Comfort for a Comfort Foodie.

Oh Pizza. I often have to travel to Italy for work and in a past life this would have been heaven on earth for my gluttonous gluten self. However, now I am confined to the ‘secondi’ portion of the menu and the old staples of vegetables and meat. This isn’t to say Italians don’t do these well, in fact I am quiet lucky they prefer to cook almost exclusively with olive oil as opposed to butter, but these just don’t hold a candle to a margherita pizza. It could be asked what about Pasta? To this I say, try the Quinoa kind, it is hands down the best substitute I have found and satisfies this craving quite well.

It is the Pizza that has been so elusive. The chewiness of the crust paired with the structure of the slice, and well, the utter melted deliciousness of the cheese. Unfortunately there is no good substitute for cheese, however there are few that come close and I prefer this one. I think the one thing the removal of cheese has done is made me come to appreciate the importance of the other ingredients. For starters, the perfect red sauce is your base, the fresh herbs your structure, and within this you can layer as you wish. The key here is fresh. There are no good substitutes to fresh veggies and herbs, these are what really matter and until now I was oblivious to this fact.

The last, and arguable most important piece is the crust. Now, the perfect replacement has remained elusive, and I will update as I experiment on Sean, but for now Whole Foods has a great gluten free option. And, on a recent ‘Indian Summer’ evening, we went about allying those gluten desires.

My favorite pizza happens to be Pesto, and for this I always start from scratch. Fresh basil is the most vital part, and from this base it is fun to experiment with novel ingredients. For this round I looked to a current appetence of mine: cashews. Cashews blend into a smoother and creamy paste than pine nuts, thus I had the idea they might help make up for the exclusion of cheese. From here I shaved a bit of lemon, added the necessary olive oil and garlic while spicing with salt and pepper as I blended these together. The smell of freshly ground garlic and basil started to fill the kitchen and I knew it was going to be a good night for epicureans. From here I went on to simmer freshly peeled and pureed tomatoes with garlic and red wine as my second base. And, if you are going to do pizza you might as well go for broke, so I created a third base of sautéed garden fresh cherry tomatoes, basil, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar with caramelized onions.

To each crust I added my sauce; for the pesto I layered multi colored heirloom tomatoes with my ‘mozzarella’ of choice and topped this with a couple extra leaves of basil, as if the pesto wasn’t enough. For the tomato sauce I added fresh bell peppers, red onion, and porcini mushrooms to create a hearty vegetarian. Lastly, for the sautéed tomatoes I kept it simple by just adding my ‘mozzarella’ of choice and fresh basil so the sweetness of the tomatoes could shine.

Although it would be a stretch to equate these to a traditional ‘comfort food pizza’, slices drowned in cheese and grease- soggy in all their gluten glory and yet so gloriously satisfying; they are and were a new comfort for me. Awash in the heat and aroma of baking red sauce, cooking garlic and basil, and the satisfying pull of ‘cheese’ in your first steaming bite, these were my comforts. New comforts, novel ones, fresh ones; and hell these were some tastey pizzas.

I cooked under the assumption I would be saving some of these for lunch the following day as an easy shortcut past the ‘cafeteria’, but alas when you get two gluttons around pizza it is guaranteed not to last. It is nights like these that make me forget the old life and appreciate the simplicity of my new way of eating, consuming, and living. Make it simple, we do.

Married to Food

I am continually thankful for Ryan's food allergies. Perhaps, it is an enjoyed thankfulness because I don't directly live with many of the negative consequences. I do, however, get to enjoy almost all of the positive consequences. I am thankful for Ryan's food allergies because they force him to be mindful and aware of food. It heightens the relational dynamic he has with it and food becomes personified in our home. Guilty by association, I think more about food, on the rare occasions I go grocery shopping, I can't just grab what looks good. Farmer's Markets, being a great source of gluten/dairy free food, also force me to come face to face with who is behind the food.

Part of the reason I enjoy this mindfulness is because I have an odd memory. To most people, it would seem like I have barely a sliver of memory at all. It is a familial joke that a finite portion of memory is continually split each time a new generation is born. My grandmother has quite a normal functioning memory, my mother's is rather troublesome and I seem to have been born without one entirely. But I do have a memory, albeit an odd one. I remember snippets, bits and pieces, emotions, colors and temperatures. I'm reminded of this eccentric memory of mine by this post because I have a memory from several years back of a linguistic idiosyncrasy relating to food. Someone once pointed out to me, that it was odd how many different names we have to disguise where our food comes from. I remember thinking it fascinating. While, I now understand that many of the substitute names are more indicative of how a food is prepared as opposed to where it comes from, I still think the intuition was correct.

We tend to distance ourselves from the 'dirtiness' of raising and growing food. Perhaps, not as much as in the efficiency, modern technological gabfest of the 50s and 60s, but we certainly would still garner a few strange looks if we ordered a cow patty with cheese. An example from our own home (nobody's perfect!), comes from just the other day when Ryan while munching happily on a bag of baby carrots, stopped and examined one tiny orange spear. He suddenly wondered aloud, how do they make these? It seems a perfectly natural question in our common attitude, but to think of plain raw ingredient (not some fancy carrot dish) as having nebulous origins, especially as mundane as a carrot is odd.

Not everybody can be a farmer and roll their hands through soil and hold the butcher's knife, but everybody does eat. Food is a central part of lives, we astonishingly! depend more on food than on our cell phones or the Internet. It takes a lot of work to run a farm or manufacture 'food products' like twinkies and tv dinners. I find peace in the symmetry of spending extra time, effort and work on preparing our meals. If I'm not out there growing food, or studying chemistry in a lab to mimic food, then I should at the very least, spend some time cooking food. And in that sense, I should spend some mental and physical energy, putting food back in the center of my life. The cultivation and consumption of food is the single most important meaning making activity known to our species, because really, what is the point of our lives if not to sustain ourselves and sustain ourselves well.

A Christian scholar at Yale Divinity School gave a sermon about restlessness, a relationship with food and land, and Christian faith. Putting respective religious institutions and organizations aside, the sermon was moving in Professor Jenkins recollection of Biblical analogies of marriage. The intimacy with which we should treat our environment and food is as the intimacy we should treat our marriages, both human and divine. I must say, I like the idea of being married to food.

A book I'm reading now reminds me how central food already can be to many Americans, Barry Glassner, a sociologist at USC wrote The Gospel of Food which chronicles along with other major food books I've read (The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan and Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser) how fear, anxiety and neurosis are often the reason food is at the center of our lives. I proudly can say, that I put food at the center of my life because I like it. Good genes, sure, but also that American streak of getting what I want. And I want good tasty food.

This post was sparked by a TED talk (surprise!) by Carolyn Steel about how food shapes our cities. Thinking about the centrality of food markets and routes in the development and urban planning of pre-Industrial cities, reminded me of how distanced we'd become from our food. However, I attempted like a good young idealist should, to live off the grid in rural Ireland for several months. Through the astonishing and eye-opening experience, I was confirmed in my convictions about food, but also my love and need of the city, the urban center, the metropolis. And as Ms. Steel points out, many many more of us will be living in cities in the future. Check out the video and if you haven't read any of the above books, they're worth a gander.

Shall I close with a cliche? Food for thought.