On New Scandinavian Cooking, Andreas Viestad discussed cloudberries, and how Norwegians jealously guard the secret locations of cloudberry bushes. He seemed most emphatic about it. His eyebrows took on a life of their own. I’ve been thinking again about the conflict between wild imagination and the frailty of the body. We could plant more, but I’m having trouble vacuuming a whole room. I’d like to teach grade schoolers to grow herbs, but my stamina runs out on the way to the coffee pot. I’ve skipped exercising 10 days out of the last 13 months and feel certain yoga three times a week would significantly improve the condition of my hip, but I need a nap I’m not going to get. Somehow, though, having the ideas seems like enough for the moment. After the holiday madness is over, I’ll have time to ask questions, find programs looking for volunteers and think about the garden. Today, I found a new yoga studio four blocks from my house I might be able to move in and occupy. Depending on the schedule over there, I might not even have to wait. And, as Andreas let slip, cloudberry preserves can be purchased in the States. I’ll never tell you where.

Lots of people don’t think much about the words they choose. How about you: do you think about words or do you just talk? A phrase most people don’t think much about is If I can do it, you can do it. Now, that is shorthand for something longer, bolder and more vulgar like, My parents were mouthbreathing, six-fingered triplets, and if I can do it, you, a person who eats with utensils and ties your own shoes, can do it, too. People misuse this phrase all the time. My favorite misuse of it currently on TV is Marie Osmond, mother of eight and professional entertainer since birth, insisting that if she can drop a pile of pounds, I can too. Frankly, Marie Osmond can do shit all day every day I can’t do, but that’s probably not true of you and me.

If I can dehydrate pears, I believe you can too – not because my parents were related but because I’m just learning how to dehydrate fruit. You can learn it, too. If I can brandy blueberries, I think you can handle it because I can’t follow a recipe to save my life. If I can mix up brown sugar with cinnamon, a pinch of salt, some allspice and nutmeg, I feel sure you’re up to it. Call it a hunch. I don’t even have to have one and an entertaining lisp to know you’ll be inspired to sprinkle this stuff on anything you bake.

So what did I do that you can do, too? Bake something architecturally unlikely and improbably delicious, that’s what. Go ahead, scroll down. I’ll wait right here. Go ahead. Feelings! Nothing more than feelings! Trying to forget my feeling of loooooooooove! Yup, I did that and a few other things, and you can too. Start at the grocery store with a box of phyllo dough, a spritz bottle of oil or I Can’t Believe It’s Stopping My Heart, a filling you make yourself or one you buy. You need pans and parchment paper. For some reason, tart pans are the shittiest things in everyone’s kitchen. Don’t put food on those!

I mean these! Don’t put food directly on these, no matter how beloved the dead relative who gave them to you. How did I know? You didn’t buy your own tart pans. No one does. Someone dies and you get them. Or there’s a garage sale and the garage owner pays you to take them away. I didn’t even know these were mine until Pete told me they came from Dad. Anyway, these pans had nice steep sides and the flutey shape meant nothing to me because I wasn’t going to let food touch it. No touching!

That would be chaos!

Tear off strips of parchment paper to cover the surface of the pan. I was thinking of the parchment as a guide and not as an exact shape, then I cut the edges down to about half an inch above the edge of the form. You can cut this or leave it long. That doesn’t really matter. I was warbling along to Side 2 of Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy and the sustained notes made me want curves and ruffles. Perhaps it was the extra oxygen.

When you’re working with phyllo dough, the hard part is the easy part. Have everything you’re going to work with laid out and ready. Heat your oven. Turn off your phone. Discourage your helpful pets! Open the phyllo dough, lay it out flat and cover it with a barely moist towel. Ready? Go! Gently peel a layer of dough, lay it where you want it and spritz with oil. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Now and then, sprinkle a little of your cinnamon sugar here and there. It’s not engineering and you don’t have to be precise. Peel, lay, spritz. Try to keep the towel on the unused dough so it doesn’t dry out.

There’s a muddled instruction I hear on cooking shows over and over, but variations of it turn up on all kinds of how-to shows, probably because people don’t know what they’re saying. You’ve heard it. Alton Brown says, Don’t over-mix. Giada says, Not too much. Even Jacques Pepin is not beyond saying, Just enough! This tells you nothing and makes you nervous. What they should be saying is Mix until such and such happens, then stop, or Add the ingredient until you see or feel a desired effect, because then you’d learn something. No sense adding peril to a peril-free situation. In this case, I piled on sheets of dough until I decided plenty was in the form and that it was pretty. Don’t be nervous. There’s no right or wrong. You’re making something fun and pretty. Don’t lose your nerve!

I made two crusts in the two pans, filled them with fruit and baked them at 350 degrees for about 20 or 25 minutes, at which point the crust was golden brown. You should bake stuff to golden brown. If you get to black, you’ve gone too far. See? You learned something. Then I laid out phyllo dough in the same pattern, only flat and as close to even as possible. Phyllo dough grabs wet phyllo dough, so where it touches it sticks. When I was satisfied that I had a thick layer of stacked phyllo to work with, I put down a thick line of fruit filling down the center of this rectangle and folded like a burrito. You’ve folded a burrito, right? Then you can make strudel.

When the strudel came out of the oven we kept our paws off it long enough for it to cool to a temperature slightly hotter than lava. I cut pieces. I mixed homemade yogurt with a dollop of ginger marmalade and tossed in some allspice. At this exact moment, Pete’s sister needed to talk to him, so the strudel cooled, exactly as you see it, for another seven or eight minutes. Then we ate it like we were raised by wolves – wolves with poor table manners.

I made a third kind of thingy by layering phyllo into a loaf pan. When it came right down to it, putting it together was no more difficult than messing with PlayDoh. Nobody taught me to do this. I simply decided I could, figured out the spray goo trick and everything else was just playing. You should give this a try because it was so freaking easy even I could do it. See?

After the shopping, I forgot to mention a crucial step. You cannot miss it! Tie up your hair with the silliest, girliest, most hilarious hair tie. If you’re bald or have short hair, you can now get hair nets with rhinestones and swim caps with flowers. Could we look one another in the eye again if you missed a chance to synchronized swim in your kitchen? I fear not, you know what I mean?

Tonight, Pete reclined with his feet up and eyes closed while I tried out making compound butter without him. I had questions.

Tata: What if the butter’s too cold to combine smoothly?
Pete: Turn up the speed.

A minute later.

Tata: The mixer and I have had a disagreement.
Pete: What’s all down the front of you?
Tata: Dill and lime juice. I smell tangy and floral!

A minute later.

Tata: Get up and come taste the compound butter!
Pete: I don’t like dill.
Tata: Is it balanced or what?
Pete: It is! Want me to wrap it up?
Tata: Sure. I don’t know whether to wash the bowl or scrape it and moisturize.

Cosmetic issues aside, the butter is refreshing and I’m shocked. I thought it would be harder to do but it just isn’t. Plus: since everyone else in the whole world seems to know this already, you’ve stuck zillions of wildly exciting recipes all over the intertoobz. Clever you! I can’t wait to sample your handiwork.

Pete and I live under towering oaks, which means we’re also up to our knees in drifting leaves.

Pete: We’re gonna blow the leaves to the driveway and you’ll push them into the backyard.
Tata: So…there’s nothing for me to do until you’re done with the leaf blower?
Pete: Not really, because I have two. Would I hog all the fun?

For two hours, we blew leaves all over the place, though it seemed much longer because “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant” was stuck on the mental jukebox and I fucking hate Billy Joel. I was hoping for “Ghostbusters” but not such luck. Anyway, we had a blast tossing a giant pile of leaves into the leaf shredder and dumping piles of mulch around our trees for the winter. Hooray! Before we went in for the afternoon, I cut a daunting pile of fresh herbs, then we fell down and took short naps, during which I cursed Bill Joel’s ancestors.

Many moons ago, I fell in love with the idea of making compound butters, but lacked the nerve to try it. Pete tossed the cleaned and stemmed herbs into the food processor, and two pounds of butter into the stand mixer; he combined the butter, herbs, some ground pepper and white wine and took it for a spin. We tasted it and opted for more wine and ground pepper. Pete wrapped three separate portions in parchment paper (though we could just as easily have glopped it into Gladware), labeled it and shoved it into the freezer.

I had absolutely no idea it was that easy to make. No idea. Pete says for decades he’s put all kinds of things like sun dried tomatoes, shallots and spices into compound butters. Tomorrow night, I want to try making compound butter with tomatoes I dried in the dehydrator and herbs from the backyard. Suddenly, I see what I might find at the farmers market in a new light.

And now I’m much too tired to come up with a punchline.

The other day, an old friend was early to a meeting and sat down in my cubicle to chat. We talked about his son, now in a special program at Fort Dix. It’s a miracle the boy survived childhood, so knowing his future opens before him is special indeed. We talked about how a mutual friend tried in vain to teach me to use a sewing machine, about Miss Sasha’s headstrong toddler, about my experiments in jarring and canning. I mentioned Dad had left a dehydrator without instructions and early this summer, storage became a real issue when everything I dried turned blue and grew fur. Gene actually pointed at me and laughed.

Gene: What color fur?
Tata: Blue. Duh! So I bought a food laminator contraption, which is driving me nuts. I steam greens to freeze them but even drops of water bollix the thing.
Gene: Freeze the greens first, then use the gadget.
Tata: …No water into the machine. Thanks, Gene!

After he left, I suddenly realized I should have known all along he’d know what to do. He always learns something five years before it crosses my field of vision. He could tell my what he’s studying now so I might pencil that into my datebook.

So. Gene has answers to my questions. I am going to make a tremendous nuisance of myself.

I get stage fright. Then I get even with me.

A funny thing happened on the way to jarring tomatillo sauce: I succeeded. Yeah, I don’t know how that happened. Except it was all pretty simple: Sunday, I bought a metric assload of tomatillos, peeled off the sticky papery peely thing and tossed them into bowls of water. After the tomatillos quit being sticky, I quartered them and dropped them into a giant stockpot, where tomatillos turned into tart green goo. Today, I re-heated the goo, burr-whisked it, pushed it through a strainer to remove seeds, which sounds labor intensive but that’s silly because I’m very lazy. Anyway, jars boiled, then I filled them with tasty goo and boiled them some more. Now they are sauce!

And, crap, I totally ran circles around the person who wasn’t sure she could do it.

To continue Wednesday’s mile-wide rampage: Lou Dobbs can fucking bite me.

On Monday night, Lou Dobbs did a segment on how “Meatless Monday” is being adopted by the Baltimore city school district in an effort to cut costs and get children to eat healthier food. The segment showed schoolchildren eating vegetarian chili and grilled cheese sandwiches, and CNN reported that they found no parents who objected to the policy.

The news network also noted opposition to the one-day-a-week of vegetarian food by the American Meat Institute – a trade group that represents meat processors and packers with obvious financial interests in meat consumption. Without pointing out factors that helped fuel the initiative, such as childhood obesity and a national school budget crisis, CNN reported that the AMI is concerned that “students are being served up an unhealthy dose of indoctrination.” The institute’s Janet Reilly claims the policy was depriving students and parents of “choice.”

After watching the segment, Dobbs described this as “a real political storm in the making.” Um. Really?

Yesterday, I explained to the dumb fucker writing in the New York Times, for crying out loud, that his article made no sense. He insisted it did. I told him I’d sent that article to ten smart, interesting people, asking, “What is this guy’s point?” Most of them wrote back to say they had no idea. The writer then said his OpEd was intended to be tongue in cheek, his facts were correct and the editor did a slash job on his prose so his point was garbled. I told him that part of basic composition is to learn the difference between what you think you wrote and what you actually wrote. On the page. See? We then told each other to fuck off in colorful terms. It was brilliant, really. When he tries, he really can compose a sentence!

Part of our problem when we discuss poverty, nutrition, obesity, health care, insurance, reform of any kind, politics – anything, really – is that we are working in the medium of language. We do not agree what words mean. Good example: I said he is a bad writer whose work will hurt people. He thought I was saying I was a crazy person who found his email address and pressed the send button. It’s a mistake anyone could make. It’s not entirely his fault. We were using words and a lot of people, even smart people, don’t know what words mean or what they’re saying.

Example: if someone says to me, “We need to get more people on insurance and the problem will be solved” I hear ordinary words married to deceptive ideas, producing an argument that doesn’t hold water. It’s pretty simple if you’re actually listening. Let’s count off the problems:

* No one needs insurance. Everyone needs health care.
* The agent that needs more people on insurance is the insurance industry.
* The problem, in the case of that speaker, is not how does America solve its health care problem; no, the problem is how does the insurance industry increase its profits.
* The pronoun We is used to create a tribal identity that includes the speaker and the listener where no bond may exist, certainly not a shared need.
* That people who are not insurance industry flacks repeat statements like this is a function of successful advertising and public relations.

Statements like the above quoted signal that I am talking to a person who is not thinking about the topic anymore. His thoughts have been codified for him by an outside source. This person has gone to sleep. He probably does not know that; it is a waste of time to talk with him. That’s a lot to learn from one sentence. Imagine if we listened all the time?

Back to Lou Dobbs, who can still fucking bite me: presenting the American Meat Institute as an aggrieved party is HILARIOUS. Asking if anyone in this country talks straight anymore is a spittake waiting to happen. And tossing off that little lie that most children don’t get enough protein is a deft touch. Most Americans get more protein than their bodies need – so says the American Heart Association, but maybe Lou thinks the AHA is a bunch of pinko slackers. Babycenter.com’s research nutritionist Debby Demory-Luce says if your child refuses meat altogether, don’t have a cow.

The only time I worry about protein intake is when a child is on a restrictive vegan diet without dairy or eggs. If your child follows such a diet, either by your choice or because of his own food whims, you may want to consult with a registered dietitian who can help you devise ways to make sure your child gets enough protein from alternate sources.

The truth is that most Americans get twice as much protein as they need.

There’s nothing even the tiniest bit controversial about going meatless one day a week. There ought to be a very heated discussion, however, on the subject of Lou Dobbs.

I have all the emotional maturity of an eleven-year-old. Ew:

Human Pee With Ash Is a Natural Fertilizer, Study Says

That sound I just made? Heard only by dolphins. What’s this, then?

The scientists fertilized several groups of greenhouse tomato plants: one with human urine and birch ash, another with commercial mineral fertilizer, and another with just urine.

Plants fertilized with urine and ash yielded nearly four times more tomatoes than nonfertilized plants.

This compared favorably with commercial mineral fertilizers, which produced roughly five times as much fruit as nonfertilized plants.

To the team’s surprise, urine alone produced a slightly greater yield than those of urine and ash together.

But the urine-and-ash plants became larger than the other groups, and they bore tomatoes with significantly higher levels of the nutrient magnesium, which is key for bone, muscle, and heart health, among other biochemical functions.

Recently, I took a gardening class. That endeavor wasn’t entirely successful in that it took me an hour to figure out what we were talking about and about a minute to realize the topic would never apply to my gardening. After that, there remained 59 minutes of listening for useful bits of information and sucking down as much coffee as my kidneys would allow. Gardening instruction is often abstruse and assumes that the student knows both nothing and everything the teacher knows, so I was surprised to learn something simple and useful: when planting nightshades like tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, put a spoonful of epsom salt into the hole first and the plant will develop better roots. Good roots might’ve come in handy this year. Even so, no one at any point in this gardening class suggested fertilizing with pee. I bet there’s a pretty specific way it’s done so no one gets cooties. Speaking of cooties, let’s just get this out of the way:

A group of 20 taste testers ranked tomatoes grown by all methods as equally tasty.

Breathing through the mouth…two…three…four…Okay, then. Final specifics:

Urine can be collected from eco-friendly, urine-diverting toilets. Or farmers could just collect their pee in cans.

The researchers estimate a single person could supply enough urine to fertilize roughly 6,300 tomato plants a year—yielding some 2.4 tons of tomatoes.

The farmer would just need to give plants ash three days or more after applying urine.

Once again: this summary assumes both that the reader knows nothing and everything the farmer knows. Perhaps you’ve had conversations like these:

You: My stomach is upset and tooting like a trombone.
Helpful Friend: Mint will help that.
You: Mint what? How much? What kind? Applied where?

You: How did you grow such enormous pumpkins?
Enthusiast: I milk-fed them. It’s old school.
You: You watered pumpkins with milk?
Enthusiast: No. Yes. Sort of.

You: My house is so haunted my cats look like someone ironed them standing up.
Serious Person: Get some sage.
You: Am I decorating or cooking?

Helpful hint: do not braise your cats if furniture is rearranging itself. My point here is not that people do not know what they’re talking about; it’s that people teach and explain so poorly in general that where fertilizing my food with human waste is concerned I might miss my cue to be nauseous, and in no way is nausea a better late than never scenario.

Turns out, peeing outside is not just old news, it’s some folks’ new habit and a money-saving proposition. There’s even a Facebook page for PeeOutside.org. One commenter pees into a bucket of sawdust. One says add a teaspoon of baking soda. How the outdoor animals would react if the garden beds of suburban neighborhoods smelled like human pee? I have to give this some thought. The idea of accidentally tipping over a bucket of Pete’s pee in the basement fills me with dread. On the other hand, who am I to argue with people who walk it like they talk it?

Well, that’s a good question too because Pete keeps talking about putting a composting toilet into a downstairs closet, but he’s kidding. I think he’s kidding. He may already be planning for our well-fertilized future.

Let’s pretend we’re in our footie pajamas!

A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, is “designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices.”

The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including — to the surprise of many nutritionists — sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops.

“These are horrible choices,” said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health.

…from his secret underground fort made of couch cushions. Kapow! Kapow!

Dr. [Eileen] Kennedy, [president of the Smart Choices board and fairy princess] who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

…from her turret on the Barbie Dream Castle and Unicorn Sanctuary, no backsies!

“Froot Loops is an excellent source of many essential vitamins and minerals and it is also a good source of fiber with only 12 grams of sugar,” said Celeste A. Clark, senior vice president of global nutrition for Kellogg’s, which makes Froot Loops. “You cannot judge the nutritional merits of a food product based on one ingredient.”

Dr. Clark, who is a member of the Smart Choices board, said that the program’s standard for sugar in cereals was consistent with federal dietary guidelines that say that “small amounts of sugar” added to nutrient-dense foods like breakfast cereals can make them taste better. That, in theory, will encourage people to eat more of them, which would increase the nutrients in their diet.

…from her perch on the edge of the top bunk where her head is wedged between the guard spindles, and she is so gonna tell!

Michael R. Taylor, a senior F.D.A. adviser, said the agency was concerned that sugar-laden cereals and high-fat foods would bear a label that tells consumers they were nutritionally superior.

“What we don’t want to do is have front-of-package information that in any way is based on cherry-picking the good and not disclosing adequately the components of a product that may be less good,” Mr. Taylor said.

He said the agency would consider the possibility of creating a standardized nutrition label for the front of packages.

…from his ZOT! ZOT! ZOT! laboratory behind the bookcase, where he knows you’ve been eating his pet microbes again, loser!

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, was part of a panel that helped devise the Smart Choices nutritional criteria, until he quit last September. He said the panel was dominated by members of the food industry, which skewed its decisions.

“It was paid for by industry and when industry put down its foot and said this is what we’re doing, that was it, end of story,” he said. Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Clark, who were both on the panel, said industry members had not controlled the results.

…

Despite federal guidelines favoring whole grains, the criteria allow breads made with no whole grains to get the seal if they have added nutrients.

“You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria,” Mr. Jacobson said.

…from his big two-wheeler in the driveway but not all the way in the street because Daddy said, you jerk!

Nutritionists questioned other foods given the Smart Choices label. The program gives the seal to both regular and light mayonnaise, which could lead consumers to think they are both equally healthy. It also allows frozen meals and packaged sandwiches to have up to 600 milligrams of sodium, a quarter of the recommended daily maximum intake.

“The object of this is to make highly processed foods appear as healthful as unprocessed foods, which they are not,” said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University.

Mom, why is my Ariel underwear all bunchy?

h/t: Wintle.