Unless you’re on a media blackout, I suspect you know that today would have been Julia Child’s 100th birthday. She lived a long life–she died nine years ago at 91 years of age–and I have to admit to shedding a few tears for her even though I never knew her personally–because she is one of my greatest influences.

She found her path, and nothing deterred her once she began moving forward. She just kept forging her way, guided by passion and love, and in doing so, changed the way Americans view food, cooking and eating forever.

Without Julia, I doubt there would be locavores.

The Slow Food movement would undoubtedly have started in Italy, but would it have come to America if we hadn’t been schooled by Julia? Maybe not.

And I doubt that there would be as many women in professional kitchens today if we hadn’t all grown up seeing Julia cook her heart out on television before God and everybody.

God bless her–we need more like her. (And truly, I think we have many, many more like her, following in her footsteps each and every day. People learning to grow, cook, eat and preserve good food seem to be popping up everywhere like porcini mushrooms after a rainstorm.)

To celebrate, PBS put together a video–”Julia Remixed.”

Here it is, so we can all celebrate together.

And remember: “Life itself is the proper binge.”

I credit the intense emotional connection to the excellent soundtrack provided by Zak, the very talented musician who also happens to be my husband. His fingerpicked acoustic guitar song, “So Pretty” and slide resonator guitar version of “Simple Gifts”, as well as a short electric guitar bit called, “Big Ag Blues” were all stupendous, but everyone’s favorite seemed to be a song called “Circle of Life.”

“Circle of Life” is a round, and was written decades ago by one of our oldest friends, Sonja Coble. It was originally sung a capella, but Zak worked out an arrangement with multiple acoustic and electric guitars playing all of the vocal pieces, building the music to a lovely emotional crescendo.

The music combined with the powerful words of our interviewees– farmers, food producers, non-profit directors and businesspeople– and the beautiful footage shot and edited by Dan, into a heady brew which moved our audience in ways I don’t think any of us involved in the project expected.

I’m thrilled now to finish up our interviews–we have about six of them left to do, and start writing a script so we can start the hard work of editing, composing and recording music and doing all of the other post-production stuff that makes a film magical. Having seen the effect it has on other people has energized all of us, propelling us forward toward our goal of seeing this project through to the finish.

So, let me publicly thank the folks working on the film with me: Daniel Trout, Heather Irwin and Zak Kramer, as well as all of the amazingly generous people of Athens who have cheerfully opened their farms, homes, businesses and lives to our cameras and microphones so we can capture their stories.

Together, all of us are making something that I hope can carry the story of how a thriving, continually expanding local food economy evolved in Athens to other communities so that the model can be made anew in other small towns and cities across our country.

We have a great harvest here in our small corner of Appalachian Ohio–now it’s time to plant some seeds elsewhere and watch them grow.

Longtime readers will recall that oh, a year or so ago, it was mentioned that my friend and videographer, Dan Trout, and I were working on a documentary film about the food community here in Athens, Ohio.

I am pleased to announce that the cogitation, pre-production equipment gathering and research phase is finished and as of last week, actual filming has begun.

And, as you can see, we have a name for our production company–which I suggested as it uses both of our last names to good effect and it’s tangentially about food. Dan took my idea and turned it into a really readable, memorable and cute graphic for all of our business cards, release forms, letterhead and suchlike stuff.

Dan went out shooting b-roll footage last Wednesday and then he and I went out on Saturday to the Farmer’s Market to shoot specific images to use in the trailer for the film, which does have a working title (Simple Gifts: The Athens Food Model) and to talk with some of the people we want to interview on camera.

I was unprepared for the enthusiasm with which our project was met by pretty much every person with whom we spoke. I was sick with nervousness; I had awakened overly early in the morning and was unable to go back to sleep because I was dreading talking to people because I had the fear that no one would want to talk with us, or that they would think that the project wasn’t worthwhile.

I was so wrong–it turned out that it was just my nagging self-doubts at play in my head. From the very first farmer I spoke with (Star of Shade River Farm), everyone was unfailingly positive, and many were exceptionally enthusiastic. Even farmers who started out as somewhat suspicious warmed up when we described our project as an independently produced feature-length documentary that shows how Athens grew this amazing local food system, with the aim of showing people in other communities how they can do the same thing. Once we got it across to people that we wanted to empower other communities to look at how Athens managed it and then start a similar system in their areas, farmers were ready for us to come to their farms and talk.

They -want- us to tell their stories, not only for the sake of these stories themselves–but so that other people can make their own stories and successes elsewhere.

That meant a great deal to both Dan and I. In fact, it rather blew us both away. It was truly breathtaking.

Between getting contact information from farmers and community organizers and business owners, I took some still photographs to use in marketing and packaging. Dan tells me that much of his footage caught the same look as my photographs–which capture much of the feel we want for our film. We want it to be beautiful and uplifting–not only because Athens is a beautiful place, but also as an antidote to many of the recent food-related documentary films that are out there, which, let’s be honest, are pretty bleak.

We have a pretty full schedule of shooting set up for the next couple of weeks; our goal is to have a trailer put together and ready to present by the end of August or the beginning of September. We are taking a full year–a cycle of the seasons to complete our filming, and then begins the long, arduous editing process.

This project, which is being independently funded and produced, is going to be a long, time-consuming work, but it is work that I believe has worth in the world. Feeling the excitement of the food producers here in Athens as we described our project, seeing their faces light up as we talked, showed me that this can mean a lot not only to Dan and I, not only to Athens and to the food community here, but to viewers out there in the world. The story of our town’s food system can really make a difference in the lives of people in other small communities.

We want viewers to feel uplifted, cheered and empowered by this documentary. We want them to see that there are things they can do to change their own communities, that the power to grow a sustainable local food network lies in their own capable hands.

Not in the hands of the government, or of corporations.

But simply in the hands of ordinary citizens. Individuals who do seemingly ordinary things, but who, when working together, can build something extraordinary.

I love food magazines.

Well, let me clarify: I love the idea of food magazines, though the reality of them usually don’t stand up to my own preconceived–and some would say idiosyncratic–notions of what a periodical about food and cooking should be. Back when I was the editor for “The Paper Palate” which is a now defuct blog in a series of networked food blogs (The Well Fed Network) that covered food in the paper media which included newspapers and magazines, I -had- to read a lot of food magazines. A LOT of them–many of which I would not normally pick up and glance through, much less read.

I mean, really–can any of you regular readers see me willingly pick up “Cooking With Paula Deen” unless circumstances forced me into it? (Circumstances being that I had to “review” the magazine and I was being paid to do so. Not paid enough–no one could pay me enough to look through that magazine more than one or two times in my life. Ugh.) Or how about “Every Day With Rachael Ray?” Rachael Ray–the woman who has put her name on a special “Garbage Bowl,” that you need to buy to use to put scraps in while you’re cooking. (Look–just use a frickin’ regular bowl, people. Or a counter-top compost bin. Or toss it in your sink if you have a disposal. Anything that you have around, for jeebus’ sake–but don’t go and buy a bowl because Rachael “designed” it to hold garbage! Ai ya!)

Well, it should be obvious to most readers that I’m not going to like either of the aforementioned magazines, and not just on principle, but because there’s nothing for me in either of them, but look, I don’t even like the venerable and beloved Cook’s Illustrated. When I was first really learning my cooking chops, I bought the magazine, but a few things started to bug me after a couple of years. One was the superior and somewhat condescending tone of the writers and the editor when they talked about their “best” recipes. The second thing that started getting under my skin was the fact that they started repeating recipes–they’d do a “best” recipe for brownies one year and then a couple of years later, do another “best” recipe for brownies. How many “best” recipes for pot roast do we need in the world? Or chocolate chip cookies. And, how can two different recipes both be the “best” recipes for any given dish?

What finally tossed me over the edge into an eternal loathing of Cook’s Illustrated was the way that the writers and editors treated Asian recipes–which is to say they wrote in a condescending, and culturally insensitive manner about cuisines that they really didn’t know diddly-squat about and I did. And that, my friends torqued my gizzard so badly that I wrote a big long rant about it and has kept me from reading the magazine (or watching their television shows) ever since.

So, I’ve fessed up–I don’t like very damned many cooking magazines. I love “Fine Cooking,” because they actually teach technique in addition to recipes and when they feature recipes from other cultures, they don’t play stupid games like suggesting substituting dill pickles from Safeway for Sichuan pickled vegetable. Instead, Fine Cooking’s authors and editors treat each recipe and cuisine with the respect they deserve, recognizing that food is one of the ways people from every culture define and share their innermost, cultural selves.

And Gastronomica is a pretty awesome read, though it can get way cerebral at times, more so than even I, an intellectual elitist, can bear. But its still fun, enlightening and thought-provoking, with lovely illustrations.

(There are other food magazines that I like, but I’m not going to go into them all right now–if you want to know the others I like, ask in the comments section.)

So, you get the picture, right? I’m a hard-nosed, cranky, jaded and apologetically picky reader when it comes to food magazines, and now that I don’t have to write about them all the time, I can read them or not as I please.

Which brings us to the subject of our post today–the new quarterly food journal from Momofuku’s obsessive, outre and outspoken chef, David Chang, “Lucky Peach.”

Have I eaten in one of Chang’s restaurants?

No.

Have I read about him?

Yes.

Have I read his cookbook?

Yes.

Do I like what I read?

Oh, yes.

Chang is one of those people whose obsessions run along parallel to my own, and so I feel a kinship with him. He seeks deep flavors, rich flavors that speak not only to the belly, but to the heart and mind of his diners. He’s constantly searching for ways to communicate these flavors to the wider world and bring cultural understanding by culinary means.

And, he just bloody well likes a damned good bowl of noodles.

So, he has restaurants, right? But he wants to reach folks who don’t eat at his restaurants. So, what does he do?

He starts a magazine, which he names after his first restaurant. (Momofuku means, “lucky peach.”) Actually, originally, the project was going to be a television show, but then that turned into an iPad app (which I don’t think is available yet, but when it is, I’ll be looking into it), and the idea of a quarterly journal came about. And then, some great writers came on board, including Peter Meehan, Harold McGee, Anthony Bourdain and Ruth Reichl, and some great-looking “outsider” style art and photography were tossed into the mix along with stylish but readable graphic design and out came a food magazine that by damned–even the bitchy old culinary nerd here likes.

Yeah, I liked it.

It’s not pretentious, the writing is fresh, new and not too hip to function. Perfectly good, but socially improper Anglo-Saxon words are sprinkled throughout which doesn’t bother me at all, because I’ve worked in quite a few kitchens in my time and I know exactly how chefs and line cooks talk. (“Colorful” does not even begin to describe the language of the restaurant kitchen.) There’s lots of drinking, laughing and bragging in these pages, but also deep wisdom on what exactly a dish of noodles should be and mean.

Oh, yeah, noodles. The first issue is all about ramen. Yeah, ramen. Not just the instant ones (though they are present and accounted for therein), but bowl upon bowl of the hand made ones cranked out and slurped up in little dives and airy restaurants and smoky joints all over Japan and now the world. It was the topic of ramen that made me pick up this first issue, and it was the article by Ruth Reichl on the topic of the instant noodles that made me keep the magazine in hand and pay for it.

Look–take it from me–it’s a great read from cover to cover. It will make you think, laugh out loud and most importantly, hungry.

There is no higher praise for a food magazine than that.

But wait! There’s more.

Recipes! What’s a food magazine or journal without recipes? (Gastronomica. Though, to be fair, they have recipes now and again, too.)

Anyway, there will be no “best” recipe for brownies to be seen in Lucky Peach. Nor any super-quickie 25 minute meals. Nope. Instead you get cool (and admittedly somewhat esoteric) stuff like a recipe for proper home made alkaline ramen noodles. (Don’t know what those are? Read Harold McGee’s article about them on page 82.) Pork belly and pork shoulder cooked so they can be sliced and served with ramen. The until now unpublished recipe for Momofuku’s ramen broth, v. 2.0.

And, some really weird recipes using instant ramen noodles that I’m not too sure about, but not every recipe in every magazine has to be a winner. Besides, these instant ramen recipes are pretty fun to read if not eat.

Go out, now and pick up a copy, sit down and feed your head, heart and belly on the words and pictures therein. Even if you’re not as picky a reader as I am, I bet you’ll still like Lucky Peach.

I’m very familiar with this way of cooking because that’s what I used to do for other people back in the day when I was a personal chef in Maryland. I used to get up in the morning, go grocery shopping for one of my client families, go to their house with my box of equipment and car full of food, and then cook up enough entrees and side dishes that were freezer friendly for a week’s worth of meals. Then, I’d freeze the meals in containers, clean the kitchen get paid and go home.

It’s not a bad way to do things, but for people who work and are loathe to give up a weekend afternoon–and frankly, I don’t blame you one bit for wanting a weekend afternoon that is NOT spent in the kitchen–it just sounds like too much work. And that’s because it IS work.

I just wanted to let you know that there’s an easier way to go about this, and while it works more gradually, it still works. This “slacker method” of cooking ahead has saved me on many a night when I was either too damned tired to cook anything or too damned busy to remember that I had to cook dinner until it was, oh, a half an hour before dinner time.

All you have to do is this: on a night when you are cooking something that goes nicely in the freezer, cook at least twice the amount you need. Then, when the food is done, you put it in a container or wrap it up and put it in the freezer.

Most foods that go well in a freezer don’t really take any longer if you double or even triple the recipe. Mind you, when I first started using my “slacker method,” I didn’t even do it on purpose: (that’s how you can tell its the “slacker method–” I came upon it by accident!) I wasn’t doubling or tripling my recipes–I was having trouble transitioning from cooking in quantity as a chef at work to cooking for two adults and one toddler at home. So, I accidentally cooked too much and had a buttload of leftovers that I had to do something with.

Rather than eat the leftovers for a week, I started packaging them up and putting them in the freezer to be used the next time I came home from work in time to cook dinner but without an ounce of will or gumption to stand in front of a stove again. On those nights, I could open up my freezer door, find a container marked, “taco filling,” defrost it in the microwave, heat up some taco shells and shred some cheese and cut up lettuce and cilantro, and BOOM! Like magic, a home cooked, nutritious meal seemingly out of thin air, put on the table faster than you can say, Rachael Ray. (With nary an utterance of EVOO in sight or hearing range.)

I’ve since refined my slacker method of cooking ahead. I actually keep freezer bags, reusable plastic (BPA-free, of course) containers, and a Sharpie marker in my kitchen so I don’t have to go hunting around frantically when it’s time to package stuff. (In my early days of cooking this way, I neglected to label some containers thinking, “Oh, I can tell chili from taco filling!” only to find that when I’m tired, headachy and hungry, no, I can’t.) I also buy extra ingredients on purpose and everything.

Dishes that are good for this method include chili, beans, lentils, stews, curries, mashed potatoes, nearly any kind of pasta sauces including marinara, puttanesca, pesto, and bolognaise, meatloaf, soups, rice dishes like jambalaya and pilaf, and casseroles like lasagne, squash (or any vegetable, now that I think on it) gratin, and arroz gratinado.

Lasagne is a great example of the slacker principle at work. It’s already a pain the butt to make and it takes a while. I have found over years of extensive experimentation (that’s a fancy way of saying, trial and error) that it takes no longer to layer noodles, fillings, sauces and cheeses into three casserole pans as it does for one. The prep is also not much more onerous for three pans as it is for one–the prep time doesn’t triple, or even double, but rather takes half again as much time as it would normally. (And for lasagne, I have found that shortcuts like using pre-shredded cheeses–which is not going to kill you–really cut the prep time down considerably.)

That’s a lot of different types of dishes. And truly, most of these dishes, if you double or even triple your recipe, you aren’t doubling or tripling your cooking or even your prep time. In my experience, it doesn’t take twice as long to make a six servings of puttanesca as it does to make three. Nine servings takes maybe five minutes of prep time longer for the same recipe. Pesto–if you make it in your food processor, only takes more time to pick off more leaves from your basil, but really–how long does it take to pick leaves off of basil in the first place?

Yeah. Not that long.

The beauty of this slacker method of cooking ahead is that if you cook five times a week normally, and you double the amounts you are cooking, you have put away meals for five days in the same time as it takes to cook dinner for those five nights anyway, with maybe 15 extra minutes added on.

And personally, I think it’s a heck of a lot less intimidating to spend an extra fifteen minutes five times a week for a total of one hour and fifteen minutes of extra labor, than it is to spend a whole a afternoon–two to four hours say–cooking all day on a weekend when you could be spending time with your friends and family doing something fun. The end result is the same–you fill your freezer over the course of five days with five more days worth of dinners. Do that a couple of weeks in a row and you have built up a stock of really varied, healthy, home-cooked meals for you and your family to enjoy on evenings when time is of the essence, or when everyone is just too damned hot/tired/cranky/or otherwise poopy to even think of cooking from scratch.

Yes, I’m ignoring the fact that for some of us, spending two to four hours cooking on a weekend afternoon is fun, because I’m not writing for us–I’m writing for everyone else. Or rather, I’m writing for the folks who do think its fun, but have other things to do on the weekends than cook all afternoon. And, I’m writing for the folks who are really intimidated by cooking five or six different dishes and packing them up for the freezer in the span of an afternoon. Let’s face it, that’s lots of prep, cooking and clean-up, and if you aren’t a professional, like me, or someone who just cooks a lot habitually, that kind of cooking marathon can seem like endless, purgatorial and just plain old no damned fun.

In conclusion, I want you to try my slacker method. It’s perfect remedy for busy folks who want good, nutritious, home cooked food, but who just have days when they can’t pick up the knife and saute pan.

As for recipes that work really well for cooking ahead–try these from my archives–I’ve used them for slacker freezer stockpiling exercises for years, and they never fail to taste good.

Taco Filling
Mangalore Chicken Curry
Mixed Greens and Mushroom Dal
Chana Bhatura (you can freeze the bhatura dough before cooking it, then thaw it out and fry it)
Shepherd’s Pie
Jamaican Beans and Rice
Arroz Gratinado
Braised Rabbit With Marsala Wine and Wild Mushrooms

There are plenty more applicable recipes here at Tigers & Strawberries–I just gave you a few to start out with.

Have fun cooking and filling your freezer like a slacker all week, and then enjoy doing nothing this weekend! It’s a good thing.

Slacker Notes:So, uh, when I wrote this post, I was such a slacker, I didn’t really give as much specific information as perhaps I could or should have, so some readers asked a few great questions down in the comments section. I decided that the information was so pertinent, that I should just put it up here in an addendum to the original post just so folks who aren’t in the habit of reading the comments to a blog post get the benefits of it, too.

Casserole Specifics

Okay, for lasagne or other casseroles–a reader asked if I cook it first and then freeze it, or I assemble it and then freeze it uncooked.

The answer is: I’ve done both and they both work pretty well.

And there are several ways to go about it. You can just make your regular one big pan of lasagne, (one that normally serves six people, say, and its only you and a significant other eating) and bake it as normal and then after dinner, cut the remaining lasagne into one or two portion bits and pack them up in containers, and then you can either thaw them in the fridge or microwave them from frozen. Works just fine. I’ve done it with lasagne, arroz gratinado, macaroni and cheese and shepherd’s pie, and none of them have suffered a bit for it.

Or, you can assemble one or two extra whole casseroles in freezer to oven dishes, and freeze then uncooked. To cook them, preheat your oven to about 25 degrees lower than your usual cooking temperature for that particular casserole, and bake it for about 50 percent longer than you usually would. In order to brown the top of your previously frozen casserole, in the last fifteen minutes of baking, turn the heat up on the oven to the regular temperature and that should give you a nice crusty brown, bubbly top.

I’ve frozen moussaka, pastitsio and lasagne this way and baked them both thawed and frozen and they all come out of the oven smelling and tasting divine.

Now, this isn’t very slackeriffic, because it involves prior planning, but if you just know that tomorrow is going to suck big-time at work and you are going to come home hungry, cranky and just plain not in a mood for cooking, you can take one of these uncooked casseroles out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge until you get home from work the next evening. Then, you preheat your oven all the way to its usual temperature and bake it as usual, just adding an extra five to ten minutes to the time it spends in the oven.

See–isn’t that simple?

Thawing Out And Reheating Liquids

I didn’t even think about telling everyone how I thaw out liquidy dishes like soups, stews, curries and sauces that freeze into a coherent block of ice until Kim, down below, asked me how to go about it. She’s right–beans and rice or taco filling or jambalaya–stuff that is relatively dry is simple to heat up from frozen in the microwave. But those troublesome liquidy dishes are a pain in the butt, and while yes, you CAN put them in the fridge to thaw overnight and during the day while you’re at work, planning ahead just isn’t a slacker-approved activity.

So, how do you get say, marinara sauce and meatballs that has frozen into a scarlet cube of tomato sorbet to thaw and heat up quickly?

This is going to sound bass akwards, but the way I do it is I use the defrost function on my microwave to get the frozen liquid to mostly return to a fluid state, and then I plop it all into a saucepan and finish heating it up to a boil on the stove.

My microwave has a defrost function that sets the time and temperature for thawing a frozen item based on its weight. A true slacker like me guestimates the weight, but if you have a baker’s scale you can tell your microwave the exact (or rounded up) weight of the marinara and meatballs. (In fact, if you are only partially a slacker, and are thus somewhat organized, you could write the weight of the item on the label when you pack it up for the freezer in the first place, so you don’t have to play guessing games or find your scale after work.)

Anyway, use the defrost function on your microwave and when you’ve got your stuff mostly thawed out, with maybe a little bit of ice in the center of the container, just sploosh the contents of said container into a saucepan, turn the heat on high and stir like mad, chipping away at that ice until it breaks apart and melts into the rapidly boiling liquid that surrounds it. Then, you just stir and cook until everything is heated through to serving temperature.

And then, dinner is served!

Tips from Readers:

So, as is usual, I got some nice ideas from readers. Just for the folks who don’t read comments, here’s some ideas that didn’t come from my slacker self, but instead are from the myriad of good, clever cooks who read this blog:

From Jenny V: One thing that can work if you’re cooking an entire extra casserole or lasagne is to line the baking pan with foil before filling it with the food. Then, after it is frozen solid, you can remove the pan from the freezer, leaving the foil-wrapped food behind in the cold, and add it back to your cabinets to use for other meals in the meantime. When you want to eat the leftovers, just pop the pre-formed foil container into the baking dish again and bake.