Dim sum for Thanksgiving—not as unique as it sounds

It turns out that neither going to the Smithsonian nor going out for dim sum for Thanksgiving is such a unique idea after all.  The American History Museum was packed with families yesterday and we had to take a ticket and wait in line at the dim sum restaurant, which was still overflowing at 12:30 even though it seats 150 people.

I would love to make dim sum a new Thanksgiving tradition. Dim sum personifies my number-one reason for eating out: to eat things I cannot (or will not take the time to) make at home. (Perhaps I could master one or two of the dishes there, but the beauty of dim sum is the constantly changing variety). We ate sticky beef noodle crepes, taro root dumplings filled with mushrooms and a savory sauce, radish cakes (which don't taste like radishes at all, more like sticky rice and bacon), steamed buns with pork, shrimp dumplings, stuffed bean curd, and more. It was fun to get to select the little trays of food off the carts the Chinese ladies wheel around the tables.

There's one little problem: PE sat through most of the meal with her eyes moist, her lips puckered.  We thought she would like dim sum since she loves tofu (but only if bland and uncooked), rice and dumplings. And she has loved the idea of dim sum since reading Dim Sum for Everyone when she was in preschool. Alas, the food was just too exotic for her.  She wouldn't touch the sticky noodle crepe, which was really just a long steamed dumpling; she ate the steamed bun until she hit the center and found a slice of onion; and we had to keep the shrimp dishes on the other side of the table so she wouldn't have to smell them. The only thing she finally ate was the stuffed bean curd, whose center was like the center of a meat dumpling. She pulled off the bean curd skin and ate the inside.

It's hard to enjoy a meal when one of your fellow diners is unhappy and hungry.  And, though he ate a share of the food, TA was soon stuffed, leaving D and me to eat more radish cake than we wanted; we were too full for the steamed Chinese broccoli when it finally came around (our meal was missing a vegetable).

I'm not sure there is a lesson in any of this, if this means we'll have to crawl back to more traditional fare from now on, so that everyone will eat and be happy. Maybe we'll try again at Thanksgiving in a couple of years, when PE might not be so picky, or we should go there some other time, with more adventurous eaters as our dinner companions.

Thanksgiving dinner in a Chinese restaurant?

Despite what I said in my last post, how cooking Thanksgiving dinner usually gets me out of my post-summer cooking doldrums, a few days ago I decided that I really don't want to cook on Thanksgiving this year.

Though I've loved making Thanksgiving dinner in the past—mostly because I can't think of a better flavor combination than turkey-cranberry-pumpkin—I haven't be able to bring myself to buy a turkey or even a turkey breast at the grocery store this year, much less order an organic turkey from the local Amish market or natural foods store weeks in advance.

My hesitation became clear last week when I read the comic Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! in the Sunday comics. (See the whole comic at:  http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20081123/ltmrkt081123.gif ).

I already spend a portion of most evenings in the kitchen cooking dinner and another portion of the day cleaning the kitchen (I don't have the cleanest kitchen in the world, but I manage to get the dishes off the counters and loaded or washed by the end of the day). How can it be a true holiday if I am in the kitchen most of the day? And with just the four of us for Thanksgiving this year, it was hard to justify so much work for just four portions. Plus, I always find Thanksgiving pots and pans the worst to scrape and wash, taking longer than a normal day's wash.

So we are planning to head to the Smithsonian's newly reopened Museum of American History, then out for dim sum (if we can find it), or anything else that might be open. I am thinking this might be a new tradition for us, a thankful-to-be-liberated-from-the-kitchen day.

Still, if the weather turns out to be horrible, or I change my mind and become suddenly nostalgic for a more traditional Thanksgiving, there is a can of whole berry cranberry sauce and a small can of pumpkin in my cabinet, and part of a frozen chicken in the freezer, from which I could surely pull something together. Maybe I only need to know that I don't have to stay in the kitchen all day this Thursday before I can head back there with a spring in my step and a sense of freedom in my heart.

The kitchen (cooking blog) is still open, but operating under more limited hours

I haven't been posting once a week, as I promise I will in the "Frequency of Posts" section on the right of this blog.  That's because I am in a cooking rut. This occurs almost every year, somewhere between the last basil harvest and Thanksgiving, kick-started by the lifting of daylight savings time and the earlier darkness that ensues.

As long as I could make fresh pesto (and this year's final harvest was only four weeks ago), I could prolong the idea that the kitchen was operating under summer conditions—which means more fresh food, less time spent in the kitchen and a greater likelihood of  throw-together meals. Only in the summer can some version of salad be dinner.

On many dark winter afternoons, when the temperature is dipping below freezing, I've said wistfully to anyone who will listen, "Why if it was July we might be leaving for the pool right now, and we'd still have the afternoon ahead of us."

A kind of desperate feeling sets in for me when the days get suddenly shorter and I realize a whole winter of staying in—with serious cooking and baking—looms ahead.  Once winter gets going (kick-started by Thanksgiving dinner making), I'm usually at peace with it. In fact, I really do like to bake bread and make stews. 

But I cling to the idea of summer long after my summer swimsuit and SPF 45 sunscreen have been put away. I only seem to be able to face winter by continuing to look back at summer, backing ungracefully into the long, cold nights ahead.

Should we be scared of that "Product of China" label on food?

Recently I've noticed that some of the food I've brought home has been stamped "Product of China." First it was (supposed) organic frozen spinach; then, garlic; finally, bay scallops. I probably wouldn't have brought any of it home had I noticed the label in the store because I worry about food grown in China. Why?

• Much of the press before and during the Bejing Olympics discussed how polluted that city and other Chinese cities are.
  
  
• Chinese food and food supplement regulations and inspections are more lax than those of our own government, and more subject to corruption, as the recent scandals on contaminents in human food, pet food and infant formulas have shown.
  
  
• I hate the idea of my food coming all the way from China. It's one thing to buy oolong tea since it's in small quantities, and is dried and easy to ship, but frozen spinach? How much energy did it require to freeze it, ship and truck it frozen from China to Maryland?
  

Looking around today on the Internet to see if my worries could be verified, I easily came upon the article, Grown in China, by Ralph Nader. Although I've often found Nader alarmist and a little hysterical in recent years (I wish he would stop running for president), the article contains some information that is worth noting. He says that the United States imports 80 percent of its seafood and China is its major seafood supplier—and  fish grown in China is often farm-raised, grown in contaminated ponds and fed antibiotics because of the putrid conditions. 

The FDA has issued assurances on its Seafood Safety Program,  in which they have testified that the "FDA currently screens electronically-submitted information on all incoming shipments, and then uses a risk-based approach to target our inspectional resources at products having the greatest potential for causing harm to public health." But Nader says that the FDA is able to inspect only about 1 percent of food shipments into the United States, which is hardly reassuring.

But the worst thing that Nader conveys is the information that: "except for the required labeling of seafood from foreign countries (consumers take note), all other food in your supermarket is not required to have a label of the country that exported it."

So, while I can avoid seafood from China and start buying fruit grown in the U.S. (easy to see since almost every banana, apple, etc., is labeled with place of origin), there's no way of knowing where the chicken in my frozen potstickers was raised. That leaves me with three choices: learn to make potstickers from scratch (very unlikely since I once spent a whole evening—prior to having children—making cabbage-stuffed pierogies), forego them all together or just get used to eating food products from China. 

I'm not happy with any of these choices, yet since potstickers are not a major part of my diet (they're only an occasional/emergency snack-meal for us), I'm not all that worried about eating them. What's more worrisome are the foods that compose most of our meals, the supplements we take, the green tea I drink everyday. What's in them? Where did they come from?