Expressing thanks for our many blessings, chief among them good and ample food, should come naturally. But in our American world of plenty, it can be hard to feel honest-to-goodness gratitude when we sit down to eat. Few of us are wondering whether there will be food on our plates tomorrow; the only real issue is what we’ll choose to eat.

In spite of this, I’ve observed that when I take personal responsibility for my food–either by growing, gathering, or cooking it myself–gratitude comes easily. Watching a loaf of bread rise or seeing how lettuce sprouts in the garden puts me in touch with a mysterious force, and this, I think, maybe a missing link, a necessary starting point for gratitude.

One obstacle to feeling thankful, then, may be the striking disconnect around food within our culture. What we eat appears to many of us to originate at the grocery store, and so what is there to be grateful for? And there is an exchange that may also interfere: I offer money and receive food in return. Everyone gets something and so, again, is there anything more to be grateful for than the dollar that enabled the deal?

© Photo courtesy of: DTR@Ruhlman.com

In and around the kitchen, there is a different energy exchange, one I can’t fully explain though I can describe it. I mix flour and water and together these turn into bread. I put cucumbers and salt into a crock and get pickles ten days later. I put seeds in the soil and get vegetables and herbs, which I turn into salads, soups and more. These are wonders, all of them. And I am amazed by transformations that I can never fully understand; I’m grateful, too, because they are powered by a force beyond my grasp, one I cannot touch or see but have learned to rely on as I work to put food on my table.

You could say, then, that instead of engaging in commerce I am engaging in a collaboration with a mysterious force, and it’s my connection to this force that stokes the fires of gratitude.

I’ve thought a lot lately about how to strengthen this connection, and about whether it might help to see cooking in the same fascinated way that children do: “Wow, how did those eggs whip up so fluffy and light? What made that cake rise? And look at those pickles; they were cucumbers before!

I wonder if this might be a better way to inhabit the kitchen: with childlike curiosity and awe, and with an awareness that there’s mystery behind the creation of these foods. If it is, and I think it is, I suspect we might get there by slowing down and paying closer attention, by allowing ourselves to be surprised by the beauty of our ingredients and the magical way they turn into meals that nourish us.

Making room in our busy lives, enough to allow an everyday task that’s as useful and necessary as cooking to hold our attention and engage our imagination, is a gift we can give to ourselves. Growing food, gathering it in ways that are interesting and fun and, most of all, cooking: these are worth some time and effort because gratitude is the reward, and so is hope. These are necessary and uplifting feelings–and just right to hold within us as we begin a new year.

I gave birth to my first daughter when I was 27 years-old and, according to an invisible cosmic plan, every seven years I welcomed another daughter into the world. With my youngest about to turn seven, and without any conscious pining for new life, I came up with the idea–perfectly on cue–of expanding my brood to include not one, but six lovely new girls. They are hens, to be more precise, and I surprise myself by enjoying and doting on them far more than I expected to.

There is, of course, the issue of propitious timing, and there is also the natural evolution of whims and desires. My own evolution was helped along by people like Joan Dye Gussow, a passionate advocate for eating locally and well. In her book, This Organic Life, which I read many years ago, she describes the challenge she took on in  mid-life of growing all of her own food in a large and ambitious garden.  Back then, her commitment helped firm my resolve to eat as locally and cleanly as I could. This year I read her new book, Growing Older, and renewed my commitment to self sufficiency; hence the perpetuation of the 7-year cycle and the hens.

It’s not entirely Joan’s fault. I have long wanted hens though, to be honest, I was afraid. With so many predators around, I wondered how I would I keep the hens alive. More to the self-absorbed point, I wondered how I would personally face and deal with death when it happened. How would I clean up the mess?

Hens on pasture

My two youngest!

After months of burying my nose in books and articles, and some forced experience cleaning up dead mice, I convinced myself I could do it. So this spring, I welcomed new life and there is so much about it that I love. The hens run free on pasture, they eat bugs and stir up my compost pile, and here is the kicker: they turn grass and bugs and kitchen scraps into really superior eggs.

If you have ever daydreamed about small-scale farming, raising livestock in your own backyard, or taking personal responsibility for raising some portion of the food you eat, I cannot tell you what a joy you would find tending hens to be. They are smart; who knew? They are wonderfully athletic. They have distinct personalities, and recognize and greet those who tend them. They let me know when they’re happy and what they need, and they make a soft cluck-clucking noise with a sort of rolling, back-of-the-throat purr that is both soothing and reassuring.

For the linguist in you, there is another fun aspect to raising hens: there are so many figures of speech that come from chicken tending. They will come to mind daily and you will say, “Oh, that’s where that turn of phrase originated.” Here are a few to help you understand what I mean:

• Coming home to roost: At the end of the day, hens run to the coop and fly up to a horizontal bar–or a tree branch if they live in the wild–to roost for the night.
• Rooster: The male of the species sits high on a tree branch where he roosts to watch over his hens. So, he is the “roost-er.”
• Hen pecked: When hens are irritated with each other, which doesn’t happen often if they have ample space, they peck at each other with sharp beaks.
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: If, when you go out to gather eggs, you put all of them into one basket, you might lose the whole bunch by dropping or knocking it. If you put some eggs in one basket and the rest in another, there is a greater likelihood you will have eggs for breakfast.
• Running chicken: When young hens are threatened, they don’t run toward the aggressor to defend themselves, they turn and run away.
• Scratching out a living: Chickens scratch the soil to find bugs to fill their bellies.
• Pecking order: Within a group of hens, there exists a hierarchy, and pecking is the means to put an up-and-comer in her place.
• Flying the coop: A hen will occasionally take flight and leave the coop, which brings us to a related figure of speech…
• The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Hens might roam on a pasture full of grass, weeds, bugs and all a chicken could desire. But they will still stick their heads through the fence, or go over the fence, in search of some imagined improvement in circumstances.

Here are a few more examples to give you some idea of what an agricultural people we once were, with an entire lexicon established around the shared experience of chicken tending: nest egg, hatch an idea, cock-eyed, feather your nest, hen house, mother hen, rule the roost, bad egg, walking on eggshells; and there are more. If you someday get your own hens, you will have the fun of conjuring up the rest yourself!

If thinking about hens and eggs is making you wonder about the quality of the eggs you find at the grocery store, here is my own deciphering of our modern egg labels: Understanding Egg Labels

Copyright 2011, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul

It’s worth taking a moment to consider how the tending of hens, our most abundant and reliable egg “producers,” has evolved in past decades because it connects to the quality of the eggs we consume.

Background

Factory farming began in the 1920s, and the timing is meaningful. This was just after the discovery of vitamins A and D. Once farmers could add these vitamins in synthetic form to animal feed, there was no longer a need to give animals access to pasture for sun and growth. There was no longer a need to have them live as animals do. So, motivated by a potential for increased profits, farmers moved their animals off of grass and onto industrial farms. The complication was that living in confinement and indoors made animals sick, but antibiotics–which came along in the 1940s–fixed that problem. Today, 80% of antibiotics are used on animals.

Egg Quality

When considering the quality of eggs, there are many factors to take into account. Chief among them is  their balance of essential fats; how hens live and what they eat affects this balance directly and the balance then affects us. Essential fats are called essential because we need them but can’t make them; we have to get these fats from food. They are called “omega-3″ and “omega-6.” There is much evidence to suggest that traditional diets balanced these two essential fats, which is what our bodies require. Now, however, most of us consume far more omega-6 than omega-3 fats, causing internal inflammation and perhaps explaining our epidemics of obesity and cancer, as well as high rates of heart disease and neurological problems.

What do essential fats have to do with how hens live and what they are fed? When chickens live indoors and are fed grain alone, they are living in a manufactured environment, which makes their eggs less than what nature intended; these eggs can contain up to 30 times more omega-6 fats than omega-3 fats. Hens on pasture produce eggs with a 1:1 essential fat ratio.  So hens that are outside absorbing vitamin D from the sun and eating bugs for protein have eggs (and meat) that are more nutritious; these eggs are also anti-inflammatory.

The Egg Labels

In the list below, I’ve attempted to decipher the most common egg labels. Some speak to how the hens live, others speak to what they are fed, and a few focus on both.

Pastured: This is the gold standard for an egg. Pastured eggs come from hens that roam free, foraging for grass, weeds, seeds and bugs. The hens return to a hen house at night to roost, nest and lay eggs; they are generally fed grain in the evening. Pastured eggs usually come from small farms, and are often sold at the farm itself, or at farmers’ markets or small health food stores. The label on these eggs will always include the word “pastured.” Because these hens live as hens should–on grass and in the sunshine, running, taking dust baths, eating bugs and pecking at the soil–their diet contains necessary minerals and their eggs have an ideal balance of essential fats. The question to ask the farmer is, “Did these eggs come from hens that live on pasture?”

High-Omega  or Omega-3 Enriched: This label refers specifically to what the hens eat: a diet rich in a source of omega-3 fats like flax seed or fish oil. If your concern is your own health and the balance of essential fats in your eggs, and if you do not have access to pastured eggs, these eggs might be a reasonable option. Note that, like most labels, this one is unregulated so, unless it is specified, there is no way to know the true omega-3 content of the eggs and there is no listing of what else the hens eat other than omega-3 rich foods. In addition, the label gives us no information about how the hens live. These eggs may have a better balance of essential fats than those that follow.

Without grass and sunshine for the hens, the following eggs all have an imbalance of essential fats:

Certified Organic: This label requires that hens be uncaged, but most live inside barns and warehouses. Access to the outdoors is a must, but it can be a small door that the hens neither know about nor use–”access” being the key word. The hens consume a certified-organic feed free of antibiotics, pesticides and genetically-modified ingredients, but beak cutting and forced molting through starvation (to simulate the natural molting that occurs when hens are exposed to sunlight) are allowed. Certified organic eggs are the only eggs is this list that have inspections and enforcement to ensure that guidelines are met. But know that while giving organic grain to hens without giving them access to pasture does make their eggs “organic;” it does not improve the life of the hens or make their eggs more nutritious. The yolks are still pale and the eggs are often shipped long distances.

Free-Range or  Free-Roaming: While there are no standards that qualify eggs as coming from free-range hens, these hens are most often uncaged and housed inside barns or warehouses with some access to the outdoors. They can sometimes enjoy natural behaviors like dust bathing, roosting and foraging, but there is no grass, and there are few bugs and little, if any, sunshine. We have no information about what free-range hens are fed, and beak cutting and forced molting are permitted.

Cage-Free: This label makes it seem as if the hens are on pasture, and it is meant to, but cage-free is a marketing term. Hens are uncaged, as the name suggests, but they most often live in a barn or warehouse without access to pasture. Beak cutting and forced molting are permitted. On the other hand, cage-free hens can walk, nest and spread their wings, which caged birds are prevented from doing.

Vegetarian-fed: To my mind, this might be the most misleading label, meant to make the eggs seem somehow virtuous. As I understand it, the label means that the hens’ feed contains no animal matter, but the hidden implication is that the hens are locked indoors. Bugs are a mainstay of a hen’s diet, and even small bugs that fly through the air will be food. To ensure that a hen eats no animal matter, I can surmise that a vegetarian-fed hen must be kept in a warehouse with no access to fresh air. If the point is consideration for all living beings, these eggs miss it entirely.

Fertile: This tells us that the hens that lay eggs live with a rooster, which probably means they are uncaged. But there is no guarantee and the label says little else about how the hens live or what they eat.

Hormone Free: Another label that sounds good, but means nothing. Hormones in poultry were banned in the 1960s.

Natural: This is a marketing term that has no consistent meaning, and tells us nothing about how the hens live or what they eat.

The Take-Home Message

Labels are necessary when we manufacture food, but eggs, in the ideal, are not manufactured. When hens are raised on pasture, we don’t need a fancy name or label; we simply need to know our farmer. Shop at farmers’ markets, farm stands or small health food stores for eggs from hens that live as they were meant to: on grass, in the sunshine, running, taking dust baths, and eating bugs. The egg carton will say “pastured,” and it is really this simple.

Copyright 2011, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul

You might feel as I do, that as the pace of our days has quickened, we rarely make room for anticipation in our lives. Experiences move past us one after another, with little time to hope or wonder about the future, and even less time to reflect on pleasures of the past. Yet in our flurry, we may be missing an aspect of life that is beautiful and essential; planning, looking ahead, and preparing for what’s to come enlarges our experience and, as it does, it deepens every satisfaction.

It pays to look for ways to welcome anticipation back into our lives and, in the summer kitchen, making pickles is one way to do this. The process of making pickles slows us down because it unfolds over days or weeks and can’t be rushed. It is a process that has a beginning, middle and end and, with each phase, expectation builds.

There is, of course, a familiar and circular challenge: making pickles takes time when we have none to spare. But pickle making is unique among many kitchen endeavors in that it allows us to rely on an invisible team of helpmates: the bacterial cultures that make fermentation happen. These cultures move our labors along and toil for us as we tend to other tasks. Once we establish a home for them, we have the pleasure of observing their work–marveling at their bubbles, smelling, poking, and tasting from time to time.

What’s better is that if you are at home as much as I am, you will appreciate experiencing adventure without ever leaving your kitchen because pickle making is an endless source of mystery and wonder. The process is fascinating; it is also the cherished source of a quiet and particular kind of excitement.

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Based on many summer days spent making pickles in the kitchen, here are my hard-won pickle-making tips:

• It is best to make pickles from small cucumbers, usually Kirby, that are the freshest you can find. If they are not recently picked, soak them in cold water to revive them. Fresh Kirbys are easy to get at farmers’ markets all summer long. They don’t all need to be the same size, but look for the smallest, “tightest,” cucumbers and forgo those that are large–even if they are labeled Kirby–as you will not get a good result. Juicy cucumbers are not a pickle maker’s friend.
• Since proper crunch is essential, it is important to know the secret behind it: it seems to be the leaves you place in the pickling crock with the rest of your ingredients. According to fermentation guru, Sandor Katz, it’s the tannin in these leaves that preserves the crunch. I used to use oak leaves; I now use fresh grape leaves and these are my preference. Katz says that cherry and horseradish leaves work as well.
• Homemade pickles are fermented, and later preserved, in a salty brine. After getting a batch or two of pickles that didn’t preserve well, I tried making a fresh brine for storing finished pickles. This new brine ruined the pickles as I was never able to attain the correct ratio of salt to water.  To avoid the heartache that comes with ruining perfectly good pickles, strain your pickling brine and use it to store your finished pickles.
• Most pickle recipes call for dill heads; these are flowers that form at the end of dill stalks as they grow in the garden. If you like to grow herbs and you simply allow your dill to go to seed, you will have all the dill heads you need. If you have no garden, you can use a fresh bunch of purchased dill and this will work, too.
• Knowing that beneficial compounds in garlic are released when cloves are cut or crushed, I tried cutting the garlic that I added to my brine and this approach ruined several batches of pickles. It is not a good idea to create such a potent garlic flavor if you want to keep your friends and family close to you; whole garlic cloves give a more pleasing result.
• Cucumbers are held under weight in the pickle-making crock. It took me years to learn that this weight should not put any real pressure on the cucumbers. On the contrary, it should be placed gently on top as its only purpose is to submerge the cucumbers under the brine.
• Mold, alas, is part of the pickle-making process. Do not fear it. You can skim and toss it if there’s a lot. As long as mold stays on the surface of the brine and doesn’t touch the tops of the cucumbers, you will get good pickles. When you are ready to store the pickles, skim the mold. Then strain the brine into your storage container.
• In my New Jersey kitchen, pickles predictably take ten days to mature. You might eat yours earlier or later depending on the flavor you seek. They improve, for a time, after you store them in the refrigerator. I have had success keeping pickles for a couple of months, but not longer than that.

Copyright 2011, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul

I was once swept off my feet while vacationing in Italy, la terra di amore, the land of love. As I might have expected (as you, by now, might expect) my irresistible suitor was not a “him,” but an “it”–the mercato, the Florentine farmers’ market–and the language of our courtship was curiously slanted toward all things edible: rosemario, pomodori, fagioli, aglio.

Blocks away, in my Italian kitchen, I could feel the bustle and energy of the market. People streamed toward it from every direction–on foot, bicycle, or motorcycle–and I joined them each morning as I set out to gather ingredients for the day’s meals.

What the mercato offered was a vision; even now, it takes no effort to conjure it in my mind. Barrels of capers in salt. Anchovies. Artichokes. Fresh beans in their pods. Porcini mushrooms and handfuls of wild mint to go with them. More vegetables and fruit, full of color, odd shapes and personalities, and all at the peak of ripeness, the best and most they would ever be. There was rich, creamy yogurt that must have been a thousand calories. There were fresh whole fish that smelled of salt air and sea, squat yellow peaches, and eggs with deep golden yolks. Rather than pack these eggs twelve to a carton, the farmers offered them one by one, each a treasure.

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This post is a departure for me–more technical than usual, and intended to address a specific health issue: the blood sugar spikes that come with eating everyday baked goods. I based it on experiments conducted in my own home kitchen, and I have written it for those with diabetes or blood sugar issues, or those interested in lowering the glycemic index of carbohydrate-rich foods. As I have no immediate plans to publish additional posts on this topic, please contact me by email if you would like more information. If there is enough interest, I will look at ways to disseminate instructions and recipes for using sourdough in baking.

Background

Both sweet and savory baked goods can pose health concerns for a variety of reasons:

• When we eat baked goods made with white flour, blood sugar can spike upward after eating (the glycemic index, or carbohydrate component, is too high).
• When we eat baked goods made with whole-grain flour, blood sugar remains relatively stable, but phytic acid* stored in the bran may prevent us from absorbing such minerals as iron, calcium, magnesium and zinc. This can lead, over time, to mineral depletion and bone loss.
• When we bake with white or whole-grain flour and allow the batter to rest (soak) for a period of hours before baking, phytic acid is reduced, but grains become super-digestible and the result is a dramatic spike in blood sugar (the glycemic index is again too high).

The problem, then, is circular in nature, with each solution creating a new problem.

As a sourdough bread baker and teacher, I knew that sourdough creates an ideal carbohydrate: bread with a low glycemic index and almost no phytic acid due to the dough’s long rest before baking. I therefore wondered if I could use sourdough to improve the healthfulness of everyday baked goods by adding it to a batter and then allowing it to rest for a period of hours, just as when making sourdough bread. I believed this approach would lower the glycemic index of baked goods and reduce their phytic acid, a simple and elegant solution to the challenges listed above. This approach might be useful to those with insulin resistance or diabetes, those with mineral deficiencies (like low calcium or iron), and those who simply wish to lower the blood sugar impact of the baked goods they consume.

The rest of this post describes my tests and their promising results.

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A few years ago, I lived through a disastrous home renovation project. It brought mostly heartache and regret and, in the end, left me with a home that still needed extensive renovation to repair the mistakes that had been made.

Once these mistakes were corrected, order was finally restored–or so I thought–until I glanced at the kitchen ceiling and noticed a haphazard configuration of lights; it was an arrangement so illogical that it became an ongoing reminder of our chaos, heartache, and misguided investment. I was stuck with bitter feelings until, one day, one of my children glanced upward and said, “Look, we have a smiley face on our ceiling!”

That moment–that new way of looking at a situation that had, by then, become familiar–transformed the lights into an orderly, artistic arrangement. And so on that day I learned, and I mean really learned, the importance of outlook. I look up now and see a smiley face and, even when I strain to see chaos, it simply isn’t there.

In the same way, when it comes to cooking happily and with a joyful acceptance of the task, outlook may be the largest hurdle any of us will need to leap.

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The way we eat is intrinsically connected to how we live our lives and, therefore, to the way we use our world. It’s helpful if we can link these in our minds and in our actions.

It would be difficult to look honestly at the way we eat and not see that it is contributing to the erosion of so much that matters: our good health, the vitality of our small farms and local communities, and the resources offered to us by our planet. The problem, at its root, is one we might blame on a profit-driven food industry, yet the challenges we face are not due to highly-processed foods or poor quality ingredients, at least not really. These are, more specifically, being degraded by poor ways of living.

As a society, we have come to place an unusually high premium on time-saving, labor-saving approaches, and on a lifestyle that minimizes the “drudgery” of putting food on the table. An entire industry has been created to support our culinary leisure. A look to the past, however, reminds us that our great-grandparents worked hard at being food producers. They grew and cooked much of what they ate. Their days were centered around output and, without seeming virtuous, around maintaining a household and sustaining life. We, on the other hand, are food consumers. We shop for what we eat.

When we let go of daily cooking, we lost more than good nutrition; we gave up our ability to think in relevant and discerning ways about food. We deprived ourselves of a crucial connection to that which sustains us, and I don’t only mean real food, but also the process of growing, gathering and preparing it. That, too, is nourishment, and without it we are often left subtly wanting.

While living the way our great-grandparents did may not seem reasonable or possible for many of us, reversing this trend to at least some degree is a goal we might all want to embrace. By forging a solid connection to the food we eat, and to the sources of that food, we uphold the ripples that we put forth with every bite–ripples that either lift up or bring down much that is around and within us.

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Not all salad dressings are equal, and the ways they differ can be important and altogether unexpected. While quality matters, I am referring to differences that run deeper and are perhaps more significant: there are dressings that empower us, and there are those that undermine our ability to think and do for ourselves. That’s a lot to claim about so small a dish. Let me explain.

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed spending time in Italy, where salad is served daily in every sort of restaurant. Alongside bowls of undressed greens, four ingredients are placed on the table: extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. The  last two are in mills so you can grind them yourself. The offering of these ingredients is based on two underlying assumptions. First, that anyone big enough to eat a salad is also big enough to dress it–without measuring spoons and without a recipe. And second, that our personal preferences vary.

The power to dress a salad–that is, the power to choose and do for oneself–is granted and taken daily. Implicit in the granting is a message so ennobling that it’s worth pausing to consider: you can do this; without a recipe, you can dress a salad using ingredients that are simple and real, and you can make it taste good. You have that ability.

How different salads are for most of us, having lost much of our self reliance in the kitchen, along with the conviction that we are capable of preparing simple and delicious fare. It is not too strong to say that this is emblematic of the larger ways, in the realm of cooking, that we have let our power go, giving it to an industry that generally has profit, rather than our well being, as its motive. It is an industry that has reduced personal choice to an array of inferior bottled dressings.

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