When my husband Jim and I began this project, I thought it would be quite simple. After all, we grow so much of our own food. We pick it fresh from the fields, often minutes before we cook it. Our preparations are fast and simple, largely because dinner comes usually at the end of long, hard work days and largely because we don't want to cook the flavor out of what we've grown.
Today, we took the goal to a different level, to a series of food tastings that we kicked off today at the Franklin Community Center, which has a food pantry in our community. And, I realized, simplicity is layered with many complex dimensions that highlight the hidden privileges that some of us, inadvertently and unconsciously, carry.
The featured dish was kale. Easy enough, I thought. Gather the vegetables, chop them up, rinse them and cook them in a pot with a little water for about two to five minutes. Salt and pepper, garlic, lemon juice, or apple cider could be optional additions.
I gathered a pile of kale leaves from our garden this morning, about a half-hour before departing for the Franklin Community Center. Jim and I created a flyer and a handout with recipes, and assembled a chopping board, knife, and colander. I washed the leaves and chopped them, and cooked a simple batch in two minutes. We timed it because we were curious how long it actually did take. We sampled our creation and distributed samples to clients of the pantry. It was fresh and crisp and flavorful.
Only, I realized later, it was a dish, not a meal.
So I started thinking, could I make a meal with just vegetables and water? Would this approach encourage people -- regardless of their income level -- to fall in love with vegetables and to see both their nutritional and economic benefits as flavorful as well?
The answer to that question has left me wondering about what it means to cook simple food. Exploring my own experiments in nightly meal preparations, I realized that one of the reasons that I can cook simply is because I have had the privilege to invest a lot of time and money into the items that make simple special: I have a great big backyard garden that borders on being a full-fledged farm that serves as my daily pantry. I have containers on my deck that are overflowing with fresh-raised herbs. I have a cabinet full of spices, and a refrigerator full of small bottles of such condiments as miso paste, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, Bragg's amino acids, lemon juice, apple cider, and yogurt. My messy kitchen holds four different types of oils, three different kinds of vinegars, and a range of nuts and seeds. So, yes, I can cook kale with water and make it taste just fine. But if I really want the kale to sing, it's likely that I would first slice up a couple of cloves of garlic, sauté them in oil and then toss in the kale. This is what I made for dinner tonight, alongside a leftover zucchini soup, a quick stir fry of garden fresh tomatoes, peas, and onion; and a fairly delectable chunk of seared ahi tuna.
I've found myself pondering how one might cook without a stove (or another source of heat), without an oven, without a collection of differently sized and shaped pots, and a bucket filled with spoons. Sure, I love to wrap Hakurei turnips in aluminum foil and let them cook over a grill or in the oven until they're soft. They need no butter, salt, or any other additive to acquire a melt-in-your-mouth taste. But they do require heat.
At the Saratoga Farmers Market this afternoon, I eyeballed the fresh produce on the vendors' carts, looking for ideas for the Franklin Community Center food tasting for next week. "What would be a good thing to make?" I asked a cooperative extension agent. She suggested a corn salad. I looked at the recipe, in a cookbook published by the farmers market, and it looked incredible. But it did require oil, herbs, and spices for flavor as well as additional vegetables such as onions and beans. It also required cutting the corn off the cob -- a simple task with a sharp knife and a chopping board, and an even simpler task with the specialized kernel remover that my youngest sister gave a couple of years ago. What if you didn't have these extra gadgets? Would you still be able to make a dish like this? Or would you settle for frozen kernels in a grocery store purchased bag? I found myself feeling as if this was turning into too much work. Did we really have to work within such restrictions?
As if reading my mind, Steve Otrembiak -- one of my favorite local farmers -- solemnly handed me a raw green bean. Grinning, he pointed to one that he himself was eating, raw.
"I could get some cookies," he said, "but I figured that this would taste just as good and be a lot healthier."
I bit into the bean and savored the burst of sweet green flavor that it produced. "It is like a cookie," I exclaimed. "Such a simple snack."
The flavor of the bean lingered, inviting new possibilities. Could we take vegetables that were uncooked and make them into meals? Perhaps it wasn't the condiments of cooking that were improving the flavor of the vegetables but the innate flavor of the fresh vegetable itself.
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