Bone Appetite

After Lunch, Le Deluge

A cabinet minister in Italy has suggested that Italians take too long for lunch, and eat too much while they're at it. He's ostensibly talking about the health and productivity of Italian workers, but there's a bit more to this in terms of globalization and food than just the time taken out of the day. I'm all too familiar with the advantages of having predictable lunch hours for the sake of doing business -- I once counted the number of time zones I had to keep track of regularly for the job I had last year, and it was eight or nine. You try setting up a conference call that's not going to interfere with somebody's lunch. If that lunch takes 2-3 hours and has erratic start and stop times, oi.

On the other hand, as one of the commentators on "The World" noted, maybe all that healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet doesn't have so much to do with the food as the attitude and pacing behind it. If you think about this: lunch as a lazy, extended period, the traditional carnivorous big meal in the middle of the day that we may be evolutionarily adapted to, the easy socialization instead of rushing through it, and maybe a bit of a siesta on top of it -- you might make a case it's worth studying to see if this is better for your heart than "good" cholesterol.

I won't get into the (predictable) reaction to the minister's comments, which are a little irrelevant to my point at hand. Particularly with kids and regular work days and such we have this fairly rigid schedule about when we eat and mealtimes are constrained by external constraints. Our "relaxing" meal of the day is dinner, because that's the only time we have time to go in any such pace, the only time we're all together every day. From the meal structure comes our diet, and the format for all our cooking. I rarely mention lunch and breakfast here because, well, they're very much the same every day. (In my case, eating leftovers from the kids' breakfast for breakfast, and leftovers from dinner for lunch.) And yet I rarely think on this, even within this space.

Think about this in the context of slow food and eating locally: we're not only globalizing our food supply right now, we're globalizing our eating habits, the rhythm of the day. It's a necessity of sorts for the 24/7/365 society. And I'm pretty sure it's not a good thing.

Recipe: Medley of Cold Squash Salad Recipes

No, the title is not a typo.

I had originally planned on doing a green salad tonight, but because I didn't use the summer squash last night, and I made focaccia for the main course tonight, my thoughts turned to cold squash salad. I was originally thinking a little EVO, lime juice, tarragon, maybe a little salt and pepper, over steamed and doused squash, chill in the fridge, pop it out when dinner's ready.

But, this thing called the Internet, it lets you check your thinking against the wisdom of the masses. When I had typed the appropriate search terms into the Google, this is the recipe that I found.

Now, as I'm sure we're all well aware by now, anything you find on the Intertubes must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Recipes would seem to be particularly risky with respect to attribution and provenance; there's hardly a real original recipe in the world, I would think, except insofar as we're all riffing on one another. (Maybe the Soylent Green Cookbook will be an original. GMOs, anyone? The GMO Cookbook! Now that's an idea waiting for an author!)

So, I looked at this particular recipe and I thought, why not? I've actually got an avocado unspoken for unhand and ripe, and yes, I have...cream cheese? Hmmm. What's up with that? And...green chiles? And olives are not listed in the ingredient list, but they are in the directions.

And that cream cheese -- a 3 ounce package? I've never seen cream cheese in 3-ounce packages. Cut into 3/4" cubes? 3 ounces of cream cheese would make, well, about four such cubes. And while I confess that I frequently pop cheese to be grated or cut into the freezer for ten minutes to harden it up and make the cutting process easier, trust me, this does not work with cream cheese. Who cuts cream cheese into cubes, and gets cubes when they're done? (Our cream cheese comes in a circular tub, making cutting it all the more problematic.) And...you figure out how much 3 ounces of cream cheese is. I guessed, using the pizza-cutting part of my brain.

All this makes me a little suspicious. That perhaps this recipe was modified, either by the website editor, the contributor, or wherever. Because, well, if olives were in the original recipe, but not the green chiles, and the cream cheese were feta, this would make a pretty decent Greek salad, particularly if part or all of the squash were cucumbers.

I cast no aspersions on Helen Rodriguez or InMamasKitchen.com here -- that's what we all do when we innovate or try to be creative with recipes. You take an existing idea, you monkey with it, it's either a success or it isn't and you can claim it as your own or orphan it. A little careful editing and kitchen-testing would help, though.

In my case, I couldn't make it quite as instructed. I substituted a shallot for the scallions, I skipped the green chiles and used olives (5, to be precise, because that seemed like the right number), I added a quarter of a roasted red pepper diced up, and I just tried not to smoosh the cream cheese entirely (I would've used feta had I any on hand).

This was not bad -- but I think it would've been better with the feta, and a bit more lemon juice. Mika says she likes it very much, complex flavors without anything really dominating and a nice mix of textures.

Now, would that be enough for an original recipe?