I write all the time about what a great food town Charleston is. It’s mostly because of the food (but also because of the beach, and yeah, ok, fine, because of our friends, and the beauty of this old city) that I’m so sad to be moving. I’ve been working on a list of all the restaurants (using The Charleston Chef’s Table as a sort of guide) we’ve tried here and all the ones I’ve been meaning to try, and thought I’d make it a post, and perhaps it’s own page on this site. So, if you look up top, there should be a new tab of Charleston Eats where I list most restaurants I’ve heard I should check out, with ones we’ve actually tried checked off. Sometime when I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll write up blurbs about all of them, but for now you just get a list. It’s amazing to me how long it is, how many we’ve tried, and how many we have yet to try. It’s also amazing how many other places aren’t even on the list– this is just a serious food town, and if you like to eat, I recommend coming here for at least a week and trying to eat your way through it.
friday frivolity: sarah shoes
One of my Twitter friends, BootsMC, has a post today about one of her favorite things: pricey heels. Boots is a fellow Arkansan, so she will probably know what I mean when I say I do appreciate going to browse at the Park Plaza Mall Dillards in what my sister and I refer to as the Shoe Museum. I appreciate the look of a ‘spensive heel. I browse for them online and I drool over them in stores. I just don’t happen to own any.
Part of this is the fact that I grew to my current height of a hair shy of 5’8″ in about the sixth grade, years before my peers hit their growth spurts. I spent many gawky years towering over my friends, and as a result, never wanted to wear anything that might make my freakish height all the more freakish. I know people not gifted with height say they hate hearing tall skinny girls talk about how painful their adolescences were, but that was my experience. I was the “walking toothpick” and “Olive Oyl.” So instead of spending my teen years learning to wear heels with grace, I shunned them. And now, as an adult, my gait in a pair of stilettos is best described as “drunken baby giraffe.” It’s not pretty, y’all. Continue reading “friday frivolity: sarah shoes”
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what’s with the food stamp hipster outrage?
A Salon piece called Hipsters on Food Stamps has provoked a lot of outrage, most of it pretty hilarious to me. It seems that people on food stamps just can’t catch a break. First they’re stereotyped as Escalade-driving “Welfare Queens” who have the audacity to buy chips and sodas and other unhealthy food with their government benefits. Now we’re mad that this recession has put young professionals out of work, they’re on food stamps, and they have the gall to buy fresh, organic produce with their benefits? (For a great response, see this piece by an actual “hipster” on food stamps.)
Personally, as someone interested in sustainable food, I’ve been heartened to see increased efforts to get people on food stamps access to healthy produce and other food, including getting farmers’ markets to accept food stamps. A major reason people in poverty have higher rates of obesity is a lack of access to fresh and healthy food in poorer communities. Instead of scoffing at people who buy eggplant with food stamps, we should be glad that they’re eating in a way that is good for themselves (which holds down health costs for everyone) and the planet.
Food stamps, contrary to popular belief, actually put money INTO the economy. People use food stamps to buy food, which puts money in the pockets of store owners and allows them to create jobs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that for every $5 of food-stamp spending, there is $9.20 of total economic activity. In fact, food stamps are a more effective, faster-acting, and direct economic stimulus than tax cuts. The next time you think that, “as a taxpayer,” you’re entitled to judge the food choices of any individual on food stamps, you should remember that they don’t owe you anything, they don’t really cost you anything, and if anything, their benefits are benefiting your community too.
In addition, I often wonder if people who criticize the choices of people on any form of government benefits have ever had to rely on government benefits themselves. I didn’t know much about government benefits until I became unemployed in fall 2008. When I was laid off, I applied for unemployment benefits, and was shocked to realize just how meager my monthly “wage” would be on unemployment. It didn’t even begin to cover COBRA to replace the health insurance I lost along with my job, for example. If I had not been married to someone who remained employed, I would not have been able to afford to house and feed myself. While people may point to a few people who manage to “milk the system,” the vast majority of people on any sort of government benefits truly need them, and are barely squeaking by. Yesterday I saw someone claim that there are Medicaid recipients who drive Escalades and have iPhones. I mentioned this to my husband, who sees many Medicaid patients as a pediatrician, and he laughed at how far-fetched the idea is. Are there some people who may live like that and still draw Medicaid benefits? I’m sure you could find a few. But it’s worth remembering that this is not the average.
I know the current populist rage seems to be pitting “working people” against the entire rest of the country. I just pray that instead of begrudging the benefits of our neighbors who are dealing with hard times, we could think for a minute that we’re lucky we, ourselves, don’t need them right now, and be grateful that such a safety net is there if we need it, because we never know when we might.
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what it’s like to be married to me
Last night I may or may not have delivered a soliloquy on the word “vulva” to my husband while he was trying to read. That’s what it’s like to be married to me. I’ll make you chocolate whiskey pots de creme on a weeknight, but you might have to endure my monologues (aka rants) on occasion. I hope the trade-off in chocolate and other delicious foodstuffs is worth it.
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freedom and independence are not the only American values
My friend Adam posted a great link to his Facebook today. It’s an open letter to the Tea Partiers by John H. Richardson in Esquire. Many of these protesters, opposed to what they call “big government” like to claim that things like health care are part of “big government,” are antithetical to American values, and are perhaps even unconstitutional.
Claims like those make me wonder if perhaps these patriotic protesters somehow missed US history. Taking care of each other, interdependence, and community spirit are founding American values. Most of our early colonies were founded as “commonwealths,” where the good of everyone was considered crucial to the good of the colony. According to the Esquire piece:
Way back in colonial times, Americans spent between “10 and 35 percent of all municipal funds” on what was then called “relief,” according to Walter I. Trattner’s standard textbook on the subject, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. Aid to the poor and sick was the largest single government expense, providing crucial sustenance to the widows and orphans of the Indian wars, the survivors of epidemics, starving immigrants, and a surprising number of abandoned bastard children (during the Revolutionary era, between a third and 50 percent of all first children were illegitimate — take that, nostalgists of family values!).
I’d also add that a democracy is only ever as strong as its citizens. Only people who are free from basic want, secure from preventable disease, protected in the event of catastrophic illness, and ensured a basic level of education and employment are able to be the kind of citizens who can participate fully in a system of representative democracy. Our constitution’s preamble asserts that the purpose of the document and the government it establishes includes a responsibility to “provide for the general welfare.” It is for this reason that our founders, notably John Adams (who is my favorite and for whom I am crusading for a monument in Washington D.C., although that is a subject for another post), were so adamant that public education be a cornerstone of our democracy (which is why I am personally very passionate about the subject of public education and not a huge fan of private or home school, though of course people should have those as choices). I see public health as an extension of that concept. If medicine had been more of an established science at the time of our nation’s founding, I’m sure providing for the public health would have been more explicitly mentioned. (As an aside, I’d encourage any vaccine doubters to see the John Adams miniseries and observe what a miracle early innoculation was for this nation.)
The bottom line is, for all the rugged individual John Wayne-iness of this nation, there’s an equal tradition of people coming together to create communities dedicated to the good of all. We can’t be the shining city on the hill if our image is tarnished by people in this great nation unable to access even basic medical care, with people always at risk of poverty and homelessness if a catastrophic illness should befall them or a loved one.
I sure hope we get a vote on a final health care reform bill this week. Bills have already passed the House and the Senate, and now we just need those two bodies to come together to get something passed for President Obama to sign.
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wholesome like a glass of milk
Recently, in class, I did a good deed. A classmate was sniffling, and, being the always-prepared bus-commuter that I am, I had tissues in my giant Messenger Bag of Doom (my yoga teacher saw it and asked, “is that luggage?”), and I gave her one. After class, thanking me, she asked me my name. When I said, “Sarah,” she said, “I just knew you were a Sarah! You look so wholesome!” After I mentioned this incident on Twitter, somewhat baffled and indignant that I have such an apparently wholesome image, a friend suggested I should be grateful she didn’t say something like, “I just knew you were a Sarah, because you’re so plain and tall!” True. The book Sarah Plain and Tall made my adolescent years somewhat less bearable thanks to the ready taunts available with the title.
I told my husband about the whole wholesome thing, and he didn’t get why it so baffled me. “But you ARE wholesome!” he said. I mean, I guess if you look at one collection of facts, the ones like the fact that I married my first and only boyfriend at age 21, that I’m basically Martha Stewart in the kitchen, or that I grew up in church, graduated cotillion, and was a debutante, well, then, I look pretty darn wholesome. But on the other hand, I’m a feminist environmentalist equality-supporting emergent-theology-loving near-socialist, and to a lot of people, that’s not very wholesome. Focus on the Family would probably not find me very wholesome.
My boss, on the other hand, thinks this whole “wholesome” thing is hilarious. We already had a bit of a ribbing rapport, and he’s now taken to introducing me to people like, “This is Sarah, she’s very wholesome.” Then he can barely contain his chuckles. This morning he told me that my cardigan is very wholesome, but wondered if perhaps, earrings are not wholesome. I said earrings can be wholesome provided one takes Coco Chanel’s famous advice to look in the mirror and remove one accessory before leaving the house. He asked me if I followed that advice, and I thought about it for a second before admitting that while I didn’t take off any accessories this morning, I did swap out a bolder necklace for a more subdued choice. He chuckled and remarked that perhaps I’m not so wholesome after all.
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the kitchen catch-all: a new weekly series on FOOD
While we’re not currently involved in a CSA season, which fueled most of my cooking-related blogging recently, I’m still doing a lot of playing around in the kitchen. I spend a lot of time reading about food, thinking about food, making food, and eating food, and thought it might be fun to do weekly roundups of what I’ve done in the area of food each week. I think I’ll do each post on Sundays, and post them at the beginning of each new week. This week is a short one, as we were out of town for half of it.
Eating In (things I cooked):
- Zucchini Bread. Immediately upon returning home from vacation, I felt the urge to get in my kitchen and make “real food.” Back during the height of the CSA season, I froze shredded zucchini in 3 cup increments to use in this recipe. If you would like to make some zucchini bread for yourself, here’s my mama’s recipe (copied straight off a handwritten piece of notebook paper, just for you):
Mix in large bowl:
- 3 eggs
- 2 c brown sugar
- 3 tsp vanilla
- 1 c veg. oil
To these add:
- 3 c shredded zucchini
- 3 c flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 2 T cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- pinch of salt
- 1 c chopped nuts (I tend to go with walnuts)
Pour batter into two greased and floured loaf pans and bake for 1 hour at 325.
- Beer Bread. I found this recipe via Honest Fare. For any of you afraid baking bread will cost you your hopes and ambitions (sorry, I’m gonna beat that joke to death), this could really not be a simpler way to get homemade bread fast. Because it contains no yeast, there’s no waiting for it to rise. You just throw all the ingredients together, put the batter in a loaf pan, bake 35 minutes, and then you have tasty bread warm from the oven. I think my next attempt will involve less sugar and perhaps a darker beer. My first try was with a Sam Adams Winter brew, and it came out a little sweet and light for my taste, though it was still delicious. I will probably also cook it a bit longer than specified, as it was a little doughy in the middle.
- Chicken Pot Pie. It was a rainy Friday, I wasn’t working, and so, rather than making like a normal person with a craving for pot pie who grabs a Marie Callenders and nukes it, I decided to really go homemade on this thing. This involved roasting an organic, free-range bird, and then following Smitten Kitchen’s adaptation of an Ina Garten recipe. After reading a few comments that were less than stellar, I jazzed mine up with the addition of some thyme, sage, and herbes de provence, and thought this was a truly flavorful, amazing dish. I wasn’t happy with the way my crust turned out, so I chucked it and decided to make it the way my mama always does: with a biscuit crust. Turns out this was rather hip of me, as Bittman wrote about biscuit-topped pot pie this week. Here’s an admission for you: I made Bisquick biscuit for the topping, not the real buttermilk kind. It’s still yummy. I’ll also note that this turned out way more filling than the 4 bowls worth SK says it makes. I filled up a large rectangular casserole and a smaller square one. (I’m not enough of a cook to be able to tell you the measurements of my dishes.)
- Hominy Grill’s Buttermilk Pie. Sunday was Pi Day (3.14, geddit?), so I wanted to bake a pie. Not in the mood to chop a bunch of apples for my favorite Apple Pie with Gruyere Crust, I decided to go with a local favorite. You can check out the recipe here (pdf).
Eating Out (places I ate):
- Bushido. When Food Network’s Man vs. Food came to town, the host took on local Japanese restaurant Bushido’s Spicy Tuna Roll Challenge. You can read more about the challenge and MVF’s visit at the Charleston City Paper. Basically there are 10 levels of spicy tuna hand rolls, with level 5 being a jalapeno, and level 10 being something called the Vietnamese Ghost Pepper. If you eat all ten levels, not necessarily in one visit, you are given a special headband, you get your picture on the wall, and you get free appetizers for life. I am not one to tolerate extreme levels of spice, so I was at the restaurant to cheer on friends taking on the challenge, and to eat delicious sushi. After watching one friend consume level 8, with extreme face redness, sweating, swollen eyes, and even later, some parking lot vomiting, I can say that I am simply not up to the challenge. The sushi was delicious, though.
- Sweatman’s BBQ. South Carolina is a mecca of good BBQ, and there are many choices close to my home worth checking out, including Fiery Ron’s Home Team. However, once I saw Sweatman’s featured on Anthony Bourdain’s South Carolina episode of No Reservations, I knew immediately: “I want to go to there.” (Though I have some issues with that episode, like why he hung out eating oysters and drinking champagne out of mason jars with the Twee Lee Bros. instead of going to the more authentic and local Bowen’s Island, it’s a good ep.) So we recruited friends, drove for an hour into rural SC, and sampled the wonder that is Sweatman’s. They’re only open two days a week, they don’t take cash, and they don’t cook with gas. It’s that simple. Sweatman’s does wood-fired whole hog BBQ, and they do it well. It turns out they also do banana pudding quite well too. Get there early, because otherwise, they can’t guarantee to have ribs or skins (they have several signs to this effect), and you’ll want to try both. In fact you’ll probably want to try everything. After plunking down $9.95 for the all you can eat buffet, one of my companions asked the good-ole-boy cashier what he recommends. “All’ve it,” he said. “Ya paid for all’ve it, didn’tcha?” Indeed. I’m already planning a similar trip sometime soon to Scott’s BBQ in Hemingway.
Food for Thought (worth a read):
- “Ending Africa’s Hunger“, by Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez, and Annie Shattuck, in The Nation. Yeah, I just found the Nation’s food issue from last September. Still, this article hasn’t gone out of date and is worth a read if you’re concerned about global hunger. Money:
Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, suggests, “If the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations wish to extend the hand of fellowship to the African continent, they should move away from strategies that favor monoculture, lead to land grabs and tie local farmers to the shop doors of biotech seed monopolies.”
So, do you like this new weekly post idea? Have any suggestions? Tried anything delicious this week? Let me know!
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vacation, all i ever wanted
Well, Internet, I’m back. Vacation was lovely. Being married to a medical resident can be stressful and grueling, even on the non-resident, and just having some time to hang out and reconnect with my husband was just what I needed. Did you miss me?
We started our vacation in coastal Maryland. It was too cold to enjoy the beach, and the place was a ghost town. The high point was the best Italian meal I’ve ever had. We randomly stumbled upon this place that seemed to reside in a renovated Pizza Hut, a place where they happen to make all their own pasta. Jon ordered a dish with thin layers of pasta, ground veal, mozzarella cheese, and a very delicate tomato sauce. It. was. divine. Seriously. The single best Italian dish I’ve ever had. I had a pasta dish with Italian sausage, and it was almost as good as Jon’s dish. Also enjoyable was the flamboyant owner/manager who was singing solos, exuberantly greeting guests, and giving presentations of the specials with such flair that I wanted to try all of them. Otherwise, being without cable in our normal life, we were actually more than entertained just to be able to watch cable television. ESPN for Jon, marathons of “What Not to Wear” and “NCIS” for me. Here are some highlights from the Maryland portion of the trip: Continue reading “vacation, all i ever wanted”
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eating is a pleasure
So, I was going to write a great big ole political post about the Founding Fathers and the rule of law and the idea of liberty and my disappointment that it looks like Obama is going to cave on trying accused terrorists in the criminal justice system and try them in military tribunals instead, but it’s the day I start my vacation and I just don’t have it in me. So maybe that post will show up sometime after next week, full of quotes from my favorite Founder, John Adams. In the meantime, you get yet another post about food! Because I’m crazy about food! I talk about it all the time! When I told my boss that my main contribution to my trivia team the other night was knowing that “banh mi” is a type of Vietnamese sandwich (thank you for teaching me that, Anthony Bourdain), he said, “Why am I not surprised that you’d know the answer to a food question?”
The trigger for this particular food post is yet another piece from DoubleX. I promise I’m not going to go on yet another rant about baking my own bread while sacrificing my hopes and dreams and ambitions, so bear with me. Before I get to that, though, I have to talk about the Salon post that inspired the DoubleX post which in turn inspired this one. In a piece for Salon, Kim Brooks writes about pregnancy and weight gain. She describes a moment when, post-partum, a stranger asked her when her baby was due, making her feel ashamed to still be carrying “baby weight.” Now, if you ask me, Kim Brooks really shoulda told that nosy asshole off and then written a post about the GALL some people have to comment on women’s bodies or to ever dare to ask the question “when is your baby due?” But instead, Brooks beats herself up for still carrying baby weight 6 months after her baby was born. (If you ask me, it took you 9 months to put it on, cut yourself a break already, lady.) In fact, she makes the audacious claim that mothers aren’t shamed enough for daring to “get fat,” aka, look like they’ve actually grown a human in their bodies, pushed it out of their vaginas, and then lived to tell the tale. All of this is of course, completely insane, and I’d like to point Brooks and anyone thinks like her in the direction of Shapely Prose and the Healthy at Every Size movement.
But what inspired Amanda Marcotte’s DoubleX response to Brooks, and what inspires my post on the subject, was the guilt Brooks heaped upon herself for daring to LIKE FOOD. Marcotte writes: “Brooks shames herself for loving family meals, the smell of baked bread, and the flavor of cheese. I don’t consider that out of control; I consider that being human.” Marcotte, rightly, I believe, points to a culture that tells women they have no right to enjoy eating actual food (hello 80 calorie soups??) which creates monsters:
“The kind of eating that Brooks describes that causes women to put on way more pregnancy weight than recommended doesn’t sound like the eating of people who just love to eat. It sounds like the eating of women who’ve been deprived of the right to enjoy eating for so long they have no discernment at all—sucking down milkshakes, devouring entire pints of ice cream, vacuuming up white grains and pasta like they’ve never really been allowed to eat before. And in a sense, they haven’t. Not without feeling guilty, and having their enjoyment of the food dramatically compromised by that. I’m inclined to think that binge eating isn’t a matter of being a bad girl who likes food too much, but being a woman who hasn’t been allowed to enjoy it and so goes a little nuts when given even the slightest permission.”
I would liken it to my growing up in a teetotaling household and going a bit nuts with the drinking during my first semester in college. Continue reading “eating is a pleasure”
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a brief history of my activism
Today, in class, while discussing the Black Arts movement and the fact that the revolution they hoped for never happened, and the fact that many of them went on to mainstream jobs in academia and renounced black nationalism, my (fabulous) professor told us a story about one of her former students. As an undergrad, this young man had a long ponytail and carried around a copy of Thoreau everywhere he went. He was an idealist, sure the world needed changing and sure this changing had to start with him. He distrusted student government and formed his own organizations. He taught kids to read and organized street cleanups. And then he graduated, and, as you do, had to get a job, which he got, on campus. He still works on campus, and my professor described going out to lunch with him, seeing him wearing a suit and tie for the first time, the ponytail gone, and remarking that he seemed all grown up. He said to her, “You know, I have friends who are going without shoes in solidarity with people who have no shoes, but I’m not sure that’s working. Sometimes you have to put on a tie and go to the meeting.”
In some ways, I think I identify with both the shoeless idealist and the guy in a tie at the meeting. Either way, I think I’ve always been an activist. Continue reading “a brief history of my activism”
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 