My Perfect Meal

Andrea MacMichael

Food and Travel Seminar

11/21/16

Back to the Basics

            I’m not a vegan, or a vegetarian, and I’m not the kind of prepared person who plans breakfast for the next morning and meals for the entirety of the next week. Meals in my life have been about fueling up before practice or household chores. These meals have also been about family- made at home and eaten together. My parents have always scoured the weekly circulars to find the best prices for meat, yogurt, cereal, and especially produce. These have been the essentials for chili, pasta dishes, steak and potatoes, salads, and many more amazing meals I have helped cook at home with my family. Of course, I have loved the “special treats” of fresh mozzarella for caprese salad, the golden loaf of crunchy Italian bread from the bakery rather than the $1 pre-sliced baggie for assembling pulled pork sliders. Everyday eating has not been filled with the most expensive or always the freshest ingredients, but it has always been filled with the good intentions of two hard working parents and more than anything, the personal touch that comes from cooking at home.

            When I endeavored to cook my idea of the “perfect” meal, I was overloaded by more than just what to make, but also how to make it and where to get the ingredients. It is true that buying most products from the grocery store supports an industrial food system that fills us with a whole lot of artificial garbage. It is also true that buying from this system supports poor treatment of the animals we eat, treatment I think most people would consider cruel. But can I stop buying from the grocery store? Do I even know where or how to obtain grass-fed meat and local produce not treated with chemicals or genetically modified for faster growth? The answer is that I don’t know, but I want to do some exploration into other places to buy sustainably harvested food. Before learning about where our food truly comes from in this industrial food system, I would not have thought twice about simply going to the grocery store, because the grocery store was all I knew back home in Metro Detroit. Occasionally my family and I would make the short drive to Detroit to shop at the Eastern Market or the Gratiot Market, but those trips were infrequent and I think many of the products sold are still connected to the widespread industrial food system.

Nonetheless, I came to a point where I had to decide what I valued for this “perfect” meal I was going to cook. Accounting for my lack of knowledge about where to buy sustainably harvested food in general, let alone in the Kalamazoo area, I decided to go with what I have grown up believing: a few fresh ingredients and some careful preparation always makes for a tasty dish.

About every two weeks my family and I load up an entire cart piled to the top with a rainbow of various vegetables and fruits from a Market in Dearborn called Super Greenland. While also selling packaged goods and meat, the store is mainly a produce market. Wacky Wednesdays are the days we nudge our cart along through the stampede of other customers with shopping carts. Eyes light up at signs displaying: 2 heads of romaine for 50 cents, 17 lemons for $1, 2 pineapples for $1, and 50 cents/pound of apples. Every day, but especially on Wednesdays, this market sells out whole displays of cucumbers and tomatoes, nectarines and grapefruits for dirt cheap prices. Produce from this market has made many colorful, healthful, and delicious meals at my home, and I am thankful that some markets make it affordable to load up a cart with the good stuff.

So for my perfect meal ingredients I went to Meijer, because that is what my parents would have done (we have Kroger in Southfield, but that is beside the point) to find ingredients for a quick meal like the one I was going to make. To be good, it didn’t have to be fancy, say ratatouille or a prime cut of meat. In fact, I’ve never eaten ratatouille, and I don’t feel like I am missing out.

I wandered down the bright isles of Meijer, zig-zagging through parked carts and loads of people searching the shelves. I picked up the cheapest box of spaghetti noodles I could find, a package of fresh basil and parmesan cheese, two cartons of cherry tomatoes, and a package of break-and-bake cookies because, why not? I realized that with homework and projects to finish, I didn’t have enough time to make a big, time-consuming meal, so I bought what my mom would have bought, all the while hearing my Dad’s voice in my head saying “You just can’t beat fresh fruits and veggies.” Fresh parmesan, basil and tomato would brighten up spaghetti noodles and make a tangy, colorful dish.

Whenever we were low on food at home when I was growing up, I knew I could reach into the cupboard and throw some noodles on the stove to boil and cut cucumber, red pepper, or tomatoes, along with ranch or Italian dressing and cheese to top of the colorful bowl. Noodles could fill me up and keep me going. Noodles are a thick and tender complement to crunchy cucumber or gushing tomatoes, and for the creamy, sour flavor of ranch. The perfect meal isn’t specific to me, but more of a reminder of where I have come from and an example of what resources and ingredients I have to work with at any given time. Right now, in the dorms in college, with only a small bit of cooking experience, the perfect meal to me was a simple meal that reminded me of being at home and cooking with my family. Apparently my concoction has a recipe associated with it. Giada De Laurentiis calls it Cherry Tomato Spaghetti. I call it noodles and veggies.

Cooking in the dorm is a hassle to say the least, and produces only mildly appetizing results. I had lost a lot of my hope in the fate of even my simple meal after receiving some weathered and beaten pots and pans encrusted with old food from the Resident Assistant. My friends and I squeezed into the tiny, dimly lit kitchen on my floor of the dorm to cook. There is hardly enough room in this kitchen to open the refrigerator. After a few attempts to clean the burner of left-over food particles that began filling the room with smoke, the three of us decided to turn on a Justin Bieber playlist a leave the water to boil. More interested in keeping my friend from eating all of the raw cookie dough out of the package (as a sweet-tooth, I always believe in dessert), I didn’t notice when the water started to boil and my roommate, with all good intentions of wanting to help with the meal, poured the long spaghetti noodles right into the pot without breaking them.

“Sonal, what are you doing?” my friend Myranda asked with a laugh, noticing that the noodles looked more like an art piece sticking out of the pot than anything else.

“Oh shoot I should have broken them in half!” she replied. I laughed, it would be fine. The pot for the noodles was tiny, but as the bottom half of the noodles boiled, we were able to push the other ends into the water. Myranda and I halved the tomatoes with plastic knives and ripped the basil into pieces with our hands. The whole process was silly. In a separate pan we started sizzling up the halved tomatoes and basil bits, and added the noodles and parmesan cheese in at the end to finish the dish.

I served one sticky glop of yellow noodles, complete with a few wrinkling red tomatoes and cooked, wilted basil and parmesan to my roommate Sonal, and then slipped my partially melted tongs back into the pan to get a plate for my friend Myranda.

“Why are these noodles so weird?” Myranda questioned, “Andrea, do you even know how to cook?” Sonal laughed and so did I. She had good reason to wonder about my cooking abilities. The thought kept running through my head: how do you mess up noodles? It was a comical sight. Myranda plucked the noodle box out of the overflowing recycling bin at her feet and read, “Extra fiber noodles. Extra fiber. What is this? Andrea, what did you even buy? Who buys things with extra fiber? That’s just too healthy for me.” She tossed the package carelessly back into the recycling bin.

 I reasoned, “Maybe the fiber is oozing out of them and that’s why they’re sticking together,” nudging my tongs hopelessly into the messy creation with disappointment. Myranda rolled her eyes.

“I’m sorry this is so gross,” I said, handing Myranda a floppy paper plate of the fibrous noodles. Sonal slurped her noodles, leaning against refrigerator.

“Well, guys they don’t taste bad,” she reported, twirling her fork into the clumps of noodles. I thought the dish tasted fairly average, and that my roommate was trying to be nice. The shriveled tomatoes oozed their warm, sweet juices over the sticky noodles and the wilted basil and parmesan cheese added a tangy sharp flavor to a completely bland glop of noodles.

Myranda took a few hesitant bites, looking up with wide eyes. “Wow this is actually pretty good,” she offered, taking a few more bites, “I love tomatoes.” At least the tomatoes tasted good.

I learned to never buy cheap fiber noodles ever again. They ruin a beautiful, simple dish that I have grown up loving. I was disappointed by my perfect meal and its taste. I expected tender, smooth noodles to be bathed in juicy tomatoes and sparked by tangy parmesan and fresh basil. What I got was less than that. However, my friends reminded me of what it is like to be with family. Myranda teased me and questioned my every move, and Sonal did everything she could to help me in the cooking process. We made fun out of a cooking debacle, laughing at the strange noodles, the small room, dirty pans, and plastic knives. It was fun to make something from inadequate resources, and to still enjoy it to some degree. Although mediocre, it was invigorating to make a meal from ingredients I purchased on my own and from my own idea of a recipe. The best part was having friends around me to persevere with me. This process showed me that what I value for my food intake is achievable. I felt proud to make a meal from just a few ingredients and only a few dollars. Next time I will make sure to buy noodles that don’t have fiber added to them, but I know that I can make a meal for myself successfully, both quickly and inexpensively. I don’t need the best of supplies, but of course those help. Fresh veggies do amazing things. They were the best part of my meal, and solidified my belief in the values my parents have passed on to me.

Maybe in the future I will try to buy from sellers with locally produced foods and try to eat entirely out of the industrial food chain, but for right now, my perfect meal doesn’t have to be perfectly free of corn or artificial ingredients. I have become more aware of and interested in the importance of eating in these sustainable ways, but I cannot be fully committed at this point in my life. I don’t have a lot of time or a lot of money to spend on organic products, and with a college meal plan, I have no need to cook. I might splurge on some more expensive noodles in the future, though. I think a perfect meal can change. A lot of my values will remain intact as I continue to grow up, but I think I will change in some ways, and so may my bowl of noodles and veggies.