food – Better Living Through Literature

Chicken Dilettante

October 21, 2025 Karen

After 25 years of it, I officially stopped being a vegetarian sometime last month and now I’m learning how to cook chicken. I stopped eating it before I really had to cook for myself, so there’s a whole new world of recipes and tips that I’ve read about but never put into practice.

In other words: Time to be a dilettante!

So far I’ve learned that when a recipe calls for skin-on chicken, they really mean it, because that’s what browns and keeps it moist when you cook it. I’ve had success with braises and slow cookers but that doesn’t keep me from trying things like this: (the Smitten Kitchen version ^ )

…and getting this.
This is how we learn we need the skin! (I know that looks pink but don’t worry, the meat thermometer is my best friend in these experiments.)

Anyway, this is a fun new learning curve that also, finally, gives me enough protein in my life. I’m a little surprised by how okay I am about buying and handling meat, talking about skin, thinking about the chicken as a creature but still eating it… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Such is the power of protein, I guess.

There’s Nothing Stopping You

October 20, 2022 Karen

You’re an adult now. You’re in charge of feeding yourself. And there’s nothing stopping you from making a TATER TOT CASSEROLE.

Much like the pasta salads that “feed a lot of people” I made all summer, I think anything stewy and topped with tater tots is going to be the winter dish on repeat. So far I’ve made a Beyond Meat “shepherd’s pie” and a breakfast egg bake with tots in it; I think next up is something vaguely Mexican with soyrizo.

Is it glamorous? Not at all. Is it the food of my people, hearty and delicious, that makes leftovers? You betcha.

Thinking About What To Eat

May 15, 2019 Karen

This year marks 20 years of being vegetarian/pescetarian for me (it’s varied over time; at this point I try to only eat mollusks and shellfish if I do have seafood).

I cut out meat for ethical/animal welfare reasons but I’ve wondered what sort of impact still eating dairy has on the planet (and whether it makes me a hypocrite re: animal welfare), or whether I should cut out all seafood entirely because the oceans are hurting. Fortunately, the NY Times is here to answer all of those questions and more, with a big interactive piece you can click through:

Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered: How to shop, cook and eat in a warming world.

There’s even a comparison of the impact of different types of plant “milks”! Thinking about food like this is definitely a luxury and a privilege, but if you’re able to, I recommend checking out the article.

Ode To Slow Cooking

September 28, 2017 Karen

In a sure sign of my approaching 40s, I finally got a Crock-Pot. Sunday evenings we visit Doc’s family and usually combine that with errands, so we’re not home until 8. Figuring out dinner after all of that (on top of figuring out Sunday breakfast and lunch) was getting to be way too difficult.

The Crock-Pot is everything I hoped it would be: You put ingredients in in the morning and come home to food. The first time I used it I kept thinking, “It is cooking but you are not,” and realized that’s a Laurie Colwin quote, from More Home Cooking (she’s talking about a flame tamer instead of a Crock-Pot, but same concept):

On a flame tamer, a good black bean soup takes at least 5 hours to cook, hours in which you could be writing a novel, composing a brief, arguing with your dry cleaner, or playing catch with your child and her friends. You might yak on the telephone, balance your checkbook, or go through piles of work. You might even go shopping for yourself, remembering to stop afterward to buy some bread and cheese. But whatever you do, while your soup is cooking, you are not.

What I’m Making

August 18, 2015 Karen

I started making a skirt last month and had to measure my waist to check the pattern. My waist was three inches bigger than the last time I measured, back in the spring. Since about that time I’d been in a rut about work lunches and was just bringing a frozen entree from Trader Joe’s every day. Coincidence? Nope.

So that got me started making lunches. Inspired yet again by Pinterest, I picked up these compartmented “bento” boxes from Amazon and have been bringing my lunch every day for the last month. Some highlights:

Sesame noodles, cashews, grapes, and cheese

A Trader Joe’s kid’s pizza with veggie pepperoni (old habits die hard–at least it’s small!), with grapes and cucumber salad

Blurry leftover ravioli from dinner, garlic green beans, cherry tomatoes, and grapes & cheese

“Nothing in the fridge” lunch–the last of the produce, cheese and crackers, and veggie pepperoni.

I’m loving the boxes–instead of figuring out a main dish every day, I just have to fill the compartments. It even makes it easy to pull lunch together when there isn’t much in the fridge. Plus, there’s something really satisfying to me about small servings of food in little compartments. (I think the same reasons this article says toddlers like bento boxes apply to adults.)

And it’s working (along with a 30-day yoga challenge): I’m down to just two inches about my usual waist size, so–progress. Yay lunch!

I Want To Write For The Ball Cookbook Company

September 28, 2011 Karen

Thanks to generous family and friends with fruit trees, I have both peaches and pears to can this week, which means I had to break out the canning cookbooks. Before this, I’ve skipped the chapter introductions in The Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, but now I know what I’ve been missing. From the chapter introduction to “High-Acid Foods”:

As you gaze with pride on the colorful jars in your pantry packed with nature’s best, the sense of accomplishment you feel is rivaled only by the sumptuous goodness you’ll enjoy when you unseal them–for one delicious meal after another.

Or consider the lead to the “Soft Spreads” chapter:
Preserving is about more than food. When your home is filled with the fragrant aroma of sweet spreads simmering on the stove, you are preserving memories that last a lifetime.

Questionable use of “sumptuous” notwithstanding, well done, Ball Cookbook Writer. You are selling the hell out of the concept of home canning. Maybe I need to join your team, because I haven’t been able to muster that sort of enthusiasm for technology, hotels, or insurance benefits in a long time.

Feeding Myself

June 2, 2011 Karen

I am a few days into a funk of not knowing what to eat–which, if you’ve met me, is kind of a big deal, because I pretty much get through the days by looking forward to the next meal. It’s a problem.

I got home last night and nothing sounded good but then I thought, “Maybe an omelette?” And I made one and it almost hit the spot and reminded me of this quote from M.F.K. Fisher’s “A is for Dining Alone” essay:

I treated myself fairly dispassionately as a marketable thing, at least from ten to six daily, in a Hollywood studio story department, and I fed myself to maintain top efficiency…I tried to apply what I knew of proteins and so forth to my own chemical pattern, and I deliberately scrambled two eggs in a little sweet butter when quite often I would have liked a glass of sherry and a hot bath and to hell with food.

Laurie Colwin On Turkey

November 22, 2010 Karen

Kicking off the holiday week, here’s one of my favorite food writers being insightful about Thanksgiving:

So many other people seem to dread turkey […] In my opinion the poor turkey is merely a scapegoat for the mire of conflicted feelings flooding our psyches at holiday time. It is hard to divorce turkey from the expectations of family, the sibling rivalries, the unspoken resentments, the secret rages that occur in even the happiest families. Add to this the exhaustion of travel or the exhaustion of preparing to welcome traveling relatives, and even the tenderest, juiciest turkey may be as sawdust.

She then goes on to call just a turkey breast “turkey devoid of drama.” I wonder what she’d have to say about Tofurkey!

Science, Can You Give Us Vat-Grown Meat Already?

November 18, 2010 Karen

I had a post all written last week about factory-farmed eggs and chickens, and I ended up not posting it. Because I don’t want to be Angry Vegetarian Girl, and because it was too sad. (An anonymous animal rights group in Israel put a hidden camera in a battery farming operation so you can see chickens stuffed three to cage without enough space to stand up straight, let alone stretch out their wings–on a live feed. It is, needless to say, DEEPLY DISTURBING.)

Battery cages are what the vast majority of chickens producing eggs and meat live in–the hidden camera shows the norm for chicken farming, not some horrifying violation. I find it deeply disturbing, yes–which is why I don’t eat chicken and buy “beyond cage free” eggs–but I find it really depressing, too: I may care about chicken welfare, but most of the world either likes $1 chicken sandwiches too much or really believes that food animals are too stupid to notice how they’re raised.

Obviously, I disagree. (I’ve always liked the Jeremy Benthem quote,”The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but rather, ‘Can they suffer?’ “) So I was pretty happy to read an article in Time yesterday about animal intelligence. In a nice, non-Angry Vegetarian way it pointed out that yes, animals should probably be treated better because they’re actually not too stupid to feel things:

If animals can reason — even if it’s in a way we’d consider crude — the unavoidable question becomes, Can they feel?…And what does it say about how we treat them?

[…]No matter what any one scientist thinks of animal cognition, nearly all agree that the way we treat domesticated animals is indefensible — though in certain parts of the world, improvements are being made . The European Union’s official animal-welfare policies begin with the premise that animals are sentient beings and must be treated accordingly.

Ultimately, a mainstream article like this is going to change more opinions than radical hidden cameras in chicken farms or earnest blog posts from vegetarians. But I dare you to read up on chicken farming anyway.

Live From Cannery Row

September 22, 2010 Karen1 Comment

As you can see, I got more peaches and the correct size jars. As I said to myself on the second batch of peach jam, “I am canning the hell out of these peaches!”

From left to right: Peach-rosemary jam, peach jam, tomatoes, and peaches in syrup.

And now I’m thinking of the end of Cannery Row.