Foundling Gourmet

I've always been the kind of person who reads cookbooks cover to cover. I look at my shelf of cooking books (yes, I am determined to limit this collection to a single shelf; this requires painful cullings from time to time) and I see the two books that have accompanied from my childhood. There's the very worn Betty Crocker's Cook Book for Boys and Girls, and there's Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Cookbook: Favorite Recipes from Mickey and His Friends, complete with 1970s images of Disney characters cooking up a storm on every page. Also on that shelf is a book I treasure because it was my grandmother's: the 1936 edition of All About Home Baking with its stained and splattered pages and a few hand-written recipes on the final flyleaves. I also have the requisite binder-like copy of Betty Crocker's Cookbook, a book I watched my mother refer to throughout my childhood. There's other assorted tomes on that shelf, the main emphasis of my collection currently being vegetarian/vegan/raw vegan fare.

But none of my books contain recipes for what I'd call gourmet food (well, except my student binder from the courses I took at Living Light, but that's kind of a special case). I never thought, growing up in a meatloaf and potatoes home--wandering through my child's cookbook from time to time to discover how to make Shere Khan's Orange Floats or Piglet's Pizza Muffins--that gourmet would be on my mind. Gourmet belonged to the world of televised cooking shows (which I enjoyed watching, even so), or movies set in New York.

And yet gourmet sounds good to me these days. Gourmet: adj. "of or characteristic of a gourmet, esp. in involving or purporting to involve high-quality or exotic ingredients and skilled preparation: gourmet meals; gourmet cooking." I'm all over the high-quality ingredients and some of the things I keep in my pantry now as a matter of course were once exotic items I'd never heard of before. On the table beside my computer sits A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes, by David Tanis, open to page 210 (yes, I'm reading it cover to cover), and from which I derived our dinner last night. I can accept Tanis's philosophy of quality ingredients and skilled preparation united by simplicity. Not fancy food, or pretty food, or fussy food. Fine, beautiful, gourmet food.

I can't get over how weird it is to come from a place where my favorite foods were Creamy Broccoli Tuna Helper, Totino's Canadian Style Bacon Party Pizza, and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. No negative moral judgment here, just bemusement at how one's tastes change. Favorite foods today? Fresh yellow curry with tofu and brown rice and mango slices for dessert. Apple fennel pomegranate salad over spring greens with orange poppy seed dressing. Raw vegan blackberry cobbler with rose-scented cashew cream. Sea palm, straight up, or in a sea palm carrot cucumber sesame salad (sea palm is a seaweed native to northern California. Yeah. I munch seaweed like popcorn!). Pasta in a vegan lemon cream sauce from scratch with sliced mushrooms, olives, freshly ground black pepper, and capers. Steamed asparagus (asparagus!) and red bell peppers with a drizzle of maple-mustard glaze.

Okay, I'm hungry now.

The dichotomy is crazy. Does it take more time and effort to concoct all this gourmet food rather than reach for the boxed macaroni and cheese? Well, yes, and no. There's a lot more planning involved, a lot more attention must be given to finding the best ingredients at the store. I can't just scan a shelf for a favored brand name and toss it in my shopping basket. Also, because I prefer organic foods, I'm limited by seasonal availability. Pomegranates simply aren't available in March, for example. At meal time, though, I've discovered the value of practice and sequencing. Since my wedding, when I began to cook for two, I've generally allotted an hour to prepare dinner each day. Yeah, it takes a little longer to cook new recipes or try new techniques I've never used at home before, but I find that the hour it took me to get dinner on the table when we were eating frozen pizzas and packaged salads is the same hour it takes me today to set out a Thai vegetable stir-fry with spicy peanut sauce over rice noodles, and a little pineapple mango orange coconut salad on the side.

The book I'm reading made me sit back and think about this because I'm looking at menus like:

Fava Bean Salad with Mountain Ham and Mint
Roasted Veal with Morel Mushrooms and Saffron Carrots
Hazelnut Sponge Cake

and

Spinach Cake with Herb Salad
Mustard Rabbit in the Oven
Parsnips Epiphany-Style
Apple Tart

and

Provençal Toasts
Melon and Figs with Prosciutto and Mint
Deconstructed Salade Niçoise
Lavender Honey Ice Cream

I'm looking at menus like this in a gourmet cookbook and not only am I undaunted, but I am considering as I read how to adapt the recipes to my own vegetarian tastes and my own regional resources. Yes, chef school pays off! As does a long-term passion for real food. But I just think it is so freaking cool to look back over my shoulder and see how much I've learned and how much I've changed over the past eight years or so.

I never imagined this culinary state of being for myself, but now that I'm here, I find that I am pleased with the journey.