One of the best places to find new cookbooks is the public library’s discard sale. Hardbound cookbooks with dust-covers, filled with lots of pictures, sold for a few dollars. Last year I picked up several, including one that has become a new favorite.

Christine Ingram’s Rise and Risotto: Cooking with the World’s Best-Loved Grain suits our needs very well. Rice is our family staple; the kids never complain about it, and will often eat it when they refuse everything else. Ingram’s cookbook is divided into regional recipes, and while I have to skip one section that makes frequent uses of soy sauce (ahh! soy sauce), everything else is written with the single-ingredient cook in mind. The recipes are flavorful, interesting, and often one-dish meals. Perfect.

(Judging by the Amazon listings, the book has been reworked several times, and there is a newer version available under the name Risotto and Classic Rice Cooking.)

With all this sickness, we compounded last week’s slow-food sins by buying the standard sick kid foods: Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and saltines. Bland, easy on the stomach and predictable. Just what a kid needs.

Saltines sound like a simple food, but like most baked grain products in grocery stores, they are a carefully calibrated mixture of processed and chemical foods. Only one of the brands available in my grocery store is made without high-fructose corn syrup, and it also contains TBHQ as a preservative.

Baked goods in the grocery store use chemical non-food ingredients to achieve two things: uniformity of texture and preservation of “freshness”. Our palates have grown accustomed to these things. The imperfections that are a prized part of handmade crafts have not gained mass appeal when it comes to food: we want everything precisely the same size, same color, no lumps, no bubbles, no variations. A skilled baker can approach these standards of reliability, but the perfect uniformity that the average American palate desires is a false expectation created through the use of chemicals.

Some of you have mentioned that you wish you could try our experiment, but the idea of it is too overwhelming. I am not urging you to do anything. This is an experiment for us, not a proselytizing conviction. But if you don’t already, you can seriously cut down on the non-food items you eat through abstaining from grocery store baked goods. Look for a good independent bakery in your area (not everywhere has good bakeries, I know. I am blessed to live in the land of Shadeau Breads), and buy your bread or muffins or rolls from them. Even crackers, if they offer them.

We have been at this everything-from-scratch lifestyle for several months now, and though I had already realized during our previous illness-induced backsliding that fast food does not actually taste good, this time I found myself repelled by the way an animal had been rendered unrecognizable.

I eat meat. I do not find anything disturbing about eating meat, though there are ethical implications both in the frequency with which we eat it, and in the way we care for and slaughter the animals we eat. But the idea of meat does not creep me out. If we all decided to stop using the Norman-French words for meat and began calling our beef “cow” and our pork “pig,” it would provide no shocks in this household. We are aware – deliberately and even reverently – that our meat costs a life, that the bacon we eat was once a living creature.

But our McDonald’s meal disturbed me because, after all these months of preparing our own chicken, the dismembering and grinding and reshaping of a chicken carcass so that it no longer looks like a chicken carcass struck me as obscene.

Since we started our slow food experiment, I have stood in line at the butcher’s shop looking at the diagram of the different cuts of a cow, or I have unshelled shrimp, removing the tiny creatures’ legs and tails, or I have cut apart the skeleton of a chicken. All these small practices remind us not only intellectually but tangibly that this body was a life, with legs like ours, or bones like ours. I have learned to reckon the life of the animal as part of the cost of eating meat. This is not always something that sits comfortably on me. I have not yet killed our own meat, but I think I should be willing to, if I’m willing to eat it.

I was disturbed by the McNugget not because I think there’s anything wrong with eating a reshaped chicken carcass. I was disturbed because its popularity shows how excluded most of our culture is from the realities of meat. It is a spiritual impoverishment for us to eat an animal without recognizing that we have taken its life. Meat costs a life. That should matter to us.

As I said, I am not a vegetarian. I do not believe that it is wrong to take the life of an animal. I do believe that there is something wrong with us if we take the life of an animal and pretend we didn’t.

We are at the challenge stage of kitchen emptiness. I could go to the store, but there are all these odds and ends in the kitchen that tempt me to create something new. Rice is our family staple – all six of us like it, and no one ever complains about rice, so I decided to invent a new rice dish.

One of the problems with combining foods of any kind is that my children like uniform textures. They hate casseroles. So I decided I would cook several things that I could combine in my plate, but they could eat separately. After surveying the cupboards, I chose a butternut squash, a package of lentils, and raisins.

As I said, I wanted food with texture, so I halved the squash lengthwise, scooped out the seeds and strings, then peeled it and cut the flesh into one-inch pieces. I drizzled them with olve oil, sprinkled it with chili powder and cayenne, and baked it at 400 F. I stirred the pan once after twenty minutes, then baked for another ten, or until the pieces were soft when poked with a fork.

I took 1/2 cup of lentils and simmered it gently for thirty minutes in 2 cups of water with 1/2 teaspoon of cumin and salt. Lentils are a wonderful bean; unlike other dried beans, they require no pre-soaking, and they cook quickly. But I wanted to keep that nutty flavor and texture, so I did not let the pot boil. If they cook too quickly, the skins come of and you have mushy lentils. There are good recipes for mushy lentils, but that is not what I wanted.

The rice you can cook any old way. I used basmati, and just steamed it.

Once the food was done, I served the squash, lentils, raisins and rice each in their own bowls. I piled all four together on my plate. Az the Husband ate the squash, lentils and rice. The kids ate only the rice and raisins, kept intwo distinct locations on their plates. The older two tried a lentil when I insisted. They were not impressed.

But everyone ate their fill, and winter starvation was held off for another day.

Shopping with young children is not for the week. I pushed that car cart around the store, gathering the necessaries. I was feeling under the weather, so I added cough drops and a vaporizer to the cart full of groceries and 85 pounds of children. The kids were well-behaved, and nothing notably awful happened in the store. Once we had made our purchase, I successfully buckled them all in again.

And I was done.

You know that point you hit where you know you do not have the strength to do anything more? Not even one little things? I had hit that point. Exhaustion settled on my shoulders like a heavy fur cape. Anything I did next – getting into the van, herding the children into the house, making a meal – was going to cost an extraordinary effort.

Now I know that in many places, when you hit the end of your strength, you have to go on anyway. I have been in that situation. (Especially while pregnant. Childbirth is the definition of pushing past your own perceived strength.) I know that many women around the world do not have the option of deciding they are too tired to make a meal. there are no fast food joints on the corner, and if there were, mom wouldn’t have the money for it anyway.

Sometimes circumstances force us to go beyond our strength. But when circumstances don’t, we are left with the force of our own wills. The pay-off of slow food is not big enough to rally my will when I am exhausted. The kids had a fast food lunch AND supper that day.

I don’t feel guilty about it. Sometimes when I write about our fast-food slip-ups, commenters rush to reassure me that I don’t need to feel guilty. This is surely a sign that I am not writing for a hardcore foodie/slow food/vegetarian audience. But the reassurances are also unnecessary. Our Slow Food Experiment is just that: an experiment. We are trying this – and writing about it – to document our own experiences, thoughts and feelings in this new effort of eating. The failures are part of that experiment.

By the day’s end, I was moving even more slowly. The cough drops were not enough to soothe my swollen throat. I could not keep warm. I kept shaking. By 7pm, I had a fever of 101. The next day the doctor would confirm I had strep throat.

So I don’t feel guilty for last weekend’s shortcuts of pre-made food. But I do think about the parents who don’t have the option, even when they are sick, and how grateful I am for choices we cannot earn.

Skip a meal, say a prayer, and donate the cost of the meal to relief efforts in Haiti (hat tip to Jennifer at Conversion Diary).

MSNBC has a list of real charities active in Haiti, so you can give without getting scammed (hat tip to Robin at Pensieve).

Parents lie.

Oh sure, it would be nice if the kids would expand a little. But the trouble with kids who enjoy adult foods is that they want to eat adult foods.

Let’s say, for example, that a mother has a deep and lasting affection for a specific kind of cheese – the kind of passionate attachment that cannot be put in words because its ardor might inspire jealousy in her husband, who is not and will never be a block of cheese. And then let’s say that this mother spent some of the precious grocery money on a big hunk of that cheese (Maytag Blue, let’s say), thinking that the precious item could be stashed in the fridge, where she could whittle away at it over several weeks.

Suppose that mother let her children try it.

And suppose they liked it.

My blue cheese, twenty minutes after I brought it home. It was originally three times this size.

They are gnawing on the remains as we speak.

Goodbye, dear cheese. I hardly had a chance to love you.

I mentioned in a previous post that after months of making our own food from scratch, I taste the fakeness of some prepared foods. That is not a very specific description, and is only a part of how our taste has changed.

I had worried that making all our own food from scratch would turn us into food snobs. Food snobs are lousy guests. One of my friends used to make her own pasta, but stopped when her four-year-old started refusing to eat store-bought pasta at other people’s homes. She decided to she wanted him to be a good guest more than she wanted him to eat homemade food. A good choice, and one that I thought about when we started our experiment.

But while everything-from-scratch has made my palate more sensitive to some things, I don’t think it has made me a bad guest. Making all our own food is hard work, and when I am occasionally treated to someone else’s food, I only feel grateful.

My palate has changed and returned to something more natural, although “returned” is probably not the right word, since I have never eaten this way before.

1. I no longer need the crunch. For the first month, the foods we missed and craved most were chips and crackers. Crackers had been a staple of our life with children. I tried a few recipes for making our own, but they were varying degrees of awful. If we had bought any one of them at a store, we would would have thrown it away and vowed to never buy it again.

But somewhere in the last two months, I lost the need for the cracker. Once or twice we have made chips, but the tortilla chips and Cheez-its and Ruffles that constantly cycled through our home are gone, and I rarely miss them. I do make my own crunchy granola, which satisfies the occasional crunchy longing, but I do without the fried snacks.

(Az wants me point out that he DOES miss them.)

As for crackers: every now and then when I make pie crust, I roll out the leftover dough very thin, cut it into irregularly-sized pieces, prick holes in them, and bake them. I sprinkle on a little salt when they come out of the oven, and the kids gobble them. It would not do as a staple, but as an occasional treat for the kids, it works.

2. I want less sugar. Don’t get me wrong; we still eat A LOT of sugar. I tried to measure how long it took us to finish a 10-pound bag of sugar, but Az unknowingly refilled the sugar canister before I could mark the day. Still, I know I am eating less. There is no high-fructose corn syrup in anything I eat.

The only things I make with sugar are things that are meant to be sweet. That may sound silly, but consider the store bought items that usually contain sweeteners, but don’t in our home: peanut butter, bread, crackers, soups, marinades and sauces, canned fruits and vegetables.

Cutting out accidental sugar has decreased how much I want sugar in general.

3. I want less salt. At first, we salted things as much as usual. And cooking everything from scratch does make salt very important. A small amount of salt can be the difference between something tasting right or tasting lousy. When I made Elise’s Asian Cole Slaw, my first taste was awful. Then I realized that because I was using single-ingredient peanut butter, my slaw lacked small amounts of sugar, salt and oil that were probably in hers. I added a tiny bit of brown sugar and salt, and it tasted great.

Cooking everything from scratch has trained me in a more judicious use of salt. Potatoes need salt; bread usually needs half as much as the recipe calls for, and most foods get by with none at all.

4. I long for fresh vegetables. In late afternoon, when my taste buds start revving up for dinner, I find myself daydreaming about tomatoes or onions instead of macaroni and cheese. I WANT it, rather than just thinking I should eat it.

5. Nothing can replace soy sauce. It cannot be done. I cannot make it at home, and I cannot replace it with something else. Living without it has been a difficult adaptation. Forget the golden apples of the Hesperides; soy sauce is the real miracle food.

Soy sauce shows an area of disagreement between Az and I: he thinks that since we can’t make it at home, we should cave and buy it anyway. I am more interested in discovering how living without it will shape our palates in the future.

6. Chik-fil-a biscuits have lost their glamour. During our days of sickness, we ate a lot of fast food and take-out, when we ate at all. I used to love Chik-Fil-A chicken biscuits for breakfast. Now – meh. They’re okay.

I mourn this loss a little.

What taste do you think you couldn’t live without?

The photo above is from liberalmind1012‘s photo stream and is licensed under Flickr’s Creative Commons.

We are celebrating the days without school by reading books, keeping warm, and cooking comfort foods. Last night Az the husband candied almonds. This morning I will lay the baby back down for a nap so I can make onion pie before the other kids wake. I blind-baked the crusts last night (cooked them slightly while empty) and they are sitting temptingly on my counter, waiting to be filled.

When the kids wake, we will cozy up with our cocoa and some good books, and smile through the window at the falling snow, as the smell of onion pie fills the house.

My shepherd’s pie was not the best – not enough beef stew in proportion to potatoes and cornbread crust – but it was still hot and filling and comforting. Good winter fare.

This was our first everything-from-scratch party, and I was surprised at how it changed my feelings about the food. My menu was simpler than previous parties: I only made three dishes. Before we had children, I would cook for three days before a party, fussing over every detail. I enjoyed it. I loved the feeling of making something tangible with my hands, and I loved how impressed people were.

Since the kids were born, I have tried to match to my pre-kid standards, with the result that too many dishes don’t get finished in time, or I am a crazy person with the children for the days before the party. You cannot make a fancy meal with small children in the house. Can’t be done.

Since I knew I would be making everything from scratch, I did not overreach this time. A soup, an entree and a sweet bread. The end. Guests brought other things, and the table was covered with food. But most importantly, I didn’t fuss. I did not panic because something wasn’t done.

And when the shepherd’s pie did not turn out to be the best shepherd’s pie in the history of sheep-herding, I was not devastated. I knew exactly what was in that shepherd’s pie, and they were all good things. I will combine them a little better next time.

The habits of slow food have given me an unexpected equanimity about my cooking.

I don’t know when we will have another party. Maybe not for another year. But it was delightful to find that even under our new regimen, it can be done and enjoyed.