Something for your fridge, Mom

Something for your fridge, Mom

Today I received a forward from the Isthmus – my first fan letter!  Thank you for the support!  It’s been awesome to know that my recipes are being made and enjoyed, and hopefully recycled or used as tinder for a nice winter fire.  Please do let me know what you’ve liked, disliked, or want more of.

Take Mom.  It’s been a while since I’ve given her something to show for my wandering years as a waitress-turned-dog-groomer-turned-kitchen-foibler.  (To the best of my knowledge I think she still tells her clients I’m at UCLA and good-as-married to my ex…)  Here’s at least a token for the fridge until I write that book I promised to fund or buy her a first-class ticket to Korea with my fame-earned wealth:

“I have really enjoyed Marcelle Richards’ articles on vegan cooking. Last week’s One Pot Vegan Tofu Stew was our main course for dinner last week and it was excellent.
She demonstrates that one doesn’t need a lot of hard-to-get items in order to cook a delicious and nutritious vegan meal. Keep them coming!

Lynn Pauly”

This gave me the warm fuzzies.  I sincerely appreciate the letter.  I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback from vegans and vegetarians, which has been great.  I cook and eat almost exclusively vegetarian at home and I will definitely keep the veg-friendly recipes coming.

I have a conflicted relationship with meat, which I can equate to a relationship with someone who you can only takes in doses.  Perhaps it’s the type of relationship that should just end anyway but there’s history.

Take bacon and me.  We’ve got history.  But the thing we have is kind of special.  I’ll be the first to say that the idea of eating Rocky Mountain oysters provokes a gag reflex.   And that’s my moral dilemma – I judge myself for eating parts of an animal and not others.  If I can’t stomach headcheese, well, then I should say to hell with bacon.  Damn me to hell, though, I’m just not that good.  I have my guilty pleasures.

Here’s what gets my heart pumping while I guiltily question my standing as a morally upright human   being: well, bacon; fried chicken; pulled pork, preferably in BBQ; Reuben and pastrami sandwiches; and eggs benedict.  I am also going on the record to say that I would have Anthony Bourdain’s food baby.  Yeah, I said it.

A lot has changed since my days of abstinence.  I used to be a vegan, and I fell off the band wagon since a trip to rural Mexico.  I didn’t have access to soy milk or repackaged hummus and Gimme Lean beef crumbles and in a lot of parts of the world, people don’t.  I find American meat production and consumption somewhat grotesque.  As a waitress I was sickened by people who said they couldn’t eat the lamb if it was on the bone – it reminded them too much of the animal.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Then again, am I any better for not eating organ meat?

A lot of my beef with meat is its production, especially in the U.S.  I decided that while I have huge ethical issues with factory farmed meat, I do want to support farmers who are raising animals as humanely as possible, as sustainably as possible when I do decide to make the splurge.  It’s a reality that a lot of people are going to eat meat, even in small doses, and it’s important to keep such farmers in business.

I took a class on Human and Animal Relationships at UW Madison with Patricia McConnell (who raises a small herd of grass-fed lamb, and gave them more care than I’d say some people give some dogs who come into the grooming salon where I work.)  I was a strict vegan at the time I took her class and I didn’t change my mind that semester, or even the next.  I’m very stubborn, but something struck me in that class on our discussions of domestic animals, and that is that they are domestic – what constitutes humane treatment? A natural habitat?  Where do they go and what are they to do if they aren’t raised for beef?  A Black Angus was selectively bred for well, Angus steaks, and it’s a tough question to answer whether a domestic existence or non-existence is better.  One can hope to at least make the conditions of a domestic existence as humane as possible, and to reduce over-consumption, and eat consciously.  (I realize I am throwing around a lot of terms like “humane”, “sustainable”, etc. and I realize we could spend many blog entries dissecting these terms but I’ll stop here, and say that I can’t say it any better than Michael Pollan already did.)

Photo by Giovanni Sades