by Vicki Robin
The recipe sounded easy: just slice the zucchini into quarter-inch-thick rounds, fill the racks, pop them in the convection oven at 125 to 145 degrees, and remove them when the chips are crisp but not burned. Aah, crisp. Even the word makes me salivate. Toasted sourdough French bread. Dry-roasted nuts. Fresh rye crisp. Tortilla chips dipped in hot sauce, piled high in Mexican restaurants while you peruse the menu. Chitlins. Crunch! Not until this diet confronted me with the absence of my daily crunch did I have to face this addiction.
Crunchaholics
Am I alone in this? Apparently not. Psychologists like Linda Spangle are making names for themselves by identifying the difference between people like me—crunchies—and chocoholic sweeties. Crunchies have what she calls “head hunger.” We are, according to Linda, stressed and irritated, which is about how I feel when I don’t have crunch. Her point exactly. Sweeties are sad and lonely. Linda calls theirs a “heart hunger.” Clearly that is a secondary need for me—otherwise I would have insisted on chocolate as exotic number five.
Such psychological displacement isn’t bad—none of us is a saint. Better chocolate bars than singles bars, better crackers than crack.
To verify how “crunchy” Americans really are, one needs only to peruse the cereal aisle at the grocery store. The elder of the aisle is Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, a hit from the day they were released in 1928 with their signature “snap, crackle, and pop.” Cheerios have always been crunchy, but now we have Cheerios Crunch as well. There’s a crunch for every occasion—and taste: Cap’n Crunch, caramel Crunchfuls, Sun Crunchers, Cruncheroos, Go Lean Crunch!, and even Krusty-O’s, which might satisfy the ever-bumbling Homer Simpson’s need for crunch.
Just in case this house of cardboard cereal boxes comes down, though, won’t we all be glad to know about zackers?
Right from the oven, on the edge of burned, zackers do the crunch trick, especially with enough salt. Store in an airtight jar to distribute the crispiness evenly, and they may even retain some jaw-delighting snap. Even if/when they devolve from crunchy to chewy, according to Linda Spangle, our jaws will get the grinding we need. No wonder “something to chew on” means something to think about. We heady crunchies love that.
When my zackers didn’t quite satisfy, I found a slather of local butter along with the salt helped.
Butter for the Royal Slice of . . . Zacker
Butter? That wasn’t on the local list, but when I complained to a friend about the lack of “butter for the Royal slice of . . . zacker,” she said I could have it in two—or more—shakes.
“Don’t you know, you can make butter out of your raw cream?”
“No way.”
“Way.” Which could also be spelled whey, which is what’s left once the butter is churned.
She explained the basic technique, apparently taught to all second graders except me. You put cream in a jar and then shake it vigorously until a ball of butter magically appears in the thin grayish whey.
If you are my age, I suggest wearing a snug long-sleeved jersey—or support hose up to your armpits—so your upper-arm wattle won’t jiggle the entire ten minutes needed to coax the butter out of the cream. If you are a member of a gym, this activity might save you the monthly fee, especially if you jiggle and jog at the same time.
For me it was so worth the effort. The butter was okay, but demystifying butter was even better. I remembered that in the “olden days” women churned butter. I’d even seen women in bonnets and long calico dresses do it in reenactments of Colonial life in Williamsburg, Virginia. However, I simply made no connection between that quaint tableau and my current life, where butter comes in wax-paper-wrapped cubes. Until I saw the proof that butter requires only cream, a jar, and some upper-body endurance.
When I wanted something like a cookie—creamy, sweet, and crunchy—I just put some local honey on a buttered zacker. Voilà! A zookie. I was like Tom Sawyer, so convincing about the pleasures of zackers and zookies that everyone wanted to try them. Watching their faces as they chewed away at my leathery treasure, I realized that these Zookies and Zackers were not necessarily the best advertising for a 10-mile diet.
Cooking from Scratch
Cream wasn’t the only “ingredient” I had to turn into food. None of my 10-mile foods came with recipes. None had nutritional labeling so that I could calculate my protein and vitamins for the day. Some I’d never even eaten before. Remember, in August I had to turn to recipes.com to find out what to do with a turnip.
As September rolled on, though, I found that site and my half-dozen stalwart cookbooks less and less helpful. I couldn’t really use them as written. I was missing too many ingredients. In the absence of capers, anchovies, flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, rice, wheat, corn, noodles, nuts and nut butters, creamed canned soups, and on and on, I was thrown back on my own resources.
What I reclaimed when I let go, though, was resourcefulness. I was learning to cook without recipes the way you learn to ride a bicycle without training wheels or ice skate without gripping the side railing and mincing around the rink.
I learned how to address a zucchini—as well as kale, chard, beans, snow peas, basil, oregano, potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, garlic, kohlrabi, rutabagas, turnips, and did I mention kale?—the way a karate master might address a plank he was going to break with his bare hands. Utter attention, respect, and presence. I needed to listen to what the zucchini—or any food—could become.
Slowly I shifted from seeing my range of ingredients from limited to limitless, from a few dozen ingredients to endless possibilities for delicious meals.
Take zucchini—just to pick a vegetable randomly out of a hat. Not only did I roast or bake or dehydrate it in my convection oven, I sliced it into wedges lengthwise like cucumber sticks. I used a serrated peeler that produced long strands of “zukett.” I julienned it (more to come on this method) for stir-fry, I lightly steamed chunks, which I could eat as a side vegetable or blend into soup with some garden herbs.
Or take kale, my other fail-safe crop. It can be steamed, dehydrated, stir-fried, and added to soups. Baby kale can go into salads raw. Curly kale can cup potato salad on a platter to make that potluck dish look “dishier.” Best of all, kale can also make kale crisps.
Green beans can be pickled as well as steamed, fried, added to soups, or crunched (aah, that blessed word!) raw as you walk barefoot in the morning through the dew in the garden.
Beets can be shredded onto salads, roasted, made into pickles, made into borscht, or just boiled. The leftover water can be used to make beet wine (which we did in Rhinelander under the tutelage of the Lithuanian neighbors, ending up with something akin to decent port). On those long winter subzero nights, when playing cards or endless philosophizing weren’t enough to see us through the boredom, that beet wine tempered those tempers that cabin fever can ignite.
And God, the potato! What can’t you do with a potato? You can bake it, fry it in thin rounds to be chips or in sticks to be “freedom fries,” or slice it a bit thicker for a frittata. You can shred it for fritters, boil it for mashed potatoes, or blender it for a creamier soup. Not only that, but it’s a lifesaver. You can chunk potatoes as a correction for an oversalted stew or soup. The neutral, generous potatoes will mop up the excess and balance the pot.
Apples as ingredients are simply amazing. You can eat them, of course. But you can cook them down into applesauce and further down into apple butter. You can bake them with some honey, cinnamon, and nutmeg dribbled down the core. You can also slice and dehydrate them for a chewy snack later. If you juice your veggies, apples can be thrown in after kale and beets to make the slurry actually palatable. They bring sweet and tart. They bring crisp. They bring color when chopped into a salad.
Each fruit, each vegetable, can be used for its many qualities: color, texture, where it sits on the sweet-to-sour scale, how it transforms when cooked. They aren’t
just “called for” in someone else’s recipe. If you approach them with curiosity and amazement, you can hear them telling you what to do.
Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice
One thing you’ll learn right away if you ever attempt your own version of a 10-mile diet: herbs and spices are crucial to cooking from scratch.
I really got it why women of yore had herb gardens—and vegetable gardeners these days do too. Take that zucchini. It’s one thing with basil, another with rosemary, another with garlic, yet another with oregano. Herbs relieve the monotony of a simple diet.
It never occurred to me before that herbs and spices are different. They shared shelf space in the store and the same greasy rack on my kitchen counter, and that was that. Now, hungry for any crumb of wisdom, I almost snorted whatever knowledge I found. Sometime during week two, I spotted a fat volume called the Dictionary of Food in a used-book store—and snapped it up. I bought it, brought it home, and for the rest of the month it sat on my kitchen counter so I could peruse it daily. Every page was an eye-opener! Who knew there were fundamental differences between herbs and spices? Herbs come from, duh-uh, leaves of herbaceous (nonwoody) plants. Spices come from the roots (ginger), flowers (cloves), fruits (vanilla), seed (cumin), and bark (cinnamon) of plants. I felt like I was in grade school in the daily wonder of discovery. Further, I learned that herbs are generally European in origin and spices are from tropical climates. This is why herbs were a slam dunk on a 10-mile diet and spices were not. They have to squeak in under the term “exotics.” Another duh-uh.
Along with the “real” food, i.e., what I could actually chew, Tricia’s boxes came with bags of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Another duh-uh. Could this be why Simon and Garfunkel’s rendition of “Scarborough Fair” had these herbs in the refrain? Was it because these flavors—now essential for adding interest to my veggies—were long ago essential for turning medieval slop into tasty dishes? Further, did they have a function in keeping us well?
A study by the Nutrition Research Institute1 project director and University of North Carolina professor Martin Kohlmeier, M.D., reveals why I, a lowly consumer, was not informed about the medicinal properties of food. In the study, 109 medical schools were surveyed and only 28 of them met the National Academy of Science requirement of even twenty-five hours of nutrition education.2
I was certainly a poster child for the failure of our medical system to educate us on that food/medicine link. My diet was waking me up, though. Herbs and spices are used not just in cooking but in healing. All medicines once originated in nature. Where else would they come from?
We think of medicines as pills in jars, not leaves and seeds and bark and flowers. It’s obvious, but until that moment I’d never put it together. When I quit chemo the naturopath prescribed turmeric—the same spice that’s in curry. Reading up on this spice/medicine, I found it’s even used to prevent cancer!
Only now is the food industry touting “functional foods”—ones with some smidgen of health-promoting, disease-preventing, or healing properties. What could be more functional, though, than fruits and vegetables—the mainstay of my 10-mile diet?
When Hippocrates said “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food,” he must have meant just what I was discovering as I read the Dictionary of Food.
Tools of the Trade
The final “ingredient” in my 10-mile kitchen was my stash of simple cooking tools.
I already mentioned the convection oven. In addition to producing zackers, it also did a fine job of roasting zucchinis sliced the long way, like chicken fillets, slathered in oil, and salted. The bigger zucchinis could be baked almost like winter squash—seeds scooped out and the cavity filled with sautéed chopped carrots, eggplant, and even Long Family beef. The oven was even big enough to roast a chicken, which I did as a treat at the end of the month.
The convection oven was one of my top eleven tools for turning the bounty in my yard and fridge into breakfast, lunch, and dinner and those minimeals in between. The others were
• a chef’s knife
• a 4-quart pot with a steamer basket
• a heavy 8-quart pot
• a pressure cooker/canner
• a cast-iron skillet
• a mandoline
• a Zyliss slicer
• a food mill
• a peeler
• a blender
Perhaps I should have gotten a food processor and become Martha Stewart–proficient with it. That didn’t occur to me. For one thing, the thrift store never had one, and I treat the thrift store as an angel of God—answering only truly righteous prayers. The Unfathomable Divine just did not want me to have a food processor. Not only that, if I’d gotten one it might have taken me the whole month just to learn how to use the dang thing. And the clincher is this: by a fluke of fate I happen to be a whiz with a kitchen knife.
How so? In 1968–69 I was a frequent extra on soap operas. The producer recognized that I had some “je ne sais quoi” (it didn’t hurt that I was married to him and we needed the money), which led to a short career as the lady at the bar or in the elevator. On days when I didn’t have other work, I would watch the soaps—at first just out of vanity to see my butt butterfly across the screen. Eventually, I got hooked on the stories and developed an embarrassing soap opera habit—which is how I learned to chop, because Graham Kerr’s Galloping Gourmet came on right after Love of Life. I can still see his fingers on the back of that chef’s knife as he rocked it up and down along a carrot or an onion, leaving a wake of perfectly even pieces. I actually went through a bunch of onions and several knuckles practicing in my own kitchen. The Galloping Gourmet also showed me how to sauté, braise, poach, roast, toast, bake, broil, and fry meat, fowl, and vegetables. I learned how to make a roux, a sauce, a gravy, and a meringue. In terms of life skills, Kerr proved to be a better professor than any I had in college.
And so it was that my chef’s knife—with a little help from a mandoline and Zyliss slicer—was my noneclectic Cuisinart. No, I’m not talking about a mandolin, about using the strings of a musical instrument to slice boiled eggs. The mandoline—as well as the slicer—are hand tools that allow you, with rapid strokes, to turn fruits and veggies into thin or thick slices, thin or thick sticks, or fine or coarse grated pieces.
I make such quick work of any vegetable that I could easily be hired for an infomercial. I’m so fast, in fact, that if I am not conscious of what I am doing, I can make quick work of my knuckles as well. Really, in the time it would take for you to pull out your food processor, change blades, plug it in, do the grating or slicing, wash everything, dry it, and put it away, I could be finished and cleaned up with time to spare just using my mandoline and Zyliss slicer.
Not that I am against things with power cords. My stove, fridge, and microwave were so essential I didn’t even put them on the list of “tools.” I chose to list the blender because I hauled it out almost every day to turn steamed stubs of this and that into creamed soups. My Foley food mill, an ingenious hand-crank device for turning stewed fruits and veggies into thick sauces, might have been sufficient, but this wasn’t a back-to-basics experiment. I don’t live in the woods anymore. I live in a subdivision in a house with wall-to-wall carpets.
A word about the pressure cooker. It reduces cooking time, yes, but mine, an industrial-duty one, has served me for nearly forty years for so much more: canning fruits, vegetables, and meats; cooking dried beans in twenty minutes rather than three hours; and turning wild game into delicious, tender stews. In high school we would joke about “mystery meat” on our sandwiches. A pressure cooker can turn many mystery meats—raccoon or woodchuck, anyone?—into passable dinners.
These tools plus my basic cooking skills from Mother, home economics class, and Graham Kerr were what got me through the month of cooking my 10-mile diet.
Rediscove
ring Cooking
What I was discovering again, in short, was cooking. Cooking as a learned skill. Cooking as how one eats every day instead of our quick grazing in restaurants and shopping in minimarts and takeout and drive-throughs. Cooking from scratch, from what’s at hand. If you can’t cook, your eating is totally in the hands of the food industry. Even if you cook from recipes, you still need to know the basics of cooking.
When I started the 10-mile diet, these learned skills and the can-do attitude I acquired from years of do-it-yourself-ing helped me make 150+ yummy meals.
Had I stayed in New York, though, and remained on a career and family path, I might never have learned these household arts.
Do any of us these days—with food, food, everywhere and not a drop home-cooked—really need to know how to separate eggs, caramelize onions, whip egg whites and fold them into angel food cake? Do we need to know the difference between roasting, baking, braising, sautéing, frying, and stewing—and when to use each? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s fine to rely on the deli counter or the supermarket or the purveyors of dinner in a box or microwave bag or restaurants of every class and style to make our meals while we make money to pay for it. Perhaps it’s just my passion for getting down in the guts of every aspect of life, learning how things work. Perhaps I lived in the woods too long. Perhaps I drank the Kool-Aid of a post-peak world, where such competencies will distinguish those who are happy from those who are bereft. Remember the old Boy Scout motto “Be prepared”?
Making Dishes Sing
All this improvisational creativity aside, I did have one cookbook on my shelves that actually taught me the essence of transforming ingredients not just into edible food but into rich, deep, flavorful meals. Rebecca Katz, former cook for the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, where I went on my road to recovery, wrote One Bite at a Time, which is about putting “yum” into healthy fresh ingredients so that people who can’t keep down much food might actually want to eat. As someone who couldn’t even get down a smoothie during my brief foray into chemo, I know how vital that is.
