New Year's Eve

Pickled beets, dilly beans and canned tomatoes, all dressed up for Christmas

How do I end up posting right before the holidays?   I guess on an academic calendar that's when we have time.

Well, as the sun sets at 4:20 pm on New Year's Eve, 2010, I'm doing my little reflecting thing.  The day has been intensely, beautifully quiet, the way only winter in New England can be, especially when you have no "outside" responsibilities: family, school, work.   We're done with all the parties, entertaining and gift-giving, lesson planning and paper writing, deadlines and test-taking.   At least for a little while.   And so I, happily, turn to food.  And not just eating it, which has started to feel like a recurring bad habit with all the holiday meals we've been served (thank you, thank you, we are grateful for the hard work and abundance that went into them - oof, my pants feel tight!  :).

No, I'm talking about the work with raw ingredients that has, over the past few years, started to feel so intensely personal, soothing and healing for me.  I spent today boiling and bottling orange-flavored homemdade vinegar, my head blissfully woozy from the scent of all that boiling vinegar.
  It's the last of several holiday food-related projects (including from-scratch squash soup for thirty people, recipe and blog post forthcoming), and it feels good to spend a few hours today bringing it to completion.   I've written about how food production and writing seem to compliment each other for me (one short term and sensual, the other fit into the future and stimulating only the insides our brains), but in some ways food prep feels like a nice antidote for almost all my other activities in life:  riding the T, looking for jobs, planning parties, corralling teenagers or editing papers.    All of these take energy directed outward, interacting with the busyness and needs of the world.    In contrast, chopping vegetables, stirring soup, tasting, judging, and eating seem almost monk-like, meditative in comparison.    Making food, I am in a quiet conversation with my own senses, and with the ingredients themselves.   Smelling, feeling, tasting, I can let myself be guided by intuition and my own moods and whimsies.   I read about micro-gastronomy and dizzying French recipes and, while I"m impressed, its not what I'm after.   I want to make food that is nourishing, delicious and satisfying, not fancy.

The day after Christmas, worn out with all the holiday traveling and visiting, expectations and gift-buying, I came home and made soup from the couple of things left over in our fridge.  For me at that moment, nothing could have been more soothing than pulling out carrots and potatoes, cabbage and onions, garlic and lemon juice, and using a box of broth, leftover chicken and whole wheat noodles to whip up instant Abby-style chicken-noodle soup.   Well, not instant, but not hard either.    This time of year root vegetables are plentiful in our Boston Organics box, and, craving green, cabbage seems like just the thing.  While the onions softened on the stove  the carrots got chopped, garlic smashed, cabbage washed and grated.  I wore an apron to give myself permission to get dirty, to know that little bits of vegetables and broth spattered on me are part of the deal.   The feel of the cold hard carrots, the smell of the garlic when the clove splits out of its skin, the sizzle of the onions frying are were soothing to me as any of the other soft noises I relate to harmonious living: the whooshing dishwasher, the burbling coffeepot making my coffee in the mornings.   I was back in my house, reconnecting with myself, feeding myself in the most literal and metaphorical way possible: the practice of cooking.


Over the holidays, it made me very happy to share homemade projects.  As always, its nice to have something to give to everyone without going through half a paycheck for tchotkes.   My relatives received pickled beets and dilly beans with little squares of fabric under the lids.   For whatever reason, I LOVE pickles (and all things made with vinegar), and I also love the way they look, suspended in golden or rich purple liquid, sitting in my pantry.   I gave away flavored vodka, which looked so gorgeous on my countertop filled with sliced lemons or cranberries that I didn't want to strain it out. And today I bottled up the first round of a project I started this summer: homemade red wine vinegar.    I kept adding more and more red wine, so it has never really gotten as sharp as I wanted it to, but it sure did turn into vinegar. 

Homemade Orange-infused Red Wine Vinegar

For the weeks before Christmas this year, I sliced up some top-notch organic oranges and lemons and added them to a 3-quart jar of the vinegar, then covered the whole thing with cheesecloth and let it sit in a dark corner of my warm living room, letting the vinegary microbes have a little more time to sharpen up, and the oranges have time to steep.   Today I boiled the brew and filtered it, using cheesecloth, into bottles I have been saving all year.    It looks beautiful: a rich, dark purple.    It is still fairly mellow compared to store-bought vinegar (maybe because of the juice from the oranges!), but it is thick and flavorful.   The boiling should have stopped the fermentation process, so hopefully now it will keep fairly well, even with the extra sugars from the fruit.    And with the five (count them, five) food preservation cookbooks I received, I'm excited for next summer, when I can infuse all kinds of fresh herbs and spices into the next batch of homemade vinegar.

Again, I don't know why it is so dang satisfying to me to make homecrafted food.   It is not a particularly rational impulse, because everything, from potatoes to yogurt, cheese, pickles, vinegar and frozen beans, can be bought more cheaply at a grocery store.   But it makes me feel like I have one up on the world - like I am learning these intensely human skills that industrial production has rendered so many of us ignorant of:  how to make my own cheese and save food I grew.   How to use simple chemistry to transform food that would go to waste into a useable product.   How to use the foods that are available to feed ourselves well, no matter what time of year.  I have always been enthralled by the act of growing food, of creating something to eat out of a patch of dirt and a garden, but now, with the snow still about a foot and a half high on the ground outside, I'm stretching my definition of what it means to feed myself and my house.   Here, in the middle of the winter, we can still scare up delicious meals from what is saved, stored, frozen and canned.   Sure, somebody else saved the carrots, potatoes, beets and cabbage we get from Boston Organics, but they are still crisper and more flavorfull than anything I'd buy at the supermarket this time of year.   And the fact that now, on New Year's Eve, my house (and my hands!) smell like sharp vinegar, soft wine, and sweet oranges just makes me smile, even if it is completely dark by 5 pm.