Fashion after 50

Skinny jeans are everywhere, in bright colors, like fistfuls of pick-up-sticks with legs in them. Cheery. Fun. Great with boots and bulky sweaters.

I want some.

But my mother’s voice sounds a warning: “teenage grandmother,” she’d say, rolling her eyes when we’d pass a woman (and there were lots of these in Florida) dressed in clothes my mother thought would be far more appropriate on a girl one quarter the woman’s age.

I am not my mother.

So I take a look at my favorite shop (the one with “thrift” in the name), and find two pairs of skinny jeans in what I think are my size. One pair is blue denim, the other black – disappointing, as what I really want are the crayon-colored legs I see in the magazines, but I don’t want to go on a full-out shopping spree, so I settle.

These are pretty ridiculous pants. I have to point my toes to get into them, then pull them up as if they are tights. You could tear a fingernail doing this—even a short one, like mine. Then I have to inch them up my legs. This reminds me of the girls in high school (not me) who would lie down on the dressing room floor to zip up pants they had no business wearing. I was so disdainful of that sort of thing. Fashion. Puh.

I begin to wonder if these skinny jeans are worth the trouble, and whether they’ll look like “they’re painted on,” another of mom’s favorite put-downs, once I have them on over my, well, healthy thighs. Yes, me and Beyonce. I have to tug to get them over my rear end. And then there’s a little adjusting of curves before I’m entirely comfortable.

But once they’re on: they look good. They feel fine. I like them. My boots go over them without looking like I’m trying too hard, with jeans tucked into my boots, as if to say, “look at my boots!” I check for muffin tops: sigh of relief. It is a little dicey if I squat down to pick something up – these particular skinny jeans could be higher-waisted and that would be good – but other than that, they’re great.

The second pair doesn’t fare as well. They’re also skin-tight, in a good way, but only up to the knees. Then there’s a lot of extra fabric and a funny gap at the top in the back. Plus, the fabric feels chintzy. They remind me of the jeans your mother wants you to buy – usually Wrangler, as I recall – that are just not cool at all, but you can’t explain how they are uncool. Something about the stitching, or the cut, something invisible, only to be felt.

Still, I have one pair of skinny jeans. I feel like I’m 20 again.

Mom, that’s not a teenager. Plus, I actually own a pair or Wranglers. And I like those, too.

 

Grandma Jean's coleslaw

I came home tonight with no particular plan for dinner, other than what I could dream up in the car on the way back from dance class. I decided on my old stand-by, grilled cheese and tomato. But since I was out of salad greens, I had to be creative if I wanted something besides carrot sticks on the side. I had to make due.

Turns out I am good at this, probably the result of frequently avoiding the grocery store: if I can make something work from what I already have in the pantry, I will.

Tonight’s side veggie came from an old piece of red cabbage and a carrot. That’s really about it. I was going to shred the vegetables and then improvise a dressing, maybe throw some mayonnaise and lemon together and call it coleslaw, but then I thought of the Southern cookbook Ann gave me a few years ago – I’d just baked cornbread from it, and I figured it would have a good coleslaw recipe as well.

The book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, is by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, and though they contribute to it at least equally, mining their southern childhoods and subsequent journeys into all things culinary, it’s the only cookbook I have by Edna Lewis, and I think of it as hers.

According to the New York Times, Miss Lewis (as she was known) was the first to elevate southern cooking  beyond its “knee-slapping, cornpone image.” She was born in Freetown, Virginia, the granddaughter of a freed slave, and wound up bringing her kitchen traditions to New York society through restaurants and cookbooks. She became the doyenne of southern cooking, widely respected and admired by top chefs and glitterati. She died at age 89, in 2006.

I love this book. It really is a team effort; Peacock, it turns out, was so close to Lewis that he lived with and cared for her in her final years, and they were widely known (again, according to the Times) as “the odd couple of southern cooking” – she, an elderly, African American widow and he, a young, white, gay chef. The coleslaw recipe is his, developed when he was chef for the governor of Georgia in the 1980s, cooking for countless political barbeques. I know this because the story is included in the book: The bits before the recipes are at least as good as the recipes themselves. In addition to the provenance of the coleslaw, the explanations and stories turned me from disdain over lard, to wondering where I can buy some; and convinced me that I should make the homemade baking powder, to avoid that occasional metallic taste in my muffins and biscuits when I use the store-bought variety.

The recipes here are solid. I can vouch especially for the lemon chess pie and the biscuits, I am charmed by recipes like “cat’s tongues” cookies, red-eye gravy and chow chow, and I want to bake my way through nearly an entire chapter on cakes.

Tonight I found another reason to love this book: coleslaw. This one involves a cooked dressing, just like my Grandma Jean’s. Hers was finely shredded, and so is Peacock’s (though I have to admit, mine strayed far from the actual recipe, and I just shredded it coarsely since I was hungry and didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it). The dressing is heavy on the vinegar, too, a trait that puts me right back in the kitchen at Bixley Heath, the street in Lynbrook, New York, where my grandmother served my family Sunday dinners when I was small.

The recipe is simple, really: equal parts vinegar and sugar, boiled together for 3 minutes with a little salt; to this you add some Dijon mustard and half the amount of oil as vinegar, then the dressing gets added to the vegetables – Peacock calls for cucumbers with the cabbage, but I used carrot to stretch what little cabbage I had (and I had no cucumbers). There’s also a little cream and sour cream to finish the dish.

I think of Grandma Jean’s coleslaw with “cold cuts,” a favorite short cut for lunch or a casual dinner at her house. It also makes me think of her potato salad, which we called “German potato salad,” though I’m not sure why. She was actually Scottish and Irish.

As such, she would probably find it pretty funny that I now think of this pair of southern cooks as her compadres in the kitchen.  I love how cooking unites all kinds of people. Maybe she and Miss Lewis have found one another in some sort of culinary afterlife.

Thanks, Ann, for this book. As you can see, it’s a winner in more ways than one.

 

Photo is by John T. Hill, and ran on the cover of Lewis' book, The Taste of Country Cooking.

 

The return of the crockpot

 Since the prospect of someone (like this fine gal to the left) greeting me at my own front door with a martini and the smell of dinner cooking is slim to none, at least in the foreseeable future, I’ve discovered the next best thing: the old crock pot.

Really.

I unearthed this from my basement yesterday when I had to run off to yoga class, but the beef stew wasn’t finished cooking. I couldn’t leave the burner on to finish the stew while I was away, but I knew it needed more time to simmer. So I (literally) dusted off the crockpot that’s been sitting in the basement for eight years, slopped the unfinished stew into it, turned the dial to “high,” threw a lid on it and left.

 

I wasn’t sure the pot actually worked – so I did wait around for long enough to be sure it didn’t explode and cause a fire, and that it did heat up and not sit there, broken, on the counter, with beef stew cooling inside it.

But all systems seemed to be in working order. And when I came home from yoga class, I opened the door and voila! The sumptuous smell of dinner cooking greeted me (albeit without the martini). The stew was bubbling away, and it turned out to be delicious: tender beef chunks, sweet carrots, tender potatoes, all flavored with garden herbs and tomatoes and onions cooked so they melt in your mouth.

Now I’m going to google around and try to find other ways to use this wondrous tool I’ve resurrected. I’m hoping it will work for black bean chili, or maybe a lentil-based Indian stew. Are there revised crockpot cookery books out there that update an old trend, the way books about canning and knitting made home-making hip and cool again? I’ll find out. Or maybe write one myself.

Yoga class beef stew

Yes, it’s probably not very yoga to eat animals, but this was free-range, antibiotic-free, hopefully well-treated beef. And I’m grateful I could buy it for that undeniable red-meat craving I cannot seem to shake.

Approx one pound stew beef (it’s the cheapest cut in the case!)

Olive oil for the pot
1 large onion
3 or 4 carrots, chopped
6 or 7 small potatoes, peeled and chopped
A handful of fresh rosemary (I actually used a 7-inch sprig that had been drying on the countertop), chopped
A handful of fresh sage (again, this was sort of drying out on the countertop), chopped
1 can chopped tomatoes
Water
Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse and pat dry the beef. Heat olive oil in a soup pot. Add beef, brown on all sides, turning each piece with tongs, as needed. Add onion, cook until onion begins to soften, stirring occasionally. Add the rest of the veggies and herbs, give it a stir and let cook up to five minutes. Add the tomatoes and enough water to almost cover. Bring to a boil.

    At this point you could either
1) skip yoga class and keep cooking the stew for a couple of hours -- either on top of the stove or in the oven, with a lid, at about 300 -- or
2) cook it for as long as you can, then change into yoga clothes, dump the stew into the crockpot, and leave it for about two hours more.  
3) Third option is to go ahead and bring it to a boil, then transfer it to the crock pot and follow the instructions that come with the pot -- or look it up on a website that is more thorough in the crockpot category than mine. I like this one, as it has veggie options as well as meat.

For the martini, you're on your own.