h o m e * e c o n o m i c s

loud was the voice of the lonely goatherd

This morning Slate linked to a Los Angeles times piece about the growing demand for goat in the United States. The first time I was served goat was at a college dining hall, and I thought, "you've got to be kidding me." But ever since I saw how popular goat was in little Caribbean take-out joints in the Bronx, I've been meaning to figure out where to buy it so I can try my hand at goat stew. Developing...

turnip and rutabaga stew

These are the seven medium-sized turnips for which I paid EIGHT DOLLARS Saturday at the Greenmarket. I was so shocked when the guy said "eight dollars" that I just handed him a twenty with the same sense of impending shame I feel when splurging on a dress at Bergdorf Goodman. As god is my witness--isn't your number one association with turnips the starving Scarlett O'Hara, defiantly gnawing a raw turnip as she plots her revenge on the world? Or peasants, or pig slop? My determination to appreciate these precious turnips is strong. Half of them went into this week's buffalo stew. The other half may meet the same fate as their cousins who served to make last week's stew.

I have been playing pastry chef too often lately--brown sugar pound cake, peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies, cinnamon ice cream--and so looked to Deborah Madison for a vegetable stew that would make me feel a little more virtuous. Braised turnips with thyme turned out to be just what I was looking for, and it even won male approval. I also got to know a new vegetable--rutabaga, which I had never even seen before, as far as I can remember. It looks like...a big turnip.

-Put a big pot of water on to boil. Peel one pound of turnips and cut them into sixths. Peel 2 rutabagas and dice into 1/2 inch cubes. Add salt to boiling water and parboil the turnips for 1 minute, rutabagas for 3 minutes.
-Melt 2 tbs butter in your stew pot over medium heat. Add 1 finely diced onion, 3 cloves of garlic cut in half, the rutabaga, 1 diced carrot, and 4 sprigs of thyme. Cook for 4 minutes.
-Add the turnips to your pot. Sprinkle with 3/4 tsp salt and 2 tsp flour [I do not know whether you're supposed to stir the flour in or leave it on top. I left it on top and am not quite sure what it added here.] Cover, turn heat to low, and cook for 4 minutes.
-Stir in 1/5 cups water and 2 tbs chopped parsley. Simmer, covered, until turnips are tender, about 15 minutes.
-Taste for salt and pepper. Stir in 1 tsp Dijon mustard and 1/4 cup cream. Cook for 2 more minutes and serve.

the carnivore question

When Fast Food Nation came out a few years ago, I deliberately kept away from it because I didn’t want to spoil McDonald’s for myself. I wasn’t eating there all the time or anything, but it was something I did every now and then, maybe once a month, as—can’t believe I’m writing this—a treat, on a tired or lazy or self-indulgent day. The book got so much publicity, though, that the facts I had tried to avoid set up camp in my head. One day I found I couldn’t eat fast food any more, certainly not the burgers. Then I came to know other things I hadn’t wanted to know about the way meat gets to us and how it’s treated before it’s meat. As my interest in cooking grew and I devoted more thought to what I was eating, shrinkwrapped supermarket meat looked less and less appealing, finally bottoming out at unacceptable. Things only got worse. A piece in Harper’s revealed an environmentally pernicious aspect of meat production I had never considered: the amount of fossil fuel it takes to raise a steak from calf to plate. And it turned out the salmon I had been enjoying was pumped full of dye and that the techniques used to farm it were polluting the waters and the wild fish stock. It got to the point where the only animal products welcome in my house were precious, carefully selected, not at all shy about proclaiming their virtues; and even those eggs and cutlets, I wondered, were they telling the truth? Was I asking enough questions and shopping at the right places?

Recently I began to wonder whether this had gone too far: maybe I should stop being such a pretentious spendthrift and buy supermarket chuck for stew and supermarket chicken for stir fry. What am I proving to the food industrial complex by spending too much of my own money on wild fish? In the nick of time, this piece in The Believer reminded me that cheap and plentiful meat is not a right and that I should not regard it as such, if only to curb my own greediness. If it’s too expensive to eat responsibly raised meat all the time (and it is), then meat should grace your table less frequently (if you need it at all, which I’m afraid I do). This kind of worry is a luxury, I know, but one of the nice things about the Believer piece is that it makes clear some of the reasons why the meat issue can be so emotionally and personally fraught. I am curious to know whether others agree or I am just neurasthenic!

strangely compelling butternut squash muffins

Last week I cooked from the Babbo cookbook for the first time. I've never been to Babbo, I'm kind of scared of Mario Batali, and I only have the book because I got it for free a few years back. But something made me pick it from the pile, and I got excited about making braised shortribs with pumpkin orzo. Though the dinner was nothing spectacular (cook's fault, I'm sure), the next morning I adapted his recipe for pumpkin cake to make these butternut squash muffins with rosemary, which were so tender and fragrant I ate one after another in a futile attempt to locate the exact source of their irresistible appeal. (Andrew, who was not as enthralled as I was, says I liked them so much because they occupy some weird middle ground between sweet and savory.) Since I had neither cake flour nor canned pumpkin puree, couldn't include the pine nuts, and didn't want to include the raisins, there's a good chance my muffins bore little resemblance to the pumpkin cake. I can't imagine liking them more, though, and they are deliciously autumnal.

-Preheat oven to 325. Prepare a standard 12 muffin tin.
-Stir together 1 cup of flour, 1/4 tsp salt, and 1 tsp baking soda.
-Beat two eggs with 3/4 cup light brown sugar until very light. Since I didn't feel like dealing with appliances, even small ones, on Saturday morning, I did this with a fork, and it was fine.
-To egg and sugar mixture add 1 tablespoon of finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves. Beat in 3/4 cup olive oil. Stir in the dry ingredients.
-Now you stir in 1 cup of mashed roasted butternut squash. I had this left over from roasting squash with olive oil, salt, and pepper the night before. Consistency need not be perfectly smooth, though it should not be chunky; mine was a little watery, too.
-Bake until skewer comes out clean/top springs back when you press/muffins have achieved muffiness. This took between 20 and 25 minutes in my oven.