blood, sweat and quiche

Last weekend, we may have made the meal of the year. I know it's a bit early to declare something like this, but truly, it was spectacular. We had agreed to watch my in-laws' puppy (a task that, however adorable this puppy is, made me vow to forgo puppies and children for the next ten years) and consequently found ourselves stuck inside for most of the weekend. Undeterred by this turn of events (it was raining, anyway), we spent most of the weekend making food: muesli, sourdough no-knead bread, chocolate chip cookies, lavender shortbread with sea salt, and the aforementioned meal of the century. What else were we to do? Little Oscar, only three months old, needs to go outside to do his "business" after nap-time or active play, which by my calculations was about 95% of our waking hours. So, we cooked.

THE MEAL was truly restaurant quality (and easy to boot): poussin marinated in paprika and olive oil, then broiled and placed over lemony sauteed kale and onion resting on a bed of pillowy soft polenta, the whole meal drizzled with a pomegranate reduction. It was based on a Mario Batali recipe with the addition of polenta we'd recently acquired from Ayers Creek Farm (read more about them here). It was also a triumph of eating locally, something we've been working into our lives more and more these days. The kale and onion were direct from Oregon farms, the polenta from Ayers Creek, and the poussin sourced locally by Viande Meats. I tell you all of this not to gloat, nor to preach, but simply to provide a contrast to a time when things were not so easy.

Eating locally provides plenty of pleasures. There are nights (most nights) when I am astounded by the variety, the bounty, the incredibly tasty (and surprisingly easy) combinations that come forth from within a 100 miles of where we live (see above, for emphasis). However, as with anything, there are also the lows...the nights that look more like last Thursday. These nights roll past 8:30 with P retreating from my grouchiness to the bathroom to shave, while I hungrily pick at my chicory salad until all that remains is a pool of dressing, both of us waiting for the quiche in the oven to finish its long journey from raw ingredients to plate. [I should qualify this by admitting that we have never been very successful when making quiche. I know you may laugh at this. Quiche is supposed to be one of the quick fixes of home-cooking: mix up the eggs and milk, toss in some vegetables and maybe some cheese, throw everything in a tart shell (pre-prepared for extra convenience) and pop it in the oven for 45 minutes. Voila, dinner! Ours normally take twice that cooking time and never seem to have quite the firmness that we desire.]

There were a few hurdles during the meal that, had we been making this meal a year ago, probably would have pushed us to change course. The first, and probably most significant warning sign came in the form of dairy. We had decided to substitute milk for the cream the recipe called for and had picked up a gallon of whole milk from a local dairy. Or so we thought. P decided to take a quick swig before measuring the appropriate amount and immediately scrunched up his face. "Nonfat."

Oh, the horror.

Call me creamist, but I maintain that there is no earthly reason to drink/cook with anything less than 2%. You might as well be drinking water and, frankly, water tastes better. The evil fascists (actually very nice, friendly staff people) at the neighborhood grocery store must have cruelly switched bottles on us and, in our excitement to buy from a local dairy (with a returnable glass bottle, no less!), we had fallen for their scheme.

But, before I make you think this post is simply a diatribe about the evils of watery milk, let's just say that I blame the milk for the endless cooking time of the quiche and leave it at that.

The real problem with the evening was not that it was a night where everything seemed to be going wrong, ending with us eating dinner a full three hours after we had started cooking. There were many points during the cooking, and the waiting that followed, at which we could have abandoned the meal for something faster. At around 8:00, P noticed that I was getting a hungry look in my eye (never a good sign) and mentioned that maybe we should grab some food at a nearby restaurant. But the more we cook at home, the more I make a point to eat consciously, the less I feel like going out, and especially not for just any food.

Cooking locally and from scratch can become a sort of addiction. Once you are in the rhythm, you realize that cooking from scratch is not the chore that its made out to be (rarely the ordeal that I describe above). It can be incredibly soothing to watch the flour, water and yeast combine as you mix a bread dough and incomparably satisfying to taste the finished project. And there's the second layer of the addiction: taste. Home cooked food tastes differently than food you'll find in a restaurant. Of course, it tends to be less rich and salty, but the flavors can often be more distinct, whole and comforting. Eating local foods in the season in which they're meant to be eaten only heightens these tastes. Lately, it's the meals we make at home that I crave on a regular basis, the special occasion restaurant food that I want to taste on just that - a special occasion.

To compound these feelings, there is the inevitable guilt and confusion that I find when eating out at many restaurants. And no, this is not a concern about weight gain. Whereas before I used to eat a pile of take-out Thai without blinking an eye, now I find myself blinking both and, often, losing my appetite. When you know many of the people who grow the food that you eat, it's hard not to think of them as you bite into the factory farm chicken, the green beans from South America and the watery slice of tomato (in the middle of winter, no less). Not only that, but I've tasted eggplant in the height of the season, when the flavor is rich and fruity, the color vibrant, and the flesh firm, but tender. Eggplant in January just isn't the same.

Faced with this barrage of questions, and given my view that eating seasonally, knowing your growers, and putting some of your own labor into the food that you eat makes it taste better, I think I'll take a three hour quiche every so often. Again, see the opening of my post for more reasons to stay the course. Not that it matters here, but it was, without a doubt, the best quiche we've ever made.