The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [7]
Cooking has become a tool of many persuasions in this country, and it has seeped its way into our culture far beyond the basic need to feed oneself. But how good are we at doing just that—cooking, simply to feed ourselves, on a daily basis? For no other aim or purpose? Less and less, it seems. So long as busy workdays and constant commutes dominate our schedules, and restaurants populate our neighborhoods more than grocery stores, so will the eating-out regime dominate cooking.
I recently attended a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y on “food finds and trends.” One of the notable food critics on the panel, Gael Greene, said at one point that she didn’t think people actually cooked at home. “I think they get frozen meals or takeout,” she said. I think she’s right, for the most part. Then I almost fell out of my chair when another panelist, Bon Appétit editor Victoria von Biel, countered that statement by mentioning a food blog written by a young woman called “Not Eating Out in New York.” (Thank fully, I had a friend sitting beside me to keep me from running up to the stage right then to shake her hand.) However, at another lecture given at the American Museum of Natural History a few months later, I listened to Michael Pollan observe that more Americans were getting back into the kitchen and rediscovering how to cook once again, and that this was “a healthy change.”
In America Eats Out, John Mariani attested that restaurants particularly in this country always hinged upon a gimmick: “Lunch wagons, milk bars, diners, drive-ins, speakeasies, restaurants shaped like hot dogs, restaurants designed to look like a pirate’s den, restaurants where the waiters sing opera, restaurants with wine lists as thick as family bibles—all are, in their own way, gimmicks to hook in the crowds.” The gimmicks go on. It could be foods that restore the health, or fine meals in the middle of the day. It could be purely outstanding food, food being served all night, how about waitresses who wear tight T-shirts over their well-endowed chests? It could be ribs. Fifties nostalgia. Or chefs who serve the patrons themselves, like at The New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni’s pick for best restaurant of 2008, Momofuku Ko.
Well, I decided to give home cooking a gimmick of my own. To eat for a prolonged period of time without the assistance of restaurants whatsoever. Was that something that a New York-born, New Jersey-bred, working, middle-class, twenty-six-year-old American such as myself could achieve?
It seemed only fitting to test this humble experiment in the eating-out capital of the world.
CHAPTER 1
The Start of My Restaurant Fast
It began as a lark.
“I think I’m going to swear off restaurant food for a while,” I told my friends at a beer garden in Brooklyn. It was the middle of August, the dog days of summer 2006.
“Yeah? How come?”
I looked down at the wooden table separating myself from my friend and roommate, Erin, and her friend Sergio. It was covered with four or five grease-blotted paper plates, two of which had half-eaten hamburgers on them, three plastic cups surrounding a plastic pitcher of light golden beer, and a white paper boat that had previously held a hot dog.
“Well, I’ve been wanting to start a food blog,” I began.
Erin perked up in her seat. I told them that my blog would be based on home cooking, a repository of sorts for all the recipes I had brimming in my head all the time. just the other day, I had some leftover pesto, and when I started to make a potato salad to bring to a party, I decided to use the pesto instead of mayonnaise and added some sliced radishes and bits of red pepper to the mix, along with a splash of balsamic vinegar. My blog would be about easy-to-prepare, healthy,