FOODIE FRIDAY: Meet “The Feast Nearby”‘s Robin Mather! Pt. 1

Welcome to FOODIE FRIDAY! For the month of September, we’ll be celebrating “THE FEAST NEARBY,” the latest book release by my friend, ROBIN MATHER.

ROBIN MATHER is a veteran food columnist and journalist, as well as a non-fiction book author. I met her when we both wrote for The Detroit News back in the early ’90s. Her food column at the News always made me hungry! She often used food as a metaphor to discuss larger life issues. That tradition continues with her latest book, THE FEAST NEARBY: How I lost my job, buried a marriage, and found my way by keeping chickens, foraging, preserving, bartering, and eating locally (all on forty dollars a week) (Ten Speed Press ’11). For more info, go here: http://thefeastnearby.com/

Part 1 of our two-part Q&A is posted today. Part Two of our Q&A will be posted next Friday 9/16. And stay tuned for a special recipe from Robin Mather for our Foodie Friday blog to be posted on Fri. 9/23. Many thanks to Robin for taking time out of her busy schedule to join us every FOODIE FRIDAY for the month of September! 🙂

During the month of September, I’ll also be hosting a book giveaway contest where you have the chance to win a signed copy of Robin’s book! You can participate simply by letting me know via our COMMENTS section or by emailing me at paula at paulayoo dot com with your contact info. I will collect a list of names and pick a winner at random and announce the winner on Friday 9/30. The contest is open between now and Thursday 9/29/11. So join in on the fun! 🙂

(Keep reading after the jump for Part 1 of our two-part Q&A with Robin)!

Q&A with Robin Mather, author of “THE FEAST NEARBY”

Q: Your latest book is VERY personal. You do not pull punches with the opening paragraph in the Introduction: “In April 2009, my husband of twelve years told me that he wanted a divorce. Less than a week later, the Chicago Tribune… laid me off, effectively ending my lifelong career as a newspaper reporter.” I know your past food columns for The Detroit News blended food with personal anecdotes. But your latest book is very blunt and candid. Was it difficult to write about such personal experiences? Or did you find that you shared a common ground with many people today who are going through similar circumstances?

A:  I wrote so personally for several reasons. One is that yes, I feel a common bond with the thousands of others whose lives have been radically changed — often and usually, very much for the worse — by the economic chaos that we’re living through right now. I think there are a great many people who, like me, feel the rug was pulled out from under them. So one theme underpinning the book is, “Be strong! It gets better! It’s definitely a different rainbow, but it’s still a rainbow and there’s still a pot of gold at the end.”

I also write personally because there’s no other way for me to convey the knowledge that I’ve gained over the 30+ years I’ve written about food. I’ve had the privilege and opportunity to speak with authorities on so many different things related to food in that time, from experts on food preservation to famous chefs to fabulously talented home cooks, and I think that knowledge has little value unless it is shared. I don’t own that knowledge; I am merely its steward, and it must be shared to prevent its loss.

It’s been interesting to see unfavorable reviews from people who think I should have gone into the details about why the marriage failed. They’re disappointed, I think, because I veiled that. The decision to do that came from respect for my husband; I loved him enough to marry him, and I continue to love him enough to extend him that respect. Such information is not mine alone to share; he is entitled to his privacy. It’s the same reason I don’t betray secrets when people confide in me.

No one has criticized the book because I didn’t go into the details of why I was laid off, curiously. So I find that interest in the reasons why I suddenly found myself alone a kind of unseemly snoopiness. In this day of reality TV and tell-all memoirs, where people will blab about the most personal parts of their being, from their sex lives to their addictions, I guess it’s to be expected that people should want me to do so. But although I write personally and intimately, I hew to a more dated belief about how one should carry himself in the world: With grace, and with a careful attention to the line between public and private.

Besides, the reasons why the marriage failed really aren’t important. The proof of a person’s character lies in how they deal with the challenges they meet — not in the reasons for the challenges.

Q: You decided to live frugally – no more foie gras! What made you decide on a $40 limit? Why not $30 or $50? Is $40 a reasonable budget – is it the “magic” number? 🙂

A: LOL, no, $40 isn’t a magic number! The first week I realized that I was on my own, I sat down and drafted a budget. $40 a week just happened to be all that was left over, when I calculated my income and outgo for that first month, and I decided to stick with it. As I noted in the book’s introduction, it’s about halfway between the USDA’s suggested lowest-possible food budget and the one that’s the next step up — which is still very, very low by most people’s standards. If your budget permits more generous spending, by all means, enjoy it!

I also wanted to defeat the criticism that eating locally is only for the “rich” foodie elite. That’s just hogwash, and I proved it to be so.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about that foie gras, by the way. Foie gras and prosciutto and fine imported cheeses and other high-end kinds of food had been part of my life because I am, and was, a food writer. Reporters who write about cars test-drive the latest models; reporters who write about gardening try out the newest tools and gizmos. They need to do so to be knowledgeable about the subjects they cover. It’s the same for food, only food, um, can’t be returned. If I didn’t fully know those kinds of foods — as well as foods like hot dogs and Velveeta — I wouldn’t have been fully grounded in my beat and so couldn’t have provided the best service to my readers.

Q: You also talk about the increased interest in eating locally and sustainably. It’s amazing how affordable it can be versus buying commercially packaged products at a major grocery store chain. For example, I sometimes see parents filling up their shopping carts with tons of frozen, microwaveable pre-packaged meals and tons of canned vegetables. I know a lot of people either don’t know how to cook or allegedly don’t have time to cook when they’re working and raising families, but it seems as if they are wasting money by buying such over-processed pre-packaged food. What advice would you give a working parent who wants to change his/her food habits and make the transition to eating more local fresh food instead? It can be overwhelming if you’ve never done this before.

A: People who say they don’t know how to cook — often with a great deal of pride! — frustrate me. It’s a fundamental part of taking care of yourself, like bathing, and I can’t imagine being proud of the fact that you don’t know how to take a bath!

But if you really, truly don’t know how to cook, and want to learn how, I would say look to the thing you do know how to do first. If you know how to cook ramen noodles, then you already know how to make soup and other sorts of dishes that begin with boiling something. If you know how to scramble or fry an egg, then you’re familiar with the principle behind sautéing. If you know how to make a sandwich, you know about layering, so you can make lasagna and casseroles.

Start small, and look to the kinds of foods that poor people around the world eat. It doesn’t take much cooking skill to put some raw rice into a rice cooker and then saute some home-cooked or canned beans with onion and garlic; once you can do that, you can eat anything from the Costa Rican gallo pinto (black beans and rice) to the Cuban “moors and Christians (another, very different, black bean-and-rice dish) to the iconic New Orleans red beans and rice.

I still remember, Paula, how amazed you were when I showed you how easy it is to roast a whole chicken one afternoon in your apartment in Detroit. I can still hear you saying, “That’s it? That’s all you have to do?” It was such a great moment for me, to see your face as that light bulb lit up over your head. And look where that one dish has led you! I know you’re a dedicated foodie now.

All cooking boils down to one principle: Take food. Apply heat. The fun comes in when you realize that you get to decide just how you want to apply the heat.

You don’t even need to spend tons of money on equipment and books. The basics are a good knife that you can keep sharp, a 10-inch cast iron skillet (because you can do anything in it) and perhaps 2 pots, a smaller and a larger one, preferably with a lid that fits the skillet. Total cost: less than $50. Upgrade as you can afford to, but realize that very good cooking around the world gets done on equipment like that. The two books I recommend for absolute beginners are The Joy of Cooking and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. If you can’t afford to buy even used copies (see abebooks.com and alibris.com), both are surely in your library.

Start small. Choose one thing that you really love — whether it’s chicken or peaches — and find a local source for it, at a farmers market, a CSA farm or some other way, like growing it yourself. Then move on to another thing or two. Before you know it, you’ll be a proud locavore like me.

Q: Your recipes are so delicious! I noticed you have a lot of recipes that feature vegetables and fruits as the main ingredient because you are buying local, fresh, sustainable food. But what about people who eat a lot of meat in their diet? You discuss in your book about how you figured out what amount of meat you could buy each month based on your $40/week budget.  Some of your solutions, given your frugal budget, was to buy a pound of bacon or a few pounds of pork (or other protein) to see you through a month of eating. What do you recommend as some of the most economical cuts of meat for people to buy that they can stretch out over a 30-day period?

A: I’m glad my recipes please you!

Stretching your meat (or protein; if you’re a vegetarian, you’re probably still buying tofu, and perhaps eggs and cheese) budget is an art with several key components.

The first is to make the best use of what you buy. In general, larger cuts — pot roasts, pork shoulders, whole chickens — are less expensive than single-serving cuts like steaks and chops and boneless skinless chicken breasts. Learning how to cook larger cuts will make the biggest shift in your meat budget. So you cook one larger item, then use it as an ingredient in dishes over the succeeding days. A whole roast chicken will feed two people for dinner for four days — more, if you make soup from the bones when you’ve taken the meat from it — in sandwiches, drumsticks and thighs, chicken pot pie, chicken stew over biscuits, chicken salad, quesadillas and so on.

Making the best use of what you buy can apply in other ways, too. A pound of ground pork serves 4 if you’re planning to eat it as little patties or homemade sausage; but it will provide you with several meals for 4 if you use it as the filling for homemade Chinese pot stickers, as an example. A pound of bacon will serve 4 or 5 if you serve it as strips at breakfast; but it will serve many times that if you use a couple of strips at a time to flavor a bean soup or stew.

The second component is simply to eat a little less meat. Try figuring in one day or two days when you don’t have meat in your menu. People already do that, they’re just not realizing it. So: pasta tossed with pesto or a fresh tomato sauce and a salad, perhaps some bread; vegetable or roasted butternut squash soup; bean burritos or soft tacos or tostadas; any of the dozens and dozens of rice-and-bean dishes. When you’re comfortable with one day, go to two days; when you’re comfortable with two days, go to three days, and so on.

The third component is to shop wisely, and watch the specials. It helps to keep a freezer, the big kind, not the one in your refrigerator, which isn’t good for long-term storage. Pork is least expensive in the fall and winter; that’s the time to buy the spare ribs you want to barbecue at Memorial Day next spring. Buy your turkey for Thanksgiving in the summer when they’re on special, not in the days right before the holiday.

Finally, learn to use the less-popular cuts, which are almost less expensive than steaks/chops/roasts. I love oxtails and beef short ribs, for example, and cook them in a myriad of ways (some of which are in my book). Brisket and flank steak are also adaptable and there are literally hundreds of recipes out in the world for both.

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Thanks Robin! Stay tuned for PART TWO of our Q&A with ROBIN MATHER, which will be posted next Friday September 16th. We’ll discuss things like canning/preservation of food, obesity rates, and the health benefits of eating locally.

Remember – I’m also hosting a month-long book contest too! Please comment in this month’s FOODIE FRIDAY blogs or email me at paula at paulayoo dot com to be part of our book contest giveaway drawing where I will draw a name a random to win a signed copy of Robin’s book, THE FEAST NEARBY. Winner(s) will be announced on Friday Sept. 30th’s blog.

Our Foodie Friday schedule:

Friday 9/16: Part 2 of the Robin Mather Q&A

Friday 9/23: A special Robin Mather recipe!

Friday 9/30: Contest winner announced for a signed copy of Robin Mather’s book!

Until next week, remember… Happy Writing! WRITE LIKE YOU MEAN IT! 🙂