Counting Coup at Potluck

Several native American tribes used to have this charming custom of "counting coup". It went like this. To prove your superior skills as a warrior, you took this club and rode toward your enemy very fast. Before horses you'd run at your foe or lurk in the bushes and jump out at your enemy. The purpose of this behavior was to designed to deliver a whack upside your enemy's head, that would raise a knot. Such a knot on the head ostensibly proved the courage of the warrior who delivered it.

You didn't try to kill the guy or anything. You were just trying to show him up. Humiliate him a little; that was the point. They are not the only tribe or culture to ever engage in such behavior.

Seventh-day Adventists have a long tradition of hosting regular Sabbath afternoon potluck dinners after services. Everybody prepares a dish on Friday, brings it to the church where the ladies warm up the most amazing casseroles and side dishes in the fellowship hall kitchen while the service is going on. One reason SDA services end pretty much on time on potluck Sabbaths is because of the smell wafting in from the fellowship hall.

Adventist potlucks are pretty genial affairs, with everyone loading their plates and generally feasting to celebrate the Sabbath and the goodness of the Lord. The food is amazing and traditionally, entirely vegetarian, of at least lacto-ovo vegetarian. If anyone does bring a meat dish, it gets set to one side on a special "meat" table where shame-faced individuals sneak over to indulge their weakness for flesh food. Otherwise potlucks in my church are relatively nonjudgmental affairs. Some of the best vegetarian food you'll ever eat is served up at these feasts. The food is pretty healthy too. Adventist generally live 5 or 6 years longer than most Americans and the diet is likely part of the reason why.

Unfortunately, there are always a few bony-fingered old birds, that show up at potluck with massive bowls of almost inedible lentils, salads chock full of kale or vegan concoctions that feel like you're doing some kind of penance when you eat them. Now, officially, Adventists don't believe in doing penance, but these folk pride themselves in producing dishes, which are healthier than anybody else's and making people eat them through the thick application of guilt. They generally plant themselves by the serving table, where they can bully everybody that comes by into trying whatever it is they brought. It's gluten-free, soy-free, fat-free, free of animal products and, they assure you, tastes great. Most of the time it doesn't, but you always feel obligated to take a big scoop of whatever it is in order to demonstrate your vegetarian street cred.

This week, I'm debuting my new weblog, "The Potluck Vegetarian" to memoralize the wonderful lacto-ovo vegetarian dishes that populate the serving tables of Adventist churches around the world. The first recipe went up this morning.  I decided to start off with Sheila's premier vege dish - Barbecue Tender-Bits. The blog is about potluck vegetarian food - the kind we bring to potluck to feed masses of hungry young people and their families.

My wife is the chef here and comes up with the recipes. I just chop up stuff and put it together for her. This is Adventist comfort food. We're going to test every dish personally with some help from Loma Linda and Worthington, who will be supplying some vege-meat for testing purposes.

This is not the kind of vegetarian cooking that allows you to count coup at potluck. It's just good-tasting food, everybody will love and will want the recipe for. And best of all, no chicken or cow had to make the ultimate sacrifice to make them. The blog will be a celebration of traditional Adventist lacto-ovo vegetarian food.

If you feel your nose turning up and you are smitten by an urge to tell me how terribly unhealthy one of the recipes is because it's not gluten-free or soy-free or radical vegan or has too much salt, sugar or spices, save your time. I won't post the comment. Who needs that kind of negativity. The Potluck Vegetarian will be a happy place. Take your criticisms to Facebook or Google Plus. Just not there.

And if you have a great recipe, you can send it to me there. I'll put a link on the site so you can email it to me. I'll credit you and if you'll send me a picture of yourself, I'll post that too. A picture of yourself with your amazing dish would be even better.  I looking forward to collecting all sorts of amazing recipes and posting them on The Potluck Vegetarian.

Tom

© 2015 by Tom King

Inhabiting Your World: Home Cooking

During our recent life's journey, I became the chief cook for our household. We had a change of chore responsibilities during my wife's illness that suited us both. I was working at home, so I no longer had commute time to deal with, I liked cooking, she was tired of it and too sick, so I took up the kitchen chores.

Let me say off the bat that my wife is a brilliant cook. My grandmother and hers were brilliant cooks and she learned from them both and went on to surpass them. I burn rice. I burn beans, I burn potatoes. Anything that can be burned, I have found a way to burn it. On the other hand, I don't mind experimenting and I'm comfortable making a meal out of whatever's in the cupboard and can make something out of nothing. Missing ingredients do not bother me.

When I took up the cooking chores, I took it up in typical man-fashion. I bought kitchen tools. I bought cookbooks. My son Micah had told me which cooking shows to watch, so I checked them out. I learned to cook the way a student learns chemistry. Sheila was my coach and chief critic. In the early days I was a one star cook - maybe less.

But as I got better at it, I learned three great lessons about cooking.

1.  Find your style and learn to cook accordingly.  If you're a by the book cook, then by all means measure and set the time and temperature accurately. If you're more of an artistic temperament, then learn to cook with dashes and dabs. However you do it, you'll soon understand how things work together to produce a delicious dish and you'll soon be making up dishes of your own creation. Don't try to cook like your wife or your cooking teacher. If you need to use every dish in the place, do it. If you hate to use more than a bowl and a spoon, then figure out how to do it that way. To your own style be true. Instead of fighting with the kitchen organize it so the layout matches the natural flow of your own peculiar brand of food preparation.

2.  Cook to make yourself happy.  Cooking to impress the critics is the reason so many great chefs become madmen. Cook to please yourself first and soon you will find that others are pleased with your cooking too. The great truth of life is that only you can make yourself happy. This is true in the culinary arts. Cook what you want to cook the way you want to cook it.

3. Be not afraid. This is the first thing an angel always says when he appears to a mere mortal.  It is the first thing an angel would say to a beginner cook I imagine. The tragic death of a souffle' is not the end of the world. It may just be that you aren't ready to do a souffle'. Me? It's highly unlikely I will ever even attempt a souffle', but I've taken on bread-baking, scratch-cakes and pies and homemade pizza. With my Mom's Betty Crocker Cookbook, I can take on anything. Besides, cooking is wonderfully forgiving once you get the bones of cookery learned.

Cooking for ourselves is what separates us from the beasts. The gradual loss of our ability to cook is, I believe, what is causing the collapse of civilization.  There is virtually no difference in temperament between a pride of lions loose amongst the wildebeests and a gang of teens descending on an unsuspecting Pizza Hut. They are consumers of food, not participants.

Until you work a ball of bread dough with your hands, flatten a pie crust or lay down a lasagna layer by layer, you have not fully participated in the holy act of feeding yourself.  Unless you have prepared a meal from scratch, with your own hands and your own brain fully engaged, you have not fully savored one of the finest things in life. Without learning the intricate interplay of flavors, textures and colors that go into good cooking, you miss an essential part of life.

You can choose to be a critic or an artist. The critic knows nothing. He nibbles at food. He often criticizes what he does not understand or appreciate. He looks around to see what the snobs say before he makes up his mind. That's why foods and cooks and restaurants that make me smile are often blasted by food critics. The critic is a sad little king on his sad little hill, looking down on a life they will never fully appreciate nor never fully savor. 

New York Style Pizza Recipe

So go out and find a recipe and make it. You might want to try this New York Style Pizza recipe.  You can find it at this link.

Start easy. It's fun to do stuff like this and, if you're a guy, the women-folk in your life will be mightily impressed.  AND the great thing about it is, you don't ever have to eat food you don't like again if you're the cook.

© 2013 by Tom King

Comfort Food - The Cornerstone of Civilization

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Mom's garlic and cream cheese 
mashed potatoes - mmmemories!

You forget just how important it is to cook to suit yourself until you share a kitchen and have to cook to suit the tastes of another.  Since my wife and I moved to the carriage house, we've been enjoying a change in our diet that happened without us really thinking about it.  When you shop for your own groceries and cook for yourself, you soon revert to your old habits and old favorite dishes.

We've gone almost completely vegetarian again.  We've had some tuna, but other than that, we've gone back to the old SDA vegetarian dishes I grew up on.  I've made cottage cheese loaf, oatmeal patties, barbecued Tender Bits (bought a case of that stuff), all kinds of spaghetti and pasta dishes seasoned with vegeburger, homemade vegetable pizzas, Chinese vegetables.

We've started stocking frozen veggies by the giant economy bag, fresh produce, fruit and vegetables.  Avocados are cheap up here in the Pacific Northwest for some reason and tomatoes and peppers aren't too terribly expensive either.  Haven't had anything made of hamburger or chicken since October except on the road when traveling.  My veins feel degreased. I've been making homemade whole wheat bread again and homemade cookies, pies and even did a German Chocolate cake for Sheila's birthday.

We celebrated her birthday by going to Goodwill and buying cooking utensils, pots and pans and kitchen stuff for our new kitchen. It was fun.  I highly recommend spending money to properly equip your kitchen. There's nothing quite like cooking with the proper tools.  It's faster, things come out better and taste better and it's more fun.  I bought a set of Eversharp knives that are so sharp you have to be careful not to pitch them in the dishwater.  You can cut yourself badly groping around for them when you do the dishes. 

I have begun to believe that the real problem with the next generation of young people is that they haven't learned how to cook properly. Young people don't cook anymore.  They're always going out to eat at restaurants and they eat a lot of takeout.  What happens when you don't cook for yourself, you have your taste in food determined by someone else - some chef or short order cook or, worse, a gaggle of teenaged fry cook operating out of fast food joints.

You don't develop your own signature dishes if you eat out all the time.  You miss the routine of making a pan of rolls on Friday for Sabbath dinner.  You don't learn about homemade cinnamon rolls, Dad's breakfast burritos or pancakes every Sunday morning.  It's those sorts of things that anchor your life so you're life is not drifting around consuming whatever somebody offers you on a menu.  You chart your own course, Create your own family traditions so that your own kids remember things like family taco night or inviting folks over for homemade pizzas like we used to do when the kids were little. I remember back at Valley Grande Academy, Mrs. LeBard, the principal's wife, used to make a whole pile of pies on Friday nights once a month or so and feed all the kids in the school pie after Friday night vespers.  It was a lovely tradition.

God gave us food for other reasons than to keep us alive. He could have made food utterly tasteless, but he did not.  He gave us flavors in infinite variety and endowed us with an innate creativity that we might enjoy the fruits of the Earth in all the shapes, colors, textures and tastes imaginable. No two families eat precisely the same meals and snacks and yet we are able to meet all our nutritional needs just the same.

If your refrigerator is full of soft drinks and frozen pizzas, I invite you to create yourself a menu for one week and determine to not go out to a restaurant for the full week.  Then, take a trip down to your grocery store.  Buy a week's worth of ingredients.  Splurge on a few things like olive oil and favorite spices. Get some produce for goodness sake.

If your kitchen tools are woefully inadequate, you don't have to spend much.  Run down to Goodwill or the Salvation Army thrift store and do like we did.  Create yourself an eclectic collection of dishes and pick out some good kitchen tools, pots and pans to cook with.  Cook with flair. Experiment.  Make stuff from scratch. It's actually fun if you have the right equipment and a properly set up kitchen.

Make yourselves some lovely meals during your week off from eating out.  Set the table and sit down at it. Fix a pitcher of iced tea.  Eat slowly and talk about your day. Let civilization creep up on you and transform your mealtimes.  If you've got kids, you'll be making memories they will never forget. The best and strongest memories of childhood are almost inevitably tied to smells and flavors as well as sights and sounds.  You owe it to your little ones to fortify them with those memories. When they go off on their own, they'll want to come home and have you recreate those memories for them.  They'll steal the big yellow bowl you used to make banana pudding in because they'll want a piece of home to carry with them out into the big, bad old world.  They'll want your recipes, but they'll always make them their own and they'll never be quite what they remember from Mom's kitchen.

You'll also be surprised how much your food costs drop every month too. You can use the savings to buy yourself some toy trains and start a hobby.  But then that's another blog and I don't have time for trains now anyway.  I need to finish putting together the telescope I'm building.

Sometime life is just so very, very good.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King