A rant about citrus. And recipes!

I am driven by productivity. I can't call it a day unless I can say I was productive. I think it's all that Jewish guilt I didn't get as a child finally catching up with me.

I will moan to my husband, who is covered in grease and G-d-knows-what-else, "I am so upset! I did nothing today. Like, I did 2 loads of laundry, baked three cakes, reorganized the pantry and paid all the bills but that was LIKE IT. Other than that, I sat on my ass." And he's not really sure what to say. I'm sure he wants to yell at me and say, "You moron! I am covered in diesel fuel because I worked all day on my feet and didn't even get a lunch and you complain because you DID NOTHING?! I want to smack you!" Instead he says, "Aww, it's okay honey. You always do a lot. You can do more tomorrow." Which is just weird. But exactly what I need. Which is why we're married, probably.

So today I find myself with just an ever-so-slight surplus of citrus.

I have no concept of restraint.

Do you know what you can do with citrus? Well. NOT FUCKING MUCH. There, I fricken said it. Why are there not more posts on "TEH INTARNET" about this? I see, over and over again, some poor sad soul bemoaning their lemon, lime and/or orange tree asking for recommendations of what to do with their glut and the replies they get are from people who clearly have no idea what a 'glut' is or just how many G-DDAMN FRUIT a tree produces. Let me put it in perspective. Each tree will produce about a thousand fruit in one season. People tend to have about THREE OR FOUR trees if they have one. This box of fruit? This PILE of fruit? Is not even 1/10th of what was currently ripe on one tree.

So when people ask for recipes and someone replies with, "Why don't you put one in a chicken!?" You just kinda wanna smack them. One, you probably already thought of that and two, what the ever loving crap do you do with the other 4000 fricken lemons you have? Make 4000 roast chickens?

Marmalade, you say? Marmalade? Okay... about 5 lemons produce a jar of marmalade. How much marmalade do you eat? Suckiest thing for me is I dislike marmalade. I don't like that I dislike marmalade because citrus season is just so. damned. productive. I wish I loved marmalade. I wish I could eat it out of the jar with a spoon. But the truth is - I just end up with 40 jars of marmalade leftover every year I sell in the markets or to greedy friends. And I feel weird (very weird) selling something I don't even like. Everyone seems to love it, at least. But it's a dirty secret of mine, "Here, buy this jar of stuff I don't eat! People say it's delicious!"

This is why I love Indian people. Hello there, random logic jump. Come with me. There are these amazing things like this amazing lemon pickle from Indian Food Rocks (and they have lime too!). I found an enlarged version of the recipe that asks for forty lemons. Forty! Now that's what I'm talking about, people. Plus - it's a fun rare treat that can be spicy, sour, salty and just plain amazing. And I love me some spicy food. And Indian people. You see where I went with that?

This recipe only asks for 4 oranges but it also only makes 6 cups of orange (which includes the liquid which you probably aren't skulling like an alcoholic). Bloody delicious, if you ask me. Like winter in a jar. But you can eat it in summer! I would make a quadruple batch of this if I were you so you can tuck it away until summer when you really want an orange and, like me, don't buy out of season from the markets.

See, the main problem I have with citrus-y recommendations is they are so boring. Orange cake. Done it. Marmalade. We discussed this. Eat one whole. Not even remotely helpful, people. The other problem is the rest of the recipes, like candied peels, are a fricken nightmare when you're doing it to 400 fruit. 5-10 is easy enough. Peel. Peel. Peel. But after about 7 or 8, your hands start to wrinkle and then, after about 15, you're pretty sure you've managed to pickle your fingerprints. Wear gloves, you say? Well, you wear gloves while peeling oranges with a tiny filet knife. See how exact you are. Yeah, I thought so. But hey, at least I can commit crimes and not get caught now, which'll totally help my business.

Then, there is this holy grail of "I can't believe how delicious this is and yet, how random it is we don't make it in the Western World because we're too afraid to try new things." Fifty lemons, people. FIFTY. Now that's a recipe. Oh yeah, and this shiz is fricken delicious.

And there's the classic preserved lemons. Anybody with a lemon tree should know about this, as it's simple, delicious and uses a good amount of lemons (and limes, and oranges, to different effect).

And of course, just to be a dick about the whole thing, some recipes I want to try I can't even read.

So when my husband asks if I did anything, I will say no. Because I "Only made 200 lemons into 5 different varieties of spicy Indian pickles and preserved them for future use for the next millenia." and he will feel sorry for me.

Farm-Fresh Friday: A Thought.

Yesterday I went to a new farmers' market, which is always a fun experience. This one was on the beach, so we sampled fresh-grown California strawberries while listening to the Pacific crashing nearby. Everything looked delicious, so we took it home and made a nice big feast for dinner:

Marinated London Broil
Arugula-Strawberry Salad with Fried Shallots
Grilled Corn on the Cob
Grilled Asparagus
Lemon Meringue Pie

The pie was left over, and the meat didn't come from the farmers' market, but honestly those were the least enjoyable parts of the meal (incredibly delicious though they were). It was the farm-fresh tasty that rocked my world - the sweet, juicy corn that didn't even need butter, the asparagus all crisp and delicious, and best of all, the salad, with the sharp bitter arugula as a perfect complement to those sweet, succulent strawberries.

It got me thinking (again) that 90% of cooking is in the ingredients you start with. That corn, that asparagus? Just tossed them in a bowl with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and rubbed with a bit of garlic. Then they only took a few minutes on the grill while the meat cooked up. Good veggies don't need much of anything to make them delicious. A lot of people who think they can't cook, because whatever they turn out tastes bad, are just starting out with shitty ingredients that Bourdain himself couldn't do anything with. Start with good, organic, farm-fresh produce and you really would have to try very hard to screw it up.

On "Guilt"

I have before me the new "Fearless Flyer" from Trader Joe's. For those of you without a Trader Joe's nearby, it's a supermarket that features "natural" (typically organic, but not always) foods. Some of it is good, but it's all processed packaged food just the same - they do have a produce section, but it's generally a pretty shoddy one compared to the quality of the rest of the goods they offer, and I've never understood why they feel compelled to package the produce the way they do - I mean, what is the point of shrink-wrapping a potato in plastic?

They do offer very inexpensive, high-quality booze there, plus the famed Charles Shaw wines (Two-Buck Chuck or Three-Buck Chuck, depending on your area), which I use very successfully as cooking wines.

Anyway, they send out this newsletter every so often with a description of their featured products. It's amusingly written and I leaf through it whenever I get it in the mail. This time I noticed a particular emphasis on the word "guilt" - as in "Reduced Guilt Organic White Corn Tortilla Chips" and other "Reduced Guilt Fare."

It got me thinking. Why do we as a society invest so much of our eating with guilt? Is it a vestige of our Protestant beginnings? Anthony Bourdain once observed, "Food is the new porn," and I believe he was on to something. Food now occupies the prurient back room that sex (which is now, for the most part, more guiltless than tortilla chips) once occupied.

It doesn't have to be that way. I much prefer Michael Pollan's philosophy: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." There's room for just about everything in there - everything, that is, that humans evolved to eat, which does not include the chemicals and refining packaged as edibles by Corporate America.

So cast off that guilt. Eat butter, eat good stuff, eat to enjoy. Relish everything you put into your mouth, just as you relish what you'd put into other parts of your body! Life's too short to do otherwise.

Health Regulations AKA Why I Don't DO Supermarkets

When I found out the FDA, an American company, considered Vagina Dye a healthy consumerable product, which, by the way, doesn't seem to include their ingredients list on their website, I had to start a bit of a my usual ranting.

These are the people Americans trust with their food. They think dyeing your labia colours to please men is a good idea. And hey, while I'm all up for women actually paying attention to their own vaginas, I'm not only miffed that it seems to be a good idea to change the colour of my vagina for a man, but that the FDA seems to think this is a perfectly safe and healthy practice. If dying my vagina the shade of Audrey Hepburn is healthy, what the fuck are your people passing as decent food?

I live in Australia, where the standards of foods are stricter but still nowhere near perfect. I am all for people eating whatever they want, it's when they lie about it that I feel I need to say something about it. It's not even lies anymore, really, they've caught onto that. It's lying by omission.

99% fat free! your yogurt will claim. What they DON'T tell you is that 1, fat doesn't make you fat. In fact, fat is good for you. It gives you great nails and skin. You know how you have fat free food and then decide Tonalin CLA is a good supplement? CLA is FAT. Congratulations, you've taken it out and then put it the fuck back in. Obviously, too much fat is a problem, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about the stuff that replaces fat. Sugars, chemicals, poisons - things that break down your body and make it so your body has a HARDER time ingesting nutrients. All this so you don't eat something that makes your hair glow? What on Earth? Here, take this magic pill and you'll have glowing hair. That, or just have some fucking fat in your food!

Unless you get liposuction or are involved in some horrific accident, you will ALWAYS have the same amount of fat cells. Fat cells do not duplicate, they expand. Fat cells store glucose, which is what happens when your food breaks down into it's most basic form, and expand depending on how much glucose they're holding vs. how much glucose you're using. Sugar is pretty much straight glucose, depending on where it's from. Congratulations, that (considering you're expelling as many calories as you're taking in) is what's making you fat. Not fat. So all those things replacing your fat? Are making you fat. Does the FDA tell you this? No, it writes in big black bold letters how fat is bad (and yes, some of it is, but I'll elaborate on that another time) and then offers you a 'magic pill' to fix all the stuff it took out to begin with.

So not only are you taking fat out just to replace it, you're also adding unnecessary chemicals from the fat replacements you're just going to put back anyway! Let's not even get started on chemicals covering your foods, the fact that pesticides used to kill swarms of bugs is simply lying on your salad like a zingy dressing and that's FDA approved or the fact the FDA has passed some pretty poor examples of food off as being healthy. Case in point: cereal.

So let's get to the part of this rant that helps. Shall we? Did you know you can grow your own herbs and salads and vegetables and fruit? That it doesn't take up NEARLY as much space as you think it does? Of course you believe it takes acres upon acres to grow your own food. It doesn't.

Blueberries, pomegranates, blackberries, hell - even lemon trees, can all grow in pots. Also, they can grow in pots indoors. I know, right? Nobody told you this! Did you know pomegranates have the prettiest little pink flowers all over a bush? Most of the year they don't even look like food! They look like pretty flowery bushes. How on earth can that look bad in a tiny flat?

At my old place, which was a small no-garden flat, I managed to have herbs growing on my entry-way. Spinach is a must-have for me as it beats out strawberries as the most pesticide ridden food on the market. Strawberries, of course, being second, which also can grow in a tiny pot. Chives, basil, habeneros, dill and thyme all possess the little planter I took with me to my new house when I got engaged. The pot is a food wide, two and a half feet long and about two feet deep - it can fit anywhere, really. And there we go, organic nutritious foods that I know exactly what's in it and what's gone in it since birth.

So here's what I have to say to the FDA. Go ahead and hand out packaged overpriced cardboard as food, I don't care. But, for the love of G-d, label it 'cardboard' and not 'now with more fibre!'. I'd rather eat the damn box.

Yeah, every night it takes me about 10 more minutes to make a meal than those instant-lovers. But you know what I have? Supreme happiness, fitness, health, great hair, great shiny eyes, great polished nails, a rapid healing time, energy and the need for only 6 hours sleep a night (where when I was eating like that, I needed 10!).

So fuck the FDA and it's overpriced fibre filled cardboard. I'm going to have me a zinc and potassium loaded salad with all the trimmings for FREE.