Bone Appetite

The New Microwave: if it had an 11, would it cook at 110% power?

As a special Christmas treat, our microwave gave up its ghost of Christmases past. It was not as spectacular a death as I have observed on some microwaves: I was once present when a microwave decided to spark and catch on fire at a friend's house. No, the interlock mechanism between the latch button and the door appears to have once and finally given out, after being balky for several years. Both Mika and I were right in front of it as the microwave died in mid-zap; we at first thought a fuse had gotten tripped, and then maybe the ground protector on the outlet had flipped, but the microwave, try as we might, would simply not come back on.

There was once a time when this would have been considered a "major appliance" and fostered a trip to the bookshelf for consumer reports and an agonized discussion about what features we wanted and what brands were best. We're on our third microwave of the relationship since setting up housekeeping in 1987, and I remember well the great amount of research that went into the model we bought at Lechmere in Somerville for $129.95 22 years ago. That one (a GE) lasted 13 years, and broke more or less for the same reason the recently deceased Sharp did, namely the mechanical safety feature failed.

But time and tide being what they are in electronics, a larger (1.2 cubic foot, 1000-watt) microwave is now $50-$60 cheaper than the tiny 500 watt microwave was in 1987, and rather than waste a lot of time researching the ovens for what might be marginal differences in features and price that would not make a lot of difference in the end (we have limited options in our area for comparison shopping, anyway, being a less than metropolitan area, and Circuit City having exited the market a year ago). In the meantime, I found my body trying to put something into the dead microwave no less than five times between its failure yesterday and when I went out to buy a new one this morning (my body and brain often do not communicate, particularly in the kitchen). Obviously in the time-money-luxury-convenience tradeoff matrix of consumer purchases, getting a replacement fast was more important than marginal differences (if any) that could be achieved by better research.

So I went out the door this morning with the following list of criteria for finding a new oven:

• Don't buy a Sharp or a GE. I will not reward manufacturers who have created a product that broke on me.
• It must have a carousel. This seems to be the key to good microwaving, IMHO, having the food rotate inside.
• Capacity and power should be at least what we had before (1.1 cu foot, 1000 watts).
• Footprint should be approximately the same (we have a tiny kitchen and two growing boys).
• If possible, find a model that does not have a push-to-open latch, but has a handle on the outside.

On that last point, easier said than done: I could only find a couple of models like this. I comparison shopped at Best Buy, Kohl's, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Target, because this involved only a brisk walk up and down the Dunes shopping center and thus only one car trip and one attempt to park on a busy shopping day. (You get a sense of what my priorities in life are these days.) I found the model I wanted, an Oster, that had confusing and unnecessary controls (a "Popcorn" button, a "Soup" button, etc.) but which had the desired outside handle and a carousel and a minimally-acceptable feature set. It also had the very very nice feature of a child lock to prevent the kids from operating the microwave, which I found came in handy almost immediately (Izzy, my two year old, has buttonitis and has grown that he can now reach the place where the microwave sits.)

Here's the mistake I made. It was listed at $79.99 at Best Buy, which has a "we'll beat any competitor's price" "guarantee". In the course of my shopping, I found an identical one at Target for $79.99. What the heck, if I can get $10 knocked off, it's worth a trip back across the parking lot. So to make a long story short, since I had to wade through three employees at Best Buy, when I finally got a manager he offered to beat the price...by one cent. Yes, the "beat the competitors' price" guarantee was to sell me the same model at $79.98. In my continuing effort to not reward evil behavior, I told the guy I was going to pay a penny more at Target if that was the best he could do. That was the best he could do, so I bought it at Target.

All this is a rather long prologue to the hilarity that is major product design. Now you would think that the prices being what they are, in the perfection of the marketplace (ha!) now that we're about 30 years or so into the microwave-in-every-kitchen era (my in-laws excepted), my expectation would be that with component prices probably as low as they can go, manufacturers would seek to derive competitive advantage through better design and clearer user manuals.

Not so with this Oster. Buttons I expect to be "one touch" require 3 or 4 touches. The "minute plus" button doesn't zap food for a minute unless you press another button first. The "defrost by weight" feature requires that you memorize a little chart to indicate whether you are cooking chicken or beef or whatever (you punch in a numerical code) followed by the weight in pounds and ounces (with no leading zero for pounds, but a leading zero for ounces if you have between 0 and 9 ounces). There's no possible way to memorize this, or at least I have better things to do with my limited memory capacity. Hence the user manual goes up in the cabinet.

But the page illustrated herein really got me thinking. It lists the table of power settings on the microwave. You press "power" and "9", you get 90% power, "8" for 80% power, etc. So far, so good. There's nothing new here compared to any other microwave I've had. Can you notice the odd thing about this chart, though?

That's right, it includes a setting for "0" to indicate "0% power". Well, at first I thought, that's just another hilarious idiocy in technical writing. Or...was it? So I tried hitting 1 minute of cooking at 0% power, and hit start. And..the microwave came on, or at least the fan did, and it counted down from 1 minute!

Was this actually cooking anything, and perhaps 0% was some kind of base low power setting? I got a glass of water and let it sit to room temperature (measured with my new kitchen thermometer, THANK YOU SANTA CLAUS!) I then zapped it for five minutes at 0% power, with the microwave again humming with the sound of the fan, and the light on, and the countdown all taking up electricity. And when it pinged that it was done, I took the water out, and measured it, and it was at exactly the same temperature it was when I put it in.

So, yes, they have designed the internal software in the control pad to zap something at 0%. Maybe I'm being dense; maybe there's some reason to set it at 0% power. Although you'd think they'd also have an "infinity" button to cook it forever.

This may not seem like a big deal to my fellow cooks, but trust me as a software engineer this sets off all sorts of alarm bells about what sorts of corners they cut on the code-checking. I know, I know, there probably isn't anything actually dangerous lurking about, probably only more stupidity.

And, not to bury the lead, so far I'm quite happy with the new oven; it's cheap, it's got a lot more features than the first microwave we had, and it's pretty. I'm just a curmudgeon, I know.

Christmas Dinner

Just a little more retro-blogging to catch-up...

Christmas dinner menu! Ah! For many years my sister has been sending us tritips, the Central California beef cut that's oh so fun to barbecue, which was fun. But it's not a tradition we were wed to, and this year we decided to cook up something our youngest would eat...so drum roll please, we cooked a very traditional Turkey. We went pretty tame since there were only four of us at the table: mashed potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts, steamed carrots, cranberry sauce (which we forgot), and a little bread and cheese. Almost all of it was make-ahead and we split the cooking down the middle (spouse got the turkey, I did the sides). The hardest part was finding a small enough turkey, and we ended up settling on a 9-pounder.

We were surprised to count on our fingers and realize this is the first turkey we've cooked ourselves in three seasons. I'm happy to report it came out great...just like falling off the old bicycle or riding a log, following the directions on the turkey package tends to have happy results.

Christmas Eve Pizza!

Catching up after the fact on neglected holiday postings...

We don't have a particular Christmas Eve tradition in the house, so each year we just pick something different to do. If there's company, of course, a fancy meal is in order of some sort, but otherwise anything that's celebratory sounds like a good idea. This year, I asked the eldest what he wanted, and he answered "Pizza!" which was pretty predictable even if he doesn't actually eat much pizza when we do have pizza. We try to make a vegetarian pizza for the younger and Mrs. Claus, so I frequently make two small to medium pizzas on pizza nights. This time, however, I decided the seasonal design would lend itself well to a half-veggie, half-pepperoni! (That's artichoke, pepper, red bell pepper and cherry tomato on the upper half.)  

Neighborhood Nog and Nosh

I am not a big fan of the Splendid Table on NPR, for reasons I won't get into here, but I do listen to it when I happen to be riding in the car when it's on, Saturday afternoons. Sometime in December there was a guest on (didn't catch her name) who was somewhat glibly offering advice to those having holiday parties about what to serve and so forth. The one piece of advice she gave that I decided to take to heart was: when you're entertaining, make sure you entertain yourself, make yourself available to the guests, and don't commit yourself to a complicated menu that requires you be out of action and in the kitchen most of the time. I confess to having had this problem on occasion, and with all the other craziness around the hollerdays, I thought it would be nice to just have a relaxing get-together with some of the neighbor kids and their parents and a few selected other friends, if for no other reason, then to get some of the kids' wiggles out before Christmas. But it's nice to enjoy a little adult company when you can, too.

So I stuck to make-aheads, finger-foods, and a couple of store-bought, make-in-the-oven-for-12-minutes appetizers. Dips, bread and cheese, fruit and nuts. We featured the gingerbread house (so much the better to get it all eaten) and our second batch of Christmas cookies for the baked stuff, had some sparkling apple juices for the kids, and of course, egg nog.

Oh, egg nog, where did I go wrong. I thought I was really keeping myself in check, by not making even one kind of egg nog by myself (we did one party a number of years ago where we did three -- the New York Times cookbook, one from a family friend, and Elvis' Eggnog from the Elvis Cookbook). Yes, I had store-bought eggnog. 

Which nobody drank, save me. I was left with a lot of leftover eggnog. Not that I object, but even with a steady every day diet of a glass we had enough left over to have to throw it out a week later when it started getting aged. 

It may be that in these strange warm climes of California there isn't a big eggnog -drinking tradition. Or maybe the drink is out of fashion. Yes, it's incredibly rich and calorific, even without booze in it, but...it's the definition of a seasonal drink! (I don't think mulled wine or glüg ever came close in the US). Well, live and learn. Next year I'll make eggnog to please myself and save some spoiled 'nog in the end.

That said, I was glad I didn't overdo it with the food this time. Good advice to break with the usual discipline of the regular year as far as cooking-slow-unprocessed food per se, but more to just relax about the whole enterprise. Ho ho ho!

The Secret to Christmas Cookies

We have a variety of family-tradition cookie recipes we like to make every year, but I've abandoned any kind of schedule for doing this. Once upon a time we liked to bake some dozens and give them away as presents to co-workers, etc. One year we filled up 30 cookie tins' worth, and that was, well, both an apex and a nadir. That kind of commitment is hard to come by these days.

I may get around to posting the family recipes -- they were mostly included in The Hoffwall Cookbook (now still in its first printing, ten years after publication!) (For now, I've included the recipe for zimstern, which is a great cookie and simple but lends itself to exotic decoration.)

The one cookie recipe I long to make every year is chocolate crinkles -- which we don't, because of the boys' sensitivity to chocolate. Some of the more exotic (relatively speaking) cookies, such as thumb prints and spritzen, would certainly be eaten but we're not sure if we can consume them in sufficient quantity without having sugar-addled children upon us the whole holiday. At least not relative to the labor involved.

In any event, we got started last week with simple sugar cookies, and shape cutters. Duncan instigated this, of course, being the big baker in the family these days. In many ways these are the best holiday cookies -- real simple to shape and decorate, and enormously flexible with respect to the decorator's intentions. (Note our baker also wanted to make a lot of letters, and any cookie cutter can be made into a holiday cookie cutter with red, green, and white decorations -- our holiday cows are famous.)

The hard part for me to remember, the real secret to Christmas Cookies -- is to remember to have FUN MAKING THEM. When I think of those years where we went through a long list of cookies and lists of people to give them to and the mechanics -- well, it's nice to be able to give out a home-made thing. But when it started really interfering with a happy, sane, simple household at Christmas, it was time to put it into a pause. And so it is this year, where we're making cookies on a given night, preferably as a family, if we feel like making cookies, and we are also trying to keep our consumption down to somewhat-above-normal, but still-below-insane-levels-of-sugar, to keep the old holiday system in balance.

Next up: the gingerbread house, on the weekend. We're being smart about this this year as well: we have a plan for getting it eaten by the neighborhood kids before Christmas. Among other reasons, we did not want it to become a source of frustration for our youngest, who is a complex-carbs-fixated child and needs some positive encouragement and help in not pushing his natural proclivities too far.

ZIMSTERN

Yields 6-9 dozen

3 T butter (softened)
2 eggs
1 tsp lemon juice
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp ground or grated nutmeg
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional) (fine chop)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 more egg, separated
2 1/3 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.

Mix the butter, sugar, and two eggs, plus the yolk from the third egg, and add the lemon juice. Mix this until very fluffy.

Stir the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl, then blend into the sugar mix.

Roll the dough out into three chunks of about 1/3 of the total each, to about 1/16th of an inch thick, on a lightly-floured board. Cut with cookie cutters, and put cookies on a lightly-greased cookie sheet. Fluff the egg white, and brush the tops of the cookies. Decorate the tops with colored sugars, etc. The tops can also be coated with food coloring, or you can divide the egg white into little bowls, color each little bowl, and use it as "paint" for each cookie.

Bake 10 minutes per sheet, removing to cooling rack while you lay out the next batch.

The origin of this recipe is obscure to me; it was one of the recipes I copied from my mother's 3 x 5 card recipe box when I set out on my own for the first time. It may have its origin with her or with my Grandmother.

Retro Meal Plan (featuring Indian Red Lamb Stew)

Hey, where's the meal plan for last week? my loyal readers (both of them) may be asking. Well, in case you haven't noticed, it's the silly season, aka the month leading up to Christmas, and we had "outside" events affecting dinner four of the seven nights. I had a meal plan, and it was tested and twisted much of the week.

For 12/7-12/13, to keep in the archival spirit of these pages, however, here is our retro meal plan:

Monday - Pasta night with salad. I was occupied with something and dished this one over to my sous chef, so I can't rightly remember what went on here.

Tuesday - a big mess of gyoza, egg-fried rice. I was insane to try this on a weeknight. It took portions of much of the afternoon to get the dumpling stuffing ready -- lots of chopping -- and even though I used store-bought wonton wrappers (NOT the same thing as specialized dumpling dough, fwiw) -- and of course I was only able to get a couple dozen dumplings made (more than enough for the dinner, of course) of both meat- and vegetarian fillings, freezing the rest. I also froze a dozen pre-made. The good news is I've got the makings of about five dozen gyoza in the freezer now, waiting for a night when we need a little comfort food and don't have all the time in the world. As fun as this is, family tradition and all, etc. etc., I can't help but thinking we're actually better off buying Trader Joe's dumplings in bulk sometime instead, though.

Wednesday -- a school fundraiser pizza night out, which ended up in taking the pizza out as my eldest had an unexpected onset of some kind of social anxiety. We will perhaps post about this another day, but it was very odd, as he normally loves restaurants and adores pizza no matter how good or how bad.

Thursday -- we "grazed" with some simple foods from home, some snacks purchased out, and treats from the Christmas at the Adobes in Monterey. The kids' nutritional balance was definitely off this week --- a meal consisting of at least 50% cookie content is not containable inside the food pyramid.

Friday -- potluck -- more grazing.

Saturday - we had another school event during the day, so I ended up making Mac and cheese (with roasted brussel sprouts, yum). I had planned on doing latkes but ran out of time.

Sunday -- I had one feast on the menu this week and it got bumped to Sunday, and it took a while. I made Indian Red Stew with lamb, ala Madhur Jaffrey, with Samosas ala Mark Bittman. The stew (pictured) was superb -- I have not had a single recipe from this cookbook turn out badly. I am cursed with the duality of absolutely adoring spicy food, particularly Indian cuisine, and having quite the stomach for it --- but not the digestive system. I suffer greatly when the spicing is overdone, and my tongue thinks if it's overdone by that standard it's underdone. That said, I have been able to cook using Jaffrey's recipes without modifying the spice content much and come out with digestible and wonderful dishes -- only the kids won't eat them right now (they even rejected the samosas, deep-fried and all, as too spicy.) So we don't make much Indian these days. But I do have to give props to my sister for giving me Jaffrey's Indian Cooking some years ago, which was just the delicious reference cookbook I needed.

While I spent more time than I probably should've cooking on Sunday, it was deeply satisfying, and I also used up one of the on-sale legs of lamb I bought some time back and threw in the freezer. The lamb, slow-cooked, was utterly deliciously tender. And there were enough leftover that both my spouse and I could have it for lunch the following day. Yum!!

I did do one moderately whacky thing with the stew: I used a big turnip for part of the volume (I only used about a pound and a half of usable lamb, the recipe called for two). Turnips are not unheard of in Indian cuisine, at least as Jaffrey creates it, but they weren't in this recipe. I thought they were outstanding in the dish, adding a certain something potatoes occasionally lack in the deep sauces of much of Indian cooking.

Recipe: Foggy Night Green Beans

I originally posted this elsewhere in September, just before I revived this blog, and since tonight is a bit dank I thought I'd repost it.

This was made on a night when we had lots of cold fog and really nice green beans. It doesn't feel that original but since I whipped it up on the spot we'll pretend it is for now.

1 # fresh green beans
=> trim, cut into thirds, steam until bright green and crunchy, then chill under cold water, drain

2 tsp capers
2 oz anchovies

crush together with the back of a spoon in a mixing bowl

1 T sun-dried tomato paste or finely diced sun-dried tomatoes
2 T olive oil
juice of 1 lemon (about 1 T)

combine above with caper-anchovies and whisk to smooth consistency

toss green beans in the dressing, cover with plastic wrap, and chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes before serving

serving suggestion: serve with cold chicken, crostini, fresh tomato, and a little fresh mozzarella.

Recipe: African Squash Soup

Mika and I included this recipe in our cookbook (now ten years old, and still in its first print run!), which was based in turn on the recipe in the Africa News Cookbook, sadly out of print but available (according to Amazon as of this writing) used pretty cheap. We love this as a "winter warmer" and I thought of it today since the temperature here was actually (gasp) below freezing. For years we made this as an appetizer for Thanksgiving, but the last few celebrations we trotted it out it was too spicy for the taste of any of the guests except for us. (And we thought we'd dialed it down.) No matter: this is a great soup and I heartily recommend it for potluck and various solstice-holiday-event parties, as it's quick, delicious, unusual, and warming.

Don't be fooled by the length of the ingredient list - this can be done in 25 minutes or so start to finish, with time off to attend to something else.

1 largish butternut squash, or 2 acorn squash, or equivalent amount of other winter squash
1 bay leaf
1 small onion, minced very finely
4-5 large cloves of garlic, pressed or minced finely
1 TBS cooking oil (we recommend peanut oil or canola if you don't want the peanuty accent)
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp black pepper (fresh ground is great, but not necessary - fine grind)
1 TBS fresh ginger, minced finely or grated (dried is a very poor substitute here)
1/4 tsp curry powder of your choice
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp dried rosemary; if you use fresh, try to mince as finely as possible
3 TBS fresh lemon juice, or more to taste (we always seem to put in more)

Peel, cube, and cover the squash in enough water to cover, then bring to a boil in a soup pot.

When the pieces are very soft, mash them. It's easier to do if you lift them out of the water with a slotted spoon and mash them in a bowl, and then return them to the water, but if you want to save washing an extra dish, you can mash them right in the pot.

Add the bay leaf and bring to a simmer.

In a small skillet, sauté the garlic and onions in the oil over medium-high heat. Combine the remaining spices and add to the garlic and onion. Turn the heat to low and sauté 5-10 minutes until the flavors have blended well.

Spoon a little of the squash liquid into the skillet with the spices, stir and simmer gently until well combined, and then pour the skillet mixture into the soup pot. Pour the lemon juice into the skillet to get all the remaining spices and such in the skillet, and then pour all this into the soup pot, too.

Add more water if the soup is too thick, and adjust to your texture preference. We like the soup a bit on the thick side. Adjust seasonings to taste (particularly the lemon juice at this point).

For kids and the spice-adverse: you can reserve a portion of the squash base before adding the spices, and simmer it separately, adding only salt and lemon juice to taste. It's bland, in my humble opinion, but if you have a sweet squash many kids can be persuaded to try it, particularly if you serve it with a dollop of yogurt or sour cream. It's not the same dish as the recipe above, of course, but it's a minimal effort to cook "two" dishes this way if you have some folks who you reckon will not like the complex and nuanced brew of spicing in this dish.

Bone Appetite's First Holiday Charity Beg Post: Food Bank of Monterey County

One of the wretched ironies of living in Monterey County is that despite the fact it's one of the major food-producing areas of the United States, we also have extensive hunger among the working poor, many of whom are the same people who help grow and pick the food.

I am fortunate that I've only been "hungry", in the sense of not having enough food to eat, a couple of times in my life (touch wood). Once was when I was stranded in Washington, DC during the air traffic controllers' strike -- my plane ticket was worthless and the summer session at Georgetown I had been at had ended -- and I had run out of money expecting I'd get a refund for my ticket home. I went two days without eating anything, and it made a big impression on me. Boo hoo, you say, old Matt: yes, I admit this is the worst I've ever had it, of actually wanting to eat (not having the flu or whatever) and having no food, and no place to sleep.

Sadly I admit to not having acted on this knowledge as much as I should have over the years. But with the advent of the recession last year, realizing exactly how well we were eating here and how much we enjoy this aspect of California life, I started trying to "round up" our grocery bills each month and contributing the rounded-up amount to the Food Bank of Monterey County.

I am not sure many people realize how pervasive hunger is in this country of plenty. In particular there seems to be an impression that because we have a Government food stamp program, nobody need go hungry. Unfortunately, this is far from the case. The hardest hit folks are often those with regular, low-paying jobs, who have crises with finances for a variety of reasons (health care costs in this country are a major contributing factor to these household emergencies - consult your Maslow's hierarchy). I encourage my readers to check out the FAQ from the Food Bank of Monterey County to see why food assistance is so critical, and how it works. Food contributions are great, but the organization can use cash even more, as it's able to leverage its network to buy $7 of food for every dollar of contributions.

I don't have advertising links on this page, but I should probably put up a link to the Food Bank. In the meantime you can donate on-line here. Even $10 or $25 helps a lot and if you like the content on this blog, it would mean a lot to me to "support" this effort tangibly for somebody who could really use it.

Definitely the Chicken, then the Egg

When I first visited my in-laws' little farm, I had never seen chickens up close. So I poked out into the chicken yard with a certain fascination while my then-girlfriend was saying her greetings to her folks. The chickens were all running around (eyeing me quite warily, not sure if I was the fox or the farmer), pecking at bugs and doing what chickens do. Except one: there was one lying motionless in the middle of the chicken yard. So, urban rube that I was, I called out to my girlfriend's dad: "Um, sir, is that one sleeping?" He peered over, and said, "oh, that one's dead. Throw it on the compost heap, would you?" Throw it on the compost  heap?!? I gingerly picked up the chicken by its feet, not entirely sure what I was doing, vaguely afraid of dead chicken disease. I figured out which one was the compost heap and, still holding it with two fingers, gently slung it on the top. At this point, I was unsure if I was supposed to bury it or whatever. I went back over to where my future father-in-law was doing something with the rest of the family, and I asked, wondering if there was some sort of ceremony in store, "What was its name?"

The response of course was peals of laughter, followed by more peals of laughter when they realized I wasn't being intentionally funny. Naming the chickens? Even on a little farm, hardly industrial, just a big garden and some horses and chickens and not a lot else, the idea was so...sentimental.

I will say that's the only chicken I've seen die of natural causes at this farm. Chickens on the farm either end up the fox's dinner or the farmer's. Not that I've been around for the demise of many of them, and the girls generally live a long happy life including a healthy retirement from what I can glean.

I buy "organic" "free range" eggs at the store. The requirements for these designations are not what you might think. "Organic" is just a designation for the lack of certain additives to the food, not an active healthy bug-eating chicken. "Free range" only requires that the chickens have access to the open air, out of a cage, for a small portion of the day - whether or not they choose to take advantage of the opportunity is a big unknown. They do taste better than factory eggs.

During the winter, the veggie CSA we piggyback on has an egg option, and we get a half dozen with every box. You can tell the difference between store "organic free range" and these eggs instantly. The shells are slightly thicker, the color yellower, the proteins puff up more in the pan (or cake). They're also of course more irregularly colored, of irregular size, and as such any given recipe made with them will be both more delicious and slightly unpredictable with respect to consistency.

But neither the "organic free range" nor the CSA farm eggs hold a candle to those from my in-laws (er, in-laws' chickens, you know what I mean.) These eggs are a lovely orange, they have shape and texture unlike even the CSA eggs, and the shells are THICK. I don't have a micrometer handy but the difference is stark. The store or CSA eggs are, well, fragile, thin, they break easily, you get the little shattering pattern on the egg that results in the occasional eggshell shard coming into your egg when you break it. My in-laws' eggshells look like, well, they could be used to protect a growing chicken embryo until it's ready to hatch. Natural, in a word.

I am fortunate to have crazy/thoughtful in-laws who pack a dozen eggs in their carry-on luggage when they come out to visit us. The eggs, unrefrigerated and tossed about for 3000 miles, are never the worse for the wear. In the store, the eggs I buy have a broken one in the dozen at least once a month.

Of the modern food fads, one I find kind of cute and hopeful is the neophyte home chicken farmer. I know of at least three people in our area who are keeping chickens now. I can't imagine it's cost effective, and frankly, the fact that the chickens are given names suggests to me it's a lifestyle thing more than actual farming. That said, nothing wrong at all with trying to grow your own food - we'd keep chickens if we can. The only way you can be sure of the provenance of your food is to grow it yourself.

But you can't get sentimental about the practice. Farm life isn't nature but it has its own realities which, even for the happiest of chickens, have cruel implications if one anthropomorphizes the animals' lives. Fair and humane (to use an anthropomorphic concept) treatment of animals is a spectrum, not a black and white exercise, and like most aspects of life there's both compromise and optimization along the spectrum.

And the reality of modern life, of course, is having the space and wherewithal to raise your own chickens is a luxury of the rich (certainly relative to the lifestyles of most of the people in the world). I am reminded that decentralization of agriculture, if that's a goal of local food, would have to necessarily be a long process dependent on an incredibly complex array of other factors, including a completely different population profile worldwide. Climates in the vast majority of the world are inhospitable to agriculture for most or all of the year. We need to be a richer civilization relative to the number of people on the planet before every chicken can be as happy as my in-laws and every egg as good. (Choosing not to eat chickens or eggs is an option, although I'm not sure it's not an impoverishing one in its way, literally. It would certainly be the ultimate disaster for chickens.)

That would be the order of the chicken and the egg.

In the meantime, I will feel rich and fortunate every time I have one of in in-laws' eggs.