Wednesday, April 30, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

I did not start cooking with dried beans until I moved to Los Angeles, and for the last two years I’ve been trying to make up for lost time. Until I cooked dried beans, I never knew beans could have so much flavor, intrigue and nuance.

Yes, I said beans have intrigue and nuance. They do. There are so many varieties of colorful, provocative legumes. They are satisfying. And they’ve become a staple in my diet, because I’ve discovered that not only can I eat them all the time without getting bored, but I crave them. I need more beans.

With the disrupted plumbing issues of the past two weeks, I’ve fallen out of the one-soup-per-week practice and Eric and I have suffered for it. I’m getting back into the swing now, and I’ve made a direct beeline for the beans. I want 3-bean chili.

Step one is today, and it so easy: prepare the beans for cooking tomorrow.

1. Choose the beans. When I make 3-bean chili, the bean assortment varies. Today, we’re using black beans, Great Northern beans (white), and pintos. They’re so beautiful!

2. Measure the beans. I like to have one variety that’s more prevalent (2 cups) than the other two “supporting beans” (1 cup each). The “star beans” today are black beans, so I measured out 2 cups of them, and they’re being supported by 1 cup each of white beans and pintos.

3. Sort through the beans to remove any debris like tiny rocks, then placed them in a colander in the sink. Rinse them with cold running water from the tap, then place them in a bowl. The bowl should be twice the size of the amount of dried beans.

4. Fill the bowl to the top with water, seal tightly so the water doesn’t spill out, and set the bowl in the fridge so the beans soak up the water overnight.

Why Bother Soaking Dried Beans Before Cooking?

An overnight soaking allows the beans to absorb water before they’re cooked, which results in a shorter cooking time. Plus, I feel like I’m getting away with something if I can have the same delicious chili and also keep the cost of gas for cooking as low as possible. Why pay more for the same great food?

Posted in soup, los angeles, recipes, cooking, love, enthusiasms, beans, brain food | 2 Comments »

Saturday, April 26, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

Well, yesterday was our first full day with water! Hallelujah!

There are still holes in the ceiling with sawdust and wood chips everywhere. But I refuse to complain about that. The water is on!

And because it’s Saturday and there is currently no plumbing emergency, there are no plumbers on-site today and we are experiencing the blessed quiet. What relief!

My schedule is not very compatible with plumbers. I usually wake up at about 10 a.m. to start my freelance workday. (Don’t hate me — I don’t have kids yet, I know this won’t last.) For two weeks now I’ve been forcing myself to stay asleep in spite of all the racket that usually begins at 7 a.m.

Thursday morning was a bit more than I could take with a smile and an even temper, though. I was rousted from my bed just before 8 a.m. so that plumbers could saw holes in my bedroom ceiling and route pipes through. It would not have been so horrible if we had been warned ahead of time. But no one ever mentioned they’d need access to our bedroom, let alone at a time of day when I’m very actively using it.

I finally got to sleep in today. It gives me the feeling of life getting back on track, at least a little.

On the bright side, we were cheered by our neighbors across the courtyard this week. Mr. & Mrs. B brought us lunch one day: spinach pie with corn and potato kugel. Bless them twice! All I had to do was heat it in the oven in the aluminum foil it came in. I’ve been pushing hard to keep up with all of my freelance work in spite of the loud distractions and their special lunch delivery was a miracle to me.

The B’s are retired and since Eric and I work from home, we often get the chance to chat with them about what’s going on. And sometimes Mrs. B will drop by with some kitchen talk.

It’s nice to have good neighbors like this and it is one of the things I was looking for when we moved to Los Angeles — a neighborhood with people who interact with one another.

My grandparents had this type of neighborhood, and I practically grew up at their house. And ever since I finished college and moved out into the world, I have wanted to live in a place with good neighbors.

The B’s celebrated Passover last week and they attended a dinner at Mrs. B’s sister’s house. Mrs. B volunteered to bring the Potato Kugel. But she was missing one important thing: she does not have a food processor or other electric grinder to pulverize the potatoes.

Since I’m the only other cook, she was not surprised to find that out of 11 other apartments in the complex, I’m the only person with the appliance she needed.

So, she scheduled me — a month in advance! — to come over with my Kitchenaid stand mixer with food grinding attachments to grind all her potatoes and onions for the kugel. That was on Friday, April 18. It was a delight to help out and it was even better to get to sample the results. Simply delicious — and I will make it myself soon.

I was fortunate to get a copy of the recipe:

Mrs. B’s Potato Kugel

10 large baking potatoes
2 onions
6 eggs
2/3 cup matzo meal
3/4 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon baking powder

1. Peel and slice the potatoes to fit into your food grinder chute (or, if you’re lucky, a 14-cup food processor — it’s faster). Process potatoes until ground. If they’re very watery, drain out the water using a strainer.

2. Peel and slice the onion into wedges to fit into your food grinder chute (or food processor). Process onions until ground.

3. Beat eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add all remaining ingredients, including potatoes and onions and mix well.

4. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees (Fahrenheit).

5. Liberally grease a 9″ x 13″ casserole or pan with vegetable oil and preheat the empty pan in the oven.

6. Once the pan is hot, spoon the potato kugel mixture into the hot pan. Bake a 400 degrees (Fahrenheit) for one hour until firm.

Posted in los angeles, balance, making do, recipes, cooking, attitudes, pie, sleep, love, freelance, miracle foods | 4 Comments »

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

In the midst of the plumbing craziness, I’ve received an equal and opposite jolt! Today Lori Cates Hand, who blogs at Publishing Careers, has directed her readers to Learning To Eat — and with glowing praise. Thank you, Lori!

In her post, Lori mentions that Learning To Eat is mostly a food blog, and I would agree. But food comes in many forms. Finding your True Work and doing it with all your might brings a very wholesome sense of joy, just like preparing and eating a homecooked meal. It fills you up and makes you hungry for more.

Working from home integrates my work life and home life into one giant 24/7 occupation 365 days a year. And at times it will look on the page to be about two parts food to one part publishing. As we dig into the busy season in the coming months, the balance will shift towards publishing shop talk. And then back again towards food toward the end of the year.

This is the annual cycle of my life as a freelancer. And the cycle of learning to find work, do work, get paid for the work, pay the bills, buy the groceries, keep myself motivated and working and growing forward — this is what I mean by Learning To Eat. I’m only just starting and the scope will unfold as I blog along.

I thank you all for reading and for your comments. And I especially thank Lori as one of my earliest inspirations and supporters for sharing my freelance life through this blog.

Posted in balance, blogs & blogging, publishing, attitudes, editing, love, energy, freelance, celebration | 4 Comments »

Monday, April 21, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

Last week was brutal.

Starting last Monday, April 14, the very old plumbing in our apartment building decided to give up. My next-door neighbor got the worst of it, including a flooded kitchen and living room, ruined carpeting, and a jackhammer busting through the concrete slab underneath the carpet so the plumbers could repair the main water line. This is still going on, so we will not have water fully restored until the end of this week. If more complications arise, it may be longer.

Eric and I have been making do as best we can, with some interesting results. For the first few days, we were disappointed and a bit cranky, but we’ve now gotten into a rhythm and having limited access to water is not so horrible. Our neighboring building across the courtyard still has water, so we’ve been using my giant stockpot to draw water from their laundry room sink. That allows us to flush and wash enough to get by.

It occurred to me yesterday how much water we must be saving. I was able to “shower” (standing in the tub and using the help of a big plastic cup) with about one half of the filled stockpot. I’m sure I use a lot more than that taking a traditional shower, and now it seems like showering the regular way is a lot more of a luxury than I realized.

While the water issue is an inconvenience, the noise of plumbers at work is much more disruptive. They’re cutting through the building walls, sawing pipes into proper lengths, and don’t forget the jackhammering through concrete. Most of the noisy work is done while the other tenants are at their jobs for the day, but our peace is doubly wrecked by this plumbing breakdown because we work from home. To make a business call without deafening, pounding interruptions, we have to take a long walk or get in the car.

Anyway, in the midst of this, I somehow managed to cook one decent dinner. On Saturday I made a homemade chicken pie. I did take photos and I have a little story about it and making do, but I’ll have to reserve it for when my nerves are a little less jangled.

In the meantime, please take a look at Cooking to Ground: Daily Acts as Sacred. It’s an article I recently wrote for AmericanMetaphysics.org, which was posted to the site on Sunday, April 20.

Posted in balance, making do, los angeles, cooking, dealings w/feelings, energy | 5 Comments »

Wednesday, April 16, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

I finally made that pie I dreamed of. And it was better in real life.

It’s the pan. I know it’s the pan. I’ve baked dozens and dozens of pies and this is the first time I have ever inspected the crust and the word “perfect” left my lips in a whisper. It was evenly golden brown from the crusty fluted edge to the center of the bottom.

No dark spots, and no vaguely overbaked too-dark aftertaste. Also, no soggy part there in the middle because you took it out early worried that the edge would char.

And I did not shield it while it was in the oven — neither with one of those aluminum shields nor with foil. I didn’t need to because the stoneware pan baked the most fantastically even crust. I’m not going back. Not ever.

The photo above is of the first pumpkin pie in the Pampered Chef Stoneware Deep Dish Pie Plate in Cranberry. I made a second one this past Sunday when I had out-of-town guests stop over for dinner. It was as perfect as the first. Yes, I know that may be difficult to believe, but you’ll either have to trust me or get a hold of one of these pans and test it yourself. (If you need a PC consultant, I can refer you to mine. Just drop me a line.)

There has got to be a lot more pie now. Not only because I loved the fantastic results from the first two pumpkin pies. But also because baking pies this past week reminded me how easy it is to make something that improves my life by leaps and bounds.

I know there are people who fear pie baking because the crust makes them nervous. I think pie baking has a lot to do with confidence. And if you’re not confident from the start when you’ve made your first few pies, you need to keep baking more pies until you earn that confidence. It will come. And in the end you too will get fantastic results.

I’m fortunate to have learned pie baking at the elbow of two fine ladies – my maternal grandmother and my step-mother – and neither of them had any pie fear. Both made the crust by hand by cutting vegetable shortening into flour with a pastry blender or with a fork. Both got delicious results.

I’ve done it that way and I’m nostalgic about the method because it’s what I first learned. But, in my adulthood, I’ve been fortunate to receive a KitchenAid stand mixer as a gift and I recently have used it to blend the fat into the flour. It is very fast and thorough, which is especially good when you’ve got more on your to-do list today than “bake pie.”

My current pie pastry recipe contains all butter (plus flour, salt and water) and comes from Rosie’s Bakery All-Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed No-Holds-Barred Baking Book by Judy Rosenberg (see the recipe on page 175 for Basic Pie Crust 1). I have also enjoyed using a crust based on vegetable oil, which I learned in my home economics class in the seventh grade. I think that there are lots of good crusts out there and I don’t think any are inherently better than others since taste and preferences are very personal.

But I tend to go back to the all-butter crust time and again because (1) it’s butter, and butter tastes better to me and (2) I have such excellent results rolling out this crust. I place the refrigerated disk of dough on waxed paper or plastic wrap, and I roll it out with my rolling pin using no additional flour. As long as it stays reasonably cold, it does not stick to the pin. If you need to work very slowly, just slide it gently back into the fridge when it starts to stick. Slide your hand under the waxed paper or plastic wrap and the gently turn it dough-side-down into the pie plate. Then gently peel away the paper or plastic and guide the dough to fill all corners of the plate. Fancy up the crust with your favorite design — I prefer crimping by hand.

For the pumpkin filling, I did a search through my recent favorite cookbooks. I did not want to trudge up to the store just to buy the evaporated milk that is an ingredient in many pumpkin pie recipes. Instead, I found a lovely alternative in From Amish and Mennonite Kitchens by Phyllis Pellman Good and Rachel Thomas Pellman.

Their recipe on page 212 contains the usual ingredients with the addition of one tablespoon flour (as a thickener, I think), one tablespoon molasses or King Syrup and one tablespoon of browned butter. Where they called for one half cup each of milk and cream, I substituted one cup of whole milk. I spiced it with ground ginger and cinnamon and left out the nutmeg because I’m running low and needed it for my secret ingredient in mashed potatoes.

This is a fantastic pumpkin custard — so delicious, soft and smooth. Once again, I’m not going back to the old way with the canned milk. I like this better. It is simpler because I often have milk in the fridge but have to buy evaporated milk just for pumpkin pie. What for? No reason, it turns out. It seems like lots of interesting things happen when I make do instead of buying ingredients just because they’re listed in a recipe.

I had been putting off pie baking for months, as I mentioned in my post about Pie Dreams, and as I slid the first pumpkin pie into the oven, I thought, shame on me! This was not some sort of difficult project to dread and delay. It was easy and fun. But I let myself get too busy and forget.

It’s amazing how finally doing something you’ve had on your mind opens the world up to you. I need to start baking pie all the time; weekly, at least, because I need to solidify my relationship with it. So I’m adding that to the cooking plan. My last pie was this past Sunday, so I need to get another one in by the end of the weekend. I’m going to go for the other dream pie: Amish-style oatmeal pie. Then we’ll see where the wind takes me.

Posted in change your mind, energy, attitudes, nostalgia, cooking, love, pampered chef, celebration, pie, dreams & dreaming, books, enthusiasms | 7 Comments »

Friday, April 11, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

The Los Angeles Times sponsors a food blog called Daily Dish, which I read and enjoy (and have now added to the blogroll).

There is an unfortunate error in their post dated April 9: “Chicken and waffle feud”

What they claim is a case of copyright infringement is actually a trademark dispute, as reported in an Associated Press article available from the LA Daily News. See “Roscoe’s sues Rosscoe’s over trademark rights” for accurate yet brief coverage.

I’ve been thinking about blogs lately, and the responsibility I have to readers as a blogger. Bloggers are publishers in the sense that we put print (and other content like audio and video) into the universe. We don’t need much more than access to the Internet and basic word processing skills to do it. We each decide on our own editorial standards. We look up to our mentors and try to outshine our competitors, in a sibling rivalry sort of way.

This is a pretty loose type of writing, so there is a wide range of content and quality out here in the blogosphere. I accept that errors happen. Sometimes readers give a shout when something’s amiss, and bless them for reminding us to get it right because we’re not singing to ourselves alone out here.

But having the Daily Dish, which is staffed by professionals at the LA Times, post such a serious error is a bummer. I take my responsibility for accuracy and fact-checking seriously, even as a beginner. If it was a misspelling or a punctuation error, I would think “must be a typo” and leave it without comment. But there is a pretty extreme difference between copyright and trademark. And anyone working in any kind of publishing should either know the difference or make sure to pass on the newswire transmission word-for-word.

The U.S. Copyright Office defines copyright as “a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. Code) to the authors of ‘original works of authorship,’ including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works.” Many creative works qualify for copyright protection, but business names do not. They are protected by trademark.

According to attorney Lloyd J. Jassin who provides “Trademark Basics” at Copylaw.com, “trademark law protects names, titles, short phrases and other symbols that distinguish the source of one product (or service) from another” and affect business and marketing efforts. The “other symbols” mentioned by Jassin include business logos, such as the waffle background and chicken foreground made famous by the original Roscoe’s in Los Angeles.

See “Copyrights vs. Trademarks: Related but Different” at Copylaw.com and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for more information.

In the lawsuit involving two houses of chicken and waffles, the famous Roscoe’s in Los Angeles objects to another restaurant’s similar name and logo because those marks of trade make it difficult for the businesses to be distinguished from one another. The suggestion is that Rosscoe’s deliberately means to deprive Roscoe’s of sales. This is especially important now that the famous Roscoe’s is opening a restaurant in the Chicago area where Rosscoe’s currently does business.

So, for the record and as a public service dedicated to accuracy in the blogosphere, I present this information.

And now that I have, I’m pretty much starving for chicken and waffles. Where the heck did I put that waffle iron?

Posted in blogs & blogging, publishing, copyright & permissions, los angeles, attitudes, trademark, editing | 4 Comments »

Tuesday, April 8, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

I’ve been a freelance permissions editor for eight years now, except for four months last year when I worked full-time as a permissions editor for SAGE Publications, Inc. When I decided to return to freelancing, one of several factors affecting that decision was food.

With the long commute and the rigid schedule required by office work, I could not seem to get any cooking done. It was a high-stress position, and I used each weekend to recuperate from the past week and get ready for the next.

Somehow I could not scrounge up any creative energy or joy to plan new meals, restock the pantry, and cook to fill the freezer. I hoped that over time it would get easier, but months passed and it didn’t. Eric and I ate through our stockpile of frozen, pre-made and portioned foods and then turned to take-out in desperation.

I live in Los Angeles, and everyone here seems to eat out as the solution to finding food on a busy schedule. But I have trouble feeling satisfied with take-out. When it becomes a habit, it tends to make me feel dull and listless. I can never answer the question, “What do you want to eat?” when handed a fistful of take-out menus.

I guess I get confounded by take-out because what I want is usually found in a home kitchen. I want variety and convenience. I want high-quality, inexpensive, home-cooked food. I want to eat an incredible soup and sandwich combo ten minutes from now for under $1. I want an organic omelet with eggs laid by happy, vegetarian chickens living la vida free-range.

Again: variety, convenience, high-quality, inexpensive. I want all of it together, and it’s not really out there. It’s in here, in my own kitchen.

Perhaps most people don’t find cooking at home to be convenient. You’ve got to have the right ingredients on hand and they need time and attention, and then don’t forget all those dirty dishes at the end.

Sure, that’s true. But I have a basic pantry of dry goods. I keep a small array of veggies on hand (onions, peppers, carrots, celery, potatoes, cabbage), and since I’m cooking every day it’s easy to eat things before they expire. I keep some meat in the freezer. And I strategically selected this apartment because it’s walking distance to three major grocery stores: Trader Joe’s, Ralphs, and Gelson’s. There is also a small produce market nearby. If I really want something else, I just need to put on my walking shoes.

The time and attention that go into cooking are an important draw to get me away from this computer screen, which I would otherwise gaze into all hours of the day. And the dish washing doesn’t bother me. I do most of it in the morning while I clear the sleep from my mind, plan my important to-dos for the day, and get that breakfast oatmeal on the burner.

I don’t have a rigid cooking plan because I don’t respond well to rigid anything. I would only cause a mess by planning a week full of square meals because I would start with good intentions Sunday and by Tuesday be angry that I was stuck with all these square meals. It doesn’t matter that I chose them myself before shopping carefully on Sunday — by Tuesday I would feel penned in, not liberated. Sometimes you have to anticipate your failings and plan to succeed around them.

My cooking plan instead involves loose cooking practices. I started with a small one, the oatmeal habit (see my first post, Donut Consequences, for the origin story). That is my breakfast default. If we have a box of celebratory donuts on the counter, then I can choose to go ahead and eat one. Or, if it’s the weekend, I may splurge and make a special cowboy breakfast of fried eggs, hash browns, beans, toast and coffee. But if I wake up and have no clue what I want for breakfast, I put on the oatmeal. It keeps my brain from starving on days where I need to stay focused on work (all of them, really).

Next, I rely heavily on soups. I make a giant vat of some new soup each week, store four or six portions (where a portion equals one meal for two adults in my household) in the freezer for later use, and then serve the remainder of the soup with different accompaniments for lunch all week. Some soups are vegan, some are vegetarian, some have meat or meat stock.

There are a few favorites that I keep on hand almost always. I have a standard all-vegetable soup based on cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and kale in a tomato broth. It’s vegan, incidentally, and homey and delicious. I’ve fiddled with the recipe, but it started as Southern Vegetable Soup from Victor-Antoine D’Avila-Latourrette’s Twelve Months of Monastery Soups.

I made it yesterday, in fact. It goes with toasted cheese one day, then fresh hot cornbread the next, then whole-wheat crackers, then a fried egg on toast. On day five, Eric and I discuss: “Should we go back to toasted cheese or make more cornbread? We haven’t made bean and cheese quesadillas yet . . . ooooh, that’s it!” It stays interesting this way. And honestly, I love that soup so much that I could eat it alone every day for a very long time without tiring of it. It is homemade and it is mine.

I love to keep a pureed pinto bean soup that also doubles as an excellent dip when boiled down with shredded cheddar melted into it. I made this one last week. It starts out vegan (before you add dairy to garnish it) and is fantastic paired 50/50 in a soup bowl with cooked brown rice. Garnish with salsa, scallions, cilantro, a squeeze of lime, sour cream, yogurt, cheddar, whatever you have.

Again, I was inspired by a cookbook and then altered the outcome according to what I had on hand. See page 53 of Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen for the original Pinto Bean Soup. I tend to add carrots, celery and green peppers where the recipe suggests only onions, garlic and chiles. I like adding more veggies to this one especially because they add complexity to the flavor when I use the soup as a dip, which I do often. It also converts quickly to refried beans (remember cowboy breakfast?) or a filling for quesadillas and tacos.

As I prepare for a busy spring and summer I will stay diligent, cooking and freezing portions of a new soup each week. I want to cook far enough ahead so that when I am hungry I can heat up something great without needing any more brain cells than boiling requires. As I mentioned before, by the time I’m hungry my IQ has dropped considerably. And I need to eat, get smart, and get back to work!

In a way, the freezer becomes a kind of freelancer security as the schedule fills up. It keeps me eating well when I’m under deadline pressure. And hitting those deadlines keeps the grocery money flowing in. When the system is working, it’s all one complete circle. And when it’s not — like last summer — I feel lost. I seem happiest when my life, work, and universe revolve around one small apartment kitchen and the tiny, cluttered desk parked near it.

Food and work are the center of my life. They feed each other. And they feed me.

Posted in cooking, editing, soup, los angeles, balance, copyright & permissions, freelance, energy, enthusiasms, brain food, beans, books, love, oatmeal habit | 4 Comments »