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By Root 1136 0

entire time I was not eating out and blogging about it, there were of course innumerable homemade meals that I made and never bothered to share with readers. I tried to leave the simple, dull, everyday recipes out of the blog and this book, so as not to bore readers. But just as I experienced, I guarantee that if you just get into the habit of cooking at home more often, you will figure out ways to make the process more efficient, and the things you cook more satisfactory. Practice can’t be learned from books. Plus, with practice, you will figure out how to cook in a way that suits your taste and lifestyle, and not mine—I’m not sure everyone wants to eat fried rice with scrambled eggs any given night of the week.

Six years after taking Professor Cooper’s course and two years of not eating out later, I think I finally get what his media fast was aiming at. He was trying to get us to make more mindful choices when it came to media, art, maybe even ourselves. He was also asking us to consider, what are we losing, as a culture, in exchange for the conveniences of modern life? What might we have already lost? In return, what can we gain from doing away with it for a while?

I was at a dinner party one night, and my neighbor in the next seat told me about how, during a phone conversation with his mother, he’d expressed a little frustration with paying for restaurant food. She followed up by mailing him a stack of recipes written by his Dominican grandmother. Not only were they greatly helpful in allowing him to re-create some of the dishes he’d always loved, but he said it was almost like receiving a diary from his grandmother.

Had my friend never taken up cooking, he might not have gotten to know his grandmother as well as he did through her cooking advice and recipes. And had I never done so myself, then I would have never discovered a whole lot of unique things about myself, and the people around me, through food. And that’s been by far the best part about the journey.

CHAPTER 2

Breaking into Bread

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,

“Is chiefly what we need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

Are very good indeed.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Squash rolls: Put 1 cup milk,cup sugar,cup butter or margarine, and 1 tsp salt in a glass dish and heat in microwave until scalded. Add 1 pkg cooked squash thawed, but cold, to the milk mixture to cool that off (if the squash has a lot of water that separates when you thaw it, drain most of it off).

In a small cup or bowl, put ½cup very warm water and 1 pkg (about 2½ tsp) yeast and a pinch of sugar. Add 2 cups flour to the milk mixture and stir well. Add the yeast/water and mix very well. Keep adding flour (about 3 cups or so depending on how much moisture is in the squash). I add about 2 cups, still mixing it with a spoon, and then turn it onto a floured surface and knead the rest of the flour in until it isn’t so sticky—it probably takes about 10 minutes or so.

Put the dough into a generously greased glass or metal bowl and turn dough over so that some of the grease gets on the top. Cover with a dish towel and put into a warm place and let rise until double its size (about 1 hour). Punch down dough and form into small balls.

I leaned back from my computer screen. The recipe went on, but I wasn’t ready to scroll down farther. I was about a month into my not-eating-out habit, and for motivation I’d asked my friends to send me some of their favorite recipes. I didn’t think I’d have enough ideas of my own to keep the mission afloat. But were these really the directions for the simple squash rolls that DJ had talked about a few nights ago? It sounded like an elaborate science project, with things bubbling over in beakers or creeping off the counters. Punch down the dough? Was this really necessary? Couldn’t it just be pressed? What was yeast anyway, and where did you get it?

I reread the beginning of DJ’s e-mail:

Here’s my mom’s recipe for squash rolls. We always have them with our Thanksgiving meal, so I figured they’d be a nice fall-time food. Note