Food Sleuth: Finding Joy in Your Own Kitchen Can’t be Measured

By Melinda Hemmelgarn

Columbia Daily Tribune

September 10, 2008

Available online at: http://www.columbiatribune.com/2008/Sep/20080910Food005.asp

Jean Johnson has a great idea: throw away your measuring cups and spoons and "take back your kitchen."

Johnson’s hot-off-the-press cookbook, "Cooking Beyond Measure," teaches us "how to eat well without formal recipes." To that, I say hallelujah. It’s about time we rediscovered our natural instincts and put together simple fresh foods, seasoned to taste the way our great-grandmothers prepared food generations ago.

With a Ph.D. in culinary history, Johnson sprinkles her cookbook with unique stories about food. For example, she explains that "Americans only got measuring cups in the early 1900s, and everyday cooks from around the world still operate measure free." She argues that our system of precise measurements stifles what should be a "free-flowing, creative process."

Her mission: "empower busy people who want to eat more reasonably priced farm-to-table food."

Many of Johnson’s recipes reveal her Scandinavian history and Portland-based roots. In her recipe for Swiss Birkermuesili - think granola - she tells of the cereal’s creator, Maximilian Bircher-Benner, M.D.

"Departing from the wisdom of the day," Johnson explains, the doctor believed that diets rich in uncooked cereals, fruits and vegetables would lead to robust vitality. His critics took offense at his idea to eat "mere peasant food," and he lost membership in his medical society. But the doctor went on to open a sanatorium in Zurich where he cured many patients with conditions that had previously baffled physicians.

Unlike celebrity chefs-du-jour and sophisticated food snobs, Johnson’s a self-confessed former junk-food-junkie turned whole-food enthusiast. Coming of age in the 1960s transformed her, she says, because she "wanted to be hip like the women in Berkeley, Calif."

Johnson credits "Laurel’s Kitchen," the popular vegetarian cookbook of the hippie generation, for weaning her off donuts and introducing her to whole food and whole grains.

"Why buy fiber in a bottle?" she asks, "when you can eat quinoa, oats, millet or polenta waffles?" Buying whole grains from the bulk bins is a lot cheaper than cereal in a box, too. Despite her rich education, Johnson pinches pennies just like the rest of us, she confides.

Historically, we rejected whole grains because we wanted to eat the industrialized refined foods associated with a more modern, progressive age. But those refined grains have taken a toll on our health.

Packaged and processed foods hit our wallets harder, too. Every time someone else does our shredding, peeling and cooking, we pay more.

"It’s not that we’re too lazy or busy to cook," Johnson says. We simply turn to ready-to-eat food because cooking in our society has turned into the equivalent of "a small chemistry experiment." Needing our reading glasses and following directions takes the fun out of cooking.

At 45, Johnson planted her first garden, and at 60, she’s published her first book, proving it’s never too late to learn new tricks.

Here are Johnson’s top ten tricks for measure-free cooking:

● Bake or grill enough squash for leftovers.

● Find the bulk bins at your grocer.

● Put a pot of beans on the stove Sunday afternoon.

● Get the largest cutting board you can find and a chef’s knife.

● Dedicate a countertop to slicing and dicing.

● Steam up a pot of whole grains.

● Look for young, tender fresh vegetables.

● Buy a block of interesting, affordable cheese.

● Keep fresh fruit on hand.

● Remember you don’t have to be gourmet to eat well.

Learn more, check out some recipes and take a sneak peek at the beautiful photographs proving that good, simple food stands the test of time. Johnson reminds us that "in history, as we look back, we look forward."

See www.measurefreerecipes.com

Melinda Hemmelgarn, M.S., R.D., is a clinical dietitian, advocate for sustainable food systems and 2004-2006 Food and SocietyPolicy Fellow. She lives in Columbia.