Anyone can cook, everyone should cook.

Anyone can cook. Or so that is what Chef Gusteau from Disney-Pixar’s “Ratatoullie” told me. Days like today I believe it to be not only true, but also necessary. Anyone can cook, everyone should cook.

The more steps I take away from the American food industry, the clearer the picture becomes. While there is much to be said here about American consumer culture, as far as food goes, we’ve super-sized our consumerism. There was a time in American history when we had to actually think about feeding ourselves. There were actual hours of a day dedicated to preparing the food for our standard three meals. The task of preparing food was actually considered a valuable task. The ability to produce one’s own food was not a hobby, but a necessity that held invaluable. Eating was not gluttonous, but crucial. There was a time in American history when food was fuel. Now the tables have turned, and food eats up fuel as it is shipped day and night, in and out of season, ripe or not ripe, fresh or frozen, from farms that are thousands of miles away to the cardboard box designed to fit in the cup holder of your car, from which you are pulling out pieces of chicken, engineered into the shape of french fries, using the hands you ought to be using to drive, to stuff them into your mouth as you travel from the drive-thru window to your poorly neglected kitchen table. I used to do it too, I am not an innocent bystander.

Yet, we are not a people beyond appreciating good food. At a party I recently attended, a gentleman twice piled his plate with piping hot barbeque beef and sloppy joe out of a row of crock pots, explaining that he was a “single guy,” and didn’t get a “home cooked meal” often. We obviously know that home cooked food has value. Our media driven minds are addicted to shows like Top Chef, No Reservations, and 30 Minute Meals. We are not blind to the fact that good food is out there, and it is worth our time to watch it being prepared. We rationalize occasionally splurging our hard earned American dollars on a “good meal,” at a “fancy” restaurant. We easily could’ve spent that money on some other form of self-indulgence. We know that good food has value. My question to you is, when did food have to be “good,” to have value? And when did “food” become less than good?

Unfortunately for Americans, food fell just as hard as the rest of our cherished crafts and trades when industry became the wave of the future and left value to kick a can in the dirt. Food became fast, easy and cheap, yet somehow we haven’t demonized it as we would demonize other things that take on those characteristics. We have whole-heartedly embraced it. We have lost the life-sustaining connection we once had with food. While we all still eat to survive, many of us no longer eat to stay alive.

This is a blog about food, which means I don’t want to delve into politics or subjects about which I am not informed. I think, however, that anyone who has been paying attention to our recently observed “obesity crisis,” can clearly see that there is one thing about Americans that is blatantly obvious and true: We are sick, very, very sick. People living in America suffer from heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and different forms of cancer more than any other population of people in the world. We are eating the wrong kinds of foods, we’re eating too much of them, and we’re consuming food and industry recklessly. Should our fastest growing industry really be “healthcare”? If we could all break that concept down to the idea that more and more Americans are finding employment in a field that treats the diseases, ailments and injuries of other Americans, would we finally get the message? The message is that we’re all getting sicker.

We’re too good for that. We’re Americans. We don’t let things beat us. We’ve prided ourselves in progress, expansion, and being the best of the best. We were founded on and by the best of the best, and because of them we’ve set an example for the rest of the world. Our children are the first generation in American history that will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents do. We’re dying. More Americans are dying every year from diseases that are a result of our diets than the total number of American soldiers who have died in the past 10 years of the Iraq-Afghanistan war. Why do we place such value on their lives and place so little on our own? We’re losing this battle. We’re Americans, we don’t lose.

We don’t lose, and this brings me back to the title of this blog. Anyone can cook, everyone should cook. We must place value on our lives. We must eat to stay alive and not just to survive. We are worth it. This weekend we are celebrating our annual holiday—Labor Day. There was a time in America when we used to labor. We’d labor at work, we’d labor at home, and we’d labor over our meals. We used to have to work for things, and even so, we still managed to grow and progress. Hard work and simplicity are not synonymous. We must get back to a place where we labor for things again. We will not be reverting to the dark ages, we will not be giving up all aspects of modernization, but we will be saving ourselves. We must learn how to eat to stay alive. We must, must, must learn how to cook again.

The following recipes are recipes I created last night, in the spur of the moment, inspired just by what was available at my local farm stand. This was my meal last night, and I cherished every bite of it. I had the privilege yesterday of being able to cradle warm sweet potatoes in my palms, picked out of a basket and smelling like dirt. I placed each candy onion to where it was just barely touching my upper lip and I could inhale its pungent smell to make sure I was picking out the very best of the crop. The basket of pears I bought was crawling with fruit flies—that told me they were sweet, ripe and ready to be eaten. I was given two ears of the very best corn I’ve eaten so far this year. It was dull, buttery yellow when I husked it, studded with pearly white kernels here and there. After I boiled it, it took on a popping shade of yellow that artificially colored margarine longs to be, and the white kernels stood out like the little white boxes of a highly complicated crossword puzzle. These are real foods. Corn on the cob is real food, not like corn in the form of heavily refined syrup that laces every ounce of a can of soda or sneaks into fat-free products to make them taste better. Real food is good food. The food our bodies crave in order to make ourselves feel better, and stay alive is good food. The food our grandparents and great-grandparents ate was good food.

This meal is not hard to make. There are several elements to the meal itself, all of which are prepared individually. It’s going to take a little bit of time and a little bit of work. In the end, it’s going to be worth it. This is a meal prepared with real food. It tastes like real food, and it is good and good for you like real food. Why don’t we just call it “food,” then. It’s what “food” should be—good, real and something of value.

Learn how to cook again, after all, anyone can.


Menu:
Roasted Sweet Potatoes, Red Candy Onions & Bartlett Pears over Whole-Wheat Cous Cous with mixed mesculin greens, Honey-Chevre goat cheese, Olive Oil and Honey

Roasted Sweet Corn on the Cob with Honey Butter

Crusty whole-grain bread



Roasted Sweet Potatoes, Red Candy Onions & Bartlett Pears

3 medium size sweet potatoes, peeled and cut to 1” chunks
3 small red candy onions, quartered
3 medium size Bartlett pears, peeled, cored and quartered
2 ½ TBS. extra-virgin olive oil
1 tsp. salt
¼ tsp. ground black pepper
1 sprig of fresh rosemary, leaves only
Large pinch of ground cardamom

1. Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees. Brush a 9x13in glass or ceramic pan with ½ TBS. of olive oil.
2. Add the sweet potatoes, red candy onion, pears, 2 TBS. olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary leaves and cardamom to the pan and toss to coat well.
3. Cover with foil and bake 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake another 20-30 minutes, tossing occasionally, until the potatoes and pears are tender and lightly browned.


Whole-Wheat Cous Cous

1 cup water
1 TBS. extra-virgin olive oil
½ tsp. salt
1 cup whole-wheat cous cous

1. In a medium sauce pan, combine the water, olive oil and salt. Bring to a boil.
2. Remove from heat and add the 1 cup of whole-wheat cous cous, mix well. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes.
3. Fluff with a fork and serve.


Roasted Sweet Corn with Honey Butter

2 ears fresh sweet corn, husked
1 TBS. salted Amish butter
1 tsp. local honey
Ground black pepper

1. Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Make honey butter by creaming together the butter and the honey until smooth and combined.
3. Break each ear of corn in half and place in a medium size stock pot. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Boil 2 minutes. Remove the corn from the boiling water.
4. Place ears of corn on a large piece of foil. Spread honey butter over the hot corn, and sprinkle with ground black pepper. Wrap the corn in the foil.
5. Place corn on rack of oven. Roast for 10-15 minutes or until you open the oven and can smell the corn.
6. Before serving, roll ears of corn in the melted honey butter collected at the bottom of the foil.


This will serve 4 people a healthy and appropriate portion of food. When I served it, I first bedded down the cous cous (about 1/3 cup cooked), topped it with a handful of mesculin greens, topped that with a scoop of ¼ of the roasted sweet potatoes, then dotted it with 1oz per serving of honey-chevre goat cheese, poured evenly over it one teaspoon of olive oil, then drizzled it very lightly with dark honey. I served one half of an ear of corn as a side, and one slice of crusty whole-grain bread.

For this blog, I am as always going to encourage you to buy local. However, all of these things are available at most grocery stores, and if that's where you have to shop, that's totally okay. We need to eat well again. We need to cook again. Period.