Coming Home

There is so much to do after being away for 18 days. Besides all the normal things like going through the mail, paying the bills, watering the plants, doing laundry, I need to finish my travel journal. I try to write in a journal nearly every day I’m away, leaving plenty of blank pages to incorporate the ephemera: train tickets, playbills, menus, blogs, mini-photos, drawings of chairs. The trip journal takes on a life of its own as an art project, memory booster, and scrapbook. I revisit the country in choosing photos and pasting them into the book; in the process I move the memories and learning into my brain’s long-term storage compartment. I love the process. Even more I love having it done.

My very first trip journal was a small green faux leather book that I took with me to Europe in the summer of 1965. Writing with a very fine-pointed rapidograph pen, I crammed more information into this little book than I ever thought possible. The ephemera and photos went into scrapbooks and a box that for years have been tucked away. My current journals combine it all.

I also get to start cooking again. And how about this: I continue to have a hankering for Middle Eastern food—even though I spent six days eating it twice or three times a day. So I’ve made a Bulgur Salad with Roasted Peppers, Meatballs with Sour Cherries from The Book of Middle Eastern Food, trying to reconstruct the dish we had our first night in Damascus (see photo), Lebneh with Za’atar, Red Pepper Walnut and Pomegranate Dip, Zucchini Mint Fritters, and Cinnamon Chicken with Orzo. So good. Still hungry for those flavors.

Store Lists: More Little Notebooks

I’m about half way through reading  Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found by Bill Keaggy. He and his friends spent several years collecting grocery lists that people left in their shopping carts or dropped in the parking lot. He has arranged them into categories, like Doodles and Noodles or Chides and Asides. In truth the lists are pretty similar in their brevity, bad spelling, and preponderance of processed food. These little scraps of paper, while fetching and evocative, are not nearly as detailed and organized as my little notebooks. Are you surprised?

















I have two such notebooks, one for Berkeley and one for Sonoma. I’ve been using the Berkeley one for ages—maybe since we moved to the west coast 13 years ago. I started the Sonoma notebook in 2005, finished it up last week and initiated a new one today. These notebooks are a little beat-up by the time I’m done with them—what with going in and out of my purse, resting on the child seat of the grocery cart, and finally sitting on my kitchen counter where I can consult the current plans and add items for next week’s shopping. Each page is filled with my scribbles: items crossed out as I throw them into the cart, others circled that aren’t available, and the odd note to myself.

So let me take you through the process. I pull a couple of cookbooks off the shelves, sit in my favorite chair with them on my lap, and start flipping through indexes. Sometimes my choices are based on a hankering (like today I just felt like some red meat) and sometimes on the basis of what is hanging out in the fridge (like the tomatillos I bought recently without a designated use). When I find a suitable recipe (within my capability, time and cost constraints, taste and aesthetic preferences), I jot it down on the right hand side of the page, along with the cookbook (Mastering the Art… becomes MAFC) and page number. On the left hand side, I list the ingredients I need to make the recipe. I repeat the process until I have two or three meals planned. This sounds intense but in fact it doesn’t take very long and I love looking through the cookbooks and imagining good things going into my mouth.

I try to make enough food at any given dinner to give me an additional dinner of leftovers which, fortunately, everyone in this family adores. So three preparations yield at least six meals. Because I don’t like to eat the same thing two nights in a row, I often alternate leftovers with freshly cooked meals. For example a typical week might look like this: Cook 1. Cook 2. Leftover 1. Cook 3. Leftover 2. Eat out. Leftover 3. You get the idea.

Taking the time to plan the menus and shopping about once a week suits me just fine. I am fortunate to have farmers markets and good supermarkets in easy reach. I love knowing that at the end of the process we are provisioned for the week and that once I start cooking, I’ll have everything I need. Most of the time.

Dang, I forgot the milk.

Why I Write in my Cookbooks

How did I know that I had cooked 66 recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking? (See August 15, 2009 blog on the movie Julie and Julia.) Actually all I had to do was flip through the pages and count up every recipe that had my penciled notes in the margins. They were the sure give-away that I had cooked it. And I could give you a count for every one of the more than 500 cookbooks that I have amassed over the past 43 years of cooking. I have written in them all. I owe this habit to my mom whose battered and speckled Better Homes and Gardens was sprinkled with her black ball point notes. How useful, I thought.

But why, you might ask? Here are my thoughts.

1. I make notes because I want to remember that I’ve cooked a particular recipe. I want to record whether we liked it or not. God forbid that I should cook a recipe again if we hated it. But other comments are useful too like “too weird for my taste” or “just great” or “too much trouble for the end result” or “the best.” I also note any changes I might have made, like adding less olive oil or more salt or making a substitution, like red onions for shallots, or if some procedure simply didn’t work and what to do about it.

2. I make notes because my cookbooks have been my cooking teachers from the very beginning. Like notes from a good lecture, the recipe notes help cement the learning and help me remember the experience. I want to record what I have learned so I won’t forget.

3. I make notes because I am an historian (BA in History, University of Michigan, 1965 after all), recording/archiving my cooking history. Flipping through a well-used cookbook is a trip down memory lane. The notes reveal the likes and dislikes of my sons Franz and Ben through the years. They reveal how our tastes have expanded. They reveal that at one period we were eating chicken livers, salmon cheeks, and finnan haddie. They tell me what I ate for Thanksgiving dinner in Japan in 1972. Ah yes, jujubes in the stuffing. Might future historians enjoy looking through my cookbooks and seeing what I was cooking and eating in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Without the notes, how could they tell?

4. I make notes so that as my memory gets increasingly sketchy, I don’t accidentally cook the same dish for guests that I made for them on another occasion or serve bread salad to a treasured guest who hates it. So on each recipe I write the month and year I made it and for whom, including any relevant comments.

5. Most of all, I write notes because I am making these recipes my own. Over the years some recipes, especially “the keepers,” have a vast array of notes scribbled all over the page. The dish that results is still recognizable as being Chicken Marbella, for example. But it has become “my” Chicken Marbella. Isn’t that the whole point? To make the dish our own?

So you, my dears, are the beneficiaries of my learning and my note-making. I have taken these scribbled up recipes, typed them up fresh and clean, including helpful notes and worthy changes, and put them on this blog. Now I turn them over to you so that you too can write on them, change them to suit your tastes, and make your own.

Noting a Life: Dinner Notebooks

When the group from First Congregational Church of Berkeley and I arrived in Spain from Morocco, our first stop was Marbella. I knew the name immediately from Chicken Marbella which is one of my favorite dishes, originally from the famous Silver Palate Cookbook. You’ll find the recipe below. But I had always called it Chicken Marbella—like Mar-bel-la. To my surprise the city’s name was pronounced Mar-bay-a. So now I know, Chicken Mar-bay-a.
















We spent one night. I didn’t eat Chicken Marbella—in fact it wasn’t on the menu. But I can tell you exactly what I did eat at Bar California: salad with carrot, tunafish, tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and onions and poured my own oil and vinegar. Then I had Shrimp Pil-Pil which is shrimp in boiling hot olive oil and garlic served in a small casserole. A Barbarillos (white?) and a Rioja (red) to drink. Then we went off to a bar and I ate Cuarent Tres, which means 43, almonds from Catalonia, and Poncho Cabineros, a spicy liquor, which I loved. Please correct my Spanish.

The reason that I know exactly what I ate is that since 2004 I have been writing down my dinners (and on trips all three meals) along with important information like where, with whom, what and the cookbooks I used, wine, etc. I put the information in little 4 x 6-inch notebooks which are easy to take along on a trip and to restaurants if I think a meal may be worth recording in detail.

At the end of each month, I put this information on a spreadsheet, clearly a throw-back to my 16 years as an administrator at Duke University. Then at the end of the year I tally it up. Here’s what it looked like the first year 2004 and the most recent year 2008: Cooked dinner for guests 46/38, Cooked dinner for myself or myself and Katherine 80/84, Ate leftovers 84.5/63, Take-out 0/4, Out at restaurants 50/57, Out at friends 23/17, Out shared (mostly holidays) 3/6, Catering 4/0, Traveling (mostly restaurants) 75/97. They each add up to 366; I don't know why. But close enough.

There is no real reason for recording my dinners in this way. I think originally it seemed like a fun project—and I love projects. I do occasionally go back, as I did above, and check out what I ate on a particular date, like Saturday, March 20, 2004.

Sometimes I think that I am providing a future graduate student with a masters thesis on what a white, middle-aged, middle class, woman ate between 2004 and whenever I decide to stop.

But mostly I like to keep track of my life. I call the bookshelf that holds all these notebooks and others you will hear about at another time Noting A Life.