Dining Un-Dead?

They ate in silence - but they said they were having a "lovely" time. According to this post in the Chicago Tribune, the dining dead are all around us. Whether it's the texting drones or the silent non-tech couples, it seems there is an epidemic of dead silent dining going on.

New communications tools have their limits.

My friend David posted this on Facebook and I began to reply only to find I'd discovered the limits of the posting length there. How's that for irony?

Dining Etiquette - Neither Tweety nor Silent Be

Cellphones, Blackberries and laptops are off limits at the dinner table. (Unless someone has a crisis call they need to be on alert for. Then, that's it.) It's not just about technology, it's also about communicating. The two are different, you know. (Even the author of the Trib piece seems to confuse the two.)

I often look at those couples - you know the deadly silent ones - and think God let's not ever end up that way! I don't think it's about being married as one person in the article said, or not knowing how to disconnect from technology, as everyone assumes. 

It's about a couple of simple things: knowing how and when to communicate, or not. And communication is not a one way data dump. Think of it like tossing a ball back and forth. Data dump is one person constantly throwing at or to the other, ball after ball after ball. That's not interaction. 

Communication can be fractured and compacted and immediate. And technology-assisted. But we forget that texting is not the same thing or the whole game - it is merely a form of communication to be used in certain proscribed circumstances. But not at dinner. Conversation is another form of communication. It should be interactive (unless you're off your meds and alone), it should be attentive, it can be entertaining, enlightening, thought-provoking, inspiring, touching, funny. It can be so many things if we let it. If we choose it. This is about intention.

Here's my advice for Breathers who want to breathe new life into dinner (or other) conversation.

1) Dine with (and by all means, marry) the right person.

This is half the battle. If you've run out of things to talk about it means you're not thinking, not growing, not curious. Or possibly you're exhausted, but that can't be an excuse for daily silent dinners. In a healthy couple you trade off "carrying the ball" when your partner has had one of those grueling days.

Think about what you can do for the other, not what you need from the other. Just asking yourself that question will change things.

Same goes for friends. You should surround yourself with fun, interesting people who enrich your life, bring new perspectives or ideas. 

2) Remember any dinner guest has the responsibility to bring something interesting to the table. I'm not talking about a new flavor of panna cotta for the potluck. I'm talking about interesting conversation and good company. We do that at dinner parties, why wouldn't we do the same for our own families?

Rose Kennedy used to post a news clipping on the cork board outside the dining room so the kids (the kids being JFK, RFK, Teddy...) knew the topic of the day. They were to be prepared with an opinion on it. Is it any wonder these guys grew up to be so influential? They were thinkers, trained to be so from an early age.

Try modifying that by bringing up a news item to discuss. Not gossip or bad news, but something interesting and out of the ordinary. Like, where exactly the Appalachian Trail is and how one might lose their way, only to end up in Argentina. See, you could even learn some geography. Or, why Bank of American kept extending Michael Jackson's credit when he was already so many millions in debt? 

3) Phone etiquette: ask permission if you must dial, text or tweet.

a) If you happen to remember someone you had to get back to earlier in the day, and it really can't wait - ask permission of your dining partner. Send the text or make a quick call to let the other person know you will return the call fully later, or the next day, or by email. Don't hold the call at the dinner table. Then shut the phone or crackberry off.

b) If you're out with an aquaintance or friend - don't Tweet or Facebook the encounter without permission and don't do it while you should be enjoying each other's company. If being out with me is a scoop, and I can understand that it might feel that way, then please at least let me know you are posting it on Twitter or Facebook or both so I can prepare for the barrage of disappointed emails from friends I didn't invite to join us. (I'm kidding, but you get my point.)

4) Play a getting-to-know-you game:

 a) Shake things up: ask your partner one of those fun couples' game questions - like "If you could cheat and be certain not to be caught, would you do it?" Or, "Guess how many years I'd remain married to a Zombie?" You will be certain to learn something new and interesting about your partner.

b) Share a new story with your partner just to see if they're paying attention: "Did I ever tell you about the time I Giselle Bundschen hit on me in a bar in the Village?"

Seriously folks....I actually think the ability to be in constant communication has some disadvantages. If we have texted or phoned each other all day long, the chances will be significantly slimmer that there is something new to talk about come dinner time! Try holding on to something to save for dinner.

Instant can be less gratifying than delayed...we've just forgotten. Perhaps because we were too busy Tweeting.
 
 

Reviewing two contrasting “foodoirs” or food memoir cookbooks for Suite101 (see, Foodoir, the New Genre of Cookbooks) made me appreciate each of the two books, anew. They’re not long published but have languished in my pile while I attended deadlines and Big Projects.

The books are:

• Secrets of the Red Lantern: Stories and Vietnamese Recipes from the Heart, Pauline Nguyen, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2008

• Falling Cloudberries: a World of Family Recipes, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2009 - Gourmet Magazine’s Cookbook Club selection.

With the approach of Father’s Day each year difficult memories get stirred up and also some sweet ones. A little voice asked if one of the reasons I’d let the Secrets of the Red Lantern review go so long unattended wasn’t perhaps because of the difficult relationship the author had with her father?

Reading the book when it arrived, I was overwhelmed by the intimate nature of the stories shared. It was oppressive and somber. I waited and hoped for the happy ending, which thankfully does come, but quite late in the book. Too late for me, but it’s not my story.

Only through the objective exercise of reviewing the book for my column did I realize that Pauline Nguyen may have deliberately designed this book for the effect of drawing you into her world. Fearful, sad and angry, ashamed, we experience the pains of her childhood and young adulthood.

The book is large format, and nearly 340 pages long. It’s past page 300 before some therapy begins to bring hope into the story. Nguyen begins by telling us food is how the family communicates. The reader feels momentary relief from the oppressive family when the recipes appear amidst the tears and anger. Like oases or (later) epiphanies, the recipes materialize amidst the sad stories.

It’s a beautiful book, has gorgeous recipes, and helpful endnotes about sourcing and substitutes; but this may not be for everyone. Ultimately, there is joy, but it is a long time coming. How long that feels to you will probably have as much to do with your own childhood, as with the book.

Here’s how I would recommend read this book: pick a recipe some ways in say Bún Bò Xào (Wok-tossed beef and lemongrass, p. 121), shop for the ingredients and read till you get there. Then take a break, cook, eat, relax. Have a glass of wine. Repeat with the next section.

Read here to learn more about the new “foodoir” genre and to learn about another beautiful book, Falling Cloudberries, that shares some similarities with Red Lantern.

Berry Coincidental Incident
During Kim O’Donnel’s excellent food chat, Table Talk at Culinate.com (you have joined in, haven’t you?) - last week the subject turned to berries. Salmonberries and Cloudberries both were discussed (you can see the transcript, including recipes and links!). That chat was another catalyst for pulling this together. I mentioned the salmonberries I’d been introduced to in Alaska last year and pulled the Falling Cloudberries book from the top of my pile.

Salmonberries, Cordova, AK (J.Church)

A helpful reader/chatter sent me info on the berries, and I began to flip through Tessa Kiros’ beautiful book. Her family is on the other end of the spectrum, happy vignettes dot the recipes. Both are worth a read and you can learn more about the “foodoir” genre over at my Suite101 column.

Further reading:

• Click here to read my own Father’s Day food story from last year. It’s pretty evergreen. Call it “foodoir lite”. 

• Get my “MTM Strawberry Buttermilk Cake” recipe in the “Ode to a Handmixer” story. It’s also a bit foodoir-ish come to think of it, and of course, uses the beautiful strawberries in season for many of us right now.

Did you know? Strawberries:

• are an excellent source of Vitamin C and contain antioxidant phenols such as anthocyanins. They’re also anti-inflammatory.
• are a “false fruit” the fleshy part is covered with exterior seeds (technically the seed is the fruit, the berry is the stamen).
• are a good source of Folate and Potassium, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin C and Manganese.
• 1 C of strawberry halves is only 49 calories but contains 149% of your Vitamin C for the day.
• Contain ellagic acid which is being studied for its ability to inhibit the DNA binding of certain carcinogens.

And here for your berry season pleasure is a recipe from Falling Cloudberries, reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Sipi’s Strawberry Cake A recipe from Falling Cloudberries:

The Finns, we learn, are crazy for strawberries. This is the author’s mother’s cake “so lovely, really pure and pretty, just like the Finns.”

• 1 3/4 C all purpose flour (plus extra for dusting pan)
• 3/4 C sugar
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 sticks butter
• 3/4 C warm milk
• 4 eggs separated
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 lbs (5 C) whole strawberries
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 4 TBSP confectioner’s sugar
• 3 C heavy whipping cream

Preheat oven to 350, grease and flour an 8 1/2” Springform pan or a Bundt pan.
Put the flour and sugar in a bowl with 1 tsp of the baking powder. mix in the butter and then stir in the milk. add the egg yolks and vanilla and beat well. Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks, incorporating the rest of the baking powder when the eggs have started fluffing up. Fold the egg whites into the cake mixture.

Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake for about 1 hour or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean the top is golden and crisp. Remove from the oven and let cool in pan before turning onto rack. When cool, slice the cake in half horizontally and put the bottom half on a large serving plate.

Clean the strawberries and hull them (leave a few unhulled if you prefer for the top of the cake.) Dice about half the strawberries and sprinkle with a little lemon juice and 1 TBSP of the confectioner’s sugar. Whip the cream into stiff peaks with the remaining confectioner’s sugar. Mix the diced strawberries with about a third of the whipped cream and spoon over the bottom of the cake. Put the other half of the cake on top and thickly spoon the remaining cream over the top and side, then decorate with the rest of the strawberries. This is best eaten immediately, will keep a day refrigerated.

And the Contest:
All comments to this post and to the Foodoir post on Suite101 will be thrown in a hat and two winners will be drawn. Winners will receive a copy of one of the two books. Both are gorgeous, to keep it simple I’m going to make it random and the book will be sent directly from the publisher.

Comments can share a link to a favorite berry recipe or share a title of your favorite “foodoir”. Anyone signing up for the newsletter gets two entries (let me know.)

• Big Thanks to Tammie Barker at Andrews McMeel for sharing these lovely books and for your support with the contest!

Don't forget: Books I recommend are on my Powell's Bookshelf, here.

 

It’s not very often that you grow attached to a beat up old appliance. But this Black and Decker hand mixer has been with me so long, I think it’s taken on some greater significance.

Never mind that the cord has some live wires exposed in one spot where I apparently let it rest too long on something pretty hot. Never mind it only cost me $12.99 some 20 plus years ago. This little guy represents lots of what I love, what I’ve lost and what I’ve gained.

I distinctly remember when I bought this, and where. You see, I’d moved to Boston with the hopes of getting into law school and living on my own, in my very own apartment. I was Mary Tyler Moore, minus the beret. Only girls that came of age in the same general time period as I will know what that means, but suffice to say we had very few images of single women on their own. Even though she called her boss “Mr. Grant” and he called her “Mary” and she cried at the drop of a hat (or beret), she gave us some sort of idea that we could live on our own, have good job and nutty friends.

So I moved to Boston to become a lawyer and change the world. Or at least make a life. I’d found my first apartment with roommates in Chelsea. This was before Chelsea was cool. It was crazy and scary and at the very end of the subway line and then some. There was a bus from the subway line ("Maverick Station", appropriately enough) that dropped me off right in front of the beat down, walk-up where I rented a room.

The apartment was an old floor-through with two cheating, lying roommates (Christian Scientist lesbians whose family believed they shared the apartment and nothing more). Throw in some mice, an abusive family upstairs, and absentee yuppie landlords who refused to fix the smoke alarm that inexplicably, but regularly, jolted us out of bed at at 3 or 4 AM; and you can see I was thrilled to find my own place, in town, no mice.

It was an “alcove studio” which is real estate-speak for “large closet with kitchen”. Essentially, I had real kitchen (tiny, yet functional); and a single room with an alcove for the “office”. This consisted of a door placed over two file cabinets for a fine, large desk. The futon couch made the one room easy to convert from a living room to a bedroom and back again.

Furnishing the apartment was tough on the budget I had - but luckily there was a Tru Value hardware store around the corner. I love hardware stores. The promise of finding the right tool or practical solution to any household problem is so enticing. This one was the college town variety which was perfect for my needs. We were close enough to Boston College that when students were poised to invade, the Tru Value stocked up on cheap student-apartment types of things. Laundry baskets, bathroom organizers, hand mixers and irons. I think I was the only one to buy the latter two.

Shockingly Durable

My insistence on a “real” kitchen was anchored in the fact that I cook. No matter there was no place to sit and eat (the steamer trunk coffee table in front of the folded up futon worked fine) - I was going to cook, even if I was starting law school. So the $12.99 price point of the Black and Decker hand mixer was just perfect. The mixer represented a “real” kitchen to me and meant I was really making a home for myself.  Some inexpensive dishes at the Crate and Barrel outlet store rounded out the ensemble as I recall.

To this day, I can’t for the life of me figure out how Black and Decker can survive if it makes such cheap mixers that last this long. Haven’t they heard of planned obsolescence ? Don’t they want me to need a new mixer sometime in this century?

This little guy is lightweight, stores easily and has three speeds: Slow, Mix, and Whip, I think. Only mine has the late addition of “shock” mode, though. It has survived several boyfriends, law school, two bar exams, more jobs than I care to count over three distinct careers (or is it four?), and Thanksgivings each year since 1985.

It’s helped me whip egg whites for Pavlovas and cream for pumpkin pies (no Cool Whip has ever entered my kitchen.) I’ve mixed cake and cookie batters and who knows what else over the years. Every time I take it out, I make a mental note to watch the bare part of the cord, then I say a little prayer that it will work one more time. And it always does.

I’m not ready to buy a Kitchen Aid and have no room or budget for that, nor a Vitamix. Hell, I don’t even have budget to buy another hand mixer.

Mostly, I’m not ready to let go of the last vestige of my new independent life in Boston. I’m just not ready to relinquish that wonderful little hand mixer that seems to say to me each time I take it out, “You’re gonna make it, after all.”

[Cue beret toss.]

[And fade.]

MTM Strawberry Buttermilk Cake

(adapted from Gourmet June 2009)

• 3/4 C all purpose flour
• 1/4 C whole wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 stick unsalted butter softened
• 2/3 C plus 1 1/2 TBSP sugar + grated orange zest, divided (turbinado is great for the topping sugar)
• 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp orange flower water (optional but really makes it sing)
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 C well-shaken lowfat buttermilk
• 1 C fresh strawberries (if early like mine, add a little dusting of confectioner's sugar to sweeten)

1. Preheat oven to 400, rack in middle. Butter and flour one 9" round cake pan.
2. Whisk together flour, baking soda, powder, salt.
3. Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy. (I used "mix" setting on the shockingly durable B&D hand mixer.)
4. Add vanilla, egg and orange flower water.
5. At low speed, mix in flour mixture and buttermilk in alternating thirds. Just till combined.
6. Spoon batter into prepared pan. Smooth top, add berries and sprinkle with remaining sugar.
7. Bake until golden and tester comes out clean.
8. Cool in pan 10 minutes, turn onto rack, cool to warm turn onto plate.

Eat, Drink and be ...Strawberry

You know how much I love our farmers' markets. You know I've been on this red kick. Well, I must be aligned with the right energy in the universe (where are these words coming from?) because lookah here...a whole bunch of restaurants are supporting the Mass. Farmers' Markets are (listed here) by donating proceeds from Strawberry desserts to the FMFM- including Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro (winner of the recent Chocolate Madness event), Burton's Grill, Rialto, Garden at the Cellar, Haley House and Henrietta's Table. 

Between Friday, June 12th and Sunday June 28th, eateries across the Bay State including restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and ice cream parlors will donate a percentage of proceeds from specially prepared strawberry dessert items to benefit the work of Mass Farmers Markets.

And if you're hankering for a strawberry parfait and find yourself near a Whole Foods...four in the Boston area (Charles River Plaza, Symphony, Brighton, and Fresh Pond, Cambridge) will donate 50% of proceeds from sales of their strawberry parfaits from June 12 – 21.