This can't be the right place to post this....

I forgot this blog even existed. Well, it doesn't really. Until now....?

We were eating dinner tonight, a quite mixed up affair. More on that later. The important thing is that despite being so utterly delicious in every way, it felt All Wrong to me. I finally started to elucidate how I was feeling to Brooks. Not at all new, but gradually becoming clear. I said, "I really believe in the value of simplicity", and off I went. I talked about wishing to obtain perfection of flavors with just a few ingredients. He said, "but this only took you an hour to make."
I ranted - Why don't we really know any one cultural or traditional way of cooking? Not just in our overall diet, but for even one cohesive meal??? One of the things I love about farming is feeling connected with others throughout time and space who have done the same tasks, like carrying a basket of freshly dug roots. But this cooking, though it may be a fusion of delectable flavors, is not natural and was never historically possible until recently. Now, Now that we have global trade, industrial agriculture, the cooking channel, and disposable income, we throw everything together without care for tradition. I said to Brooks, "this is nothing", and he said "no, it's everything." But it feels like a slap in the face to me. I don't know who it is a slap in the face to, but that's what it seems - disrespectful. Of nature, and our ancestors, and the foods themselves. We're lost, with nothing to root our culinary habits. Our parents didn't teach us because their parents didn't teach them.

And then we started talking about alternatives. Perhaps we could recreate entire traditional meals. But how would I follow the recipes, me who can't follow a recipe to save my life? And how would I deal with the fact that we are trying to eat seasonally, grown as much as possible on the farm? And, AND (big and), how would we possibly stay true to this low carb anti-candida diet that we're committed to?
He challenged me anyway. To cooking 2 meals a week, completely traditionally (as much as possible within the above restrictions). That is, of ONE tradition. And not "Italian", either. Regionally researched accuracy... like Sicilian for example. In this season. And then from there, we make do with what we have, buy what we can, and see how it goes. I don't know if this is really worth pursuing or not, but I really feel strongly opposed to what happened tonight.

What happened tonight? I knew I had cabbage in the fridge, and I've had a cold so I wanted soup. I proceeded to look in 2 different Julia Child cookbooks, a German cookbook, a Chinese cookbook, a generic soup cookbook, and then winging something together with complete disregard for any of them. It was great.... sauteed onions, garlic, ginger, and pancetta with thinly sliced cabbage and dry-cured beef, all perfectly cooked in a light stock. On the side we had more fried cured beef, fried leftover corned beef, sauerkraut with caraway, savory nut "pancakes" spiced with the lebanese spice mix zaatar, raw butter, and homemade garlic mayo. It was delicious. And so wrong.

Yeah I know the basic techniques. And I can make healthy food that tastes really really good. I excel at improvisation in the kitchen. But I don't really KNOW what good food is. I mean, I don't know where it came from, and what traditions stuck around for eons because they worked and fed people well. I don't know what it was like to cook all homegrown foods over a fire (and maybe I never will). But I really want to know what it's like to cook, say, a true Moroccan meal. And have it maybe, just maybe, have it end up being similar to what they actually eat in Morocco. That would be some kind of unity.