Unidentified Schmutz and the Rock Bottom Eight

Chapter 6 of The I Hate to Housekeep Book is possibly my favorite chapter. It’s had a huge impact on me, but I’ve only grasped this on re-reading the book now, after several years of housewifery and adulthood.

The first thing I realize, on examining the text again, is that the word “mingy,” which I thought I’d somehow adopted from Laurie Colwin, turns out to be one I’d probably first seen in Peg Bracken. Score 1 for Bracken. The second thing is that I have unwittingly used a ridiculous number of the tricks in here over the years. I probably got a lot of them from this book, and just didn’t remember it, but lo and behold here we are.
The tricks here are about being mingy — which is a kind of variant of being stingy; it’s about being cheap in cold and unpleasant way — ideally without having it be really obvious. How to stretch your money without appearing to be someone who’s doing precisely that; how to make certain things last longer, or last differently. How to make sure you’re really getting the most out of whatever it is you’re using.
I cannot count the number of times I have very consciously used the last scrapes of peanut butter from a jar with the last, unreachable spoonful of ketchup from a ketchup bottle by using them as the base for a sauce for chicken and vegetables and wound up with something I think of as Bastardized Malaysian Chicken. Adding water to the jar or bottle, closing them, and then shaking really hard means you can get every last bit out, and since the sauce needs water in it anyhow, there’s no harm done by watering down the peanut butter or ketchup in the first place. Plus, Bastardized Malaysian Chicken is really, really good.

And I am pretty sure that it was Peg Bracken who converted me from kitchen sponges to dishrags. I don’t remember when this happened exactly, but I do know that sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I stopped buying kitchen sponges and started buying dishrags, and I’ve not changed my mind. Bracken doesn’t mention the hygiene-related aspects of dishrags winning over sponges, or the possible “green”ness of the dishrag over the sponge (of course, the Environment was not the issue in Bracken’s day that it is now). But she is correct about this: you buy a package of new sponges, and the colors are all bright and they look pretty and you go, “look at that, look how clean everything is.” And then after about two weeks the sponge starts to get disgusting, and it’s smelly, and there’s god knows what trapped in the little holes, and it’s gross. So you have to buy more. If you’re the sort of person who’s going to bleach and microwave your sponges, that’s fine, I guess, but the other thing is, eventually (and it’s a short-time-frame eventually), the sponges start to fall apart. Whereas the dishrags I use tend to last about three or four years before they crap out altogether; in my case, “crapping out altogether” means they get retired from kitchen use and are demoted to “housecleaning rags,” which is fine. Dishrags are kept in a stack above the sink; I have about 7 or 8 of them in constant rotation; they are laundered in hot water with the other towels and linens; and I never worry about them being disgusting, because if they’re disgusting, they’re about to be laundered.
Bracken observes that the truly mingy might crochet her own dishrags out of little bits of string or whathaveyou. I’m not that far gone.

Now, here is where the environmental movement, anti-fracking, vegan types, the ones who’re buying all those organic dishwasher detergents, should really sit up and pay attention. On page 68 of The I Hate to Housekeep Book is a list of the essential things you need to keep stuff clean. Bracken states clearly: “This list doesn’t include those pantry items — salt, vinegar, baking soda, and so forth, which you keep around anyway to cook with. We’ll come to those a little later on.”
But the Rock Bottom Eight things you need to clean your house and the stuff in it: this is a list that could be printed today in Real Simple magazine. It could have been a list in ReadyMade magazine (RIP, I still have my early issues). This is a list you see on a zillion websites where people are talking about living Simple, Authentic, Non-Toxic Lives. (Which is baloney: I mean, ammonia is toxic and so is bleach. But I guess we mean things that are toxic in ways that feel finite, that we can identify — so, I’m for that.)
So: the list. The Rock Bottom Eight. They are as follows:

The Big Soap Jar. This is a jar you put all your little scraps of bars of soap into and you add water and wind up with soap jelly you can use for pretty much anything. These days, when people insist on using liquid soap (which I think is stupid, and, basically, a scam), this might not seem obvious; but to turn soap scraps into liquid soap you can use to clean all sorts of things is pretty intelligent. Tiny bars of soap are annoying. No one wants to go into the guest bathroom and see a sad, dried-up little sliver of soap. Unwrap a fresh bar and put the sliver into the Soap Jar and move on.

2. Washing Machine Detergent, for your laundry and other situations where you need detergent, which is not the same thing as soap, okay?

3. Cleansing Powder (here we mean something like Bon Ami or maybe Comet or Ajax, whatever floats your boat). Bracken beats Martha to the punch by pointing out that if the brand you buy comes in a can you think is ugly, you can decant it into a big copper, glass, or plastic salt shaker; or, you can use an empty glass bottle with a couple of holes poked into the lid of it. She also points out something very true: the fewer holes you open to the cleansing powder, the longer the can will last, because you won’t automatically use as much of it when you use it.

4. Steel-wool soap pads. I don’t use these often at all, but when I need them, I need them. Bracken’s hot tip, which is super-smart: to keep from using one once, and then having it wither or slime or rust away, just cut small sections off of the pad out of the box, as needed. And wear gloves when you use them, because steel wool does not improve the looks or feel of your hands.

5. Ammonia. “This gives your sudsy water more enthusiasm.” Indeed it does. My stove top burners looked completely revolting, unclean able, but I “soaked” them in ammonia vapors overnight in a Rubbermaid bin and the next day when I went to wipe them off, damned if five years of crud didn’t swoosh right off. Ammonia is amazing stuff. Unfortunately it also smells like death, so you have to be careful here. But Bracken is right, everyone should have a bottle of household ammonia around. (This is where another tip comes in, by the way. She advises us to use it to wash windows, which is all well and good — but the real hot tip is, when you’re washing windows, do vertical strokes on one side of the window and horizontal on the other, so that you can tell where you went wrong easily to go back and fix it.)

6. Sal soda. No one knows what sal soda is, anymore, except people who do taxidermy (hello, hipsters!). It’s some kind of washing soda that you can buy in a yellow box in the laundry aisle; Arm & Hammer makes it. It cleans porcelain beautifully and is a laundry booster and you can also use it safely to clean pots and pans you’ve burned the hell out of. It’s not expensive and it is a much more flexible cleaning agent than that bottle of Method Whatsit you bought at Target. I don’t even want to talk about Mrs. Meyers.

7. Bleach; or Javelle water.
No one knows what the hell Javelle water is, but it gets mentioned a lot in old housekeeping books. Bracken didn’t know what the hell it was either, but it turns out to be a bleach you can make yourself, if you’re so inclined. On page 71 she provides a recipe for readers who want to make their own bleach. You have to get a half pound of chloride of lime, and I don’t know where to get that (Home Depot? Agway?) but I tell you what: you give me a half pound of chloride of lime, and maybe I’ll try to make Javelle water. Bracken describes Javelle water as “a pretty stout mixture,” which I interpret to mean “this will burn the hairs out of your nose given half a chance” so I’m not sure I’d really want to muck around with it. A bottle of generic bleach is cheap enough, why make yourself crazy?

The last item on Bracken’s list is 8. Paste Wax. This is an item…. I don’t know anyone who keeps wax around for waxing their floors. I know that I bought a can of paste wax at a hardware store, one of those old-style hardware stores where the man behind the counter would set down his unfiltered Camel cigarette on the edge of the counter so that he could help you find the paste wax, which was, in fact, right in front of you, had you known what you were looking for. Yes, this actually happened to me once. Paste wax is very useful for taking care of certain types of floors but it requires real effort and real energy and I just don’t think sane people wax their floors anymore. I did it because I had just had a very nifty black and white checkerboard vinyl composite tile floor installed in the kitchen, and it looked awesome, and I knew that the only way to really seal it well was to wax it. I spoke to numerous flooring people about how to do this, before I got started, and it was, believe you me, a HUGE pain to do (the kitchen is not a small room; there was a lot of vinyl to take care of). I don’t intend to ever do it again. But I have the can of wax, just in case.
Bracken points out one of the truths about waxing floors, which is, it isn’t JUST that cleaning the floor before you wax it, and applying the new layer of wax, is a pain — though they are; it’s that the thing that makes the wax make the floor look so nice is all the buffing. Buffing is something that is probably best done by a large machine, the kind they have in all schools and hospitals. My house is not a school or a hospital; I do not have a buffing machine. So right off the bat, let’s pare one item off this Rock Bottom list: you do not need paste wax.

I would say that there’s one thing that’s not on the Rock Bottom list that maybe should be, though it’s possible you could substitute the Big Soap Jar for it: this would be a bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap. I don’t happen to have any on hand right now, but for many many years, this was the stuff I turned to for washing floors and pieces of furniture that were so beschmutzed I hardly knew where to start. Some Murphy’s Oil Soap added to a bucket of water goes a very, very long way and is useful on many surfaces. It’s not particularly expensive and if you buy it in its undiluted, non-spray-bottle form, you can adjust proportions according to your specific needs, which is useful.

The last bit of genius in this chapter is the last paragraph, which points out something that should be obvious but isn’t. You need to make sure that the front of your refrigerator, your stove, your dishwasher, your desk, and so on, are kept clean, otherwise they are grim to behold. “It’s the fronts of chests and desk drawers that get the most finger marks,” she points out reasonably, adding, in italics, “Fronts are on the eye level of people sitting down.” So very true. This is also why it is a good idea, now and then, to clean the handles of your refrigerator and stove. YOU know that those smudges are just from you and your husband and your filthy child, but in general? It’s just gross. The instinct that makes you recoil from the crud on the phone in a public place (not that there are such things anymore, but you know what I mean) is the same instinct that will make visitors to your home recoil when they go to get more ice out of the freezer. Schmutz is not the end of the world, most of the time; but unidentified schmutz is no one’s idea of a good time. Even a hipster with a beard that’s filthy with old mustache wax should be able to grasp that.

October 11, 2015 0

The Desperation Dinners: or, Everyone’s Got a Secret

Peg Bracken’s chapter 5, in The I Hate to Housekeep Book, is actually a text that could have been pulled from The I Hate to Cook Book. It’s about providing a decent evening meal in a time of crisis or indecision or apathy. The chapter’s title is “Dinner Will be Ready as Soon as I Decide What We’re Having.” The question, obviously, was “What’s for Dinner?” And while it’s almost impossible (unless you’re talking about microwave meals) to produce a meal as quickly as “now that I’ve decided what we’re having,” it IS possible to have no clue whatsoever as to what dinner will be, and yet produce a not-bad meal within twenty or thirty minutes.

Bracken points out that the thing to do is have a few tricks up your sleeve that you can pull out using the kind of stuff you’d be likely to have stashed away in the fridge or the cabinet anyhow. Eggs. Cheese. Canned beans. Pasta. Cans of tuna (some normal in water, and one nice tin packed in olive oil). These are all things you have to have on hand in order to be able to create the evening miracle so many times in a year.
Then there are things that you can’t exactly keep around all the time, because they have a finite life-span, but you can buy them very easily and use them to produce an impressive-seeming meal that makes people happy: parsley; in the summer, a really good big fat tomato; cheeses that don’t last forever but are rich-tasting, like goat cheese. The number of times I have boiled water for pasta and made a raw pasta sauce using parsley, tomato, and goat cheese is impossible to calculate. In the height of summer, we probably eat this twice a week and no one ever gets sick of it. It’s something Peg Bracken wouldn’t have recommended — too much fresh food involved, plus no one talked about goat cheese in her day — but I think she’d admire how little effort it requires to pull this together, and the short time frame involved.

A favorite desperation side dish of mine is one that makes everyone happy and which I can almost always make because I almost always have frozen peas in the freezer and a jar of mayonnaise in the fridge. Green pea salad — which I guess is a kind of Southern classic for potlucks and church dinners — is very flexible and can be assembled in about five minutes at its most pared-down. Thaw your peas, crush a clove of garlic over the peas in a bowl, mix in some mayonnaise until it looks like a salad. You could chop up a hardboiled egg or two if you had them, to add a little more heft to it, or shred some cheese in. Sometimes I add pickle relish, or capers. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that thawing frozen peas is a cinch and then you just dress them up with whatever’s on hand that seems nice at the time.

Last year I figured out that I could make a noodle salad version of elotes (Mexican street corn) that no one ever got sick of eating, and I’ve since made about 50 pots of it, even in the dead of winter, because frozen corn is about as handy as frozen peas are. This is a matter of taking the cooked corn and mixing it with mayonnaise, grated Parmesan cheese (assuming you don’t have access to a proper hard Mexican cheese like cotija), some chili powder, and then combining that with cooked noodles (not long noodles like spaghetti — I find medium shells perfect for this). Sometimes I add parsley. Sometimes I add basil, cut into ribbons. Sometimes I had both parsley and basil. One time I had some leftover chimichurri sauce and I threw that into the mayonnaise sauce and there were no complaints at all.

Bracken’s point, and mine, is that desperations dinners don’t actually have to be near-inedible slop if a tiny amount of effort is taken to make sure that there are a few basic things always in the house. This is something that I talk about a lot, and I probably got it from Bracken originally, to be honest, but it’s really, really important. Even a half-assed hausfrau should be able to keep the basic pantry maintained, because none of its components have to be super-pricey.

The other day a man I know mused that, tasked with making dinner, he’d gone out to the store and bought a ribeye steak, wild rice, and fresh peas. He didn’t say how well the meal had turned out, but volunteered that the ingredients had probably cost him as much as it would have cost to have a nice meal out. My own feeling is, It shouldn’t be this way, or at least, it shouldn’t HAVE to be this way. A grownup ought to be able to open the fridge at any given moment and be able to come up with something — a protein, a vegetable, SOMETHING — that can be combined with a starch (rice or noodles) to be a decent meal. Ideally, a grownup can produce that meal, from the time he takes off his coat until the time he sits down, in 30 minutes.
Once you’re good at this kind of thing, these even become meals you wouldn’t be embarrassed to serve to company. At least, I’m not. Though it is true that not once has my husband ever invited a boss home for dinner. (Does anyone still do that?)

October 7, 2015 2

Peg Bracken’s Literary Chops: in which I offer money to anyone who can confirm my suspicion that Nicholson Baker is a Peg Bracken fan

One of the things I like about Peg Bracken — this holds through all of her books — is that even if she’s writing about things that are — let’s call them mundane, though I’m tempted to call them trivial, even though I don’t actually think they are trivial at all — she throws these bits of erudition at you that make you remember that she’s really writing for you — she’s giving you all the credit in the world for having much better things to do, and having spent a lot of time doing them. For example, reading is a high-priority activity on Planet Bracken. You can tell by how she scatters literary bits throughout the books. Chapter 4 of The I Hate to Housekeep Book opens with a little epigram from Christopher Fry (“What, after all, is a halo? It’s only one more thing to keep clean.”) and closes with a bit from Peter de Vries (“What’s the panel discussion about?” “The Ordeal of Modern Women is the subject!” “You mean those two cars, automatic dishwasher, beautiful house in the suburbs but Something’s Missing? That ordeal?”). This kind of thing just wouldn’t happen in a housekeeping manual written today, I’m pretty sure. Cheryl Mendelson’s more than capable of it, but I think she’d feel that a household manual isn’t the place to get clever: that it’s a waste of the reader’s time to slip little literary jokes into the text. She does seem like a very serious person, after all.

But Peg Bracken is full of clever asides, quips that make you laugh while you’re sitting there thinking about dusting the furniture, though obviously, since you’re on the couch, you are not actually doing it. Lest you think I’m implying that Bracken was an intellectual snob, I can assure you she is not, and this is demonstrated by the fact that while she’s quoting Fry and DeVries (whose names might not be household words now, but they certainly were when Bracken was writing her books, and they were respectable names, too), she speaks in no uncertain terms of the joys of reading trash as well. Back in the Bride’s Own ABC (discussed in an earlier post), she talks about how Great-Grandma didn’t wax the furniture, but just dusted quickly with a polish-soaked cloth she fished out of her Mason jar (take that, hipsters), and “had time to sit down and read Love or Lechery: The Story of a Good Girl’s Temptation, and a rattling good story it was, too.”
In other words, Peg Bracken wouldn’t mind you reading pretty much anything, except, I suppose, the manual that came with the vacuum cleaner, unless you were really in a pinch.

Now, one of the funny aspects of re-reading this Peg Bracken book is that on examination today – I think the critics would call this a close reading — an explication de texte, for those of you who insist on being jerks — it’s come to my attention that direct lines can be drawn from the works of Peg Bracken to the works of a writer I admire very much but would never have thought to connect to Peg Bracken. This would be Nicholson Baker, who is one of the funniest writers going (when he’s not writing about World War II, don’t get me wrong, not all of his books are funny). It is suddenly very clear to me that Baker must have read Peg Bracken growing up. He grew up in the 1960s; his mother, from what I can tell of her, is the kind of woman who would have had Peg Bracken books around; and I would bet $50 that Baker read these books over and over again, probably while sitting at the kitchen table eating sugary breakfast cereal. I suspect that a significant amount of his comic tone, his phrasing, was adopted unconsciously from Bracken. If anyone can put me in touch with Nicholson Baker to discuss this, let me know. (And if I’m wrong, and Mr. Baker says, “Peg who? I have no idea who you’re talking about,” then I will concede defeat. But look at my two fast examples, and tell me there are no similarities.)

I had to get in touch with my husband to confirm some of this, because I couldn’t remember what it was, exactly, that made Bracken’s dismissive take on “how to make ironing fun” seem so Baker to me. She disses the women’s magazines that tell you to put on a Fresh House Dress and open a window to catch the cool breeze, saying, “This is a lot of clam juice.” I re-read that sentence and thought, “Nicholson Baker.” Naturally I couldn’t think WHY I was having this thought, so I emailed the Gourmensch and explained my problem. He wrote back almost immediately and said, “It’s in The Anthologist. “Now, people are going to feed you a lot of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They’ll say, “Oh, ho, ho! Iambic pentameter!””
And he is correct. (Almost correct. The actual line is, “People are going to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They’re going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter!” But my husband’s paraphrase is ridiculously close to Baker’s original, so I’m giving him all the points.) We can, as my husband points out, make this even more fun to think about by remembering that the narrator of The Anthologist is named Paul Chowder.

I never expected to write this much about mollusks in my entire life, but here we are. I hold that Baker’s Chowder and Bracken’s clam juice are related. Even her cookbook talks a lot about using canned clams, too. There are just a lot of mollusks stashed around Peg Bracken’s books, probably because of living in the Pacific Northwest all those years. And I hold that these things — Bracken’s clam juice and Baker’s Paul Chowder and his oyster crackers — are related.

But another thing that makes me think Baker read Bracken: the use of funny noise words. Here is Bracken talking about car noises. “Let’s say, as another case in point, that your car has developed a small plinkety-bleep under its hood. In the repair shop, the men in the white overalls can spend a good couple of days changing it to a plinkety-bloop. But if you had only sat tight and waited, it would probably have turned into a plinkety-bloop anyway, and a lot cheaper, too.”
Now, let’s jump back to Baker, his brilliant tribute to John Updike (whose works were getting big just at the time Bracken’s were, let’s remember). U&I is always ignored, I feel, by general readers who have the very wrong idea that you have to be a fan of John Updike to find this book interesting. This isn’t the case at all. You don’t even have to have read any Updike to find the book of interest. What you have to be is interested in how Nicholson Baker writes, and how his mind works. I am both of those things (as well as marginally interested in Updike) and so I have read this book probably a dozen times. I remember that the first time I read it, I laughed so hard at a couple of things in it that I nearly made myself puke (and if I had, I would probably have turned to Peg Bracken for tips on how to clean up the mess). One of those things was this passage, which now strikes me as not only Bakerian, but Brackenesque. Here, we read Baker’s version of an Updikean sentence, its pattern and rhythm. But what strikes me is how it adopts the occasional silliness of Bracken. See this: “her blank seemed, in its blinkety blankness and blanketed blankness, almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk.”

Plinkety-bloop. Blinkety blankness. Tell me that one of these writers is uninfluenced by the other. I totally realize that this kind of silliness stretches way back; it’s the kind of noise-writing that you might have seen in Perelman or Benchley even. People who basically write very dignified sentences making the reader giggle by casually tossing something ludicrous into the mix. But I feel in my heart of hearts that this is a sign that Baker is a Bracken fan, and it makes me like Baker even more. (Should Nicholson Baker ever read this: please confirm or deny. I’d really like to know, either way, realizing that if I’m wrong all of this makes me look like a pretentious twit.)

I am going to be looking for some Peter de Vries books soon.

September 23, 2015 0

The Use-It-Up Rosh Hashanah

Let me start by saying that this all began because we have in the “sweet” drawer a wooden box of fancy dried apricots that my husband ordered from Zabar’s last December. It’s now September. No one’s eating these things. I’m tired of having the box take up space in my kitchen. We’ve got to use these things up.

Dinner this past Sunday night was something I made up on the spur of the moment to use up what few leftovers we had on hand. But last week, for Rosh Hashanah, I had to come up with something a little more special yet also economical. So I decided that for dinner, for Rosh Hashanah, I would make chicken with apricots; broccoli rabe, with lots of onion and garlic, for the side dish; and do a pot of white rice.

What we wound up with was pretty much what’s described above, but with the following embellishments. Some of the embellishments were not made with economy in mind, I’ll admit. But it was such a successful meal I’m writing this all down by my husband’s request, because he believes that if I don’t write it down tonight, precisely, I will forget what I did and never be able to replicate any of it.

The Chicken. Slice thinly 1/2 a large onion and sauté in olive oil. Add about five cloves of garlic sliced in half (big fat cloves) (5 is what I used this time; next time I’d put more, because they were so good). When onion is soft, sear both sides of two boneless, skinless breasts of chicken. Remove chicken from pan. Deglaze pan with about 1 cup white wine. Add about 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar; stir. Cut about six dried apricots in half, place in pan, place chicken on top of apricot pieces. Cover pan and put in low oven (250 deg.) for about 40 minutes. About halfway through, turn chicken pieces over.
After 40 minutes, take pan from oven. Spread a teaspoonful of fig jam on top of each piece of chicken. Return to oven for another 20 minutes. Cut cooked breast into pieces (about 3 pieces each) so as to allow sauce to be absorbed by meat.
The chicken can be removed from the oven and gently reheated at cook’s convenience.
The broccoli rabe. Blanch rabe in pot of water; sauté onion and garlic (lots of both) in olive oil. Add blanched rabe, roughly chopped, and about 1 cup water. Put in oven to cook with the chicken (above).
The rice. Well, I had thought I’d just make a pot of white rice. But then I got to thinking about how the chicken had this kind of vaguely middle-eastern quality about it. And then I started to dimly recall a recipe I’d read for something called Jeweled Rice — it was a Persian dish, or something like that. I thought, “I could do that, more or less, I bet.” So I did. I sautéed a small onion, diced, in about 3 tablespoons of butter, and once it was soft I threw in about half a cup of dried cranberries, a light drift of cinnamon, about 1/2 tsp. of cumin, and some salt and pepper. To this I added Basmati rice which I had carefully rinsed. (I measured with the special cup necessary for our rice cooker; it’s this little plastic cup that does not measure by normal “cups” or anything metric, either, as far as I can tell. It was probably the rough equivalent of 1 1/2 cups raw rice.) I sautéed the rice in the butter and onion and spices, and when some pieces began to turn golden, I scraped it all into the rice cooker. To the rice cooker I added 1 cup water in which I’d soaked maybe 6 saffron threads, and then filled with water to the correct waterline marked on the pot (just above the number 3 — again, this is meaningless unless you have the same model rice cooker we have, which you probably don’t). I stirred everything together quickly, hit “cook,” and walked away. When the cooker was done (which is actually 5 minutes after it clicks off), there was perfectly fluffy, wonderful, jewel-speckled rice.

This was a meal that everyone adored. My daughter suggested I cook it for Thanksgiving, if we’re hosting this year. I said I didn’t think that would go over very well, but pondered its viability as a Passover option.
If I make this again, I think it’s important to up the amount of garlic and apricot in the chicken dish. Not because it seemed weak — it did not — but because both of those things (even the apricots — and I HATE apricots) were so delicious, after cooking so long with the chicken, that everyone wished there were more chunks of garlic and apricot in the pot. So: add more. Like, double it.
Also, it would probably be good to scatter some chopped nuts on the rice. It’s not desperately needed, but it would be a nice touch. Some chopped up pistachios, perhaps, because the obvious choice (almonds) are disliked in this household by everyone but me. Cashews could work, but pistachios would be prettier.

I started cooking this meal and worked on it, off and on, from about 2.30 in the afternoon until 7 o’clock. I’m not going to say this is a quick’n’easy meal. And all the dried fruit, and the saffron: those are not cheap things. But I had them on hand already, which meant they went into the “you can use this up, it’s ok” category. This meal, given time and some energy, is doable, and even worth making the slightly extra effort to make. It occurs to me that the chicken could be made a whole day or two in advance, which would definitely make making the rice an easier proposition.

Let’s see if I remember this next year, when Rosh Hashanah rolls around and I don’t know what to serve.

September 21, 2015 0

To the Non-Believers on Sunday: Kitchen Economy is Possible and Not That Hard, Even on Sunday Night

Sunday afternoon. A weekend spent engaged in wholesome family activities, none of which included grocery shopping. Five p.m., we’re heading home, when my husband asks, “Should we stop at a store to buy something for dinner?”
I am loath to spend money on groceries; we’ve spent money on lunch out already. “Nah,” I say, “I’ll figure something out when we get home. We have some leftover chicken breast from the other night.”
My husband gives me a glance that we’ll call doubtful-but-polite. I blithely wait until 6.10 to step into the kitchen, at which point I pull the chicken from the fridge and reach for a bulb of garlic.

The chicken had been sautéed in coconut oil and cooked with garlic, onion, and the dregs of a bottle of ginger beer. After two days in the fridge, the leftover chicken is encased in solidified oil; the chicken juices have jellied a little. I take two more fat cloves of garlic and slice them thickly; I take the solid coconut oil off the chicken pieces and throw them into a small pot on the stove. The garlic cooks in the melting oil. I slice up one green hot pepper of type unknown, but purchased recently in an Asian grocery store. It goes into the pot with the garlic. When the garlic is golden brown, I pour the chicken juices into the pan and add about 1/4 cup of ketchup and 1/8 cup of soy sauce. I slice the leftover chicken, place the slices in the pot, and let that simmer.

In the meantime, a pot of rice is cooking. Two partially-full bags of frozen peas, which had been forgotten in the freezer, are thawing on the kitchen counter. Those peas will be dumped into the chicken pot when we’re almost ready to eat; they’ll heat up quickly. The rice will be done in about 10 minutes. This will be a dish we could pay $15 dollars for, eating out in a restaurant, if there were a restaurant that served this kind of thing, but I will have made it at home for probably $4, if that. And have pulled it together out of leftovers and scraps, to boot. And, no, the hot pepper is NOT required, so that’s not an excuse. It is possible, easy, even, to take the not-enough-for-another-meal leftovers you have in the fridge and turn them into something that IS enough to feed your family. If you can’t keep a bag of frozen peas around, though, I don’t know what to tell you.

September 20, 2015 0

Lady Macbeth and Your Tablecloths

There is, at some level, nothing you can really do about things acquiring stains or getting rid of them. I know this because I’ve lived with my husband for quite some time and though he is a very, very tidy person, he has caused the demotion of many of my favorite tablecloths: original status being “Good tablecloth, for nice dinners, formal events [or, what passes for formal around here]” to “everyday schmatta I throw on the table and it doesn’t matter anymore.” Understand: I am someone who owns many many tablecloths, but very few of them will work to cover our dining table. I acquired most of them in the days when the tables in our apartment were all pretty small, designed to seat at most four people. Then we were given my parents’ old dining table, which is this big formal monster that, fully extended, seats some ridiculous number of people. At its smallest, it seats six very generously. It requires table linens that are no joke to acquire or launder well. So the fact that over the years my (very finite number of ) large tablecloths have all been dotted with small holes and burn marks and food stains and, most gallingly, Angostura bitters — I try to not let this get to me too much. The “good” tablecloths get turned into “everyday” tablecloths pretty damned quickly.

Peg Bracken’s chapter on stains (and spots and blots and scars and dueling wounds) is very practical. She points out that by and large this kind of thing isn’t the disaster that most household manuals insist it is, and her attitude about spots and dents and things is usually, “well, you can try this, but I make no guarantees, and, really, just take it to the cleaner’s and hope for the best.” She makes no promises and is up-front about this, which is smart. What’s more, she encourages her readers to embrace the idea that a house is meant to be lived-in, and show it. “Never let your furniture get the upper hand,” she writes. This may be a meaningless sentiment in the age of IKEA furniture, but for people who have gone and spent four thousand dollars on a sofa, this is good to remember. I try to not agonize over the wear and tear on our furniture, almost all of which came to us second-hand (even the stuff that wasn’t originally my parents’). You can’t expect things to look picture perfect forever, especially if they were already old when you got them. We got our couch at the Salvation Army: it had been beautifully re-upholstered by its previous owner in a strange iridescent taupe velvet. I worried that it would wear very badly, but told myself that since we’d only spent $60 on it, it wasn’t the end of the world if the cat ruined it. Sure enough, in the years we’ve had it, it has been puked on (by the first cat) and clawed at (by the first cat and then the two cats that followed) and it shows no wear whatsoever; I expect it to last another ten years at least. The one problem it’s ever had was when a seam split a little on one of the seat cushions. I was unsure of how to handle this. I mentioned this to a friend whose mother is an interior decorator and she said, “Oh, that’s no big deal, you can glue it shut with Gorilla Glue.” Glue? This would never have occurred to me. So I bought a little bottle of Gorilla Glue and tried it out and it’s been two years and the cushions look fine. This is a Peg Bracken style solution: cheap, easy to do, and good enough for anyone who’s not looking to have their living room resemble a display at the Cooper-Hewitt.
There are books (and websites) that talk about home repairs and stain removal and things like this and they assume that one’s goal is a kind of perfection that most of us are never going to contemplate, let alone achieve. Bracken, as always, aims for the “good enough,” and the “good enough” is, in my experience, often much, much better than that. The best example of this I have is the problem (well-known to renters, I suspect) of wanting to hang something on a hole in the wall but not being able to because the hole in the wall’s gotten too big to hold a screw. Bracken’s tip, which I’ve used so many times it’s ridiculous, is that you can cram a little wodge of steel wool into the hole (use a toothpick to do this) and then put in the screw. It works like a charm. I used to keep a box of steel wool in the house not for its intended purposes — cleaning things — but to use to fill up little tiny holes in the walls.

Agonizing over stains is something I think should be done carefully and with measured reason. There are situations where it’s not worth any worry at all: most children’s clothes, I feel, should be stainable. If you really want an exhaustive reference on how to deal with laundering things (all kinds of things, not just clothes) the thing to do is turn to Cheryl Mendelson and embrace all tendencies you have toward obsessive-compulsive disorder for the length of time it takes you to solve your problem. But on a day to day basis: don’t let it get to you.

Or, you can take the pre-emptive position I took regarding the use of Angostura (which, it turns out, stains like a bastard, not that I knew this when my husband started adding it to his drinks all the time). I bought a relatively inexpensive wooden cutting board and stained it with Angostura. Now when he mixes drinks, he does it on the Angostura board, and if he drips Angostura on it, I don’t give a crap.

September 13, 2015 0

Some of the Clever Stuff Peg Bracken Knew about When You were in Short Pants, you Lederhosen-Wearing Hipster

Actually, you probably weren’t even in short pants. You probably weren’t even in diapers.

But Peg Bracken, in Chapter 2 of the I Hate to Housekeep Book, has a nifty little A to Z of housewifely tips for the new bride (translation: the person setting up house or trying to take care of Adult Life as We Know It for the first time). A lot of this is stuff I don’t worry about much, like the tip regarding oatmeal. She suggests we add chopped raw apple to our cooked oatmeal because it somehow improves the oatmeal and “doesn’t hurt the apple.” However, if you’re like me, and only eat apples under duress as it is, this isn’t much of a tip.

But then, there’s stuff in here that I know I read at an impressionable age and it had a positive effect on the rest of my life, such as…

P is for Plastic Bags. This is about re-use, people. How trendy is that? She explains that the bags your packaged bread comes in can be re-used in all kinds of ways, and it is certainly true. (It also holds true for the plastic bags you might put your fruit and veggies in at the grocery store, assuming you don’t have to tear a hole in the bag to get at your onions.) Several of her ideas are ones I have used. These include: freezing dampened clothes so that I can iron them later when I have time (not that I iron anymore, but in the days when I ironed, I certainly did this); using as covers to pack shoes when heading out on a trip (why have the crud on the bottom of your shoes get all your nice, clean, packed clothes dirty?); put wet bathing suits on them to take home from the pool or beach without soaking everything else in your bag… Bracken doesn’t suggest this, but I also use these bags to help me out when I’m cleaning our cat’s litter box. Presumably Peg Bracken was too delicate to suggest this. Or maybe she hated cats, and couldn’t have imagined such a scenario. But now you know another thing to do with little plastic bags left over from your groceries.

The entry for E — Equipment — is admirable for its encouraging you, the reader, to not buy things. She points out the painful truth: the majority of gizmos and devices that people buy to help them maintain their households (whether kitchen equipment or bells and whistles on a vacuum cleaner) go unused and are, hence, a waste of money. “I am personally acquainted with two food liquefiers which made just two frozen Daiquiris apiece before they were retired to the top shelf of the pantry.” Where I’m sure they collected a lovely protective layer of greasy dust. Just as well to’ve not had them in the first place.
This is something Laurie Colwin talked about too, in her first cookbook: she said, plain and simple, that there are a million things to use in the kitchen that someone might buy with all good intentions but then never use, and you have to think hard about what’s going to be worth having and what isn’t. She says — accurately — that occasionally there is a special need that has to be catered to; sometimes there is a kind of cookie that requires a special shape cutter. So be it. But she and Bracken would agree that to simply acquire nifty things for the kitchen because a friend has one and it looks cool — this is silly and not worth anyone’s time or money. I know that when we were living without a functional kitchen a couple of years ago, a friend lent us a slow-cooker and it was, at the time, a life-saving device. I got pretty good at cooking with it, and we discussed, briefly, whether or not we should buy one for ourselves. I said absolutely not, because there’s nothing I can do with the slow cooker than I can’t do equally well with the Dutch ovens we already own and the oven that we knew would eventually be installed. The oven has been installed; it works just fine; and I am very happy to not have a slow-cooker taking up real estate in my small kitchen.

The way you know Peg Bracken was ahead of her time, and know for sure that the hipsters of today should embrace her, as well as the yoga mommies — is that her alphabet even uses Yoga for her Y entry. Yes, it was 1962 when this book was published, and Bracken was talking about yoga for housewives. She encourages people to do yoga breathing when faced with a housekeeping disaster, such as the time her friend was throwing a fancy dinner party and it turned out there was a wee mouse lurking in the silver-lidded crock of curry mayonnaise that the friend had made to impress the muckity-muck Guest of Honor. It wasn’t a pet mouse, either. It was some hideous unpedigreed mouse.

I’m not sure what I would do if I opened a tureen of something at a dinner party I was hosting and found a mouse. Partly because I don’t have a tureen (see: Equipment). I suspect my first thought would not be “yoga breathing!” My first thought would not be printable in a family newspaper. But I am confident of this: once we’d smashed the little wee beastie into furry mush (or the cat had caught him and brought him to us) I would be more than happy to wrap my hand in one of those leftover plastic bags to safely and hygienically dispose of the mouse.

September 10, 2015 0

An aside on One Particular Bit of Bracken-Genius

One thing that Peg Bracken recommends, in The I Hate to Housekeep Book, is a tiny little thing in her A-to-Z for the new bride but it’s a concept about which an entire book could be written, or at least an essay of a few hundred words. The piece of advice is this: When buying groceries, you slip one “luxury item” into the shopping cart along with your more run of the mill items. If you add one small splurge to each cart of groceries you buy, eventually your pantry will wind up with several nice little things that you can use to jazz up your otherwise-boring, regular meals.
I remember absorbing this tip in the days when I had a daily food budget of $3.00. I spent (in retrospect) a whole lot of time figuring out how I could make that money go farther. I started clipping coupons, and paying a lot of attention to what the weekly specials were at the supermarket. If I got lucky, and I had a coupon for something that was already on sale, I could score deals like getting a four dollar jar of marinated artichoke hearts for one dollar. My best friend and I used to write to each other copying out our shopping lists and our receipts. We’d explain what was on the original list; what we actually came home with; and we had a system for annotating them to indicate what items had been on sale and what items we’d had coupons for, and we’d gloat to each other over how little money we’d spent. We were agreed that if you snuck one luxury item into a shopping trip — or every other trip — it benefitted you in the long run, because you never felt like you were breaking the bank, on any one trip, but you wound up with things in the house that made you feel ready and secure.

I realize you now think my best friend and I were crazy people, but I don’t care. It was a subject that was important to both of us, and we weren’t doing anyone else any harm.

Now it’s twenty years later and I find I still do this kind of thing. What’s more, I have developed an amazing ability to unconsciously keep track, roughly, of how much money I’m racking up as I walk through the supermarket. Over the summer, we spent a week housesitting for someone out of town, and had to buy groceries. I had a mental budget of $100 and as we walked through the Stop and Shop, my husband threw things into the cart as he saw fit, my daughter suggested items and we ignored her, and I also added to the cart. When we got to the checkout, my husband sighed and said, “This is gonna cost an arm and a leg.” I said, “Well, it’s a lot, but it won’t kill us, it’ll be about $100. Maybe a little less, even.” “Oh, yeah?” he said skeptically, bagging the groceries. When the cashier announced the total, it was just over $98. My husband looked at me and his eyes were wide. “How’d you do that?” he said. “You can’t have been keeping a running tab — you can’t do math.” “No,” I said, “I’m just good at grocery shopping.”
Interestingly, if you take that $100 worth of groceries, and divide it by 7 (days of the week) and then divide that by 3 (the number of people in our household who require feeding), to find out how much was spent on food to feed each person each day, the number is $4.76. (I figured this out using a calculator just now, because, as we’ve just said, I can’t do math.) This is more than the $3 I allotted for feeding myself every day twenty years ago, but not as much more as one might expect. It might even be explained away by inflation — I’m not clever enough to figure that out, though I guess an online inflation calculator would do the trick.
What I do know is, I can bring the number down by making splurges last. A jar of good capers can be pricey — but if you use those capers carefully over a matter of weeks, the $3 purchase (“that’s a whole day’s worth of food!” I’d’ve said in 1995) is less painful to absorb. As Bracken says, it’s a mental trick, this kind of thing. But it works, and it means you can add to your meals in a good way without feeling you’ve bankrupted yourself.

I think I might pull out one of the recipes I used to cook a lot in 1995 and serve it for dinner this week. It was from the Enchanted Broccoli Forest. You boil pasta and make a sauce by sautéing an onion in the oil from a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. When the onion is cooked through, you add the artichoke hearts (I used to chop them into smaller pieces to make them go further) and then carefully mix in about a cup of cottage cheese (inexpensive protein!) and maybe some sour cream if I had it. Drain pasta; combine with sauce; douse with Parmesan.

It’ll be a problem that my daughter doesn’t like artichoke hearts, so I’ll have to serve this with a side dish she likes. But it sounds really good to me.

September 8, 2015 0

The I Hate to Housekeep Book: A New Assessment

Two weeks ago I had occasion to talk with some people about my love of Peg Bracken, which is something I’ll do if poked even a tiny bit. The way some people talk about their favorite jazz albums to anyone who’ll listen (and even people who won’t listen), I will talk about Peg Bracken. I think she’s hugely underrated, ignored unfairly, and just generally given short shrift. She was one of the great comic writers of the 20th century. It’s true that comic writing of decades past is always ghettoized (even current comic writing is ghettoized), but one of my Things is trying to keep the greats in the hands of current readers. And if the books are actually useful in some way — which Peg Bracken’s definitely are — then all the more reason to crow about them at any given opportunity.

The Bracken title most people know is The I Hate to Cook Book, which is an undeniable classic. It got reprinted about ten years ago, and I huzzah’d with joy along with maybe a thousand other American women who’d grown up reading their mother’s copies of this book. The I Hate to Cook Book is, in its original edition, a work that no one I know is likely to cook from today — there’s far too great a reliance on canned goods and freeze-dried this-or-that. But the newer edition was updated to make it somewhat more approachable to someone in the kitchen today — it was not made trendy (there’s no mention of “clean” eating, thank god), but it was altered to match more closely what a pressed-for-time woman in the kitchen today would have at hand. The basic premise still stands, and, more importantly, Bracken’s voice still stands. Peg Bracken wrote a snarky mama blog decades before anyone could have imagined such a thing.
The cookbook she wrote was followed by a few other titles. One of them, I Try to Behave Myself, is an etiquette book. I re-read it two weeks ago and while it was amusing, much of it was rather beside the point in today’s world (not too surprisingly). On the other hand, I admit, a lot of it was quite relevant and I found myself nodding my head now and then as I read it. So that’s worth a look, perhaps especially for parents of young children. Bracken’s observations on children and their impacts on life are always valuable.
But the one that’s absolutely mandatory reading, no question, is The I Hate to Housekeep Book, a copy of which, if you ask me, should be handed to every person as soon as they sign a lease on their first apartment. All those listsicles you see online with handy hacks for this and that? Dude: probably half of them are in this book, which goes to show that the people writing these listsicles aren’t half as clever as you think they are. This book is super-useful and really funny and you don’t have to click through annoying ads when you’re reading it, because it’s a BOOK.
A lot of those lists online, hot tips from the good people at Martha Stewart or Real Simple, or Buzzfeed, or whatever, are good but also somewhat unrealistic. Expectations can be a little high. Well, you say, Okay, but it’s a starting point, right? It’s a baseline. Well, sure. For me, the baseline is Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson: when you really need the most precise, anal-retentive, Cook’s Illustrated-level instructions on how to take care of a housekeeping issue, that’s where you go. But for the run of the mill stuff, Peg Bracken beats the snot out of the entire editorial staff at any magazine online or in print today, because she is really funny. She’s so funny that my husband, who believe me, does not want to read housekeeping manuals, was laughing at passages from this book last week. (I took this book with me on vacation and read it in two sittings of approximately two hours each.) Hints from Heloise were good, but smug and rather humorless; what’s more, as Bracken writes in her foreword, the advice is often more trouble than it’s worth. “I have been doing all this myself for about twenty years, and I find it hard on the manicure. I’ve found, too, that none of the books about it does me much good. The household experts hand out cures are worse than the ailment. They expect you to do things that depress you to merely think about, let alone do. They think you’ll actually keep an orderly file of all the washing instructions that come with the family clothes, once you’ve been told to. The efficiently organized expert makes the mistake of assuming that you, too, want to be one.”

Take that, Heloise.

I invite readers to come with me and examine (or re-examine) the I Hate to Housekeep Book, chapter by chapter. If I’m really on my game, I’ll be able to reproduce here some of the Hilary Knight illustrations. But even if I’m not, you’re going to see that this book is worth acquiring. I acquired my copy online (via Abebooks) and if I can do it, so can you.

September 1, 2015 0

The Myers-Briggs Test for Housewives

The I Hate to Housekeep Book opens with Peg Bracken’s concise layout of Who We Are, we hausfrauen, personality types that are infinitely clearer and probably have more scientific validity than the Myers-Briggs tests everyone takes online when they’re bored.

“There are three kinds of housekeepers,” she writes at the start of Chapter 1. “There is the spotless housekeeper, who won’t stop, and there is the spotful housekeeper, who won’t start. Then there is the occasional or random housekeeper, whose book this is.”

(An amusing aside: when I was typing out the above, WordPress autocorrected “spotful” to “spiteful,” which is damned accurate, for an autocorrect.)

I have friends who think I am the first type, but they don’t know the truth. I am definitely the third type, the occasional or random housekeeper. How do I know this? Because our bathrooms can get quite grungy looking before I’ll think, “gee, I should probably do something about that.” Because I know for a fact that I haven’t dusted the bookcases in the guest room since we moved here, which was in 2011. (I’m writing this on September 3, 2015.) The spotless housekeeper has these things under control because she keeps a weekly schedule from which she will not deviate, ever. Bracken sketches a sample schedule on page 4, and it’s definitely on the grim side. Bracken pokes fun at the spotless housekeeper’s tendency to clean the kitchen while she cooks (something I do — because I have to, my kitchen being a rather finite space). And, I admit, I am someone who will say, “Monday is Laundry Day,” in earnest, because otherwise the laundry will pile up to a scary degree and we’ll all run out of clean undies. But even I totally see that the Spotless Housekeeper has to be, at some level, insane.

The piece of advice I grabbed onto immediately upon reading this book for the first time in the 1990s was this — No. 5 : “Act immediately upon whatever housewifely impulses come your way.” It is this sort of thing that explains why I only ever wash the kitchen floor at nine o’clock at night, when I ought to be lying on the couch watching TV or thumbing through the pile of magazines that have piled up over the last six weeks (thus creating even more clutter than we might have to begin with). The fact is, it’s while I’m washing the dinner dishes that I tend to become most disgusted with the state of the kitchen floor. We have a wooden floor which we paid good money to have installed a couple of years ago. I do not enjoy it when it feels sticky underfoot. The good news is that because we have a small, one-wall, galley-type kitchen, the span of actual kitchen floor is quite minimal. So it takes me about ten minutes to wash it, rinse it, and dry it. But trust me, I never do this at a normal time of day, like when the kid is at school and the husband’s at work. No, I do it at night, when the light is poor and I probably miss a ton of schmutz because I can’t see properly anyhow.
But the important thing is that I take advantage of the housewifely impulse when I have it. Some cleaning is preferable to none, which is what we’d have otherwise. Bracken advises us that the cliche “anything worth doing is worth doing well” is not true — I disagree a little, she’s probably right. What I really think is, it’s a matter of taste and personal preference. There are some things that I think are worth doing properly, as often as possible, if only because the results make one’s life measurably more comfortable or safe. For example: it’s not necessary to make beds nicely every day. No one gets hurt because the bed is messy at bedtime. But we are a family who appreciate getting into nicely made beds at night. It’s comforting, it’s pleasant. So it’s worth it, to us, to have the beds made in the morning (after being aired out). That’s just us. Maybe you don’t care. Fine. But if you’re a guest at my house, spending the night, your bed will be nicely made, with sheets that smell and feel clean. The bookcases will be very dusty, because dust on bookshelves doesn’t happen to be one of my own bugaboos (and my husband seems to not believe in dust at all). But the bed will be comfortable and neat, with an extra blanket folded for you at down by your feet.

One idea that Bracken emphasizes in this chapter happens to be very trendy right now, which is that you do not, no matter what the marketing people tell you, need to own thirty-six specialized cleaners for the ten different types of surfaces in your house that need occasional cleaning. Peg Bracken was probably the person who first alerted me to the cleaning value of things like baking soda and vinegar — I remember keeping cans and jars of these things under my sink in the apartment I lived in in 1995. No Fantastik or Method Special Granite Cleaner for me (not that I ever had granite counters, but that’s beside the point). The items on the Bracken List were cheap, I knew, and I figured if it was good enough for Peg Bracken it was good enough for me. Reading the book again, I find it amusing that the Bracken lists seems so contemporary, so…. well, hip, even, as housecleaning supplies go. I remember that when I first read the book I was mystified by all these references to “sal soda.” What the hell was sal soda? I’d never seen it anywhere. Well, I know what it is, now: it’s sodium carbonate, and you can buy it in boxes in the laundry aisle of the supermarket, and it’s worth buying. I have even learned, thanks to Google, that if I don’t feel like using it to help scrub the bathtub or brighten the laundry, I can also use it to help me with my taxidermy projects — making me a very hip hausfrau indeed.

Bracken closes this chapter with a sage nugget: “never think unkindly about someone else’s housekeeping, nor speak unkindly either.” This is a real challenge sometimes, at least for me. (My mother is reading this and laughing. Hi, Mom.) But it’s true. And in this era of Sanctimommies, it’s definitely worth keeping in mind. She points out that you, we, the visitor to the friend’s house that we regard as crazypsychoneat or crazypsychoCollyerBrothers, don’t know what the friend is really dealing with on the home front. In other words, there can be good and valid explanations for behavior that may strike us as completely unacceptable in any given direction. So don’t criticize peoples’ dirty bathrooms or their manically clean bathrooms either.

Bracken opens her book gently and encouragingly. She is not lecturing us. She’s inviting us to sit down and put our feet up with this book for a while, saying, “ok, so, this might get a little ugly, but really, it doesn’t have to be as ugly as you fear.” And you can figure it all out while you’re sitting at the table drinking a nice iced coffee. Don’t worry about leaving a ring on the table. It’s fine. Not a big deal. We can deal with it later (probably much later).

September 1, 2015 1