There's a legendary story that gets retold on occasion at my family's gatherings, about my great-grandmother and g-grandfather. My great-grandmother was an amazing woman. She was still cooking and hosting and playing piano and writing music and painting well into the 1990's. There was a show of her art and a write-up in a Nashville newspaper about it when she was 90-something (?) years old. One of my treasured possessions is a little print of one of her paintings, in an original handpainted frame she made herself--all the great-grandkids (and there are lots of us) got a different print for Christmas one year. I have a book of her original hymns. There was, however, one thing this amazing woman apparently couldn't do.

As the story goes, one morning my great-grandmother decided to get up early and cook a special breakfast instead of just a normal breakfast. Eggs, bacon, biscuits--the whole Southern breakfast deal. Instead of the usual canned biscuits, because this was a special thing, she made biscuits from scratch: mixed them up, rolled them out, used a biscuit cutter. My great-grandfather ate his breakfast and his special homemade biscuits without comment, until the end of the meal, when my frustrated great-grandmother prompted him with the question, 'what did you think about the biscuits?' to which the reply came, 'I b'lieve I like t'other brand better.'

Biscuit FAIL. But apparently she did successfully resist clobbering him with her skillet. She was, as I've said, an amazing woman.

But truthfully, who has ever made homemade biscuits that are as yummy and fluffy as the canned ones? No one can replicate with regular old butter and flour and baking powder what those mysterious chemicals and preservatives do for canned biscuits.

Until NOW.

Over Christmas my mom made us a batch of biscuits using a Cook's Illustrated recipe for Southern biscuits, and if I hadn't watched her do it, I would have sworn it was impossible that they were from-scratch. Tall and fluffy and buttery and WOW. Of course, they're a helluva lot more trouble than opening a can, but they are totally worth it. The ingredients are pretty basic except for an increase in the liquid to dry ratio, but the real secret is in the handling of the dough and the shaping of the biscuits. From now on in my house they will be called "Nana Biscuits" and no one in my family will ever have to say, I b'lieve I like t'other brand better.

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 T baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1 t salt
1 T sugar

4 T cold butter, cut into little cubes

1 1/2 cups cold buttermilk

1 cup extra flour for handling
2 T melted butter to brush the tops

Mix the dry ingredients together by buzzing a few times in food processor, then add butter cubes and cut in by processing a few times more until the cornmeal-like consistency is achieved. (Personally, I have trouble getting this step to really work and end up cutting in the butter chunks with my pastry cutter, so I may eliminate the food processor altogether and see what happens.) Add buttermilk and mix until just incorporated. Using a 1/4 cup measuring cup, scoop the biscuit dough and place the mounds on a cookie sheet dusted with the extra cup of flour (the dough will be very wet and goopy). Consistent 1/4 cup scoops will yield 12 mounds of biscuit dough. Sprinkle some flour on the tops, then pick up each mound and toss in your hands until it forms a rough ball shape, and place in a well-greased round cake pan (9 biscuits on the outside, 3 in the middle). Brush melted butter on the tops (currently without a pastry brush, I just drizzle the butter over the tops and this seems to work too). Bake for 5 minutes in a pre-heated 500 degree oven, then lower heat to 450 and bake about 15 more minutes until well-browned on top. Let cool in pan 2 minutes, then turn out onto plate.

fish are friends (not food?)

If you've got a toddler living in your house, you recognize that line. Finding Nemo's character Bruce the Shark's 12-step program for "nice sharks, not mindless eating machines" begins with a pledge that concludes with the mantra: "fish are friends, not food." Nemo is Clare's current TV obsession; so Bruce the Shark's fish-friendly mantra has been repeated about three times a day for the past week during Clare's mid-winter break. (Don't worry, we've done other stuff too--fingerpainting, trips to the playground, a quick jaunt out to Princeton to say goodbye to friends moving overseas, that sort of thing. It's not all glassy-eyed TV coma around here.) She's a mimicry machine these days and so of course, not only is Bruce repeating his mantra three times a day, Clare wants to remind me too: fish are friends, not food.

We also made a short little shopping trip and picked up Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse for Clare. It's a beautiful book, with a cute little story about (of course) Mr. Seahorse and other various fish for whom the "daddies" are the primary nurturers of their offspring. [pause for tangential children's book critique: while I love the role reversal that is the theme of the book, the Mr. and Mrs. names for all the fish pairs irk me a bit, and when Mr. Bullhead tells Mr. Seahorse proudly that his eggs have hatched and he is now "babysitting," I can't help but hear echoes of a friend's anecdote about the absurdity of calling a daddy's care of his own kids "babysitting."] Mr. Seahorse, who keeps the seahorse eggs in his pouch; Mr. Kurtus, who sticks them on his head; Mr. Pipe, who keeps them on his belly; and Mr. Tilapia, who carries them in his mouth.

On this week's menu: pecan-crusted tilapia.

I'm not sure Clare will eat it. She might refuse on toddler-intuited principle. And hell, even my vegetarian baby sister will eat fish occasionally. (Pesky-vegetarian.) (Just kidding, mei-mei. You are a delightful vegetarian who makes a kick-butt curried butternut squash bisque.)

But the problem's worse than whether or not I can convince my toddler to ignore her Nemo-indoctrination and eat her fish, because the real issue to decide beforehand is whether or not I should. Aside from the fact that my Shoprite-bargain frozen tilapia fillets hail from China rather than sustainably managed US farms, (damn! should've known), the prior philosophical dilemma of how we define food and how to eat well are raised.

This is an ongoing negotiation for me. Not convinced yet that vegetarianism is mandated, I try to at least consume meat responsibly; this means, basically, eating less meat, and whenever possible, taking into account the practices that provide our meat. (These two things are mutually reinforcing, since free-range/organic/sustainable meat is more expensive.)

Fish are friends, not food: it's a curious mantra when you get down to it, the opposition of "friends" and "food" as categories. It reminds me of one of Mary Warren's seven multileveled criteria for personhood, specific personal relationship. She argues that even if you don't consider cats (for example) as "persons" categorically speaking, you're pretty likely to consider your own cat a "person," or something like a person, because you have a relationship with that specific cat. Now this makes sense, but by itself, the logic is inadequate. The big loophole of course is that we could turn it around and say, "I don't know you personally therefore you are not a person"--leading to a great rationalization for, say, killing people in a war. Just for example. We have a word for this of course: dehumanization. (Warren's proposal balances this criterion with several others, so this is not a criticism of her proposal as a whole.)

Fish are friends, not food: what kind of relationship is necessary with another creature to preclude categorizing it as 'food'? Pretty much everyone will stop short of human cannibalism; pretty much everyone would refuse to eat their own pet; pretty much everyone would refuse to eat other animals of the same kind as their pet. This is true even in places in China where dog is an acceptable meat for some dishes; I learned in Changsha that there is a particular breed of dog for eating, and it is not a dog one would keep as a pet--it has its own distinct ontological category. I wonder if people who keep aquariums feel queasy about eating fish. I bet most of them, like dog-eaters, accommodate by drawing more specific ontological boundaries.

What will I tell Clare? Will she connect the pecan-crusted tilapia fillet on her plate to Nemo and Mr. Tilapia, the good daddy fish with his mouth full of baby fish eggs? Or will there be an obvious and distinct ontological boundary provided, courtesy of the rounded edge of her plate--separating food from the rest of the natural world--to prevent her from making that connection?

The truth is, "there is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not to become-with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence or transcendence or a final peace" (D. Haraway, When Species Meet, 295). But this admission is no blank check, as if by acknowledging that we live via the practice of consuming our others, we put ourselves beyond redemption and therefore accountability. It matters how we eat, by what lives and in what we ways we sustain ourselves. Recognizing that the category of "food" overlaps with the categories of other creatures with whom we have relationship (acknowledged or not, functional or dysfunctional, personal or not, sustainable or unsustainable) is part of what it must mean to well, and not blindly. Bruce reassures us: "I am a nice shark, not a mindless eatin' machine." We too can at least aspire to be more than mindless eating machines. That fillet in my freezer is a fish: once a living, swimming creature with physical needs and competencies and intents, different from my own, but no less vital from the fish's point of view. Perhaps that fish once carried his baby fish eggs in his mouth, like Mr. Tilapia of Eric Carle's story. If Clare can make that connection, how can I deny it? Certainly not without distorting reality for the sake of maintaining a false purity of boundaries in pursuit of the innocence Donna Haraway assures me does not exist--and which, in the end, if she learns anything from me, she will dismantle as an adult. Maybe it's too difficult a truth for a toddler to understand, that killing and eating cannot be hygienically separated...and yet, Nemo's mommy gets eaten, as do all his siblings, at the very beginning of that Disney narrative; and Bruce the Shark's mantra is bookended by Nigel the pelican's dry comment, "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta eat."

thinking about food

I spend a lot of time and brainpower thinking about food. It generally takes over an hour to plan a menu and a grocery list for the week, and it's not something I can do easily while Clare is awake and clamoring for my attention, so it's an after-bedtime task. It's logistical. It takes sustained concentration. Why? Because we have to eat cheap. But I am also determined that we shall eat well. These two things don't easily go together, the way our culture does food. And so I spend hours putting menus together so that ingredients dovetail and there's no waste. If I buy an out of the ordinary cheese (for budget purposes, read: anything other than cheddar) then I must use ALL of it somehow, which means more than menu item using it. If I buy meat, I stretch it to cover at least two meals, and try my best to use a cheap cut or find something on sale. (But almost never ever ground beef...I mean, there's only so much you can do with it, and I think early in childhood I was chronically overdosed on ground beef casseroles. That's no slur on my mom--it takes a cook of extraordinary dedication and brilliance to make ground beef into something truly edible and nutritious on a weekly basis. Unlike her, I'm just not up to it.) I try very hard to buy produce in season (difficult in the winter, especially when your spouse is not overly fond of winter squashes). And if something goes bad in the fridge, I feel it like some kind of moral failure.

So I love me a good cheap recipe full of inexpensive ingredients that can be transformed into something yummy and good for you. And because I know how hard it is to eat cheap and well, I am going to share a couple from our menu this past week.

Brent's pick: Andouille Red Beans and Rice. This is a super-quick recipe, also a bonus. You can skimp on the sausage, freeze what's leftover and use it for another recipe or for this one when you make it again.

My pick: Lentil Soup with Chard. Lentils are dirt cheap. And this is an amazing soup. Very earthy and flavorful, and the squeeze of lemon at the end really brightens it up. Even if you don't like lentil soups, I would still say give it a try. You might be surprised.

And if you like people who recommend good recipes, go here.