Learning through your Ass: The Return of Laurel’s Kitchen

October 8, 2004

When I became a vegetarian at the tender age of 13, my parents, fearing that I would stunt my own growth, gave me what was considered at the time to be a good introduction to vegetarian nutrition, amino acid chains and global food politics. It was my first cookbook ever and its pictureless recipes for soy-milk, cashew cheese and other ‘technically advanced’ foodstuffs threw me completely for a loop.

It was California in the 70’s but my Mom wasn’t about to go foodshopping in a store filled with goat-knitting long-hairs smelling like garbanzo farts, and I didn’t know that you could simply go to an Asian supermarket and BUY a ready-made block of tempeh. So when one of Laurel’s recipes called for say, soy milk and said, (see recipe page 138) I would actually make the soy milk - often with unsavoury results.

Due to a series of intrusive kitchen disasters, my mother decided that I could only do the big preparations for the week’s food on Sunday. (Not the fresh things, just the… legume-rich things.) Considering that I had turned the family kitchen into a soybean laboratory it wasn’t entirely the cruel thing to do. I would prepare my vegetarian food for the week ahead and microwave it warm each day. For an experienced cook, preparing food in advance wouldn’t have posed much of a problem but I had very little PRACTICAL cooking experience. I couldn’t tell beforehand if a recipe was difficult and mistakes I made on Sunday were the grits on the table, all the livelong week. This educational technique is known in some cultures as learning through your ass.

I was cooking outside the repetoire of my family and Laurel wasn’t helping. Laurel’s Kitchen, although an amazing source of 1970’s California anthropology was absolutely a crap book for an inexperienced cook.

But yesterday when I brought home Roxanne Klein and Charlie Trotter’s R A W, the first thing I did was pull Laurel from my shelf for one more read.

This is the text on the inside flap:

“An original and, to me, irresistible presentation, as useful as it is inviting.”
-The New York Times Book Review

Ten years ago, Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey decided to raise their families on natural foods. They had discovered that good eating habits lead to good health and made people feel stronger, happier, more alert, and more alive.

Laurel and her friends wrote this book because they wanted to share their unique kitchen experiences and pass on a solid collection of tempting, inexpensive vegetarian dishes. But Laurel’s Kitchen is not just a cookbook. It is a handbook of vegetarian nutrition. Filled with practical information on viatmines and minerals, the four food groups for a meatless diet, weight control, and ways to preserve nutrients in your cooking, Laurel’s Kitchen is the book Laurel and her friends wished they’d had when they took their first tentative steps into the world of vegetarian cookery.

debra at 1:09 | Comments (16) | post to del.icio.us

Ik lust je R A W

October 7, 2004

Wing flapping all around! Today I indulged myself and bought a cookbook that I have wanted to own for quite some time. R A W by Roxanne Klein (a culinary approach to vegan and raw food cooking) with Charlie Trotter, one of the US’s most innovative chefs. Regular readers know that porkatarians like me can’t also be vegans but I am still so very excited by this pairing of the minds.

A browsiebrowse through and so far there are lots of recipes that look like watermelon spit-up (maybe she took Trotter’s ‘froth thing’ a little bit too literally) and I think that bit about preserving the enzymes is a load of halookie. If you put a blended something in a dehydrator for 5 hrs I doubt very seriously that there will be any ‘living’ quality left in the foodstuff. TEST: Put yourself in a sauna for 5 hrs and see how you feel. Now imagine yourself to be a carrot!

B U T

The book is brimming with beauty, love of a rich variety of ingredients and new techniques (new since *Laurel’s Kitchen) and I swear I’m going to take cashew cheese seriously this time.

* You’re going to have to wait until tomorrow’s entry about Laurel’s Kitchen, written in 1976 it was THE quintessential bible of Californian hardcore vegetarianism.

debra at 17:52 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us

It’s not easy being green

October 6, 2004

We asked ourselves if Absinth was legal in the Netherlands and without waiting for the answer popped that screwcap right off the bottle. It was a first for me to have actual manufactured absinth instead of the bitter homemade wormwood brews we used to make back in the day. This stuff was almost too delicious to be real so once the kid was in bed we did the natural thing and started lighting it on fire.

HM and KL cooked an excellent dinner (mostly HM) and their 4-year old son EM cheerfully explained to me that I was the guest and that he was the host. Now that’s child-rearin’!
(Please read more… )

debra at 18:49 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us