Cooking With Time

About that bread starter on my counter: Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated (apologies to Mark Twain). Turns out that sitting overnight on the counter is the equivalent of Miracle Max’s remarkable bellows. The starter/sponge isn’t exactly thriving, but it’s got a little spark—not enough punch to make bread, but enough to use it like sourdough starter and make a batch of sourdough pancakes for breakfast.

I got the recipe online at a site called Cowboy Showcase (it’s amazing what you find when you Google), along with a good description of how to make sourdough starter from scratch. I used whole-wheat pastry flour but otherwise changed nothing in the recipe. The cakes rose nicely in the skillet (the maiden voyage for my new Calphalon-knockoff skillet), and they weren’t very sweet—they would have gone well with a touch of syrup, except I couldn’t find any without a protracted search of the fridge. I didn’t even have confectioner’s sugar to dust on top, so sprinkled the warm pancakes with a pinch of turbinado sugar crystals. They didn’t match the heights of pancake perfection, but considering that they’re essentially the product of a salvage operation, they were pretty tasty when fresh from the skillet.

Messing around with the starter/sponge has reminded me of the challenge of capturing wild yeast from the air—what could be more local than a loaf of bread risen thanks to native Spokane yeast on the wind? Once I get my bread-baking chops back in shape, maybe I’ll give that a try. The Cowboy Showcase site explains four different methods of making starter from nothing more than flour and liquid—and time.

I think maybe that’s what’s drawing me to the idea: Spending time instead of money was a common way to take care of one’s needs a century ago, but now we’re more likely to use our money to buy someone else’s time. After all, isn’t that what processed food is? It’s a product manufactured with a few raw materials and a lot of time and effort put in by other nameless, faceless people. And machines. But the machines are just stand-ins for people and their time—a machine itself is the result of lots of time by lots of people, so it’s time made tangible, if you will.

Now it’s a bit after 9:30 pm, and I’ve just completed cleaning up from my latest round of cooking. On the docket for tonight was a batch of roasted root vegetables—beets, carrots and parsnips, with mushrooms tossed in near the end. The recipe came from a Thanksgiving-themed issue of Real Simple magazine* from several years ago. Most of the dish is going to a semi-potluck dinner that I’ll be attending on Monday night, but I did have a small plate of the veggies for my dinner tonight. Since I had the oven on, I roasted some potato wedges at the same time and munched on those as well. (My main course was a small serving of cheese and crackers that I ate as I peeled and chopped, chopped, chopped five pounds of vegetables.)

I started the veggie prep a little before 6 pm; the roasting pan went in the oven at 7:10 and came out an hour later. The potatoes were done by 8:30. I sat for a few minutes, finishing my munching, then began the cleanup process. And here I am, done at last, nearly four hours after I began. Sheesh.

According to the veggie recipe, the “hands on time” for preparation is 15 minutes. Who are they trying to kid? Maybe a professional chef could do the prep in 15 minutes, but I’m thinking most home cooks would be hard-pressed to meet that deadline.

I consider myself a pretty speedy chopper, as it were, so I’m flabbergasted that my prep time was so long. In my defense, most of my time went into the parsnips—primarily because my parsnips (two oversized specimens left over from my CSA box, as were all the vegetables) looked like Jabba the Hut’s long-lost cousins (see photo), complete with tentacles and antennae. (OK, really, they were just root tendrils, but they certainly complicated the cleaning and peeling and chopping process. Damn good thing I really like parsnips.)

Had the parsnips been more normal looking, I probably would have finished with my chopping in a half-hour or less.

Yeah. I’m not slow; I just need a lightsaber.

Now that I have vanquished my kitchen foes for today, I’m going to bed.

*Footnote: The mention of Real Simple magazine gives me a platform for the tiniest of rants. I’ve always contended that Real Simple magazine is neither real nor simple. Real simplicity is not dependent on consumption, yet a glossy mainstream magazine, by definition, must be. Simplicity is not about $240 shirts, even if they are made of organic single-origin cotton. The “simplicity” preached in the magazine’s pages seems to be aimed at image-conscious upper-middle-class women. And it is a desirable fantasy—a simplified, uncomplicated life that’s filled with beautiful (and expensive) clothes and gorgeous (and exclusive) furnishings.

But the magazine has a lovely aesthetic and good production values, making it a delight to look at. And occasionally it has good recipes.

Justification complete. There. I feel better.