Fish tostadas, a political discussion, and a nursery rhyme

Here is what the Neffs ate tonight. The bottom layer, which does not show, is a homemade corn tortilla. Next comes a handful of wild arugula ($1.99 for 8 oz. at TJ). On top of that, 1/2 of each of three bell peppers (red, yellow, green) sliced and cooked in olive oil with a sliced onion. Next, six TJ fish sticks. After that, a hearty handful of grated feta cheese. On top, a mixture of diced tomato, avocado, and lime juice.

Here is what the Neffs talked about while eating. Mr Neff was interested in this article by Helen Alvaré, the Catholic church's poster girl for intelligent non-feminism. She is concerned that some initiatives by some governments seem aimed at forcing, or at least strongly nudging, mothers out of the home and into the workplace, and she writes approvingly of governmental programs that subsidize homemakers.

All very high-minded, said Mrs Neff to Mr Neff, but an odd situation has developed over the last hundred or two years. Once upon a time, if the man was an agricultural worker, so was his wife. If he was a servant, she probably was also. If he was in the leisure classes, she had servants waiting on her too.

But since the industrial revolution, there is often a social-class divide between husband and wife. While he is off, say, editing a magazine and running a department, she is at home, say, cooking fish tacos and doing the income taxes.

In such a hypothetical situation, Mrs Neff persisted, the man is part of the upper-middle-class intelligentsia, and the woman is his servant. Perhaps some of the governmental initiatives that worry Ms Alvaré are simply trying to move the man and woman toward parity.

But no, Mr Neff countered:

The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.

When you were working on taxes, quoth he, you weren't doing a servant's job. You were doing the work of a king!

Never argue with Father Goose.

Homemade pizza

Coming home from a lovely hour-long walk in the Arboretum, I couldn't resist stopping at Trader Joe's, and that's why we had pizza tonight.

They were selling rather large, healthy-looking pizza crusts: just add topping and bake. I chose the whole-wheat variety and picked up a brick of feta cheese. Yesterday I had bought a trio of bell peppers (yellow, red, and green) at Aldi's as well as some marvelously cheap onions. A partially used jar of marinara sauce has been in my refrigerator for too long.

So I smeared some olive oil on the crust. Then I poured a little more oil in a large frypan, lightly cooked one thinly sliced onion and half of each pepper, and added a spoonful of garlic (from a jar) and a little salt at the end.

To assemble, I smeared a little of the marinara sauce on the crust on top of the olive oil. I arranged the cooked pepper mixture evenly, and then added two or three ounces of feta cheese, diced small. I baked the pizza at 450 for about 12 minutes and served it with a salad of wild arugula, tomato, and green onion.

Half of the pizza was left over, so we will each have cold pizza for lunch tomorrow. Or maybe I'll microwave mine.

Verdict: I enjoyed the pizza, but the crust was on the tough side and tasted healthier than it needed to. Next time I'll save money and raise quality by making my own crust.

For inspiration: check out the Wikipedia article on pizza. I had no idea.

Lent and lentils continue

Two weeks until Easter. We're back from our week off from Lent, and of course we had lentil soup for lunch. Last Wednesday our daughter Heidi rolled her eyes when her sister, Molly, announced that dinner would be lentil soup. "All your posts recently have been about lentil soup," she said to me, exaggerating only slightly. The lentil does not fall far from the pod.

Dinner tonight, however, featured no lentils. At the top of the plate: tomato and fresh mozzarella from Trader Joe's. In the middle: half a container of gnocchi from Caputo's Cheese Market mixed with homemade pesto (basil, olive oil, parmesan, sliced almonds from TJ). At the bottom: spinach from TJ cooked quickly in olive oil and seasoned with salt and fresh lemon juice. Wine: chianti classico from Caputo's. Lovely meal, inexpensive, nutritionally balanced, no red meat. Life is good, even in deepest Lent.

Review: How Starbucks Saved My Life

At the advice of Beth, readers' services librarian at Wheaton Public Library (who has her own blog here), I just read How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gates Gill.

I half loved it. It was a great airport/airplane read, and this week I spent a lot of hours in transit. The author/protagonist, son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, left Yale and went to work as an executive at the nation's largest ad agency, J. Walter Thompson (now JWT). Along the way he met lots of famous people and made piles of money. He also ignored his family, lost his job, set up as a consultant, couldn't get clients, had a son by a woman he met at the gym, lost his family, lost his house, ran out of money, lost his health insurance ... and did I mention that he had a brain tumor?

Well, if you read the book jacket--or saw Mr Gill on CBS or CNN or read about him in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or any number of other places--you know that, in his 60s, he got a menial job at Starbucks. He had to commute an hour and a half each way by subway, and he spent a lot of time cleaning toilets. Schadenfreude! How are the mighty fallen! And how good it feels, hearing him say that he's happier and wiser as a working man than he ever was as a high flyer!

So why did half of me not love the book? OK, maybe only a third of me. Or a fifth. It really was fun to read. But still, a nagging little voice--echoed, I learned, by a number of people who left comments at Amazon--kept wondering, Mr Gill, have you really changed all that much? Yes, you've learned how to do physical work, and you've made friends with people of other races, and you now feel guilty about the way you treated your wife and children.

But doesn't it make you feel good to tell us that, unlike the people you work with now, you once worked with Jackie O, and unlike the coffee purchasers ("Guests") you chat with now, you once chatted with Ernest Hemingway? And doesn't it feel awesome to write a memoir that not only is immediately published by a major New York house, but also is reviewed by most of the major media and is now slated to become a movie starring Tom Hanks? And hey, you don't suppose Starbucks might figure out that you really love everything about them and maybe will start selling your book in all their stores, do you ... ?

Sure, you've learned important life lessons (which you divulge in a sometimes annoyingly cheery ad copy style--but then, writing ad copy was your métier), and you tell reporters that even if you were offered big bucks to go back to corporate life, you'd stay on at your Bronxville Starbucks. On the other hand, you have no family to support--and not all that much contact with the families you've left behind--so your situation doesn't really compare with that of many of your coworkers. Besides, you now get Social Security and are working only part time.

Yadayadayada. It's easy to carp. Whatever his faults and the faults of his little book, Mr Gill has been through a lot and survived. He may not really be living like everyone else, but he's serving others--literally--and is happy with his life. His book offers a lot of wisdom and quite a bit of humble pie. And maybe its real take-away value isn't so much its paean to downsizing as its first-hand evidence that a hard-working creative guy can turn even the most desperate situation around.

Two and a half cheers, and in a few minutes I'll return the book to the library so you can check it out.

One delightful feature: each chapter begins with an inscription on a Starbucks cup. Here's my favorite, from chapter 7, "Turning Losers into Winners":

The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating--in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.

--a quote from Anne Morriss, a Starbucks Guest from New York City,
published on the side of a Grande Caramel Macchiato

Refreshment Sunday

Today, the fourth Sunday in Lent, is Laetare Sunday in the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, though probably not many of us notice. (Laetare is the first word of the introit for the day: "Rejoice, O Jerusalem!") In the UK, it's Mothering Sunday, and sometimes it's called Refreshment Sunday. Hey, it's halftime. Those onerous Lenten restrictions can be relaxed for the day. Take off that hair shirt! Eat some chocolate! Spend wildly on food!

The Neffs are going to take a whole Refreshment Week. We're going west to visit our descendants and celebrate our 41st anniversary, and we're going to pay no attention to our food bill. Well, knowing us, we'll notice. But it will all be off-record. The Lenten Experiment returns one week from today.

Meanwhile, a progress report. For the first 25 days of Lent, we have spent $241.92 on groceries. That's a per diem of $4.84 apiece. In addition, Mr Neff has had several business lunches and a couple of restaurant meals when he was out of town; his company paid, so that somewhat lowered our food bill. We have each bought ourselves one lunch out: Mr Neff's was frugal. We have had meals with friends several times, sometimes at their place and sometimes at ours.

Most of our food has been vegetarian, though not vegan. We've had fish several times and chicken once or twice. I've put sausage in the soup. We've drunk a little wine, but not much and mostly when visiting friends. I've baked a lot of bread.

And now I'm going downstairs to warm up the lentil soup, chop some cilantro, slice some bread, and pour some wine. Laetare!

Leftover ratatouille

Mr Neff and Muffin have a wonderful bond. They especially enjoy talking to each other after supper. That has little to do with tonight's post, apart from the fact that every meal is better when shared with friends. Muffin really wishes we'd share the ratatouille.

So what do you do with one serving of four-day-old ratatouille (once you've explained to Muffin that she can't have it)? Well, you look in the refrigerator to see what it might go with--and what might need to be eaten before we go out of town and the housesitter comes. I don't want to gross out the housesitter, who is a good friend.

Yesterday I noticed green bell peppers on sale for $1, so I bought one. And last night I noticed half an onion that seems to have taken up permanent residence in the lower crisper. It is obviously an effective crisper, because the onion was in good shape. I also noticed a half-empty can of chipotle chilis in adobo sauce left over from when I made black bean stew.

So I began cooking the way I nearly always do, by pouring a little olive oil in a frying pan. I chopped the onion and added it, then did the same with the pepper along with a little bit of the adobo sauce. After four or five minutes, I dumped in the leftover ratatouille.

Meanwhile I warmed up two frozen cheese tamales (from Trader Joe's) in the microwave, and then warmed up a small amount of frozen corn with a smidgen of butter.

I arranged the ratatouille-onion-pepper concoction on half of each plate, snuggled a tamale up to each vegetable pile, and arranged corn on the other side of the tamale. And that, plus a bite of dark chocolate with hazelnuts (from Aldi), was lunch.

This morning I threw a pile of stuff (onions, dry lentils, carrots, sweet potato, celery, canned tomatoes, chipotle in adobo sauce, and, eventually, some diced turkey sausage) into the slow cooker, and for supper we had lentil soup with whole wheat bread. Tomorrow's lunch will be similar. Perhaps identical.

And now, back to editing. I really want to finish my current project before we go. Leftovers help.

Ratatouille

Ratatouille ... I'd never heard of it until I married a foodie's son and he insisted I learn to make it. Back then my motto was, if it takes longer than five minutes, we don't eat it. I thought ratatouille was extremely time consuming.

Then, nearly 40 years later, it became a movie about a rat and everyone learned how to pronounce it [ʁatatuj]. Nowadays I consider ratatouille to be the fourth-most important food, after bread, wine, and cheese. And I can make it in not much more than five minutes.

OK, maybe fifteen minutes. But then--assuming you already have the bread, wine, and cheese--your meal is ready. And if your family is small, you can eat ratatouille leftovers for days. Just don't follow most of the recipes you'll find online. They are too complicated.

Here's what you do, in two versions for two kinds of cooks.

For both versions, buy one eggplant, two zucchini, one big round onion, and some tomatoes--3 or 4 medium, 5 or 6 plum tomatoes, or even a handful of cherry tomatoes. I'm assuming you have extra-virgin olive oil and a head of garlic already.

Short version
Cut everything into bite-sized chunks, adding it to the pan as soon as it's ready and cooking as you go. Here's the order to add: olive oil, onion, eggplant, zucchini, garlic, tomato, seasonings. That's all you really need to know.

Long version
Get out a nice big heavy frying pan. Pour olive oil into it. Heat it up.

Chop up the onion. Dice it, slice it, do whatever you feel like doing to it. Put it in the pan and let it soften (not brown--turn down the heat if it tries) while you...

Peel and then dice the eggplant. Chunks should be between 1/2 and 1 inch square. Toss the eggplant into the pan with the onion and let it cook, even brown a little (you may feel like adding more olive oil; eggplant drinks the stuff), while you ...

Chop the zucchini. No need to peel. If they're small, just slice them fairly thick. If they're bigger, cut them in half lengthwise before slicing. If they're truly huge, use only one of them and cut them in quarters. Toss them into the pan with the onion and eggplant and let them cook while you ...

Dice some garlic, as much as you like, and toss it into the pan with the onion and eggplant and zucchini and let it cook while you ...

Chop the tomatoes. I don't generally remove the seeds; they don't get in the way and probably are good for us. Then dump the tomatoes in the pan with the onion and eggplant and zucchini and garlic and let it all simmer until you get the table set and the bread sliced and the wine poured.

If you like, you can add dried or fresh herbs after the tomatoes: parsley, basil, oregano are all good.

What to do with it once you've made it

• Whatever else you do with it, top it with shredded or shaved fresh Parmesan cheese (never the powdery stuff that comes in a green tube, however).
• Serve it as a soup or stew, with fat slices of good bread.
• Use it as pasta sauce. It's great on spaghetti or in lasagna.
• Brown some chicken breasts and then braise them in ratatouille.
• Smash it up a bit and spread it on bread rounds. Garnish with sprigs of parsley.
• Top a baked potato with ratatouille and cheese.
• Use it as a side dish with meat and potatoes.
• Serve it cold, on greens, perhaps with chopped boiled eggs.
• Stuff an omelet with it.
• Get creative.
  

This week we've had it on spaghetti (twice: I've been busy). And today we'll be having ratatouille omelets. If I ever finish my current work project, I might cook something else...

By the way, the Lenten Experiment is having a good effect on Mr Neff's lunch habits. He managed to eat in a restaurant with a friend at noon today for only $2.25.