The Food Splurges I Still Make

At the Stranger, we're working on a group piece about the places we still go out to eat. For me, the list is pretty short--primarily Afrikando Afrikando, a terrific Senegalese place down the street from my house, but also Ali Baba, a falafel-and-shwarma joint on Capitol Hill, Green Leaf, a tiny Vietnamese place in the International District, and the taco bus by my house. I still splurge on food; it's just that my splurges these days consist of the things I bring home, not the places I eat away from home. Here are a few:

• Fresh oysters, served freezing cold with lemon and horseradish, about $7 a dozen at the farmer's market.

• Locally produced, free-range chicken (the anonymous chicken "parts" at the supermarket scare me).

• Fancy sodas, like Dry Soda or Dad's Root Beer.

• Organic almost-everything--especially root vegetables, which absorb everything that's put into the ground they grow in.

• High-quality spices (I make my own spice blends, like curry powder, but I buy the best spices I can find.)

• Fancy pasta. I'm convinced that certain pasta shapes--like pappardelle--just taste better than the ones you more commonly find mass-produced, like fusilli and spaghetti. I don't know where I got this, but I'll frequently spring for hand-cut pasta in interesting shapes.

• Bottled salsa. Yes, I could make my own (and frequently do, in the summer). But after spending most of my life in Texas, I can't go more than a day or two without indulging my salsa craving. Emerald Valley's organic hot salsa is the closest approximation I've found in the Northwest of hot Texas red sauce.

A lot of people are trying to cut their food budgets these days--hardly a day goes by the the New York Times doesn't make some mention of saving money by eating in. (For example.) And while I know I'm far from the only serious home cook turning to convenience foods to save time and money, I was pleased to see Kathleen Flinn's recipe today for doctored instant ramen. By tossing the MSG spice pack, adding some nutritious stuff like tofu and green onions, and ramping up the flavor with miso, sricha, and cilantro, she elevates a 33-cent packet of ramen into something that sounds not just edible but actually delicious.

On Poverty Tourism

Didn't Barbara Ehrenreich teach us anything? The "Nickel and Dimed" author went undercover as a low-wage worker in several US cities to find out just how people survive on wages of $6 or $7 an hour. The trouble was, Ehrenreich didn't start from scratch--she had a private safety net consisting of rental cars, "just-in-case" credit cards, a college education, a savings account and--most importantly--the knowledge that she was just play-acting at being poor. You can't know what it's like to survive minimum wage until it's actually a matter of survival, any more than you can learn what it's like to be homeless by spending a night in a homeless shelter.

Well, here we are again: A CNN reporter named Sean Callebs (left) is attempting to live on a food stamp budget for a whole! month! Since he couldn't actually get food stamps (that would be fraud), he put $176 on a debit card--the maximum amount a single person can get for food stamps in Louisiana, where he lives.

His lessons so far:

Don't buy brand names.

Eating out is expensive.

No more bottled water, sob!

OK, I'm being a little unfair; he's also learned that it's actually really tough to get by on just over six bucks a day. And he's an empathetic guy, if not particularly self-aware (he really does seem baffled by the prospect of life without Diet Coke and bottled water, and he treats the news that he can buy stuff and freeze it like a major revelation).

But I can't help noticing that despite his painstaking efforts to describe every last meal ("peanut butter sandwiches, a banana, and some left over rice"), he neglects to mention the many little comforts and privileges that differentiate him from people who actually live on food stamps. I'm speculating, but here are a few things I'm guessing distinguish him from a typical food stamp recipient:

• Reliable transportation. I'm guessing Callebs doesn't get around on public transportation. In fact, I'm guessing he drives to the grocery store to get what he needs--and that he's able to comparison shop if his neighborhood supermarket doesn't have the best prices. That's not something you can do very easily on the bus, especially if you're working more than one job to make ends meet.

• A decent grocery store. In most cities, the number of grocery stores in a neighborhood correlates directly with income. In poor neighborhoods, the only option within easy walking or busing distance is often the local convenience store--where the markups are guaranteed to be high, and the food to be packaged and unhealthy. Callebs describes going to "health food stores" as well as a regular grocery store. Show me a health food store, and I'll show you a middle-class neighborhood with plenty of fresh, affordable options.

• A well-equipped kitchen and plenty of access to information about how to stretch a small food budget. Callebs repeatedly mentions having readers (and his mom) email him recipes, and he mentions making broth with chicken bones, a stir-fry, beans, and mac and cheese. Those are all great, thrifty ideas, but they assume a fair amount of culinary knowledge--or, in Callebs's case, the wherewithal to make up for lack of cooking skills with extensive research on the Internet. I'm not saying poor people can't look up recipes and make food from scratch, just that it's less likely they'll have the time, energy, Web access, and resources to do so.

• Most importantly: The knowledge that eating on a food-stamp budget is a temporary "lifestyle," not a way of life. At one point, Callebs mentions that he's on vacation--a luxury that, needless to say, isn't part of the typical food-stamp lifestyle. And he's only doing it for four weeks, not months, years, or a lifetime. That makes a big difference, both in terms of the day-to-day experience of eating on a budget (if peanut butter sandwiches get old after a month, imagine how they'd taste after several years?) and in terms of what it does to your long-term outlook. Knowing you're going to be able to eat out again on your CNN salary in two weeks is much different than not knowing whether you'll have enough money to make it to the end of next month.

The New Economy; Or, Braising!

The New Economy, for me, has meant more crappy frozen dinners (logic tells me I should cook everything at home, but desperation says, sure, it's made of corn syrup and hydrogenated oil, but it only costs $1.59!), fewer meals at restaurants, and stretching my food budget to five or ten bucks a day. In the winter, what that means for me is means braising--searing then slowly stewing tough, cheap cuts of meat in a low oven for several hours until all the fat and connective tissue has melted down into the sauce. Once you get over the fact that you're eating something not ordinarily found in the supermarket meat case (tongue, tail, hoof, whatever)--and embrace the fact that they take an extremely long time to prepare--these fatty, "weird" bits are actually some of the most satisfying cuts of meat you can buy. Especially in winter.

A couple of weeks ago, I headed down to Fero's Meats in Pike Place Market for five pounds of oxtail. The nice man behind the counter (we'll call him Fero) offered to show me what a whole one looked like. Wanna see?

Most everyone I've shown that photo to (or, even better, this one) says it's squicky. But to me, perhaps perversely, a whole tongue or oxtail seems less gross than plastic-wrapped "parts" or ground beef, because at least you know they're not from a dozen anonymous animals on a factory farm somewhere. Ever since I gave up vegetarianism (somewhere between college and old-ladyhood), there's something about whole cuts of meat--pieces of meat that look like the animal parts they actually are--that has fascinated me. Shortly after I started eating meat again, I remember my tablemates watching in mild disgust as I chewed my way through a plate of curried goat meat hacked crosswise into anonymous, unidentifiable chunks; for people who grow up eating nicely differentiated boneless skinless chicken breasts or even ribs, I imagine not knowing just what the hell you're eating comes as a shock. But for me, meat is meat: It may not be my favorite cut, but none of it (OK, maybe sheep eyeballs) is really gross.

So back to braising. Last week, I spent Sunday cooking the oxtails--searing them first, then braising them roughly like this. I didn't have the Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry, so I used rice wine vinegar instead (figuring the long cooking would mellow the vinegar's bite); I sliced the lemongrass up instead of just bruising it; and I didn't have any scallions so I tossed a sliced shallot in instead. Otherwise, I stuck to the recipe. Oh, except for one thing: where the recipe says to "cover oxtails and sauce and refrigerate overnight," I read "spoon the fat off the best you can and eat at once." I can't help it; I'm impatient that way. And damn, it was good.

This past Sunday, I made another trip to Fero's for three pounds of short ribs (Fero, Jr.--much surlier than Senior, but equally efficient--helped me this time), stopping afterward at a market stall to pick up fennel and parsley for Mark Bittman's braised short ribs with mustard and another Bittman recipe I'll make later this week.

This time, I browned the (salted, peppered) ribs on all sides (sneaking outside to thin my lettuce and mustard sprouts while they cooked), then sauteed an onion and some garlic, tossed in a bit of thyme from the herb garden, and added the ribs back to the pot along with a couple cups of homemade beef stock from the freezer. After forgetting about it for about three hours, I came back and halved a pound or so of Russian banana fingerling potatoes (the subject of a forthcoming post tentatively titled What To Do When Your CSA Gives You Five Pounds of Potatoes and You Even Don't Like Potatoes!!) and added them to the pot. After about 20 minutes, a couple tablespoons of Dijon mustard went in, along with a handful of chopped parsley and some more salt and pepper; and that was that. The ribs were meltingly tender and still crisp on the outside from the initial browning, and the mustard cut perfectly through the fatty sauce (again, without refrigerating it overnight).

In my heart, of course, I know I should practice patience, but four hours is about my limit. That said, both these dishes were far better the second time around. And when I took each one out of the refrigerator for reheating, I removed at least a cup of rendered fat--fat that, according to five minutes of rigorous Internet research, I should now flatten in Ziploc bags and freeze. Don't know what I'm going to do with it all yet (sukiyaki? refried beans? meat pies?) but in these economic times, to waste anything, even beef tallow, seems like a sin.