It’s not because of my skill at baking, which can more accurately be described as the ability to read and generally follow instructions. This brownie is based on a great recipe from Smitten Kitchen who adapted it from another great recipe from Baked in Brooklyn. Eat anything from these justly celebrated dessert creators and you’ll probably bust out the superlatives too. Plus, it’s got a lot of butter in it, and we all know the important kitchen equation: butter = awesome.

But the brownie got me thinking more about the food we eat and how it’s produced. If you just want to skip ahead to learn how to make these brownies yourself, scroll all the way down.  But first, some brownie pondering…

***

Sitting at my crumb-covered kitchen table with a belly almost uncomfortably full of dessert and one hand still clutching a few chocolatey morsels, a surprising realization came to me: I almost never eat brownies made from scratch.

Do you? I’m curious. Think about it. Despite being a fan of brownies, I rarely buy them from bakeries.  Restaurants don’t often offer brownies on the dessert menu, and even if they do, I’m not likely to order something I can just as easily bake at home.  And that’s the thing – brownies are a homestyle, comfortable, familiar, fifties housewife/school bake sale kind of dessert.  A dessert that almost universally, at least in my world, came straight out of a box.

A brownie recipe from my childhood would look like this: pull the Betty Crocker box out of the cupboard. Pop the plastic bag of brownish powder, add an egg and some vegetable oil, stir in a big bowl, bake in a pan and cut into squares.  No need for complicated baking equipment, kitchen knowledge, or really any degree of thought or effort.

On the contrary, baking brownies from scratch takes not only a fair amount of time and effort but also a great deal more money.  I decided to make spiced brownies for the Rambling Cafe at Somerset House Design Fair over the holidays and found myself choosing between a box of brownie mix under £2 and the ingredients to make them myself for almost £8, which didn’t even include the flour and spices I already had in my cupboard.  Since we care about making good, real, food with high-quality ingredients at Rambling Restaurant and it fits into my general ethos of food and cooking, I went with the expensive choice. But I was annoyed that these were my options.  I’m willing to put in the work;  shouldn’t that save me money?

pause for brownie ogling.

I was chatting about this mid-brownie devouring with my friend Alexis, who mentioned that a roast chicken from her supermarket costs less than buying the whole raw chicken and taking several hours to season and roast it herself. Like so many pre-made items in our supermarkets at refrigerators these days, you have to be crazy to make it yourself. Or you just have to be willing to spend more money, take more time, and expend more effort. You have to love the process of cooking and appreciate the taste of homemade food and value the act of creating something yourself (and enjoy the kudos you get for preparing something delicious from scratch). Sure, sometimes the professionals do it way better, and that’s absolutely worth paying for. But too much of the time, you’re trading flavor, health, and taste for convenience and price. And all too often, the money you save reappears as hidden costs externalized in our health care system, the polluted state of our environment, serious issues with factory treatment of workers and animals, the little time spent enjoying the sharing and eating of food with people in your life, the disconnect with where our food comes from, and so many more problems associated with our current methods and industries of food production and consumption.

Michael Pollan, in books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, has written a great deal about the American food industry over the past century and how governmental systems were put into place with the goal of creating cheap calories so people could afford to eat. In addition, companies like General Mills (owner and creator of brand name Betty Crocker) produced convenience items that allowed people, almost exclusively women, to spend less time in the kitchen and more time pursuing their own careers or interests. It was a profitable enterprise for those huge conglomerates that arguably had the positive social benefit of achieving more gender equality in the home and workplace (I’d actually be very interested to research that exact connection). But these industrial methods also made high-calorie treats like brownies and chocolate chip cookies and french fries and microwave pizza widely accessible,  affordable and effortlessly replicable in your own home. Which, in turn, have contributed towards making people extremely unhealthy and so we find ourselves in the midst of this obesity crisis the United States and increasingly more Westernized countries face today.

Browsing a bookstore a few weeks ago, I flipped through a few pages of Michael Pollan’s new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (full review and commentary coming soon from Irene Bean!). One of the rules talks about the notion of treats and how we’d all consume a lot less junk food if we had to make it ourselves. Imagine how much work it takes to produce a french fry and how much less you’d eat them if you had to peel and slice potatoes, purchase and heat large quantities of oil, and risk first-degree burns instead of sidling up to the McDonald’s drive-thru. And you could probably cut down your brownie eating if you had to spend $10 on chocolate, eggs, sugar, and flour rather than $2 on a box of dehydrated chocolate mix.

Clearly this doesn’t make sense for plenty of people who have neither the time nor the money nor a general idea of ‘fun’ that includes two sticks of butter and a cupboard full of spices for experimentation. But it speaks to a way that perhaps we should all be eating, both for our own health and the health of our planet. New York Times writer Jane Brody covers this idea succinctly in her recent article on Pollan’s book, ‘Rules Worth Following, for Everyone’s Sake.’

So take a stand. Make those expensive, rich, chocolatey, effort-full, amazing brownies.  Shun the prepackaged and the processed in favor of the butter and the eggs and the chunks of good chocolate. They might take a bigger chunk out of your wallet, but you can feel good about making them. And most importantly…they just might be the best brownies of your life.

gratuitous brownie porn shot

Ridiculously Good Spiced Brownies With Almonds

Adapted from the Smitten Kitchen recipe who adapted it from another great recipe from Baked. I added a few more spices, took out some other ingredients I didn’t have around, got rid of an egg (my mom walked by while I was baking and said ‘5 eggs? Do you really need 5 eggs?’ and I said…you know, probably not. And I didn’t miss it).  Feel free to play around with the spices depending on what you like and what you have in your cupboard.  Also, I only had chocolate with almonds in the kitchen, which I never would have bought but ended up being surprising little crunchy bites of toastiness.

What You Need:

1 and 1/4 cup flour
1tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp white pepper
12 ounces dark chocolate with almonds, or add separately if you want ‘em. Or walnuts. Whatever’s your bag, really.
1 cup (2 sticks yeeaaaah) butter, chopped into small chunks.
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract

What You Do:

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter the sides of a pan.

2. Mix the flour and all the spices in a bowl.

3. Stick the butter chunks and the chocolate chunks into a heatsafe bowl over a pot of boiling water. Stir every so often until the mixture becomes chocolatey smooth, so silky and fragrant that you could pour it into a chocolate fountain and jump in. Don’t though – you have brownies to make. Unless of course you’ve changed your priorities.

4. Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the sugars. Once the mixture has cooled a bit, whisk the eggs in one at a time, trying not to overmix or the brownies will get cakey.

5. Fold the flour/spice mixture into the chocolate soupiness using a spatula.

6. Bake for about 30 minutes. Important note: contrary to what you might have learned back in the day from Betty Crocker about using a toothpick to test for doneness, you DO NOT want your toothpick to come out clean or your brownies will not be moist and fudgy. You want a few little crumbs on the toothpick. For an adorable illustration (complete with brownie-eating monster!) check out this drawing from the amazingly talented Claire Murray.  She’s got some other fantastic and whimsically illustrated recipes as well as some funny random drawings.

I wish I had a brownie monster friend to help me finish off the pan sometimes.  Eating way way way too many brownies is just a possible side effect of baking some of the best brownies you’ve ever eaten. Oh, and I’m still curious. When was the last time you ate a brownie from scratch?

I’m psyched I managed to catch part of both their talks live because the full videos don’t appear to be online. However, you can see a brief minute-and-a-half recap of several speeches on PopTech 2009: Saturday Highlights and read well-written, comprehensive overviews on the PopTech blog as well. If you’re interested in food and don’t know about either of these guys, start reading now…

Read about ‘Michael Pollan’s Gospel of Sustainable Food’. His talk was full of great quotes – like how a vegan in a Hummer uses less energy than a meat eater in a Prius and how our generation in America will be the first to have a shorter life expectancy than our parents. Below, he grins next to a double Quarter Pounder and the equivalent 26 ounces of oil needed to produce the burger.  This is right before he dips a finger into the viscous black liquid in the glasses, sticks it in his mouth..and then tells the shocked audience that it’s actually chocolate syrup.

Read about ‘Will Allen and the Urban Farming Revolution’

And while I’m busy linking, read about the talk given by Marije Vogelzang – a Dutch designer who does edible art projects and installations. I like that she got vegetable-hating preschoolers to eat their greens by gnawing fun shapes into their vegetables using their teeth. Play + Food = Fun and Delicious.  And it’s given me some good ideas for Rambling Restaurant…

You can read about the rest of the America Reimagined conference and watch some more videos here. And the PopTech website has tons of other amazing videos, blog posts, useful links, profiles of fascinating people and projects and companies, and an inspiring social innovation fellows program.  Click around the site and you’ll almost get overwhelmed with all the interesting material. So go check it out – you don’t even need to be in the right place at the right time. You could be in your underwear in your closet in the middle of the night and still learn about world-changing ideas at PopTech – now that’s the Miracle of the Internet.

UPDATE:  Apparently the quote on the vegan in the Hummer is not statistically accurate. Pollan acknowledges and chooses to refocus on the general message of the environmental concerns against industrialized meat. It’s basically just a pithy soundbite anyway…but too bad cause it was a good one.

The correlation between good-tasting food and well-produced food is a happy one, since I would have a lot of trouble denying myself if they happened to be mutually exclusive. Luckily, a lovingly and thoughtfully crafted croissant or pizza or salad is most likely to be made of the best ingredients. MP noted that most of the chefs who first started serving organic ingredients in their restaurants did so because they tasted better, not because they strongly disapproved of pesticide usage. However, the one place where eating tasty, sustainable food doesn’t align with people’s general food goals is the price. Organic is generally more expensive than conventional. Farmer’s markets in many places are more expensive than supermarkets (although not always!) However, all the panelists agreed that you can eat well and sustainably on a budget. But..you have to cook. And you can’t eat a lot of meat.

Clearly, this would be a huge shift for many Americans who work long hours, don’t want to cook at the end of a long day, and expect their usual 6-8 ounces of meat at every meal. Hitting up the McD’s drive-thru is easy, fast, cheap, and you only have to buy four Quarter-Pounders to consume an entire pound of nasty meat! MP mentioned how the rise in fast food paralleled the collapse in incomes (I think I quoted that correctly) and it just got easier to buy cheap processed meals rather than going through the time, effort, and cost of cooking. He touched upon the importance and value of the feminist movement in dispelling the notion of a women’s place in the kitchen and getting rid of sexist divisions like home ec for girls and shop for boys, but through that journey, cooking has become a chore to avoid for many Americans. In his words, cooking is a key part of evolving food culture that needs to be addressed, and we need to reinvent a way of cooking that is not sexist.

I agree wholeheartedly that cooking is extremely important for enjoyment and appreciation of food and that healthy, sustainable eating probably isn’t doable without it. Cheap, healthy, sustainable cooking is impossible without it. Cooking should be versatile according to your needs and desires, to help you prepare complex and beautiful meals to share with others or present to guests, or to whip up simple, fast, and healthy meals after a long day of work. Cooking should be enjoyable and entertaining and fun and give you an opportunity in your day to share and connect with others. Part of why I so enjoyed my time in Italy was because Italians seriously know.how.to.eat. Think four hour meals with multiple courses (antipasti! primi! secondi! dolci!) and enjoying food and discussion with loved ones. I appreciate that they place true value and importance upon the meal, it’s not something to finish quickly and get out of the way so you can continue on with your day. Americans need to embrace this style of eating, of sitting around a big table sharing food and stories with family, not sitting in front of the TV with a reheated frozen dinner watching primetime.

Seguing a bit for a second – MP mentioned a book he just read that said 97% of societies studied throughout history have had a food culture of women cooking in the home, and men usually cooking for public or communal events. I find this pretty fascinating considering how many celebrity chefs in the U.S. are men. I do think gender roles in cooking are evening out though, with the rise of cooking shows in pop culture and generational change. Maybe it’s because most of my friends, male and female, love food and therefore like to cook in pretty equal proportion. Anyway, my roommate Annie happened to tear out an Economist article for me about the evolutionary role of cookery and the hypothesis that processed food makes people obese because it’s softer and therefore easier to digest and therefore burns fewer calories (I also think processed food makes people fat, although that reasoning is new and interesting to me). Turns out the researcher is the same author quoted by MP. His name is Richard Wrangham, and his book Catching Fire will be released in a few months. Excited!

Returning to this whole idea of cooking as an essential ingredient to eating healthfully, sustainably, and affordably, it helps a lot if cooking can be easy, fun, and not an intimidating endeavor where you may burn the house down or set yourself on fire. Some people may never like to cook and would prefer to take a pill for their daily caloric intake, but I feel that if you like food and enjoy eating then you will probably have a good time playing around in the kitchen. I’m certainly no expert chef, but I know what I like to eat and what tastes good, and I feel that’s all you need to make good food. And I haven’t set myself on fire yet (although it’s been close). So one of the things I’d like to do with this blog is show some easy recipes for food that can be made quickly, cheaply, healthily, and sustainably whenever possible.

So. Coming soon from a kitchen near you…fun with leftovers!

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/02/28/826-food-politics-and-renewing-a-love-for-cooking/feed/ 1 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/02/27/826-food-politics-and-i-have-an-intellectual-crush-on-michael-pollan/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/02/27/826-food-politics-and-i-have-an-intellectual-crush-on-michael-pollan/#comments Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:55:19 +0000 mei http://familystyles.wordpress.com/?p=419 after letting the ideas from the 826 food politics discussion marinate in my brain, i’ve decided to serve up some thoughts in bite-size morsels rather than one huge and  indigestible essay. sorry, the whole evening ended with a nod to bad food puns, i can’t help myself.  i’m doling out ladlefuls from the jumbled soup pot of topics and carving off idea slices from the humongous turducken of food politics thought in my brain (that’s a gross mental picture. i’ll stop now).

here’s some details about the evening and the panelists, thoughts about food culture and ecology and production systems, and a whole lot of michael pollan…

<!–[if !mso]> <! st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } –>

I’ve got a whole lot to say about the amazing food politics discussion at 826 Valencia, so be prepared. It’s been a long time since I wrote an essay, so my apologies for the meandering nature of this post. Although Irene and I mostly started this blog to share our food adventures with macaroni and cheese cat cakes and salmon cupcakes, we’re both also very interested in larger issues of food and how food affects people’s lives in so many ways besides whether it’s cooked in bacon fat. I’ve recently been thinking a lot about food on a large scale in considering issues of food production – sustainable vs. industrial, its relationship to the environment and natural world, its effect on health and our bodies and more. At the same time, I’ve been thinking about food on a very personal level – the role that food plays in my life as a consumer, a food lover, a person attempting to make conscious food choices, and as a human whose health is affected daily by what I choose to put in my body.

Wednesday’s discussion touched upon all these issues and more, and I feel very blessed to have been able to hear the opinions of the three incredible panelists: Harold McGee, Bonnie Azab Powell, and my serious food writer crush, Michael Pollan. The discussion was moderated by the dryly hilarious and also very thoughtful Chris Ying (he’s an editor for McSweeney’s, which explains why I was laughing so much all night). Harold is best known for his influential book called On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, which is probably why he reminds me of someone’s super smart dad who likes to putter around the kitchen and listen to classical records alone in his study all day. Bonnie is a food writer and editor who manages to juggle an impressive array of sustainable food-related activities like writing about food politics and managing a meat CSA. I’m really excited to explore her group blog, Ethicurean.com, which addresses a lot of issues I’m into, and the magazine Edible San Francisco.

Last but certainly not least, Michael Pollan. Irene and I may or may not have mentioned him once or twice because, now that I think about it, I consider him the most influential author in my life. His most popular book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has actually affected the choices I make regarding my consumption of food on a daily basis, an ever-present topic that all humans must consider (at least those who are old enough or able enough to feed themselves). MP (his nickname in my notes, cause we’re tight like that… I wish) discussed, among many other topics, how information he learned while writing Omnivore (for example, the horrific details on the cruelty, dangers, and environmental harm of industrial meat production) deeply affected how he ate and helped shaped certain decisions he makes about purchasing and preparing food. He spoke about the idea that, once you’re made aware of certain truths, you often can’t continue to act in the same ways as before. He rejected the statement, made by someone at the Knight School of Journalism at Berkeley where he teaches, that you shouldn’t be in journalism if you want to change the world. On the contrary, journalism is all about researching fact, synthesizing ideas, conveying information and getting people who read your work to think about an issue. If you manage to reach one person and give them a deeper understanding of a certain topic and a broader range of facts upon which to base their decision making, they may change one behavior as a result. If your book sells a million copies and more people make better decisions informed by what they read, what else is ‘changing the world?’

I would say Omnivore had this exact effect on me by making more aware of the systems I support by buying, for example, grass-fed pasture raised beef instead of processed hormone-injected meat product. Apparently, an article of MP’s (in the NYTimes I think) had the exact same effect on Bonnie. I was fascinated to hear that this woman who manages a Bay Area meat CSA and writes articles on Midwest vs. California pork used to be a vegetarian. But not only a vegetarian…a PETA member!! (which explains her reference to food being a safe topic in her household, considering her father is an ex-Marine Republican. Whew! I can just imagine the dinner table arguments there). As she said, Omnivore was her tipping point and it’s actually Michael’s fault that she now thinks about food as a citizen and not just an eater.

I enjoyed hearing all of the panelists discuss their food writing influences, including each other, and MP actually talked a fair amount about one of my other favorite books, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. He referred to the book as the starting point of tipping the public consciousness towards the current drive to make food production more sustainable. It’s a major example, as MP said, of a book that made people act differently by bringing a deeper awareness of industrial food systems and the many ways they are harmful to society. This happened for me when I read the book in college, then heard Eric Schlosser speak. Without even making a definitive conscious decision about it, I stopped eating fast food and haven’t touched it since then. No more Chicken McNuggets and no more Big Macs, (although I did stuff an entire mickey d’s cheeseburger in my mouth on tape for a game at work once. That shit took up so much room in my very small mouth, I couldn’t have swallowed it even if I wanted to.It’s amazing how it tasted exactly the same as the last hamburger I had like ten years ago. How do they do that? Oh right, there’s no variation because it’s not really food, just assembled chemically food product). Anyway.

I absolutely recommend reading both Fast Food Nation and Omnivore’s Dilemma if you’re interested in learning more about the industrial food system, which MP discussed a fair amount during the talk. To paraphrase his words, the goal of food policy in the U.S. over the past century has been to make food as cheap and accessible as possible. Our current reliance on processed ingredients and industrially produced food has been supported and encouraged as policy in order to produce cheap calories. And it’s been immensely successful – food is as cheap here as anywhere else in the world and that, in and of itself, is a good thing. However, this industrially processed food isn’t necessarily healthy to consume, nor is it sustainable for the environment. And that’s where things get complicated. It’s easy to look at numbers and cut costs in food production any way you can. It’s much harder to look at what you’re producing and how to make it healthy and sustainable and ethical. As MP said, quality is a much messier issue than quantity.

However, people are starting to think about these issues, and many of them have been made aware by Fast Food Nation and Omnivore’s Dilemma. In Michael’s opinion, food culture also changed when things started to go wrong with the food system that used to be largely invisible and behind the scenes. Mad cow disease. E.coli scares. The Jack-In-Th-Box food poisoning. In addition, eating and making decisions about food on a daily basis became a way for people to ‘vote with their fork’ and support certain methods of food production and avoid others, whether that was eating vegetarian, purchasing only organic chickens or maybe just buying a few more vegetables instead of TV dinners. As MP said, in a world full of hugely daunting problems like climate change and the current economic crisis, it’s easy to feel helpless in the face of these seemingly intractable problems. But you can make little choices every day, maybe to spend 15 cents more on organic apples, or reading a label to buy a loaf of bread without added corn syrup. It’s these choices that I’m trying to examine as a conscious foodie (I’m starting to hate that term already) or just a person who cares about food and its journey towards my mouth. Educating myself on these issues is a huge part of the process, as is doing more cooking (that’ll be another individually wrapped portion of the food politics discussion) and doing more writing (the final piece of pie in the dish).

Thanks for reading, if anyone managed to make it this far. I’m getting sick of the repetitive sound of my own voice inside my head too.  To finish things up, here are some handy links to the books I mentioned and others I think everyone should read:

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

Food Matters: A Guide To Conscious Eating, by Mark Bittman

Here are some books and authors suggested by the panelists that I plan to read:

Food Politics, by Marion Nestle

Wendell Berry

M.F.K. Fisher

Francis Moore Lappe

Thanks to 826 Valencia, all the amazing panelists, Chris the moderator, Leif and Anthony the chefs, and everyone else who made this awesome night happen. MP, any time you want to grab a Big Mac, by which I mean scrape some sea salt off boulders and shoot a wild pig, give me a call.

and this:

ooh, you ask, what are those, mei? and i’m like, ummmm, you know,  some delicious mushroomy shit and some awesome creamy asparagusness bruschetta thingy. okay, i don’t know. but they were mighty tasty. luckily, the creator of most of the dishes, a chef named leif hedendal, not only knows how to cook but knows how to get all arts and craftsy:

ahh. driftless. of course. (wtf?!) and this gorgeous dish? i’ll let him answer that too.

i love all the books on the walls of the tutoring and writing workshop room in the back of 826 valencia. i found ruth reichl’s book tender to the bone while waiting for the seminar to start and read the beginning where she’s trying to prevent her notorious food poisoner mom (aka the Queen of Mold) from serving a potentially botulism-laced dinner to 250 dinner guests. mmmmmm. now i have to go find the book at the library and find out how she managed to avert mass murder, or how she managed to hide the evidence so it didn’t affect her successful culinary career.

leif, your food was fantastic. i hope you’re okay with me posting the photos of your food and also the accidental photo of you below (i think that’s you on the right). i swear i was not stalking you and surreptitiously taking secret photos to hang on my bedroom ceiling. if you’re not cool with me posting this photo i will take it down, but don’t worry, no one will really see you because there is a GINORMOUSLY HUMONGOUS AND AWESOME LOOKING CHICKEN WING IN THE WAY.

according to the comment on mission mission that initially alerted me to the impending deliciousness, a chef named anthony from mission street food made these wings. except it wasn’t three kinds of wings, it was triple-fried chicken wings. fuck yeah. i’m not sure exactly how one triple-fries, but it results in a moist, juicy meat and a dry, intensely crispy but not super greasy skin. no jiggly, oily, mottled chicken skin here. check out this glistening pile of triple awesome:

mmmmmmmm. you can practically see the sprinkle of cayenne or chili powder that gave the skin a subtle spiciness that i didn’t even notice at first until i sat back down and my lips started lightly burning. final photo – i ran into my friend aron, a self-styled eco-gastronome who shares my love for taco trucks, sustainable food discussions, and tasty-ass shit. here he is stalking the plate like a prowling tiger on the savannah, ready to pounce on his prey :

devour that shit aron, it’s fucking delicious. i’ll be back with some actual content tomorrow when i stop hyperventilating from being so close to michael pollan and finally get some oxygen to my brain cells.

looooooooove mei