Brown bag or Chop't?

The difference between my leafy, close-to-urban-suburban home (plain old “suburban” sounds too Desperate Housewives, we like to think we’re way more hip and artsy), and bustling, busy D.C. gooses me every time I ride into the city. It is the contrast between ambling dog-walkers and purposefully clicking high heels on pavement; between the idyll laughter of children playing in a garden and the rumble of a city bus squeezing by the crosswalk.

I love to straddle these two worlds, ramping up to the city’s pace in the morning, settling into a steady office groove during the day, then easing back home in the evening, feeling the pressure of relentless activity fall away under the canopy of oaks and maples. It is not exactly a schizophrenic enterprise, but the two facets of my life do seem distinct.

At lunchtime, though, I tend to mix it up and bring Takoma Park to my city office building – in a brown paper bag.

This week it was leftover grilled veggies sandwiched in fresh Farmer’s Market bread smeared with goat cheese—a taste of my backyard grill and Takoma Park’s Sunday market on a plate. Another day it was pasta with roasted eggplant, which reminded me of the little dinner Clara and I had with her friend the night before, when I first served the dish. I especially like bringing salads harvested from the garden, and always hope someone in the office kitchen asks me what’s for lunch so I can boast that I grew the greens myself.

Once in a while, though, I join the throngs of going-out-to-lunch folks and buy. My favorite place to go is Chop’t. This custom-order salad spot is a study in contrasts, too: the food is healthy, clean, and delicious, much like what I aspire to make in my own kitchen. But the city-influenced pace is so fast I can barely keep up.

Chop’t reminds me of the New York deli's where I have to rehearse what I want to order before someone barks at me to speak up and I lose my turn, or, worse, someone rolls their eyes at me and pegs me as a slow country bumpkin. Chop’t isn’t quite so intimidating, but the pace is still breathless. Last time I was there, the more experienced customer next to me helped me out, interpreting what my “chopper” was asking me, since I could barely hear him over the din of other customers, and prompting me to move along to the registers when it was time to pay up. This made me feel way more middle-aged than usual, but also grateful for quick young brains that can pull me along into the swiftly-moving traffic of a fast-food restaurant line like this.

About Chop’t: fabulous salads, as good as the ones we make at home and sometimes better. Some locally sourced ingredients. Some organic. “Naturally raised” meats (could use more of the organic, locally-raised items, please!) Nothing is pre-chopped, and you never get that weird chemically taste that comes with some bagged or restaurant salads (what is that? Do they spray it with some preservative or something? You go for a bite of what you think will be super good and fresh and it tastes like it’s been sprayed with chlorine, blech)

Anyway, the Chop't deal is much like Chipotle: you go to the line and tell the folks working furiously fast behind the counter what you want, chosen from the array of brilliantly colored fresh veggies and other ingredients set neatly in bins before you. I especially like the selection of greens: romaine, mesclun, arugula, spinach or iceberg.

If you’re making your own salad, you can choose four add-ons. At home we call these “sinkers,” as they sink to the bottom of the salad bowl (thanks Joe Fairbank). They include things like carrots, beets, bell peppers, tomatoes, green peas, snow peas – it’s a long list, and then there are “premium” add-ons like Applegate Farm salami, smoked tofu, wild planet tuna (sustainably caught), and six kinds of cheeses. And there are 32 dressings. If it’s all overwhelming (and it was for me) you can go with an established combo like the Grilled Asian, with spinach, oranges, carrots, almonds and snow peas, or the Cobb, with grilled chicken, avocado and bacon.

Once you’ve chosen, they throw all the ingredients into a recycled bowl and pass it to the choppers, who dump it all out again onto a cutting board and go at it with a bow-shaped knife, chop-chop-chop. Then the salad goes back into a big stainless steel bowl, gets dressed, tossed, returned to your takeaway bowl and they whisk you to the register to pay.

I love the results. So much, in fact, that I’m sure I’ll visit enough to get accustomed to the mad pace – and eventually I’ll be the one helping a newbie through the line. Unless I’m in the office having a mid-day visit with the much more laid back Takoma Park, imported via brown paper bag.

Coffee break

It’s two o’clock and my favorite coffee shop is full.

I must be in sync with the urban afternoon call for café time. I like this notion. Because in many ways, I am out of sync, I am “other” in this hip-and-cool find of a place.

For one thing, every other boy here reminds me of my son—especially the 20-something sitting at the bar, raking his fingers through long, tangled hair as he reads the Post. Maybe he’s just now decided not to let the hair go to dreadlocks, after all. He’s wearing shoes with no socks, pants rolled at the ankle, and though his look is perhaps a bit more studied than Tyler’s is, he gives a haphazard impression that is attractive and endearing.

At a nearby table, a delicately featured girl with a buzz cut reminds me of my daughter Clara, whose hair is undergoing radical change this year, from long to short, red to blond to purple and pink. The coffee shop girl is talking with a friend, but other tables are singletons, and all about the laptops. I feel old-fashioned, with my journal and my newspaper (and the 25 years or so I have on just about everyone) but being different seems to be the thing here so in a way I fit in as well.

And even if I didn’t, I love this place. Not only for the beautiful people (and I mean that in a creative way, not an LA way) but for the general vibe. Much of this is due to industrial-but-intentional, off-the-cuff décor, another study in unstudied style. There’s exposed brick that gives way to drywall that is chipping at the top to expose more brick. And cinderblock. Maybe intentional, maybe just disrepair. The space is long and narrow, and from where I sit, at the end of the counter looking out, that element is magnified by a dark rectangle of dropped ceiling that mirrors the service counter’s length. Framed photographs dot the uneven walls—a red Banksy-like stencil, a dock on a lake, three Buddhist statues.

Behind the counter, three skinny young guys are in perpetual motion, in shorts and torn tee-shirts, frothing milk and tamping down espresso grounds. The one who serves me is especially friendly: when I order cake with my cappucino, he says, “yeah, bring it on,” as if this is the best decision I’ve made all day.

It very possibly is.

Costco Moments

I have avoided Costco for many years, put off by the crass commercialism and over-consumption of a place where everything comes in gargantuan quantities (do I REALLY need four 36-ounce jars of cinnamon toasted almonds? Or eight 22-ounce cowboy steaks? What cowboy is going to eat 22 ounces of steak at a sitting, anyway?)

But.

There are some good things about this shrine of bargain prices. Like, buy in bulk, save much money. For large families – and yes, small ones too – this can be smart and keep folks afloat during tough times. If you have room to store 16 rolls of toilet paper at a time.

And I just discovered Costco has eyeglasses at deep discounts. Cool ones. So we headed over recently, and chose a pair for Joseph. They look fabulous – and cost about a quarter of what he’d seen elsewhere.

Then we moseyed around the store, thinking we wouldn’t get much but, ha ha! Of course we did. Even me, the cynic.

Get this: they have organic foods! I got a double-size clam shell of Earthbound organic mixed greens for $4.99. Half that amount costs a dollar more where I shop! Joseph and I split the container, as all that lettuce would go bad if it were just me and Clara eating it (or just Joseph).

I also got several cartons of Pacific Crest organic tomato-roasted red pepper soup, and Amy’s organic lentil soup. I got orange juice. And underwear. I got organic peanut butter. And socks. And shrimp. (But don’t buy the shrimp, they were not only from Vietnam (oh so far away and inefficient to transport here) and farm-raised, they tasted old, so disappointing.)

But I loved the Mayorga stand – the guy was super friendly and the Cubano coffee was outstanding. And the man demonstrating the super-duper, change-your-life blender was a stitch, he just needed a TV screen around him to complete the late night commercial picture. “Soup in minutes! Smoothies at the press of a button! Even a man can do it,” he said, “Here, you, sir, go ahead and push this button,” and Joseph grinned and complied. Voila! Grapes, berries, apples, mashed into a milkshake sans milk. Delish! We didn’t buy the miracle device (for $300-plus) but wow, were we impressed!

The best part – another surprise – was the lunch counter. A set of big (everything is big at Costco) photos set high on the wall above a service counter shows various fast food-type choices – the photos are so big, you can see them from the lines at the registers and make your choice while you’re waiting to be checked out. Among the possibilities: hot dogs, burrito-looking things, and pizza. I went for the Italian sausage. And Joseph ordered a hand-dipped ice cream bar.

Italian sausage in hand, I waited and waited as the server went back to get that ice cream, thinking wow, she must be reaching deep into that freezer where the ice is starting to bury drippy ice cream sandwiches, this’ll be a freezer-burned disaster. Why would Joseph order such a thing? Maybe it was his Costco moment. Then the server came out with something on a Styrofoam plate. And I said out loud (to the chagrin of the people around me who were all politely keeping to themselves) “it’s on a plate!” “Yes,” she smiled, as if I were an idiot, of course it’s on a plate. “You just dipped it!” “Yes,” she smiled again.

Right at Costco. A freshly dipped ice cream bar, still glistening with liquid chocolate, and covered with real, roasted, fresh almonds. Yuh-UM!

And we didn't have to buy it in bulk.

Bone With a Hole

Winter brings on a craving for stews. Meaty stews. All vegan experimentation aside, I do like a rich, weighty piece of meat every once in a while, and there’s nothing like the smell of a slow-cooked pot of meat and vegetables to make the house seem cozy, homey, and the perfect place to be on a windy winter-like day like today.

In keeping with my proclivity for naturally raised, grass fed meats, the stew I made recently was from local, grass-fed bison. I bought it from a bundled up young woman at the Gunpowder Bison and Trading stand at the Takoma Park Farmers Market, where the farmers were sporting bright red cheeks in the wintery wind on Sunday, and using those mittens that fold over fingerless gloves, to give you alternating warmth and enough agility to handle coins and bills from their customers. Farmers Market gloves.

Instead of the chunks of bison she was selling for $10 a pound, the woman behind the folding table guided me instead toward the cheaper stew option: $1.50 a piece for chunks of bone with some meat still clinging to them. These were called “osso bucco,” which I thought was a fancy dish. It is, kind of. Here’s the definition from my food encyclopedia (one of my favorite books ever, The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques L. Rolland and Carl Sherman): “braised shank, usually veal [not this time!] with a rich tomato-and-onion sauce, originally from Milan. Italian for “bone with a hole,” from the Latin os, meaning “bone.”

So this was definitely “bone with a hole.” But how much meat was really on those bones? The farmer first suggested they’d make a great stock, then assured me if I bought six of them, it would be the equivalent amount of meat to the package of chunks, so I decided to give them a try. I plunked down $8 for 6 packages frozen like rocks. I brought them home and left them on the counter (well away from where the dog could reach them!), then realized I wouldn’t have time for the slow-cooked stew I wanted to make, so I put them in the frig until the next day.

I’d looked for a good beef stew recipe, but not very thoroughly. The one in Jamie Oliver’s book, for Jool’s favorite beef stew, became a loose model for me: he cooks it for 3 to 4 hours in the oven, and I took my timing cue from him. This also allowed me to leave the stew in the oven while I went to dance class (probably not the best idea, if you asked the fire department, maybe I’ll do the crock pot next time).

The girl at the market recommended dredging the meat in flour, then browning before cooking. I liked this idea, it seemed like it would make the whole enterprise more substantial, so I followed that advice but added salt, pepper and thyme to the flour. Jamie Oliver uses cubed squash and Jerusalem artichokes, but I didn’t want to take the time to peel the hard-skinned acorn squash I have and I didn’t have any Jerusalem artichokes, so I went with the traditional carrots, onions and potatoes, hoping they’d be sufficiently flavored by the end of 3 hours in the oven. And they were, the carrots brilliant orange and sweet, the potatoes—also from the farmer’s market—becoming little pillows of buttery flavor. I also threw in whole, peeled cloves of garlic – apparently I have a reputation among Clara’s school friends for throwing whole garlics into my roasted veggies (and giving her leftovers for lunch), so I figured I’d continue the trend and use whole cloves in the stew. I was glad I did: they became soft little bursts of flavor in the finished dish.

Bison is leaner than beef so I was apprehensive about it getting dried out. Not to worry. I also thought the absence of red wine in the broth would make it less hearty – again, I needn’t have worried. The only possible problem with this dish was that my Dutch often ALMOST didn’t hold it, since some of the bones were so big. But it all fit in, and I had a feast when I got home from dance class.

Ginny's Bison Stew
6 osso buco bison bones
about 2/3 cup flour seasoned with 1/4 teaspoon thyme, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper
2 onions, chopped
4 carrots, chopped and sliced (peel 'em)
2 potatoes, chopped (no need to peel 'em)
thyme to taste
sage to taste
5 cloves garlic, peeled but not chopped
1 quart plus 1 cup vegetable broth

Dredge meat in flour mixture and brown lightly in olive oil heated in crock pot. Remove meat, saute onions in the same pot. Add vegetables, meat, broth and herbs and bring to a boil. Cover and put in preheated 300 degree oven. Cook 3 to 4 hours, until meat is falling off the bone.

Hot Breakfast

I know it’s cliche, but I love a bowl of steaming oatmeal on a cold morning. I am not talking about Quaker Oats instant oatmeal packets, which carry a thin essence of what a good, sturdy bowl of oats should be (along with a few unwanted extras, like sugar and guar gum—though to give credit where credit is due, Quaker also offers organic options with no additives at all). What I like is homemade oatmeal, complete with loads of chunky fresh fruits and nuts, done up in my favorite little bowl and served with a scalding hot cup of tea.

My favorite is ginger and pear oatmeal, but I’ll also go for apple and raisin, or plums, or frozen blueberries or raspberries. Any fruit, really. Yogurt is good on top, cream is better (though I’m still going without dairy, so it’s hemp milk or soy yogurt these days). And nuts: for crunch, for protein, for rich depth and flavor. I like toasted pecans the best, but walnuts are good too – whatever’s around. Sweeten it with honey or maple syrup – or, as I discovered recently, a bit of apple cider will give you sweetness and a blast of autumn, straight from the farmer’s market. This reminds me of college, when one of my friends ate raw oats with apple cider on them to avoid having to start the fire in the wood cookstove at his house (remember that, Chuck Mecho?). It wasn’t too bad – chewy and flavorful. But I like cooked better.

A great bowl of oatmeal doesn’t have to be a production: it’s as easy to make your own as it is to rip open a packet of (overpackaged) premade stuff and zap it up in the microwave. Don’t bother with instant oats – just go for the regular, rolled ones. They hold up better and stay a bit chewy, instead of turning to complete mush. You can get them from Quaker (in those great cylindrical boxes that, after they were empty, became toy drums when our kids were toddlers), but I buy mine in bulk at the Food Co-op.

This is so simple you probably don’t need a recipe, but here’s how I make my favorite

Ginger Pear Oatmeal

Pour some oats in a bowl, add good shake of cinnamon, a pinch of salt and some diced up ginger (maybe a tablespoon. I love this stuff, and it’s great for digestion). Add water to a half inch or so above the oats, and zap in the microwave for 2 minutes (more if all the water isn’t absorbed). Or, if you’re in a mood (which strikes me occasionally) that dictates avoiding the mysterious who-knows-what-it-might-do-to-our-bodies microwave, simmer the mixture in a small pan on the stove until it’s the consistency you like. It only takes a few minutes more – just be sure to stir it up or it’ll stick to the bottom of the pan.
When the oats are finished cooking, add cut up pear, maple syrup or apple cider, and toasted pecans. Top it with (optional) cream or yogurt.
Yum.

Spinning

When the kids were small, and dentists were new to them, I decided I’d reject the old dreaded trip to the dentist routine and use spin to make it more appealing. As someone who cringes when approached with sharp tools near my mouth, this was no small feat. But I knew other people who liked the feeling of clean teeth, who didn’t mind so much going to the dentist. Maybe my kids could be like that.

The result? They never clamored to go to the dentist, but they didn’t protest, either, and they never bit him – as one of their young friends did once. I’m not sure their lack of dread was due to anything I did. You never know, really, whether our children do something good (or bad) because of us parents, in spite of us, or just because that’s who they are and it has nothing to do with us. But. If I did have any influence, I’d credit a small turn of phrase I intentionally used each time we headed off for our check-ups.

Instead of “having” to go to the dentist, we “got to” go to the dentist. It helped that our dentist, Michael Bernstein, was kind of a goofy guy who joked around with them and let them choose new toothbrushes at the end of each visit (which, when you’re that young, seems like a big treat). But starting the anticipated trip out as if it were a fun adventure, that might include a treat afterward, couldn’t have hurt.

The best thing about this verbal trick is that it now works with other things, and I can actually trick myself. Tricky, no? The other night, for example. I went out with a friend for a glass of wine. Anticipating that I’d be cutting off the evening early because Clara needed help studying her vocabulary words for school, I began to think about “having to” drill Clara with vocab flash cards. But my new habit caught me, and instead I thought, I’m “getting to” do vocabulary. Which is really closer to the truth, anyway. I love words. I love learning new ones. I love sharing them with my daughter. And the way we do vocabulary flashcards, with dramatic exaggerations of pronunciations and facial expressions meant to give gigantic, give-away hints (Dessicated. Corruption. Calumnious.) often turns into a hilarious session for both of us.

This trick works to varying degrees, and requires different amounts of stretching. For example, now I “get to” sign off the blog and pay bills – not so appealing (though phrasing it this way makes me more likely to feel grateful that I have enough money to pay them all). I also “get to” go back to work assignments – depending on which ones, that’s a mixed blessing.

Switching the Soundtrack Around

When I was a small girl, my sisters and I took turns having “sleepovers” at Grandma Jean’s house. This was a treat, when we’d get pampered and bathed in one-on-one attention. Literally bathed – Grandma Jean had a big, deep tub with bubble bath and bath oil beads. Her bathroom smelled like Camay soap, and she had a mirrored tray crowded with fancy perfume bottles in exotic shapes, some of them with puffy atomizers we could squeeze for a spritz of scent. Sometimes our grandmother took us to the beauty parlor, where we got “nailish,” – nail polish – and all the old ladies would coo over how cute we were, and give us sloppy lipstick kisses.

I was the youngest of the four girls, and while spending the night at my grandmother’s was a treat, it was also a little scary to be so far from my own house. To make me feel more at home when bedtime came around, Grandma Jean would busy herself outside my bedroom door with noisy activities – I don’t remember what, but it might have involved clattering dishes as she washed them, or listening to the radio. She was trying to simulate the comforting sounds of a household full of family – that background noise that provides the soundtrack to so many young lives.

It’s like hearing your parents talking in the front seat of the car, while you doze in the back. Or like listening to adults clink glasses and laugh downstairs at a party, when you’re already tucked into your bed. Or hearing your older sisters giggle and chat in the cockpit of the boat while you rock gently in your bunk below. You might not understand exactly what’s being said, or even what’s going on, but there’s a certain quality to those muted voices that makes you feel safe and easy.

Over the recent Thanksgiving holiday, I remembered those voices when I heard my own kids rattling around the house, gathered together with friends home from college. I’d be reading in the living room, and hear their laughter and conversation while they made cupcakes in the kitchen. Or I’d be making dinner, and hear them singing together, then playing the piano, then talking two rooms away. It was that same soundtrack of muted conversation and activity that I didn’t quite understand when I was small—this time with younger voices.

It was the sound of home.