When I use the phrase "living skinny," don't think that I'm referring to a lowfat diet. In fact, oftentimes, living skinny in those terms often implies eating more (financially) expensive ingredients and eating at more expensive restaurants. What I mean when I use this phrase is in contrast to "living fat," with which I'm referring to living generously, or living large, I think is how some people put it. In plain English, it means to live cheaply, or frugally, in my case, which I try to do to the extent possible and practicable.
Much of the mundanity of my life is spent living a pretty skinny life, as I do not have unlimited funds with which to finance my desires, much less my needs. I take advantage of the many free and public events that cross my path, and absorb as much as I can in any learning environment.
Take the Pastries and Desserts class I am currently enrolled in. There is no fee for the class, and just a nominal materials fee for ingredients. I've thought to bring my own cooking utensils to use, but since I no longer have any inkling of what we're preparing each week, that's a rather difficult thing to do, for sure. In this class, I'm learning about ingredients and new methods, and am being exposed to recipes that I have not encountered before, such as this week's Rum Baba. Bananas Foster, which was our second recipe this week, I've approximated before, though without the rum.
I'm adding the recipes to my (paper) library as I get them, collecting the handouts each week. Eventually, I will add the ones I like (or ones that I missed but want to try) to my electronic library by scanning the sheets and saving them as pdf's on my computer in the Recipes folder to which I've been adding for the past several months. I have some subfolders for some of the more common recipes I like to use when I know I'm in the mood for making a certain type of item, but need a specific recipe. Among these subfolders are: Cookies, Bars, Biscuits and Muffins; Cakes; Pies, Cobblers, and Crisps; Soups; and Pasta, Rice, and Beans. Other recipes are kept in the general Recipes Folder, itself a subfolder in my Documents folder on the hard drive.
Thinking about ingredients that I want to use, I had prepared a jar of preserved lemons in either December or January, following a (free, of course) presentation at the public library's central branch downtown. The presentation was sponsored by the Culinary Historians of San Diego and the recipe was given to attendees after the main presentation, which was about an author's travels around the Mediterranean, and the people and foods she encountered there.
The preserved lemons are beckoning me from the kitchen counter, where they sit next to the coffee grinder and coffeemaker. Another recipe I came across when searching for recipes using preserved lemons was that for preserved butter, another Moroccan invention (or so I'm led to believe). It looks a little harder to make, but I have the pound of butter required for the recipe (actually, it requires 500 grams, but a pound is close enough). I'm just not sure how one kneads butter without causing it to melt with the heat of one's hands. Maybe one uses really, really cold water for kneading the salt into the butter to keep the butter cool and relatively solid.
Making my own preserved lemons is an example of another activity that I like to engage in: producing ingredients to be used in other recipes. Even when I was in school in Virginia, in the late 1980's to the late 1990's, I made herbed vinegar with which I dressed salads, as well as used as substitute when vinegar was called for, to add extra flavor to whatever I was making.
Speaking of herbed vinegars, I ought to dry some of the herbs from Peter's herb garden and set them into jars of vinegar to flavor them. Currently, we have some vinegars, two of which that are made from citrus fruits and one that is made from honey. These are not flavored vinegars, but rather vinegars that are made by fermenting their namesakes themselves. The honey vinegar is quite nice, with extra virgin olive oil, on salads made with leaf lettuce, tomato, celery, sliced mushrooms, bell peppers, and quartered and sliced cuke. Of course, a little bit of crumbled/cubed feta (Bulgarian, Danish, or Greek) wouldn't hurt, either!
I followed a recipe for "paleo" coconut bread, which used half a dozen eggs, half a cup of melted butter, half a teaspoon of sea salt, and three-quarters of a cup of coconut flour. After it came out, I decided that when I make this again, I will add things to improve the texture: almond milk, to add moisture, and baking powder, to provide some leavening. I'll write about the result in a future post. For now, I'll just eat the evidence...
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