Success: 10,000 hours of cooking

Perhaps you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers?  He talks about people who are generally considered to be talented geniuses – the Beatles and Bill Gates are a couple of examples.  Gladwell’s premise is that  these people are not just geniuses but actually became masters due to the crazy number of hours spent practicing their craft.  Specifically, he estimates 10,000 hours as the rough amount of practice it takes for someone to truly master a complex skill. 
 

This is the sort of information that could make a person feel inadequate.  I haven’t even been employed for the last seven or so years, much less have I been closing in on mastery of some respectable and lucrative skill like writing legal briefs or tying tiny sutures in heart valves.

However, as I reflected on this, I realized that I must be approaching 10,000 hours of cooking.  True,  I am at a very safe distance from being a genius chef.  But I have been cooking one whole day a week, every week, for almost the last twenty years.  Missing a few days a year here and there, figuring a seven-hour day, I’ve probably got a solid 7,000 cooking hours under my belt.  And I have to say, I have noticed subtle but solid improvements lately.  I improvise a lot more, and a lot more successfully.  I have a better sense of what flavors go together well.  More often I can open up the fridge and throw something delicious together from unlikely and uninspiring ingredients.  I have more cooking mojo. 

No matter how many thousands of hours I cook, I will never be a celebrity chef, nor do I aspire to this.  I’m not spending my 10,000 hours practicing restaurant food.  That’s not the point.  I cook for me, my family and sometimes my friends.  Every hour I cook I’m aiming for an elusive combination of food that is healthy, inexpensive, varied, local-ish and organic-ish, and made from ingredients available in my fridge and pantry, among other considerations.  Mostly, it has to be delicious to four different people with varying tastes, two of whom aren’t tall enough to get a drinking glass out of the cupboard.

Perhaps in a few years I’ll have developed enough talent to subscribe to a CSA farm box.  Maybe be then I will welcome the challenge of weekly winter squash for four months.

Do you have 10,000 hours of practice with anything?

Mixed Holidays

I've failed to post anything about the holiday season until February.  Consider this the equivalent of still having my Christmas lights up on Groundhog Day.

Another Christmas and birthday season steamrolled through our home leaving the four of us happy and exhausted.  My boys have birthdays one day apart, just days before Christmas.  This year I tried to manage the festivities a little differently to tamp down the insanity, with mixed results.  Some of the things I tried:

Four year old birthday party:  At our house, invited the whole preschool.  Crossed my fingers that half of the preschool parents would be out of town or working (we like everyone but didn't really want to have a party for twenty kids and twenty parents.)  We had seven kids, which was perfect.  We requested books as presents at both kids' parties.  Both kids hated this idea but rolled with it. We ordered pizza takeout and I paid a friend with a baking business on the side to make the cupcakes.  In a perfect world I would have made the pizza, but most very small children consider homemade pizza to be "pflaugh" in my experience.

I prepared my extra-special low carbon-footprint goody bags (cheapskate goody bags.)  Here's how I do it: Save all bags from goody bags at parties throughout the year.  While the kids are sleeping, gather together all of the really crappy tiny plastic toys they've gotten throughout the year.   Get out the extra bags of tiny plastic crappy toys you brilliantly bought during summer yard saling.  Distribute everything in the bags, then toss in some random leftover stickers.  Finally, add a pinch of the leftover Halloween candy your kids didn't really like.  Seal bags with another sticker (your children may not be allowed to look in bags and see their own toys).

Overall, a very successful and cheap party.

Seven year old birthday party:  Gave into my husband who insisted that our son really wanted a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party.  Pared the guestlist viciously to afford the least outrageous party package.  Hired a ten year old friend to babysit our four year old at Chuck E. Cheese during the party.  Got a table directly in front of the loudspeaker.  Ordered and ignored some truly awful food.  Felt certain that the really nice woman who was our "party coordinator" could not possibly be well paid enough.  Bought and gave out official Chuck E. Cheese party bags, which included a CD of the greatest hits of Chuck E. Cheese (free to the first two people who request them!) Will be saving contents for next year's five year old party bags.    Left with a beaming seven year old who talked about his party for days.

Overally, a very successful and expensive party.

Christmas:  In past years, we have opened everything on the evening of the 24th (my family tradition).  Typically the kids are thrilled with the first gift and want to play with it immediately.  I have to divert their attention to gift opening rather than playing.  Repeat with gift numbers two and three.  By gift number twelve they have become crazed entitlement monsters shredding wrapping paper and comparison shopping amongst their gifts.  This year I decided that we would do things more like Hannukah and open just one gift  a day, until Christmas when they could open stockings the night before and the remaining presents in the morning.  The idea was that they could focus on just one gift at a time and get all possible enjoyment out of it.  My plan was thwarted in several ways. 

First, the kids did not have the same break this year.  They were supposed to open a present each morning of the vacation, giving them more time to enjoy each present and a built-in activity each day of the break.  However my first-grader's school went until December 23rd this year.  So we opened a few in the evenings after the birthday hoopla had come and gone and still had bunches on Christmas morning.  I decided to break with all tradition and saved even more gifts to open for several days after Christmas.  This went surprisingly well, because I hid these gifts and did not tell the kids that they existed until each morning when - surprise! - Santa found some extra gifts to deliver late.

Second, my husband told me the day before Christmas that he had very strong and previously unexpressed feelings about how stockings had to be opened on Christmas morning.  This meant that even more gifts got lumped together on Christmas morning instead of being spread out over several days.  So we still ended up with the traditional opening of far too many gifts at once, followed by the traditional Christmas pouting over the gifts. 

Overall about half of the gifts from us came from garage saling over the summer.  I'm keeping it up as long as the kids don't notice or care.

Later on Christmas Day while walking through Muir Woods, taking in some of the tallest and most magnificent trees in the world, my seven year old said "when are we going to do something good?"  Fortunately we had just walked by a young boy glued to an electronic game out in the redwoods, so I didn't feel as though I had produced the most awful child in the world.  Later the kids got to buy a bag of polished rocks in the gift shop, so as far as they were concerned the nature experience wasn't a total waste of time.

Good news from Christmas!  We get a little closer to a zero-waste holiday each year.  This year's tally:
The bottom bag is stuffed with gift bags and wrappings we reuse each year.  The middle bag is full of paper and plastic recycling.  The tiny sandwich bag on the top contains the actual garbage from this year's wrapping.  Not bad.

Outsourcing

It seems fashionable nowadays to subscribe to the belief that running a household is an easy part time job; the sort of thing you can toss off in between your nine hour workday and helping the kids with homework.  But the more I do it, the more I realize that competently running a household with small children is at least a full time job, even if you don’t include the childcare. 

Healthy meals do not come in microwavable plastic packaging.  Laundry does not sort, load, dry, fold and put itself away.  Having a reasonably clean kitchen and bathroom contributes to the health, comfort and happiness of family members.  Bills must be paid, errands run, dishes washed, repairs and appointments made.

Virtually everyone I know handles some portion of this by outsourcing.  We buy the packaged food, or the take out.  We hire housekeepers and handymen if we can afford to.  Our children go to after school programs or have nannies.  We outsource cleaning and food preparation by buying disposable and single-use products, or the easy and familiar out of season food from far away.  Some of us send the laundry out. 

Those working to be greener, more frugal, or more locavore have endless tasks that could be done to save money, help the environment or eat more locally.  Nearly all of these tasks take longer than their typical counterparts.  In fact, much of the work in adopting these philosophies is in rejecting the varieties of outsourcing that have become common.  Frugal people might wash out plastic storage bags instead of treating them as single use.  People with an environmental bent might hang their laundry to dry.  Those practicing zero-waste are likely going to alter their grocery shopping to involve more and different stores.  Those trying to eat more locally are probably going to have to preserve some of their own local food instead of relying on their supermarket to ship out of season produce from other continents.

I have definite feelings of failure about the forms of outsourcing I use, and yet they clearly free me up to have more fun and be more productive at things that matter to me.  Self reliance and common sense seem to require that I examine all of the forms of outsourcing that I use.  On the other hand, this could be taken to an idiotic extreme –  I'm not about to keep sheep in my back yard so I can knit my own underwear.

Where do you draw the line?  What do you outsource, and what do you keep in-house?  Do you feel guilty about the jobs you outsource?  Do you have resentment about jobs you cannot?  What do you wish you could do yourself, and what do you wish you could get off of your plate?

Sometimes I flush the pee

Here is California we are reminded constantly to conserve water.  This includes not flushing the toilet just for pee.  Generally in our house we follow this rule, but it has some exceptions.  I flush when people are coming over.  I flush the upstairs toilet every morning before we come down for the day, and the downstairs toilet before going upstairs for the night. I flush when visiting other people’s homes, and in public bathrooms.  I flush when the toilet bowl starts to look like some sort of horrifying yellow papier mache experiment.  When our parents come to visit from other states we flush with each use, which does feel very wasteful now that we’re not used to it. 

Do you follow the "if it's yellow..." rule?  When do you make exceptions?

Disposable diapers

And just like that, I’ve lost the hardcore zero-waste crowd. 
 

Yes, we use disposable diapers.  I wanted to use cloth diapers when my first son was born, I really did.  The information I found seemed to show that the environmental costs of disposables were roughly the same as those involved in a diaper service (trucks for delivery, heat, water and chemicals for washing). So it seemed that the only reasonable way to use disposables was to wash them myself and dry them on the clothesline whenever possible.

There were several drawbacks here.  All of them centered on the ick factor.  For one thing,  I wasn’t all that keen on getting the poop off of the baby.  It really seemed to be asking too much to then scrape it off the diaper.  And then soak the still-poopy diaper in a bucket of water.  But the dealbreaker was that with a front-loading washer, I couldn’t later dump the whole disgusting bucket into the wash.  No, I would be required to pull one dripping, gunky diaper after another out of the crapola bucket and  put them individually into the washer, and then wipe the drips off of the floor.

Since parenting a newborn baby stretched my adult functionality to its breaking point both times, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t try to add a time-consuming and repulsive chore to my roster.   Still, I continue to have guilt about this failure. 

Those of you who are better people and who cloth diapered can take heart.  I continue to be punished daily for my environmental transgressions:  Disposables are so efficient at absorbing and wicking moisture nowadays that boys who wear disposables take forever to potty train.  I won’t reveal any details that would later embarrass my kids, but let’s just say that I have worried that we might have to permanently shelve that old joke about no kids going to college in pull-ups.  

My big fat cancer failure

You’re dying to know about the cancer thing, right?

I failed to make it to forty without a cancer diagnosis.  It was a whopper too, not your little case of the cancer sniffles.  No stage-one this or that, no basal cell carcinoma.  I had to go and come down with fancy cancer.  When I was 39 and my kids were not quite 2 and 5, I was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma.  That’s right, eye cancer.  Ocular melanoma is not given a “stage” like other cancers, with stage one being pretty hopeful.  It doesn’t spread out through the lymph nodes, so instead it is simply labeled as small, medium or large.  Mine was medium, which according to the obligatory food reference is the size of a dried chickpea (I just measured this.) A dried chickpea is not very big, but then again, neither is your eyeball.   There had not been an obvious problem seven months prior to diagnosis, at my last eye exam when I had retinal photos taken.

 Now, there was some good news.  The treatment is very low key.  The surgeon attaches a radioactive plaque to the outside of your eye, and you go home and stay six feet away from other people for about seven days.  My folks came, it was great to have them here.  It’s not much in the way of pain (though I’m sure I was whiny), and after a day or two you get used to the pirate look (I had to wear a patch covered by a lead shield.  The kids put dinosaur stickers on it, when it wasn’t on me.)  After a week or so they took the plaque off and I kept the patch on for another week.  After a couple of months I even went back to wearing contacts.

 Twenty years ago the state of the art treatment was to just yank the whole eye out (enucleation, if you prefer something less graphic), so this was a big improvement as far as I was concerned.  My vision has so far been great, only about 10 to 20% worse than usual, though I can expect radiation effects to diminish that for the next couple of years.  Any vision deterioration is not correctable since it affects the retina, not the lens.

The catch is that there are really two genetic forms of ocular melanoma.  One form has a 90% survival rate over 15 years.  The other form has a 30% survival rate over 15 years.  Until a couple of years ago, there was no way to tell which kind a person had.  Then, just at the time I had my surgery, a company called Castle Biosciences started offering a genetic test.  So right before Christmas of ’09, I learned that I had failed that particular test.  My unoriginal response to the retinal surgeon upon hearing this news was "shit".  Officially, I have a 50% chance of being alive by the time my younger child goes to kindergarten in a couple of years.  I have a 30% chance of being alive by the time my older child graduates from high school. (Pause for magical thinking moment…40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100%!)

This is a very weird diagnosis for a bunch of reasons.  One is that there is nothing wrong with me.  The primary tumor was killed with radiation.  Quite a lot of CT and MRI scans have shown that I have nothing nasty going on in my liver and brain.  I’m told that while metastases tend to occur in the liver, they can actually show up virtually anywhere at all, at any time. Soothing, huh?  Another weird thing about this diagnosis is that there is no protocol for treatment.  This is a pretty rare cancer, and until lately they couldn’t even tell which people had the bad kind.  So me and my oncological posse are making it up as we go along. 

Despite being a rare cancer, one of my favorite authors, Oliver Sacks, has also had ocular melanoma.  He’s alive, too.  Go Oliver!

Now I have what one friend refers to as my little medical hobby.  Every three months or so I have bloodwork done, then get an abdominal MRI, then see my eye surgeon for a major checkup, then see my oncologist.  Every other two weeks I do daily injections of a drug called Leukine.  Theoretically the Leukine should boost my immune system to eat up any cancer cells.  There is no evidence that the Leukine will help me, there is no evidence that it will not (it improves life expectancy, marginally, in people with metastasized melanoma).  There is a small chance that it could later give me leukemia.  The injections are not as bad as you might think (I’m the queen of ice packs as anesthesia.) Every time I'm waiting for MRI results I spend several days as a basket case.  It is very much like what I imagine a falsely accused defendant feels like in a death penalty case while the jury is out.  With each MRI and CT so far, the jury has instead opted for something more like a long sentence.  I hope it’s a very long sentence.

There’s not much else to do in the land of treatment.  I try to eat a healthy diet with a lot of colorful organic produce and whole grains and less in the way of sugar, animal products and processed food.  I try to exercise. I’m a good sleeper, I avoid stress.   I do a lot of magical thinking and denial and a certain amount of meditation and visualization. I keep strong connections to many friends and my family.  Mainly I fail to do all these things as well or often as I think I should.  I work very hard to think about it as positively as possible.   I work very hard to think about it as little as possible.

 Some people with this diagnosis, many people with this diagnosis, live.

I take comfort in the successes of others.  Another science writer I really like, Stephen Jay Gould, was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in 1982.  This was a cancer with a median survival of eight months after diagnosis.   As a scientist, he immediately wanted to know everything he could about his grim diagnosis.  One thing he noted when looking at the distribution charts of mortality for his disease, was that the tail of the distribution never dropped to zero.  What this means to a layperson is that some people with his diagnosis were continuing to live far past their life expectancies, years and decades past their life expectancies.   As it happened, Stephen Jay Gould was completely cured of his disease and died twenty years later of an unrelated cancer.   David Servan-Schreiber tells his own similar story in the excellent food book, Anticancer. (David is still alive and well.  Go David!)

Look, if the signup form comes across your desk, don’t check the box for “ocular melanoma”.  But I’m aware every day of worse possibilities.  Also, nothing focuses your mind in quite the same way as a potentially fatal diagnosis.  There is no way to know how you would react unless it happens to you.  In my case it has made me acutely grateful for my very mundane life, which I now see as amazing.  It has me sure that I have the exact life I want to be living, perhaps with a few more hugs for my kids.  Mainly, I want to follow Stephen Jay Gould’s example and end up in the long tail of the distribution.

Success: Things I do make homemade

Yogurt.  This is stupid easy if you have a thermometer.  It’s not any cheaper than store bought if you use good organic milk though.  I got my recipe from a column Harold McGee did a couple of years ago in the Dining section of the New York Times and it’s never failed.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/dining/15curi.html

Bread.  My mom has always made homemade bread and while I don’t quite live up to that standard, I make at least some of the sandwich bread we eat.  Recently I’ve been making the whole wheat bread from Cook’s Illustrated, which manages to use about 50% whole wheat without turning into a brick.  The recipe is a really, really big pain.  On the other hand, the comparable store bought Vital Vittles brand is $5 a loaf, and homemade bread costs maybe eighty percent less.  [Update:  The CI recipe has now failed for me three times in a row, so I have banished it from my repertoire.]

mmm... squashy

Jam.  I make freezer jam, which is so, so, so much easier than you would ever think.  It also makes you aware of what a shocking amount of sugar is in jam, even if you use the low-sugar pectin.  Freezer jam is roughly ten times better than anything you can buy in a store, and a lot cheaper.  I can make about twelve jars in an hour and a half. 

Dill pickles.  I make four or five jars a year and just pop them in the fridge.  Last year I had to buy the cucumbers for them because my first try at growing cucumbers was less than spectacular.  

Hummus.  The good quality hummus available in our local grocery stores runs about $4 a cup.  Once I’ve cooked the garbanzos while doing other things on my cooking day, I can make it in about ten minutes for a pretty small fraction of this price. 

Croutons and seasoned bread crumbs.  I learned from Deborah Madison’s book Vegetarian Cooking the genius of putting garlic breadcrumbs on pasta.  Every so often I throw the ends of the bread into the freezer.   When I get around to it, cube it or put it in the food processor, dry it, and then sauté it with oil and herbs and garlic.  It lasts a surprising amount of time in the fridge.  You can pop it into the toaster oven briefly and have warm croutons on your salad or fragrant, crispy breadcrumbs on your mac and cheese.

Chili powder:  Toast, grind, done.

Vanilla.  Buy vanilla beans, slit open, mash up the insides, put into vodka.  As far as I can tell, you just reuse the jar and keep adding new beans and vodka until it gets too crowded in there.

Roasted tomatoes.  Each tomato season for about ten weeks I buy 15-20 pounds of tomatoes a week, slice them thick, spray with good olive oil and sprinkle them with salt and a pinch of brown sugar.  Then I roast them in a low oven until they’re somewhere between squishy and leathery.  Total ambrosia.  No matter how many Ziploc freezer bags of these I make, I run out six or eight months later.  This year I wanted to make a couple of solar cookers so that I didn’t have to have my oven running all day once a week in the summer.  Maybe next year.  I fantasize about growing enough tomatoes for this purpose.

Granola.  This is marginally useful, since I’m the only one in the family who will eat it.

Pizza.  If I had more time, I’d put up thirty jars of sauce for the year and freeze lots of batches of dough.  As it is, I make the crust and the dough each time we want to eat it.  Yes we do get takeout pizza too, but I consider that to be a different type of food.

Pesto.  Still dreaming of growing enough basil for this, but no, I buy it.  Like the tomatoes, I make a big batch each week all summer long for the freezer, and it still runs out by April.  Pesto isn’t cheap to make, but it’s still cheaper than what they have at the store and it’s easy to make.

Whole grain pancakes.  When I’m really on top of things I make a big batch of dry mix with a simplified version of the Cook’s Illustrated recipe.  Then we can have healthy but yummy pancakes in about 20 minutes on a weekend morning.  The leftovers can be saved to reheat in the microwave.  Then we run out of mix and don’t have them for five or six months.  I used to simply cook a triple batch every few weeks and freeze them for later use.

Cranberry sauce.  Now I can buy berries grown by a family I know near my hometown in Wisconsin.  (Never mind that they’re imported several thousand miles to California.)  When they’re available during the winter holidays I pop about five bags in the freezer.  I also put small handfuls of plain frozen cranberries into smoothies.

Applesauce.  We inherited a large and unruly Gravenstein apple tree with our house.  Every other year* it produces about 300 apples, which I pick by standing on our carport roof with my fruit picker.  Some go to friends and neighbors and some get eaten fresh.  Gravensteins don’t store well, so mostly they get turned into applesauce. Friends tell me that I make very good applesauce, so of course only one of my kids will eat it.

*Every other other year it produces almost nothing.  The tree is about 25 feet tall and cannot reasonably be thinned in a high yield year, so it productivity seesaws up and down.