed to the fact that I was not eating meat (although I was replacing it with large quantities of mozzarella), and remedied the situation by immediately sending me a $200 gift package of individually wrapped veal chops, which I was suppose to store in the shoebox-sized freezer I had in my "European-style" refrigerator. Mom never knew the truth: that secret, unrequited love bundled together with extreme aggravation make for a terrific metabolic booster.

Anyway, what I do want to make clear to all of my readers is that no, I am not a vegetarian, and no, I'm not on some weird crash diet involving avocados and Brislings, either; I have, however, decided to approach the way I eat from a different angle. As some of you can probably guess, part of this decision was spurred by the discovery in December of a small cardiac issue that turned into a midlife crisis, and an acknowledgment of my inability to treat my body like it was still 23. The other side of the coin is more straightforward: the more I know of food, how it's produced and the way we eat it in this country, the less I want of it, unless I have at least a decent idea of where it's coming from. And no, a multi-acre industrial feedlot in northeastern Colorado isn't a good thing, no matter how cheap the beef winds up being.

At first, I thought that eating this way was going to be too challenging to even think about, from a practical point of view. But, it seems, there are easy ways to accomplish it: first, I'm buying and preparing local vegetables, and making them the center of my plate. Literally. Putting them down in the center. Second, (and I know I'm repeating myself) I'm limiting my purchasing of meat to what is available locally, and I'm willing to shell out money for it because it is expensive. Very expensive, in some cases. But this also means that I'll probably eat less of it, because I have to. Another way to accomplish this is to eat what grows in my own garden, when Morris, our resident groundhog isn't flossing with the pea shoots. Unfortunately, as of this writing, my garden is sitting beneath a layer of snow and ice, so I'm dependent upon the local farms that happen to have root cellars. They're few and far between in my neck of the woods, so it's a damn good thing I like turnips.

Luckily, we have managed to find a wonderful commercial resource for all manner of fresh, local root vegetables and hearty greens, and I must say, they are stunning, even just aesthetically-speaking. Unfortunately, I've discovered that I do what most neophytes do when faced with alien produce--that stuff that's pretty unrecognizable to most Americans, like kohlrabi, or burdock: I stare. And then I think "What would Deborah do?" Then I go home, open up her book/bible, and find out. She tells me pretty much everything I need to do, every single time.

Long way of saying that if you live in a temperate climate, and you have Meyer lemons growing in your backyard, or you can proudly recognize far more than the usual supermarket suspects--asparagus, celery, onion, carrot, turnip, and rutabaga--and furthermore you actually know what to do with them, you're on the right track. Send me an email, or comment here, if you do. I'd love to hear from you. And whatever you do with them, put the result in the middle of your plate; just give the meat a little nudge out of the way, first.

The Flower of Bleak Mid-Winter

This is the time of year that many of us love to hate: Christmas is long over, and while the calendar is spotted with the odd holiday Monday, most of us (at least in New England) spend the weeks from now until early March grumbling over the grayness. Everything feels dead; the trees are bare, the roads are icy, and the garden is asleep. This is probably why the seed companies send out their catalogs right around the time that we all start resembling Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

There is, of course, one place we can all go to feel good in that slightly fake, mildly medicated Fantasyland sort of way; packed to the rafters with gorgeous produce--bright, perfectly formed tomatoes, stunning pineapples, piles and piles of fresh fruit and vegetables, lovely lilting muzak--it lures us mere mortals in in the dead of New England winter like Tantalus' dangling grapes. Where is this place and what do you have to do to get in? Nothing. It's the supermarket. Get into your Hummer and take a ride over.

I've made a recent commitment to myself to try, even now, to eat as locally and seasonally as I can. Which means, in my neck of the woods, that I'm faced with, as my grandmother would say, bupkus (loosely translating to goat s**t). If I eat one more squash, it's going to come out my ears. Although we don't belong to a CSA (we can't; there aren't any near where we live), and although our two local farmer's markets have been shuttered since October (what is that about? why can my friends in Maine still shop for fresh produce in mid-winter while I have to go out of my way to avoid my local fluorescent-lit supermarket), we've recently discovered a nearby food store that still manages to provide some pretty spectacular seasonal goods, like hearty greenhouse-grown greens, and gorgeous, local garlic of all kinds. And in my house, where there is garlic, there is, always and forever, Kathy and Veet's Garlic Salad.

Almost thirty years ago, Susan spent her weekends visiting friends in upstate New York; Kathy and Veet left city life behind, and put down rural roots for themselves and their small family, which included a hideously nasty goat named Jodie, and two sheep, called Dot and Spot. Money was scarce, and when it came time to make a salad for dinner, they grabbed whatever was growing abundantly in their garden: radishes, carrots, pole beans, greens of every and any type--but always spicy mustard greens--and garlic. A lot of garlic. Combined with a splash of cider vinegar, olive oil, and a heavy dusting of freshly grated cheese (sometimes Parmigiana, sometimes aged goat, sometimes sheep), the resulting salad is an incomparable blend of flavor and texture, raw spice, heat, and sometimes, sweetness (depending on the season). And in the depths of winter, this is the salad I want, as often as possible.

Kathy and Veet's garlic salad--created out of necessity at a time in the 1970s when gas lines were long and cars were enormous, politics were vicious, and the economic environment was hideous--conjures up a fragrant, green oasis in the midst of chaos, which is why they moved to the country to begin with. We have no idea where they are, but their salad lives on in our home and the homes of our friends, all year round--even in the dead of winter.

Kathy and Veet's Garlic Salad

The proportions here are embarrassingly flexible and in truth, the salad rarely comes out the same way twice. In our experience, much depends upon the quality of cider vinegar you use, the freshness of your greens, and whether or not you use white, grocery-store garlic, which will yield a much more pungent, biting flavor, while larger, local garlic generally is sweeter and nuttier.

Serves 4-6 garlic and greens-lovers

1 small bunch Romaine lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces

1 small head red or green leaf lettuce (or other, heartier lettuce), torn into bite-sized pieces

6-8 Mustard green leaves (depending on your heat tolerance), torn into bite-sized pieces

4-6 cloves fresh garlic, peeled

1-2 cups blended chopped fresh tomatoes, cucumber, snap peas, carrots, radishes, in any combination*

2-1/2 tablespoons cider vinegar

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiana

salt and pepper, to taste

1. Toss greens together in a large wooden salad bowl. Using a garlic press, crush the garlic directly over the greens, add the remaining vegetables (if any) and toss well.

2. Drizzle on the vinegar, and toss. Drizzle on the olive oil, and toss. Sprinkle on the cheese, toss again, and add salt and pepper, if you must.

* During winter months, these additions are omitted unless we're lucky enough to find fresh carrots and radishes locally.

Of Bricks and Bread

Every year over Christmas break, I devote myself to one kitchen project that takes a long time to complete and is seriously labor intensive, or both; one year it was making preserved lemons (a failure). Last year, it was making cassoulet (a success). This year, for reasons I don't quite understand, it was bread.

Not just any bread.

Sourdough bread.

For the last 10 days, I've had an assortment of bowls and one large Mason jar sitting on the shelf above my stove, filled with mixtures in varying states of disrepair. One gave off a noxious, yeasty odor so foul that the dog just stood in the doorway of the kitchen, refused to come in, and stared at me, wagging. The contents of the bowl had to be thrown out, and I considered burying it in the backyard. Another, which seems to be more promising, is a concoction of water and unbleached flour, whisked together, and stirred a few times a day; it has to be treated a bit carefully, and I've been following strict rules about scooping out half of the sludge and replacing it with newer sludge. Every day. For a week.

Sometime during the course of the holiday, I got it into my head to read The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, which is all about whole grain baking, and this is what I'm aiming to do, ultimately. We live very close to a wonderful food store that sells a spectacular loaf called a 12-grain sourdough miche; it's remarkable. It's chewy but soft with a crunchy but still supple crust, and filled as it is with grains and seeds and twigs, it manages to be light as a feather. It's produced by the Bantam Bread Bakery, which is one very good reason to come to Connecticut (among others). It's also around $7.50 a loaf, and in my house, it's gone in about a day and a half. So, on the one hand, I would like to be able to turn out a sourdough whole grain miche that is a close facsimile of the one that comes from Bantam. On the other hand, I'd be happy to just settle for producing something that doesn't weigh 9 pounds, or has the consistency of a doorstop.

Anyway, I cozied up on the couch with the book, and read a few chapters; one of the starter recipes called for little more than rye flour, a single granule of yeast, some water, and time. It seemed too good to be true, so I put the starter together. Twelve hours later, it was supposed to "look like pancake batter," and it did, if the pancake was the kind I used to eat in Woodstock in the late 1970s. It actually looked like brown Quick-crete, and had a thick rime of dried whole grain skin on its surface. The book said to just mix the stuff back in, so I did. Twelve hours later, it had a second thick rime of dried whole grain skin on its surface. So I mixed it back in. Again.

The starter, studded with onions, as directed.

A bad idea.

"Why don't you just use Jim Lahey's recipe?" Susan asked. She had recently brought home Lahey's wonderful book, the appropriately titled My Bread (since everyone and their brother has furtively laid claim to the no-knead process that catapulted Lahey and his Sullivan Street Bakery to fame, on the wings of Mark Bittman's Minimalist column in the New York Times); we've had a lot of luck with Lahey loaves--they're impressively stunning, chewy, and easy to put together, assuming you don't mind that pesky little 18 hour waiting period.

A recent Lahey loaf. How pretty!

"Because I want to experience the time and work that goes into producing a sourdough loaf," I told her.

"But Lahey's loaves also take time," she responded.

And she was right. That's the thing about bread that I find so intriguing: unless you use a bread machine--that heavy contraption that showed up in the early 1990s, was all the rage, and now is sitting in more attics across America than Cabbage Patch Kids--bread baking takes time. Even if you aren't kneading it, it still takes time. Think about this bit of dharma: the no-knead method of bread baking is considered the quick-and-easy, no-sweat, shortcut way to creating something delicious. It's what most of us want: the remarkable, artisanal-style result without the labor required to produce the real thing. I mean, let's not kid ourselves--this is a metaphor for the way most of us live. We want the glory without the work. This method has fooled thousands of people (myself included) into thinking that bread baking is a simple exercise that can be thrown together mindlessly. The truth is, of course, that just because it offers us an easy way around an otherwise labor intensive process, it still requires patience; a lot of patience. Quick and easy? No way. The joke's on us.

And if it's sourdough you want, you're in for a long, long wait. If it's whole grain sourdough you're after, you might as well pitch a tent for a month or two. Trees grow faster. The fact is that bread baking--no-knead or sourdough-- forces you to slow down, to stick close to the kitchen, to focus on something other than yourself and the work you have to do, the news, the movies you're planning on seeing, and all of the resolutions you intend to keep in the coming year. You have no choice with bread. Like any good co-dependent relationship, if you don't give it what it needs, it won't give you what you want.

Last night, after 3 days of stirring the rye starter, I decided that it was time to make a loaf. I grabbed my largest bowl, dumped in 3/4 cup of starter along with a yeast/water mixture and a few cups of whole wheat flour, like the recipe told me to. I tried to stir, but was unsuccessful. Susan brought up the Kitchen Aid stand mixer--the one with the same horsepower as a Volkswagon--and we attached the dough hook, plopped the dough into the bowl, flipped the switch, and stood there, watching it go round and round. Eventually, the mixer started to give off an acrid sort of odor--the kind that small engines emit right before they explode.

"Maybe it's supposed to be this way," I said, reading the recipe. After all, the consistency was exactly as it was meant to be, according to the description.

I shaped the dough into three "hearty loaves" and baked as instructed. Here is the result:

Ballast for the Titanic.

The taste is quite good, but not so sour. Each petite loaf weighs about 3 pounds. That's 3 loaves at 3 pounds.

3 loaves x 3 pounds = 9 pounds

As dense as a plank of wood.

So, on it goes. This is clearly a process and there's definitely a learning curve. It's okay; I have nothing but time.

Au Revoir, Rotten Decade

For what seems to be the fifth day in a row, it's snowing, the plows aren't even out yet, and it's too frigid and windy to walk. And why, exactly, would anyone even consider walking in this weather? Well, there are some of us who like the cold, like my grandmother, who would march around Queens in knee-deep snow with a smile on her face and a song in her heart. There are others who are gluttons for punishment, like the unsmiling, miserable-looking triathlete lady who lives in my neighborhood and runs like she's being chased by a snarling pitbull, regardless of weather. And there are still others who have to walk, daily, whether we really want to or not. Like me. This prescription--this gift--which can neither be approved nor disapproved of by my health insurance provider, is how I ended 2009.

Goodbye, foul decade; don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

It's been quite a bang-up ten years, hasn't it? And not just for me. Almost everyone I've spoken to seems to have experienced a lengthy period of exceptionally bad karma since 2000. Let's start first with the arrival of Dubya. Now, it matters not one iota if you're a Republican or a Democrat, a Liberal or a Conservative: we could have done better than supposedly electing a man who ultimately couldn't watch television and eat a pretzel at the same time. Then came 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the deaths in Pennsylvania of an entire plane-load of people who were merely trying to get from point A to point B. The decade also brought us Katherine Harris and hanging chads; Mad Cow Disease and anthrax; the space shuttle Columbia, and Enron; Monsanto running roughshod over virtually every farmer in the nation; Abu Ghraib and Beslan; an Asian tsunami, Scooter Libby, and Alberto Gonzalez; Benazir Bhutto, Tom DeLay, Randy Cunningham, Harriet Miers, and, just when we thought things couldn't get much worse, Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of an American city, and Heckuva Job, Brownie.

I could go on, and so could you. And that's just the public stuff.

But what does this have to do with walking in the snow as a prescription, and the very last thing I received in 2009? Because it was the exclamation point at the end of my personal decade of ennui; it was like the gods were chuckling and blowing me a Bronx cheer. Apparently, I have spent so much time over the last ten years sitting on my rear reading about all of these events, that my body has sort of settled, like a building, and my genetic makeup came calling. High blood pressure? Check. High cholesterol? Check. Weight gain? Check. Add to this my line of work, and I became the unwitting patron lady bountiful of the health insurance industry, not to mention my local pharmacy. Something's not right here.

Now that I've become a bit more conscious of the fact that I spend days--on end--either sitting on my ass and watching life unfold, or standing in the kitchen and cooking food that I eat too much of, I was a bit shocked when Susan and I had our almost-annual New Year's Day open house pot luck for our neighbors: we opened up the dining room table as far as it could go, and by noon, it was laden with the foods that I would usually find myself drawn to like a hysterical hyena. Macaroni and cheese. A small ham that we'd glazed with rhubarb compote. Bagels. Chips. And I admit to noshing on them; actually, in truth, I was grazing in a distinctly sort of bovine manner, along with my beloved neighbors. Everyone stood over a particular bowl or dish, scooped up a portion, and moved a little bit to the right. Rinse and repeat, and around and around we went, mindlessly. After a small piece of ham, I was full; the macaroni and cheese beckoned and I answered. After a small dollop of cheesy goodness, I was staggering--I actually felt drunk and a little bit lightheaded--but I also wanted more. My genes--those hateful little bastards--were shouting at me from the inside: go ahead, do it. Screw the quinoa. The decade has been pure crap. This will make you feel better. You can always take a nap.

So, the question for me now is, can I turn to comfort foods that will actually, heaven forbid, provide me with pleasure as well as healthy sustenance? Is there such a beast? Are they mutually exclusive? Do they have to be? There's a lot to be said for portion size, for sure; but will more nutritious foods and things that are one step away from the earth rather than refined to hell and back provide me with the same sort of endorphin rush that, say, cheesy potatoes will? Maybe; I intend to find out.

The decade stank, and it ended with my learning that my heart is no longer a happy camper. But looking back, it had some big upside; maybe it's all in how you look at it. I am finally, legally married in two states. The financial collapse pushed me, and many others, to realize that simple living is better living, and that consumerism isn't necessarily a desirable virtue; and a bad generic version of a pill I take every day sent me to a cardiologist, who discovered an underlying disease that I otherwise would never have found, and she probably saved my life.

That alone is worth a walk in a snowstorm.

Quinoa and Kale with Poached Eggs

I love quinoa, but it can sometimes take on a distinctive and often annoying graininess that benefits from the addition of another texture. I choose kale, for its meaty, robust quality, and the fact that it holds up well everywhere from the steamer to the saute pan. I have also long been a fan of topping everything and anything with a perfectly prepared poached egg; there's virtually nothing like it for texture and flavor, and if you're lucky enough to have a neighbor who raises chickens, you'll never eat anything less than a fresh egg (or at least an honestly organic one) ever again. I now limit myself to one, but if your cholesterol can stand it, have two; if there is any quinoa left over, mix it with an egg or two, form into patties, chill, and sear in a cast iron pan until brown. These can be chilled down and frozen for up to a month, making the whole ordeal deliciously frugal in the extreme.

This recipe can be altered any number of ways: use bulgur instead of quinoa; top the egg with a few shavings of sheep's milk cheese, a sprinkling of crisply sauteed shallots, or a drizzle of Sriracha. It can also be served atop a slice of toasted, country-style bread that's been rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil. Add a small ladle of the pot liquor for good measure.

Serves 2

1 cup water, lightly salted

1 cup quinoa, rinsed well

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 small onion, peeled and diced (about 1/2 cup)

2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1 small bunch red kale, cleaned and chopped

1/4 cup water

2 poached eggs

salt and pepper, to taste

extra virgin olive oil, for drizzling

1. In a medium saucepan, bring water to a boil, and add the quinoa. Cover, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, and let stand, covered. And don't peek.

2. In a deep, medium skillet set over medium heat, warm the oil until rippling. Add the onion and garlic, and saute until tender, taking care not to burn them. Add the kale and the water, combine well with the onion and garlic, and continue to cook, covered, until the kale is tender, about 8-10 minutes. Fluff the quinoa with a fork.

3. Fold the quinoa together with the kale, and serve warm in shallow bowls, topped with 1 poached egg each. Season to taste with salt and pepper and a drizzle of good quality extra virgin olive oil.

A Hearty Holiday Season

Well, not exactly that kind of hearty. Not the posole stew with braised pork belly kind of hearty. Or the glazed goose with sweet and sour red cabbage and spaetzle sort of hearty.

That's not what I'm talking about.

First: Apologies for the mysterious and sudden disappearance. I'd like very much to be able to attribute it to the craziness of the season, the parties, the cleaning in preparation for Christmas guests, the endless shopping, the crowds, the decorating of the tree, the dinner planning, the latke making. But I can't.

The short version: a few weeks ago, I had my annual physical. Everything was peachy, except for my blood pressure and my EKG. We know about my blood pressure, so this isn't much of a surprise. People in their mid-40s who write about and work with food often have this issue. But my EKG? Off we went to a cardiologist. I passed some tests. I failed some others. I was poked and prodded to within an inch of my life. Heads have been scratched. Never mind my line of work, my doctor tells me; my genes stink. Scary words have been thrown around. My brain has soared and swooped to stratospheric levels of silent, middle-of-the-night hysteria, bombarded repeatedly by a little gremlin shouting What Ifs in my left ear, and Remember Laurie Colwin in my right. It's been totally exhausting, and so I've done what most Cancerians do at times like this: I crawled under a rock.

And now I've come out.

I still know very little except for the fact that I've had what they call a "come to Jesus moment" which I guess is a little odd for a Jew with Buddhist leanings. A better translation: I've been warned that I'd better stop with the prefabricated stress. I can only control what I can control. Everything else is totally and completely meaningless and impermanent. I have a lot of people to cook with and to break bread with. I have a loving partner and a kind and funny dog and wonderful friends and family and very small cousins whose weddings I must dance at. In twenty or thirty years.

"You also have to stop with the food," someone said to me. "You probably eat huge amounts of very fatty things, every day. After all, Poor Man's Feast extols the virtues of eating vast quantities cheaply."

Screw stress; I was incensed when this person uttered these words. I rose up like Sholom Aleichem's Fruma Sarah and my muscles popped out of my shirt sleeves like Lou Ferrigno.

Fruma Sarah rises up from the grave and scares the crap out of Tevye, c. 1971.

Did this person ever read this blog? Okay, sure--I've written articles about thirty things to do with leftover pork, or how to make six dinners from a three pound chicken. But that's not what PMF is really about. PMF is about understanding that if you've got nothing but a bowl of beans and a slab of bread sitting in front of you, it can still be a feast. It's about taste, for sure. But it's also experiential. It's about making each meal--each drop of soup and crumb of cake--somehow more sacred. It's about understanding that feasting has absolutely nothing to do with vertical food and fancy squiggles on oversized plates. It's not about seeing and being seen and dining at the spot of the moment, or being seated in the front room as opposed to Siberia. Poor Man's Feast is not about eating as entertainment; it's about what sustains us, even if that thing is a pile of cured pork products and a hunk of good cheese.

But I have to be practical, too: there will be some changes, and they will be noticeable. They will not be entirely unBittman-like in that there will be a lot more vegetalia showing up pretty much everywhere. (After all: what's more parsimonious than a humble vegetable?) There will not, however, be Tofurky; there will be no turkey bacon because it's a crime against humanity and I haven't ever found a brand that didn't taste like a bookmark. There will also not be the confited pork shoulder that sat for three days in my fridge in a container of dork (combination duck and pork) fat before I tossed it on the grill (thank you, Suzanne Goin). No worries there, doc. We will also not be making cassoulet this year the way we did last Christmas; we will therefore not be confiting our own duck. I am sure that I will at some point find a use for its rendered fat that is sitting in my freezer, however, but probably not for a little while.

So, has all the porky fun gone out of Poor Man's Feast? No. But where there was too much fat, there will now be spice-laden flavor and seasonal freshness. Where there was deep pan-frying and dependence on fat for flavor, there will now be pressure and clay pot cooking. Where there was and always will be Julia Child there will now be Deborah Madison and Elizabeth David, Paula Wolfert and Yamuna Devi, Suvir Saran, David Tanis and Andrea Nguyen, and Judy Rodgers, all of whom take simple dishes with simple ingredients and elevate them to extraordinary. There will likely be a lot of layered flavor and a lot of whole grain bread baking, too, assuming I can manage to turn out something that weighs less than a construction brick. There will be the fresher, cleaner flavors that come with cooking seasonally, knowing where my food comes from, and not buying or eating it if I don't. (Even in Connecticut, even in the dead of winter. So I'll eat turnips and celeraic for a few months. Big deal.)

That said, we all know the price of locally-grown, ethically-produced, non-industrial food, and it is breathtaking; this is one of the greatest inequities we face. So where Poor Man's Feast--which is now almost a year old--has focused, overtly or not, on what it means to eat well and parsimoniously, it will go one step further: it will talk about eating with care, and about making the tough decisions between a $12 pound of grass-fed stew meat that is free from chemicals and hormones and god knows what kind of bad karma, and twice that amount for $3.99 at the local supermarket. That's the tough part because, even with the best of intentions, things almost always comes down to money, for most of us. What to do in that case? I'll buy the good stuff, and eat less of it. My heart will thank me, I hope.

Onward to Christmas.

In Praise of Happy Mouth

The hottest meal I have ever eaten was in 1983, at an Indian restaurant in Glasgow. I was there visiting friends who were native Glaswegians, and after a day or so of having mostly pub food and one gunmetal gray pork chop cooked to the consistency of a charcoal briquette, I was taken to a mysterious establishment that was up a long flight of stairs. It was very late at night, we were all a tiny bit worse for wear, and when my friend's husband ordered for me--"she'll have the vindaloo"-- I couldn't fathom what on earth was going to show up.

I remember distinctly what it looked like, and it didn't look good. Or like vindaloo, for that matter. Nevertheless, I tasted one forkful, and immediately had the sort of reaction that neophytes have when they innocently mistake a Habanero for a pickled tomato: I wept with incendiary bursts of flame that tore through my head. My throat burned, and I coughed and hacked like a tubercular coal miner. It wasn't at all pleasant, and for a full week, I couldn't taste a thing. I was a student at Cambridge at the time, so this was not necessarily unfortunate.

Fast forward twenty-six years, and there is not a dish that comes out of my kitchen that isn't laced, often heavily, with chiles of some sort. I crave the warmth, the heat, the mouth-filling layers of flavor and roundness that heavy spice affords; it gives me what I call Happy Mouth.

Bland food feels like pablum to me now, devoid of passion and electricity and sensuality; even when I'm not feeling well, I'm instantly put right by a flash of fire. Barbara Sibley, co-owner of the extraordinary La Palapa put it more succinctly while cooking on Chopped, when man-tanned judge Geoffrey Zakarian claimed that he couldn't figure out what to do with the searingly hot pepper garnish sitting on the plate that she had prepared, and then snidely commented on whether or not he was actually supposed to eat it. Sibley's dead-accurate aim at the judges' gushing interest in vertical plates of tasteless slop instead of exuberant wallops of flavor got them right between the eyes, like a good chile pepper does: Bite into the pepper, and "At least you know you're alive," she said to Zakarian, and she was right. The judges never knew what hit them, and Barbara was gone in a flash, the very obvious metaphysical winner ousted by the pepper-and-heat threatened.

But where does my love for spice and heat leave me during the often gastronomically bland Christmas season? Is it kosher to spice up the Christmas ham when your guests are (largely) over 90? Is it cool to massage the standing rib roast with a paste of crushed Ancho chiles, coffee, sea salt, and garlic? How about injecting the Christmas pudding with Habanero-infused brandy?

I don't think so.

Bad things would happen, just the way they did when I attempted, one Thanksgiving, to pass off the roasted poblanos I'd added to the butternut squash soup as "just a hint of spice."

Part of the problem here is that in our house, as in many, Christmas tends toward the very traditional, at least gastronomically-speaking; I studied in England for a time and am something of an Anglophile, and I'm sure that the influence of all of those kippers and roasts of beef and gooseberry fools and Yorkshire puddings took its toll on me, culinarily. Some day, Susan and I will do what Alice Waters used to do, according to her foreword in the wonderful Elizabeth David's Christmas, edited by the amazing Jill Norman: I will make a traditional Mexican Christmas dinner one year, an Italian one the next, and so on, and I will add spice to my heart's content. But for the time being, Christmas means ham or beef; possibly some Cumberland sauce; and Stilton. This year, the only heat will be in the pudding I'm making, and I hope that I don't incinerate my eyebrows. Jews aren't particularly known for their dexterity with flaming desserts.

This Christmas, and for Christmases in the near future, our cooking will be limited to the delicious but comparatively benign foods that some long for, and that I want to drench in layers of heat and spice so as to achieve Happy Mouth; instead, we'll all look around and wish each other a happy holiday and best wishes for the New Year. And then I'll start writing my Boxing Day menu:

Quinoa and cotija-stuffed roasted poblanos with crema and New Mexican red chile sauce

Clay pot chicken enojado

Maple and chipotle-rubbed roasted butternut squash

Mexican chocolate pot de creme

With a serrano garnish.

Maple and Chipotle-Rubbed Roasted Butternut Squash

There is nothing simpler to make, or more delicious. Susan loves this dish so much that she claims she could eat it day after day, every day. I don't know about that; but I do know that the combination of sweet maple syrup and smoky spice is unbeatable. Make sure to use grade B syrup here, which will give the dish a much rounder, fuller flavor.

Serves 2-4

1 medium whole butternut squash, sliced in half, seeds scooped out

1 teaspoon grapeseed oil (or other neutral oil)

2 tablespoons grade B maple syrup

1 teaspoon ground chipotle pepper

1. Place a large piece of foil in the oven, and preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Rub each squash half with the oil, then each squash half on the foil flesh side up, and roast until a knife can be inserted into it without any resistance, about 45 minutes.

2. Combine the maple syrup and chipotle in a small bowl, brush onto each squash half, and continue to roast until brown and bubbly, around 5 minutes.

Serve hot, or at room temperature.