Getting to know your food: Mustard Edition

A Jamie Oliver food revolution clip has been making the rounds.   It features a classroom of first graders unable to correctly identify a single vegetable.  We're not talking sunchokes and rutabagas here; we're talking common, everyday vegetables.  Tomatoes, cauliflower, potatoes!  It's heartbreaking, because one can only conclude that these kids only eat super processed foods, and have serious health challenges ahead of them.  Also obvious is that these kids have likely had no exposure to the beauty of seeing food grow on a plant.

It's easy to sit up here in my first-world perch and tsk, tsk, tsk about how sad it is for them.  But then I realize how I am not that far behind them in terms of real connection to my food.  I've never milked a cow, or hunted or butchered my own meat for food.  I've never harvested wheat to make flour in order to make my daily bread.  These are things that anyone living 100 - 200 years ago was accustomed to doing just to stay alive.   Yes,  I have a kick ass garden, but it's really a token, compared to what it means to truly be connected to your food in a primal way.

I was humbled by one experience this week.   Mustard.  How often do you think about it in terms of food-origin?  I never really thought about the process of making mustard.  It's as if it magically appears in its Frenchy yellow, dijon, spicy stoneground mustard form.   Just there, on the shelf, in a jar or a squeeze bottle.   I recently read somewhere that it's really easy to make mustard.   So, I footnoted it in my mind as a project to take up.

I tracked down this recipe.  I used my Magic bullet (a far cry from 'stone ground') to grind the mustard seeds.  I only gave it a few pulses because I wanted to have that grainy mustard look.  I probably could have let it go in the bullet a little longer, but I'll get that to later.  I used some Pacifico beer instead of water, and honey that I got from the Googleplex beehive.   After 12 hours, the mustard looked a little liquidy.  That could be the result of a couple of factors, namely 1) I probably skimped on the dry mustard powder and 2) not grinding the seeds enough.  So, I popped the mixture, minus a tablespoon or so (for grainy-ness), back into the bullet and blended it up some more.  That did the trick.  It was a lovely texture with a real zing of a bite.  We ate it on 4th of July with bacon wrapped hot dogs, and the next morning with a few varietals of deli ham, and it really shined.


But even this exercise leaves me with some mystery steps on how food gets to my table.  I have seen mustard plants on the side of the highway... but never stopped to really examine them.  I have no idea what it looks like when it goes to seed, or what it takes to harvest mustard seeds.  Or how many plants it actually takes to yield the 6 tablespoons of mustard seeds I needed for my recipe (not counting the pre-ground mustard).  I'd love to have an excuse to hunt down the answers to those questions.

Going through this process made me savor each bite of that mustard in a way that I just don't when I crack open a jar from the store -- artisanal or not.  J. is a big consumer of mustard, so I know I'll be making this again, perhaps in bigger quantities, and maybe even will jar them up. Is it cheaper?  Probably not.  Is it more fun? Undoubtedly so.