Slappy Cakes: A Post In Two Parts

PART ONE: THE NARRATIVE

Our recent visit to Slappy Cakes was special for a number of reasons.

For a start there's the sheer gimmicky pleasure. How often in a restaurant can you cook pancakes right on top of your table? We ordered one batch of regular batter and one batch of weird batter, and had both savory and sweet drop-ins. These arrive in little boats that can be combined and swapped around to your heart's content. Pure culinary freedom.

Of course, (if you are insufferable like me,) this may mean you find yourself sauteing apples in butter and sugar on the bare griddle before pouring the batter over them, not doing the conventional batter-then-fillings route, because the first batch was oddly crunchy and needed something else. If you are not insufferable, it just means you have a magical breakfast adventure.

For us it was also magical because it's been so long that we could go out for breakfast like this. The weird pattern of a housecleaner's Christmas bonuses (see previous entry) means I end up with some cash well after the main event, so unless you truly celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas you have a nice little cushion for the last week of December. And while most of it goes to bills, and repaying the little Christmas dent, shouldn't some of it be spent out with someone you love? Especially when you can visit a novelty restaurant nearby?

One thing I should say: don't make the mistake we did. Do not forget that squeeze-bottle-based pancake cooking should naturally lead to fantastic pancake art. We were far too full to indulge this realization by the time we had it. Our subsequent creations were wonderful but had to be left uneaten, and it was a crying shame.

PART TWO: THE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES



This was a very satisfying picture to whip out. I started it a few days ago (the last time I had time to sit and paint), and then finished it tonight in one sitting. Excellent. I am very pleased with how it turned out -- not always true for us artists and madmen. I think the blocking is strong and the lines are crispy and where they need to be. I think I want to do more with the lamp, but I worried that going there tonight would "over finish" it somehow so the jury's still out on that until morning. It's in a perfectly shareable state, and feels very real and completed, which was my only goal this evening apart from eating dinner.

It has been incredibly unsatisfying to try to get this scanned image to look like the real picture.

The first problem is just my method. I like to paint with bright colors. Colors that bounce around well in real light and have astonishing vibrancy and life. Lately, without expressly setting out to do so, I have also been doing a lot of limited color combinations, that are often two or three colors very close to one another on the color wheel and then one wild card from the other side (think peachy red, orange, orangey yellow then light teal.)

Teal (cyan) in particular is very hard for computers to see for some reason, at least in the way that I see it and the way it plays with other colors for me. For just about every picture I post I spend a lot of time trying to coax the monitor into seeing things my way -- changing the contrast a little, tweaking the colors in an attempt to get closer to how it really looks.

At this point I actually have my stand-by Photoshop tricks narrowed down to a few routine changes, and that's usually all things need. Occasionally though a painting is challenging and this was one of them. I had this greenish-teal that needed to come through, and a buttery-bright table, and a vermilion, plus the dark purple which to me mostly needs to be deep mauvey purple but which the computer wants to see as almost fuchsia.

Nothing I did really looked right, and in the end I mostly just gave up and settled for something serviceable but not really accurate.

In addition I have this weird problem with visible light in general. You'll notice above my desk there are two lamps. The one on the left is a squiggly long-life bulb. The one of the right is one of those "happy" bulbs that they sell at natural food stores. I have two different bulbs because both give off a slightly different colored light.

Here is an unedited digital photo of the painting I just finished, laid under the squiggly bulb to my left.



The same, under the other bulb.



See that?! No?

Let me make it a bit easier for you.



See? REALLY different treatments from my lamps. Pictures aren't always that crazy different under the different lights, but this one was incredible. And of course the problem is I am seeing a mixture of both lights and perceiving my color that way, rather than just with one light like the computer does. So I'd rescue the teal and lose the yellow. Then I'd bring back the yellow and lose the blues in the teal and everything went green. And I could either have fuchsia with vermilions or weird pinky reds with darker purple. To say nothing of the lavenders. Those really didn't work at all.

Of course ideally you'd be here in my apartment and I could be showing this to you live, without the worry of monitor calibration or any other nonsense. Very possibly you don't notice the difference, or if you do you think, "oh darling what does it matter." It maybe doesn't matter, but it does bother me that one light thinks that color is blueish, the other light thinks its tealish, and neither light picks up the subtlety of the purple that I keep talking about.

This is not a problem that is going away. If anything it will get worse as I begin to sally forth into the world of Making Prints. I will have to make a much bigger effort to mind my RGBs and CYMKs, and really learn about shadows and highlights in Photoshop, not just the mid-tones. I suspect I will need to jigger with my scanner as well. I suspect I will have to do real research on this stuff. As a person who firmly believes in painting by hand, it is a skill I will absolutely have to develop. Good thing I don't mind doing things the hard way.

It turns out, the way to make your house wonderful at 7:02am, when the sluggish autumnal sun hasn't yet crept over the rooftop's silhouettes, is to prep a soda bread recipe the night before.

Five minutes of fuss, and 45 minutes later, warm biscuit-y breakfast. And a soup-friend for the rest of the week.

IF: double

There's another problem that was mentioned in that NPR story.

As healthy eating becomes trendier, food bank donations become more unhealthy.

It was something that I hadn't ever thought about, but which makes sense and is also very worrisome. It's the element of the "diet of poverty" that no amount of budgeting, education or planning can really help.

So the take home lesson is: keep the health of the needy in mind when donating food. Or donate cash? Is that possible? There must be organizations out there working with food banks and soup kitchens to try and make everything wonderful -- and goodness knows they do SO much with so little. But chip in if you can. A little for you is a lot for someone else.

How I Eat

I heard this story on NPR the other morning. And this is what got me thinking:

"A gallon of milk is $3-something. A bottle of orange soda is 89 cents," she says. "Do the math."

In my notebook I wrote:



Just saying.

I couldn't stop thinking about this story all day. About the son who worried constantly about food yet would snub Brussels sprouts in favor of chocolate. I don't think that's unusual. Is a child who gets up in the middle of the night foraging for these things unusual? When does a person decide everything is available at all times? Is it a question of family rules about snack time, or is it commercials about junk food? Is it confusing needs with wants, and interpreting your body's requests for certain nutrients as tastes? Is it a habit that is taught or something deeper?



It's so hard to loose that appetite for sweets. I have to a certain degree -- partly because of hypoglycemia (obviously not the ideal path) and, for me, the poverty helps. But it hasn't helped these people nor most of the people in this country.

I looked up the story when I got home and did the math. This family receives $600 in food stamps. If we assume a four week month this adds up to $120 a week, or $30 per person. (Setting aside the question of portions.) Thirty dollars. That's about what we have been spending on groceries, per week, for two people in my house. A little more than what we've been spending, actually.

While this certainly has me reevaluating the qualifications for benefits in the state of Oregon, I don't know that poverty is the key to the question. The reason we can get by with two people on about $30 a week is because we have completely changed the way we eat, the way we shop, and the way we look at food. I did not learn it from my family (we ate mostly Meat With Sides when I was younger,) and I did not really learn it from school (so we can't chalk it up to education directly). So how do we do it? How is it that we eat healthily for cheap while millions of families across the country have the paradoxical yet very real crisis of hunger and obesity?

I can't answer for America. But I can answer for myself.

HOW I CAME TO BE THIS WAY: A SOMEWHAT DISORGANIZED LIST OF WHAT I'VE DONE TO TRY AND EAT AS HEALTHILY AND AS CHEAPLY AS POSSIBLE



1. Learn what one should eat.

- dark leafy greens
- lots of colorful fruits and veg (i.e., a variety of colors)
- whole grains. Any food that might show up on a Martha Stewart wellness list seems to be a particularly wise choice, especially if it shows up in more than one place.
- eat what's in season when it's in season ("greener", but also cheaper)
- eat lower on the food chain (make meals that focus on grains and legumes rather than meat.)

None of this is compelling if you don't normally eat this way, thus:

2. Learn to cook.

- accept this as a new challenge
- a positive thing -- think of it in terms of learning
- excuse to find new food (i.e., what orange things can we eat in summer? fall? winter? spring?)
- learn how to fiddle with recipes (swap beans, omit things, substitute things, etc.)
- plan meals for the week that use similar ingredients (play the Shop As Little As Possible game)
- think about food in terms of what you have

MAKE A LIST OF EVERYTHING IN THE FREEZER, FRIDGE, AND PANTRY RIGHT NOW!

- Learn how to tell what's in season when. (Don't be daunted by produce, learn about it.) (And get that book from the libary. Ask the librarian about similar books. Ask the grocer about what is fresh and what isn't.)

- Learn how to store food.



- Learn how to keep something. (What freezes? How long will it keep in the fridge? When do spices go bad?)

- Know that everything can be made at home (the pioneers did it. Tribes people do it.)
- food processor, morter and pestle? Can be a knife and a rock
- books like this one teach you crackers, chips, popsicles, bacon. (THIS book even has a recipe for grape-nuts!)

MAKE A LIST OF WHAT YOU LIKE TO EAT THE MOST

- find recipes for those things (esp. the "junk" food. Try to find recipes that do not have lots of junk in them.)
- Do not be intimidated by vegan/vegetarian/ethnic cookbooks. Learn to substitute. (i.e., ghee = canola oil, vegan cheese= real cheese, etc.)

IF you want to cut something out (like for me: cheezits) find something with a similar taste in the world of real food. (super sharp chedder broke my habit). Chunks of cheese alone are not winning health-points, but I notice how much I am eating.

LOOK FOR GOOD RECIPES



- details!
- avoid badly written ones, or, find a similar recipe written well and sub
- if you can't conquer something: learn from a friend, take classes, ask someone.

EAT SLOWER, TASTE YOUR FOOD.

- supposedly it takes the brain 8 minutes to realize it's full.
- also eat slower lets you appreciate it a lot more, and in a bind it can make, for example, my sad little lunch of carrot sticks and raisins feel like a big meal.

START TO LIKE FOOD



- people sometimes don't, they just mindlessly eat. That ain't no way to live!
- Food love perhaps not difficult for us fugitives, but it's important
- we can start to listen to what we actually want
- we can then give ourselves what we want

SHOP WELL RESTED AND RELAXED
- haste makes waste,
- hunger makes off-list items more appealing
- unit prices are the key. Bulk, large packaging are not always best. Bring a calculator. Look at the bottom of the receipt to find out the state's grocery tax and use Wolfram Alpha to learn how to calculate that tax into your total. (Or do it the lazy way and always round up).

- only use coupons for products you usually buy.
- buy staples. Save the fancy pre-made stuff for special occasions, if at all

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

American Public Media's The Splendid Table has been very influential in changing the way I look at food. It did not start with the Locavore Nation project, but there is a lot of good stuff in there about regular folks musing on the eating-local challenge. This episode wraps up that project from the folks themselves.

What I think helped me most about food of course is the way Lynne talks about food during the caller-question segment of the show. Listen to a few podcasts and see what I mean. For her food comes naturally, and it's in sentences like "sage loves pears" where I was able to start understanding what food could be beyond what I'd learned from my mother.

Lately they have been running more segments equating eating healthy and eating thriftily, which I have found very helpful. Recently Lynne interviewed Tamasin Day-Lewis, author of Supper for a Song, who is a little severe but brings up some VERY good points about eating everything one buys.

ALSO

Food blogs are helpful. Food blogs give you a back story, a reason why something is made a certain way. Often there is trial and error, full disclosure, and lots of pictures. It is like Cook's Illustrated without the snobbery. There is a Food blog search, wherein you can type in whatever you happen to have on hand and see what comes up, and can help you find some solid ones. Lately I find I visit 101 Cookbooks almost on a daily basis, because I am using so many of her recipes. She is very in line with the way I am cooking right now, partly responsible for it.

Alfalfa sprouts

Know what's awesome? Food you can grow inside, even on rainy days.

Know what else is awesome? The tone of the website I used to figure out how to do this. Taste them. They are really good for you! We can make our own!

I heard this on the radio just now while I was peeling wilted, leathery chard leaves from limp stems. Old chard leaves might feel like what bat wings must feel like, if you let yourself think things like that. I don't. Or I try not to.

I have never had to go hungry but I do know what it means. I have known people who have had to be hungry. I know people who are free-gans because they have the luxury to choose, but I've also known people who had had to dumpster dive because they couldn't scrape together enough food at home. And of course I have listened to stories about the Great Depression (see Act One, though I recommend the whole show.). To say nothing of the seas of gaping mouths and concave stomachs in all the hungry places in the world.

I am not remotely close to hunger, although I am closer than I ever have been. We get so used to how we eat that initially it's overwhelming to have to finally turn to the food budget and make cuts. But you learn. There are a lot of things you can do before you go hungry. You learn to eat lower on the food chain, to stop worrying about specifics in recipes. You learn to lessen your portion sizes. You learn to pay attention to the serving sizes. You learn to make things instead of buying them, you learn new ways to use the things that the younger, more wealthy, more wasteful self would have thrown away. You learn when all of the grocery stores give out free samples.

And sometimes that isn't enough. And I know. And I was reminded tonight as I listened to these people talking about what it feels like to go into a store and steal food. What it feels like to tell your children that you have nothing to give them to eat. And I watched as my limp chard turned into vitamin-rich powerhouses of nutrients. I picked the eyes off the tiny last potato, dumped the last of the leftover onion into the mix, added the pliable garlic cloves and tossed them around in some oil and sage. And I watched all of this turn into food in the roasting pan, and suddenly I wasn't butchering a pasta sauce recipe, I was Eating Food.



For the first time in years I said grace. And meant it.