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 »

Saturday, March 22, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

A good rest for me is nine or ten hours and includes dreams I can remember when I wake up. Freelancing allows me to get this much sleep every few days. Call it my bonus for not having a long commute, or a trade-off for a lack of paid vacation.

I think of my dreams as belonging to groups or categories. For example, one group would be “recurring themes.”

I call another group “pacing” or “speed” dreams — these feature a lot of stuff that happens so quickly that I can’t get a grip on any narrative or story. I usually interpret speed dreams as messages that I’m afraid my life is going too fast (or too slow) and that I need to slow down (or speed up) to feel better.

I have “everyday” dreams where what I am doing and saying is very much like my real life. I have a conversation with my husband or I go get the mail. They reaffirm feelings of satisfaction, that the status quo is pretty good (for now).

Then there are the “metaphors,” which can be whole stories or short bursts of loaded images that I need to dissect when I wake up thinking, “Why on earth would I dream about THAT?” A big proportion of my dreams lately have been metaphors.

This week I dreamed of pies. Two specifically: pumpkin and an Amish-style oatmeal (like pecan pie but with oatmeal instead).

Why pies?

Pumpkin pie is by far my favorite pie. It means safety and comfort to me. And while I have not yet made or even tasted an Amish-style oatmeal pie, I have been reading and thinking about it for a long while, maybe years. I could taste it very clearly in the dream.

I have thought of baking both these pies more than once in recent months. It started back in September. I hosted a Pampered Chef cooking show when my dear friend Christina became a consultant. Because I wanted to try one of Pampered Chef’s well-reviewed stoneware baking dishes and because I have always loved pie, I bought the beautiful Deep Dish Pie Plate in Cranberry.

I LOVE this pie dish. It heats and bakes very evenly — better than any glass or metal pan I own. I have used it many times — for apple crisp, brownies, even a lovely lemon cake. I get better results than I expect with each new trial. But for some reason I have not gotten around to baking a pie in the pie dish.

No pie. This is strange because I am a pie enthusiast. I have a pie background. When I was 17, I spent an entire day picking sour cherries from my grandmother’s two trees, half a day pitting and preparing them, and the following two days baking cherry pies from scratch. I made 19. It was July in Ohio (humid), my mother’s house had no air conditioning, and the oil-based dough that made my favorite crust back then practically melted into each pan. It must have been 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) in the kitchen. The pies were lattice-topped and I crimped the edges pretty, too. No shirking.

Why have I not made pie?

I have meant to, and I certainly have the ingredients for both a pumpkin and an oatmeal pie. In the fall of 2006 I went to Costco and did a serious stock-up on canned pumpkin. And thanks to the oatmeal habit and my love of apple crisp, I keep both steel-cut and olde-fashioned oatmeal on hand as pantry staples.

I have lots of recipes to choose from because I seriously love cookbooks. I flip through them at night to help me relax. In preparation for testing the new pie pan, last fall I bought and read Pie by Ken Haedrich, which I adore for its depth and variety and think of as “The Pie Bible.”

I’ve recently been cooking from the earthy and homespun From Amish and Mennonite Kitchens by Phyllis Pellman Good and Rachel Thomas Pellman, and they have a perfect, simple oatmeal pie on page 220.

There appears to be no other reason for not baking pie besides irrational pie block. I think that I have both a literal and figurative need for pie. I am putting off pie for later when today and every day is a great day for pie.

This is definitely a metaphor dream. I think my pie block may have something to do with a wrong idea. And that wrong idea whispers in my ear: “You don’t have time.” Or: “You should be working.” Maybe even: “You don’t deserve it yet.”

But would baking a pie keep me from doing good work? No, I know it wouldn’t. Would joy contribute energy to the work in front of me, this week and month and year? Oh, yes.

This is why I need that sleep to pay attention to my dreams. Because without them I can mess up for a very long time — by not baking pie or by missing some other vital aspect of life. I never forget work and deadlines and clients and bills. But I do forget to nurture myself, sometimes for months.

I’ve got some correcting to do this weekend. I’ve got to go bake a pie.

Posted in pampered chef, balance, sleep, books, pie, dreams & dreaming, oatmeal habit | 4 Comments »

Thursday, March 20, 2008 by Julie Cancio Harper.

I think I might as well just start where I am. I ate a donut for breakfast today.

This is very un-normal for me. Normal is a long-cooked bowl of steel-cut oats with soy milk and a shot of ground flax seed. Which sounds as appealing as gnawing on branches if it is not what you are accustomed to. But I am. I love it. I crave it, usually.

I didn’t start out that way of course. The oatmeal habit started back in 2000. It was a result of two unlikely forces colliding in my life. First: my dad and step-mom started yet another diet-slash-new-eating-plan-for-life (not uncommon). Second: I was returning to my blissful home office after two treacherous weeks shooting a short film in the desolation that is Cisco, Utah.

Note: No one eats properly on an indie film shoot, even if everyone is trying to. You eat what you can get your hands on when you can get it. Your focus is on trying to continue working without falling over dead. I have never seen so much beef jerky consumed per capita (and by professed vegetarians) in all my life. May the angels save us.

So, strung out from the road, I returned home and phoned all my parents (who live in another state) to report on my safe flight. What news have you, good parents? I ask.

The Word is oatmeal. Oatmeal, my dad reports, will save us from our ills. My dad is not a religious man, per se, but he is delightfully prone to enthusiasms. I get this from him. Enthusiasms come on like fevers. They overwhelm your sense of sight, taste, and smell. You touch nothing, hear nothing else.

I do not generally like food fads or believe in miracle foods. But what I needed at that moment — after all the film food — was a high-fiber enthusiasm. So I took his advice and ate it, every day.

Right away, my life improved.

I’m a driven freelance editor. And in the first few years I worked at home I had trouble remembering to eat. I would wake up every morning, turn on the computer and get crackin’. Until I noticed a few hours in that I had become stupid. And then it was too late to decide what to eat — can’t think, brain broken.

Many, many hours of productive work were lost because I was not smart enough to keep my blood-sugar up. And once you get a decent meal in you, you never fully recover your brain-power that day. You’ve got to start over again tomorrow and . . . it’s pretty darn hard to break the cycle once you’ve started.

The oatmeal mandate solved this. Before turning on the computer each day, I would put on the long-cooking steel-cut oats. By the time they were done, I had realized I was hungry because I could smell their steamy oatmeal invitation wafting into my office from the kitchen. A perfect system.

So then why break a perfect system by eating a donut today?

Because they were on sale. Because they were the lovely olde-fashioned kind that Eric and I love best. Because it is my birthday month. Because I’ve been very good. Because my happiness requires some variety. Because we worked on a film shoot last month and I did not get nearly enough donuts. Because I’m still learning to eat.

All of that is true.

Some days joy is worth a little lost productivity. That is my best reason to start this blog.

Posted in enthusiasms, celebration, balance, miracle foods, brain food, film, oatmeal habit, junk food | 6 Comments »