In fact, when I steamed up a few handfuls of wild rice this morning, I only vaguely thought dressing. But it smelled so nutty I got in the mood and toasted up some quinoa, pilaf-style, for steaming. Then after yoga I got serious. Minced garden sage, stirred in a few eggs, diced some celery & shrooms & apples, all sauteed in the requisite stick or two of butter Thanksgiving seems to demand.

It was an enchanting experience, this business of letting what was on hand and fresh run the show. Not that it’s a new idea, but somehow at Thanksgiving all that easy does it goes out the window and there’s more time spent pre-planning than actually eating.

Of course, I incorporated techniques from years of cooking: stirring in enough eggs like you do in meat loaf or bean loaf to hold things together, not skimping on the butter, tasting to make sure the salt was right, mincing enough sage to say Thanksgiving, staying mindful of appearance. So beautiful it was with the chunks of apple. So beautiful I made three skillets full: big ones for each of the meals I’ll attend and a small one for the house here so that even though I’m going out, those cherished leftovers will still be around.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone–As Pink Floyd sang so many years ago: Wish you were here…

Breakfast. This morning. Out came a clean pot and in went organic polenta from the bulk bins for a new batch of porridge. Stir, stir, stir. Then to the garden to round up what have you. A couple scallions. A handful of young fava beans. Back in the hippie kitchen. Choppity- chop for the veggies and into the pot they went. Just a quick stir and then covering to let hot golden polenta turn the greens al dente.

Fry an egg. Grab a couple roasted chiles. Ultrafast. Healthy. Thrifty. Local/Seasonal. Me and Swish were ready to feast.

Oh–and that last fava that turned up in my pocket unchopped and uncooked. I just chomped that down au naturelle, tender and young freshly picked as it was…

In case you haven’t appreciate what a radical tune Jimmy Crack Corn is before, here are the lyrics:

When I was young I used to wait
On master and hand him his plate
Pass him the bottle when he got dry
And brush away the blue-tail fly

Chorus

Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care
Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care
Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care
My master’s gone away

When he would ride in the afternoon
I’d follow him with my hickory broom
The pony being rather shy
When bitten by the blue-tail fly

Chorus

One day he rode around the farm
Flies so numerous that they did swarm
One chanced to bite him on the thigh
The devil take the blue-tail fly

Chorus

Well the pony jumped, he start, he pitch
He threw my master in the ditch
He died and the jury wondered why
The verdict was the blue-tail fly

Chorus

Now he lies beneath the ‘simmon tree
His epitaph is there to see
Beneath this stone I’m forced to lie
The victim of the blue-tail fly

But my garden squash patch is almost entirely devoted to spaghetti because it’s such a work horse in flash-cooked warm salads. On the previous post, Getting Our Acts Together, I showed how prettily spaghy dressed up a New Year’s potluck dish (that I took to KCC). And how easily I got fed the following day by simply making some gremolata to go with.

Now here’s day three. Still spaghetti squash waiting in the fridge so I got a full blast burner going under my cast iron wok, poured in a puddle of water, grated a broccoli stem and gave the florets a brief chop. Into the steaming heat the good greens went along with some scooped out spaghetti squash. By the time I found some olives to toss in and a plate, the squash was warm and broc al dente.

Dressing was some olive oil poured over, pinch of coarse salt, grind of black pepper, lemon zest grated right on top, lotsa fresh squeeze lemon juice to follow, and a big fluffy grating of parmesan using my hand dandy microplane.

Yup, I could have stopped to mince some garlic but I didn’t and things were luscious with the olives especially saying, “hello.”

So, that’s getting on a roll with spaghetti squash, day 3. You can put it in a blender with eggs and cornmeal to bake up like pizza crust and top it with the usual too. Who knows, day 4 might just roll on out with that little number–or even some big puffy yellow muffins. How about you? Into to getting around and getting on a roll?

Think about it. Before we got measuring cups and formulaic cookbooks a century ago in the 1890s, cooking was a art. And just ask any artist–it’s the creativity they love. The decision making power. The joy of producing something that conveys a glimpse of who they are and what they can offer to the world.

Yes, yes. I know. You’re thinking all that pie-in-sky talk is fine for starving artists, but when the family wants dinner, there’s no time for nonsense.

Rhubarb Pie

I’m hip. But I submit that measure free cooking is a fast track to first rate, ultrafast, easy-healthy-thrifty-delish food. More, and here’s the key: it’s fun because you get to be boss. Indeed, I think one of the reasons we all grab more product and take out food than our health and wealth can afford is that we’ve got it in our heads that cooking is a tedious, even boring exercise in following rote directions.

In a measure free kitchen, you leave behind your low status of technician–one who merely carries out the ideas that others have conjured up. Instead you get to be boss. You get to be the one who makes the decisions. Surely in our over-regulated lives from the alarm to the traffic lights to the time clock, in the privacy of our own kitchens we deserve that much…

Intrigued? If so, poke around the site and see if any of the samples I’ve shared from the books seem do-able to you. We’ve also tucked in vids of me rocking & rolling here and there to help the cause. As you do you’ll find a whole new kitchen world opening up before your eyes. Not a gourmet one. Not a silly one. Just a down to earth kitchen scene that women around the world have known for centuries. Indeed, no need to go to Tuscany to have a sexy food life…just spend some authentic time your very own kitchen!

So here you go.

In these vids I show how to

1. Turn the burner on high with a puddle of water.
2. Put your rustically chopped veggies in, in the order of which takes longest to cook Build your flavor using the sacred quartet: oil, vinegar, salt, pepper
3. Pair with protein and carbs
4. And bring on the goodies to make Plain Jane fare rock your socks!

It’s as simple as that, and the clean-up is too. Plus I talk about eating seasonally, thrift, health, and how delicious this food revolution really truly is. Hope you come along. We’re having a blast…

Not much to say here other than enjoy this vid on mixing up a bean loaf. There’s even an afterthought on one of my favorites, spaghetti squash.

After the Sixties in Flagstaff where better to go and chill out than Indian County. Call me lucky. I managed to cobble together an education degree and spent the next decade out on Navajo and Hopi posing as a school teacher. It’s true, I arrived looking for smoke and feathers–the romance of Indian spirituality. But what I found was the women and their kitchens–and a corn cuisine to write home about. Scarcity really can bring out the best in our creativity and ingenuity.

Bob and his wife, Beth, still live down on the big pink Colorado Plateau along with my ex and the old crowd. Last year he sent up a lid of blue corn meal along with some seed. So here you be: a recipe for blue corn waffles. And because when I lived up on Second Mesa we used to have a skillet of fried red chile in the center of the table to dip and dab in, that recipe’s below. Both measure free, of course. No room–or need–for Big Cooking here. After all, precise measurements and prescriptive step-by-step directions is hardly the Hopi Way–or mine.

I also included the bits below as side bars in Hippie Kitchen. Basically tips on waffles, working with cornmeal, and Hopi memories.

On Avoiding
Sticky Wicket Waffles—

I’ve dug my share of failed waffles out of the little square indentations. That was back when I didn’t oil the iron nicely with a pastry brush, and more critically, when I used too much liquid in the batter. It’s true that sometimes I can get by with a thin batter that results in the cracker-like, crispy waffles, but the safest bet until you get your sea legs is to go with a thicker than thinner batter, something akin to thinned mashed potatoes. At one point in my waffle making, I thought milk products made things stick, but I never got very scientific about it and can’t really say it wasn’t because those batters were simply too thin.

The main thing is that making waffles isn’t as much of trip as I used to think. Plus, they’re better than pancakes because there’s no possibility of doughy middles. Sort of like the difference between baking a cake in a regular pan and a Bundt pan—the indentation in the center helps the cake cook through.

Finally, on the horror of lifting the lid and finding your lovely waffle pulled apart and clinging to the top and the bottom. Never fear. All it takes—given that your batter was thick enough—is closing the iron and letting the heat finish doing its thing. In another minute or two, the miraculous will have happened. The waffle will be waiting under the lid in one dazzlingly fabulous piece.

On a Roll with Blue & Yellow Corn—

It goes without saying that you can substitute yellow for blue cornmeal and still rock. You can also easily turn waffle batter into pancakes or cornbread. The gist here is to make pancake batters thinner that waffle batters so they pour onto a griddle easily and aren’t too thick to cook through. On the cornbread route, follow the lead of your waffle batter, augmenting it with whole wheat pastry flour, a little honey, and another egg or two. That way you’ll get a moist cornbread plus leftovers to toast into croutons and toss into to Bourbon Chard Ribbons (page 134).

Most recipes that use cornmeal—whether for waffles, pancakes, or bread—call for at least part wheat flour and sometimes I go that route. Mainly, though, I like to explore what happens with 100 percent cornmeal and have found I can control how well what I’m making holds together with the amount of oil and eggs I use.

On Leavening—

I remember a novel set in the early 1800s in which the older women criticized the young marrieds for using the new quick leavenings. It was just one line, but it’s stayed with me. The idea of how little the old guard thought of the young moderns and their penchant for being in such a hurry they couldn’t wait for yeast to work. There’s not a reason other than time that you couldn’t use yeast to make Blue Corn Waffles, using a ratio of a teaspoon of yeast softened in warm water for every cup of dry ingredients. But what can we say; we get more biz-biz all the time it seems and want things on the double.

Sodas can leave an off taste in quick breads if you goof and use too much, which is one reason so many recipes call for baking powder. But as my all time favorite cookbook, Laurel’s Kitchen, points out, you can make your own aluminum-free baking power using one part soda to two parts cream of tartar. Frankly, whenever I have some of this made up I use it instead of straight soda. But I can be a very lazy hippie cook. Besides, isn’t it the Irish that use nothing but soda in their famous bread?

On Blue Corn—

I still remember the time after I’d moved from Hopiland home to Flagstaff. It was back in our rafting days and someone wanted to take some blue corn meal along on a trip down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. So I called Alfreda out on Second Mesa.

“How can we get some blue corn for the river trip?” I asked.

Her answer? “Grow it.”

Tough love from a Hopi woman for sure.

I arched my middle class brow and thought, “Forget it.”

The times, though, they really did change. This season I’ll be sowing the blue corn kernels Bob sent along with slew of other things. Perhaps not the big time thrills of a romp through the Grand but an experience sure to bring its own enduring joy.

Once we tasted her pumpkin pie and declared it a home run clear up, over and out of the park–every bit as good as the ones mama used to make–she divulged her secret.

“Acorn squash from the garden.” To her husband’s lifted brows, she explained that she was darned if she’d buy official pumpkin when she had perfectly good winter squash in the house.

Laura with some of her Liberty apple harvest a couple years ago

Yes! This is the kind of talk thrifty, innovative cooks understand. Cooks who are primarily concerned with where their ingredients are sourced. Cooks who realize that threads running through flavor and sustainability and health will make whole cloth if we just let them.

Speaking of health. Laura didn’t stop with the filling for her pumpkin pie. She made her butter crust from 100 percent whole wheat pastry flour–flour that I’d bet half a hundred, came from the organic bulk bins.

Yah. My kind of eating. My kind of cook. Laura gets it.

(Camera was nowhere in sight to capture Laura’s acorn squashes or her 2009 pie, but here’s one of my own winter squash harvests. Those spaghetti squashes are such charmers piled up in their basket.)

Given all that, why does this blog languish in the backwater of everyday cooking, making a big deal out of the measure free kitchen? A cutesy ploy? Not for this historian who’s thought some about Americans only getting measuring cups 100 years ago.

Here I am (front right) in Puebla, Mexico a few years back with on food writing assignment for the Smithsonian’s American Indian Magazine. What I saw in Puebla was the same thing I witnessed in Indian Country when I lived a decade with the Hopi and Navajo. Great food. Pride and creativity. Appreciation of sustainably sourced produce on which a community can depend. It’s all interwoven.

That’s the point, then. If we cooked more we’d care more. And we’d cook more if it was easy and fun–not some dutiful direction-following exercise.

Big Cooking really kicked in with Fannie Farmer. Fine and good–some might argue– for late-19th century Boston elites who wanted their help to follow orders from headquarters. But what about us? Do we really need to be told what to do in our kitchens? Other everyday cooks around the world don’t–southern France’s Provence and Asia included.

Unconvinced? How about this: Ethnic cookbooks superimpose measurements and prescriptive steps for our western taste–or lack of it. In effect, we get the blue print but not the heart and soul.

Like so many in the food biz, including the New York Time’s Mark Bittman, are confiding: everyday cooking just ain’t all it’s trumped up to be. No fine knife skills or knives required. No need to create a mini-masterpiece. Just going for it like women around the globe have for centuries. Using what’s in the cupboard to make good, healthy, affordable eats.

So Big Cooking? Buzz off:) Some of us are finally getting wise out here!

After the Sixties in Flagstaff where better to go and chill out than Indian County. Call me lucky. I managed to cobble together an education degree and spent the next decade out on Navajo and Hopi posing as a school teacher. It’s true, I arrived looking for smoke and feathers–the romance of Indian spirituality. But what I found was the women and their kitchens–and a corn cuisine to write home about. Scarcity really can bring out the best in our creativity and ingenuity.

Bob and his wife, Beth, still live down on the big pink Colorado Plateau along with my ex and the old crowd. Last year he sent up a lid of blue corn meal along with some seed. So here you be: a recipe for blue corn waffles. And because when I lived up on Second Mesa we used to have a skillet of fried red chile in the center of the table to dip and dab in, that recipe’s below. Both measure free, of course. No room–or need–for Big Cooking here. After all, precise measurements and prescriptive step-by-step directions is hardly the Hopi Way–or mine.

I also included the bits below as side bars in Hippie Kitchen. Basically tips on waffles, working with cornmeal, and Hopi memories.

On Avoiding
Sticky Wicket Waffles—

I’ve dug my share of failed waffles out of the little square indentations. That was back when I didn’t oil the iron nicely with a pastry brush, and more critically, when I used too much liquid in the batter. It’s true that sometimes I can get by with a thin batter that results in the cracker-like, crispy waffles, but the safest bet until you get your sea legs is to go with a thicker than thinner batter, something akin to thinned mashed potatoes. At one point in my waffle making, I thought milk products made things stick, but I never got very scientific about it and can’t really say it wasn’t because those batters were simply too thin.

The main thing is that making waffles isn’t as much of trip as I used to think. Plus, they’re better than pancakes because there’s no possibility of doughy middles. Sort of like the difference between baking a cake in a regular pan and a Bundt pan—the indentation in the center helps the cake cook through.

Finally, on the horror of lifting the lid and finding your lovely waffle pulled apart and clinging to the top and the bottom. Never fear. All it takes—given that your batter was thick enough—is closing the iron and letting the heat finish doing its thing. In another minute or two, the miraculous will have happened. The waffle will be waiting under the lid in one dazzlingly fabulous piece.

On a Roll with
Blue & Yellow Corn—

It goes without saying that you can substitute yellow for blue cornmeal and still rock. You can also easily turn waffle batter into pancakes or cornbread. The gist here is to make pancake batters thinner that waffle batters so they pour onto a griddle easily and aren’t too thick to cook through. On the cornbread route, follow the lead of your waffle batter, augmenting it with whole wheat pastry flour, a little honey, and another egg or two. That way you’ll get a moist cornbread plus leftovers to toast into croutons and toss into to Bourbon Chard Ribbons (page 134).

Most recipes that use cornmeal—whether for waffles, pancakes, or bread—call for at least part wheat flour and sometimes I go that route. Mainly, though, I like to explore what happens with 100 percent cornmeal and have found I can control how well what I’m making holds together with the amount of oil and eggs I use.

On Leavening—

I remember a novel set in the early 1800s in which the older women criticized the young marrieds for using the new quick leavenings. It was just one line, but it’s stayed with me. The idea of how little the old guard thought of the young moderns and their penchant for being in such a hurry they couldn’t wait for yeast to work. There’s not a reason other than time that you couldn’t use yeast to make Blue Corn Waffles, using a ratio of a teaspoon of yeast softened in warm water for every cup of dry ingredients. But what can we say; we get more biz-biz all the time it seems and want things on the double.

Sodas can leave an off taste in quick breads if you goof and use too much, which is one reason so many recipes call for baking powder. But as my all time favorite cookbook, Laurel’s Kitchen, points out, you can make your own aluminum-free baking power using one part soda to two parts cream of tartar. Frankly, whenever I have some of this made up I use it instead of straight soda. But I can be a very lazy hippie cook. Besides, isn’t it the Irish that use nothing but soda in their famous bread?

On Blue Corn—

I still remember the time after I’d moved from Hopiland home to Flagstaff. It was back in our rafting days and someone wanted to take some blue corn meal along on a trip down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. So I called Alfreda out on Second Mesa.

“How can we get some blue corn for the river trip?” I asked.

Her answer? “Grow it.”

Tough love from a Hopi woman for sure.

I arched my middle class brow and thought, “Forget it.”

The times, though, they really did change. This season I’ll be sowing the blue corn kernels Bob sent along with slew of other things. Perhaps not the big time thrills of a romp through the Grand but an experience sure to bring its own enduring joy.