In the epilogue of The Art of Eating In, I bemoaned my oversight of home gardening as one of the restaurant-free food subcultures that I explored in its chapters. Thinking that my outdoor space-free residence would eliminate the option, I’d left out the very preface to cooking: growing the stuff. Fortunately, there have been many sage leaders in doing just that, even in the tiniest urban crevices they can find, and their voices are getting some much-deserved attention. Last month, Just Food paid a lively tribute to the pioneering food advocate, Joan Gussow, who at one point during the ceremonies quipped that she’d originally wanted to title her classic memoir, This Organic Life, “Eating My Lawn.” So since writing the book, I’ve been inspired to close the gap between agriculture and what’s on my plate, both in theory and actual, trowel-wielding practice. This time, I am so not alone in my quest.

From community plots to schoolgrounds to offices to the White House, edible gardens are cropping up all over the place. Which means a lot more food is being produced and prepared at home. Whether for economic reasons, a distrust of processed foods, or pure fun, home vegetable gardening is taking off — and it’ll take us straight to our kitchens, too. Who else is going to cook all the stuff you grew? And what better reason to not eat out than a couple black beauty eggplants hanging from the vine, a confetti of ripe cherry tomatoes, and a fragrant basil plant in need of some trimming? You’re three-fourths of the way to some killer eggplant parm.

If you don’t have a yard, lawn or acreage of your own, you can still forge your way into growing a few goodies for yourself this season. Fire escapes and windowsills are good places to start. You can join a community garden, or spend a day volunteering at community farms like Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, Added Value and the soon-to-be Brooklyn Grange for more extensive gardening exposure. Live in Detroit, and you can guerilla-garden in a vacant lot, as many have done. Sign a petition for the Peoples Garden NYC if you want to see fruits and vegetables in front of City Hall. Or, check with your landlord if you can use the roof.

The roof of one local brewery is where I’ve been greening my thumb this spring, and I hope to share that journey with you. Sixpoint Craft Ales based in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to be exact, and all the photos here were taken on it. There are dozens of varieties of mostly organic and heirloom vegetables growing on it, a rainwater collection system (so as to not waste tap water), a compost bin, and now, four egg-laying chickens in a rooftop coop, which I recently wrote about on markbittman.com. They’re all doing great.

It would seem I’m not the first one to spill this news to you, but I will share another update. In the next month, I’ll be transitioning out of this blog and into a new one, which incorporates my rooftop endeavors. Lunch at Sixpoint, where cooking, green roof gardening, and beer collide. It should be hella fun, and I hope you’ll follow my move there. I dearly love Not Eating Out in New York, but in the three and a half years I’ve been writing it, feel that it’s evolved far from a diatribe on restaurant culture in New York, to a more fluid conversation about food, what we value about it, and how to have lots of fun cooking and sharing it. So it just seems ripe to give this dialogue a new home base. There will still be plenty of recipes, and budget-savviness will still be king. In the meantime, posts may slow down on this blog as it gets ready to launch. Stay tuned, pitch in any suggestions, and as always, be excellent to each other.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” –Albert Einstein

(Still gotta love quotes.)

Therefore, when a waiter pulls a chair a few inches away from the table for me to sit down in, I am appreciative of the gesture, but ultimately, would have preferred doing so myself. Most of the time, at least. Don’t get me wrong, there is an art to serving at a fine restaurant, just as there is one to preparing the meals (but we already know how I feel about that). It’s a tradition invented and perfected by the French, and which many others have tried to imitate. But there can be a fine line between being hospitable and just being annoying. As a friend once remarked, after a waiter had interrupted our conversation to ask for the second time how our food was, “It’s like they’re fishing for compliments!”

Restaurants might misfire at providing service, like this, but it’s the customer who has the concept all wrong if he or she patronizes them more than they really need. In a few short decades, we’ve come to regard restaurant — whether sit-down, take-out, delivery or street cart — food as everyday, from being held mostly for special occasions. I joke at my readings and classes that it seems that in New York, we have it the other way around: cooking at home is a big production, a special occasion, while dining out is the de rigeur. So naturally, our expectations and understanding of food have become skewed. We want this, we don’t want that, we want this on the side, we think restaurants should hurry up and serve us quicker and quicker. Maybe we should just give them a break — literally.

Being doted on rather than doing-it-yourself is something that can seep into one’s psyche over time, too. I can say from the DIY stance that this made me feel more empowered in general, to cook for myself and my friends. On the other end of the spectrum, having more of your worldly needs taken care of by specialists inspires reliance rather than responsibility. We pass it on to our kids, too. We live in an era where children are often taught how to place an order with wait staff before being taught to peel an orange. This lack of direct contact with food preparation has other detriments, too, not knowing what food is, in particular — just take a look at these elementary kids on Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution scratch their heads at the sight of tomatoes. I used to find it cute to see little kids ordering off a menu, because it seemed so precocious. Now the real picture of novelty might be helping mom bake a birthday cake instead of buying one at a shop.

It’s not that I have anything against the various service industries in themselves, and the talent that so many exhibit within it. It’s just that I don’t need it all the time. Let’s face it, none of us do. And we’d probably enjoy something like fine dining even more if it was a rarity. Some people — myself included — may never learn for ourselves the intricacies of manicures, while others might find that cooking never strikes their fancy. But being active and open to learning a few new trades now and then rather than leaving it up to others has personal — and maybe personality — benefits.

On the other hand, I recently made an appointment with a facialist whom an old friend had highly recommended. I had never had a facial before, but was touched that this friend had thought so much of her facialist to send an email about it, out of the blue. So I went. Over the next seventy minutes, I laid on my back with my face and neck exposed to a series of being lubricated, smoothed, steamed, scrubbed, poked and massaged, to a softly playing CD of Om chanting. I was so relaxed toward the end of it that I actually fell asleep, like a baby. And my skin felt like that of one when I awoke. It was a marvelous experience, and I’d like to do it again. But not every day, of course.

By the way, all you local ladies, that facialist’s name is Diane at BeWellBK. I highly recommend.

On the latest episode of Let’s Eat In, four of the five food bloggers I’d asked to take the Week of Eating In challenge came on air as guests, and we had a powwow about how it had gone. At one point, upon being asked what was most difficult about eating in for a week straight, Marc from No Recipes said that he felt like, “we were all in this together.” And that had helped him bluster on. From our separate kitchens, separate blogs, and separate lunches, dinners and breakfasts (only if there was time), a team mentality was forged, and it was encouraging. But even though this challenge was a very deliberate, controlled experiment, with us subjects making it a point to not eat out, a community of cooks who prefer doing so at will is growing steadily, it seems.

This observation, of course, is coming from a source distinctly slanted in favor of more everyday home cooking, for no other purpose than just to eat. But I will say that the Week of Eating In was not my idea — it was Huffington Post Green’s. When Katherine Goldstein and Adam Estes wrote eloquently about the eco-conscious potentials of cooking and eating in, and called on readers to take the pledge for a week, we didn’t really know how it would go. But more than 1,500 people signed up, and several other bloggers wrote about their week. An innocuous slideshow of winter recipes from my archives was compiled for the Green page, and it received a wild number of hits and comments — for a brief moment of Zen, appearing in the top five most viewed column on the site, below Pamela Anderson’s “barely-there jumpsuit.”

who knew HuffPost readers were such foodies?

The chorus continues, as I view my incoming links, and I’m deeply humbled as well as inspired by these tales from other kitchens. From Serious Eats cooking three recipes from my book (and quite well, from the photos of that bread!), to blogs like Forking Tasty and The Young and Hungry making others, or taking up brown-bagging cues, or writing about the merits they’ve found most beneficial to eating in, I’m feeling the team effort, indeed. There is a not-so-quiet revival in home cooking, for the unlikeliest set: young, busy urbanites. And beyond: even my Aunt Amy, one of the few family members who was spared of mention in the Art of Eating In, fell in love with her homemade version of san bei gi, according to Facebook photos that she tagged me in (no, that was not me chopped up and sprinkled with Thai basil), and she doesn’t cook too much normally. Perhaps the craziest compliment to home cooking that’s come my way recently was from an acquaintance who’s in a band in Brooklyn, and as such doesn’t have much time to cook in between practice and travel. But, so compelled to “stop spending and love the stove,” he decided to start writing a blog himself “documenting my continued denouncement of restaurants.” I can’t wait to check that one out.

What’s next for not eating out, if so many people were to adopt it that it’s no longer anti-mainstream? What happens if everyone else jumps off the cliff? (For the record, doing the opposite of what everyone else seemed to be — ordering in, and taking out for almost every meal — was what got this blog started in the first place.) I never imagined a paradigm shift might take place, and am sure that it still hasn’t or won’t yet for some time, at least not in New York. But for the time being, seeing others cook more at home has been empowering. We’re in it together, and that keeps me plowing on. And in the near future, I plan to expand the scope of making food to include growing it, too. More on that soon.

the start of a new season

I know this is not a pleasant topic for anyone. But chances are, if you’ve been eating restaurant food throughout your life, this has probably happened to you at least once. So sorry for bringing back the bad memory. And for this thought: what about the particles, germs, and other human artifacts that are in our food, too, but that we can’t see? Creeping, crawling, migrating into food, because they just do, in even the most sanitary kitchens.

When you go to a restaurant, your trust is in their hands, literally, and you trust that those hands are clean. Unless that trust is broken (like from finding a hair in the food, or becoming sick afterward), you don’t have reason not to. When cooking at home, you don’t have to operate on guesswork and faith — you know that you washed that spoon, rinsed that pot, and above all, have pretty clean hygiene. That is, if you do and did.

On the other hand, hair happens. It happens when I cook for myself. Naturally, I try not to let it get into food, and in most cases I think I’d be able to spot it before it winds up on a plate, or fork. It doesn’t always work. I’ve found hair in loaves of bread that I’ve baked. I was mortified to hear, a few months later, that at one of the first meals I’d cooked at home for a date, he’d found a strand of hair in my homemade linguine (I should’ve made “angel hair” instead). I suppose I could wear a hairnet in the kitchen and that’s always an option. If this isn’t enough to gross you out entirely, there is a rare disorder of people eating their hair, so unless that’s your thing, you can rest assured of not being at the pinnacle of hair consumption if any of this has happened with you, too. (The old saying, “You are what you eat” just got weirder.)

But herein, a glimpse of my point. Hair, and the rest of one’s bodily effects, is just more palatable when it’s your own. Call it fickle or unfair, or just a fact of life: we live with our germs, our bodies are ours, so what could be icky about any of that in our mouths? So no, I didn’t throw away the loaf of bread with a strangely twisted strand of hair that poked out of one piece, because there was no mystery as to whose it was. And if I found a piece of hair in a food that a friend, family member or acquaintance cooked, then I’d just use my own judgment about whether I trusted him or her enough to remove it shrug it off.

I’ve always praised the act of cooking with other people or trying their homemade food as a good way of getting to know them better. It brings a new dimension of peoples’ personalities to light, watching how they chop and dice, teamworking on a time-sensitive dish, etc. It’s intimate, and now we can attribute that to a more physical reality. You can end up eating one another, sort of, to an extent, sharing germs and such. That’s why knowing not only where my food came from but who made it are two mottos close to my fork.

“I think it’s because most menus are cluttered with familiar dishes that they know are going to sell well; then the chef likes to throw in a wildcard here and there, that’s more creative, or unique. The food writer always orders the wildcard.”

“I think you are absolutely right,” she replied, making me beam.

It was a sweeping generalization, but it made sense to a fellow adventurous foodie. It’s either a blessing or a curse, but we’ve all seen, smelled and tasted it before. We are constantly searching for that more exceptional something than what’s normally dealt. We’re difficult to please. Often, we are dreadfully single.

But that’s another story. Back to the wildcard theory, I’m sure we can all name several standard-issue foods that make its way, in some fashion, onto menus more often than not. Tried and true, these choices may include: a something-crusted salmon fillet, a meaty cut of beef dribbled with reduction sauce, “diver” sea scallops with something else light, and in this day in age, braised pork belly. Wild mushroom risotto. Beet salad with goat cheese. Moules frites. The gourmet burger. There’s nothing wrong with ordering them, after all, the public’s chosen them as winners. (Or is it the other way around, the chefs chose them and the public followed?) Restaurants are first and foremost a business, and they thrive on bestsellers. In many ways, its role is to simply compete against others for the best execution of popular favorite foods — like at a steakhouse.

Then there’s the wildcard. Experimental, playful, brazen or frank, this could be a specialty or seasonal dish, like squid ink pasta or rabbit stew. It could be something average cooked with unconventional flavors and flair. It could be plain and simple where unexpected, like spaghetti and meatballs from a Michelin-starred kitchen. Whatever it is, it’s clearly taking a risk.

Sometimes, the wildcard is a flop. Whoever thought vanilla bean went well with parsley? Or decided to deep-fry sausage? Sometimes, sweetbreads just can’t be saved. This is probably instant death to the menu item, and the restaurant will recover from its losses by selling the other courses they know sell well. But when they do excel, the novelty is well worth the risk.

My theory may have holes (i.e. a chef can get very inventive with a roast chicken… but often don’t), but I think these are two distinct camps of courses. And I completely understand that sometimes you just feel like eating that fill-in-the-blank familiarity, no frills attached. But if you’re persnickety about food like the critics, remember that you can always make a wildcard meal at home. You won’t be allergic to it, like you might the one offering at a restaurant that actually entices. There’ll be more to choose from; you can fill your mental menu with inspired choices and forget the rest. You can also fail at cooking it and figure out why, and then try again at it. Or move onto cooking something else equally unusual.

Unlike at a restaurant, your wildcard dish won’t vanish from the face of the earth if it turned out poorly, or just didn’t appeal to enough people. You’ll have some newfound understanding from the experience if yours flops, rather than just a bad taste in your mouth. And you’ll be better prepared to make a uniquely delicious masterpiece afterward. Basically, you will only get better at cooking for yourself in a way that pleases you, even if you’re hard to please. And all the more power to you if so.

Which led them to renovate a warehouse as the Brooklyn Kitchen Labs, a multi-faceted culinary workshop at 100 Frost Street., a few blocks away. Its grand opening is Monday, November 16th. The Labs is also the home of The Meat Hook, a full-service butcher store manned by Tom Mylan, and stocked with quality cuts from Fleisher’s Grass-Fed Meats and other local, sustainable small farm sources. And instead of 700 square feet, like the Brooklyn Kitchen’s flagship Lorimer St. location, the Labs is 7,000 square feet and two floors of cooking classroom and retail space. Expect lots of classes and events to fill their calendar — perhaps more than one at the same time — and lots of room to mingle with other foodies and home cooks.

The Brooklyn Kitchen Labs under construction (floor’s now finished!)

Cooking classes are bubbling over in this city, that’s for sure. One of my favorite adventures in not eating out has been going to them. From pig butchering with Tom Mylan to charcuterie with (now) Char 4 chef Matt Greco at the Brooklyn Kitchen, to learning easy Indian meals with Geetika Khanna at Indian Culinary Center and making some mean pies with Mark Bello at his Pizza a Casa workshop and tour, these experiences have given me a lot more than some new knife skills. I began going to these events seeking a different social atmosphere based around food, not the kind where you simply get served plates from an unseen kitchen. In the process, I made lots of friends; I also went to classes with friends, and we still got to enjoy a dinner together after we cooked.

Many small shops and businesses do lively workshops and tutorials, too, often running popular classes frequently. You can learn how to make mozzarella at Murray’s Cheese, or to mix up Greenmarket-inspired cocktails at Astor Center. Saxelby Cheesemongers is famous for their Day-A-Whey trips to dairy farms upstate. And if you’re up there anyway, check out the hands-on workshops and special events at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture.

an eye-opening heritage livestock session was taught at Astor Center this summer

cookbook author Lorna Sass taught slow-cooker technique at a Slow Food Time For Lunch campaign Eat-In

Also in the nonprofit sector, the Greenmarket features cooking demos and tastings at the markets, and also chef-led tours and meals. For the more studious pupils, the 92nd Street Y hosts great food talks and tastings. WholeFoods Bowery Culinary Center has a motley mix of food classes on their calendar. Then, there are one-off events happening all the time — hear, hear: You can learn how to cut and cook fish, and taste sake with Japanese Food Report blogger, Harris Salat (December 7). You can cook Sri Lankan with guest teacher Skiz the spice wiz at Indian Culinary Center (November 20). Kids can roll up their sleeves, too, at educational workshops like those given by Growing Chefs. Restaurants like Camaje often invite students into their kitchens, and wine stores like Bottlerocket, intensive palate-sharpening sessions. I’m sure there’s plenty more places to take a friendly class or two, but I think you get what I mean — and would be surprised at how many of your favorite businesses, organizations or farms run programs like these (I taught one this summer at Garden of Eve).

scene from a crazy class I took with the bloggers of Ideas in Food

The proliferation of amateur cooking  and food-related classes in NYC seems to reveal a generation of foodies who enjoy dining out as much as they love crafting the perfect dinner themselves. Hungry to sharpen their kitchen skills and also have fun, these home cooks (and hopeful would-bes) have heightened demand for casual, one-class only cooking sessions. More homey and relaxed than a traditional classroom, this new school of food instruction is certainly no place to worry about being called on in class, or even bringing a notepad and pen. Gum? I think chewing — on anything — is perfectly cool. And compared to courses at “real” culinary institutes like the FCI or ICE, they cost a heck of a lot less; under $100 for a one-night class is to be expected.

There’s more to it than cost, I think. Working in less professional settings, with personable instructors rather than stodgy professors or chefs, lends the cooking a more approachable feel. As Harry Rosenblum said, explaining the layout of one room on a sneak preview tour of the Labs, “I’d like there to be no barrier between the kitchen and the class.” In some cases, like with Pizza a Casa, the instructors teach the classes in their own homes.

Some classes might teeter toward sit-down classroom style, or focus on food-related topics more so than hands-on technique. Some might be too beginner for your chops, too. That’s why having so many options is a boon for us curious home cooks, and makes food classes a truly viable, and practical alternative to eating out. Imagine, instead of a menu of dishes being placed before you, or a tired hit list of restaurants “you’ve got to try,” a full summary of the different food workshops happening in your neighborhood right then. That would be a menu I’d order from any night. As the famous Chinese proverb says, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.” Apparently, you can be well fed for many lives over with the help of friendly pros like these.

Okay, and just in: Indian Culinary Center is offering two-for-one tickets to any class in November and December. So you can bring that friend or date along for free! I do not lie. This is pretty amazing, so hurry up and book it up.

It’s not a compulsory part about cooking, but if you’re proud and searching for appreciation of your food, you’ll find many opportunities to get it at amateur cook-offs. This is where the talk turns into actual, edible tokens. Can a person truly be a foodie if they can’t cook at all? I see some problems with this. On the other hand, I’ve learned from going to countless cook-offs that a person can be completely normal, or not food-obsessed in every aspect of their daily life — he or she might be a teacher, a banker, a set designer, and might rarely have the chance to exercise it – but be a total, blow-the-competition-out-of-the-water champion when it comes to making chili. (Or fill-in-the-blank homemade food.) Seeing this sleeper culinary expertise in action is one of my favorite things about cook-offs. Or anything.

Matt Timms of the Takedowns (right) counts ballots at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Yes, Brooklyn loves the sport of competitive cooking. And it should not be surprising to anyone who may have read more than five posts on this blog, but so do I. I recently sat across from a fellow volunteer at a community farm, who began talking excitedly about all these cool cook-offs in Brooklyn she’d read about, and it turned out that she could trace each mention of them to my writing (in Edible Brooklyn and here). She sounded a little bit skeptical after making that discovery, but I don’t think there’s any question about the popularity of competitive cooking in this city – especially judging from the swarms of people who attended the back-to-back Takedowns this weekend (first, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Chile Pepper Fiesta, and the next day, at the Lamb Takedown). It’s a big ticket, these small-time cook-offs. And it draws in more and more home chefs hoping to impress.

On Saturday, I stood beside a new contendor like this as we served our concoctions at the Chile Pepper Fiesta Chocolate & Chile Takedown. A former chef who now had an office job, he had decided to play up the chocolate and chile-based food theme (and only requirement of this contest — that our dishes have both elements) by entering handmade raviolis stuffed with braised short ribs and topped with a thick, mole sauce. How he came up with that concept is just another completely unique phenomenon on display at the event. Among the six home cooks who also competed, everyone had their own ideas about how best to represent chocolate and chiles. Some opted for sweets kicked up with spice — there was a chocolate and chile bread pudding, a dense, chocolate ice cream with ginger cookies to serve, and another chile pepper-flavored ice cream was topped with sweet chile marmalade and served on pancakes. Others went for mostly savory dishes with a surprising sweet element — like my neighbor Olin’s ravioli, Dan’s chocolately, meaty, spicy stew, and my deep-fried, cornmeal-crusted, sweet pepper “poppers” stuffed with dark chocolate and cream cheese.

my chocolate-stuffed, deep-fried sweet pepper poppers

Jui’s chile ice cream and marmalade

the sliced-open popper, still oozing from frying

Nobody went for the obvious, which I would guess to be a classic mole dish, or else chocolate-covered hot peppers. Nobody made the same thing. Everyone had a good time, and there was a huge line in front of this table at the festival, making it one of the most popular events. Once three hundred people had cast their ballots for their favorite chocolate and chile dish, the winners of the day were Katie Feola and Anne Garrett, for their sweet and spicy bread pudding (which I failed to snag a photo of!). Actually, bread pudding doesn’t sound like such a bad dish to base an entire cook-off around. Anyone hear me out?

In any case, Katie and Anne can rest assured that they not only talk the talk, but can walk the walk when it comes to making really good food. It’s a wholly difference experience than dining out — lining up to eat at a cook-off; and it’s different to cook for, too. You’ve got to transport your dish du jour from the comfort of your kitchen, step outside your element, and deal with minor logistic challenges that the restaurant chef who serves straight from the kitchen to its diner in the next room doesn’t have. But when the payoff of your efforts is winning first place based on three hundred strangers who sampled your fare, the competitive streak of the home cook will be sated. And that’s something pretty unique from eating out.

A cook’s gotta do what a cook’s gotta do. That usually includes dealing with the whole vegetable or grain from its raw to fully-cooked and plated states. Sometimes, it means the same for an animal. And the way I see it, all the better for the person cooking it.
 
Last Friday, the Hapa Kitchen hosted a Hawaiian-themed “luau” at BKLYN Yard. It was also a pig roast, and my first stab at really carrying out that procedure (rather than just helping, or eating at ones before). From the horrified stares received while carrying a freshly slaughtered pig through a busy Union Square Greenmarket (which had been carefully wrapped in plastic to resemble a long-torsoed mummy), to being rejected by a cab driver for my strange-looking load, to figuring out how to refrigerate and brine the beasts overnight, to roasting them on a spit and in a wooden box, and finally, chopping their hot flesh and crispy skin before a sea of hungry eaters and cameras at the event, this has been a visceral, enlightening experience, and I want to reflect on that for a moment.

As you can gather, I’m an omnivore, and though I’m having a strange phase with seafood now, I’m proud of cooking as well as eating everything. These days, most Americans tend to see meat only portioned off into pieces — wings, chops, medallions, etc. For that matter, I had never seen a carrot with its feathery greens still attached until I was maybe twenty, so many vegetables go through filtering from its natural state, too (i.e. “baby carrots”). The disconnect between food and its eater goes even farther when food is fully cooked as at a restaurant, or heavily processed, as in convenience or fast food. Many have commented on this gaping divide, but how good are we doing at reconnecting ourselves with the sights, sounds, smells and so-called unpleasantries of real food? It seems the only way to get better at it is by putting more “primitive”-looking foods back into public view. And cooking it ourselves.

Off-putting, barbaric, inhumane — all these things could be said of a pig roast, or even a whole trout on a platter. But to many cultures throughout the world, showing off the animal is a sign of respect. It forces the diner to consider its life, and death. There’s also a strong communal aspect about eating a whole animal. Unless it’s quail, you’re cooking for many at a time, and there’s something oddly spiritual about eating the flesh from the exact same animal as everyone else at the table, as if you’re more deeply connected from that bond. (I really hope that doesn’t sound too weird or vampire-ish.) I know I get that feeling when a whole turkey is presented at the Thanksgiving table.

There’s another benefit to eating, or purchasing whole animals: it’s more economical, and efficient. Compare the prices of a whole chicken to pieces cut-up, skinned or boned and you’ll quickly see. In a recession-stricken era, people are stocking their pantries with economy-size tubs of ketchup and toothpaste, so if we’ve got the room and muscle for that, we might consider making the extra effort of paring down sides of beef, or making room in the freezer for it. You’ll also get to use all the parts of the animal, like the bones or carcass of a bird for stock. Chicken livers make a savory mousse to put on crackers. If gizzards are not your thing, perhaps you can save them for your neighbors, or for the next time you go fishing.

Cooking an entire animal such as a pig on a spit is a tradition as old as eating itself. In this country, it enjoyed — and still enjoys — a strong following in the South. But as Nicole Taylor mentioned on Heritage Radio Network’s The Q Report yesterday, it’s waned in popularity significantly. However, a not-so-insignificant pig roasting renaissance has been happening in New York City: there was one going on yesterday at Roberta’s Pizza, a few weeks ago, at Third Ward, a July 4th one at Queens County Farm Museum, a “Big Brooklyn Pig Roast” last fall at the Yard, and there have been so many others. Here and there, more progress is being made to put meat back into perspective, from the butchering classes given by Tom Mylan at The Brooklyn Kitchen, to more restaurants purchasing whole animals to divvy up into numerous dishes. I’m excited to see where else it goes.

It might not be the “whole” story, but cooking whole animals is definitely another layer to eating. I can understand the discomfort of whole animals, pig roasts, etc. if the observer is morally opposed to eating animals, but let’s face it (literally), this is the reality of eating meat. It may be extra work, playing butcher once in a while, but isn’t cooking extra work after all? And if you’re reading this site, then you’re probably in agreement that it’s worth the effort.

I’ll end with a link to a site that made me feel much better after my pig-carrying trip through the Greenmarket. Since we’re talking about putting animals for food into public view, after all. Thanks to Josh for the discovery, who also took the photo at top.

There are many ways to deal with the grand finale of restaurant outings, when pulling out one’s wallet is required. My favorite is, “Here, I’ll get this one.” But treating for an entire meal is an indulgence that requires deep pockets and faith in your friends — that they’ll do the same another time. It’s easy enough to do when the dinner is for two, but for tables of more mutual friends on no special occasion, it seems to be a dying gentility. Not so long ago, this was more common, and divvying up a check was social taboo. Now, even in wealthy circles, even splitting is more and more the modus operandi. And among my friends, factors like the ones above are increasingly influencing the pay break-up, or at least causing feathers to ruffle.

This is the point when I conveniently make a run to the bathroom. Two years of not eating out has made me extremely rusty at handling such sensitive operations — the sticky arithmetic as well as the social skills surrounding the check. But since re-entering the world of restaurant eating last fall, and encountering the occasional large-group dinner a few times, the landscape has seemed to change somewhat. Or, I completely forgot how miserable it is.

I’m not the only one at the table who’d rather be hands-off; I suspect most people don’t want to wrap their heads around the check, nor care enough about how much they’ll have to pay and whether the calculations will be correct. “Just tell me what I owe,” they say. I’ll call these folks the Loafers.

Then, in any group no matter it’s two or twenty people, there is always a person who steps up to the plate and actually seems to enjoy figuring out the check. The Enforcer, as it were, is a Type A personality and borderline bully. He or she might not be a bully in other, day-to-day atmospheres, or get a chance to exert any power in his or her life and career. He or she probably insisted on those oyster shots for the table, or ordered the most expensive entree. If the latter is true, he or she probably wants to sway the table toward the even split; or in the reverse situation, and this person only had a salad, he or she will attempt to calculate what everyone owes (in disproportion to his or her own tally).

When the Enforcer is at work there are usually a number of Sniffers, whose eyebrows crinkle as they lean in to get a view of the check in his or her hands. The Sniffers are probably wary of the Enforcer for reasons that extend beyond the scope of the meal itself. They are concerned about how much they will pay, and what’s fair for everyone, including the waiter. They may also be checking to see that everyone’s course is rightly accounted for on the bill. They may not have minded being the Enforcer themselves.

In cases where there is no truly zealous Enforcer, then we have the Reluctant Enforcer. This is the best person at math at the table. Or, just the least drunk. And as such, is probably very quiet and un-assertive usually. The Reluctant Enforcer does the deed according to standards and exact calculations, no questions, no personal feelings attached.

Once the check is paid up, a huge weight is lifted from the table. Now we can all relax. We can go back to being ourselves, and not the Loafer, Enforcer, Sniffer or other dining-out alter-egos that may exist in us. We can be the party girl or guy, the intellectual, the freakish foodie, or whoever we normally are – and we can talk about other things! And that’s the way I prefer things to be.

But don’t call me the alarmist one. That home cooking is being practiced less and less in this country is nothing new. Nor is its decline being put into such maudlin terms. Over the past few months, I’ve read articles, attended talks, screenings and readings where influential thinkers in the food world have pointed to the demise in home cooking as one of the culprits for the “broken” food system in America. In the view of many, no longer cooking has contributed to an overall decay in personal well-being, too, and that includes our obesity epidemic. It’s not nearly just the individual who’s to blame, though. In many urban areas of the country, there are more fast food restaurants than there are stores to purchase whole and fresh foods; grocery stores are dwindling in numbers to the point where many New York City residents have no fresh food within reasonable walking distance. Around schools and colleges, fast-food and other convenience eateries have set up shop in the hopes of steering students away from the comparably more healthy cafeteria food choices (which could include a brown-bag lunch). And many of those students are taking the bait, and eating fast food every day, as was lamented by a public school teacher who raised his hand to ask a question after a sneak-preview screening for Food, Inc. a few weeks ago.

So here are a few quotes from other concerned voices on the “death” of home cooking and its repercussions, culled from my favorite recent food-related articles and scribbles in my notebook. Please note that the direct quotes were hand-transcribed by yours truly on location and thus may not be completely accurate in wording (but probably are; I’m just being cautious). I encourage you to check out the articles linked, which are terrific.

“I don’t think they cook, I think they get frozen, take-out food when they eat in” — Gael Greene, of people when they “eat in,” at a panel on “Food Trends and Finds” at the 92nd St. Y, 12/15/08

“Unfortunately for the last few generations, cooking has been left by the wayside in exchange for cheap, convenient substitutes as people became increasingly squeezed for time and energy.” — Rob Smart, in the Huffington Post, 7/2/09

“Home cooks more than ever today don’t know the basics of cooking — once learned by watching parents or grandparents in the kitchen.” — Pervaiz Shallwani, in The Wall Street Journal, 4/1/09

“As we lost our skills at the stove, we also lost something less tangible but no less important: the opportunity to spend time together in the kitchen, talking and cooking.” — Amanda Hesser, in a New York Times Op-Ed, 5/30/09

“Americans hate inconvenience.” — Joel Salatin, at a panel discussion after a screening of Fresh, 5/27/09

“You do see a lot more people cooking, and that’s a healthy change.” — Michael Pollan, at a discussion on his book, In Defense of Food, at The Museum of Natural History, 5/14/09

This last quote offers a slice of the brighter side, and a point that’s being made more and more frequently: that people are cooking more due to the economic recession. A second wind for the “dying art” of cooking?

“In the last depression, we didn’t have McDonald’s,” Michael Pollan went on to say at that lecture, alluding to the fact that the fast food chain’s sales have been climbing ever since the recession began. Frozen food like pot pies and TV dinners are on the rise, too. I think this goes to show that cooking for everyday consumption is already out the window for many people. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t enjoy a little play for novelty’s sake, does it?

So rather than overwhelm oneself with make-ahead meals, weekly grocery shopping and recipe-hunting, perhaps all those non-cookers out there might want to think of preparing a meal as a fun recreation. Like enrolling in a class on knitting, or taking up the art of ship-in-a-bottle making. For the sake of preserving an archaic tradition. They might just find it rewarding enough to keep it alive.